On her first night in Los Angeles, the model-turned-author Susanna Moore slept in a broom cupboard. She was 21, and had been flown in by a producer to appear in the 1967 Dean Martin spy comedy, The Ambushers. Prior to this she had been working as a fashion model and was helping to put her husband, Bill, through college in Chicago. With barely a cent to her name, she arrived to find the hotel was not expecting her. The desk clerk took pity and sent her to the fourth floor where there was a tiny closet crammed with bleach, toilet brushes and mops. There Moore bedded down on a small rusty cot, the smell of ammonia in her nostrils. Despite this inauspicious start, she was “neither worried nor afraid”, and soon resolved to leave her husband and make LA her home.
Moore’s poignant and hugely entertaining memoir Miss Aluminium – the title refers to an early modelling job for the Aluminum Association where she was squeezed into a scratchy silver dress and made to carry a cardboard trident – covers her unconventional early years before she found her calling as a writer. (Moore’s first novel, My Old Sweetheart, a fictionalised version of her life, was published in 1982 while her bestselling 1995 novel, In the Cut, was made into a film by Jane Campion.) This memoir documents her childhood in Hawaii blighted by the death of her mother and the neglect of her philandering father; her escape to her grandmother’s home in Philadelphia aged 17; and her subsequent adventures in New York, Chicago and California.
During these years, Moore, who is now 74, was coasting, unsure of who she was and unable to see her future, all the while longing for her mother. She worked variously as a newspaper ad taker, a personal shopper at the department store Bergdorf Goodman and, following a few years of acting and modelling, a reader of film scripts. As she tries on different identities, the book becomes less about childhood trauma than an examination of the masks women wear to meet social expectations, occasionally prompting them to forget who they are entirely.
A series of benevolent mother figures took Moore under their wing, among them a rich neighbour in Hawaii who fed her when her stepmother wouldn’t. There was also Connie Wald, the widow of the film producer Jerry Wald and doyenne of Beverly Hills. Through Connie, Moore got to know Hollywood’s crème de la crème, sitting down to dinner with Joan Didion and her husband John Gregory Dunne, Christopher Isherwood, James Stewart, Roman Polanski, Natalie Wood and Audrey Hepburn. Amid the glamour and wealth, Moore never stopped feeling like an outsider. “I was self-invented,” she explains, “adapting myself minute by minute, a girl on the run.”
She was also an observer, which serves her well here. The book bursts with brilliantly gossipy titbits, recounted with wry understatement, from James Stewart’s use of a toupee to the story spread by the mistress of Alfred Bloomingdale – he of the department store – that he “liked to sit ina custom-made high chair in baby clothes and a bib while she threw cold pablum [baby porridge] at him”.
Elsewhere, there is a second marriage to the Oscar-winning production designer Dick Sylbert, with whom she had a child; an affair with Jack Nicholson; and a job reading scripts for Warren Beatty (during the interview, he insisted she hoist up her skirt so he could inspect her legs). At a party at her house, a simmering dispute between Beatty and the Don’t Look Now director Nicolas Roeg boiled over as Beatty asked Roeg to step outside. “We watched through the window in astonishment as he punched Nick in the face,” recalls Moore. “He then pulled Nick to his feet, examined his upper lip, and led him back into the apartment.”
The narrative is interweaved with snapshots of Moore’s childhood in Hawaii and of her mother, Anne, who was in and out of psychiatric wards. Moore was devoted to her and, as a small child, had helped thwart several suicide attempts. Then, when she was 12, her mother died in her sleep, leaving her and her younger siblings to be brought up by their father. There is a dispassionate matter-of-factness to Moore’s prose as she relates her most traumatic moments. Self-pity isn’t her style, even when she revisits her rape by the fashion designer Oleg Cassini, during which “I found myself crouched in a corner of the ceiling, my bare feet balanced on the molding as I watched from above”. When her first husband, Bill, pitches up in Acapulco, where she is on a job, and announces that he will be her manager, she asks for a divorce. He responds by beating her unconscious. Her writing takes on a woozy, distant quality as she recalls her slow recovery, an apt reflection of her befuddled and battered state.
From the outside, Moore’s life seemed gilded with its merry-go-round of parties, lovers, designer clothes and dizzyingly famous friends. In Miss Aluminium, her tales of the Hollywood high life certainly provide giggles and glitz, though the darkness is never far from the surface. The real story is the ripple effect of grief, a woman’s self-invention and the awful deeds of powerful men.
• Miss Aluminium is published by W&N (RRP £9.99).
