Re-introducing Barbra Paskin
by Barbra Paskin 20 June 2022
Many of you have been asking how a young Jewish girl from Hove went to Hollywood and became part of the media circus there. So………..here goes!
I came to Hollywood in the mid-seventies, armed only with a meagre contract from the BBC as their Hollywood correspondent (the first ever) and a couple of retainers from British film magazines, Film Review and Photoplay. I had a lovely studio apartment (with the requisite swimming pool of course) at an address slap in the heart of West Hollywood on Sunset Boulevard. Next door, as it happened, to Peter Finch who I kept bumping into. I’d always loved and made a study of cinema so coming to Hollywood to write and report on movie-making was my idea of heaven.
I remember my first Academy Awards, the year before I came out permanently. I’d come out to write a book – a collection of interviews with a dozen of the biggest names in the movie world – and had been too late to be granted press credentials backstage, so I viewed the whole affair from a seat out front. (That was the year that Marlon Brando refused to accept his award and sent a Red Indian to renounce it on his behalf. She later turned out to be a starlet.) There I was, having walked into the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, where the Oscars were held, along a red carpet, sandwiched between Robert Wagner and Natalie Wood and Veronique and Gregory Peck. It was a fine introduction to the glitter and glamour of the movie capital.
The following year when I returned to be based here, doors were swift to open. Partly because of the BBC, partly because I was the only television journalist here for all of the UK, and also because I was the only female on the British press corps in Los Angeles. I was also the youngest, barely 23, which made some of the older movie stars feel protective towards me. Those were some of the longest friendships I forged. Among them, Charlton Heston, Rock Hudson, Gregory Peck, Kirk Douglas, Rod Steiger, Gene Kelly, James Coburn, Vincent Price and Lee Marvin. A few, like Robert Wagner and Angie Dickinson, survive to this day.
Hollywood is an unusual town. Unlike many cities, it has no nucleus. It’s basically a collection of suburbs interconnected by freeways or long streets like Sunset or Hollywood Boulevard and Wilshire Boulevard which begins in downtown Los Angeles and spans the various suburbs, some 35 miles all the way down to the ocean in Malibu. Many of the residential streets of Beverly Hills and environs don’t have pavements so you need to drive. Walking is hazardous to one’s health here.
Today’s Hollywood is very different from the one where I began my career. Today it’s filled with cutthroat paparazzi and tabloid journalists, all clamouring for the next meaty front page splash. At the time that I arrived, I was lucky that the press were treated, for the most part, as respectable individuals. It really wasn’t about tabloid journalism back then. The stars became, if not friends, close acquaintances. Ones that you could pick up the phone and call at home. And for those with whom you couldn’t do that, their press agents – also close acquaintances – were all too amenable to assist if a decent story seemed likely. But the press agents of yesterday have transmuted into the suppress agents of today, most of them hired now to prevent the press from getting too close to their star clients. Unless a really good front cover story is being dangled.
I miss the old Hollywood. It was fun to go out at night and join in the glitter, even if one wasn’t strictly part of it. Just going out to dinner could be an experience. I remember many times running into Arnold Schwarzenegger at the Bicycle Shop, a restaurant on Wilshire Boulevard in Brentwood. We both shared a bad habit – chewing our fingernails. So whenever we saw each other, we’d hold up our hands, even from across the room, for examination. Dudley Moore was a frequent encounter during my sushi period – his favourite restaurant fast became mine. I’ve shared petrol pumps with Keanu Reeves, James Woods and Kiefer Sutherland. I’ve played tennis on Charlton Heston’s tennis court; shared another tennis court with Jamie Lee Curtis; even played on a public court with Lloyd Bridges who was a top player. I’ve had cocktails with Jack Lemmon, Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart, lunches with Rod Steiger, Bob Hope and Mickey Rooney, tea with Angela Lansbury, Alfred Hitchcock and Christopher Reeve, dinners with Jodie Foster, Christopher Plummer and Jackie Collins ….. and a thousand other fun experiences, all of them rooted in Hollywood.
Till next time, Shavua tov.