So what constitutes moving out of your parents' house? I think I still had stuffed stored there until I finally got married. I guess my first place was on North Broadway in Lexington, Kentucky, after the year I graduated, when I was building up a stake to go somewhere else. It was a third floor apartment of a converted old house that I shared with my erstwhile theatre arts chum, Roger Leasor. He had the turrett room, I had a strange cozy nook with a slanting roof. We had a spacious living room, small kitchen, and a sizable bathroom with only a shower, no tub. Very Bohemian. I think we paid eighty bucks.
My next place was in Odessa, Texas, in an apartment above a converted garage, behind the house of the lady who founded the theatre I was working at -- The Globe of the Great Southwest. It was free, came with the gig, but she was a very Christian lady and allowed no visitors of the female persuasion. I managed to smuggle a few past her anyway. Oddly enough, she kept trying to get me to go to church by telling me, they had a lot of "nice, pretty young girls" there...Imagine that, pimping for Christ.
In Dallas, I started out in a small efficiency with no kitchen, only a small refrigerator. Then I graduated to a two-bedroom duplex, rooming with Larry Drake. Since one or the other of us was usually on the road, it was like have the place to oneself most of the time.
When I moved to LA, I started in a spacious efficiency with a huge kitchen on Beachwood Avenue. It cost $205 and allowed pets, so Hotspur and I took it. The day we moved in, I watched from my window as they began to tear down the old Hollywood sign and rebuild the new one. I figured that was a good omen. I had a lot of my stuff from Home shipped out here.
When Larry Drake came out a year later, we rented a bungalow together on Ivar, right below Marie Dressler's old home (now apartments) across the street was the Alta Nido, the apartments that William Holden came out of when he was ducking the car repossessors in SUNSET BOULEVARD. And right across the street from us was an apartment building Nathaniel West had lived in when he wrote DAY OF THE LOCUST...the bungalows we lived in, there since 1926, were probably the ones he was writing about in that novel.
After Larry moved out to live with a grilfriend, Julieanne and I lived here until I bought my first house up in the old Hollywoodland development.
