Focus: There is another Hollywood, one Lana knew all too well

Lana Clarkson lived a world away from Michelle Pfeiffer, her 'co-star' in Scarface. But her bit-part life and violent death is pure Tinseltown, writes David Thomson

'There is something uneasy in the Los Angeles air this afternoon," Joan Didion wrote in the mid-1960s in Los Angeles Notebook, "some unnatural stillness, some tension." She was talking about the hours before the Santa Ana started to blow, the wind that upsets prevailing directions and comes in like Attila from the east and the desert, bearing gifts of heat and grit.

Plus that ratcheting up in the tension. Well, it's still there. I was in LA nine days ago. I'd flown down from San Francisco for the day to talk about the naturalness of Jimmy Stewart for BBC Scotland and Hollywood Greats. We did the shoot in a little house off Melrose, trying to keep the nice shadow pattern "natural" on the wall behind me as the damn sun kept shifting in the sky. The next morning the space shuttle Columbia went down, and they didn't know that it wasn't some purple bolt in the high sky over California. And then on the Sunday night Lana Clarkson found her Santa Ana wind.

How could there be any possible connection, you ask. Look, in Los Angeles, everything cuts together; everything is some kind of story.

"It's Sunset Boulevard in reverse," said one of the guys at Cantor's, the delicatessen on Fairfax, the next morning. "The chick is the William Holden character. Her car breaks down. She pulls into this mansion up in Alhambra, and there's this little old guy, Phil Spector."

"What chick today has heard of Phil Spector?" asks his companion.

"This chick is 40. And Spector sees her, and he thinks maybe she is the one sent by providence and the William Morris talent agency to save him. Aren't you waiting to be rescued by a gorgeous chick?"

"Well," his companion simpers. "I haven't ruled it out."

No one rules anything out in LA, including the thought that they might have to shoot themselves by the end of the month if something doesn't happen. And why not a leggy blonde who wonders if you can get her engine to start again? I mean, we're being facetious about this, but most of these girls were somebody's daughter once. Or they were you and me. There's a dread can hit you in LA if the cheque bounces, and your car won't start, and the telephone has been cut off. It could happen to any of us. I mean, take William Holden himself – the real fellow – dead in some apartment in Santa Monica, and it was the best part of a week before anyone asked, "Where's Holden?", and did anything about it.

So, consider Lana Clarkson. She was 40 and an Aries – not a pretty mix – and there is the exploitation producer Roger Corman in the press saying: "She was a beautiful woman, a wonderful actress and an adventurous spirit."

Like, how adventurous? Well, she had slipped, as only 40 can. She hadn't had a credit since 2001. No more Princess Athalia in Barbarian Queen II: The Empress Strikes Back. And it was a long time since her Ms Allure in an episode of Amazing Stories for television. Longer still since she'd been "woman at the Babylon Club" in Scarface, the Al Pacino picture, in which she and Michelle Pfeiffer would have been about the same age. Except that Michelle had this aqua-sheath dress in the glass elevator, swaying to coke music, and Lana got just a couple of shots sitting at a table. And sitting was never her best angle.

So it gets to be 2003, and Lana has to take a job waitressing at the House of Blues on the Strip. This is a no-hope job and a concession speech for anyone over 17. And, somehow in the early hours of the morning, Spector comes by. Phil Spector, inventor of "The Wall of Sound"; a genius in his own mind; producer and manipulator of such classic groups as The Crystals, The Ronettes and The Righteous Brothers. And numbers such as "Da Doo Ron Ron" and "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin".

Phil has been out cruising in his black chauffeur-driven Mercedes S430. Earlier in the evening he had eaten at Dan Tana's restaurant with another woman, and he dropped a $500 tip – cash – on a $55 tab. If any Lana Clarkson in her right mind had seen that flash she'd have walked home, thank-you. But it was later in the morning before Spector found Lana, and it was 2.30am before they drove back to his Spanish-style mansion in Alhambra. And it was 5am before the sound of shots – with the weather that weekend it could still have been sweet at 5am – and Lana was dead.

"It's still the same old story," says the guy at Cantor's, leaving half his blintz Danish. "She says, 'Spector? Who's Phil Spector?' And it's more than he can handle. I tell you, guys, this is one heartless city."

A waitress comes by, one of the Cantor's ladies. She says: "Waitressing is a serious job. Anyone doesn't take it seriously – they have given up the ghost."

"$500 tip!" crows one of the old guys.

"That's what Alex Korda said," I remember. "If you want to make it in Hollywood, check in at the most expensive hotel, be seen at the best restaurants with the most unbelievably beautiful young women – jail bait. Charge everything, but tip vulgar, and wait for offers."

The cruel sociology hasn't ended yet. In The Day of the Locust, in 1939, Nathaniel West saw the great mob of Mid-Westerners, of half-outlaws and lost souls who came into Los Angeles on the buses and expected their lives to be transformed. And the culture supports this irrational hope, not just with details like the Korda anecdote, but with the magazine and TV life-stories about this or that lovely girl arriving in Los Angeles with $37 and the right attitude and ending up as Michelle Pfeiffer – or Lana Clarkson.

And these girls get their teeth fixed, and they go to aerobics classes, and they put out for the best wardrobe they can manage, and they find some cheap photographer who will do them the right set of glossies that leave the matter of pornography or nudity open. They take acting classes; they do anything to get attached to some kind of agent – and you can easily enough picture the kind of guy who has worked out his own access to endless pussy if he says he's an agent. More than that, when you see the glossies that get passed around, you realise how very close the great art and craft of acting can come to prostitution.

"So, honey, listen. There is this party tonight off Coldwater. And a lot of the right people will be there. You feel uneasy, bring a friend – a girl-friend, I mean. Honey, I'm not promising you anything. But first of all in this world you have got to be noticed. The rest is downhill with a girl like you."

Most of the girls hit LA as teenagers, because – to be frank – everyone is liking the skin younger and younger. This means that very few of them have had any kind of education to fall back on. It makes it necessary for them to take any screen job, and sometimes you're shooting and the "director" wants your top off before you realise this is straight to Japanese video.

Lana Clarkson picked up a dozen or so lurid credits in film and television in the 1980s, and there are stills that show how she had perfected that haughty stare-you-down look that Playboy bunnies are known for. But by the time such a woman is 30, she needs to invest more in her skin, and in working out. She hardly eats, so that hunger has got into her nature. She is beginning to worry whether this has affected the natural warmth of her smile. Does she look a touch desperate? She has even taken a job or two in the business – typist or reception – where she learns the blowjob rhythm.

There's a girl like that, called Bobby, in Norman Mailer's great Hollywood novel, The Deer Park. She's on the office staff of a mogul, and it's her job in the afternoon to come in, sit on his lap, whisper any gossip she's heard to him, then let him drop her on the floor where she is in the best position for the ministration he requires. She's in and out in 10 or 11 minutes, and when she's gone the mogul is telling himself what a slut and a tramp she was. You see, the thing about all of these stories is that they're told by the guys – how the perfumed blancmange had no character, no soul, just this chronic willingness to suck on the system for the chance of a break.

The real and the fictional mix together like forlorn figures in this hypocritical landscape. There's Bobby or Peg, Peg Entwistle, a real starlet, who was getting nowhere and on her knees too much. So one day she threw herself off the second "d" in the Hollywoodland sign. (It was more than Hollywood once, the longer name advertised a real-estate scheme from the 1920s). That "d" was the thirteenth letter, and the only break Peg had ever had was a little part in a picture called The Thirteenth Letter. You could put Heidi Fleiss in the list – remember her? And you'd have to include Bonny Lee Bakley, the sometime actress, singer and nude model, who somehow got herself married to the washed-up actor Robert Blake, and then one night, two years ago, outside Vitello's restaurant, she's sitting in Blake's car waiting, and boom, she's shot in the head. For which he's under indictment.

OJ Simpson was another kind of has-been, too old to play football, too drugged to be a commentator, too wild to be reliable. But he was a black kid from the San Francisco Projects who, with just a great grin and a terrific body, had got himself major league fame and a white wife who might have been in pictures. Then the whole thing turned into a lonely place. You can read the same story in the lives of stars such as Marilyn Monroe and Jean Harlow.

And if you've ever tried to make it in Hollywood, and you have run out of paperbacks while waiting nine days for the phone to ring, and you doubt your car will start, and you have two more days in the room, well, you count your lucky stars that you're not someone's runaway daughter.

Some day one of those chicks – one with a butt of spunk and a gun – is going to do one better than Peg Entwistle. She's waiting for the Santa Ana, and then she'll go on a serial killer rampage. Come to think of it, with the right lawyer, a good agent and one of the new young writers who does sardonic that could even be a career move.

Unhappy endings

Albert Dekker

Memorable in The Wild Bunch but suffered a lack of film offers after his courageous stand during the McCarthy witch-hunt. Found strangled in 1968 with obscenities scrawled on his body. Said by some to be a gay suicide; others that it was murder, the lurid style an attempt to discredit him.

Gwili Andre

Danish blonde found dead in 1959 surrounded by the remains of press notices. Her symbolic end was topped only by Lou Tellegen, a star of the silents, who committed hara-kiri with a pair of gold scissors, his press cuttings around him.

Carolyn Mitchell

After a career amounting to little more than a role opposite Jack Nicholson in The Cry Baby Killer (1958), she became Mrs Mickey Rooney the fifth. Shot dead in 1966 by Alain Delon's Yugoslavian chauffeur, having tried to end her affair with him.

Susan Cabot

Proved her acting ability in Machine Gun Kelly (1958) but was cursed by early typecasting as an Arabian temptress. Slipped out of films, did much charity work, but became ever more reclusive. In 1986 was beaten to death in her San Fernando Valley mansion by her son.

Sal Mineo

Former pre-teen gang member who became a child actor. Flickered briefly as a star playing the boy who idolises James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. Swift descent followed as he blew his cash. Lived an ever more openly gay life. Murdered in the car park of his cheap apartment in 1976.

Carol Landis

Big in early-1940s B movies but her career went on the slide. Four marriages failed and her affair with Rex Harrison was a source of more misery when he refused to leave his wife. In July 1948 she took an overdose. Her lunch date found her on the bathroom floor, a suicide note beside her.

Ramon Navarro

One of the most admired hunks of the silent era, he made it into talkies, but the parts got smaller and smaller. On Hallowe'en night 1968, two hoodlums broke into his home and bludgeoned him to death with an Art Deco dildo given to him by Rudolph Valentino.

Dolores Hart

A healthy exception. Starlet who featured in MGM's Where the Boys Are and played opposite Elvis Presley in two of his early vehicles. Prompted by her experiences to enter a convent in 1963. Now Mother Dolores in a Benedictine community in Connecticut.

David Randall