Born Savages - Cora Brent Page 0,10

before his death three years ago described August Savage as ‘gloomy and morbidly disturbed’ throughout his childhood. He would collect dead birds from the corners of the family’s decaying Hollywood estate and leave them in various cupboards throughout the home. Supposedly he even stowed some in his pillowcase and slept on them. I have no idea if that’s true or not. Regardless of his strange fetishes, in his day my father had the ruggedly striking Savage profile and he happened to be a decent actor. In the late 1970s he starred in a series of critically acclaimed small budget films that were considered provocative, groundbreaking. In fact he was nominated for an Academy Award for Fist, a harrowing story about a young man who develops a disturbing obsession with his elderly neighbor. It’s the kind of movie you see once and never want to see again because by the time the credits roll you feel vaguely ill. He didn’t win. But it’s an honor to be nominated. Or whatever.

My father’s career came to a crushing halt in 1984 when a young photographer died of a heroin overdose in his bed. Although there was never enough evidence to charge him with a crime, he was tried in the media. According to their one-sided verdict, the strange, intense actor with a legendary family name had injected the drug into the woman’s veins while she slept. There were even whispers that he ah, abused the dead body afterwards.

Of all the rumors and bullshit that surrounds our family, that’s the one thing I don’t really believe. My father was far too confused about everyday life to be capable of harming anyone else. He never talked about any of it but the trial-by-media apparently devastated him and he lived like a recluse for a while. He was probably so lonely and vulnerable by his early forties that when a twenty-year-old radiology student encountered him at a local diner she had no trouble sinking her talons into his bewildered flesh and becoming a permanent appendage.

Here’s where we join the story.

It would be rather pointless, though maybe therapeutic, to sit here and count all the ways my mother, Lita Cohan Savage, was a heinous bitch. But I have a habit of not thinking about her any more than I have to. She left my father shortly before his sudden death but she and I were on the outs long before that.

About a year ago I was thumbing through a magazine while I waited for a flu shot and paused at a paragraph describing how Lita Savage, once married to the late August Savage, was remarrying.

“Lita is presently estranged from her children and they will not be on the guest list.”

Estranged. It’s always struck me as an odd word. As if one day the parties in question blinked and didn’t recognize one another. The truth is liable to be a bit more ugly and complicated. Like her.

Lita already had one foot out the door when August lost the crumbling deco-style mansion, among the oldest estates in Hollywood. She demanded something better. She demanded blood from a stone.

For once he stood up to her and moved us all out to the desert to the only piece of real estate his meager assets were capable of saving.

My father had always hated California anyway.

I have to believe that when he towed the lot of us out to the old western film set in the heart of the Arizona outback he had good intentions. He said he wanted to remove his children from the cold scrutiny of stardom and give us a chance to live somewhere we weren’t known, weren’t sneered at.

But at the time all I knew was that I was sixteen and outraged. It was really a bad plan. Eventually he learned that when you take a bunch of bratty teens out of their comfortable lives and deposited them in a dusty oven, miles from the nearest traffic light, something is bound to go wrong.

The place was called Atlantis Star but in a sarcastic twist, Monty and I rechristened it Atlantis Slum. It was run down and isolated, a vague whisper of the bustling studio that existed in the 1950s when Rex Savage (pre-alien abduction) filmed a half dozen movies in the area. Rex had been so taken with the backdrop he bought the entire make believe town when it went up for auction a few years later, after the old western film trend was finished.

These days my brother Spencer