I'm writing another novel, well I have only just started – maybe about two to three thousand words. I don't know what happens but I've started, that's the main thing, and my characters will show me the way, and that is true.
If you write every day the whole thing will come to you.
I have written two others, and they didn't sell well on Amazon, but here we are years later, and I have seen them going for hundreds of dollars on ebay, and I have often wondered where the catch is there – is it a con? - who knows, and who cares?
I called it The Callaghans and it put me in mind of a man called Nobel – or even Noble - who was the manager of the building where we lived in Los Angeles. He was a dear gentleman, with very long white hair, Indian accent, and he would always claim to be British and said he hated The Beatles and their M.B.E. As they didn't deserve it.
When I first met him he told me he was almost one hundred years old – he would say he was 99 and looked toward his hundredth birthday.
He lived in the penthouse, and you could see, by going inside, that every time one of the tenants left he would empty their apartment into his.
To enter through his front door, you had to go in sideways, as there were mattresses in the hallway, and the rest of the apartment was full of similar items, apart from two seats in front of an electric heater, with a couple of bars of red heat drawing us closer to it.
He always promised that if my children came across to stay, he would be able to put them up; where, I don't know.
In later years some of our children would stay in the hotel around the corner, where many actors would come and stay for the pilot season – that mythical time when casting directors have actors in to audition for roles in the new plethora of series, either crime or comedy.
If you were a selected actor you would have to have at least three or, maybe four, call backs; then they would make you sign a deal. It would be something like $500 per episode for the first season of about 13 episodes, and then the next year maybe a 15% rise (or raise) and before you knew it, you would be expecting to have your life changed because of all the money you would be expecting to earn. This is before you have been offered the job.
Sometimes you might even go into rehearsal and shoot the pilot, for which you were paid handsomely, and then they would drop the whole idea leaving you back to the eggs for breakfast lunch and dinner.
You could even go as far as having the episode you are in broadcast, but if it wasn't well received it would be dropped straight away with no explanation to the viewers.
They did this to protect themselves in case the series was a huge success and the agents would be in to see the producers to triple your salary, or take you out of it.
If you did a full series and then the series is extended to 100 episodes, it could go in to syndication. Then you would be paid a fortune for the series to be shown forever. For example the TV series Seinfeld was screened its last episode in 1998 and went into syndication and this is where the contributors make a fortune – Seinfeld, himself, makes $400 million for each cycle of syndication; can you believe that - $400 million.
In the UK? Nothing like it at all; the top paid actor at the BBC is one of the stars of Casualty who is on around £250,000. If they repeat an episode of Dr Who for example, the Doctor would get £1,000.
That hotel, by the way, was called The Highland Gardens Hotel, and it is the place where Janice Joplin died in 1970; back then it was called The Landmark Hotel and the room, in which Joplin spent her final hours, is still a rentable room, and her fans seem to know it. The closet contains a small brass plaque, commemorating her life, and the walls are heavily decorated with fan art and notes, comprising a shrine to her.
But getting back to Nobel, at one time he was a nurse and worked with Albert Scheweitzer, the Nobel prize winner, at his leper colony in Africa, and had connections in Hawaii. He wasn't anywhere near 100, maybe 75 and he kept falling ill.
He spent some time in The Good Samaritan's Hospital on Wilshire Blvd where they took Robert Kennedy when he was shot at an hotel on Wilshire Blvd.
Nobel got to calling me Mister Callaghan – I know he was deaf but he could hear sometimes and maybe Sullivan sounded a bit like Callaghan to someone who is hard of hearing.
I would go to the hospital on occasion and cut his hair – one time, when trimming his beard, I caught him with the scissors and he pulled a terrible face, almost screwing it up in a ball. I was mortified - not a peep out of him just a painful face.
He would use strange phrases – if he met English people he would talk of Beatles – shouldn't have the MBE.
One time I was giving him a lift, somewhere, and I went into a large pharmacists on La Brea Avenue, where there seemed to be some kind of fuss.
A little old lady was trying to spend her store card, mistaking it for a debit or credit card, and the store manager stopped her. She didn't have credit or debit cards and was getting upset.
I explained to her that her card was worthless, which she eventually accepted.
She must have been older than Nobel and I offered to take her home – it wasn't far away.
I took her back to the car and I told Nobel I was taking her home and he said 'What?? She's your accountant?'
We dropped her off and all was well.
One of the times he was in The Good Sam - as they called it - I went, as usual, to cut his hair, but he was fast asleep.
I didn't want to disturb him so spent the time sitting there looking at him sleep.
Two ambulance men came into his room and woke him up; they had to take him back to the care home, and when they woke him, he looked at them and said 'you can't move me from here; I'm dead.' And went back to sleep.
The poor old sole actually thought he was dead.
He did die not long after that and whilst writing this I can't believe I've never written about him before.
When we first found the apartment building, in Hollywood, we looked at it and he very kindly showed us around and and I called him back to say we would take the apartment. When he answered the phone, I said 'Hello; it's Chris Sullivan.' And he said 'Oh hello Mister Callaghan.'
