Cast from the film version of Less Than Zero –  Andrew McCarthy as Clay, Jami Gertz as Blair, and Robert Downey Jr. as Julian.

Episode three of the podcast, Once Upon a Time at Bennington College, is titled An Alley Along Melrose, and it focuses on Bret’s exposure to the seamier side of Hollywood, courtesy of another Buckley schoolmate, Dominic Gross. Dominic is described as a ‘Richard Gere lookalike’ with a surfer edge.

Dominic’s Hollywood is down-market compared to Julie’s. The movie stars in it are movie stars on the slide and not-quite-yet movie stars, and the sex partners of movie stars on the slide and not-quite-yet movie stars. But it’s younger, wilder, and far more titillating…

Dominic was dating Nicolette Savalas, a girl with freedom and money, courtesy of her mother, Sally. Sally, ‘…who is really just an older sibling in disguise, one with clothes you can borrow, and boy troubles worse than yours’ was relaxed about Nicolette’s relationship with Dominic, and he was essentially living at their house (along with Sally’s boyfriend, Don Johnson, of Miami Vice, but that fame was years away at this point).

Nicolette Savalas became Nicolette Sheridan, who played Edie in the hit television program, Desperate Housewives. But as a high-school student –

This is before she’s the living embodiment of the California dream girl in the Rob Reiner romantic comedy, The Sure Thing, or the home wrecker, Paige Mathison on Knott’s Landing, or the cutie on roller skates in that famous Martini & Rossi commercial.

When not with Nicolette, Dominic would hang out at Westwood, where he would see Bret and his friends. Although Bret was younger, Dominic enjoyed his company, and Dominic, with his good looks and good-times lifestyle, made a big impression on Bret. Dominic said,

“…I would just try to shock him with the most gnarliest stories about facts or whatever. And he would just chuckle and laugh, and he was always good-natured about it.”

Nicolette gets shipped off to boarding school and by her return a year later, Dominic has a new crowd of friends, including Tatum O’Neal and Leif Garrett. He’s also ‘hanging out’ with Bret. They spend time at Dominic’s brother, Eric’s, apartment. Through Eric, they meet Dean and Davis Factor and Eric’s neighbour, Ron Levin. Pat Hackett (editor of the The Andy Warhol Diaries) described Levin as –

“…a con artist with an open and magnanimous nature… And it was just so interesting to watch somebody who had no rules, would just see what he could get away with.”

Bret’s recollections of Levin vary from Dominic’s (and many others). Bret implies Levin was a man who was pushing gifts and drugs on boys in exchange for sex. The majority of those around Levin state that ‘…Bret is projecting something that was not there.‘ Anolik speculates –

Let’s say Bret is drawn to Dominic, a rich and gorgeous straight boy and sexually unattainable. So he imagines a scenario in which Dominic can be attained sexually, if not by him, by some other male. Basically, what he’s done is take Dominic, a human being he can’t control, and turned him into Julian, a character he can.

Who knows whose version of Levin is accurate, but regardless, Levin ultimately becomes the character of Finn, a pimp, in Less Than Zero.

Suddenly, Bret has his cast of characters and he smashes out a draft of what would eventually become his debut novel. His English teacher, Steve Robbins, read the draft and said that he immediately saw Bret’s skill, but that it lacked a plot, and felt more like ‘journalism with some fictional elements’.

Meanwhile, Bret is coming out of his wallflower phase, entering his senior year, and dating Julie Foreman. Bret recalls –

“There were no openly gay dudes even at a ritzy private high school in Los Angeles back then, and yet we knew of each other, like secret agents. And it wasn’t difficult to connect, to read the signs, to crack the code.”

Bret becomes infatuated with one of these secret agents –

“The porn fantasy, the jock, the hot football player, the one who just grinned and told dirty jokes masking the torture of it all. We became close. And it often seemed that something was going to happen. I was falling for him hard because he was charismatic, freewheeling and funny. He was also way too popular to endanger his reputation. It was just easier for him to flirt and laugh about everything until he could just get the fuck out of here and be himself.”

Ultimately, the jock proves elusive, but others were not and by senior year, Bret is ‘...actively, if secretly, gay‘. Bret says of his sexuality during high school –

“…you really see the lie of high school in so many ways. When you’re gay and you’re standing on the sideline and no song is about you and no movie is about you and you have to kind of reprocess everything. Was it traumatic? Did it make me want to become an artist? I certainly don’t think I would have been a writer if I’d been captain of the football team or the prom king. I mean, well, look, it was nothing that ever I agonized over. It was something I just kind of accepted and said, okay, this is another thing that I’ve got to deal with.”

Meanwhile, there were rumours that the body of a person who had overdosed in an alley on Melrose, was available for ‘gawking at’. Although this did not happen, the darkness of the rumour foreshadowed what would happen next.

People referred to in episode two:

Lili Anolik (author)
Bret Easton Ellis (author)
Julie Foreman (actress and Bret’s first girlfriend, and basis for character of Blair in Less Than Zero)
Dominic Gross (high school friend of Bret’s and inspiration for character of Julian in Less Than Zero)
Ajay Sehgal (high school friend of Bret’s)
Nicolette Sheridan (actress)
Telly Savalas (actor)
Sally Sheridan (actress)
Don Johnson (actor)
Melanie Griffith (actress)
Tippi Hedren (actress)
Chip Rosenblum (high school friend of Bret’s)
Bruce Taylor (high school friend of Bret’s)
Tatum O’Neal (actress)
Leif Garrett (musician)
Ron Levin (investor and business person)
Dean and Davis Factor (business – cosmetics industry)
Steve Robbins (Bret’s high school English teacher)
Richard Gere (actor)
John Shanks (music producer)
Lee Selwyn (music producer)

Books and films referred to:

Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis
The Sure Thing (film)
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (film)
The Harrad Experiment (film)
The Andy Warhol Diaries by Pat Hackett (editor)

Soundtrack:

I Was Made for Dancin’ by Leif Garrett