During the time I lived in Oakland, I began a long distance relationship with a man from Los Angeles, a comedian and sometimes actor.  You may even have seen him on “Ozzie and Harriet”.  Anyway, about once a month I would fly down to LA for a weekend with him. He was in his early to mid 30's but never had the huge successes guaranteeing the kind of name recognition to ensure you would know his name; Oaky Miller.

Oaky was a “nice Jewish boy” from Philadelphia. His father was Chuck Miller, a vaudeville performer whose calling card was a great Al Jolson impersonation, in blackface. His mother, Gertrude, was a professional gambler known as "Fast Gertie from the East."

He and his father had been an act, singing, dancing and joking in the waning days of Vaudeville, but eventually he went out on his own when those types of acts died, particularly the blackface acts. He still worked in clubs, though I had never seen one of his acts.  He also was on television as an actor, yet he still never received the kind of adulation he craved.

I pretty much fell for this man, his boyish face and trademark cigar.  The weekends spent with him were such a world away from anything I knew. On hot August Sundays we went to the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, hunting for some of the things he collects; political memorabilia, as well as comedy related items.  When he would leave me alone in his apartment I took to writing little “love notes” and would stick them in places I hoped he would find later, after I had gone back home.  I put them in books, in drawers, tucked into the meticulous cabinet he kept his treasured political buttons; pretty much anywhere I thought he would stumble on them sometime and think of me when I was not around.

It was probably about a year into our relationship when he phoned me so excited because he had been offered a job at a club in Phoenix as the Master of Ceremonies as well as getting to do his standup comedy act. I congratulated him on it and he went on to say it was for an entire month, the club would be footing the bill for him to live in a hotel the whole time.  This would be in addition to his salary.

Naturally I thought it was great, maybe now he could break out of the pack.  Once he calmed down he asked, “Sheilo,would you like to go with me?  I only have to work nights, and I bet I could get you hired on as a cocktail waitress.  We would have a grand time you and me.”  He always called me Sheilo, taken from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s nickname for columnist Sheilah Graham.  He always thought in terms of Hollywood.  I was in one of those phases where I had no job, so the thought of accompanying him and getting to work with him was pretty exciting.

I said I would have to get back to him. What he did not realize was I had, only recently, begun a relationship with a man in Oakland, so I was not sure if I wanted to be apart for an entire month.  However I was unemployed at the time so it sounded like an answer for me.  I asked my new guy what he thought of the idea;  he thought it would work out fine.  He would house-sit my apartment and his daughter could come to visit for a few weeks. He was living on a small boat so it would work outnicely. Done deal, I was going.

I called Oaky back and told him I would be happy to go.  I packed what I needed for a month and flew down to LA. He picked me up at LAX and we left from there to drive to Phoenix, both of us filled with the kind of excitement only show-biz could bring. He would be introducing acts after his opening comedy act. I of course had never heard of the club, but he had already secured a job for me to cocktail there while he worked nights.  It was all so exciting.

Oaky drove a sexy convertible making it seem all the more glamorous and real.  My hair slipped out from my Marilyn inspired scarf whipping around stinging my face, I put on sunglasses and let the hair fly.  Both of us were acquiring sunburns, which later made for a rather racoonish appearance, but overall we laughed, joked and enjoyed the drive and being together.  This could be a real life-changing trip.  Who knows maybe leading to fame and fortune for him, and perhaps, we would discover we could not live without each other anymore.   I still wanted for us to work out.

Oaky rehearsed his act as we drove, corny to be sure, but I loved it all, and his sense of timing was always impeccable. Finally we arrived in the sprawling town of Phoenix and after driving around for a while were able to catch a fleeting glimpse of the corner building he said we would be working in later that night.  We drove on by in search of our hotel.

Somehow I had in mind it would be a fancy hotel with room service and a turquoise pool for sunning all day.  Instead we had turned into the parking lot of the Wig-Wam Motel, a tired sprawling motel definitely having seen better days. We found ourselves surrounded by junky cars, rusted pickup trucks with peeling paint and detached trailers piled high with what appeared to be pure junk.

There were filthy, noisy children playing games in the dusty parking lot, and groups of bandana-wearing men and women sitting around on old faded aluminum chairs.  All of the rooms' windows were thrown wide-open, flimsy curtains flying throughthem to the outside like wind socks. A further look around only revealed bits of laundry flung over haphazardly strung clotheslines. It looked like a Gypsy Camp. It was. The smells emanating in that semi-circular hovel was nauseating in the dry heat, but Oaky simply pulled into a vacant space and got out to go check in saying,“I love a place with atmosphere.”  I sat there stunned, praying that somehow this was a huge mistake, maybe a wrong address or something.

                                                           Home at last! 

Oaky did not seem in the least phased by this turn of events as he returned to the car with a jig in his step holding two tacky green oval key chains, one for each of us. Hah, like I would be coming and going from there alone. He seemed excited explaining,  “Hey kid, we even have a kitchenette... we can make our own food.  We won’t have to eat out all the time.”  Oh boy. This was not going anything asI had envisioned. But being young and adventurous, I figured it was only a month.  Besides getting to see him work would be a fun thing, and I did get a job out of it.  I would make the best out of room 28.

                             Me in front of our hotel eating ice cream 

What I had not discovered during our initial drive-by of the club was immediately evident when we arrived at an empty parking lot for work; a marquis spelling out, NOW APPEARING: OAKY MILLER and MISS CANDY BARR.  Well now, this was getting better!

                                                  Comedian  Oaky Miller 

                                                      Stripper Candy Barr 

We walked into the darkened room. Before my eyes adjusted I could smell stale cigarette smoke, cheap booze,and oddly enough, sweat. Uh-oh.   I was dressed up really cute in the ubiquitous mini-skirt of the era, Oaky was looking dapper in his blue sports coat with a blue and gold striped tie.  It was immediately clear this was a joint, not a supper club. The tables were semi-circle around a smallish rather bare stage, just faded curtains and a microphone, bleak even with my limited knowledge of clubs.

It seemed our gig was at a strip club, something he conveniently did not mention. His job was to warm up the audience with some jokes then slip a music cassette into a portable player and introduce the strippers, the most famous of them being Candy Barr.

My gig was equally as disappointing to me; I would be not only hawking beers for a buck (receiving 25 cents commission for each one) but also to sell cheap bottles of pink champagne to the big spenders, each bottle cost $100...worse still; once they bought one I had sit with them and pretend to drink the stuff and enjoy myself.  When a stripper had finished her act she would join a man sitting alone at his table, signaling to me it was time for my job to begin in earnest; to pour the rest of the champagne into the ice bucket while he was distracted by her charms.  Once I had discreetly emptied the bottle I would feign surprise, "Oh, that's the end of the champagne.  May I get you another bottle?"  By then he was so enraptured by the stripper’s obvious charms he always said "Yes", all the while she was batting those big fake lashes and leaning titillating close to his face whispering how parched her throat was.

I hated this. I did not at all mind the beer orders, but the deceptive champagne part just turned my stomach.  It was stealing, and I was no thief. 

One night I was sitting next to the headliner, Miss Candy Barr, affording me the close-up opportunity to watch men drool on her, grope at her body, watching her smile a lost and vacant smile and put up with it. She actually did a lovely job at stripping, but I imagine the humiliation of sitting through Oaky's corny old vaudevillian jokes coupled with the canned music and lesser strip acts, followed by the humiliation I witnessed all signaled the approaching end to her once lucrative career.

After exactly four nights of having me waiting on the men, during the small breaks in acts, with the customers yelling for me to get up on stage and strip too, cheating men out of their cheap champagne...followed by cooking hamburgers on a dirty old skillet in our room in Gypsyville, I decided I wanted to go home.  I could not stomach it anymore.

I tried explaining this to Oaky, but it did not sway him from thinking I needed to fulfill the obligation I made to stay a month.  It was push come to shove, so I needed to get creative.

Each day I had gone to the payphone to call the new boyfriend I left in my apartment.  I told him how miserable things were and he said, “Well, come home sweetheart.”  That did it.  With tears streaming down my face I entered into our room at Motel Hell, “Oh Oaky....” I cried. 

“What’s wrong doll?”  He looked up from the newspaper.

“I have to go home.  Now!”

"Why?"  He asked through his teeth clenched on a cigar stub.

Sobbing,  I answered, "B...because Bob'sformer girlfriend found him staying at my house and shot him. He's in the hospital.  I just spoke to his daughter.  I have to go to him."

It was a bold, humongous lie, but it got him to drive me to the airport and we never spoke after.  I think he knew it was bullshit, but it was the end of us, it was 1971.

One morning in January of 2005 I was sitting in bed with my husband drinking our morning coffee and savoring the routine we had grown accustomed to; he took the sports pages and the ads while I would hone in on the Style section, frontpage, and finally their Sunday Magazine. I reached into the pile of papers carefully extracting the magazine I always left for last.

The face on the cover...well, it seemed familiar in some distant way, but I could not place it immediately, so I opened it to read the story.  Sporting a much older face, but with the trademark cigar and huge black rimmed glasses, a new name and occupation there he was; Hollywood agent to weird acts....like glass eaters, sword swallowing acts and much more bizarre was my old lover Oaky Miller, reincarnated as Chuck Harris.  I could not have been more pleased for him, achieving this kind of success for himself.  I contemplated trying to call him, but decided it probably was best left in the past.

  Chuck Harris as seen in the LA Times, a Phoenix risen from the ashes 

Imagine my surprise some two years later when I got an email with the subject line saying:  Sheilo!  I knew immediately who it was.  It seems someone had Googled his name and found a little story I wrote about the death of Candy Barr, one also mentioning him in a not very flattering light.  Oh, and confessing to the lie.  I never was a good liar. 

One thing led to another and soon we were talking on the phone making plans for a lunch meeting in Los Angeles.  Some thirty-nine years later we finally met again.  To this day he calls me Sheilo, and said about my online confession, “Kid, if there is one thing I learned in this life, there is no such thing as bad publicity.”

                                                   We meet again! 

He also told me that even after all of these years, two marriages and umpteen moves... he or his wives still find my little notes tucked into odd places.  Perhaps in another life, in another time....