Margy Rochlin

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Tori Spelling’s Got My Back…

Margy Rochlin
“I don’t want to do Access Hollywood. I’ve already had access to Hollywood.” —Ally Sheedy at the Cannes Film Festival when her publicist prematurely tried to end my interview, which was the sole purpose of my trip “It’s okay, I’m not going to hit you...” —Grace Jones, after making me......

My Parents’ Bachelor Pad

Margy Rochlin
Photo by Debra DiPaoloOne winter afternoon in the late ’80s, my father and I were sitting at the kitchen table of my parents’ high-rise Wilshire Corridor condominium when the body of a man hurtled past. It was the floor-to-ceiling windows framing a post-card view of Century City to the Pacific......
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Where Mob Meets Mod

Margy Rochlin
Photo by Michael WildsmithThe central figure in British novelist Jake Arnott’s The Long Firm could drive any bookstore lackey around the bend. Where does one shelve the tale of Harry Starks, a charming, gay, Jewish gangster in ’60s London who is bipolar, tortures insubordinates with a white-hot poker and is......

The Comfort of Tea

Margy Rochlin
For the past 14 years or so, the most eccentric tea in town had to be the Annual Winter Solstice Ladies High Tea held at my friend Michele’s cramped one-bedroom Venice apartment. My first invitation to this event arrived in my mailbox back in 1991. There was a sentence at......
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Violent Femme

Margy Rochlin
Photo by Colin McPherson When critic Terrence Rafferty called Glasgow-based crime-fiction writer Denise Mina “another plate of haggis altogether,” he wasn’t just riffing on her country’s affection for the boiled pudding of suet, oatmeal and minced organ meats. Mina’s work feels internal and — to an American reader — exotically......
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Two Ways to Party

Margy Rochlin
Photo by Debra DiPaolo Recently, I found myself attending a Junior League lawn party in Pasadena. While walking up the narrow driveway to the event, I spotted the featured speaker assembling something out of the back of her shiny Navigator SUV. She took out a bell-shaped glass vase, poured in......

Must-Feel TV

Margy Rochlin
ON THE BRITISH WARDROBE-MAKEOVER SHOW WHAT Not To Wear, fashion journalists turned slightly wacky television co-hosts Trinny Woodall and Susannah Constantine can't seem to keep their hands off other women's chests. The pair are forever pinching, jiggling, slapping and grabbing their subjects' (as well as each other's) breasts. "In an......

Cabaret Tammy Faye

Margy Rochlin
Photo by Brett Vinovich TAMMY FAYE BAKKER MESSNER PERCHES HERSELF on the edge of a brown velour sofa in the sitting area of her manager's eighth-floor Century City hotel room, yanks the neckline of her black nylon top forward, dips her nose into her bountiful cleavage and takes a deep......

Peter Bogdanovich Doesn't Live Here Anymore

Margy Rochlin
PETER BOGDANOVICH SNAPS THE CUFFS OF HIS starched lavender shirt out from under the sleeves of his dark blue denim jacket and adjusts the jaunty purple apache scarf tied around his throat. The director, most famous for making The Last Picture Show, and most notorious for his romance with murdered......

Bad, Bad Gurley Brown

Margy Rochlin
Photo by Marty Lederhandler/APA YOUNG LATINA WOMAN AND HER THREE SONS stare at the stranger standing on their cracked cement doorstep through the black mesh screen of their security door. Helen Gurley Brown has come home. "I used to live here," Brown tells the bewildered family in an almost musical......