Lulu in Hollywood

Anyone who has achieved excellence in any form knows that it comes as a result of ceaseless concentration. Paying attention.

As a loner, I count as my two most precious rights those that allow me to choose the periods of my aloneness and allow me to choose the people with whom I spend the periods of my not-aloneness.

Then, in 1956, James Card, the film curator at Eastman House, in Rochester, New York, persuaded me to move to Rochester, where I could study old films and write about bits of my rediscovered past. The I found that my recovery from the Hollywood disease had been wholly imaginary. I still judged all the films I had made while I was a movie actress not on their merits but by their success or failure in the eyes of Hollywood. I immediately set about correcting my vision.

Someday, I thought, I would run away from Hollywood forever. Not just the temporary running away I did after making each of my films—but forever.

As for my own failure as a social creature, my mother did attempt to make me less openly critical of people's false faces. "Now, dear, try to be more popular," she told me. "Try not to make people so mad!" I would watch my mother, pretty and charming, as she laughed and made people feel clever and pleased with themselves, but I could not act that way. And so I remained, in cruel pursuit of truth and excellence, an inhumane executioner of the bogus an abomination to all but those few who have overcome their aversion to truth in order to free whatever is good in them.