Wanting ‘friends’
Mark Steyn
Mayor of the Sunset Strip 15, selected cinemas ‘Idanced with a man who danced with a girl who danced with the Prince of Wales,’ they sang in the Twenties. Reflected fame is a little different today:
Celebrities they come and go One day you’re Cary Grant, next you’re Scott Baio Aspiring actress and a social ladder climber Saw you at Denny’s with Rodney Bingenheimer Congratulations, you’re Pick of the Day ...
Who’s Rodney Bingenheimer? Well, he knows everyone, at least well enough to get in the frame. If you’ve got a photo of a rock star taken in Los Angeles in the last 40 years, chances are he’s in it: here he is standing just behind Jerry Lee Lewis while the great man sings ‘Great Balls Of Fire’. There he is sitting just in front of the Mamas and Papas as they sing ‘Monday, Monday’.
And, of course, he’s big in his own right. ‘We love you, we’re big fans,’ say a gaggle of gals from out of town star-spotting on Sunset Strip. ‘Do you know who he is?’ ‘Are you one of the Monkees?’ Close. He auditioned for the group, but they got Davy Jones instead, though the equally diminutive Rodney picked up a few gigs as his stand-in on the TV show, and in the Sixties that was celebrity enough to get you laid. In George Hickenlooper’s bleakly elegiac rockumentary, Davy is one of dozens of stars — Phil Spector, Courtney Love, David Bowie — who turn up to reminisce about their ‘friend’. Looking back to his early days in Hollywood, Rodney says, ‘Sonny and Cher were kinda like my mom and dad.’ Which is hard to believe, if only because, sitting next to Cher now, Rodney looks like Sonny’s gram’pa — a wizened little prune face under an unchanging Sonny moptop. The top’s doing better than the rest of the mop — great hair, a spindly twig of a body and in between wan, sagging features and vacant eyes that light up only when Nancy Sinatra’s wishing him a happy birthday or Cher’s sorta kinda almost recalling his late mom.
Rodney wasn’t just a stand-in Monkee. In the Seventies, he owned ‘Rodney Bingenheimer’s English Disco’ in LA, and then became the city’s most influential disc jockey, turning KROQ into the leading new-music station. ‘This is a guy who for 30 years has been on the cutting edge,’ says Michael des Barres, ex-husband of legendary groupie Pamela des Barres. ‘He’s also had bangs for 30 years, which I think is a major accomplishment.’ And that’s how his world’s ending, with bangs and a whimper. KROQ keeps cutting him back and moving him deeper into the dead zone. He’s currently down to one show a week, Sunday night, midnight till 3 a.m. ‘We’re an 18–24-year-old station,’ says one of its younger jocks. ‘Do they really care about Sonny and Cher and the Beach Boys?’ Don’t get him wrong. He likes Rodney. They all do. But, even when they’re trying really hard to be nice about him, they make him sound sad and faded.
He may not have been a Monkee but he got paid peanuts, never wily enough to parlay his connections into any real money, and living today in a nondescript pad devoid of any possessions other than memorabilia. But in his heyday he got plenty of action. ‘He had this extraordinary posse of pussy,’ marvels one admirer. Not so today. He explains how much he loves his beautiful girl Camille, who’s gorgeous and smart and loyal and thin, etc., as she sits expressionless next to him and then explains deadpan to the camera that ‘I kind of have a boyfriend and Rodney’s just a friend’.
If that. His friends from school can’t quite figure out how the class dweeb nobody wanted to be seen with has spent his life being seen with Jodie Foster, Rod Stewart, John Lennon. His dad, Bing Bingenheimer, and his stepmom and his sister Sharon still live way out in the sticks — genteel domesticity, wing chairs, nests of tables crowded with family photographs of everyone except Rodney. ‘They’re in the other room,’ they explain. And indeed in the other room is one picture of Rodney, with Bill Clinton’s convicted cokehead brother Roger. For the purposes of his film, George Hickenlooper stages a family reunion at which none of them has anything to say to the clan’s near-celebrity and he has nothing to say to them, though he does belatedly hand over a personally autographed note to Sharon from Elvis that he got for her in the Sixties but forgot to pass on.
Everything else he’s kept himself. He proudly shows the camera a framed invitation to Brooke Shields’s birthday party. Quality control is nowhere in sight: ‘There’s a picture of me with Elvis.’ Fair enough. ‘There’s a picture of me with Roger Clinton.’ Again? How many prints did you have made? Rodney’s proud of his ‘celebrity idents’: ‘Hi, this is Debbie Harry and you’re listening to Rodney On The Roq from KROQ . . . ’ But my own disc-jockey career was incredibly short and uninfluential, and I’ve got a ton of those ‘personal’ IDs mouldering in the attic, including Debbie: ‘Hi, this is Debbie Harry and you’re listening to ... ’ I had a big-time heavy-metal guy trying to stick his tongue down my throat in the men’s room, and got lucky with one-third of a fairly wellknown girl group. I would have liked a bit more of that, or at least to be the stars’ buddy, but there’s a waiting list for celebrity hanger-on longer than an NHS hip operation and they learn to weed ’em out. Rodney seems perfect for the part: no threat, no talent, no demands really — he’s happy to keep his distance, a solitary figure even in the throng of a celeb party. He seemingly has no need of friends, as long as he can be photographed with ‘friends’.
Hickenlooper goes easy on his deadeyed rock waif. To compensate for the gaping hole where his subject ought to be, he makes good use of Nancy Sinatra, Cher and co. But in the end there isn’t any reflected glow from even the biggest stars, and, after 40 years in their orbit, Rodney Bingenheimer radiates only a vacant chill.
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