In Memoriam

Susan Lee West (Photo: Ruby McCollister)

This one isn’t easy to write.

My dear friend Susan “Sue” West died last week.

Sue had been a treasured friend and a large part of my life for more than two-thirds of it. We met when I started as a stock boy at Dean & Deluca back in the early 80’s and she hired me into the pastry department which she ran. She then took me to the ’84 LA Olympics with her to work at the Arts Festival and we worked together for years after on various projects after she moved with her family back to LA. At one point she dubbed us “Charity Caterers.” Not because we were necessarily doing good works, but because we never managed to make money. We catered for friends, sometimes in the oddest of places. Like underneath the stage in a small (now gone) theater in West Hollywood with a ceiling that caused even Sue (who was a tiny girl) to have to bow over to assemble the hors d’oevres or baking a wedding cake in Manhattan and transporting it to a hotel in the Catskills in a rented Sedan deVille which was given to us with bad grace by the agent because it was the only thing on the lot left, but was perfect for four people, luggage, and a wedding cake. If you ever get the notion that finishing decorating a wedding cake using a Martha Stewart recipe involving gum paste decorations in a hotel room using hotel cutlery and car keys is light entertainment, let me disabuse you.

Sue and I at D&D (Photo: Andrew Pleak)

She and I also enjoyed road trips. We both are of the type that enjoy what she referred to as “companiable silence”. We could put in a book-on-tape and not speak for hours, perfectly content. She would tease me sometimes about my driving like an old lady on those dead stretches of the 5 on the way to San Francisco or back, until I did a few miles at over 100. Then chickened out because I was afraid of the CHP dropping down out of the sky (it could happen!) One of the things I most wanted to do at some point was cruise around England in a vintage car and look at antique shops like “Celebrity Antique Road Trips” minus the celebrities and keeping the purchases. Sue enjoyed antique shopping as much as road trips, especially for vintage Mid-century items. The hotel in the Catskills was stuffed with vintage Heywood Wakefield and we were plotting/daydreaming about showing up with a U-Haul.

A scent inspired by Sue’s Daughter. Ruby McCollister, by Marissa Zappas

She also loved scent as much as I. She was the person who first turned me on to Serge Lutens and would let me know of some new discovery when she found it. She paid me the supreme compliment by telling me how much she enjoyed my writing and exhorted me to keep it up. Roses and gardening were a passion for her. Her first (rented) house on Kings Road had a driveway that was mostly given up to what she called “rose alley”, a beautiful allée of roses in pots, many of which had to be given away in moves from West Hollywood to Highland Park. She also had a flair for decorating, not being afraid to do the work herself. She was the first person I knew who had bleached floors, and did them herself. She (and our friend Johanna and I) laid linoleum floors in two houses and with Johanna’s input they chose bright, daring colors for the interiors of the house she last had in Los Angeles.

Ruby, at her grandmother’s house in Laguna Beach, one Christmas

Her work was mainly in the Arts. She and her husband were the first general managers for Blue Man Group, she produced documentaries with Jessica Yu, worked with Sam Shepard (he said he named “True West” based on Sue West) and briefly worked with a famous author who she never named, referring to her only as “She Who Must Be Slapped.” While she worked in films I think her heart was in theater, and she was kind enough to employ me in some capacity on many of those shows. I think theater was part of the reason that she returned to New York at around the time her daughter went off to college.

As I remember her bast. Photo is her daughter’s

I admit that I missed her when she left. I missed the Christmases especially: through her I grew to know and love both her mother and her child. Some years I would pick up Sylvia in Laguna Beach and bring her back for he festivities, at least once we went there. I could see where Sue got her dry wit. I would usually get an AM phone call on Christmas day asking me to rush over because her daughter didn’t want to open presents without me present. If it was a pleasant fiction I never knew, or cared.

But we did see each other when we were on the same coast- this last time was a couple of years ago when we met to see an installation at the Academy Museum in the old May Company building on Wilshire Blvd. I honestly don’t remember whether that was John Waters: Pope of Trash or Regeneration: Black Cinema 1898–1971. (Both were great) but I do remember that it was like we had seen each other the day before rather than months- I think we spent most of the time laughing.

I will miss that laughter.

Photos: My iPhone, Ruby McCollister (via Instagran), Andrew Pleak (via Facebook)