The Lost Boys of the Canyons

Keep Your Heart and Order the Ice Cream Sundae

May 2023

EDITOR’S NOTE: As readers of this newsletter know, my daughter Miranda died on February 16, at the age of 32, from complications arising from brain tumor surgery exactly five years ago.

At the time the tumor was diagnosed, Miranda lived in Los Angeles. She worked in and near the entertainment industry - and dated men who worked in and near that industry too. She put her sharp and funny observation skills to use in the following essay about some of those men. My husband David dissuaded Miranda from publishing it at the time. It seemed to him unwise for a young woman hoping to make a career in the industry to make fun of her potential bosses.

Miranda heeded the advice and put the essay aside. She managed social media accounts for influencers and celebrities. She did production work on film documentaries. Before then, Miranda had improbably combined a career as a fashion model based in Israel with a second career as a journalist and writer. She contributed columns to The Daily Beast on topics as varied as her experiences under Hamas rocket fire to the abuse of underage fashion models.

I rediscovered the essay as I sorted my “Miranda files.” It’s a jewel — a perfectly crafted short story.

Our family friend, the brilliant writer and Atlantic contributor Caitlin Flanagan, knew Miranda well. Caitlin summed up Miranda with this epitaph:

She was a Raymond Chandler beauty with a Joan Didion mind, and every single person who met her once knew they'd had an encounter with some eternal force of femaleness in its every dimension. She was a model, a writer, the definition of cool.

Every quality Caitlin describes is apparent in this small example of Miranda’s emerging literary voice. Sadly that voice never had the opportunity to grow.

Miranda now has nothing to hope or fear from the world in which she lived and worked. So I offer her essay to Femsplainer readers as a special memorial edition of this newsletter, which I’ve otherwise paused while I continue to grieve our beloved girl. ~DC

---

“Never measure the height of a mountain until you have reached the top. Then you will see how low it was.” - Dag Hammarskjold

BEWARE THE MANCHILD who lives in the Canyon; Benedict, Laurel, Coldwater, whatever Canyon. They’re all the same. In Los Angeles, there is a tribe of lost man-children who live in the mountains overlooking the city. The Canyon manchildren are different from their Malibu surfer counterparts, or the Venice tech bro, and, of course, the Mount Washington Male Feminists. Some are Kings, others Captains of Industry. Some lucked out on a good real estate deal at the right time. Some are writers, or producers, or showrunners. Despite this professional diversity, men who live in the Canyon all share these characteristics:

1) “You have got to see my house...” They dwell in homes with unique architectural perspectives and/or historical/cultural significance. Maybe their home was previously owned by Steven Spielberg. Maybe Frank Lloyd Wright’s favorite pupil sketched out the original plans for the architect. Maybe an old movie inspired by a Raymond Chandler novel had been filmed there, many, many years prior (“Katherine Hepburn would have looked out of this very window...”). Point is: The Canyon Man’s home is special. This will justify (in his mind) his desire to never leave it.

a) Another detail: These homes are mancave fortresses. Audio speakers and lighting dimmers controlled by an iPad. He frequently uses apps designed to summon masseuses, groceries, marijuana, dog walkers, yoga instructors, cocaine, personal trainers, or a particular mouthwatering black truffle risotto from the Italian restaurant down the hill. All these effects are to create an elaborate fan dance; to blow the mind of the twentysomething year old he has enticed into his lair.

2) He always looks perfectly the part. He always has the perfect tie, the perfect sweater, the perfect accessories. While his look is always put together and groomed, it’s designed to seem effortless. One particular TV writer I dated seemed like a regular low maintenance kind of guy in appearance. I misread. He owned not one, but two types of Kiehl's anti-aging eye serums. The scruffy Chelsea boots were also a deception — not boots he’d had for years and worn through to give them their scruffy exterior, but instead carefully sourced from Lanvin and purchased at Saks Fifth Avenue in Beverly Hills.

3) He has a lot of friends. You never see them. But he always knows a guy. He is happy to name drop. Usually it happens like this, casually and unexpectedly:

- “My friend is Johnny Depp’s lawyer.”

- “Yes, I know Jerry. Bruckheimer. Was that who you were talking about?”

- “Have you met Allen yet? He produced [insert major motion picture here].”

- “I know Wes Anderson’s tailor. He made me a jacket once.”

However, you won’t meet them. You are a plaything — destined for his eyes, and his eyes only. He does not desire competition, especially from those who have given him a success complex. Which leads to:

4) He has a success complex. He remembers climbing his way up to the top of the Canyon, and he won’t forget it. Part of the nature of the business is finishing a project, collecting a nice check, and then starting all over again. He agonizes over his next steps, not entirely sure if this project will be “The one” or another dud. Remember, when he is searching for “the one” it is not you. It is not commitment. It is a project which lands him the right invitations, the correct dinner reservations, the car of his dreams.. You are not even a close second to the Maserati or a regular table at Craig’s.

Part of the success complex is derived from the successful friends he name drops that you will never meet: what is so and so working on, who got money from whom, who is doing what. He is so consumed by maintaining and elevating his status that he will not have time for you: your feelings, your dreams, or your time. Buy new lips, lose 15 pounds — all of this is futile. It will only bring you sex (a fleeting feeling of success for him), but never a solid commitment. He commits only when he is close to death, and he realizes he needs an in-house nurse to remind him to take one of his many anti-aging supplements and vitamins.

5) There is a high probability he is lying about his age, especially if he is over 40. Women aren’t the only ones dealing with Hollywood ageism; men apparently grapple with it in their own strange way as well. Beware a man who says he is 39 or 41 — he could very well be 48. Why lie? Because if he is trying to date into an age demographic he knows he is too old for, instead of changing the demographic, he would prefer to change himself. Graying hairs are dyed, plugs implanted, filler injected, and in many cases, black market human growth hormone consumed. You can usually tell if he’s lying by the cut of his jeans. These men tend to continue to wear the same style that was in fashion when they were at their prime. I discovered two men I had been dating lied about their age: one a well-known director, with a simple Google search; the other at a well-lit dinner where I could see the faint implications of hair plugs on his head (and then later confirmed by Google).

With these men, honesty is not the priority. At least not with you. The details are unimportant — only the display matters. I recall a date with an Oscar-winning director who insisted we meet at a specific restaurant in Malibu. He even offered to take care of my Uber to make his invitation more tempting (he could sense my reluctance to travel to a faraway location).  The Uber arrived and instead of meeting at the restaurant, we met at his house (atop a Malibu canyon). He didn’t relay this last minute change to me. It was an ‘unimportant detail.’ Only when I called to ensure that I wasn’t being abducted and murdered by my Uber driver did he disclose the update. It was easier to meet at his house after all, right?

What to do about these Lost Boys? There isn’t much. They are to humanity what resumes are to employers — great on paper, but a possible sociopath in real life. When you have identified one, your best move is to see him for who he is. Keep your heart to yourself, get a dog, and enjoy the $25 ice cream sundae at the Sunset Tower Hotel when he remembers to take you.

---

PS. Thank you, dear subscribers, for all your kind notes through this difficult time. Your support helps more than you can imagine. The grief over losing a child is relentless. It pounds and pounds like stormy waves against a shipwreck. All you can do is cling on to the floating shards of wood, gasping and praying and waiting for the storm to abate.

Many of you have reached out to share your pain over your own terrible losses — and for this I’m also grateful. If I’ve learned anything over these past weeks, it’s that there is, and has always been, an invisible skein between “normality” and a concurrent world of unbearable suffering. Those of us who live on the normal side are aware, in a general sense, that there are people out there facing terrible circumstances. We can be empathetic, we can be compassionate, we might pause to give someone money on the street or donate to a charity. But once the skein is pierced and you find yourself amongst the ranks of sufferers, you realize they have been right next to you all along — in the next aisle at the grocery store or driving too slowly in front of you. This awareness is a gift of sorts, even if it’s an unwanted gift, a non-returnable gift. It makes you aware in every encounter with another person, no matter how trivial, that they, too, might be doing their best simply to stand upright in that moment. The awareness brings about a new kind of patience, an impulse to be kind under trying circumstances, an openness to listening to the even-more-wrenching-if-possible stories of your fellow travelers. Or so I’ve found. It’s a new country I’ve entered, this land of grief. I didn’t plan this trip. I would have done anything not to find myself in this place. But now that I’m here I must explore it. Eventually I hope to leave it — although not without the sweetest memories of my daughter, remembered without pain, and the newfound self-awareness that results from any life-changing journey.

I hope to be writing again soon. Thank you for staying with me.