The Adventures Of Bette Porter And Sissee Gardner After Yale (Part 6, Chapter 1)

PART SIX: TIJUANA, MEXICO

Chapter 1

I gradually moved in with Bette at her rented home in Venice which was close to Venice Beach and all the fun things they had there. I did not immediately sublease my Newport Beach house, however. I liked going there for a variety of reasons. I had started to write a screenplay, encouraged by Bette’s boss Terry, who may have owned an art gallery but was foremost a successful producer at Universal International Studios. He encouraged me to write about my traveling adventures and weave it into a love affair between two people who kept winding up in the same places.

It was an easy subject and I liked the solitude of writing it in Newport. It was a very quiet place in the winter time, so when I was not at my L.A. newspaper office during the day, I went there.

Terry of course had an ulterior motive in encouraging me to write. He liked the idea of me being with Bette because I had no problem with him taking her to posh places just to have that beautiful trophy on his arm with no strings attached. In fact, I often went with them as his date’s date. It was just one of those things that happened in Hollywood that was suppose to somehow fool people. Bette and I got a great kick out of the charade and had a helluva lot of fun doing it, going to places and doing things in high society that we probably would never have dreamed of doing otherwise, especially at our tender age of twenty-two. Our occasional winks and personal glances kept it all in perspective though and we always wound up going home together.

As to where we slept at night depended on which house we were closer to. Sometimes Venice; sometimes Newport, it did not matter as long as we slept in the same bed. It helped of course when I bought a new bed at my house, plus slip covers for the living room couch and chair. It somehow obliterated all traces of Howie so he became out of sight, out of mind for both of us.