The Borderline Bar & Grill in Thousand Oaks, California, site of the November 7, 2018 shooting of 12 people, has been around for a long time in various iterations. In Thousand Oaks, a bedroom community 40 miles from Los Angeles, where everything is torn down and rebuilt on a regular basis, it is virtually unheard of for a restaurant or the building it is housed in to continue for decades. Yet Borderline Bar & Grill’s building, with its exterior look and interior dimensions, are the same as it had been three decades ago in the form of a restaurant called Charley Brown’s.
Charley Brown’s: Dark Steakhouse
The Charley Brown’s Restaurant, located at 99 Rolling Oaks Drive in Thousand Oaks, was a vast, single-room hall with a high open ceiling. Like the other Southern California Charley Brown’s Restaurants, it was a dimly lit steakhouse that revolved around a ponderous Olde English theme, heavy on the wood and brass. At one end of every Charley Brown’s, in large letters: “Work is the curse of the drinking classes,” a quote attributed to Oscar Wilde.
Charley Brown’s MenuCharley Brown’s Menu 1976
Food was equally heavy. A May 6, 1976 article describes
langostinos marina, $4.95, and the filet tips Stroganoff, $5.25. They were gourmet all the way, prepared to individual order in the spotless exhibition kitchen. The langostinos were tiny baby lobster tails prepared with butter, onions, fresh mushroom slices and green peppers, tipped with rich bearnaise sauce.
In a 1996 article about the closing of the Woodland Hills Charley Brown’s, restaurant industry analyst Janet Lowder said, “They’ve been on a downhill course for quite some time. They’re a dark steakhouse. They didn’t change with the times.”
Charley Brown’s AdvertisementFormer Charley Brown’s, Motto at End Once Said, “Work Is the Curse of the Drinking Classes”Charley Brown’s Restaurant, Marina Del Rey 1960s
One of the earliest Charley Brown’s (above) located in Marina Del Rey gives a good indication of the “vast hall” style of these restaurants’ architecture.
Quietly ensconced in 130 acres of woods south of Seattle is the abandoned campus of the Weyerhaeuser Corporation. Much like the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, with gardens built into the walls of the palace, the Weyerhaeuser campus’ 5-story building is heavily draped with English ivy; thus the name of the complex: The Greenline.
Built in 1971 by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) architect Edward Charles Bassett, the complex is set into a hilly cleft and feels similar to Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1962 Marin County Civic Center. SOM calls the building a “groundscraper” or a “skyscraper on its side.”
The building has been one of my most satisfactory experiences. I wanted to find a point where the landscaping and the building simply could not be separated, that they were each a creature of the other and so dependent that they could hardly have survived alone. It’s a very simple statement, there’s nothing to it. Simply a number of terraced floors moving across from one side of a swale to the other. It’s a low ridge, so that you enter at the fourth level, a communal floor, with the three office floors below you instead of above. As the building progresses across the swale, forming a kind of dike or a dam, it gets broader as it goes on. The terraces are then planted with ivy that sweeps from the natural land form at either end. It’s elegant and understated and essentially un-architectural.
It was also the first example of the open office plan, with no walls between offices, only movable dividers (there were a few enclosed rooms for private conferences). Long before the green roof movement began, the Weyerhaeuser headquarters’ green roofs absorbed solar energy, directing glare and heat away from the inner office area.
In 2016, Weyerhaeuser abandoned the complex and moved into an uninspired glass building near Occidental Square in downtown Seattle. Today, The Greenline lies abandoned, crumbling, overgrown with ivy.
It was the period when you could shoot, stab, punch, and humiliate cross-dressing men with complete abandon and glee. It was the 1970s. If the 1960s were all about peace, love, and understanding, many identity groups were still excluded going into the Seventies. A man who dressed like a woman in Seventies film and TV was little more than a convenient plot point signalling evil. Audiences automatically understood that this was an evil that had to be eradicated. Movies don’t allow for a lot of complexity. You have two hours or less, so you need to use shorthand. And this was one of the easiest, laziest ways to do it.
Freebie and the Bean: Christopher Morley
In 1974’s Freebie and the Bean, Christopher Morley and other actors, notably Paul Koslo at his twitchy best (and that character actor, the City of San Francisco Circa 1974) are the true stars. Headliners James Caan and Alan Arkin, by contrast, couldn’t have been more one-dimensional or annoying, their entire interaction running along the lines of:
FREEBIE: Whad’ ya!
BEAN: Hey, whad’ ya back!
Constantly, back and forth, this bickering “married male cop couple” dialogue being a familiar feature of Seventies shows and movies.
Paul Koslo, James Caan, and Alan Arkin in Freebie and the Bean (1974)
Like other cross-dressing characters of the Seventies, Christopher Morley’s characters have suffered many a fate. In Freebie, he was shot, kicked in the groin, and had half of his clothing torn off. In the TV show Switch, he was hit on the face by Robert Wagner and half-Nelsoned into a shower, water turned on, and wig ripped off.
Not Just Kill But Humiliate
As significant as the physical violence against Morley’s and other cross-dressing characters of that period is a certain indignity that is visited upon them. It’s not enough to riddle them with bullets; they also need to be humiliated. They need to be told that they will not find love. They need to be reminded that they are vain, and that their vanity is a cheap and tawdry one.
In Switch, watch carefully. When speaking to Wagner, Morley reaches for the small handgun secured to his leg by a holster. Then, so entranced by Wagner’s alleged debonair flair and manliness, Morley forgets his killer mission and begins to holster the handgun. He makes himself ready for the kiss, but no kiss is to be had. Wagner smacks him.
In Freebie, in the Candlestick Park scene where he fights James Caan, his character is so vain that he takes occasional breaks from delivering kicks and blows to Caan in order to primp himself. Vanity rules all, especially a cross-dresser’s vanity, right?
In T.J. Hooker, after William Shatner rips off Morley’s wig, the female co-star sputters the inevitable “She’s a…” Morley’s character responds, “If you’re confused, you should be in my heels.” The implication is that no cross-dresser can be secure in his convictions: he is eternally confused.
Even on the somewhat nicer end of the spectrum, while acting with Ted Knight in Too Close for Comfort, Morley experiences that classic Wig Reveal Moment.
Grace Under Pressure
Morley brings a unique calm and grace to his roles of that period. He is reserved, self-composed, sure of himself–anything but confused. Call it poise. In the Switch scene, contrast Morley’s low-key self-composure with Wagner’s oily fake swankiness.
Because the Freebie script was so convoluted, I was never clear on why I was supposed to hate Morley. And in that bizarre death scene, I found myself wanting the trim, doe-like Morley to prevail over big, lumbering James Caan.
In a YouTube comment about his characters of that time, Morley says, “That’s the best critique of my scripts so far….brutal and transphobic.” In his 60s now and living in West Hollywood, Morley is still around and continues to perform as a female impersonator.
This is a circa 1979 cutaway drawing of a solar-heated home in Falmouth, Massachusetts. That part of Massachusetts has a 6,000 degree heating season, yet owner John Moody was able to get by spending only $9.63 in the 1978 winter.
The whole winter.
The house does not have solar panels that generate electricity. Rather, the house collects solar heat, redistributes it, and saves it. The pile of rocks (lower center section of cutaway) is one way of absorbing and storing heat.
The house is located at 5 Fire Tower Road, Falmouth, MA 02540. Ironically, when I look on Google Street View to see if the house is still around, Fire Tower Road is lined with electric company utility trucks.
