Los Angeles. January, 1992

I’ve been thinking about Vincent Price lately. About this first time I was a guest at his home in the “Bird Streets” near Doheny Drive above Sunset Boulevard. (When he invited me, he jokingly called it “Vincent’s Bed and Breakfast.”) And about the last time I visited him, a year after this picture was taken, in 1993 when he was confined to bed or a wheelchair, and we watched City Slickers together (“Jack Palance is such an asshole!”) with the lights of LA glittering below. He had people taking care of him that time (one was fledgling Doogie Howser actor Mitchell Anderson), and I remember that during one of his naps, I spent time in this garden, taking cuttings (with his permission) so that I could root them and have a part of him with me always. (I still have them, thriving large plants now.) As I left in a cab one morning, heading to the LA County Museum and then on to visit Simon and David in Tucson, he reached up to me and said, “We will never see each other again.” I was stunned. No one had ever said anything like that to me before. And sadly, of course, it was true.