MUSINGS: Joan’s on Third, 2007

Her legend was louder than her voice

Joan’s on Third wasn’t a café, it was a mirage. You didn’t eat there; you curated your appetite. You didn’t talk there; you issued statements in a volume low enough to be mistaken for mystery. The people who came—producers, stylists, socialites in their off-hours—hovered somewhere between important and forgotten, each waiting to be recognized or mistaken for someone more famous. The air always smelled faintly of croissants and indifference.

It was January 2007. L.A. was between identities—post-Paris Hilton, pre-Instagram. A golden age of visible disintegration. Everyone looked hungover, even if they weren’t. That morning was washed out, pale gray, the sky pressed down like a smoggy palm. I was halfway through a burnt almond milk latte when I saw her glide in.

Esmé.

She was a new kind of familiar. Her face had been printed in the margins of British tabloids since she was fourteen. Her father was a rock legend. The kind of musician who had gone platinum before she was born, whose albums were passed around by boys who swore they got it. She wasn’t his only child, the accidental heir to a dynasty of noise and self-destruction. Her mother, a once-brilliant stage actress who had abandoned public life in favor of private collapse, lived in a crumbling estate outside Oxfordshire with two wolves and a disinterest in mirrors. That was Esmé’s lineage—half legacy, half cautionary tale.

She had just moved into a borrowed guest house in Laurel Canyon, the kind of place where Jim Morrison might’ve died, and was trying to "slow down,” which meant Adderall only when necessary and vodka only after dark. The city didn’t confuse her the way it confused most new arrivals. She understood the language of fame—the codependency, the curation, the way cruelty could pass for charisma in the right lighting.

We became friends almost instantly. I was from here. I'd grown up circling Hollywood like a shark too small to bite. I wasn’t impressed by proximity, but I understood it. I had enough restraint to stay out of frame, which made me useful to someone like her. She didn’t want a crowd—just a witness. Someone to validate the loneliness she refused to admit to.

And she was lonely. So lonely it shimmered off her like heat. Even when we were at crowded parties in the Hills, even when she was making out with someone semi-famous beside a pool, I could feel it—this ache underneath the glitter, a pulse of absence she kept trying to fill with men, art, danger.

When she tweeted at him, it wasn’t subtle. She didn’t do subtle.

“Your monsters have nothing on mine. ☥🖤 Call me.”

The photo underneath was grainy, almost intimate. Her body half-shrouded in satin sheets, her wrist peeking out, cigarette ash scattered like clues. The whole thing felt like an invitation wrapped in threat.

He liked it. Seven minutes later. Then followed her back. Then DMed her.

She showed me the messages over cocktails at Bar Marmont the next night. I remember the look on her face—not giddy, not even curious. Certain. Like this was just the next step in a film she’d already storyboarded in her mind.

Three days later, we saw him.

He was in line at Joan’s—tall, hooded in black, carrying himself like a man who’d long since stopped worrying about being liked and started enjoying being feared. He was older than I expected, but not in a fragile way. There was something calculating in the stillness of him, like he’d rehearsed every movement in front of a mirror. He wore sunglasses indoors. Of course he did. You’d recognize the name even if you didn’t watch his films—he was that kind of director. His work had been called "transformational" and "predatory" in equal measure. He made horror that made you feel complicit.

“That’s him,” she said, and then she walked over like she’d been summoned.

I followed. Not because I wanted to, but because I needed to. She introduced herself with the air of someone greeting a future ex-husband. He barely nodded. When I introduced myself, he didn’t acknowledge me at all. Just scanned me briefly, like I was furniture. An obstacle, not a threat.

He invited her to sit. She looked back at me—just a flick of her eyes, a gesture of loyalty or habit—and I followed. He didn’t say I couldn’t. But he wanted to.

He talked in abstractions, mostly to her. About fear, memory, ritual. About how real horror isn’t blood but silence. She was rapt. I could see her shape-shifting as he spoke, molding herself into the role he wanted from her: dark, knowing, bruised but beautiful. His ideal subject.

After he left—coffee untouched, number scrawled across a napkin like an afterthought—she sat for a long time without speaking. Then she looked at me and said, “He’s exactly what I thought he’d be.”

“And what’s that?” I asked.

“Worse,” she said. And smiled.

The affair—or whatever it was—unfolded in public and in whispers. They were photographed at screening rooms, warehouse parties, obscure downtown hotels. Her outfits got darker. Her interviews got more elliptical. She stopped sleeping. She started quoting him in casual conversation.

“He says crying on camera is the purest form of honesty,” she said to me once.

“But he’s behind the camera,” I said.

She looked at me, dead in the eye. “Exactly.”

I tried to keep close. I tried to be her tether. But I could feel her slipping, inch by inch, into something curated and cruel. And he hated me for it. Hated that I reminded her of her before. That I remembered the girl who danced barefoot in my kitchen at 2 a.m., drunk on sake and St. Vincent.

Then, suddenly, it was over.

He ended it. No announcement, no fight. Just stopped returning her messages, unfollowed her, deleted the pictures. She called me that night, her voice flat.

“I’m going home,” she said.

And she did. Back to the U.K. Quietly. Without drama. No parting dinner, no goodbye hug, no closure.

One week later, a blog posted a blind item that was clearly about her. “Director known for slasher horror ditches troubled muse.” The comments were vicious. She knew what she was getting into. That girl’s always been a mess. He’s a genius—she’s just a scene.

I never saw her again.

Sometimes, when I walk past Joan’s, I think about that day. The beginning. When she reached for something she thought she could handle, and for a moment, held it.

She was never fragile. That’s not the right word. She was open. Open to being hurt. Open to being seen. And in this city, that’s a fatal flaw.

But I remember her. The way she lit a cigarette like a promise. The way her sadness felt like art. The way she looked at him—like she wanted to be ruined and didn’t care how.

And I was there.

Watching. Always watching.