There was a bungalow in the Holy Wood
With windows blind and doors that could
Be seen clear through, yet when sorrows come
they come not single spies, but in battalions.
There was a girl in the bungalow in the Holy Wood
Given to the name Ophelia and as mad as can be
Reasonably considered. A little girl completely
Stranded there as the world awaited her.
And this is how it is going on
Where the women come and go
Still talking of Michelangelo
Antonioni and a poet in Paris undertaken.
She came out from the bungalow in the Holy Wood
Although it were more trailer if you’d pardon the fiction
For the little girl was an actress hired and immodestly alive
her arms broad for the acting and her mouth full of diction.
And then a bullet or a bathtub rang out
From the bungalow in the Holy Wood
With no time left for bad or good or bourbon
Or whiskey showers, those heroin hours.
And this is how we make our money now
In the Los Angeles left to us
singing of the women in the throats
of a man who is gone from the city tonight.
Coda:
It's hard to make a Hollywood
Out of threepence of grass
Say ‘thr…’, just that
Just the t and h and r, like thrum,
Without any umming or ahhing.
Thr.
And then, all at once
Add ‘pence’
As though to rhyme with
“the suffering of so many Lents”
(but with a c not a t at the end).
Thr-pence. Three pennies
In the very old money that England had
Before one cold February in 1971:
It's hard to make a Hollywood
Out of threepence of grass
It’s hard to leave the tits behind
And only take away the arse
End of a miracle
Of an imaginary could
But that’s the cost of living
Here in Hollywood.