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Jon English’s “Hollywood Seven” is ostensibly the straightforward though tragic tale of a young girl seduced by the bright lights and empty promises of Hollywood. But success eludes her and the city that has left so many others spiritually ruined is the scene of her literal destruction.

1. Setting the Scene

She came in one night from Omaha, worn out
She never could sleep on trains, took the bus to Hollywood
Lookin' for a room in the pourin' rain
With hair so blonde and eyes so brown
She thought she'd take this town and turn it upside down

The unnamed she – the Everywannabe – arrives by train, presumably unable to afford a plane ticket. She arrives at night, in the rain, so naïve and unprepared that she hasn’t even found accommodation in advance. Instantly the curious radio listener is filled with a sense of foreboding. The rainy night is forewarning of a dream that won’t turn out quite as planned. But with an opinion of herself that she would “take this town and turn it upside down” our would-be starlet is clearly no shrinking violet. She has ambition.

Uppity cow.

And me-ee, I was livin' in a hotel just off Sunset
She moved in across the hall
And she said she'd be a movie star-ar-ar
And waited every mornin' for a ca-all
So I asked her in just to have a little drink but she hardly had the time
A call might come tomorrow, she got to learn her li-ines

The stanza in which we are introduced to our narrator. We know nothing of him, except that he lives in “a hotel just off Sunset”. Who is he and what old, unrealised ambitions does he nurse within him? It would be easy to dismiss his presence as the voice of the passive witness to this woeful tale, except that he does seem to have a lot of time on his hand, monitoring the comings and goings of this young woman from Nebraska. The young woman who doesn’t have time for a drink with him. Does she think she’s better than him? Or does she sense something strange, possibly dangerous, about this man “across the hall”? Perhaps he feels rejected, but there is also an air of tired knowingness in these last two lines: he’s seen it all before.

On Hollywood Seven, rooms to rent, till your name goes up in lights
Woh-oh, Hollywood Seven, dream your dream - seven bucks a night

Dreams are, indeed, cheap.

2. Reality Comes Knocking

And then the months went by without a job
The money that she saved was nearly spent
So she started bringin' strangers home
Just tryin' to find a way to pay the rent
And she'd sit down and drink my coffee, got nothin' much to say-ay
Just busy rehearsin' in her mind the scene she'd never play-ay

It would seem that our Nebraska beauty is nothing special in Tinseltown. The calls she waited for have not transpired. But her reaction seems a little extreme – hasn’t this girl heard of working in a pub or a supermarket or something? The listener wonders about her moral fibre and whether the lure of Hollywood was all that sent her, possibly running and not looking back, from her home town.

Now she’s brought low. Her desperation, and the time she has on her hands, sees her reduced to drinking the narrator’s coffee, though still essentially withdrawn from him – “got nothin’ much to say”. One cannot help but note the similarities with the anti-heroine of Bob Dylan’s ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, when he sneers:

You used to be so amused
At Napoleon in rags and the language that he used
Go to him now, he calls you, you can’t refuse
When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose
You’re invisible now, you got no secrets to conceal

But back to the matter at hand (the matter at hand is a mic in a mic stand). Note how careful the narrator is to mention it is his coffee: the wry, slightly hurt observation of the previous stanza – “she hardly had the time” - has percolated into resentment. Homicidal rage is brewing just beneath the surface.

On Hollywood Seven, rooms to rent, till your name goes up in lights
Woh-oh, Hollywood Seven, dream your dreams for seven bucks a night

Yeah, yeah. Life’s harsh.

3. Dénouement

I found her there one mornin'
She didn't co-ome for coffee when I called
She'd gone and brought the wrong one home this time
There were crazy lipstick marks all over the wall
Now she's goin' back to Omaha but not the way she'd pla-anned
There'll be no crowd to cheer her on, no welcome home, no ba-and

And so we come to the grim conclusion of this little morality tale. The girl who pictured returning home in triumph – thus giving emphasis to the nagging question of what drove her away in the first place – is going home in a dreadful, brutalised defeat. Our world-weary narrator is there to tell us all about it.

And while the police listen to him finish up his story, then close their notebooks and turn away we want to move in and ask a few follow-up questions. This man has egress to her room – he, after all, is the one who finds her. Has he ever been tempted to abuse this privilege? And, more importantly, for a man who followed her movements so closely, why was he deaf on this particular night when she no doubt screamed and struggled for her life? Who exactly was this “wrong one”? Is he anything like Ray Bradbury’s Lonely One?

When considering the two verses that came before, two alternatives spring to mind. Both of these assume that the innocence implied in the line “she didn’t come for coffee when I called” is a lie. Unreliable narrators are rife in literature – American Psycho and The Good Soldier, for example – and here we have but another instance.

The first scenario is that he hears the girl screaming and struggling, but filled with resentments and anger that he can’t name, he lets her suffer and die. Perhaps he never intended for her to die, but given what she was up to, he knew that she was at risk and he enjoyed knowing she was paying a hefty price.

The second, more compelling, scenario is that our narrator is the murderer. The “crazy lipstick marks all over the wall” suggest a frenzied attack on her body. We can only imagine what would be revealed if this was a movie and the camera panned down. She has been living opposite him for months – initially disdaining him while parading her body and ambitions before him, and then when she finally lowers herself to accept coffee from him she remains distant, still faintly clinging to a dream of being in a better place, with better people. The final insult is when she begins “bringin’ strangers home”. A man can only be expected to take so much before he lashes out in fury. His passions spent, he can then return to the persona of the bland, nameless man across the hall who only knocked to see if she wanted a coffee.

On Hollywood Seven, rooms to rent, till your name goes up in lights
Hollywood Seven, dream your dream for seven bucks a night

Dreams are cheap, yes. But life is cheaper.

4. Let’s Do the Twist

She came in one night from Syracuse, tired from sleepin' o-on the plane
Took a cab to Hollywood, dreamin' of the lights, that would spell her name

As is always the way with these scenarios, our murdered girl was just one in a long line of many anonymous faces. And this grim scenario is destined to play itself out over and over again.

5. Conclusion

If Jon English lives near you, RUN. Run, run for your life, and never stop running.