1.
I met Camilla Overbye Roos back in 1986. She served at a birthday party of mine and did a memorable job, spilling red wine on my mother and charming the pants off a middle aged fashion designer.
A few weeks back I met up with her for the first time in over twenty years. During that time Camilla has been very successful. Around 1990 she became an actress in Hollywood working with people like David Lynch. She made the cover of Life Magazine in 1993 as a young starlet. And hey, she had a small part in an unknown film called Titanic where she played Kate Winslet's Norwegian friend. Later she has directed several prize winning documentaries, among others Queenas about Latino transvestites in LA.
2.
Now Camilla and I are enjoying a Vietnamese dinner together, but we're not talking about her past in Tinseltown; we're not discussing how she used to play backgammon with Leonardo di Caprio on the set of Titanic; we're discussing whether ghosts can have a hard on.
"Yes, they can," Camilla says taking a bite of a huge Vietnamese spring roll. "I used to live in the El Royale in Hollywood and we had a ghost that haunted the apartment building - he used to walk around in his bathrobe with a great erection. I kept on telling the others, send him up to me, send him up to me."
I watch the spring roll disappear into Camilla's mouth.
Never trust an actress, I tell myself.
Especially not if she has worked with David Lynch.
3.
According to Camilla, the name of the ghost was Mr. Felcher. Everybody knew him because he had lived in the building in the flesh (so to speak), but now he had taken his boner with him to the Afterlife.
Mr. Felcher started haunting his own apartment - then he was seen in three other apartments as well. The four places had one thing in common; they had the doorknobs from the old place. Why a ghost would be emotionally attached to something as ridiculous as doorknobs is beyond weird, but the well mannered lady who was the first to spot Mr. Felcher's boner blushed when she told the management about her sighting.
"His bathrobe was open," she said, "wide open."
Mind you, even in Hollywood horny ghosts are a rarity. And it doesn't make it better that felcher is a description of a sexual act that doesn't go down well in the Bible belt, unless you happen to have an anus.
4.
Some facts:
Ghosts are souls that refuse to leave the earth. They feel they have unfinished business, so they stay around trying to contact the living. Mr. Felcher was probably scared that he couldn't flash any archangels in the Afterlife, so he hung around El Royale looking for a blow job.
Actually, El Royale was a good place for any one who wanted to fulfill his sexual fantasies. Cameron Diaz, Uma Thurman, Michelle Williams, and Diane Lane lived there. So did Ben Stiller, Matt Dillon, and Billy Zane who probably could have gotten a quickie with most female ghosts.
"I loved living in El Royale," Camilla tells me, "but as I said, I never saw Mr. Felcher. I lived in the wrong apartment."
Apart from this tragedy, it's hard to feel sorry for my friend. Even though most of Camilla's Titanic scenes ended up on the cutting room floor, she still lived on the Mexican set for months hanging out with Leonardo, Kate Winslet, and other beautiful icebergs.
James Cameron, the director of Titanic, was fond of her, too. Actually so fond that di Caprio begged Camilla to come on the set on her days off because she had such a soothing influence on the director.
Camilla Overbye Roos in Titanic. She isn't crying because of the iceberg, you know ...5.
But now Camilla is back in her native Copenhagen after twenty years of la dolce vita in New York, Hollywood, and London. She has three small kids who are living it up in their Danish apartment. And she's thinking of studying psychology. So would you if you'd lived in Southern California.
And Camilla doesn't seem to miss the old days at all. Not even Mr. Felcher with that metaphysical boner of his.
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