Interestingly, Dr. Leecing—who remains firmly convinced that Mike Irvine’s death was a simple suicide (Leecing’s testimony was an important deciding factor in the coroner’s verdict)—also connects the death with Brad Hellis, but for a quite different reason. “Brad was like another son to J.I.,” says Dr. Leecing. “He was Mike Irvine’s best friend. But Brad was another one of the causes of Mike’s depression. At the time of Joan’s lawsuit, and Brad’s falling-out with the company, he offered to resign, and it was Mike, as president, who had the deciding vote in accepting his resignation. Later he said to me, ‘I feel I’ve betrayed my best friend.’ But of course he was being forced to decide between the demands of his family and the demands of friendship. Mike had to decide in favor of the family, but he felt terrible about it. Brad Hellis was tops, and so was Walter Tubach. At the Rotary Club everybody loved them. Brad was a man of the highest integrity. I would trust Brad as much as I would my own father.”
And so we are left with the unsolved riddle of Mike Irvine’s death, a riddle that has a tantalizing number of possible solutions, interconnected, and yet none quite plausible. Perhaps the true villain was the land. Had the land taken hold of him too, as it had done to so many others? Had it possessed him, the way it appeared to possess his niece Joan? Did he take his own life rather than risk the shock of moving off the Irvine land, even though Corona del Mar was only a few miles away? Perhaps. If so, the secret does not lie under the sands of Las Vegas. It lies with Mike Irvine in the land, in the plot of Irvine ranchland where the others of the family are gathered, in the ashes of the old mansion and along the brown hills and among the mesquite clumps and the old canals and levees, in the orange groves and sheep trails and horse paths, all the dusty roads that lead to Finisterra.
Or perhaps the secret was revealed long ago in Peck’s 1837 New Guide to the West: “… the real Eldorado is still further on.”
POSTSCRIPT
FURTHER ON …
And o’er his heart a shadow
Fell as he found
No spot of ground
That looked like Eldorado.
EDGAR ALLAN POE
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The Gilded Nomads
The future of California will be written, unquestionably, in the south, where the little town that no one took seriously fifty years ago is now loosely defined as “metropolitan Los Angeles” and continues to eclipse San Francisco in size, economic importance, and attractiveness to the very rich. Los Angeles, furthermore, has lured an entirely new breed of rich, and against the gaudy backdrop of this glittering new city the “old” American pioneer families—the Crockers, Huntingtons, de Youngs, Spreckelses, and even the Irvines—seem like creatures from another, more naïve era.
It was not until the summer of 1978 that anyone in Beverly Hills really noticed it—the fact that many of the sleekly dressed denizens of that particular enclave of California superwealth had a decidedly foreign look about them, with swarthier complexions than ordinarily result from a California tan. That was the summer when a twenty-three-year-old Saudi Arabian sheik, who no one realized had moved to the community, revealed the renovations he had had made on his Sunset Boulevard mansion, hard by the Beverly Hills Hotel. He was Sheik Muhammad al-Fassi, and his house, which had hardly been a modest residence to begin with, was now surrounded by a wall imbedded with glittering mother-of-pearl. This wall was surmounted by dozens of large stone vases filled with plastic flowers. The house itself had been painted a bilious shade of green, and fan-shaped windows had been overlaid with gilt scrolls. At night, huge opening-night spotlights, also green, illuminated the house and its extensive grounds, and green and orange lanterns were suspended from the trees. Most startling of all was the curving front terrace, facing the street, which had been decked out with a parade of male and female nude statues. The statues had been painted flesh color and were explicit right down to pink nipples and black pubic hair.
Beverly Hills was accustomed to a certain amount of vulgarity, but this was too much. The neighbors were outraged. Even more disturbing was the fact that the house, and the nude statues, quickly became a local tourist attraction and created traffic jams on Sunset Boulevard as gawkers lined up in their cars for a closer look at the sheik’s new house.*
It was at this point that Beverly Hills realized that it had been undergoing an invasion of moneyed foreigners for the past ten years—Latin Americans, Israelis, French, Chinese, Koreans, Japanese, and, most notably, Iranians and Arabs. Foreigners had purchased the Harold Lloyd estate, the J. Paul Getty mansion, and other properties in Beverly Hills at cost of up to $4,000,000 apiece. “Foreigners will pay almost anything to live here,” a local real estate man reported, revealing that in 1978 the median price for a Beverly Hills house was $500,000. Princess Shams, the sister of the deposed Shah of Iran, had relocated herself in Beverly Hills, along with others of her expatriated friends and relatives. Perhaps the reason why the steady migration of foreigners to Beverly Hills had gone unnoticed had something to do with the fact that Beverly Hills itself was a community of immigrants from elsewhere—New York, Philadelphia, or the Middle West—a nomadic population that had come to southern California in search of fame and riches, or, having already achieved these, to partake of Beverly Hills’s famously easy and luxurious lifestyle. Now, it seemed, strangers from other lands were also coming to California in search of El Dorado.
Though no one knows, in this community of about 32,000 residents, exactly how many have come from abroad, some of the results of the influx can be seen in the growth of the Beverly Hills School District’s English-as-a-second-language program. Early in 1979, The New York Times reported that there were 187 elementary-school children enrolled in these classes—101 more than the year before. Fifty-three percent of these children were from Iran, 12 percent from Israel, 11 percent from China, Korea, and Japan, 6 percent from Spanish-speaking countries, and 5 percent from Italy. The remaining 13 percent were from countries in which French or Russian was the primary language. At the high school level the increase in the use of the program was just as dramatic. In the 1977–78 academic year there were 85 students enrolled in it; by 1979 the number had more than doubled, to 177. By that year 7 percent of the Beverly Hills school population were taking part in the program, and, of these, 79 percent were Iranian.
The foreign influx has also made itself felt along Beverly Hills’s celebrated monument to consumerism, North Rodeo Drive, where one strolls not only to marvel at the goods and price tags displayed in the expensive shops but also to be dazzled by the exotic array of foreign and custom-built automobiles parked along the curb. In addition to the traditional foreign-owned fashion and jewelry establishments, such as Gucci, Bally, Battaglia, and Buccellati, there are some impressive newcomers. In 1978, for example, Pietro and Margo Fallai, wanderers from chilly Sweden, where they had operated a successful chain of boutiques, came to Beverly Hills, where they opened the Yves St. Laurent Boutique and have continued to prosper happily. Another successful venture has been that of Bijan Pakzad, a thirty-six-year-old Iranian who spent more than a million dollars to transform a parking lot into one of the town’s most fashionable boutiques for men.
The newcomers, furthermore, have had no trouble fitting in socially with the eclectic Beverly Hills mix of rich: movie and television stars, producers, agents, rock stars, psychiatrists, retired corporate executives, hairdressers, divorce lawyers, and restaurateurs. Within weeks of his arrival on the Beverly Hills scene Mr. Pakzad had been invited to fifteen black-tie dinners and was having to turn down invitations because they were interfering with his six-day-a-week business schedule. The Fallais, who came to this glittering melting pot to escape both the Swedish winters and the crippling taxes, were apprehensive that they would have trouble making new friends. They need not have worried. Soon after their arrival they were being entertained everywhere and were giving large parties of their own in their hilltop house. Part of the easy acceptance of outsiders in Beverly Hills
has to do with Californians’ traditional wish to appear outgoing and hospitable. But, more important, social acceptance in California is easier because society itself is so new, unlike society in older eastern cities, where there really is an Establishment and where social lines demarcating who is who have been more rigidly and carefully drawn for several generations. “Beverly Hills is not a place where one group controls all the power bases,” its New York-born mayor, Joseph N. Tilem, has said. Also it is harder to adhere to the stiff formalities of social ritual in a community in which the style dictates gold chains, designer jeans, and Gucci loafers.
As Mr. Fallai puts it: “Maybe residents of Beverly Hills are hospitable because they know what it is to be strangers. Very few people I’ve met are native Californians.” Mr. Pakzad says it even more succinctly: “If you are successful, it is very easy to be accepted in any social circle in Beverly Hills.” Success, then, is the Beverly Hills criterion for aristocracy, not the schools one went to or the maiden name of one’s grandmother. Success of course means money, and part of the California dream is that in California success and money are easy to come by. Southern California, in other words, has abandoned every form of snobbery except the one dealing with the bottom line: one’s bank balance. But even that is assumed to be expandable. A young psychologist, visiting from the East, was chatting at a party with a young woman he had met just a few minutes earlier and was asked why he didn’t move to Beverly Hills. He mentioned something about the difficulty of establishing a practice in a new city. “But that’s simple!” she cried. “I’ll just have a luncheon for you, and that will be your practice.” He is not at all sure that the young woman was not absolutely right.
Still, though all the new Californians have arrived more or less successfully at the continent’s brink, the nomadic urge persists in curious ways—the urge to continue the illusion, at least, that one is willing to uproot, to move on to some farther, undisclosed place. The quickness with which California has come to be appears to have lent a certain transience to the quality of California life; no one seems to be completely settled in. In southern California in particular—and especially in Beverly Hills—addresses change quickly; these are still migratory birds, drifting and circling, looking for some more nearly perfect place to alight. (“Are you still on Mulholland Drive?” “No, I’ve rented Cliff Robertson’s place at Malibu.”) Every resting place is somehow temporary and, quite literally, shaky, but if, as some oracles of doom have predicted, California will one day shake itself into the Pacific Ocean, Californians, one feels, will be philosophical, ready to move on, outward, somewhere.
Nowhere is this illusion, this mobile frame of mind, more apparent than in the miles of mobile-home parks that stretch along the Pacific Coast Highway and elsewhere. (When Linda Irvine Gaede gives driving directions to Finisterra, one of the nearby landmarks is a trailer park.) Many of these parks are quite sumptuous, such as one at Dana Point, where Mrs. Norman Chandler, publisher of the Los Angeles Times, keeps a mobile weekend mansion. Nowhere but in California—not even in Florida—has the mobile home been able to achieve the status of a Correct Address. True, many of California’s largest and most lavishly accoutered mobile homes are planted firmly in the ground and are clearly homes that will move no more. But the mood is mobile.
Out in the desert, some hundred miles east of Los Angeles, lies yet another enclave of sudden (or very recent) wealth—Palm Springs. In spirit Palm Springs is not at all unlike Beverly Hills. Indeed, it is one of Beverly Hills’s favorite weekend playgrounds. Palm Springs is purely and simply about money, nothing else, and it is also a place where mobile-home living has come to a kind of glorious climax of extravagance. Even more so than other California cities, it is a place of superlatives and has its heady statistics backed up by an extraordinarily enthusiastic chamber of commerce.
Palm Springs has “more swimming pools per capita than any other city in the world”—roughly one pool for every four residents. Periodically the chamber of commerce makes a nose count of prestigious automobiles so that Palm Springs can continue to boast more Cadillacs, Lincolns, Bentleys, and Rolls-Royces than can be found assembled on any other 41.6-square-mile area on the planet. At various times Palm Springs has also advertised itself as the home of “the world’s most luxurious thermal baths,” “the world’s only flying great-grandmother,” and “the world’s wealthiest tribe of Indians.” No Palm Springs resident can escape for long his own personal, identifying superlative. A Seattle retailer has been pointed out in local promotional literature as “the owner of one of the largest department stores in the West.” A Milwaukee restaurant owner was identified as “the head of one of America’s biggest chains of steak houses.” Clearly bigness is what counts in Palm Springs. A Pebble Beach woman named Laurena Heple was identified as “the world’s largest manufacturer of remote-controlled gates.”
If a superlative can be attached to a slogan, so much the better as far as Palm Springs is concerned. Depending on the mood of the chamber of commerce, Palm Springs is either “The Winter Movie Capital of the World” or the place “Where the Sun Shines on the Stars.” The chamber publishes a periodic list, “Hollywood Personalities with Homes in Palm Springs,” and a similar list, “Prominent Business People,” is also available. Palm Springs, with its physical and emotional proximity to Hollywood and the motion picture industry, has had little difficulty accepting wealthy Jews into the community. But it was less sure how to handle the arrival of moneyed blacks, as was evidenced with the appearance of John H. Johnson, the publisher of Ebony, as a new winter resident a few years ago. The problem was solved, however, when the chamber of commerce was able to announce that “the wealthiest black in America” now owned a home in Palm Springs.
In Palm Springs, rich folk and the public relations business have merged, or at least they have come to a working agreement. Everyone is a booster. Conducting a tour of “society mansions” in the low hills around Palm Springs, a resident delivered the following information: “Here is the house where Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher spent their honeymoon. Over there is the house where Eddie Fisher and Liz Taylor spent their honeymoon. I forget which house Liz Taylor and Michael Wilding spent their honeymoon in, but the house where Liz Taylor and Mike Todd spent their honeymoon is over there …”
The town is touted as “The World’s Friendliest Place” as well as “The Winter Golf Capital of the World.” Golf, which may have become a middle-class sport elsewhere, is the required upper-crust game here, and it goes without saying that there are more golf courses per capita in Palm Springs than anywhere else on earth. Furthermore, Palm Springs is either “The Birthplace of the Golf Cart” or “The Site of the Development of the Golf Cart,” depending on which handout you read. In any case it undoubtedly has more golf carts per capita than it has golf courses and can go so far as to make this dizzying claim: “More homes with specially built, semi-attached golf cart garages than any other resort area.” Recently, too, Palm Springs has become “The Playground of the Presidents.” It started with Dwight D. Eisenhower, who used to spend a part of each winter in a cottage on the grounds of the Eldorado Country Club. John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson also spent time in Palm Springs, and Harry Truman and Herbert Hoover visited there, though not while they were in office.
Most recently, Gerald R. Ford enjoyed a sojourn in Palm Springs, and of course Richard Nixon is a frequent visitor at the Palm Springs home of his friend Walter Annenberg, who maintains Sunnylands, the area’s most sumptuous estate, which has its own private golf course. (Though it has only nine holes, the course is laid out in such a way that a total of twenty-seven holes can be played.) There are eight Annenberg golf carts with blue-and-white hoods, thirteen man-made lakes, and a swimming pool that cascades down on various levels like a natural stream. Sunnylands requires a staff of forty-five to run it, and to make sure that his golf course would always have water, Walter Annenberg bought the local water company. The place has guesthouses, equipment houses, and a m
ain house with a fountain copied from the one at the Museum of Natural History in Mexico City. The entrance to the house is a room with a high vaulted ceiling through which sunlight pours down into a reflecting pool. Beside the pool Rodin’s “Eve” is placed. All the rooms of the house are so located that they overlook the huge, rare beaucarnea tree which Annenberg purchased from Estelle Doheny’s estate and had transplanted from Los Angeles. There is a sculpture garden, a cactus garden, two hothouses—one just for orchids—and Mrs. Annenberg’s private meditation garden, a simple affair: a circle of white chrysanthemums enclosed in a square of Japanese pebbles set in grout, the whole surrounded by a holly hedge. Gardeners make sure that Mrs. Annenberg’s chrysanthemums are always fresh. Guests at Sunnylands go on picnics with insulated hot and cold picnic baskets and are driven about in a Mini-Mok, a housewarming gift from Frank Sinatra.
In the years since World War II—when the developers first “discovered” Palm Springs—the population has doubled every ten years, and in the next ten years the population will at least double again. The winter, or “in season,” population climbs at an even more alarming rate, and on winter weekends as many as a hundred thousand people a day pour into the city, mostly from Los Angeles. These figures would dismay the inhabitants of a traditional eastern resort area, but they delight the wealthy who have made Palm Springs their winter home; the popularity of the place assures them of the wisdom of their original investments.
California Rich Page 30