by Bill Barich
Welcome to Los Angeles, The guru had got it all wrong, of course. The apocalypse had been and gone, and those of us who were sweltering on the San Diego Freeway or the Pomona Freeway or the Hollywood Freeway or the Santa Monica Freeway were trapped in the world’s first postapocalyptic, postmodern, postliterate city, a place without absolute boundaries that floated freely beyond the grasp of history, parody, and any concerns other than the momentary.
Los Angeles had always told its stories with a limited handful of variables, among them power, fame, money, speed, beauty, and sex. It played itself out in a highly evolved surface kinetics that offered premium amusement to the masses. It was a brutal and ghettoized arena in which self-dramatization was not only tolerated but encouraged. A moral life, a life of commitment, they could be lived elsewhere, in Wichita or in New Paltz.
Los Angeles had always been the source of all enduring California imagery, a foundry where the component parts of the Edenic dream had first been pounded out and manufactured for export, and in the American mind, as well as the global mind—even the Urdu mind, for that matter—it continued to be the preeminent signifier of all that was holy and rotten about the Golden State.
The city was inescapable, an unavoidable condition. Its highs were the highest and its lows were the lowest. It invited you to a party, threw an arm around your shoulder, drew you into a lavish bathroom, gave you a hit of cocaine, stuffed some dollars into your pocket, and asked if it were really true that you had no strange desires or perverse cravings. It pressed your nose to the candystore window and coaxed you into admitting that you wanted things.
Los Angeles laughed in the face of virtue. It did not go in for unalloyed feelings. It stared you down and forced you to both love it and hate it. It was about fire and being consumed by the fire and living and dying in the fire.
I joined the single-lane queue of drivers skirting the jackknifed big rig and realized by the sudden nearness of the ocean that I was on the threshold of a definitive Los Angeles experience, the one in which the grossness of a desecrated landscape does an instantaneous flip-flop, turns breathtaking, and makes you believe that nothing is as bad as you thought it was a moment ago.
In Santa Monica, where I left the freeway, the weight of the turgid air seemed to lift. I could see the Pacific and a line of gentle breakers foaming across a beach. There were billowy palm trees like those I used to covet as a child in New York. Flowering bougainvillea vines trailed over balconies, and seagulls of an unsullied whiteness winged about them.
On the green palisades, some joggers were running their afternoon laps through an obstacle course of shopping carts and rag bundles that constituted a large encampment of the homeless. Here by the sea, in an environment of unwithered promise, the homeless did not look quite as desperate or as destroyed. Instead, they had a weird sort of vigor, as if they had come to terms with their burden and had decided that if they were going to be poor and hungry, Santa Monica was the paradise in which to do it.
O, California! Two blocks up from the beach, in a quiet neighborhood of stucco houses, was the Sovereign Hotel, soon to be my home away from home.
Built in 1928 and designed by Julia Morgan, the architect of William Randolph Hearst’s Castle, the Sovereign had a casual elegance. It was part Mediterranean villa and part Spanish mission, all white stucco, arched windows, and red-and-white striped awnings. It had once been a fashionable place to lodge, but now it catered to Asian and European tourists on a budget, and to screenwriters performing patch jobs on slasher pictures or waiting in limbo for a meeting with a studio executive that kept being postponed.
At some point in time, the Sovereign had rented out its rooms as apartments, so for a bargain price you could have a suite with a sitting room and a kitchen. Sometimes the suite even had a view of the ocean. A continental breakfast was provided, too, and served in a nook off the Art Deco lobby, where guests from abroad seemed always to be grappling in vain with a broken toaster.
Every morning at the Sovereign, I came downstairs to the smell of burnt toast and the sound of invectives in foreign languages, but in compensation there was always some classical music playing from a small radio hidden behind a larger, nonfunctional radio of the 1930s. In some respects, the hotel was a doppelgänger for Los Angeles, never quite what it appeared to be and forever staying one step ahead of interpretation.
I had to settle for a third-floor suite that lacked an ocean view. The door had a peephole for checking out visitors, and the furniture was overstuffed and redolent of powder and perfume. It summoned to mind an era of Gatsby-esque cocktail parties, where the men wore white linen trousers, knocked around croquet balls, and answered to the name of Hal.
A suite at the Sovereign would have been ideal for Philip Marlowe, the definitive southern California private detective, I thought. His creator, Raymond Chandler, had based his corrupt Bay City on Santa Monica. Chandler was raised in England and remained a devoted Anglophile to the end. He claimed that Los Angeles gave him an eerie sense of unreality.
“I’ve lived half my life in California and made what use I could of it,” he once said, “but I could leave it forever without a pang.”
He never did leave it forever, though, in spite of having enough money to move wherever he pleased. In his old age, he tried to escape back to England, only to return to the Coast. Chandler became a victim of the unavoidable condition, carping and griping and carrying on about how he wished to be among a better class of people than the Californians he met, whose pride expressed itself “in their kitchen gadgets and their automobiles.”
On and on went Raymond Chandler, raving about corruption and blight and deceit and yet never budging from where he was.
“The whole of California is very much what someone said of Switzerland,” he wrote in a letter to a friend, “un beau pays mal habite.”
SAILING ALONG THE PACIFIC COAST in their four-masted caravels, Juan Cabrillo and his crew came in October of 1542 to the present site of San Pedro Harbor and saw a sky blackened by smoke from the fires at Indian villages. They called the place Bahia de los Fumos, “a good port, and a good land of many valleys, plains, and groves.” They were met by some Indians who were dressed in skins and lived on fish and agave, a plant in the Amaryllis family, and they were told about a big inland river where maize and other crops grew.
The Indians were from the Shoshonean family and would later be known as Gabrielinos after their domicile at Mission San Gabriel. Gabrielinos had a visionary bent and used jimsonweed in their cult of toloache, instructing young boys in spiritual matters while the boys were hallucinating.
Junípero Serra founded Mission San Gabriel in 1770. His superiors had ordered him to build a compound by Río de los Temblores, the River of Earthquakes, now the San Gabriel River. Serra and his party of soldiers, mules, and muleteers encountered opposition from the Indians there, and church legend has it that they would have been killed if they hadn’t unfurled a painting on canvas of Our Lady of Sorrows, who intimidated the Indians with her grief-stricken face and caused them to put down their bows.
The River of Earthquakes, though excellent for irrigation, flooded frequently. The padres had to rebuild their mission compound at a new site five years later. There the Franciscans flourished, but the Gabrielinos did not, plagued instead with the usual miseries of mission chattle and dying off from smallpox, measles, and syphilis. Mission San Gabriel became one of the church’s richest holdings, accounting for the most bountiful wheat harvest in the region. Jed Smith, no brilliant speller, stopped over in 1826, and sang its glories to his journal:
“Two thousand acres of land … An extensive vineyard and orchards of Apples Peach Pear and Olive trees som figs and a Beautiful grove of about 400 Orange trees … a scene on which the eye cannot fail to rest with pleasure.”
The Gold Rush left Los Angeles largely unaffected, although a few of its merchants made a bundle by supplying beef and wine to miners. Into the mid-nineteenth century, it remained a sleepy settlem
ent whose attributes William Brewer outlined in 1852, while he was camped on a hill in a cold December rain.
Los Angeles is a city of some 3,500 or 4,000 inhabitants, nearly a century old, a regular old Spanish-Mexican town, built by the old padres, Catholic Spanish missionaries, before the American independence. The houses are but one story, mostly built of adobe or sunburnt brick, with very thick walls and flat roofs. They are so low because of earthquakes, and the style is Mexican. The inhabitants are a mixture of old Spanish, Indian, American, and German Jews; the last two have come in lately. The language of the natives is Spanish.…
Here is a great plain, or rather a gentle slope, from the Pacific to the mountains. We are on this plain about twenty miles from the sea and fifteen from the mountains, a most lovely locality; all that is wanted naturally to make it a paradise is water, more water. Apples, pears, plums, figs, olives, lemons, oranges, and “the finest grapes in the world,” so the books say, pears of two and a half pounds each, and such things in proportion. The weather is soft and balmy—no winter, but perpetual spring and summer. Such is Los Angeles, a place where “every prospect pleases and only man is vile.”
The shortage of water did not inhibit the first Los Angeles boom during the 1880s—at the time, water was still an afterthought. The railroads helped to ignite the growth, as they’d done elsewhere in the state. With the Southern Pacific and the Santa Fe in competition, there were constant fare wars, and a roundtrip ticket from Chicago, say, might drop from a high of $125 to $25.
Midwestern farmers traveled west on holiday and were quickly charmed by the chief agriculture benefit of Los Angeles County—as Brewer had put it, no winter. The low price of acreage convinced many of them to move and take up the cultivation of citrus groves, never again to sniffle and sneeze through another January. Along with their farming instincts, the new pioneers brought with them a heartland fundamentalism, Christian and Republican, that was in marked contrast to the freewheeling liberalism that had always obtained in San Francisco, the capital city of the north.
Ordinary tourists also availed themselves of the cut-rate fares, drawn by the prospect of shirt-sleeve weather at Christmas, and by the glowing endorsements of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, established in 1888, the first such organization in the United States.
The chamber was packed with boosters and go-getters out to sell off Los Angeles as fast as they could. Special trains labeled “California on Wheels” toured the snowy interior and teased the ice fishermen, the bobsledders, and the frigid Scandinavians with photos of beaches, palm trees, and bathing beauties, and with crates of oranges, lemons, olives, almonds, and avocados that showcased L.A. as the primal cornucopia.
There were lulls in the Los Angeles growth curve, moments when it appeared that the city would stretch no more, but something always came along to jump-start the action again—Doheny’s oil strike, for instance, or the enticements of a budding motion-picture industry.
Subdividers of every stripe and ethical persuasion were going gangbusters by the 1920s and constructing the first expansive tracts around the city. They lured customers with such incentives as cruises to Hawaii or a chance to kiss the prettiest starlet on the MGM lot. If you checked into a hotel, a realtor was liable to give you a blind call. Bellhops were bribed to slip flyers about tantalizing, affordable property under doors. Midgets and hirelings in sandwich boards walked the streets handing out brochures. Sometimes a hundred ships stacked with lumber were docked in the harbor waiting to be unloaded.
A new booster group, the All-Year Club of Southern California, supplanted the Chamber of Commerce and began promoting Los Angeles as something more than a mere winter retreat. Its prime mover was Harry Chandler of the Times, who owned plenty of land that he was willing to surrender if the price was right. To extoll the city’s assets, the club advertised in dozens of U.S. papers and sent out its absolutely unbiased speakers to deliver countless lectures to interested groups.
Sloganeering was the club’s forte: “A new man in two weeks! You’ve earned, you deserve, a real vacation!” At its most excessive, the club implied that the ultraviolet rays shining down on Angelenos were so good for humanity that medical researchers were hoping to duplicate them in the lab.
As an adjunct to the All-Year Club, a newly chartered Automobile Club, also the first ever, promoted Los Angeles in its publications. There were almost 200,000 cars in the city at the end of the 1920s, and they had taken over the downtown and had thrown the trolley system out of whack, slaughtering mass transit in the bargain.
Angelenos loved to drive, and they did it with impunity and an alarming sense of entitlement. With the greatest possible goodwill, they harkened to the notion that a Sunday afternoon could profitably be spent motoring the family’s Model T to a proposed subdivision in the San Fernando Valley, where they could inspect an architect’s rendering of the nearly identical houses to be built rapid-fire by carpenters whose labors echoed the assembly-line techniques of Henry Ford.
The automobile gave developers more freedom. They could stray farther afield and acquire land for even less money because tracts didn’t need to be anchored to the traditional modes of transportation anymore. The doomed trolleys were turned into dinosaurs overnight. One entrepreneur even bought some trolley cars for a pittance, put them up on blocks, and sold them off as homes.
World War II had the same stimulating effect on Los Angeles as it did on the San Francisco Bay Area. Employees of such shipbuilding and aircraft firms as Northrop, Lockheed, and McDonnell Douglas joined returning G.I.s to settle the new towns being constructed where the oranges and the lemons used to grow. The towns shared a number of standard features—most notably, a shopping center or a mall—but schools, then as now, were seldom among them.
The craft of putting together a subdivision was soon refined into a quasi-science, and a crew could complete a house in a few days, although it might take months for an owner to have a phone installed. Sewer systems weren’t always dependable, and flooding was common during the winter rains. The philosophy of the period was strictly grab-and-run.
The tracts with their interchangeable parts gave Los Angeles its characteristic look of many diverse little suburbs that didn’t quite add up to a recognizable city. When the flatlands were covered, the developers moved on to the canyons and to the ridges. The freeways followed in their path, ever-multiplying ribbons of concrete and asphalt braided together in such intricate configurations that if you looked at an aerial photo of L.A., it seemed to be crisscrossed by ganglia reverberating in an odd neural structure.
In Silver Lake, in Glendale, in Culver City, and in Pomona, houses reposed in neat rows beneath skies that were blackened by smog, not Indian campfires.
THOSE FIRST FEW DAYS IN SANTA MONICA, I felt as if I were on vacation. After so many weeks of sleeping on the ground or in the same generic motel room, I wallowed in the peacefulness of the Raymond Chandler Suite. There were no car doors slamming at dawn, no flustered husbands shouting at their wives to hurry up. The essence of motel living is flight, but a good hotel makes you want to linger.
In bed, while starlings sang in the crowns of the palms, I would drink coffee, open the Los Angeles Times, and read about the Dodgers, the random shootings, the intentional killings, the box-office grosses, and especially the real estate deals of the movie stars and the moguls. They were all crucial things to know if you aspired to be an Angeleno.
You were definitely out in the cold if you were unaware, say, that John Landis, the director, had ripped down Rock Hudson’s old 1950s hacienda in Beverly Hills to put up a new house of more than 7,000 square feet, or that Mel Gibson was getting $45,000 a month for leasing his 2.3-acre Malibu Colony compound. Such gossip allowed you to calibrate your own worth by the decimeters that separated you from the aura cast by Hollywood.
Along with the baseball scores, the real estate scores, and the murder bulletins, I sometimes read the air-quality report in the Times. In fact, I was relatively sure that I was
the only person in the city who did read it. It measured the levels of ozone, nitrogen dioxide, and carbon monoxide in the air and rated them on the Pollutant Standard Index.
Almost every day, some inland area was in the grip of a first-stage episode (unhealthy) or a second-stage episode (very unhealthy). Third-stage episodes didn’t exist. Once the pollutants had reached a certain density, coagulating and mutating, the air was simply described as “hazardous.”
In Santa Monica, near the beach, I seldom had to worry about the air. The ocean breezes took care of the excess ozone, nitrogen dioxide, and carbon monoxide on all but the stillest, hottest days. The weather was always balmy when I left the hotel for my morning stroll, and I would experience the same sort of privilege that I had felt so long ago in Westwood, glad to be where I was, in California, drawn irresistibly toward a bright patch of light.
Santa Monica wasn’t truly part of Los Angeles, but it was the Los Angeles that Americans slavered over in their fantasies. It had its origins as a real-estate development along the ocean, on Santa Monica Bay, and had been incorporated as an independent town in 1886. Guidebooks often mentioned that Shirley Temple, a confectionary California child, had been born there.
After I’d walked for a block or two, I found it hard to remember any of the information that I had just digested at the hotel. The debilitating news stories seemed not to matter anymore. They were obviously fictions that some despairing editors had dreamed up to sell a few papers. Human misery belonged on the map of elsewhere, a place that you could drive to, like any other.
In Palisades Park, the perennially fit were always doing their exercises, outrunning calories and yesterday, while the facially challenged were nowhere to be seen. Old Eastern Europeans in absurdly heavy clothes, their shawls and their tweed suits like the trappings of the past, sat on benches to converse or to play a hand of cards.