Big Dreams

by Bill Barich

  As a planned community, Venice never caught on. The canals got swampy and stank. The pier burned down and had to be rebuilt. When oil was discovered on the flats in the 1920s, the last glimpses of faux European splendor were lost to rigs and derricks.

  A stroll on Ocean Front Walk in Venice was like being spliced into the world’s longest dolly shot. So many films, TV shows, and commercials had employed the boardwalk for color that at least half of the people were there to perform.

  One morning, I saw an Academy Award performance on the basketball courts. A pint-size white woman in a leopard-skin bikini, the only female in the game, ran around with terrific intensity, shouting to her teammates for the ball, even though they ignored her.

  Defense was her strong suit. She hounded the black man she was guarding, pressing close and brushing him with her fingers and sometimes with her breasts. He didn’t know what to do. He looked furious, as if he wanted to drive to the hoop and smash her, but propriety held him back—or maybe it was the thought that he might bump into her again somewhere, in another lifetime, and she’d recall his knuckly biceps and his ridged abdominals and take from the memory another meaning.

  A black teenage girl who sat next to me in the bleachers said to her friend, “I’d put my foot in her face and teach her a lesson.”

  Her friend scowled. “Who does that girl think she is, anyhow? A Detroit Piston?”

  IN SANTA MONICA, I became obsessed with Fred Sands, a realtor whose signs were fixed to skyscrapers and exclusive condominiums, and outside mansions and estates in all the choiciest districts of the city. Wherever I drove the signs seemed to be waiting for me, and I fell into a habit of playing a game with myself and seeing how long I could go before I came upon another one, but it was never very long. Fred Sands had always been there first to nail down the turf.

  Beach sand, shifting sands, the sands of time. In my freeway reveries, Fred Sands appeared to me as the Realtor King who controlled the dynamo churning in the gut of Los Angeles, somebody who possessed esoteric knowledge about California on a par with Derrel Ridenour, Jr., the Mini-Storage King of the San Joaquin.

  But unlike Derrel Ridenour, Jr., Fred Sands agreed through his publicist to meet with me in a few days. Sands was no shrinking violet. The publicist sent me a packet of materials about him, and I discovered that he was extremely successful, among the top five residential realtors in the country. His company was the largest one-owner real estate firm in the state.

  In photographs, Fred Sands seemed deceptively bland. He cultivated the mild-mannered look of a harmless accountant, dressing in dark, conservatively cut suits and ties of no special flare. One photo in the packet showed him posed next to George Bush, both of them smiling broadly over some Republican intimacy or other.

  When it came to selling real estate, Fred Sands had a philosophy, of course: Use creativity. He believed that there was no such thing as an ordinary house—every house was extraordinary to the right buyer. As an example, he liked to cite a tiny, one-bedroom dwelling without a garage. Most realtors would blink at the prospect of listing it, but the place was really perfect for a midget who rode a motor scooter!

  Fred Sands thought that creativity in sales was rooted in the ability to listen to a customer. He must be a good listener, I thought, because he’d built his company from the ground up, and now he had a grand beach house in Malibu. He owned a radio station and had been a real estate consultant to the syndicated TV show “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.”

  As I read on, I felt that we were fated to meet, and that from the meeting would emerge the special understanding about Los Angeles that I’d been seeking.

  SUMMER WAS IN FULL SWING at the Gigliottis’ extraordinary house. The twins were going to a day camp in Malibu, where they rode horses and go-carts. Noah and Gabriel had attended a baseball camp at Pepperdine University and were about to start at a basketball camp under the tutelage of John Wooden, the former coach at UCLA. Aaron had a job as a camp counselor and seemed almost to be liking it, getting out of bed for work with a minimum of fuss.

  Little Michael didn’t go to any camp at all. Instead, he palled around with his mother or with his Aunt Page, who was sweet on him and sometimes brought him along when she was out with her boyfriend, Lou Adler. They were out together on the Saturday afternoon I came by to watch a boxing match on TV with Pat.

  Pat was still logging in his hours at Jupiter Realty and putting in his miles on the beach, but he’d have a break soon when the family went to Italy for their annual vacation at the end of the month.

  It occurred to me while we were watching a couple of featherweights duke it out that Pat might know Fred Sands, but he didn’t. His interest in real estate was minimal. It was just a place where he’d alighted for a time and from which he would eventually move on. Often he wished that he could be back behind a counter in a bookstore reading Henry Miller or talking to the customers.

  He told me that he’d just gone through a bad scene trying to acquire a downtown parcel to include in a development scheme. The owner had liked the deal. Then he hadn’t liked the deal. Then he got paranoid, began to queer the deal, and sold the parcel to a satellite company in Sylvester Stallone’s empire.

  “Stallone’s people play hardball,” Pat said reflectively. “You know who’s good to do business with? Tom Selleck. He and his brother put together shopping malls.”

  So, I thought, in Los Angeles the stars command the earth even as they manipulate the heavens.

  Although Pat was a realtor by default, he kept up with the action. Everybody in town might be railing about the Japanese, he said, but that was misguided. The Germans and the Canadians controlled more of the city. The Japanese were just better at offending people. They could be as arrogant as Americans. Sometimes when they took over a building, they lost tenants through their high-handedness.

  Pat believed that the Japanese were buying up all the Adidas’s Rod Laver-model tennis shoes in town, because they hated Koreans and Lavers were made in Europe, not in Korea. Some Japanese businessmen didn’t like talking to Pat’s secretary, who was black. Symbols of status were extremely important to them, he said—so American! They, too, were excited by flash and movie stars.

  Once, Pat had led a party of Japanese executives through a building that he wanted to rent to them. He had listed its advantages to no avail. Then, absently, he mentioned that John Wayne had died in the famous cancer hospital across the street.

  The executives had exclaimed, “Ah! John Wayne!” and had closed the deal on the spot.

  Gabriel dashed into the room as brashly as his namesake herald and interrupted our conversation. “Dad!” he shouted, in the most imperative voice that he could muster. “You have got to see Lou’s car!”

  In the driveway outside was a car such as none I’d ever seen before, black and sleek and low to the ground, mysterious, elegant, and doubtlessly speedy. It looked like a prototype for a twenty-first-century Batmobile, something with capabilities suited to a superhero. The kids were running around it and whooping.

  Pat whispered to me, “It’s an Aston-Martin Lagonda.”

  He figured that it had cost about $200,000. Aston-Martin only manufactured a few of them each year, so the demand far outweighed the supply. There was no guarantee that you could buy one even if you could afford it. As a status symbol, the Lagonda put other automobiles to shame. The other luxury cars around Los Angeles now seemed as common to me as weeds.

  The driver, Lou Adler, wore the slyly satisfied look of the proverbial cat who’d swallowed the proverbial canary. He was an L.A. legend, tight in all the right circles. In the great California strike-it-rich sweepstakes, he had rolled the dice and come out a big winner.

  Adler had earned his millions doing the record thing and the music thing, managing or producing such groups as Jan and Dean and the Mamas and the Papas. Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys was an old pal. They were so close to each other in the Surfin’ Sixties that when Wilson decided to get married, Adler bo
oked a suite for him at The Sands in Las Vegas and piled it to the ceiling with flowers. Brian had even named a dog after Adler, Louie.

  There were quips of Adler’s that still made the rounds. Somebody had once complained to him, for instance, that Los Angeles lacked seasons.

  “Nah, that’s not true, man, we have seasons,” Adler was rumored to have said. “We’ve got basketball season and the rest of the year.”

  The children kept whooping. The sly look on Adler’s face never budged an inch. He had a cool beyond cool, an absolute mastery of the offhand stance toward being alive that marked the L.A. elite and could only be gained after decades of grooving and being grooved upon.

  When Pat introduced us, I sensed that Adler could answer any question I might ask him, however surreal. I could ask him how things were on Planet Venus, and he’d reply, “They’re fine, man. Just fine.”

  “Hi, Lou,” I said, shaking his hand. He had on a slouchy hat covered with dancing musical notes.

  “Hi,” Lou Adler said.

  In a minute or two, Page released Michael with a good-bye kiss, and the happy couple drove off. Pat said to his son, “Where’d you go today, Mikey?”

  “To Kareem’s,” Michael said.

  Michael was tired from the outing and on the verge of a tantrum. He fell on the floor inside the house and commenced to wail and bang his fists. Everybody was used to the tantrums and inclined to let them run their course, but I was a first-timer and tried to talk the boy down, thinking what a strange California life he had ahead of him, not quite four years old and already passing the afternoon hanging out with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

  His tears stopped flowing after a bit, his clenched face relaxed, and he asked to see a video. There were a number of them on a shelf in the den, Bambi and Dumbo and lots of cartoons. Michael studied each box judiciously before rejecting it. He also rejected Nightmare on Elm Street—too scary, even though Aunt Page was in it.

  At last, I came to a box with Aunt Daryl’s picture on it, all blond serenity, and Michael nodded in approval and settled in for a soothing viewing of the old Cyrano de Bergerac drama that Hollywood had retold as Roxanne.

  CHAPTER 22

  IN 1887, Horace Henderson Wilcox, a real estate tyro from Kansas, parceled off a ranch outside Los Angeles, in Cahuenga Valley, to forge a new subdivision that he called Hollywood after a friend’s country estate back home. It was to be a saintly, abstemious place where alcohol was forbidden and emigrants from the rural Midwest would not risk the bite of temptation. Any religious group could build a church in Hollywood, Wilcox said, without having to pay for the land.

  Cahuenga Valley lay in a frost-free belt of orange groves and barley fields. Truck farmers grew tomatoes, green peppers, and watermelons and sold them at produce markets in the city. A photo taken in 1905 shows Hollywood as a tranquil agricultural village, where a few farmhouses were set well apart from one another in a grid of dirt roads and citrus orchards.

  Wilcox apparently did not have an abiding belief in temperance. He’d made a sneaky deal with a French family, the Blondeaus, by selling them a roadhouse in his subdivision on the condition that they not open the doors until after he had died. As soon as the good gray gentleman was in his grave, they set the bottles on the bar and enjoyed a profitable run until their neighbors shut them down with a new prohibition ordinance.

  The Blondeaus were forced to lease the premises. They found an eager tenant in the Centaur Film Company of Bayonne, New Jersey. Like most small studios in the East, where the fledgling film industry was located, Centaur wished to be as far as possible from the law—in this case, the operatives of the Edison Company, which held the only legal right to manufacture movies. Under the guise of protecting a patent, the Edison cops were trying to put the competition out of business.

  In 1911, Nestor, a Centaur satellite, became the first Hollywood-based studio, but movies were already being shot in other parts of California. Since 1908, the Essenay Company had been pounding out Broncho Billy one-reelers in Niles, not far from Oakland, and would eventually complete 375 episodes. The Bison Company had a movie ranch in Santa Monica, while Biograph rented some property in downtown Los Angeles so that its great director, D. W. Griffith, could winter in the sun.

  Sunshine was the key ingredient in enticing most movie people to the West Coast. The Chamber of Commerce in L.A. promised them 350 days of it a year. There were so many cloudless mornings and afternoons that most pictures could be filmed outdoors on the cheap. The sagebrush, the canyons, and the desert lent a new authenticity to the oaters that had previously been shot in the wilds of New Jersey. Industry moguls also took advantage of the immigrant labor around and employed Mexican and Chinese workers to construct sets and sew costumes. The moguls were glad to be close to the border, too, ready to disappear across it at the first whiff of an arrest.

  A trip to the Coast in those early years was a pastoral vacation for a movie company. The streets in Cahuenga Valley were often unpaved and stopped dead at the foothills. Coyotes howled at night, and deer ranged freely. Signs on the trolleys in town advised against taking any potshots at rabbits from the rear platform. The only cop in town seldom moved from the intersection of Hollywood and Vine.

  As the studios grew, they began to restructure and rearrange the valley to their liking. Their unplanned clutter of office buildings and sound stages went up without regard for either the landscape or their neighbors. They cut down the graceful, old pepper trees on Vine Street because the berries left stains on the hoods of automobiles. Non-native species were imported to replace the trees, eucalyptus from Australia and palms from Hawaii.

  The arrogance of the studios knew no bounds. Their pictures kept bursting unapologetically out of the frame, with celluloid cowboys galloping across lawns, jungle beasts wandering by schools, and the debris from car crashes blocking traffic. Movie people themselves were seen as a class apart—theatrical, unsavory, and probably guilty of moral turpitude. On occasion, children from established Hollywood families were warned to stay away from movie children.

  The homespun settlers that Wilcox had attracted, farmers and senior citizens devoted to religion, were a literal-minded bunch. They had a basic mistrust of the way a movie blended together illusion and reality. Movies could not be counted on for the facts. Films might be newfangled and entertaining, but they were also powerful, confusing, and intimidating, sometimes making the lives of ordinary folks seem even more unrewarding and lacking in imagination than they truly were.

  In his novel The Day of the Locust, Nathanael West described the bitterness and hostility of a crowd waiting in line for a movie premiere at a “picture palace” that was modeled on Grauman’s Chinese Theater, which had opened in Hollywood in 1927.

  All their lives they had slaved at some kind of dull, heavy labor, behind desks and counters, in the fields and at tedious machines of all sorts, saving their pennies and dreaming of the leisure that would be theirs when they had enough.… Where else should they go but California, the land of sunshine and oranges?

  Once there, they discover that sunshine isn’t enough. They get tired of oranges, even of avocado pears and passion fruit. Nothing happens.… They watch the waves come in at Venice. There wasn’t any ocean where most of them come from, but after you’ve seen them all.…

  Their boredom becomes more and more terrible. They realize that they’ve been tricked and burn with resentment. Every day of their lives they read the newspapers and went to the movies. Both fed them on lynchings, murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks, love nests, fires, miracles, revolutions, wars. This daily diet made sophisticates of them. The sun is a joke. Oranges don’t titillate their jaded palates.

  The city fathers in Los Angeles shared the ambivalent attitude toward movies—an attitude that the world would one day adopt toward their entire city. They praised the studios for spreading gorgeously composed advertisements for the land that they hoped to develop, and then raged at them for their wanton disregard of private property.
Whenever they tried to exert more control, the studio heads would threaten to move elsewhere.

  Some merchants and manufacturers in L.A. came together to study the situation. They cut quickly to the chase and conveyed to the city that the film industry had about 25,000 employees and added about $5 million a year to the local economy. In most quarters, the bad feelings soon abated.

  Hollywood and the movies were synonymous by the 1920s. The studios were bigger, better, and smarter, always ready to put a new spin on their product. Carl Laemmle, who owned the Independent Motion Picture Company, a precursor of Universal Studios, was instrumental in changing the course of the industry by widening the focus of his company’s marketing to include the personalities of its actors under contract. He had learned from audiences and exhibitors that some actors generated more applause than others, and that movie fans yearned to know more about their lives off-screen and who they “really” were.

  Biograph Studios had a very popular figurehead, Florence Lawrence, who was billed as the Biograph Girl and paid twenty-five dollars a week. Laemmle hired her away for a thousand a week and circulated a phony story to the Saint Louis papers that she’d died in a trolley accident. He followed that by placing a statement in a trade journal that accused his rivals of starting the rumor and denounced them for such low tactics.

  No, no, insisted the wounded Laemmle, Florence Lawrence was not dead! To prove it, he dispatched her to Saint Louis with King Baggott, IMP’s top male lead, and the two actors caused a mob scene and garnered even more publicity for the studio. In that instant, the star system could be said to have taken flight.

  Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin were the first big stars in town. They made side bets about who could command the most money. Chaplin’s brilliant films had an obvious appeal, but Pickford’s popularity was harder to explain. At a time when feminism was on the rise, she seemed to comfort audiences by playing girl-women who were no danger to the sexual or political status quo.