What Ever Happened to California?

Before TIME Correspondent David De Voss moved to a new assignment, he spent nearly five years observing the California scene. This farewell essay gives his impressions of his favorite state's current condition.

Atop a bluff ten miles outside Sacramento sits California's opulent new Governor's mansion. When former Governor Ronald Reagan called for its construction a decade ago, he admonished his bureaucracy to design a home that symbolized the bustle and promise of America's fastest-growing state. Completed three years ago, the residence does indeed capture California's quicksilver suburbanty. It has expansive verandas, teakwood floors, eight bathrooms and a caretaker assigned to collect golf balls sliced off the fairway of a nearby country club.

But the $1.3 million house is not a home--and it no longer symbolizes California. As just about everybody knows by now Reagan's successor, Jerry Brown, refuses to inspect, much less inhabit the abode, conspicuously preferring to bunk downtown in a modest $275-a-month apartment. Today this monument to the California dream stands cold and mute, an incongruous reminder of an era that no longer exists.

Californians differ over when the dream fizzled. Those of a political bent say the end came last November, when the state bucked a Carter tide to vote for Hayakawa and Ford. Some argue that the peak came in '74, when gasoline shortages tarnished the freeways and exurbs anchoring California's lifestyle. Others insist that the curtain fell last year, when citizens realized the inevitability of an earthquake and the consequences of a drought. But everyone agrees that the California of the '60s a mystical land of abundance and affluence, vanished some time in the 70s.

The golden epoch that gave rise to the California dream began when America, disillusioned over the loss of its hero President, looked west for spiritual renewal. On the edge of the horizon it found California. Heretofore dismissed for its aimless spirit and shallow purpose, California seemed reborn--or at least exciting. While think tanks scanned the future, aerospace technicians outfitted adventures to the moon. There was a flourishing journalistic "underground" and an archipelago of multiversities that bristled with post-modern architecture.

Originally a simple mix of ranchers and stucco dwellers California society had become an exotic melange riddled with hippies, surfers and executive dropouts. Out of this sprang a mutant pop culture. "Do your own thing" was the golden rule; ambivalence was its only sin. Mid-life divorce, recreational nudity and "Sunshine" LSD were all tolerated in the land of the topless shoeshine. Rock songs advertised the state (Fun, Fun, Fun) and its people (Eight Miles High). Thousands of teen-agers headed west and were hailed by older Californians seeking a formula for perpetual youth. Together they began an inner-directed search for a separate reality. Some trekked into the desert looking for Castaneda's ephemeral brujo, Don Juan. Others sought to gain an identity through encounters in the Esalen Institute's steamy communal baths.

California was no Camelot, but a growth rate higher than that of either Japan or Israel was making it a new frontier. With 70% of its work force employed in the service sector, California was the world's most advanced industrial state. Kansas City, Mo.'s Midwest Research Institute rated its "quality of life" tops in the nation. Few disputed that conclusion, since annual per capita income ran 18% above the national average. California was the future, and it worked.

Throughout the '60s, California rode point on reality. It discovered the Frisbee, embraced vodka and popularized credit cards and garage-door openers. The 1964 student protests at Berkeley sparked passions on campuses across the country. Detroit and Newark symbolized black rage, but Watts was the first ghetto to burn. Three years before Wounded Knee fell under siege, Indian militants fought for possession of Alcatraz. Almost every state had its draft riot, hippie commune and Black Panther spokesman--but the phenomenon that each represented surfaced first in California.

California was the media star of the '60s, and television was its agent. TV loved "the Coast." It was kinko-pop in Technicolor, with Carol Doda for dessert. Why trek to states out back when legions of braless grandmothers, hirsute cultists and banner-waving Chicanos could be filmed within an hour's commute of Los Angeles or San Francisco? Under the unblinking gaze of TV, California's every permutation assumed cosmic significance.

The state rushed into the '70s without breaking stride. Its gross product was larger than all but five countries; were California an independent nation, its per capita income would have been the world's highest. Yet, statistics aside, something was wrong. Michael Davie noticed the change in his 1972 book, California: The Vanishing Dream: "In the very part of the globe where there is the greatest concentration of knowledge and the most power over nature ... many people had begun to doubt whether knowledge and power really did bring worldly happiness. The economic and technological machine was grinding on but fewer and fewer people thought that its whirrings were a prelude to a better future."

The decade was scarcely a year old when the nightmares began. The demoniac leer of Charles Manson. Confessions without remorse. An aerospace unemployment line of 180,000 bodies. Flickering images of a bank burning. Such impulses, such possibilities, had always been there beneath the glitter, but once they surfaced, it was hard to see Utopia any longer. Suddenly, a 1971 California poll showed that half the state's recent arrivals, plus a full third of its permanent residents, would leave if given the chance. This was big news. By 1972 California migration was 90% below the annual rate of 300,000 who entered during the '60s. The recession of 1974 destroyed California's illusion of invincibility. Weaned on the high-test economy of the '60s, the state sputtered and wheezed as it geared down to the era of limits. It seemed to have more than its share of problems. Compton's street gangs and the Mexican mafia of East Los Angeles were just as bad as their counterparts back East. Men committed to zero defects and preoccupied with cosmic realities began to wonder if air you could taste was fit to breathe. California was distinctive no longer. The state that waltzed through the '60s now faced the same problems as those antediluvian provinces east of the Rockies.

Today the spirit and reality of California are different from those a decade ago. Nearly two-thirds of 1,000 think tanks operating eight years ago are moribund. For the first time in 15 years, both the University of California and California State enrollments are slipping. California's housing market is strong, but most businessmen remain skittish because of a 1975 Dunn & Bradstreet Fantus report that ranked the state's business climate 47th among the 48 states surveyed. For the first time in two decades, industrial investors, put off by bureaucratic red tape and environmental lobbyists, are bypassing California to relocate in other Sunbelt states. Statewide per capita income is still above the national average, but it is declining , as are the populations of Los Angeles, Oakland and San Francisco.

Though it seems robust, Hollywood has not escaped the results of lowered expectations. The five major studios this year will each release only eleven to 17 films, about half he number each would have produced a decade ago. Money is not the problem--film budgets have doubled since 1973. George Lucas' Star Wars and soon-to-be released extravaganzas by Francis Coppola and Steven Spielberg have a combined price tag of more than $63 million. Unfortunately, the studios' reliance on blockbuster epics means that fewer experimental movies are being made. The state's once sassy underground press has become superfluous, even insipid. Rock groups like Eagles, who once celebrated the ambience of their adopted state with songs like Peaceful Easy Feeling, now look on California as a latter-day Weimar Republic inhabited by ghoulish sybarites and double-knit hucksters.

California's current mood does not greatly surprise its demographers. Having skewed its population by welcoming successive waves of youth, it is now suffering the "baby-boom doldrums" of a generation confronting its inevitable mortality. Sociologists view the despair as something that logically follows a period of growth, the end of heady promise. But they worry about the effects of a prolonged malaise. Observes University of California Sociologist Neil Smelser: "There is abundant evidence that California is presently in a state of psychological depression because of the hollow notion that things are running out. Californians believe the best is behind them."

Of course, the California dream was doomed from its inception; a society based on the illogic of instability is no society at all. Once every institution is toppled and all behavior patterns are violated, the euphoria of freedom turns to boredom. Today the vitality of Los Angeles is beyond dispute, but San Francisco's health is questionable. The city that spawned a counterculture now leads the nation in suicide and cirrhosis of the liver. Nor is California any longer a rollicking trend setter. While innovators in other states experiment with megastructures and mass transit, Californians dawdle with their latest amusement: the video game.

Should California be written off? Hardly. Many Californians believe they are now embarked on a new, more modest adventure. Esalen continues to shelter 5,000 people a year, but instead of vagabonds, its climate runs to corporate executives. Innovation can be found in the present climate, but it now occurs quietly, less flamboyantly. Instead of protesting, the University of California's 125,000 students employ a lobbyist (at $84,000 a year) to battle the legislature. Nearly a dozen "open universities" in the Bay Area alone provide a less structured, tutorial approach to learning. The ruddy affluent of Marin County have made holistic medical clinics into community centers that sometimes offer their clients life-style-evaluation group sessions.

The leader in California's restructuring is Governor Brown, a Zen egalitarian whose announced goal is "regaining the ideological initiative Western society has lost to other parts of the world." Ethnics account for more than 35% of Brown's new 1,780 government appointments. The state's supreme court's new chief justice and the director of the California department of transportation are women-- as are 541 other Brown appointees. Reforms do not end with quotas. Once bastions of professional courtesy, the states regulatory boards are being filled with ordinary citizens. The medical board's vice-president is a black woman auto worker. A tough coastal commission protects what remains of California's 840-mile coastline. A new law freezing the state's agricultural acreage will halt the untamed growth of suburbs. Smog is down 50% in the L.A. basin because of stiff fines and surveillance. Two-thirds of a projected $2.5 billion state budget surplus has been earmarked for public school financing and middle-class tax relief.

Still, all this is very far from the image of Utopia that was so seductive in the '60s and early '70s. Perhaps the pursuit of Utopia has become small bore everywhere, concentrating on traffic control, garbage compactors and the blessed ability to breathe even half-clean air. The loss seems greater in California because there the expectations were so much greater than elsewhere. If the continent once seemed to tip west, allowing all things unattached to roll to the Golden State on the Pacific, it has by now regained its equilibrium. California has clearly lost the magic it once had, but it is not ready to concede that magic to any inheritors. Despite the state's export of so much of its culture and mores to the rest of the country, it may just be that the of California does not travel well.

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