In Search of the Angels

By Gregory Jaynes

They may be scarce, but Los Angeles has just about everything else

And then there will be a day when the light comes in on a bright, sharp slant--clarity an artist lives for. Even drunks, then, can see the mortar between the bricks--and the place appeals and no longer seems absurd. An absolutely azure sky set off by a single cloud looking as if it were shot up there from a pastry chefs icing gun, that kind of a day. And everywhere houses cling to the cliffsides like cockleburs. Jade plants, looking like so many butter beans on a stick, grow high and thick out here, form hedges, give privacy. (Back East, they live, if they live, in pots.) With air soft on the cheek, a boisterous green ocean in view, blazing red bougainvillea at the back, it is suddenly clear what has pulled so many souls to the City of the Angels--a place just as easily perceived, on another day, as one of the ugliest, most unlivable towns in all America.

"Los Angeles is a city about which almost anything may be said in praise or derogation," Charles Stoker remarked in 1951, "and about which a case can be made out either way."

Condescension informs much of the literature about Los Angeles, or something darker (The Day of the Locust). It seems to beget in the outsider the tendency to be snide, to say, for example, that if Houston is the buckle on the Sunbelt, L.A. is the melanoma. "Double Dubuque," H.L. Mencken called it. Westbrook Pegler proposed that the city be declared incompetent and placed in the charge of a guardian.

The city has had no Dickens; it does not have one here. It has defied attempts to capture it entirely: writers have taken it on, got lost in its complexities, returned advance money. How can anything linear be made of sprawl, dirty air, glitz, wealth, power, celebrities, a Noah's ark of immigrants, real estate gone mad, earthquakes, brushfires, mud slides, avalanches, floods, a million or so illegal aliens, freeways, enslavement to the automobile, drive-in churches, Disneyland, outrageous poverty, oil, the Pacific Rim, living on the fault line, heart-stopping geographical beauty, to name but a few ingredients? In spots it owns a resemblance to Lagos: vines grow in the cracks. In other places, a word that comes easily to the tongue is paradise. Generalities abound, and most apply. The City of Angels.

Frank Lloyd Wright, looking at the buildings in the shape of hot dogs, doughnuts, cameras, tacos--whatever was sold inside--is said to have been struck by the thought that if the country were tilted, all the loose nuts and bolts would tumble down here. "I don't know whether I would like to know my neighbors here," Ernest T. Emery wondered in 1905. "I don't like the way some of them act." (Emery's and other trenchant observations employed in this account repose in a fine collection by Bruce Henstell called Los Angeles, an Illustrated History.) There is to this day a certain nuttiness to the place; it is as if the mentally unwrapped in every other state got together once a year, chose the wildest card among them and paid the chosen's expenses to Los Angeles. Look under churches in the Yellow Pages, and you will find 70 columns of listings, many of them having little or nothing to do with God.

The Queen Mary is berthed in the harbor at Long Beach, a tourist attraction. She has a restaurant astern called Sir Winston's. The menu is in French. Under dessert you find "tuile aux fraises, "with no English translation. You summon a waiter, whose name is Juan. "French taco," Juan explains, "with strawberries."

"Nonconformity in our city is no easy feat; it's hard to find any standard to rebel against." That was written by an Angeleno, David Clark, in 1972.

"A big hard-boiled city with no more personality than a paper cup," said Raymond Chandler. "Iowa with palms," said John Gunther. Too severe. Iowa cannot claim to have, in one city at least, a Little Tokyo, a Chinatown, a Koreatown, all of which have personality. Hard-boiled is another matter.

All explorations of Los Angeles, a top-down kind of town, must begin with the same action: cranking an automobile. "How can one pursue happiness by any swifter or surer means," the Los Angeles Times asked in 1926, "than by the use of the automobile?" This year the paper advised in an Olympics guidebook that "the car's the thing, and if you have one or have rented one, be sure to become familiar with Los Angeles streets and freeways. (This is the key to 'happy' motoring in and around the large basin.)"

"It should be carefully noted," the newspaper further advised, "that rush-hour traffic into and out of Los Angeles is very much a part of the city; learning to accept this fact will ease some of the pain, for there is no getting around it: between the hours of 7 and 9 a.m. and 3:30 and 6 p.m., you will be 'stuck' if you happen to be in the wrong place." The local driver, according to the Times, "is professional, coldblooded, and no-room-for-error. As long as no one errs, the flow of traffic is rapid. If an accident does occur, the freeways come to a screeching halt." One digests this, and takes the wheel with a shaky hand.

And hits the Santa Monica Freeway at rush hour. Currently, the rush-hour (What a misnomer!) speed on downtown freeways is 15 to 18 m.p.h., according to a study by the University of Southern California. By the year 2000 the speed is expected to drop to 5 to 8 m.p.h. There are 3.3 million commuters every morning and evening here, some 75% of them driving in cars by themselves. There were 500,000 cars in Los Angeles in 1924. By 1940 there were 1 million, and the region boasted it had one car for every three residents, while behind-the-times New York was stuck with one for nine. In 1979 Los Angeles drivers were racking up 200 million miles a day. In 1983 the total number of registered vehicles in Los Angeles County was 5,119,194. Motoring gamely along, an exhaust-pipe taste gathering about the teeth, one is self-conscious of erring in a world of gorgeously maintained 1965 Ford Mustang convertibles.

"If California ever adopts a new state flower," Poet Ernest McGaffey wrote in 1923, "the motor car is the logical blossom for the honor. Whether commercially or socially, whether from the standpoint of business or sport, it is the same, the whole same and nothing but the same. All hail rubber! All hail the automobile!"

During rush hour, according to California transit officials, the 725 miles of freeways serving Los Angeles are used at 100% capacity. Ninety-seven percent of the area's daily trips are taken in private automobiles. If McGaffey were around today, he could say that if this culture ever adopts an icon for all, the logical choice should be the orange rubber cone signifying that a lane is closed for repairs.

Single people speak of other single people as being "geographically undesirable." Such is traffic. The morning paper ran a feature on people driving around with entire wardrobes hanging from a rod suspended over the back seat, the easier to spend the night far from home and go to work the next day in a fresh outfit. "Liberation," said a liberated woman reader, "has turned us into goddamned gypsies."

And what distances there are to cover! Los Angeles County is 4,083 sq. mi., or 800 sq. mi. larger than Delaware and Rhode Island combined. If it were a state, it would be the eighth largest in population (7.9 million--behind Michigan, but ahead of New Jersey), not including California. The city measures 30 miles at its widest, 44 miles at its longest. It is roughly 465 sq. mi., and when you reach an edge and leave the city behind, there is no sense of leaving anything, because the fried chicken joints, the car washes, taco houses, newspaper racks, billboards, stop lights and, along your flanks, oil pumps bobbing like giraffes eating the tops out of acacia trees just go on and on.

Atlantic Richfield, Occidental Petroleum, Getty Oil and Union Oil have their headquarters in Los Angeles. At the beach you see seals and oil pumps, as well as men, too dumpy and too old to be making fools of themselves, on roller skates. On the freeway you see an oil pump in a bend where, elsewhere in the nation, there would most likely be a fruit stand. There is a camouflaged oil pump on the campus of Beverly Hills High School. Just as you begin to understand there is sensible, sound, big commerce in this vast polyglot a sign looms up: LANDSLIDE AREA. CONSTANT LAND MOVEMENT NEXT 0.8 MILES. USE EXTREME CAUTION. Constant land movement? So why build a house on mobile dirt?

The thought is momentarily interrupted as a graybeard Kerouac beat screams past on a Harley, one of the 174,671 registered motorcycles in town. One of the things he no doubt likes best about the place is that it does not require you to wear a helmet. California recognizes a man's right to bare his brains at all times.

But about those houses on jiggly earth: Frances Ring, who has lived in Los Angeles since 1937, who was F. Scott Fitzgerald's last secretary and who is currently writing a book about that job, lives on a hillside back in a canyon. Her house is not on stilts, as so many others are, but she explains them by saying, "Well, you're kind of on top of the world. Where else could you have this horizon? And some stayed in place even in the earthquake in '71. You may get a slide, but then the sun comes out, you clean up the mud, and you're here for another season. You build a retaining wall." A journalist who lives here volunteers that "people say, 'That felt like a 5.3 or a 6.8.' What really concerns them is an 8.1. They never say Richter."

"Why should anybody die out here? They'll never get any closer to heaven," Stewart Edward White wrote in The Rose Dawn in 1920.

In 1920 this was farm country; nobody had heard of smog, and heaven it might have been. Ride around today with any elder Angeleno, and the talk inevitably turns to what used to stand on this corner or that. Today a service station, four years ago a convenience store, before that a diner--before that a bean field. Tom Bradley, the mayor, once said that "Los Angeles is a place where people can start life anew without feeling the pressures of what is proper or what is right in another city." That must be true, for more new businesses are started here each year than in any other city. The region also leads in bankruptcies; in 1983 there were 38,258. The corners are, like the earth, constantly changing.

"What America is, California is, with accents, in italics," Carey Me Williams said in 1946. It may be America's quintessential city. To believe it, you can wade through the statistics or visit any supermarket, gasoline station or bowling alley and listen to the languages. Or you can turn on TV station KSCI and hear English, Spanish, Arabic, Farsi, Armenian, Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese, and Cantonese and Mandarin Chinese.

There seem to be as many differing estimates of the number of Armenians here as there are Armenians: a good guess would be 175,000 to 200,000, more than in any other city in the country. In Soviet Armenia only two cities have more.

One estimate puts the number of Koreans in Los Angeles at 150,000 to 200,000. But Demographer Eui-Young Yu, chairman of the sociology department of California State University, Los Angeles, suspects that as many as 100,000 Koreans have come to this country since the 1980 census, the majority of them settling in Los Angeles. At last look there were 2,100,000 Mexicans here, as well as 200,000 Salvadorans, 150,000-plus Filipinos, 60,000 Samoans, 30,000 Thais, 153,000 Chinese, 40,000 Vietnamese, and the list goes on and on. Los Angeles County school officials have counted at least 85 languages being used by the students. At Hollywood High alone, students speak 38 languages. In the city's Unified School District there are 120,000 "limited English-proficient" students.

Statistics tend to numb, unfortunately, for statistics tell more about this place than anything this side of hiring a car and driving for three straight weeks--though neither method will give an outsider the full grasp, or an insider, for that matter. Most of the population watched the riots in Watts in 1965 on television, far enough removed from the violence not even to hear a siren. Flowers bloom in the ghettos here, putting a pretty face on poverty. According to the police department, Los Angeles has the largest concentration of street gangs in the country. (The reader will just have to get used to the phrase largest in the country.) Half of the urban area of Los Angeles is staked out by street gangs. There is a gang located in virtually every community in the city.

On public television the other night, a lieutenant was defiantly explaining that the police had not lost control of the streets to thugs because "we got the biggest gang in the city. There are 6,800 police officers here to back me up." Chicago, which has just lost its second-city title to the Los Angeles masses, has 12,500. The murder rate in Los Angeles in 1982 was 4.3 times that of Northern Ireland. Last year there were 115.5 robberies for every business day. Los Angeles magazine reported this spring that not a day has gone by since Oct. 4, 1979, that a bank has not been held up in Los Angeles. Beverly Hills has 122 uniformed policemen for its 32,000 citizens. The best most communities can shoot for is 1.8 officers for every 1,000 citizens. Response time in Beverly Hills is in seconds.

Statistics but not texture, that. Then this: on certain seedy city street corners there is a urine smell, the smell of humanity broken in every way. And yet you hear a policeman reporting, "Man down at Hill and Sixth." The cop does not register disgust and say that there is a wino soiling himself in the gutter here. He reports it the way the best of civilization would view it: "Man down."

A real estate offering: "The home of Michael Landon, star of the TV series Little House on the Prairie, is another jewel at Rodeo Realty from Dorothy Barish. On more than seven acres overlooking Beverly Hills, this seven-bedroom 'little house' is offered at $13 million, about $1 million for each of its 13 baths."

Beverly Hills is the side of Los Angeles that the unfamiliar sometimes take for Los Angeles, though it is no more a reflection of the place than Hollywood, whatever that is. Ninety percent of the world's recorded entertainment is produced within five miles of the intersection of Hollywood and Vine. The motion picture industry employs 77,000 people, and most of them are waiting for a call.

It may seem some nights like a town full of limousines and klieg lights, but people do do other things here. There are 915,000 of them in services (220,000 in health care alone) and 843,200 in retail and wholesale trades. There are 471,000 in government, 267,000 in the aerospace industry, 242,000 in real estate, insurance and finance. The place has 23,488 lawyers, natch; 19,856 doctors. These are the folks you see on the freeways. Carbound, they form intense allegiances to disc jockeys, who are some of the highest paid in the nation, which is understandable, given the market. There is a radio station for every slot on the dial.

All these people inching toward work or back from it spend more of their income on retail goods than people do in any other city. This city is ranked 97th in what Sales & Marketing Management magazine calls median household after-tax "effective buying income" ($23,655), yet it is first in retail sales. New Yorkers spend 37% of their effective buying income on retail goods; Angelenos spend 48%. In 1982, in Beverly Hills, where the figure has to be skewed by out-of-town buyers, $143 million was spent on clothing, $72 million on cars, $96 million on general merchandise and $64 million on dining out. Also that year, $2.5 billion was spent in the metropolitan area's 16,672 eating and drinking establishments. At one shopping center alone, albeit a good shopping center, South Coast Plaza, sales in 1982 came to $297 million.

Promoters planted the first palm tree here in the 1880s. At the same time, real estate agents were known to pin oranges on Joshua trees, claiming this had been a terrain given over to orange groves since beyond memory. At the beginning of this year, the median sales price for an existing house in greater Los Angeles was $114,200--in the nation, it was $71,800. But who can find a "median" home? The other day, on a quiet street in Santa Monica, a FOR SALE sign went up in front of a three-bedroom, one-bath, fake stucco 1940s house on a lot the size of a gas-station road map. Asking price: $269,000. A plump woman walking by wearing a muumuu said, "It may sound high, but you pay to be close to the beach. The air is better." Down at the beach in Santa Monica, at Ocean Boulevard Park, the government had erected a sign: NOTICE. BLUFF SUBJECT TO SLIDES. USE PARK AT YOUR OWN RISK. This for $296,000!

" 'Then what do you live on if you don't raise anything?' asked my friend.

'Credit. Haven't you been here long enough to learn that trick?'

'I exhausted mine some time ago.'

'What are you doing then?'

'Poising.'

'Poising? What's that?'

'Did you ever see a hawk poising--hanging still in the air watching for something to drop on? That's my business at present.' "

--Theodore S. Van Dyke, 1890

Deals, deals, deals. Studio people still "give good phone" here, still "take a meeting." On San Vicente Boulevard there is a shop called A Definite Maybe Boutique. That is studio talk. A producer and scriptwriter who has had some success calls it "the coldest town in the country, run by some of the dumbest rich men in the world." He stays, he says, "for the money, obviously." Screenwriters have always bitched; this cliche is true. And yet there are certain circles in which it seems that everyone is writing a screenplay. One Eastern writer who is accustomed to working for "nickels and dimes," as he puts it, was hired for ten days' work on a remake of a movie the studio in the end decided not to remake. Nonetheless, he was paid $50,000 and is still in a daze. People say, "Let's have lunch" all over town, with no more sincerity than you get in a form letter.

"I do not mean to say that everybody in Southern California is rich," said Charles Dudley Warner in 1888, "but everybody expects to be rich tomorrow."

At any number of intersections along about dawn nearly every day, a knot of Mexicans forms. They are in the country illegally and, to them, getting rich tomorrow means hooking a job for as much as 20 bucks. Locally these pockets are called "slave markets." You want your lawn mowed, some boscage trimmed; you drive by, wave a bill, they hop in. They are industrious, trustworthy, and at night they melt back into an area known to all as East Los Angeles, although it is an area much larger than the 7.4 sq. mi. the city defines as East Los Angeles. It is "where the Mexicans live."

"It is O.K., but I miss my family," a young laborer on Olympic Boulevard said the other morning. In his village he has a wife, three children, a mother and an invalid sister he supports. With the money he earns in construction work or cutting lawns, his family gets along well at home, but would be terribly poor in East Los Angeles. So he works for two months, goes home for a month and returns. The loneliness is the only thing that gets him down.

At a bar in Marina del Rey, home to 10,000 pleasure craft, a young single man was smitten by a young single woman. His occupation: photographer. Her occupation: secretary-actress. Several rounds of tequila preceded her confession that she liked to get "a little kinky" sometimes. The photographer had no personal experience with kinkiness but lied that he had. At her apartment, she suggested that she get undressed and that he tie her up and take some pictures.

He trussed her and then remembered his cameras were in the trunk of his car. He went for the equipment, returned to the maze of apartments all looking alike and realized he did not know her floor, much less her apartment number. He left and for months avoided the area.

One night he saw her in a restaurant, and she recognized him. He walked over to apologize and explain, but before he could say a word, she shouted happily, "Kin-keeeee!"

Los Angeles: 48,000 palm trees; 16,732 registered poodles; 3,672 traffic lights; 46,000 acres still in cropland. Everything seems larger in Los Angeles. It is the biggest fishing port in America. It leads the U.S. in per capita sales of bottled water. The cities of Washington, Detroit, Denver, Boston, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Philadelphia and Providence combined would fit within the boundaries of the Los Angeles Unified School District.

It is a city of such glorious materialistic consumption that some first-time visitors are stunned. For instance, in 1963 a young actor named William Campbell met and fell in love with a Yugoslav sociologist while he was in Yugoslavia making a film. He married the woman. Tereza Campbell picks up the story today: "We were flying into L.A., me for the first time. Our song at that time was the one that went, 'Take my hand, I'm a stranger in paradise.' We were humming it, holding hands, and I looked down and saw all these beautiful blue spots. I asked Bill what they were, and he said, 'Swimming pools.' "I was impressed. In all Belgrade we only had two--and one belonged to Tito."

--By Gregory Jaynes