A Long Way from the Rue de la Paix

By Jordan Bonfante

The dress code in Los Angeles is assuredly not strict. So the other customers at the shopping mall on Santa Monica Boulevard that evening scarcely noticed the newcomer in a tuxedo who had joined them in line at the flower stalls. Neither the young lady in the decal-covered bomber jacket nor the young gentleman with the sheepskin vest over his T shirt and the pith helmet saw any reason to fuss over someone evidently doin' his thing in a tuxedo costume. No, what turned their heads was the new arrival's inquiry.

"Say, what kind of corsage could you make up for me?" he asked of the clerk when his turn came. The other customers had no way of knowing that the newcomer needed the corsage for a high school father-daughter dance, a real treat for a returning expatriate. Ah, good old American sociability, he thought. What a relief after some of those gloomy European schools! "Wha?" said the clerk, a young man with a big mustache. "A wha?"

"A corsage. You know . . ." the newcomer repeated, gesturing feebly toward his own chest and wrist. The clerk looked at him with new suspicion, consulted his superior by the back tulips and returned to announce through a curled lip, "We don't do corsages!"

The newcomer should have known better, of course. He should have realized that the corsage is as dead as the darning egg. His excuse was that after seven years abroad he had moved from Paris to Los Angeles. And as everyone knows, the distance between the Rue de la Paix and the Pacific Coast Highway is measured not in flying hours but in light-years. Catapulted from the European fixation with the past into the Californian intoxication with the future, the returning expatriate felt he had been gone for half a century, and sometimes that he had been born yesterday.

The newcomer felt time-warped, mired in a past age of LP records, the ERA and two-wheel drive. It wasn't the new lingo ("persona," "agenda," "biorhythms"), nor the acronyms ("EIS," "CAD" and "MSG"). It wasn't the commercial wackiness of products like "gourmet dog food." It wasn't even the daily drive-by shootings -- talk about an automotive civilization -- in Los Angeles' gangland. Mayhem is not confined to the U.S.

No, what made him feel like a retrograde stuffed shirt was less lethal but daunting things. Cacophonies of competing phone companies, and car and poolside cellulars, have not yet proliferated in Paris. It is in California, not the Dordogne, where your teenager phones you and then puts you on hold. Similarly, Europeans remember when their films were the risque ones. Hah! Now . the show is on the other foot. Europeans at the TV children's hour would be aghast at the torrent of video violence, the Tampax-machine gags on Murphy Brown, or the 27 -- count 'em -- condom jokes in a single segment of Kate & Allie.

The time-warped expatriate was also struck by a sunbaked parochialism that is increasingly turned toward the Pacific rather than the Atlantic. No one asked him what was going on in Europe, only whether he liked it in California. Last month a television-news crew staked out the portals of the Beverly Hills Hotel as the visiting Jacques Chirac, the former French Premier and still well-known mayor of Paris, strode inside, trailing limousines and entourage. The TV crew failed to budge. Turns out it was there to cover a more important celebrity, wrestler Hulk Hogan.

One of the most reassuring things was the rediscovery of a boundless first- name friendliness. In Los Angeles now his banker is Judy, his mortgage-loan officer Adam, and his used-auto dealer Gary. Restaurant tables are held under his first name, as are pizza orders. A TV skit conveys more documentary accuracy than comedy when it shows a couple sitting down in a restaurant and telling the waiter, "I'm Sheila, this is Bill. We're your customers this evening." Try that in Paris on that ornery waiter one is careful to call "Monsieur." In Paris the older generation -- not the younger -- can be so unfriendly that on Sunday at the big church of St. Philippe du Roule, one can witness a scene of uncommon standoffishness, even for Paris: at the point in the Mass when the priest says, "Now let us offer each other a sign of peace," nobody moves.

It would thus take a Parisian time to get into the spirit of a Los Angeles traffic school where motorists ticketed for a moving violation may attend eight hours of driving instruction in lieu of court. At the newcomer's school in the San Fernando Valley, an actor named Dick Corbin provided diverting impersonations of a woman driver on the freeway talking on the car phone, eating lunch and doing her lashes in the visor mirror all at the same time.

But the part the pupils like best is the confessional, when each participant recounts the details of his moving violation, whereupon his 40-odd classmates judge whether it was a mortal or just a venial infraction. "Thanks, David, for sharing that with us. I'm sure few of us were aware that you can actually purchase the STOP sign you've knocked over." So much emphasis is put on self- expression and broad-mindedness that at one point an instructor found himself equating drug taking with drinking, and upholding both. "You can do alcohol. You can do drugs," he admonished. "Just don't drive!" A stodgy European less accustomed to the same blase acceptance of drug taking -- and a good many citizens of Los Angeles for that matter -- would shudder to extend such logic much further.

The newcomer doesn't wear a tuxedo anymore. He wears a necktie, though, and he mixes with the stars. While he was waiting to be seated for lunch at the Ivy in West Hollywood one day, Zsa-Zsa Gabor and her mother mistook him for the maitre d' and asked him to show them to their table. She called him "Darling." He still hasn't decided if he should have called her Miss Gabor, or just plain Zsa-Zsa.