Gradually, it emerged. While everyone agreed that Miss Ashland had been correct in pointing out Santa Barbara’s fondness for foreign cars—Mercedeses and BMWs in particular—what everyone objected to was the magazine’s choice of people photographed to illustrate the article. What, for example, did Suzy Parker (formerly a New York model, now married to actor Bradford Dillman and living in Santa Barbara) have to do with Santa Barbara? How did Clifton Fadiman (born in Brooklyn, and Jewish) or Barnaby Conrad (a San Francisco transplant) fit into the Santa Barbara scene? Certainly Hair producer Michael Butler, sort of a millionaire hippie from Chicago who was once arrested for growing marijuana in his garden, was far from the typical Santa Barbaran; he had once entertained Mick Jagger. Most offensive of all, it turned out, was the woman whom the magazine had chosen to place on its cover, Mrs. Manuel Rojas, wearing chandelier emerald earrings to match her eyes. What did she have to do with the Santa Barbara style? everyone wanted to know. Chandelier emerald earrings are most definitely not the Santa Barbara style. The Rojases, furthermore, are considered nouveau riche (Perta Oil Marketing, Inc.) and originally came from, of all places, Beverly Hills. They settled in Santa Barbara as recently as 1974.
Santa Barbara is a community where literally hours can be spent discussing who is “typical Santa Barbara” and who is not. The typical Santa Barbaran, it is agreed, is “conservative.” If, for conservative, some people read stuffy and smug, that is perfectly all right with Santa Barbara. Santa Barbarans feel that they have elevated smugness to the level of an art form. The typical Santa Barbaran goes in for espadrilles and tennis shoes more than for emeralds, which Mrs. Rojas was clearly shown wearing in broad daylight. The typical Santa Barbaran distrusts outsiders, and dislikes change. When the local Baskin-Robbins ice cream shop discontinued a flavor called Pralines ’n’ Cream, the citizenry, who had grown fond of the flavor, picketed the establishment until Pralines ’n’ Cream was restored to the inventory. Santa Barbara women like to boast that theirs was the last community in America to accept the pants suit. The typical Santa Barbaran is extremely town-proud and civic-minded. It has been said of Santa Barbara that it is a city of meetings, and that nothing can be done until at least one meeting has been called to discuss all the ramifications of whatever it is. At the same time, Santa Barbara is distrustful of city government, and prefers to leave any decisions affecting the city to its citizens themselves, who are believed to know what is good for them and what isn’t. When a stretch of freeway was planned between San Francisco and the Mexican border, Santa Barbarans decided that they did not want traffic streaming through their community at seventy miles per hour. They went to battle with the California State Department of Transportation and—though it took years—they won. Now Santa Barbara is the only segment of the freeway’s six-hundred-mile length where motorists must keep a respectful speed and pause for traffic lights. When offshore oil spills began dirtying their beaches, Santa Barbarans met and formed an organization called GOO (for Get Oil Out). They took on some of the country’s largest oil companies, and got them to clean up their operations.
Typifying Santa Barbara’s attitude toward city governments is Miss Pearl Chase, who says: “People won’t be inspired to help a community unless they are part of it. Government officials are really temporary. They come and go, and this constant turnover means that citizen organizations have far greater impact.” Miss Chase is perhaps the most typical Santa Barbaran there is. She is immensely rich. Her family owned the vast Hope Ranch, which, not long ago, was sold off and subdivided to become one of the town’s most elegant and expensive areas. But she lives in a Victorian house full of sagging furniture, old scrapbooks, and genteelly dusty clutter. When she goes out, she is always hatted, always gloved. If she owns any emeralds, she has never been seen wearing them. Though she is eighty-eight years old, and ailing, she is still regarded as one of the town’s leading dowagers.
Change, of course, has come to Santa Barbara as it has everywhere else where the rich have tried to isolate themselves behind walls and gates and rolling lawns and gardens. Not long ago, for example, a rich and social wedding united two old-line Santa Barbara families. Shortly after the wedding, however, the young bridegroom announced his intention of undergoing a sex-change operation. And for years, the Little Town Club was Santa Barbara’s leading social club for women. Founded in 1914, the club never served alcoholic beverages. But several years ago, a proposal was made that the club offer wine with lunch. In a surprising development, it turned out that all the older ladies were in favor of wine, while all the younger members were not. Eventually, the older group won out and wine was introduced, then liquor. “Now,” complains one member, “it’s so noisy at lunchtime you can’t hear yourself think!”
“Oh, how Santa Barbara has changed!” complains one matron, Santa Barbara resident for over fifty years. “It used to be a simple, charming place. All the houses had blue shutters. We would eat at El Paseo, standing in line with trays for the most delicious food. The annual Fiesta was beautiful. Now it’s horrible. People used to have lovely parties; now we don’t go anywhere. There was wonderful dancing at the Biltmore. Now it’s part of a chain.”
The change, the dowager feels, began during the Second World War. “There began to be a strong Fascist feeling here,” she says. “There were a few men who were out-and-out Nazis. I remember one man who called ‘Heil Hitler!’ across a table, and another who said, ‘Let us hope and pray that Germany wins the war.’ One of those men is still around. During the war, it all became terribly snobbish and anti-Semitic.”
But a more profound change occurred earlier, on the twenty-ninth of June, 1925, a date engraved on the memory of every true Santa Barbaran. That day, an earthquake registering 6.3 on the Richter scale rocked Santa Barbara. Trees thrashed about, the towers of All Saints’ Church swayed, and the ground heaved in great waves. At least one Santa Barbara dowager, old Mrs. Cunningham—a Forbes of Boston—was killed. (One of the residents had a psychic butler, who foresaw the quake and removed all her costly vases, which were thereby saved.) The aftershocks continued for the rest of the summer, and before it was over, most of what had been old Santa Barbara had been destroyed.
Nowadays, in retrospect, the quake is usually referred to as “a blessing.” Santa Barbara had, up to that time, developed somewhat haphazardly, without zoning. When the earth finally quieted, an architectural board of review was formed by a group of local worthies. Its purpose was to oversee the rebuilding of the town, and to see to it that it was rebuilt in such a way that it would be pleasing to the eye and would also have a certain architectural uniformity. The result was a vaguely Mediterranean mixture of Spanish Colonial and Mission Revival, appropriate to Southern California’s history. Walls were of beige or yellow stucco, and roofs were of red or yellow tile. Bell towers and balconies and grillwork abounded. Santa Barbara’s acres were strictly zoned. For obvious reasons, high-rise buildings were prohibited. These architectural, building, and zoning codes have been adhered to until this day, and have become a matter of intense civic pride. Right now, the city is in the middle of an intense dispute over the design of a new wing for the art museum, which proposes to depart, ever so slightly, from the Spanish Mission style. Though architects have found Santa Barbara’s elaborate building codes and rules somewhat inhibiting, landscape architects have flocked to the area and have prospered creating the town’s many pretty parks, malls, and private gardens.
Santa Barbara first came into existence in 1850, when it was incorporated by an act of the California legislature a few months before there actually was a state of California. But it was not until the late 1860s, in the post-Civil War days, that it had its real genesis. It began, like so many wealthy enclaves, as a seasonal resort. These were the days when so many families, rich from the war, began to cast about for new ways to spend and display their money, and to encapsulate themselves in luxurious redoubts where they would encounter only their “own kind.” This overnight gentry—members of th
e Armour family (meat), the Mortons (salt), the Fleischmanns (yeast), the Hammonds (organs), to name a few—came largely from the East and the Middle West, and began to build imposing winter homes in the hills above the town. This was the era when golf, tennis, and polo suddenly became popular pastimes for the rich, and it was the dawn of the American country club. Many of the rich Easterners who came to Santa Barbara were, furthermore (or so Santa Barbarans like to boast), the black sheep of their families, and were encouraged to go to California by relatives who were just as happy to have them several thousand miles away. This accounts, Santa Barbarans say, for the relaxed and laissez-faire air of the place—less grand and pretentious than Newport, less formal and competitive than Palm Beach. “Here we have always just gone our happy ways,” says one long-time resident.
The exclusive Valley Club was built, which is now the “Old Guard club,” and then the Birnam Wood Club, which is considered the “New Guard club.” The third country club, the Montecito, bought recently by a Japanese syndicate, stands lowest in the club pecking order and is considered “commercial.” The Little Town Club established its quaint rules, such as “Six to a Susan.” (For lunch, the club has tables for six, with a lazy Susan in the center of each table; it is against the rules to sample a tidbit from anyone else’s lazy Susan.)
When an architect named George Washington Smith came to Santa Barbara, he quickly put his stamp on the place, doing for Santa Barbara what Stanford White did for New York and Long Island and Addison Mizner did for Palm Beach; he designed mansions in the preferred Spanish Colonial style with vaulted ceilings and the requisite bell towers, balconies, and courtyards. His flights of Mediterranean fancy were extreme, and he thought nothing of going to Spain and Italy to bring back boatloads of tiles, lanterns, shutters, and grilles to adorn his creations. It is said that when Harry K. Thaw (who murdered Stanford White) was released from prison, he visited Santa Barbara, and viewing a George Washington Smith house, commented, “I think I killed the wrong architect.” Still, because there are only twenty-nine Smith houses in Santa Barbara, to own one is now a—if not the—major status symbol. And when, as rarely happens, a Smith house goes on the market, it is certain to bring at least $100,000 more than a comparable one.
One woman who still lives in the Smith-designed mansion she built in 1925 after the earthquake is Mrs. Angelica Schuyler Bryce, the widow of Peter Cooper Bryce, who, along with Harold Chase, Pearl Chase’s brother, developed Hope Ranch. (Things tend to get somewhat inbred in Old Guard Santa Barbara, and it is important to remember who was a Hollister, who was a Meeker, who was a Poett, and so on.) The eighty-six-year-old Mrs. Bryce, who has always been known by her childhood nickname, “Girlie,” is, along with Miss Chase and Mrs. Horace Grey, one of the grandes dames who for years have ruled the social seas of Santa Barbara. She actually worked with George Washington Smith on her house, helping him collect the antique hammered-iron hardware which was copied in Europe and brought to her estate, Florestal. On her fifty-five landscaped acres Girlie Bryce maintains what amounts to a private zoo, including forty-five peacocks and a sixty-year-old tortoise named Gappy, who is fed a diet of watermelon and fresh fruits imported from Hawaii. Gappy reciprocates by letting Mrs. Bryce’s thirty-eight grandchildren take turns riding on his back when they come for visits. For all the splendor of her surroundings, Girlie Bryce complains: “Santa Barbara has gotten so big. If it gets any bigger it’s going to be a horrible place.”
Santa Barbara has gotten big, and now has a population of over 200,000. After World War II came Vandenberg Air Force Base, bringing in a sizable military contingent. Then came the University of California’s Santa Barbara campus, and Robert Hutchins with his Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, both of which not only added people but contributed what Santa Barbara considers an intellectual, think-tank atmosphere to the place. Dr. Hutchins’s pronouncements from his lush hillside villa (“Mankind’s intellectual power must be developed”) are given much weight. Then came General Motors, bringing with it some hundred new families. The General Motors people tended to stick to themselves, which was fine with Santa Barbarans, who said, “If you don’t want us, we don’t want you.”
But, for the time being at least, Santa Barbara isn’t going to get any bigger. For the last few years, Southern California has been undergoing an acute water shortage and now each Santa Barbara household has a water ration allocated on a complicated formula based upon past consumption, number of persons in the household, etc. If a Santa Barbara home owner exceeds his water quota, he is charged a penalty, even though there seems to be plenty of water to sprinkle golfing greens and to fill thousands of backyard pools. It was the water shortage that was given as the reason Santa Barbara declared a moratorium on new building some time back. But the real reason for the building moratorium, Santa Barbarans admit, was to keep out more new people. It has also had the pleasant effect of keeping Santa Barbara real estate values going up and up.
“Santa Barbara is an international suburb,” says Mrs. Michael Wheelwright, the wife of a prominent landscape architect, and many Santa Barbarans would agree with her. It is true that many Santa Barbarans maintain homes elsewhere, and are always jetting from one part of the world to another. When Santa Barbara attempted to publish its own edition of the Social Register a few years ago, the enterprise collapsed after four editions—largely because most of social Santa Barbara is already registered in Social Registers of other cities. Foreign visitors also abound, including Baron Philippe de Rothschild, who customarily winters at the Santa Barbara Biltmore and swims daily in the Olympic-size pool at the adjacent Coral Casino (a members-only club for Santa Barbara residents, free for guests). And certainly, for all its suburban appearance, Santa Barbara is technically not a suburb of any particular city. It is too far from Los Angeles to be considered a commuting town—though some people, like Manuel Rojas, make the trip back and forth to business in private planes. It is no secret that San Francisco thinks little of Los Angeles, and that Los Angeles echoes these sentiments about San Francisco. But Santa Barbara thinks little of both Los Angeles and San Francisco. “I go to Los Angeles as little as possible,” says one woman. “I sometimes go there for shoes from Saks.” Santa Barbara thinks even less of the Los Angeles suburbs. Beverly Hills is dismissed as “mostly Jewish.” And of mostly non-Jewish Pasadena, a Santa Barbaran snorts: “They have more smog in Pasadena than they do in Los Angeles!” San Francisco is also given short shrift. When a visiting San Franciscan mentioned, in the way San Franciscans have, that he lived in “the city,” his hostess retorted, “I live in a city too—Santa Barbara!”
Santa Barbarans also point out that Santa Barbara actually has suburbs of its own. The old money lives in a coastal community called Montecito. New money has collected itself in the hills beyond, at Hope Ranch.
In fact, the word “suburban” is anathema in Santa Barbara, as it is becoming elsewhere in America. The word no longer has the pleasant, easy ring that it once had. Euphemisms have been tried. “We live in the country,” is a popular one. A Santa Barbaran, of course, would say, “We live in Santa Barbara.”
Santa Barbara is one of the few remaining towns in the United States—Port Huron, Michigan; San Antonio, Texas; and possibly Greenwich, Connecticut, are some of the others—that, for whatever else it is or isn’t, is still a place, its own place. It’s a place where, as one woman describes it, “genteel people live—people who don’t need to be justified by anything.”
As for the rest of California, Merv Griffin, an unwilling transplant from the East, asserts: “It’s nothing but polyester leisure suits, frozen yogurt, mood rings, Big Macs and fries, Cuisinarts, heated water beds, sharks’ teeth on chains, and jogging”—little of which will be encountered in Santa Barbara.
CITY VS. SUBURB
18
The Price of Status
City planners bemoan the fact that the so-called flight to the suburbs has already begun to cause the death of the cities which spawned
the suburbs. “We’re moving out of the city for the children’s sake,” is the commonest excuse that is given, and it is true that the suburban migration has been led by the responsible, well-to-do, well-educated parent group in search of the grail of better schools—that is, by the people most able to bolster the tax bases of the cities. With these people gone, the cities become abandoned to the poor, the ill-educated, and the irresponsible. Tax levies for schools are voted down, and city school facilities deteriorate, while good teachers flee to the suburbs as well. Some cities have managed to solve the problem in part by annexation. The Ohio villages of Hyde Park and Clifton, which used to be separate townships, are now annexed to Cincinnati (though Indian Hill and Glendale have no intention of becoming annexed, and have resisted). This has helped the city’s tax coffers somewhat. But a Cincinnati school-tax levy failed in 1966, and the schools had to give up their kindergartens. Currently, Cincinnati’s police and fire departments—a community’s first lines of citizen protection—are both in the throes of manpower cutbacks. Without protection and without good schools, what the city planners call the “responsible parent group” simply will not stay.
The Golden Dream Page 19
