A Writer's World

by Jan Morris

  I am antipathetic to the famous, though, and I found that my eyes kept straying from these luminaries to the two sound technicians who, just off the set, sat nonchalantly over their equipment wearing headsets and reading the trade papers. One was called Jerry Jost, the other Bill Manooth, and they had both been in the business twenty years and more. How calm they looked, I thought, how sure of themselves, how easily aware of the fact that nobody in the whole world could do their job better than they could! They had seen the stars come and go, they had helped to make flops and winners, they had suffered every temperament, they had seen the film industry itself in boom and decline. Sometimes they looked up to exchange a pleasantry with a passer-by, sometimes they turned a page of the Hollywood Reporter: but they were always alert when the moment came, always watching their quivering instruments, always ready to mouth the magic word ‘Speed!’ – which, with its assurance that they had got things right, gave the signal to that whole assembly, director, cameraman, actors, Capote and all, to proceed with their flamboyances.

  For somewhere near the heart of the LA ethos there lies, unexpectedly, a layer of solid, old-fashioned, plain hard work. This is a city of hard workers. Out on the hills at Santa Monica, overlooking the Pacific Ocean, the writer Christopher Isherwood and the painter Don Bachardy share a house, sunlit and easy-going, with a view over the rooftops and shrubberies of the canyon. In such a place, with such occupants, in such warm and soothing sun, with the beach down the road and Hollywood up the freeway, it might seem a house for cultivated indolence, interminable wit around a swimming pool, long cool drinks with worldly neighbours before lunch. Not at all. ‘We are working people,’ Isherwood says, and so they literally are: each at his own end of the house, each with his art, the one surrounded by his books, the other by his brushes and pictures, carefully and skilfully they work through the day, friends and fellow labourers.

  I very much like all this. It suggests to me, unexpectedly, the guild spirit of some medieval town, where the workers in iron or lace, the clockmakers and the armourers, competed to give their city the glory of their trades. All the mechanisms of Los Angeles are like apprentices to these matters: the robot lights and the TV cameras, the scudding helicopters, the labouring oil pumps bowed like slaves across the city, or the great telescopes of Mount Wilson, brooding among their conifers high above the city, which in the years before the Second World War more than doubled man’s total knowledge of the physical universe.

  *

  It is true that this expertise is sometimes rather dated, but then LA is essentially a survivor of earlier times, and one is constantly plucked back to that simpler world of the forties, when values were surer than they are now, and the attainment of wealth or fame seemed a true gauge of contentment.

  Nostalgia blurs the realities of Hollywood, the Versailles of Los Angeles, and peoples it for ever with the royalty of another era, the Astaires, the Tracys, the Garbos, and nobles of even earlier vintage. Now as always the tourist buses circumnavigate the Homes of the Stars, and the touts peddle their street plans on Sunset Strip. Now as always Hollywood feeds upon narcissism, cosseted in sycophancy and sustained by snobbery. Scattered over the Hollywood Hills, and over the Santa Monica Mountains into the San Fernando Valley, the houses of the movie people stand sealed and suspicious in the morning, the only sounds the swishing of their sprinklers, the snarling of their guard dogs, or perhaps the laboured breathing of their gardeners: and in their garages the cars are profligately stacked, Jag beside Merc, Rolls upstaging BMW. Hollywood prefers its own world to ours, loving and living, generation after generation, its own fairly tawdry legend.

  I stayed in the middle of it all, and soon came to feel how period a piece it was. My hotel was the Chateau Marmont, a monument in itself, built in the French manner half a century ago, and directly overlooking Sunset Boulevard. Everyone in Hollywood knows the place. That’s where Bogart proposed to Bacall, they say, that’s where Garbo used to stay, Howard Hughes had a suite there, Boris Karloff loved it, Valentino preferred the penthouse. It is impregnated with showbiz, from the gigantic antiques in the downstairs lounge to the strains of the electronic organ from the pop group practising in the garden bungalow: but what seems to the aficionado amusingly evocative seemed to me only a little threadbare, and I often found myself pining for an honest downtown motel, where never a Gable raised his eyebrow or a Garland threw a tantrum.

  Every morning, too, I walked across the boulevard to have my breakfast at Schwab’s, ‘The World’s Most Famous Drugstore’. Everyone knows Schwab’s, too. Schwab’s is where Lana Turner was discovered, sitting on a barstool. Hardly a Hollywood memoir is complete without a reference to Schwab’s, and it is heavy with the old mystique. Elderly widows of émigré directors reminisce about Prague over their cornflakes. Young men in jerkins and expensive shoes ostentatiously read Variety, or greet each other with stagey endearments and expletives. Ever and again one hears across the hubbub, in the whining intonations peculiar to not very successful actors offstage, an exchange of critiques – ‘I love her, she’s a fine, fine actress, but it just wasn’t her’ – ‘Well, but what can you expect with Philip directing, she needs definite direction’ – ‘True, but shit, it just made me puke, the way she did that last scene …’ I used to drink my coffee at the counter, until I found its instinct for intimacy too cloying for comfort, and took to sitting at a table with the divorced wife of a Mexican set designer who shared my enthusiasm for Abyssinian cats.

  If fetish and nostalgia often make for vulgarity in LA, they often make also for homeliness, in the English sense of the word – a community feeling, a domesticity. Even Hollywood is far less repulsive in its private aspects than in its public goings-on. This is largely because Los Angeles is a haven, to whose doors people have come from all over the world. It is a fraternity of refugees. Isherwood, showing me the view from his window one day, remembered the days when Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Brecht and Aldous Huxley had all lived in the city out there. Hardly a day goes by without the death of some celebrated European resident, driven here long ago by war, ambition or persecution, and the British consul-general told me that within his area there live more than 50,000 British subjects, some of whom fly Union Jacks from their roofs. San Francisco, up the coast, has an intimacy of a totally different kind, a hereditary or environmental closeness, bound up with the beauty of the place and the allure of its traditions. There is no such grace to the brotherhood of LA. This is a charmless city really, humourless, often reactionary, a city without a gentry. Its comradeship lies only in a common sense of release or opportunity, tinged with a spice of holiday.

  I used to buy my bread at Farmer’s Market, a rambling enclave of stalls and tables off Wilshire Boulevard, and sitting over an orange juice afterwards, nibbling bits off the end of my loaf, loved to watch the Angelenos go by. Often, of course, they were not Angelenos at all, but Japanese businessmen being shown around by bored local agents, or package tourists in wild sunglasses and kerchiefs, or bookish Europeans from UCLA deep in Sociological Ratios in Southern California. But there were always plenty of indigenes too, and they were instantly recognizable, not so much by their looks as by their posture, for they displayed all the somewhat impatient complacency of people who have discovered a Promised Land, and don’t want to miss a minute of it. Though there are obviously lots of unhappy people in LA, lots of dispossessed blacks, unemployed layabouts, junkies and nuts and winos, still by and large this strikes me as a happy population – determinedly happy, perhaps. Nobody I met wanted to go back to New York or Detroit. With its Middle West squareness, its Manhattan bitterness, its imported touch of the European and its glorious Pacific sun, LA seems to please most people in the end – or for the moment.

  In particular it provides a cheerful refuge for the jollier kind of American widow or divorcee, and many of these belatedly liberated souls frequent Farmer’s Market. I often talked to them. There was a certain sameness to their appearance: in their bright blouses, leather jerkin
s, rather too tight slacks and rather too rakish sailor caps, bowed often by arthritis but resolutely vigorous of step, most of them looked more or less like Mr Capote except, of course, for the layered make-up ineffectually disguising their cod-skin complexions. To their attitudes though there was a sprightly element of freedom. Briskly, gaily, talkatively they walked around the stalls, a pumpernickel loaf here, a bag of cashews there, and often they exchanged rather throaty comments with acquaintances about last night’s movie or tomorrow’s meeting of the Democratic Party.

  For such citizens LA offers an unexpected security, for its hard efficiency provides a bedrock, so to speak, upon which they can safely reconstruct their lives. It is nourished by the certainties they were weaned upon, like the pre-eminence of gadgetry or the goodness of capitalism. For all its cosmopolitan excitement, to a far greater degree than Chicago or San Francisco, let alone New York, it is still a provincial American town. ‘Did you know,’ one Farmer’s Market lady asked me, supposing me, I imagine, to be a bit lost for social satisfactions, ‘did you know that the telephone company offers a free tour every day? My, that’s a rewarding way of spending an afternoon.’

  I went one night to one of those Hollywood parades one used to see on newsreels long ago. Nothing much had changed. The long motorcade crawled down Hollywood Boulevard in a welter of self-esteem, with drum majorettes and elephants and Scottish pipers and US Marines and belly dancers and coveys of movie personalities in antique cars who stopped now and then to be interviewed by TV men – ‘Hey, Bob, great to see you! How’s everything? Isn’t this a great parade?’ ‘Sure is, Jim, fantastic, just great, and I wantya to meet my family, Jim, my wife Margie, this is my son Jason, my daughter Laureen!’ ‘Great, fantastic, great to meet all you folks, nice talking with you, Bill.’ ‘Sure thing, Jim, sure is a great parade, fantastic …’ The echoes of the bands trumpeted across town, the belly dancers spangled their way past Grauman’s Chinese Theater, and overhead the helicopters clanked and circled, playing their searchlights upon the junketings below.

  I was touched by the crowd that watched this display, for I felt in it a truly innocent wonder. Its people came from everywhere. There were a few of my Market friends (‘I forgot to mention this morning, dear, that the Municipal Cleansing Department offers a very interesting lecture tour Tuesday mornings’); but there were Mexicans, too, in bright ponchos with babies on their backs, and lots of Italians, and Hindus talking impeccable English, and Greeks talking Greek, and there was a Scotsman in a kilt looking maudlin when the pipers went by, and a man who looked like a Zulu chief, and a voluble family who seemed to be talking Finnish, or perhaps Basque, and there were thousands of that particular neo-American blend, of no particular colour, no specific race, no exact dialect, the Homo californii; and though the cops strode up and down fiercely slapping their nightsticks against their thighs, still everybody seemed genuinely, guilelessly delighted to be participants in such an unmistakably Angeleno spectacle.

  I stayed till the very end, and the last I saw of the parade were the winking red lights of the police cars which brought up the rear, blinking away slowly down the boulevard as the crowds flooded off the sidewalks to follow them.

  * * *

  Hollywood itself, its fact and its reputation, its studios and its publicity machine, is a family of sorts, not always very loving indeed, and frequently incestuous, but still bound by a common loyalty to its own legend. Its members often speak of it with true affection, especially if they are old. As the glamour of success fades, as the meaning of money blurs, so Hollywood memories acquire a mellower force, and elderly directors, dowager stars, speak of old Hollywood as others might remember happy school days, or Edwardian society. Age is paradoxically venerated in Hollywood, and one is told without pejoration that so-and-so is living in a home for aged actors, or assured with respect that Miss Estelle Winwood really is in her 93rd year. The new breed of entertainer often seems awkwardly anomalous, almost alienated, in this hierarchical community: which is why the Hyatt hotel on Sunset Boulevard, where the rock bravos tend to congregate, was long ago nicknamed the Continental Riot House.

  And unexpectedly, when I examine my feelings about this tremendous and always astonishing city, I find them inextricably shot through with regret. LA is full of vitality still, full of fun and wealth. The refugees are still flocking to this haven beyond the deserts, the men of brilliance are still at work in labs and laboratories and studios from Malibu to Irvine. Almost every development of Western thought, from space research to comparative linguistics to Transcendental Lung Control, finds its niche, its expression and its encouragement somewhere in this metropolis. Surveyed in the morning from one of its mountain belvederes, Los Angeles really does look one of the classic cities, one of the archetypes. Its streets and houses and bridges and buildings seem to lie there differently – massed differently, differently integrated, sprouting here and there peculiarly with the clumps of their urban centres, and hung over already, as the sun rises over the deserts, with the particular chemical haze whose very name, smog, was a Los Angeles invention. Then it looks unmistakably a world city: and it will represent for ever, I think, the apogee of urban, mechanical, scientific man, rational man perhaps, before the gods returned.

  For it is past its prime already. It has lost the exuberant certainty that made it seem, even when I first knew it, unarguably the City of the Future, the City That Knew How. None of us Know now, the machine has lost its promise of emancipation, and if LA then seemed a talisman of fulfilment, now it is tinged with disillusion. Those terrific roads, those thousands of cars, the sheen of the jets screaming out of the airport, the magnificent efficiency of it all, the image building, the self-projection, the glamour, the fame – they were all false promises after all, and few of us see them now as the symptoms of redemption.

  There is one monument in LA which hauntingly commemorates this failing faith. It is the queer cluster of pinnacles called the Watts Towers, and it stands in one of the shabbier parts of town, way out on 107th Street, beside the railway tracks. Simon Rodia, an Italian immigrant, built these arcane artefacts single-handedly, taking more than thirty years to do it. He made them of cement, stuck all over with bits of glass and pottery, strengthened by frames of scrap metal and wound about with curious studded spirals, rather like precipitous roller coasters. When he had built them he surrounded them with an irregular cement wall, like a row of tombstones, so that the whole ensemble has the air of a temple or shrine, rather oriental in nature.

  It is very dusty there, and all around are the unpretentious homes of black people, so that you might easily suppose yourself to be in some African railway town, in the Egyptian delta perhaps. Few cars go by. You can hear children playing, and dogs barking, and neighbours chatting across the way. It is like a simple country place, before technology arrived, and the Watts Towers, years before their time, were a symbolic cri du coeur against the computer tyrannies to come. Mr Rodia was a prophet: and when he had built his towers he slipped away from Los Angeles once and for all, and went to live somewhere quite different.

  Manhattan

  What I had thought about Manhattan in the 1950s, I thought still in the 1970s. Whatever the condition of America, however I felt about its policies or its values, this was one American city that never let me down.

  Sometimes, from the high windows of the Rolling Stone offices in Manhattan, you can make out a faint white blob in the green of Central Park far below. It is like the unresolved blur of a nebula in the night sky: and just as through a telescope the fuzz in Andromeda resolves itself into M3I, so that whitish object in the park, defined through binoculars, becomes a phenomenon hardly less spectacular. It is the polar bear in the Central Park Zoo, and even as you focus your lenses, bringing his indistinct physique into clarity, with a shaggy shake of his head he swings his great form vigorously from one extremity of his cage to the other.

  The bear lives alone in his compound down there, and I am told that he is a character of weird
and forceful originality – sadly neurotic, some informants suggested, genuinely imaginative, others thought. He is a bear like no other, and it is not the fact of his captivity that makes him so, I am sure, but its remarkable location. Destiny has deposited that animal plumb in the middle of Manhattan: you might say he is the central New Yorker. He affects me profoundly whenever I see him, and when I put my binoculars down, and only the suggestion of him remains, apparently inanimate among the trees, all around him in my mind’s eye the marvellous and terrible island of Manhattan concentrically extends, ring after ring of cage, ditch or rampart, precinct limit and electoral boundary, Hudson, East River and Atlantic itself – the greatest of all the zoos, whose inhabitants prowl up and down, like victims of some terrific spell, for ever and ever within it.

  For Manhattan really is an island, even now, separated from the mainland still by a channel just wide enough for the Circle Line boats to continue their pleasure circuits, and it is this condition of enclave that gives the place its sting. Like the bear, its citizens are heightened, one way or another, by their confinement. If they are unhappier than most populaces, they are merrier too. If they are trapped in some ways, they are brilliantly liberated in others. Sometimes their endless pacing to and fro is sad to see, but when the weather is right and the sap is rising, then it assumes an exhilarating rhythm, and the people of Manhattan seem to dance along their avenues, round and round the city squares, in and out the sepulchral subway.

  *

  Images of confinement certainly haunt me in Manhattan but the first thing that always strikes me, when I land once more on the island, is its fearful and mysterious beauty. Other cities have built higher now, or sprawl more boisterously over their landscapes, but there is still nothing like the looming thicket of the Manhattan skyscrapers, jumbled and overbearing. Le Corbusier hated this ill-disciplined spectacle, and conceived his own Radiant City, an antiseptic hybrid of art and ideology, in direct antithesis to it. His ideas, though, mostly bounced off this vast mass of vanity. Tempered though it has been from time to time by zoning law and social trend, Manhattan remains a mammoth mess, a stupendous clashing of light and dark and illusory perspective, splotched here and there by wastelands of slum or demolition, wanly patterned by the grid of its street system, but essentially, whatever the improvers do to it, whatever economy decrees or architectural fashion advises, the supreme monument to that elemental human instinct, Free-For-All.