Collected Essays

by Joan Didion

  A certain fatalism comes into play. When the ground starts moving all bets are off. Quantification, which in this case takes the form of guessing where the movement at hand will rank on the Richter scale, remains a favored way of regaining the illusion of personal control, and people still crouched in the nearest doorjamb will reach for a telephone and try to call Caltech, in Pasadena, for a Richter reading. “Rock and roll,” the D.J. said on my car radio that Friday afternoon at six minutes past four. “This console is definitely shaking ... no word from Pasadena yet, is there?”

  “I would say this is a three,” the D.J.’s colleague said.

  “Definitely a three, maybe I would say a little higher than a three.”

  “Say an eight . . . just joking.”

  “It felt like a six where I was.”

  What it turned out to be was a five-two, followed by a dozen smaller aftershocks, and it had knocked out four of the six circuit breakers at the A. D. Edmonston pumping plant on the California Aqueduct, temporarily shutting down the flow of Northern Cal­ifornia water over the Tehachapi range and cutting off half of Southern California’s water supply for the weekend. This was all within the range not only of the predictable but of the normal. No one had been killed or seriously injured. There was plenty of water for the weekend in the system’s four southern reser­voirs, Pyramid, Castaic, Silverwood, and Perris lakes. A five-two earthquake is not, in California, where the movements people remember tend to have Richter numbers well over six, a major event, and the proba­bility of earthquakes like this one had in fact been built into the Aqueduct: the decision to pump the water nineteen hundred feet over the Tehachapi was made precisely because the Aqueduct’s engineers re­jected the idea of tunneling through an area so geolog­ically complex, periodically wrenched by opposing displacements along the San Andreas and the Garlock, that it has been called California’s structural knot.

  Still, this particular five-two, coming as it did when what Californians call “the Big One” was pretty much overdue (the Big One is the eight, the Big One is the seven in the wrong place or at the wrong time, the Big One could even be the six-five centered near down­town Los Angeles at nine on a weekday morning), made people a little uneasy. There was some concern through the weekend that this was not merely an ordinary five-two but a “foreshock”, an earthquake pre­figuring a larger event (the chances of this, according to Caltech seismologists, run about one in twenty), and by Sunday there was what seemed to many peo­ple a sinister amount of activity on other faults: a three-four just east of Ontario at twenty-two minutes past two in the afternoon, a three-six twenty-two min­utes later at Lake Berryessa, and, four hours and one minute later, northeast of San Jose, a five-five on the Calaveras Fault. On Monday, there was a two-three in Playa del Rey and a three in Santa Barbara.

  Had it not been for the five-two on Friday, very few people would have registered these little quakes (the Caltech seismological monitors in Southern Cali­fornia normally record from twenty to thirty earth­quakes a day with magnitudes below three), and in the end nothing came of them, but this time people did register them, and they lent a certain moral grav­ity to the way the city happened to look that weekend, a temporal dimension to the hard white edges and empty golden light. At odd moments during the next few days people would suddenly clutch at tables, or walls. “Is it going,” they would say, or “I think it’s moving.” They almost always said “it”, and what they meant by “it” was not just the ground but the world as they knew it. I have lived all my life with the prom­ise of the Big One, but when it starts going now even I get the jitters.

  2

  What is striking about Los Angeles after a period away is how well it works. The famous free­ways work, the supermarkets work (a visit, say, to the Pacific Palisades Gelson’s, where the aisles are wide and the shelves full and checkout is fast and free of attitude, remains the zazen of grocery shopping), the beaches work. The 1984 Olympics were not supposed to work, but they did (daily warnings of gridlock and urban misery gave way, during the first week, to a county-wide block party, with pink and aquamarine flags fluttering over empty streets and parking spaces for once available even in Westwood); not only worked but turned a profit, of almost $223 million, about which there was no scandal. Even the way houses are bought and sold seems to work more effi­ciently than it does in New York (for all practical purposes there are no exclusive listings in Los Ange­les, and the various contingencies on which closing the deal depends are arbitrated not by lawyers but by an escrow company), something that came to my at­tention when my husband and I arranged to have our Los Angeles house shown for the first time to brokers at eleven o’clock one Saturday morning, went out to do a few errands, and came back at one to find that we had three offers, one of them for appreciably more than the asking price.

  Selling a house in two hours was not, in 1988 in Los Angeles, an entirely unusual experience. Around Feb­ruary of 1988, midway through what most people call the winter but Californians call the spring (“winter” in California is widely construed as beginning and ending with the Christmas season, reflecting a local preference for the upside), at a time when residential real estate prices in New York were already plunging in response to the October 1987 stock market crash, there had in fact developed on the west side of Los Angeles a heightened enthusiasm for committing large sums of money to marginal improvements in one’s domestic situation: to moving, say, from what was called in the listings a “convertible 3” in Santa Monica (three bedrooms, one of which might be converted into a study) to a self-explanatory “4 + lib” in Brent­wood Park, or to acquiring what was described in the listings as an “H/F pool”, meaning heated and filtered, or a “N/S tennis court”, meaning the preferred place­ment on the lot, the north-south orientation believed to keep sun from the players’ eyes.

  By June of 1988 a kind of panic had set in, of a kind that occurs periodically in Southern California but had last occurred in 1979. Multiple offers were com­monplace, and deals stalled because bank appraisers could not assess sales fast enough to keep up with the rising market. Residential real estate offices were rou­tinely reporting “record months”. People were buying one- and two-million-dollar houses as investments, to give their adolescent children what brokers referred to as “a base in the market”, which was one reason why small houses on modest lots priced at a million-four were getting, the day they were listed, thirty and forty offers.

  All this seemed to assume an infinitely upward trend, and to be one of those instances in which the preoccupations and apprehensions of people in Los Angeles, a city in many ways predicated on the ability to deal with the future at a rather existential remove, did not exactly coincide with those of the country at large. October 19, 1987, which had so immediately affected the New York market that asking prices on some apartments had in the next three or four months dropped as much as a million dollars, seemed, in Los Angeles, not to have happened. Those California brokers to whom I talked, if they mentioned the crash at all, tended to see it as a catalyst for good times, an event that had emphasized the “real” in real estate.

  The Los Angeles Times had taken to running, every Sunday, a chat column devoted mainly to the buying and selling of houses: Ruth Ryon’s “Hot Property”, from which one could learn that the highest price paid for a house in Los Angeles to that date was $20.25 million (by Marvin Davis, to Kenny Rogers, for The Knoll in Beverly Hills); that the $2.5 million paid in 1986 for 668 St. Cloud Road in Bel Air (by Earle Jorgenson and Holmes Tuttle and some eighteen other friends of President and Mrs. Reagan, for whom the house was bought and who rent it with an option to buy) was strikingly under value, since even an un­built acre in the right part of Bel Air (the house bought by the Reagans’ friends is definitely in the right part of Bel Air) will sell for $3 million; and that two houses in the Reagans’ new neighborhood sold recently for $13.5 million and $14.75 million respectively. A typi­cal “Hot Property” item ran this way:


  Newlyweds Tracey E. Bregman Recht, star of the daytime soap “The Young and the Restless”, and her husband Ron Recht, a commercial real estate developer, just bought their first home, on 2.5 acres in a nifty neighborhood. They’re just up the street from Merv Griffin’s house (which I’ve heard is about to be listed at some astronom­ical price) and they’re just down the street from Pickfair, now owned by Pia Zadora and her husband. The Rechts bought a house that was built in 1957 on San Ysidro Drive in Beverly Hills for an undisclosed price, believed to be several million dollars, and now they’re fixing it up . . .

  I spent some time, before this 1988 bull market broke, with two West Side brokers, Betty Budlong and Romelle Dunas of the Jon Douglas office, both of whom spoke about the going price of “anything at all” as a million dollars, and of “something decent” as two million dollars. “Right now I’ve got two clients in the price range of five to six hundred thousand dollars,” Romelle Dunas said. “I sat all morning trying to think what I could show them today.”

  “I’d cancel the appointment,” Betty Budlong said.

  “I just sold their condo for four. I’m sick. The houses for five-fifty are smaller than their condo.”

  “I think you could still find something in Ocean Park,” Betty Budlong said. “Ocean Park, Sunset Park, somewhere like that. Brentwood Glen, you know, over here, the Rattery tract ... of course that’s inch­ing towards six.”

  “Inching toward six and you’re living in the right lane of the San Diego Freeway,” Romelle Dunas said.

  “In seventeen hundred square feet,” Betty Budlong said.

  “If you’re lucky. I saw one that was fifteen hundred square feet. I have a feeling when these people go out today they’re not going to close on their condo.”

  Betty Budlong thought about this. “I think you should make a good friend of Sonny Fox,” she said at last.

  Sonny Fox was a Jon Douglas agent in Sherman Oaks, in the San Fernando Valley, only a twenty-minute drive from Beverly Hills on the San Diego Freeway but a twenty-minute drive toward which someone living on the West Side—even someone who would drive forty minutes to Malibu—was apt to dis­play considerable sales resistance.

  “In the Valley,” Romelle Dunas said after a pause.

  Betty Budlong shrugged. “In the Valley.”

  “People are afraid to get out of this market,” Romelle Dunas said.

  “They can’t afford to get out,” Betty Budlong said. “I know two people who in any other market would have sold their houses. One of them has accepted a job in Chicago, the other is in Washington for at least two years. They’re both leasing their houses. Because until they’re sure they’re not coming back, they don’t want to get out.”

  The notion that land will be worth more tomorrow than it is worth today has been a real part of the California experience, and remains deeply embedded in the California mentality, but this seemed extreme, and it occurred to me that the buying and selling of houses was perhaps one more area in which the local capacity for protective detachment had come into play, that people capable of compartmentalizing the Big One might be less inclined than others to worry about getting their money out of a 4 + lib, H/F pool. I asked if foreign buyers could be pushing up the mar­ket.

  Betty Budlong thought not. “These are people who are moving, say, from a seven-fifty house to a million-dollar house.”

  I asked if the market could be affected by a defense cutback.

  Betty Budlong thought not. “Most of the people who buy on the West Side are professionals, or in the entertainment industry. People who work at Hughes and Douglas, say, don’t live in Brentwood or Santa Monica or Beverly Hills.”

  I asked Betty Budlong if she saw anything at all that could affect the market.

  “Tight money could affect this market,” Betty Budlong said. “For a while.”

  “Then it always goes higher,” Romelle Dunas said.

  “Which is why people can’t afford to get out,” Betty Budlong said.

  “They couldn’t get back in,” Romelle Dunas said.

  3

  This entire question of houses and what they were worth (and what they should be worth, and what it meant when the roof over someone’ s head was also his or her major asset) was, during the spring and summer of 1988, understandably more on the local mind than it perhaps should have been, which was one reason why a certain house then under construc­tion just west of the Los Angeles Country Club be­came the focus of considerable attention, and of emotions usually left dormant on the west side of Los Angeles. The house was that being built by the tele­vision producer (“Dynasty”, “Loveboat”, “Fantasy Is­land”) Aaron Spelling and his wife Candy at the corner of Mapleton and Club View in Holmby Hills, on six acres the Spellings had bought in 1983, for $10,250,000, from Patrick Frawley, the chairman of Schick.

  At the time of the purchase there was already a fairly impressive house on the property, a house once lived in by Bing Crosby, but the Spellings, who had become known for expansive domestic gestures (cross­ing the country in private railroad cars, for example, and importing snow to Beverly Hills for their chil­dren’s Christmas parties), had decided that the Crosby/Frawley house was what is known locally as a teardown. The progress of the replacement, which was rising from the only residential site I have ever seen with a two-story contractor’s office and a sign reading construction area: hard hats required, became over the next several months not just a form of popular entertainment but, among inhabitants of a city without much common experience, a unifying, even a political, idea.

  At first the project was identified, on the kind of site sign usually reserved for office towers in progress, as “the manor”; later “the manor” was modified to what seemed, given the resemblance of the structure to a resort Hyatt, the slightly nutty discretion of “594 south mapleton drive”. It was said that the structure (“house” seemed not entirely to cover it) would have 56,500 square feet. It was said that the interior plan would include a bowling alley, and 560 square feet of extra closet space, balconied between the second and the attic floors. It was said, by the owner, that such was the mass of the steel frame construction that to break up the foundation alone would take a demolition crew six months, and cost from four to five million dollars.

  Within a few months the site itself had become an established attraction, and evening drive-bys were en­livened by a skittish defensiveness on the part of the guards, who would switch on the perimeter floods and light up the steel girders and mounded earth like a prison yard. The Los Angeles Times and Herald Examiner published periodic reports on and rumors about the job (“Callers came out of the woodwork yesterday in the wake of our little tale about Candy Spelling having the foundation of her $45-million mansion-in-progress lowered because she didn’t want to see the Robinson’s department store sign from where her bed-to-be was to sit”), followed by curiously provocative corrections, or “denials”, from Aaron Spelling. “The only time Candy sees the Robinson’s sign is when she’s shop­ping” was one correction that got everyone’s attention, but in many ways the most compelling was this: “They say we have an Olympic-sized swimming pool. Not true. There’s no gazebo, no guesthouse. . . . When people go out to dinner, unless they talk about their movies, they have nothing else to talk about, so they single out Candy.”

  In that single clause, “unless they talk about their movies”, there was hidden a great local truth, and the inchoate heart of the matter: this house was, in the end, that of a television producer, and people who make movies did not, on the average evening, have dinner with people who make television. People who make television had most of the money, but people who make movies still had most of the status, and believed themselves the keepers of the community’s unspoken code, of the rules, say, about what consti­tuted excess on the housing front. This was a distinc­tion usually left tacit, but the fact of the Spelling house was making
people say things out loud. “There are people in this town worth hundreds of millions of dollars,” Richard Zanuck, one of the most successful motion picture producers in the business, once said to my husband, “and they can’t get a table at Chasen’s.” This was a man whose father had run a studio and who had himself run a studio, and his bewilderment was that of someone who had uncovered an anomaly in the wheeling of the stars.

  4

  When people in Los Angeles talk about “this town”, they do not mean Los Angeles, nor do they exactly mean what many of them call “the commu­nity”. “The community” is more narrowly defined, and generally confined to those inhabitants of this town who can be relied upon to sit at one another’s tables on approved evenings (benefiting the American Film Institute, say) and to get one another’s daughters into approved schools, say Westlake, in Holmby Hills, not far from the Spellings’ house but on eleven acres rather than six. People in the community meet one another for lunch at Hillcrest, but do not, in the main, attend Friars’ Club Roasts. People in the com­munity sojourn with their children in Paris, and Aspen, and at the Kahala Hilton in Honolulu, but visit Las Vegas only on business. “The community” is made up of people who can, in other words, get a table at Chasen’s.