All Gone to Look for America

by Peter Millar

  Time to take the metro back towards whatever can loosely be termed the centre of a metropolis that is actually a sprawl of unplanned development covering much of two counties (there are 10 million people here and the urban territory is larger than that of the US’s smallest state, Rhode Island). I want to see if there really is such a thing as downtown LA. There is of course historically an area where the city first began, not far from Union Station, although even that wasn’t here in the eighteenth century when a couple of dozen Spanish settlers first founded El Pueblo de nuestra Señora, la Reina de Los Angeles (The city of our Lady, Queen of the Angels). Surprisingly, the city has managed not only to maintain, but in recent years also to refurbish a little area which is still known as ‘the pueblo’ and, spanning maybe half a dozen streets or so, includes most of LA’s oldest buildings from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

  Inevitably there is a bit of a touristy feel to it with Mexican sombreros and carved donkeys on sale, but they are alongside genuinely good restaurants and food stalls. Olivera Street has been a market for all things Hispanic since the 1930s. Settling in for some tacos and a margarita at the Casa Golondrina with Spanish spoken all around feels more like the Yucatán than downtown LA, even if it does awaken a rumbling remembrance in my intestines of last night’s chilli salsa. But it is after lunch when I hit the Grand Central Market a few blocks away that I really come to understand how much the Hispanic presence in Los Angeles has come of age. For all the size of the city this is hardly Seattle’s Pike Place but it is a bustling marketplace full of fresh farmers’ produce – mostly fruit and veg – but the remarkable thing is how little of it is labelled in English. Walk in and the first thing that hits the eye is a giant sign proclaiming Especialidad en Chiles Secos (Dried Chiles Our Speciality – the translation is mine, there wasn’t a word of English in sight). Next to it a neon sign is touting somebody else’s ‘chiles secos’ along with ‘moles’. There are stalls called La Huerta (garden) and La Casa Verde (the green house) and at least a few offer help: alongside ‘antojitos mexicanos’ the sign offers ‘Roast to go’. It’s apparently a famous downtown LA institution. The other elements in cosmopolitan LA are also on show: a Japanese restaurant and someone offering Chinese massage, translated into the vernacular: Masaje Chino.

  LA also has its bustling restaurant-filled Chinatown, just north of Cesar Chavez (I won’t make that mistake again) Boulevard as well as Little Tokyo, which was the hub of the Japanese community that first began to settle here in the 1880s. Unfortunately the ill treatment of the Japanese-American community during the Second World War and a thoughtless redevelopment programme during the 1960s which replaced most of the original architecture with bland buildings, has left little to see. Even the designation of the buildings along East First Street as a protected National Historic Landmark has been more of a sop to the errors of the past. The most poignant structure is a monument to Ellison Onizuka, the Hawaiian-born Japanese-American who died in the Challenger space shuttle disaster. Unfortunately it is also the most kitsch memorial I have ever seen outside a Soviet cemetery (the Russians used to put scaled-down tanks or rocket launchers on the graves of military men): a 10-foot-high full-colour model of the Challenger on lift-off, still strapped to the massive fuel tanks whose explosion would cause the deaths of the astronauts inside.

  Bizarrely it echoes the similar-shaped structure in the background, LA’s iconic city hall, a great rocket-shaped tower, built in 1928 and for four decades the city’s tallest structure. It is also incredibly familiar, and then I realise why: it’s been used in so many movies, from the original 1954 movie version of the War of the Worlds when it was attacked by the invaders to the modern Superman series where, with a bit of computer-generated assistance, it has served as the offices of the Daily Planet.

  The rest of the rocket ships are just a short stroll away. This is the clump of skyscrapers that looked so unfriendly from a distance. They don’t look much more welcoming close up. The five glass cylinders of the Westin Bonaventure Hotel look just like five glass cylinders while the US Bank Tower which proudly boasts of being the tallest building between Chicago and Hong Kong (though as from here on out that means basically the Pacific Ocean I’m not sure how much of a boast it is) is imposing only because of its height. Bizarrely, to be allowed to reach that height it had to purchase ‘air rights’ from the neighbouring Central Library. Reinforces my belief that Americans and Russians aren’t so different after all: an old Russian saying is ‘the law is like a telegraph pole, very difficult to get over, very easy to get round’; the only difference here is that you have to buy your way round. Come to think of it, maybe that isn’t a difference at all.

  On my last visit, when I didn’t spend a night in the city, and only ventured downtown by accident, I drove through this area as quickly as legally possible feeling intimidated by a surly population. Today, I’m surprised to find myself wandering in relaxed mood into Pershing Square, which extensive remodelling has rescued from a dubious inner-city empty space to become a remarkably pleasant oasis, which is what it literally resembles with its forest of small palms and bubbling fountain. Along one side stretches another of those former American architectural archetypes: the great triple-pronged bulk of the Millennium Biltmore. For a moment I’m struck by a sinister sense of déjà vu and then it hits me: the Buffalo Statler. The difference is stark: whereas the former Buffalo palace for presidents and industry moguls is a crumbling neglected heap, the Millennium Biltmore still oozes the money it had when it was built in the 1920s – palatial public rooms, a smart cocktail bar and a Roman-style marble-floored indoor pool. What a difference a few thousand millionaires make!

  Not just millionaires though: looking up at this example of preserved 1920s opulence I’m accosted by a grubby, foul-smelling beggar demanding ‘change’ rather forcefully. He’s caught me by surprise, still trying to work out what would make someone name a city square after a nuclear missile. It takes a bit for me to get my head round the idea that the missiles – so notorious for years amongst the peaceniks who fought their deployment in Britain and Germany – were themselves named after a general. How come they never named any after Custer?1

  But, apart from this little intellectual digression, the main reason I’ve not managed to avoid the attentions of the bum is that my mind has suddenly become fully engaged by another semantic interpretation of that word. For the past 20 minutes or so, encouraged by my cathartic consumption of tequila and tacos, the rumbling in my lower intestines has become increasingly intense. My Grand Canyon chilli salsa is threatening to produce an earth movement all of its own. So here I am standing in the middle of a square named, as far as I’m concerned, after a nuclear missile, eyes watering and buttocks firmly clenched, trying to ignore a smelly man persistently saying, ‘Well, you gonna give me a few bucks or what?’

  This would be annoying enough at the best of times but right now it is positively excruciating. If you can imagine sitting on top of a volcano that has suddenly decided a few centuries of dormancy are enough and it’s time to let the old lava flow again, then you are close. Except that I’m not sitting on the volcano, it’s inside me. One way or another, perhaps misinterpreting my clenched fists – actually nails digging into palms to aid concentration – the tramp (the word ‘bum’ is one I daren’t even call to mind at the moment) ambles off, allowing me to close my eyes for a few seconds, channelling every last ounce of energy to my sphincter’s efforts to control its inner Etna. And eventually, like the sound of war drums slowly retreating into the jungle, the crisis subsides and it occurs to me that, rather than face up to the challenge of finding a public toilet downtown, it might be time to head back to Hollywood and see if the axe man’s been yet.

  He hadn’t. Suitably relieved, in every possible way, it’s time to head out west, for another view of Hollywood culture: Sunset Strip. It’s not really called that, of course, the road: it’s called Sunset Boulevard and runs out to Beverly Hills and beyond to Laurel Can
yon and below the Hollywood Hills, which is where the real celebrities live these days. Leonardo di Caprio, Kylie Minogue, Cameron Diaz, all have their pads up there.

  But I can’t help my fascination with the ‘Strip’ itself, which is basically the mile and a half that runs from west Hollywood to Beverly Hills. The reason is not the night clubs or the bars that increasingly attract celeb-spotters rather than the celebs themselves, but an ancient, black-and-white television series called 77 Sunset Strip.

  It was the predecessor of all the cop shows you’ve ever seen and ran from the late 1950s through to the mid-sixties, which is the reason I remember it so well: I was still a child and wasn’t allowed to watch it. With its catchy jazzy theme tune, ‘Seventy-Sev-en, Sun-Set-Strip’ represented a glamorous exotic world that was totally alien to families in provincial Northern Ireland. My father lapped it up – the gangs, the guns, the girls and strange slang – while I was sent to bed with that theme tune and an image of men in dark suits and women adjusting stockings that stirred vague sensations I didn’t really understand.

  I should have hired a limo and cruised it. Instead I took the bus. I had thought I might start at ‘Sunset and Vine’ just because of the Bowie song ‘Cracked Actor’, about a Hollywood star down on his luck trying to squeeze one more blow-job on the price of his fame, but – perhaps unsurprisingly – that’s the wrong direction: one of those things we Europeans have a problem with in America, and LA in particular, is streets that go on forever. Almost literally: miles and miles and miles. Sunset Boulevard stretches nearly 16 miles in total, from the wiggly bit on the far side of downtown LA, along the dead straight bit that runs through Hollywood to the wiggly bit again that is the start of the ‘Strip’ and runs beyond it for miles of twists and turns right down to the Pacific Coast Highway that is the extreme edge of the vast Los Angeles conurbation. So when I catch my bus – a 217 heading west – my main concern is where to get out. I opt for Fairfax and Sunset, which turns out to be at least a stop too early. But already I realise that any chance of actually locating a number 77 on the ‘Strip’ – where the detectives supposedly worked out of – or in fact any number remotely similar is ridiculous, given that the first number I actually find is 8225. But then it’s not in black and white either.

  In fact, it’s hard to find anywhere less black and white than the ‘Strip’ with its gaudy, garish riot of neon, big hotels, bustling bars with kids hanging out on the streets, beer bottles or cocktails in hand. This is theoretically one of the world’s greatest rock’n’roll meccas, home to the Whisky a Go-Go club where the Doors and Guns’n Roses got their big breaks, not to mention being the home of the original Go-Go girl back in the sixties when their female DJ started dancing to the records she was spinning. There’s also the Roxy, The Troubadour, The Rainbow Room – all of them legendary venues, if you happen to be there at the right time. On most other nights, though, they’re just familiar noisy nightclubs, especially if you’re a middle-aged bloke not dressed in the height of fashion. Superficially, I have to say, it feels more like Magaluf on Majorca with an 18–30 Club tour group in town.

  Even the famed Viper Room, owned by Johnny Depp himself, is just another old rock’n’roll club on an ordinary night. You wouldn’t know that this was where megastar-in-the-making River Phoenix was found dead by the doorway in October 1993, overdosed on drugs, aged just 23 and only a few days before he was due to start filming Interview With a Vampire alongside Tom Cruise. If he had snorted less up his nose we might never have heard of Brad Pitt. There are people who make pilgrimages to scenes of famous Hollywood deaths, though as far as I can make out, cyberspace father William Gibson’s virtual reality art recreation of his corpse in situ (in the novel Spook Country) hasn’t materialised yet. Or maybe I was just missing my VR helmet; there are times on Sunset when it’s easy enough to lose your grip on what’s real and what’s made up on the spot.

  The only bit of true upmarket chic on Sunset is the quaint little collection of shops and cafés called Sunset Plaza, a low-rise throwback to the 1930s, stuffed with expensive designer stores. Bruce Willis and the Governator himself are said to favour Billy Martin’s Western attire store, while Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman pop in at Oliver Peoples. Richard Gere took Cindy Crawford here to buy her wedding ring, though the shop where they bought it has gone. Even Sunset Plaza is not immune to fickle fashion trends and the credit crunch.

  But I’ve seen enough to get the flavour and a stroll down into Beverly Hills suddenly seems irresistible, the change in the noise and traffic immediately palpable. Wandering along just a few of the verdant, almost subtropical avenues, listening to the sound of the cicadas and taking in the aroma of orchids, it’s easy to imagine myself back in Bogartland. The celebrities have changed though – even if the one name the address Beverly Hills still conjures up for me is Jed Clampett – today’s superstars cosseted in their mansions up in the hills around me include not just movie stars but pop singers and British footballers. Well, one footballer in particular. But I’ve got a date with David Beckham tomorrow, so there’s no need to rush.

  I had ordered up my ticket for the LA Galaxy’s match against the New York Red Bulls several months before leaving Britain. Not because I’m a particularly big Beckham fan – though few England supporters could fail to owe him a debt of gratitude for that miracle free kick that saw us through to the 2002 World Cup. And I certainly was never a fan of Manchester United who have long since been not so much a club as a brand: it would be like being a fan of Starbucks. Yes, yes, I know some people are. I have seen them paying homage at the site of the holy latte grail.

  But ‘Posh and Becks’ have made themselves into such remarkable – and despite the extravagantly immodest displays of excessive wealth – remarkably likeable symbols of modern Britain, that I can’t resist the temptation of seeing how the great man goes down in his new homeland. Especially as he’s come with the express aim of infecting the planet’s only nation immune to proper football (okay then, Yanks, soccer) with the germs of passion for ‘the beautiful game’. Also, it’s been almost a month since I was last at a game; I’m suffering withdrawal symptoms.

  But kick-off is not until 7:00 p.m. according to my ticket so there’s most of a day to kill. Under the circumstances I do what any British football fan in LA for the day would probably do: Universal Studios. I’d like to tell you it was an extraordinary, culturally captivating insight into the secrets of Hollywood moviemaking. Unfortunately it wasn’t. Apart from a couple of modestly interesting short shows about special effects, Universal is basically a theme park like any other. True, there is the ‘studio tour’ but it’s basically a bus ride around the back lots of sealed-off sound stages where the real action goes on. There are a couple of outdoor sets, most notably the pond that doubled for the oceanfront in Jaws, complete with the hilariously unrealistic-looking but allegedly original rubber shark (somehow not the same when you’re expecting its appearance any moment, rather than a blinding flash out of the dark on a cinema screen). Other than that – and the fact that the rides are named after Universal blockbusters: Jurassic Park, The Mummy etc. – its main concern is that of any other theme park: churning the punters and selling hot dogs and souvenirs.

  By early afternoon I’m ready for something different. Like the part of LA where most of my British friends said I should have been staying: Santa Monica beach. As the name implies, it’s not really Los Angeles, but then nor is most of what is generally called Los Angeles, any more than most of what is called London is actually the original Roman square mile city. Santa Monica is merely the bit by the beach, at the end of – logically enough – the Santa Monica Boulevard. And as a Sheryl Crow fan from way back I know I ought to hang out there until the sun goes down. But I have to be gone a bit earlier or I’ll miss the start of the game.

  The most fascinating thing about the Santa Monica Boulevard – apart from its musical fame and, as I’m about to discover, its length – is that it more or less passes directly over the La
Brea tar pits. This may sound less than interesting until you know, as I had just learned, that America could make a significant dent in its reliance on imported oil if they only drilled there. It is the supreme irony of a great city whose prime problem in growing to the size it is today was initially the shortage of water wells – see Jack Nicholson in Chinatown – they ended up unwittingly building it over one of the country’s largest onshore oil deposits. The only reason La Brea hasn’t been turned into an oilfield is that it lies underneath some of the most expensive real estate in America. And the inhabitants of Beverly Hills are amongst the few Americans who wouldn’t think it was worth drilling into a guaranteed oil well in their back garden. Whatever would Jed Clampett have thunk?

  A rare Angelino public transport fan later that night, would tell me: ‘Effectively, the whole of Los Angeles is sitting on an oil well. A federal bill was enacted to ban pushing the line west in case it exploded a giant methane bubble more or less underneath Beverley Hills. Since then the ban has been rescinded – in theory, and with obvious conditions – but no one has found a way of extending the line that would cost less than billions.