Dodgerland

by Michael Fallon

  Despite the fact that the economic downturn of the 1970s had affected moviemaking, as it had most other industries, the vision of the local movie industry remained a potent lure. The attraction of Hollywood, of course, has always been mostly intangible, mostly wish fulfillment. This fact was acknowledged as far back as 1935, when Harry Carr, an old newsman, wrote: “Hollywood is at once the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow and the struggle between two drowning persons for the last life-belt.”7 As the 1970s progressed, however, more and more commentators came to realize how tenuous was the “Implausible Dream” of Los Angeles. In early 1978 Art Seidenbaum was examining the truth that lay behind the city’s gauzy facade. “Los Angeles began without easy overland contact with the rest of America,” Seidenbaum wrote. “[The city] was cut off from the United States by harsh deserts and high mountains. We started thirsty from the beginning, without adequate or consistent water supply. . . . We didn’t have a natural harbor, unlike almost every major city. . . . [And the] mountains and dry lands constitute the great wall of California. They are the barriers that separate the West Coast industrially from other states. California is an economic island.”8

  The split personality of 1970s California—a land of golden fantasies on one side, and something far less perfect on the other—was no real surprise. After all, from the get-go the driving engine of California’s growth was overblown propaganda. After the Spaniards left and America wrested California from Mexico, the prospectors who came to California after the start of the Gold Rush—the so-called forty-niners—were only the first of many groups whose California dreams were unrealistic. Each successive wave of California dreamer, drawn to the West, hoping for a better life, found much the same as the forty-niners had—life in California was not markedly better here than anywhere else, or at least it was not as wonderful as advertised. And this dynamic, of course, caused plenty of problems in California. As Erik Davis noted in his book Visionary State: A Journey through California’s Spiritual Landscape, because of the successive mad dashes to California of people seeking to capture the fleeting chimeras of wealth and happiness, significant numbers of Californians possessed a warped, out-of-touch, even pathological outlook. “When the United States seized the territory from Mexico in 1848,” Davis wrote, “California became the stage for a strange and steady parade of utopian sects, bohemian mystics, cult leaders, psychospiritual healers, holy poets, sex magicians, fringe Christians, and psychedelic warriors.”9 From its earliest history California was home to a continuous stream of fads and gizmos, cults and mysterious secret societies, snake-oil salesmen and proselytizers, and the world’s most savvy pitch men and public relations (PR) professionals.10 Even more strange, as became clear in the early 1970s, the California Dream itself was the very cause for most of California’s growing problems. That is, the way that the ever-increasing newcomers pursued the dream led to a number of less than beneficial side effects. Consider, for instance, the state’s vaunted status as a car mecca. The many pilgrims who came to California in the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s loved the seemingly limitless space in which to move and constantly seek better horizons. By the late 1950s, in fact, only six states had more cars than Los Angeles County. But, over time, the intensely itinerant way of life in California set in motion a death spiral of freeway building and land development. Already by 1960 approximately two-thirds of the land in metropolitan Southern California supported car-related needs: highways, roads, driveways, freeways, parking lots, service stations, and car lots. The constant construction of this auto-based infrastructure swallowed up the former open spaces and farms of California and pushed the growing metropolis outward in all directions. The Southern Californian pattern of development destroyed much of the natural beauty of the region, created a vast and barely sustainable urban megaplex, and even spawned a new concept: “urban sprawl” (sometimes also somewhat disparagingly called Los Angelization). By 1977 the spread of concrete and pavement now called Southern California reached in all directions across vast valley floors from the Pacific Coast inland to the foothills of the Sierra Madre range and out into the Palm and Mojave Deserts.

  Southern California’s low-density development patterns, once lauded as the American growth-model of the future, contributed to diminishing quality-of-life issues even beyond the destruction of open spaces and natural beauty. Since the city was situated in a low basin surrounded by mountains and was both blessed and cursed with a unique weather pattern of warmth and dryness, a strong atmospheric inversion layer often trapped factory smoke and vehicle emissions. Early on observers noted the bad air of Los Angeles. The word smog, a nineteenth-century portmanteau of smoke and fog, first appeared in a January 19, 1893, Los Angeles Times article. And the millions of vehicles that flooded into the region in the twentieth century, which were necessary to traverse the rapidly expanding cityscape, only made the air quality worse. In 1954, for example—only a year before the opening of Disneyland—the smog had grown so intense in Los Angeles that schools and major parts of local industry were shut down for nearly the entire month of October.11 The sprawl of people, highways, parking lots, and low-slung buildings across the semiarid mountain valleys of California also created intractable logistical problems for the area’s residents. Sustaining the growing spread of people and concrete across such a harsh and unforgiving landscape was particularly problematic. Yearly, Californians battled harsh desert winds, brush fires, mud slides on the region’s raw-earth hills, sudden violent flash floods, dryness from lack of rain, even drought. While the California sunshine was a common reason so many were drawn to the state, its constancy was not terribly accommodating to the needs of human habitation, especially on the scale it had developed across the Southern California basin. “It never rains in Southern California” went the 1972 song by Albert Hammond, which was very nearly accurate—the region drew only about fifteen inches of annual rainfall (comparing, for example, with Marrakech, in Morocco, which had about ten inches of annual precipitation). Water had always been somewhat scarce in semiarid Southern California, and although the city’s early water problems had been solved by William Mulholland, a water engineer who was responsible for the construction of a system of dams and aqueducts in the 1910s,12 it was only a temporary solution. The city’s constant growth stressed the water system, leading Time to note in 1969, “If someone turned off the irrigation faucet for a week, green Southern California would be a dust bowl.”13

  Another unforeseen result of California’s development pattern was the division and isolation of formerly quiet ethnic and culturally vibrant neighborhoods. The massive freeway structures built between the 1940s and 1970s unexpectedly blocked millions of people’s access to other parts of the city, trapping them in their own circumstances and causing widespread economic hardship. Mike Davis, in his book City of Quartz, described how the dominant cultural driving force in the Los Angeles in these years—its “malevolence” in reshaping the natural landscape—caused systemic problems like crime, unemployment, drug abuse, and general depression, and it ruined many potentially lovely and wholly livable swaths of the city, including newly isolated ethnic neighborhoods like Watts, East Los Angeles, and Compton. The economic and physical isolation brought on by local development patterns is thought to be a root cause of the Watts riots in 1965. Although this event occurred immediately following the arrest, on August 11, 1965, of a young black motorist, behind the arrest lurked the long frustration and malaise among the neighborhood’s underemployed, isolated, and unengaged youths. After peace was restored nearly one thousand buildings in the area were damaged, stripped bare, or completely destroyed.

  The riots attracted widespread national attention to local inequalities, appearing bleakly on the cover of Time and damaging the idea of California as a social paradise. But this wasn’t even the worst of it. That would come a few years later, near the end of the Vietnam War, when Californians began to realize that the century-long free and unfettered bacchanalia of construction and development was coming to
an end. “During the Vietnam boom,” wrote Davis, “developable coastal land—the raw material of the Southern California dream—began to disappear. Resulting land inflation, which went ballistic in the late 1970s . . . profoundly reshaped the distribution of wealth and opportunity.”14

  What happened to Tom Fallon’s family after resettling in California in 1953 reveals everything one needs to know about what life was like in Southern California. Despite coming to the state to pursue his dreams of the easy life, once in California Fallon discovered how difficult it was to make money. For the longest time, in the 1950s and 1960s, Fallon got by doing relatively menial work, often holding several such jobs at one time. His children grew up hardly knowing him. Despite his struggles, however, Tom’s faith in the California Dream, like that of many locals, remained unshaken. He remained ever optimistic about the possibility of nabbing California gold, even to the point of going to the Mojave Desert to find it.

  The story is this: Sometime in the later 1960s Tom Fallon, who always had an ear for wild dreamers, came to know a man who claimed he had invented a machine that could draw gold dust from desert sand. “There’s more gold scattered around the deserts of California,” this man told him, “than have ever been extracted from all the gold mines in all of history. All you need is an easy way to capture all those riches.” The man’s name is lost in family lore, but his was enough of a sales pitch to convince Fallon to throw his money into a speculative enterprise being set up in a desert outpost of Barstow. His middle son, Jim, was finishing college and looking for a way to support his wife and two-year-old son. Tom offered him a job, for a salary of $150 a week, toiling away at the hard task of finding gold in the Barstow sands.

  Summers in Barstow are blazingly bright and hot, and after a few futile months of hard effort Jim realized that the machine did not work, that it would never work. Jim left Barstow in the fall and found a desk job at Allstate Insurance in Pasadena. But he would never stop dreaming of striking gold. Neither would Tom Fallon. And in Tom and Jim Fallon’s defense, it was not their fault that they’d been duped by promises of desert riches. It was, to be sure, a normal, everyday occurrence in Southern California. Almost daily, after all—in local newspapers, on television, around water coolers, on neighborhood corners—came the same message: Dream Big! And weekly, no matter where you were, you would come across a certain kind of person: dreamers selling faddish meditation techniques and diets, hucksters intent on reinventing fashion or language or style, savants mired in idiosyncratic pursuit of an arcane hobby, as well as all manner of entrepreneur, dabbler and tinkerer, snake-oil crackpot, mystical cultist, and sellers of magic beans. For every visionary founder of a future multimillion-dollar company like Intel, Jiffy Lube, Kinko’s, and McDonald’s—or for every small-time operator with a big idea who was lucky enough to strike it rich—California was home to thousands upon thousands of others who never came close to realizing their dreams. And it was okay. It was the California way.

  By the spring of 1977, as the Dodgers gave the city of Los Angeles a dose of much-needed hope going into the new baseball season, most Californians agreed the California Dream was all but dead—though, as Time would suggest, “Californians differ[ed] over when the dream fizzled.”15 Some people traced their disappointment back to the previous November, when California failed to register its electoral college vote for the candidate who eventually became president, Jimmy Carter. Some suggested the state had peaked in 1973 and 1974, when gasoline supply shortages and steep fuel price hikes followed the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries oil embargo, resulting in a sharp recession. Others blamed the idea that, because it was inevitable that a large earthquake would eventually strike the overgrown city of L.A., mass devastation was inevitable. (In 1971 sixty-five people had died from a magnitude 6.6 earthquake in San Fernando.) And others suggested further reasons: increasing crime rates, the loss of 180,000 jobs by the failure of the state’s aeronautical industry, the turmoil and systemic strain being caused by an ongoing drought, the spread of street gangs in Compton and East Los Angeles, the state’s rising divorce rates in the 1970s after the passage of the country’s first no-fault divorce law,16 the mass student protests in the later 1960s and into the 1970s, and on and on. Whatever the reason, Time concluded, everyone agreed that the California “of the ’60s, a mystical land of abundance and affluence, vanished some time in the 1970s.”17

  Having reached the end of his first term in office in 1977, Mayor Tom Bradley had a markedly different view of his city as he had in 1973. A year before, in 1976, Bradley had worked as the cochair of the Democratic National Convention in New York, during the campaign that elected Jimmy Carter to the presidency. After the election Carter had offered Bradley a position in his cabinet, as the secretary of housing and urban development. Bradley’s own messages of hope for the multidimensional, multicultural city of Los Angeles likely influenced Carter’s decision to invite Bradley. But Bradley had already promised local business leaders, who were concerned about a number of ongoing issues, that he would run for reelection in 1977, so Bradley declined Carter’s offer. “This was in December [1976],” said Bradley, “so by that time I had made a firm decision to run. It would have been unfair to my supporters for me to back off at that point. So it was an easy decision, having made that prior commitment to running for reelection.”18

  Throughout his first term Bradley had set a strong tone that many in the city admired. He continued to work hard—often twelve or more hours a day—to tackle the many challenges and problems, some quite intractable, that his city was facing. This included, among other things, addressing head-on the need for a modern public mass transit system, for which he obtained federal dollars to develop a new rail line downtown (though his tax proposal to finance mass transit failed to win approval from county voters); petitioning the federal government for funds to provide better services to local citizens; setting up an Office of Small Business Assistance to help struggling businesses get through the recession; improving the availability and quality of housing for low- and moderate-income families in the city; encouraging various urban renewal projects in some of the more destitute parts of the city; undertaking a massive revitalization of the city’s harbor in order to expand its capacity to handle international shipping; and so on. And he did all of this work quietly, with little regard to gaining accolades. “One of the major differences between Tom Bradley and other politicians,” said prominent local businessman Barry Erdos, toward the end of the mayor’s first term, “is that he is not always looking for a spotlight for himself.”19

  Even with all the successes, not all was well behind the scenes. Part of the problem was the sense that, no matter what he accomplished as mayor, some things would never change. Back in 1973, after his first election victory, Bradley had expressed his hopes for Los Angeles and Angelenos. “Never did I lose faith that this city could live by the creed of this nation’s birth,” he said in his July inauguration speech. “Let it be said that here in Los Angeles, we began today to build the kind of government that means what it says and says what it means. Let it be said that we built the kind of government that the decent, hardworking citizens of Los Angeles respected because it respected them.” Now, four years later, Bradley was disheartened by a number of setbacks, both personal and political. In 1973, just after taking office, Bradley had received news that his eighty-two-year-old mother, Crenner Hawkins Bradley, had died of a heart attack. Then, about a year into his first term in office, Tom Bradley’s twenty-nine-year-old daughter, Phyllis, had the first of what would be many run-ins with the police—a resisting-arrest charge after a minor traffic stop.20 Even as Bradley racked his brain to come up with a solution for his daughter’s problems, in February 1976 he had to accept the resignation of a longtime friend and adviser, and one of the most important members of his cabinet, Deputy Mayor Maury Weiner. Weiner had been found guilty of lewd conduct in a movie theater, a misdemeanor charge, but to minimize the political damage he decided to st
ep down.

  Despite these ongoing issues and frustrations, during the lead-up to the election in 1977 Bradley was hopeful that the city had truly turned a corner in its history. In particular, he hoped that this election might avoid much of the ugliness that had characterized the previous two elections. In mid-December a state senator from the San Fernando Valley named Alan Robbins announced his candidacy for the mayor’s office, declaring that he would steer clear of the racial overtones of past elections. Robbins’s pledge was disingenuous, of course, as he immediately began criticizing Bradley for his stance on the issue of mandatory school busing, for being soft on crime, for kowtowing to downtown business interests, and so on. In all of Robbins’s criticisms and campaign themes, there was, as election observers noted, a subtle undertone of racism. “The persistent thrust . . . of much of Bradley’s opposition,” wrote journalist Kenneth Reich, “[was] that the predominantly white Los Angeles electorate will not believe a black is as safely conservative as a white.”21