I Used to Be Charming

by Eve Babitz

  We loved Golden Gate Park, the Cliff House, Fisherman’s Wharf and Nob Hill. We loved it. We’d save up our money to spend on ravioli and Grant Street. It never occurred to either of us to wonder what kids who were raised in San Francisco would think if they had to go to L.A. But now it occurs to me all the time because half my friends live in San Francisco, and flying back and forth all the time as I do, I am under constant fire with such questions as, “But how can you live in L.A.?”

  My poor friends from San Francisco mostly get booked into hotels other than the Chateau Marmont or the Sunset Marquis. The Chateau Marmont and the Sunset Marquis are the only two places people from San Francisco are ever even marginally content (unless whoever’s paying for the trip can afford suites at the Beverly Hills Hotel or the Beverly Wilshire).

  The Chateau Marmont, with its slow elevators, high ceilings, and amazing views, is a bastion of grace holding on by its fingernails against time.

  Sunset Marquis is pure L.A. but, like the Chateau, it doesn’t have room service and this seems to be what makes the difference—you cannot pick up the phone and get that deadly hotel food. But the Sunset Marquis has more than that; it has a kind of jolly ambience like a summer camp for people involved in the Industry. (There are only three business constants in L.A.: aerospace, real estate, and the Industry.)

  Since most of my friends from San Francisco come down to L.A. to do business with the Industry, they should tell whomever it is who’s making their reservations to forget about the Holiday Inns or any other of those Inns, and that they’ll take anything in the Chateau, even an eight-by-ten cell. Or that they want to stay at the Sunset Marquis.

  I realized what happens to people from San Francisco when they get off in the Burbank Airport and suddenly it’s hot, the buildings lie low, and it’s “My God, Eve, how can you live here?” the first time I returned to L.A. after having “moved” to San Francisco. These “moves” are periodic notations in my life for the times I’ve decided to grow up and leave Hollywood. They last, at most, three months and then I am drawn back to L.A., irresistibly. “Just for a day or so,” I say to myself, and then suddenly I’m back. My “moves” to San Francisco seem to occur about once every seven years.

  People from San Francisco never come to L.A. for a vacation the way I’d fly up north just because it’s so nice. People from San Francisco think L.A. is horrible enough just standing there like that without having to actually go, voluntarily.

  It’s funny, too, you know, because it’s a snap to convert New Yorkers into giving up and loving Los Angeles. Italians take to Hollywood without a backward glance. Englishmen come practically armed with more knowledge about L.A. than even I know and plunk themselves right into the mainstream with awed remarks about the engineering miracles of the freeways (of all things). And the French . . . well, they can live anywhere. But my friends from San Francisco won’t budge.

  Like an evil sister who’s gone on the stage and enchanted the world, L.A. may be all right for everyone else, but San Francisco knows all about her and is not impressed. “She simply won’t do!” ladylike San Francisco says, “She won’t do at all.” And when it’s unavoidable, for business reasons, that the northern sister make a trip to the grisly south, she holds her breath until she once more flies over the narrow escape of water that is the San Francisco Airport. Meanwhile, people from L.A. think, “Wouldn’t it be nice to go up and visit darling San Francisco. I know she won’t mind.”

  It’s like that, I think, from what I’ve been able to see. And I wouldn’t have noticed how little they can stand us up there if I hadn’t become aware of the adverbial clause “too L.A.” Looking at a horrible gold chain that you’re supposed to wear around your waist, a person from San Francisco will say: “Too L.A.” A person from L.A. will say, “My God, how horrible, it’s so Las Vegas.”

  RENT A CAR: THAT’S RULE ONE

  Let’s say that you were from San Francisco and you had to come down to L.A. for a whole week on business although you’ve tried everything to avoid it, but it turns out you have to and that’s all there is to it. The first thing to do, if you haven’t done it already, is learn to drive. You will be abjectly miserable in L.A. if you’re at the mercy of other people’s cars. You must have your own unit. After you’ve learned to drive, all you have to do when you get to L.A. is rent a car and drive to your hotel which hopefully is not the Continental Hyatt House or a Ramada Inn. (Unless you really want to immerse yourself in orange plastic.)

  Once you have the keys to your rented car and are in the airport parking lot ready to go, check your attitude. After all, it’s your life. The ideas you have about cities that you’ve always known don’t work in L.A., and once you toss those aside you’ll be much better off. (Also, don’t break any traffic laws in L.A. The LAPD is incorruptible and humorless.) Forget about downtown museums, parks, and all the other things pointed to with pride in every town worth its salt, except L.A.

  The fact that L.A. does have a “downtown,” museums, and parks has nothing to do with it and everyone here knows it. I was downtown once four years ago to pay a ticket; it was awful. The museum, designed to look like a riverboat floating down the Nile with water and bridges all around, is no fun at all now that the water’s been drained and it never was much fun anyway unless you’ve seen this gorgeous Vuillard they’ve got upstairs with the French Impressionists—or the L.A. artists’ exhibit that’s always there. Or if you like Varèse’s music and you go to a Monday Evening Concert where pieces that are too far-out for anyone else to touch with a stick are performed regularly by L.A. musicians who are so adept at sight-reading from all the studio work they’ve done that they can pick up Alban Berg and just play it.

  L.A. doesn’t have anything as much fun as Golden Gate Park, but it does have Griffith Park which is nice to wander in, especially by car, especially up by the observatory where James Dean tried to save Sal Mineo’s life in Rebel Without a Cause. There are two babbling brooks up there, one in Ferndell which is a primeval heart’s desire, just smothered in huge ferns, mossy stones, and wild strawberries. The other brook is in the Bird Sanctuary (where the Byrds’ first album cover picture was taken) which is across the street from the Greek Theatre.

  If you went to Vermont and Hollywood Boulevard and loaded yourself up on Italian cheese, artichoke hearts, and salami from Del Monico’s and went next door to Samo’s pastry shop and bought fresh Italian strawberry tarts, you could then drive straight up Vermont north and go sit down on the luscious green grass by the Greek Theatre and look at the trees. Or you could take the same stuff over to Barnsdall Park which is just two blocks away, south of Hollywood Boulevard and about half a block west of Vermont. There, you could look at more trees and grass and see some rather crumbling Frank Lloyd Wright buildings which sometimes house sweet little exhibits of Maxfield Parrish paintings or photography shows.

  NOT FOR PEOPLE WHO LIKE THE TRIDENT

  However, if you’re like most people, you won’t probably drive farther east than La Brea and so won’t know. Nobody knows about anything in L.A. except the people who already live here, and most of us never think of taking our out-of-town friends anywhere but those daffy fake places in the Marina.

  Don’t go to the Marina.

  Whatever you do, don’t even let your business associates take you there for Sunday brunch. You’ll fall into a slough of despair which will be almost impossible to shake. Don’t go the Marina even if you like stewardesses; they’re all out of work now and aren’t smiling.

  The Marina is of doubtful interest. These fantastic and troubled new apartment buildings keep incessantly going up and the stewardesses who move out of one and into another, newer one (when it gets dirty which usually takes six months) share the unbelievable rent so that they can get tan and ride their bicycles along the bicycle paths in the hopes of meeting their male equivalent or someone “interesting.” If you really wanted to see a bunch of stewardesses, you’d already be living in L.A. or you’d live in Sausalito and th
ink the Trident is just wonderful. I’m not writing this piece for people who like the Trident.

  But suppose you’d really like to see something grandiose and flashy, something that lives up to every expectation of Hollywood and Southern California that you’ve ever, in your weaker moments, owned up to? Then you should take your car out of the parking lot of the Chateau Marmont or the Sunset Marquis and point it west on Sunset and drive to the Beverly Hills Hotel. Like all truly great hotels on earth, the Beverly Hills is an unflinching masterpiece better than any museum, shopping center, or the Paris Opera House. There is nothing going on at the Beverly Hills other than a constant battle to maintain perfection.

  It’s better than Chartres because there are no groups of tourists moving from place to place under the supervision of a knowledgeable guide. You can wander around, instead, at your own pace and no one has to tell you what to look for. Everyone knows that the Beverly Hills Hotel is the best hotel in the world and not just because it’s so beautiful on the outside but also because they have the best beds and the most flamboyantly efficient telephone system left in civilization. When you pick up your phone in the Beverly Hills Hotel having just arrived eight seconds before, the woman says, “Hello Miss Babitz.” She knows! They also take down your phone messages in triplicate, leaving one in the lobby, one under your door, and one for their records in case the other two get lost.

  The best thing to do is to park your car along Crescent just north of Sunset Boulevard and then walk over to the back of the hotel where an insanely luscious garden is always abloom around what they call “bungalows” which are little pink houses you can rent for about a thousand dollars a second. Orange trees and jasmine, bougainvillea and palms—everything along the pathways is tended perpetually by three gardeners per square yard. There are never any dead leaves. Nothing ever dies at the Beverly Hills Hotel. It’s not allowed to.

  After strolling around the winding maze, in which you can easily become lost and even lose sight of the main hotel although it is four stories high, you could gild the lily by going to the Polo Lounge either for a light lunch (they don’t believe anyone should eat more than three shrimp despite what they charge you) or a drink, and you could watch movie people. Watching movie people is child’s play in the Polo Lounge because they are the only people in there besides you. In the lobby you might run into James Baldwin or Dr. Joyce Brothers (or both at once like I did long ago), but they don’t usually go into the Polo Lounge unless it’s with a producer.

  A good thing to do is to ask someone to meet you in the lobby of the Beverly Hills Hotel (so you can go to the Polo Lounge for a drink). Then you should arrive about twenty minutes early so you can just sit and watch. You will see people you never thought existed pad softly across the carpeted floor, silent testimony to the fact that Los Angeles is, after all, the center of the universe as far as the Industry is concerned. (If you’re a woman and want to go to the Polo Lounge for a drink alone at the bar, they won’t let you. Vestigial amenities, I suppose. There is no women’s lib at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Even if you’re going to be a hooker, you have to sit at a table.)

  Los Angeles is a city of amazing streets, streets that go on for miles and miles through slums (which in New York would be unattainable delights), fancy business sections, car lots, and palatial mansions. Wilshire Boulevard (an oxen cart road up until about fifty years ago) is a great street to drive to the beach on if one has the time although Sunset Boulevard is even prettier.

  Los Angeles is a strange city as far as the ocean is concerned, because no other city so close to the sea has ever started inland and branched out later to the beach. San Francisco—like Genoa, Venice, Boston, New York, Tangiers, Palermo, Athens, Honolulu, Amsterdam, and New Orleans—is based on the premise of harbors for ships. Los Angeles is the only giant-sized city by an ocean that got around to harbors after the place was already established.

  GO WEST

  Santa Monica used to be a day’s jaunt from downtown L.A. There was nothing in Santa Monica except the beach and there was nothing between the city and the beach except huge ranches and trigger-happy bandits. When the railroads came, people could move about more easily than by ox and they scattered all over the countryside growing oranges to send east. Los Angeles is a railroad town and sometimes, right in the middle of Santa Monica Boulevard at night, strange trains make their way across La Cienega causing drunk people to shake their heads. They tell me that the train is run once or twice a week for tax purposes. Early diagrams of the railroad tracks in the city are strange and wonderful to look at; they show a city pushing west to the Pacific Ocean rather than a city pushing in from the sea.

  Perhaps it is because of the railroads that the beaches in Los Angeles are the most fun in the world. Before anyone knew what was happening, Santa Monica just kind of emerged as the most beautiful beach in the world open to anyone and not restricted to either the rich or the shippers.

  Although the rich are now doing their best to ruin the Marina and have crept north into Venice Beach with their stewardess constructions, I feel that Venice will always survive man-made determination to turn it into a place for rich people. In the early 1900s a crazy scheme was devised to turn Venice into that other Venice by building canals, “casinos,” and archway boardwalks, but the whole thing had to be abandoned because oil was discovered underfoot. Oil wells ruined the layout but made it possible for just ordinary people to live by the Pacific Ocean in peace without it costing an arm and a leg.

  A drive at twilight down Sunset or Wilshire or Olympic Boulevards toward the sun setting into the ocean is a very romantic Raymond Chandler thing to do and ought to be appreciated as such. Raymond Chandler things are easily come by in Los Angeles and not to be sneezed at, for they bring sweet romance, danger, and memories of things past (even if they aren’t your own past) into focus. And there is no smog at night.

  One of the best, most secret Raymond-Chandler-things-to-do in Los Angeles is something I discovered quite by accident when I went through a period of being unable to “go on the freeway.” If the given is that you can’t go on the freeway, then suddenly you are stuck to the streets, the streets with Raymond Chandler names like Chevy Chase, Oletha, or Cheremoya. Just at the time I could no longer stand going on the freeway, one of my dearest friends became tractioned in a hospital in Pasadena where he waited for anyone to come visit him. The Pasadena Freeway is more gentle, slower, and vastly superior to the whipping L.A. freeways, but I couldn’t even go on that. I was suffering from the Freeway Sorrows, and even the Pasadena one terrified me.

  To go to Pasadena by surface streets is just about like driving the Raymond Chandler Memorial Parkway. Almost nothing new has been built along those interior and forgotten roads since the forties; it’s intact, perfect. It involves going east of La Brea once again, but then an adventurous San Franciscan can be relied upon to brave the almost unknown hinterland for a true look at the Los Angeles he scorns.

  THE RAYMOND CHANDLER MEMORIAL PARKWAY

  To take this trip, however, requires about three hours and should be started at about 9 a.m. If you have meetings in the afternoon, it’s perfect.

  You get to Vermont (find a map; they sell them at Schwab’s) and again go north to Los Feliz, the street below Griffith Park. On Los Feliz you turn right and all at once you’ll be right there at around the time Humphrey Bogart drove a ’38 Plymouth (poetic license; I don’t know what he drove). On Los Feliz are the well-to-do houses of the upper bourgeoisie with lawns, rubber trees, and magnolias. In my experience, most of these houses are owned by men who at one time were members of the Communist Party but who later went into law, real estate, or cars. Members of the Industry rarely move there, too square.

  Heading east on Los Feliz you suddenly come to its end, but it isn’t really. Here it twists leftish and on your right you will find a wondrous shop called the Horse Laundry with a plaster-of-paris palomino on the roof of one of those 1930s buildings styled after the idea of a yacht. Across the street
from the Horse Laundry (which sells saddles, saddle soap, and stuff like that) is a place to rent horses.

  Continuing along Los Feliz for about a mile brings you unexpectedly to a street called Glendale Boulevard and here, turning left, is where the Raymond Chandler Memorial Parkway begins, becoming even more so as you turn right again onto Colorado Boulevard. Once you’re on Colorado Boulevard, you’ve done everything and you can relax and look out the windows; there are no more directions.

  Colorado Boulevard goes on for miles, all the way to Pasadena. What Los Angeles was thirty years ago is now on Colorado Boulevard. The little bungalow houses with their front yards and porches and unbelievable motels, buildings, and peace. The deariness of it; the fact that mountains and hills come so close down to the main streets. I always find it heartbreakingly unselfconscious. It never tried to be anything. All it wanted to do was scratch out a small square of tranquility in a city where the only weather was earthquakes—no snow, no hurricanes, no famine. Just little houses, nasturtiums, and the San Gabriel Mountains in the background when there was no smog.

  Pasadena is my favorite phenomenon, which is why I got you out there with stories about Raymond Chandler. Once you’re in Pasadena and Colorado Boulevard turns abruptly from almost a country road into a sort of a city and the freeway exits and traffic lights begin again, you have probably come to Orange Grove Drive. Turn left.

  A WHOLE HOUSE BUILT AROUND CLOUD DESIGN

  Once you’re on Orange Grove, you’re on your own and you should forget the map, time, and how you’re going to get back. Just find a street to wander over. If you’re a good sport, you’ll stop about two blocks north of the Colorado Boulevard–Orange Grove intersection, and go to look at the Gamble House and see if it’s open.