Authors: Bill Barich
The shortage of water did not inhibit the first Los Angeles boom during the 1880s—at the time, water was still an afterthought. The railroads helped to ignite the growth, as they’d done elsewhere in the state. With the Southern Pacific and the Santa Fe in competition, there were constant fare wars, and a roundtrip ticket from Chicago, say, might drop from a high of $125 to $25.
Midwestern farmers traveled west on holiday and were quickly charmed by the chief agriculture benefit of Los Angeles County—as Brewer had put it, no winter. The low price of acreage convinced many of them to move and take up the cultivation of citrus groves, never again to sniffle and sneeze through another January. Along with their farming instincts, the new pioneers brought with them a heartland fundamentalism, Christian and Republican, that was in marked contrast to the freewheeling liberalism that had always obtained in San Francisco, the capital city of the north.
Ordinary tourists also availed themselves of the cut-rate fares, drawn by the prospect of shirt-sleeve weather at Christmas, and by the glowing endorsements of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, established in 1888, the first such organization in the United States.
The chamber was packed with boosters and go-getters out to sell off Los Angeles as fast as they could. Special trains labeled “California on Wheels” toured the snowy interior and teased the ice fishermen, the bobsledders, and the frigid Scandinavians with photos of beaches, palm trees, and bathing beauties, and with crates of oranges, lemons, olives, almonds, and avocados that showcased L.A. as the primal cornucopia.
There were lulls in the Los Angeles growth curve, moments when it appeared that the city would stretch no more, but something always came along to jump-start the action again—Doheny’s oil strike, for instance, or the enticements of a budding motion-picture industry.
Subdividers of every stripe and ethical persuasion were going gangbusters by the 1920s and constructing the first expansive tracts around the city. They lured customers with such incentives as cruises to Hawaii or a chance to kiss the prettiest starlet on the MGM lot. If you checked into a hotel, a realtor was liable to give you a blind call. Bellhops were bribed to slip flyers about tantalizing, affordable property under doors. Midgets and hirelings in sandwich boards walked the streets handing out brochures. Sometimes a hundred ships
stacked with lumber were docked in the harbor waiting to be unloaded.
A new booster group, the All-Year Club of Southern California, supplanted the Chamber of Commerce and began promoting Los Angeles as something more than a mere winter retreat. Its prime mover was Harry Chandler of the
Times
, who owned plenty of land that he was willing to surrender if the price was right. To extoll the city’s assets, the club advertised in dozens of U.S. papers and sent out its absolutely unbiased speakers to deliver countless lectures to interested groups.
Sloganeering was the club’s forte: “A new man in two weeks! You’ve earned, you deserve, a real vacation!” At its most excessive, the club implied that the ultraviolet rays shining down on Angelenos were so good for humanity that medical researchers were hoping to duplicate them in the lab.
As an adjunct to the All-Year Club, a newly chartered Automobile Club, also the first ever, promoted Los Angeles in its publications. There were almost 200,000 cars in the city at the end of the 1920s, and they had taken over the downtown and had thrown the trolley system out of whack, slaughtering mass transit in the bargain.
Angelenos loved to drive, and they did it with impunity and an alarming sense of entitlement. With the greatest possible goodwill, they harkened to the notion that a Sunday afternoon could profitably be spent motoring the family’s Model T to a proposed subdivision in the San Fernando Valley, where they could inspect an architect’s rendering of the nearly identical houses to be built rapid-fire by carpenters whose labors echoed the assembly-line techniques of Henry Ford.
The automobile gave developers more freedom. They could stray farther afield and acquire land for even less money because tracts didn’t need to be anchored to the traditional modes of transportation anymore. The doomed trolleys were turned into dinosaurs overnight. One entrepreneur even bought some trolley cars for a pittance, put them up on blocks, and sold them off as homes.
World War II had the same stimulating effect on Los Angeles as it did on the San Francisco Bay Area. Employees of such shipbuilding and aircraft firms as Northrop, Lockheed, and McDonnell Douglas joined returning G.I.s to settle the new towns being constructed where the oranges and the lemons used to grow. The towns shared a number of standard features—most notably, a shopping center or a mall—but schools, then as now, were seldom among them.
The craft of putting together a subdivision was soon refined into a quasi-science, and a crew could complete a house in a few days, although it might take months for an owner to have a phone installed. Sewer systems weren’t always dependable, and flooding was common during the winter rains. The philosophy of the period was strictly grab-and-run.
The tracts with their interchangeable parts gave Los Angeles its characteristic look of many diverse little suburbs that didn’t quite add up to a recognizable city. When the flatlands were covered, the developers moved on to the canyons and to the ridges. The freeways followed in their path, ever-multiplying ribbons of concrete and asphalt braided together in such intricate configurations that if you looked at an aerial photo of L.A., it seemed to be crisscrossed by ganglia reverberating in an odd neural structure.
In Silver Lake, in Glendale, in Culver City, and in Pomona, houses reposed in neat rows beneath skies that were blackened by smog, not Indian campfires.
T
HOSE FIRST FEW DAYS IN SANTA MONICA
, I felt as if I were on vacation. After so many weeks of sleeping on the ground or in the same generic motel room, I wallowed in the peacefulness of the Raymond Chandler Suite. There were no car doors slamming at dawn, no flustered husbands shouting at their wives to hurry up. The essence of motel living is flight, but a good hotel makes you want to linger.
In bed, while starlings sang in the crowns of the palms, I would drink coffee, open the
Los Angeles Times
, and read about the Dodgers, the random shootings, the intentional killings, the box-office grosses, and especially the real estate deals of the movie stars and the moguls. They were all crucial things to know if you aspired to be an Angeleno.
You were definitely out in the cold if you were unaware, say, that John Landis, the director, had ripped down Rock Hudson’s old 1950s hacienda in Beverly Hills to put up a new house of more than 7,000 square feet, or that Mel Gibson was getting $45,000 a month for leasing his 2.3-acre Malibu Colony compound. Such gossip allowed you to calibrate your own worth by the decimeters that separated you from the aura cast by Hollywood.
Along with the baseball scores, the real estate scores, and the murder bulletins, I sometimes read the air-quality report in the
Times
. In fact, I was relatively sure that I was the only person in the city who
did
read it. It measured the levels of ozone, nitrogen dioxide, and carbon monoxide in the air and rated them on the Pollutant Standard Index.
Almost every day, some inland area was in the grip of a first-stage episode (unhealthy) or a second-stage episode (very unhealthy). Third-stage episodes didn’t exist. Once the pollutants had reached a certain density, coagulating and mutating, the air was simply described as “hazardous.”
In Santa Monica, near the beach, I seldom had to worry about the air. The ocean breezes took care of the excess ozone, nitrogen dioxide, and carbon monoxide on all but the stillest, hottest days. The weather was always balmy when I left the hotel for my morning stroll, and I would experience the same sort of privilege that I had felt so long ago in Westwood, glad to be where I was, in California, drawn irresistibly toward a bright patch of light.
Santa Monica wasn’t truly part of Los Angeles, but it
was
the Los Angeles that Americans slavered over in their fantasies. It had its origins as a real-estate development along the ocean, on Santa
Monica Bay, and had been incorporated as an independent town in 1886. Guidebooks often mentioned that Shirley Temple, a confectionary California child, had been born there.
After I’d walked for a block or two, I found it hard to remember any of the information that I had just digested at the hotel. The debilitating news stories seemed not to matter anymore. They were obviously fictions that some despairing editors had dreamed up to sell a few papers. Human misery belonged on the map of elsewhere, a place that you could drive to, like any other.
In Palisades Park, the perennially fit were always doing their exercises, outrunning calories and yesterday, while the facially challenged were nowhere to be seen. Old Eastern Europeans in absurdly heavy clothes, their shawls and their tweed suits like the trappings of the past, sat on benches to converse or to play a hand of cards.
The homeless, too, were always out, regrouping their tenuous community. The cops didn’t roust them, but the lawn where they slept had sprinklers that switched on in the middle of the night, so they’d wake and cough and shiver in their rags until the rising of the sun. Sometimes they got a free ration of food in the afternoon, and at dusk they collected again around bonfires, positively upbeat if they had a joint or a poorboy of wine to pass around, all memory of the sprinklers apparently banished from their heads.
Santa Monica had the effervescent mood of a seaside resort. A long pier functioned as a boardwalk, and there you could ride a carousel, toss a softball at weighted milk bottles, or eat homemade potato chips from a greasy bag. After dark, a stroll on the pier was like a journey back to an age of uncomplicated pleasures, when soldiers kissed girls against the trees, and victory was eternal.
The fancy waterfront hotels and restaurants on Ocean Avenue had big glass windows that looked out at the surf and reflected the rippling breakers. The Pacific was the ultimate symbol of sanity for Angelenos, a final refuge for their overheated brains. Everybody longed to be close to it, to merge with it and possess a tiny piece of it as a good-luck charm. It worked against the terrors of the land—against
the hazardous air and the random shootings—cleansing, invigorating, and assisting in the process of forgetting.
A swim in the Pacific took on aspects of the ceremonial. Swimmers turned their backs on the ghost ships of the Puritans and instead looked west toward the mysteries of Asia, toward the future. We dipped into a timeless flow and made a spiritual connection. Yes, the ocean was our benefactor. Even the pedestrians on the boulevard had a strange buoyancy to their steps, as if friendly underground waves were massaging the subsoil to provide a cushion for their tired feet.
A
ROUND THE CORNER FROM THE SOVEREIGN
, Pat Gigliotti, an old friend of mine, was enjoying the sort of big life that everybody hoped to have when they took a chance on California. He and his wife, Judy, and their six children lived not far from the ocean in a fine, three-story house that had a swimming pool in the backyard, and also a paddle tennis court and a wood-burning brick oven where pizzas as authentic as any in Naples were cooked of a summer evening.
The Gigliottis were well within the Hollywood aura. Judy had two half sisters, Daryl and Page Hannah, who were actresses, and some of the children had worked as extras in their aunts’ films. Other movie and TV stars owned houses on their block, but the neighborhood was not so much flashy as substantial and family-oriented. Its glamorous elements were held in a rough balance with its mundane ones.
Pat Gigliotti had grown up in a blue-collar Italian family in Kansas City. When we had met twenty years ago, he was managing Cody’s Books in Berkeley and wore a beard and longish hair and liked to foment the impending leftist revolution and discuss radical politics with his customers while chainsmoking cigarettes. He had a nervous intensity and the romantic good looks of a doomed Sicilian anarchist.
Now Pat did something called land assembly for Jupiter Realty and put together tracts to be developed in Los Angeles. The company
was huge, based in Chicago, and operated by Judy’s father. Instead of blue jeans, Pat dressed in Ralph Lauren suits and drove to his downtown office in a white BMW convertible. He had not touched a cigarette in years, ran six miles on the beach every day, and sometimes spoke favorably of the Republicans.
Like the rest of us in California, he had been transformed. What he really wanted to do was to write or produce movies.
I had never been to the house in Santa Monica before, so on the first night I came over for dinner, Pat gave me a tour. The place was a fixer-upper when they’d bought it, he said. The previous owners were foreigners with an extended family, and they’d done some cooking over the fireplace and had stored meat and vegetables in the closets and, in general, had left the house in a shambles. The Gigliottis were able to steal it for just under a million dollars.
When I heard those words,
a million dollars
, I felt a shock run through me, but then I remembered where I was, and I imagined how much John Landis must have spent on his seven-thousand-square-foot home and realized that a million dollars was not a meaningful figure in postapocalyptic L.A. Money was everywhere in the city, miles of money, money dropping from the clouds.
I enjoyed the sensation of being in a real home for a change. The Gigliottis’ place was comfortable, roomy, and unostentatious, and a guest didn’t have to worry about spilling some wine on the furniture or knocking over a Ming vase. They couldn’t have had a Ming vase even if they’d wanted one, really, not with so many children dashing around.
The energy of the kids throbbed through the house. The oldest child, Aaron, was a senior at Santa Monica High, a public school, and occupied a teenage province of his own, but there were two preteen boys, Noah and Gabriel, and a pair of twin girls, Katie and Annie, who put out enough electricity to keep everybody on their toes. The kids were interested in normal pursuits. The boys liked sports and rock music, while the girls were fond of horses and dolls.