ANGELENOS

Photo by De'Andre Bush on Unsplash

       “You’ll hate Los Angeles,” people in London told me as I packed to come here for a brief working vacation. “Everyone’s as mad as a hatter there. You should go to New York, where people are more sensible.”

       Since those cheery words of encouragement were offered more than half my life ago, and my proposed trip of six months to the City of the Angels has yet to draw to a close, I think I can safely state that the first part of the prediction has proved just a tad shy of dead-on accuracy. Well, horses for courses, and each to her own, and one woman’s heaven on earth may well be another’s hell on a plate. But, having lived here now for as long as I have, I would suggest that I am also in a better position than most to refute the subsequent assertion: that the people of Los Angeles are nothing but a collection of sunbaked harebrains, spending their days lying beside astrologically compatible swimming pools, sipping unicorn’s milk smoothies and one-upping each other on the colors of their auras.

       Of course there are ridiculous people in Los Angeles: it would be unreasonable to expect otherwise. Los Angeles, after all is the home of big, shiny ol’ smoke and mirrors Hollywood, and the attraction of Hollywood for the silly is that of the moth to the fruitcake flambé. As a celebrity journalist, I’ve been observing the Hollywood ridiculous brigade with some entertainment for years now: the meticulously muscled actor who announced unbidden his love of poetry, and whose clear brow clouded like winds shaking the darling buds of May when he was invited to name his favorite poet; the lush-maned starlet who thought – and to be fair, this is a theory that has yet to be tested – that if everyone were to dress in yellow, there would be no more war; the highbrow director who declared, straight-faced, that the reason he had cast the scenery-chewing harpy as his leading lady was that she was so darned good he had clean forgotten she was what could only be described as his wife.

       But all of Hollywood is not like this – if it were, no one would get anything done, and since movies are still being made, this is clearly not the case. And outside of Hollywood is the rest of Los Angeles, which is a different, and on the whole far lower key, story. Now, it may well be true that Los Angeles on average attracts more than its share of oddballs: it is the city that people dream of, after all, the city where, if you’re lucky, your dreams do come true, and where even if you aren’t lucky, you at least get to sit in the sunshine and look at palm trees and pretend to be one of the fortunate ones.

       It’s also true that I’ve encountered my share of … let’s call it unusual … behavior here, from civilians as well as show business folk. There was the yoga teacher who hammered on my door when I was battling a deadline to demand advice on her newly discovered pregnancy, who after an hour of intensive soul-searching on her part and unwavering moral support on mine, at last thought to mention, with a coy giggle, that she “wasn’t officially late yet.” (As it turned out, she, unlike my copy, was bang on time). There was the attorney well on the far side of 40 who took some pains to persuade my pretty visiting cousin to let him take her out to dinner, only to retreat into shocked and betrayed silence over the Ceasar salad when she admitted to the venerable age of 26. There was the sweet-natured religious nut who blessed the fruit bowl and wished God’s grace on the wind chimes.

       But these people by no means define Los Angeles, any more than London is populated exclusively with dancing pickpockets inviting you to consider yourself at ‘ome. If you come to LA looking for eccentrics you can certainly find them; but the majority of people who live here are no different from those in any other big city, doing their jobs, taking care of their families, and maybe enjoying a glass of wine at the weekend. They just happen to do it while living on a 468 mile square movie set.

       Contrary to the propaganda, I have discovered that making lasting friends in Los Angeles is neither difficult nor complicated: you find people you want to hang out with, and you hang out with them. When I first arrived, I joined a church and met a group of people who had attended St. Monica’s Catholic High School together: they knew each other’s parents, attended each other’s birthday parties, and made each other cookies at Christmas and tamales on New Year’s Day; they folded me, unquestioningly, into their midst, and were tickled vermilion when, in exchange for the tamales, I showed them how to make Scotch eggs.

       Later on, I inevitably fell in with a crowd of actors, some more successful in their chosen precarious career than others, but all of them equal on the friendship scale, each one of them unfailingly loyal, generous, and indefatigable in showing up to support their fellows on occasions both personal and professional. (If you’ve ever given a speech with an actor friend in the audience, it’s something of an experience: they are so eager to cheer you on, their eyes fixed on you in rapt absorption, their heads nodding vigorously at the most minor points made, their bodies doubling over in laughter at the mildest of witticisms, that it verges on the vertigo-inducing). It’s the way it is with all my friends, the way my husband is with his friends, too. We like each other; and we have each other’s backs. It’s as simple – and as old-fashioned – as that.

       How I met my husband, Mr. Los Angeles, was such as Jane Austen herself would have found difficult to disapprove. One of the St. Monica’s gang, Jaime, lived in an apartment above the garage of a house in Venice that was owned by his mother; one day, his mother was looking for a new tenant in the bottom half of the house, and Jaime suggested me; the next Cinco de Mayo, Jaime and I gave a joint party, along with the house’s upstairs tenant, Keri, who had scored the place because her elder brother had been friends with Jaime’s elder brother in Little League; Keri invited to the party her old friend Yukiko from Venice High, who brought her husband David, an alumnus of the neighboring Culver City High, along with David’s old friend from tenth grade at that school, an affable fellow with a booming voice and a Viking beard, with whom I fell in love and will have been living in marital (mostly) harmony for thirty years this coming February.

       Mr. Los Angeles and I live in the unpretentious Westside neighborhood of Mar Vista, on a street noisy with children and dogs, where the radio host a few doors down will take out the trash cans for the old lady across the street, where the water color artist on the next block will appear at our front gate with overflow offerings from her abundant vegetable garden, and our next door neighbor, who works on continuity in the movies and in his spare time collects antique music boxes which pour forth weekly streams of Josephine Baker and Jeanette MacDonald into the sunny Saturday morning air, will wander by to cadge a cup of coffee in return for some truly terrible jokes, and will feed our cat when we are out of town, while we will feed his tortoise when he is. It’s maybe a touch more bohemian than your average small town neighborhood. But in terms of human values, it’s every bit as solid as Little Rock, Arkansas. And we can see the Hollywood sign from the top of Mar Vista Hill.

       For those who continue to harbor the idea, apparently still prevalent in some circles, that New Yorkers are somehow more sensible – more mature – than Angelenos, I have a small suggestion to make. Call to mind, if you can steel yourself to, the single least mature adult in America today. You know the one I mean. The one who proudly inhabits a fantasy world of his own creating, so gaudily outrageous that it makes the Land of Oz look like a mild day in Kansas by comparison; the one who proves himself, again and again, incapable of the most basic loyalty to friend, or spouse, or colleague, or moral principle; who howls like a spoilt toddler should someone attempt to suggest consequences for his actions; whom you will know for certain to be lying whenever you see his lips move. Consider this person, and now ask yourself this. Does he come from Los Angeles?

       I think my case rests.