Eric, the scion of a soap fortune, pressed the "Wolf kills visitor" button inside the entrance of his Malibu beach-house. Outside his front door, I heard the approaching growls of an angry hound; a hatch opened and out sprang the three-foot neck of a blue-haired, red-eyed, mechanised wolf, drooling viciously over the welcome mat.
"That's cool," said Eric's friends. Eric smiled and led me inside to his pool, where, he said, there was a monster.
"It's down this end," he said. As I peered at the cartoon mermaids on the pool's floor, a Freddie Kruger model jumped up behind me and sprayed a jet of cold water down my back.
"I got you pretty good," Eric said, shaking my hand. A tanned girl in a bikini looked up from her deck chair and smiled, as if she'd seen this all before. I went out onto the veranda to watch Nicholas Cage playing in the sand with some children and a chubby blonde in shiny black-plastic trousers. The move star was without his toupee.
Los Angeles is full of the outrageously banal, the irresistibly empty, like Eric's $12 million home. Still, it's somehow one of America's most attractive cities, striving after substance in an instant kind of way, just as everyone here seems to feel they're only moments away from status and recognition in the entertainment business.
The city's most expensive shops, on Rodeo Drive and Via Rodeo, all decorate their windows with tastefully printed poetry by "y.o." -- none other than the artfully inane Yoko Ono. As Yoko orientalised about "following footprints in the sand / in the water," it seemed Los Angeles was the perfect place for her words. Only here could shopkeepers imagine a use for this most insubstantial of art, hyped and unread, as a way to make the act of consuming somehow more thoughtful, more deep. Just as most of Hollywood's movies are about dollar signs more than creativity. (At Universal Studios, tourists watch the less than terrifying spoutings of a mechanical shark and are told they've "survived Jaws, brought to you by Ocean Spray," a brand of cranberry juice.)
There's a conglomeration of ideologies in Los Angeles, as if it formulated its thoughts through the smog that hangs over the San Fernando valley, blurring the stripes of spinach-green foliage on the khaki hillsides. Like a radio that can switch bands instantly from AM talk shows to an FM rock station, Los Angeles is the ultimate American city, always seeking its next gig, hovering on the edge of the country. It threatens to break off in a techtonic cataclysm and fall into the Pacific, glimmering beneath the mountains along the coast road. The hip melange is there to greet you at LAX, the airport, where Hare Krishnas eschew their telltale robes and lure you into conversation with a high five from behind baseball caps and baggy homeboy jeans.
In a play I saw by one of Los Angeles' hottest new writers, Thomas M. Kostigen, a young man is described by his girlfriend: "He's thoughtful, but he's not thought-through." That's Los Angeles. And perhaps it took a Boston transplant like Kostigen to see it.
Los Angeles is no ardent, committed city of anger, like New York, with its downtown activists handing out needles to junkies, and arrogant Wall Streeters, crisp and one-dimensional in Ralph Lauren Polo shirts. It's no Frenchified town of think-tank pseudo-intellectuals like Washington D.C., and its snobbery can't compare to Boston's more desiccated variety.
In this city, they believe anything can be dressed up like a dream with a little cash, whether it's the backlot at Universal or a fat girl. An Argentinian who runs a West Hollywood salon selling extravagantly beaded wedding dresses for as much as $18,000 mimed the act of forcing fat into a
brace of petticoats and sneered at his customers. "They come in and think we can make them look like Cinderella. Well, for 90 percent of them, it just ain't gonna happen."
There's a danger in the dream, too, something of a nightmare quiet and smoothness, like riding in an air-conditioned Mercedes (leased not bought, of course, as most cars here are) through the shadows of the inner city. The riots of 1992 that wrecked South Central L.A. in the wake of the Rodney King trial showed how keyed the rest of America is to Los Angeles. The shock spread throughout the country. Even imperturbably ballsy New Yorkers called each other frantically with reports of shots fired at aeroplanes taking off from J.F.K. airport and massed blacks marching down from Harlem to pillage the Upper West Side.
That tension remains in Venice Beach, home to hippies and drug freaks, the place that spawned Jim Morrison. As tanned rollerbladers wind in their own Walkman-worlds down the path that twists along the beach, they're watched by crowds of blacks, milling about the cheap T-shirt stores and bargain shoe shops along the front.
A spray of cold water doused the back of my neck and I turned to see a seven-year-old black girl with a plastic cup in her hand run to her family, which giggled at her prank. I felt like a ringleted Jew strolling through the car-park outside a Nuremburg rally, waiting for the joking to turn harsher and, in the meanwhile, a game target.
A group of Black Hebrews stood in ranks between the rollerbladers and the crowded strip. A dozen black men in bright, satin turbans, they read from the Bible. One of them held a six-foot Star of David; another held a placard that listed the 12 tribes of Israel, redubbing them the 12 tribes of negroids. "Jesus was a black man," read one of their T-shirts.
Their leader, incongruously attired for the beach in the black, grey and white of arctic combat fatigues, held his microphone to the mouth of his acolyte reading a line from the Bible. Then he banged out his interpretation of the biblical verse with the venom of a rap song.
"That mean the white man and the white woman, the white race has done all that's evil; they are evil. He's oppressed and killed and raped and maimed. When the white man dropped the atomic bomb on the so-called Japanese at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they shall reap that destruction, that's what that says there. That means all this, this crap -- " he waved an arm along the beach, left and right, taking in all of Los Angeles "-- is going to get wiped out. Read!"
The reader stumbled over the words "perpetual destruction." "Say what?" the leader said into his microphone. Then he gave up and pulled in the man with the Star of David to read instead.
With his clothing and imagery, the Israelite could have been a Christian, a Jew, a Muslim, a Sikh, or a corporal in the U.S Army -- just about anything except a so-called Japanese, in fact. Thought-through? Whatever, it looked good to him. He had to live in L.A., after all, until the crap was destroyed.
Yet the ideological confusion is one of Los Angeles' most engaging qualities for any visitor, because it's the muddleheadedness of those who are at least striving to figure it all out, to understand what they want. Like the bearded Harley Davidson rider rolling along La Cienega Boulevard, long hair flying from under his helmet. His bike bore the traditional Harley motto: "Live to ride." Below was a second slogan, of high-speed recovery: "Ride to live sober." Kick some of your dangerous habits -- just some of them.
I heard that same tone, confidently doubtful of its own effectiveness, in the voice of a man in the pool at the Jewish Community Center in West Hollywood. He couldn't stop talking about the muscle-relaxants he was taking for a firmer erection and the stool-softeners he hoped would cure his constipation. There's a solution for everything, but, if it doesn't work out, find a new guru, or a new pharmacist. Or a new producer.
A casting agent who works at MCA talked about the city's Museum of Tolerance, where displays on the Holocaust stand beside exhibits on racism in America's old south. "It makes you think," she breezed. "But that doesn't last."
In fact, Los Angeles' apparent vapidity brings with it an inverted snobbery of superficiality. Every time I suggested to Angelenos that their city is a pleasant place to be and, maybe, to live, they pounced on the chance to show how they'd seen through it all. "Oh, but it's really superficial," they'd say. And you'd have to be deep to see just how superficial everyone else is, wouldn't you. See what I mean?
Perhaps you can't think too much, when that might mean facing up to the idea that success isn't just round the corner. At a party thrown in a gigantic Italian restaurant by one of the city's biggest acting agencies, the Dolce & Gabana suits spoke of wealth. But few of those at the party were agents; most were struggling actors, trying to persuade those agents to take them on as clients, or they were clients eager for the agents to send them to better auditions.
"They're not actors," said my friend Avital, a successful stage and film actress with an Israeli Oscar under her belt who's trying to get ahead in Hollywood. "But they have to face so much rejection, they've got to really love something about what they do."
When I left the party, a slicked-down 26-year-old was trying to persuade the man with the guest list that he was supposed to have been invited. He was the same hopeful who'd been badgering the host when I arrived two hours before.
And rejection can come quickly, just like success. Jeffrey, a transplanted New Yorker with a trim grey beard and a collarless Armani shirt, told me about his plans for the modelling agency he founded 10 years ago. "I want to take over a bunch of small, Mom'n'Pop agencies," he said. I couldn't imagine Mom and Pop mixing with Hollywood's top models, and perhaps the people who now ran Jeffrey's agency couldn't either: three days later Jeffrey handed in his notice. When a friend learned Jeffrey had resigned from the agency, she said: "Again?"
Back at Eric's Malibu beach-house, I walked out along the private road and passed a minor film star I vaguely remembered from a role in some kind of comic vampire film. "Isn't that...uh?" I asked my friend.
"In this town, you see a lot of people who are someone, but you don't remember their names," my friend said. "In a while, no one else will, either."