In Search of Los Angeles

It was 6:30 of a bland, midweek morning and, like millions of other people in Los Angeles at that hour, I was indulging a fantasy. For years back East, it had seemed to me that the quintessential Southern California experience would be sitting behind the wheel of a powerful American car, tooling out to Malibu on a morning that smelled like a fresh sliced cucumber. And now here I was--in a rented '71 Galaxie, on my way to the beach, the sun just gilding the shaggy fronds of the palms along Santa Monica Boulevard, and the last day of my trip stretching ahead of me.

I had come to Los Angeles to get a firmer imaginative grip on the milieu of a novel that was based on the premise that (continued on page 150)Los Angeles(continued from page 123) whatever was going to happen in the America of the Seventies was happening already in L. A. I had put 700 miles on the car and never left the city or its environs. I had wandered the freeways and the canyons and the valley, attempting to capture the staggering size of Los Angeles in a single metaphor, and I had failed. After two weeks in a motel in West Hollywood, it was time to go back to Connecticut and the book, and yet the nagging suspicion that my own memories and premonitions about L. A. might have sabotaged my objectivity drove me toward the Pacific one last time, trying for the mindless poise of the seismographs out at Caltech that were daily registering the aftershocks of the big earthquake of two months before.

• • •

As it happened, my personal version of the Great American Daydream of innocent, bucolic boyhood was centered in Los Angeles and, over the years since I had been here last, a certain kind of winter's-end morning had always aroused in me a powerful longing for California. The fugitive smells of orange grove and just-cut lawn would tease my nostrils, the taste of guava and avocado would come up into my mouth and I would suddenly recall the five-year-old boy who had once stood barefoot in the hot, dusty sunlight of Pasadena in 1931, watching the rain inexplicably falling just down the block, and experiencing the first amazed discovery of a world of which he was not the absolute, dreaming center. To that boy, California was the voluptuous, bottom-of-the-well odor of an overlush patio down into which the sun rarely reached, and the hot breath of the Santa Anas strumming the afternoon nerves to an awful pitch. It was a milk shake too thick for a straw and bungalowed boulevards shimmering off under skeletal phone poles all the way to the fabled world of Hollywood. It was the hairy legs of a black-widow spider come upon in a kitchen cupboard, and butter dripping over the fingers out of a rolled tortilla, and all the first stirrings of a body newly aware of its hungers and its ignorance. Pasadena in 1931 was my first more-or-less continuous experience of myself, and part of my longing to return was a longing for the thrilling sensuosities and terrors of that buried past.

But in the decades since, another Los Angeles had been superimposed over this one: the Los Angeles of popular myth--a space-age Sodom, a dream factory, a city that was the doom toward which all America was marching in lock step; a sprawling, smog-stifled, freeway-bisected urban jungle as vulgar as a Hawaiian sport shirt worn outside the suit pants, as ecologically schizophrenic as an oil derrick in Eden, and about as cultured as a stripper weeping over Love Story. In short, a civilization of such spiritless artifacts as mushroomburgers, Hula Hoops, the metaphysics of Charley Manson, Forest Lawn and Doris Day; a city that was haunted, for me, by the hopeless pealing of Marilyn Monroe's telephone the night she took that overdose of pills, and by Scott Fitzgerald's humiliated reply to Joseph Mankiewicz, "Oh, Joe, can't producers ever be wrong? I'm a good writer--honest." For years, I had entertained the notion that Los Angeles was a glimpse of all our tomorrows, a drive-in Babylon where the end of the world would arrive on its ominous Harley-Davidson, accompanied by the maracas of a cocktail shaker at poolside. Innocence and corruption, paradise and paradise lost, memory and premonition; I was as unprepared for the real Los Angeles as Voltaire was for judgment day.

• • •

Now the wide, palm-lined blocks of Beverly Hills opened out on the right-hand side of Santa Monica Boulevard. Buried sprinklers played, like silvery maidenhair ferns, over the manicured lawns of palatial houses in the early sun. Chicano maids walked poodles as meticulously clipped as the tall hedges behind which you fancied you could hear the thwock-pause-thwock of prebreakfast tennis games. If Buddy Ebsen and Irene Ryan had come rolling down these very streets in their outlandish Ozark truck, I wouldn't have been surprised, for Los Angeles disappointed only those who had no expectations about it; and after half a century of movies and TV, that species was as nearly extinct as the American bald eagle.

Expectations. Two weeks before, I had assumed myself to be free of them. None of the shallow gauds of movieland for me! I would begin my search for the special character of L. A. where I had begun similar searches for other cities in the past, in that district--part market place and part tenderloin--that is usually designated downtown. I would get a room somewhere off the night's mart of Pershing Square. I would prowl the Pueblo de Los Angeles, where the city had been founded. I would take its pulse close to the heart. I would walk.

Two days later, I admitted my mistake. Downtown Los Angeles was as characterless as downtown Gary and, aside from noting that three out of five faces that you passed along scruffy Main Street were nonwhite, and that Filipinos could be distinguished from Hawaiians by their cheekbones, and that Chinese waitresses in L. A. were often fluent in Spanish, the only insight I derived from my two downtown days was the not-very-pithy realization that Los Angeles was a Pacific city, more akin to Tokyo than to Chicago. Like central cities all over America, it was at once dying and coming to birth. Wherever people lived--the poor and powerless, the excluded-from-the-dream--it was as wretched as back-street Mexico City. Wherever people worked, it had all the many-leveled, dwarfing complexity of an ant city between Windexed panes of glass. The veteran of ten years of tramping in New York, the walker of the length and breadth of a score of European cities, suspected for the first time that his usual modus operandi had scant meaning here. Los Angeles wasn't an Old World town centered on a river or a railhead or a harbor. It wasn't made up of concentric circles of suburb, borough and neighborhood, narrowing toward New York's Fifth Avenue, or Chicago's Loop, or San Francisco's Union Square. Eighty years ago, it had had barely 50,000 citizens, and now L. A. County numbered over 7,000,000. It hadn't simply exfoliated, it had exploded, and its peculiar character, if there was one, had nothing whatever to do with such old-fashioned conceits as "downtown." At that moment, the walker began his metamorphosis into the driver.

Cañon Drive was coming up, and I was off duty at last. There was nothing more that had to be done except to rent a dinner jacket (Henry Fonda was opening in a play that night and I was scheduled to go to the party at the Hilton afterward), so why hurry to the beach? Los Angeles was spatial, after all, not temporal. I recalled the climax of my downtown stay: Charles Manson, accused of complicity in the deaths of seven Angelenos, and Lieutenant William Calley, accused of murdering at least 22 Asiatics, had been sentenced within hours of each other. I had gone to the Hall of Justice, where members of Manson's "family" had vowed to immolate themselves with gasoline if he was convicted, and found dozens of cameras at the ready, but not a single fire extinguisher. I had stayed awake all that same night, listening to the outraged voices of Orange County (on a phone-in radio show) demanding that Calley be awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, and I had sensed another Los Angeles out there--immense, contradictory, decentralized and, above all, contemporary; a city that seemed to epitomize those violent extremes of mindless obedience to authority and senseless rebellion against it that Calley and Manson had revealed in the current American spirit.

On whim, I turned off Santa Monica Boulevard onto Beverly Drive. I'd go up into Benedict Canyon, where Sharon Tate and her friends had been murdered, and eventually take Mulholland to the ocean. Sunset Boulevard was broad, islanded and verdant as a park there in the 9000 block. A mile or so back, along the Strip, it would be (continued on page 198) Los Angeles (continued from page 150) drifted in last night's Zig Zag papers, and ten miles ahead it would come to an end on the beach at Pacific Palisades. The Beverly Hills Hotel rose out of its palms and rich plantings with all the pink-stucco hauteur of a Monegasque palace, making the new hotels down around Wilshire look as if they had been scissored out of plastic and polyethylene by an architect who had since moved back to Miami Beach. The soft morning air of California that always seems to promise you the accomplishment of a dream that you will have forgotten by twilight smelled deliciously of coffee and eucalyptus and money.

Even in this town of early risers, Benedict Canyon, winding up through the Hollywood Hills behind the hotel, wouldn't wake up for half an hour. Its heated pools steamed with fairy mist among the bougainvillaea. Above English Tudor and French Provincial, above banks of geranium and hibiscus, the raw scrub and crumble of the canyonsides loomed precipitously, scored by the concrete vees of drainage ditches. To a New Englander, used to worn, inhospitable, rock-strewn hills, it seemed shockingly new land, as humped and spineless and temporary as the mountains that a child palms together in a sandbox. The native California brush--chaparral--that rooted these unstable hills in place was one of the most combustible varieties of flora in the world, and if you weren't in a slide area where the rain washed the land out from under your house, you were in a fire area where you weren't supposed to light a cigarette even in your own living room. Fire and water being treacherous elements here, the canyonites had taken to the air, and their houses were cantilevered out over empty space, like those precarious castles that tease the imagination in the illustrations of children's books. On the other side of Mulholland, there was a house that appeared to hover motionless, like a huge, metallic flying saucer, over 300 feet of nothing. Ten-room chateaux and 20-room cottages clung, mirage-like, to the sides of slipping arroyos. There were swimming pools that had less purchase on solid ground than the normal bridge. Everywhere there was evidence of an attempt by the Los Angeles construction industry to repeal the law of gravity, and yet in few places on earth was that law more remorselessly operative. According to even the most conservative seismologists, Southern California had been overdue for a major earthquake since 1957, and sooner or later every house up in the canyons would probably become rubble at the bottom.

"How's the old San Andreas today?" one native would joke over his shopping cart, heaped with diet food, in the mammoth Hughes supermarket on Van Nuys Boulevard.

"You know what they say," a second would reply. "Los Angeles is going to lose by default. Have yourself a good day."

The quake of two months before had killed 65 people and dumped Fisher's Furniture Store into the main street of San Fernando ten miles away; and only six days ago, the latest of over 200 aftershocks had injured half a dozen more, tumbled pink cement-block garden walls all over Northridge and shaken me awake in my motel bed in West Hollywood. Aftershock or forewarning? It depended upon who was speaking. "What's the sense of worrying about it?" said a canyon dweller on his sun deck up in Beverly Glen. He was wearing a pair of portable stereo earphones, with ten-inch antennas, that made him look like a large nut-brown insect tuned into the inaudible static of interstellar space. "You people back East are involved with tomorrow, with the mind. We're involved with the body, with today. Why prepare for an unknown possibility when you can go to the beach and work on your tan?" Manson's "family," on the contrary, squatting on the sidewalk outside the courthouse, their heads shaved like Buddhist monks, quietly mad with the certainty that the great quake to come would save Charley from the gas chamber, intoned: "Go to the desert, lock your doors, protect your children. Because it's going to be heavy."

But then, there was something in the very air in Los Angeles that aroused premonitions of apocalypse. Sometimes torpor or violence seemed the only options in the long, windless afternoons. Girls in the sunny streets around Fairfax High handed you slips of paper that read Jesus Is Coming Soon. A converted yellow bungalow on the Sunset Strip advertised Timeless Occult Books and Bell-Bottom Jeans. On a bridge over a scummy canal out in Venice, someone had written in spray paint The Earth Is Not a Stable Place--It Sucks! Up in deepest Topanga Canyon, there was a more-or-less-continuous encounter-group-cum-nudist-camp-cum-orgy going on at a place called Sandstone Retreat. And the Los Angeles Free Press that very week had come up with the Swiftian proposal that Lieutenant Calley execute Charles Manson in the Los Angeles Coliseum on closed-circuit TV, the proceeds to go to charity.

Driving farther up into the canyon, I could see how all this reckless expenditure of money to construct hanging gardens and floating houses in a subtropical never-never land might have encouraged Manson in his messianic reveries. "Why not?" he must have asked himself, echoing the words of countless Los Angeles contractors, who said, "You want a cantilevered swimming pool? Why not?" Because none of this would last. Its very attempt to imitate styles more rooted in time or tradition served only to emphasize some fatal ephemerality beneath the naive zests of the canyon life. One day the poor or the desperate would simply burn it all down while rich hedonists frittered away their afternoons, trying to make a perfect margarita. These houses would fall, these pools burst, these gardens heave. And what was he, Charley Manson--jailbird-prophet, scruffo-seer--but an advance agent of those vast psychic and geologic forces that were inexorably building up toward the ultimate cataclysm? In the land of Aimee Semple McPherson, where showbiz and evangelism had always shared the same bed, he had thought to deliver his message in the religious epistle that most typified L. A.--the rock lyric; and when no one would listen, he had initiated a dialog with himself no less indigenous to this city of interchangeable identities than the gossipy backbiting of the cynical hopefuls in Schwab's drugstore on the Strip: Who am I? I am the Stranger in possession of the truth. But then who are they? They are the ones to whom my truth is strange. So what must I do? By the logic of Vietnamized America. I must bring them the truth, even if it kills them. Show me the flaw.

If the bewildered and resentful voices of Orange County, justifying Calley's murders by turning him into a contemporary Dreyfus, produced the eerie suspicion that America had become morally schizophrenic at last, the justification for Manson's crimes that you heard on the lips of dozens of young, blue-eyed, law-abiding Southern Californians suggested that sympathy for the Devil--in one guise or another--was everywhere in L. A. just then.

I turned onto Mulholland Drive, pulled over and got out for a cigarette. Down there, the smog--which at street level lent a faintly leprous cast to everything--hung in a dirty zone of grease smeared above the Civic Center complex that rose like a group of headstones almost ten miles away. A week before, leaning on the parapet of the Griffith Park Observatory, I had looked down onto the dirt path that wound up through mountain pine 200 feet below (in this largest of all municipal parks in America), where Boy Scouts were hiking up through dappled sunlight, and I had seen--a level below them--a red fox scamper across the path, his bushy tail carried weightless and aloft behind him, and then I had looked up and out and seen, in the blink of an eye, those same downtown buildings. The astringent smell of pine needles, the chilly plash of water somewhere far below, bird song, a feeling of mountains; and, in the same glance, the architectural cemeteries of bureaucracy rising from the stews of the basin. There was no avoiding it: L. A. was as astoundingly horizontal as New York was vertical. But why had a city materialized on this unlikely spot? It was as if Manhattan had grown up out of the marshy wastes of north Jersey.

Except for the invention of the automobile, Los Angeles might have remained nothing but a second-class way station off the mission route to the north, instead of becoming the sixth largest city in the world. For a man without a car was as incongruous here as a motorist in Venice, and L. A. has the highest ratio of automobiles to people of any major city anywhere. Strollers in Beverly Hills are regularly questioned by the police on the assumption that they are up to no good. Mass transportation is all but nonexistent, and you have to walk blocks, often miles, to get a bus, and it rarely takes you anywhere near where you want to go. The old Pacific Electric trolley line that I had ridden from Pasadena to Los Angeles in 1942 ceased to function years ago, and there are people in Watts who have never been to Glendale. But once behind the wheel of an automobile, the Angeleno is liberated as few citizens of modern cities ever are. It's easier to drive the 12 miles from Hollywood to Santa Monica than to taxi cross-town on 45th Street in New York, and I regularly zipped down to Hermosa Beach for breakfast.

Superhighways in other cities were predicated on the principle of avoidance; they were designed to move cars over or around the densities of the urban center. But the idea behind the freeway system here is accessibility--to provide high-speed arteries that can feed more cars into the city; and as a result, every part of this horizon-wide metropolis is reachable in no more than 55 minutes from any other part, and when you get to your destination, there is always a place to park. Here, where space is in abundance, a bank, a store, a restaurant or a church without its own parking lot has small hope of customers and, contrary to the comic scare stories of the Bob Hopes and Johnny Carsons, driving on the freeways, except during rush hours, is not like being trapped on a 100-foot-wide roller coaster without tracks. It's merely the Connecticut Turnpike, doubled in width and flow, and L. A. drivers are generally savvy, quick thinking and reliable in their reflexes, the automobile being as natural an extension of their nerves as the New Yorker's contortionist agility in boarding a five-o'clock subway car. There is little or no cursing or honking in an L. A. traffic jam, and people wait behind their wheels, each isolated in his own small, air-conditioned portion of space, patiently listening to the Top 40 or the Sigalerts.

What accounts for this, I suspect, is the curious psychological fragmentation, the disoriented time sense, of this most mobile of all cities, where the Bekins moving vans are continually transporting people and their differing life styles from one section of the town to another, and where no one takes very much notice of anyone else, being too absorbed in his own house or pool or patio. The automobile has made L. A. an intensely private city, a city without a distinct sense of neighborhood, let alone of community. One's friends mostly live ten miles away, and there is little of the public conviviality provided elsewhere by bars. People get together in each other's houses, and a girl from Palos Verdes either sleeps over or drives herself home--or is designated G. U. (Geographically Undesirable) by her date in Westwood. Indeed, city living in Los Angeles resembles nothing so much as living in the country, and the hippie enclaves up in Laurel Canyon have little more to do with the garden apartments full of young marrieds on Fountain Avenue a few blocks south than Upstate New York farmers have to do with the harried fatalists of Manhattan.

Up on Mulholland, I got back into my car and turned the key. The motor hummed with the quiet power that is the source of the feeling of limitless availability that always witches you, in Los Angeles, into the illusion that time is only a spurious obsession with linearity, whereas space is a Zenlike awareness of simultaneity; an idea that gives the average Angeleno the slightly distracted look of a man hesitating among too many pleasant choices. I pressed the gas pedal and turned toward the Pacific.

Down there on my right, the floor of the San Fernando Valley stretched away like the enormous grid of a waffle iron all the way to the Santa Susanas, lavender-tinged and indistinct in the morning. I rolled down my window and smelled the elusive, herbal odors of L. A.'s fixation on foliage, remembering the summer I had spent alone out here in 1942, after which I had gone back East again, a 16-year-old rebel against puritanism convinced that he had glimpsed a new civilization--a leisure-oriented civilization of drive-ins, supermarkets, private pools and casual clothes--an informal, almost Mediterranean civilization that had come to him as a vision of Utopian proportions in the hard-nosed reality of wartime America.

Now Mulholland Drive became a twisting, houseless, graveled mountain road. 1 passed a family of motorcyclists--the mother and father on full-size machines, the kids on tot-size replicas--drag racing on a level stretch. I slowed down for a loin-clothed youth, beaded headband securing shoulder-length hair, who was loping along bareback on a pinto. A sense of everyone beginning his private day, in accordance with his own whim, possessed me. Yet I was still well within the municipal limits of a world city. Was it a new civilization, as I had felt years ago? ("L. A. is embarrassing only when it tries to imitate other cities," the sun decker in Beverly Glen had said. "Mostly New York.") Was it the city of the future, as both its knockers and its boosters were so fond of saying? ("New Yorkers are ulcerous, Angelenos orthopedic," a sociologist had concluded. "The difference between brooders and act-outers, mullers and maniacs.") Or was it, above all, a city of now, a city without tenses, on which the past exerted little or no drag, and the pull of the future might best be measured by a seismograph? Wasn't it the America of the Seventies, plain as the self-carved X on Charley Manson's forehead?

I thought of him racing along this very road in a car full of his girls ("These days in L. A., every profession has its groupies," a young man, drinking sangria on the Strip, had said), freed to any and all distances by the internal-combustion engine, which had eventually built a psychic equivalent of itself into his soul, at once the most pitiful pariah and the most pitiless judge of whatever America was becoming, calmly thinking to himself (as he would hint in the courtroom later), "I am only a mirror of all this--the hamburger stands that look like hamburgers, the money that builds hills as well as the houses to put on them, the miniature rain forests that arrive on truck beds, and all the fantasies that are built on other fantasies in this land of lost distinctions. What they see in me is only the madness they have made." But I was dissatisfied with the monolog. Like all conclusions about anything in L. A., it seemed facile, off the mark.

Far below me, and parallel to Mulholland, the neons of Ventura Boulevard--which Romain Gary had once called the most interesting street in the world--were just coming on, redundant in the morning sun. It had been early prototypes of such shopping strips that had seemed so Babylonian to me in 1942. But on this trip I had been surprised mostly by my lack of surprise, for in the intervening years, the peculiar life style of Los Angeles had spread back across the mountains and the deserts and the prairies, and now Iowa City had its equivalent of the Sunset Strip, and there were supermarkets in all the Fay-ettevilles that rivaled those in Burbank, and my own town in Connecticut sported, proportionately, almost as many swimming pools as Inglewood. The Los Angelization of America had become complete, and people in Evanston and Shreveport one-stop-shopped to Muzak Mantovani, banked from the front seat of their cars, barbecued in their back yards, went soft-in-the-leg in their split-levels and eventually took on that faintly passive, vegetal, dreaming look that had once seemed so peculiarly Southern Californian.

When you lounged on a garden chaise outside a summer house on Cape Cod, with Burt Bacharach on the stereo and a steak on the charcoal, you were in Los Angeles. When you made drinks built around fruit juice at your tufted, black-leather minibar with the abstract painting from Sears on the wall behind it (as Calley had been photographed doing countless times), you were in Los Angeles. When anxiety, and the Kantian sense of personal responsibility to which it sometimes leads, seemed less urgent than the next fleeting pleasure, then, too. All America was California dreamin'--as the song had said.

Perhaps only the inhabitants of the vast, decaying cities of the East, where the nerves always sizzled and the feet always ached, had escaped this process, but probably those cities were doomed anyway. How could such places as New York survive in an era of proliferating population and pollution? They had nowhere to go but upward into the poisoned air, whereas L. A., whose regulations concerning auto emissions were already more rigorous than future national standards, had only to annex another community or two, link them to the city by a freeway and build them their own versions of Ventura Boulevard.

The most interesting street in the world? No, that was only a left-handed, Gallic way of stating that an ultimate had been reached--like saying that Hiroshima was the most interesting ruin in the world. Still, Ventura Boulevard had achieved some kind of giddy zenith of the shopping-center vision. There was an air of finality about it, as if the science of arousing the acquisitive hunger had at last exhausted all the commercial possibilities of neon, poured concrete and plate glass. It stretched unbroken, arrow straight, all the way from the Hollywood Freeway to Woodland Hills, tying together a string of such separate communities as Studio City, Sherman Oaks, Encino and Tarzana. Twelve miles of midway! Twelve long miles of carnival hucksterism, where not a single thing was tasteful to the imagination or pleasing to the eye! And yet there was a stupefying fascination about it.

You could live out your entire life on Ventura Boulevard--be born, get married, die and be buried from it. You could eat in a Taco Belle, a hard-boozing Kansas City steakhouse or a chic French restaurant. You could furnish an apartment in Swedish modern or a mansion in fine antiques. You could learn karate or how to swim. You could bowl, dance, ice-skate or ride horseback. You could buy, rent, wash or repair a car--or a motorcycle, or a camper, or a mobile home. You could go to movies, saddleries, nude entertainments, jazz clubs, lectures, or even church. It was the ultimate bazaar, and driving its length three days before--the temperature up in the high 80s, everything two blocks away unfocused by a shimmer of heat and exhaust, the glare off cartops, chrome, neon and aluminum piercing even my Polaroids--I had had one of those premonitory hallucinations that a man who has been quits with cities for some years occasionally experiences: Eventually this street would lengthen, store after store, mile after mile, state after state, all the way back to the other ocean--the vast signboards walling out the trees, the leveled concrete denying the contours of the land, the towering neons creating a perpetual, timeless hour that was, eerily, neither night nor day. At last, the continent would be conquered; its ability to disturb us, enlarge us, depress us or arouse us finally annulled. And the valley that had given birth to this incredible street--the valley that was over 100 square miles of tract houses and subdivisions where no down payment and instant financing made the split-level paradise of leisure living and wife swapping available to all--the valley would finally leap over the mountains that circumscribed it here and become America. The meanest aspect of the democratic dream would be achieved at last: Everything, in this land founded on the idea of diversity, would have become one thing.

I looked out across the vast shimmer toward the mountains that were paling from lavender to beige as the smog accumulated. Had a similar vision of an air-conditioned, middle-class prison, into which millions of Americans seemed to be so happily rushing, relieved Calley of any sense of personal complicity in his own actions? There were probably thousands of replicas of his black-leather bar down there in as many recreation rooms, and certainly tens of thousands of valleyites could see nothing wrong in what he had done. To them, Manson's assumption of nihilistic freedom was the real danger, and they glimpsed no similarity to it in Galley's appallingly literal enslavement to "orders"--no matter how inhuman. A feeling of the hopeless polarization of life in Los Angelized America swept over me. I felt as alien in it as a refugee from the novels of Henry James. Then I swung around a curve on that mountain road, on either side of which this endless, flattened city sprawled, and started the gradual descent, and sensed the ocean like a hope.

Deciding to skip Malibu, I turned onto Topanga Canyon Boulevard, wanting my trip's last sight of the Pacific to come after those wild miles of gorge and thicket where the red tiles of Italianate villas baked in the sun atop precipices, and houseless roads wound up into hills where there was nothing but the omnipresent water pipes of a city optimistically anticipating endless expansion. I wanted to get a quick sense of how this last, this greatest of oceans must have looked to the Spanish dons. Continent's end! Nowhere else to go. And there it was--blue-gray, milkily opaque, with a mild surf and no horizon. Indeed, I had yet to see the Pacific horizon on this trip. There was always a strange fog bank obscuring it half a mile out, and farther down the coast the evil exudations of the refineries filled the air with a visible murk.

The morning was sunny and cool and half clear (a combination of conflicting attributes that perhaps only an Angeleno could comprehend), and I turned south on the Pacific Coast Highway, looking for breakfast. A firm wind blew in bland, sea-freshened gusts across my face. Early hitchhikers waited at the lights with transistors, sleeping bags, surfboards, babies. The slopes of the massive headlands up toward Malibu were pale yellow with a profusion of tiny mustard flowers. The coast along there was raw, sandy, looming, misty, with that disturbing feel of new land about it that always arouses a powerful sense of the impermanence of things, a feeling that was somehow only intensified by the imitation lath-and-plaster Porto-finos and Torremolinos that dotted it.

At Pacific Palisades, I gave a lift to two girls--all cascades of hair, fringed buckskin, beads and bare feet--who were taking a portable cassette player to Hermosa Beach for the day. They got in the back and, on a whim, I offered to drive them there. They seemed typical specimens of the perpetually tanned, streaked-blonde, salt-burnished, pretty young narcissist that Southern California beach life produces in such numbers out of sunshine and orange juice, and the tale I overheard in the next half hour may not have been untypical, either. They were both 18 and they had met only the day before in Lum's in Santa Monica. The taller one with the freckles had left her husband and three-month-old baby two weeks ago. "I'll never marry again," she said. "Every kiss is an obligation. Man, they figure they've got you. You're not free anymore."

The plumper one with the bangs had been beaten up by her father after a weeklong argument about getting her own apartment. "I managed to call the police, and he got so embarrassed--because of the neighbors--that I had a chance to cut," she said. She had just sold her Camaro and would live with a friend in Ocean Park until June, when she graduated from high school, and then pack it in and go to Vegas. Both of them suspected they were pregnant.

All of this came out in an easy, casual, chatty flow as we passed the algae-choked canals of Venice, where dirty cats and uncombed dogs scavenged around the mudguards of 1954 Studebakers in front of run-down bungalows, behind the psychedelically painted windows of which I imagined shaggy-faced young men, who carpentered for a living, having a second cup of bancha tea with the blue-jeaned girls who cooked their macrobiotic rice. A scant two minutes later, we were in Marina del Rey, with its ten-story apartments, crenelated with balconies, its subterranean garages full of Porsches, and its enormous man-made harbor where 6000 pleasure craft were berthed--an instant Brasilia risen full-grown from a bog; and I was amazed again by the violent juxtapositions--the dropped out and the upwardly mobile living literally within sight of one another--that didn't seem to amaze or antagonize the Angelenos at all.

"Oh, yes, I watched my afterbirth come out when I had Cheyenne," the taller one was reassuring the plumper one as we passed the massive, bile-green oil tanks beside the highway in El Segundo, where bright borders of pansies had been planted along the chain-link fences and the air stank of chemicals. "It's kind of groovy, really--the whole having-a-baby number."

"This guy I'm with now is really beautiful," the plumper one replied, seeming not to notice the long pier in Manhattan Beach at the end of which the ominous tankers waited, nor the sudden unearthly roar of the jets climbing out of L. A. International, leaving an ugly-brown trail stain behind them in the sea air. "But I won't stay with him after June. He's into too many weird scenes. I think I may have the baby, though. Don't you just dig babies?"

I drove them down to the public pier in Hermosa Beach, where motels, tacoburrito joints and live-bait stores fronted a wide, absolutely pebbleless esplanade of soft sand. A few surfers were paddling out on their boards in shiny black wet suits to the breaking point, and the sun was as wan as a moon in the white sky. "It'll work out for you," the taller one was saying, "just like it'll work out for me. It always works out. Say, you know, really, though, thanks for the ride. It was real nice talking to you."

I watched them ankling off across the sand, their lives seemingly no heavier in their hands than the cassette that hummed with Melanie--off for a day at the beach to work on their tans. I drove on south of town to Cap'n Ahab's Coffee Shop on the marina, where the gunstock beams were sleek with too much varnish and the plank tables had been laminated with protective plastic, to be faced with one of those enormous California breakfasts--hashbrowns, sausage patties the size of beer coasters, ranch eggs (never fewer than three) and grape jelly in an impenetrable little cube--that always make the Easterner feel vaguely stingy with his coffee and toasted English. I pondered the meanings of the beach life, which burned the hours away like pools of sea water evaporating under the sun. What else did it burn away? The surfers paddled out, waited, gauged the swell, missed it and waited again--finally to be rewarded by 15 pure seconds of the surrender of the self to a tidal rhythm, the body energized by its brief moment on the wave's crest, rushing downward--loosed, free--toward the brink of a state before consciousness, that primal state we had lost when water ceased to be our element. But was something more surrendered, too?

I walked off my breakfast in seaside streets full of campers, their curtains still drawn, the occupants still asleep, reminded of the minor uproar that was going on just then over this use of the public thoroughfares as hotels. The kids of California seemed to have taken, en masse, to the VW buses, the Econolines, the delivery vans chromeless with age, and they were wandering up and down the coast, following the surf, the rock festivals or some elusive promise of better vibes elsewhere. It seemed gypsyish and good to me. Nothing in Los Angeles awakened that need for roots--for a roof and a hearth--that seasonal change necessitated back East. Life here was as undulant and gravity-free and crazy as making love on a water bed. The fact that the ski slopes of Mammoth Mountain were only a few hours away from this very beach narcotized the sense of having to earn an experience in advance. Had it, as well, so hypnotized my two passengers that the panic or despair about the fix they were in, which they might have felt in Boston's winter streets, simply hadn't materialized? I didn't think so. After all, the psyches of the young, who had all grown up in Los Angelized America, had been Los Angelized, too, and the conceiving of a baby was no more a consequence (with all the moral and temporal hangups of that word) than was an earthquake--which also happened while you weren't paying attention. It was simply an event, an occurrence among a myriad of other occurrences, to which it had little more direct relation than Watts to Westwood.

"The riots?" a magazine writer had mused to me eight days before. "Well, I've never even been to Watts. I mean, it's twenty miles from here, and it's almost as hard to get into--because of the freeways--as it is to get out of." He seemed troubled by my pursed lip. "Well, what I'm trying to say is this: The riots weren't happening in Westwood," and any idea of the city as a single, cohesive human unit, held together by a community conscience, seemed unreal, even dishonest, in a town where out-of-work actors arrived in Bentleys to pick up their unemployment checks and the mayor regularly indulged in racial innuendo at election time.

All at once, I decided that I wouldn't go to Henry Fonda's party after all. These were my last hours in L. A.; why spend any of them with people I could just as well see in New York, Rome, London or Nassau? It didn't seem relevant to the trip, somehow. Then I had to laugh, realizing that my two passengers would have considered partying with Henry Fonda very relevant, indeed. After all, he was related to Peter and Jane, wasn't he?

• • •

It was after 12 when I eased the Galaxie into the pell-mell, four-lane flow of northgoing traffic on the San Diego Freeway, with a feeling that I was completing a great circle--the canyons, the valley, the beaches--that had Hollywood as its terminal point. Sun-blistered boulevards of stuccoed courts, where you imagined the Bogart of In a Lonely Place trying to open a can of Coors for his hangover, fanned out into the heat haze on both sides of the highway, and I almost missed the exit for La Cienega Boulevard that arrowed through the barrens of the Baldwin Hills, where dead oil derricks stood against the glassy sky like those gaunt skeletons that somehow survive a forest fire, and working pumps seesawed up and down like genuflecting grasshoppers.

What other major city in the world would tolerate an oil field in its center? But then, oil had created L. A.--oil along with aviation, electronics, tourism and the movies--commodities as ephemeral as the next defense budget and the passing taste in fantasy, and in Pasadena the $70,000 homes of 34-year-old computer analysts were up for sale and you saw their owners reading the want ads in the Los Angeles Times over coffee in the House of Pancakes.

What other city, where power and water should have been elements as chancy as sun in winter London, would build a perpetual waterfall above a downtown freeway, or sport so many swimming pools that from the air its vast grid looked as if chips of turquoise Formica had been scattered over it, or burn with so much candle power at night that it had all but put out the stars in the telescope of the Mount Wilson Observatory 20 miles away?

What other city could boast that the richest source of ice-age remains in the world (the La Brea tar pits) was a tourist attraction almost as magnetic as the richest source of plastic-age imagery in America--CBS-TV City--which was barely ten blocks away? You felt the bones of extinct mammoths under the bubbling macadam of the parking lots around the Farmer's Market nearby, and the tired husbands from Des Moines, in see-through nylon shirts, plodding through mountainous displays of gift-wrapped fruit after their tireless wives, seemed no less bewildered and unadaptive than the enormous, sad beasts upon whose viscous graves they rested their openwork huarachos.

What other city suffered so publicly from the identity crisis that secretly afflicts many American cities that feature writers in its newspapers continually, obsessively anatomized the soul of the town and comparisons to San Francisco came up in dinner-party chat like the paranoid fixations of Kafka writing to his father? If you said (as I had many times) that you much preferred L. A. to Frisco, Angelenos looked at you as if they were searching for an ulterior motive, and when they learned that you were from New York, kilowatts of defensiveness crackled in the air like summer lightning.

What other city expended such astonishing creativity on the decor of its restaurants, and then set afire every foodstuff that wouldn't actually be destroyed by flame? For Los Angeles was as infatuated by the idea of flambé as it was by the concept of the cantilevered strut, and I had spent two weeks ducking the skewers that burned like torches in the pagan catacombs of Los Angeles' singed cuisine.

Yet despite all this, I liked the place. Parts of it were as surrealistically ugly as if Luis Buñuel had designed them as sets for Los Olvidados, but parts of it were as impressionistically beautiful as an Italian hill town reconstructed by the artisans of MGM in the Thirties. If someone had given an imaginative, impatient, pleasure-prone adolescent 100 billion dollars and told him to build a city that would gratify all his divergent urges, he would have built something very much like Los Angeles, and the city had all the unself-conscious charm, vitality and naïveté of The Threepenny Opera staged by Holden Caulfield in his girlfriend's garage.

I drove on toward the castellated hills that rose in a patchwork of sere brown, tropic green and stucco white over Hollywood. Now that I had no need of a dinner jacket, what was left to do? Pack up, retrieve some shirts from the cleaners, check my reservation on the morning flight home and make an eight-thirty curtain for The Trial of A. Lincoln. Suddenly, I missed my wife with a keenness that had nothing to do with the usual, nagging absences that a man discovers, one by one, after a few days in a motel. The trip was all but over, the "business" done, and I wished that she were there beside me in that car. She had never been to Los Angeles, and I imagined the pleasure of showing her--what? Hollywood Boulevard, with its bronze stars, each bearing the name of a showbiz personality, embedded in the sidewalk? The Grand Central Market in downtown L. A., where you could buy Chinook salmon, Calimyrna figs, cooked lambs' heads like Francis Bacon skulls, chili pasilla, sweet paprika, roasting rabbits and all the other ingredients of the Oriental, Mexican and southern European cuisines that intermingled there? Acme Hardware on La Brea, which would sell you a flowered-porcelain toilet bowl for $325? Universal Studios, where the tourists gawked at mock-up movie sets that had been carefully built to resemble real sets? Disneyland? No. Turning onto Fountain, with its stubby palms and peeling stucco, I wanted her to be there to sense what I sensed so strongly in the afternoons of Los Angeles: the ambivalent mood of a nation adrift among its conflicting desires--either to star in the next half century's all-time money-maker or to drop out of sight as completely as a hermit among the scorpions of Death Valley.

I parked and went to pick up my laundry and almost bumped into one of those apparitions that I had come to call "the ghost ladies of Hollywood." They were usually in their late 60s or early 70s and there was an air of musty eccentricity about them--of oversweet perfume and too much Coty face powder; of diaphanous clothes saved in attic trunks and the time-shriven flesh of lonely women who have taken to gossiping querulously with themselves. They came drifting up the block under the palm trees with their Twenties pocket-books and their hectic shades of lip rouge and their huge, haunted eyes--to buy a lamb chop, a container of cottage cheese and a single can of beer. You always saw a face inside that ruined countenance that you vaguely recognized--Mary Miles Minter, Billie Dove, Barbara La Marr--and in that face you glimpsed a vanished Hollywood of champagne corks, cocaine eyes, Hispano-Suizas and tango violins. These ladies took no notice of the girls in hip-huggers and Capezios getting out of Karmann Ghias in front of garden apartments with names like the Fountain Blu. Ghosts themselves, they seemed to be conversing silently with ghosts. They were always on foot (a fact unusual enough in this town without pedestrians), and for a moment the rueful, twilight sadness beneath Hollywood's flamboyance came over you. All of its cheap dreams had come cruelly true in the faces of these wraithlike Norma Desmonds, and the brevity of glamor, the attritions of a lifetime devoted to the phantasmal, and the inexorable passage of the years no matter what, were as graphic there as the lines no powder puff would ever expunge again. Yet Dyan Cannon, fur-coated despite the temperature, taller than she appeared on the screen, her caramel-tinted hair in need of a rinse, still strode into Schwab's as if nothing could ever ruin the moment of celebrity she was enjoying.

Hollywood! My earliest ambition, rather than to act or write or make a fortune, had been to direct movies; and in snow-drifted New Hampshire mill towns in the late Thirties, I had survived puberty's first awareness of estrangement on a diet of two films a week and dreamed of Sunset Boulevard as feverishly as other boys dreamed of the Boul Mich. But the dream, even then, had never been a dream of the Hollywood of glittering galas, star-studded premieres or jasmine-scented girls whose bodies were the stuff of masturbatory myth; and when I arrived here in 1942--all of 16--I found that something in the B films that had been shot in these very streets had prepared me for the other Hollywood, the Hollywood of moldering side-street bungalows where whirring table fans moved used air through stifling bedrooms; the Hollywood of ugly trolley tracks under a webbing of power lines; the Hollywood of the 1937 version of A Star Is Born, where, for every Janet Gaynor who succeeded in wooing the gods of fame, there was a Fredric March who walked into the Pacific as a suitor who had failed; the seedy, anonymous, dream-shattered Hollywood of Nathanael West--a Hollywood to which I was still drawn, because, with age, you come to have a certain distant fondness for your illusions. They are the last connection to your earliest self.

Just the day before, at dawn, I had made an ironical pilgrimage down to the old Paramount Studios on Melrose, where I had hung around through sweltering summer afternoons almost 30 years before in hopes of seeing Cecil B. De Mille, or at least his automobile, passing through the famous wrought-iron Spanish gates. The neighborhood was run-down now--dingy stucco courts advertising rooms for singles, an early-morning smell of pinto beans and sour coffee, Western Costume rising like a mausoleum among the Mexican cafes, and the not-unpleasant air of an abandoned Thirties airplane hangar about the studio itself. The billboards on its sand-brown walls touted three TV series for every film, and just inside those fabled gates on Marathon, the stanchions stacked with the bicycles of extras on an early call were visible evidence that--as the leaders of a floundering industry had told President Nixon two days before in San Clemente--76 percent of the members of the Screen Actor's Guild had made less than $3000 last year, a sum that was considered below the poverty level. Plainly, the action and the money had moved elsewhere--to Cinecitta, or Shepperton, or Timbuktu.

Hollywood, which had been the dream factory of the Twenties and Thirties, when America's aspirations were as innocent and hopeful as a youth planning to marry Jean Arthur and thinking of bedding Jean Harlow, had become at once an assembly line of sop, in the form of dozens of hours of inane situation comedy ground out for TV like sausage meat each week, and the capital of raunch where, along Santa Monica Boulevard alone, you could paint a girl's nude flesh for a few dollars an hour, or study her crotch in full-color close-ups in movies made on the outskirts of Bur-bank, or have her service you in any one of two-dozen massage parlors, or purchase glossy-paper picture magazines of her eating--or being eaten by--men and women and assorted animals. Green Acres or Lust Pit? Calley or Manson? Was there an honest choice between them? Sometimes it seemed that it was to such antitheses of unreality that America's secret life had come down. Yet perhaps it was as important to resist the simplicities of this either/or as it was for those of us who could to continue to remember and to hope--particularly in this city of the present tense.

I walked to La Brea, went down to Sunset and started back to the car. A golden, late-afternoon glow burnished everything with that warm light that always seems to foretell the languid, yellow moon that will hang in the palm trees, like some nocturnal grapefruit, once the sun goes down in the Pacific. The air wafted against the skin with the phantom caress of long-since-bulldozed orange groves. I felt that elusive lift that comes to even the most skeptical of men in places that are still unfinished, still enamored of the day, still inventing themselves, and with some amazement I realized that perhaps this was the only city in America in which it might be challenging to live again--at least for a while.

• • •

There was no moon when I parked just east of Sunset and Vine some hours later, but the long fingers of searchlights were playing on the upper stories of darkened office buildings and No Left Turn signs had been set up in most of the intersections. Jesus, I thought, do they still indulge in all that hyping up of false excitement? In 1971? For a play? The crossings were thronged with kids in gypsy garb. There were a lot of policemen on the sidewalks, trying to look like tolerant Dutch uncles. The metronomic thumping of a bass drum and the steely whang of overamplified guitars filled the night with their blurred reverberations.

Then I saw that the searchlights weren't in front of the Huntington Hartford Theater two blocks away but just outside a parking lot on El Centro, across from which some sort of carnival lofted its canopy of light and noise out of a canvas enclosure. The green and yellow struts of a Ferris wheel turned leisurely, out of rhythm to the music, and I realized that all the panoply was for the Tenth Annual Los Angeles Teenage Fair, and not for A. Lincoln, after all. The Rolling Stones wailed their defiance of the very sort of "cultural event" I was attending, wailed against Hollywood and all it had once meant. But then, of course, they had commandeered the searchlights now, they were the objects of the false excitement, and if there was an establishment anymore--an in-group whose money, fame and influence would make a difference to tomorrow--they certainly cut more of the mustard than the likes of Henry Fonda.

But Fonda, I found, had a searchlight, too--though it was smaller and older than the others--and three quarters of an hour before curtaintime, there were all of 10 or 15 people in front of the theater. A TV cameraman was filming the fans who were filming him filming them, and the bronze star in the sidewalk under the marquee bore the name Theodore Kosloff, a Paramount feature player from the early Twenties. Fonda's own star was in the sidewalk in front of the parking lot just down the block. It was streaked with tire marks.

I took up a position in the lobby across from the ticket window as more onlookers began to gather on the sidewalk--people who all had that indescribable look of the out-of-towner that a certain kind of middle-aged Angeleno never loses: the look of a vacationing dentist from Wichita. They took pictures of the billboards with their Instamatics and studied one another surreptitiously, as if Dennis Weaver or Edgar Buchanan might be hiding behind that plaid shirt, those sagging Bermudas.

George Montgomery arrived, and smiled, and was photographed. Van Heflin came. A few months later, he would be dead of a heart attack, and this night he looked grizzled and tired as he signed autographs. As a star, he was a bigger draw than Montgomery, and so he joked with the news photographers, who, when he had gone into the theater, said, "Well, who else is going to turn up?"

"The ushers, that's who," someone cracked.

"Listen," another said, "this is all routine.... Last week, I caught Shirley and Jack and David Cassidy outside the Ambassador."

James Garner arrived in a tuxedo (obviously, he was going to the party at the Hilton afterward), and he was bigger than either Montgomery or Heflin because he was a TV star, and he smiled his bland, apologetic smile as the flashbulbs exploded in his face.

The crowd was thickening now. Two tall, disdainful blacks, with a Diana Ross look-alike between them, swept into the theater in ankle-length black-vinyl coats with epaulets of ostrich feathers. The play was about the arraignment of "A. Lincoln" before a kangaroo court of angry blacks, and they had the look of critics who had already written their reviews.

The searchlight tractor coughed and roared. Faces, as famished by fantasies as by a diet of chow mein, hungered for more under the unreality of the lights. Then one of the photographers, looking down the street, called out, "Hold it right there, Liz--for a good one," and a deep, expiring gasp, somewhere between a death rattle and orgasm, swept the crowd forward as if on cue. But it wasn't Liz Taylor. It was--oh, you know, you know--what's-her-name! It was Elizabeth Ashley and George Pep-pard, and they had been invited to the party, too, and looked cool and dressed up and married as the autograph books were thrust into their faces and the newsmen begged for "just one more."

The lobby was filling now. Industry men--producers with fishy, dead, san-paku eyes, agents with swept-back, graying pompadours stiff with lacquer-- stood around with their chic, 40ish wives, who winced under the lights and pulled the collars of brocaded opera capes over the telltale wrinkles on their tanned throats. These people knew the dangerous emotions that the proximity, in the flesh, of the symbols of magic could unleash in this crowd--"But he's short!" or "It's her--it's really her!"--and their faces were pinched, weary, emptied, scared. They knew what was under the rock; they knew the jungle of vanities behind the jeweled screen; they were the diamond merchants who had trafficked all their lives in expensive glass; and to me, at that moment, there was a certain old-whore bravery about them because of all the squalid secrets they kept. They were like aging Tammany ward heelers. Their world was over. The as-if on which their lives had been constructed had about as much relevance as the snout of an Edsel, and yet they "showed the flag," they came. There was the sadness of long-unexamined compromise about them, of a cynicism that had become sentimental, of the dinosaur's bewildered roamings in the first icy twilights that foretold his doom.

Then I noticed that Martha Scott was talking to the man right next to me. Unrecognized in that crowd of TV addicts, she seemed as at ease as the hostess of a successful dinner party once the brandy has been poured. I stared into her lovely, animated eyes--the peculiar vulnerability and poignance that had made her performance in Our Town so memorable 30 years ago still there, elusively matured--and all at once she looked at me, at the expression of recognition that must have melted my public face, and seemed a little flustered, and smiled, and nodded, and said, "It's so nice to see you again," cocking her head a little, and faking it, as if saying to herself, "Martha, you're forgetting. Now, who is he?" For an instant, the peculiar false intimacy that shared fantasies encourage held us together, as if we were 20-years-ago lovers who had forgotten each other's names. I smiled and she smiled back, and neither of us knew how to acknowledge, much less explain, the flash of counterfeit sympathy that seemed to flow between us.

"It's good to see you, too," I said. "You look marvelous." Her smile was as modest and pleased as the smile of the girl in Our Town, and then she was swept away by the press of people trying to get closer to Fernando Lamas and Esther Williams.

Ricardo Montalban arrived and the lobby cracked with flashbulbs. There was the gathering tension of boredom in the crowd--more, more! They wanted to touch the hem of glamor and, having touched it, they wanted to touch its sleeve and, having touched that, they wanted--what? Anthony Quinn! But having touched him, they wanted him to write down his name on their postcards and souvenir programs as proof that they had actually been close enough to see through the image to a homelier reality: "Oh, yes, Mabel, Tony's only five-ten, but he's a regular guy.... Sure, we talked for a minute, and he's not so special, really." I stood there and realized that it was precisely as if these people had read Nathanael West and were willingly, even gleefully, playing characters out of The Day of the Locust, and that I wasn't really so different from them--my Martha Scott for their Anthony Quinn.

What was it in American life that had starved us so grotesquely? I had met enough movie actors to know that most of them were sad and mixed-up Orphan Annies trapped in the bodies of The Dragon Lady or Smilin' Jack. Was it the film medium itself that gave them such a compelling power over our imaginations? Was fantasy the only refuge for a people without a sustaining past? Or had the fragmentation of modern cities, the process of Los Angelization, aroused some last vestige of hunger for a life of proportion, coherence, wonder, meaning? A hunger that could be assuaged these days only in the pathetic make-believe of the most vicarious of dreams?

Anthony Quinn smiled the empty smile of a man named George who has been caught in a conversation in which he is repeatedly addressed as Bill, and the lobby lights flicked off and on to announce the curtain. Suddenly, I didn't want to see a play; I didn't want to see Lincoln tried for his sins of omission; I was sick of the lust to expiate ourselves by judging others that had made us strangers to one another--Manson to Tate, Calley to the villagers of My Lai, and all of us to all of them. I craved the luxury of my own thoughts and left my ticket, unclaimed, at the box office, and walked back to the car. On a so-far-unengraved star in the sidewalk on Vine Street, one Duane Broder had written his name with a marker pen. I'm here, it's me, I exist! The gesture seemed so emblematic of Southern California--the Southern California now proliferating in the American heart--that I wrote the name down in my notebook. Duane Broder, a self-proclaimed celebrity in Hollywood, and Richard Nixon, from nearby Whittier, the President of the republic.

• • •

The trip was over, but I had no sense of completion, and as I drove down Hollywood Boulevard toward my motel, I succumbed one last time to the urge-- to get up into the hills, to search out a taller building, to take to a helicopter, anything to get above the city--that testified to how L. A. frustrated the visitor's eye by its smog-blurred, amorphous distances. I took a turn into Laurel Canyon and on a whim veered onto the white curve of concrete that ascended into a new and expensive housing development, called Mount Olympus, that had been carved out of a small mountain on the right-hand side of the canyon. Eight-foot cypresses and spectral Grecian fountains appeared fleetingly in the swerve of my headlights as I climbed Venus Drive past scores of empty, leveled lots on which, overnight, those pleasure gardens that money can always buy in Southern California would miraculously blossom.

I pulled onto the highest lot of all, drove to the very edge, killed the headlights and got out. As yet, there was nothing there but the soft, parched dirt under my shoes, and a few clumps of chaparral, and the distant plash of a fountain playing on and on through the night with no one but me to hear. Yet just across the narrow canyon, the opposite hill was verdant, mysterious, dark, awink with life, peopled, and down there, spread out before me in vivid bands of red, yellow and blue light, the thousand glittering boulevards of Los Angeles stretched away toward some lost point of convergence on the horizon. The sight was awesome, appalling and spectacularly beautiful. A city that had engulfed every square mile that could be seen from that height under the blanket of a million blazing lights. An underwater city laved in phosphorus. An endless city. Perhaps the last.

The ghosts of the five-year-old boy and the 16-year-old youth stirred in me again. The heavy, sweetish odor of nighttime orange groves was long gone now, and these days the splendid white beaches were fouled with gobbets of oil and the carcasses of poisoned grebes. Off those sparkling boulevards, violence and despair ripped the silken darkness with the angry scream of police sirens. And yet those ghosts longed to contain Los Angeles enough to justify their stubborn fondness for it--its energy, its gaucherie, its honied nights and salad dawns, its very size that was commensurate with something untrammeled in the enormous continent itself--just as the 44-year-old man longed to love again the tragic, bedeviled, violent and idealistic nation that stretched back 3000 miles from here, bafflingly, under the unjudging night.

For what had built this most American of cities was nothing less than the unfettered and impatient national genius that often seemed to be foundering in bitterness and confusion back East, and L. A. might turn out to be the last place where Americans had taken a stand and created a mirror image of their peculiarly complex souls. It was all our dreams--the meanest and the most audacious--made astoundingly visible.

Suddenly, I realized that I was loath to leave it, and that the reason for this was that it had maddeningly eluded me, and that it had been years since I had experienced the frontier urge that once had amounted to a national trait: What's over the next ridge? What's it like there? After all, weren't the habits of limitlessness and horizon chasing, in themselves, our oldest tradition, our uniquely sustaining past? What else could have gotten us through the Nebraska grass and Colorado snows and desert alkali to build this final city on the margin of the last ocean?

I remembered a friend of mine, a director from New York, who had phoned me in Connecticut one night from Beverly Hills, after spending six fruitless months here, to say, "Listen, everything you've ever heard about L. A.--good and bad, pro and con, everything--it's all true!"

The fantasy-starved crowds at the theater, the reality-numbed girls on their way to Hermosa Beach, Ventura Boulevard, the canyons, Manson and Calley: All this was a reflection of the madness we had made. But wasn't it just possible that we could assume the human responsibilities of our own audacity? Something--perhaps a waft of far-of Pacific salts in the warm night air--whispered: "Why not?"