November 28, 2014 |
The first time I went to LA I stayed at the Hyatt House (aka Riot House) on Sunset Strip. Because that’s where Led Zeppelin used to stay. I loved the chapter in Hammer of the Gods where the guy walks into Jimmy Page’s room and it’s all blacked out with velvet drapes and hundreds of candles are burning and Page is standing motionless with his guitar and the guy says, “What are you doing?” and Page replies, “I’m waiting for something to come through.”
Led Zeppelin used to rent six floors of the Hyatt at a time and that’s where Bonzo rode his motorcycle down the hall and where, supposedly, Robert Plant looked out over LA and declared, “I am a golden god!” Keith Richards dropped a TV out of the window of room 1015 on the 11th floor. Jim Morrison lived there until they threw him out for hanging off a ledge by his fingertips while drunk. I thought maybe that was the Hyacinth House he sang about. “What are they doing in the Hyacinth House? What are they doing in the Hyacinth House? To please the lions this day.”
The Hyatt seemed like a good place to start LA. I was tired after the trip and fell asleep early. When I woke up there was plaster on the bed. When I left the room somebody said, “Didn’t the earthquake wake you up?”
Just down the street was The Source, the famous hippie restaurant founded by a dude called Father Yod that had the pyramid from the dollar bill on the sign, with the legend “Annuit Coeptis. Novo Ordo Seclorum”. Father Yod was the head of a commune, the Source Family, and the lead singer of their psychedelic band Ya Ho Wa 13. I liked the Aware Salad. The vibe of the place was creepy but I felt like I had a better understanding of the Manson Family having eaten there. They made a good carrot/ginger juice.
In 1974 the Source Family sold the place and moved to Hawaii, where Father Yod died in a hang-gliding accident on his first flight, jumping off a 1,300ft cliff. It always occurred to me that there was something reckless at the heart of LA. I just couldn’t shake the feeling that it was a mistake for people to live there. It was something about the hills that looked very temporary, and the oil rigs by the airport, and the incredible cloud of smog that hung over the city that you could look down on from the hills. After years of environmental regulation, it got better. You couldn’t see it so much any more. But LA is still the most ozone-polluted city in the United States. I still get that apocalyptic feeling there. More than in Tokyo or Beijing. You know the film This Is The End, where James Franco and the neo-Rat Pack encounter the end of the world? I always had that feeling there. Helter skelter! It’s coming down fast.
Still, it’s a good place to get a tan. That’s why the Brits love LA. They all live around the beach, in Santa Monica, Malibu or Venice. There are a lot of pubs there that show all the soccer matches on big screens and serve bangers and mash and a proper pint. Many of the Brit expatriates there look like stunt doubles from Spinal Tap. I always liked Venice, with its funny canals, even when it was considered a high-crime district. It has the highest proportion of never-married men, never-married women, divorced men and divorced women in the United States. Partay!
I once contemplated moving to LA. I had been spending a lot of time there living in a cabana room at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, right by the Walk of Fame. The hotel has a great pool, painted by David Hockney, and Clark Gable and Carole Lombard once lived in the penthouse. It was an easy walk to my office and I didn’t really want to drive too much in LA. Everybody drives. From the Roosevelt it’s an easy walk to Musso & Frank’s, the perfect restaurant for anybody who misses New York. Or misses New York in 1938. Scott Fitzgerald drank here, and Dorothy Parker, Dashiell Hammett and Robert Benchley. If you get bored you can look at the addicts, hookers and the people walking into the Scientology Celebrity Centre, or head over to the Ripley’s Believe It or Not Odditorium.
Eventually the Chateau Marmont became my LA pad – the famous hotel on Sunset was then a sort of Hollywood version of Hotel Chelsea. It was down at the heels but glamorous. I first stayed there before it was refurbished by André Balazs. I lived there for a few months in a big suite with a refrigerator older than me. My friend Richard Prince was living there at the time, too. His room directly faced a huge Marlboro Man billboard. At night we went to Club Fuck! in Silverlake, where Richard wore white Levi’s under his leather chaps, or to watch the topless girls at The Body Shop on Sunset across from the Chateau. My favourite girl came out in full California Highway Patrol uniform and stripped down to nothing but a truncheon.
After Balazs took over, the hotel got much nicer – they even gave you top-quality earplugs in some of the rooms. I mean, you were staying there in part for the action, and action isn’t exactly quiet. Sometimes I stayed in the bungalows by the pool. I remember when my son was making so much noise in the pool Jerry Stiller had to take his script inside to read. One time I broke a tooth on a slice of carrot cake, and every time I went back Balazs sent me a whole carrot cake. Once in a while I got upgraded to the modern Craig Ellwood Hillside Bungalow 3. John Belushi died there, but as far as I could tell he’s not haunting it.
Eventually I got into LA driving. Everybody always wants a sports car there, but the time I rented a Jag I got pulled over. After that I always rented a Town Car, not that I wanted to look like a limo driver but I loved the anonymity, and trying to fill the big car up with beauties.
LA is huge and unfortunately one often has to spend hours in the car to commit to an interesting social life. I often got lost. I was looking for a club one night and wound up in Compton. The funny thing about the dangerous neighbourhoods in LA is that they look so nice. But I never got scared in LA except when there was a cop driving behind me. Also, walking was a little scary. I love to walk and will walk miles in New York, but in LA if you’re walking it feels like something is wrong. Like you could get arrested for walking. Or worse. I remember when Jerry Rubin died after being hit by a car while crossing Wilshire Boulevard. LA drivers are terrible, which is one reason why the traffic is so terrible there.
I think in the end I never went to LA because of the car thing. In New York I can walk out my door and run into someone on the street and it might change my life. In population-dense Manhattan (70,000 fairly rich people per square mile) we have random access good look. You bump into love and money. In LA (only 8,000 people per square mile) everything has to be planned out. There is no centre, only the grid. You have to make a date to run into somebody. If you go to Mr Chow’s, The Little Door, Dan Tana’s or The Ivy you might get lucky and see somebody. I always got lucky at Michele Lamy’s Les Deux Cafes, but it’s gone.
People wear baseball caps and sunglasses in LA because most people only see them from the shoulders up. Maybe they’re not even wearing pants. It is not illegal to drive in California with no shoes or pants. But LA is not really a fashion town. Fashion is unnecessary there. Muscles are useful, hair is important, but clothes – well you really just need T-shirts and yoga pants and sneakers. Except for the awards shows, when everyone borrows something hideous. Anything that is black in New York or London is white in LA.
You don’t really miss the fashion that much because everybody is beautiful. Not everybody, but you realise sooner or later as you observe waiters and waitresses, boutique clerks, parking valets, bellboys and bartenders, that the best-looking girl in every high school in America moved here to be an actress. And then she got another job. Same with the boys. It seems like the entire infrastructure of the city has a glossy headshot and maybe a script just a few feet away.
Yes, it’s a place of people from somewhere else, people who came here to follow a dream. I knew quite a few hip and happening people from New York who went to LA hoping to get even bigger and more fabulous and drive a convertible. Never heard from most of them again. Yeah, a city of hope and dreams and bad series pilots and options never picked up. Reminds me of that old Al Dubin and Harry Warren song Boulevard of Broken Dreams:
The joy that you find here you borrow
You cannot keep it long it seems
But gigolo and gigolette
Still sing a song and dance along
Boulevard of broken dreams
I still love going to LA. I want to eat at the sushi bar at Matsuhisa and walk around the Hannah Carter Japanese Garden, hit Trancas Beach in Malibu, grab some fish tacos. You have a meeting with agents – they say, this project is a go. It doesn’t matter that you’ll never hear from them. It’s relaxing. It’s not New York. The sun is out. It’s a good place to get a tan and maybe examine the tan lines of America’s most hopeful.
Photographer: Maria Ziegelboeck
By Glenn O’Brien
