Just to watch the front-page news out of Los Angeles during a Santa Ana is to get very close to what it is about the place.
The longest single Santa Ana period in recent years was in 1957, and it lasted not the usual three or four days but fourteen days, from November 21 until December 4. On the first day 25, 000 acres of the San Gabriel Mountains were burning, with gusts reaching 100 miles an hour. In town, the wind reached Force 12, or hurricane force, on the Beaufort Scale; oil derricks were toppled and people ordered off the downtown streets to avoid injury from flying objects. On November 22 the fire in the San Gabriels was out of control. On November 24 six people were killed in automobile accidents, and by the end of the week the Los Angeles Times was keeping a box score of traffic deaths. On November 26 a prominent Pasadena attorney, depressed about money, shot and killed his wife, their two sons, and himself. On November 27 a South Gate divorcee, twenty-two, was murdered and thrown from a moving car. On November 30 the San Gabriel fire was still out of control, and the wind in town was blowing eighty miles an hour. On the first day of December four people died violently, and on the third the wind began to break.
It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination. The city burning is Los Angeles’s deepest image of itself: Nathanael West perceived that, in The Day of the Locust; and at the time of the 1965 Watts riots what struck the imagination most indelibly were the fires. For days one could drive the Harbor Freeway and see the city on fire, just as we had always known it would be in the end. Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and, just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way life is lived there, so the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.
2
“Here’s why I’m on the beeper, Ron,” said the telephone voice on the all-night radio show. “I just want to say that this Sex for the Secretary creature — whatever her name is — certainly isn’t contributing anything to the morals in this country. It’s pathetic. Statistics show!”
“It’s Sex and the Office, honey,” the disc jockey said. “That’s the title. By Helen Gurley Brown. Statistics show what?”
“I haven’t got them right here at my fingertips, naturally. But they show.”
“I’d be interested in hearing them. Be constructive, you Night Owls.”
“All right, let’s take one statistic,” the voice said, truculent now. “Maybe I haven’t read the book, but what’s this business she recommends about going out with married men for lunch?”
So it went, from midnight until 5 a. m., interrupted by records and by occasional calls debating whether or not a rattlesnake can swim. Misinformation about rattlesnakes is a leitmotiv of the insomniac imagination in Los Angeles. Toward 2 a. m. a man from “out Tarzana way” called to protest. “The Night Owls who called earlier must have been thinking about, uh, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit or some other book,” he said, “because Helen’s one of the few authors trying to tell us what’s really going on. Hefner’s another, and he’s also controversial, working in, uh, another area.”
An old man, after testifying that he “personally” had seen a swimming rattlesnake, in the Delta-Mendota Canal, urged “moderation” on the Helen Gurley Brown question. “We shouldn’t get on the beeper to call things pornographic before we’ve read them,” he complained, pronouncing it pornee-oh-graphic.” I say, get the book. Give it a chance.” The original provocateur called back to agree that she would get the book. “And then I’ll burn it,” she added.
“Book burner, eh?” laughed the disc jockey good-naturedly.
“I wish they still burned witches,” she hissed.
3
It is three o’clock on a Sunday afternoon and 1050 and the air so thick with smog that the dusty palm trees loom up with a sudden and rather attractive mystery. I have been playing in the sprinklers with the baby and I get in the car and go to Ralph’s Market on the corner of Sunset and Fuller wearing an old bikini bathing suit. That is not a very good thing to wear to the market but neither is it, at Ralph’s on the corner of Sunset and Fuller, an unusual costume. Nonetheless a large woman in a cotton muumuu jams her cart into mine at the butcher counter.” What a thing to wear to the market,” she says in a loud but strangled voice. Everyone looks the other way and I study a plastic package of rib lamb chops and she repeats it. She follows me all over the store, to the Junior Foods, to the Dairy Products, to the Mexican Delicacies, jamming my cart whenever she can. Her husband plucks at her sleeve. As I leave the check-out counter she raises her voice one last time:” What a thing to wear to Ralph’s” she says.
4
A party at someone’s house in Beverly Hills: a pink tent, two orchestras, a couple of French Communist directors in Cardin evening jackets, chili and hamburgers from Chasen’s. The wife of an English actor sits at a table alone; she visits California rarely although her husband works here a good deal. An American who knows her slightly comes over to the table.
“Marvelous to see you here,” he says.
“Is it,” she says.
“How long have you been here?”
“Too long.”
She takes a fresh drink from a passing waiter and smiles at her husband, who is dancing.
The American tries again. He mentions her husband.
“I hear he’s marvelous in this picture.”
She looks at the American for the first time. When she finally speaks she enunciates every word very clearly. “He…is…also…a…fag,” she says pleasantly.
5
The oral history of Los Angeles is written in piano bars. “Moon River,” the piano player always plays, and “Mountain Greenery.” “There’s a Small Hotel” and “This Is Not the First Time.” People talk to each other, tell each other about their first wives and last husbands. “Stay funny,” they tell each other, and “This is to die over.” A construction man talks to an unemployed screenwriter who is celebrating, alone, his tenth wedding anniversary. The construction man is on a job in Montecito: “Up in Montecito,” he says, “they got one square mile with 135 millionaires.”
“Putrescence,” the writer says.
“That’s all you got to say about it?”
“Don’t read me wrong, I think Santa Barbara’s one of the most — Christ, the most — beautiful places in the world, but it’s a beautiful place that contains a…putrescence. They just live on their putrescent millions.”
“So give me putrescent.”
“No, no,” the writer says. “I just happen to think millionaires have some sort of lacking in their…in their elasticity.”
A drunk requests “The Sweetheart of Sigma Chi.” The piano player says he doesn’t know it. “Where’d you learn to play the piano?” the drunk asks. “I got two degrees,” the piano player says. “One in musical education.” I go to a coin telephone and call a friend in New York. “Where are you?” he says. “In a piano bar in Encino,” I say. “Why?” he says. “Why not,” I say.