Nobody Walks in La-La Land (part 2)

Posted on 23. Apr, 2008 by Kerry Banks in Writing from the road

When I arrive in a foreign destination I like to plunge headlong into the street life. Although Los Angeles may not exactly qualify as a “foreign destination,” I’m still eager to walk. However, from the Beverly Hilton my options are limited. Turning left on Santa Monica Boulevard takes me to Rodeo Drive, while turning right leads to Century City. I opt to go right because the concierge said there was a mall there where I could buy a Los Angeles travel guide, which strikes me as a necessity in this gigantic and confusing labyrinth. The trip was only two blocks, but it still took about a half an hour and I had to stop several times to dig grit out of my eyes.

Walking to Century City reminded me that L.A. is not an easy place to navigate on foot. The scale is simply too vast. The metropolitan area covers 4,850 square miles and the streets are often choked with traffic. Incredibly, there are more automobiles in California than there are people in any of the other states of the U.S., and the Los Angeles freeway system handles over 12 million cars on a daily basis. The 6,000 tonnes of toxins that these vehicles spew into the air each day and frequent temperature inversions over the Los Angeles basin that prevent the smog from escaping, has helped make it the most polluted city in North America. However, thanks to clean air initiatives the situation is improving. The number of Stage 1 smog alerts has declined from over 100 per year in the 1970s to almost zero today.

Just to remind pedestrians that they are in hostile territory, the stop lights in L.A. are equipped with a timer. When the walk sign comes on, the seconds start ticking off: 15, 14, 13, 12 … If you are young and fit you might be able to hustle across the boulevards before your time runs out, but most of the people you see walking are the old, the mentally unhinged and the handicapped. For them, street crossings are a harrowing ordeal.

I make it to Century City unscathed and stagger around for awhile feeling like a flea amid the forest of skyscrapers. These glass towers house the offices of law firms and executives–many with ties to the film, television and music industries–once all belonged to 20th Century Fox, but the movie studio had to sell the land to developers after losing a fortune on the making of Elizabeth Taylor’s Cleopatra in 1963. One of the area’s most striking skyscrapers, the 34-storey Fox Plaza on the Avenue of the Stars, is the building that was Nakotomi Plaza, the fictional setting of the first Die Hard film.

Los Angeles is often cited as the poster child of rampant, unplanned urban sprawl. It certainly defies many of the normal expectations of a city, such as its lack of any clearly defined centre. There is a downtown L.A., but I have never met anyone who has actually been there or wanted to go there. In their 1997 guide book Bizzaro LA., authors Anthony Lovett and Matt Maranian called the district as “a crumbling, putrefied, God-forsaken wasteland.” That’s quite an advertisement. American writer Dorothy Parker once observed, “Los Angeles is 72 suburbs in search of a city.” Of course, the suburbs that Parker was referring to–Burbank, West Hollywood, Pasadena, Covina, Malibu, Santa Monica, Redondo Beach–are actually incorporated cities. At last count, there were 89 of them in this humming swarm of electricity.

A few hours later, I’m on the sidewalk outside the Beverly Hilton watching a sleek parade of cars roll up to the entrance: Bentleys, BMWs, Mercedes, Jaguars, Porsches, Maseratis, Ferraris and the hotel’s stretch Hummer Limo, which looks large enough to carry an entire football team. The gleaming beast disgorges its cargo. A pot-bellied guy in a Hawaiian shirt stumbles out, sucking on a cigarette as though it’s his last one before he faces the firing squad. Even though it’s dark outside, he’s wearing sunglasses. His bosomy wife is next. She is jammed into a red cocktail dress and outrageous red platforms. It’s all about shoes and cars here, the more expensive and flamboyant the better.

The rich are arriving because the Beverly Hilton is hosting a charity fundraiser. “Some Israeli thing,” mutters Larry the doorman, a skinny, pale-skinned guy who looks lost in his uniform. Larry, it turns out, has worked here for 34 years.

“Wow, you must have seen some changes in the place over that time,” I say.

“Yeah, a lotta changes. Hell, I’ve changed a lot too. When I started this job I was black,” he jokes.

The Hilton stages 175 red-carpet events a year, including the Golden Globe Awards, the Jerry Lewis Muscular Dystrophy Telethon and the Academy Awards Governors’ Ball. “We have the biggest ballroom in Beverly Hills. So if you wanna throw a big party, you’re gonna want to have it here,” says Larry.

It’s been that way from the beginning. The night before the hotel’s official opening on August 12, 1955, Conrad Hilton hired the Goodyear Blimp to float above the site and nearby communities with the lighted inscription “Welcome Golden Starburst—Gala Grand Opening—The Beverly Hilton” blazing from the sky. The blimp sprinkled small golden starbursts of confetti onto the community below. On the night of the opening gala, uniformed trumpeters greeted guests with a regal fanfare as pink-painted elephants, escorted by bathing suit beauties, circled the main entrance of the hotel. At the end of the evening, the staff tossed pink rose petals along the path of the departing guests. The next day, Esther Williams, film star and swimmer extraordinaire inaugurated the Beverly Hilton’s Aqua Star Pool by swimming through white gardenias with three of her swim students.

It is too cool for swimming tonight, but the Canadian Tourism Commission is holding an outdoor shindig to kick off Canada Media Marketplace 2008. The “Acadian Kitchen Party” in the Oasis Courtyard is sponsored by Tourism New Brunswick. Two Mounties welcome guests as they come through the doors. There are canapes, desserts, fiddle music and free beer and wine. The assembled throng is composed of more than 200 journalists and tourism industry players who will be meeting tomorrow in the hotel’s International Ballroom. “It’s an intense, brain-melting marathon,” one industry rep tells me. Hearing that, I decide I really could use another drink.

(To be continued …)