Big Dreams (53 page)

The Pacific Coast Highway ran along the ocean’s tracery beneath a sky pulsing with cormorants and pelicans, my road to everywhere and nowhere that caused me to take up the standard cry, “I love L.A.!”

At Surfrider Beach in Malibu, the waves were flat of an afternoon, but many surfers were trying to catch one anyhow to win the favor of some nonchalant, gum-popping sweeties in Jimmy Z suits. The coastal stretch of Malibu, some twenty-two miles, had been Chumash land until it was deeded to a soldier serving with the expeditionary force of Juan Bautista de Anza in the 1770s. In the twentieth century, the land was worked as a ranch and then sold to subdividers in 1941, who offered it in parcels to members of the movie colony.

Malibu Colony was still a special preserve, home to famous entertainers who were beyond such mortal concerns as money or ambition, the Johnny Carsons and the Larry Hagmans now cooling it on the golf links or on the tennis courts. Here, too, the dealmakers had houses, those whose power was so unlimited that an agent would actually leave the purview of Century City to take a meeting with them on the sand.

Malibu also had a stratum of demi-stars and stars on the wane, actors perilously close to devolving to the rank of mere celebrities, the Ali MacGraws and the Martin Sheens who’d been smart enough or lucky enough to parlay their brief moment in the limelight into a prime chunk of beach real estate.

Celebrities did not live in the Colony or anywhere in Malibu. They lived elsewhere—in San Fernando Valley, say. Their TV series
were gone from syndication, and the only work that they could find was as guests on witless game shows or as accomplices to such events as the opening of a new car wash in Encino.

In Malibu, I sensed a world-weariness edging toward absolute repose. Any show of energy, except in sports or in sex, might be regarded as bad form. The town was as inbred and status-conscious as any society town in Connecticut. The beautiful people were highly visible, but I also saw the ones whose beauty was fading, sad-eyed men and women aging awkwardly and beginning to agonize over the possible gains and pitfalls of cosmetic surgery.

Special rites were obeyed in town. The owner of the only theater, a second-run house, had to be careful never to play one resident’s movie longer than another’s.

After a good dinner at a local restaurant, I thanked the waitress, who said, “This is Ali MacGraw’s place,” as if the participation of a demi-star guaranteed every customer superior food.

And in the weekly
Malibu Times
there were always items to puzzle over:

Other days I lounged around in Venice, where my brother had once lived. Often I had flown down from San Francisco to stay at his apartment near the beach in the early 1970s. His upstairs neighbors were a chiropractor who adored Clint Eastwood films and a woman who kept a mastiff as a pet. Sometimes she’d put on a bikini and take the mastiff for a walk, delivering the ultimate in mixed messages.

In little cottages down the block, women who resembled the post-Hitchcock Kim Novak grew roses and reminisced about lovers past. One afternoon, we tossed some horseshoes with a grizzled old
bugger who claimed to be Tom Mix’s nephew. Were we in California yet, or what?

Venice was a quaint dream that Abbot Kinney, heir to a tobacco fortune, had indulged. Kinney, an insomniac, had left the Midwest for his health. He was a freethinker, who founded two public libraries, published a book about sex (
Tasks by Twilight
, 1893), and planted some of the first eucalyptus trees in the state. In July of 1905, he opened his new real estate development, Venice-by-the-Sea, on 160 acres of tidal flats. It had canals, gondolas imported from Italy, and villas in the grand manner. Sarah Bernhardt did
Camille
on the pier, but the crowds turned out for the Ship Cafe, a replica of one of Cabrillo’s caravels that stood on pilings.

As a planned community, Venice never caught on. The canals got swampy and stank. The pier burned down and had to be rebuilt. When oil was discovered on the flats in the 1920s, the last glimpses of faux European splendor were lost to rigs and derricks.

A stroll on Ocean Front Walk in Venice was like being spliced into the world’s longest dolly shot. So many films, TV shows, and commercials had employed the boardwalk for color that at least half of the people were there to perform.

One morning, I saw an Academy Award performance on the basketball courts. A pint-size white woman in a leopard-skin bikini, the only female in the game, ran around with terrific intensity, shouting to her teammates for the ball, even though they ignored her.

Defense was her strong suit. She hounded the black man she was guarding, pressing close and brushing him with her fingers and sometimes with her breasts. He didn’t know what to do. He looked furious, as if he wanted to drive to the hoop and smash her, but propriety held him back—or maybe it was the thought that he might bump into her again somewhere, in another lifetime, and she’d recall his knuckly biceps and his ridged abdominals and take from the memory another meaning.

A black teenage girl who sat next to me in the bleachers said to her friend, “I’d put my foot in her face and teach her a lesson.”

Her friend scowled. “Who does that girl think she is, anyhow? A Detroit Piston?”

I
N SANTA MONICA
, I became obsessed with Fred Sands, a realtor whose signs were fixed to skyscrapers and exclusive condominiums, and outside mansions and estates in all the choiciest districts of the city. Wherever I drove the signs seemed to be waiting for me, and I fell into a habit of playing a game with myself and seeing how long I could go before I came upon another one, but it was never very long. Fred Sands had always been there first to nail down the turf.

Beach sand, shifting sands, the sands of time. In my freeway reveries, Fred Sands appeared to me as the Realtor King who controlled the dynamo churning in the gut of Los Angeles, somebody who possessed esoteric knowledge about California on a par with Derrel Ridenour, Jr., the Mini-Storage King of the San Joaquin.

But unlike Derrel Ridenour, Jr., Fred Sands agreed through his publicist to meet with me in a few days. Sands was no shrinking violet. The publicist sent me a packet of materials about him, and I discovered that he was extremely successful, among the top five residential realtors in the country. His company was the largest one-owner real estate firm in the state.

In photographs, Fred Sands seemed deceptively bland. He cultivated the mild-mannered look of a harmless accountant, dressing in dark, conservatively cut suits and ties of no special flare. One photo in the packet showed him posed next to George Bush, both of them smiling broadly over some Republican intimacy or other.

When it came to selling real estate, Fred Sands had a philosophy, of course:
Use creativity
. He believed that there was no such thing as an ordinary house—every house was extraordinary to the right buyer. As an example, he liked to cite a tiny, one-bedroom dwelling without a garage. Most realtors would blink at the prospect of listing it, but the place was really perfect for a midget who rode a motor scooter!

Fred Sands thought that creativity in sales was rooted in the
ability to listen to a customer. He must be a good listener, I thought, because he’d built his company from the ground up, and now he had a grand beach house in Malibu. He owned a radio station and had been a real estate consultant to the syndicated TV show “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.”

As I read on, I felt that we were fated to meet, and that from the meeting would emerge the special understanding about Los Angeles that I’d been seeking.

S
UMMER WAS IN FULL SWING
at the Gigliottis’ extraordinary house. The twins were going to a day camp in Malibu, where they rode horses and go-carts. Noah and Gabriel had attended a baseball camp at Pepperdine University and were about to start at a basketball camp under the tutelage of John Wooden, the former coach at UCLA. Aaron had a job as a camp counselor and seemed almost to be liking it, getting out of bed for work with a minimum of fuss.

Little Michael didn’t go to any camp at all. Instead, he palled around with his mother or with his Aunt Page, who was sweet on him and sometimes brought him along when she was out with her boyfriend, Lou Adler. They were out together on the Saturday afternoon I came by to watch a boxing match on TV with Pat.

Pat was still logging in his hours at Jupiter Realty and putting in his miles on the beach, but he’d have a break soon when the family went to Italy for their annual vacation at the end of the month.

It occurred to me while we were watching a couple of featherweights duke it out that Pat might know Fred Sands, but he didn’t. His interest in real estate was minimal. It was just a place where he’d alighted for a time and from which he would eventually move on. Often he wished that he could be back behind a counter in a bookstore reading Henry Miller or talking to the customers.

He told me that he’d just gone through a bad scene trying to acquire a downtown parcel to include in a development scheme. The owner had liked the deal. Then he hadn’t liked the deal. Then he
got paranoid, began to queer the deal, and sold the parcel to a satellite company in Sylvester Stallone’s empire.

“Stallone’s people play hardball,” Pat said reflectively. “You know who’s good to do business with? Tom Selleck. He and his brother put together shopping malls.”

So, I thought, in Los Angeles the stars command the earth even as they manipulate the heavens.

Although Pat was a realtor by default, he kept up with the action. Everybody in town might be railing about the Japanese, he said, but that was misguided. The Germans and the Canadians controlled more of the city. The Japanese were just better at offending people. They could be as arrogant as Americans. Sometimes when they took over a building, they lost tenants through their high-handedness.

Pat believed that the Japanese were buying up all the Adidas’s Rod Laver-model tennis shoes in town, because they hated Koreans and Lavers were made in Europe, not in Korea. Some Japanese businessmen didn’t like talking to Pat’s secretary, who was black. Symbols of status were extremely important to them, he said—so American! They, too, were excited by flash and movie stars.

Once, Pat had led a party of Japanese executives through a building that he wanted to rent to them. He had listed its advantages to no avail. Then, absently, he mentioned that John Wayne had died in the famous cancer hospital across the street.

The executives had exclaimed, “Ah! John Wayne!” and had closed the deal on the spot.

Gabriel dashed into the room as brashly as his namesake herald and interrupted our conversation. “Dad!” he shouted, in the most imperative voice that he could muster.
“You have got to see Lou’s car!”

In the driveway outside was a car such as none I’d ever seen before, black and sleek and low to the ground, mysterious, elegant, and doubtlessly speedy. It looked like a prototype for a twenty-first-century Batmobile, something with capabilities suited to a superhero. The kids were running around it and whooping.

Pat whispered to me, “It’s an Aston-Martin Lagonda.”

He figured that it had cost about $200,000. Aston-Martin only manufactured a few of them each year, so the demand far outweighed the supply. There was no guarantee that you could buy one even if you could afford it. As a status symbol, the Lagonda put other automobiles to shame. The other luxury cars around Los Angeles now seemed as common to me as weeds.

The driver, Lou Adler, wore the slyly satisfied look of the proverbial cat who’d swallowed the proverbial canary. He was an L.A. legend, tight in all the right circles. In the great California strike-it-rich sweepstakes, he had rolled the dice and come out a big winner.

Adler had earned his millions doing the record thing and the music thing, managing or producing such groups as Jan and Dean and the Mamas and the Papas. Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys was an old pal. They were so close to each other in the Surfin’ Sixties that when Wilson decided to get married, Adler booked a suite for him at The Sands in Las Vegas and piled it to the ceiling with flowers. Brian had even named a dog after Adler, Louie.

There were quips of Adler’s that still made the rounds. Somebody had once complained to him, for instance, that Los Angeles lacked seasons.

“Nah, that’s not true, man, we have seasons,” Adler was rumored to have said. “We’ve got basketball season and the rest of the year.”

The children kept whooping. The sly look on Adler’s face never budged an inch. He had a cool beyond cool, an absolute mastery of the offhand stance toward being alive that marked the L.A. elite and could only be gained after decades of grooving and being grooved upon.

When Pat introduced us, I sensed that Adler could answer any question I might ask him, however surreal. I could ask him how things were on Planet Venus, and he’d reply, “They’re fine, man. Just fine.”

“Hi, Lou,” I said, shaking his hand. He had on a slouchy hat covered with dancing musical notes.

“Hi,” Lou Adler said.

In a minute or two, Page released Michael with a good-bye kiss, and the happy couple drove off. Pat said to his son, “Where’d you go today, Mikey?”

“To Kareem’s,” Michael said.

Michael was tired from the outing and on the verge of a tantrum. He fell on the floor inside the house and commenced to wail and bang his fists. Everybody was used to the tantrums and inclined to let them run their course, but I was a first-timer and tried to talk the boy down, thinking what a strange California life he had ahead of him, not quite four years old and already passing the afternoon hanging out with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

His tears stopped flowing after a bit, his clenched face relaxed, and he asked to see a video. There were a number of them on a shelf in the den,
Bambi
and
Dumbo
and lots of cartoons. Michael studied each box judiciously before rejecting it. He also rejected
Nightmare on Elm Street
—too scary, even though Aunt Page was in it.