Sunset Boulevard
BOULEVARD OF BROKEN DREAMS
Few
streets in the world are as famous as this one, but we tend to see it
through a screen, darkly. Laura Barton gets under the skin of Sunset
Boulevard
From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, November/December 2013
SIX IN THE morning,
Beverly Hills. The air is filled with the aroma of expensive lawns,
warming in the pallid sun. Plastic-bound copies of the LA Times
lie before wrought iron gates, watched by security cameras, a chatter
of birds, a glimpse of pink sky. Stand quite still on the sidewalk here,
and the neighbourhood draws into focus. Box hedges, orange trees, the
scent of magnolia. The ineluctable neatness of here.
For several blocks,
Sunset Boulevard is home to LA as we know it—millionaires and
billionaires, Oscar-winners and entrepreneurs, supermodels and TV
shrinks. And over its high fences you catch flickers of affluence: a
floodlit basketball court, a sliver of turquoise swimming pool.
But stand a little
longer, and you see things that do not fit so neatly. Close to where
Sunset meets the curve of Foothill Road, a woman waits at a bus stop.
She is nondescript—black coat, white trainers, scarf, short hair, Trader
Joe's bag. She speaks softly, as if her voice might ruffle the grass.
Her name is Petra, and
she is a 64-year-old live-in housekeeper. She talks of how she moved to
Los Angeles from Peru over two decades ago, and of the longing she
still feels for home. Today is Sunday, her day off, so she is going to
the Catholic church, two bus rides away in Culver City. The Number 2 bus
draws up, and she is swallowed by the soft hiss of the doors. As the
bus slides by, the faces in the windows are all Hispanic or black, all
weary.
The street resumes its
steady composure. A red sports car hums towards the coast, and a woman
in white walks in circles in the middle of Arden Drive.
This is a story of
belonging and not belonging, of preposterous wealth and immense poverty;
of how, in a city where people love to be seen, so many can slip
through the cracks unnoticed.
It is also the story
of a single street, Sunset Boulevard, a 22-mile vein that goes from the
coast to the clutter of downtown, past Sunset Strip, the Church of
Scientology and on through Silver Lake. And of how, if you should choose
to walk that street, from sunrise to sunset, you will come to see a
city unadorned and unmade, a city at odds with itself.
SUNSET WAS ONCE a cattle trail. In the 1780s it ran out of the
Pueblo de Los Angeles, west towards the sea. It remained a dirt road
until the early 1900s, when it was paved and polished to fit the
intentions of a burgeoning city. "The paving of Sunset Boulevard is one
of the most important public improvements attempted in Los Angeles,"
said the Los Angeles Herald in 1909, "and because of this fact
has been attended with more than the customary amount of difficulty."
The bickering between the rival contractors dragged on for two years,
with the Board of Public Works finally awarding the contract to Barber
Asphalt, for $181,733.16.
Within a generation,
it was given another make-over. In the early 1930s, Sunset Strip—the
mile-and-a-half-long stretch that runs through West Hollywood—was paved
with thick Portland cement and Warrenite Bitulithic, to match the growth
of glamorous casinos and nightclubs along its route.
In the years since,
Sunset Boulevard has become shorthand for what Los Angeles represents in
the collective imagination. It is the Chateau Marmont and the
Whiskey-A-Go-Go, the Hollywood Palladium, Schwab's Drugstore, the
Directors' Guild of America and the Hustler store. It evokes extremes,
from the spangled American Dream to seedy, untempered excess; the wild
and peculiar destination of a country forever looking West.
California is not the
draw it once was. Although nearly 740,000 people move there each year,
840,000 leave—many of them heading to Texas and Arizona, where the
living is cheaper. Even the Mexicans are going off it, deterred by
California's unemployment and an emerging middle class back home. But
Los Angeles bucks the trend. In 2010-11, it had 100,000 more people
moving in than moving out—along with over 40m tourists, who come for the
theme parks and the studio tours, the shopping and the nightlife and
the hope that they might just spot a celebrity. Because this is what
beckons the newcomers to Los Angeles' hearth: the great, fiery
possibility of it all.
AT ALMOST THE precise point where Beverly Hills turns into Sunset
Strip, and a short way back from the edge of the pavement, a man of
about 50 sits selling Star Maps. Manuel's last job was sewing in a
factory, but a lack of business led to job cuts, and now he spends seven
hours a day sitting here in the semi-shade, in which time he hopes to
sell "maybe four, five, six" maps.
Manuel is not alone in this enterprise. All along Sunset Boulevard
you see the gawpers passing by in open-top buses, the Primetime
Hollywood mini-trucks full of tourists, all waiting for their cue to
snap pictures of Frank Sinatra's former home, or the Rainbow Bar and
Grill, where Joe DiMaggio took Marilyn Monroe for their first date, or
the shrub that Lindsay Lohan flattened with her Mercedes (she was
subsequently arrested). As much as its streets are lined with high-rise
towers and Art Deco mansions and Spanish-colonial houses, it is really
the myths that make the architecture of this city: the whispered names,
the tales of who lived, loved and died here.
It is still early as Sarah the photographer and I reach Sunset Strip;
the streets below the high-rises lie smooth and quiet. We can still
smell the early lilacs of Beverly Hills, hear the low call of wood
pigeons as we pass City National Bank, billboards for Guess jeans and
Jack Daniel's. Scratched on an electricity cupboard is a warning: YOUNG
HOLLYWOOD WILL PAY.
At this hour, the Strip is largely populated by late-night stragglers
and morning street-sweepers. The cleaners in their orange tabards work
head-down, tidying all evidence of the evening’s revelry—broken glass
swept from patios, beer bottles fished from eucalyptus hedges. A group
of young women in short skirts, bare legs and leopard-print heels totter
by in a cloud of boozy laughter. In a bus shelter sits a young man
wearing shorts, a Chanel earring and elaborate sunglasses, ready to make
his weekly journey home from an electronica club. His name is Jake. "I
live far," he says sleepily. "It’s in LA county, but it's far." When a
woman jogs past, he looks faintly baffled by this strange collision of
night and day.
Past the Viper Room, where River Phoenix died 20 years ago, and the
clairvoyant and the tattoo parlour, and the window of the Hustler store,
with its gimp masks and its stripper shoes and the huge sign that
reads: "The Screaming O—Have One Tonight". Past the car-rental store
where you can lease a Bentley, the better to impress your date or your
business associates. Past the gaggle of Nickelback fans camped outside a
plush hotel, hoping to catch a glimpse of them. And on to Book Soup,
which has occupied this spot for nearly 40 years. Nicholas, a
63-year-old beautician, is flipping through Paris Match. "I
love this place," he says. "It's the only civilised place on the Strip. I
first started coming here way back in the early Eighties, when I had a
little nook up there, a salon, and the choice was either to come here or
get drunk in the bars."
He loves the smell of books, and he likes to buy the European
magazines. "It gives me a different perspective," he explains. "There's
more truth, more reality than flash. At my age I can't deal with fluff, I
need something more in my brain. My daughter says to me 'Dad, what are
you doing here? This is La-La Land!'"
LA-LA-LAND is a nickname that seems to have spread from the 1970s
onwards, a way to capture the strange and dreamy affectations of this
city. To walk Sunset is to be struck not only by the deliberately
outlandish characters but by the many mentally disturbed people on its
sidewalks: the woman rooting through bins who growled on approach, the
man masturbating in a car park, the slink-eyed souls muttering darkly to
themselves on street corners.
Then there was the peculiar encounter not far from the intersection
with La Brea Avenue, as a normal-looking young man hurtled towards us on
a skateboard. He was bare-chested, carrying a guitar and eating an ice
cream, and it was only as he drew close that we saw something fractured
in his eyes. "Save us!" he barked as he skated by. "Before they all kill
us!"
And if the air soured then, it was just as suddenly sweetened by the
chirruping of a man sitting among the plants on the verge, his hair a
tangle of ribbons and purple plastic, swigging Bud Light from a large
water bottle. "I'm in the penthouse!" he called brightly. It would be
wrong to say we had a conversation. He spoke as if a string had been
pulled to make him talk. Why had he come to Los Angeles, I asked, and he
gave a disconcerting grin. "I'm tropical, like a dolphin!" he hollered.
"You don't put it in the snow!"
He propositioned us, and upon our polite refusal he launched into
Carly Simon's "You’re So Vain". We all sang it, from start to finish,
there on the sidewalk.
Back on the Strip,
when the day was still young, we stopped by Mel's Drive-in, a 24-hour,
1950s-themed diner offering burgers and pancake stacks and Coke floats.
They were playing "Dancing in the Street" and "Beauty School Drop-Out"
on the jukebox, as a waitress with bouffant hair and bright pink
lipstick delivered a plate of waffles to a plump woman in a leatherette
booth.
At the back, a young
woman sat sketching on sheets of hotel notepaper. She was dressed in
high-stacked shoes and elaborate eyeliner, and at her elbow sat a
half-eaten bowl of apple pie. She frowned when I asked her name and
stared for a while. The light through the window made her skin look
ashen and her eyes hard. "Sun," she replied eventually.
Sun (above)
was born in Belarus and moved to Israel as a child before heading to New
York eight years ago to work in a clothing store. Somehow she ended up
in Los Angeles, running away from a bad relationship and arriving with a
dream of recording with Marilyn Manson. Her voice is heavily accented,
her glower at odds with the California day. "I'm super-tired," she says
suddenly. "I didn't sleep for like a week."
She tells us she has
just been released from jail, where she had been placed for trespassing
at the Four Seasons Hotel. "I was just there writing lyrics," she
insists, "I was really inspired. And a gentleman…" her sentence trails
off then revs up again: "I've been arrested twice in the past week," she
says. "The first time was because I started throwing tampons into
people's cars. I shouted 'Free tampons everyone! Free tampons!' I was so
bored, I needed company, and some guy was walking past and I took the
headphones from his ears and I told him 'Whoo! Let’s go party!' But he
was scared and he ran away. And then the police stopped me and said 'Are
you OK miss?' and I said to them 'I want to drive your car!'" And then
she was arrested. Now, she says, she has all these papers—she waves the
court documents, squints at the small, dark print. "I wish I could throw
them away. I wish I could make toilet paper out of it."
Now she is unsure what
to do. The bad relationship was psychologically harmful, she says. “It
was hard for me to recover. I thought OK, my goals are acting, art,
writing. But they won’t give you the papers for work. And it creates
legal problems.”
She is wondering if
she can stay with friends, or squat in an empty office block she has
seen on Rodeo Drive, but she is more pressingly concerned by a romantic
entanglement with a guy named Alex. "We met on Valentine's Day last
year," she says. "We met at noon-time in Hollywood. I said to him 'I
want to see your eyes.' And I took his sunglasses off and I thought 'Oh!
I love him!' I was hypnotised. I said 'I love your brown eyes.' And
then we went and bought contact lenses." She sighs. "I don’t understand
the differences between hanging out, dating or a relationship here in
America. He started telling me he was sleeping with other girls. I
wonder what the reality is? Is it a test?"
She shows us her
sketches, and her notebook, full of lyrics and half-ideas, doodles and
elaborate plans for an ecosystem that will cool the Earth. "I'm writing
things to fix the world," she explains. "It sounds stupid, because I
don't even have a place to be right now. I have a couple of cents left.
But I feel like I have nothing to lose. When you have complete freedom,
you realise you can actually survive without money and without sleep."
Sometimes, she adds, "you see the moon in the middle of the day. And so
sometimes I wonder if this is for real or if I've been punked."
Somewhere between Sun
in the diner and the tropical dolphin of a man near La Brea lies a story
of this city's lost and lonely and weak, of how easy it is to lose your
footing here, to lose your self and your sense of purpose, your job,
your home, your friends, your mind. Perhaps the most la-la thing about
Los Angeles is the apparent absence of a sufficient safety-net to catch the vulnerable.
THE LOS ANGELES region has one of the highest concentrations of
homelessness in America. In the two years from January 2011 to 2013 the
number of people living on the streets in the LA city area has increased
from 25,539 to 29,682. And it's estimated that a quarter of these
people suffer from a severe form of mental illness.
Many congregate downtown, in the area known as Skid Row, with its
cardboard-box shelters and shopping carts. "The poor man's underworld,"
the Pulitzer-prizewinning journalist Hal Boyle called it in 1947. "A
cross-section of American futility, the place where men who have lost
hope go after they have jettisoned their dreams." But you find this same
sense of futility on Sunset too: dirty bodies curled in doorways, a man
asleep on a bench, his feet turtled and grey.
The climate here makes it somewhat easier to survive on the streets.
It was part of the appeal for Debbie, now 58, who came here a year and a
half ago from Michigan. Debbie's story is not unusual: when the bank
foreclosed on her house she decided to head west to California, "because
I thought it was nice and warm." She had fond memories, too, of a trip
she made here when she was a 17-year-old hippie. She stayed in a hotel
at first, but nine months ago, when the money ran out, she began
sleeping on the street. For a while she moved about from day to day, but
now a leg injury means that she can mostly be found tucked under a
blanket outside Starbucks. "I watch people go by, I watch the traffic, I
think," she says. "Sometimes I get bored, so I take a nap."
Some of the homeless came here with dreams of more than warm weather.
A man sits smoking in a bus shelter. He is wearing blue surgical scrubs
and listening to "The Essential Michael Jackson". Calvin says he moved
to LA from Houston, leaving behind a well-paid job as a surgical
technician for a dream of becoming a stand-up comedian. He has a new job
lined up, at a surgery centre in Newport Beach, but until then he is
surviving from day to day. "I've been on this bench three months," he
says, jovially, "and I've got another month till I start work."
The experience has
been "pretty interesting," he says. "Some motherfucker stole my food
yesterday. And some homeless guys stole my money and my clothes. So this
is my life." He gestures towards his rucksack. "Two scrubs, two pairs
of underwear. But the police don't mess with me too much."
He put off coming here
for years, he says. "It's hard to leave a good job, good money…but my
heart kept calling me to LA." Now 40, he has wanted to be a stand-up
since he was 15 and watching "Showtime at the Apollo" on TV. This year,
he even performed at the Oscars after-party at the Comedy Store. "You
hold on to your dreams," he says, and it is only later that I begin to
wonder if any of it was true.
But still they come.
On our walk we meet aspiring directors, actors, cinematography students,
trainee music producers who dream of writing soundtracks, wide-eyed
young men from Sacramento queuing for brunch outside the Griddle. We
meet Matt and Bill, smoking cigarettes outside the Guitar Center. They
live in the Valley but came here for the weekend to record with their
"sorta nu-metal, thrash-metal" band. "Friday was a good night," says
Bill. "We got wasted. We had the cops called on us 12 times. And we had
to shower our guitarist because he threw up in his hair."
In the summer of 1950, Paramount Pictures released "Sunset
Boulevard", the story of an aspiring screenwriter who heads to Los
Angeles from Ohio and ends up dead in a swimming pool. It is a
cautionary tale, one that encompasses a pet chimpanzee, a faded movie
star, and the dangers of both delusion and aspiration. It culminates,
famously, with the washed-up actress addressing a great director:
"Alright, Mr DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up."
When we mention that
we are walking the length of Sunset, people look at us in disbelief,
assuring us that it was not only dangerous but most definitely weird. At
street level, though, you see more: an IBM laptop in a discarded
takeaway box holding seven prawns; two men dancing in the back room of a
salsa club; the words "Love Is What You Make It" scrawled across a
wall. You catch the faded incense as you walk past the Church of the
Blessed Sacrament, see Jayne Mansfield's pink suitcase displayed in the
window of the Dearly Departed Tours Office and Curiosity Shop, with a
sign beside it instructing you to "note the damage".
You meet people like
José, a former labour-union worker who, six months ago, opened a taco
van here on Sunset. "I'm 52 years old," he smiles, "but this is not a
midlife crisis. I am halfway through my life and it is a checkpoint:
where are you in life? Where you want to be? I consider this a journey.
There's a very bright light at the end of the tunnel. I can see it."
Or Paul, 58, who for
the last three months has stood silently outside Orchard Supply Hardware
with a sign notifying passers-by of its relocation sale. Normally he
works as a kerb painter. Paul grew up in Los Angeles. He remembers
Sunset in the Sixties, "when it used to be a lot cleaner. A. Lot.
Cleaner." He gets a little bored, he admits, standing here with little
to do except watch the traffic and think. Recently he saw a homeless guy
pushing a woman into the road. "About a month and a half ago. Right
there. He just pushed her. I've been thinking a lot about that guy."
You notice the
procession of names: Sunset Gower Studios, Sunset Bronson Studios, Home
Depot, Food4Less, Kaiser Permanente, The Hollywood Dialysis Center. You
notice the drive-thrus and the billboards, their adverts for "Mad Men"
and Adult Con and the Phil Spector biopic, all facing out towards the
road rather than to the pedestrians. And in this strange no-man's-land
you notice the hulking solidity of the buildings, the cars that sail by
so impermeably, the curious absence of life. So that when we chance upon
a group of skateboarders outside the Metro station at Vermont and
Sunset, we watch them, mesmerised, as they go rolling along the grey
marble benches, bodies flung backwards into mid-air, T-shirts flaring.
Again, and again, and again. They seem so vibrant.
The mood shifts as we
enter Echo Park and Silver Lake. The sidewalks are busier here, full of
hipsters walking dogs and eating gelato, standing on ladders and
painting murals, physically engaged in the process of gentrification.
There are microbreweries and vintage stores, cheese shops and vegan
restaurants. People ride bicycles. People even walk.
Gentrification brings
odd juxtapositions—designer handbags beside nail salons, tired-looking
launderettes pressed up against ashtanga-yoga centres, car-repair shops,
liquor stores, pawn shops; a giant American Apparel billboard
overlooking a bridge, and, under it, a homeless man on a dilapidated
sofa.
The sun is low as we
pass the Comfort Inn. A woman stands against the wall of the parking
lot, wearing a tracksuit and smoking a cigarette, her face tilted
upwards, soaking up the late warmth of the day.
She looks down over
the wall to talk to us. Her name is Alicia and she is here from Phoenix,
Arizona, for her daughter’s "X Factor" audition tomorrow. Her daughter,
Savannah, is 16. "She’s real good," she assures us. "Some people say
that because it's their child. Well that's not the case. All of her
teachers, everybody, they say how good she is."
She calls Savannah to
come down and join us. While we wait, Alicia tells us her thoughts on
Los Angeles: "Everybody's lost their mind," she says, her breath clouded
with cigarette smoke. "I've had relatives out here, they've come here
for their dream and they've been used, ended up on drugs and homeless."
Savannah appears by
the wall. She is a sweet, sensible-looking girl with soft eyes and a
pretty oval face. Tomorrow at her audition, she will sing an Etta James
song, "All I Could Do Was Cry".
"I like the words," she says, "the concept of it, how she sings, how she builds it up."
There outside the
Comfort Inn, Savannah begins to sing. She closes her eyes and lifts her
voice over the roar of the traffic on Sunset. "Ohhh, I heard church
bells ringing," she sings, her voice rich and dusky and warm. "I heard a
choir singing/I saw my love walk down the aisle/On her finger he placed
a ring…"
And as we stand quite
still on the sidewalk here, the scene once more draws into focus. A
scruffy stretch of road. The silence that follows song. The bright,
enchanting promise of this city.
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