"East is East, and West is San Francisco, according to Californians. Californians are a race of people, not merely inhabitants of a state."
- O. Henry, "A Municipal Report", Strictly Business, 1910.
I have California cousins. Two girls, both strong, blonde and beautiful, on whom I have not laid eyes in ten years. I guess they'd be women now. They're my mother's cousin's kids, not all that closely related - just close enough that we could tastefully impose on their hospitality every few years growing up, when my brother and I needed a Disney fix. They actually live in Anaheim. On clearer nights in their backyard you could see the fireworks from the Magic Kingdom. I've never envied anyone so much.
Heidi was my favorite and my idol. She had long, shiny hair and knew a lot about makeup. And boys. Her younger sister, Alison, and I deferred to her in every situation. Alison was chubby and friendly, and insightful in a way I didn't recognize then. She cried easily. Heidi loved to boss her around.
They had mysterious customs. One night they made me run around the neighborhood with their gang, throwing toilet paper all over people's palm trees. I'd never heard of such a thing. They said "yuh-huh" for yes and "nuh-uh" for no, and called me "Ayun". They were kind to me, but they never let me forget for one second that I wasn't one of them. I didn't need reminding; their Otherness was made manifest in their every move, so much freer than I could dream of in strapless terry-towel shorts sets, snapping their gum and shining in the constant sun.
I suppose that's why I never really made it there. In 1985, the last time I was in California, my dad was offered a job in La Jolla. We could have moved there right away, spent the rest of our teenage years beached and blissful, but when asked if I wanted to go I just couldn't say "yuh-huh." Like O. Henry - writing before the summer of 1920, when the population of Los Angeles at 508,000 surpassed that of San Francisco for the first time, effectively usurping its position as the Capital of the Coast - I understood that California doesn't exist for those who dream of all it has to offer; it exists for those who think they deserve it, and those who have never known anything else. To live there all the time, you'd have to be pretty greedy - or pretty special. I chose to be neither, and now I live in New York.
New Yorkers just don't get California. We rarely get anything outside Manhattan, come to that, but we really don't get The Golden State, particularly Los Angeles. That's not to say we don't think about it. I know I do, a lot. Perhaps because my memories of the place are of the sun-drenched childhood variety; perhaps because all road trips seem to end there, in the movies and in real life; and perhaps because I live in New York, and am denied the very basic pleasure of cruising around in a car. It's hard to know what California means to the rest of the world, having encamped myself firmly on one side of the East/West blood feud, but that's exactly what I want to find out. People can't still be going there for the weather, can they? As a Philadelphian friend of mine puts it,
"I have absolutely no sympathy for anyone who chooses to live in California, when God has given them every conceivable sign - excepting maybe plagues of locusts - that people are just not meant to live there!"
A quick hitch up the Pacific Coast Information Superhighway later, I discover just a little more evidence to support her opinion than I care to. Baffled by the number of California Disaster-related online sites, I settle for the Weekly Earthquake Report for Southern California, March 9-15, 1995, prepared by Kate Hutton of the Seismological Library and Lucy Jones of the U.S. Geological Survey at CalTech. Hutton and Jones, without the slightest hint of humor or terror, state,
"This week's report covers the time period from midnight Thursday morning, March 9, to midnight Wednesday night, March 15, 1995. We recorded 268 earthquakes of M1.0 or larger during the 7-day period covered. It was another quiet week. The largest event was a M3.5 Landers aftershock, that was located about 6 mi. E of Barstow. ...Two smaller quakes were also felt ... ."
Other treats Mother Nature has tossed CA's way in the last few weeks include: dangerous flooding of the Sacramento river, threatening the population of the state capital and surrounding area; massive flooding of Clear Lake, at Lakeport; and winter storm warnings for virtually all of Northern California as of this writing. According to the State of California's online Emergency Digital Information Service, which distributes up-to-the-minute disaster information via their Oasis satellite, Californians in every part of the state should be aware of current fire, flood, and wind advisories. I decided to forego whatever wisdom I might have gleaned from the California Hazardous Materials Response Plan seminar. I assume it disseminates helpful hints for those living in proximity to any of the state's numerous nuclear reactors. Earthquakes and radioactive substances? It doesn't get any better than that, kids!
Of course, if you can ignore the earthquakes, the flooding, the fires, and the inevitable avalanches of crystals, there's apparently still a very peaceful way of life to enjoy out there. If you don't mind being utterly deluded, I guess. Delusion is big business in California. Listen to the words of Walt Disney, who'd recently turned 180 acres of Anaheim orange groves into "The Happiest Place On Earth"TM,
"I don't want the public to see the world they live in while they're in Disneyland. I want them to feel they're in another world."
To many, Disneyland might as well be the capital of California - and California the capital of the U.S.A. The idea that anything is possible if you only put your heart and mind to it is a sweet one, but even the folks in Iowa probably regard it with some irony today. The words with which Walt opened the park on July 17, 1955, could just as easily have come from some founding fathers' document, suitable for carving into a big marble arch at the state border to welcome travelers to Neverland.
"To all who come to this happy place: welcome. Disneyland is your land. Here age relives fond memories of the past ... and here youth may savor the challenge and promise of the future. Disneyland is dedicated to the ideals, the dreams, and the hard facts which have created America ... with the hope that it will be a source of joy and inspiration to the world."
And, indeed, Disneyland has attracted hundreds of millions of visitors in its forty years of operation, many of them notable. Guests on the park's opening day included then-and-future California governors Goodwin Knight and Ronald Reagan; and a host of entertainers including Jerry Lewis, Jimmy Stewart, Buddy Ebsen, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans. Future crook and then-Vice-President Richard M. Nixon opened the Monorail in June, 1959. The official Disney publication "Disneyland - The First Thirty-Five Years" features photographs of: Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie; all the Kennedys; King Hussein of Jordan; and numerous distinguished others, all getting in touch with their inner children at the park. When Nikita Krushchev visited the U.S. in 1959, he expressed a desire to visit Disneyland. According to the book,
"At a film industry luncheon attended by scores of movie stars, he was advised that too many security precautions were necessary before he could visit the Magic Kingdom, and that he would not be able to go. Like a child who had been denied a toy, the Soviet leader ranted,
'Just now I was told that I could not go to Disneyland... . For me, the situation is inconceivable; I cannot find the words to explain this to my people!' "
Public response to this international crisis was swift, say the "Disneyland" authors, as VIP's from every walk of life leaped to the tantrum-throwing leader's defense.
"Author Herman Wouk wrote, 'I don't blame Krushchev for jumping up and down in a rage over missing Disneyland; there are few things more worth seeing in the United States, or indeed anywhere in the world.' "
Had little Nikita known about the dark underbelly of the world's most celebrated theme park, however, I suspect he might have counted himself lucky to have escaped the place. Surfing the 'Net in true California style, my eye was caught by one of many peculiar Disney-related postings: "Waiting in Line to Die (Death at Disneyland)". The text, from a 'zine entitled "Murder Can Be Fun" (issue #13), outlines the relatively rare, but incredibly disturbing, Disneyland fatalities that can be attributed to the park's attractions rather than natural causes. It's a hilarious article - who knew the Peoplemover had undone so many? - that makes no attempt to gloss over the park's responsibility in some of the incidents. The most upsetting anecdote involves the park's only homicide, which occurred in March of 1981. A scuffle broke out between two young men near the Tomorrowland Skyway. James O'Driscoll, a 28-year-old man from San Diego, accused 18-year-old Mel Yorba of Riverside, of touching his girlfriend. O'Driscoll produced a blade and stabbed Yorba, and was eventually convicted of second-degree murder. According to the author of "Waiting in Line to Die", John Marr (of San Francisco),
"No one criticized Disneyland security's handling of the killing. With efficiency rivaled only by certain Third-World dictatorships and some former Eastern Bloc police states, they swung into action. ...O'Driscoll only managed to evade the kingdom-wide manhunt for little more than an hour before he was found hiding in the bushes in Adventureland."
He levels a more serious charge at park management's treatment of the victim. Apparently in keeping with Walt's policy of letting guests forget about the world outside, a Disneyland nurse decided to have the seriously wounded Yorba driven to the hospital in a park van, rather than calling an ambulance. Marr writes,
"By the time the van, lacking flashing emergency lights, made its leisurely way to the hospital (which, unlike other nearby hospitals, did not have a trauma center), Yorba was to all intents dead from a knife wound piercing his heart, liver and diaphragm. For once, Disneyland was roundly chastised in the media. Two Disneyland workers claimed "the rule at the park is don't call the paramedics." Presumably, flashing red lights and uniformed rescue personnel tearing up Main Street would mar the park's atmosphere."
As a result of this bad publicity, Disneyland hired an ambulance and changed its emergency procedures slightly - but in the ensuing trial, the jury found Disney negligent to the tune of $600,000.
This isn't the only scary bit of evidence that "The Happiest Place On Earth"TM may be just slightly rotten on the inside. A friend of mine who works every summer at the Park will attest to the legend that Disneyland employees, or "Cast Members", as Walt styled them, are paid peanuts and treated like dirt by the corporation. They also refer to the park as "Mouschwitz" or "Duckau". She produced a frighteningly long list of park attractions that still contain asbestos, but in the interest of self-preservation. I won't go into that this time.
I don't mean to suggest that poor old Walt - who, as legend has it, may float, cryo-preserved, beneath the climate-controlled warehouse of "Pirates of the Caribean" - is the only famous Californian in the delusionary business. The whole point of the Hollywood film industry is the creation of fantasy, both on-screen and off. Louis B. Mayer, the Walt Disney of his Hollywood heyday, exercised a degree of control over every aspect of his stars' lives that would make a career in the military seem like a relaxing and creative atmosphere. When Hollywood was the planet's capital of illusion, and the "star system" was at its peak of operation, the public knew nothing about an actor that the studio did not approve. As the always-astute Quentin Crisp noted in an interview in New-York based Casting magazine,
"Anyone who's been on television wears permanently an expression of fatuous affability. I'm sure Miss Taylor does that. When Miss Taylor arrives, she doesn't wave at the audience and she doesn't ignore the audience: she steps out of the limousine far enough for the door to be shut behind her. Then she turns her face, and on it is written: 'This is what you came to see ... and here it is.' And that's what you have to do, to present your image. Marlene Dietrich was the first person I ever heard use the word "image" in the modern sense; she said, 'I dress for the image.' She controlled her image. In the old days, we only knew of the stars what Mr. Mayer wished us to know; and he wished them to be glamorous. But he also wished them to be domesticated, because he had this weird idea that they must be nice people. Now, we know everything about everybody.
Back in the day, a star could virtually ruin his or her career by filing for divorce. Engaging in an extramarital affair, should the public find out about it, meant certain career death. (Look at what happened to Eddie Fisher after he left Debbie Reynolds for Liz Taylor. They crucified him!) Now, such "scandals" are practically de rigeur in order to remain in the public eye. It's only in the last decade or so that phrases like,
"There's no such thing as bad publicity," have been echoing through the hallowed halls of Creative Artists' Agency. Entire careers have been built upon rumors that would have once been considered too distasteful for public consumption (Joey Buttafuoco, Jessica Hahn, John Wayne Bobbitt, Kato Kaelin). Remember when tiny Scientologist Tom Cruise left his wife Mimi Rogers to marry mail-order bride Nicole Kidman?. He had her shipped over to be his co-star in the wretched "Days of Thunder" after salivating over her work in "Dead Calm". This all unfolded smoothly, despite the common industry knowledge that he had already proposed to Nicole before he even informed Mimi that he was unhappy with their marriage. The Hollywood community supported his decision, and consequently, so did the rest of the world. Apparently, abruptly ditching one's wife for a younger woman is an acceptable sin in California, but getting fat is unforgivable. (When was the last time you heard anything nice about, say, Delta Burke?)
What, exactly, constitutes a scandal in Hollywood these days is fairly difficult to predict. Industry types were quick to blackball Vanessa Redgrave for her stance of non-support during the Persian Gulf Crisis; yet no one is willing to make a strong statement about Michael Jackson. Or O.J. Or just whose power-player names were contained in the disposable Heidi Fleiss' little black book. Everyone's heard, but no one's willing to say. In a culture so wholly dependent on image as a commodity, when push comes to shove no one wants to admit, maybe even to themselves, that anything is wrong. Cracking up in public is certainly not advisable in California. Unless, of course, you can turn the situation to your advantage. Comedian Denis Leary, himself an increasingly significant Hollywood presence, decries this phenomenon in his "No Cure for Cancer" special, talking about his plans to revive his moribund career by staging a feel-good comeback, complete with thumbs-up smiling cover story in People magazine. But for every Liza Minelli, David Crosby, Patty Duke or Dennis Hopper, California can produce any number of unfortunates who have achieved the same degree of notoriety, but somehow fallen by the mental wayside: Brian Wilson; Howard Hughes; Crispin Glover; Marlon Brando.
It seems particularly tragic that Wilson - the gentle genius of the Beach Boys, who gave the world the cult of California set to music - could stop having so much fun fun fun after three bad trips and a failed marriage that he literally stayed in bed for years. Maybe, just maybe, he was ashamed to admit that he wasn't as goldenly happy as he should have been. Of course, twenty years and a lot of radical therapy later, he's "back", presumably better than ever, and has just resolved his long-term differences with his nasty little meditating cousin Mike Love. (Read Wilson's heart-wrenching autobiography, Wouldn't It Be Nice?, to get the real story on that no-talent sponge, as well as tremendous insights into Brian's deeply Californian madness.) Now that Love's managed to extricate Brian utterly from the clutches of his beloved (and, oddly enough, also insane) therapist Dr. Landy, we can look forward to even more "let's parade the freak" public appearances by Wilson and the remaining Beach Boys. "Dead Man's Curve" survivor Jan Berry, the brain-damaged half of Jan and Dean, is wheeled out of hiding every few years in much the same way, which only serves to remind us that Californians leave no situation unexploited, no matter how indelicate.
None of this should come as a surprise - I imagine the good citizens of the state take incidental mental illness in stride, given the enormous pressure to relax and stay mellow. California is built on escapism. First it was the great frontier, then the moving picture show, Disneyland, LSD, EST, the Betty Ford Clinic, Virtual Reality. In California, they have discovered that the frontier needn't be an external thing. It's more of a Golden State of mind. In the future, hopefully, no one will ever have to leave their car.
It's hard not to draw analogies between California culture in 1995 and the many other influential empires the sun has sadly set on. Rome, say, about the time of the Decline and Fall? Even California icons like media darling/demon Charles Manson have been quick to compare the greater Los Angeles area to the setting of the final Apocalyptic showdown (as artistically rendered by St. John in his "Revelations"). Perhaps it's the idea of living so deliciously close to the Ultimate Destruction that turns people on. Death is certainly a major player out there. Used to be, California was the province of the young and beautiful, who'd conveniently cash it all in before plastic surgery was even necessary. The land, as in pagan times, required a few of these sacrifices per generation to keep things fertile. Now, before you can finish listening to the Hard Copy broadcast of the River Phoenix 911 call, up pops Leonardo, Eddie, Brad; any one of an endless supply of babes who will doubtless live forever, land be damned. Perry Farrell, who was my surest bet for the first rock'n'roll martyr of the nineties, is looking richer and healthier with every passing day. Those who should have died young are living a long, long time in California, and someone is going to pay the price.
When did California start to suck? The impression I get, from people who've been there more recently than myself, is that it used to be better than it is. The two major cities, San Francisco and Los Angeles, are by all accounts just as rotten as New York.
"Even worse in some ways", says a friend who tried living in both last year. "Everyone in California still suffers under the illusion that other people envy them, that they're really cool and cutting edge. At least people in New York have the decency to be miserable."
Of all the people I've talked to, only one would even consider moving to California - and only because she's an actress and she wants more film work. I find this a bit odd, as it's traditionally portrayed as the last stop on the way to achieving the American Dream. This sentiment isn't held by non-Californians alone. Apparently, if anything, the trend is turning the opposite way. The U.S. census reports that a projected four million, forty-nine thousand people will leave California for other states between the years 1990 and 2020, indicating a previously unheard-of migration from the state. The remaining population, meanwhile, will be older than ever before. As of the 1993 Census, 10.5% of the state's population was over the age of 65; for 2020, the projected number is 13.8%. The expected number of births between those years is 20,129,000, with only 8,300,000 deaths on the horizon. However, net immigration to the state over the thirty-year period is expected to top ten million. What all this means is, although people will continue to flood California from all over the country (and the world), there will be more oldsters amongst them - and for the first time ever, Californians will be leaving in droves.
Perhaps these figures are indicative of the kind of xenophobic attitude that has brought about proposed state legislation like the anti-immigrant Proposition 187 in recent times. Obviously, the proposition's aim is to make life in California even more difficult for undocumented immigrants, the vast majority of whom are Mexican - which is strange, because if it weren't for Mexico, not only would California as we know it not exist, it would probably be a lot more like its trashier cousin, Florida. The state that is now called The California Republic (yes, it says so right on the flag) was initially explored between the 16th and 18th centuries by the Spanish, who were also the first to colonize it, in 1769. The colony was under Mexican rule from 1822 to 1848, when it was ceded to the U.S.A., and became the 31st state of the Union in 1850. Now, a century and a bit later, state legislators are attempting to shaft the descendants of a population to whom they owe most of their place-names, cuisine, and knowledge of psychedelics. As my nan would say, well isn't that a fine how-de-do?
I don't wish to blame anyone. But when a whole nation tends to look towards one place to find out what's acceptable in the mainstream - through film, television, music, advertising - it's important to make sure that we're not all following a stampede of incompassionate, self-absorbed, yogurt-swilling lemmings as they plunge headlong into the Pacific. Bear in mind that in addition to vast resources of oil, natural gas, gold, salt, tungsten, and 60% of the country's supply of mercury, California possesses the largest natural stores of vibes in the world - and how much longer they'll be good is anybody's guess.
