Coast to Coast (20 page)

In Montana once I found the road blocked for a mile or more by a mass of sheep. Some were moving very slowly, some were nibbling the sparse grass beside the highway, some were sitting down, and one or
two seemed to be fast asleep. At the head of this leisurely procession were two cowboys, mounted on fine black horses. The men were very weatherbeaten, dirty and bearded, with their tangled hair escaping from their hats and their finger-nails black and broken. They had been rounding up the sheep in the surrounding mountains, to bring them down for shearing and to escape the coming winter snows. “We been fourteen days in the hills,” said one, “and seven days on the move. Sheep ain’t very fast movers. Boy! Will I be glad of a bed!

“As for this horse,” he added affectionately, “all
he
wants is a good hot cup of coffee and a place to put his feet up! Ain’t that right, boy?”

L
ong after the Industrial Revolution in England the Pacific Coast of the United States remained unspoilt and idyllic‚ all the way from the forests of Washington State to the Spanish shore of southern California. Times have abruptly changed, for at its most delectable point, where the mountains come down to the sea, the Americans have built Los Angeles, and for most people that hectic complexity has become representative of the region. I have never experienced a less pleasing contrast than the one which overwhelms the traveller, in his innocence, as he journeys out of Nevada into the frenetic bustle of Los Angeles.

The city sprawls from the sea for many miles inland, an enormous mess of related townships, criss-crossed by big busy roads, blotched by dingy quarters of poor whites and Mexicans, given its reputation of fabulous peculiarity by the mansions of the film magnates and the glamorous streets of shops and hotels that surround the studios of Hollywood. The business area of Los Angeles is drab and ugly; the long line of the beaches has been spoilt by relentless exploitation, so that the beautiful semi-tropical coast, so warm and inviting, is alive with a riotous mass of feverish architecture, tarnished and corrupted by the touch of a jazzy civilization.

The pressure of life in this place is wearying, and many of its people are therefore touchy and unfriendly, even disdaining (as often as not) to summon that veneer of standard charm dictated by the American theorists of success. Irritable faces are everywhere, and hurried, waspish movements. Only the police force, one of the best in America, manages to maintain the easy courtesy one would expect of a people so happily placed geographically, and with so gracious a historical background.

Nevertheless, there is a fascination about Los Angeles, emanating chiefly from the film studios, that is not easily escaped. It arises partly, of course, because of the extreme notability of its inhabitants. I once arrived at Mary Pickford’s house in response to an invitation to tea. Miss Pickford, though no longer acting, is a powerful force in the financial structure of Hollywood, and her mansion, a pleasing white house in a country-house garden, is excessively grand. I was greeted
by her manager, but by a misunderstanding he had not been told of the invitation. His manner, I thought, was a trifle forbidding. Might he see my credentials, please? Yes, yes, a visiting card was all very well, but how could he tell that I was who I purported to be? Did I not realize that Miss Pickford was a very very important person indeed? “Tell me,” he said, “would you expect to go straight in and see the Foreign Secretary, back home? Do you realize people try and get in this house just to
touch
Miss Pickford? She is
a
fabulous
personality, and we have to be very,
very
careful who comes in here.” I was stifling a surge of resentment at this Kremlinesque treatment when Miss Pickford’s secretary arrived, the impasse was resolved, the manager beat a rather embarrassed retreat, and I was ushered into the garden; where Miss Pickford was drinking China tea, given her by Madame Chiang Kai-Shek, with a young Episcopalian clergyman and a celebrated surgeon from Texas.

The fascination lies in the fact that this aura of unnatural despotism surrounds people who are intimately familiar to us, whose faces we know precisely, whose very boudoirs we have, as often as not, entered in the course of some dancing comedy. It was greatly interesting to me, if not moving, to enter the very room where Walt Disney’s chattering chipmunks were conceived. Disney’s studios are large and beautifully tended, with gardens and lawns and streets named after cartoon characters: but for me the best of it was to hear a friendly artist say: “I’ve always loved the chipmunks, ever since we first drew them.” These two little creatures, who live together in a tree-trunk, talk to each other in a wild flow of unintelligible language, very fast and squeaky. I asked Disney if they were really saying anything comprehensible. “Well, we began by recording a conversation, speeding it up very fast, and then playing it backwards, so you couldn’t really make much sense of that. But lately we’ve played it the right way about, and if you listen very carefully you can sometimes get the meaning of it.” Two little American animals (their very species is unknown to millions of their admirers) sent out to distant and exotic places to talk an alien language backwards!

The stars, poor things, can scarcely resist the temptations of global celebrity. Beverly Hills, the district they have built for themselves on the hillside, stretching away out of the perpetual mists of Los Angeles into the heavenly sunshine above, is a caricature of a stockbrokers’ suburb, enlivened by illusions of greater grandeur. The streets are neat and symmetrical, lined with handsome trees. The garden gates are dainty, often suggestive of gnomes and thatched summerhouses. The
houses are rarely blatant, but generally decorous, and often of Olde Worlde inclinations. On the higher reaches of the hill, where the flowers are more brilliant and the air more stimulating, the houses lose some of their restraint, but most of Beverly Hills is eminently genteel, in appearance anyway. The bigger and more established the star, the more he tends to see himself as a magnate rather than an artist, and the more hierarchical his household becomes, and the more dignified and manorial his residence. How unbecoming they must think it, these constitutional monarchs of Hollywood, when the tourist guides set up their stands on the pavements, and tote their brazen signs: “See where the Stars Live: Maps and Guide Books, 50 cents! Every Star’s Home Marked!”

I watched one of the most feudal of all Hollywood actors in action in a studio, and was amused to see the corrosive effect of many long years as a celebrated profile. How he posed and postured! How regularly, when he muffed his lines, did he stare petulantly towards the door, as if to imply that some poor stagehand, standing morosely there, had disturbed the flow of his words with a stifled cough or a shifting of feet! With what consummate tact the director gave his instructions, so circuitously worded that no suggestion of command could be read into them, and purposely designed to allow that ageing hero, with a flourish of impatience, to disobey them in the required manner! “Do we really need all these people on the set at once?” said the profile irritably. ‘I mean, they don’t appear in this frame, do they? Forgive me, but I really can’t see why these people should hang around.
Would
you mind?” (Here a sudden intense flash of the famous smile.) “
Would
you mind leaving us, my dears?” And with what grimaces of tired and tolerant distaste those two good subsidiary actors left the set, the little man with the wrinkled face, the tall lady who portrays to perfection the fussy schoolmaster’s wife, with a wink to the director from the man, a mock flounce and tossing of skirts from the woman—lost, all lost, on that dull conceited actor behind them, smoothing his greying moustache with one hand, thumbing his script with the other, with the air of a man who is expecting to find spelling mistakes!

However, I confess that despite the presence of such unattractive phenomena, I enjoyed my glimpse of Hollywood and its people. I sat one evening in a smart and famous restaurant as the guest of a distinguished English actor, not one of the cosmic celebrities, but a man much-loved in his profession; and past us, down the passage between the tables, came a dazzling procession of handsome men and girls in wonderful dresses, shimmering with fine brocades, sparkling with diamonds, their furs as crisp as snow, their manner of festivity flaunting and
irresistible. I do not know what sordid proceedings were hatched at Chason’s that night, nor what forbidden intimacies were performed afterwards, nor how crucial were the contracts discussed. But many of those ambitious young celebrities paused very pleasantly to pay their respects to my host, with a smile or a light remark, and to shake hands agreeably and unhurriedly with me. Some of their faces are as familiar in Baghdad as in Stoke Newington; but only occasionally did I see one racked by the blasé complacency I expected.

On the technical side of film production, in particular, there are many bright, able and accommodating people. You may meet them anywhere as you stroll about the studios, the English artist working for Disney, with his northcountry bounce, his cheerful cockiness and his excellent tweeds; the young cameraman from Brazil, with a roving eye and a wittily disjointed style of conversation; the writer from Yale, not too cynical about his professional tasks, but deeply engaged nevertheless, in the corner of the studio, with the manuscript of a book on the Metaphysicals. I shall never forget the grave pleasure with which one of the greatest art directors accepted his winnings at a game of bingo in a club at Santa Monica, on the sea; the prize was one dollar, and he wondered anxiously (whispering about it to his wife and to me) whether he ought to go and collect it, or whether it would be presumptuous to expect the master of ceremonies to bring it to him; and he sat there indecisively until it was brought to him at last, a silver dollar at the bottom of a goldfish bowl, and he picked it out seriously and slipped it into his pocket, very pleased indeed.

The wealth of Los Angeles, and especially Beverly Hills, is incalculable. It was brought sharply home to me by the manager of an actor who suffered from recurrent illness, and was thereby handicapped in the making of films and the accretion of money. “Poor fellow,” this man said, “he’s going through a bad time. I don’t mean he’s starving, or anything like that, you know. He can manage. He gets by. He can make—poor chap, it’s hard to watch—he can make one film in the year—90,000 dollars or so—he
manages
—but it’s a bad time for him, a very bad time.” This was an actor never particularly well known, a familiar face without a name; and his situation emphasized the simply fabulous resources of the top stars—wealth beyond the imagination of the old gold prospectors, and by no means to be sniffed at by many a small and moth-eaten Republic. The streets of Beverly Hills are among the most glittering in America; the shops packed with delectable items, the hotels piled deep with carpets, the boulevards wide and embellished with fine palms. Around the fringes of Los Angeles there is much dinginess, and
some of the streets that link the business section with the sea are paragons of drab monotony; but Beverly Hills, adapting itself skilfully to the demands of the television era, still oozes opulence, well-being and good preservation.

Not all this money comes from films. The high company and glamour of Hollywood has lured many rich men to its precincts who have nothing to do with the cinema; and Los Angeles itself, in area the largest city on earth, is booming with industry. Several of the American oil millionaires live in Beverly Hills, as much courted by the film community as the stars are pestered by their fans. I went to a cocktail party at the house of one of these tycoons. His was a mansion built in the Spanish style, with shutters and porches and creepers, and large slim dogs standing languidly near the door. In the hall, I remember, there was a large bookrest, like a lectern without its eagle, and on it opened at the letter O, thus making a fairly symmetrical ornament, was a gigantic leather-bound copy of Webster’s Dictionary. The room in which the party was already noisily proceeding was crammed with the heads of wild animals—not just the odd elk’s head, or a few scattered antelope, but close, serried ranks of larger and more ferocious creatures —lions and rhinoceros and hippopotami—pushed in together, jowl to jowl, tusk to tusk, so that one beady eye seemed to run into the next, and shaggy matted ears were all but entangled with neighbouring horns. Our host, a genial and robust person, was standing at the bar, built of dark oak in one corner of the room, telling a funny story to the barman. “Hi, there! Come on in!” said he, pushing me a potent Martini. “You know the General, don’t you?”—and still with one arm on the bar he waved cheerfully in the direction of an elderly man whose very word (only a few years before) had been enough to summon an army or launch a campaign. So the evening began, and I found myself wandering a trifle dazed among the animals and the celebrities; the film stars, bronzed or beautiful; the captains of industry, in dark double-breasted suits, wonderfully suggestive of stocks and oil wells and astronomical incomes; the leopards; the public figures from a few years back, whose faces once looked at us from the cover of
Time
magazine, who have written their memoirs and ground their axes, and who have now withdrawn to California, with their plump wives in pale pink cocktail dresses, and their sons on leave from Fort Knox, to mingle eminently with the party crowds, and express their ponderous opinions on the strategic value of sputniks.

“And where are you off to next?” asked a benign plutocrat, wearing shoes of crocodile skin.

“Seattle‚” I replied “for a couple of days. I’m taking the train there tomorrow.”

“Ha!” said he. “Don’t take the train, I’m going there tomorrow myself, on my way to visit my oil wells in Alaska, and I’m taking my private plane. Why don’t you come along? It’s very comfortable—it’s a DC-3, boosted up, of course. I’ve put my own engines in, we should make it in three hours. Okay? See you at the airport.”

And so saying he wandered off, to flirt heavily with a nearby actress, and dig a friendly admiral wickedly in the ribs.

So I did, and left Los Angeles suitably. We arrived at the airport in three different cars—the millionaire, his private secretary, and I—each with our uniformed chauffeur. There stood the aeroplane, gleaming in a peculiar combination of colours. It was decorated with the flags of every territory it had crossed, and with the names of the various seas, and the millionaire’s monogram was prominently displayed on its nose. There stood the pilot, and the co-pilot, and the steward, and the crates of good food, and the bottles and the siphons, and the napkins decorated with the millionaire’s initials. There waited the various secretaries, and managers, and couriers, with last-minute advice about the state of stocks, and a few whispered queries, and a briefcase or two full of papers.