The Golden Dream (24 page)

Al Benjamin says: “As the suburbs have grown, they've separated more and more into tiny islands—each one cut off from the others, isolated from the others, and then separated again into islands within islands. The insularity becomes stronger and stronger.” Perhaps, then, what Professor Tutko was trying to say was that in shopping-center country, a family meeting ground and an armed camp are now pretty much the same thing.

Indeed, it could be postulated that nearly all of California (with the exception of “the city”) is a collection of islands in search of a common state of mind. (Los Angeles, in fact, has often been described as “a group of suburbs in search of a city.”) California's growth has been suburban sprawl, and though each new California suburb looks much like all the others, no prevailing emotional force has appeared to bind them all together except, perhaps, the climate. Truly, California's communities waste a great deal of energy denigrating each other. Publisher Michael Korda, who has spent a good
deal of time in the state, thinks all this is because when the westward settlement of the United States ran its final course, it encountered the Pacific Ocean; it was stopped there and could go no farther. The pioneer spirit that had pushed across Ohio and the Great Plains, over the ordeal of the Rockies and the Sierras, came to rest at the beach. There, with a feeling of “Was it this that we were after?” it has been reposing ever since, disappointed, but too tired to go back. If California communities seem to lack separate identities, and to lack a sense of commonality as well, this is perhaps why.

And yet at least one California community has managed to create a distinctive personality for itself, and that is Santa Barbara. Too far from both Los Angeles and San Francisco to be “influenced” by either place, Santa Barbara has set about determinedly to develop its own particular style. It is a style, furthermore, that resents and resists criticism from outside. Not long ago, for example, Santa Barbara was up in arms. There was only one topic of conversation on everyone's lips. (Normally, there are two topics of conversation on everyone's lips in Santa Barbara: rising real estate taxes and the more comforting phenomenon of rising real estate values.) The uproar was over a magazine article.

In its June, 1976, issue,
Town & Country
had published an article by Easterner Linda Ashland called “The Santa Barbara Style,” consisting of a short text and many pages of photographs of wealthy Santa Barbarans enjoying their favorite pastime, Santa Barbara. It showed Santa Barbarans in their terraced, Italianate formal gardens, around their colonnaded pool houses and pools, in their opulent living rooms and bedrooms with
trompe l'oeil
walls painted to produce, say, a likeness of the view from the Gritti Palace in Venice, in polo outfits and riding habits. It showed Santa Barbara suffused in sunlight with views of blue sea and skies and purplish mountains, and dressed in pastels of pink and blue and lavender, in Pucci pants and Gucci shoes. “Disgusting!” “Perfectly ghastly!” “Dreadful!” were some of the opinions circulating about Miss Ashland's article. But considering the obvious beauty of the setting which the article conveyed, along with the golden healthiness of its residents, it was hard to figure out what the fuss was all about.

Gradually, it emerged. While everyone agreed that Miss Ashland had been correct in pointing out Santa Barbara's fondness for foreign cars—Mercedeses and BMWs in particular—what everyone objected to was the magazine's choice of people photographed to
illustrate the article. What, for example, did Suzy Parker (formerly a New York model, now married to actor Bradford Dillman and living in Santa Barbara) have to do with Santa Barbara? How did Clifton Fadiman (born in Brooklyn, and Jewish) or Barnaby Conrad (a San Francisco transplant) fit into the Santa Barbara scene? Certainly
Hair
producer Michael Butler, sort of a millionaire hippie from Chicago who was once arrested for growing marijuana in his garden, was far from the typical Santa Barbaran; he had once entertained Mick Jagger. Most offensive of all, it turned out, was the woman whom the magazine had chosen to place on its cover, Mrs. Manuel Rojas, wearing chandelier emerald earrings to match her eyes. What did
she
have to do with the Santa Barbara style? everyone wanted to know. Chandelier emerald earrings are most definitely not the Santa Barbara style. The Rojases, furthermore, are considered
nouveau riche
(Perta Oil Marketing, Inc.) and originally came from, of all places, Beverly Hills. They settled in Santa Barbara as recently as 1974.

Santa Barbara is a community where literally hours can be spent discussing who is “typical Santa Barbara” and who is not. The typical Santa Barbaran, it is agreed, is “conservative.” If, for conservative, some people read stuffy and smug, that is perfectly all right with Santa Barbara. Santa Barbarans feel that they have elevated smugness to the level of an art form. The typical Santa Barbaran goes in for espadrilles and tennis shoes more than for emeralds, which Mrs. Rojas was clearly shown wearing in broad daylight. The typical Santa Barbaran distrusts outsiders, and dislikes change. When the local Baskin-Robbins ice cream shop discontinued a flavor called Pralines 'n' Cream, the citizenry, who had grown fond of the flavor, picketed the establishment until Pralines 'n' Cream was restored to the inventory. Santa Barbara women like to boast that theirs was the last community in America to accept the pants suit. The typical Santa Barbaran is extremely town-proud and civic-minded. It has been said of Santa Barbara that it is a city of meetings, and that nothing can be done until at least one meeting has been called to discuss all the ramifications of whatever it is. At the same time, Santa Barbara is distrustful of city government, and prefers to leave any decisions affecting the city to its citizens themselves, who are believed to know what is good for them and what isn't. When a stretch of freeway was planned between San Francisco and the Mexican border, Santa Barbarans decided that they did not want traffic streaming through their community at seventy miles
per hour. They went to battle with the California State Department of Transportation and—though it took years—they won. Now Santa Barbara is the only segment of the freeway's six-hundred-mile length where motorists must keep a respectful speed and pause for traffic lights. When offshore oil spills began dirtying their beaches, Santa Barbarans met and formed an organization called GOO (for Get Oil Out). They took on some of the country's largest oil companies, and got them to clean up their operations.

Typifying Santa Barbara's attitude toward city governments is Miss Pearl Chase, who says: “People won't be inspired to help a community unless they are part of it. Government officials are really temporary. They come and go, and this constant turnover means that citizen organizations have far greater impact.” Miss Chase is perhaps the most typical Santa Barbaran there is. She is immensely rich. Her family owned the vast Hope Ranch, which, not long ago, was sold off and subdivided to become one of the town's most elegant and expensive areas. But she lives in a Victorian house full of sagging furniture, old scrapbooks, and genteelly dusty clutter. When she goes out, she is always hatted, always gloved. If she owns any emeralds, she has never been seen wearing them. Though she is eighty-eight years old, and ailing, she is still regarded as one of the town's leading dowagers.

Change, of course, has come to Santa Barbara as it has everywhere else where the rich have tried to isolate themselves behind walls and gates and rolling lawns and gardens. Not long ago, for example, a rich and social wedding united two old-line Santa Barbara families. Shortly after the wedding, however, the young bridegroom announced his intention of undergoing a sex-change operation. And for years, the Little Town Club was Santa Barbara's leading social club for women. Founded in 1914, the club never served alcoholic beverages. But several years ago, a proposal was made that the club offer wine with lunch. In a surprising development, it turned out that all the older ladies were in favor of wine, while all the younger members were not. Eventually, the older group won out and wine was introduced, then liquor. “Now,” complains one member, “it's so noisy at lunchtime you can't hear yourself think!”

“Oh, how Santa Barbara has changed!” complains one matron, Santa Barbara resident for over fifty years. “It used to be a simple, charming place. All the houses had blue shutters. We would eat at
El Paseo, standing in line with trays for the most delicious food. The annual Fiesta was beautiful. Now it's horrible. People used to have lovely parties; now we don't go anywhere. There was wonderful dancing at the Biltmore. Now it's part of a chain.”

The change, the dowager feels, began during the Second World War. “There began to be a strong Fascist feeling here,” she says. “There were a few men who were out-and-out Nazis. I remember one man who called ‘Heil Hitler!' across a table, and another who said, ‘Let us hope and pray that Germany wins the war.' One of those men is still around. During the war, it all became terribly snobbish and anti-Semitic.”

But a more profound change occurred earlier, on the twenty-ninth of June, 1925, a date engraved on the memory of every true Santa Barbaran. That day, an earthquake registering 6.3 on the Richter scale rocked Santa Barbara. Trees thrashed about, the towers of All Saints' Church swayed, and the ground heaved in great waves. At least one Santa Barbara dowager, old Mrs. Cunningham—a Forbes of Boston—was killed. (One of the residents had a psychic butler, who foresaw the quake and removed all her costly vases, which were thereby saved.) The aftershocks continued for the rest of the summer, and before it was over, most of what had been old Santa Barbara had been destroyed.

Nowadays, in retrospect, the quake is usually referred to as “a blessing.” Santa Barbara had, up to that time, developed somewhat haphazardly, without zoning. When the earth finally quieted, an architectural board of review was formed by a group of local worthies. Its purpose was to oversee the rebuilding of the town, and to see to it that it was rebuilt in such a way that it would be pleasing to the eye and would also have a certain architectural uniformity. The result was a vaguely Mediterranean mixture of Spanish Colonial and Mission Revival, appropriate to Southern California's history. Walls were of beige or yellow stucco, and roofs were of red or yellow tile. Bell towers and balconies and grillwork abounded. Santa Barbara's acres were strictly zoned. For obvious reasons, high-rise buildings were prohibited. These architectural, building, and zoning codes have been adhered to until this day, and have become a matter of intense civic pride. Right now, the city is in the middle of an intense dispute over the design of a new wing for the art museum, which proposes to depart, ever so slightly, from the Spanish Mission style. Though architects have found Santa Barbara's elaborate building
codes and rules somewhat inhibiting, landscape architects have flocked to the area and have prospered creating the town's many pretty parks, malls, and private gardens.

Santa Barbara first came into existence in 1850, when it was incorporated by an act of the California legislature a few months before there actually was a state of California. But it was not until the late 1860s, in the post-Civil War days, that it had its real genesis. It began, like so many wealthy enclaves, as a seasonal resort. These were the days when so many families, rich from the war, began to cast about for new ways to spend and display their money, and to encapsulate themselves in luxurious redoubts where they would encounter only their “own kind.” This overnight gentry—members of the Armour family (meat), the Mortons (salt), the Fleischmanns (yeast), the Hammonds (organs), to name a few—came largely from the East and the Middle West, and began to build imposing winter homes in the hills above the town. This was the era when golf, tennis, and polo suddenly became popular pastimes for the rich, and it was the dawn of the American country club. Many of the rich Easterners who came to Santa Barbara were, furthermore (or so Santa Barbarans like to boast), the black sheep of their families, and were encouraged to go to California by relatives who were just as happy to have them several thousand miles away. This accounts, Santa Barbarans say, for the relaxed and laissez-faire air of the place—less grand and pretentious than Newport, less formal and competitive than Palm Beach. “Here we have always just gone our happy ways,” says one long-time resident.

The exclusive Valley Club was built, which is now the “Old Guard club,” and then the Birnam Wood Club, which is considered the “New Guard club.” The third country club, the Montecito, bought recently by a Japanese syndicate, stands lowest in the club pecking order and is considered “commercial.” The Little Town Club established its quaint rules, such as “Six to a Susan.” (For lunch, the club has tables for six, with a lazy Susan in the center of each table; it is against the rules to sample a tidbit from anyone else's lazy Susan.)

When an architect named George Washington Smith came to Santa Barbara, he quickly put his stamp on the place, doing for Santa Barbara what Stanford White did for New York and Long Island and Addison Mizner did for Palm Beach; he designed mansions in the preferred Spanish Colonial style with vaulted ceilings and the requisite bell towers, balconies, and courtyards. His flights
of Mediterranean fancy were extreme, and he thought nothing of going to Spain and Italy to bring back boatloads of tiles, lanterns, shutters, and grilles to adorn his creations. It is said that when Harry K. Thaw (who murdered Stanford White) was released from prison, he visited Santa Barbara, and viewing a George Washington Smith house, commented, “I think I killed the wrong architect.” Still, because there are only twenty-nine Smith houses in Santa Barbara, to own one is now a—if not
the
—major status symbol. And when, as rarely happens, a Smith house goes on the market, it is certain to bring at least $100,000 more than a comparable one.