Los Angeles
When we arrive in LA, the first thing you notice is the dust
and the pollution. It’s summer, heat hangs in the air as the plane passes over
the city, smothering the low, vast suburbs that spread out below. LA is really
very odd. I noticed how odd it was as soon as we arrived, and our cab zoomed
between cars on the clogged veins of LA’s livelihood - America’s livelihood
really - the Highway. Highways under each other, over each other, twisting
around neighbourhoods and buildings and other highways with perplexing
regularity. Cars pile up on either side of us, some sleek and new and driven by
people with Bluetooth headsets, and others battered and old and bruised and
driven by people with all their belongings in the backseat. In America your car
says a lot about you.
Our apartment room is mid-town, and our cab driver doesn’t
have much to say about the area. Instead, he just points out a distant hill.
“See that white blur, that’s the Hollywood sign.”
Our apartment is in a compound near Wilshire and Vermont, a
cheap wire fence like the type you see on old tennis courts enclosing it, and
the area is hot and bare and poor. We’re the only white people around, and
we’re the whitest people we could be. We’re almost blue. I’m sure the Lonely
Planet Guide would recommend we stay away from it, but if you were only guided
by Lonely Planet you’d be broke in a week, and you’d think Rodeo Drive is what
LA is all about, which of course, it isn’t.
It’s around this time I discover a few things about LA. The
first is that the Hispanics have midtown as their own. Most everything is in Spanish. Shops sell
tacos and burritos and odd cans of indecipherable Spanish fare, and buildings
are low and dusty and falling apart. In the heat of the afternoon, I suppose
the traditional siesta, men and women and children lean on shady stoops and
huddle near air conditioned shops. The
homeless shelter under makeshift tents in corners of car parks, road train
style trolleys beside them. Many, many people are shouldering their lives in
garbage bags. As the afternoon becomes cooler what sounds like a hundred
children play ball in the compound beside us.
The next day the band heads to Venice Beach, where Baz
Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet played out their Malibu tragedy, and where the men
rollerblade and the women bake in the
sun. Everybody’s a little eccentric, but it isn’t glamorous. Muscle Beach is
about as seedy as it sounds and, like everywhere in LA, everybody’s selling something.
Friendly black guys accost you with rap CDs and dudes on segues try to sell
medicinal marijuana. A woman in the square is selling TV audience tickets for
some comedian whilst break-dancing and occasionally bursting out into song.
It’s a kind of American thing, a total blind self-confidence in one’s self.
Nobody fears anything in the slightest, nobody feels embarrassment and it
seems, anything is possible. LA’s kind of like an entire city with Aspergers. But,
like midtown, people are clutching trolleys and living on the grassy island
between beach and tourist footpath. As a Hollywood native will tell us, “The
City of LA is poor as shit. Half a billion dollars in debt. The City of Beverly
Hills is rich as hell.”
He’s right. When Clair and I decide to do the LA thing and
head out on a star homes tour, it’s like a total reversal. The pull of
celebrity in LA is immense. If Highways are the life blood of LA then celebrity
is brawn and muscle and sheer fucking power. Going on a star homes tour is like
going on a disconnection of reality. You don’t like the idea of it, you don’t
even like the reality of it, but somehow, some little piece of you is
fascinated by Oprah Winfrey’s gates, Madonna’s letterbox and Michael Jackson’s
old driveway. The Tour Guide, a vaguely desperate fast-talking dude, makes his
dough from these gates, letterboxes and driveways. He’s a part-time paparazzi
so he spend a lot of time outside
them. He literally lives off these people. As we climb the half carefully
manicured, half wild greenery of Beverly Hills, we pass Taylor Lautner on his
afternoon jog. The Tour Guide beeps, Taylor grimaces. There’s a weird
relationship between celebrity and those who make money, indirectly, from them.
Later in the day, when we stand beside a couple veteran autograph hunters and
paps for a film premiere, there’s an unspoken set of rules between celebrity
and pap. Mary J Blige is a ‘biatch,’ Alec Baldwin an ‘asshole’, Tom Cruise ‘adorable.’
When a celebrity refuses to make his or her way over, the hunters are vicious
in their dissemination of their hair, their outfit and their face. It seems
unfair, but I see their point.
Celebrities aren’t really people, they are business. All the pretence in the
world can’t dissuade us from seeing them as weirdo zoo animals, eating and
scratching behind the glass walls of public fascination. They are herded animals, sheparded from car to
red carpet, house to party. Microcosms of people rely on them for income – from
the guy in the Iron Man suit on Hollywood Boulevard, to the guy setting up the
film camera by the red carpet, to the girl serving fries in Hard Rock Café.
Celebrities are an entire enterprise, not an individual. Some of them recognise it. When Catherine Zeta
Jones passes us, she recognises the autograph hunters and smiles, judiciously
autographs their pristine copies of Empire and Rolling Stone in just the right
place and they all nod. They wouldn’t exist without one another, and they know
it.
Beverly Hills is gated and guarded and private and I
understand why. When we pass the Wilshire Hotel our Tour Guide beeps at the bus
boy. “That’s George,” he explains. “I pay him a lotta money to tell me what
celebrities check in.” Because you see, celebrites are surrounded by these mini
armies of paps, autograph hunters, informants, manipulators and leeches who
will happily destroy them at a moments notice. Even us, the loyal masses, will
cut them down. So they hide away in the hills, like hunted animals, sheltered
in gigantuous mansions and ridiculously extravagant compounds and create their
own worlds made with their unjustly large paychecks because quite honestly, the
real world is not their friend.
When we stop by Tom Cruise’s compound we’re informed that if
the flag is flying, Tom is home. Tom’s the King of Beverly Hills. So when we
see Tom Cruise at the film premiere, it feels unreal. Because Tom Cruise, the
man standing directly in front of us, isn’t real. He looks like the guy in the
cinema, but I know he isn’t real. Because he’s so good at this celebrity thing
now, he’s such a pro, that he’s groomed himself to look like Tom Cruise from
every angle. His smile is perfect. His face perfectly symmetrical. His manner
pleasant, genuinely interested, constantly enthusiastic. If somebody was told
to pretend to be Tom Cruise, they would be just like this fellow. He’s a nice
guy. He arrives an hour before his co-stars because he judiciously greets every
fan, signs everything, takes every photo demanded and is always, always,
smiling. After the premiere, the King Of Beverly Hills is herded back into a
tinted jeep and taken to the after party, where he will grin and shake hands
and pose for photographs and look like Tom Cruise from every angle yet again.
Because he understands the fundamental deal with the devil; when you are famous
you will always be at the mercy of others. His power is his and our illusion,
and he knows it. Celebrities only last as long as those in the real business – not show biz per se,
more like mega fame biz - want them to, and the poor guy can only look over his
shoulder and bury his mind in a fake religion and buy time with surgery and an
all-too-neat hairline.
Winding back down through Beverly Hills and onto Rodeo Drive
(where we slow at cafes to ‘spot the celebrities’ as though they are wild
mongoose on a safari), we pass the mansions of the rich. And in almost every
garden are a small army of Hispanic men and women trimming hedges, weeding and
watering impossibly green grass. They’re the men and women of our area,
mid-town, and this is where they get up at 5am every morning and carpool in
battered old wagons to earn their money from the celebrities and super-rich.
And they’re sweating it out under the horrible sun and aching backs and you
begin to understand that if Tom Cruise lost his job as King of Beverly Hills, a
bunch of hardworking individuals would also lose theirs. So like them or hate
them, celebrities aren’t just useless wastes of exorbitant sums of money -
though some are – they are the back on which LA rests. The film industry isn’t
just a money industry, it’s an industry of the soul. Films are our meter, our
gauge and our social sphere. We watch movies about people and lives we will
never lead, illusions of reality, voyeurs of some far out world that is never
our own, no matter how similar it seems. We compare ourselves to celebrities,
some devote themselves to them; to all intents and purposes they are the better
looking, more successful, cooler and highly desirable versions of ourselves,
and likewise their films. And the celebrities hidden away in their alternate
universes of high gates, tinted windows and compounds, feel the weight of
expectation hardest. We’re pulling them down as much as we’re pushing them up.
When we leave LA through LAX the smog over the city is
unbearable, like the city is choking itself into submission.
Lucy Campbell
