Wednesday, July 31, 2024. Warm, but mid-70s, so just perfectly comfortable, with rain in the forecast for the next couple of days.
L.A. Diary, May 11, 1992. Part IV. Beirut is in the air outside. Last week in April, first week in May, a serious series of riots and civil disturbances materialized; more than 12,000 arrested, killing more than 50 people, and injuring more than 2300, 1100 buildings damaged totaling about $1 billion. The entire city got very scary.
All provoked by a jury acquitting four officers of the LA Police Department charged with using excessive force in the arrest and beating of Rodney King. King, an African-American man, was a victim of police brutality after a high speed pursuit for driving while intoxicated.
Violence all around us. Anyone with half-a-brain can feel it. Now we have the boys with guns. Everybody’s afraid of being killed. There’s anarchy under the swaying palms on the streets where the Supply-siders ran out of trickle somewhere south of Beverly and east of Cahuenga.
There are also walk-by muggings which often end with a bullet in a body. And follow-homes where sleek, juicy Beemers are trailed to their Brentwood or Encino driveways at which point (of the gun) car keys exchange hands. Some of these boys also invite themselves in, which can also lead to a bullet in a body. Now we have the rear-enders, armed and dangerous with any number of sophisticated hand-weaponry available to one and all like hot dogs at your local pushcart.
I first heard the verdict late Wednesday afternoon when I turned on the tv and the kinda-goofy-guy face of the just acquitted officer Laurence Powell leaning into the news mikes caught my eye. He looked so Surf City lamb-like in his suit and tie. Funny how brutal mugshots can be.
Thirty miles to the south on the other side of the Hollywood Hills near the corner of Florence and Normandie Boulevards a bunch of angry young people pulled a man from his truck and started to beat him. Minutes later the news switched from Simi Valley to the “telecopter” hovering over the intersection. From our silent aerial view the crowd moved like protoplasm from their victims to the liquor store on the corner. Windows breaking; looting begins, smoke rising. Where are the police?? I yelled at the tv screen.
Two hours later, still riveted to the tv, it was getting dark outside my bedroom window. I hadn’t fed and walked the dogs. But should I go outside, I wondered. Those fires were five miles away as the crow flies. They’ll crack down hard and stop this, I thought. Then Mayor Bradley appeared on screen. He called the verdict outrageous. He appealed for calm. The telecopter at Florence and Normandie was now showing us a burned out liquor store and three more buildings that had gone up. Parker Hall was turning violent. Crenshaw and Jefferson was being consumed by flames with still no cops or firetrucks.
At one in the morning, I could smell smoke and my windows were shut tight. Was it the house? Outside the smoke-filled Doheny Drive like a bad smog lit orange by street lamps. I went to the curbside and looked up and the Drive; no cars in sight. Only silence and smoke. And sirens in the distance.
I went to sleep thinking it would simmer down by dawn. But Thursday morning was Forget-It. This was no longer South Central L.A. This was all of L.A. Everyone from the tippy top of Trousdale knew it. At noon, Luce, the Salvadoran housekeeper next door, watched the tv as her apartment on Vermont and Third raged up in flames.
By late afternoon the markets were jammed. From the top of Blue Jay Way I looked down on a sprawling low-lying city stretching for miles. The sky was grey and full of swill. At random like an environmentalist’s nightmare, with roots of orange-red flame, huge billowing columns of black smoke leaned into the desert sky. It didn’t look like Kuwait. It looked like The Day of the Locust.
The early lack of police presence made everybody nervous and some people paranoid. Then the Guard came on Friday, it was like, whew! Saturday, the Sun shone through the muck and the air. The jacarandas, yet to reach their peak, blossomed like dazzling lavender clouds above the streets. The second night of Curfew felt odd, like martial law. But it set many a mind at ease. By Sunday crowds were out in South Central with their shovels, brooms and plastic bags, like brave flowers that always bloom out of the rubble. But, as a friend remarked, “we’re living on the sloping side of Vesuvius now.”
On Sunday, I sat outside on the terrace and read the Timeses. A million miles away, over on the pink and green grounds of the Beverly Hills Hotel, an old man, pushed in a wheelchair, suited sharply but weakened in posture, emerged from one of the hotel’s private bungalows, led and followed by a retinue of attendants in white.
They lifted the chair of the crusty, helpless looking gent down from the house’s terrace to the sidewalk.
Cortege positioned, there then emerged from the same doorway, a small delicate looking, noticeably younger (but not young) woman with a porcelain complexion, dressed in gossamer silk peach pajamas, her exquisite face perfectly made up and framed by lustrous raven hair, a perfect memory of all, tenderly protected from whatever Sun there might be, by a silk Japanese parasol, in the very same shade of peach.
Then the little group — the man in the wheelchair and the exquisitely presented companion in peach silk, along with their attendants — made their way a dozen yards … in ninety seconds … down the walk to the entrance to the hotel’s lounge, whereupon they turned around, retraced their brief steps, and disappeared back inside the hotel’s little pink private villa.
Norton Simon and his wife Jennifer Jones had had their little weekend walk way out here in the Nathaniel West. Hooray for Hollywood.
