Tuesday, July 30, 2024. More bright, sunny days as we get set to move into August. The city is pleasantly quiet. Or quietly pleasant; take your pick. The weather is warm but not too, and the quieter traffic adds an element of calm on to this metropolis.
The schools in my neighborhood in-season add several hundred more locals during the day. However, at night after school hours, and now at the height of Summer, as well as many neighbors traveling or even living elsewhere during these warmer months, it’s very quiet.
Most recently, the last couple of weeks I have been researching a project when I came upon a file of letters and articles I’d sent to my eldest sister Helen over the years of ’78 through ’92 when I lived in Los Angeles.
Helen was an enormous treasure in my life. When I moved to California in ’78, she was the one with whom I shared the experience of the “enterprise,” and wrote her frequently and detailing my experience. Several months ago, my niece, Helen’s daughter Susan presented me with a large and wide cardboard box with all of that correspondence tucked away in organized piles by date.
I knew, when I learned of them, that Helen had marked them for me, for use, years later. Among the literary detritus that still has legs to tweak my curiosity were several social/entertainment potential columns about that part of the world at that time: LA and movieland – 1978 to 1992. The following is an example of one I’d sent to Helen keeping her informed of her little brother’s ventures …
L.A. Diary; May 11, 1992. Easter Sunday was 89 degrees; cloudless bluer than blue skies. The streets were empty of traffic. The green green city (thanks to the rains) was kissed by the sweet perfume of the pittosporum and a coolish airmass so full of stuff that in large enough doses could probably kill a good lot of us … and quick. Ahh, but such is L.A.
I sat out amongst the blooming azaleas, roses and bougainvillea, and read the papers. The news in L.A. Times was about Willie Williams, the new police chief recruited from Philadelphia. The news on cellular phone circuit in Beverly Hills, Bel-Air and Malibu, however, was about Craig Johnson longtime protégé of Aaron Spelling’s very rich partner and producer (“Loveboat” ), Douglas Cramer.
Several days before, on a sunny, midweek afternoon, Mr. Johnson, sitting in Mr. Cramer’s brand new eat-yer-heart-out Mercedes convertible, parked down the block from the Pacific Design Center on Melrose in West Hollywood, was rear-ended by a van carrying three men (first identified as black, and later discovered to be Hispanic).
Having seen them in the rear view mirror, Johnson felt sufficiently alarmed to lock the car doors — although the top was down. Then one of the men got out of the van and went up to him, putting a gun to his head and saying something like “get the fuck outta yer car.” But Johnson instead put the MBZ in Lo and accelerated. At which point the gunman pulled the trigger and shot him in the head, boom. The MBZ careened across the street and hit a pole.
The boys in the van hit the road. Blood gushing from his skull, Johnson was out. Someone in a nearby shop saw the whole thing and called 911 and within minutes Craig Johnson was in Cedars having emergency brain surgery.
The good news is that the patient survived and is up and about. An eyewitness got the license plate number of the van. It had been stolen. Its thieves had been busy boys that day. Their first victim refused to comply. He was shot to death. The second, also in a new Mercedes convertible, was delighted to hand over his keys.
Craig Johnson was the third. Having failed with him, the trio went down Melrose, a couple of blocks east of La Cienega and hit on a woman in a new Toyota. She didn’t argue either.
The Monday after Easter I had lunch at the Ivy the very expensive “in” restaurant sitting behind a dilapidated and peeling white picket fence on Robertson Boulevard in West Hollywood. We sat outside amidst the flowers in planters, with old Fred Astaire recordings being pumped over speakers (“you say either and I’ll say eye-ther….”), surrounded by a crew of good looking people gossiping seriously and laughing over their Chardonnays.
My hostess was Beth DeWoody whose father is Lew Rudin, the New York real estate magnate. Her other guests were Elizabeth Kabler, daughter of Schenley Industries founder Lewis Rosenstiel and step-daughter of former Ambassador to the Court of St. James, Walter Annenberg; and
a thirty-eight-ish young man about the world whose nest apparently has been eternally feathered by a family insurance fortune.
Two tables over was the exotically beautiful Isabel Goldsmith, daughter of Sir James, and grand-daughter of Antenor Patino, the Bolivian Tin tycoon; with Wendy Stark, the social hostess daughter of Broadway and Hollywood producer Ray Stark. Two over from them, the tanned and fit looking producer David Geffen fashionably turned out in a vision of proletarianisms: salt and pepper grey stubbled bearded face, faded denim shirt and jeans.
It was a total Hollywood moment when suddenly somewhere about the middle of the lunch hour, amidst the crystal chatter, a young-ish homeless woman, white, but grey and brown in her dirty overcoat, trudged by — with a knapsack, green but also grey and brown — on her back. She walked with a steady though thumping gait and a stiff blank gaze at the sidewalk in front of her.
She may have been oblivious to the spanking clean crowd of sparkling vitality behind the tatty fence. She may not have noticed the Jags and 560s meeting the valet boys in their red vests. And she couldn’t have known that all within six feet of her, at just three of the more than two dozen tables, and divided amongst only six of those ten lunchers were fortunes, in aggregate, of at least a few billion dollars.
On Wednesday, a week ago, the headlines of the L.A. Times announced the death of Robert Alton Harris in the gas chamber at San Quentin. Beneath was a colored photo of two brothers of one of his victims dabbing their eyes upon hearing the news. Left of the picture, in the first column was an article, “Stealth Wealth is Vogue” revealing that among others, Wendy Goldberg, wife of another very rich Spelling partner and producer (“Charlie’s Angels”) Leonard Goldberg, was now keeping her Rolls in the garage, her jewels in the vault, and getting about in a Cherokee.
L.A., L.A.
