Loving Los Angeles

Still in Los Angeles, but in a setting that in the long ago I would have associated more with somewhere exotic I'd never been, like Kashmir, say. I'm sitting on a shining terrace, looking down the steps bordered by two immense curving bushes packed with hundreds of delicate white azaleas, of the sort that look more like spray orchids than anything else. They got down to a small, topiary garden and a pool fringed with locust and frangipani and then a small bank of woods and, in the distance, the sound as of a muffled steady wind, which is no wind, but traffic of the seven or eight million cars on the weaving freeways of Los Angeles.

I look up into the intense blue sky above me and there, slowly wheeling and dipping is a single buzzard which makes me feel, for a moment, I'd better move around and not just lie there in case the buzzard should mistake me for a corpse. This is a part of Los Angeles that has been there as pine woods and golden hills since, I imagine, the first Spaniards – the few soldiers and the Franciscan priests who came on it as a fertile river valley and, in a small but solemn religious ceremony just over 200 years ago, named it, El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora La Reina de los Angeles – the town of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels.

In its present form, this particular part of the city, known as Bel Air, is a compound of about 160,000 rolling acres of hills and woods and canyons, alongside or rather drawn away in wooded privacy from its nearest neighbour, Hollywood. As I sat here, far removed in sight and sound from the teaming 40-mile stretch of the town of Our Lady of the Queen of the Angels, I recalled a wise remark made to me several years ago by the late great D. W. Brogan, who knew more about the history, the political history, of America and France than the vast majority of Americans or Frenchmen. He said you can live in a country for 30, 40 years and know more about its life than most of the natives. The only slips you'll make are elementary ones. He was, as usual, right.

And not long afterwards I discovered one I'd been making for years and years. I was always going into supermarkets or delicatessens and asking for soda water. In the middle west and the South, they usually checked by saying, 'Would that be seltzer?' Or 'You said, Scotch with charged water?' The same. In stores, supermarkets, the man would hesitate and suggest some soft, fizzy drink, one of those ghastly concoctions with names like Skat, Fuzz, Foam, Tad. After 30-odd years of not noticing their slight puzzlement, I finally learned to ask for club soda and got what I wanted.

Well, by an obvious extension of this same tendency to make elementary errors, I came to realise that if you stay away from a foreign or distant place long enough, your own knowledge of the place, the real place as it is, begins to fade and you revert to the first elementary picture you had of it and, usually, it's the picture in a travel folder or newspaper airline advertisement because the advertising boys are so persistent. They keep on showing you a simple picturesque colour photo till it's printed on your mind once for all.

In a great work, a classic work, on North America by the late J. Russell Smith who was an economic geographer, he illustrated his chapter on the Florida peninsula with a photography, courtesy of the Miami Chamber of Commerce. It was meant to impress on intending tourists a typical picture of the true Florida. Since, and to this day, Florida's chief crop and source of income is tourism.

The picture does not show the main highway and the trucks pounding along which lie just behind the cameraman, it shows two or three swimmers in the cobalt sea, a couple, one a nubile, young woman in swimsuits sitting peaceably on the sands. In the foreground are four, small, glistening, waving palm trees. Professor Russell Smith's laconic caption for the photograph is, 'The healthy condition of these two few small palm trees is proof that repeated photographing does not injure a tree'.

This lazy tendency of succumbing to the simple picture the travel bureaux want us to believe in is resisted by many intelligent people, by intellectuals especially, in a peculiar way. They react by insisting that the truth is the very opposite, usually an obnoxious opposite of the picture. Hence, the roving reporters from Western Europe who come hurtling in to reveal that Miami, for instance, is a jungle of poverty and vice. And, to an extent, they're right but the travel people are also right if you want to count the millions of visitors who spend winter holidays there and ignore the Colombian drug traffic and do not, as tourists anywhere do not, go in search of the slums.

This applies to Los Angeles in an almost boringly familiar way. You rarely read a piece on Los Angeles by a European, by an Englishman especially, that does not make a very big deal of the vulgar ostentation of some movie or TV stars, the plight of the thousands of Mexican peasants who move in illegally every week and the fact, which is a fact, that by the year 2000 an actual majority – more than 50 per cent of the entire population of California – will be Mexican or Puerto Rican, Haitian, Colombian or, as we say collectively, Hispanic. The wheel of the Spanish conquest of the state which lasted till 1848 is coming full circle with a vengeance.

However, I came out to visit these friends in Los Angeles because I haven't stayed here for any length of time for several years, not since most of my friends in the so-called movie colony – not, by the way, either vulgar or ostentatious – either died or moved away. The last of them, the late, beloved humorist Nunnally Johnson died seven years ago and I have not cared to go and stay there since.

Consequently, I now realise I have fallen into the rather smug view of the city that is standard, indeed, almost required, by San Franciscans, which is that Los Angeles is huge and brassy, whereas San Francisco is small and whimsical and cultured. Travellers who know both cities well tend to say, however, what they used to say about Johannesburg and Cape Town, that Cape Town, like San Francisco, might be conservative and mature, whereas Johannesburg, like Los Angeles, was big and brash BUT it was where the action was.

And this comparison is, I think, roughly true. Of course, everything depends on the set of people you know in either place. If you can escape from your acquaintances and move around and keep your eyes and ears open, you will find that San Francisco, for instance, with the University of California of Berkeley there across the bay and a considerable pack of important writers of all sorts in and around the city itself, and the most bewildering range of music and drama and exhibitions and what-not being put on by a score of the world's top professionals and many more scores of colleges and amateur societies, everything from Verdi and Mahler and Greek Tragedy and Pinter and architectural shows and modern jazz and their own ballet and symphony, and fringe groups everywhere, it is possible to enjoy San Francisco as a sort of continuous Edinburgh Festival.

But, as the third largest city in the United States, Los Angeles, in the past 30 years or so, has asserted itself as the place where the action is. Even 50 years ago, more when I first knew it, the movie industry was not its main source of income. Agriculture and the tinning of same, its huge spread of citrus and many other fruits, tourism for its desert resorts and its skiing and its great national parks of Yosemite and Sequoia. It was an insurance capital; it had what was to become the second-largest bank in the world, now in trouble.

After the war, after Henry Kaiser had taken his oars from Utah, there was a thriving steel industry and, today, the San Fernando Valley over the hills from Hollywood is THE national centre of the aerospace industry. There are only a couple of full-time movie studios. Television has moved in and Los Angeles is certainly the capital where the world's TV myths and legends and some of the trashiest are manufactured. But there is a great medical school, a great symphony orchestra, two famous universities, not to mention Caltech, the California Institute of Technology which, even 50 years ago, boasted more Nobel Prize winners than any other American university.

My last prolonged visit outside the movie folk was 25 years ago, when I went there to spend a couple of days with Aldous Huxley. He told me then that he preferred living in Los Angeles to any other city he'd spent much time in, including London and Rome, because of the nearness of so many congenial intellectuals. Round his corner lived Stravinsky and Heifetz, and down the road, Bertolt Brecht and Hubble, the astronomer, and two famous men doing pioneer work on genetic engineering. Huxley was, he said, morbidly attracted to, and repelled by, the prospect of test-tube babies.

But if there's one sign of a serious big city it is a serious big newspaper and the Los Angeles Times is beyond any comparison the second-best newspaper – in one or two ways, perhaps the first – in America. Next Monday, as everybody knows, Los Angeles will stage its annual festival of awarding the Oscars. It was not in New York or London or Manchester that the funniest, the most scathing, satirical piece was written on the frantic and ruthless business inside the industry of lobbying for the Oscars.

There are many first-rate journalists on the Los Angeles Times, one, previously unknown to me, is P. J. Corkery. Exercising superhuman restraint, I think it would be unfair to quote from it this week for fear you might think that any of the winners had, as he put it, 'gone about clamouring and campaigning after the Nobel Prize for Mummery as a way of keeping up with the Joneses in the Los Angeles neighbourhood of villas, châteaux, palazzos, ranch houses, mansions and attendant pergolas, guest houses and roof top satellites known as Bel Air'.

Maybe we can, should, with more tact and taste, hold over for a week P. J. Corkery's corking piece.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.