MUSINGS FROM THE PAST : A Column From ’65 Reveals More Than a Sense of Deja Vu

Reprinted from The Times, March 15, 1965. The polar flight from London to Los Angeles lasts 11 1/2 hours . . . two newspapers, three magazines, two meals, five drinks, four paperbacks and when all else fails, all four languages of the Security Arrangements brochure. The flight covers 5,000 miles and at least half a century, give or take a couple of lost weekends.

You depart from an overwhelming sense of yesterday and land in the powerful presence of today, with clues to tomorrow. Everybody says the time change gets you, and it does. But it’s not the eight-hour change that does the business, it’s that change of half a century.

You leave the bowlers, furled brollies, three-piece suits with bell-bottom pinstripes, Dover sole and lawns that have been rolled every day for 600 years, and in no longer than it takes to read Burke’s “Landed Gentry” you’re deplaning in what Fortune magazine calls the prototype city. Remember H. G. Wells’ time machine? Now it has jet engines and stewardesses and dispenses free mouthwash in the Gents.

Mid-afternoon is not normally the ideal time to descend onto the Prototype City. The blanket of smog has a way of acting like a total depressant. But this day the APCD had done itself proud. From high up the blanket looked thin and summer-weight. On the ground you couldn’t see it at all and the city looked washed and sparkling.

I admit to being a zealot about this wild and improbable place, and about most--though not all--of its works, pleasures and pursuits. One of the wonders of our day is the way the myths about Los Angeles persist, years after the reality began to change. You know the myth--the suburbs searching for a city in a cultural desert with Hollywood as its nutty oasis of conspicuous waste.

The perceptive Europeans stopped bum-rapping Los Angeles quicker than some Americans, and with reason. The best thumbed phone book in the office of London’s greatest art dealer is not Central London but our Western directory--Beverly Hills and Bel-Air. At a rough guess, half the London art scene will be coming over this summer to inspect the new Museum of Art, massively envious. English actors who have worked in Hollywood dutifully cry that they hated every minute of it, then talk wistfully about being able to get back soon and hate it again first-hand. C. P. Snow, now Lord Snow, doesn’t hesitate to say that “the University of California is very likely the best in the world.”

Still, getting off the plane, blinking in unaccustomed sunshine, you could have doubts. Maybe it really is a myth.

It isn’t. After three years, the city looks greatly different, greatly better. Some sort of architectural miracle drug has gone a long way toward healing much that was scabrous. The heights of downtown Los Angeles, dominated by The Music Center and that excellent new Water and Power Building, and all the surrounding complex, ARE a civic center, not a distant hope of one. Against the mountain backdrop, the new and thrusting high-rise becomes a visible graph of assertion, of progress, of change. By night, the whole Basin is more than ever Thomas A. Edison’s finest memorial. It’s quite a place.

Mind you, the old outrages, some of them, are still there, the peeling stucco, the garish signs, the jim-crack, jerry-built, fly-by-night, shoddy-dealing streets you wouldn’t recommend as a vacation resort for a Nazi. But on revisitation these places never seemed quite so out of place, so likely to be soon swept away by a city full of better ideas and more solid aims.

My beat is entertainment, and it can be argued that much of this is relevant only in the sense (the big sense, it may be) that living here is in itself an entertainment, as against a duty or a servitude. But this is the entertainment capital of the world, as no place on earth disputes, and the setting measures up.

The excitement you see is matched by the excitement you feel. Three years ago the lights were going out at 20th Century Fox and you weren’t sure what friends you’d still find at any studio. What a turn-around. The problem now is to keep up with everything that’s going on.

No one here will argue that this city has got it made. Theater here is still an import rather than an export industry, and Los Angeles awaits an explosion of local play writing talent such as hit London in the late 50’s. Theater going is not yet, for obvious reasons, a deeply ingrained local habit. The Music Center sets up a taste for a still-richer musical diet. If television is edging out of the wasteland, it is a ways yet from the promised land. Hollywood has done “The Sound of Music” but not “Tom Jones” or “8 1/2.”

But there seems now no reason to believe that these things will not happen, and every good reason to believe that they will. The notion here, borne out already by a half-hundred conversations, is that, as an early showman once said, “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet,” and that Los Angeles, so notably changed in only three years, looks to be changed as much again in another three.

We all share a ringside seat at the greatest civic show on earth.