Mulholland: Visual Feast Above City

It’s a warm, clear weekday morning, a perfect day to play hooky from work and meet the people of the city’s most splendid street of visual pleasures.

Not quite the time, perhaps, to catch the notorious people of Mulholland Drive--the hot-rod racers, the moonlight lovers and the urban elves who come inexplicably at night to deposit their trash.

But, at any time, the 55-mile drive from the Hollywood Freeway to the Pacific Ocean can be counted on to yield a traveler’s tale or two. They come for views, for isolation, for inspiration. Some come because it’s a way of life.

Mulholland begins on the east at Cahuenga Pass, from which it ascends to sudden vistas of Los Angeles’ skyscrapers and some of its most expensive homes.

Scenery in Houses

Here, the houses are part of the scenery. There is a glass house built on stilts with a peaked living room through which motorists can see the Westside, and a white Moorish mansion on the hillside below.

Some of the houses cannot be seen. Their brick driveways, walls, electric gates, “Armed Response” signs and, sometimes, even guard shacks make a disordered blend of old European and new American fortress architecture.

Along the way there is an airborne tennis court on stilts, as well as a house consisting of a disc on a pillar, a geodesic dome house and Roman temple houses.

Chris Zambon has parked her car below a Mediterranean villa. She is wearing white pants and a red paisley scarf inside a pink blouse. She has just set up an easel and holds a tray of pastel chalks.

“I’m from Wisconsin,” she says. “I just got here two weeks ago.”

Zambon came to study art and was quickly drawn to this spot, where the hillside mansions melt into a panorama of Burbank, Universal City and the San Gabriel Mountains behind them.

Lesson in Driving

“This is the first day I tried to drive here myself,” Zambon says.

She drove a friend’s car up Coldwater Canyon Avenue and hit the curves of Mulholland.

“My heart was pounding,” she says. Back home in Rhinelander the roads are flat and straight. And the colors are not the same, she notices.

“They’re much softer,” she says. “I’ve never drawn mountains before, so it’s going to be real interesting to begin, to learn how they work.”

“It certainly is a beautiful place,” she says. “I’ve never seen so many rich people in my whole life.”

Across the San Diego Freeway, Mulholland indulges in one more splurge of opulence and then, at a sharp, unexpected turn, becomes a winding, rutted, dusty dirt road removed from the city around it, like a Baja back road.

Around a bend a cloud of dust appears and a two-stroke engine stutters with nervous energy.

A man in his mid-30s kills the engine on his 2-day-old Suzuki four-wheeler with balloon tires, free-floating suspension and water-cooled engine.

He says his name is Randy. No last name.

“I might be incriminating myself,” he says. He doesn’t know if four-wheeling on Mulholland is legal. But he knows it feels good.

“It’s a perfect antidote to civilization,” Randy says. “After driving on the freeway every day and people get you up-tight, you come up here. You just go out in the hills and go mad. It’s great.”

Randy lives in Woodland Hills, right around the corner from Mulholland.

Short Journey

“I just pull out of the garage--I got my garage door opener right here--” he says, patting the zippered pocket of a leather jacket with his gloved hand, “hope the police don’t see me. It’s only 3 1/2 blocks--drive around, then drive back, open the garage door, go in the kitchen, have a Pepsi, and that’s it. I usually stay away from the dogs and the horses and don’t hassle people.”

Randy is excited about his new machine.

“This thing will fishtail and the front wheels will come up in every gear,” he says. “It’s so scary I have to lay off of it.”

There’s only one, not very important, drawback.

“I feel guilty playing hooky from work, though.”

Randy hits the starter, raises a large crescent of dirt and disappears.

Paving reappears on Mulholland where it enters a housing tract at Canoga Avenue.

Across Topanga Canyon Boulevard, Mulholland leaves Los Angeles, enters unincorporated county territory and changes its name to Mulholland Highway. After that, it retreats haltingly from civilization, cutting first through a shopping center and then a gradually thinning stand of new, extravagant houses--imitation castles, Tudor mansions and Swiss chalets.

‘Story for Every Mile’

Then a long valley opens and brings a view of green fields, white fences and large farmhouses.

Two motorcycles and a car are parked at a scenic overlook.

h A middle-aged man in a business suit is asleep behind the wheel of the car.

Darrell Grisham and his friend, Peggy Berry, lean against a rock wall.

“It’s a great road, you know,” Grisham says. “It has a story for every mile.”

Grisham knows all the miles, if not all stories.

He thinks he has driven the road a thousand times on his motorcycle over the last 22 years.

‘Sneak Up on Animals’

“One of the most fun things to do is, when you get to the top of a hill, put it in neutral and coast down and you get to sneak up on the animals,” such as deer or coyotes, Grisham said. “And, depending on how your mood is swinging, you can go fast or go slow--depending on how the gendarmes are doing. The thing about riding out here during the week, you meet more mature people. The kids are in school”

He calls them squids.

Grisham began driving on a motorcycle.

“My dad rode a motorcycle and wouldn’t let me have a car,” he says. “My dad figured, if we had a car, we’d all go out and get drunk. So, I got a bike. We all went out and got drunk anyway, of course.”

He works for the Southern Pacific railroad.

“I’ve been accused of not working a lot,” he says, smiling. “It’s the perfect job for me because it gives me time for what I love, which is riding my motorcycle on the roads of Southern California. A day out in this part of the country is easily worth a day’s work, just to relieve the stress cracks.”

Grisham and Berry linger at the overlook.

The man still sleeps in his car.

Entrance to Park

Ahead, Mulholland enters Malibu Creek State Park. Tall, tilting promontories rise like buttes on the Arizona desert.

A car is parked beside the road. A tall, young man with curly hair wearing only shoes and shorts sits on a beach chair at the edge of a canyon.

He is writing on a notebook on his lap.

Regan Bayless says he is a business student at Pepperdine University. He has a 15-page paper due the next week. He has come here to write.

“I’m writing on corporate takeovers,” Bayless says with a friendly smile.

He has only an hour left. The sun is close to the horizon.

Mulholland continues through the basin of Malibu Lake and past a trailer park. It climbs switchbacks, then levels off to a plateau where more horse ranches and a few modern houses are scattered through a landscape of dense chaparral.

For a moment, the mountains fall away and Catalina appears on the horizon.

Then Mulholland descends into a steep canyon at one moment thick with stream-bed trees, then barren and black, reduced to soot-encrusted dirt by this fall’s fire.

At last, the Pacific Ocean appears in the V-shape of the canyon.

As Mulholland meets Pacific Coast Highway, the sun is setting and motorists are heading home from work.