The L.A. Women : The Faces Behind the Statistics

THE BEDTIME STORY Sarah Napolitano liked best--the one she could wring night after night from a doting grandmother who knew she was being conned and loved it--was the one about glass.

Not the glass slipper. Not the Cinderella fairy tale of a modest maiden who lost a shoe but won a prince. Sarah wanted the one about glass--how it was made at the Oklahoma glass factory where her grandmother had once worked; how they took plain old opaque sand and other stuff and turned it into planes of lovely, crystalline nothing.

“I was curious. I guess I’ve been curious all my life,” says Napolitano.

She wondered why, when she pleaded for one of those little metal toy Texaco stations one Christmas, a friend of her mother’s asked sotto voce if something was the matter with little Sarah. Why, when she longed for art lessons, her mother insisted on typing classes. Why it mattered so much to the airline she flew for that she should wear a girdle. Why a boss would tell dirty jokes, and then laugh and call her a cheeky little thing when she said she didn’t like it.

In that time in America, in the late 1940s, it didn’t do for girls like Sarah to ask such questions.

Now that she is 52 years old--with a husband she is “really happy with,” two grown sons she enjoyed staying home to bring up, and a book- and art-filled house in the “tree section” of Manhattan Beach--time and America have caught up with Napolitano’s wishes. And she has one more thing: a license for her art business, one she felt like waving in the air and saying to her mother’s spirit, “See, Mom, I finally did it, after all these years.” She’s a professional artist at last.

THOUGH AN APTITUDE test showed that the girl who was fascinated with glass-making stories would be a good mechanic, and though her art teacher hinted at scholarships, Napolitano’s parents saw to it that she graduated from high school prepared to be a secretary. And then,in the nesting mood of postwar America, she did what a lot of single young women did as they waited for Mr.--preferably Dr.--Right. She worked.

In 1955, after saving up money she’d earned as a department-store clerk, she went to France for a year, and haunted the museums and boulevards. When the money ran out, she followed her parents to California, where they had moved from their Oklahoma ranch.

She worked as assistant manager of an apartment hotel, and when it was scheduled for demolition, she applied to be a stewardess (what flight attendants were called then). After the interviewer asked a few questions, he told her to stand up and turn around; he was looking at her legs. “He said, ‘You have very thin ankles.’ I said, ‘Yes, I know that.’ ”

She and her thin ankles were hired. And made up and coifed and coached. She could handle the hurried mandatory full meal and three glasses of champagne on the Los Angeles-San Francisco flights, the drunks and rowdies, and the pilots who had to be fended off. But girdle muster was too much: Girdles made her itch. In the stewardesses’ lounge, the chief stew would snap and pinch to make sure they were girdled. And after eight months and one girdle warning, she quit and went to work for an aviation company. “I didn’t know what sexist was until I got there,” she says. There was one boss who recounted distasteful jokes; a system that would not move women into better jobs, dates with men who turned out to be married.

“I always felt there was somebody out there who was intelligent and fascinating and funny. There’s got to be someone else out there besides these people.” Enter Anthony Napolitano. On one of their first dates, he had Sarah enthralled with his story of a business trip to Philadelphia when, on a cold day, he went to the zoo and almost met a tiger. Any man who would go to the zoo, alone, on a business trip, had to be special, she reasoned. On another date, they sat on opposite sides of her living room and just read. “I thought, ‘Gee, this might be somebody I could really enjoy being with.’ ”

Twenty-five years later, she still does.

She quit her job to bring up their sons, and “I was perfectly content to stay at home,” gradually appointing her low, bright house with Indian blankets and rugs, Mexican pottery and baskets to reflect a bit of her Irish and Seminole Indian heritage--early Santa Fe chic, desert-country when country wasn’t cool. And art? Well, art “was just kind of put aside. I just thought that I couldn’t afford to do this right now, I couldn’t take the time.”

Ten years ago, at an art sale, she met an artist whom she came to admire. They talked about their ailing parents, and they talked about art classes. Her husband urged her to take up her brush, and she signed up at a community college.

“I figured I’d be the old lady in this class. My hands were sweating so much it ran down to my elbows. After about a half-hour I didn’t know where I was, what time it was. It was like I was blooming; I was just in my element.”

At first, it was an escape--therapy, even--from the pressures of her mother’s declining health and her husband’s frighteningly early heart attack. And those hours she could vanish into her work “saved me from going bananas.”

She sold a few works, and a few more, and last year, her backdrop fashion sketches for a community festival were a “sensation. It did my little heart good.” They also had boutiques and shops pounding on her garage-studio door for illustrations for their ads.

The years between, the ones when she did not draw or paint, are not lost ones. “It’s so rewarding for me now, as you grow older. I probably wouldn’t have been ready for this before, and probably would have missed out on a whole lot of important experiences.

“On the whole,” she says, “life is delightful. And I have been blessed in many ways.”

TO FILIPINO KIDS AFTER THE END OF World War II, the Americans who walked among them were gods and the United States, California in particular, paradise.

Marilyn (Pinky) O’Neill is the daughter of a retired Philippine army major and his wife who “had a few bucks”--five maids, and eight kids who all went to college, except Pinky. She wanted to fly, and especially she wanted to fly to America.

So for four years, she was an airline stewardess, surviving a crash landing and using her two free tickets a year to travel to the United States. She liked this country enough to quit to marry her Filipino boyfriend, who was working for General Motors when he was picked up for being here illegally.

Eventually, after she’d moved to Los Angeles, someone told immigration about her, too, just about the time she had met a good-looking man just out of the Army--divorced, with a couple of kids from a too-early marriage, but a nice guy, and a Catholic, too. They got along fine--as well as anyone can after two dates--”and when immigration came along, I said, ‘Well, I have to go home,’ and he said, ‘What would it take for you to stay?’ I said, ‘Well, I have to marry an American.’ So he said, ‘OK, we’ll get married.’ ”

She thought her marriage to Bill O’Neill would last six months. “That was my plan, but my plan didn’t work out.” Pinky O’Neill’s laughter percolates with renewed astonishment. Instead, she became pregnant on their honeymoon. “I figured, I can’t have this baby without a father. . . . My husband treated me very, very well, and there was no reason for me to divorce him.”

It wasn’t supposed to turn out like this, but 20 years, four children, one bankruptcy and two thriving businesses later, Pinky and Bill are still together, a solid, Irish-Filipino teamwork marriage. “I didn’t love him--I liked him a lot when we met but I didn’t love him,” says O’Neill, 42. “Through the years, of course, and having children and everything, it worked out very, very well. We’re happily married, considering we knew each other a month and a half. And our love is much, much stronger I think than all of our friends’. There’s a lot of love and a lot of trust.”

Bill started his own big-rig trailer business in 1975, and it consumed 16 hours a day. Eventually, though, the money was good--very good. Although Pinky had a Filipino housekeeper, she stayed home until all four kids were in school. Her husband didn’t want her to work, and with the business doing well, she didn’t have to.

But in 1980, the recession shook a lot of businesses off the corporate map, and the O’Neills’ was one of them. Soon, the money from her 25-hour-a-week waitressing job was practically keeping them afloat.

One year she was driving a Mercedes, then boom--the next year she was selling fish in a market during the week and getting up at 3 a.m. on weekends to sell ski pants at the swap meet, pulling the family back toward solvency.

“Our life was like this,” she demonstrates, snaking her hand like a roller-coaster track. “We’re on top, we’re down, we’re on top, we’re down.” It was a rugged four years, but “we never went hungry.” When, more than three years ago, Bill began to reassemble the business, Pinky was right there. If they needed parts, she drove off to fetch them. She cleaned the office toilets because they couldn’t spare money for a janitor. Now, the business has three branches, and Pinky is office manager and majordomo, pacifying customers, keeping things running smoothly.

“If you work hard here in California, you’ll make it,” Pinky believes. “If you really try very hard, you won’t go hungry. So I get irritated, I’m sorry. I watch the news and these people, the homeless--they sit there and they complain, and you know what? Why don’t they go find a job? Even sweeping streets or cleaning toilets, anything--but they’re too good for that. They’re so lazy, they want to sit on their butts, so that way, other people can support them. I don’t agree with that, I’m sorry. . . . I worked hard for the money I get. So does my husband.”

The couple’s personal life hasn’t been without turbulence. They had religion in common, but the differences bothered their relatives. Her mother was concerned, but his mother, a Utah farm woman, was incensed. “One time she said, ‘Why don’t you go back to the country where you belong?’ ” Pinky answered mildly: “Mom, you don’t belong here either. Nobody is a real true-blooded American. We all came from different countries.” But her husband flung open the front door. “He said, ‘Mother, you’re talking to my wife. You can leave now.’ ”

Pinky’s mother and father were strict, but if she grumbled about them as a kid, she imitated them as a parent. Homework is done before play, and nothing below a B is acceptable. The children need permission to go out. They are not to smoke or drink, and no R-rated movies for the younger kids. She believes that children need discipline as well as love, that hard work is rewarded, and that a good education helps you make something of yourself--which is why, even in those few slogging years when she waited tables to help support them, the checks to parochial school went out like clockwork.

They live in West Covina and have three sons--all altar boys, she says with pride. But it is her daughter who is most interested in running the family business, and they want her to follow her elder brother to college. Pinky would like to let their daughter handle some of the business, so she and her husband can travel together.

“In our family, when you get married, you don’t divorce”--despite her six-month deadline when they first wed. “When you get married, it’s through thick and thin, and only death will you part.

“And since we’re both still alive,” she said, laughing, “we can’t part--so we’re stuck.”

THESE DAYS, THE woman named Sherrilyn feels a lot like the little girl named Dorothy, who went looking for happiness in the exotic and perilous land of Oz and found it had been right there in her own back yard all along.

Sherrilyn Winkfield-Thompson had a teen-age daughter when she came to the American Oz, Los Angeles, a year and a half ago.

This summer, after having been here less than two years, she plans to return to her native Atlanta.

She is 34, a cosmopolitan woman, striking and assured, the sort one expects to find in big and thriving cities. But of Los Angeles, she says, “I like the city but I don’t like living in the city. I don’t feel comfortable with living here.”

Almost from the start, the mix didn’t work. Used to Atlanta’s clean and convenient buses, she found the transit system in this vast, rich city to be depressingly poor and “a rolling circus” to boot. Used to real neighbors in real neighborhoods, she lives in an Inglewood apartment building, where maybe you know the people next door, and maybe you don’t. Accustomed to having some money for little luxuries, even a trip to New York for a salon facial, she found it a stretch just to pay for the basics. And, prepared to find healthy competition in her line of work--skin care and cosmetics--she found complete saturation.

“You’d think coming to a city like this, where everyone’s concerned about their looks, it would be very, very easy here, but once I got out here. . . . On every corner there’s a nail salon; every other nail salon offers some sort of facial or pedicure.”

That is not what she had envisioned for herself, some shop in a stucco mini-mall, a place to get your nails done while waiting for your pizza. But even among chic and cushy salons, “competition is so fierce out here my concern was, would it be worth it to invest that much energy?”

Her decision to go home “is not because I’m afraid and backing off but because I know that financially it (staying here to open a business) wouldn’t be feasible at this point. The time is just not right. I really want to go back home to do it, and that’s what I’ve decided to do.”

As a girl, she wanted to be a corporate lawyer. That ambition pretty much ended in her freshman year of college, but two elements of it endure: She loves to talk, and she wants to be “rich,” a word she imbues with a lush sound.

Her family was prosperously middle class, a father with the IRS, a mother who had been a schoolteacher but quit to bring up her only child. Insulated from want, even from the uglier forms of racism (until high school, when she went with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to register voters in Alabama and witnessed a near-riot when a 73-year-old black woman hobbled up to register), she had the kind of charmed childhood whose only cause for regret is that she can’t go back to it.

She was majoring in political science, planning for that law career--”I always wanted to be what people would label a professional person”-- when marriage and motherhood came “very rapidly,” and she left school for her Army husband, her daughter, and maybe one more reason.

“I got afraid, is what I think it really was, to be honest about it. I got afraid of not achieving something in my life, of being a failure. Somehow that was implanted in my head, of not being what I always said I’d be.”

She had already begun junior college classes in advertising and business when she learned that her husband, then overseas, was on drugs. “That increased my sense of urgency to hurry up and do something. But even if it hadn’t happened, I really felt I was going back to school. I never would have been content just to sit at home.”

Soon divorced, with an AA degree, she worked in a department store, modeled and discovered the cosmetics trade. “You become wrapped up in it. It’s an industry that is so fascinating, so spellbinding, so innovative. It’s such a psychological fix for some people.” Corporate law began to look drab and pale in comparison. She became a licensed “aesthetician.”

She remarried, to a high school gym teacher, and eventually was partner in an Atlanta salon with a hair-styling couple, but sold her share when she found the demand for skin care not as large as the demand for hair care. That, and a second divorce after 11 1/2 years, made Los Angeles appealing.

“I was divorced; I wanted to see how it would feel to live somewhere else. But my primary goal was, basically, in the back of my mind, I really wanted to start a business here.”

There are some splendid things about living here. Her daughter loves the beach and her friends. Winkfield-Thompson got to see the Bolshoi once. But at the high school her daughter attends, there are students bigger and tougher than the teachers; it often seems like “a combat zone.” And in Atlanta, she could afford season tickets to the ballet.

Instead of having a salon of her own, she is a cosmetics-counter manager at a department store in the Beverly Center. In the glitter and flash that pass every day, she sees a city hypnotized by its own P.R. “Everyone, it seems, is mesmerized with the fact of being in Los Angeles--the ocean and Hollywood. It’s like being in love with love. They’re in love with being in Los Angeles. But what is the quality of their life? I can’t speak for everybody, but I can speak for myself.”

Los Angeles strikes her as intensely class-conscious--and divided into only two classes. People who qualify as middle class anywhere else do not in Los Angeles, “because you’re not here , at the upper level. You’re not at the lower level, but that’s where they consider you because you are not at this upper level.”

Some things were better than their billing. She had been told a lot of unlovely things about L.A. men, their egos and such, “and I find none of it is true; I think it’s all personal, whom you attract.”

But there are “a lot of men who expect women to do more for them--taking care of them, financially, emotionally, in other words reversing the role.” Not her kind of man, gallant and gentlemanly. “There’s nothing wrong with a woman earning as much as a man--I’m all for it. I think women, especially now, need someone basically they can lean on sometimes. I guess I’m very old-fashioned, I don’t want to have to open a door for myself. I like having chairs pulled out for me.”

Ten years from now, Winkfield-Thompson figures she might be a lot of things--a grandmother, certainly the owner of her own business, perhaps even marketing her own cosmetics line, including her dream signature lipstick, “Hussy Red”--but remarried? Probably not. Maybe, at least for her, trying to have it all can’t work. In business, “you literally sell your life away. It’s very hard on a marriage.”

Like living in Los Angeles, it is a balancing act. A lot of people have done it, but it’s not for her.

There won’t be much to pack. Most everything is still in storage in Atlanta, except a favorite art piece, a woman’s head sculpted in birchwood, sleek as a swallow. It has been a pleasingly familiar focus in a bare apartment in a trying city, and she stroked its glossy surface like a worry stone.

“I’m not very pleased with living here. But I never would have known how I felt living here if I hadn’t come, and that would always have been in the back of my mind.”

OLIVIA’S FRIEND HAD heard a lot about Olivia’s mother--how strict she was with her eldest daughter. Your mother, her friend told her, has one foot in the 19th Century and one foot in the 20th.

Then Olivia’s friend met Olivia’s mother. I was wrong, the friend teased Olivia. Your mother has one foot in the 18th Century and one foot in the 19th.

Maybe it is Olivia De La Torre who is partly in the 19th Century and partly in the 20th. In fact, in her short life, 21-year-old De La Torre has found herself struggling to span two generations and two cultures.

The Mexican-born daughter of a carpet installer and a housekeeper, De La Torre says her most ardent dream is to become an engineer, or maybe an accountant. Her philosophy is that “no matter what you do, you’re going to grow old; you might as well grow old educated as uneducated.”

The part of her that is Mexican (and she feels more Mexican than American, still) misses the affectionate life among friends in the Mexico City neighborhood where her family lived until she was 12 and they moved here. If she had ditched school--and she never has--someone would have told her mom. But here, in East Los Angeles, in America, even if they see you, they don’t care.

The part of her that is American listened to Councilwoman Gloria Molina speak at school and attended a forum by women engineers at Cal State Los Angeles, and told herself, “If they can do it, I can do it, too.” She likes “The Cosby Show” and “Family Ties,” in which professional women work in tandem with husbands and children who love and respect them, and she says to herself, I want to do that, I really do.

The family followed her father, who had come here years before to work and send money back to them. They came here, her mother never let them forget, to get an education. “My mom was very strict. We didn’t have anything else to do but study. That was our obligation.”

When a girl at school in El Sereno Junior High jeeringly called her “TJ,” it “made me think, ‘They’re not going to call me that anymore. I have to learn--if I’m going to live here--how to speak and how to read and everything.’ ”

The school part was easy. Her grades were high in Mexico, and the curriculum here was a snap. The world outside was harder: Here, “you didn’t even know who your neighbor was. You don’t know whether to trust them or not.” The 12-year-old girl next door talked casually and shockingly about sex, and about running away. “You hear about those things, but it’s not the same to hear about them as to see them yourself, right next door.” And at school, the established Mexican-American girls snubbed her for her modest clothes and shy studiousness.

When the family moved to East Los Angeles and she enrolled at a new school, she discovered MESA, a math, engineering and science program that consumed her. She took some college-level courses, attacking math texts with the joyous raptness that other kids apply to comic books.

Although her mother was pleased with the intensity of her studies, at the same time, “she said I never had the time to help her do things. I tried my best to help her, but it was very difficult.”

Still, she is grateful to her mother for insisting that she keep after her studies, for motivating her to succeed in this brave new culture; if her mother hadn’t been so strict, “I’d probably be working” in some drab job that would afford little money and no future.

De La Torre bore the weight not only of being the eldest of six children, but of her mother’s own culture shock and fears. If there were banquets or dances at school, she was not allowed to go. Like every eldest child for whom the rod has not been spared, De La Torre compares what her younger sisters are allowed to do with what she was not. Her 14-year-old sister Christina hops the bus and goes shopping. “I tell my mom, ‘How can you let her get away with that?’ My brother didn’t even get away with those things when he was her age.” Next to Christina’s bold hair and clothes, it is Olivia, with neat long hair and demure jewelry--a high school ring and gold religious medal--who looks like the younger sister. She and her mother listen to Spanish radio stations and talk wistfully of Mexico. The younger girls like to visit, but “say they would never ever live down there.”

By the time she was a junior, counselors were making plans for her. “My goal was to be an engineer.” One counselor suggested Loyola or MIT, which sounded “exciting but it’s very, very scary. In a way I wanted to get away (but) I contradict myself--away but not too far away.”

The family she loves, and that loves her, is afraid for her in a big, rough world. Whatever you want to do, her mother said. One of her sisters discouraged her; a brother said she set her goals too high. Then “here comes my father,” who behind her back, she hears, brags extravagantly about her. You’ll miss your family, he told her. What if you need them? These new people you’ll meet at school--” ’you aren’t going to know whether you can trust them or not.’ He made me feel that fear back again.”

But then there is her ability, and she has seen the kind of doors, to income and security, that ability can unlock. So with a grant for tuition and books, she began close to home, at Cal State L.A., majoring in accounting. She loved her classes, but felt even more the press of another culture, where “everybody lives by the clock--you count every minute of your life.” Every day she whipsawed between a sheltered life at home, familiar and secure, and the intense demands of school--hundreds of new people, from every country, with more religions and tastes and ideas than she had ever encountered.

Stress finally made her ill, and she left school. “I got discouraged after I got sick, because my father told me, ‘If it’s too hard for you, stop going to school.’ ” But “it isn’t school,” she told him. People at Cal State said what she needed was more friends, more freedom, “to feel more comfortable with myself, that I need to gain more confidence.”

She has thought a lot about it since she has been at home, taking care of her mother’s new baby. She is going back this spring, re-enrolling and taking it slow. She can still be an accountant, or perhaps, even an engineer. “Right now it’s very difficult for me.”

In 10 years, she expects to be married, and a mother, and working. She has not dated a lot, but she knows that there are many men who “want to feel proud of their wife, their mate. They want to feel proud, and they want them to be something in life. It’s not, ‘OK, you stay home and I go to work and I come back and give you the money.’ They want somebody to share their life.”

In high school there were two teachers whom she admired, a married Latino couple. They took turns, teaching and taking care of their kids, equally. De La Torre thought it was “great. I think if I find myself a man like that--I don’t care,” she says, with a sudden vivid smile, not shy at all. “I’ll marry him. I wouldn’t let him go.”

IF IT SOUNDS GREAT--AN APARTMENTin the Marina, a BMW, a New Year’s trip to Paris--it is.

Of course, the BMW is 9 years old, bought, used, long before the Y-word was coined. And Nancy J. Pearl went to Paris alone among a group of couples and came back to her apartment with a souvenir, a raging cold. Then she had the nerve to go down to the drugstore for cold medicine--in the Marina-- wearing . . . no . . . makeup.

There is something winning about Pearl’s amusement over that. It is not a timorous giggle, but the fully engaged laugh of a woman who, at 40, feels “on top of the world.”

After enough years in radio and television to earn the Linda Ellerbee Merit Badge (motto, roughly translated: No one can be worth his or her feed who has not been fired at least once), Pearl has carved out her own niche in the competitive public relations turf of Los Angeles, as a consultant specializing in promoting ad agencies. She works at home, and alone, with “a great boss and a great employee.” Her life, she says, is professionally and spiritually better than ever. She even looks better, she is sure, than she did when she came here 13 years ago.

“I feel better about life in general and myself and work and friends than I ever have, and it’s from testing myself and from finding all those hidden resources within myself, and the ability to make those support myself. I’m really enjoying being an adult.”

It took a lot to be able, finally, to say those words--years when her self-esteem was battered from soloing in a man’s industry among men who didn’t let her forget it. Years of off-and-on relationships that worked at cross-purposes to much of the rest of her life, like the one with a man who asked pointedly on their first date whether she rented or owned.

Ten, even five years ago, that might have worried her. Now--once again--she laughs.

She got her first radio when she was 9, and she and her youngest brother--the one who is a TV anchorman now--would listen to the Chicago stations and critique what they heard. Their father, a management recruiter, had equal expectations for his daughter and his sons--that “I would go to college and I would get a job and that I would lead some sort of meaningful life.” It wasn’t until she took up a “man’s major”--broadcasting--that “I realized other people didn’t necessarily consider me the same as anyone else.”

She has long since stopped bewailing that or feeling like a victim. Sure, there’s sexism; it’s a fact of life. And sure, she hasn’t got it all; she hasn’t had a child or been married. “But look at what I have.”

Somewhere along the line--after her father died and she went into therapy for a while and career success bolstered her self-esteem--her outlook gradually changed, and now, she says, “things are a lot easier and a lot more pleasant than they were a few years ago. If you can’t concentrate on the good things that are given to you or provided for you, if you can’t take advantage of those things and make a good life for yourself, then you’re cheating yourself and you won’t live the fullest life you can.”

But it sure looked hard back in the late ‘60s, when a professor asked her why she was worried about a grade, when she was just going to get married and be a stewardess. (Years later, she wrote him a triumphant little note, “and I said, I haven’t gotten married, I’ve been working in the profession all this time, so there.”)

Her first job out of college was as production and continuity director at an Ann Arbor radio station. After three years, she went into television, a production job in Atlanta that turned out to be more secretarial than producing. She was a Northerner and a college graduate among men who “teased me about it, but they meant it. They would say, pushy broad, or pushy Jewish broad.”

She was labeled a troublemaker. They thought it “just awful” that she would suggest things like a format sheet for newscasts. Someone started the rumor that she was having simultaneous affairs with three men in the newsroom. Finally she told her boss: “If a third of that was true, I’d be a helluva lot happier than I am now. And I just walked out of his office. I couldn’t believe it.”

She stayed in Atlanta for a while, doing radio, then public relations for a theater group and the Playboy Club. But the call of Los Angeles was strong: Another brother was here, and so was a huge market for her skills. After a couple of years of crummy-paying jobs and dismal interviews, she caught on to public relations, and vice versa. For someone who at 31 was earning only $200 a month more than she had 10 years before, the money was vastly better. After working at a few agencies, she struck out on her own in 1981.

In the nation’s most aggressive and clamorous media market, she is proud of having made something of a name for herself. “I didn’t think I had what it took. Other people went into business for themselves, but not me. Suddenly you’re in a position where you’re testing yourself in many different areas. The ability to survive is the bottom line--can I make enough money to survive? And I have, thank God.”

She had always sought to distance herself from the cash-and-glamor fixation of Hollywood, but its reminders are everywhere. Dudley Moore lives one beach away. John and Bo Derek lived in her complex at one time; she met them at a security meeting.

When Pearl first got here, she roomed with her brother’s girlfriend, who kept urging her to fix herself up, wear low-cut blouses, because “ ‘this is how the competition dresses,’ as she put it.”

When her used BMW suddenly acquired status, the idea that a car should make her “a lot more believable” to clients became a private amusement; “I just grinned.”

But some of Los Angeles’ brass-ring-think inevitably rubbed off, too. For two years she dated a Beverly Hills man who, on paper, matched the qualities she thought she wanted: aggressive, established, a nice income. But over deeper matters--her business judgment, her opinions--they locked horns. Two years into the relationship, they still had “structured” dates, and if she showed up early, he would comment on it, as though his territory were being invaded. It was “training wheels,” she kept telling herself, learning what she wanted in a man, now that she had learned what she wanted from herself.

“I’m sure at any point in the past, if someone had said to me, ‘I’ll take care of you, you don’t have to work,’ I would undoubtedly have said, fine. I don’t think I really would do that now. Now I’m more interested in someone who’s real warm and real loving, who doesn’t necessarily need to take care of me financially. I’ve created my own life. I’m not rich or anywhere near it, but I know that I can always create a living for myself, and that’s fine with me.”

In the years before she turned 35, she went through a sort of dating frenzy. “I thought, ‘I don’t have time, I have to get settled down and have babies.’ ” Then someone she dated--a man with a vasectomy--asked her: Why? And she thought, “Why do I want children? Because I’ll be their mother and they’ll love me no matter what, un-conditionally?”

It occurred to her that that wasn’t the best reason.

“If I met someone and we had a real positive, solidly based relationship, and we decided we wanted to be a family, I would not hesitate. I haven’t found him yet. But that’s the right reason.”

Not long ago, she felt “the need to be a little bit rooted,” to re-establish some ties. So she took religion classes, went to Judaism lectures, started going to temple again--something to take her out of the here-and-now obsessiveness of Los Angeles.

Something out here--the climate, maybe?--fosters it; the casualness that makes for open-mindedness and easygoing natures also encourages its obverse, a lack of commitment. It bothers her to think that she has owned one car longer than many people stay with one spouse. “There’s always something else. There’s always going to be someplace new to go to, someone new to go with. Why limit yourself?

“(But) at some point you’ve got to feel part of something, like you belong somewhere.”

ON DAYS WHEN SHE IS SORE-SPIRITED and downhearted, Carol Richardson takes a bus.

Sometimes she leaves her home in Carson and takes a downtown bus, one that grinds through Skid Row in a wheeze of fumes the color of the sidewalks, where men and women pace aimlessly.

From her window, Richardson looks out at those people, “and I say, ‘This will never be me. I know in my heart I will never get that low. And I get inspired.’ ”

Sometimes she takes another bus, one that slides down boulevards edged in flowers that seem perpetually in bloom. And there, in almost any direction, will be a house “whose front lawn looks like a park,” a place “so huge you could sneak in this house and live in one wing of it for three years, and nobody would ever know you’re there.”

And then, uplifted, she thinks, “Whatever it took for that person to get that huge mansion--this person is not lazy. This person might have had a humble beginning like me.”

At 29, Richardson is just starting out, stepping into her first real position. The seventh of eight children, she has put herself through college--taking months off to earn the money to keep going, working jobs so mindless or grueling she sardonically labeled them “jobs from hell.”

Around her, people in the South-Central Los Angeles neighborhood where she grew up dropped out, for quick money or early motherhood or the consoling oblivion of drugs. But she is patient. “I believe you can have it all,” she says. “Other people have it, why not me? It’s not going to materialize tomorrow; it’s not going to fall in your lap.”

In her sometimes wearing pursuit of a better life, inspiration is nourishment as real as food or love. And Richardson has been well nourished. She was inspired by Martin Luther King Jr., by Stokely Carmichael and by Angela Davis when her parents took the kids to hear them speak. “I could remember all the slogans from the ‘60s, like ‘Learn, baby, learn, so you can earn, baby, earn.’ So I just grew up thinking I owed the black community something. I couldn’t be just another lost soul--I have to make something of myself.”

And there was the woman down the street--a woman who lived alone, who had prospered in real estate, a neighborhood philanthropist who made sure everyone had food baskets at Christmas and took up the collection when anybody died. “She always said, ‘Girl, don’t you let these men ruin your world, you just get you a job.’ She told me about birth control and stuff, and my mother--she was an old Southern girl--she didn’t discuss sex at all.”

Richardson’s parents came here from Louisiana; her father retired from the merchant marine and opened a dry-cleaning shop in South-Central Los Angeles. The family idol was an uncle who had played cello with Duke Ellington; the dry-cleaning customers included black performers such as James Brown whose business, like their music, was not always welcome elsewhere.

The shop made money, but “eight kids, that’s a lot to provide for, so it was a little tough.” Her mother’s credo was, “ ‘No matter how poor you are, you still have clothes on your back and shoes on your feet, and you don’t have to worry about your next meal. So don’t complain about what you don’t have.’ I learned at an early age that if you didn’t get it for yourself, you weren’t going to get it.”

It’s an attitude that’s sustained her. It would be easy to say, “Oh, I’m oppressed because I’m a woman, I’m oppressed because I’m black, I’m oppressed because the market in L.A. is real competitive and you’ve got to know somebody, you’ve got to type your way to the top or screw your way to the top,” she says. “I just don’t feel like you have to do that. If you don’t take some of the obvious avenues, it might take me five years what somebody else would do in two, but the goal is to do it.”

She graduated from Cal State Dominguez Hills a year ago with a journalism degree, and until November, when she began copy-editing part time for the Los Angeles Sentinel, she had “pounded the pavement” for a job. For her mother, this one daughter’s dreams of newspaper and TV reporting are “alien to her. She does not understand the impact of journalists or writers in this society.” When Richardson was in college, her parents--with the kindest of intentions--kept leaving her applications for jobs as a janitor.

Being unmarried at the big three-O doesn’t rattle her; her Louisiana cousins, several years younger and mothers several times over, have stopped clucking over her single state. She can take her time on that. “If you start climbing up, you don’t want to be with (a man) who’ll get jealous or be in your way or doesn’t understand why you’re not happy baking breakfast every day.”

A couple of years ago, she says, she was talking to a guy--a black guy--and mentioned apartheid. “He thought I was talking about an apartment house or something.” For a woman who wants to learn a foreign language and travel and go to graduate school, “I just feel you can be really one-sided and get away with it here. You can’t do that in other places.”

Los Angeles is funny like that: “I’m hardly making any money, and uneducated people are making more than me.” For now. It will come. An anchorwoman job, maybe. Writing. Her own station, perhaps. “I feel I have to perfect my craft; I have to apply my craft. I have to become good.”

ON THE SHELVES AND WALLS OF Ricarda Garcia’s house, the house she bought and paid for by herself, are pictures of the two most constant and reliable men in her life: her eldest son and Jesus Christ.

Her son--he’s now a sergeant stationed in Hawaii--was the one who looked after the other kids when his father left, the one who came in to talk softly to her when she got home from work tired and anxious, the one who turned off the TV and tiptoed out when she fell asleep.

And Jesus--well, Jesus has always been there, before any of the kids or husbands. “The good Lord has always been a help,” her rock and her foundation. But at 56, Rickie Garcia is at last getting comfortable with giving herself some modest credit. “To me,” she says, tilting her head toward the back yard of her Reseda home, then the kitchen, where one daughter sits with her son Ricardo, his grandma’s namesake, “it makes me proud that I made this on my own. I kept it going with six kids, and I’m contented with what I got.”

In the land of largess, Garcia feels no envy; her desires are modest. “I don’t like luxury. The only thing, I would like my house to look nice. A nice bathroom, nice kitchen, but not these fancy things, because you know what? Many people might have all these things but are not happy. Money is not everything. It buys a lot of things, but it doesn’t make you happy. You appreciate more things in life when you work for them than when they’re given to you.”

Little was given to Garcia, besides seven children--the youngest, 12-year-old Xavier, a partly paralyzed Down’s syndrome child still in diapers--and three not-very-worthwhile husbands. One of nine children of a Mexican immigrant, Garcia was born in Arizona. When she was 5, her father would take her to the cotton fields with him--not to work, but to accustom her to the toil that her grandparents had done and that her parents figured their children would do.

Twenty years later, she did work the fields, for three months, around Oxnard. But now she works in an office, uses a computer and handles emergency-room patient intake at a Sylmar hospital, where she is not awfully far, but then again a thousand leagues, from where she once picked tomatoes.

None of this was planned. “I thought I would be like my mother, but life changes.”

Her mother lived here for 55 years and never learned English. When her babies came, she kept Rickie out of school to help her with them. She never got past sixth grade. But another sort of education began at 15, when she rebelled against parental strictness and married a much older man. It was, she says, a nightmare, not a marriage. He was harsh, and he beat her. After nine years, her mother told her tearfully, “Leave that man before he drives you crazy.”

With husband No. 2 she came to the Oxnard fields, before she found a job ironing Navy uniforms in Port Hueneme. By 1960, they had moved to Canoga Park.

Jobs came as often as the children. She worked as a machine operator, as a housekeeper, on a factory graveyard shift and, eventually, as a federally funded community liaison, helping people find work and deal with such daunting institutions as the phone company. When the funding ended, she started as a hospital file clerk, learned on the job how to type, and two years ago won her current job, patient-resource worker.

Her second husband left her in 1972, not long after their sixth child was born. (“I wasn’t sure I was going to make it on my own. I figured, oh my God, how am I going to raise six kids?”) She hired a cousin as a live-in baby-sitter ; the cousin had two kids of her own, more mouths to feed. Garcia’s widowed father lived with her until he died. She married a third husband, who was jealous of her job, jealous of the men she worked with, jealous of her kids. She became pregnant at 43 and refused amniocentesis. “I left it to the Lord. It’s whatever the good Lord wanted him to be.” But Xavier was too much for her third husband, who she says eventually left the country rather than pay to support his retarded son.

And for six years now, there has been her fourth husband, Victor Garcia, a diesel mechanic. “I’ve had more help from my husband now for Xavier than from his own father,” Rickie Garcia says. Her husband cuts the boy’s hair, baby-sits him and helps feed him, and Xavier adores him.

On paper, her life could be a connect-the-dots picture of pure calamity, crisis linked to crisis. That is not how she sees it. God does not give people more than they can handle. Some people, adversity snaps. Some people, it tempers.

“The breaking up of my (second) marriage--it made me independent. I knew that I had to work for what I had.” And now she would not have it any other way. “I think if (Victor) tried to keep me away from work, I’d die !”

She would like to go back to school--computers, data entry, even public relations, “because that’s what I do” with all those patients. “But it’s so hard for me to go to school because when I come home I have to cook dinner, and after I serve dinner I have to clean the kitchen. If I would tell (Victor) I’m going to leave everything and go to school, maybe he’d like it for a few days, but not as a steady thing.”

A younger woman might not care what her husband thought. An older woman might not think to go to school at all. But Garcia’s world changed. It is not the way it was 30 years ago. “The difference between now and then is when I came here, women were not liberal. Whereas now women are more liberal; they don’t need a man to survive. In Arizona, probably that is the way I was brought up: You have to abide by what your husband says.”

But when the husband is wrong, or when he is not there, well, “a woman can do it on her own any time, and in a decent way. You don’t have to go to prostitution or doing something immoral or illegal to survive. Maybe you don’t have luxury but, hey, as long as you have a roof and food on your table, that’s all that matters, and clothing. And happy kids. I mean, that’s my way of being.”