Living the L.A. Dream : Money: In the city of fast fortunes, newly rich sometimes find a greater reward in the striving than in the arriving.

Nouveau riche. New money. The words suggest tactless millionaires spending lavishly on overpriced, gaudy trappings: buying original art to match the living room decor; accessorizing the Mercedes with 24-karat gold trim; building outsized, Tara-style mansions.

New money is a fact of life in Los Angeles, where fast fortunes are made in fields such as entertainment, real estate and restaurants, and spent on high-visibility commodities such as large, lavishly decorated homes; pricey, glittery gowns, and fast cars. While old money stands back and clucks at such extravagant expenditures, new money is buying its way into previously unattainable prestigious charities and private clubs where old money once reigned supreme.

With each new millionaire comes a new way of spending the millions--and not everyone goes the way of flash and trash. If the rich are still different from you and me, the nouveaux riches might be a shade more like us.

“My experience has been that there isn’t one kind of nouveau riche, just as there isn’t one kind of old money, or one kind of poverty,” says Rex Beaber, an attorney and psychologist who has treated patients in the ultra-high income range. “I know a couple who invested their money in real estate and have become millionaires. These people have never splurged. They own houses throughout Beverly Hills, and they live in a small house in Hollywood. They drive a Toyota. They never played out the scenario of the image we have. It was hard for them to buy a CD (player) to replace their stereo. So here are people who still function as if they’re not rich.”

There are those who fail to acknowledge the principle of diminishing returns, says Beaber. “The first million tremendously increases the quality of someone’s life. The second adds just a little bit. The third even less.” For these people, the thrill is in the challenge of acquiring money, rather than in enjoying it.

Some who have acquired wealth, says Beaber, worry their children will grow up spoiled. “Some people are frightened that without enough deprivation, their kids won’t be like them. It’s not that I’m suggesting that it’s not worth people being achievement-oriented, but why would you if you were the daughter of a rock star who made millions of dollars? Why should you go to college? To get a good education for what? To get married? That’s why most people go to college; to get a degree so they can get a better job that pays more. Without that, what do grades mean? You’d be surprised how much time is related to the acquisition of money.”

Rick Rosenfield is keenly aware of how the trappings of wealth might be affecting his 7- and 3-year-old daughters from his second marriage.

The co-owner of the California Pizza Kitchen chain of restaurants says it’s something he watches all the time.

“I think it’s very important,” he says, “that we keep our feet on the ground for them, and we work on that. I think now the 7-year-old really is starting to feel the pride in these restaurants, and we’re monitoring that, to make sure that that is used as a very positive force and not the way it could be, which could be to have an arrogance about it.”

Adds his partner Larry Flax: “Wealth just makes you be a little more clever about life. It’s a challenge. You can still be happy rich, your kids can grow up happy and successful, you just have to think it through and help them think it through and understand it.”

Although both profess not to care that their pizza is more famous than they are, both admit they enjoy being in the limelight.

“A couple of years ago we’d walk into a party and people would say, ‘What do you do?’ ” says Flax. “And we’d say, ‘We own California Pizza Kitchen.’ And we’d expect, ‘Oh my God, you’re the guys?’ But they’d say, ‘What’s that?’ But now it’s really fun. We walk into a party and everybody seems to know us, especially in Los Angeles. And it’s exciting, I have to say. It is very exciting stuff, more exciting than my car, more exciting than my house. That recognition of accomplishment. We’ve worked hard for it.”

With the success of their business, which last year grossed $20 million in sales, the two, friends for 16 years, have become multimillionaires--several notches above the life style they had when they met, working as federal prosecutors.

They became partners in their own law firm, then started the pizza chain in 1985 with a mutual feeling of burnout and a love of good food. They now have 10 restaurants nationwide serving “designer” pizzas such as barbecued chicken and Peking duck, and six more in the works.

Flax, 47, and Rosenfield, 44, wearing similar crew neck sweaters and ensconced in leather chairs in the California Pizza Kitchen offices in Beverly Hills, admit there was a time when nouveau riche might have applied to them. “Maybe when we were lawyers we were sort of nouveau riche because we were starting to feel the money, and we were spending it,” Flax says. “There was a time when I wanted the girl I was dating to see that bottle of Dom Perignon and if the waiter wrapped it up I’d unwrap it and show it to her.”

He laughs at the memory.

Money has afforded them bigger houses, fancier cars (Flax owns a Rolls-Royce) and a new life style, which is sometimes approached with bemusement.

There’s the charity circuit, for instance. Donations of money and food to various causes were never a problem; they expected that as part of their civic duty, and are happy to give back something to a community that supports them.

But showing up at black-tie functions is another thing.

“We don’t really enjoy the dinners, I must tell you,” Rosenfield says. “That is the least interesting part for us. It is good to do the good, and we are expected to show up for certain events. . . . We really have been laughing about it. The other night I turned to my wife and said, ‘Honey, what tie and cummerbund do you think I should wear tonight?’ ”

Adds Flax: “I’m learning all sorts of different things about ‘society’ that I never understood before. Now what’s important is what table you’re at. I find this very amusing, the table game. And now I realize that people are looking at me and judging me by what table I’m at. And I don’t think that’s fair. I wish that charities would do it by lottery.”

They credit their background as lawyers for their analytical approach to society, and their parents’ values for allowing them to stay sane about the whole thing.

Both come from stable middle-class families where life was comfortable and money was never scarce, but education and hard work were priorities.

“Being Jewish,” says Flax, “I grew up with a vision of the Holocaust, and that not only was this a horrible thing for the world, but my people were the target . . . I came away from that thinking, as long as you’re healthy it sure beats being burned in the gas chamber. Therefore there is no devastation that life has to offer me that I can’t put in perfect perspective in relation to the Holocaust.”

If everything were taken away from them tomorrow, Flax and Rosenfield shrug and say they wouldn’t have a problem with that.

“What all of us agree, “ says Flax, “is that as long as we’re healthy, as long as we’re together, then we’ll go do something else and it’ll be another experience. We’ll learn how to turn things around and challenge our life. I’m not wishing it on me, but I certainly could handle it positively.”

“How people handle their wealth is connected to their self-esteem and their values,” says psychologist Beaber. “The myth of wealth notwithstanding, most people who become wealthy do so not by accident, they decided to do so.

“Another price you pay for being wealthy, and one of the frequent things people complain about, is the issue of friendship. Most people make friends within their socioeconomic class, and that’s where part of your shared interests arise from. People who become wealthy find it difficult to be friends with friends they’ve had in the past. Conversations are difficult. And in addition to this reduced commonality of interests, you also have the envy issue. Then you have to make friends with people in a different socioeconomic class, and you may not be (acculturated) to that.”

Faith Ford is discovering that wealth isn’t what it used to be.

The 24-year-old actress, who portrays the ditsy beauty-queen-turned-newswoman Corky Sherwood on “Murphy Brown,” pulls at strands of her blonde hair and says, “My salary is a lot, yeah, it’s great, but it seems the more I make the more people I have to pay. I have a business manager because I don’t have enough time to manage my funds. I have a publicist. And now I have to buy a house. Not maybe I’ll buy a house; I have to buy a house. I’m in the process of saving for a down payment. The money doesn’t seem to go quite as far any more. You think, ‘If I can just make this much, I know I can have it.’ Then you find yourself making that much and you think, ‘No, not quite.’ As time goes by, what looked like a lot of money two years ago is not so much now.”

Although she’s not yet a millionaire, Ford’s salary (actresses in her category get roughly $15,000 per episode) has enabled her to afford a housekeeper once a week and a personal trainer; neither one a luxury, she says, but necessities to cope with an ever-dwindling amount of spare time. And, she points out, she still drives her 1985 Plymouth Turismo.

Her acting career started with commercials, then progressed to soap operas--”One Life to Live” and “Another World”--before she landed “Murphy Brown.” Besides coping with a much larger salary, Ford has the extra duty of grappling with celebrityhood.

“I’m finding myself a little more paranoid about security,” she says over an early breakfast at The Source. “Most of the time people don’t recognize me, since I’m so different from my character. . . . When I go home to Virginia, it’s starting to be more of a big deal, my being on the show. My parents play it down big time. They don’t tell anyone they’re my parents, because they want to have a normal life as well.”

While some of her peers are in their second round of drug rehab, Ford credits her parents (her father is in insurance, her mother is a teacher) with giving her a level head about success.

“They always said, ‘If you believe that you will be successful in what you do, you will be successful.’ They always gave us a really positive attitude that we can do whatever we set out to do as long as we work . . . We had a very Christian upbringing and prayed, but we were never the kind of family that sat back and prayed but then didn’t work as well.”

Recently married to an aspiring actor, Ford finds life is going pretty smoothly right now, except for some recurring dreams where she is being chased by people and then wakes up in a cold sweat. “Nothing has really gone to my head because I feel like everything that has happened so far has been earned. I just feel really fortunate that it hasn’t happened too fast for my head. It’s probably my roots and the people I’ve surrounded myself with in my life. I have very close friends who are down to earth, and pretty much believe the things I believe in.”

If some friends have been shed along the way, Ford says the culprits are time and distance.

“When you get really, really busy, you just can’t keep in contact with them. It’s not that I don’t care for them any more. I have two friends from high school and they’re just as busy as I am with what they’re doing.”

Requests for appearances at charity functions come regularly; Ford says she only goes if she has to, and if it’s a cause she truly believes in. Her public appearances leave her a little shell-shocked. At this year’s Emmys (she was nominated for best supporting actress in a comedy series), she recalls, “People were yelling, ‘Faith, come over here! Faith, come over here!’ And I didn’t know what to do. I felt so weird. I was wearing this dress that was really tight and I could hardly breathe. And you just say, ‘Wow, how much do I wish I was sitting home watching this on TV, eating pizza.’ I guess it can be glamorous to sort of stand back and look at it, but when you’re there, it’s like, this is no big deal. You mean, this is what I’ve been watching on TV for years? This is being on a series? We still all have to eat breakfast in the morning and still have to worry about the kids getting colds. We’re all just people.”

Work and acquiring wealth is the only game many nouveaux riches have ever known, says Beaber. “It’s not surprising they’d still want to play it. It gets boring. They either change the game or the stakes. But it’s still the same. If you talk to people 10 years after they become rich, it’s a very rare event that they’re doing the same thing. The first stage they go through is, ‘I’d better get more and make sure it’s true.’ After a while, a large number of people will delegate responsibility, and then they’ll find another game.”

The fact that many with new money don’t worry about losing it doesn’t surprise Beaber.

“At some level they wish that could happen,” he says. “Because getting there really is the fun. They’re like kids playing Monopoly. You redeal the money and play again.”

Of course, life isn’t a board game, and the smart ones will invest their money wisely.

“You can’t really burn up all your money,” Beaber says. “So the next game can never be as much fun. It’s like starting Monopoly with Boardwalk and Park Place. Unless what you have to risk is what you’ve got, you can’t get that excited about it.”

Bruce Nelson laughs when he thinks about the fuss people make over his car, a butter-yellow Rolls-Royce Corniche (license plate: “HOLMBY”), for which he paid cash.

“They get so fascinated by that car; it’s more famous than I am!” says Nelson, a jovial man who is quick to laugh. “It’s funny--everybody says, ‘Your clients must love riding in that car.’ I say, ‘My clients probably have their own Corns to begin with, and I’ve never had a client in my car.’ These aren’t the kind of people you pick up and schlep around.”

The kind of people Nelson is referring to are the ultra-rich, the subjects of “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” profiles, the kind of people able to afford the multimillion-dollar mansions that Nelson sells as a real estate agent with Asher Dann & Associates.

He sells only the top-priced residential properties in the platinum triangle of Beverly Hills, Bel-Air and Holmby Hills. His properties have included Pickfair (it sold for about $7 million), the Haagen estate ($15 million) and the Patrick Frawley estate, which Aaron Spelling bought for just over $10 million and then tore down. Last year, Nelson earned $1 million in commissions; this year he’ll double that.

The 58-year-old Nelson didn’t exactly go from rags to riches. An only child, his father was a successful architect and builder and he spent his childhood in a small town outside Chicago, moving to Beverly Hills when he was 12.

His friends were the sons and daughters of movie stars, studio moguls and other assorted millionaires.

“I would say that my parents were well-off, that we were very comfortable and probably middle-class in Beverly Hills--upper class anywhere else, financially speaking. But in Beverly Hills we were just another average family. I’m very thankful for spending the first 12 years of my life in the Midwest. When you’ve lived there, it gives you values that you have your whole life.”

He put the work ethic they instilled in him into practice in real estate.

“The whole thrust of my career,” he says, lighting up one of many cigarettes with nervous energy, “in the 20 years I’ve been in business has been to sell only at the top. In essence I positioned myself to be where I am. But a reputation takes a long time to build, it doesn’t come overnight. And as the escalation of prices went up, then the amount of my commissions obviously went up, too.”

He bought his Holmby Hills house 12 years ago, and although it is spacious it is hardly a palace. The rugs are a little worn, the living room under-furnished. Besides the Rolls, Nelson’s other splurges are the original artworks on the wall by Chagall and Picasso. He’s landscaping the back yard for a pool. Three cats that he obviously adores wander in and out of the house.

“It’s not as though I was starving and all of a sudden this hit me,” he says. “I’ve always lived well, but now my income is much stronger than it ever was. I’ve bought a few luxuries that I might not have bought; for instance the Corniche. But then, I had a Rolls 10 years ago, too. But (the new one) was a special thing. That’s something that I always wanted. But other than that, essentially, my life style and my friends are the same. My friends are very supportive.”

Nelson just bought a limo to squire him to Orange County and San Diego, where clients have requested his services. “I’ll try it out for a year and see how it goes,” he says. “People have asked me to represent them down there, but the driving time is so much, and if I drive I can’t get any work done. This way I can. We’ll see how it works.

“Money shouldn’t change a person,” he adds. “I’m not a pretentious person, and I don’t want to ever appear as such.”

Mention nouveau riche and Nelson’s mind immediately associates it with New York millionaire builder/developer Donald Trump.

“Nouveau riche to me is somebody who has new money and almost flaunts it,” he says. “Somebody who has acquired money and is low-key about it could never be accused of being nouveau riche.”

He’s seen every kind of rich in his business: new, old, loud, quiet. Their commonality is that most of his clients pay cash for their homes.

Nelson doesn’t even flinch when asked what he would do if he lost everything tomorrow. “It wouldn’t mean a thing,” he says, crushing a cigarette into an ashtray. “I couldn’t care less. Honestly. Because I know I have the ability to do it. It wasn’t given to me, I made it. You have to prove it to yourself before you can prove it to anyone else. It has to come from within first.”

“My own observation is that people who don’t have money spend a lot of their time either trying to get it or fantasizing getting it,” Beaber says. “And that’s an activity that’s very hard for the nouveaux riches to stop engaging in. They often carry on their lives as if the game is not up. They still have to. This will often go under the guise of, ‘I really did like being a grocer, so being rich doesn’t change it,” implying that the decision is philosophical. They cannot shed the consciousness that it is necessary to make money.

“In that sense,” Beaber continues, “I regard the nouveaux riches in some sense as being poor. I define the most important power in having money is purchasing freedom. It liberates the most valuable commodity in the universe, and that is time. So in theory a person isn’t really wealthy until he’s utilized his wealth to make him free. If he’s still a slave to an inner sense to continue to earn money, he hasn’t been liberated from the consciousness of survival.”

There are few things in Laura Balverde-Sanchez’s outward appearance that give any clues to the fact she runs a business that grossed $4.5 million in sales for the 1989 fiscal year. The head of the Vernon-based El Rey Sausage Co., a chorizo manufacturing firm, greets her visitors wearing a simple red cardigan over khaki trousers and a tailored white blouse, little makeup and sensible shoes. She apologizes for her simple, clean office; somehow she thinks it should be furnished a little better. The only clue to her upgraded status is her blue Mercedes.

“I drive a good car,” she says, “but because it’s the safest car on the market. When I’m asked what kind of a car I drive, I say a blue sedan. Maybe some people (celebrate their success) by having the champagne flow, but I reinvest the money in our company. Last year I bought a brand new machine that cost $87,000. It was like a baby. I was so happy. I was so proud of it. To me, that’s my champagne.”

The 38-year-old former teacher and telephone company executive bought the bankrupt chorizo company in 1983 with her husband, Joe Sanchez, an independent grocer, and two other partners, eventually sending it into the black. She puts the company ahead of herself, her husband and her friends.

Her work week always soars over 40 hours and she covets a glamorous female executive look that she knows she’ll never attain--at least as long as she keeps doing things like spilling liver blood on her pants while making a routine check of the factory.

In social situations, “I’ll think that the color of my shoes and bag don’t match for about two seconds, and then I forget about it . . . I’m conscious of it now because of the different circles my business has brought me into . . . I’ve often admired beautiful, glamorous women, and I say, ‘Gee, I wish I could do that.’ I can buy the clothes, but I put them on and say, ‘That’s not me.’ I’m not ever going to be this glamorous creature because that’s not me. I’m an ex-schoolteacher. I’ll always be this matronly looking woman.”

Her personal life and her job running El Rey can’t be separated with a crowbar. She orders a tuna salad for lunch at a nearby coffee shop but barely nibbles at it because of the intensity with which she speaks about El Rey.

Ask her if having money has changed her and she replies, “I think not so much of having money, but having the responsibility to pay out more has changed me. I tell my department managers, if you’re ordering something, picture it as money from your own pocket.”

Has it changed her personally?

“Even before I had the company I worked two jobs,” she says. “When I was teaching and working at General Telephone I had a nice salary and I bought some homes, so I had income before I was married. I can always buy my little hamburger and my gas and my room, so I don’t feel beholden to anyone. That comes from my mother. She said that whatever you earn is your own. You don’t have to share it with me or your dad, and that always stayed with me.”

Balverde-Sanchez grew up in Monterey Park, where her father was a machinist and her mother was a sewing machine operator.

“We were a working-class family, and we we had a very strong work ethic,” she recalls. “And we learned to make do with what we had. We were also taught that you could do whatever you wanted to. When I went to UCLA I didn’t have the money. When I went to USC I didn’t have the money. Money was secondary. Just get accepted and money will come, with student loans. I had four jobs while I was going to UCLA and carrying 12 units.”

When asked what she would do if offered $20 million but told she could never work again, she quickly replies, “I’d find a way to keep the money and work. I think it’s just something in me. I was a very obstinate child. I would ask questions about everything and I would never take an accepted answer.”

She knows that money can now buy her time, but she has little inclination to take advantage of it. While many would consider her a success for turning the company around, Balverde-Sanchez can only think of the new machine she wants to buy, the money she’d like to have in the bank earning interest, the states where her product isn’t carried yet.

“There are some benefits that I have been able to reward myself with,” she finally acknowledges. “I read somewhere that people have to listen to their ‘ooohs’ and their ‘ahhhs.’ What that means is, when you pass by a window and see a beautiful dress or pin or flower and it takes your breath away, buy it, because you are being good to you. That had a big impact on me. When I’m traveling on business and I have a time for a little shopping, I’ll buy maybe a pair of earrings, an investment piece, something that I think will be of value five years from now, something that makes me feel good.”

Despite the Mercedes and a nice house in Los Feliz, Balverde-Sanchez would never give herself the label of nouveau riche. “I was a working-class person . . . hard working, you eat three times a day and have dessert twice a week. That’s the kind of grouping I’m in. It’s working class, but you know the salad fork from the dinner fork.”