PRIVATE FACES, PUBLIC PLACES : Los Angeles Scotsman Spins His Web to Skye

Here is Neil McLeod at home in the Hollywood Hills, marmalade cat stalking across bleach-white floors, plastic alligator floating serenely on aquamarine pool. The talk is of “teeth overpowered by the biting forces,” of reconstructing jaws and spongy gums. McLeod is a dentist, the perfect technician, silvery, pale, 40ish, a fine English resonance to his polished voice: a man, first glance has it, of little romance and no history. Just another Hollywood remake.

In the empty air, amid the jungly and expensive privacy, Neil McLeod lifts his voice and sings of the death of Sir Rory Mor, a melancholy, heart-breaking lament of an ancient clan. And in his voice is all the loneliness of exile and loss. Neil McLeod of the Clan MacLeod, calling across thousands of miles to the walls of mighty Dunvegan Castle, standing on the rocks of Skye. The MacLeods: 800 years of unbroken history, memories of ’45 (1745 and Culloden), of slaughter, oppression, savage fighting, evictions and hunger. “Hold Fast” goes the MacLeod motto. How little we know of one another, how quickly we misjudge.

In this city of the future, we forget how complicated were the many trails that led here. Far away, the call of the Cuillan mountains, the mists and glens of Skye, must have stabbed the hearts of those torn from them by poverty and desperation. It was not always duty-free Glenlivet Scotch, cashmere Pringle jumpers on the Queen Mary shopping deck, Chariots of Fire and Military Tattoos in Irvine Meadows: the cartoon images of Scotland.

Evictions from hard and stony farms, storm-dashed fishing boats lost on treacherous shores. Brutal years brought men to the New World. And there are those here who remember that: 350 families on the mailing list of the Clan MacLeod Society in Southern California, 100 or so whirling in Highland dress at last week’s Skye Ball close by the Pasadena Freeway.

Neil McLeod hears the call of the Cuillans. He thinks often of his great-great-grandfather who sailed bitterly from Scotland to New Zealand in 1862, of his father who found himself working for less pleasant reaches of the British colonial government in Kenya. The family’s history abroad became tangled. Ancient blood and new shabbiness: the march of men.

McLeod was 10 when his mother took him from Africa to England, the expatriate child with the wrong accent and the strange ways, the outsider trying to fit in to East End London and then to genteel seaside Hove. The colonial story: gardeners, cooks, houseboys, an ayah in Kenya, life making-do back “home.”

But it was never home. Only here in Southern California has he found the way home over the sea to Skye. Paradoxically, only here in the comfort of Beverly Hills’ dentistry, has he found the freedom to be himself, a McLeod among MacLeods, who honors St. Andrews’ Day, who organizes the Skye Ball, and next month’s Kirking of the Tartan at a Hollywood church--the clan calling his heart back to MacLeod lands, to Alltrain-Duibh where his forefathers first went to sea.

In the California bungalow, French windows opening onto the pool, tiles from Portugal and Mexico in the Hollywood style, old clocks ticking as they have in small Highland crofts through dark winter nights of the soul. On the shelf, memories of scholarship money for USC, a Fulbright, a MacLeod from the purse of Dunvegan Castle. Leather-bound copies, too, of his own book “The Dances of an Island Clan.” And Neil McLeod talks here of “surrendering to the greater community of the clan, to a spiritual network going ‘round the world like a spider’s web. And everywhere you go, you’ll find the eccentric few. What has been, what will come, what will pave the way in the next 800 years--what part will MacLeods play in that?”

Roots running invisibly beneath this city of freeways--we are more complicated than outsiders know.