ADIOS, FRUITS AND NUTS : What Died With California the Magazine, Let’s Hope, Was California the Idea

Modern journalism has accumulated cliches with all the eagerness of an autograph hound at the Oscars. Almost every loss of life that approaches double digits is a “terrible tragedy,” possibly because the word tragedy has been so overused that it’s lost all emotional punch. “How do you feel/how did it feel?” may be the most frequently asked questions since the species acquired speech, a good argument for the evolutionary superiority of barks and squeals. And let’s not forget “Now, this,” without which we’d probably be stuck forever with . . . that.

Equally threadbare are the notions that often pass for story ideas. Every medium is a sucker for a story built around an anniversary. “It was two years ago that . . .” is as reliable a lead-in as “Fear stalks the city tonight, in the wake of . . .” Anniversary stories are all that constitute our sense of history, along with the commercial of the M&Ms; watching their old commercial.

And the media do love reporting the demise of media outlets. “An era came to an end this week when . . .” applies equally well to big-city afternoon dailies, hot scene magazines of the late ‘80s, radio formats or even Pravda. Yet something did come to an end recently when the Australian press lord who owned California magazine, needing cash to pursue an even more swollen newspaper empire down under, finally folded the 15-year-old periodical. What died with California the magazine, let’s hope, was California the idea.

It’s a totally East Coast notion that such a place as “California” exists. That ersatz land is where some of the hoariest journalistic cliches hang their hats, if indeed cliches can have headgear. “Land of the fruits and nuts,” “home base for every cult on the mental landscape,” “the place where trends begin”--these tired thought substitutes would have to retire to Florida were it not for “California.”

We sensible people say we’re going to Seattle or Chicago or London; Easterners say in all seriousness that they’re going to spend a few days “in California,” and their friends never take that to mean that they’re planning a weeklong trek through the desert. Like a Saul SteinbergQ map, Easterners’--especially New York media-type Easterners’--idea of this place is wonderfully surreal. It consists of a huge slab of the west side of Los Angeles, with a dollop of San Francisco on top.

For decades, New York editors have had reporters out here filing stories that reify that view of this mythical place. During a stint in the L.A. bureau of a national magazine, I was asked to participate in a national roundup of reporting on a trend toward “rooftop living,” a trend that a New York editor discovered one day when he gazed out his window and saw a few pathetic attempts at leisure activity being carried out among the water towers on nearby building tops. I talked to a local helicopter traffic reporter who confirmed the obvious point: Southern California at the time had so much land that almost no one needed to put anything on his roof, much less spend leisure time there. That information was duly dispatched back to HQ, along with interviews with the two or three exceptions to the rule. When the magazine appeared, the New York editors had introduced quotes from those interviews with: “Lotusland, so prominent in the forefront of other trends, leads the way in rooftop living as well.”

Reality gets its revenge. California magazine disappointed a succession of owners because not enough people lived in its namesake fantasy to buy it. The magazine, founded as New West, evolved from an East Coast insistence on seeing a place that encompasses deserts as disparate as the bikers’ Mojave and Sonny Bono’s Springs, coasts as varied as Venice and Elk, valleys as different as the Central and the San Gabriel, as one place, as--more to the point--one market. The imaginary California was not only valuable to New York editors as a towel rack for soggy story ideas. It was useful to ad salesmen as a coherent group of consumers to bundle and sell to advertisers. We let them all down. It turns out that San Franciscans care as little about Mike Ovitz as Angelenos care about Harry Britt (ask a gay friend). And who knows what Bakersfielders care about except perhaps cotton prices and Buck Owens?

It may have occurred to you by now that I’m not the most hopeful of men. Still, I nurture the dream that the idea of California will soon seem as nonsensical as the idea of Illinois. If not, then a good magazine will have died in vain. And that would be a terrible tragedy.

Now, this.