Trouble in Paradise: Souvenirs Serve Up Myths and Realities

Keith Hill brushed disdainfully past the racks of Dodger caps and Raider T-shirts and quickly sidestepped the “Made in America” pen sets. As his flight home to Great Britain neared departure time, the 30-year-old tourist ran his eyes desperately across the souvenirs stacked beneath cutouts of Elvis and Marilyn Monroe.

The gift shop display at Los Angeles International Airport was brimming with gaudy tinselized Hollywood caps, a galaxy of star-spangled Walk of Fame cups, ashtrays, coasters, summery California T-shirts emblazoned with fish as bright as neon--everything, it seemed, but what Hill wanted.

“Doesn’t it seem pointless,” he complained impatiently, “that they don’t have anything with Los Angeles on it?”

That inscription was a must. To Hill, it did not matter that “people feel (Los Angeles) is smoggy, it’s dirty . . . and there are people getting their heads blown off every day.” He wanted to show that he had dared set foot in it. “It puts a name on people’s tongues, doesn’t it?”

Glancing at his watch, the harried visitor finally gave up, snatching a couple of Universal Studios T-shirts before hurrying away, looking disgusted. He left the city unaware that if he had only kept searching, he would have found that perfect memento--for tourist shops like this one thrive on their capacity to promote Los Angeles’ ever-evolving image.

Just down the aisle were $14 Los Angeles sweat shirts featuring hot-color montages of waves, beach balls, tuxedo vests and sea shells. And nearby, Hill could have found gleaming souvenirs of less idyllic--if unintended--symbolism: $17 Los Angeles Zippo lighters, for torching cigarettes only, please.

*

In a year of civil unrest, fires, political tumult and earthquakes, Los Angeles is a lot like the soapbox moralist who is caught embezzling millions for his mistress. All of a sudden, a glittering reputation is sullied, if not shattered. The world has seen, in all too graphic clarity, that L.A. is not just a carefree movie play land populated by film stars and bikini-clad women, all dancing under the palm trees.

Souvenir sales are down, if only because tourism is down. The overall visitor industry--the city’s “second-most powerful financial engine”--is expected to show a drop of 10% to 15% from last year, according to Michael Collins of the Los Angeles Convention and Visitors Bureau. That translates to $500 million in lost tourism income in Los Angeles County by the end of the summer season, he said.

Two of the hottest souvenir items of the past few months have been T-shirts boasting: “I Survived the L.A. Riots,” and “I Survived the California Earthquake,” according to gift shop proprietors.

*

And yet, in the countless stores where hucksters purvey image, not substance, there is evidence that the Los Angeles of old--the palm-lined, pixie-dusted, surfboard and sunglasses Los Angeles--may hang around for awhile. For tourists such as Eric Foss, 49, of Copenhagen, Denmark, glitz is what L.A. is all about, never mind the news.

Foss had just picked up a miniature Elvis statue and a few Batman figures and was grabbing a jet-black T-shirt featuring a silvery limousine and motion-picture camera.

“When I was a kid I liked all the ‘Batman’ comics,” he said, confessing a lifelong passion for old Westerns and Humphrey Bogart movies--notwithstanding the Danish subtitles.

Carolyn Gauthier of Cincinnati laughed as she read the slogan on the $13 T-shirt at Hollywood Tours and Gifts, adjacent to Mann’s Chinese Theatre. “L.A.P.D.,” it said. “We Treat You Like a King.”

The shirt--a cynical reference to the beating of motorist Rodney G. King by Los Angeles Police Department officers--easily outsells the picture T-shirts featuring Marilyn Monroe and James Dean, said clerk Lina Lantsman.

At least for now.

But the shop also does a booming trade in facsimile Oscars and Rodeo Drive key chains, and Gauthier bypassed the King T-shirt for more stereotypical images: postcards of sunny beaches, the L.A. that drew her here.

Like many visitors, she seemed to crave a Los Angeles that exists in her dreams and her memories of a pleasant, earlier visit.

“It’s fantastic,” she said of the city. “You see all kinds of people. . . . I’d like to live in L.A. one day.”

Sue Ebright, 60, of Canton, Ohio, shared a similar attitude as she shopped the boardwalk at Venice’s Muscle Beach, picking among souvenir T-shirts bulging with artistic muscle. As yet, she had not decided what to buy her 23 grandchildren. But just outside, hulking bodybuilders were busily pumping iron, and she seemed to relish the chance to visit such an incomparable beach.

Why, to go to a beach in Ohio, she added, “you have to go clear up to Cleveland.”

Actor Morten M. Faldaas, 23, a tourist from Oslo, Norway, was yet another looking for that make-believe slice of Tinseltown, that symbolic piece of American culture. Having climbed to within “a few meters” of the Hollywood sign, he rang up $47.90 in souvenir purchases at the airport gift shop--most of it in eclectic odds and ends, such as Los Angeles shirts and a yellow-and-gold Oakland A’s cap, which just seemed to say America.

Faldaas was completing his first visit here, a grand tour of San Francisco, Las Vegas and Los Angeles. Frisco, he loved. Las Vegas he found “frightening and interesting . . . people sitting in front of machines and waiting for luck.” And Los Angeles . . . well, Los Angeles left him dazzled, troubled--unsure just how he felt.

“Los Angeles,” he concluded, packing his T-shirts away, “is a very strange place.”