Hollywood’s Charms Take Edge Off Its Darker Side : Neighborhoods: Many residents say community is surprisingly nice. Great Good Places are part of appeal.

Caroline O’Connell loves Paris. She also loves her neighborhood in Los Angeles.

Nothing odd about that, except that O’Connell lives in Hollywood.

Yes, Hollywood--once the glamour capital of America but more recently the embodiment of sleaze and urban decay.

Hollywood, where tragic street kids swap sex for hamburgers and fries. Home of Mann’s Chinese Theater and the smog-enshrouded Hollywood sign and nonstop debate over whether the Community Redevelopment Agency is the best or the worst thing since the movie “Sunset Boulevard.”

The operative word in that sentence is home. Despite problems that range from teen-age runaways to one of the highest crime rates in Los Angeles, Hollywood is home to thousands of people with money enough to have options who have chosen to live close to the Capitol Records building.

Many residents of Hollywood are poor and live there because they cannot afford to live elsewhere. According to the 1990 Census, the median income of families living within a mile of Hollywood and Vine was $25,105, far below the citywide median of $34,364. But more than 11% of the families in the area earned $75,000 or more and over 6% topped $100,000.

Whether they are wealthy or not, many of these residents of Hollywood say it is a surprisingly good place to live. Their Hollywood, unlike the squalid Hollywood of downbeat headlines and the mythological Hollywood of the movies, is an economically and ethnically diverse community with many viable neighborhoods--and not just in the upscale hills. These are made even more desirable by the presence of what sociologist Ray Oldenburg calls Great Good Places, the gathering places that can make urban life a joy.

A writer and owner of a public-relations firm, O’Connell is happy to call Hollywood home. “I love my life here,” said O’Connell, who spends part of each year in France and Italy. In her view, Hollywood has the amenities of a European city at a fraction of the cost and a cultural richness that no European city can provide.

Many of the people who seem happiest living in Hollywood are examples of what writer Paul Fussell calls category X, not a socioeconomic class so much as a point of view. As Fussell explains in his 1983 book “Class,” X people tend to be independent, creative, even what used to be called bohemian.

“The places where X people choose to live usually have a decent delicatessen and a good wine store,” writes Fussell, in what could be a description of Hollywood. “There is likely to be a nearby Army and Navy or hiking shop, for the dress-down clothes, and a good public or university library as a stay against boredom. A sophisticated newsdealer is also an attraction, for one needs British, French, German and Italian periodicals.”

Hollywood’s charms for X people are remarkably varied, from the Hollywood Bowl to an active theater scene to less-obvious attractions, such as Frances Goldwyn Regional Branch Library on Ivar to the Gaucho Grill, a hangout for entertainment-industry workers in a Sunset Boulevard mini-mall.

One favorite is the Beachwood Market in Beachwood Canyon. “I missed it the entire five years I lived in Westwood,” said writer Kathy Hendrix. At the market, the chore of shopping is transformed into an affirmation of community, regulars say. Among the market’s merits, says Hendrix: “It’s no big deal if you forget your checkbook.”

Victors Restaurant, on North Bronson near Franklin, is another Great Good Place. John Nielsen, 38, a helicopter pilot who lives on Beachwood, goes there two or three times a week, often with his screenwriter wife, Marjorie, and their 2-year-old son, Jake.

“He always makes us comfortable having Jake along,” says Nielsen of Victors’ manager Bill Gotti, who usually hands knee-high patrons mini-bagels when they come in. Nielsen likes it that children are welcome here but that the place is not overrun with them. “It’s not a Chuck E Cheese.”

There is diversity of a sort in Beachwood Canyon, or Hollywoodland, as many of the locals prefer to call it. Houses range in price from $200,000 near Franklin to the $5 million paid by Madonna for her mansion by the Hollywood sign. “I meet white people in BMWs all day,” said another Victors’ regular, director of a hit sitcom. In Beachwood Canyon, he is at least close to the jumble of classes and cultures that he enjoyed in New York. Downtown Hollywood sometimes seems “like a bad carnival,” he said. But he likes living nearby “because I can either be away from the madness or in the madness.”

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O’Connell, who just laughs when asked her age, rents part of a house in the foothills above Chateau Marmont, the hotel where John Belushi died in classic Hollywood fashion of an overdose of heroin and cocaine.

Although she lives within walking distance of bustling Sunset Boulevard, her home, filled with French country furniture, has a rustic feel. There is the soft plash of fountains and the turquoise sparkle of a pool beyond. Year-round the scent of flowers wafts in from the outside and meets the perfume of the freesias she buys each week.

“I have two criteria for picking places to live,” she said. “I want to run right there in the neighborhood, and I want my friends to be able to park when they come to visit. Beverly Hills--it’s not civilized. You can’t have friends over to dinner without their getting a ticket.”

She said her $1,000-a-month rent is half what she would pay in Paris, for half the space sans hummingbirds. “I think for what we get, the cost of living here is about the best of any major city you can think of.”

In Hollywood, O’Connell said, she is able to have both urban stimulation and the special blessing of hills and hawks.

And important little things. As every European knows, good bread is a determining factor in quality of life, and O’Connell finds it a short drive away at the La Brea Bakery.

But the best part of her neighborhood, she said, is what is within walking distance. If she wants the club scene, she can stroll over to Roxbury on Sunset. “Most people don’t know it,” she said, “but Roxbury sells more Dom Perignon than any other club in town.”

She likes the new three-tier plaza at 8000 Sunset Blvd. despite its garish yellow-and-green color scheme. Now she can walk to the movies, the grocery store and the Virgin Megastore for music and videotapes.

She can also walk to her office, a suite in the historic Piazza del Sol, also on Sunset, just over the line in West Hollywood. Sometimes, she takes clients across the street to Butterfield’s, where patrons eat California cuisine in a courtyard attached to what was once the guest house of John Barrymore’s estate. Like so much else in and near Hollywood, the Butterfield’s experience is enhanced by the establishment’s links to the film legends of the past. As they twirl their pasta, patrons can muse about Errol Flynn’s shenanigans while staying in the guest house.

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When Ari Gold was trying to decide where to live in Los Angeles, he rejected Park La Brea as “too anesthetized” and Beverlywood because of its architecture. “The buildings were just too flat and suburban-looking,” said the 22-year-old writer.

As a longtime resident of San Francisco, Gold expects the places he lives to have a certain richness of character. So he moved into the shabby grandeur of the Villa Carlotta on Franklin at Tamarind, said to have been bankrolled by William Randolph Hearst.

The son of novelist Herbert Gold, Ari came to town three months ago to sell a screenplay he wrote with his father, based on the elder Gold’s novel “A Girl of 40.”

Ari is a second-generation observer of Hollywood life. Herbert Gold, 68, has written about the city he knew 30 years ago in his new book, “Bohemia: Where Art, Angst, Love and Strong Coffee Meet.” In an interview, he recalled staying at the Chateau Marmont and repeatedly running into “somebody who knew somebody who knew somebody who was Marlon’s dope dealer.”

Ari Gold said he loves living in Hollywood, despite the genteel decrepitude of his abode.

“I like the hardwood floors, and I like the high ceilings, and I like the fact that the building’s not so well fixed up that I can’t afford to live here.” He writes to the archetypal Hollywood sound of a palm tree scraping against his window.

The younger Gold is amazed at Hollywood’s concentration of dream-seekers, the number of people waiting tables who truly believe they are on the verge of becoming stars.

At least since Nathanael West, whose apocalyptic tale, “The Day of the Locust,” was conceived on North Ivar Avenue, Hollywood has functioned as a tawdry muse for many writers. Like others before him, Gold is grateful for Hollywood’s dark complexity. There are certain types of people you can meet only here, he said. Lately, he has become acutely aware of blonde women of a certain age whose lives peaked with bit parts in movies or TV series.

“I’ve met a lot of these women who have really girlish voices and have obviously spent a lot of years in the sun who are hoping to be a girl again. . . . It’s an interesting culture here because there is so much hope and desperation at the same time.”

As he moves through his neighborhood, Gold said he often finds himself wondering, “What did this look like when it was paradise?”

He also thinks about the writers who came before, committed to fiction but aware that movies were where the money was. William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nathanael West, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and the others hung out at Musso & Frank Grill on Hollywood Boulevard and at Stanley Rose’s bookstore next door.

“Sometimes, I think this is the most stimulating place in the world,” Gold said. “And sometimes I wonder if the desire to make it sucks people of their creativity.” Meanwhile, he loves bicycling in the hills and playing pool at the Bourgeoise Pig, a coffeehouse with the darker ambience of a bar.

And, because writers need books as well as other forms of inspiration, Gold likes browsing through the secondhand books at Counterpoint on Franklin.

Although many of the antiquarian bookstores on Hollywood Boulevard are gone, Hollywood still has a major concentration of used bookstores. Book City Hollywood is the city’s largest, and Baroque Books on nearby Las Palmas is something of a shrine to the leading chronicler of down-and-out Hollywood, Charles Bukowski. When Gold walks the meaner streets of Hollywood, though, it is the work of Raymond Chandler that comes to mind. “More than any place in Los Angeles, Hollywood has some of the strangeness Chandler was writing about.”

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Some people say the Hollywood Farmers’ Market, which opened in 1991, is the best thing to happen there in years.

Held Sundays on Ivar Avenue between Hollywood and Selma from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., it attracts no tour buses, like the larger, more commercial market on Fairfax.

Brought in by outgoing City Councilman Michael Woo, this market is strictly for the locals. True, Gap-clad professionals from the hills wander among the pesticide-free herbs. But shopping alongside them are seniors with little money and fewer places to buy organically grown produce at reasonable prices. The market attracts the area’s whole rich mix of ethnic groups, including Armenians, Eastern Europeans, Asians, African-Americans and Spanish-speakers from a dozen countries.

There are farmers’ markets throughout city, but there is something especially welcome about this one, located on a grubby stretch of unlovely Ivar. Every Sunday morning, the reek of urban life is masked by the voluptuous scent of peaches warming in the sun and the tang of mint.

Mary Beth Gaik, 33, is one of 2,000 to 3,000 shoppers who visit the market each week.

The director of marketing for a video-distribution firm, Gaik lives contentedly in a townhouse on Sycamore. Her home is attractive, affordable, and she has a view of the Hollywood sign from her bedroom window.

Gaik’s home is deep in the flats, close to the light-industrial buildings that house the editing studios and other Hollywood support businesses that still fill the area. It’s not a stroll-around, talk-to-whomever-you-meet block, she said. People work during the day and either stay in or drive elsewhere at night. So it was at the farmers’ market, she said, that she first had a sense of Hollywood as a real community.

One of the reasons Hollywood works for Gaik is that it supports a series of Great Good Places, like the farmers’ market. As University of West Florida sociologist Ray Oldenburg, who picked up the term from columnist Pete Hamill, explains, these are the cafes, coffee shops, community centers, beauty parlors, general stores, bars and other hangouts “that get you through the day.”

The bar in “Cheers” is a classic example. Regulars meet to share the sacrament of small talk and newcomers are readily accepted. One of the virtues of Great Good Places is that you can walk away whenever you want, Oldenburg says. They are low-cost, low-obligation, high-return institutions that remind people that they are part of an extended social family.

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Ruth Goulet remembers why she decided 20 years ago to move to Hollywood.

“I had gone to Europe and, when I came back, living in Woodland Hills was like living inside a pillow. I saw the same multiethnic, multicultural thing happening in Hollywood that was happening in Europe, and I didn’t want to live inside a pillow anymore.”

Today, Goulet lives on Vista del Mar in a California Craftsman home almost a century old. Her house, on a cobbled street, was part of the first tract developed in Hollywood, she said proudly. It was built in 1914 by legendary Hollywood developer C. E. Toberman, builder of the Roosevelt Hotel and the Pantages Theater.

Goulet lives in the heart of Hollywood, only a block and a half from Hollywood and Vine. She and her ethnically diverse neighbors sit out on their porches and wave to each other. “It’s a cohesive neighborhood. We know whose cars belong to whom and whose pets.”

But Goulet, a nutritionist, believes her pleasant neighborhood is endangered. Convinced the Community Redevelopment Agency will destroy Hollywood, she has become an activist, a fixture at zoning hearings and other public meetings at which the fate of her community is being determined.

At 62, she would rather be cultivating her roses, but she is always ready to raise her voice against politicians who think they know more about Hollywood than the people who live here, she said.

She thinks the Metro Rail line will ruin what is left of the small-business community on Hollywood Boulevard. She remembers when there was a Broadway store and a series of good little shops. “Hollywood people walked the boulevard,” she recalled. “That’s what people did. Now I don’t go for two reasons: It’s not safe, and I have all the T-shirts I need.”

Goulet can name all the historic buildings that have been lost in Hollywood in recent years, and she is always willing to circulate a petition or carry a sign. Recently, she joined a group outside Musso & Frank to protest the towing of cars parked out front on Friday and Saturday evenings.

“Even the aborigines in Australia have the word Hollywood in their language,” Goulet said. “They’re putting up replicas of Hollywood on (Universal) CityWalk and in Disney World, but they won’t save the real thing!”

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The beautiful young woman is an actress who waits tables at a Hollywood restaurant but doesn’t want her agent at Willian Morris to know. A Harvard graduate who chats in French with one of her customers, she loves living in a funky old house with an orange tree in the back yard. She just got her first semi-decent movie break, playing a high-school bad girl.

“I’ve wanted to come out to Hollywood since I was 3 years old,” she says. “Just to have Hollywood as part of my return address, it still makes me feel great.”