HEARTS OF THE CITY: Exploring attitudes and issues behind the news. : 60 Years Later, the Volcano of People Is Still Erupting in Los Angeles

One morning about 60 years ago a young man emerged from the Biltmore Hotel at Pershing Square. This young man eventually would grow into one of Los Angeles’ great writers but on that day he was simply young and suffering dreadfully from the previous night’s excess at a Hollywood party. Sometime in the wee hours he was deposited at the hotel by persons unknown.

Now he stood facing Pershing Square in a state of miserable decrepitude. Even then, in the 1930s, the square attracted a crowd of deadbeats and chanting swamis who filled the benches and lawns. It repulsed him. The young man had lived in Los Angeles for seven years but had never adjusted. In fact, he had decided he hated the place with its sprawling, deformed character and milling crowds. Who could love a city so utterly shiftless?

But that bright morning would change him. As he picked his way through the crowd, he began to absorb the essential message of Los Angeles, a message that has lasted to this day. Here’s how he described it: “In front of the hotel, newsboys were shouting the headlines of the hour: an awful trunk-murder had been committed; the district attorney had been indicted for bribery; Aimee Semple McPherson had once again stood the town on its ear by some spectacular caper.

“A University of Southern California football star had been caught robbing a bank; a love mart had been discovered in the Los Feliz hills; a motion picture producer had just wired the Egyptian government a fancy offer for permission to illuminate the pyramids to advertise a forthcoming production, and there was news of another prophet, fresh from the desert, who had predicted the doom of the city, a prediction for which I was morbidly grateful.

“It suddenly occurred to me that, in all the world, there neither was nor would there ever be another place like this. Here the American people were erupting, like lava from a volcano. . . .”

The writer was Carey McWilliams, one of the first to expound on the mysteries of Los Angeles and explain them to the rest of the world. The “eruption” of which he wrote was not pleasant nor pretty. It contained a deep anger that sprang from disappointment and was permeated in violence. But Los Angeles, he wrote, should not be seen as a place apart from America. Rather, it was the place where all the different cultures of America came crashing together and got displayed in their dangerous wildness.

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You might think that 60 years hence we would have outgrown that phase. We have not. Los Angeles has never settled down into a pretty or coherent culture. We erupt today as we erupted then, only now we tend to do it even more dangerously.

Just consider, for example, this very week. Here are the headlines that might have been shouted by newsboys at Pershing Square: an awful shooting is committed at Cypress Park; the chief of police is enraged by leaked documents relating to his Las Vegas escapade and he files a $10-million claim against the city; the father of Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss is sentenced for helping her hide the call girl revenues.

The emergency room at County-USC hospital, the nation’s largest, all but shuts down in work stoppage; Bob Hope’s butler, claiming he was fired for wearing a beard, sues his ex-employer; several movie stars open a restaurant that doubles as a Hollywood museum; Los Angeles County, dead broke, debates turning down a $100-million loan offered by the state because it says it can’t pay back the money.

And so on. Notice that we got through the entire list without having to dip into O.J. even once. It’s what you might call a rich selection. L.A. rolls on and on, erupting without grace or dignity or serenity. Exhausted and beaten, the city gets up and dances again. It would be nice to think that each of us could come to terms with Los Angeles as did McWilliams. Sometimes it’s not easy, especially after a week like this one.

“This land,” McWilliams wrote, “deserves something better, in the way of inhabitants, than the swamis, the Realtors, the motion picture tycoons, the fakirs, the fat widows, the nondescript clerks, the bewildered ex-farmers, the corrupt pension plan schemers, the tightfisted “empire builders’ and all the other curious migratory creatures who have flocked here from the far corners of the earth.”

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Yeah, Los Angeles deserves something better. But it didn’t get it. It got us. We, the inheritors of this once-paradise, have built something as ugly and as mesmerizing as any place on earth. We are exhausted by it, afraid of it, but, as McWilliams pointed out, we do not know the end of our story. And therein, I hope, lies our charm. Let’s dance.