Jack Smith and L.A.’s Backyards : HEARTS OF THE CITY / Exploring attitudes and issues behind the news

I had a friend back in the ‘70s who published a small magazine in West Hollywood. This magazine was the sort that delivered high attitude and regarded itself as a cool piece of work. Anyway, my friend always claimed you could divide Los Angeles into two groups of people: Those who “got” Jack Smith, and those who didn’t. Personally, he didn’t.

I remember one time at lunch he produced one of Jack’s columns and read parts of it to me. The column described some patio paving or barbecue building at Jack’s house on Mt. Washington. The work had hit a few snags, as it always did in Jack’s universe, and there were also some problems with the dog. I recall the dog trying to walk on wet concrete.

The editor looked at me. “See what I mean?” he said. Where was the political commentary? The leg-biting anger toward our civic leaders? He rested his case.

Jack Smith died Tuesday. For what it’s worth, he out-lived and out-worked my friend’s magazine by some 15 years. But on the day he died, you could still make the same observation about Los Angeles: The city was divided into those who “got” Jack Smith and those who didn’t.

Not to say that the Jack Smith question provoked fistfights on street corners. Jack himself remained far too civilized and full of good humor to raise blood passions. Rather, among the constituency of newspaper readers in the city, people simply knew where they stood. Either you appreciated the grand message behind his talk of carpenters and TV trays, or you were left baffled.

Jack’s message came down to this: Los Angeles operates under rules that are different from other cities.’ Perhaps you can find the soul of New York or Chicago on the sidewalks, but not here. Los Angeles has an interior life that is private and hidden from view. L.A.’s soul can be found behind the hedges, in its backyards and patios, around the barbecues.

And where other cities build communally, L.A. builds individually. Everyone here constructs their own universe behind their own fence. Like all great columnists, Jack understood that crucial difference between his city and others, and he exploited it to the full.

He filled his column with his family rather than the mayor and his henchmen. The children fell off ladders and broke their arms, grew up, married French girls. Jack bickered over the selection of TV dinners. The bathroom got remodeled, the patio grew a little more grand.

Though he took an occasional auto tour with his wife, Jack’s life always seemed circumscribed by the boundaries of his property and the interior of his car. That’s how life goes here, Jack was saying. And he was right.

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Of course, there was also the house in Baja, the weekend getaway that consumed years in construction. In many ways, the Baja cabin simply functioned as a proxy for the house on Mt. Washington, except that it also produced Mr. Gomez, probably the greatest character in Jack’s repertory.

Gomez owned the Baja property, had little formal education and did things his own way. Jack and Gomez did not share a common language or even a common view of the way the world worked. In their bafflement at each other, they epitomized the cultures they represented. Yet they were forced to work together in building the cabin and eventually each developed a deep trust and affection for the other. You wonder if such things could happen today.

You also wonder if another Jack Smith could happen. I doubt it. In many ways, Jack served as the country’s first--and most enduring--columnist of postwar suburbia. With his minimalist, non-intrusive style, he fit superbly with his era. He functioned almost as a diarist of the time when modern L.A. was being built.

But those days have ebbed away. L.A., in fact, no longer truly functions as a suburban culture. It is something else, something in between suburban and urban. When my friend, the magazine editor, suggested that he did not “get” Jack Smith in the 1970s, he probably represented a growing population. People who did not share the suburban dreams of Jack’s generation, who wanted their backyard barbecues but also wanted a public life on the sidewalks.

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In many ways, L.A. has given it to them. At its heart, the city remains a haven of the interior life. Yet that life has combined with public neighborhoods that leave L.A. looking curiously like a real city.

It was part of Jack’s greatness that he never complained, at least publicly, about the passing of those glory days. I suspect he found it not sad at all but mostly interesting. Jack never had to own his city.

He continued, to the end, writing about the grackles he spotted from his patio, about the remodeling project down the street, about the ads on TV.

Also, most courageously of all, he wrote about losing his memory, about the terror of being enclosed in an MRI machine, about life in a wheelchair. He was telling us that he was dying, describing how the process happened bit by bit, accompanied by technicians in white coats and machines that hummed. He didn’t like it but he kept writing because he thought we might be interested. And if we “got” it, we were.