Wizards of Aaahs

On a sooty stretch of Pico Boulevard populated by the likes of M & T Auto Body and Maurice’s Snack ‘n’ Chat, a black limousine pulls up outside a prison-like building and stops next to a creamy Rolls-Royce Corniche. In a parking lot a few yards away, a burly Russian guard with a buzz cut strolls up and down, whistling and keeping an eye on the Mercedes-Benzes, Jaguars, Porsches and various other chariots under his watch.

“Good evening, Mr. Travolta!” shouts another guard, who comes barreling down the sidewalk to greet John Travolta as he gets out of the limo. “Hev a good time!” he says in a thick Russian accent as Travolta disappears into the building.

Inside City Spa, a semi-legendary in-town competitor with Southern Californian luxury havens such as La Costa Resort & Spa and Two Bunch Palms, the evening’s activities are in full swing. But if those state-of-the-art resorts are paradigms of modern spa living, this operation might be called, well, the anti-spa. While the raison d’etre of most contemporary spas is a mix of fitness, pampering and prestige, City Spa is more like a tony Roman bathhouse, where toga-clad patrons of all ages, races, religions and nationalities gather to sweat, schmooze and kvetch. Where else in town could you find a prominent local rabbi kibitzing in the Jacuzzi with a politically active black Muslim?

On a typical evening here a visitor will likely find a herd of corpulent Eastern Europeans gathered around the TV in the men’s locker room, yelling enthusiastically about the Lakers game and refreshing themselves with shots of vodka. Cries of “Come on, ya schmuck!” can be heard a hallway’s length away.

In the Russian rock room, a wet sauna that reaches searing temperatures of 200 degrees, super-agent Bill Block sits in self-imposed solitude, purging tension after another high-pressure day at International Creative Management. Next to Block, British journalist William Cash, who was recently labeled a “magnet for trouble” by USA Today after he appeared at Marlon Brando’s news conference to make his own apology for allegedly anti-Semitic remarks, sweats out the day’s frustrations and hopes that the Jewish Defense League’s Irv Rubin doesn’t show up today, as he frequently does.

Upstairs, Jesse Jackson works out on an exercise bike under the eye of a personal trainer, while a group of young women attend a weight loss seminar in a room next door. As they get diet tips, the rich fragrance of smoked sausages wafts up the stairway from the coffee shop.

There, Cappy Capsuto, 81, is having a dinner of toast and eggs, and arguing with Sid Rich, 75. Capsuto is remembering how it was in the 1940s, before City Spa & Health Center, when everyone went to the Monte Carlo bathhouse downtown.

“What?” Rich says. “You’re full of hot air! That was the second place--the first was Pecan Street Baths.”

“No, no,” shouts Capsuto, and the debate rages on.

The two friends have been coming here since 1955, when the spa opened and it cost $2 a day. Chicago-born Capsuto, who has shining eyes and twice the energy of your average slacker, says he’s known Rich so long, he knew Rich when Rich was poor. Today, Rich owns “millions” in real estate, allowing him the leisure time to spend three afternoons a week at City Spa yakking with the guys in the rock room or the officially sanctioned “Bull---- Room.”

For Capsuto, the spa is a lifestyle. He’s there every day among friends, eight hours a day, nurturing his body and spirit. Capsuto and Rich knew ages ago about the restorative powers of a nice spa, a concept that a new generation is just learning.

In a decade when “stress” has evolved from a humble condition into a billion-dollar business and a potentially deadly affliction suffered by most of the U.S. population, the ancient Roman bathing ritual, with its powers to soothe and heal, is suddenly golden. Beverly Hot Springs in Koreatown is also booming and drawing a big Hollywood crowd. The premiere issue of Spa, a glossy national magazine from Seattle, is the latest evidence of Americans’ mad race to relax. Spa reports reverently on the “worldwide revival of mud,” and is chock-full of ads showing stressed-out men and women getting seaweed wraps in paradisal settings.

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“If you want to be left alone, you got it. If you want to talk money, you got it. And if you want to talk sex, you got it,” says an elderly man who commutes to City Spa from Compton.

Rubin is king of the Jacuzzi schmooze. Rubin, the national chair of the Jewish Defense League, can often be found holding court in the enormous Jacuzzi, where lively debates are conducted amid the bubbles. He uses the spa as much as a place to do research as a place to schvitz, Yiddish bathhouse slang for “sweat” or “steam.”

“I find the spa tremendously relaxing and stimulating at the same time,” Rubin says. Over the years, getting to know people from all walks of life has “heightened my sensitivity to people who I thought I had nothing in common with, people who I may even have had hostility towards.”

One golden rule of bathhouse etiquette: Check your beefs at the door. You may argue, but amiably. Like the leveling effect of a nudist colony or a school uniform, a well-run bathhouse strips its members of their pretensions, obliterating the normal social hierarchy.

Rubin, wrapped in his potato sack-like, spa-issued toga after a session in the eucalyptus-steam room, is extremely warm, personable and, well, stress-free--worlds away from the ranting figure frequently seen shouting at his enemies on TV. “If people took a lesson from how people get along here, bringing with them all their different cultures, the world could be a more peaceful place,” he enthuses.

The spa is indeed a humid United Nations. At any given time, the rock room might be a forum for simultaneous conversations in Russian, Hebrew, Hungarian, German, Italian, French, Farsi, Armenian--you name it. And on weekends, Hollywood jargon is tossed about on the sunroof while agents and executives read scripts alfresco.

But even in a two-story building half a block long, there isn’t quite room enough to neatly accommodate cultures from at least four continents; so, as at the U.N., there is the occasional scuffle.

Rubin’s agenda being slightly more aggressive than most, he still has “issues” with a couple of members. He and Henry “Red” Williams, a black Muslim and staunch supporter of Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, have had some “really heated” political debates in the men’s locker room, Rubin says. It’s never come to fisticuffs, but for the two of them, ending up side by side in the Jacuzzi is about as appealing an idea as, say, diving headfirst into the icy “plunge pool,” next to which hangs a sign: “Immediate immersion in cold water can result in undue stress to cardiovascular system.”

City Spa is no place for the faint of heart. The rock room’s extra-large gas pipe supposedly makes it the hottest licensed facility in America. The plaitza, a muscle-melting beating / massage administered with soaking-wet eucalyptus branches, is the most popular treatment.

Nor is it necessarily a place where all women will feel right at home. Despite a two-year policy allowing women twice a week, the atmosphere these days is still men-mostly. A slightly chauvinistic hangover from the old days means that women have to put up with locker-room-style banter or join in.

Milena Popovich, a deeply tanned, muscular Yugoslavian masseuse, prefers to join in. “Book me for a one-hour massage,” a portly Russian customer tells her. “No--make it an hour and a half.”

“Are you kidding?” jokes Popovich, who has spent the day kneading Jeff Fahey, John Cusack, and her childhood friend and L.A. Lakers center Vlade Divac. “You want to spend that kind of time with me, take me home with you!”

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Jordi Ros, vice president of production at Disney’s Touchstone Pictures, likes the spa so much, he bought a $1,200 annual membership. Part of the attraction is that it’s a place he’s not likely to run into many typical Hollywood types.

“You know what clinched it for me? I walk in for the first time here and see a bunch of fat Russian guys smoking, and no one is on the exercise machines. I love that.” Ros, a trim, healthy looking 33, isn’t quite as decadent as all that. But, as he points out: “I’m health-conscious. Not health-obsessed.”

Ros typifies the attitude of the young doctors, lawyers, actors, real estate developers and stockbrokers filling the steam rooms. Since the spa was taken over in 1989 by the four Besharat brothers--David, Soli, Kambiz and Cameron--who saved the property from demolition and gave it a massive renovation, concessions are being made to cater to a generation that knows the meaning of the word “cholesterol.” Fresh-squeezed carrot juice is now available in the coffee shop, how do you like that? A fully equipped gym and a plush private screening room were built, and facials, manicures and pedicures are offered for both sexes.

David Besharat says he just underwent the first facial of his life to test out the new treatment. “Can you tell? Do I look better?” he jokes.

The Iranian Jewish Besharats, a tightknit foursome who know many of their 2,000-odd clients by name, take a great interest in their spa while also working “day jobs” variously in law and in the family-owned real estate development and floor-covering businesses.

Actor Jeremy Piven, who plays Spence Kovak on the ABC-TV sitcom “Ellen,” is another next-generation City Spa addict. Piven has been coming to the spa for seven years. As he readies to leave for dinner, sculpting himself a neat goatee at a shaving station in the mist-filled central room, he recounts how he schvitzed one day alongside Travolta.

All of a sudden, he says, a Hasidic Jewish kid materialized out of the steam to ask Piven for an autograph. Piven was horrified by the breach in spa etiquette. First of all, where did the schlemiel think he was going to get a pen in a soaking-wet room? And worse, “The kid comes to me, and here’s John Travolta in the room, who is so hot!”

Travolta, who can be seen at City Spa whenever he’s in town, was as good-natured as can be about the snub. “He’s a real mensch,” Piven says.

At City Spa, another potential misunderstanding melts away.