Val Gals? Only to a Southern New Yorker

The other day I called a friend who works at the other Times, the one in New York, to do a little intelligence work on B. Drummond Ayres Jr.

“A very nice guy,” my friend said. Ayres was “one of those Southern raconteur types. . . . Been around a jillion years.”

“What’s the B stand for?” I asked.

At first I thought it might be something like Bartholomew. Now that I knew he was a Southerner, I was thinking maybe Bubba.

“Beats me,” my friend said. “Why don’t you give him a call?”

I was tempted to call the New York Times’ L.A. bureau and ask for Beatsme Ayres, if only to make a point. You see, this week B. Drummond Ayres Jr. wrote a story about Los Angeles and the Valley secession issue. My boss summed it up as “full of East Coast snottiness about L.A. Really quite awful.”

I happen to like East Coast snottiness about L.A. It’s a fine, old tradition. Los Angeles has been disparaged by visiting writers ever since writers started visiting Los Angeles.

It was H.L. Mencken who said that “the whole place stank of orange blossoms.” A decade later, Westbrook Pegler wrote a screed modern secessionists should love: “It is hereby earnestly proposed that the U.S.A. would be better off if that big, sprawling, incoherent, shapeless, slobbering civic idiot, the city of Los Angeles, could be declared incompetent and placed in the charge of a guardian.”

Some 20 years ago, Chicago columnist Mike Royko suggested that all of California be fenced off to protect the nation from our lunatics.

So B. Drummond Ayres Jr. was walking a well-worn path, and he really picked up the pace in the third paragraph:

“And when it comes to civic pride, well, Angelenos simply do not boast about being from Los Angeles. Instead they slide off and work the subject from the side, asking how a person likes Los Angeles, then segueing into some name-dropping about their latest movie-star sighting, following that with some drooling about last night’s to-die-for dinner at a little new-wave Pacific Rim place that serves up sushi with a puree of fennel-flavored chili.”

This tasty passage is where Manhattan’s Upper West Side meets L.A.’s Westside. Maybe it wasn’t coincidence that, after reading his story, I talked some friends into a sushi feast. (We were in Chatsworth, where the movie stars apparently wear disguises.)

OK, so B. Drummond Ayres Jr. was painting with a broad brush. Big deal. But what stopped me was the way he botched the name of the San Fernando Valley’s preeminent, world-famous icon--the Valley Girl.

The tip-off was the headline: “Giant Suburb, Famous for Val Gals, Threatens to Secede from L.A.”

Val Gals?

I thought this might be the headline writer’s fault. But in his prose, B. Drummond Ayres Jr. made the error of referring to the Valley as “home of the terminally hip Val Gal.” Expanding on this, he wrote: “It is the place to see the blond Val Gal as she hangs in the malls and cruises the drive-ins in daddy’s ragtop BMW, her vocabulary seemingly limited to ‘Totally awesome!’ and ‘Oooh, wow, bummer!’ ”

Now here’s a genuine reason for complaint. The phrase “Val Gal” sounded utterly foreign to my ear, but just to be sure, I surveyed a few locals. The proper term, of course, is Valley Girl, or Val, and never Val Gal. A few people had heard and even uttered the phrase Val Gal, but only as a nickname for two women who happen to be named Valerie.

B. Drummond Ayres Jr. also seems to conflate the stereotype of the Valley Girl, as popularized by the Zappa family, with the California surfer-girl stereotype, as popularized by the Beach Boys. As Moon Unit Zappa herself demonstrated, a Val is by no means necessarily blond. And maybe this is picky, but Ayres could have chosen less generic language. “Totally” is, like, totally a key element of the Val-speak, but “awesome” and “bummer” are more generic teen phrases that have roots elsewhere. “Fer shur” and “omigod” are better examples of the Valley Girl’s contributions to the American language.

Some people, such as the editors of my second-favorite Los Angeles newspaper, take great umbrage at Valley stereotypes. The late Jack Smith, I would suggest, had the proper attitude.

“I am not defensive,” he wrote in the foreword of “Jack Smith’s L.A.”

“I don’t wish to do anything to discourage this entertaining stream of invective. One of the delightful things about Los Angeles is that we inspire abuse. . . .

“Being a newspaperman myself, I think I understand this evidently irresistible urge that Eastern journalists have to throw another cliche at Los Angeles. They are sent out here on expense accounts to write stories that will please their editors, and their editors want to be told that Los Angeles is a dreadful place, so they will feel better about living in New York or Boston or Philadelphia, especially in February.”

That’s part of it. View anything from a distance and the detail fades away. B. Drummond Ayres Jr. must be glad he doesn’t have to worry about, say, placing the Platt Branch Library in West Hills when in fact it’s in Woodland Hills.

Mistakes, I’ve made a few--and not too few to mention. So perhaps I shouldn’t be so hard on B. Drummond Ayres Jr.

But really--Val Gals?

Imagine a drama critic visiting New York and then writing about the Great White Lane. Or a sportswriter covering a Yankees game and referring to them as the Bronx Bombshells. And the Knicks--that’s short for Knickerwearers, isn’t it?

B. Drummond Ayres Jr. returned my phone call from Phoenix, where he’s working on another story. He spoke with a Southern drawl and revealed that his son is named Blackstone Drummond Ayres 3rd. That’s even better than his dad’s name and, for that matter, better than Westbrook Pegler’s. As for B. Drummond Ayres Jr., he was as likable as advertised. He also insisted that he’d heard the term Val Gals “everywhere.” Oooh, wow, bummer!

Perhaps the generation gap was at work. “I’m two days older than dirt,” Ayres told me. Later he owned up to 61 trips around the sun, which makes him much younger than dirt. You know how journalists stretch things.

We chatted a bit about Valley secession and agreed that, if it doesn’t get waylaid politically, it’s destined for the courts. The idea of rebellion had him thinking of his Virginia ancestors.

“We tried this a long time ago where I come from,” drawled B. Drummond Ayres Jr. “And they kicked our butts.”

Scott Harris’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. Readers may write to Harris at the Times Valley Edition, 20000 Prairie St., Chatsworth, CA 91311. Please include a phone number.