Hooray for Hollywood

When I lived near Sunset and Gower, friends and colleagues worried about me. They wondered why I didn’t move somewhere nice, like Silver Lake or Los Feliz or West Hollywood --somewhere with a friendly atmosphere and a coherent culture. They did their best to instill some kind of upward mobility in me.

The same friends are really worried now that I’ve moved even deeper into the dark heart of Hollywood. My new place is in a raffishly glamorous early ‘60s high rise. It’s got a 50-foot-long balcony with a view that arcs from the “Hollywood” sign to the Capitol Records building. At night, the 101 Freeway twinkles like a miniature constructed for a long shot in “Logan’s Run.” Over the swoosh of midnight traffic, a faint buzzing sound and the occasional loud pop I choose to identify as out-of-season fireworks reaches us from Hollywood Boulevard, two small blocks away.

Having lived in Hollywood for the last 13 years, I had always thought of the boulevard as a dumping ground for movie industry leftovers and the culturally outre. I would sometimes take a brisk afternoon walk on the shady side of the street on my way to hike in Runyon Canyon, or to see a matinee at the Galaxy 6. But because it was always tangential to my circle of everyday experiences, I was able to keep a cynical distance from it, to view its tawdry lures and shady characters with a jaundiced eye.

Since I moved at the beginning of July, I’ve had to embrace Hollywood Boulevard as my Main Street. It’s where I get my daily carrot juice; pick up things I forget at the supermarket; buy the occasional pair of disposable $5 sunglasses; watch the antics of the local wildlife; and perform the sometimes urgent, sometimes relaxed, morning coffee ritual.

My friend Tim, who lives three floors down from me at the Hollywood Ardmore, is convinced that once the subway goes in, the boulevard will be lined with Starbucks and other designer-brew outlets. But for now, the only place that serves a drinkable cup of joe is Grand Central Coffee, adjacent to the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, the accommodation of choice for package tours originating everywhere from Santiago to Seoul.

Summer being the high season for tourists, for a while after I moved, it felt as if I were living on Main Street USA in Disneyland. My boyfriend and I would nod at other locals as we jockeyed for position at one of the coveted sidewalk tables for morning coffee at Grand Central. Then we’d play Scrabble (we have a travel set that goes everywhere with us) amid a throng of tourists. Buses, vans and Red Car replicas would pull up in front of us, depositing a Japanese group and taking on a pan-Scandinavian mix, or gather up a few disparate Latin American or Spanish customers. Soon our games stretched into the lunch hour because we were so distracted by the bustle. We became very attentive to the tourists’ reactions and activities, as if we might be held responsible for their enjoyment.

At the height of the tourist rush, around mid-August--and I think it’s safe to say that Hollywood tourism is enjoying a boom after several years of waning interest--passersby often stopped at our table to ask questions: Where’s the Hard Rock Cafe? How do I get to Beverly Hills? Do you know where Barbra Streisand’s star is?

I began to feel like a costumed guide at an amusement park--someone immediately recognizable, somewhat exotic, purveying a certain sense of order and sure to be full of enlightening trivia, like the lederhosen-clad keepers of the Matterhorn. I even thought it might be a good idea for the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce to give all the locals salaries and name tags for keeping an eye on their visitors, making the out-of-work writer, hung-over rock star wannabe and lower-echelon drug dealer as lovable and popular as Sleeping Beauty, Peter Pan and Goofy.

But as I got caught up in the pilgrim-like fervor of the tourists who gazed hopefully at Mann’s Chinese theater or wandered the streets looking for their favorite celebrity’s star, I realized I had been too naive in my perceptions. These visitors were not starry-eyed and oblivious.

On the contrary, they were just as aware of the disparity between the glamorous illusion of Hollywood and its cheap, dirty reality as I was. They were simply there to exercise their faith, like visitors to Lourdes, coming from all corners of the world to make offerings before the graven images of their cherished saints. And I found that this kind of unrewarded but unwavering enthusiasm was contagious. Slowly, I stopped resenting the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce for focusing most of its energies on organizing new star unveilings, and I now understand why the local government decided to spend our money putting little sparkly bits in the pavement rather than cleaning up the parks or revitalizing the old movie houses.

I also found that the tourists were able to tell me much more about Hollywood than I could ever tell them. For instance, eight out of 10 people who pass Cybill Shepherd’s star on the Walk of Fame--which lies directly in front of my favorite table at the coffee house--stop and exclaim over it. To me, she’s just an actress on the comeback trail with a passable television show, but somehow she’s become a central icon to the world that views Hollywood through the looking glass. One Australian family even stopped to take turns videotaping each other posing by Shepherd’s star, and I was asked to be in a couple of the shots.

On my way home that day, I stopped next to a crowd of people taking pictures of a large crane with a lighting fixture on it--just one specimen of the many pieces of movie equipment that regularly dot the boulevard, giving rise to the expectation that one may suddenly be caught up in the filming of an important scene at any moment. At first I thought, it’s just a hunk of metal, but I watched people in the crowd exclaim over it and snap their photos, and I thought, yeah, that is an object of wonderment, I get it.

Now that the high season is over, and the local tourists who are around can attempt an aloof, at-home affect even though their constant excitement and bewilderment are betrayed by their darting eyes and halting gaits, I have gained the freedom to be a tourist on my home turf.

Bolstered by the lingering exuberance of the summer crowds, I no longer feel silly stopping to gawk at the celebrity snapshots that line the windows of the souvenir shops or checking my recently purchased guidebook to the sidewalk stars to see who Louise Fazenda was or what year Gloria Grahame’s star was dedicated.

I am endlessly fascinated by the selection of T-shirts available in the stores, and I no longer sneer at the tour guides who try to hand me fliers. Like me, they live and work on this fault line between illusion and reality. It may be full of fakes and ploys and loonies, but it also contains an endlessly plunderable booty of imagery, information and misinformation about who we think we are and what we see in our dreams.