A Regular Hotbed of Crime

Well, there goes the neighborhood.

Again.

Monica Lewinsky has come home this week--home from sordid, tawdry, intern-despoiling Washington to serene Southern California, to her daddy’s lovely house on a corner lot in Brentwood, where life is all lovely houses, all corner lots. A place to date nice boys closer to her own age, like Kato.

But something’s amiss. Brentwood has been going to pot. To the dogs. To rack and ruin. Life has been creeping up on it like a cat burglar, taking the good stuff and leaving behind an unholy mess.

Precedent has prepared Brentwood for Monica’s return. In a drill now dismayingly familiar, the LAPD will allow no street parking around Maison Lewinsky, and only one TV crew out front at a time, so residents can, as an LAPD spokesman put it, “have some peace and quiet of their normal life.”

Too late, too late. Life has not been normal in Brentwood for a long time.

Crime? We are not talking wave, we are talking tsunami.

Ron and Nicole, obviously. And that Woodman couple, blown away in their condo garage in 1985 by men hired by their own sons. Mickey Cohen’s business competitors set off 30 sticks of dynamite in his little pied-a-terre near the country club in 1950. And that nice Col. Potter from MASH was charged with misdemeanor spousal battery after his wife turned up all bruised in their house in Brentwood.

Per capita, Brentwood must own more pepper spray and personal alarms and house alarms and car alarms and yards of tall fencing than anywhere else in town--and has, ever since those terrible ’92 riots, which seared Brentwood to the core. Seeing those wrenching images on TV, and realizing that it wasn’t Bosnia or Rwanda--it was happening only three Thomas Bros. map book pages away! Well, you just don’t get over a thing like that overnight.

Car thieves seek out Brentwood for the same reason Willie Sutton sought out banks. Some fellow from LoJack came off like Cal Worthington when he observed, “There’s a real good selection of cars to choose from.”

And behind closed doors, Brentwood must have about the highest rate of political fund-raisers of any ZIP Code in town. Do you know what class of people attend political fund-raisers? Senators. Presidents. The afternoon those riots started, Daryl Gates was off at a fund-raiser . . . in Brentwood.

Law-abiding L.A. was horrified last year to learn that valet parkers at a Brentwood bistro were using illicit handicapped placards to commandeer that most valuable real estate of all--parking spaces.

And what they charge for a gym membership there is just criminal.

Even O.J. has moved to the Palisades. Can you blame him? Who wants to stay in a neighborhood with a throat-slashing knife murderer on the loose?

Even the mayor had been seriously considering moving to Sacramento, among upstanding lobbyists and career pols.

Anybody can see what’s coming, as clear as that Baccarat crystal buffalo that O.J. had to hand over to the court. First an LAPD substation opens next door to Boulemiche. And then it’s goodbye, Starbucks, hello, Lou’s Bail Bonds.

*

The capper is the Getty.

Half a dozen years ago, hill folk and flatlanders alike were appalled at plans for the shining citta on the hill. Construction would send “millions of rats” running down the mountain, and when it was finished, other undesirables would come--people, fretted one resident, who “will be able to look right into our backyards and pools to see what to rob.”

Pool thefts have not increased since the Getty opened, but like a pool, the Getty is Brentwood’s latest attractive nuisance. If they’re not gaping at Nicole’s condo, they’re gawking at Getty art. If they were serious art lovers, they ought to buy it and enjoy it at home, like normal people--like the Brentwood doctor whose Monet and Picasso were stolen in 1992. (They turned up safe last year in Cleveland. Maybe it was an exchange program; we send them fine art, they promise not to come to the Getty.)

It reminds me poignantly of something that happened when I toured Hollywood with Vincent Miranda, founder of the Pussycat Theatre porn chain. He opened his flagship theater on Western Avenue in 1963, and kept the marquee demure because “you have people going by on their way to church.”

Now look, he said to me. He pointed to a vast discount store that had opened less than a block away. His voice was aquiver with civic sorrow. “The whole neighborhood has gone downhill, ever since that Zody’s moved in.”

*

The past, they say, is prologue, and for Monica Lewinsky, it can be instructive, even cautionary:

Marilyn Monroe, reputed presidential squeeze. Found dead in bed. Suicide? Accidental OD? Who knows?

But you do know where it happened.

Brentwood.