Chasing the Star Man

I tell him I’ll buy the map.

“Eight dollars,” he says.

The title on the cover reads, “Map of the Movie Stars Homes.” I notice the printed price on the map is $7.50. It’s been marked out by felt pen and replaced with the new price.

The young man takes the money. He is Latino and sits huddled underneath a sandwich board on Hollywood Boulevard. The board serves the double purpose of advertising the maps and covering him from the scum and sun of the street.

“Who makes the maps?” I ask him. “Who sells them to you?”

The young man stares into the middle distance.

“No habla,” he says.

I ask him again in crude Spanish. This time he says nothing, maintaining his focus on a spot 20 feet away.

*

And so, for one more day, the mystery endures. The star map business proceeds as always along Hollywood and Sunset boulevards, the young men sitting in chairs, standing, crouching next to their sandwich boards, selling maps that have a history as old as Hollywood itself.

But no one knows who makes these maps, who hires the young men, and who--most important of all--collects the money. The star map business turns out to be as shadowy as an old detective movie.

Actually, it’s an exaggeration to say that no one knows. The young men know, of course. They just aren’t talking.

Frank Giovinazzo and Al Safarti have come close to knowing. They have good reason for their curiosity and we’ll get back to them later.

First, a brief primer on the star map business. Roughly 100,000 star maps get sold each year, and currently three types are available. Two are published by legitimate businesses and sold by souvenir shops. The third--the sidewalk star map sold by the young men--operates as a well-protected and lucrative enigma.

For example, take the name of the map company itself. The cover claims the map was produced by the “Coast Map Co.” of Los Angeles.

Yet, if you call the telephone company, you will get no number. And neither Los Angeles County nor the state Board of Equalization has any record of its existence.

And consider the wariness of the young men to all and any questions. Have they been coached? Threatened?

In fact, the unseen operator actually inspires some fear among the brotherhood of souvenir and trinket businessmen in Hollywood. One of these men began telling me a story about a friend’s experience but then stopped and asked that his own name be kept out of print. He was frightened, he said, of retribution.

His story goes like this:

“My friend was just about broke and asked if he could buy some star maps from my store, wholesale, to sell on the street. I told him sure, but be careful.

“So he makes a sign and plants himself at a corner with his maps. On the second day a car pulls up and men get out. They show him a knife and tell him it’s time to move on.

“My friend says, ‘Are you threatening me?’

“ ‘No,’ one of them says, ‘we’re warning you.’

“He thinks about it and decides it’s time to leave. Within a couple of hours a kid arrives with his sign and starts working the spot.”

If you saw the 1997 movie ‘Star Maps,’ you might be wondering about its depiction of the operation as a cover for male prostitution. I asked the businessman if it was possible.

No, he said, he doubted that. The map business itself was too lucrative.

“Who would threaten such a good deal with a little whoring,” he asked rhetorically.

Still, something fundamental has changed about the enterprise over the last decade. Remember the grandmoms and other light-hearted types who once sold star maps out of their vans parked along Sunset?

They’re gone, replaced by the young men with their middle-distance stares. And with them has gone a long tradition of innocent star worship that stretches back to the 1920s.

*

At his design studio in Culver City, Jim Heimann has portfolio books full of early star maps and postcard sets containing colorized photos of stars homes.

“Star maps began almost as soon as the big stars of Hollywood started building big, fancy homes,” says Heimann. “First you got the fold-out postcards and then you got the maps themselves.”

In the beginning, in fact, star searching had none of today’s embarrassing connotations. Heimann owns a 1926 map produced by Security Pacific Bank for attendees at a American Bankers Assn. convention in Los Angeles.

The map, titled “An Illustrated Guide to the Homes of NOTED CINEMA STARS,” contains the home addresses of Lon Chaney, Marion Davies, Hoot Gibson and several dozen others. Apparently the bankers were expected to go trolling for stars after a long day of conventioneering.

At some point, star maps moved from the gimmick stage to serious business. Although no one can say for certain, the transition likely took place in 1948, when Van Nuys businessman Wesley G. Lake copyrighted a map for the first time and began selling it around town.

Eventually others, including a former actor known as Hurst Amyxx, created versions of their own. Los Angeles became the only city on earth where people made a living publishing the addresses of their more famous neighbors. Many stories were told of famous stars waving to their fans when they emerged in their bathrobes to pick up the morning newspaper.

Even now, when the old friendliness has disappeared and stars build walls and high gates around their houses, the map business continues to grow. Some of the current publishers are direct descendants of Hurst Amyxx and others, having purchased their copyrights, and sell hundreds of copies a day.

Which gets us back to Frank Giovinazzo and Al Safarti. They distribute the two legitimate star maps--”legitimate” in this case referring to their legal status and not the vast array of goofy graphics and wrong addresses that are the hallmark of the genre. And they have long conducted a campaign to shut down the sidewalk operator and his squadrons of young vendors.

“The map you get on the corner is a knock-off of our map,” says Giovinazzo. “It violates our copyright. And the sidewalk vendors operate without licenses. But neither the city of Los Angeles nor anyone else seems interested in enforcing the law.”

Safarti says he strongly suspects the operator pays the young men poorly. Most of them, he says, speak very limited English and are recent arrivals.

“He seems to hire people who can’t fight back,” Safarti says.

But who is the shadowy operator? Safarti and Giovinazzo were reluctant to take a guess. I finally found one businessman on Hollywood Boulevard who said he knew the operator’s name and would share it with me. On condition of anonymity, of course.

He whispered the name in my ear. I wrote it down, returned to the office and dialed directory assistance.

No listing under that name, the operator said. Nothing. Nowhere.

I put down the phone. The next day, I knew, the young men would be stationed along the boulevards. Someone would put them there. Someone would give them the maps. And collect the money.

But who? He, or she, remained as hidden as the houses in Bel-Air. As silent as its streets. And as vaporous as the stars themselves.