A Dim View of L.A. Indeed

The late Walter Matthau played one of my favorite characters in Neil Simon’s “I Ought to Be in Pictures,” a screenwriter who voices the complaints of many transplanted New Yorkers.

Summing up the climate in Southern California, he grumbles: “Thirty inches of rain in two hours--the rest of the year is all sun.”

“You don’t like the sun?” the writer’s visiting daughter asks.

“Not every day for 15 years,” he responds, adding, “It tries to get at me through the cracks in the door. I have to hide.”

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SPEAKING OF L.A. INSULTS: A new tequila billboard makes a crack about the City of Angels’ lack of purity, the latest in a number of ads to lambaste L.A. (see photos). Naturally, they were all proudly displayed in L.A., a city that likes to kid itself.

My attitude is, the more gibes at L.A. the better. Maybe we can stop people from moving here--and save them from all that sun.

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UNIONS OF EGOS: Former Miss America Vanessa Williams is the latest actress to marry a professional athlete, Lakers forward Rick Fox. Some others, with the couples’ track records:

* Debbie Allen: Lakers star Norm Nixon (1984-present)

* Halle Berry: Baseball player David Justice (1993-96)

* Laraine Day: Baseball player/manager Leo Durocher (1947-60)

* Robin Givens: Boxer Mike Tyson (1988-89)

* Elyse Knox: Football player Tom Harmon (1946-90)

* Marilyn Monroe: Baseball Hall of Famer Joe DiMaggio (1954 for nine months)

* Tatum O’Neal: Tennis player John McEnroe (1986-93)

* Jane Russell: Football player Bob Waterfield (1943-68)

* Brooke Shields: Tennis player Andre Agassi (1997-99)

* Estelle Taylor: Boxer Jack Dempsey (1925-31)

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HE HAD AN ALIBI: It was Estelle Taylor who had Dempsey get his nose bobbed after the couple moved to L.A. in the hope that he would become a film star. Instead, he went back to boxing. After he was beaten soundly by Gene Tunney in their first fight, Dempsey had some explaining to do about the condition of his face.

“Honey,” he told his soon-to-be-ex-wife, “I just forgot to duck.”

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WHERE ARE THEY NOW--AND FOREVER: Perusing the celebrity Web site www.findagrave.com, I checked out some urban folk tales about the dead and found:

* W.C. Fields may or may not have said that, all things considered, he’d rather be in Philadelphia, but he’s buried at Forest Lawn in Glendale.

* So is Walt Disney, who some believe was frozen in a cryogenics facility so that he could be thawed when a cure for cancer is found.

* Jimmy Hoffa is listed as “location of body unknown” (hey, you can’t blame me for trying to come up with a scoop).

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MYSTERIES SOLVED: The latest police log of the Los Alamitos News-Enterprise included these two offbeat incidents:

* Cypress, June 29: “A barefooted man seen climbing a rope to the roof of a home was the husband fixing the antenna.”

* Seal Beach, June 29: “The operator on a 911 call heard fumbling with the phone and buttons being pushed. It was the resident washing his phone.”

miscelLAny:

On Tuesday, traffic was slowed by a spilled barbecue set on the Santa Ana Freeway in the Tustin area. Talk about a true Fourth of July SigAlert!

Steve Harvey can be reached at (800) LATIMES, Ext. 77083, by fax at (213) 237-4712, by mail at Metro, L.A. Times, 202 W. 1st St., L.A., 90012 and by e-mail at steve.harvey@latimes.com.