On Rodeo Drive, True Patriots Heed Clarion Call to Spend

We’ve heard the same call to duty from the president, governors and mayors. If we’re going to prevail, we must not live in fear. If we’re going to rise up, strong once more, we must get out of the house, march into the streets and spend money.

And so I went to the front lines, Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, and watched true patriots step bravely into Bulgari, Cartier, Prada, Louis Vuitton and other outposts along a three-block battlefield of luxury goods.

How’s business?

There is hope, my friends. There is hope.

One woman, loaded down with shopping bags, found the strength to raise her cell phone to her ear to tell a friend what she’d just bought. She almost walked into a parking meter and fell off a curb, but that’s why there’s a medal called the Purple Heart.

Business faltered after Sept. 11, said Peri Ellen Berne, who manages La Perla and heads up a Rodeo Drive merchants association. But traffic is rebounding now, as shoppers act on a need to return to “normalcy.” In this case, normalcy is a $650 bra on display in the window.

“Once you buy a luxury item,” Berne said, “you can never go back and shop at . . .”

Kmart?

“Exactly.”

The regular army might shop at Kmart. Out here, you’ve got Green Berets.

“I don’t want to hold back,” said Jacob Lee, who strolled out of Cartier with a pretty young girlfriend on his arm. She was wearing a smart new watch.

Price tag?

“About $3,000,” said Lee, who owns an Internet company and said he shops “quarterly” on Rodeo. Lee said he’s being a little more conservative right now. But if conservative means a $3,000 watch, victory is at hand.

While waiting to see the manager at Louis Vuitton, I watched the video that plays on a big screen in the store. At first, I thought it was a David Lynch movie about a curious band of anorexics stranded on an Arctic ice floe. But it apparently was a fashion show, staged on a glacier for reasons I chose not to question.

So how’s business? I asked the manager.

Sorry, she said, but she was not at liberty to discuss such sensitive matters. I’d have to go through corporate headquarters.

I would have protested, but maybe it was a national security issue.

Outside the Hotel Luxe, I came upon a pink neon sign that says “visual space has essentially no owner.” Perhaps not, but put a price tag on it, and someone out here will buy it.

“You cannot stop living,” said Josette Banzet, who walked the streets in a blue “Top Gun” hat and a gold Giorgio of Beverly Hills T-shirt. She had just returned from the national charities awards dinner in Washington, an event attended by President Bush.

“I love him,” said Banzet, who endorses Bush’s notion that we have a public duty to shop till we drop.

Banzet, who lives in the neighborhood and was out for a stroll, is an actress, of course. Without solicitation, she offered the following information, lest anyone had forgotten why we love L.A.:

“I won a Golden Globe for ‘Rich Man, Poor Man.’ ”

The recession found a deeper groove in November, with 331,000 people thrown out of work as unemployment hit a six-year high. But the U.S. economy is designed for the rich man to get richer as the poor man gets poorer, as Enron’s nose dive reminds us. This bodes well for Rodeo Drive and, through the trickle-down, for all of us.

At Dolce & Gabbana, Renee Dupont, like everyone else, was talking on a cell phone while shopping. If one day everyone on Rodeo Drive suddenly drops dead, we will know there was something to the theory that cell phones pose a health risk.

Dupont, a producer and director, had to hang up when she saw a $615 black sleeveless T-shirt with “Material Girl” spelled out in what looked like rhinestones.

“That is so hot!” one of her friends said.

“Wouldn’t this be great for ‘Rock Chik?’ ” Dupont queried.

“Rock Chik” is one of the many projects Dupont has in the works at Krispy Films. Slated for MTV, it’s the zany story of the life and times of a music muse. Another Krispy Films project--and a distribution pitch meeting was just an hour away--was for a property called “Naked Couch.”

“It’s about porn stars in psychotherapy,” Dupont said.

Osama bin Laden ought to just give it up. We are stronger--and more American--than ever.

Dupont, who looked fabulous, said her shoes were by Rossi, her suit by Valentino and her sweater by “an expensive guy” whose name she couldn’t remember. She had just been in Dolce & Gabbana two days earlier to buy a dress, shoes and a necklace, and came back to see the trunk show. This is where the line for next spring and summer is brought out for early orders, and shoppers are plied with champagne and hors d’oeuvres while models slink about.

I might have been the only one in the place who did not have a champagne glass in one hand and a cell phone in the other. Which may be why I was asked to leave by a fussy manager who huffed that no interviews are allowed in the store.

I would have protested, but he was right. By interfering with people trying to shop, I was being un-American.

All signs are good out here on the front lines, but now is not the time for complacency. We must stay the course, and we must all do our part. And remember, only 15 shopping days left till Christmas.

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Steve Lopez writes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. He can be reached at steve.lopez@latimes.com.