Dazed in the Maze of Beverly Hills

I always get lost in Beverly Hills. And I’m not even talking about the confusing part, the odd peninsula of Trousdale Estates or the weird and windy roads north of Sunset where the really, really big houses are. I’m talking the flats--those blocks between Sunset and Olympic, La Cienega and the Los Angeles Country Club that are, in the Thomas Guide of my mind, an empty space, a geographic wasteland relieved only by the glinting dome of City Hall and a vague image of the Regent Beverly Wilshire.

Although I have lived in Los Angeles for a dozen years now, I have done little of that time in walking distance of Rodeo Drive. Part of this is because I am an emphatic member of the proletariat--I am just not fancy enough to have friends who live or work or carry on in Beverly Hills. I go to Barneys occasionally as a tourist and find I cannot stay, so suddenly aware am I of every pound of flesh I carry, every freckle and wrinkle, every unwaxed follicle.

The hotels I know a bit better because famous people stay there, and I occasionally interview famous people. I have friends who dine in the glimmering recesses of Spago and Mr. Chow, just not with me. Which is fine, actually, because, as I said, every time I make it to this part of town, I get lost.

Beverly Hills is not part of Los Angeles, and in case you had forgotten, it will take the time to remind you. With the possible exception of Pacific Palisades, it is the most difficult neighborhood to reach from just about any starting point that is not Century City because it is absolutely and specifically non-freeway accessible. The trip from downtown to the Beverly Hills Hotel can take more than an hour. The Palisades at least has PCH; Beverly Hills is miles away from the 10 and the 405.

That would be annoying but acceptable if the surface streets were not in such amazing disarray. Beverly Hills is the birthplace of Burton Way, which feeds into San Vicente, as confusing a street as there is. Which direction does it follow? South? East? Southeast? Perfectly good cross-town thoroughfares--Beverly Boulevard, 3rd Street--come to a halt just west of La Cienega, as if they hadn’t the heart or the fortitude to go on.

Yet confusingly enough, Beverly Drive slants south out of Coldwater Canyon before it splits into Beverly and Beverwill. Try explaining that in a limited-English situation. Santa Monica, meanwhile, simply loses its mind, splintering into Big Santa Monica and Little Santa Monica and Little Big Santa Monica, all of which drop south of Wilshire, which in avenue parlance is something like passing the master of the hounds.

On none of these streets do the numerical addresses correspond in any way with those in Los Angeles, which makes slogging especially tough on Robertson and Doheny as they dip in and out of Beverly Hills, Los Angeles and West Hollywood. In fact, approaching from the east along Beverly, there are several blocks in which the three districts almost overlap, sweeping past the chaos of the Beverly Center into the beating heart of vehicular confusion--Cedars Sinai. Technically part of Los Angeles but spiritually part of BH, Cedars is its own separate universe, where Gracie Allen and George Burns eternally intersect.

In BH proper, navigation is made similarly challenging by signs announcing cross streets (Canon, Rodeo, Alder) that appear blocks and blocks before the actual street--the inevitable slowdown on Wilshire, on Santa Monica is not caused by the wonderment of those looking upon the storefronts for the first time but by drivers asking themselves, “Is that Canon? Or is it a driveway?” I once saw a Lexus parked on the sidewalk at Wilshire near Beverly, and I understood completely.

The smaller streets are not much better. Those in the northwest quadrant--Crescent, Rodeo, Bedford--bend and curve like willow boughs until they hit Wilshire and straighten up. Driving through Beverly Hills, I often experience a hunched-shoulder anxiety, a feeling that I am lost in an enchanted (although not necessarily beneficently so) land, that my course and destination are no longer things in my control. “The Beverly Triangle,” one friend says, describing an hours-long search for an address on Clark Street.

Didn’t I hear they found part of Amelia Earhart’s shoe somewhere on Rexford?

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Mary McNamara is at mary.mcnamara@latimes.com.