Leader of Breakaway Bid Has a Hollywood Flair

Gene La Pietra sits in a back corner booth at Musso & Frank, telling the story of his first days in Hollywood, when he begged for nickels in front of the Hollywood Boulevard restaurant and slept for a month in a nearby church parking lot, washing his one shirt each night in the gas-station sink across the street.

At 54, he’s now a millionaire, the owner of two of the most popular gay nightclubs in town. He’s also the leader of the Hollywood secession movement, to which he has contributed “at least half a million” so far, he says. His dollars and drive pushed the campaign forward so fast that it was already inches from the ballot before City Hall and much of Hollywood seemed to notice.

Today, the Local Agency Formation Commission is expected to put the proposal to break Hollywood off from Los Angeles on the Nov. 5 ballot, alongside the secession bid for the San Fernando Valley.

La Pietra’s critics say his motives are selfish, that he hopes to use a new city to make more money at his clubs. He says he wants to be Hollywood’s mayor, so he can fully restore its lost glory.

His own rags-to-riches tale mirrors his plan for a Hollywood city.

Between bites of orange roughy and the media calls that keep his cell phone constantly dancing on the tablecloth, he leans back in the red-leather booth and describes how he grew up in a Rhode Island orphanage and foster homes, and then hitchhiked west, tugged straight across the country by a celluloid image of Hollywood.

The Hollywood name still lures people from everywhere, only to disappoint them when they get here, he says in the slightly twangy, street-tough Rhode Island accent he’s never shed.

“I’m going to bring Hollywood back to the future, to restore it to the glamour and the grandeur it once had,” he said. “Right now, Hollywood is so far down in the garbage, we can only do better. We can only see daylight.”

On the surface, Hollywood might seem to be on the upswing. The city has a hot bar and club scene in addition to the new Hollywood & Highland mall, built for nearly $1 billion.

But La Pietra and others in his small secessionist group Hollywood VOTE, which includes his hypnotherapist brother John, say the district has a long way to go. They point out that stores at Hollywood & Highland already are closing, and that the city is paying about $500,000 a month to cover the shortfall at the mall parking lot, which was built with city funds. They say money would be better spent on sprucing up Hollywood Boulevard around the mall and on fighting the drug dealing on the surrounding streets.

Driving east on Hollywood Boulevard after leaving Musso & Frank, La Pietra can’t stop fuming.

“It’s a rough neighborhood here,” he says. “It gets pretty scary. And there’s so much denial at City Hall about the crime and the gangsterism, which goes all the way from here to Melrose [Avenue]. Any idiot can see it’s grown. Some people have made gallant efforts to turn things around. But they need an engaged government. They can’t do it alone.”

La Pietra recently hired a public relations representative, who sits by his side at LAFCO meetings. But Hollywood secession hardly needs professional help to attract attention.

For months now, La Pietra has been fielding calls from the likes of the Times of London and Tokyo TV. As a news story, Hollywood has more sex appeal than the San Fernando Valley. So does the Hollywood movement’s leader, a very different breed of secessionist from the conservative real estate types running the Valley breakaway movement.

“I’m not as angry. I’m pretty happy,” he said, laughing, while noting that the Hollywood and Valley campaigns are united. In fact, he says, he got the idea for Hollywood secession from a news article about Valley secessionist Jeff Brain, “who made it all sound so easy.”

But the differences between La Pietra and other secession leaders run deep.

He is a liberal Democrat and a longtime major donor to Gov. Gray Davis, who appointed him to the state Parks Commission.

He is openly gay, and open, too, about the fact that in the early 1970s, he was convicted of state and federal obscenity charges for selling sexually explicit movies and books.

His partner, Alejandro Lopez, 28, is a popular mariachi singer at the clubs. The two men drive silver and gold Lexus sedans. They divide their time between an almost entirely unfurnished, 10,000-square-foot white mansion on Los Feliz Boulevard--complete with pool, tennis court and topiaries shaped into dogs and a teddy bear--and a cozy bungalow on Fountain Avenue in Hollywood, where La Pietra fashioned the beige marble bathroom to look like the ones at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas.

The Los Feliz house lies just outside the proposed Hollywood boundaries. La Pietra says he uses it mostly for fund-raising, and quips that it will be Hollywood’s Los Angeles embassy after secession.

La Pietra’s brash ways rile some people. Former employees say he really wants to take control of Hollywood so he can keep his clubs open all night. John Walsh, a transit advocate who lives in Hollywood, says La Pietra wants to make Hollywood “pornopolis.”

“Gene is a promoter and I feel he’s very typical of all promoters,” said Chris Schabel, a longtime Hollywood activist who was upset when La Pietra got city permission to close part of Hollywood Boulevard for his annual New Year’s party, which raises money for youth programs.

But La Pietra also inspires fierce loyalty among those who are moved by his longtime community activism and philanthropy.

“To me, the proof has been in what he’s contributed. And from the perspective of the gay community or AIDS, there’s been no better friend,” said Michael Weinstein, head of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, who has known La Pietra since 1987, when the nightclub owner donated $200,000 to an AIDS hospice.

“He’s passionate, he’s smart, he’s compassionate and he’s generous--to the tune of I don’t know exactly how much but easily into the seven figures,” Weinstein said.

Miki Jackson, who runs Aunt Bee’s, a nonprofit organization that benefits people with AIDS, described La Pietra as an iconoclast.

“He’s his own man. Nobody tells him what to do or think. He doesn’t care what the fashionable thing to do is. He just does what he thinks should be done,” she said.

La Pietra’s clubs, Arena and Circus Disco on Santa Monica Boulevard, regularly draw long lines, especially for Boys Night Out, a Tuesday tradition at Circus since the 1970s. Arena has a gilded DJ booth that La Pietra designed, and a balcony with private cabanas hung with leopard-print curtains. At Circus, silver disco balls hang over an enormous wooden dance floor, kept gleaming by La Pietra’s 166 employees.

In the last two years, La Pietra, who says he was “pretty much all schooled out by the eighth grade” (and admits that he paid a teacher $300 to get a high school diploma), has become fluent in the dense jargon of LAFCO, with its comprehensive fiscal analyses, mitigation payments and intangible assets.

He’s equally fluent in the businesses he runs, where he proudly shows off the immaculate, graffiti-free restrooms and talks about the different crowds that fill the clubs on different nights--”gay Latino over here, black lesbians over there.”

He is a short man, who rocks a little when he walks. He has a politician’s toothy grin and a corporate look--navy blue suit, crisp blue oxford shirt, maroon tie.

But he is anything but conventional.

He naps every day from around 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. Then he stays up at his clubs until around 4 a.m. He’s up again at 7:30 a.m. to start his day.

But even though he spends his nights under disco balls and laser lights, he doesn’t drink or smoke. He says grace before meals. He coos over his pets, especially his five cats. He says the “Chicken Soup for the Soul” books make him cry. He says Andrew Carnegie should be on Mt. Rushmore “because he gave everything away.”

On the path from Hollywood homelessness to wealth, La Pietra did a number of things ordinary and less so. He served in the Coast Guard. He worked in an insurance company mailroom. He sold adult materials in Hawaiian Gardens and Bell Gardens.

His arrests became a major campaign issue in 1986, when he spent more than $334,000 to run for the West Hollywood City Council.

But La Pietra said he never served time, and that getting arrested made him an activist.

Talking about what’s wrong with Hollywood and how to fix it, he gets in his car and gives a tour. On Hollywood Boulevard, he points out a drug dealer working in plain sight in front of the Roosevelt Hotel. Driving east, he passes a theater whose facade is grimly boarded up with plywood.

“Look at that. That should be allowed?” he asks. “Before the Pacific Theater gets a license in the new Hollywood, they’re going to have to fix that.”

On Van Ness Street, south of Hollywood Boulevard, he points out “Couch City,” an area where furniture sits abandoned on the street for months. In his city, he’d have a truck come around every day, he says.

“Quality of life is the last thing they’re going to enforce. God bless ‘em, they’re going after the murderers,” he says of the Los Angeles police. “But it’s quality-of-life issues that will destroy a neighborhood overnight.

“You and I together could go out and pick up those couches,” he says, then laughs. “Well, you could pick ‘em up. I could drive.”

He says Los Angeles is so big that it no longer knows how to solve small problems.

“L.A. always has to apply everything in a big way. It’s time to think small,” he says.

La Pietra’s version of small isn’t everyone’s. He’s working on a plan to renovate a park in Hollywood and turn it into “Centre of the Universe,” a free, 24-hour youth center, where kids would be fed, get health care, play sports of all sorts, and learn cutting-edge skills at film and culinary schools.

“Can you believe it?” he says, showing off a brochure for the park, with a drawing of a “Jetsons”-like campus.

When he gets enthusiastic, he can’t stop. He’s prone to comparing himself to George Washington, who he says paid his soldiers out of his own pocket when necessary.

“George Washington put his money where his mouth was.... You’ve got to,” he said. “It does no good to go and complain unless you’re willing to do the work, unless you’re fully committed.”

He also says he’s been checking out the first president’s playbook.

“I go on the Web site there--the George Washington one--and I read how he did it. And that’s the strategy we used here. It was a very stealth strategy. He didn’t engage the enemy on every hill. But he stayed strong, and in the end he won.”