New Yorkers: How to get a life out here

She’s not dull. She’s not shy. She sees the potential in porn stars and sluggers on steroids and murderers’ mistresses.

Judith Regan’s announcement that she’s moving her publishing company to the West Coast has New Yorkers aghast and Angelenos dreading her vow to inflict yet another “salon” upon us, but we’ve gotta say: For a New Yorker, she already appears to be fitting right in here in Los Angeles.

Still, when New Yorkers come west, the arc is all too familiar: so much promise, so many bad sunburns from sitting on the 405 in rented convertibles. The lame “La-La Land” jokes, the smoking where it just isn’t OK, the needing to know where we all went to college, the being seduced by personal trainers.

It’s an epidemic, and, people, it doesn’t need to happen. Not with so many other New Yorkers having gotten here first.

As our modest contribution to Regan’s “Welcome to L.A.” goodie basket, we surveyed a few New York transplants, recent and less so, for their wisdom on relocating here.

Oh, we know, New York versus L.A. is one of the world’s oldest riffs, and for a minute we thought, maybe this is too stale, maybe it’s too low class, maybe this move is all about two great cities finally acknowledging their oneness, maybe it’s time to end this long, parochial municipal smackdown.

Then we thought: Nah.

Besides, New Yorkers like to give advice long after they’ve technically ceased to be New Yorkers, and they’re fun to talk to, especially now that L.A. has them thick on the ground. Also, being New Yorkers, they had opinions. Thoughts ranged from the idealistic (don’t compare cities, try to love each for its merits ... yada yada, the weather, the “energy” ... yada yada) to the conflicted (whatever you do, stop/keep reading/rooting for the New York papers/sports teams) to the pragmatic:

“Get a car.”

That’s from stand-up comedian and Air America morning radio personality Marc Maron, who bought a house in Highland Park in 2003.

“As a New Yorker, you’ll want to walk, but you’ll find after a few weeks of walking in Los Angeles that it works against you,” Maron said.

“You’ll find you’re the only person walking, and people in cars are looking at you as if something bad has happened. You’ll get these sympathetic looks from behind car windows, like, ‘Wow, that guy must have it bad.’ They won’t look at you and go, ‘Oh, look, there’s a New Yorker trying to adjust, and this is a mistake they always make.’ ”

Oh, and by the way, said Maron’s wife, Mishna Wolff, an actress and comedy writer, if you do get that car, read the owner’s manual.

“When I first moved to L.A., I bought an ’84 Pontiac Fiero with stripes on the side, which I thought was really bitchin’, but it didn’t last,” she confided. “No one told me you had to put oil in it. No one tells you that stuff in New York.”

Fasten your seat belt

Will you enjoy driving here? No, you will not. Not at first. Maybe not for many, many years.

“I hate the way the streets are laid out here,” sighed writer Stephen Saban, who moved from Manhattan 7 1/2 years ago and is now editor of the gossipy WOW Report, at worldofwonder.net.

“I hate that the sun blinds you in the morning and in the night because there are no skyscrapers to block it. Driving west, how can you see? Aren’t you blinded? Aren’t you? Why don’t you have an accident?”

Saban says that at first he sought to minimize the need to drive by settling in a centrally located neighborhood with a little buzz and a lot of commerce. The lesson: The New York formula for heat seeking is not so surefire in L.A.

“I ended up in an apartment in Koreatown,” he said. “It was going to be the ‘next big neighborhood,’ everyone said, but apparently I wasn’t going to live long enough to see it. So then I moved out of there to a little house with a backyard off Melrose, near Fred Segal. But then the landlord sold the house without letting me know. Now I live in a hellhole in Echo Park, another neighborhood that’s going to be the ‘next neighborhood.’ ”

A cautionary tale, which is why most New Yorkers, like most of L.A.’s other huddled masses from elsewhere, often make it a point never to go where others of their ilk haven’t gone before.

Once that meant anywhere in the Greater L.A. area except “the Westside and parts of the Valley near Universal,” laughed Ruth Lansford, president of Friends of the Ballona Wetlands, a New York native who has lived in Los Angeles since 1957. (Of course, she added, back then “everyone else in L.A. seemed to be from Oklahoma.”)

With time, however, L.A. New Yorkers have branched out. Gone are the days of self-segregation in Wilshire Corridor high-rises and cramped Mar Vista bungalows and Santa Monica condos within walking distance of crumbling art house theaters.

As the world has gotten smaller and more and more people have become bicoastal, New York and L.A. have, in fact, become more and more the same city, observed Robert Rosenthal, a promoter, lawyer and New Yorker who has lived for the past 40 years in L.A.

“The people are equally hardworking. The politicians are equally stupid. The law enforcement is equally good and bad. The L.A. Times is a good newspaper; the New York Times is a good newspaper. The only difference is, the leaves don’t fall in the fall here, and if they do, they’re palm leaves and they put a dent in your car. Also, this is going to shock some people, but I’m gonna say it: There’s no difference between the pizza in New York and Los Angeles.”

(But one shouldn’t get carried away, Maron noted: “Let’s not forget the sad quest for a good deli. You move to L.A., you have to let that go. You have to learn to accept that it doesn’t exist here. Just try to appreciate what’s here as uniquely Los Angeles. Just say to yourself, ‘Look, there were Jews here a long time ago, and this was the best they could do.’ ”)

And these things go step by step, said Details magazine founder and die-hard New Yorker Annie Flanders, who for the past several years has partnered with her daughter, Rosie, in a real estate business that specializes in selling L.A. homes to New York transplants.

Asked if she and her daughter ever went Greater L.A. or L.A.-adjacent -- turned clients on to, say, the ranchers of Duarte or McMansions of Brea -- she shuddered: “God forbid.” Though she’s hardly close-minded.

“I go to Pasadena once a week to my acupuncture doctor, and I always say every time that I can’t believe how close it is, so why do people fear Pasadena? It’s a very good place to shop, and so much easier.”

Still, she said, for the latest incoming New Yorkers, “It’s all Hollywood Hills, Hollywood Hills, Hollywood Hills. Or Los Feliz or Silver Lake.”

Los Feliz is where LAPD Chief Bill Bratton and his wife, Rikki Klieman, settled, and Klieman said they don’t regret it.

“We walk the hills in Griffith Park on weekends, and it’s transporting, like Tuscany,” said Klieman, a lawyer and legal analyst for E! Entertainment and Court TV. Yes, she said, “Los Angeles is an early town for people used to Manhattan, but I’ve never been healthier, because I go to bed early -- I can’t go down the block anymore to solve the world’s problems over a bottle of wine.”

For those nights when she nonetheless wants to, she said, they have found a handful of restaurants that remind them of Manhattan. The one downside, she added, is that those restaurants tend to be populated by show-business types, and show-business types mean show-business females. Which for other women can be depressing, scenery-wise, even if you’re a celebrity in your own right.

“I remember my first lunch at an outdoor cafe in Beverly Hills, mouth open, jaw dropping, saying, ‘Omigod, are they all 6 feet tall with narrow little waists and they’re my age?’ ” Klieman said, laughing. “It was a bit startling. One night I was at Ago [in West Hollywood], and halfway to the bathroom, I realized that I was the only woman in the place who was short, dark and over 50. Now when we go there, I refuse to stay past 10 p.m. We’re out by 9:45.”

Klieman thinks Regan -- who is a friend, and published Klieman’s memoir, “Fairy Tales Can Come True” -- “will love it here.”

“She’ll love it for the same reasons I love it,” Klieman said. “She’ll love the whole idea of being outdoors all the time, to sit in the open air and have a meal, to have less, I don’t know, less body armor, because people who live in warmer climates I think tend to be more open, and there’s a real nice sense of openness here.”

Notice she said “sense” of openness, not openness per se. Openness in L.A. is not the lovely, full-hearted warmth New Yorkers display when they let down their famed guard. L.A. doesn’t do warmth, not on a mass scale. Warmth here is viewed as an individual option. A lot of people, in fact, are here because the place they came from was a little too warm, frankly. Cool is our default mode of interaction. Our friendliness is the friendliness of people who intend, for the moment, to remain friendly strangers. This can throw your newer New Yorker.

“We had friends in from New York who went to Trader Joe’s, and when they came back to our house, they were freaked,” Klieman said. “They said people walking down the aisle at the store kept saying, ‘Hi! How are you?! Have a nice day!’ People they’d never met, wearing these strange, bright smiles! They said they thought they were in some weird village-of-the-damned movie.”

But for all that aggressive sunniness, comedian Maron said, L.A.’s signature posture is arm’s-length.

“New York is like a large organism -- if you’re in it, you believe it requires you in order to exist,” he said. “But in L.A., if you go to get something to eat, you literally feel that the people at the next table are going, ‘There he is -- don’t tell him where we’re meeting later.’ You might as well be on the moon if you’re not here with something to do.”

Playing hard to get

ONLY with time does L.A. reveal itself.

“There are definitely stages of moving here,” said Maron’s wife, Wolff. “There’s the excitement stage, where you have these rose-colored glasses, and my God, you can go to the beach, and everything’s so cheap, and everyone’s having a barbecue.

“Then there’s the disillusionment stage, where there’s no good food and everything closes at midnight and everything conspires to waste your time because you can’t just get together with people by showing up.

“And then there’s the stage where you find out the first wave of friends you got are all full of ... and then there’s this rebuilding process, where you have to put together your real crew. Your people who you can call if you’re doing well or doing badly. Who usually happen to be people you knew from back in New York.”

Contact Shawn Hubler at calendar.letters@latimes.com.