Middle-Aged Myth

If luxury has a lap, Beverly Hills sits square upon it.

The city, currently celebrating its 50th anniversary, reeks of opulence: a two-car family might as well be on relief. But the shape of the place and the nature of its glamour have changed since the golden years, when Hollywood's pioneer stars came to the five-square-mile tract of beanfields, carved castles out of the surrounding canyons, and turned a wasteland into myth, when

Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford built their fabled 14-acre "Pickfair" and proposed that the community be walled off from the outside world, when the Basil Rathbones ordered snow one slow summer day, provided sleds and skis for a couple of hundred friends. Beverly Hills was then, and is now, the most glamorous suburb in the U.S.

The early stars died or moved away; their estates were sold or razed, divided and subdivided into expensive housing developments. Now the landscape looks like a Monopoly board toward the end of a hot game. Half a dozen houses now share the hilltop where Charlie Chaplin's castle and tennis court once stood in lonely splendor. The city is home to a new sort of populace--an ever-thrusting band of upper-middle-classmen, walking bank accounts without names who are determined to live up to the legacy of glamour. They are concerned not with style but with status.

Restless Natives. Mostly, they are high-priced professionals--doctors, dentists, lawyers--plus bankers, stockbrokers and real estate agents. An area known variously as "Couch Canyon" and "Libido Lane" houses most of the city's 198 psychiatrists, or approximately one to every 166 residents (compared with the national average of one per 1,100). There is no heavy industry and no effort to attract any. There are 22 banks, nine hotels, the cleanest jail in the county, and a chamber of commerce that couldn't care less. There are 65 acres of parks and playgrounds but no pool hall; a fencing academy but no laundromat or bowling alley.

No one has ever been buried in Beverly Hills, and few have been born there; it has neither a cemetery nor a hospital. It claims to have the highest density of telephones of any community in the world (50,000 for 14,300 people). The average family income is more than $19,000. There are no slums, no visibly poor, and no night life. Today's population is the oldest, with a median age of 46.8 years, of any major California city, and a high time in the old town consists for the most part of a movie and a malted.

Naturally, the natives are restless. They flit between the La Cienega art galleries to the east and the avant-garde theater and cultural programs at U.C.L.A. to the west. They suffer, at $50 an hour, from what a leading psychiatrist, Dr. Ralph Greenson, calls "agitated boredom." "There was a time," says Greenson, "when people came to me with a specific problem--I love a girl who doesn't love me, something like that. Now they ask me 'Why am I unhappy?' When people who grew up worrying about making a living suddenly find they've made it, they have to find a new focus for their anxiety. So there is a lot of dilettantism, a lot of bustling around." Some turn to philanthropy. "It is no problem," says former Democratic National Committeeman Paul Ziffren, "to raise $150,000 overnight in Beverly Hills."

Docile Paradise. "The latest prestige contest," says one cynic, "is to see how much money you can spend on the smallest house. The current front runner is a guy who spent $300,000 on a two-bedroom 'bungalow.' " Lots in the prestigious Trousdale Estates (where Richard Nixon lived out his seventh crisis) can bring as much as $200,000, without house. But serious status seekers want real estate somehow associated with a celebrity. A man who had never seen it bought Frank Sinatra's two-bedroom pad for $200,000. A businessman snapped up Dinah Shore's shack for a mere $350,000. A little old lady with a fortune in oil stocks shelled out $225,000 for Judy Garland's place; she had the house torn down, explaining: "I just bought it for the lot."

The city has occasionally flared into notoriety. In 1947, an ill-mannered colleague fired a bullet through the head of Mobster Bugsy Siegel as he sat at ease in his mistress' mansion. In 1958, Actress Lana Turner's daughter stuck a knife into Johnny Stompanato, a smalltime hood who was a big-time boyfriend of her mother's. The occasion was celebrated by local teen-agers in a new dance, the "Stompanato Stomp." But by and large today's Beverly Hills is a docile little paradise. Its 95-man police force is on constant patrol; no police car is ever more than two minutes away from any house within its assigned area. The police are also vigilant guardians of public (if not private) morals, recently ordered the removal of a Michelangelo naked male figure from an art gallery window.

Gossip Columnist Hedda Hopper told guests gathered at a civic luncheon in honor of the city's anniversary that "Beverly Hills is no different from Altoona, Pa., except that the people here have more money." The assemblage laughed. They know better. Beverly Hills is a state of mind--and a hard one to attain.

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