Where the Auto Reigns Supreme

By Timothy Tyler

THE tourists come off the plane and shoot around Los Angeles like camphor boats in a bathtub, trying to locate the downtown so that they can taste the drama of the big city, just the way they would back in Cleveland or Chicago or New York. At dusk they position themselves in the shadow of the city's tallest, busiest building and are simultaneously bee-swarmed by the swish of traffic, smell of bagels, whistles of cops and honking of cabs while they wait to feel the electricity of the place coming right through their shoe soles from the neon-sparkly sidewalk.

But it doesn't come. It isn't here, and they go numbly away feeling cheated. By the time they're back on the plane they're angry, as if Los Angeles were some ghost town, a big empty movie set merely masquerading as a city. Of course they have missed the point. Los Angeles does have its own charged-up inner life and soul. It just isn't out on the sidewalks waiting for them. It lurks in a very strange place: under the hood of the automobile.

It takes newcomers to L.A. months to find it there, and some people never do. At first the tourist feels totally lost and vulnerable, especially on the freeways: great, wide, whooshing things, marvelously engineered so that they average 15 m.p.h. faster than the weather-beaten, relatively narrow roads that pass for throughways in the East. But then, if he stays for a while, the newcomer gradually comes to look forward to going off across town, to the rolling barrios of East L.A., on up through brown hills to green Santa Barbara, knifing through the Santa Monica mountains into the flat maze of the San Fernando Valley, zipping across orange groves to San Bernardino.

The distances are so great and loose and easy, there is so much to see from the car window, baking, gleaming out there, that the driving, the perpetual motion, takes over. Get a good cigar, flip on the air conditioner and the FM radio, shut out the world with your windows and zip on down the freeway lulled by Carmen McRae, by the air whistling to get out the window crack, by the distant hum of the tires, zip past the palms and the houses at a standstill in the sun and float on the air on your shocks, free, rootless, just going--like the girl in Joan Didion's Play It as It Lays. You become a skier out here, your times off the freeway being mere chili stops at the bottom, breathless, charged, waiting for another move.

Everyone here seems to have this deadly fascination with motion, whizzing around on bicycles, dune buggies, motorcycles, skis, boats, surfboards, waves, cars. The town has more cars per capita than any other place, more freeway miles and car dealers. Its dealers, even retired ones like Ralph Williams, are celebrities. "People here will go without food for their cars," a West Hollywood Jaguar repairman told me. It used to be said that some people did that for their children.

Cars are clearly essential to the place. Without cars, Los Angeles would disintegrate into the "thousand tiny villages" that its critics have always claimed it to be. This is because the city spreads out long and wide and low, a nearly 500-sq.-mi. amoeba. There is no "central business district," no "good" residential quarter, no specific locale for heavy industry. Built in the car-dominated 20th century, L.A. had no need to cluster around a railroad station nor any need to throw up skyscrapers to shorten pedestrian distances. So in L.A. you find business, industrial and residential areas hopelessly intermixed and scattered everywhere. All of this makes L.A. a new kind of city, no less vital than a vertical Eastern town but without any hierarchy, held together by the auto.

Being so car-oriented, L.A. looks different from any other city in the world. Everything, including the California ranch homes, is long and low and sleek. Store blocks and offices grow sideways instead of up, because it is easier to drive an extra block than get out and take an elevator. Partly out of fear of earthquakes, but also for convenience, the Hollywood moguls built their studio offices as one-and two-story buildings with parking slots at the office doors.

The Angeleno, attuned to motion, moves more often than the resident of any other major city in the U.S. As he shuttles among Alhambra, Tarzana and Gardena, La Canada, La Crescenta and Placentia, Maywood, Lynwood and Hollywood, he gives up trying to identify with his neighborhood. He loses his regional accent, which merges into a breathless, slightly lisping "I-just-got-off-the-freeway-and-guess-what-I-saw" California way of talking. And, needing something more than freeway signs and shopping centers to identify with, he sometimes looks to his constant companion, his car, for more than just transportation.

Take Ron Frantzvog. A television cameraman who shares a small West Los Angeles apartment with his brother, Ron is away filming a show in Hawaii, and this worries him, not because he misses his girl friend or his brother or his wormholed stereo, but because he misses his 1958 Porsche. What will it do without him, pining away in a garage? He writes his brother Wayne often: "Did you remember to pump the brakes?" (This tests the condition of the master cylinder.) Wayne agrees to show us the Porsche, deep in a carefully padlocked garage. He unties a silk-soft dust cover and gently folds it up onto the top of the car, being careful not to scratch the paint--35 coats of the richest, most luminous black paint that the world's most industrialized nation can provide. Each coat has been applied personally and diligently over a three-month period by the area's master car painter, Junior himself, of Junior's House of Paints in Lynwood. "This has gotta be the sharpest '58 Speedster you've ever seen," Wayne whispers reverently. "Look inside, those are Bigelow carpets on the floor . . . Ron had the whole interior ripped out and redone. He paid twenty-eight hundred for the car, put another four thousand in it." The door hinges are lacquered as shiny black as the rest of the car; the engine is all gleaming chrome. But Ron has gone too far: it is so perfect that he doesn't dare drive it. He takes another car to work and leaves his darling cuddled for months on end in its supersoft dust cover.

Cars have become the main expression of the Angeleno's personality. A black man who works in a restaurant on La Cienega Boulevard proudly cruises Hollywood in a '56 Chevy covered in fuzzy chartreuse velvet, its wheels colorful revolving bull's-eyes and its fenders painted with slogans expressing the man's feelings (INTEGRATION; I'M IN

LOVE WITH A WHITE GIRL). An Indian cocktail waitress named Mary Whitecloud lives for her basic-black Volkswagen done all over in marvelous primitivist scenes. Other cars are flags, dollar bills, insects and painted faces coming at you on the freeway. John Livingston, Hollywood designer, had to have a car all his own, unique, so he stripped a Chrysler down to its frame and hand-built his own shiny aluminum body held together by crude rivets; the car is pointed at the ends like a silver Buck Rogers rocket ship --enough to frighten drivers off the road on Santa Monica Boulevard. North Hollywood's Nudie the Tailor glorified his Pontiac Bonneville with Western regalia. The religious here do not settle for plastic Jesuses on the dash, they erect whole creches and biblical scenes next to the Kleenex boxes in their back windows.

Because people spend so much time on the road in L.A., actual conversation has been partially replaced by bumper stickers, a way of communicating where you're at even while you're busy zipping down the passing lane with your Alfa wound up to 90 in third gear. You can witness whole bumper dialogues as you drive along: A Volkswagener croons in a feminine-hip voice, HAVE A NICE DAY, a Pontiac GTO with an Orange County dealer's sticker snorts back, p.o.w.s NEVER HAVE A NICE DAY, and a VW bus crammed with hippies answers, ALL OUR BOYS IN VIET NAM ARE P.O.W.S.

But the bedrock car nuts, and there are tens of thousands of them in L.A., are the car customizers, the people who are forever rebuilding cars. The Nossecks are typical. Donald Nosseck, some extra cash on hand from his chain of dress shops and dissatisfied with his Toyota 2000GT, took the car to Chief Kar Kustomizer George Barris, out in North Hollywood, and had Barris totally rebuild the little sports car into something more like an old Jaguar XK.140. After that, he couldn't stop. Nosseck next took his 1970 Firebird 400 to Barris, had him plunge through the roof with his acetylene torch and put in a sun roof, apply heaters (great phony silver pipes coming off the head of the engine, exiting from the sides of the car behind the front wheel, zipping, shiny chrome tubes, down the sides of the car and fastening just in front of the rear wheels), a mammoth hood scoop and delicate pinstripes all over to underline the changes.

The disease spread to Nosseck's daughter Debbie, 20, an otherwise typical California girl: "I don't do much. I just swim, watch TV, see my friends." But Debbie plunged $4,000 into a 1958 Triumph 3 she had picked up for $75. "It's got a new engine all done in chrome, new seats and interior, seats are diamond button tucked, the body Mercedes chocolate brown highlighted with walnut lines, multiplex stereo and tape deck inside, roll bar . . ." That is not so unusual as it might seem. Dick Steele, a Rambler dealer in the Valley, sold a man an Ambassador with reclining seats, telephone, removable hardtop--and an engine compartment that was completely carpeted in a lovely gold. Those months before the car was repossessed were the finest in the man's life.

Once your car is the way you want it, you start going to Vilem B. Haan, an accessory shop that is like a pet shop for cars. There you buy a brassiere for your car, padded plastic cups that fit over the car's nose to ward off bugs and tar. "We sell them by the ton," says a salesman. And beer mugs and beach towels with an insigne of your auto's make on them, air horns that play your favorite tune, wood and leather steering wheels, driving gloves, headers, roll bars. Jack Cassidy recently picked up an air horn for his Rolls, Bill Holden a bullhorn for his Continental, Paul Newman some gloves to help him handle his VW, Robert Wagner a wood shift knob for his Mercedes, James Garner some goggles for driving around in his dune buggy.

Kar Kustomizer Barris, a short, hefty Greek, understands the car-nut psyche: "Cars out here are like clothes, very personal. They are a form of entertainment. You might go for cigars or for guns, but this type of entertainment you can enjoy while driving, not just while you're at home. And it's a good clean form of fun, instead of pills or dope. You know, you can get high on your car." "Here," says Ben Carco, an American Motors dealer in Reseda, "your car is part of you." There are Angelenos who, like those old ladies with toy poodles, bristle when told that they have to leave their cars outside, which accounts for the popularity in Los Angeles of drive-in banks, drive-in churches (with speakers and heaters for every car) and Jack-In-The-Box restaurants at which you merely pause, still in "drive," give your order to a polite machine, move ahead to a window, pick up your Bonusburger with the Secret Sauce as fast as a train snagging a mailbag, pay, then munch away even as you grind back up to 70 on the freeway.

Of course, this thing Los Angeles has with its cars, this secret life, is coming to an end. You can go up in the mountains of Griffith Park in the center of L.A. any warm evening now, park on a cliff edge and see the city dying. The smog has a topography all its own these days, massive chocolate mountains of it below you to the east, a permanent black tumor over Hollywood and the downtown area seeping in channels through the passes out into the Valley and on into the Mojave Desert; to the west, over West L.A., Inglewood and Santa Monica, the smog is unexplainably green, and you realize that you are surrounded by a rainbow of smog, all of it a part of the land, undeniable, permanent, so that soon you'll be able to say, "I live in the green part"--or the brown part, or the black part. Up there in Griffith Park you realize that the city does not have long to go. Of course it's just possible that William Lear's steam-turbine car may solve the problem or that people will settle for small, light electric putt-putts before they choke on their own exhaust, but not likely. In Los Angeles there is just no replacement for that mammoth steel hunk, that roaring brute car that shrinks the land, expands your reach with churning heady acceleration, burst of speed, smell of rubber, and sends you floating dangerously at dizzy speeds, free and loose and careless, across the land. .: Timothy Tyler

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