In West Hollywood: Exotic Mix

By DAN GOODGAME

Long before its apartments were painted socialist red, even before its mayor sprayed his hair electric blue, West Hollywood was a colorful little rooster of a town. Defying expansion-minded Los Angeles, it remained an unincorporated no-man's-land, surrounded by the city but not a part of it, legally or spiritually.

From the days of Prohibition, West Hollywood's famous Sunset Strip lay beyond the grasp of the Los Angeles police department, and it sheltered illicit casinos and speakeasy bars, patronized by gangsters and movie stars. During the '60s West Hollywood attracted hippies, druggies and rock-music clubs such as the Troubador and Whisky a GoGo. A decade later West Hollywood welcomed a migration of Russian Jews fleeing Soviet oppression and an influx of homosexuals weary of perceived harassment by the LAPD.

Today, in the public imagination, it is the homosexuals who define West Hollywood, which last month celebrated its first anniversary as America's one and only "Gay City." The mayor and a majority of the city council members are homosexual, as are a third of the city's residents, opening West Hollywood to frequent jokes in Johnny Carson's monologue. Most recently the council took heat for voting to keep city hall open on Christmas while declining to meet on the evening of Halloween, which in West Hollywood is celebrated with outrageous costumes, street festivals and debauchery comparable to Rio's carnival.

The gay Camelot label, though, doesn't do justice to West Hollywood, whose charm and eccentricity extend far beyond matters of affectional preference. Says Severyn Ashkenazy, who owns a string of small, elegant hotels in Beverly Hills and West Hollywood: "At night, downtown Los Angeles is dead and Beverly Hills is boring. West Hollywood is the place for those who are interested in night life and in meeting different kinds of people, creative people." He adds, in the ultimate compliment for one educated and accented in Paris, "It's the Left Bank of Beverly Hills."

West Hollywood measures only 1.9 sq. mi. but bustles with a wildly diverse citizenry of 37,000 elderly pensioners, Hasidic Jews, yuppie straights, punk rockers, and Russian and Israeli emigres, as well as homosexuals. The mingling of these groups is best savored on a warm Friday evening along West Hollywood's main artery, Santa Monica Boulevard. There, a black-clad Lubavitcher family straight out of 19th century Lithuania strolls past a bus bench shared by a sneering heavy-metal-music freak with a slime green Mohawk and a drag queen done up as Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. Across the way, a convenience store advertises European specialties in Russian Cyrillic characters. And up the boulevard rolls a procession of white stretch limos, trundling the show-biz glitterati (and their accountants and orthodontists) to West Hollywood's tonier night spots.

Families with children, the mainstay of most communities, are a distinct minority in West Hollywood, constituting only 5% of the populace. The local International House of Pancakes does far more business during Halloween and the Gay Pride Parade in June than on Mother's Day. "In West Hollywood we don't have children's specialty shops or McDonald's with a playground," says Ruth Abrams, 36, whose daughter is two.

For apartment dwellers with children, play space is at a premium. A dozen mothers, members of the West Hollywood Munchkins Play Group, convene three days a week in cramped West Hollywood Park. They unlock a wooden shed, pass out toys and warily eye the winos by the shuffleboard court and the gay men seeking casual sex around the shrubs and public toilet. "We complain to the police, and they arrest these perverts in the toilet," Abrams says. "Look, I don't care what they do, but I don't want it in front of my kid. We want a separate children's toilet."

For the most part, though, Abrams and other parents enjoy the village atmosphere and diversity of West Hollywood, which offers something for every taste. One of President Reagan's favorite restaurants, Chasen's, is a local landmark to snobbery. An inordinate number of other acclaimed eateries --Spago, Trumps, Morton's, Scandia, the Ivy--also flourish. So do a fistful of opulent hotels, including Le Bel Age (a classy favorite of businessmen), the Sunset Marquis (occasional host to Bruce Springsteen and Cyndi Lauper) and Le Mondrian (boasting a $1 million rainbow paint job, nightly jazz and some of the best panoramic views in town).

When the going gets tough around the hotel pool or restaurant, the tough go shopping, and West Hollywood's boutiques offer everything from formal gowns to studded leather bikini shorts for men. There's a baker who specializes in anatomically explicit cakes, and the Pleasure Chest serves as a hardware store for the sexually adventurous. For those with more homely tastes, West Hollywood functions as the West Coast capital of the interior-design and home-furnishing trades, which are headquartered in the 530-ft.-long, six-story Pacific Design Center, sculpted of neon blue glass and known locally as the Blue Whale.

Another anchor of the booming West Hollywood economy is show business, notably music publishing and television. Both Love Boat and Dynasty are filmed at Warner's studios here.

What explains all this commerce and excitement in such a tiny community is geography: its location between Beverly Hills and Hollywood (which legally disappeared into the city of Los Angeles in 1910). Shaped like a pistol complete with hammer and trigger, West Hollywood nestles at the base of the Hollywood Hills with its barrel aimed resolutely east.

Hotelier Ashkenazy recalls that in the late '60s, prime commercial real estate sold for $12 per sq. ft. in Beverly Hills and for $4 just across the street in West Hollywood, where developers also found it easier to obtain planning and zoning approvals. "Wealthy people live in Beverly Hills, but West Hollywood is where they come to eat and drink, to listen to music, to furnish their homes," says Ashkenazy, himself a multimillionaire and Beverly Hills resident.

While the wealthy shop and play in West Hollywood, they do not run it, a point made forcefully during last year's campaign to incorporate. While the gay-rights issue got most of the ink in the press, the main push for cityhood came from tenants demanding rent control. While only 25% to 35% of West Hollywood's residents are homosexual, 85% are renters. Says Ron Stone, 38, a former U.S. Senate aide and father of the cityhood campaign: "Without a coalition of renters and gays, we would not have a city today."

One of the city council's first acts was to roll back rents to the level of the previous summer, which immediately saved $40 to $90 a month for many tenants. Later the council limited rent hikes to a piddling 3% for 1985. This sudden redistribution of income moved several outraged landlords to splash red paint on the facades of their apartment buildings, a protest against "socialism."

Although the rent-control law exempts new construction, Real Estate Broker and Investor John Parks, 33, insists that "nobody is going to risk his life savings to build housing in a city where the council is as socialistic and kooky as this one." Parks notes that one council member, Valerie Terrigno, 32, has been indicted on federal embezzlement charges. Another, Stephen Schulte, 39, has posed for a gay magazine, a third, Mayor John Heilman, 28, sprayed a blue stripe in his hair and dressed in a flowing white robe for a political gala. On top of all that, the whole council attended a $4,000 group "leadership"-therapy session with a psychiatrist. "This is not the sort of behavior," Parks sniffs, "that inspires confidence among investors."

Overall, however, the city can proudly point to some solid accomplishments. Through a contract with the Los Angeles County sheriff, West Hollywood has beefed up police protection by about 20%, adding foot patrols, organizing neighborhood-watch groups and driving serious crime down by 18%. Meanwhile, without raising taxes, the city has amassed a budget surplus of more than $6 million: money that before cityhood was collected in West Hollywood but was spent elsewhere in Los Angeles County.

"Symbolically, it's of national importance that the majority of the city council can be gay and lesbian and get elected by nongay voters, but gay rights is only part of what we're about," says Mayor Heilman. "Running a city is all about police protection and potholes and parking." As West Hollywood completes its first tumultuous year, even skeptical landlords are showing acceptance of city hall: most have painted over their Commie red facades.