'L.A.' Confidential

Los Angeles: Meet Cute
I first tripped over Los Angeles on a New York lobby newsstand in what was then called the Pan Am building. It was 1981, and, after a long study of the Basic L.A. Lit – Chandler, James M. Cain and Carey McWilliams – confirmed to me that the city was a real and exciting place, I was ready to move.

Then, bang, Los Angeles, like a Technicolor Whole Earth catalogue of Materialism (what a contradiction in terms) and commodity fetishism. Flaunting my destination city’s ugly ostentation and priciness: million-dollar Holmby and Hidden Hills estates, $40,000 gowns, restos whose celebrity far surpassed the food – plus all those watches, watches, diamond, ruby, sapphire-studded watches, Rolex, Audemars-Piaget, Breguet, Patek Philippe – the sum of it so mesmerized by consumption and gorged with the sheer rapture of acquisition that it made Manhattan midtown feel like a Trappist abbey. I thought of defaulting to Scranton. But the geese flew south and the pipes in my house were about to freeze again, so I fled to L.A. anyway.

It wasn’t until I got here that I discovered the magazine also had content: It was actually there, peering out warily from among what Tom Wolfe, referring to The New Yorker long ago, called “a tropical forest of ads.” I found Tom Nolan’s soulful nightclub columns and some diligent reporting; in 1982, there appeared what is still the best article I’ve read on the L.A. City Council. Good film and book reviews, too. Then, later in the decade, some real investigating. You learned to tune out the glitter, skim over the Best Ofs, and go for the worthwhile. I’ve been doing that ever since.

That’s just me, apparently, and it can still be difficult. I wish I could remember much about a fairly recent L.A. piece on a local PR mogul, Mike Sitrick – besides that the guy represented people like Cardinal Roger Mahony in his role of supporting molester priests. Sitrick, you might say, is in the waste management business as much as Tony Soprano, but the piece gave him a pass as to whether being in the bottom-feeding, top-profits end of PR is absolutely a good thing. This is a persistent weakness at the magazine: The feeling seems to be if you meander through a person’s life in leisurely enough a fashion, get in enough details and anecdotes and random facts, a summing up, an evaluation, is redundant.

The story did give us a nice peek into Sitrick’s home watch museum, though, complete with a carousel that dispensed the Rolex du jour.

In Which We Taunt You With ‘L.A.’ Subscribers’ Wealth While You Read This Over Your Crust of Western Bacon Cheeseburger From the Carl’s Dumpster Where You Live Because You Are Homeless
Los Angeles weighs like two quarter-pounder patties, has more pages than an average Raymond Chandler novel, comes on slick paper, and is found in every Caucasian hair salon in the city – meaning many of us wouldn’t read it regularly if we never got our hair cut. Los Angeles is 48 years old, the same age as a long-in-the-tooth Gen Xer, and it is national paterfamilias among its city service-magazine kind. Always, of course, excepting the Grand Seigneur urban journal, the 83-year-old New Yorker. But hey, that’s a weekly; really a “literary magazine” – America’s weekly ultimate mid-cult arbiter, that Wolfe sardonically and long ago called “The Olympus of the Mother Tongue.” Who’s to compete with that? Certainly not a slick local monthly with spoofy celebrity photo covers, that ordains what to buy, to do, and whose flypaper allure flaunts countless enumerated lists – the Annual Best of LA (which just this year picked a major record store that lacks public restrooms); the 53 best high schools; 162 Great Places to Eat Now; 86 most romantic weekend destinations; the best Soju bars; the best TV anchor hairdos; along with a smattering of worsts. An “All Is Numbers” universe straight out of Pythagoras. Plus, of course, and mostly, sluices of bright color advertising priced at $8,000 a page. Ads whose fashion element melds almost seamlessly into the editorial fashion segment.

There are islands of good writing, some not-so-good writing and sometimes some spectacular writing sparingly spread among L.A. layouts. Along with all the spectacular pimped-out watches that can cost the same as a pimped-out Benz. (Benzes too are in evidence, plain and pimped.) According to its media kit, the typical L.A. - reading family has an average net worth of $1.7 million, with a median of $800,000. By either measure, that’s far from most of us with our net worth, say, in the low four figures. But the readership is also well-educated – and one can draw an inference, at least, that such a readership not only ought but also might be a lot more interested in the lower depths of L.A. than the magazine generally shows itself to be. At least since, as L.A. has discovered from time to time, ignoring those depths brought on the tragic reality checks of two prodigious and violent upheavals in 1965 and in 1992. And you have to assume also that even those “A List” people get tired of looking at pictures of A List people, even of themselves, don’t they? Then again, I’m no one’s A lister.

But now L.A. has something it hasn’t really had in decades: actual competition. The dieseling dinosaur L.A. Times has brought forth its new monthly Sunday LA, which, unlike all its polymorphous, fizzled, slick-paged predecessors, has Los Angeles square in its sights with profiles, interviews, gobs of fashion and plenty of fashionable first-person storytelling (LA’s editor, Annie Gilbar, didn’t return calls). And even that New York “literary mag” now has its first correspondent in L.A. residence.

Things are certainly good at Los Angeles, but they’ve been better. The magazine now has a circulation of 150,000, down from over 180,000 in its ’70s-’80s heyday, and it is now roughly half its onetime 480-plus-page size. Former editor Lew Harris says those were better years for magazines. Thirty years ago, Harris determined that the L.A. focus audience would be families earning $200,000. The current average is $244,000 a year. Adjusted for 30 years’ inflation, that’s down a bit.

But the magazine still has the same basic glistery ad base, focused at disposable incomes well beyond those of 85 percent of Angelenos. Through most of the 2000s, the magazine revenues grew steadily, until a visible but not disastrous drop-off this year that occasioned the layoff of two staffers. (A haphazardly-run Latino-focused sister publication, Tu Ciudad, failed to find a viable audience and was closed down.)

Is the slight slump an omen? You can’t but wonder whether the more recent Wall Street meltdown’s effect on high-end disposable income mightn’t drop some serious frost on the L.A. pumpkin – as happened 14 years ago, when the magazine’s fortunes sank to their lowest ebb to date. More on that later.

In Which We Commit an Act of Metaphor So Heinous, We Should Make Ourselves Walk the Plank
Step outside the elevator at Los Angeles’s 10th floor Mid-City office, and you face a breadth of windows sprawling across the building’s front like the bridge of some million-ton cruise ship. This ship would be plowing through the oceans of the mid-Wilshire landscape, tossing LACMA, Park La Brea, the WGA HQ, Farmers Market and the Grove in its wake as it eternally steams toward the Hollywood Hills.

Enter the captain. Kit Rachlis’s neat Bobo-shag hair and beard show less gray than you might expect at 55. He’s slender, reserved yet courtly, informally decked in sporty earth tones. He shakes, apologizes and takes a call. L.A.’s iMac computer system is having a seizure – “I’ve only been able to get four messages today,” he tells someone.

I have yet to meet a writer who doesn’t appreciate, even revere, Rachlis’s editorial hand. My friend Joe Domanick is typical: “I’m just delighted to be able to work with him,” says this author of the definitive book on the LAPD and other important works on California society. He’s done some of the magazine’s best recent policy pieces. “His assistant editors work with you every step of the way; he talks to you about your work. And in the end, it’s always a better piece, and yet it’s still in your voice.”

That’s sure not what you’d hear from some New Yorker writers. But for our first 20 minutes, what we talk about is Bhutan, one of the countries where Rachlis spent his recent four-month sabbatical. He likes talking about the Himalayan culture, the people, the serenity. But he won’t talk about the book he went there to write.

It’s been 20 years since Rachlis, a product of Yale and Massachusetts’s Middlesex Academy, left the Village Voice to take over L.A. Weekly, which, after a decade of success had by 1988 lost its credibility. Under Rachlis, the paper became better than ever. As well as, some critics said, just a bit too moderate, too uncontroversial – although he’s still proud of having put Mapplethorpe’s Piss Christ on the Weekly’s cover – and ultimately, this was a disputatious trait in the nation’s flashiest alt weekly. But if he eventually fell out with his Weekly superior, publisher Mike Sigman (who says, “I’d handle it differently now”), he retained the loyalty of his writers. After he was pushed out in 1993, a clutch of disciples left with him. “It was easier to find writing jobs back then,” he concedes – but not that easy. Several of these departed eventually returned to the Weekly. After seven years at the Times, Rachlis came to an ailing Los Angeles, which had seen seven editors in five years. He’s been there ever since – the second-longest editorial tenure in the magazine’s history.

Is the moderation that was once a career problem now a key to his success here? Does holding back, pulling punches a trifle, make a better Los Angeles? That’s relative, he says. “At L.A. Weekly, I supported Bill Clinton,” he recalls. This put him to the right of a lot of people then at the paper (which has since itself moved way to the right of its pro-labor, progressive past). He speaks of his formative years, of how he occasionally took time off from his education, perhaps so he could better take stock of it. He seems puzzled himself at the question, tries to come to grips with it. Finally, he quotes a friend’s jocular self-definition: “I’m probably more conservative than anyone in any room I’m in.”

Indeed, that might be true at his editorial meetings. The L.A. masthead bears the names of some of the Southland’s top progressive scribes. Dave Gardetta and Greg Goldin, Tom Carson, Steve Erickson – perhaps, the Lost Boys of L.A. Weekly who might be said to have flown to Los Angeles’s posh Neverland to work with their elfin editor. There are also Times veterans: editor Rick Meyer, for instance. Shawn Hubler, who got the mayor’s girlfriend to talk. Names, many other names. Good people, great people. And it’s not just that they like the editing. L.A. is said to pay its writers well; now and then upwards of $2 a word. With all this talent and pelf, you can’t be surprised by the soundness of the writing. But look back a few years and it has to be said that the flash, that snap, the occasional daring and brash, uppity dash of L.A.’s glory days, a dash that somehow made worthwhile the safari, the wading through the waist-deep sticky syrup of the advertising’s materialist liturgy, is a lot harder to find.

What seems most to be lacking in the Los Angeles of today is the excitement of journalistic immediacy, going after a story rather than a personality. This is the Macro part of what’s been called “the most risky, passionate profession of the world.” Large issues, involving big trends, multiple topics, fatal cultural and human failings – something depicting the collapse of the Hahn administration, say. One does not live by profiles alone.

Where is the evil, the grit, the dark Heart of the City? I ask Rachlis about this and he proudly talks of a previous in-depth piece on Eli Broad. A profile. He even discloses Steve Oney’s upcoming two-part series (a new departure for L.A.). He provides me an advance copy of Part One. Again, it is a perfect personality piece, this time of a second-string West Hollywood antiques con man. Oney nails the guy. But no, that’s not what I meant either. This target really isn’t that large.

Kit Rachlis Is a Fine Man Who Does Not Kick Puppies (He Does, However, Think David Spade’s a Stud)
Rachlis likes his writers as much as they like him. He praises their accomplishments like a delighted parent. He seems most pleased with work in which the writer pushes him- or herself to an extreme point of closeness to the subject, an approach which lends itself particularly to the personality profile, but doesn’t easily yield a more holistic view. He affectionately describes the typical multiple drafts, the precise rewrites, the tact involved in requesting, rather than demanding, changes. After a while, you feel you are talking not to a periodical editor but with some major book editor of the very old school – Cass Canfield, say. Or Alfred Knopf. (Rachlis’s father was in fact a noteworthy book editor.) Someone who thinks in seasons and years, not weeks and months. A person with a strong philosophy of narrative who seems to feel that the best kind of magazine writing, and the most incisive, is what you might even call “an investigative profile.”

Yet, read through a recent Sex (so help me) Issue cover piece of which he is particularly proud – J.R. Moehringer’s prolonged allegation that a comic named David Spade is Hollywood’s reigning stud – and it feels like fine writing in pursuit of an absent subject. Moehringer simply can’t make his case. Spade simply doesn’t seem to deserve all this verbiage. Steve Erickson’s accompanying “History of the Celebrity Sex Tape,” on the other hand, succeeds by simply being brief, unpretentious, and funny as hell. Maybe it got less editorial attention.

There just aren’t enough really memorable articles in a year’s worth of the magazine. When a New York-transplant and L.A. fan told me what she’d liked the most in it, she named two outstanding pieces – Hubler’s portrait of journalist Miratha Salinas and Dave Gardetta’s passionate appreciation of Griffith Park. But Salinas ran last April, and Gardetta’s piece over a year ago. The portrait of the woman who killed the mayor’s marriage was gutsy reporting, but it came seven months after the crisis. Gardetta’s meditation was pure soul, and I also liked Ed Leibowitz’s similarly soulful rediscovery of his faith in a ramshackle Silver Lake shul. But so much other stuff, like the 8,000-word fact-spinning thumbsuckers about the founders of the California Pizza Kitchen or the Urth Caffe, are journalistic sacks of Cheetos, not so much about nutrition as getting to the bottom of the bag. The political reporting, so increasingly crucial in a city whose newspaper of record has one foot in the grave, tends to be non-urgent and seriously overaffable (an exception being Kevin Roderick’s adroit demolition of City Attorney Rockard Delgadillo. But that was four years ago). Or fatally top-down: Mark Lacter’s June view, supposedly, of LAX’s infinite problems is told from the point of view of someone never likely to feel them firsthand: $300,000-a-year Airport CEO Gina Marie Lindsey. She is the literally the last person you should talk to if you were writing about what’s wrong with LAX. Why not some reporting here? How about talking to some midnight Southwest Airlines arrivals, stumbling over the baggage claim’s rodent-sized roaches in a vain search for any signs of public transportation? None of that. The piece was really a refugee from an airport trade magazine.

Articles like these lack the grip factor, don’t stick in memory. But there are many earlier L.A. pieces that still do stick, decades later. That’s because they were timely, valued the issues over personalities, and took the big stuff head-on. Sue Horton’s breathtaking 1990 takeout on the Billionaire Boys Club murders, for instance. Or Mary Fischer’s amazingly timed 1989 bustout on the McMartin Preschool molestation case – which took on all the principals in that sordid affair and tore that $16 million prosecutorial fiasco to shreds days before the nationally famed prosecution fizzled in 1989. Or Michael Collins’s 1998 disclosure of a cancer-clustering pocket Chernobyl meltdown in Ventura County’s suburbia. Proof that even this big monthly ocean liner can turn on a dime with incisive, high end reporting – if it has to. Two of these pieces were proudly nurtured by a predecessor of Rachlis’s – Lew Harris, the former Chicago Trib slot man with a hard head for news, who edited the book between 1974 and 1996. As it happened, this was also an era in which the publication had 20 percent more circulation in a city with an average 20 percent less population. And was up to double its current size. And it had the most expensive advertising pages of any monthly magazine in the nation.

So those were indeed better years for magazines. Do you suppose, perhaps, that it mightn’t also have had something to do with the fact that the book was then a good deal more, to use a ’60s word, relevant?

How Did We Get Here?
So you have to ask yourself, is the L.A. of today capable of reaching its 21st century potential? Mightn’t some of that talent be better deployed taking care of what some would call the life-or-death problems of the city today? Inflicting, rather than comforting, the comfortable? Breaking, as it did in other days, issue-related stories of broader interest to that well-educated, well-endowed Los Angeles public?

Harris recalls he had a different editorial policy: “It was about the story, first and foremost. We edited for our readers. Though we had big-name writers, we were first committed to the people who bought the magazine.” Editing for the writer can get too self-indulgent, he said. It didn’t happen on his watch. And he found he could introduce the big issues in ways that hit his readers where they lived.

Now we are living in, of course, a very different world, a galaxy away from the town where this magazine was born in 1960, the year Gary Cooper and Clark Gable died. That shallowly sprawling burg of over 2.4 million that’s revealed in the postnatal Los Angeles (first known as Prompter) had maybe a dozen reliable restaurants, 13 legitimate theaters, no building taller than City Hall, no dedicated concert hall or art museum. It did have a mayor, Norris Poulson, who bragged of mugging activists to plump Dodger Stadium into Chavez Ravine. And a local human relations panel chair named John Shattuck, who vowed that L.A.’s 440,000 African Americans wouldn’t gain civil rights “until they earned them.” But it also was the West Coast hub of jazz and classical music back when Igor Stravinsky conducted at the Hollywood Bowl. It had the world’s most spectacular residential architecture, along with a thriving modern art scene centered in a place they still called “Venice West.” Plus an aerospace industry burgeoning in the newborn Space Age. And it had Hollywood, not just the movie capital, but the new fountainhead of national TV and recording, a boutiqued and nightclubbed nether universe to the business world that still worked downtown and lived in Pasadena. The city was also growing at the postwar record rate of 26 percent per year.

Into this world popped Los Angeles. At the dawn of the decade that would kill venerable national weeklies like the The Saturday Evening Post, Look, and Collier’s, UCLA journalism graduate student Geoffrey Miller had the novel idea of a city monthly whose writers could help define the city. “It was a new idea,” he recalls. The closest equivalent was something “published by the Philadelphia chamber of commerce [that] usually featured some guy in a suit on the cover.”

So Miller and his older partner, David Brown, invented from scratch what’s become known as the monthly regional service magazine. “Out of desperation, we ended up creating most of the usual features” of such publications all over America. “The best-of feature, the monthly calendar, the weekend guide” (old joke: all L.A. ever told you was how to get out of L.A.). And most notoriously of all, the Pythagorean-numbered teases on the cover, whose humble 1963 original was called “25 Different Things You Can Do This Summer.” The idea spread like wildfire, far beyond the city mag perimeter, so if you’re looking for someone to blame for today’s supermarket covers that promise “37 New Ways to Bring your Partner to Slobbering, Shuddering Orgasm,” that would be Dave and Geoff. (Also in 1963 there appeared, as a Sunday supplement of a dying Manhattan newspaper, a service publication called New York.) Miller isn’t proud of the early issues: “We really didn’t know what we were doing,” he allows. Photo layouts were black-and-white. Ads were sparse, too.

What the magazine did have from the first was good writing. Times people like Jim Murray and Charles Champlin and Art Seidenbaum from the L.A. Time-Life bureau were regulars. Ray Bradbury was there with pioneer environmentalist Wesley Marx (author of The Frail Ocean). The enemy, said Miller, was the pre-liberal L.A. Times and Miller recalls that L.A. attracting Times writers was “evidence of its own dullness.” (Both Champlin and Seidenbaum went on to have illustrious L.A. Times careers.)

By the ’70s, L.A. had a staff of 14, as Miller recalls it, 11 less than today’s 25. In those days, when the only computer was in the bank that cut the paychecks, that staff put out a magazine twice as big as it is now. No one ever accused Los Angeles of excessive good taste. Many Angelenos found its garish flauntiness offensive: The most famous cover had Farrah Fawcett-Majors down on her hands and knees in a bathing suit. Former articles editor Steve Randall said he recalls apologizing for working there. (He now works for Playboy.) “But we did amazing things; it was like working for Mary Tyler Moore’s TV network. We were trying hard because we were No. 2,” he remembers. And the magazine attracted a growing and loyal readership.

But the root of this ’70s success was probably Los Angeles itself, finally coming into its own as a global city. The nation noticed. New York book publishers opened full-time offices in Century City. Esquire hired Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne to do a monthly West Coast column. Magazine genius Clay Felker first tried to buy Los Angeles and, failing that, began his own magazine – first called New West and then California (to which I contributed in its final years). Felker’s magazine failed: “Too much New York attitude,” says Harris. But ironically, it actually gave L.A. a boost. Says Miller: “Advertisers discovered they could buy us more cheaply.” At first.

Then New York hit its ’70s slump and its population ebbed 10 percent. L.A. kept right on growing. It started building itself a high-rise skyline. It had the world’s major club scene. “Two new restaurants opened every day,” Miller recalls. “It was a different economic universe.” The Southland’s destruction- and distraction-based core industries flourished while people actually sympathized if you said you were a New Yorker. Even L.A.’s politics were better: Instead of New York Mayor Ed Koch’s divisive whine you had the unifying baritone of Tom Bradley. L.A. was a fiesta and L.A. was the big pinata. The magazine steamed full-ahead through the Olympian ’80s and into the troubled ’90s. Where it hit the reef.

L.A.’s economy sagged. Then there were the ’92 riots and the ’94 Northridge quake. Suddenly, there seemed to be a lot more poor people here and a lot more crime. Suddenly, L.A. was the nation’s big-city basket case. Department stores, market chains, and banks were sold off to outsiders. The original L.A. management left. The magazine changed owners several times. And editors many times. (One, Robert Sam Anson, lasted only three months.)

During this difficult decade, L.A.’s

itinerant editors and publishers occasionally tried to boost circulation by adopting a more serious tone. One of these attempts, a somber O.J. Simpson cover, was apparently an all-time circulation bomb, teaching perhaps that, for this publication, it was best to cloak grave intent with at least a lighthearted cover. Then came the current owner, Indianapolis-based Emmis Publications, and the new editor. The magazine’s success returned, moderated, in a slightly subsided version of the old publication.

The Economy: a Global Shitstorm, or, Time to Sell the Watch?
As I write this, the global economy is sliding into a chasm that makes the ’90s slump look like a gopher hole. Can the magazine keep up its current circulation, reader profile, and ad base in an economic environment in which the market for squillion-dollar Santa Barbara estates and ruby-studded platinum Patek Philippes is likely to shrink the way my 401(k) just did? Will the publication have, perhaps, to broaden its appeal, toward a demographic more like, shall we say, New York magazine’s or L.A. Weekly’s? Or even ape its predecessor? Wait and see. One positive sign is that the magazine is finally amping up its website, long one of the most brain-dead in the entire industry. (Harris recalls that back in the mid-’90s, Los Angeles even neglected to secure its own URL.) Rachlis says a former publisher consciously obstructed online accessibility; but it has to have been more than one publisher – the neglect dates back 12 years. The result is that, while The New Yorker and New York both have state-of-the-art websites that access their latest and earliest issues, right now, if you want to research old L.A., even in recent years, you are first going to have to research yourself a good university or public library with both the mag on file and a complete Guide to Periodical Literature back to 1960. (I found Cal State L.A’.s the best.)

Meanwhile, the corsairs have come over the horizon, run up their black flags and are circling the good ship Los Angeles with guns up. The Times’s new monthly challenger has a lot of the same lush advertisers (rumored to be paying much lower rates), but also an unfamiliar roster of writers, some from other media. It is still a work in progress, but where L.A. recently interviewed tot star Abigail Breslin, the Times’s new LA interviewed Michelle Obama. Rachlis said the new magazine, by itself, didn’t worry him. “We’re concerned about the competition with the Times as a whole.” Gilbar has said she sees her publication as being something apart for the troubled paper.

Even that East Coast “literary magazine” has been eating a few bites of L.A. lunch. Four years ago, The New Yorker’s California circulation surpassed its circulation in New York State. For the previous 70 years, the magazine merely ridiculed our region’s goofy pretensions. Now, taking heed of its readership shift, it has put boots on the ground and is writing serious: about us and for us. Sometimes almost on a monthly basis.

Last May, for instance, resident correspondent Dana Goodyear took a jaded and lengthy look at the phenomenon of Times columnist Steve Lopez’s bestseller, The Soloist: A Lost Dream, an Unlikely Friendship, and the Redemptive Power of Music. Which is now a movie starring Jamie Foxx as homeless virtuoso Nathaniel Anthony Ayers and Robert Downey Jr. as Lopez. Goodyear’s is the only objective look I’ve encountered of the complex moral, professional, and personal issues surrounding Lopez’s succese d’estime. A quintessential L.A. mixed-success story, questioning the local media’s assumptions about Lopez’s lauded accomplishment – but it was published 2,800 miles away. Reading it, I thought, 20 years ago, this might have appeared in Los Angeles. I checked my watch, then realized I wasn’t wearing one.