On the boulevard of broken dreams - Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles, California - Western Wanderings - Column

Sunset, Nov, 1994 by Peter Fish

She'd be, what, pushing 100 now? But Norma Desmond can still hold an audience. This month she'll once again descend a gilded staircase to tell Mr. DeMille she's ready for her close-up, as the musical Sunset Boulevard opens in New York. The play is based on Billy Wilder's 1950 motion picture--that sleekly cynical film noir gem in which struggling scriptwriter Joe Gillis meets fading screen siren Desmond and trades in his ideals for a gigolo's gig in her Sunset Boulevard mansion. "I am big--it's the pictures that got small," Norma declaims, plotting her comeback. But in the last reel, Gillis is floating face down in the Desmond swimming pool, and Norma's final role will be in a production called Homicide.

You cannot currently see Sunset Boulevard on its home turf. In a much publicized contretemps over leading ladies, Boulevard's composer and producer, Andrew Lloyd Webber, closed the show in Los Angeles last spring. But we still have the real thing. Sunset remains the id of Angeleno thoroughfares, the strip of asphalt on which California dreams play themselves out with their most voluptuous and palm-lined abandon. After a couple of years in which those dreams have suffered some reverses, I wanted to see how the boulevard--and Los Angeles--were doing. I decided to drive Sunset's 24-mile length.

Sunset begins near where the City of the Angels began: its first leg, from El Pueblo de Los Angeles plaza northwest toward Hollywood, was created around the turn of the century. The boulevard did not reach its grail, the Pacific, until the 1930s. Recently, the boulevard's most easterly blocks were renamed to honor labor leader Cesar Chavez. But I still like to trace the road from its original starting point, where the proximity of Union Station permits a tidy metaphorical image: young dreamers like Norma and Joe alighting from their train, hopeful of following the boulevard to a beach house on Santa Monica Bay.

This secular Pilgrim's Progress seems tougher than it used to as I head toward Hollywood. Sunset has always reflected a cross section of Los Angeles, but these days the section seems not just cross, but enraged: tom sofas dumped on sidewalks, buildings still charred from the riots of 1992. Even posh precincts evince a certain nervousness: earlier this year, the sign over Kenneth Cole's elegant West Hollywood boutique read "Riots and fires and quakes.--Oh My," as if voiced by a Dorothy no longer sure she belonged in Oz.

Still, there are only-in-L.A. pleasures to be savored. When I worked in Los Angeles, my regular watering hole was the Tiki Ti, a darkly lacquered shack where every drink blended rum with fruit juice and bore a name like Cobra's Fang. Now, as I near Sunset's junction with Vermont Avenue, I see the Tiki still flying high. "A lot of the Polynesian places in Los Angeles have closed down," co-owner Mike Buhen tells me. "Not us."

A few miles west, along the Sunset Strip, the boulevard achieves its full flowering. Here are the Brobdingnagian billboards, the nose-ringed truants slouching past to the Viper Room, the Norma Desmond look-alikes doubtfully entrusting their Mercedeses to valet parking. The Strip's mix of chic and carelessness may be best typified by the restaurant Spago. Elegant as seen from its side street entrance, from Sunset it looms in such proximity to a rental car agency that its patrons could be clerks poring over collision damage waivers.

"Tom Cruise! Madonna! Sil-ves-tre Stallone." As Sunset curves voluptuously past the Bel Air gates, a small man stands on the sidewalk shouting at passing cars. He's flanked by his hand-lettered signs: "MAP OF MOVIE STARS' HOMES."

Which actors do people want to see? I ask, after I've paid my $7 for the map. I have to repeat the question in my poor Spanish.

"Tom Cruise. Madonna. Sil-ves-tre Stallone."

How many hours do you work here?

From 9 to 7, he says. He earns $20 a day. He asks if I know of better work.

I am sorry, I say. No.

I find myself wondering what it would be like to live at an address listed on a Map of Movie Stars' Homes. I wonder what it would be like to stand on the sidewalk selling maps 10 hours a day. "Sunset Boulevard, Tempting Boulevard, Waiting there to swallow the unwary," goes the musical's title song. Spend a day on the boulevard and you begin to understand why Sunset still resonates with lessons about success and the price paid for it. Look at Sunset at its best and you think, Los Angeles is still big. Look at Sunset at its worst and you think, we'll never be ready for our close-up.

I head west until I can smell the Pacific. I turn left into the Self-Realization Fellowship Lake Shrine, whose gardens and grottoes I have loved for a long time without ever knowing why they were there. Brother Paramananda shows me the grounds and says that the fellowship was founded in 1920 by Indian seer Paramahansa Yogananda. But the Lake Shrine is a Hollywood creation, originally built as a private retreat by a superintendent of construction for Twentieth Century Fox. Brother Paramananda points out a sculptured column rising above the greenery. "There is a carving of a lotus blossom," he says. "The lotus comes up from muck and slime, but it is beautiful. Like us. We have to come through life's ups and downs. But our job is to blossom."