For reasons Tim didn’t fully understand, the journalism teacher at Pepperdine had thoughtfully provided a class roster for Journalism 435, aka “Advanced Emerging Media,” aka, “How you can make a living on the Web if you don’t get a real journalism job.” The roster featured a polyglot of names, several with letters not of our alphabet, making the list look a little like the periodic table of elements. But what seemed multicultural on paper was downright white-bread in the flesh. A roomful of very blond, very tan, very Christian cheerleaders and surfers stared blankly at Simon James, who was the featured star, a guest lecturer talking about his good old days in New York with Breslin and Talese to a group of students who got their news from Pat Robertson’s 700 Club. Tim felt positively
ethnic. In Los Angeles, it’s easy to forget you’re Jewish, especially if you’d been brought up in an ambivalently atheist household that didn’t even attend, let alone take part in, bar mitzvahs and the like. “We’re delicatessen, not synagogue,” Syd liked to say. Even when you remember, you’re surrounded by other Jews, often more Jewishy Jews, so you hardly feel out of place. At Pepperdine, a wealthy Christian college with the world’s most blessed location—across the street from the beach in Malibu—he felt like Timmy the Ape Boy: older, shorter, fatter, and swarthier. Even Perry would be intimidated by this group, thought Tim. Simon had asked Tim to come along for moral support, but Tim had to wonder if the lanky, patrician Simon had wanted to bring along a darker counterpart just so that he might seem even Waspier by comparison.
Although girls outnumbered the boys by two to one, as they do in all journalism classes, the boys asked all the questions. And all the questions centered on money. Their voices had that certain catch, as if just now, with graduation clearly on the horizon, they realized they had signed up for a low-paying profession and weren’t too sure they liked the idea.
Simon managed both to reassure and depress them with his answers. “Yes, entry-level salaries are low. In fact, so are the top-level salaries. But that’s just compared to high-paying professions, like law or business or medicine,” said Simon. “You’ll make more money than a teacher,” he added, only to make the professor drop his head uncomfortably. “And there’s always the chance of hitting the big score.” Simon rattled off the names of writers who had seen their articles metamorphose into books or movies and reaped the mother lode as a result. “Does your garden-variety dermatologist stand a chance of getting one of those big paydays?” asked Simon. “Is he going to be on Charlie Rose?”
“I’m not a rich man,” said Simon somewhat wistfully. “I
came close, but I never had one of my projects make me rich. It’s probably too late for me now. But I can’t say that I’d do anything any differently. You’ll meet a lot of unhappy rich people in the world, and I’d rather be a happy journalist.”
For a humble but happy journalist, Simon certainly has lavish tastes, thought Tim as he climbed into Simon’s brand-new Lincoln Town Car for the ride back to Culver City. There’s this car, the fancy lunches and dinners, all at company expense, the membership at Riviera Country Club, the large house in Benedict Canyon. Simon came across very much like a well-heeled lawyer, and Tim couldn’t quite find the smoke and mirrors that made it work.
“Do you ever wish you had gone into another line of work?” asked Tim as they swooshed down Pacific Coast Highway.
“Like what?” replied Simon. “Movies? I had my close encounter with the movie business when the studio decided to bankroll my magazine. The lying. The hypocrisy. The idea of making a decision that affects dozens of lives and millions of dollars on a whim, without thinking things through. It nearly ruined my life. I couldn’t become one of them.”
“I’m surprised that you stayed in L.A.”
“I didn’t plan to,” Simon continued. “It just sort of happened. You were born here, so you might not appreciate it as much. But you’ll notice that while lots of people come to L.A. in search of something wonderful—just like I did—not that many find it, and that would include me. Yet they never go home. They get other jobs, they get married, they have kids, and they buy a house. They stay.”
“If they don’t make it here—I mean, find stardom or whatever brought them here in the first place—why do so many stay?”
“You’ve got to remember that there are two separate Los Angeleses. You probably know it and don’t even realize it.
Think of L.A. as an iceberg. There’s that tip that everyone can see. That’s Hollywood, and all the glitz and the big houses and beautiful women and the BMWs. Upper Los Angeles. The mythologized Los Angeles. That’s the L.A. you and I write about.”
“Like the stars and Spago and the studios,” interjected Tim.
“They’re all there, in all their public glory. Everyone comes out to be part of upper Los Angeles. A few make it and get to live that life. I don’t really envy them.”
“And lower L.A.?”
“You probably grew up in lower Los Angeles. That’s the better part.”
“The Valley? That’s the better part?”
“It’s not geographic. It’s more psychographic. It’s the part of Los Angeles that’s too dull to be the subject of a TV show or Joan Didion novel. It’s normal life. It’s people who came out here to be Cameron Diaz or Brad Pitt and ended up working for Allstate instead. At first, they’re disappointed, but you can adjust to almost any reality. Pretty soon, you realize that lower Los Angeles is just like where you came from—families, homes, small businesses—but with better weather and less of those East Coast affectations or that midwestern stuffiness. It doesn’t much matter what school you went to out here, or who your family is—you get to invent yourself. Or reinvent, if your first attempt fizzles. That’s a good thing. That’s why people stay. It’s not stifling. You can grow.”
“My family is definitely lower Los Angeles,” said Tim. “Very lower.”
“I’ll bet your father has never even worked in the entertainment industry and couldn’t care less about it.”
“That’s totally true,” said Tim. “He has a car dealership in the Valley. A Honda dealership.”
“Really? A car dealership,” Simon was interested. “Does he own it?”
“He’s the general manager of a partnership that owns it,” explained Tim. “I don’t have firm grip on the details—he’s been doing it since I was kid and doesn’t talk that much about it. He’s done well, though.”
“How does a partnership like that work?” asked Simon, who had pushed upper and lower Los Angeles out of his mind as they passed Topanga Beach and began to focus with surprising intensity on the ins and outs of retail auto sales. Tim couldn’t tell if his boss was just being polite in giving him a turn to talk or if, like so many journalists, Simon James was congenitally, excessively curious and couldn’t help himself.