QUEEN OF ANGELS, NOT QUITE READY FOR HER CLOSE-UP (UNDATED)

    Last night I saw upon the stair

    An Angel Queen that wasn’t there.

    She wasn’t there again today.

    My God, I wish she’d go away.

 

In other words: L.A., now you see her, now you don’t.

The Queen of Angels is three separate cities, none of which is L.A., but all share the territory.

Listen up.

I love to breakfast in oceanside Malibu, head in to a snow-mountain lunch at Lake Arrowhead, careen down for a Palm Springs desert dinner, then double back to Los Angeles for a midnight snack.

Thus ignoring L.A. itself, for in between these three civilizations there is a desolation.

Hollywood Boulevard for mindless years has had no Hollywood and Vine.

World visitors hoping to glimpse Tinseltown’s navel find only Gertrude Stein’s: “There’s no there there.”

When a New York photography team flew in years ago to film the famed intersection they panicked, finding nothing.

“Go find it at Disney World!” I said. “Walt’s elves snatched Hollywood and Vine one night and flew it to Florida, along with every rare Hollywood Boulevard building I roller-skated past as a kid.”

Now at the west end of Hollywood, they are erecting a giant fortress/cathedral/cinema near Grauman’s Chinese for next year’s Oscars. From this grand embankment, film moguls can ignore the homeless peasants on desolate Hollywood Boulevard waiting for Quasimodo’s downpour of bricks and hot lead.

The rest of Hollywood, from twenty years of neglect, will be a graveyard rarely visited after sundown. The entire street needs resurrection, but the humungous cathedral opens next spring.

Similarly on downtown Los Angeles’s Broadway at sunset, all pedestrians have fled. Chinatown is abandoned, gangs roam free, so the best cafés have turned off their ovens.

The old billboards of Columbia and RKO Studios on Gower Street stand empty. Nothing has been done to revitalize these landmarks to give tourist buses a passing sense of history.

The saddest night in recent history was New Year’s Eve 2000, when TV cameras exploded with mobs and fireworks in wild Paris, New York, and Rome, only to fizzle in L.A. when a sparse assembly of Angelenos huddled under the huge HOLLYWOOD sign with their beanbags and kazoos. The worldwide cameras turned off in disbelief.

There is hope in the arrival of new mayor Hahn, who has a greater sympathy for what cities are.

Meanwhile, to enjoy Los Angeles you must prowl those malls that duplicate the old dreams of what L.A. once was.

Beyond that, you must sift the rich sands of Malibu, ski Lake Arrowhead snows, and broil in the Palm Springs sun. In between, the old Queen of Angels is waiting to be kissed awake. Sometime in the next ten years, perhaps her prince will come.