“A Feeling of Separation”
Single women, it was agreed, should not move to Los Altos. Divorced and widowed women should move away as quickly as possible. The suburbs offer hostile territory to the unattached female. The occasion for these observations was what an earlier generation might have called a coffee klatsch—a morning gathering of five neighborhood women, the wives of a dentist, a drug company vice-president, a commercial artist, a United Airlines pilot, and a radiologist. But since the setting was California, the klatsch had a decidedly West Coast flair. Instead of coffee, the tanned and well-scrubbed ladies were sipping tall glasses of iced tea graced with sprigs of mint, in front of a garden table set out with watercress sandwiches, thin pralines, Monterey Jack cheese and biscuits, and strawberries the size of a child’s fist. Of course there was a pool. “Everyone has a pool,” said the drug vice-president’s wife.
The “problem” of the single woman in Los Altos had come up because, it seemed, the single woman was the only serious problem that Los Altos faced. Los Altos is one of a string of pretty to prettier towns that dangle, like beads, along the old Camino Real as it winds down the San Francisco Peninsula—Burlingame, Hillsborough, Atherton, Redwood City, Menlo Park, Palo Alto, Mountain View, etc. Some of the towns—Burlingame and Hillsborough in particular—are quite grand, and politically quite conservative. Others, like Palo Alto with Stanford University at its heart, are considered more intellectual and liberal. Menlo Park is regarded as a somewhat substandard Palo Alto. Redwood City, Mountain View, and Sunnyvale are ranked below Menlo Park on the intangible social scale. Los Altos—socially about midway between blue-jeansy, pipe-smoking Palo Alto and marble-colonnaded Hillsborough—is a cozy town, a family town, a town of largish, well-manicured, but unpretentious California one-level houses with redwood-fenced backyards, gardens, terraces, barbecues, and the inevitable swimming pools. Because of the recent California drought, water to fill these pools must often be brought in, expensively, in large trucks. Lawns in certain areas which have had to ban the use of sprinkler systems may now be only hose-watered, leaving grass thirsty. It is a town that seldom bothers to lock its doors when it goes out of an afternoon. Entertaining here is casual, spur-of-the-moment, drop-in-anytime. “It’s a town,” as one Los Altan puts it, “where we all own good crystal, but almost never take it out.” The air, for the most part, is clear, cool, and sunny all the year around—the Peninsula escapes San Francisco’s chilly summer fogs—and smells of lemon eucalyptus.
This is shopping-center country. Nowhere on earth, they say, are more shopping centers more heavily concentrated than in this long, wide Santa Clara Valley. At latest count, there were 135 shopping centers between Palo Alto and San Jose. More are being built, and still more are on the drawing boards and in the endless dreams of the developers. They proliferate like suburban weeds. Where fruit orchards once stood, these new landmarks proclaim themselves with towering neon signs: Blossom Valley, Valley Fair, The Prune Yard, Oakridge Plaza, Seven Trees, East Ridge, and so on. East Ridge, in fact, is the largest shopping center on the West Coast, with 160 shops, eight banks, four department stores, and fourteen restaurants. Kathleen and John Stolp got married in an open-to-the-public ceremony on the mall of East Ridge, drawing an audience of thousands. It was a first, a milestone in the history of consumerism. Robert Redford filmed part of The Candidate in the East Ridge shopping mall, drawing even more spectators and potential shoppers. When the San Jose Symphony Orchestra performed Symphony No. 26 by the American composer Alan Hovhaness on the East Ridge mall, it drew an audience of over five thousand—the largest in the orchestra’s history—even though most of the listeners had never heard of Hovhaness. Before, during, and after the concert, business boomed. Today, the shopping centers compete with one another for “attractions” and “events,” which range from wedding receptions, fashion shows, art shows, to cake shows, dog shows, and frog-jumping contests. “We try to create the atmosphere of small-town U.S.A.,” says C. W. Rowan, West Coast manager of the Taubman Company, which built, designed, and operates East Ridge and fourteen other centers across the country.
In architectural style, the shopping centers run the gamut from California Ranchero to Hacienda Moderne to Adobe Op, and a map of the Santa Clara Valley shopping centers would resemble a well-planted minefield. They are larger, more numerous, cost more money to build, and consume more acreage than the Pyramids, and more people visit them each day than have ever visited Egypt. If all 135 centers were bunched together, their commercial space would cover thirty square miles, with over fifteen million square feet of shops surrounded by enough asphalt to provide free parking for 93,858 automobiles, and every year some three billion dollars changes hands in this vast bazaar. The shopping centers, which did not exist twenty-five years ago, are now a major part of the Peninsula’s way of life. Some shoppers have their favorite centers. Others play the field, going from one to another. A great many people confess that they spend much of each day in this or that shopping center—not really to buy, but just to stroll, look at the changing window displays, and watch the other shoppers. These shopping-center wanderers, most of them women, are an increasing phenomenon as they move through the glassed-in malls, past fountains that flow out of futuristic sculptures, past reflecting pools, past tall indoor stands of tropical trees; up and down the automated stairways they travel, their eyes glazed as if in a hypnotic trance. Mrs. Babette Markel, who has made it her practice to visit each of the 135 shopping centers on a rotating daily basis, is typical. “Each one is like a different fairy tale,” she says, “and every four months, when I start out all over again, there’s nearly always something new.”
Sociologists disagree about the social value of the Santa Clara County shopping centers. Dr. Thomas Tutko, a psychologist at San Jose State University, is enthusiastic. Shopping centers, says Dr. Tutko, “serve our individual needs for security and satisfy our needs for material objects to make us feel worthwhile. They provide the opportunity to show others that you’ve ‘made it.’ Shopping centers seem to combine old psychology with new psychology. The new psychology is that you need things that are convenient, all in one spot, in the hustle-bustle present philosophy of life. But more importantly, on another level, they epitomize the old family square. It’s a return to the old marketplace, where the community really meets. We need a sense of protection and security. In the old days, we built forts.” On the surface, of course, these observations seem somewhat contradictory. Is a shopping center more like a down-homey family meeting place or an armed encampment?
Donald Rothblatt, a Harvard University scholar of urban affairs who came to California a few years ago to study Santa Clara County’s galloping shopping-center syndrome, has a different view. “Shopping centers offer a false sense of reality,” Professor Rothblatt says. “They blur the focus on the human condition, don’t accommodate the full range of people, and fail to provide a sense of centrality.” Professor Rothblatt feels that any metropolis needs “a concentration of activity at the center which creates an intensity that is urbane. It captures the historical image we have of civilized man, and gives an identity—visually and spiritually.” As for Santa Clara County, he says: “I have yet to find the essence of this place. It lacks identity, a sense of where you are. There’s no here here.”
The shopping centers, meanwhile, are distrusted by the more family-oriented Peninsula-ites. Because it is here that the unattached woman—the widow, the divorcee, the single girl—often plies her unsettling trade. Some of the merchandise that the shopping centers offer is human. The Peninsula used to consist primarily of bedroom communities for men who commuted back and forth to “the city,” as northern Californians like to call San Francisco. Today, commuters represent a much smaller proportion of the male population. The Peninsula has become industrialized, particularly by electronics companies. In addition to branches of the big San Francisco stores and the dog-grooming shops and beauty salons, the shopping centers contain banks, insurance companies, brokerage houses, lawyers’ and doctors’ offices, where professional men who used to commute to San Francisco now find it more convenient to have their practices. The shopping centers contain bars and restaurants where such men have lunch or stop for a drink before heading home on the freeway, and the single women have learned that these are excellent places to encounter temporarily unfettered men. The men they find, of course, are often husbands of dutiful housewives in communities like Los Altos.
Without ever discussing it, therefore, the wives of Los Altos and communities like it have devised tactics designed to protect their property, and to make single women feel as uncomfortable and unwelcome as possible. It boils down to an effort to keep the single woman from entering the community. Many home owners, for example, out of fear of neighbor pressure, will refuse to sell their house if the prospective buyer is a single woman. It also involves a not-so-subtle campaign to drive out the newly single woman, whether widow or divorcee. One recently divorced woman describes it this way: “It was really the Big Freeze. When it happened, I couldn’t believe it. I suppose in any divorce, your friends choose sides. But I thought that at least my women friends would stand by me. Oh, they were loyal and sympathetic enough while I was going through the separation and the divorce—as long as I was still technically married. But the minute I had my decree, the phone stopped ringing. It was as though I’d become a nonperson. My neighbors stopped smiling and waving when we passed on the street. One woman, whom I used to think of as my best friend, now absolutely cuts me dead. I hear about her parties, parties I always used to be invited to, but I’m never asked. When I tried to ask her and her husband to dinner, she told me very coldly that they were busy, though I found out later that they weren’t. At one party that I was asked to, none of the women spoke to me, and neither did most of the men. When they did, they were embarrassed and self-conscious, as though afraid of what their wives might say. I spend my evenings now doing things I never did before—going to lectures, concerts, or to the movies by myself. I refuse to go to the bars; I’m not ready for that scene. At home at night, I watch television, eat supper over the kitchen sink. I’ve read more books in the last six months than I did in twenty years of being married. I used to love this little town, but now I think I hate it. It’s been terribly lonely. I’ve practically decided to sell the house and move to the city, though I don’t know anyone there. My ex-husband, meanwhile, has taken an apartment in another part of town. And he gets asked out all the time!”
The ladies of Los Altos agree that suburbs like theirs are much kinder to the single male. “He poses no threat,” one woman says. “And for some reason, an extra man at a party is much more welcome than an extra woman. An extra man is fun; an extra woman just seems in the way.” But divorced women complain that this attitude is grossly unfair. “A man doesn’t even have to be attractive to be invited to all the parties,” the recent divorcee complains. “He can be a feeble-minded alcoholic homosexual with a wooden leg, and as long as he’s recognizably male he’s on everyone’s list. I know of one man in particular who’s such a bore and such a slob. He’s always sloppy drunk before dinner is served, and has to leave halfway through the evening. But he’s still the darling of all our leading hostesses!”
Somewhat less easy to deal with—even in towns like Los Altos, which, on the surface at least, like to project a sober, “unswinging” image, and boast of a high degree of quiet domestic stability—is the phenomenon of the marauding married woman. “I blame the Women’s Lib movement,” says one of the Los Altos wives. “A lot of women have decided that it’s okay to be promiscuous—just the way it used to be considered more or less okay for men.” Recently, Los Altos was abuzz with events in a nearby Peninsula town. An attractive woman in her middle thirties, the mother of three children, had had a brief affair. Afterward, she had decided to tell her husband about it. The result of this information was that he became impotent. As the woman explained it to her friends: “As long as he’s impotent, I don’t see why I’m not perfectly entitled to have some fun of my own. The other night, in a bar at East Ridge, I met a terribly attractive man. He said he was going to San Francisco for the weekend, and asked me if I’d come up and have dinner with him. I said I’d think about it, and he gave me his card. The next day, I decided, why not? and called him at his office. He asked me to meet him at the Bourgogne, which happens to be my favorite restaurant. We had a lovely dinner, one thing led to another, and I found myself back in his room at the Stanford Court. The next morning, I had breakfast in bed for the first time since my honeymoon.”
This woman’s friends are not sure what to do about these adulterous confessions. Her immediate neighbors, however, secretly hope that her behavior will lead to a divorce, and that she will get the house, sell it to some nice, solidly married couple, and move away.
The men of the San Francisco Peninsula, meanwhile, express doubts of another sort about the quality of the suburban experience, and what it sometimes dots to human relationships. Allan Benjamin, for example, is a prosperous physician who lives and practices in the area—“Nowadays we only get up to San Francisco a couple of times a year”—and who recently, in his spare time, built a fanciful gazebo out of slender redwood strips to add another touch of gaiety to his already very pretty backyard. “There’s a feeling of separation here,” he says. “It’s very hard to define, hard to put your finger on. It’s a feeling of living apart from other people, even your closest neighbors. It’s not just that you don’t borrow your neighbor’s lawnmower—everybody knows that you mustn’t do that. It’s a feeling that you have to leave them alone in other ways. For example, if you hear a woman screaming in the house next door, you don’t run over, or pick up the phone, to see if she needs help. You think it’s probably just a domestic argument: stay out of it, mind your own business. Of course, she could be being raped or murdered. Still, you don’t do anything. Or if you see a police car pull up in front of a house on the street, you don’t go out to find out what’s the matter. You don’t phone. That would be considered nosy. You don’t ask questions. You sit it out. If, later on, the neighbor wants to tell you what the trouble was, he’ll tell you. Otherwise, you never know.” Not long ago, in one quiet neighborhood, a youth battled with his stepfather and broke the man’s neck. Later, the boy boasted to his friends of what he had done, and how his stepfather’s face “turned green, then white.” In very little time, the whole neighborhood had heard about the episode. Everyone was shocked. Everyone was sorry. But no one mentioned it to the boy’s mother, nor did she mention it to them. No one had gone to see the stepfather in the hospital. He might just as well have been off on a routine business trip. As far as the beleaguered family was concerned, it was a private, closed affair. As far as the neighbors were concerned, it might just as well not have happened. Close the door. It will go away.
Al Benjamin says: “As the suburbs have grown, they’ve separated more and more into tiny islands—each one cut off from the others, isolated from the others, and then separated again into islands within islands. The insularity becomes stronger and stronger.” Perhaps, then, what Professor Tutko was trying to say was that in shopping-center country, a family meeting ground and an armed camp are now pretty much the same thing.
Indeed, it could be postulated that nearly all of California (with the exception of “the city”) is a collection of islands in search of a common state of mind. (Los Angeles, in fact, has often been described as “a group of suburbs in search of a city.”) California’s growth has been suburban sprawl, and though each new California suburb looks much like all the others, no prevailing emotional force has appeared to bind them all together except, perhaps, the climate. Truly, California’s communities waste a great deal of energy denigrating each other. Publisher Michael Korda, who has spent a good deal of time in the state, thinks all this is because when the westward settlement of the United States ran its final course, it encountered the Pacific Ocean; it was stopped there and could go no farther. The pioneer spirit that had pushed across Ohio and the Great Plains, over the ordeal of the Rockies and the Sierras, came to rest at the beach. There, with a feeling of “Was it this that we were after?” it has been reposing ever since, disappointed, but too tired to go back. If California communities seem to lack separate identities, and to lack a sense of commonality as well, this is perhaps why.
And yet at least one California community has managed to create a distinctive personality for itself, and that is Santa Barbara. Too far from both Los Angeles and San Francisco to be “influenced” by either place, Santa Barbara has set about determinedly to develop its own particular style. It is a style, furthermore, that resents and resists criticism from outside. Not long ago, for example, Santa Barbara was up in arms. There was only one topic of conversation on everyone’s lips. (Normally, there are two topics of conversation on everyone’s lips in Santa Barbara: rising real estate taxes and the more comforting phenomenon of rising real estate values.) The uproar was over a magazine article.
In its June, 1976, issue, Town & Country had published an article by Easterner Linda Ashland called “The Santa Barbara Style,” consisting of a short text and many pages of photographs of wealthy Santa Barbarans enjoying their favorite pastime, Santa Barbara. It showed Santa Barbarans in their terraced, Italianate formal gardens, around their colonnaded pool houses and pools, in their opulent living rooms and bedrooms with trompe l’oeil walls painted to produce, say, a likeness of the view from the Gritti Palace in Venice, in polo outfits and riding habits. It showed Santa Barbara suffused in sunlight with views of blue sea and skies and purplish mountains, and dressed in pastels of pink and blue and lavender, in Pucci pants and Gucci shoes. “Disgusting!” “Perfectly ghastly!” “Dreadful!” were some of the opinions circulating about Miss Ashland’s article. But considering the obvious beauty of the setting which the article conveyed, along with the golden healthiness of its residents, it was hard to figure out what the fuss was all about.
Gradually, it emerged. While everyone agreed that Miss Ashland had been correct in pointing out Santa Barbara’s fondness for foreign cars—Mercedeses and BMWs in particular—what everyone objected to was the magazine’s choice of people photographed to illustrate the article. What, for example, did Suzy Parker (formerly a New York model, now married to actor Bradford Dillman and living in Santa Barbara) have to do with Santa Barbara? How did Clifton Fadiman (born in Brooklyn, and Jewish) or Barnaby Conrad (a San Francisco transplant) fit into the Santa Barbara scene? Certainly Hair producer Michael Butler, sort of a millionaire hippie from Chicago who was once arrested for growing marijuana in his garden, was far from the typical Santa Barbaran; he had once entertained Mick Jagger. Most offensive of all, it turned out, was the woman whom the magazine had chosen to place on its cover, Mrs. Manuel Rojas, wearing chandelier emerald earrings to match her eyes. What did she have to do with the Santa Barbara style? everyone wanted to know. Chandelier emerald earrings are most definitely not the Santa Barbara style. The Rojases, furthermore, are considered nouveau riche (Perta Oil Marketing, Inc.) and originally came from, of all places, Beverly Hills. They settled in Santa Barbara as recently as 1974.
Santa Barbara is a community where literally hours can be spent discussing who is “typical Santa Barbara” and who is not. The typical Santa Barbaran, it is agreed, is “conservative.” If, for conservative, some people read stuffy and smug, that is perfectly all right with Santa Barbara. Santa Barbarans feel that they have elevated smugness to the level of an art form. The typical Santa Barbaran goes in for espadrilles and tennis shoes more than for emeralds, which Mrs. Rojas was clearly shown wearing in broad daylight. The typical Santa Barbaran distrusts outsiders, and dislikes change. When the local Baskin-Robbins ice cream shop discontinued a flavor called Pralines ’n’ Cream, the citizenry, who had grown fond of the flavor, picketed the establishment until Pralines ’n’ Cream was restored to the inventory. Santa Barbara women like to boast that theirs was the last community in America to accept the pants suit. The typical Santa Barbaran is extremely town-proud and civic-minded. It has been said of Santa Barbara that it is a city of meetings, and that nothing can be done until at least one meeting has been called to discuss all the ramifications of whatever it is. At the same time, Santa Barbara is distrustful of city government, and prefers to leave any decisions affecting the city to its citizens themselves, who are believed to know what is good for them and what isn’t. When a stretch of freeway was planned between San Francisco and the Mexican border, Santa Barbarans decided that they did not want traffic streaming through their community at seventy miles per hour. They went to battle with the California State Department of Transportation and—though it took years—they won. Now Santa Barbara is the only segment of the freeway’s six-hundred-mile length where motorists must keep a respectful speed and pause for traffic lights. When offshore oil spills began dirtying their beaches, Santa Barbarans met and formed an organization called GOO (for Get Oil Out). They took on some of the country’s largest oil companies, and got them to clean up their operations.
Typifying Santa Barbara’s attitude toward city governments is Miss Pearl Chase, who says: “People won’t be inspired to help a community unless they are part of it. Government officials are really temporary. They come and go, and this constant turnover means that citizen organizations have far greater impact.” Miss Chase is perhaps the most typical Santa Barbaran there is. She is immensely rich. Her family owned the vast Hope Ranch, which, not long ago, was sold off and subdivided to become one of the town’s most elegant and expensive areas. But she lives in a Victorian house full of sagging furniture, old scrapbooks, and genteelly dusty clutter. When she goes out, she is always hatted, always gloved. If she owns any emeralds, she has never been seen wearing them. Though she is eighty-eight years old, and ailing, she is still regarded as one of the town’s leading dowagers.
Change, of course, has come to Santa Barbara as it has everywhere else where the rich have tried to isolate themselves behind walls and gates and rolling lawns and gardens. Not long ago, for example, a rich and social wedding united two old-line Santa Barbara families. Shortly after the wedding, however, the young bridegroom announced his intention of undergoing a sex-change operation. And for years, the Little Town Club was Santa Barbara’s leading social club for women. Founded in 1914, the club never served alcoholic beverages. But several years ago, a proposal was made that the club offer wine with lunch. In a surprising development, it turned out that all the older ladies were in favor of wine, while all the younger members were not. Eventually, the older group won out and wine was introduced, then liquor. “Now,” complains one member, “it’s so noisy at lunchtime you can’t hear yourself think!”
“Oh, how Santa Barbara has changed!” complains one matron, Santa Barbara resident for over fifty years. “It used to be a simple, charming place. All the houses had blue shutters. We would eat at El Paseo, standing in line with trays for the most delicious food. The annual Fiesta was beautiful. Now it’s horrible. People used to have lovely parties; now we don’t go anywhere. There was wonderful dancing at the Biltmore. Now it’s part of a chain.”
The change, the dowager feels, began during the Second World War. “There began to be a strong Fascist feeling here,” she says. “There were a few men who were out-and-out Nazis. I remember one man who called ‘Heil Hitler!’ across a table, and another who said, ‘Let us hope and pray that Germany wins the war.’ One of those men is still around. During the war, it all became terribly snobbish and anti-Semitic.”
But a more profound change occurred earlier, on the twenty-ninth of June, 1925, a date engraved on the memory of every true Santa Barbaran. That day, an earthquake registering 6.3 on the Richter scale rocked Santa Barbara. Trees thrashed about, the towers of All Saints’ Church swayed, and the ground heaved in great waves. At least one Santa Barbara dowager, old Mrs. Cunningham—a Forbes of Boston—was killed. (One of the residents had a psychic butler, who foresaw the quake and removed all her costly vases, which were thereby saved.) The aftershocks continued for the rest of the summer, and before it was over, most of what had been old Santa Barbara had been destroyed.
Nowadays, in retrospect, the quake is usually referred to as “a blessing.” Santa Barbara had, up to that time, developed somewhat haphazardly, without zoning. When the earth finally quieted, an architectural board of review was formed by a group of local worthies. Its purpose was to oversee the rebuilding of the town, and to see to it that it was rebuilt in such a way that it would be pleasing to the eye and would also have a certain architectural uniformity. The result was a vaguely Mediterranean mixture of Spanish Colonial and Mission Revival, appropriate to Southern California’s history. Walls were of beige or yellow stucco, and roofs were of red or yellow tile. Bell towers and balconies and grillwork abounded. Santa Barbara’s acres were strictly zoned. For obvious reasons, high-rise buildings were prohibited. These architectural, building, and zoning codes have been adhered to until this day, and have become a matter of intense civic pride. Right now, the city is in the middle of an intense dispute over the design of a new wing for the art museum, which proposes to depart, ever so slightly, from the Spanish Mission style. Though architects have found Santa Barbara’s elaborate building codes and rules somewhat inhibiting, landscape architects have flocked to the area and have prospered creating the town’s many pretty parks, malls, and private gardens.
Santa Barbara first came into existence in 1850, when it was incorporated by an act of the California legislature a few months before there actually was a state of California. But it was not until the late 1860s, in the post-Civil War days, that it had its real genesis. It began, like so many wealthy enclaves, as a seasonal resort. These were the days when so many families, rich from the war, began to cast about for new ways to spend and display their money, and to encapsulate themselves in luxurious redoubts where they would encounter only their “own kind.” This overnight gentry—members of the Armour family (meat), the Mortons (salt), the Fleischmanns (yeast), the Hammonds (organs), to name a few—came largely from the East and the Middle West, and began to build imposing winter homes in the hills above the town. This was the era when golf, tennis, and polo suddenly became popular pastimes for the rich, and it was the dawn of the American country club. Many of the rich Easterners who came to Santa Barbara were, furthermore (or so Santa Barbarans like to boast), the black sheep of their families, and were encouraged to go to California by relatives who were just as happy to have them several thousand miles away. This accounts, Santa Barbarans say, for the relaxed and laissez-faire air of the place—less grand and pretentious than Newport, less formal and competitive than Palm Beach. “Here we have always just gone our happy ways,” says one long-time resident.
The exclusive Valley Club was built, which is now the “Old Guard club,” and then the Birnam Wood Club, which is considered the “New Guard club.” The third country club, the Montecito, bought recently by a Japanese syndicate, stands lowest in the club pecking order and is considered “commercial.” The Little Town Club established its quaint rules, such as “Six to a Susan.” (For lunch, the club has tables for six, with a lazy Susan in the center of each table; it is against the rules to sample a tidbit from anyone else’s lazy Susan.)
When an architect named George Washington Smith came to Santa Barbara, he quickly put his stamp on the place, doing for Santa Barbara what Stanford White did for New York and Long Island and Addison Mizner did for Palm Beach; he designed mansions in the preferred Spanish Colonial style with vaulted ceilings and the requisite bell towers, balconies, and courtyards. His flights of Mediterranean fancy were extreme, and he thought nothing of going to Spain and Italy to bring back boatloads of tiles, lanterns, shutters, and grilles to adorn his creations. It is said that when Harry K. Thaw (who murdered Stanford White) was released from prison, he visited Santa Barbara, and viewing a George Washington Smith house, commented, “I think I killed the wrong architect.” Still, because there are only twenty-nine Smith houses in Santa Barbara, to own one is now a—if not the—major status symbol. And when, as rarely happens, a Smith house goes on the market, it is certain to bring at least $100,000 more than a comparable one.
One woman who still lives in the Smith-designed mansion she built in 1925 after the earthquake is Mrs. Angelica Schuyler Bryce, the widow of Peter Cooper Bryce, who, along with Harold Chase, Pearl Chase’s brother, developed Hope Ranch. (Things tend to get somewhat inbred in Old Guard Santa Barbara, and it is important to remember who was a Hollister, who was a Meeker, who was a Poett, and so on.) The eighty-six-year-old Mrs. Bryce, who has always been known by her childhood nickname, “Girlie,” is, along with Miss Chase and Mrs. Horace Grey, one of the grandes dames who for years have ruled the social seas of Santa Barbara. She actually worked with George Washington Smith on her house, helping him collect the antique hammered-iron hardware which was copied in Europe and brought to her estate, Florestal. On her fifty-five landscaped acres Girlie Bryce maintains what amounts to a private zoo, including forty-five peacocks and a sixty-year-old tortoise named Gappy, who is fed a diet of watermelon and fresh fruits imported from Hawaii. Gappy reciprocates by letting Mrs. Bryce’s thirty-eight grandchildren take turns riding on his back when they come for visits. For all the splendor of her surroundings, Girlie Bryce complains: “Santa Barbara has gotten so big. If it gets any bigger it’s going to be a horrible place.”
Santa Barbara has gotten big, and now has a population of over 200,000. After World War II came Vandenberg Air Force Base, bringing in a sizable military contingent. Then came the University of California’s Santa Barbara campus, and Robert Hutchins with his Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, both of which not only added people but contributed what Santa Barbara considers an intellectual, think-tank atmosphere to the place. Dr. Hutchins’s pronouncements from his lush hillside villa (“Mankind’s intellectual power must be developed”) are given much weight. Then came General Motors, bringing with it some hundred new families. The General Motors people tended to stick to themselves, which was fine with Santa Barbarans, who said, “If you don’t want us, we don’t want you.”
But, for the time being at least, Santa Barbara isn’t going to get any bigger. For the last few years, Southern California has been undergoing an acute water shortage and now each Santa Barbara household has a water ration allocated on a complicated formula based upon past consumption, number of persons in the household, etc. If a Santa Barbara home owner exceeds his water quota, he is charged a penalty, even though there seems to be plenty of water to sprinkle golfing greens and to fill thousands of backyard pools. It was the water shortage that was given as the reason Santa Barbara declared a moratorium on new building some time back. But the real reason for the building moratorium, Santa Barbarans admit, was to keep out more new people. It has also had the pleasant effect of keeping Santa Barbara real estate values going up and up.
“Santa Barbara is an international suburb,” says Mrs. Michael Wheelwright, the wife of a prominent landscape architect, and many Santa Barbarans would agree with her. It is true that many Santa Barbarans maintain homes elsewhere, and are always jetting from one part of the world to another. When Santa Barbara attempted to publish its own edition of the Social Register a few years ago, the enterprise collapsed after four editions—largely because most of social Santa Barbara is already registered in Social Registers of other cities. Foreign visitors also abound, including Baron Philippe de Rothschild, who customarily winters at the Santa Barbara Biltmore and swims daily in the Olympic-size pool at the adjacent Coral Casino (a members-only club for Santa Barbara residents, free for guests). And certainly, for all its suburban appearance, Santa Barbara is technically not a suburb of any particular city. It is too far from Los Angeles to be considered a commuting town—though some people, like Manuel Rojas, make the trip back and forth to business in private planes. It is no secret that San Francisco thinks little of Los Angeles, and that Los Angeles echoes these sentiments about San Francisco. But Santa Barbara thinks little of both Los Angeles and San Francisco. “I go to Los Angeles as little as possible,” says one woman. “I sometimes go there for shoes from Saks.” Santa Barbara thinks even less of the Los Angeles suburbs. Beverly Hills is dismissed as “mostly Jewish.” And of mostly non-Jewish Pasadena, a Santa Barbaran snorts: “They have more smog in Pasadena than they do in Los Angeles!” San Francisco is also given short shrift. When a visiting San Franciscan mentioned, in the way San Franciscans have, that he lived in “the city,” his hostess retorted, “I live in a city too—Santa Barbara!”
Santa Barbarans also point out that Santa Barbara actually has suburbs of its own. The old money lives in a coastal community called Montecito. New money has collected itself in the hills beyond, at Hope Ranch.
In fact, the word “suburban” is anathema in Santa Barbara, as it is becoming elsewhere in America. The word no longer has the pleasant, easy ring that it once had. Euphemisms have been tried. “We live in the country,” is a popular one. A Santa Barbaran, of course, would say, “We live in Santa Barbara.”
Santa Barbara is one of the few remaining towns in the United States—Port Huron, Michigan; San Antonio, Texas; and possibly Greenwich, Connecticut, are some of the others—that, for whatever else it is or isn’t, is still a place, its own place. It’s a place where, as one woman describes it, “genteel people live—people who don’t need to be justified by anything.”
As for the rest of California, Merv Griffin, an unwilling transplant from the East, asserts: “It’s nothing but polyester leisure suits, frozen yogurt, mood rings, Big Macs and fries, Cuisinarts, heated water beds, sharks’ teeth on chains, and jogging”—little of which will be encountered in Santa Barbara.