PACIFIC VILLAGE
This is the first thing I ever wrote that I was paid for. I did it because I wanted to, and was amazed when I got a check for it from Westways, where I had sent it without introduction because that was the only magazine I knew that might be interested in a piece about Southern California. Timidity is obvious in more ways than my giving a false name to Laguna Beach, of course. When I casually sent off this story, Phil Townsend Hanna was running his crazy shop for the Auto Club, as it was then called.
Nobody ever notified me that the article had been accepted, but I got a check: $25 for three drawings and $10 for accompanying text. This was a puzzlement to me, because I knew by then that I must either draw or write, to justify taking up space, and I had a puritanical feeling that because writing was easier and more fun, it could not be the worthier choice. The magazine cuts of my sketches were almost unrecognizable; still, I saw that I would never be much better as an artist, but that I might possibly improve my use of words.
Since this piece was the first and last one I ever tried to illustrate, my decision was obvious, and meanwhile I have never had as sweet and untroubled a time in my whole life with something I earned by myself. I spent the money, all of it, on riotous living. Not a penny of it went for taxes, or agents, or anything like that in those full Depression days. It was simply money, a mysterious bonus from somewhere, and never again has it felt so silky and exciting.
I bought a bottle of VSOP Hennessy cognac for my husband, which took about $10, and several Modern Library books, which then sold for from 95 cents to an outrageous $1.25 for the Giants, for my siblings and other friends. I gave my mother a tiny bottle, perhaps an eighth of an ounce, of sandalwood oil to rub inside her handkerchief drawer. I found a necktie hand-painted in iridescent colors for my father (my sense of humor was as simplistic as my prose!).
Long after this innocent spree, Father told me that one day at lunch with his friend Phil Hanna, he had felt somewhat embarrassed when he was asked if perhaps Fisher was his daughter using an ambiguous pseudonym. He wondered distastefully if I had mentioned his name to Mr. Hanna when I submitted the article to the magazine. I told him that it had not occurred to me, and he seemed pleased, and reread it.
So here is the first thing I wrote about a place as it was, at least for public view. It is no great shakes in a literary sense, but may amuse people who know “Olas” as it is now. And it made up my mind for me, in a basically brutal way: it said, Do what you most want to do, whether or not it is of any value to anyone else.
And Olas is on the spot, for those who have long known it as a quiet, lovely place and want it to remain so, and those who feel in its present restless state a promise of prosperity and prominence as a booming beach resort, are lined up grim and hateful on either side of a wall of bitter prejudice.
Santa Catalina lies west from Olas on the sea-line, with San Clemente its shadow southward. A hard, broad road, as neat and empty of character as a dairy lunchroom, strings the village. Out of Olas to the north it hurries toward Los Angeles, and south, down the coast, curves less straightly to San Diego and the dimming pleasures of Mexican border freedom. Inland, roads lead from Olas through the endless tawny rollings of round hills, through orange-valleys to the mountains.
Near Olas, the coastline is erratically lovely. It is the kind that inspires nine out of ten visitors interviewed by the weekly news sheet to reminisce of the Riviera, Italian or French. They usually speak of the blue sky, the yellow sand, and the foam-sprayed cliffs of any correct postcard, comparing them more or less hazily with the sky, the sand, and the cliffs of Olas. And they are more or less right.
There are people, though, who feel that if a place is a place, with a personality strong and clear, comparisons are as unnecessary as they are annoying. There are people, many of them, who feel that Olas is such a place.
Some of them, artists, old settlers, young enthusiasts for life in the raw with no hate and no golf clubs, want to keep it just as it is—or, even more desirable, as it used to be: quiet, so unknown that Saturday and Sunday were like Tuesday, beaches empty, rocks and cliffs free for uninterrupted sketching of any kind.
Olas’ other lovers, just as sincerely, want to exploit to the bursting point its strong and attractive character. They want to develop it, to lure more people to it, so that all the houses may be full. Then more roads will be built into the silent hills, more houses sown on more lots, and more businesses will flourish on the bustling streets of what will soon change from village to town.
Olas itself is very sensitive to this inner struggle. There is restlessness in the air, and a kind of bewilderment. Change bubbles and fumes like yeast in a warm beer crock. Overnight the face of the village changes.
Streets are being smoothed and straightened. Old eucalyptus trees are uprooted to make way for curbings. “Desecration!” the artists shriek. “Necessity,” soothe the progressives, and they plant more trees in much more orderly rows.
Hills are chopped and scarred into level roads, and the old guard moans in pain. “Ah, but we must take out dangerous curves,” the developers explain, and as a palliative, “See how we are planting groups of ornamental shrubs, and neat rows of ice plant on the banks.”
In the meantime, the outlines of the village are intact. Hills behind and around, sea before, it lies small and pleasant in a little hollow, with houses clustered north and south along the coast. The streets are not quite straight. Fine trees shade some of them. The buildings are small and for the most part extremely ugly, possessing the one architectural virtue of unadornment.
The upper end of the village proper, with the housing and amusement of impecunious weekenders its main excuse, is plainly hideous. It is Olas’ more interesting half. A tent city, many umbrella and hot-dog concessions, a movie house, and a squat dance hall make patterns vivid and noisy.
Strange here are the two municipal halls to Beauty and Science, the art gallery and a California college’s marine laboratory. One, knowingly built like an electric power plant, houses monthly collections of bilge and occasional greatness. The other, strangely suggestive of a ratty old Louisiana mansion, fills every summer with earnest biology majors and peculiar smells.
Toward the south, the other half of the village pulls discreetly away. Its tent city is a bulky hotel or two. Its hash houses become restaurants whose food, if no better, is served with less clatter and more pomp. Its shops of abalone shell souvenirs and leather pillows stamped X the Beach Beautiful suddenly change to “antique” shops. They are equally cluttered, but here the prices are higher, the variety is infinite, and the wares range from raffia beach sandals to jade—real jade—opium pipes. There are Chinese, Mexican, Florentine, and Persian stores. And there are a myriad “Gifte Shoppes.” Most of them, like their humbler competitors at the other end of Olas, are promisingly crowded on weekends, and quite deserted in between.
The weekly visitors are, of course, divided like the village topography into two main camps. To the first belongs the usual army of clerks from banks and stores, college professors, movie extras, and various types of professional weekenders. They are in Olas to get away from noise and business, or to make noise, or to do business. They live inexpensively in a part of the village that makes enough money from their two days’ occupancy to send its proprietors to Palm Springs or Lake Arrowhead for the other five.
The other army that swarms into Olas on Fridays and Saturdays heads straight for the synthetic luxury of the hotels and restaurants to the south. It comes in bigger cars. It has fatter paunches and purses. It is made up of bank presidents and college trustees, movie magnates of the first and second rank in white turtleneck sweaters, fussy old ladies in conservative town cars. And, as in the other army, there are many professional weekenders. And business flourishes.
For two days the beaches teem with people. Back roads have their full share of puffing bicyclists, and the dusty bridle paths more than theirs of riders trying to make tired rented nags prance like polo ponies. The dance hall sags and shudders and every hole-in-the-wall sends up a cheery reek of popcorn and hamburger. Drugstores outdo their own versatility. Motorcycle officers herd people handsomely across the car-lined streets.
Monday morning is like dawn on another planet. The hordes have fled. Six or seven cars are parked sheepishly in the quiet streets. A few people walk about. At eleven, after the morning mail is distributed at the post office, the villagers do their marketing. There is a mild stir. A few go to the sand in the afternoon. At five, mail again collects small gossiping crowds. At night, a quiet shuffling about sends various groups to rehearsals, the movie, the chamber of commerce, the bridge clubs. Olas is normal again, living that life so completely unsuspected by the people who come and go each weekend.
Socially this seven-days-a-week Olas is very complex. Two main divisions separate it roughly into the artistic and the progressive elements, but that is a crude simplification. Each element has its interweaving intricacies, with all the bad and most of the good qualities of a small-town society long and firmly established.
Old settlers, in Olas since its cow-pathian days, take quite for granted their positions as social and political arbiters. They would be politely incredulous if by some shock they were made conscious of the affectionate mockery which surrounds them. They live smugly, simply. Reminiscence flows in mild flood from them, monotonously interesting.
They speak of the old road, the true Camino Real, that wound like snail-silver along the cliffs. Indians once camped by it, and gave fish to the ambling padres. There are gardens now whose grey soil prickles with the thin bones of their bass and corbina—gardens and gas stations.
Then there were the old ranches, five or six of them back in the hills. The cowboys would sweep down the canyons in the fall of the year, and gather on the beach at Olas for three-day drunks. They sang wildly. Their children still race seaward, still sing, but oftener.
Then the days of the old post office with its high steps easy for sitting—ah me!—and the little newspaper! Didn’t that old Dutchman write it, set it up, print it, sell it all himself? And the artists! Real ones they were, not pretty boys who just love color! Well, those were the days, the good days.
And the old settlers shake their heads, lonesomely. All about them is bustle and confusion. They hear nothing but wind in the groves of tall trees long leveled to the earth.
Theatre groups breed plays like maggots. They inter-hate ferociously. Two and three shows open on one night, ethics and economics are swept aside, clandestine throat-cutting springs gleefully into the light. Whole casts are shanghaied. The result is amusing and valuable. Directors of unusual ability, in their burning hope and hate, drag powers of beautiful, almost great acting from local lifeguards and waitresses and unemployed professors. Butchers and service-station flunkys design fine sets and do most artful lightings.
There are writers in Olas—too many to count. Some have made a steady sum for years from pulp magazines; a few have sold to publishers novels that people wouldn’t buy, or have seen lone stories starred in minor anthologies. One or two have written best-sellers. But most of Olas’ “authors” rank among the permanently unpublished. Their publics are small: wives, friends, awed offspring. They write for the chosen few, quite happy. They gossip glibly among themselves of agents and markets and pulps and slickies. And sometimes they discuss Letters.
Somewhere between this group and the theatre enthusiasts lies a strange band of stragglers from both: the Talkers. Where do they sleep, where eat? With an uncanny knowledge of when to appear, they crop up from nowhere at picnics and parties and informal meetings. At the first lull in sound, they pounce. And the evening is theirs. Art, politics, abalone fishing, sex, Tahiti, California wines: information fills the air, like a rushing of winds. The Talkers are pests. Oddly enough, they are for the most part charming pests.
And it is these muse-fed villagers and these old settlers who lead the artist faction in Olas. It is they who cry “Down with billboards! Away with publicity! Out with subdividers and go-getters!” And they are very bitter. “Olas has been ruined, prostituted,” they howl. “Her trees are felled, her hills pitted—give us back our old Olas!” And they stay in Olas and bring their friends, who usually stay too.
And all, artists and old settlers and the indeterminate stragglers of many professions, are equally unaware of the amused tolerance with which they are treated by the other half of the village. Misunderstanding is mutual, perhaps, but where the artists dismiss with scornful ravings the dull bourgeois of Olas, the latter view with a kind of embarrassed enjoyment the incomprehensible antics of their enemies.
They live the ordered existence of good citizens of any small town on the earth. Their pleasures are cautiously licentious, their business dealings honestly corrupt. They support, with some prodding, a Red Cross branch and a municipal church.
Clubs thrive in their circles. There are several different varieties of women’s organizations: junior, senior, garden, parent-teacher, sewing. The men have rival luncheon clubs with all the usual backslappings and buttons and good ostentatious charities. The children of the club-goers go to clubs: puppy clubs, doll clubs. And bridge clubs knit the whole faction into a nightly knot of systems and four-sided animosities.
Frequent elections exercise all the political muscles of the various groups, and real estate salesmen, garagists, and chain-store managers stalk past each other on the street with an axes-at-twenty-paces look which changes at the next primaries and then shifts again.
And all these people, these reactionary progressives, these bank employees and owners of drugstores and gifte shoppes and eating places—why do they want Olas to thrive and grow fat? It is very natural. They want to grow fat with her, to thrive that their children may thrive.
Real estate dealers need water in distant subdivisions. They cut holes in the hills for pipes. Then they sell lots and make money and build more houses to rent to more people. And those people buy food and bathing caps and Chinese lanterns. And billboards bring people, and so does publicity in the city papers and on the air.
To the progressives it is a natural, a logical thing to want Olas to be bigger and noisier and more popular. They are patient enough with the grumbling, sneering artists, and, most ironically, use them as part of their publicity program. Olas, Famous Artists’ Colony, the billboards blurb, and Visit Olas, Artist Haunt. At the New Year’s parade in a near neighbor, a great palette of roses represents the village, with hired Hollywood beauties dressed in transparent smocks and berets to represent Art. And at the annual fiesta, the aesthetic high note is reached when all the storekeepers and mechanics and beer-drawers don orange-and-green tam-o’shanters and flowing ties. They too represent Art.
So the two sides live together in the little village. One could not well exist without the other. Each fights with the tactics of righteous sincerity: each fights dirty.
And while shouts and sneers and low groans gather like warring birds in the air, Olas lies still in the creases of the ocean-slipping hills, one bead strung with many like it on the long coast road. It is rather uncomfortable. It aches at times. Rheumatism or growing pains?
—Laguna Beach, 1934