TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/061989/06198900.027

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 6.0 KB | 118 lines

                                                                                ESSAY, Page 70

A Long Way from the Rue de la Paix


By Jordan Bonfante


    The dress code in Los Angeles is assuredly not strict. So
the other customers at the shopping mall on Santa Monica
Boulevard that evening scarcely noticed the newcomer in a tuxedo
who had joined them in line at the flower stalls. Neither the
young lady in the decal-covered bomber jacket nor the young
gentleman with the sheepskin vest over his T-shirt and the pith
helmet saw any reason to fuss over someone evidently doin' his
thing in a tuxedo costume. No, what turned their heads was the
new arrival's inquiry.

    "Say, what kind of corsage could you make up for me?" he
asked of the clerk when his turn came. The other customers had
no way of knowing that the newcomer needed the corsage for a
high school father-daughter dance, a real treat for a returning
expatriate. Ah, good old American sociability, he thought. What
a relief after some of those gloomy European schools! "Wha?"
said the clerk, a young man with a big mustache. "A wha?"

    "A corsage. You know . . ." the newcomer repeated,
gesturing feebly toward his own chest and wrist. The clerk
looked at him with new suspicion, consulted his superior by the
back tulips and returned to announce through a curled lip, "We
don't do corsages!"

    The newcomer should have known better, of course. He should
have realized that the corsage is as dead as the darning egg.
His excuse was that after seven years abroad he had moved from
Paris to Los Angeles. And as everyone knows, the distance
between the Rue de la Paix and the Pacific Coast Highway is
measured not in flying hours but in light-years. Catapulted from
the European fixation with the past into the Californian
intoxication with the future, the returning expatriate felt he
had been gone for half a century, and sometimes that he had been
born yesterday.

    The newcomer felt time-warped, mired in a past age of LP
records, the ERA and two-wheel drive. It wasn't the new lingo
("persona," "agenda," "biorhythms"), nor the acronyms ("EIS,"
"CAD" and "MSG"). It wasn't the commercial wackiness of products
like "gourmet dog food." It wasn't even the daily drive-by
shootings -- talk about an automotive civilization -- in Los
Angeles' gangland. Mayhem is not confined to the U.S.

    No, what made him feel like a retrograde stuffed shirt was
less lethal but daunting things. Cacophonies of competing phone
companies, and car and poolside cellulars, have not yet
proliferated in Paris. It is in California, not the Dordogne,
where your teenager phones you and then puts you on hold.
Similarly, Europeans remember when their films were the risque
ones. Hah! Now the show is on the other foot. Europeans at the
TV children's hour would be aghast at the torrent of video
violence, the Tampax-machine gags on Murphy Brown, or the 27 --
count 'em -- condom jokes in a single segment of Kate & Allie.

    The time-warped expatriate was also struck by a sunbaked
parochialism that is increasingly turned toward the Pacific
rather than the Atlantic. No one asked him what was going on in
Europe, only whether he liked it in California. Last month a
television-news crew staked out the portals of the Beverly
Hills Hotel as the visiting Jacques Chirac, the former French
Premier and still well-known mayor of Paris, strode inside,
trailing limousines and entourage. The TV crew failed to budge.
Turns out it was there to cover a more important celebrity,
wrestler Hulk Hogan.

    One of the most reassuring things was the rediscovery of a
boundless first-name friendliness. In Los Angeles now his
banker is Judy, his mortgage-loan officer Adam, and his
used-auto dealer Gary. Restaurant tables are held under his
first name, as are pizza orders. A TV skit conveys more
documentary accuracy than comedy when it shows a couple sitting
down in a restaurant and telling the waiter, "I'm Sheila, this
is Bill. We're your customers this evening." Try that in Paris
on that ornery waiter one is careful to call "Monsieur." In
Paris the older generation -- not the younger -- can be so
unfriendly that on Sunday at the big church of St. Philippe du
Roule, one can witness a scene of uncommon standoffishness, even
for Paris: at the point in the Mass when the priest says, "Now
let us offer each other a sign of peace," nobody moves.

    It would thus take a Parisian time to get into the spirit
of a Los Angeles traffic school where motorists ticketed for a
moving violation may attend eight hours of driving instruction
in lieu of court. At the newcomer's school in the San Fernando
Valley, an actor named Dick Corbin provided diverting
impersonations of a woman driver on the freeway talking on the
car phone, eating lunch and doing her lashes in the visor mirror
all at the same time.

    But the part the pupils like best is the confessional, when
each participant recounts the details of his moving violation,
whereupon his 40-odd classmates judge whether it was a mortal
or just a venial infraction. "Thanks, David, for sharing that
with us. I'm sure few of us were aware that you can actually
purchase the STOP sign you've knocked over." So much emphasis
is put on self-expression and broad-mindedness that at one point
an instructor found himself equating drug taking with drinking,
and upholding both. "You can do alcohol. You can do drugs," he
admonished. "Just don't drive!" A stodgy European less
accustomed to the same blase acceptance of drug taking -- and
a good many citizens of Los Angeles for that matter -- would
shudder to extend such logic much further.

    The newcomer doesn't wear a tuxedo anymore. He wears a
necktie, though, and he mixes with the stars. While he was
waiting to be seated for lunch at the Ivy in West Hollywood one
day, Zsa-Zsa Gabor and her mother mistook him for the maitre d'
and asked him to show them to their table. She called him
"Darling." He still hasn't decided if he should have called her
Miss Gabor, or just plain Zsa-Zsa.