TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/061989/06198900.027

Text File | 1990-09-22 | 6KB | 108 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.