American West Coast
Ian Irvine
As one gets older the realisation strikes home that there are places in the world one may never see. California had been coming to me all my life in music and movies, but it seemed possible I would never return the favour. But when my 16-year-old son and I considered making a two-week trip together, the idea of driving from Los Angeles to San Francisco soon came out top.
I had never driven anything in my life except second-hand Golfs and sedate Dad-mobiles. So when an American friend recommended that I should hire a Mustang Convertible I was intrigued. Intrigued, tempted, and then convinced. When Hector and I collected it from the hiring lot on our arrival at Los Angeles airport, our car was recognisable hundreds of yards away. Bright yellow with Nevada licence plates, it screamed ‘tourist’, as we sped off down the freeway among the demure grey, white and black compacts. I loved it. We did find some Beach Boys to play on the radio when we took the top down, but mostly we stuck with KJAZZ from Long Beach which provided a constant Miles/mingus/ Monk soundtrack.
Driving on the freeways is crucial in LA’S sprawling, 469-square-mile metropolis. We never did less than 50 miles a day. As the architectural critic Reyner Banham, who loved the city, observed: ‘Like earlier generations of English intellectuals who taught themselves Italian in order to read Dante in the original I learned to drive in order to read Los Angeles in the original.’
We stayed in Malibu for a week in the granny flat of a friend’s beach house – it was literally 15 feet above the beach and the noise of the pounding Pacific surf was a constant
We fell asleep in Malibu to the sound of pounding surf and restful background. We fell asleep looking out through the floor-to-ceiling windows at the lights of LA across the bay.
Our days were spent in a mix of high and low culture, both of which LA has in abundance. The modernist hilltop palace of the Getty Museum rivals the Louvre and the Prado in its vast collection of art (and I was delighted to catch Pontormo’s The Visitation, one of my favourite paintings on its own first trip from Italy to California).
The Getty Villa at Malibu, a recreation of the Roman Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum, houses a magnificent collection of ancient art. We attended the world premiere of John Adams’s new piano concerto, Must The Devil Have All The Good Tunes?, at Frank Gehry’s vast swirling metal Walt Disney Concert Hall and visited the Watts Towers, a masterpiece of outsider art.
‘I learned to drive in order to read Los Angeles in the original’
But we also took in movies in vintage Art Deco cinemas, followed the pavement-set stars on the Walk of Fame along the frankly tacky Hollywood Boulevard and toured the city thrift shops and secondhand vinyl and book stores. By the end of the trip we had accumulated so many books, records and clothes I had to Fed-ex a crate of it all back to the UK. And we lived almost entirely on pizza, hot dogs, burgers, and tacos for a fortnight.
The only other American city I know is New York and LA is a considerable contrast. The superior climate helps of course, but there was a palpable relaxation among everyone I met there. They seemed at ease in an eternal and sunny present, unburdened by history. How rapidly and recently so much of America appeared always startles me. When my house in London was built in 1840, Los Angeles was still part of Mexico and had only 1,200 inhabitants. Even in 1900 there were only 100,000 people there. Today 18 million live in Greater Los Angeles.
After our week in LA we took the Pacific Coast Highway north heading for San Francisco. It is rather astounding how vast and empty so much of the Californian coast is. At times it seemed more like the more rugged parts of the West Coast of Scotland with vertiginous drops to the beaches on the ocean side and steep cliffs above on the landward. We stopped off at San Simeon, and took the tour up to William Randolph Hearst’s hilltop castle (both owner and property the originals for Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane and Xanadu). With even more money than Paul Getty, but far less taste, he scoured the world for architecture and artworks and assembled them in a colossal magpie bricolage of Gothic,
classical, moorish and renaissance. It’s as kitsch as Christmas, but cheerful in the brilliant sunshine.
Further north we drove through the wild beauty of Big Sur and stayed one night in a delightful motel among redwoods, before breakfasting at Nepenthe, a restaurant whose terrace offers a magnificent view of the dramatic coast and then heading up to the delightful town of Monterey. John Steinbeck’s novel Cannery Row is about life there between the wars and I actually read it in the course of one evening in the Cannery Row Motel on Cannery Row. Overfishing killed the sardine canning business in the 1950s and the town has been largely gentrified, but it does possess one outstanding attraction, the Monterey Aquarium. We spent four hours there and could easily have spent more, among the monumental glass-walled tanks observing great white sharks, schools of sardines, flotillas of translucent jellyfish, raucous bands of sea otters and limber octopuses.
By night we were in San Francisco, a city that seems even more relaxed than LA. The next day my bookish son and I went in search of the Beats. First stop was the City Lights bookshop (whose founder Lawrence Ferlinghetti first published Allen Ginsberg’s poem, Howl. His 100th birthday fell the week after we were there and the city declared it Ferlinghetti Day). The second stop was across the road – the engrossing Beat Museum with its vast collection of objects, photographs, papers, posters associated with Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs and many others. We stumbled across an excellent nearby Italian restaurant, Café Zoetrope, which turned out to be owned by Francis Ford Coppola and serving first-class wine from his vineyards north of the city across the (unmissable) Golden Gate Bridge.
On our last day we drove north of San Francisco to the Point Reyes Peninsula, a very beautiful stretch of coast with unspoiled beaches. In the course of his circumnavigation of the globe Sir Francis Drake on 17th June 1579 landed here on the coast of California, the first European to do so. He claimed the land for Queen Elizabeth and called it New Albion. We sat on the beach at Drake’s Bay, ate our sandwiches in the sun and tried to imagine the arrival of the tiny 100ft galleon, The Golden Hind, 440 years ago, bringing history ashore.
‘The castle is as kitsch as Christmas, but cheerful in the brilliant sunshine’