French Ghosts, Russian Nights, and American Outlaws: Souvenirs of a Professional Vagabond. Susan Spano
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There is no one way to understand Los Angeles, no one way to take it all in, no one iconic view. Congested highways link its disparate parts without providing a sense of what lies in between. On their shoulders, a fellow in an overheated Mercedes summons a tow truck on his iPhone and a homeless woman brandishes a sign that says, Stranded, flat broke, need help.
But for those who seek a road to clarification, there is Mulholland Highway, ribboning across the east-west–tending mountain range that separates the L.A. basin from the San Fernando Valley. Rising to about 3,000 feet, the Santa Monicas are not high, but they are strategically placed, beginning near Dodger Stadium and ending at the Pacific Ocean in Malibu.
Driving its sinuous 55-mile course is the enterprise of one very busy day. Parks and scenic overlooks line the way, and the city unrolls on either side of you like an animated map. Close at hand on the eastern end are the “ego homes” of the rich and famous, clawing their way up the steep, chaparral-covered flanks of a swatch of the Santa Monicas called the Hollywood Hills. Farther west, Mulholland tightrope-walks across Sepulveda Pass and the San Diego Freeway, peters out to dirt for nine miles above Encino, then emerges paved again, taking travelers on a wild, wheel-gripping ride through the mostly undeveloped heart of the mountains.
As a scenic parkway, Mulholland abjures commercial development. However, sustenance for the body and fuel tank is available by turning off on any of the arteries that intersect it and lead down to the nonstop blandishments of Ventura Boulevard in the Valley or those siren thoroughfares to the south, Sunset and Hollywood.
An excursion along Mulholland is best started early, before the Hollywood Freeway clogs. The Mulholland exit lies about 10 miles northwest of downtown L.A., in the narrows of Cahuenga Pass, near where Cecil B. De Mille scouted locations for the 1913 picture, The Squaw Man, riding a horse and carrying a six-shooter to fend off rattlesnakes. The exit siphons drivers left off the highway; should you err so soon on the trip and turn right, you’ll lose Mulholland altogether, and end up in a maze of residential lanes surrounding the Hollywood Reservoir—a fine place for a morning walk or jog, with the letters of that serendipitous monument, the Hollywood sign, poking out between Italian cypresses.
Left onto Mulholland is the correct direction to go. This way, you’ll ride the road west, chasing the sun, starting with its rise at the Hollywood Bowl Overlook, about a mile beyond the highway on the shoulder of a somewhat stubby peak, tauntingly called Mt. Olympus. It is hard to imagine a better view of the L.A. basin, unless it’s from a picture window lining the living room of one of the cantilevered homes in the neighborhood. Downtown is a smog-bound mushroom struggling up from the ceaseless grid of streets; Hollywood rolls toward your feet like a weird wave; and in a cup-like declivity to your left once known as Daisy Dell, the Bowl nestles. Freeloaders come to this overlook to listen to the L.A. Philharmonic on summer nights. In the amphitheater below, boxes go for $3,000 to $5,000 a season, and are often hotly contested when their married occupants divorce.
Here on Mt. Olympus, you’re in a residential section of Hollywood that came of age in the 50s and 60s. Turn down any lane and you’ll find a marvelous, ridiculous cacophony of architectural styles that range from ersatz Georgian to Mayan revival. The architect Richard Neutra blamed the movies for the extravagant proliferation of building styles, and he is not alone in speculating that L.A. home builders see their lots as sets. But as Noel Coward said, “There is always something so delightfully real about what is phony here. And something so phony about what it real.”
Indeed, the more you house-hunt in the fabulously well-to-do neighborhoods that line Mulholland Drive, the more the ironies explode, particularly when you contemplate Hollywood’s humble beginnings as the inspiration of Horace and Daeida Wilcox, from Topeka, Kansas. In 1887, the Wilcoxes purchased 160 acres that would become central Hollywood, envisioning a Christian subdivision, free from alcohol and vice. The holly bushes Daeida planted did not thrive, and the community took unanticipated turns.
A mile beyond the Hollywood Bowl Overlook on the left is the northern entrance to Runyon Canyon Park, with paths that lead down into the thick of Hollywood, passing a Mission Revival-style mansion built by Gurdon Wattles in 1905 and a rag-tag community garden in a strange neighborhood for communism.
Two miles farther, at the Universal City Overlook, travelers are rewarded with a new perspective, this time to the north. Once Errol Flynn, whose ranch lay nearby, might have stood at this windy eerie surveying the San Fernando Valley. But it’s a different view now—developed to the very brink of the surrounding mountains, crowded with malls, gas stations, and TV studios, and crisscrossed by boulevards.
Their very names tell a tale that’s pure L.A., about a handful of wealthy Angelinos like J. B. Lankershim and I. N. Van Nuys who owned property in the Valley at the close of the 19th century. In a move that would have fatally dehydrated the city, they claimed the right to the water in the Los Angeles River—despite the fact that on most days it looks like one of those California streams Mark Twain said you could fall into and emerge from “all dusty.”
The Supreme Court settled the dispute in favor of the city, but as you contemplate the valley, water is never far from mind. The highway you’re traveling was the inspiration of William Mulholland, an Irish ditch digger who taught himself enough engineering to serve as superintendent of the L.A. Water Department from 1886 to 1928. His best known project was the 250-mile long Owens Valley Aqueduct, which turned the dry San Fernando Valley as green as any well-tended suburban lawn. Today, many view its construction as a crime, since underhanded means were used to gain control of Owens River water while a number of leading citizens cut lucrative, if shady, Valley real estate deals. But in 1913, the city lionized Mulholland, even wooed him to run for mayor, with one councilman claiming that, “His name should be engraved on every water faucet in the city of L.A.” He got a highway instead. At the opening of Mulholland Drive on December 27, 1924, bands played, airplanes buzzed, and a ballroom dance champion danced the Spanish tango.
Before abandoning the Universal City way station, turn around and look up. Pinioned by one slender column to a near vertical cliff is an octagonal house known as Chemosphere. Designed in 1960 by John Lautner, it looks like a flying saucer frozen in the process of touching down; very striking, but one wouldn’t relish bringing the groceries in.
Two miles beyond Chemosphere, Laurel Canyon Boulevard crosses Mulholland, and it’s here that one begins to notice the preponderance of wagging tails in the front seats of cars. Most of them are headed a mile west to Laurel Canyon Park, where dogs, not people, are sovereign, allowed to run free before ten and after three. There, one dog owner told me that her Westie, Bam Bam, always comes home from the park with fleas. But the place is a human, as well as a canine, scene where movie producers are said to hit on pretty women and an ice cream truck dispenses Italian ices.
The San Fernando Valley reveals itself again at the Fryman Canyon Overlook, a mile down the road, this time in a direct headshot, with a backdrop of the San Gabriel Mountains, Santa Susanas, and Simi Hills (from right to left). Off to the northwest too far away to see, some 20 miles over the Ventura County line, lies another piece of the Mulholland story, this one tragic—the ruins of the St. Francis Dam, which collapsed on March 12, 1928, killing 450 and costing the city of L.A. $5 million in damage reparations. This was the last of “the Chief’s” 19 dams, and ironically, he visited it on the very day it gave way, pronouncing it sound. Afterward, he took full responsibility for the catastrophe, retiring from the water department, a broken man. The 1974 movie Chinatown, in which a character based on “the Chief” is murdered by nefarious water diverters, commenced the refurbishment of Mulholland’s reputation. More recently, J. David Rogers, a geological engineer who spent 15 years studying the St. Francis Dam site, reported that a landslide no one could have predicted was the true cause of the disaster.
The highway narrows perceptibly between Fryman Canyon Overlook and Coldwater Canyon Drive so that it seems you’re tightrope walking along the very backbone of the mountains, rubbernecking toward the valley at