City of War Read Free

this, I think Rhonda was expecting to be dessert.”
    “Could be.”
    “You and Rhonda serious?”
    “Well, I couldn’t just sit around waiting for you.”
    That got a laugh, and it was as nice as I’d expected it would be. So we sipped our PlumpJack, and she ravaged the rest of the basket while tow trucks and ambulances came and went up ahead of us. There’s something I’ve always liked about watching a very pretty, extremely ravenous, young lady eat. And this was a tall, healthy girl who went at it with both fists and talked with her mouth full.
    After a while, the emergency workers had a couple oflanes clear, and the geysers shut down, so the highway patrol started waving people through.
    “Where can I drop you?” I asked.
    “Where do you live?”
    “Beverly Hills.”
    “Then your place will be fine.”

2
    Sexy Elevators and Killer Pastrami
    Beverly Hills is a city of 35,000 halfway between downtown L.A. and the Santa Monica pier. But it’s not your ordinary town. It’s not even your ordinary rich people’s town. From its beginnings as a Native American spiritual site called “The Gathering of the Waters” through its cattle ranching days and finally as home to some of the wealthiest people on the planet, it’s a place of boom, bust and mythmaking.
    It’s also as Balkanized as any city in America, but not by race, ethnicity or bloodlines. All that matters here is money and celebrity. Pick the first, and regardless of how many banks your family robbed back in Dubuque, presto, you’re a leading citizen. Pick the second, and your white-trash in-laws can hang their tattooed asses out the window of your twenty-million-dollar mansion and get applause from appreciative tourists.
    I’ve got a friend, Richie Catcavage, who’s a brilliant screenwriter and a brilliant drunk—and not necessarily in that order, which is why he keeps turning up on my doorstep. In one of his many unproduced scripts, he wrote a piece of dialog.

    “Beverly Hills is a place where nobody runs for president because they don’t want to move to a smaller house.”
    A drunk or not, he’s probably right.
    I turned north off Sunset and wound my way up the hill to Dove Way. A fire engine sat at the corner, but its emergency lights were off, and the crew was busy rolling up hoses. About a dozen people were standing outside my neighbor’s house, which had its gate open and lights on. I recognized one of the men as the owner, and when he saw me, he smiled and waved. A television truck sat nearby, its crew taking shots of mostly nothing. But that’s Beverly Hills. A movie star burns his toast, stop the presses.
    My place sits on two landscaped acres hugging a hillside, but the ten-foot ivied walls, thick privacy foliage and screened gate keep it from being seen from the street. It’s a 17,000-square-foot Spanish hacienda with a little Hollywood eccentricity thrown in.
    Elevators in private homes were pretty rare in 1922, especially ones between the master suite and an underground sixteen-car garage—with both entrances hidden. But whoever had needed this kind of egress had also been particular about lift aesthetics. On the ceiling, there’s a painting of a bare-chested, gold-helmeted conquistador astride a rearing, fire-snorting stallion. And clutching him from behind is a Vargas-inspired, exceptionally buxom, mostly unclad young lady, head thrown back in ecstasy, a rose clenched between her teeth. Add in the extra-thick tapestries on the walls, and the effect is apparently to render the conveyance both erotic and soundproof—a design nuance I have yet to see fully explored on HGTV.
    1001 Dove Way is one of the original “North of Sunset” properties, and over the years, it’s had a litany of owners, including some fairly famous ones. But to me, none of the prior inhabitants is as intriguing as J. C. Stinson, Howard Hughes’s personal attorney.
    Legend has it that during Howard’s early paranoid stage, to avoid subpoenas, he lived