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L.A. seems familiar to the rest of the country. Patches of its bright cityscape are on television all the time, and Woody Allen makes cracks about its well-muscled airheads. L.A. is to the rest of the U.S. as the U.S. is to Europe: both the butt of jokes and the object of envy, derided for its fast-buck vulgarity but secretly wished well just the same.
The clichés describe a small part of L.A., but they are apt enough. The place does have eccentric glamour. The enormous HOLLYWOOD sign stuck on one of the Santa Monica Mountains is odd and funny. "Colonics," a regimen of recreational-cum-therapeutic enemas, is popular among regular people. On Sunset Boulevard nothing seems remarkable about the Professional Waiters School, and on Gloaming Drive in Beverly Hills, the only pedestrians are tanned joggers and dark-skinned servants. Los Angeles has more registered poodles (16,732) than any other city, and plenty of them are dyed the colors of jelly beans.
Even fringe politics seems zanier than elsewhere. At this year's May Day demonstration in MacArthur Park, 200 members of the Revolutionary Communist Party were like heavyhanded caricatures of Commies, shouting, "We spit on the red, white and blue!"
The L.A. Times report of that anti-American chant must have particularly astonished the paper's immigrant readers. They, after all, have come to L.A. with everything staked on a belief that American myths are real. Richard Yen-Shih Koo arrived from Taiwan in 1965. "I saw the good life in the United States," he says without irony, "as heaven."
Heaven it is not. For the new arrivals, the experience has been unpredictable, intense and usually better than what they left behind. Here, the groups that have established themselves most visibly in L.A.:
MIDDLE EASTERNERS. In 1970, 20,000 Iranians lived in L.A. Today's colony is close to 200,000, the great majority political refugees who have fled their country's revolutionary turmoil. Many more are Jews, concentrated in southern Beverly Hills: there, over bins of dates in greengrocers, signs are printed in English, Farsi and Hebrew. In Beverly Hills elementary schools, one in six children is Iranian. Some American parents worry that their children's education is suffering as teachers slow their lessons to accommodate the Farsi speakers. But one Iranian mother retorts, "When we bought their house and raised the price from $1 million to $3 million, they weren't complaining."
Most did not come to forge a better life, exactly, but to avoid death by Islamic firing squad. Ghassem Tehrani, who is editor of an Iranian community newspaper, could not find work in Paris or London. He is unhappy in L.A. "You are too much money-minded here. All of us want to go back," he declares. If it were not for his two sons of Iranian draft age (14 and 16), he claims the family would return. But Tehrani's boys would not fare well in Iran in any case. "I don't think they know enough Farsi to survive."
The Arab community has tripled to 130,000 in the past decade. Mohammed Hussein Saddick, 45, a U.C.L.A.-trained engineer, arrived from Lebanon 19 years ago, before local Arabs had acquired