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City on Wheels. Los Angeles became the first big city of the automobile age. Its citizens worship the fishtail Cadillac, use their cars for almost all transportation (there is one car for every 2.6 persons—the nation's highest average), drive up to traffic lights like ballplayers sliding into second, and regard the pedestrian with suspicion and distrust.
A pearly industrial smog now hangs embarrassingly over the city for days at a time, dulling the sun and stinging the eyes of the population. It is no longer the great open-shop town—labor unions, which cracked its defenses during the war, have consolidated their gains in the years since. It has a new leavening of industrial workers. But its tone, spirit and huge aspirations are unimpaired.
Rich, booming, and afloat with dull-eyed suckers, it is an irresistible target for shady operators, con men, burglars, jewel thieves and tired Eastern torpedoes—all of whom slip into sport coats and slacks on arrival. Murders are often bizarre. Elizabeth Short, nicknamed the "Black Dahlia," became the most highly publicized corpse in the country after a citizen left her slashed body on a vacant lot. A Mrs. Mary James was dispatched with more finesse—her husband thrust her foot into a box containing a rattlesnake, gave her a drink of whisky and then drowned her in the bathtub.
Los Angeles has its own odd set of local customs. It has few basements and fewer furnaces and almost every house has an "incinerator" in the backyard—a reinforced concrete stove with a screened stack for burning rubbish and gaper. Its real-estate men still hang up strings of flags to advertise a house for sale. Its love of the unusual extends even to the young —high-school boys at Van Nuys began dyeing their hair green this spring, to the dismay of parents and teachers.
It is movie struck, and its residents imitate and envy the stars of the screen— though members of "downtown" society and the rich of Pasadena enjoy bristling at them and Los Angeles society pages go out of their way to avoid printing a motion-picture person's name. It is a city full of people from somewhere else and it still has little sense of tradition or of unity.
Dreadful Joy. It has hordes of critics, and they damn it like Victorian belles stabbing a masher with hatpins. Intellectuals, Easterners and British writers, many of whom have lived happily in its sunshine for decades, snarl at its lack of culture, its brashness, its frenzied architecture. Aldous Huxley called it the "city of Dreadful Joy [where] conversation is unknown." H. L. Mencken handed down a one-word verdict: "Moronia."
But Los Angeles has its own brand of magnificence. It is amazingly clean, awesomely spacious. It has ramshackle houses, but in comparison with other big cities, no slums. Its great boulevards wind through miles of windblown trees, bright flowers and sweeping, emerald-green lawns. It is a Western town, with the memory of Deadwood and Virginia City in its bones; in its love of display, its detachment from the past and its obsession with its own destiny, it is simply striking the attitude of the gold seeker and the trail blazer.