But enough sightseeing. It's time for the local midday ritual. At
one p.m. sharp, the conga line of imported cars queue up at valet
parking stands at Spago and Crustacean and a dozen other
restaurants, the strivers leaping out and heading for lunch. Martin
was hesitant to name specific restaurants - "Because then people go
there to hunt me down," he says - but, with just a little pressure,
he names quite a few.
"There's the Farm of
Beverly Hills, very nice, good, wholesome
food, California food. There used to be a really nice Chinese
restaurant called the Mandarin. It just recently closed, but it had
been open for years. I was sorry to see it go. One reason we used
to go there was because it was always empty. That's why it closed.
There's the Urth Caffé on Melrose. It's a Zen-health, happening
spot. I've only been there for, like, brunch, Sunday tea."
The Farm sounds good. Parking in a $12-an-hour Beverly Boulevard
subterranean parking structure, I walk onto the patio, which looks
like a dozen other patios at lunchtime in Beverly Hills. But inside
you'd think you were in Iowa: farm implements and pitchforks and
giant farm animals. "Fresh Off the Farm," the T-shirts proclaim, as
young Beverly Hills sits down to lunch. There's a 15-minute wait,
which the attendant says she can assuage by giving me a goat cheese
salad to go. "You can eat in the park," she says. I figure Martin
didn't mean for me to eat in the park, so I wait for the table,
studying the menu and advertisements urging me to send the Farm's
famous brownies as gifts: "If it's good enough for celebs to mail,
it's good enough for you." After lunch, I'm back in the
convertible, and Martin is sending me on an architectural tour,
beginning with, of all places, the police station.
"Beverly Hills is very well run. Unfortunately, they are doing away
with the street parking, turning it into all valet parking, but
they've left some. There is a good police force, and they've got
guys on bicycles, police on bicycles, so it has a very small-town
feel … [The police station is] beautiful, they did a great job with
some kind of Moroccan/Moorish look."
Past Beverly Hills' main gas station - a fantastic Union 76 with an
enormous swooping orange awning - I turn in front of a jet-black
Bentley and into the complex that includes the Beverly Hills City
Hall, with the famous courthouse where the celebrity DWI and
shoplifters are rustled; past the Beverly Hills Fire Department,
where fire engines are gleaming like new Porsches behind glass; and
toward the police station. It's a world unto itself, sort of a
Disneyland of municipal government and law enforcement - everything
in blinding white.
From there, it's on to the Flats, residential streets lousy with
stars and lined with incredible trees, each street different from
the next. It gets my vote as the most beautiful street in
America.
"The Flats are north of Santa Monica, south of Sunset," Martin
says. "I lived in the Flats of Beverly Hills for about 15 years.
They have beautiful, beautiful trees. I used to live on Bedford,
the one with palm trees. Then there's Elm and all of that. All the
streets have matching trees. Like Bedford is completely palm trees,
another street would be completely elm trees, and another street
would be something else … Most of the houses have been modified,
which is an unfortunate thing to happen to Beverly Hills. First, it
started with what we call "authentic" Spanish homes from the '20s
and '30s, and some of them were torn down to build uncontrollable
houses that were too big and too high. It used to be a little
community and now it's a little more of a show palace for a certain
kind of taste. But it's still beautiful."
You can see them for the cost of a gallon of gas. But, Martin says,
there's much more, architecturally, to see in Beverly Hills. There
is the ridiculous, like the Rite Aid drug store he described in his
second novel, The Pleasure of My Company, as "splendidly
antiseptic. I bet the floors are hosed down every night with
isopropyl alcohol." There's also the sublime, including the new
Richard Meier-designed Museum of Television and Radio and the
venerable Anderton Court Center, a fantastic space-age Frank Lloyd
Wright-designed tiny shopping center in the middle of Rodeo Drive.
"I'm sure that developers are dying to tear it down, but that would
be criminal. It was built there a long, long time ago. So it's one
of the survivors."
After a long day in the car, I'm ready to run, hike, bike, or yoga.
Martin has lots of suggestions. But mostly he rides, biking from
Beverly Hills into the woody surroundings above and beyond the city
limits.
"I would go up into Bel Air on my bike, from the Flats, or I would
go south, south of Beverly Hills, past Rodeo and down past Wilshire
and into the parks in Century City. All over. For hiking, there's
Runyon Canyon, which is a really nice, big, steep walk, a lot of
people there."
It sounds better discussed about than actually done, so I keep
cruising and see another only-in-Beverly Hills phenom: office after
office of plastic surgery clinics.