"Try to make me interesting," Martin says, when I finish peppering
him with questions, demanding names, places, details. He provides a
pretty good description of what he calls "Beverly Hills and its
environs," which might do for a normal city. But this is Beverly
Hills. That requires something more, something extra. So I do the
only sensible thing: escape my desk in the flatlands of
Texas, slip
on my best strategically torn jeans, white shirt, and blue blazer,
and fly off to the
West Coast. There, I rent a vintage convertible,
slide on a pair of sunglasses, and insert
Steve Martin's Guide to
Beverly Hills into the cassette player.
"It was a place I would pass through," Martin is saying above the
roar of the 405 Freeway. "There were a lot of shops that I couldn't
afford to go into. I left when I was about 25 and moved to Santa
Fe, New Mexico; and then I lived in
Aspen, Colorado; and then I
came back home, came back to L.A. But you have to understand that
L.A. was very smoggy then, and so it was a place to leave. They
cleaned it up! So when I came back, I was very surprised. They
actually did something about it, and now it seems like it is very
sunny and has bright, breathable days. It made it more like
home."
From the 405, I take the Santa Monica Boulevard exit and drive
east. Turning right on Rodeo Drive - always pronounced Ro-day-o - I
enter a different world. The
Los Angeles of strip centers,
billboards, and disarray becomes orderly, clean, civilized. The sky
is as blue as the topaz in the endless jewelry-shop windows, and
the sun turns the white concrete brilliant, as if the whole scene
were lit like a movie set, making the world's most famous street
come alive. There are flowers and sculptures, and the median is
festooned with
Herb Ritts's and Mario Testino's "Rodeo Drive Walk
of Style" photographs. The three-block-long string of shops that
Martin once couldn't afford to shop at are lined up like starlets:
Gucci, YSL,
Ralph Lauren, and the new Rem Koolhaas-designed Prada
store, an indescribably futuristic structure in which mannequins
are submerged in see-through, Plexiglas-covered manholes in the
floor. Everything seems familiar, because it is - from movies and
television. It's practically a costar in Pretty Woman.