Steve Martin is a wealthy businessman
in Shopgirl and a bumbling detective in The Pink Panther.
He's somewhere in between as he leads us on a trip through
the heart and soul of Beverly Hills.
"I really didn't see
Beverly Hills, at least in my consciousness,
until I was 21," Steve Martin says, recalling his first glimpse of
the place that has become his hometown. We're doing our best to
squeeze into a 45-minute telephone interview a mythical place whose
name alone is a metaphor for fortune and fame.
Martin grew up in nearby
Orange County, where he commuted to jobs
selling trinkets and guidebooks at Disneyland and Knott's Berry
Farm. At 21, he was a comedy writer, freshly hired for The Smothers
Brothers Comedy Hour. Dick and Tommy Smothers invited him to
dinner, and after he cleaned his plate at the storied Regent
Beverly Wilshire Hotel, the brothers did a very Beverly Hills
thing, which still thrills him.
"It was the first time I ever saw anyone treat," he says. "They
treated the writers to dinner. I was 21 years old, and nobody
treated anybody. I thought, 'What a cool thing to do!' I think they
influenced me. Today, I try to pick up the tab as much as
possible."
Now, the actor/comedian/director/best-selling novelist/playwright
can afford to pick up as many tabs as he wants. But I'm willing to
pay my own way as long as Martin shows me where to go.
Investigating his hometown proves to be a task worthy of Inspector
Clouseau, the French detective that Peter Sellers made famous and
which Martin revives this February in The Pink Panther. Beverly
Hills is a place whose boundaries are vague and whose citizens are
elusive. But its charms, Martin insists, are on display for anyone
who visits.
"The strangest thing is, it was kind of a small town [when I first
became aware of it], and the point I'm going to make is, it
actually still is, in its own sweet way," he says.
"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."