Modern Living: CANDIDE CAMERA: IN SEARCH OF THE SOUL

I start by driving up the shore from Santa Monica to Malibu just because I like the drive. That area, along the shore, is my idea of California. It has the free impermanence of the place. The beach houses stand wall to wall on the sand, weather-beaten dwellings right next to opulent villas. The cliff on the other side is raw, crumbling dirt, and it periodically dumps its houses right down on the road. I get the feeling that the whole state may subside into the ocean some day.

I follow an old Volkswagen bus north to Malibu, where it U-turns and pauses at the water’s edge. Four surfboards on top, four kids with long hair inside. I ask the nearest surfer on the beach, “Why do you do it?” Terry Sinclair, a college boy with long dark hair, answers: “Because I wrecked my leg motorcycle racing.”

Back on the highway, I am distracted not by traffic, but by birds. In bathing suits these are not just any girls. California Girls. There is a difference. Maybe it’s the orange juice. Or the incessant sunshine. Or the surfing and the skiing. But there is something transporting about a California Girl; the legs are longer, the eyes clearer, the skin more exuberant. Maybe an out-of-towner can become a California Girl if she comes here early—say at about age three. After that, it’s too late. She can be beautiful. And healthy. And sexy. But she can never quite be that combination of maximum looks and minimum restraint, that tranquil body and restive psyche that is the California Girl! As difficult as it is to be a California Girl, it is harder still to stay one—even for the natives. Hence the amount of time she spends fending off wrinkles, pounds and ennui.

Cut to: Beverly Hills Health Club for Women

This is a salon for the whole body—and the whole day. The exercise room, carpeted in gold and orange, has 25 California ladies lying in it, most of them gray and hefty, in variegated pastel tights, slowly moving their limbs through the air in time with an instructress.

A young married woman, only 20 pounds away from being a California Girl, comes up. “I spend the whole day here. They have a lot of things to keep you busy—electrologist, beauty parlor, masseuse, steam room, baths, pool, coffee shop. You never have to leave. I’ve learned to use cocoa butter for my skin, take vitamin A for my hair, cuticle cream for my nails, and I’ve bought a new wig. It’s a whole way of life. Except some of these older ladies here don’t really lose any weight. . .”

Then why do they pay $200 a year to be members?

“It’s a way to spend the day. When you’re naked in the steam room, there’s no facades. Some of them spend eight hours a day in here; this place is their whole life.”

Cut to: Fullerton

I go to see the head of a California conglomerate. I expect a Western version of controlled optimism, with touches of anxiety around the edges. Company men out here are always mentioning “the rising tide of Pacific business,” the giant market in Asia barely tapped—”1 out of 18 jobs in the state is linked to foreign trade,” one executive says. And the domestic market promises even more. By 1975, personal income in California will have soared to $110 billion! But David Mahoney, young and relaxed at 46, turns out to be 180° from the kind of executives I know back East. He sits behind a modern oval desk in a palatial three-room suite of offices that he has taken over as board chairman of Norton Simon, Inc., a year-and-a-half-old concern formed from Canada Dry, Hunt Foods, McCall’s and other companies. The place is plush—driftwood walls, deep-pile carpet. The whole bit. He smiles and says, “Let’s go outside.” I follow him into the Norton Simon garden, and he takes off his jacket and we walk among the sunlit ferns and flowers. “Why aren’t you behaving like an executive?” I ask. “Haven’t you heard of status?”

“Out here, the business executives think they’re younger. They feel that all New York businesses are part of one big Establishment. And in a way, they are. In New York all different kinds of industries—Wall Street, Madison Avenue, all of it—are interlocking. They all depend on the big New York banks. Out here, the industries are mostly smaller, and they’re independent of one another. It’s less stifling.”

I watch him saunter around, loose-limbed and relaxed, and I believe the sales talk. “You know, a lot of board chairmen are here not because of the job, but because they want to live in California. Some top executives live here but commute to New York for five days a week. In fact, the speed of travel and communications today has ended the inferiority complex the California businessman used to have. The California industrialist is liberated from that old provincial feeling. And he shows it. He is tanned, he swims a lot, he is healthy—people are interested in the body out here. The California businessman is a rounded guy.” I watch Mahoney stroll through the ferns and I wonder . . .maybe his bottom drawer really is free of Gelusils and Miltown. But what about the executives on the lower level? Are they quite as ulcer-and-anxiety free? Where, after all, do California psychiatrists find their patients?

Cut to: South-Central Los Angeles

Celes King is director of the Los Angeles Rumor Control and Information Center, which serves as a switchboard for the black and Mexican minority organizations. King, a chunky brown man in his 40s, sits in a storefront office on a cheap vinyl couch. I ask him if the blacks are happy. King laughs bitterly. He points out that juvenile unemployment in the black community is 25% to 30%; adult unemployment is 12% to 15%. Transportation is a big part of the problem. Los Angeles is a horizontal city, and it’s huge. Most industrial jobs are ten to 20 miles or more from the black ghettos. Angelenos own 3,000,000 cars. But 31% of the black families don’t have a car, so how can they get to work? “Then,” says King, “there is housing. There are other problems too. The city’s going to have to make some substantial moves fast before it decays. The colonies—that’s what they are, colonies—are on the threshold of exploding.”

Cut to: Black Los Angeles

Saturday night. Watts. Like an anthill. Gaggles of black people gathered and gabbing everywhere—on sidewalks, front steps, bars, service-station lots. Sergeant Warren Larson, white, cool and 30, drives through the gloom. “Shooting at 2024½ W. Florence Avenue,” barks Larson’s radio. “Any unit that can handle please identify.”

Larson finds the victim, a 35-year-old man, sitting on the sidewalk with a groove in his head where one bullet grazed him, and a hole in one leg. The sergeant goes up to talk to the assailant in a two-room apartment. The man is wearing socks and a T shirt. He tells Larson: “You damn right I shot him. I shot at him twice. He tried to break down the door. He had two Molotov cocktails in his hands all set to go. Hey, did I hit him? Where’s he hit?” They lead the fire-bomber, drunk and bleeding, to an ambulance. They leave the man who shot him sitting on his bed alone.

Cut to: The Barrios of L.A.

Half of the 2,000,000 Mexicans in Southern California no longer call themselves Mexican Americans. They use the tougher name Chicanos, and they are renaming their political organization, United Mexican-American Students, MECHA—which means fuse. They are getting mad.

Sal Castro, a slight, handsome Chicano leader, walks with me through the broken, crumbling barrios of East Los Angeles and tells me: “We have a new nationalism now. There is no more Tio Taco, which is our version of Uncle Tom. We may be a few years behind the blacks in our militance, but we are getting there very fast.

“Our unemployment is three times that of the whites in Los Angeles. Our economic situation is so bad that less than half of us are able to finish high school. That means we can’t even break the language barrier with the whites, so we can’t even begin to get the jobs we need—it’s a vicious circle, but we’ll break it any way we can. We have the leadership now, you know. Suddenly, our people are getting educations. In 1967 only 350 Mexicans were going to U.C.L.A.; now there are a thousand. This can make a revolution. We are demanding Mexican cultural studies in grade schools and high schools, and bilingual education. We are demanding better housing and jobs now. We will fight and picket and sit-in until we get them. And we will have our confrontations with the police, too, and they will be worse than those of the blacks because there are 2,000,000 of us here.”

Cut to: Van Nuys Shopping Center

On my way to the center, a pretty girl (California bred, obviously) stands behind a table. “Exercise your constitutional rights,” she urges. How can I resist? “I’m with the people’s lobby,” she explains. “We fill up petitions on contract for different kinds of groups. In California you can get most kinds of laws passed by the people without going near the legislature. The Clean-Air Council and a group called Write for Your Life are behind this one, but there are other smog groups, one called The Right to Clean Air, another called Stamp Out Smog—S.O.S.—and one called People Pledged to Clean Air. In that one, you pledge not to buy an internal-combustion car after 1975. Right now, there are 10,000 people in the state getting petitions signed against smog. The people of Southern California are madder than hell.”

Cut to: San Fernando Valley

A lady I will call Joan Adkins lives in Mission Hills. On her color television set is a bowl of water with a statuette of Jesus submerged in it. She turns out to be the extreme in the antismog movement. “The smog here is very bad,” she tells me. “I’ve been fighting it for twelve years. I have to put cream in my nasal passages, but sometimes my nose swells up anyway, and I chew gum. They say that helps. And I have to keep washing out my eyes. You know, they say that smog can affect your mental outlook, damage the brain.

“I’ve written to everybody about smog,” she continues. “First I wrote my representatives; then I wrote the county supervisors and I wrote to Lyndon Johnson; and then I read where Nixon was gonna declare war on pollution, so I wrote him. I wrote Ronald Reagan and I wrote Mayor Yorty. I wrote the airlines, the car manufacturers and J. Edgar Hoover. Sometimes I picket. We had a couple of breathe-ins downtown; we wore health masks into the county supervisors’ offices. There isn’t much time left. We make more smog, inside our houses, you know, from all those jet cans: beer cans, shaving cream, hair spray. I often wonder if there’s any Communist payoffs behind the smog.”

Cut to: The Freeway North

Zap—the green farmland changes to brown, fields of burned grass roll gleaming up the mountains from the sea. If someone turned off the irrigation faucet for a week, green Southern California would be a dust bowl. I switch to an inland freeway heading north. The concrete knifes through raw-earth hills with drainage pipes running down the sides to keep the hills from washing away. A hundred miles north, the land is flat and planted in cotton and grapes and fruit trees. I head for Yosemite, and make it by dusk, 7 o’clock.

Joe Cody, who’s camping next to me under the tall cedars, has driven here with his wife and child in a Camper bus all the way from New Hampshire, just to climb around on these rocks. He has degrees in chemistry, biochemistry and physics that could be bringing him at least $15,000 if he worked—but he would rather climb mountains. “Every climber in the world aspires to come to this valley,” he says. “This is the best. El Capitan, the high rock with the sharp nose that you passed on your way in, is the most famous climbing rock in the world. We may try to find a house somewhere near Yosemite. Every kid who climbs dreams of coming here.”

Cut to: The Think Tank

I head out to the Rand Corp., dominant think tank of Southern California—and probably of the world. Here at Santa Monica, with the glittering Pacific in view, everything is in the future tense—very tense. Nobody bothers me when I park in the lot, but when I enter the sun-washed flowerpot-pink cement two-story building, I am met by a uniformed guard. Employees no longer have to wear badges; but visitors do. The atmosphere seems antiseptic, full of right angles, and suffocatingly quiet. But it’s not quite as uptight as it appears. This is, after all, California and the deep-thinkers are dressed in California motley—everything from shirtsleeves to Brooks Bros, suits. One man, an administrator no less, has been known to pull into the parking lot on a motorcycle and in a black leather jacket. The guard leaves me, and all formality falls away as I greet Anthony Pascal, a 36-year-old mental machine with a great, comical handlebar moustache and electric curls shooting out all over his head. He sits down and says, “Name the topic, and I’ll tell you what’ll happen.”

I think, and say “Riots.” He shoots back: “Rioting could well reemerge. In the ’70s, with fewer jobs available, employers will exercise their prejudice more; there will be more minority unrest, and more trouble.”

“Education,” I say, warming to this cosmic one-sided game of pingpong, and he says: “There will be more and more private money in education in the ’70s, because education is getting too expensive for the taxpayers to bear any more of the burden. You may see the Government issue vouchers to people, worth so much for private education. This system would spawn a whole new generation of private schools, which in turn will leave the way open for far more innovative teaching methods than we’ve seen.”

Guaranteed wage? “It will come. And when it does, it will pull the poor and the lower-middle class back together, because it will help remove the stigma of unemployment.”

Leisure time? “The 30-hour work week will not come. People will enter the labor market later and later as education grows. And they may retire earlier, but they will continue to take their benefits in the form of money rather than a shorter week.”

Marijuana? “It will be legalized. It has to be, once Nixon reduces the penalty. Without the motivation of a stiff penalty, the law becomes impossible to enforce, like a law against scratching your nose in your own house.”

Religion? “A whole new religious movement is beginning. We will see the further decline of organized Protestant denominations; more and more Eastern-religious and pseudoreligious movements will take hold.”

I leave, located somewhere in the future, and when my feet meet the pavement outside, I return to the present with a jarring thud. I make the adjustment in a microsecond. California is billed as a now scene. But the fact is, everyone living here has one foot in now and another in tomorrow. Here, you get the feeling, is the authentic international dateline. Here the future begins. As I walk away from Rand, the prospect seems kind of pleasing after all.

Cut to: Farmland Southeast of San Francisco

The old Victorian farmhouse is a wreck. It is bare wood now, so you can hardly tell it was ever painted. The yard is all high weeds, covered with dog droppings, buzzing with flies. A radio plays through the broken screen door. I can’t raise anybody so I go around back, where I find Bill McCorry and Bill McCorry Jr., the owners. The old man wears a cowboy hat and boots, the son has a flattop and cowboy boots, but a city shirt. I ask the son how he’s making out.

“Oh, we’re gettin’ by. We got 5,000 acres here, some rented, some owned. We got 300 heada Hereford, and some hogs. We raise a little barley. Dad an’ me do most of the work, but we got two men who help us part time.” One of the ranch hands materializes at his side like a movie extra and sharpens his knife on a pocket stone. It is 100° in the yard. “There’s not much money in ranchin’ around here,” continues McCorry. “One trouble is the rain. In a year we don’t get but ten, eleven inches. We get a lot of fires. A fire last year burned 9,000 acres around here. But we get green grass in November; it lasts till spring.”

“What I like about ranchin’ is you’re not workin’ with the public; you’re not all boxed in, crowded in. An’ listen, we have some fun. My wife and I go to Vegas every year. You get hooked on farmin’, really. I’m the third generation on this farm; my grandfather came here from Ireland in 1882 —he had a family of ten. You know, I’d hate to see even one field sold away from the ranch.”

Cut to: Downtown San Jose

A young man, Dennis, sits on the front porch in a floorlength white robe, with blond hair flowing past his shoulders. “Why are you wearing a dress?” I ask. “I’m a witch,” he answers. “In fact, you’re just in time to see one of my ceremonies. Come on upstairs.” I follow. “Don’t worry, I’m not a black witch, I’m a white witch. Most of us are. Our powers diminish when we use them selfishly.” We come into a room draped with silk cloths. A dozen people—housewives, girls, young men—are sitting in a circle on the floor. Lying in the middle is a blonde, Leslie, around 20. Dennis joins the circle, all 13 witches join hands, and Dennis chants, “Spring equinox, golden son of the mountains, illumine the land!” The blonde, whose name is Leslie, says, “Little things are going wrong, and I know it can’t be just bad luck.” “Leslie’s karma has been messed up,” Dennis explains. “We have to locate the spirit.” The whole group slides closer to Leslie, and all place hands on her body. “Where do you feel it?” he asks. “In my stomach and thighs,” says Leslie. “Oh, boy!” says Dennis. “I want you to just breathe in and out, really hard.” Everybody presses down on Leslie. “You’re hurting my stomach,” she groans. Finally the spirit is out; the group brushes it away with ostrich plumes. “All you have to do now is live, Leslie,” says Dennis. She limps downstairs, and he smiles: “It works every time.”

Cut to: Chinatown in San Francisco

Steep, narrow streets, wrinkled old Chinese selling vegetables, white matrons walking with their arms full of laundry, families of tourists admiring the shops and looking for a Chinese restaurant. People smile, stop and talk on the street; it is predictably peaceful. But in Portsmouth Square, 200 people mill around a rostrum. On the platform are an army bugler, a line of speakers and a big sign that says:

MEMORIAL SERVICE FOR OUR COMPATRIOTS MASSACRED BY THE CHINESE COMMUNISTS.

A dozen red flags are waving in the air. A young Chinese woman grabs my arm. “The Red Guard,” she says, and leads me away. “This is not a good place to be. I knew there would be trouble. All of Chinatown is divided.” Divided? “Yes.” We walk up the hill toward Grant Avenue. A young Chinese with long hair, George Woo, joins us. The year before, he helped start a radical youth movement called Wah Ching in Chinatown.

“Chinatown is a whore!” he yells. “The Gray Line tours are pimps, and the tourists are customers. This is the only ghetto in the world with tours. Most Chinese live in miserable apartments. The average Chinese over 25 has had 1.7 years of education. We won’t take it any more. Now, for the first time, we demonstrate. And we sue the city.”

Cut to: Laguna Hills Retirement Village

They come from all over the country to Ross Cortese’s Leisure World, where they can play tennis and golf and sit by the pool all year round: 7,000 homes, everything they could ever need, and it’s all walled in.

The old men sit in the sun. Their skin is brown and pebble-grained like a football. Harry Weiss, in black knee socks, blue shorts and pink shirt, comes by the pool and says, “It’s heaven on earth. I got more friends here in four months than I had in L.A. in 24 years.” Near by, in the clay-modeling shop, Mrs. Margaret L. Saulino, a big lady from Warwick, R.I., sits making a vase. “Tuesday morning is sewing, Tuesday afternoon is knitting,” she says. “I used to take Spanish lessons too, but I didn’t want to tie myself down.” Her glasses hang from a pearl chain. “The only thing I miss is October. You know, when the leaves turn.”