Amalgamation: LA + LA = LA

Two years ago I was told that I was conceived at the Chateau Marmont. (It was via a souvenir t-shirt for my birthday and a card that read: “Something very special happened here…” Gross, thanks, Mom.) Although I was born in London and spent my first six years there, we moved to LA for pilot season in 1987 so my formative years were spent in between prep schools and back lots and pool parties. I have lived in various places since I left LA at the tender, troubled age of 15, including a TB hospital-cum-boarding school in the British woods, a lakeside cabin on an Indian reservation and the most whitebread, homogenized suburb of Minneapolis called Coon Rapids (freals). But Los Angeles, a place so many people loathe, has always been home to me.

Recently, I was standing on the porch of a friend’s house in Coldwater Canyon, surrounded by the trees and pinecones and as I look up I say, aloud, “I love LA.” The guest I’m speaking with says to me, “well, this isn’t L.A.” And this is what fascinates me. We were standing within a mile of the actual, physical center of Los Angeles and someone is telling me that this isn’t really L.A. I’d been thinking about this more and more because I hear this comment more often than not no matter where I am in the county. Topanga, Echo Park, Downtown, Runyon Canyon, Culver City, Melrose. Well, maybe not Melrose.

Tell anyone who hasn’t been to LA that you live here and they might ask you about the surfing. Or how often you see celebrities. Or if you’ve ever witnessed a drive-by shooting. Plastic surgery. “Isn’t it totally fake out there?” or “Wow, the people are so laid back, huh?” How do these two impressions of a city co-exist if they aren’t both true? Well, they are true and they do exist. And that’s why I love it here, because I can be surrounded by a completely fantastic red carpet world one evening and spend the next morning hiking 20 minutes away.

It might be people who weren’t raised here who tend to deride the parts of LA that are generous and kind and beautiful in hopes of living out some perpetual fantasy of a mythical movie story LA that they came out here to report home about. But I think of Los Angeles perhaps as a chain of islands, surrounded by a desert sea and asphalt waterways. The variety of lives, cultures, influences, colors, shapes, weather, all come together to create what I know as ‘Los Angeles.’ There is no single defining characteristic. And that’s why it’s my home. Whatever that means.