As an English girl who trips over her feet if she wears high heels and couldn't imagine a more humiliating idea than a pool party, the last thing I expected was to fall in love with Los Angeles. I arrived late one evening at a looming pink hotel called The Cadillac on Venice Beach. The next morning I pulled back my curtains and saw what might have been a cartoon city: outside the men were super-hero shaped, the women had already been Photoshopped, and sun-baked children performed back flips on roller skates.
I'd been offered a place at the American Film Institute, to be a screenwriter, but I hadn't yet decided whether to take it or not. Did I really want to live in LA? The carnival of bodybuilders made me think it would be a mistake, but the light outside my window was entrancing. LA is wrapped in a meditative sort of sunshine — the result of air trapped between ocean, mountains and desert. The light makes everything luminous, yet feels apocalyptic, as if you're stood in the eye of a storm.
A week after first setting foot in the city, I moved to an apartment in East Hollywood, on the edge of Thai Town and Little Armenia, near a liquor store called The Pink Elephant where the poet Charles Bukowski used to buy his drink. The first thing I loved about LA was the light, but I stayed because it's a storytellers' city. If you're stuck in traffic on the corner of Hollywood and Western and get a sense of déjà vu, it could be a while before you realise you're thinking of a movie rather than a memory. Is it Double Indemnity or The Postman Always Rings Twice? You can stay at Las Palmas, the motel that was Julia Roberts' home in Pretty Woman, or get drunk in the King Edward Saloon, a bar from John Fante's Ask the Dust. People speak in stories, complete with turning points and character arcs, as if they're constructing themselves in front of you. They discuss the 'third-act twist' of their marriages or the 'emotional back story' of their girlfriends. Angelinos make themselves up and fine-tune their plot lines as they go along.
One of the best places to eavesdrop is Canters Deli, a 24-hour cafeteria on North Fairfax. It's been an LA institution since 1931. Any morning, you'll find producers discussing celebrities over omelettes alongside dilated-eyed hipsters hunched over cheesecake, muttering about their unfinished screenplays, and little old couples bickering about their air-conditioning bill while sharing plates of lox. The low-ceilinged rooms are usually scattered with half-recognisable faces. The last time I ate there, an ancient fur-clad woman was kissing a boy who was young enough to be her son and the family at the next table were trying to work out who she was — a cookery-show presenter from the 60s? Or was she from a daytime soap? Nobody was sure what part she'd played, but she was certainly performing for us that morning — flicking her hair, kissing her lover, knowing we were all watching. Untangling the layers of LA, the stories within stories, is half the fun of the city.
Los Angeles is not the Barbie-doll city of postcards and brochures. It's much stranger. Driving down Wilshire Boulevard, in the heart of Hollywood, you'll see a bubbling lake called the La Brea Tar Pits, which spits out prehistoric bones — ice-age sloth toes and snake vertebrae — for anthropologists at the Page Museum to sort through. You can hike up to the Griffith Park Observatory and see the solar system, drive an hour out of Hollywood to go rock-climbing in Joshua Tree National Park, or go drinking in Korea Town and hardly hear an English word all night. You can find David Hockney's perfect blue swimming pools displayed in the LACMA, or learn about the science of memory at the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City, where over half the exhibits are fictional. Exploring the Museum of Jurassic Technology is like exploring LA itself: you can't tell what's real, and what's a story. All you know is that it's nothing like you thought it would be.
After returning home to London, I missed LA. As a way of keeping hold of the city for a while longer I added my own imagined layer to Los Angeles, a novel called The Pink Hotel, about an English girl who turns up on Venice Beach and falls in love with a half-imaginary, half-apocalyptic city, where, with a little inspiration, a girl can be anything she wants to be.
Anna Stothard is the author of The Pink Hotel (£11.99) and Isabel and Rocco (£6.99) both published by Alma Books.
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