Category: Environment

The first job I had in Los Angeles was working at Barley Corn Entertainment, a small documentary production company in Valley Village.

It was the summer of 1994. OJ had just not killed his ex-wife and the young waiter who was returning her sunglasses. I was living in Studio City for $400 a month, and the new job as a PA paid $450 a week.

The woman who hired me, Lisa, was in her mid 30s, married to one of the owners, Sean. She was green eyed, tall, broad shouldered and drove a dark green Range Rover from her home in Pacific Palisades.

She brought along a little white Pomeranian dog to the office every day, a novelty to me, being from the Middle West and the East Coast where dogs were large and stayed at home.

Lisa was a line producer, a job she mastered in daily calm, always even tempered, even when she got cross. She commanded runs and released funds, met with producers, writers, editors, and researchers, and still had time to walk across the street to Gelsons for a cup of coffee and a large spinach salad. Her day ended at 5 or 6, and she would go down to the parking garage and drive an hour back to her enchanted life on Enchanted Way in Pacific Palisades.

There was a Christmas party at their home in 1994. I arrived at the 1960s ranch house, built on a terraced lot, like every other house, little plots of splendor overlooking the Pacific, lots along a hilly street stacked and placed like many dinner plates on the arms of a hash house waitress. 

We were all young and in awe at the $600,000 home with sliding glass windows that opened to a small patio that overlooked the mist and the ocean. 

I drank a lot, and Lisa forbade me to drive home.

I went to bed on the white sectional in the living room, and awoke under a baby blue cashmere throw with a headache. Lisa made coffee, and then Sean invited me to leave “when it was convenient.”

Lisa and Sean, Sean and Lisa, Pacific Palisades. Range Rovers, small dogs, lovely houses that always sat in the temperature range of 58-68 degrees. 

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My co-worker, Julie, was the daughter of two negligent Marin County hippies and had gone to live with her maiden aunt in Santa Monica during high school. She adored Lisa and Sean and hoped that one day she too would live in Pacific Palisades, perhaps leveraging her BA from UCLA and weekly production check to buy a house on Enchanted Way.

A few years later Julie met Aaron, a wealthy man who lived on Lachman Lane in the Palisades. She moved into his house, and they made plans to marry. I went to their house, sat by the pool, and talked with Julie about a reality show idea we never produced.

Aaron wanted Julie to sign a prenuptial agreement before marriage. Julie asked her friends what they thought, and the consensus was “he doesn’t really love you.” They broke up and Aaron married someone else, a compliant wife who signed an agreement, and they may have lived happily ever after.

Julie met a hard drinking Missouri man on a production shoot in Wisconsin, married him, had a baby girl, moved to Kansas City, got divorced after a year, and spent the next 15 years in Missouri pining for the lifestyle she lost. She and her teen daughter moved back to the aunt’s condo in Santa Monica last year.

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Kevin, circa 1995, was a producer at Barley Corn, a year older than me, married to Cori, and they lived in a house in Pacific Palisades. 

He looked like a young Dick Nixon, was kind of a dick swinger at times, bragging about his $400,000 house bought with the wife’s parental endowment. 

I hadn’t seen him in 28 years, but there was a reunion of Barley Corn folks last summer. I asked him about his house, his $400,000 house. 

“It ain’t $400,000 anymore! We sold it and bought a much larger place near the village in Pacific Palisades!”

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In the 1990s I also took a comedy writing class at the home of Bill Idelson on Brooktree Lane in Rustic Canyon.

It was a mid 1950s wood house in a redwood grove next to a creek. It was designed by Mario Corbett and photographed by Julius Shulman. (his photo below).

Idelson, an actor, also had a successful career penning sitcoms, and he had a formula, much of which I forgot, except for his drawing of a man and a moon. “How he gets to the moon is your story!” he said.

We would sit on the patio next to the creek, and with the sounds of water and nature, get instructed.

Idelson had a grown son, a handsome, athletic blond guy who said he would ride the creek during rains in his raft straight down to the ocean.

That was Pacific Palisades: the successful sitcom, the gorgeous house, the beautiful surroundings, the happy-go-lucky son who rode the rain water for fun.

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Pacific Palisades does things to people who live there and people who don’t.

For those of us who only live there vicariously, it is sprinkled with celebrities, hiking trails, valet parking, croissants, gourmet coffees and cheeses, blond boys in collared shirts, hot yoga, scented candles, soccer matches, Will Rogers, polo ponies, Eucalyptus trees, gardeners and caterers, brand new big white houses with black windows and electric steel gates, and smooth faced women in sunglasses driving large SUVs 60 miles an hour down Sunset on their way to Lululemon. There is never smog, heat, homelessness or obesity. The maids commute two hours to clean 10,000 square foot houses that are empty because their owners live in New York City. 

It was, until a few days ago, something you venerated and worshipped, like Harvard University (before October 7, 2023), Berkshire Hathaway, or inheriting ten acres of land atop Mulholland. If only you had that Ivy League degree, or ten $677,000 Berkshire Hathaway shares, or lived on El Medio Avenue so you could walk to the Temescal Canyon Trailhead. You might someday hit it big, marry that blonde girl, date the personal trainer stepson of that HBO celebrity with a lot of fame and money, sell that show, invent that software sold for millions to Meta, or become a partner of that law firm in Century City, if only you had one of these or that you could be the happiest person on Earth and live in Pacific Palisades.

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Since I moved to LA in 1994, there was always a sense to me that people migrated to places rather than improve the ones they lived in. They sometimes did this by changing names, from North Hollywood to Valley Village, or Valley Glen; or converting West Van Nuys into Lake Balboa.

To this day, Los Angeles, for miles and miles, is neglected, filthy, violent. It has no nice parks, hardly any real neighborhoods to walk around. It costs a fortune to live here, to rent or buy is oppressive. People sleep in tents, or on bus benches, they rob stores, and start fires because they are so lost and miserable. 

Seemingly not so in Pacific Palisades. Charming, safe, family friendly, delightful. Nothing catastrophic or out of control. The powers that be lived here and kept it well-tuned and well-functioning. Until January 7, 2025.

Once in a generation weather. Except it happens around the globe every week in different horror scenes. One month it’s Lahaina, the next month it’s Greece, Spain, Western Canada.

But Pacific Palisades? Our Pacific Palisades? Where we go for hikes, where my nephew goes to school, where my gentle, wine sipping bosses lived, where I brought my parents to Rustic Canyon so they could see “the real California?”

We kid ourselves thinking our good luck is our own doing, that we may escape losing our health or our home. We really do live by the whims of fate.

There is one migration that seems innocent, but it is, in a sense malignant, many people of means seeking to escape the bad air hellhole of greater Los Angeles, and it leads to Sunset at PCH where there is no more land, paradise promised at the end of the continent.

Now it is temporarily destroyed. 

Thank God for those who have survived. Life matters most.

We have seen these fierce wind driven fires and their atomic destruction. 

How one small spark can end one era and perhaps usher in another one that may be more humane and sustainable.