The Mind's Eye

IN WHICH THE SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA OUTER IS FOUND TO BE ITS INNER

TRISTAN VOX

In a comer of Palm Springs, past the dry riverbed that is the eastern border of this opulent oasis, there is a bumpy little street named for heaven, called Cielo Drive. Near the end of Cielo Drive there is a house that taught me the structure of the spirit of Southern California. The house was designed by Craig Ellwood, one of the greatest of the region's great rectangularists. It is a stark, radically horizontal building situated high above the town, under the protection of a loaflike hill; its grand rooms, its courtyard (always hung heavy with bougainvillea), its pool, and the precincts around it consecrated to the rituals of the sun are all set within the same parallel planes, two long white brick lines that are voluptuous in their volume and soothing in their sleekness. They give onto, as the middlebrow novels say, all of the valley floor, around which the leathery desert mountains lounge; in the early-morning haze the peaks show extraordinary hues of the kind that makes one think that the luminists of the last century really did deliver the evidence of their eyes.

The striking feature of this house is the ambiguity of its internal divisions. With the exception of the guest quarters, which are bounded by the same white brick, the divisions within the space are marked by massive walls of glass, which in places slide open in the manner of doors. This produces a rather odd experience of physical circulation. You never quite know when you are inside and when you are outside.

I have observed the same blurring of boundaries in many other tabernacles of California luxury. Primarily because of their walls of glass, a signature of many styles of Angeleno modernism, and because of the intense importance of their porches, houses of dramatically different design share this quality: the interpenetration of the inner and the outer. The reason, it would seem, is a mixture of the aesthetic and the ecological—a friendliness with the landscape, a close companionship with nature, with mountains and deserts and beaches, that only the rich can claim. But, prostrate before the orb of day within this Ellwood enclosure, I thought of another reason. It was that the local architecture is the local heart writ large.

Writing (as only he can) of this architecture, Reyner Banham has identified what he calls the "glass-box aesthetic." This aesthetic, which has been elevated in Southern California to an ideal of life, is based upon a horror of opacity, a frantic dream of disclosure. A literal interpretation of these houses would indicate that the glass is there for the insider looking out, for the transformation of the surroundings into a spectacle. A short stay within, however, will complicate the matter. It turns out that the design serves just as nicely for the outsider looking in. The inhabitants of these dwellings appear to be on display. A strong reciprocity of attention results; the threshold of trespass becomes difficult to define; the people in these places regularly revolve between the role of exhibitionist and the role of voyeur. (In Hitchcock's Rear Window, set in an eastern city, the gimmick of a broken leg was required for the voyeurism to be plausible. In De Palma's Body Double, set in the hills of Los Angeles, only the ordinary houses of the location were required.) It is not a big step from the glass wall to the telescope, with which many of these fancy piles are outfitted. The telescope is a socially accepted instrument of access here, the perfect symbol of the intolerability of the unknown. There is almost no such thing as prying.

The question of priority is difficult to settle. Did the people create the buildings or did the buildings create the people? At any event, in Southern California both are characterized by a certain porousness. There is, in the emotional existence of many of the natives, a loss of definition, a mingling of the inner with the outer. The anthropologist will observe between drinks that there is no more exalted attribute that may be attached to these people than "openness." They are more or less dead to the joys of the closed. Similarly, here the inner recesses of your soul are a part of your "presentation," which is Hollywood's term for the way one human being encounters another; and your "presentation" is a primary preoccupation of the inner recesses of your soul. The public and the private, in brief, are differently arranged; the private is brought out, the public is brought in.

The arrangement works best and most beautifully for the houses. For the people, the blurring of the boundaries has had the consequence of promoting a confusion about the proper station of appearances. The practices of intimacy have been interfered with. In this part of the world, conquest is frequent, but it is strangely futile. When finally one of those admirable women in the silk shirts removes the silk shirt, there is another silk shirt underneath. You desire more. She removes that silk shirt, and there is another. Still you desire more. Again there is another. She wishes to please, but she is shrinking. You have seduced the Southern California version of a Russian doll. It appears that there is no getting past the silk. What you saw was what you got. This is a place where beauty is decidedly not the promise of happiness.

No doubt the women have the same complaint, and no doubt I exaggerate. Moreover, this is hardly the whole story. Their glass walls notwithstanding, the masters and the mistresses of these extravagant environments are not exactly transparent. Indeed, there is an entire face of Southern California about which these pellucid structures deceive. It is in the widespread talent for intrigue. The fluid relationship of the public to the private has not had a simplifying influence; it has produced instead a chilling competence for games, for the manipulation of meanings. But that calls for a different chapter in the architectural history of the area. For this face, too, metaphors in buildings abound—in stucco, generally. The ornate and labyrinthine houses of the Spanish Revival nicely represent the Angeleno art of the stratagem. Raymond Chandler set most of his schemers in these structures.

The practices of intimacy have been interfered with. In this part of the world, conquest is frequent, but it is strangely futile.

But it usually rains in Raymond Chandler, and here is the radiance of Palm Springs, and I will not have my Ellwoodinduced enchantment disrupted.