Jack Smith’s L.A by Jack Smithe (review)

Reviews 81 Jack Smith’s L.A. By Jack Smith. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1980. 200 pages, $9.95.) Jack Smith’s L.A. collects over sixty “reports and reflections on life in Los Angeles in the 1970s” from the author’s column in the Los Angeles Times. Smith’s portraits of the city are upbeat and affectionate, written by an habitue who knows all the “characters” and the best bars in town. His pieces range from recollections of such vanished places as the Hollywood Canteen, Ptomaine Tommy’s, and the Montmartre to a slapstick account of the Great Air Raid of World War II (when Angelenos repulsed a non­ existent attack of Japanese aircraft). Smith watches migrating whales from a Goodyear blimp, reminisces about newspaper days and the Black Dahlia murder case, and in his one piece of “investigative reporting” digs up the real story of how Lana Turner was discovered (not in Schwab’s drugstore). Smith is on the phone a lot, calling people up and finding things out. And he’s on the move, from Sunset Boulevard to Catalina Island. He’s got a good ear. At Occidental College he overhears two students: “ ‘You know,’ a boy was saying, ‘it’s like, when you die. . . .’ ‘Uh huh,’ said the girl at his side, evidently knowing.” And he writes brisk prose, like the night he’s out at the Coliseum for John McKay’s homecoming as a pro coach: “The sun vanished at last. The low clouds turned from pink to salmon to magenta. The sky was the color of dark tea. The mountains were still visible across the city to the north. Above the peristyle a pale fire burned in the Olympic torch. The Rams, in blue and gold, and the Buccaneers, in orange and white, made ever-shifting patterns against the light-green turf, enigmatic but profoundly logical.” One of Smith’s favorite subjects is what he calls the “Tocqueville syn­ drome” of visiting eastern journalists who can’t wait to get home to write about the cultural wasteland in Southern California and how' “imminent self-destruction” awaits the city. Smith explains the behavior of these aspir­ ing Menckens and Nathanael Wests as a way to “feel better about living in New York or Boston or Philadelphia, especially in February.” But he also happily admits most of the charges. In fact, he wouldn’t have it otherwise. Smith writes that the $76,000 worth of plastic flowers “planted” along Jefferson Boulevard “may help restore our image as one lifeless movie set.” “Keep L.A. kitsch,” is Smith’s motto. “Only an ironist,” he says, “can love Los Angeles.” Still, like many local newspaper columnists writing for a local audience, Smith is basically a nostalgist, weaving memories for readers whose city supposedly has no past. JOHN TRIMBUR Communty College of Baltimore ...