Inside LA's A-list celebrity haunts and literati hangouts

I first flew to Los Angeles in 1980, on a creaking Trans World Airlines Boeing 747. This time, with TWA defunct, I crossed The Pond on a British Airways Airbus A380, a craft so imperious that you cannot tell you have left the ground, and whose gust alleviation system means you cannot tell you are in the air. 

Back in 1980, true to the pop culture cliché, I rented a Ford Mustang and drove from Los Angeles to San Francisco and back in 24 hours on the Pacific Coast Highway, a distance of 800 miles. Arrested for speeding, I found myself at the wrong end of a Remington 870 Police Magnum 12-gauge shotgun – so I never went back. Then, recently, a friend invited me to an exhibition opening and I thought, why not? I still find Los Angeles place names heartbreakingly romantic: Arroyo Seco, Redondo Beach, Studio City.

The exhibition was at Venus Over LA, a new gallery space downtown. Neil Simon, the American playwright, once said there were six million interesting people in New York and 72 in Los Angeles. All 72 were present. Just as nothing prepares you for the scale of Los Angeles, so nothing prepares you for the scale of Adam Lindemann’s gallery: it is to a Hoxton studio what the state of California is to Hyde Park. This Downtown art scene is as aspirational as the movies once were, and instead of casting couches they have private views. 

But there are other ways to experience “culture” in Los Angeles. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art are fiercely competitive, if conventional. Frank Gehry’s 2003 Walt Disney Concert Hall and The Broad art museum are good options, although the latter is off-putting if you find booking in advance for timed tickets a chore and a bore.

What I wanted to explore were quirkier, more personalised versions of culture, of the kind created when an ambitious man makes an outrageous fortune from the leading technology of his day. What does he do with his money? Well, a century ago, oil gave us John Paul Getty. And today, television has given us Jay Leno. Getty built the Getty Villa and Leno built his Big Dog Garage. Each could be a square bracket with “Los Angeles Mentality” contained in the space between them. 

Jay Leno, whose taste for denim and a jutting jawline make him instantly recognisable, was inducted into the Television Hall of Fame in 2014. A defence witness in the Michael Jackson trial, where the defendant said it was all in order to sleep in an oxygen tent with a pet chimpanzee, Leno made his reputation in stand-up and then as a popular host of The Tonight Show. 

He has collected 169 cars and 111 motorbikes, stored in vast industrial buildings on the perimeter of Burbank’s Bob Hope Airport. These cars are the stars of the hysterically popular Jay Leno’s Garage, a web and TV series that launched in 2014. There are car collections on all continents, but none quite like Leno’s. He has retainers trained in hot-rod culture and machinists who are alumni of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. His cars and bikes are fettled to a state of hallucinatory, untouchable perfection. The Big Dog Garage is only accessible if you are fortunate enough to know its amiable proprietor, but as a hermetic collection of inhumanly perfect static automobiles – like flies trapped in amber – it seems essentially Los Angelean: a miniature of the city’s preoccupations. 

Getty made his first million before he was 25. “The meek,” he liked to say, “shall inherit the earth, but not its mineral rights.” On a thrilling site overlooking the ocean at Pacific Palisades, he built with oil money a pastiche reproduction of the Villa of the Papyri. Inside are 44,000 Etruscan, Greek and Roman artefacts. And because we are in Los Angeles, there is a central parking garage below the outer row of Roman columns. With maximum simulacrum, the grounds are designed to look as if an archaeological dig is in progress. The Villa opened in 1974, but Getty never actually visited. Find the metaphor there.

After a visit, you will need to eat. It was recently estimated that there are 9,657 restaurants in Los Angeles. I can suggest a good edit: The Polo Lounge and Gjelina. The sequoia forests of California have some of the oldest living things on the planet, apart from the lunch guests at The Polo Lounge in The Beverly Hills Hotel, Elmer Grey’s 1912 Versailles of local hospitality. 

Since walking was once thought a misdemeanour here, I strolled from my hotel along Rodeo Drive. Here the stores are lined up like glittering sarcophagi that consume passers-by and spit them out again, stunned but with branded carrier bags. Soon, the walk becomes residential: silent prestige properties, with sprinklers running non-stop even in a drought. 

And then you see the hotel. Liz Taylor’s father once ran an art gallery in the lobby; President Nixon’s aides, Haldemann and Erlichmann, were lunching in booth No 2 when Watergate broke. This is surely the Californian equivalent of “Queen Elizabeth slept here”. A deluxe burger in the courtyard is fine and must be followed by a visit to the pool, perhaps the most photographed water feature in the world. Here, post-Oscar on March 29 1977, Faye Dunaway was snapped by Terry O’Neill in disarray at breakfast. He wanted to capture her mood of “dazed confusion”. Visitors are told that photography is now forbidden, although there may be an exception for morning-after Oscar celebrants.

Gjelina, meanwhile, is in Venice Beach – so called because, in 1900, its developer, Abbot Kinney, indulged the whimsical conceit of making canals. He dredged 16 miles of waterways and imported gondolas and gondoliers from the real Venice. The fake Venice had a bath-house to accommodate 5,000 and a replica of St Mark’s Square. But Venice was unsuited to the coming age of the automobile and by 1930, as its canals were becoming as malodorous as the originals, they were filled in and Venice became a backwater.

The restaurant has a nameless façade with graffiti on it, because that now signifies sophistication. Inside, it’s busy with rich, bejewelled women drinking rosé, but so laid-back it is nearly horizontal. Tapenade on toast costs $15 (£11); a pizza comes with lamb sausage and confit tomato. The other contents are assiduously listed and contain at least two that are unfamiliar – rapini (a green cruciferous vegetable) and asiago (a cow’s milk cheese). 

You are never allowed to forget that traffic is the gel holding LA together. A journey is not bowling down that great big freeway in the pink Cadillac of the imagination, but a deadening fender-to-fender near-death stall from stoplight to stoplight on bad roads. With luck, you enter a trance-like state. Author Joan Didion, a Californian native and an expert of mood and nuance, wrote: “A good part of any day in Los Angeles is spent driving, alone, through streets devoid of meaning to the driver, which is one reason the place exhilarates some people, and floods others with an amorphous unease.”

It was amorphous unease I felt in the Cadillac Escalade SUV on the way to LAX in fog. Half an hour before, the Spanish Colonial Revival tower of Beverly Hills City Hall (1934) had been twinkling in hot morning sunshine. As I checked in for my flight, I remembered watching, with ineffable sadness, an elderly man driving his immaculately restored Austin-Healey 3000 up and down Rodeo Drive at 7.30am… the only moment the strip was traffic free. 

At the time, I was having coffee on the sidewalk outside my hotel – on a patio squeezed between posters for Rolex and Michael Kors – and a man in a laundered Guantánamo-style jumpsuit arrived with a pot of paint to refresh the very kerb he had painted this time last week. In Los Angeles, futility beats utility hands-down.

Essentials

British Airways (ba.com) flies twice daily from the UK to Los Angeles, with a third daily flight starting this winter. Fares cost from £460 return, including taxes and charges.

Jay Leno’s Big Dog Garage, 3160 North Damon Way, Burbank, CA 91505. By private arrangement only, but Jay Leno’s Garage can be seen weekly on CNBC.

The Getty Villa (getty.edu/visit/villa), 17985 Pacific Coast Highway, Pacific Palisades, CA 90272. Admission free, parking $15 (£11.50) per car, $10 after 3pm.

The Polo Lounge (001 310 887 2777; dorrchestercollection.com), Beverly Hills Hotel, 9641 Sunset Boulevard, CA90210. Open daily 7am-1.30am.

Gjelina (001 310 450 1429; gjelina.com), 1429 Abbot Kinney Boulevard, Venice Beach CA 90291. Open daily 8am-midnight.