sunday times column week two

All in the best possible taste

In the Steve Martin movie LA Story, there is a moment when he enthuses as only he can about one particular corner of Los Angeles, telling his friend, “Some of the buildings round here are over TEN years old! “ It is a good joke but in a city that a hundred years ago was farmland, there is some reason to think of ten years as historic.

Los Angeles became the place to make movies for three reasons, the land was cheap, the long sunny days meant that you could film all day without expensive lights and most importantly it was as far as you could get from New York and the people who owned the patents for film cameras, it was off the radar.

At the end of my street is a castle, huge blocks of granite, turrets, a flying buttress, it wouldn’t look out of place in Scotland, except that it is a three bedroom detached house, the scale is wrong, like Stonehenge in miniature. Next to it is a Surrey style house with Chinese characters in wrought iron on the windows, then a Hansel and Gretel gingerbread style cottage, the overall effect suggests the backdrops used in old movies. All the same there is an exuberance about it that on a good day makes me smile, it’s a bad taste party for houses.

In the nearby historic Hancock Park district, (built in the 1920’s), a Music Producer bought a corner house and decided that what it needed was some kind of make over. He has a gold Rolls Royce and a gold Hummer parked outside, tasteful and understated in the American way. After he moved in he was obviously looking for ways to classy up the property and to the horror of his neighbours and the Hancock Park Conservation Society, he bought a six foot replica of Michelangelo’s David and stuck it on a five foot column outside his house. The neighbours and the locals complained vociferously that he was bringing down the whole tone of the area. In an effort to keep the peace with his new neighbours, he decided to put up a few more Davids to keep the first one company, twenty three to be exact. At Xmas he puts little red Santa hats on each of them. I think of the place as Camp David.

A year ago this week I was invited to a friend’s birthday party at the home of Carrie Fisher, daughter of Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher, a sprawling Aladin’s cave of a gaff, with a bungalow for guests, trippy sculptures and illuminated signs in the massive garden. The first thing you see as you enter the house is a photo of Carrie as Princess Leia from Star Wars alongside Harrison Ford and Mark Hamill. Next to it is an old screen magazine with her and her movie star mom on the cover.

The house is full of odd hidden little rooms. There is a stained glass window of a bishop and a choirboy in an useemly embrace, the kitchen floor tiles sport a prozac pill design.
The house is some kind of three dimensional model of her psyche.

Her parties are as well known as she is. She gives me the tour pointing out the spare bedroom where Liz Taylor would crash between divorces but making no mention of the party two years before when she woke up to find one of her house guests, a gay Republican, dead from an overdose in her bed.


My landlady is an Israeli woman in her seventies who tells me that since 9/11 Americans are too scared. “They are like chickens. In Israel, if you are invited to a birthday party or a wedding, you go. You bring a gun, but you go, because as we say… you cannot die every day!”

On Sunday we went to Malibu to the seaside and at lunch we spot supermodel Heidi Klum, her musician husband Seal and the two baby seals in a Malibu mall being swamped by six paparazzi all taking the same shot.

On the Pacific Coast Highway to Malibu we pass Moonshadows the bar where Mel Gibson had his drinks before being pulled over, blaming Jewish people for all the wars and claiming he owned Malibu. There is a sign that says Welcome to Malibu but someone has changed it so that it now reads, Welcome to Melibu.

I am told that after the success of the film Braveheart it was decided to commission a statue of William Wallace, but that since there were no photographs or other likenesses of the man, what was in fact erected was a statue of Mel Gibson, pocket sized conspiracy theorist and billionaire drunk driver.

That nigt I went to see Shrek the Third with the two eldest of my ginger brood. Mike Meyers does a good generic Scottish accent, I have decided that he sounds like he comes from one of the posher parts of Bathgate. Interesting what they use the accent for in movies. In Happy Feet the fun hating penguins are Scots, and the half man half octopus bad guy in Pirates of the Carribean sounds like a kirk Elder who has had a stroke. Why are we thought of as such killjoys ? What happened to the good old days of Z Cars when every drunk they lifted was played by a Glaswegian, mostly Phil McCall ?

Some Angelenos are a little unclear about where exactly it is that I come from. I have had ‘Scotland, that sounds like a romantic place to me, I’d like to drive there some time!’ and from an actress in the green room, ‘Scotland, is that in Scotland yard?’

My sister mailed me a copy of the Ecosse supplement with me on the cover and I notice that there is a small photo of my cousin Denise Mina just above it. She is from the shorter side of the family and e mails me to say that only people who know us both would realize that the two photos are actually to scale.

As I am reading her article my six year old son Gabriel comes into the living room, sees my picture and shouts, “Hey dad, look, you’re on the front page of a magazine, you’re famous, you’re famous, look!” I suggest he should go and find his mother and tell her the great news.