Walkabout

On California, and Big Sur, Shangri-L.A. and Joan Didion, Laurel Canyon and Elizabeth Taylor, which might just be a metaphor for my dream-time...

But there were aspects of Los Angeles that I loved: a certain frontier quality and the sleepy, small-town charm of it, the palm trees, orange blossoms in the spring, the coffee shop at the Beverly Hills Hotel, the avocado club sandwich at Schwab’s drugstore, the nascent art scene on La Cienega, and, most of all, the amazing variety of our friends. Because both my parents had lived there and worked in the movie business during the golden years of the 30s and 40s, I inherited a ready-made and ultra-glamorous extended family—their friends from the old days. -Brooke Hayward, "Once Upon a Time in L.A.", Vanity Fair