Star-dust in Hollywood (1930)

Chapter XV LOS ANGELES— RELIGIONS /^7^HE inhabitant of Los Angeles, though boasting of s-^ J his climate, took little advantage of it. Very few of the lower middle classes — who made up, of course, the greater part of the city — could have travelled as far as the ocean more than once a month. Otherwise, what bathingbeaches the clubs had left to the public would have been totally congested. Our landlord, for instance, perhaps drove complacently to the beach whenever he had a distant visitor to whom he could boast of the ocean. Nor did the people take much advantage of the climate to make the town a delight to the eye. Los Angeles has probably the best flowergrowing climate in the world. Geraniums and bougainvilleas grow almost like weeds, but few Californians seem to have in the real sense a garden-spirit. Under certain circumstances they might hire a man to dig for them, but to dig for themselves as an amusement, to dig and tend for the creation of a private and public beauty, hardly enters their minds. At Bremen, on our way home from a German steamship line, we discovered an odd paradox that in some ways touches a secret of American character. There we found a house dedicated to " the five lazy men of Bremen.' ' The first was too lazy to fetch his water from the river each day, so he dug a well ; the second was so lazy he became tired of pulling his animals out of the holes in the road : he invented a pavement ; the third wearied of cleaning up his house after each flood : he invented the dyke . . . and so on. Americans have that kind of laziness, the expenditure of concentrated effort to gain subsequent ease. Work, raw work, [248]