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POSTCARD FROM | CABANA TRAVEL | WORLD OF CABANA
“Maybe it’s because we all just lost a huge swath of Los Angeles that I’ve been thinking back on the LA of my youth, of the city and world as I dreamed it then,” writes Chris Wallace. The writer and photographer takes a road trip back west, sharing a personal postcard from his Los Angeles, an ode to now, and then.
BY CHRIS WALLACE | CABANA TRAVEL | 2 MAY 2025
Who knows what I was thinking? I wasn’t, clearly. I was dreaming. Driving-while-dreaming, in fact. About the LA in which I grew up, about the artists and designers who had constructed the LA in my mind, the LA in which I’d seen myself in my youth, about the artists who had built the world in which I’d sort of built myself.
So, dreaming and driving, I thought it would be a romantic idea to take Sunset out to the coast, to drive through Beverly Hills, past the hawkers selling maps to the stars’ homes, navigating my own personal star chart from Hollywood, through Brentwood and Santa Monica canyon. I forget that Sunset, from about Chautauqua on, is closed, that the entirety of the canyon there and all of the Palisades above it is a no-go zone, under military control — shut off since the fires that razed these neighborhoods to their foundations.
Who knows what I was thinking? Maybe it’s because I lost my father recently that I’ve been a bit... abstracted, that I’ve begun to lean back on my various surrogate fathers, the men whose example I looked to in forming my ideas about how to live and see and think, about what is of value and what is not.
Maybe it is because we all just lost a huge swath of Los Angeles that I’ve been thinking back on the LA of my youth, of the city and the world as I dreamed of it then. I know, you can never go home again, but, when I went back to LA in middle of March, it wasn’t so much the terrestrial city I traveled to, but in search of the perspectives that made me. Or maybe I’ve always been a bit lost in my own Angeleno dreamland.
One of the most meaningful articulations I’ve ever seen of that dream of LA, and the lifestyle to be lived there, came courtesy of the late great designer Paul Fortune. Even before I knew him, the green 1959 Cadillac he’d plopped into the roof of the Hard Rock Cafe at the Beverly Center felt like my own personal landmark, the threshold between my childhood neighborhood of Park la Brea and points beyond.
Later, when I did come to know Fortune, while working at the restaurant he designed, Les Deux Cafés, in Hollywood, I got to see up close the world that he had constructed, in the cafe, and at his home and ever-evolving workshop in Laurel Canyon. It was through Fortune that I met some of the most important people in my life at the time — including the filmmaker John Maybury who was then living in Fortune’s guest house, and who I began working with while he was writing a biopic about Aleister Crowley — at his incredibly casual and effortlessly elegant gatherings at his home.
I was probably too innocent and overwhelmed with everything then, in my early and mid 20s, to recognize how revelatory all of that was for me. But what I did focus on were the details, the vignettes in his magical home, which he had arranged just so, but which he had then left to live lives of their own. In fact when I try to tell people now about Paul Fortune’s vibe or ethos in a single nugget, I seem to always reach for his sangfroid when a party guest spilled a full glass of red wine on his white couch that as the best depiction of his signature ease. I think of him telling me, more than once, to get the best possible things, but to really use them. “Live your life, darling.”
Of course, I was in awe of his things. The Henry Dreyfuss touch tone phones he had, and loved — one, in a kind of buttery yellow, and another in coffee brown. His Lichtenstein lithograph of the Arizona flag. His Martz & Martz lamps. The swoopy paper lantern in the library area. But really it was his way, that so enchanted me then.
I don’t think I’d ever (before or since) met someone so elegantly put together, had never seen anyone else wear a brown suit in the late 90s, or known anyone to walk into Louis Vuitton (then the province of his friend and client Tom Ford) and walk out in a new suit. Had never seen anyone arrange a bouquet of cigarettes in a tumbler glass for a party. Had never known anyone to love Busby Berkeley and hate pop culture with such glee.
And if I have been sort of chasing that way, the elegance and ease with which Fortune constructed his life, I figured that the closest I could come to making a pilgrimage to his world now would be a stay at The Sunset Tower, Jeff Klein’s marvelous hotel which Fortune helped to renovate and redecorate. To feel the glamorous glow of the Tower Bar, which Mitch Glazer rightly called the most glamorous room in LA, to pass by the reproduction of Fortune’s Lichtenstein, to sit between the wood paneled walls, under photos that Fortune himself had taken of Golden Age Hollywood stars appearing on TCM, to dine off linen tablecloths, as Fortune would always insist.
God, it was bliss to be back in his world for a time and I was flooded with memories of his wonderful wisecracks, his stories about going to dinner at Rita Hayworth’s house with Christopher Isherwood, of his subtle, graceful arranging of the material world around him. And all I could do was kick myself that I haven’t written more about him — and promise to remedy my lack. I have written, a bit, and steadily over the years, about my fake godfather as I called him, the great photographer and teacher Paul Jasmin.
It was through Jazzy that I first met Michele Lamy and Rick Owens, in an informal sort of interview that led to my first stint at Lamy’s Les Deux Cafés, as a busboy the summer after I graduated high school. And it was certainly through Jazzy’s work and worldview that I saw a version of my hometown, of the “Los Angeles” of our dreams, to which I’ve always been in thrall. In his portraits of Hollywood dreamers — sometimes actual celebrities, or just hopefuls — there seemed to me to be a maturity, a worldliness that I might never reach.
The people in his world seemed to live such glamorous lives, all looked so incredibly cool, swanning about Whitley Heights in some sort of doomed pursuit of love or fame or meaning. And I wanted so desperately to be one of them, to look, laconically, out the window of a suite at The Chateau Marmont as they did, driving around in an old car, part of the debauched aristocracy of beautiful and longing youth that Jazzy made into a world, a pantheon. When I am homesick for L.A., it’s not for the city as it exists in brick and mortar and gridlock, but for the one seen, and felt, in a Paul Jasmin picture—it is in his world that I so wished to live, among his subjects I wished to number.
Indeed the Chateau itself is not incidental in this vision — it is more like a physical manifestation of the world he so artfully articulated, part faux fanciful castle, part mythical paradise — the worldwide capital of slightly doomed youth, of glamour and abandon. The high holy church of his dreamers.
So it is is perfectly fitting, in my own dreaming, that Jazzy’s longtime friend and formerly informal student, Sofia Coppola, should be the sort of final boss of Jazzy’s world, and our generation’s grand poet of the Chateau (see: Somewhere). I imagine her sitting in one of the terraced suites overlooking Sunset, as aspirants to the Jazzyworld demimonde are brought forward for a thumbs up or down, admitted into the cool world, or expelled to reality forever.
On my return home, I made my way to the Chateau, to look out the windows on to the world Jazzy had made, to look back on my own youthful longing, wanting to be in that world, wanting to be one of the dreamers. And, as I walked into the garden for the first time in many years, I remembered, vividly, a visit 20 years prior, having dinner with a young actress for my first ever magazine cover story, of running around the lawn of one of the bungalows for a photoshoot with a now disgraced photographer, of the place this hotel has occupied in the imagination for nearly a century.
I thought back on conversations I’d had with the late great writer Gavin Lambert, about his own youthful visits to the Chateau, as an assistant and lover to the director Nicholas Ray. About the various chimes in our biographies — about his own meetings with young stars and disgraced artists. And it comforted me, the cool and calm with which Lambert reflected on the sturm and drang of life, of adolescence and love and Hollywood. Cool which animates his brilliant novels about people living on the fringes of Hollywood. His own set of dreamers, you might say.
It was Lambert’s beautiful, brilliant books where I found the literary version of the world to which I’d been attracted in Fortune’s lifestyle, in Jazzy’s images. And it was under their influence that I had begun to wander west, into the thicket of check points along Sunset boulevard, heading as I had been toward The Santa Monica canyon where characters of his had lived, where Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy had lived, where much of Isherwood’s A Single Man is set.
At last, I made it through the canyons to the Pacific Coast Highway and down to Santa Monica to the recently renovated hotel, The Georgian, which, because of its 1933 design, I was imaging as a kind of Sunset Tower by the sea. When I arrived, I found that there was some truth in that, as The Tower’s Jeff Klein had opened his San Vincente beach club next door, an event which brought The Clintons and the like to The Georgian.
From my grand suite overlooking the pier and the long wide stretch of beach where I’d had my birthdays as a kid, where I’d begun love affairs, begun fantasies, and had them come crashing down, I watched the sun light up the Western sky.
And then I went downstairs to meet friends for dinner. To start new stories. To make new memories. To dream new dreams.
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