Between Brentwood and Beverly Hills, behind a dingy movie theater and down a series of damp alleys, sits the most exclusive members club in Los Angeles, a place where everybody is somebody. Countless famous people—writers Ray Bradbury and Truman Capote, comedic legends Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon, great beauties Farrah Fawcett and Natalie Wood—call this place home. If you can make it past the gates on a Friday night, you will see Hugh Hefner lying next to Marilyn Monroe. Oil tycoon Armand Hammer can be found with his family in their own private room. Unlike at the San Vicente Bungalows, you don’t have to know Claudia Sachs to become a member. And just a one-time payment gets you in—though it will run you six figures. The only catch is that to be a member of Pierce Brothers memorial park, you have to be dead.
Since the advent of Hollywood, the most beautiful girls and boys around the world have crammed onto buses and airplanes bound for Los Angeles to become somebody. Being somebody in Hollywood doesn’t just mean having a bigger house or a better job. It means that when you’re at a party, women won’t peer over your shoulder to see who else has arrived, and men won’t interrupt you in the middle of a story to get a drink. It means that even if your latest blockbuster fails to perform, and regardless of whether you have a spot on the lot, you will always be treated with respect. It’s no wonder, then, that L.A. has established itself as the status-anxiety capital of the world, a city where people will chase clout to the grave.
For your average status-conscious Angeleno, anxiety begins and ends with sleep. Sure, there are Oura rings—sleep trackers hidden in obtrusive pieces of jewelry. But Angelenos will spend hundreds of dollars more on Loftie sound machines, sleep masks from Violet Grey, and magnesium supplements -recommended by their most RFK Jr.–coded friends. Completely sober - 20- and 30-somethings are excusing themselves from dinner at Chateau Marmont at 9 p.m. so they can get to bed early. The status dinner is no longer about what you’re eating, but when. In Los Angeles, it’s perfectly acceptable to eat dinner out of a tin before the sun sets, standing alone in your high-contrast Calacatta kitchen.
The next jolt of panic comes with coffee. It’s wonderful to be greeted by name by one of the high-cheekboned baristas at Maru Coffee, on Hillhurst. But if you are truly somebody in Hollywood, you will be too important to waste 20 minutes driving to a coffee shop—not to mention the time it takes to find parking. Your house will be too high in the hills, and nobody wants to sit in bumper-to-bumper canyon traffic behind a Harvard-Westlake student who’s eating breakfast, texting, and shaving while driving to school. On the rare days you wake up feeling European and think, Let’s go to a coffee shop, you’ll remember that you might run into someone in line who needs something from you—a friend from USC film school who wants notes on their spec, or an ex-girlfriend who’s on her ninth step and is hoping to make amends. It’s much safer to invest thousands of dollars in a Jura coffee maker and source beans from the Gorigesha Forest. If you’re truly somebody, your personal chef will top the coffee with raw milk before your assistant—who was up hours before you—hands it to you as you get into your Escalade mobile office, complete with first-class seats, Wi-Fi, and a 43-inch flat-screen TV.
Some Angelenos will warn you against drinking this coffee on an empty stomach with the same intensity they warn against refined sugar or gluten or live ammunition. Their advice will come from a nutritionist—a person who spent years helping professional athletes win championships only to end up telling rich people that they shouldn’t eat chocolate pistachio gelato from Bacio di Latte in the middle of the night. This nutritionist will also tell you what carbs are acceptable to eat based on your blood type, and whether to intermittently fast or eat red meat—and which of these diets, at any given moment, are considered not just passé but potentially deadly.
If you’re somebody in Hollywood, you work out. Even though you work out to be thin and attractive, you will never admit this. You will tell people it’s to be healthy. Ten years ago, to brag about your Equinox membership or your spot in a Tracy Anderson class would have been perfectly acceptable. Today you will work out with a personal trainer in a private gym that looks like an S&M dungeon. To publicly exercise is now the domain of influencers, who flock by the dozen to Alo gym, an invite-only fitness studio in Beverly Hills. They will exchange Instagram posts for free personal training and an unlimited supply of leggings. In Los Angeles, a social media following means reservations at Alba and free trips to Costa Rica—but it will not get you into Guy Oseary’s Oscars party.
In the 1990s, if you were writing a movie scene about the quintessential L.A. woman, you would no doubt cut to her at Elizabeth Arden’s Red Door Spa with cucumbers on her eyes after she’d dropped off her 3-year-old at the Center. Smash cut to today. If you’re somebody in Hollywood, you don’t go to a spa. Instead, you have the personal number of facialist Iván Pol, who, even on the day of the Golden Globes, will bring his proprietary face-snatching radio frequency technology to you. Just take a look at the Zillow listings for high-end construction in L.A. If you are somebody in Hollywood, your home will come complete with a custom sauna, massage room, and cold plunge. And when these treatments inevitably fail to halt the passage of time, you will still rest easy beneath your Frette Eiderdown duvet. You know you can call Dr. Lancer and get an appointment the same day.
By and large, Angelenos do not care about food. Of course, there are exceptions—the kind of people who won’t stop talking about the line outside Max and Helen’s despite never waiting in it themselves. These people will post glossy images of patty melts and cinnamon rolls even though their bodies, shrunken by GLP-1s, will let them take only a few bites. The non-foodies usually stick to legacy restaurants frequented by the somebodies of yesteryear, like the Polo Lounge. While the Polo Lounge is half-full of tourists forward-thinking enough to make a reservation three months in advance, they will never get Jeffrey Katzenberg’s preferred table. Another watering hole, the Sunset Tower, has taken a different approach to crowd control: installing hulking men at the front door. If you’re somebody, you will sashay past the sentry and be greeted, by name, by Dimitri. No matter who you are in Hollywood, this will make you feel more alive.
And then there is Erewhon. To be someone in Hollywood, you will have sampled the smoothies full of vanilla collagen and spirulina and paid $23 for a piece of salmon that has sat out all day. Nevertheless, having consulted your nutritionist, you’ll have learned that the smoothies are full of sugar and the salmon is farm-raised. You will realize that the Santa Monica Farmers Market has the same produce at half the price. After going through the hell that is the Hollywood and Beverly Hills Erewhon parking lots, you will emerge with the realization that Erewhon is ultimately just a grocery store. Besides, there’s no way Hailey Bieber got that body eating coconut soft serve, whether it’s dairy-free or not.
Of course, there are Angelenos who go to Erewhon for the people—women with the brazen hope that they might meet a man who not only knows but also cares about NAD+. There will be something pure about this, because most men in L.A. are too afraid of cancellation or blind items posted on Deuxmoi to actually speak to a stranger. As a result of this fear, people across Los Angeles really are still on Raya. If you are a man on the app, you will compete with Olympians and television producers who have found a way to post about their trips to Aspen or their Emmy Awards without seeming like douchebags. If you are a woman, you will be compared to former Victoria’s Secret models and the women on Dancing With the Stars. But do not retouch your photos—remember, if you do manage to match with someone, you do not want to go through the humiliation of being compared to the image of yourself that you created, and to which you will never be able to live up.
If you are starting to think that chasing status in Hollywood means living alone in a house full of strangers you pay to be there, paralyzed by the fear that you will be spotted driving the wrong Porsche on the wrong highway at the wrong time, then you are starting to get the point. By the time you have spent thousands to become a member of the best clubs in L.A.—the Bird Streets, the San Vicente Bungalows, and Living Room—you will have learned the hard way that no matter how crispy their fries or bespoke their wallpaper, these places do not complete your life in the way you hoped they would. And that’s part of what makes L.A. so great. This is a city where people who have tasted the upper echelons of status understand how little it means. It’s no coincidence that some of the biggest talents of our day—Leonardo DiCaprio, Michael B. Jordan, Charlize Theron—bring their mothers as their dates and have the same friends from the before times, before they were somebodies.
If you are driven to the brink of insanity to find out that at the end of the rainbow, there’s really no place like home, I know a guy who can get you a bed at UCLA. Which is, if I’m being honest, the only mental hospital really worth recuperating at in Los Angeles.
