Long life
Perfect pastiche
Nigel Nicolson
FLos Angeles
rance one week, Venice the next, and now California. This is not my usual style of living but the product of diverse claims: a walking holiday in the Cevennes, a friend's birthday party in Venice and a con- ference in Santa Monica to which I am to contribute a lecture on why Jane Austen never drew places, any more than she drew people, from real life, preferring to take a flight of steps from here, a breakfast-room there, to create credible settings for scenes of higher flirtation or the self-gratification of snobs.
Los Angeles, too, is a patchwork of styles and impressions. As this was the week of Columbus's quincentenary and the second of the presidential debates, there was a telescoping of history. A brutal conquest (discovery is no longer the acceptable word) confronted three men, Perot squashed like the Dormouse between the other two, contriving to look compassion- ate when speaking, aloofly presidential when not. It was quite a shock to turn away from the television to face the reality of American life — the homeless and degen- erate sleeping outside the incredibly luxuri- ous Miramar-Sheraton, and the campus of UCLA where sturdy Koreans and sparrow thin Vietnamese seem to have replaced, since I was last here, the blonde and bronzed gods and goddesses whose beauty was so distracting, a young professor assured me, that it was almost impossible to teach them.
I escaped from my conference for two hours to visit the Getty Museum at Malibu. When it was opened in 1974 the architec- ture excited ridicule. It was built in the form of a Roman villa, copied from the ground-plan of one at Herculaneum. Getty was accused of emulating Nero. Its proxim- ity to Hollywood invited comparison with the sets for Ben Hur. Roger Fry's cruel ver- dict on J.P. Morgan was revived to humili- ate him: 'A crude historical imagination was the only flaw in his otherwise perfect insensitivity.'
The public, however, loved the museum from the start, and at last it has begun to shed the accumulated gibes of its detrac- tors. It is now seen as a beautifully execut- ed pastiche, entirely suited to the display of Greek and Roman works of art (which by 1996 it will contain exclusively when the Getty Center is opened a few miles awaY) and to its site in wooded hills overlookinS the ocean, echoing the landscape and lumi- nosity of the Bay of Naples. It needs to be perfect, and is perfect. When I was there this week, the Ionic columns were being freshened with white paint, and a single antefix, one of hundreds on the roof of the peristyle, was being straightened. The box hedges, old roses and oleander bushes were as trim as chess- men, and the still water and fountains were left unpolluted by coloured lights or gold- fish. The effect is entrancing. I do not care if my admiration for this fake makes me one too. It is the loveliest thing in Los Angeles, except for one other — a picture it has recently acquired, the Pontormo of Cosimo de Medici, combining the arrogance of youth with its vulnerability, such as you can see in a thousand faces in any football sta- dium.
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