Sin and Sundays in the Golden West

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33887, 5 July 1975, Page 11

Sin and Sundays in the Golden West

(By

JOHN CROSBY)

SAN FRANCISCO. California has a life style that everyone sneers at while nevertheless envying and often imitating. This is the seed bed on which you may often see your future life style. So what’s new? The first thing that struck me is that California has abolished Sunday. In San Francisco department stores and every other kind of shop are wide open and full of customers on Sundays: the normally deserted downtown streets are not as full as on a weekday but they’re far from empty. Frankly, I love it. Why gloomy Sunday anyway? The church crowd have long been routed on Sunday sports — why not everything else? There is an important reason for Sunday shopping. While foreign correspondents have reported and even gloated over the United States unemployment figures of eight or nine million, none has

pointed out that the United States has 84.4 m people who are employed — an incredible figure for a 200 m population. I’ve been gone 13 years and I missed the whole women’s lib, sexual liberation bit. Coming back after that long absence, what hits me hardest is that the whole family seems to have a job — Dad, Mother and the two teen-age kids. There’s no one left at home to do shopping in normal working hours. Hence Sunday' shopping. Full of beams California’s gone a long way toward eliminating that terrible word housewife altogether. Wives work not so much because they have to — though a little extra money doesn’t hurt — but because they’re better educated, bored with housewifery, liberated and full of beans. I found American women in far more important jobs, far more confident and far more at ease with themselves than ever before. I’d hate to have to compete with some of the young women reporters who now abound on every American newspaper. I think the best thing that ever happened is the liberation of all this womanpower. Besides unleashing a lot of economic energy, it has liberated a lot of men who let their wives support them while they pursue what they always wanted to do — become artists, study anthropology, or just stay at home and take care of the house.

Living apart We all know that young people don’t get married any more, they just live together. However, in San Francisco (New York too), the chic .thing now is not to live together. Young lovers live four blocks apart, maintain their own pads, their own identities, their own jobs.

“What about children?” I asked a young San Francisco girl. “Nobody has them any more,” she said. Too bad. 1 like children. Hollywood is going through an orgy of reminiscence, having a roll tn the hay of its own sinful past, even going to see “The Day of the Locust,” a truly terrible movie about Hollywood’s golden days that John Schlesinger should be thoroughly ashamed of. All the old Hollywood stars seem to be on television advertising things and there’s a great wave of nostalgia for old Fred Astaire and Al Jolson records. The newpapers are even running old columns by Will Rogers — a cowboy philosopher that none of you young people ever head of — complaining about the New Deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Physically Hollywood has changed beyond recognition. I remember when I first came to the coast in 1947 watching Bing Crosby eat a hamburger in an old jalopy drawn up before one of the innumerable joints on Sunset Boulevard. The sight is now a 22-storey bank. Office blocks I drove out to the old Twentieth Century Fox studios where 1 used to have lunch with Nunnally Johnson. It’s now Century City, full of office blocks and huge apartment houses — most of them empty. , Everyone seems to be writing a book about Hollywood. A young lady who is trying to write a "book about Hollywood’s celebrated children — that is, up here like Candice Bergen and Liza Minelli — had trouble to get any of the children to talk to her because they’re all writing their own books. One expression I was thoroughly fed up with before I got here is "no-way" — and I’m sure I’m not alone in this. You hear it in every American movie and TV show — you hear much too much of it on everyone’s lips here, including those of quite small children. But “no way” is very significant of' a deep change in American attitudes since I left 13 years ago. New negativism There’s a wholly new negativism in America social and political attitudes. The United Stateused to be a Do Do Do place. Now it’s Don’t Do It. After all the heady adventurism of the 19605, Americans Simply want to sit still for a change and do nothing. Some of the young politicians like California’s young Governor Jerry Brown, who looks too young even to be Mayor, (1 met the young Mayor of San Diego who looks too young to be out of school) are listening to the outraged cries of the unyoung, unpoor and unblack voters who have been ignored for too long. It’s fashionable now both in politics and in the home to avoid doing things. "No way" is the expression which sums up a philosophy I hope is temporary. The old expression as exemplified in Cole Porter’s song was “Anything Goes.” Now nothing goes. — O F.N.S. COPYRIGHT.