Not right away, though. The first week of our honeymoon in the Southland (as Southern California liked to call itself) had been blissfully uneventful-really your typical honeymoon, three parts sightseeing, one part fucking. Maybe two parts fucking.

On a delightfully sunny day, we prowled the foot trails of Elysian Park, up and down arroyo-gouged hills, through a snarl of creepers, wild roses, blue gum eucalyptus, slouching pepper trees and twisted oaks; from Point Grand View, the city and mountains lay stretched before us, as if the world was ours for the taking. The view at night at Griffith Park planetarium (within and without) widened those possibilities to the universe, though the next morning we settled for a rowboat ride on the shady, landscaped waters of Westlake Park, ogled the oozing bubbling bog of the La Brea Tar Pits in the afternoon and, that night, took in the colored lanterns and the festive music from cafes of brick-paved, shop-strewn Olvera Street.

But the sights that most thrilled Peggy were the movie palaces of Hollywood Boulevard, the ridiculous pagoda of Grauman’s Chinese-where we compared footprints with the stars (my feet were bigger than Gable’s, hers smaller than Lombard’s) and took in Till the Clouds Roll By — and the Egyptian, where we caught The Shocking Miss Pilgrim and coerced a passerby to snap our picture in front of the ancient god standing guard in the forecourt.

To me the perfect symbol of this phony burg was that shabby HOLLYWOODLAND sign on Mount Lee, a deteriorating remnant of a failed real estate deal, letters thirty feet wide and fifty feet tall studded with burned-out lightbulbs, a decaying relic whose chief function over the years had been to provide a platform for the suicide dives of failed starlets. Still, the looming letters from a distance, if you squinted, looked impressive. They certainly impressed Peggy, who was cross with me when I suggested that maybe someday somebody would have the good sense to tear the goddamn thing down.