The Hills Are Alive
When is a road more than a road? When it’s Mulholland Drive, the winding 21-mile artery in Los Angeles that has fired the imaginations of artists like David Lynch and the celebrity boy racers of the sixties and seventies. ANDREW MANESS drops the hood and takes the scenic route through old Hollywood…
Mulholland Drive is 21 miles of possibility in the form of asphalt that stands sentinel above the sprawling mega city of Los Angeles. It might be the most American road in America. To put a finer point on it, one need only read David Thomson’s essay ‘Beneath Mulholland’, in which he compares the road to Marilyn Monroe. “A pin-up and an idea: it has Brâncușis in some groomed gardens and beer bottles shattered from target practice. It is a highway made for narcissism and envy, an example of privilege, luxury and airy superiority.” If that’s not a distillation of Los Angeles, California and America, what is?
Apart from the road itself, there are the views it provides, and the views are many. They’ve inspired artists from David Hockney to Michael Stipe and David Lynch. To the south, the fever dream that is L.A. lives on; to the north, the super-sprawl that is ‘the Valley’ extends as far as the eye can see. To the west, America ends and the rest of the world sits on the glittering horizon of the Pacific; to the east, it’s occasionally clear enough to see the edge of the inhospitable desert that separates the city from the rest of the United States.
William Mulholland, the famous (as well as infamous) water bureau chief and city engineer, envisioned his namesake thoroughfare as a way of weaving together the urban core of L.A. and its bucolic periphery, and indeed there are many city parks whose trailheads are accessible from the overlooks spread out along the paved section of Mulholland Drive. However, it wasn’t long after the grand opening, on December 27, 1924, that the winding ridgeline road became an unofficial proving ground for man and machine, making the route far more famous than the man behind it could ever have imagined.
To drive the nine-mile stretch of Mulholland Drive between Cahuenga Boulevard and Beverly Glen Boulevard is to commune with the spirits of old Hollywood. Early film stars like Gary Cooper and John Carradine wrung out their magnificent pre-war Duesenbergs on the same blind corners that James Dean would later use to transform his drive between his San Fernando Valley residence and the Hollywood studios into a masterclass in how to get the most out of the 1955 Porsche 356 1500 Super Speedster he bought from Competition Motorsports in L.A. Having turned each commute into a training session, Dean bonded with the car in a matter of months, and finished first in the novice class and second overall at the Palm Springs road races in March, 1955. When asked about the surprisingly strong results, despite having owned the car for only three months, Dean said, “Gee, I can’t believe it. All I’ve been doing is driving around Mulholland Drive.”
Six months later he purchased one of Porsche’s street-legal race cars, a new 1955 550 Spyder, and a few weeks later he was killed in a head-on crash en route to a race in Salinas. There’s no record of Dean having driven the Spyder on Mulholland, but his attitude and style informed an entire generation that sought to turn their Porsches into ‘Mulholland Specials’ and capture some of the magic that Dean possessed.
Three years after Dean’s death, a young and increasingly famous Steve McQueen was doing a guest appearance on NBC’s It Could Be You and saw one of the 16 Jaguar XKSS units that survived a fire at Jaguar’s Browns Lane factory in Coventry. Immediately smitten with the machine, McQueen struck a deal with the owner, the show’s host, Bill Leyden, and became the second owner of the car that would affectionately become known as the ‘Green Rat’ after McQueen had it repainted in British Racing Green. McQueen became notorious for high-velocity runs on Mulholland in the XKSS, to the point where the L.A.P.D. sheriff offered “an expensive steak dinner” to any officer who was able to catch him speeding and write him a ticket. The dinner went unclaimed and the Jaguar continued to prowl the curves as Mulholland Drive became a pilgrimage destination for automotive enthusiasts, and McQueen became a bona fide movie star in the 1960s.
While Dean and McQueen are household names whose personal styles still weigh heavy in the psyche of men, it’s the lesser-known names inextricably linked to Mulholland Drive that provide the best glimpse into what it was to be part of the scene.
While Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood became the epicentre of European sports car culture in 1950s Los Angeles, up above the bright lights, Mulholland Drive was transforming into a destination for anyone interested in gaining full command of one of the nimble imports from Porsche, MG, Lotus, Austin-Healey and Alfa Romeo.
