I do weights and stretching exercises daily and a couple of weekly power walks. I used to do the treadmill at 24 Hour Fitness but I grew to hate the monotony, and speed-marching around WeHo during lunch hour is unappealing due to a half-dozen factors, mostly the traffic noise and the godawful bleachy light and the moderately ugly architecture. If you’re going to walk around during daylight you have to do it in the affluent areas. And moonlight walks are best. Los Angeles will never hold a candle to the great walking cities of Europe (Paris, Prague, Rome, Munich) but something special happens after dark here. The hurlyburly feels absent or at least settled by way of the cool nighttime air and nectary aromas and general aura of moisture and quiet.

Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks canoe-ing around a swimming pool (?) at Pickfair back in the mid 1920s.

Last night a friend and I did a 3 1/2 hour round trip across and through Beverly Hills, starting at WeHo Pavillions and then west on Carmelita and Elevado for 30 or 35 blocks through the flats, Doheny to North Linden (gazed at the old Bugsy Siegel mansion for the first time in my life), and then across Sunset and up Whittier Drive and Carolwood Drive, and then down Angelo Drive and past David Geffen’s home at 1801 Angelo (i.e., the ten-acre Jack L. Warner estate, built in 1937) and then across Benedict Canyon and up Summit Drive, past the former homes of David O. Selznick, Charlie Chaplin, Tony Curtis, Ronald Colman and the former location of Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford‘s “Pickfair” (1143 Summit Drive), which was torn down in 1990 or thereabouts by the loathsome Pia Zadora and her husband Meshulam Riklis.

I’ve been in this town for longer than I’d care to remember, and I can say with some degree of pride that I’ve never once driven around looking at old movie-star homes. Not once. I’m somewhat curious, of course, but the humiliation! I’m okay, however, with nocturnal roam-arounds and using the iPhone 6 Plus for guidance. I can do this without shame.