I’ve just returned to Paris after ten days in Los Angeles. When I visit, I stay with my dearest friends Jeffrey and Jennifer in their Laurel Canyon guest house, a whitewashed refuge with a pool that glints in the afternoon light. It’s the perfect Los Angeles experience, sun-warmed mornings, eucalyptus in the air, the canyon’s quiet hum interrupted only by the sound of a distant leaf blower.
I sit in the kitchen on lazy mornings, coffee in hand, watching them coordinate the endless pickups and drop-offs, the shuffle between schools and activities, and I’m reminded just how much of life in Los Angeles is measured in logistics.
I return often. Twenty-five years of a life doesn’t fade quickly. My store and office remain. So do the friendships, the memories, and the ghosts.
Los Angeles is a city that can seduce you and betray you in the same breath. During Covid, it swelled with outsiders, then deflated just as quickly, the transplants packing up as if a spell had broken. It is, at heart, a city built for isolation. I’ve always been partial to solitude in small doses, but in LA it can be relentless. And the extremes of sun, of fires, of earthquakes, of homelessness are never far away. So is the peculiar rhythm of an entertainment capital, where everyone has a story to sell.
It’s a wonderful place to raise children, until they turn ten. After that, it’s time to go at least, that was my truth. After my separation, I couldn’t picture myself alone in the Hollywood Hills, driving down to Ventura Boulevard every time I forgot something on the grocery list. The Valley is so perfectly, oddly LA with movie studio lots and soundstages colliding with shuttered 70s diners, strange mom-and-pop shops that look permanently closed, and the occasional sushi restaurant so good it feels like a secret.
I arrived in April 1998 to produce a small independent film and moved in with my cousin Paul and his three roommates. Six months was the plan, twenty-five years later, I was still there. We lived in a ramshackle craftsman house in Silver Lake, long before it was hipster ground zero. Our neighbors played mahjong all day and raised chickens. My friend Elodie would come for the summers, and our lives became a collage of diehard vintage shopping, late-night parties, chasing boys, cigarettes, weed, and a constant stream of people. From my small room upstairs,
I could hear the front door slam all day long, each bang marking another person arriving or leaving and each one carrying the promise of something new and exciting.
We spent days under the awning in the back of the house, playing records until the needle wore thin. Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks remains the sound of that era in my life. Money was scarce, but it didn’t matter. The parties were a blur of artists and musicians; Elliott Smith, Beck, Daft Punk, Michel Gondry.
Everyone was there to make something, films, songs, art. It was chaotic, intoxicating, and it shaped me. That was the LA I fell in love with. You felt both far away from it all and at the center of it all. That is Los Angeles.
Eventually, the beautiful chaos gave way to something more deliberate. Our Silver lake days coming to an end. I moved to Hollywood, started my film company, opened an office in Beverly Hills. I got married, got divorced, met the father of my son. For twelve years I raised him and built a fashion company under the California sun, in a city that felt like a pioneer town where anything was possible.
Hollywood taught me everything; great work ethic, how to unearth the heart of a story, how to speak so the meaning lands, how to be ready when the plan falls apart. In the end, the camera rolls, rain or shine. I miss it; the sharp-witted writers, the scrappy producers, the agents who could turn a Beverly Hills Hotel lunch into an epic.
But over time, something shifted or maybe it was me. The current slowed. Creativity thinned. The cost of living soared. The dream of space and light grew expensive. The homelessness deepened. Covid cast a long shadow. I couldn’t imagine growing old in the Hollywood Hills, wondering if months might pass before anyone noticed I was gone. My family broke apart and it broke me open, the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but it was the only way forward. And as endings sometimes do, it led me somewhere new. It led me to Paris.
And yet, I still love you, strange and beautiful LA. I love and miss your food so much: Erewhon (what I call the cultural center of Los Angeles), Beverly Hills Juice for the best smoothies on earth, Courage Bagels, Goop Kitchen (because how could I not), Korean BBQ , Tsubaki for Japanese, Hail Mary’s for pizza, Dan Tana’s for the true Hollywood experience, Jitlada for Thai, Musso & Frank for cocktails and confidences, Saffy’s, Tower Bar, and Destroyer in Culver City. I could go on and on and I’m not even a foodie.
Now, when I visit, I keep my head down and occasionally look up to the sun for a touch of golden California skin. I go to the office, spend afternoons by friends’ pools, eat well, and let the memories, good and bad, pass through me. Some people thrive in LA. I call them the vampires of LA, pale-skinned and content never to leave their houses, strumming guitars in basements, eating tofu, and holding headstands for impossible lengths of time.
The funny thing is what I love most is your strangeness, LA. Paris doesn’t trade in that kind of cool, anything is possible, weirdness. LA is punk. It’s no longer for me but I’ll never forget how inspiring it once was. Now I visit, observe with a knowing smile and leave the vampires where they belong circling in their packs, deep in the Hollywood Hills.
