L.A. vs O.C. : Just How Different Are They, Anyway? Now the Truth Can Be Told

WHAT IS IT between Los Angeles and Orange counties?

Are we not warmed by the same ultraviolet rays, quenched by the same pirated water, ensnared in the same gill net of freeways? Are our differences really any wider than the line on a gerrymanderer’s map?

Let us put it to scholars, men of enlightenment and reason.

Orange County historian Jim Sleeper (with feeling): “I wouldn’t go up to Los Angeles to see Jesus Christ rassle a bear.”

Los Angeles historian John Weaver (a trifle smugly): “The Irish poet AE (George Russell) said we tend to become the image of the thing we hate. Orange County, of course, has become L.A.”

THIS FAMILY FEUD has a long history. In 1889, Orange County--then known as the Santa Ana Valley and resentful at being taken for taxes and then taken for granted--seceded from a Los Angeles County that was nearly as big as Ohio. One hundred and one years later, the first- and third-most-populous counties of the wealthiest and most populous state in America find themselves lashed together by geopolitics, entwined by the luster of riches and land and encumbered by too many humans questing for both: a single coastal and sub-desert domain forged from the same delusion that, here, life could be all things to all people.

Ask any family: There is more relish in fighting at close quarters. You know the other guy so well. So here we are, playing out something from a prime-time soap opera: the mercurial con man older brother versus the anxious-to-please, overachieving younger sibling. Like any siblings, though, they’re more alike than they care to admit. They share a common history, a social vocabulary, an obsession with the automobile and, until recently, an almost genetic belief in the virtue of growth.

As the two counties swiftly evolve, sometimes on parallel tracks, sometimes at oblique angles, sometimes in accordance with their own cliches and sometimes in violation of them, they embody two designs for living (and dreaming).

Some of their differences can be quantified. Orange County is wealthier, whiter, with far less violent crime than L.A. County. Nearly half of the L.A. County residents polled last year had recently considered moving away, one out of every dozen naming Orange County as a good place to go. Far more Orange County residents like it where they are, and only six in 1,000 wanted to live in L.A. County. Angelenos do sound grumpier, according to polls conducted for The Times; 42% of L.A. residents were dissatisfied with Southern California in general, compared to 30% in Orange County.

Other differences are matters of custom and style. At its best, Orange County comes across as well-groomed, generous of creature comforts, pretty in a standardized, debutante fashion, in part from master planning that has become a worldwide model. In a 1976 television program on the American Bicentennial, the BBC crowned it “the culmination of the American dream.” At its worst, Orange County appears to be nouveau-riche snobbish, insecure, artificially flavored and colored, vapid, priggish and drearily sanitized. At a Tustin bagel shop, the bestseller is a Pillsbury Bake-Off kind of flavor: cinnamon raisin.

L.A. County, at its best, comes across as urbane, lively, tolerant, expansive, with a sense of humor about itself. What other place can palm off on tourists a huge and hideous sign (HOLLYWOOD) as an icon? It offers the world in miniature, for the world comes to it. Have the kiwi cheesecake at the Cuban bakery for dessert, after a kosher-style burrito or the mititei at the Romanian diner, after sitting through a Fellini marathon at a movie revival house fitted out like a Pharaoh’s palace. At its worst, L.A. seems to be self-absorbed, deeply segregated for all its ethnic mix, stupefyingly rich and Third World poor, self-congratulatory yet in places as squalid and grimy as any Rust Belt burg, wearyingly obsessed with success, civically inept, a big floundering lummox of a place.

DEBBIE BOHNETT DEPARTED the sweet peaceability of Northern California some months ago to work at the Neiman Marcus in Newport Beach. (It was the first Neiman Marcus in California, and when Neiman Marcus plants its flag in foreign soil, that spot is bound to be as moneyed as the outflow end of an oil pipeline.) In her Bay Area innocence, Bohnett had rather casually taken one Southern California beach town to be indistinguishable from another. Neighbors and colleagues let her know otherwise. “I learned in the first three days not to say you live in L.A. I would be immediately corrected, and it wouldn’t be in a joking manner,” she says.

During the 1960s, as pioneering Republican political consultant Stu Spencer was trolling for contributions, Orange County’s moneyed businessmen would not pull out their checkbooks until they had asked him, “ ‘How much have those bastards in L.A. given?’ They weren’t gonna give me a dime until I got the money out of L.A. first.”

Rational men would find no grounds for such spleen. They understand the intertwining of local economies, the co-dependencies of air and water and traffic. Yet we are not talking about the rational here. We are talking about something knotted up in envy and indifference and disdain.

As surely as the Iron Curtain once safely delineated the Commies, the Orange Curtain once marked a dividing line; looking across the border, each side saw not people but cliches, stereotypes that the rest of the nation revels in:

Viewed from Orange County, L.A. is the flagship of the fleet of the absurd, the dreamland of pitchmen and grifters, the progenitor of wicked Hollywood glitz and drive-by shootings. “Metrollopis,” is what Aldous Huxley called it when he lived here. It is home to a signature cemetery more lushly inviting than the urban spread around it, a place where a 22-foot tower of wooden beer pallets is an official San Fernando Valley cultural landmark. Hollywood’s Walk of Fame has Clark Gable. Classic mystery crime: the gentleman who murdered his heiress-wife and, so legend holds, buried her somewhere in the newly poured San Diego Freeway. Horticultural note: The first of the fabled palm trees was imported.

Viewed from L.A., Orange County was but a trifling gas stop on the way to San Diego, once a major outpost of the John Birch Society, the jurisdiction where the Ku Klux Klan, in 1924, briefly ran the city of Anaheim. The hayseed county that begat Richard Nixon and the boysenberry also bestowed the Righteous Brothers’ “blue-eyed soul” and the drive-in church upon the world. Its longest-serving congressman sought a constitutional amendment to proclaim the supremacy of Jesus Christ. Anaheim’s Walk of Fame has Donny Osmond. Classic mystery crime: the teen-age couple tried and acquitted for dynamiting her parents aboard their yacht in Newport Harbor. Horticultural note: The first eponymous orange trees, of which dwindling numbers remain, were imported.

Orange County, once the bedroom of L.A., is now a high-tech Oz with bedroom communities of its own--Riverside and San Bernardino counties--and an archetype of what UCLA urban geographer Jim Johnson calls the “elite city” of the future. The county’s status is a product of its farming roots, its white-flight bedroom-community genesis, its high-tech here-and-now and its housing prices.

The counties’ faces are certainly distinct. Orange County is 70.1% white, 17.8% Latino, 10.6% other, mostly Asian, and 1.5% black. L.A. County is 46.4% white, 32.8% Latino, 11.3% black and 9.5% other, mostly Asian. A white businessman who moved south from L.A. has daughters who worry when they go into L.A. and see a black person. And he worries about their worrying, “which is very distressing to me,” he says. To him, Orange County is “an unreal ethnic mix.”

Orange County’s schoolchildren do better on standardized state tests than L.A.’s, and its schools, among the best in the state, are a prime lure. The median household income in L.A. County is $37,000; in Orange County, it is nearly $47,000. The median-priced home in L.A. sold for $210,458 in March; in Orange County, it was $246,002. Only about 15% of people who live in these counties could afford to buy those houses.

Politically, the two counties are reverse images: In L.A. County, 55% of the people are registered as Democrats, 35% as Republican. South of the border, 55% are Republicans, 34% Democrats. F.D.R. in 1936 was the last Democratic presidential candidate to carry Orange County. Yet on some issues that engage the entire region, their thinking is not that far apart. In Orange County, 75% oppose offshore oil drilling, compared with 67% in L.A. In both places, there is agreement that there are too many immigrants in Southern California--59% in L.A. County say so, 60% in Orange County.

Poor Republican Assemblyman Dennis Brown; he must satisfy voters in a district that crosses into both counties. “There’s still a rivalry there,” he says, aiming to please, then amends, “I don’t think rivalry is even the proper word--a distinction between the counties and the way that people who live in both think of themselves.”

L.A. Supervisor Ed Edelman: “I think they suffer sometimes from an inferiority complex because their big brother on the north is the most populous county in the state. I think that causes them sometimes to be suspicious or envious of us, though I think they have progressed pretty well.”

Pretty well. The tone rankles.

Half of Orange County adults polled had lived in L.A. once before; clearly, once was enough. The Great Satan to the north is the reason they’re in Orange County, the reason that fewer than one in six of them still commutes to earn an L.A. paycheck and enjoy it in Orange County.

Orange County exalts the suburb, something that L.A. has by choice and chance obliterated. At a party of baby boomers, almost everyone from Orange County had been in L.A. recently and often. None of the Angelenos had been to Orange County within the past four years. We’ve been to New York more often, some of them crowed. By comparison, in a given month last year, four in 10 Orange Countians came to L.A. at least once for reasons other than business, a poll for the Times showed.

Veteran San Fernando Valley real estate agent Temmy Walker speaks for the Angeleno who finds America’s second-largest city sufficient unto itself. When she began selling houses 17 years ago, she says, “Orange County never came into our consciousness.” She knows only two people who moved to Orange County. “One moved to Irvine--that’s in Orange County, right? They hated every minute of it and moved back up here.”

L.A.’s nonchalant highhandedness can gall today as it did 101 years ago when it precipitated what secessionists hailed as the “day of deliverance” from the “imperial county.” The football team that today plies its trade in Anaheim Stadium is known as the Los Angeles Rams. For, as L.A. Supervisor Kenneth Hahn once asked in a manner that was witheringly rhetorical, “Who’d go to see the Anaheim Rams?”

Frontier terms such as “rustling” and “claim-jumping” might have come to mind when, in the space of two months last year, patrons of the excellent Newport Harbor Art Museum learned that they were losing both the museum director and the chief curator. The director’s move to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago did not sting nearly so much as the news that the curator was going to the Museum of Contemporary Art in L.A..

“There are people very seriously annoyed,” says curator Paul Schimmel. It might be “their way of saying they’re going to miss me, and I appreciate that, but in some ways it’s seen as a direct assault on the sort of blossoming culture of Orange County, that their curator has been swiped.”

It should be flattering to Orange County that its museum had matured enough to send its guys up to the majors. The fact is that, for all its shortcomings, L.A. still can make offers a lot of people can’t refuse.

As Orange County has gone chuffing along to national applause, L.A. has gone into overdrive, launched into international orbit. The second city of America is becoming the premiere city of the Pacific Rim, a polyglopolis home to more people from--pick a country, Guatemala? South Korea?--than anywhere but--fill in the blank again, Guatemala City? Seoul? Angelenos are not the dreamy-eyed exurbanites of 30 years ago, but an evolving species of city-dwelling Westerner.

Harry Usher, an L.A. executive headhunter, says, “There are two pulls and tugs going on: the growing realization that L.A. is the city of the future, sitting on the Pacific Rim, sitting with an ethnic mix that is really a harbinger of America to come, with the influx of financial transactions. This is the place to be in terms of action and growth, excitement, from an arts point of view, from an entertainment point of view.” Crime, crowds, smog and Monopoly-money home prices also make it “difficult to recruit into. There’s a strong attraction and a strong detraction. Some people think, ‘Well, it’s going to be tremendously exciting; I want to be there.’ Others say, ‘I can’t live on a postage stamp for $900,000.’ ”

crowds, smog and Monopoly-money home prices also make it “difficult to recruit into. There’s a strong attraction and a strong detraction. Some people think, ‘Well it’s going to be tremendously exciting; I want to be there.’ Others say, ‘I can’t live on a postage stamp for $900,000.’ ”

WHEEL AROUND A curve on Echo Park Avenue. On the morning after Easter, there lies a movie monster, star of the sequel “Alligator II,” stretched out on a flatbed truck. It is trussed with rope, 20-plus feet of special-effects reptilian viciousness with a phony human hand protruding from its jaws. It lies waiting to slide into the murk of Echo Park lake, waiting for the cameras to roll.

Wheel around the next curve. Struggling up the steps into St. Athanasius and St. Paul Church are six young men carrying a pink coffin. Anna Magallanes was shot by a gang member who was aiming at someone else. She was 15.

The priest drives the curves of Echo Park Avenue to his church for the funeral. He thinks about the alligator and the fake hand and the dead girl. In the midst of fantasy, we are in reality. In the midst of fake death, the real thing.

And in the midst of Echo Park, Raul Gamboa waits for his call. He is an up-and-coming graffiti artist who signed up to paint some authentic-looking graffiti for this film. Then he got “discovered,” just as it’s supposed to happen. The producer and director liked his look and cast him in a bit role as a gang member. He wears wardrobe’s black leather jacket, with “Crazy Boys” across the back.

For a visitor, he splays out a wallet cushioned with other people’s business cards, looking for the one he wants, and unthrottles his patter: “They wanted me to get this video (artwork) done today, but they delayed it so I could finish this. . . . Plus I got stuff going with Caltrans. They’ve already got a special permit. I’m waiting for the spray paint they ordered for me. . . . I’m meeting with Fox Television; they might do a show about graffiti art. . . . Just give me a call--I have a machine if I’m not at home.”

Los Angeles. Ever the realm of the possible, for those willing to hang on for the ride. The patter of the street and the patter of the studio share a relentless optimism for the big break.

Both L.A. and Orange counties are built upon idealized self-image. Nothing new there--California’s very name was cooked up in a 15th-Century Spanish novella that describes a rich land ruled by Queen Calafia and Amazons armed with golden spears. In 500 years, fantasy California-style has been refined and marketed to a fare-thee-well, so much so that tourism is the second-biggest moneymaker in both places.

Image sells. Rick Kenyon, marketing manager at the L.A. Visitors and Convention Bureau, is always battling Orange County for tourist dollars. In 1988, Orange County drew 35 million visitors and L.A. 48.3 million.

Clubs called LA Fitness operate in Orange County, in Riverside, in San Bernardino, everywhere but in the city of Los Angeles. Co-owner Louis Welch is among Orange County’s converted. “Ten years ago, I was one of the worst. Orange County, that was worse than Siberia at the time. But things change.” L.A.’s name is still golden, which explains the health club’s name, but “the L.A. mentality has gone to Newport, Costa Mesa. (L.A.) nostalgia is better than the reality at this point.”

Orange County has labored solemnly to cultivate some of the airs and graces that give a place character: museums, restaurants and UC Irvine, the academic magic bean thrown into a donated bean field 30 years ago that has grown into an impressive university competitive in fields such as biotechnology and literature. The bronze anteater outside the Bren Events Center is the UCI mascot. It was sculpted by the same man who created the bronze Bruin in Westwood.

As L.A. did 25 years ago with the Music Center, Orange County has sought to shed its Philistine associations as it has shed field mud from its work boots. Its lavish, privately funded $73-million Performing Arts Center is the showpiece, where only white wine is sold, lest a splash of red stain the carpeting. Its patrons like to get all gussied up; in L.A., one sees Guess? jeans in a Verdi audience. Culture vultures in Costa Mesa do not like being rebuked by carpetbagger critics who chastise them for applauding between movements; the New York Times took L.A. audiences to task for doing the same thing in the 1960s.

Orange County residents do attend more live theater, which includes dinner theater, than Angelenos, and more symphony, opera and concerts. Yet the highly praised Spike Lee movie “Do the Right Thing” closed in Orange County within a week, so fast that one black attorney complained he had to drive to L.A. to see it.

Some maintain that Orange County is still basically a cultural cipher--and some who adhere to this notion are home-grown. In a 1982 song, “O.C. Life,” punk artist Rikk Agnew makes an environmental impact report on his home turf: Blocking out the real world that you seldom ever see / Pace the cage you live in with your friends and families. 714 embedded in your brain / Designer jeans and malls are all you’ll ever have to gain . . .” An Irvine woman, daughter of an L.A. cop, speaking of her own Orange County-bred sons: “They think they’re street-wise, but they’re greenbelt-wise.”

L.A. culture, too, wears some fledgling feathers. Adroit in the green arts of film and popular music, L.A. is only now beginning to cultivate opera. Art is often exported by artists who head east when they want to sell their work. Half the $100 million donated for a new concert hall were millions made on the back of Orange County’s Mickey Mouse.

Angelenos take their amenities for granted. Restaurateur Evan Kleiman: “All this stuff about museums and shows in a city--if we all were to cop to the reality, we’re not all going into art galleries every day. But just knowing there is such a density of stuff to do informs you by osmosis. You absorb it, you read reviews, you know what’s out there even if you haven’t gone to three plays that week.”

Orange County’s new sophistication ought to be above rivalry, but a touch of parochial defensiveness remains. A Newport Beach society woman, a former Angeleno, caught hell for even saying--never mind that she disapproved of it--that some of her friends still go to Los Angeles to have their hair styled.

TRACK 9, Union Station. Friday. Behind the passengers, over the weary, end-of-the-week droop of their shoulders, is downtown L.A. In the smog-colorized sunset, its towers are the towers of Ming the Merciless on the Planet Mongo.

Twenty minutes late, the Amtrak San Diegan begins to roll south. The towers recede. The cork on the Mondavi Chardonnay, the first of several excellent bottles, is popped. The wage slaves of L.A. are going home to God’s country. “L.A.? It’s a cesspool. When I was transferred from Chicago, I said, ‘Only if I can live in Orange County.’ ” So says insurance executive Bob Sharp, who lives in Yorba Linda, an hour and 20 minutes from downtown L.A.

(The train was something of a leitmotif for the cross-county loathing. In 1849, two unknowns who would become among the most substantial men in California, Collis P. Huntington and James Irvine, met aboard ship, heading for the Gold Rush. They decided for reasons lost to history that they could not abide each other. By the 1870s, Huntington was a plutocrat, a co-owner of the Central and Southern Pacific railroads, and Irvine was the largest landowner in Orange County, where Huntington wanted to lay track after having done so across L.A. But Irvine, nurturing the grudge, refused to sell the right of way. Even after Irvine died, his heirs said no sale. One morning, Huntington simply sent out a crew to start laying tracks. A few Irvine ranch hands rode up with guns, and that put an end to that. Not long thereafter, the Irvines sold the right of way to Huntington’s rival, Santa Fe.)

The closer the train draws to Orange County, the jollier the commuters become. On this waning Friday, the group is saluting one of its number, soon to be moving to Northern California. Deborah Scurlock, a financial expert, stands in the aisle in her running shoes and blazer and tosses off a joke: “Orange County will be glad to get rid of me. I’m a woman, I’m a Democrat, and I’m Jewish.”

There it is again, the old Orange County that the new Orange County hates to be reminded of. Just as there was an old Nixon and a new Nixon, so there is old and new Orange County, and in both cases, some say the differences are arguable.

Take this L.A.-Orange County quiz:

1) Where did Gorbachev rank higher in a poll than Reagan?

2) Where is the country’s first regular gay TV news show aired?

3) What city in which county tried to order Greenpeacers to be fingerprinted before they could canvass on city streets?

4) What city in 1968 pioneered a widely praised sex-education program, then promptly scrapped it when opponents called it a “CommuNazi” plan to create a “one-world child”?

Answers: 1 and 2, Orange County; 3, Glendale, in L.A. County; 4, Anaheim.

Not befuddled enough? All right. At a time when L.A. County is being sued over redistricting that excludes Latinos from its Board of Supervisors, Orange County’s first Latino supervisor, Republican Gaddi H. Vasquez, is in his second term.

In 1963, the same year that a classified ad in Orange County sought the services of “a conservative pediatrician,” a newsletter from Rep. James B. Utt warned that “barefoot African hordes” were waiting in Cuba to participate in military exercises in Georgia.

In L.A., William Mulholland, the man who brought in Owens Valley water in 1913, told a committee that sought his candidacy: “Gentlemen, I would rather give birth to a porcupine backwards than be mayor of Los Angeles.”

The man who is at present the mayor presides over a city which, as it ages, becomes more difficult to manage. The city that Tom Bradley has led with impassive aplomb for 17 years is frayed at the edges, with aging sewers and inadequate housing stock. Bradley himself is pricked by personal money scandals and the misdeeds of associates. Yet the general disinterest in these goings-on is evident; only 24% of registered Angelenos bothered to vote when the mayor won his fifth term last year.

Beyond Bradley’s realm is the mighty Board of Supervisors--five white men, the same five for a decade, whose 8.6 million constituents are by some margin neither white nor men, many of them dependent on the services the county can less and less afford to provide. Hospital services are at the breaking point, mental health clinics have been shuttered, and AIDS-related services cannot keep up with need.

L.A., the county, is hardly as tolerant as some of its boosters would pretend: Hate crimes are at a record high, Supervisor Pete Schabarum characterizes as “pornographic” a graphic safe-sex brochure for gay men, and some San Gabriel Valley communities are agonizing over the proliferation of signs in languages other than English. And despite its solidly Democratic numbers, the county twice voted to send California Republicans Nixon and Reagan to the White House. (Orange County gave Reagan and President Bush their biggest countywide margins in the nation.)

Orange County’s best-known politicians are its Republican celebrity firebrands: “B-1 Bob” Dornan, who said he was only “straightening” the tie of a Democratic congressman he had called a “wimp” and did not grab him, and first-term Republican Dana Rohrabacher, a former Reagan speech writer who is behind an effort to pull federal support for controversial artwork and who spent a New Year’s Eve in Mexico partying with heavy-metal icon Sammy Hagar.

On the home front, no one is using the L-word, but some demographically definable segments of Orange County are drifting toward neo-conservatism, a more libertarian tolerance of abortion and homosexuality. In the face of last year’s U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding more restrictions on abortions, one Orange County chapter of the National Organization for Women saw its membership shoot up 60%.

A gay Republican club thrives in the county, and gay civil rights attorney John Duran says: “Orange County is not the conservative monster that it’s made out to be. I think it’s more libertarian.”

Party is less a factor these days than issues. “There are great differences in the politicians elected in the two counties, but I don’t think, all else being equal, that there are great differences in the approach to political attitude (in the two counties) and in the values that are placed on individuality,” says UC Irvine social ecologist Mark Baldassare.

“Progressive” is how supporters describe Irvine Mayor Larry Agran; his critics call him a socialist. The former Berkeley activist has caught a new mood in Irvine, instituting child care, banning chlorofluorocarbons and regulating hazardous materials. “I think we’re seeing a blending of the self-interest and public interest that’s a refreshing development. I have conservative Republicans making clear to me they want government, and more of it, to protect interests they hold dear.”

Stu Spencer, the old master political pro, clears the smoke. Orange County “is the first place the Republican candidates from all over the country come. Beverly Hills is still the first place the Democrats come, for obvious reasons.”

SINCE ORANGE COUNTY seceded from the underside of L.A., the American frontier has shrunk; the American dream has been winnowed into the California dream, which narrowed further into the Southern California dream. Among Orange Countians are thousands of ex-Angelenos who packed their picket-fence dreams and went south. Orange County’s vast and then-visionary housing developments were built with an eye to avoiding L.A.’s flaws. No one ever said there might not be enough Eden to go around.

Within 150 years, both counties had heaved through boom-and-bust cycles of ranching, crops, land, oil and aerospace. Both practiced relentless real estate hucksterism to lure residents. In the white heat of salesmanship, an L.A. real estate agent is said to have stuck oranges on Joshua trees and sold plots as groves. Historian Sleeper has noted the tale of the minister who announced that his text for Sunday was drawn from the St. John Subdivision, Block 3, Lot 6. The difference is that in Los Angeles, it spread and evolved more leisurely, from the city core outward. In Orange County, it happened so fast that 30-year-old natives can natter on like octogenarians about the great old days of riding bikes through the orange groves.

Indeed, panicking that the past, thin as it is, is slipping away in the rush to bucks, L.A. struggles to conserve notable buildings that are a mere 50 years old. In Orange County, as groves and fields vanish under the tyranny of plumb bob and blueprint, an Isamu Noguchi environmental sculpture lies at the feet of an enclave of banks, a kind of atonement to the agrarian past, a work wistfully entitled “Spirit of the Lima Bean.”

Each county looks as it does in part because the vast Spanish land grants gave Orange County something L.A. had let slip away: immense tracts to build on. The tracts became fields, and the fields’ fate was really sealed after Disneyland opened in 1955, perfectly timed to coincide with the new reaches of the Santa Ana Freeway. Indeed, in places, Orange County looks as if Disney didn’t stop at Tomorrowland but instead kept right on building. Occidental College architecture critic Robert Winter says that--with the exception of some spectacular modern buildings, among them the Crystal Cathedral, and preserved older districts such as Fullerton (“the Pasadena of Orange County”)--many of Orange County’s tract developments “look like dentures.” He contrasts L.A.’s “ability to reward eccentricity” to the nouveau rigidity in Orange County, whose style lacks “a sense of humor on a civic scale.”

Central L.A. was built up piecemeal over decades. There is the amusing muddle, and there is the world-class architecture. Frank Lloyd Wright, who once said that if you tip the continent, all the loose pieces roll to California, saw fit to come here and design. Frank Gehry is still on a roll here. Not that all Angelenos find it to their liking. Writer-futurist Ray Bradbury admits to liking the look of Orange County. “They shouldn’t be criticized for being clean because Hollywood right now needs a flood, number one, and a fire on top of that, and when you’ve leveled everything, you build all over again,” says Bradbury.

The planned community is probably Orange County’s chief cultural contribution, notwithstanding regulations that govern decisions like the color you can paint your house. Ray Watson is vice chairman and first chief planner for the Irvine Co., one of whose earliest efforts was the 10,000-unit Woodbridge Village. “We deliberately picked the word village. It sounds better” at a time when suburbs were getting bashed and city was becoming unworkable. Woodbridge offered schools, pools and parks within walking distance of every home. “That was the selling point of the planning and continues to be. You have the opportunity to do something here that you don’t have anywhere else in Southern California at the moment. . . .” The planned community is still being refined as south Orange County fills up with whole new towns. The first resident moved into one of them, Rancho Santa Margarita, in 1986; the 50,000th is expected to arrive in 10 years.

L.A. police officer Bill Frio’s 100-mile daily round trip from Rancho Santa Margarita to Parker Center is his trade-off for “cleaner, newer” living, for “mountains you can see.” L.A. has become “its own worst enemy, it has driven people away from it” in its indifference to its own chaos. But in fairness, Frio adds, Orange County’s white-bread reputation is “one of the things I dislike. . . . We’re the new up-and-coming yuppie fundamentalists, and it drives me crazy. I think L.A. has a lot going for it in that L.A. is an open-minded place that doesn’t have resolutions like Irvine’s against gays and doesn’t have anti-abortionists crawling all over it.”

On the day in 1967 that the May Co. opened its store in South Coast Plaza, then a mere nub of a mall, Larry Ober stood at the door with a fellow employee, gazed out at farmland and said, “My God, look at those bean fields. No one will ever come here.” Today, Ober owns several stores in a South Coast Plaza that is the vastest and most prosperous of all of Orange County’s many temples of shopping. The acres have filled with houses or have turned to pricier crops, asparagus and strawberries, or profitable ornamentals to adorn all those houses built on the bean fields.

Those houses wouldn’t still be built, much less sold, if the business of Orange County were not business. The county’s economy is a star turn of the Ronald Reagan decade, when it grew by 90%. Deregulation brought in financial and investment companies by the score and the diverse services to keep them going. Says Martin Brower, whose monthly Orange County business report circulates as far away as Japan: “Everybody starts his own business. In L.A., I see lots of mini-malls and yogurt shops, (but) everybody here seems to go into service. Nobody has any products. “ He refers to everything from escrow companies to office management to carpet-cleaning services. The two counties, he adds, are not the rivals they used to be as more of the economic growth in Orange County comes from internal expansion.

O’Melveny and Myers, one of the most L.A. of the mainline L.A. law firms, sent partner Jerry Carlton down to Newport Beach in 1979 to open a six-lawyer office. The office now has 53. “We have been quite successful in getting some of the true stars of O’Melveny to relocate. It’s obviously a boom area, with a lot of business to be done, which means a lot of law to be practiced.” Nonetheless, when it comes to recruiting at Harvard and Yale and other points on the Other Coast, “I still think the county has got nowhere near the name recognition that Los Angeles does.”

BID GOODBY TO Lotus Land, where the living is easy. Bungalows get bulldozed for Trump towers. L.A. is coming to terms with a new reflection in the mirror, with some of the toughness, and the pride in toughness, that New Yorkers perfected: We got smog--so what? We got crime--so what? We live in L.A.--we can handle it.

Getting mugged near downtown eight months ago as he scouted a film location has put Brian Haynes off L.A., enough to think about leaving but not enough to bring himself to leave. An almost-native who remembers the city “before they sowed condo seeds on Wilshire Boulevard,” he allows that “it’s certainly gotten more difficult to live here. When you’re a teen-ager, nothing is tough. As you get older, you start seeing more defects--pollution, traffic.” There are flawless, easy days when “I still see it as it used to be. It’s days like those, to be corny, I still love L.A., but they’re fewer and fewer.”

Realities that have settled onto L.A. are drifting to Orange County, where the myths have not been altogether uprooted, myths of open space, of suburbs, of “being able to get in your car and drive alone to work at 60 miles an hour, being able to buy a single-family home with a big back yard,” says UCI’s Baldassare. In that gap between myth and truth is “one of the great reasons for frustration and unhappiness.”

It is conflict that feeds the divisions within each county. In L.A., the fragmentations are east-west; in Orange County, north-south. The money, the newness, the influence have gone west or south; the older neighborhoods, the racial mix are largely east or north. When the smoke went up from the Watts Riots in 1965, the San Fernando Valley scarcely knew where Watts was.

Although “rich cultural diversity” has become a buzzword for an ethnic mix, L.A.’s mix is mostly one of daylight hours. At night, it retreats to its separate fastnesses. Next to Chicago, according to UCLA researchers, L.A. is the second-most-segregated metropolitan area in the nation.

This fragmentation-by-freeway is further refined in Orange County. Both counties are becoming what Alan Scott, a professor of regional studies at UCLA, calls a “bi-geneous” society, two polarized levels increasingly abandoning--and abandoned by--the middle class. Such a society “has a very highly paid upper segment of engineers, scientists, managers, professionals. And it has a bottom tier of immigrant workers, Hispanics and Asians working at minimum wage, close to the poverty line. It’s like two nations.”

Driving across Southern California, sales rep Michael Vezo, late of Washington, D.C., finds that even amid undifferentiated urban spread, “you can tell when you go from L.A. County into Orange County because the houses seem to have walls built around them, like they’re protecting themselves from us in Los Angeles.” Much as he likes L.A., even he, fresh from the Murder Capital of America, finds the graffiti’d surfaces of L.A. more unsettling than the blank walls of Orange County: “I heard someone comment, today they spray paint, tomorrow they spray bullets, and I don’t think that’s far from wrong.”

The Night Stalker’s murderous 1985 incursion into Mission Viejo sent crime soaring to the top of Orange County’s list of worries, along with drugs and traffic. In Orange County, some freeway ramp meters are kept on 24 hours a day, and still the routes are impossible. Orange County residents spend more time in traffic delays than residents in Los Angeles, according to one regional study, and Orange Countians consistently name traffic as their chief annoyance. Traffic broadcaster Bill Keene says, “If I had my druthers, I’d rather drive in L.A. County. I think they’ve got a lot more traffic than we do.”

Just as the homeless are now found in Westwood as well as Skid Row, so, too, do they wander among the sleek business plazas of Irvine and Newport Beach as well as in downtown Santa Ana. Rumblings are heard these days presaging a future that has already engulfed L.A.: only the memory of open space; a racially mixed, impoverished population; no affordable housing; crime; crowds; beaches fouled with oil--a product of its own gluttony for success. Is Orange County simply an L.A. understudy in the wings?

Having banged the boosterism drum to get people here, both counties have had occasion to recall the old curse: Be careful what you wish for; it might come true. Pollution, homelessness and immigration problems acknowledge no boundaries.

Yet Bill Hodges, executive director of the Orange County division of the League of California Cities, maintains that L.A. is still high-handed when it comes to regional issues. A “rift still manifests itself” on issues of regional planning and growth, he says, as Los Angeles officials continue to think of their county as “the hub of the region.” Overall, he adds, the rivalry “used to be a lot more obvious than it is today, and yet I think it’s maybe at a more refined level” because of Orange County’s growing sense of self.

SO NEITHER PLACE is a paradise any longer, whatever its hopes. Fine. But maybe something else is in the works, something bigger.

How do you gauge the waxing and waning of paradise? Novelist Judith Krantz, who is a founding patron of a new center for decorative arts in San Juan Capistrano, has lingered among the shopping and sunning lanes of the Orange Riviera in her research and found them to her liking. She is about to do for Orange County what she did for Rodeo Drive. Part of her new novel, “Dazzle,” is set in Orange County. From her Westside home--that’s in Los Angeles--Krantz says this: “I think that I had the feeling that Orange County is now at the point Beverly Hills was when I wrote ‘Scruples’. . . . I feel it’s a new hot place, a very, very hot place, from every point of view. . . . It’s changed, it’s not what it used to be. It’s been a place for 100 years, but it’s now finally a place .”

L.A. Festival director Peter Sellars came here two years ago, and thus is not encumbered by nostalgia for L.A. as giddy Easy Street. He doesn’t even own a car: How is that for faith in a future that even includes Metrorail?

“Most people traditionally thought of L.A. as the ultimate escape, the official giant suburb, and, of course, it just isn’t anymore,” Sellars says. Those who leave because it isn’t that--and some of them leave for Orange County--go “because it’s more complex than they bargained for. If you’re really not interested in facing the big questions, it’s not the right city to be in, because L.A. has been summoned to play a major part historically now. If you’d rather be in Kansas City, you should be there.”

The big questions are racial tolerance, the death of fantasy, the finiteness of resources. “Frankly, L.A. is just at crisis point earlier than elsewhere. . . . Of course, it’s hugely scary. I don’t mean to imply that it’s easy, but if you want a big nut to crack, this is it.”

SMOG

A sampling of cities and the number of first-stage smog alerts (when there is a 0.20 part per million concentration of ozone in the atmosphere) recorded last year:

LOS ANGELES COUNTY Azusa: 30 Pasadena: 18 Burbank: 5 Downtown L.A.: 1

ORANGE COUNTY La Habra: 5 Anaheim: 5 El Toro: 2 Los Alamitos: 0 Source: South Coast Air Quality Management District

VIOLENT CRIMES

(per 100,000 population, 1988)

WILLFUL HOMICIDES

Los Angeles: 15.7 Orange: 5.4 FORCIBLE RAPES Los Angeles: 4.3 Orange County: 7.6 BURGLARIES

Los Angeles: 1,381.3

Orange: 1,276.5

Source: California Department of Justice

NUMBER OF REPORTED FATAL TRAFFIC ACCIDENTS

(per 100,000 population)

Los Angeles: 14.2

Orange: 12.7

NUMBER OF REPORTED FATAL TRAFFIC ACCIDENTS INVOLVING ALCOHOL

(per 100,000 population)

Los Angeles: 5.46

Orange: 5.43

Source: California Highway Patrol

TALLEST BUILDINGS

Library Tower, Los Angeles: 73 floors

Center Tower, Costa Mesa: 21 floors

Sources: World Almanac 1990 and Coldwell Banker

LARGEST SHOPPING MALLS

Del Amo, Torrance (largest in country): 367 stores, 12,000 parking spaces

South Coast Plaza, Costa Mesa (highest sales per square foot in country): 197 stores, 9,400 parking spaces

Source: International Council of Shopping Centers and South Coast Plaza

UNEMPLOYMENT RATE

(March, 1990)

Los Angeles: 5.9%

Orange: 2.5%

Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

NUMBER OF HOMELESS

Los Angeles: estimated at 5.8 per 1,000 population

Orange: estimated at 4.4 per 1,000 population

Source: United Way and Orange County Homeless Issues Task Force

AMOUNT SPENT PER STUDENT IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS

(1988-1989)

Los Angeles: $4,118

Orange: $3,628

PERCENTAGE OF DROPOUTS

(from Class of 1989, during grades 10-12)

Los Angeles: 26.1%

Orange: 15.3%

AVERAGE CLASS SIZE

(grades K-12, 1988-1989)

Los Angeles: 28.1 students

Orange: 28.6 students

AVERAGE SAT SCORES

(1989 seniors)

Los Angeles

Verbal: 395

Math: 473

Orange

Verbal: 434

Math: 511

Sources: U.S. Census Bureau and California Department of Education

PERCENTAGE OF HOUSEHOLDS WITH ONE OR MORE CARS

Los Angeles: 90.2%

Orange: 95.7%

Source: Scarborough Report 1988

CAR PREFERENCES

(most popular models based on new-car purchases in 1989)

Los Angeles: Honda Accord, Toyota Camry, Toyota Corolla, Nissan Sentra, Honda Civic.

Orange County: Honda Accord, Toyota Camry, Honda Civic, Ford Taurus, Nissan Sentra.

Source: R. L. Polk & Co.

TYPES OF INVESTMENTS

(percentage of households with these investments)

Stocks or stock options

Los Angeles: 20.3%

Orange: 34.4%

Second home or other property

Los Angeles: 7.7%

Orange: 13.9%

Source: Scarborough Report 1988

NEIGHBORHOODS WITH THE HIGHEST AVERAGE HOUSEHOLD INCOME

(by ZIP code and rank)

Los Angeles County: 90077, Bel-Air, $166,000; 90210, Beverly Hills, $132,000; 91108, Pasadena / San Marino, $117,000; 91436, Encino, $104,000; 90274, Palos Verdes Peninsula, $96,000.

Orange County: 92625, Corona Del Mar, $120,000; 92705, Tustin Hills, $88,000; 92660, Newport Beach, $82,000; 90742, Sunset Beach, $78,000; 92807, Anaheim Hills, $73,000.

Source: National Planning Data Corp.