Los Angeles — ‘Black Range Rover!” calls the parking valet at Soho House in West Hollywood, and a row of tanned and unlined and well-tended faces with practiced, thoughtful, I’m-listening-to-you-really-listening-not-just-waiting-for-my-turn-to-talk expressions on them pop up and prairie-dog over the tops of their iPhones and squint, because this is a place where a lot of people drive a lot of black Range Rovers, and nobody is sure which is whose.
Hollywood has outgrown its red-car years and embraced its black Range Rovers, its muted grey German sedans backed up bumper to bumper on Westlake Boulevard, its conscience-clearing Teslas and — if you must have a little flash — BMW i8 hybrids. It has sworn off the late nights and the cocaine and the sort of sexual promiscuity that once made Warren Beatty feel obliged to issue a public denial of a report that he had slept with 12,775 women (“That would mean that there was no repetition!” he scoffed), and not only the celebrities but also the operators and middle managers and creatives and money-runners of the entertainment world have taken up politics and yoga (two young women waiting for their cars debate the merits of the various styles of yoga offered at the local $200-an-hour spots, kundalini vs. set-and-flow, Bikram having become both passé and, as one insists, sexist) and early meetings and politics and clean living and politics and the endless endless rows of juice bars down Hollywood Boulevard.
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