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Poor Val and Gary Ewing, refugees from rapacious Dallas and
the series of the same name. Now they live in Knots Landing,
a small, exclusive Southern California beach town, and they
can't adjust to life on the West Coast.
Val looks like Joan Kennedy but dresses like Daisy Mae. In her
early 30s, she wears hair ribbons, flat shoes and ruffled sundresses
she must order from the Prepubescent Miss department of some
Dallas store. How can she possibly fit in, in Southern California,
without natural cottons from a chic boutique, a $40 haircut
and porcelain fingernails?
As for her husband Gary, he still wears his cowboy boots. Luckily,
these are trendy just now among people who've never seen a cow;
but someone should tell Gary to stop sleeping in that Stanley
Kowalski undershirt before he hears from the Knots Landing improvement
association. In the inflated California real-estate market,
those big houses in the Ewings' cul-de-sac, ticky-tacky though
they are, must go for half a mil. And out here, communities
that well-heeled generally have rules. I know of at least one
in which cats must be kept on leashes.
We're big on role models out here, too, so Val might as well
choose her neighbor Karen Fairgate. Karen is nice, mind you;
intelligent and likable. Still, one can tell at a glance that
she has her designer jeans, drycleaned to keep their shape and
that her eyelashes began life as part of a mink. Karen also
has regulation Southern California fingernails, those inch-long,
dark-red, "sculptured" claws that look as if they
belong on a lobster. We're told she still manages to be a marvelous
cook, in her gourmet kitchen with its requisite butcher blocks
and baker's reck, but I don't believe it. Sculptured nails,
like Chinese bound feet, render a woman fashionably helpless.
"Type?" wailed a secretary in a Los Angeles TV production
company to me. "I can't. I just spent $60 on a brand-new
set of nails." Surely no one would subject such an investment
to the hazards of a garlic press or a chesse grater.
Two other Knots Landing neighbors have just the right look.
Laura is a lawyer's wife, Ginger a schoolteacher married to
a record producer. Both are thin, pretty and glowing with health.
You know they're on the Scarsdale Diet and never miss a workout
at the local branch of Jane Fonda's gym. Despite half-hearted
efforts to suggest the Knots Landing gang are just folks, these
are people with a least superficial sophistication. When they
go to dinner at a fancy French restaurant, for example, they
all know their way around the menu, debating between bouillabaisse,
escargots and caviar. (I should add that all this urbanity was
undercut when Richard ordered the wine. What he asked for came
out "Shadow LaFeet.") Yet Knots Landing is a cul-de-sac
in more ways than one.
"Karen, do you know it's 10 o'clock?" Sid Fairgate
demanded in one episode, when his wife came home from a high-school
PTA meeting. I dropped my popcorn. This is California husband
to a California wife? Karen protested mildly but, in what I
thought a marked departure from reality, did not tell Sid where
he could put his wristwatch. As throwbacks go in Knots Landing,
though, Laura and Richard are even more unlikely. When Richard
complains about his breakfast eggs, Laura cowers and offers
to make more. She also apologizes abjectly for having sent his
shirts to the laundry. What should she have done--beaten them
clean, with rocks, in a cold stream? Richard is fiercely ambitious
professionally, a '70s replay of the '50s organization man.
Dutiful Laura even goes to bed with an old boy friend to advance
her husband's chances, but go-getters aren't regarded as properly
mellow in Richard's part of the world, and he is hopelessly
out of touch with the pervading style. What other Southern California
lawyer wears gray suits, white shirts and ties?
Because I live in Northern California, one must allow for regional
differences. I still think Richard should know that my most
successful lawyer friends, dress like very clean, very rich
lumberjacks. Sometimes, happily, Knots Landing manages to blast
out of its time warp and take on a contemporary California feel.
One such episode hinged around the effort to save the town's
beach from offshore oil drilling. In a new and timely version
of the Western, Texas oilmen were the villains and the ecologists
the good guys in the white hats. True, the save-the-beach contingent
brought the oilmen to their knees with remarkably little effort--about
as much as it would take to recycle the bottles from a case
of rare old Shadow LaFeet. They're to be commended none-theless.
As the governor of California likes to point out, we're all
fellow passengers on "Spacehip Earth," although some
of us are traveling coach while the Knots Landing types travel
first-class.
Another up-to-the-minute segment dealt with rape. The four
husbands of the series, even Richard the jerk, reacted to the
event sensitively. No macho chest-beating, no vigilante attempts,
no flicker of suggestion that the wife involved might somehow
be to blame. Since husbands in TV rape dramas are often depicted
as unfeeling louts, it pleased me to see this treatment avoid
such stereotyping. Small details, too, often ring true if one
knows the turf. When Laura orders a drink in a bar, it's a white-wine
spritzer--the fashionable California drink. (Order a Scotch-and-soda,
and the bartender will peer through the overhanging ferns and
ask you how to mix it.) A high-school teacher not only has the
blond good looks of an overgrown surfer, he wears his shirts
fashionably unbuttoned almost to the navel. You know he not
only doesn't sleep in his underwear, he doesn't own any. Even
Val and Gary's kitchen sports golden-oak furniture and a Tiffany
lamp, sure signs they're assimilating. So maybe they'll like
it here after all. They'll settle into their new, biodegradable
soap opera, get themselves suntans and trade their Texas-style
gas eater for a tiny compact.
Frankly, I'm glad they're not my neighbors, though. That Val
Ewing has problems. Spectacularly miscast as a country-music
singer, Julie Harris did a guest shot on Knots Landing as Val
's monster of a mother. Harris played a stone-hearted woman
who trompled her nice husband and her tender young daughter
in her mad pursuit of fame. "You would have been proud
of me if I'd made it big," Harris screamed, in the obligatory
mother-daughter confrontation scene. "No!" Val screamed
back at her. "All I wanted was a momma!" This episode
set both country music and career mothers back a hundred years.
But never mind. What worries me is that it ended with Val crooning
tenderly to her childhood rag doll. God knows I'm usually the
last to recommend such things, but maybe Val would benefit from
some of the new California therapies--primal screaming, or est,
or meditative massage. Or maybe she could just bundle her doll
and her Dogpatch sundresses off to Goodwill and try writing
a thousand times "I AM A GROWN-UP."
Copyright KnotsLanding.Net 2003
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