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Introduction
It’s a scorchingly hot Thursday in Calabasas. A helpful guy in the sushi bar told me it was 100 degrees outside. In the middle of the day, even the shade is too warm. The old cliché that you could fry an egg on the pavement certainly applies; in fact, you could cook a full English breakfast. No wonder you are unlikely to see Kim Kardashian West in her new custom-designed silver Rolls-Royce Phantom before the sun has cooled in the late afternoon or early evening.
Calabasas is in what’s known in Los Angeles as ‘The Valley’. More accurately, this is the San Fernando Valley or the West Valley. Locals reckon it’s at least 10 degrees warmer here than in the fashionable beach areas of Santa Monica, Venice and Malibu. Calabasas, though, is becoming just as desirable, thanks to an influx of the rich and famous who realise a 40-minute crawl along the Ventura Freeway (Route 101) is a small price to pay for getting so much more bang for your buck. A $1 million property here might cost $10 million in Beverly Hills. That value for money won’t last forever. The Kardashians have made Calabasas famous, thanks to their reality show and the number of times they are photographed apparently living their lives in a normal way.
Other than Kim and her family, the most famous current resident is probably Drake, the phenomenally successful Canadian rapper, who immortalised the place in his song ‘2 On/Thotful’: ‘Crib in Calabasas man I call that shit the safe house. Thirty minutes from LA man the shit is way out.’
Local legend has it that Calabasas owes its unusual name to an incident in 1824. A rancher from Oxnard, 60 miles north, was on his way to Los Angeles when he crashed his wagon, spilling a load of pumpkins along the track. The next spring, hundreds of pumpkins or gourds started to grow by the roadside. As a result, the area was called Las Calabasas – the place where the pumpkins fell – after the Spanish word for pumpkin, calabaza.
Technically, Calabasas is a city that became part of Los Angeles County in 1991. It doesn’t feel remotely like Los Angeles here. The great Hollywood stars of the past didn’t live in Calabasas. Instead, they came to work here, although some would take Valley vacations away from the bustle of LA.
In 1935, Warner Brothers bought an estate near Calabasas Creek, which became known as the Warner Bros Ranch. Many classic films were shot there: in The Adventures of Robin Hood, starring Errol Flynn, the dusty terrain doubled for Sherwood Forest. Flynn travelled out to the Valley to shoot a number of movies, including the Western Santa Fe Trail, which co-starred a future President of the United States, Ronald Reagan. The Hollywood great, Gary Cooper, won an Oscar for his portrayal of Sergeant York fighting in the (Calabasas) trenches in the story of the First World War hero. Most famously, Casablanca, the wartime romance that features on almost every list of all-time best movies, was partly shot at the ranch.
Nowadays, classic movies have given way to reality shows, although the Valley has also long been a favoured setting for porn flicks. Keeping Up with the Kardashians is by no means the first reality show to be shot at a house in Calabasas. The best known was probably Newlyweds: Nick and Jessica, which began in 2003 and followed the embryonic marriage of boy band vocalist Nick Lachey and the blonde bombshell singer Jessica Simpson. The dumb blonde antics of Jessica were quite amusing, but the show had nowhere to go after three seasons, when she filed for divorce. Real life ruined the reality show.
The Kardashians aren’t seen in town as much these days, especially after moving their boutique, DASH, to West Hollywood in 2012. The original store, I discover, was in a small parade in Park Granada, just across the road from a large shopping complex called The Commons, the central point of Calabasas. A few years ago, the Kardashians were genuinely out and about every day, as they sought to build their business before the store became little more than a film location. It was pleasant enough, but nothing special – the sort of place you might find in a thousand small towns across America.
In the Shibuya sushi bar, a few yards down from DASH, they used to see the Kardashians every other day. The Kardashian women have always tried to keep their voluptuous figures in check by eating healthily. The chef preparing my tasty lunch of seared toro and peppered tuna at the counter told me that Kim had been to the restaurant lots of times, but Kanye West had joined her on only one occasion.
Shibuya is small and fills up quite easily, so when Kim and Kanye turned up on an evening in late April, they were made to wait in line and sat on a bench outside for half an hour until a table became available. Kim had just appeared on the talk show Jimmy Kimmel Live! and this proved to be a convenient photo opportunity on their way home. A photographer was able to shoot some very clear shots. Kanye looked miserable and scowled, as he always does for the cameras. Kim, elegantly made up and revealing her considerable cleavage, smiled happily.
Kim always favours the house sushi roll when she visits Shibuya. In actual fact, they had no need to stop off at all, because they employ a full-time chef. My own chef was not so absorbed in news of the Kardashians. He was extremely interested in Manchester United, however, and dreams of the day when Wayne Rooney pops in for a sashimi snack.
In and around the exclusive little shops, ice cream parlours and health food stores, you are far more likely to see Kim’s younger half-sisters, Kendall and Kylie Jenner, who, as teenagers do, prefer to hang out in the mall with their friends than in the fur-lined prison of their gated community.
Round the corner for coffee at the Blue Table deli, a young woman, who was working in Calabasas while she waited for her break as a singer, told me that she had seen Scott Disick the day before. The long-standing boyfriend of Kim’s sister Kourtney, and the father of her children, has become a well-known face from his regular appearances on the TV show. ‘What does he actually do?’ asked my companion. I had to admit I had no idea and made a mental note to find out.
Having celebrities pop in does wonders for local trade. A few hundred yards away, in yet another shopping centre, El Camino, is a ‘homey café for health-conscious bites’ called Health Nut, which has become celebrated as the place where the Kardashian girls buy the salads they are always munching on TV. I pop in to grab a takeaway of Kim’s favourite salad, whatever that might be.
‘No problem,’ said the man at the counter, bashing my order into the till and taking the money.
‘What’s in it?’ I asked.
‘No idea,’ he responded smilingly. ‘I just hit a button marked “Kardashian”.’
It turns out to be a pretty dull chicken salad with a pleasant tangy dressing – nothing the chef couldn’t run up in five minutes at home.
For a while, the Kardashians had a major rival as the most famous faces in the neighbourhood when Justin Bieber bought a house in a gated Calabasas community called The Oaks for $6.5 million in 2012. These days it’s a Kardashian enclave. Justin tired of life in the suburbs after two years and sold his five-bedroom
