Unlock the secret world of Los Angeles and you'll discover a city full of hidden gems ? including a magician's castle, a naked spa and a fictional heritage tourAll I am told is to wear black tie and not to bring a camera. So now, in a cocktail dress and stilettos, I stand outside a vast pink hotel on scruffy Venice Beach boardwalk, waiting among psychics, street pianists, body builders and beach bums, for my evening's guide to turn up."Never put out on the first date, remember," cackles an ancient woman dragging a shopping trolley of Reader's Digest magazines down the street. I check my watch for the ninth time that minute and see a 10-year-old doing back-flips off a bench, landing like an alley cat each time. It is the end of a busy public holiday weekend and the boardwalk is finally packing up when a junk-heap grey Volvo pulls up. "Get in then, will you!" the driver grins at me, a sword-shaped brooch flashing on the lapel of his suit. "We're late."Brett Loudermilk is a sword swallower at the Venice Beach Freak Show, where we'd met earlier that day inside a museum of live two-headed turtles, many-headed stuffed farm animals, embalmed Cyclops heads and Siamese foetuses crushed into formaldehyde jars. The Freak Show in Venice is run by six-time Grammy award-winning music producer Todd Ray, who gave up his day job because he loved LA so much. "I told New York: 'See y'all later.' Cos me, I wanted to make a new sound," Todd drawled in his thick South Carolina accent. "This here's a city of magic, of doing things different. It isn't like they say on the packet."Being driven through LA later that evening by a sword eater and his magician's assistant girlfriend Liberty, I have to agree with Todd. Los Angeles is more spectacular, and more unnerving, than its clich� suggests. Just as the environment is simultaneously ideal and unstable ? prone to forest fires, droughts and earthquakes, yet with perfect clear sunshine ? it has a tug-of-war effect on people's affections. I lived in East Hollywood for two years and hated it as much as it fascinated me, but after leaving, I missed it desperately. The City of Angels is a storyteller's world with so many secret doors that it's easy to get lost.On my first evening back, Liberty and Brett drive me to a castle on the top of a hill where you say "Open sesame" to a bookshelf to enter. The Magic Castle is a private club for magicians, but gaining entrance has become a game for curious Angelinos and tourists. "The castle was renovated using demolished bits of LA," explains Liberty as we sip vodka gimlets under art deco chandeliers and listen to a "ghost" named Irma play Bach on a grand piano.Each of the five bars and four theatres in the castle feels like a living museum of LA history. One bar is made out of old Hollywood vaudeville slides, another is taken in its entirety from an old hotel. In the Owl Bar you can see an original backdrop from The Johnny Carson Show, and in the hallway is Jack Nicholson's green-eyed bedpost from The Witches of Eastwick."It's too easy to get stuck on the surface of LA, the rooftop pools and boutiques," explains Richard Schave, co-founder of Esotouric, which runs guided tours to the "secret heart" of Los Angeles. "There are circles within circles in this city," adds Richard's wife and wingwoman, Kim. "You have to choose your Virgil."A few years ago, city tours meant tourists taking long-lens photos of "celebrity houses" from open-top buses. With Esotouric, exploring the fictional heritage of LA ought to be compulsory. LA was built around stories and illusion, so missing the make-believe is missing half the picture. Richard and Kim's tours range in subject from literary icons such as Raymond Chandler and John Fante to famous crimes such as the unsolved "Black Dahlia" case.I explore the haunts of Charles Bukowski, an iconic LA poet and novelist who wrote The Post Office and Women. My "Virgil" for the day read fast-paced poetry in the downtown library Bukowski adored, and quoted pornographic thoughts on women while standing outside the bungalow in East Hollywood where the poet courted his fans, slowly drinking himself to death through the California nights.It is mostly Angelinos rather than tourists on the bus so it's worth noting that knowledgeable Angelinos are the best guides you can get."Have you been to the Wende?" asks a fellow Bukowski fan, a heavily tattooed sound engineer named Betty who I get talking to outside the Pink Elephant liquor store in East Hollywood, where the poet used to buy his booze. "You totally wouldn't expect it in Los Angeles," Betty continues, elegantly sipping a can of beer in the blinding heat. "But it's awesome. It's all about storytelling and propaganda ? so LA. But so not LA, if you know what I mean. Then you have to go to the Olympic, in Koreatown. That place is truly wild."I wasn't sure what to expect from these Betty-recommended institutions, since she was drunk when we spoke. It turns out both involve inconspicuous carpark-level doors leading to other worlds, but that is all they have in common. At my first stop, the Wende museum, the last thing I expected to find was a panel of the Berlin Wall hovering at the edge of a business park among dentists' surgeries and law offices, just across the way from the Holy Cross cemetery, where Marilyn Monroe is buried. Anyone who imagines that Los Angeles is a superficial or one-tone city should take Betty's advice and push through the glass door behind a panel of Berlin Wall, walk up a staircase, then find themselves face to face with a wooden statue of Lenin in a room full of Soviet paintings and posters above a brightly lit vault containing more than 60,000 artefacts from the cold war."It's not like it says on the packet," as Todd Ray would say. If you're lucky, someone from the museum will take you on a journey past Lenin busts, briefcases of spy equipment or false passports and paintings still marked with the ghostly scars of political figures midway through being rubbed out of Soviet history.Since Betty's first recommendation turned out to be a cold-war archive hidden next to a graveyard, I decide to do a little research before plunging into whatever the Olympic might be. "It's a spa," my friend Angela, a director, explains to me. "But it's about as far away from the Beverly Wilshire as you can get.Everyone's naked, for a start," she adds. "Supermodels to shop assistants all in the hot tub together and nobody cares. You can get the best scrub in the world for 30 bucks if you don't mind it being a public experience."Being English and nervous of public nudity, it is with trepidation that I approach a side door in a strip-mall parking lot just off a smoggy stretch of Olympic Boulevard in Koreatown and walk into a corridor that smells of incense and noodle soup. Inside, small women steal my shoes and clothes, putting them in lockers, and I'm left naked in a room scattered with people of all shapes, sizes, ethnicities and ages. The first bodies I see belong to an obese Korean lady and a leggy Angelino bottle-blonde sitting together, as Angela told me they would be, in one of many scented hot tubs. I sit on a straw mat in a glowing room called an "oxygen bath" and make small talk with a UCLA student majoring in political science. Then I am bossed around from sauna to hot tub to plunge pool by a troupe of women in black knickers and bras before being called into a private room.I have a 50-minute shiatsu massage for $50, performed by a doll-sized Korean girl who walks all over me and digs her elbow into body parts I never imagined needed to relax. The next morning it still feels as if I am floating 2ft off the floor.After-hours Koreatown is the antithesis of the West Hollywood club scene. There are no red velvet ropes or pretensions, just more inconspicuous doors leading to Alice in Wonderland-type warehouse bars that you can't see from the street. I end up in a restaurant/bar called Gaam at a plaza on West 6th Street, where I reinstate all my lost toxins with rice wine and endless plates of Kobe beef. In Koreatown people smoke inside and ? don't tell anyone ? they sell alcohol after their licence permits it.If you're lucky you might even stumble on a street-puppet theatre that performs occasionally outside a rent-a-car shop on the corner of Western Avenue and Elmwood, where a crowd of in-the-know Angelinos and lucky out-of-towners sits on the pavement in the dark while a hidden puppet-master, mysteriously named Almighty Opp, burns cardboard effigies of celebrities.On my last night in Los Angeles I run into Almighty Opp, pontificating on subjects ranging from death to urban planning. "Just like everything in Los Angeles," the puppet nods earnestly to her audience, raising her wooden arms to her puppet-theatre sky, "you just have to find it". After a week taking advice from sword eaters, magician's assistants and drunken sound engineers outside liquor stores, it seems perfectly reasonable to take my last travel tip from a street puppet.The Pink Hotel by Anna Stothard (Alma Books, �11.99) is published on 20 AprilEssentialsAir New Zealand (airnewzealand.co.uk) flies from London to LA from �499 return. Esotouric (esotouric.com) offers tours into the secret heart of LA. The Venice Beach Freak Show is at 909 Ocean Front Walk, Venice, California 90291. The Magic Castle is at 7001 Franklin Avenue, Hollywood (magiccastle.com). The Olympic Spa (olympicspala.com) is open daily. The Wende Museum (wendemuseum.org) is open Monday-Thursday by appointment. For more information, go to discoverlosangeles.com? This article said Marilyn Monroe was buried at Holy Cross Cemetery, Los Angeles. In fact, she rests in a wall crypt at Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in West Los Angeles near Elizabeth Taylor, Natalie Wood and Fifties fetish model Bettie Page.Los AngelesUnited StatesJack NicholsonPoetrySpa breaksMuseumsFood and drinkguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
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