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ACROSS THE TOP OF LOS ANGELES

There is no one way to understand Los Angeles, no one way to take it all in, no one iconic view. Congested highways link its disparate parts without providing a sense of what lies in between. On their shoulders, a fellow in an overheated Mercedes summons a tow truck on his iPhone and a homeless woman brandishes a sign that says, Stranded, flat broke, need help.

But for those who seek a road to clarification, there is Mulholland Highway, ribboning across the east-west–tending mountain range that separates the L.A. basin from the San Fernando Valley. Rising to about 3,000 feet, the Santa Monicas are not high, but they are strategically placed, beginning near Dodger Stadium and ending at the Pacific Ocean in Malibu.

Driving its sinuous 55-mile course is the enterprise of one very busy day. Parks and scenic overlooks line the way, and the city unrolls on either side of you like an animated map. Close at hand on the eastern end are the “ego homes” of the rich and famous, clawing their way up the steep, chaparral-covered flanks of a swatch of the Santa Monicas called the Hollywood Hills. Farther west, Mulholland tightrope-walks across Sepulveda Pass and the San Diego Freeway, peters out to dirt for nine miles above Encino, then emerges paved again, taking travelers on a wild, wheel-gripping ride through the mostly undeveloped heart of the mountains.

As a scenic parkway, Mulholland abjures commercial development. However, sustenance for the body and fuel tank is available by turning off on any of the arteries that intersect it and lead down to the nonstop blandishments of Ventura Boulevard in the Valley or those siren thoroughfares to the south, Sunset and Hollywood.

An excursion along Mulholland is best started early, before the Hollywood Freeway clogs. The Mulholland exit lies about 10 miles northwest of downtown L.A., in the narrows of Cahuenga Pass, near where Cecil B. De Mille scouted locations for the 1913 picture, The Squaw Man, riding a horse and carrying a six-shooter to fend off rattlesnakes. The exit siphons drivers left off the highway; should you err so soon on the trip and turn right, you’ll lose Mulholland altogether, and end up in a maze of residential lanes surrounding the Hollywood Reservoir—a fine place for a morning walk or jog, with the letters of that serendipitous monument, the Hollywood sign, poking out between Italian cypresses.

Left onto Mulholland is the correct direction to go. This way, you’ll ride the road west, chasing the sun, starting with its rise at the Hollywood Bowl Overlook, about a mile beyond the highway on the shoulder of a somewhat stubby peak, tauntingly called Mt. Olympus. It is hard to imagine a better view of the L.A. basin, unless it’s from a picture window lining the living room of one of the cantilevered homes in the neighborhood. Downtown is a smog-bound mushroom struggling up from the ceaseless grid of streets; Hollywood rolls toward your feet like a weird wave; and in a cup-like declivity to your left once known as Daisy Dell, the Bowl nestles. Freeloaders come to this overlook to listen to the L.A. Philharmonic on summer nights. In the amphitheater below, boxes go for $3,000 to $5,000 a season, and are often hotly contested when their married occupants divorce.

Here on Mt. Olympus, you’re in a residential section of Hollywood that came of age in the 50s and 60s. Turn down any lane and you’ll find a marvelous, ridiculous cacophony of architectural styles that range from ersatz Georgian to Mayan revival. The architect Richard Neutra blamed the movies for the extravagant proliferation of building styles, and he is not alone in speculating that L.A. home builders see their lots as sets. But as Noel Coward said, “There is always something so delightfully real about what is phony here. And something so phony about what it real.”

Indeed, the more you house-hunt in the fabulously well-to-do neighborhoods that line Mulholland Drive, the more the ironies explode, particularly when you contemplate Hollywood’s humble beginnings as the inspiration of Horace and Daeida Wilcox, from Topeka, Kansas. In 1887, the Wilcoxes purchased 160 acres that would become central Hollywood, envisioning a Christian subdivision, free from alcohol and vice. The holly bushes Daeida planted did not thrive, and the community took unanticipated turns.

A mile beyond the Hollywood Bowl Overlook on the left is the northern entrance to Runyon Canyon Park, with paths that lead down into the thick of Hollywood, passing a Mission Revival-style mansion built by Gurdon Wattles in 1905 and a rag-tag community garden in a strange neighborhood for communism.

Two miles farther, at the Universal City Overlook, travelers are rewarded with a new perspective, this time to the north. Once Errol Flynn, whose ranch lay nearby, might have stood at this windy eerie surveying the San Fernando Valley. But it’s a different view now—developed to the very brink of the surrounding mountains, crowded with malls, gas stations, and TV studios, and crisscrossed by boulevards.

Their very names tell a tale that’s pure L.A., about a handful of wealthy Angelinos like J. B. Lankershim and I. N. Van Nuys who owned property in the Valley at the close of the 19th century. In a move that would have fatally dehydrated the city, they claimed the right to the water in the Los Angeles River—despite the fact that on most days it looks like one of those California streams Mark Twain said you could fall into and emerge from “all dusty.”

The Supreme Court settled the dispute in favor of the city, but as you contemplate the valley, water is never far from mind. The highway you’re traveling was the inspiration of William Mulholland, an Irish ditch digger who taught himself enough engineering to serve as superintendent of the L.A. Water Department from 1886 to 1928. His best known project was the 250-mile long Owens Valley Aqueduct, which turned the dry San Fernando Valley as green as any well-tended suburban lawn. Today, many view its construction as a crime, since underhanded means were used to gain control of Owens River water while a number of leading citizens cut lucrative, if shady, Valley real estate deals. But in 1913, the city lionized Mulholland, even wooed him to run for mayor, with one councilman claiming that, “His name should be engraved on every water faucet in the city of L.A.” He got a highway instead. At the opening of Mulholland Drive on December 27, 1924, bands played, airplanes buzzed, and a ballroom dance champion danced the Spanish tango.

Before abandoning the Universal City way station, turn around and look up. Pinioned by one slender column to a near vertical cliff is an octagonal house known as Chemosphere. Designed in 1960 by John Lautner, it looks like a flying saucer frozen in the process of touching down; very striking, but one wouldn’t relish bringing the groceries in.

Two miles beyond Chemosphere, Laurel Canyon Boulevard crosses Mulholland, and it’s here that one begins to notice the preponderance of wagging tails in the front seats of cars. Most of them are headed a mile west to Laurel Canyon Park, where dogs, not people, are sovereign, allowed to run free before ten and after three. There, one dog owner told me that her Westie, Bam Bam, always comes home from the park with fleas. But the place is a human, as well as a canine, scene where movie producers are said to hit on pretty women and an ice cream truck dispenses Italian ices.

The San Fernando Valley reveals itself again at the Fryman Canyon Overlook, a mile down the road, this time in a direct headshot, with a backdrop of the San Gabriel Mountains, Santa Susanas, and Simi Hills (from right to left). Off to the northwest too far away to see, some 20 miles over the Ventura County line, lies another piece of the Mulholland story, this one tragic—the ruins of the St. Francis Dam, which collapsed on March 12, 1928, killing 450 and costing the city of L.A. $5 million in damage reparations. This was the last of “the Chief’s” 19 dams, and ironically, he visited it on the very day it gave way, pronouncing it sound. Afterward, he took full responsibility for the catastrophe, retiring from the water department, a broken man. The 1974 movie Chinatown, in which a character based on “the Chief” is murdered by nefarious water diverters, commenced the refurbishment of Mulholland’s reputation. More recently, J. David Rogers, a geological engineer who spent 15 years studying the St. Francis Dam site, reported that a landslide no one could have predicted was the true cause of the disaster.

The highway narrows perceptibly between Fryman Canyon Overlook and Coldwater Canyon Drive so that it seems you’re tightrope walking along the very backbone of the mountains, rubbernecking toward the valley at one hairpin turn, and L.A. at the next. Up here, where the rich lust to live, home building continues apace—real estate crunch and all—much to the dismay of the conservationists who are trying to preserve the scenic integrity of the road. Bulldozers eat away whole hillsides in a procedure known as mountain cropping, which provides level space for foundations. Still, there is green up ahead at Coldwater Canyon and Franklin Canyon Parks, which together provide a walking route all the way over the mountains from the Valley to Beverly Hills.

Coldwater Canyon is the enclave of a group of nature-loving volunteers called TreePeople, dedicated to making the world more arborous. I sat in on a session during which an instructor explained planting techniques to a group of school-children, each clutching his or her own sapling. “Don’t put them under a telephone pole,” she told them, “or next to your swimming pool.”

Minutes down the road is the entrance to Franklin Canyon Park, surrounding what was a reservoir, until the earthquake of 1971 convinced the Department of Water and Power that it didn’t want to be blamed if a dam busted above Beverly Hills. Now the upper section is the domain of the William O. Douglas Outdoor Classroom, which offers nature appreciation classes for kids and stress relief walks for adults. You can drive all the way down Franklin Canyon, passing through a section of greenbelt where Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable tested their hitchhiking skills in It Happened One Night. At the time, the area was owned by oilman Edward L. Doheny, who used to ride up the canyon on horseback from Greystone, his mock Tudor palace below.

Actually, it makes sense to come down off Mulholland at this point for a little replenishment. Coldwater and Franklin Canyon Drives, and Beverly Glen Boulevard a bit farther on, dump you out of the mountains within striking distance of the Beverly Hills Hotel and the equally ritzy, if somewhat more retiring, Hotel Bel Air. But those with a macabre bent should take Benedict Canyon Drive, winding past hedge-shrouded homes that do not want to make your acquaintance; signs on the fences outside proclaim the virtues of their security systems and guard dogs. A little more than halfway down on the right is Cielo Drive, where one August morning in 1969, a cleaning woman discovered the grisly remains of the Manson family killing spree at #10050.

If you still have an appetite after that, and prefer picnics to power lunches, stop for provisions at the little shopping center just south of where Mulholland crosses Beverly Glen. There’s another overlook on Mulholland a mile west of this intersection with a bench placed high up like a throne, where you can break into lunch, contemplate Stone Canyon Reservoir, and possibly catch your first sight of the Pacific.

You have now covered only a third of Mulholland—the dense, civilized section. But just as the Santa Monicas widen and rise and you prepare to step on the gas, the pavement stops at Encino Hills Drive about a mile beyond the San Diego Freeway. Happily, even without four-wheel drive, you can rumble on across dirt Mulholland, because it’s navigable, except in foul weather. And you should, because here the mountains begin to reveal their wild side, as well as their controversial nature. For years, community groups and the Santa Monica Mountains conservancy have worked to head off development at every pass with the ultimate goal of creating a national park.

One of the parcels of land the Conservancy bought lies about a mile past the end of the concrete, on San Vicente Mountain. There, perched high above Mandeville, Rustic, and Sullivan Canyons, is an old lookout station for the Nike Missile System, boldly commanding a view of the Pacific. The lookout hasn’t been restored and is off limits, but even from its stanchions, the sights are terrific in all directions, including backwards along the winding course of Mulholland. From this point, mountain bikers and walkers take off on a network of paths and fire roads that lead down into Topanga Canyon Park. On the other side of the road is the bright blue surface of Encino Reservoir, looking very much like the one in which the water-logged body of the fictional William Mulholland was found in Chinatown.

Dirt Mulholland rambles on, passing a number of dusty new subdivisions, to emerge in concrete near Topanga Canyon Road. There, you must watch the signs closely to make sure that you stay on Mulholland Highway, as opposed to Mulholland Drive, which strikes off toward the Ventura Freeway. It’s about 10 miles to 6,000-acre Malibu Creek State Park. It runs all the way down to the Pacific, with a network of trails that take hikers to Castro Crest, manmade Century Lake, and through a meadow that was once part of a ranch owned by Ronald Reagan. Pink and white mountain lilacs and peregrine falcons were out when I passed that way. Hunter House, the park’s information center, is the source for trail maps, but serious hikers will have to return to the Santa Monicas another day, for Mulholland awaits.

In many ways, the eight miles between Las Virgenes and Kanan Dume Roads is the most scenic stretch of Mulholland, and over the years moviemakers have agreed, coming to this vicinity to film movies from Ruggles of Red Gap to Mr. Blanding’s Dream House. What is so remarkable about this countryside is its versatility—parts of it look like Australia’s Outback, parts like Tuscany and the English moors. Three miles past Las Virgenes is Cornell Road, the turnoff for the Paramount Ranch, now a park complete with a western town set where Borax’s Death Valley Days was shot. Just beyond Cornell, Sugarloaf Mountain rises. To the left is the entrance for a diminutive private enclave called Malibu Lake, developed as a weekend retreat for movie folk by Cecil B. De Mille. The lake and cabins that surround it are surprisingly humble, but one can imagine the mogul leaning against the clubhouse gate in his jodhpurs.

Between Cornell and Kanan Dume Roads, a large tribe of motorcyclists rule Mulholland—as many slumming lawyers as Hell’s Angels. Their favorite watering hole is the Rock Store and Vern’s Deli, where you can sip a soda as you observe their rituals.

If by now the sun is setting, you’d be well advised to turn left down Kanan Dume Road to the safer, saner pleasures of the coast. On the other hand, there are still 15 death-defying miles of Mulholland to go before Arroyo Sequit Canyon funnels you out on the beach at Leo Carrillo State Park like a piece of mountain jetsam. Honk before rounding all hairpin turns. Watch for the random dumped corpse and rock slides that routinely narrow this stretch of Mulholland to one lane. Ignore the smashing views of the Pacific and the weird satellite dishes that stick out of the canyon like Mickey Mouse ears.

You may be somewhat wired when you reach the Pacific Coast Highway. By now, it might be Magic Hour, that crepuscular time the movies love. Up on Mulholland, the mountain lions and backseat smoochers are coming out, and the lights in the valley and basin are beginning to bloom. You could go back to see night-side Mulholland. After all, the road runs right to L.A., not straight, but true.