Samuel Johnson -- Mr. Los Angeles

Johnson and his circle met at 7 in the evening on Mondays at the Turk's Head. This club, called the Club, was Johnson's only club, and it became the prototype for the exclusive gatherings that, a century later, dotted the social topography of London's elites. None of the Club's informal members needed another group -- theirs was the British intellectual oligarchy of its day.

In L.A. today, there are, to my knowledge, at least five such clubs, and that is only one person's experience. Johnson would probably say there need to be so many because their achievements are so few. There's David Horowitz's club of Hollywood conservatives that meets on Wednesday mornings, and a slightly less conservative group that meets on the first Friday of every month at a hilltop Hollywood restaurant at 6 p.m., an hour Johnson would have found uncivilized. There's the Morons (its actual name), a wandering club dominated by journalists, too big really to be called a salon, more of an ad hoc movable potluck for hungry Grub Street types. There's the Geniuses, more formally known as the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities, which has a sit-down luncheon every two weeks at USC, bringing together "academics and writers, musicians and dancers, curators and critics, journalists and poets," according to the institute's founding documents. Johnson surely would have been horrified. He had no ear or liking for music and considered dancers a very low group indeed, certainly not worth talking to. Plus: lunch?

And there is Arianna Huffington's dining room table. Huffington may be the closest thing Los Angeles has to a Johnson, although her hair is different and, as a friend of Johnson's said on hearing of his death, "Johnson is dead. Let us go to the next best. There is nobody -- no man can be said to put you in mind of Johnson."

Like Huffington, Johnson considered conversation a kind of sparkling competition, and the Club operated on the same rule as Huffington's table, more or less: Only one conversation at a time. No sidebars. Johnson said that the proof of the inequality of men was that, if you put two next to each other, before half an hour was up, one would have shown his superiority. And everyone who has read him knows better than to try to emulate the Good Doctor. "Almost all absurdity of conduct," as he said, "arises from the imitation of those whom we cannot resemble."