JAMES AGEE, to his priest
FEBRUARY 12
1957
The blacklist in the American motion picture production industry is enforced by all three branches of the government of the United States. The expansion of American motion picture production throughout Europe has carried the blacklist with it, and writers abroad are now alarmed lest the American policy of suppression be imposed, by sheer weight of financial power, upon countries where such practices are abhorrent.
I have been asked to discuss this matter in very respectable publications in Britain and France, and I consider it my duty to do so. I felt, however, that I was first obliged to make the essential facts known to the head of my own Government, in the hope that relief might be obtained….
My moral obligation being thus fulfilled, I shall proceed in good conscience to warn the intellectuals and artists of Western Europe to resist with all their strength that policy of inquisition, imprisonment, blacklist, and denial of passport which in America has destroyed hundreds of artists and intimidates all of them.
DALTON TRUMBO, to President Eisenhower
1965
First, about the STAR TREK pilot itself. Whether or not this was the right story for a sale, it was definitely a right one for ironing out successfully a thousand how, when and whats of television science fiction. It did that job superbly and has us firmly in position to be the first who has ever successfully made TV series science fiction at a mass audience level and yet with a chance for quality and network prestige too.
We have an opportunity, like “Gulliver’s Travels” of a century or more ago, to combine spectacle-excitement for a mass group along with meaningful drama and something of substance and pride….
For the first time I think I see our particular and peculiar medium exactly for what it is. It has been and can be very good—and if someone proves to me they want me to try for that level, I gladly will. On the other hand, without that proof, I intend to aim for safe copies and parallels of existing successes—settle for doing it just two or three percent better than the next guy so that job and profits are always there, and I eat dinner every night at 6:00 p.m. with the children and have two days at home out of every seven to play horseshoes and putter in the garden…
GENE RODDENBERRY, to his agent
FEBRUARY 13
1947
The city is quarter-built, empty building lots everywhere and vast distances. Since the war they have succeeded in spoiling even the climate by inducing an artificial and noxious fog….
The men lunch in wineless canteens. Jovial banter prevails between the hotel servants and the guests, but our insular aloofness is respected. We have trained the waiters in the dining-room not to give us iced water and our chauffeur not to ask us questions. There is here the exact opposite of the English custom by which the upper classes are expected to ask personal questions of the lower.
On Thursday afternoon Gordon proudly showed us his last film—The Green Years; it was awful. Mercifully the cinema was provided with push buttons to stop the film, so when Gordon had gone I stopped it….
We met the actor who plays Dr. Watson.
EVELYN WAUGH
1967
THERE IS ANOTHER HIGH-RISE APT. GOING UP DIRECTLY ACROSS THE STREET. I am now completely surrounded. I see all these beehives….
Luckily I can’t afford to die in such voluptuous candyshit; I will end up in a cardboard box in the hills. I have discovered the last green hills in town—it is just before you hit Huntington Drive on the way to Santa Anita, a turn left off of North Main or North Broadway, I don’t know which, anyhow the streets end there, and there it is: these slices of high green hills, tall, and nothing on them, no terrible houses, no terrible people, and I always feel like stopping the ’57 and getting out and climbing up there, walking around in it, laying down in the weeds, but no guts, the city has me, the track calls me, but those hills ride inside me as I drive past, and looking at them, it’s like vomiting up a whole sick metropolis and I feel better….
2 p.m., 2:05 KFAC symphony now coming on, hope they give me something to lean against this highrise across the way…not bad, something offbrand by Haydn, who was a kind of a kool suckass in his time but managed to save some juice.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI
1991
Late tonight we were walking along the Sunset Strip. The only other pedestrian was a man up ahead dressed in baggy shorts. “If he’s walking he’s got to be British,” my wife said and as we got closer we recognized the [British] pop songster Billy Bragg.
ALEXEI SAYLE
FEBRUARY 14
1924
Formerly we were way out in the country, while now everything is rapidly moving in our direction….With the exception of one or two tracts, everything between us and Los Angeles has been subdivided.
EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS
1949
It is beginning to look like television may soon kill not only the theater and the movies but radio, books, magazines, newspapers, and finally articulate speech and all the processes of ratiocination. Talk of the barbarian invasions—the fifth century was nothing to the 20th.
We had Grace and Edwin [Hubble] staying with us for three days last week. Both in good form, and Edwin full of enthusiasm over the first photographs taken by the two-hundred-inch telescope. The thing does all that was hoped for it, and the first sample shot revealed two entirely new and unsuspected kinds of nebulae, with faint images of nebulae going on and on in undiminished numbers to 1 billion light years into space.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, to Anita Loos
1987
Today I sit on the library lawn in front of Doheny and it’s cloudy and I’m cold in my cotton overalls and Tanya’s t-shirt. I’m sitting on the green hunting jacket. I have a little cold. I have bruises from the Chili Peppers last night and I kind of have to pee. This is a very normal day. Maybe sometime I’ll have a special Valentine’s Day. Maybe it’ll mean a lot to me. Maybe it’s time to walk home.
CAROLYN KELLOGG
FEBRUARY 15
1928
Constance took me for a ride to Beverly Hills and Santa Monica where some very picturesque and costly estates are being built among the hills. It is an astounding development. There is, however, a disturbing effect of unreality in it. It is like a stage setting, something built in a hurry, in a flurry of enthusiasm, of sudden wealth. It suggests the eagerness of those newly rich. Twenty-five years from now this region will look settled but it will still lack the settled quality which I love in old New England. If I were young I might, possibly, find it to my liking because to my interest. I have no future. My task is to record the past.
HAMLIN GARLAND
1941
We got us a cabin in a two by four tourist court. Aircraft boom here make it hard to get shelter. Wont take kids hardly a tall. We househunted 3 days with no luck. Same old tale, How many kids? Sorry the owner’s away. No kids. Awful sorry. The god dam silly way they look at you like you’d ought to take your kids off somewhere and tie a grinding stone around their neck and throw them in the river—and then you could pay twice as much as you ought to and rent you a house. I’m a adult and I dont need their bastardly old houses, but my kids do and it is one hell of a thing. You run onto hundreds of folks that feels this same way. Some kind of houses has got to be built for families with kids—the more kids, the bigger bargain you would get.
Have made a few bookings out here already, the APM, People’s World Forum, etc., and they are as worked up over the songs of the east coast as they are of their own west coast. It is a good thing to see a feeling so solid from coast to coast and to see the songs of the midwest or the old broke down south as welcome in Seattle, San Diego, Boston, or Houston—; and that is sign that folks are just plain folks everywhere you go, all has been hit hard, went through several political cyclones, been sold out so
often that they feel like they’ve got pimps….the thought is about the same everywhere, because the song on one side of the map is the same on the other side—and when newspapers and radios and records wont carry these songs, nor help these people out, it is good to see the song spread anyhow, like their war scare, only bigger—just like on any other subject, folks has got something to say about it; they might not let on around high society ginks, but the people has got just a plenty to say about every little thing that’s said and done that’s a leading us down this lonesome road to the war—and of course you know how folks always has pretended to be dumb or blank in the presence of officers of the law that they dont trust or like. With every invention of modern times turned against them, the people sing their song just the same as they ever did. Everywhere you go they tell you they dont believe what you hear on your radio. They point and smile and listen the same as they play cards or pool or checkers, just to have something to pass the time away—as far as soaking up all of this war scare and bloody talk and hooray stuff—, they’ve had hard luck enough to wake them up and put them away above that stuff—that comes from great big overgrown rich folks. They control everything that’s said and done on every single radio. (Everything but the feelings of the people). We’ll have some real honest to goodness singing and playing on the air waves some of these days, when the real peoples songs and programs can be broadcasted instead of what we have got now.
Los Angeles and southern California is thickly settled. This little station covers a strip about 100 miles in each direction. It is full of people that work and talk a working man’s lingo, no matter what tongue or color; so I thought, beings our program on WABC was overloaded, beings it only come on 3 times a week, beings it didn’t ever get released onto a nationwide chain, that it might be better for me to step off out here and take a swing at her six times a week, and cover this country that’s so newly settled and where there’s a possible chance for alot of new things to get started.
My best regards to all of the gang on Back Where I Come From. Tell them all to set their self down and write me a big long letter.
Take it easy but take it,
WOODY GUTHRIE
1976
Souvenir shops by the thousand, laden with pin-cushions, plastic doilies, worry-beads, and shell necklaces there are; bookshops piled high with Christian Science tracts, plaster replicas of the Madonna, and catechisms bound in broderie Anglaise line the streets; but restaurants and laundries there are none. The philosophy, obviously, is that since everyone here is 92 years old, he is practically dead anyway, so why feed him and wash his undies?
S. J. PERELMAN
1991
To get to the airport, LAX, from Sunset Boulevard you just head down Sepulveda Boulevard for about 400 miles. One thing you notice as you crawl down this wide avenue is that as most shops such as greengrocers and butchers have retreated into the shopping malls and supermarkets, their premises on the streets have been taken over by specialist retailers, many seemingly connected with light engineering.
It’s much easier to pop out of your house and buy a cone and friction drive variable speed lathe than it is to buy a grapefruit.
ALEXEI SAYLE
FEBRUARY 16
1880
Never before, and not since, when, with Gov. Smith we spent those wonderful eighteen days in Old Egypt, have I seen any such sunlight, transparency and luminousness of atmosphere as characterize the days here in Southern California. They are much alike.
The Indiana settlement is eight or ten miles northeast of Los Angeles. This settlement was started some seven years ago upon virgin land by Indiana people. It is situated directly before the Sierra Madre Mountains, upon an open, undulated plain. Today it is a garden spot. Handsome dwellings rise up amid orange and lemon groves, and occupy a wide expanse of country. Admirably-made roads and churches and school-houses attest the character of the people. A system of water works, carried by iron pipes, spreads through this settlement [Pasadena], affording water for irrigating and other purposes.
E. D. HOLTON
1943
E. and I went to Cukor’s at 4:30, a party for Evelyn Waugh. Ethel Barrymore was pouring, the Reggie Allens and Andrea, Olivia [De Havilland] and Marcus, Constance Collier, Lucille Watson, Garbo—but no Evelyn Waugh till just as E. had decided she wasn’t feeling well and wanted to go home, Mr. and Mrs. Waugh came up the steps, very unprepossessing—a bank clerk and his snuffly wife, an ill-favored tailor’s dummy with halitosis and a blue-eyed Elsa Lanchester part. I brought E. home and returned to Cukor’s. It seems that in my absence Waugh had sent his wife home, dismissed her in a rude way which impressed everyone unpleasantly.
Talked at, or rather sat next to Garbo for some time, stirred by her beauty but bored by her little-girl silliness.
CHARLES BRACKETT
FEBRUARY 17
1954
Up to LA where I dig city again, to Woody Herman’s band on marquee—Get off bus & down South Main St burdened with all pack and have jumbo beers for hot sun thirst—Go on down to SP railyards, singin, “An oldtime non-lovin hard-livin brake-man,” buy wieners and wine in an Italian store, go to yards, inquire about Zipper. At redsun five all clerks go home, yard quiet—I light wood fire behind section shanty and cook dogs and eat oranges & cupcakes, smoke Bull Durham & rest—Chinese new year plap-plaps nearby—at seven I get foolishly on Zipper caboose and talk to rear brakeman as train is made up—BRAM! SLAM! Brakeman struggles to fix mantle and lamp and start coal fire—conductor is Stormy Mason—doesn’t bide my papers, order me out of the caboose—train is underway to Santa Barbara
…For first time in months, in cold rushing night air of California Golden Coast, uncork wine & drink up—raw, bad, rotgut—but I warm and sing all the way—
JACK KEROUAC
1962
Thank you for your champagne.
It arrived, I drank it and I was gayer.
MARILYN MONROE, to the local German consul
FEBRUARY 18
1948
Since I do not intend to alter my behavior in the future, I’m afraid you’ll just have to go on hating.
DALTON TRUMBO, to a colleague
1957
Well, we began shooting with a drama I’ve no doubt Orson planned. We rehearsed all day, lining up a dolly shot covering the entire first scene in Sanchez’s apartment. We never turned a camera all morning or all afternoon, the studio brass gathering in the shadows in anxious little knots. By the time we began filming at a quarter to six, I know they’d written off the whole day. At seven-forty, Orson said, “OK, print. That’s a wrap on this set. We’re two days ahead of schedule.” Twelve pages in one take, including inserts, two-shots, over-shoulders; the whole scene in one, moving through three rooms, with seven speaking parts.
CHARLTON HESTON
FEBRUARY 19
1853
On Tuesday of last week we had four weddings, two funerals, one street fight with knives, a lynch court, two men flogged, and a serenade by a callithumpian band; also a fist fight and one man tossed in a blanket. If any of the flourishing up-country towns can hold a candle to that, let them do it forthwith or forever hold their peace.
La Estrella de Los Angeles/The Los Angeles Star
1934
Left home at dinner time.
EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS, leaving his wife
1940
This singular place is an odd haven in which to sit in the sun and read about the boarding of the [Nazi oil tanker] Altmark. Kaufman, Hart and Alice Miller, all of whom came out to see the opening, are all quitting their villas [at the Garden of Allah hotel] here today. Rachmaninoff has the next one to mine and begins practicing every morning at dawn. Beyond him are the Charles Laughtons. Beyond them is Robert Benchley. Beyond him is Dorothy Parker. It’s the kind of village you might look for down the rabbit-hole. That muted mu
tter from across the way is just Dame Mae Whitty, rehearsing as the nurse to the impending Juliet of Vivien Leigh and the Romeo of Larry Olivier. Down the street is the charming home of a small Jewish screenwriter who used to be my office boy. He has just bought a Reynolds. It’s a mad world, my masters! And always was.
ALEXANDER WOOLLCOTT
FEBRUARY 20
1861
I climbed a high ridge, some two thousand feet above camp. Here a stratum of rock comes out filled with large shells in fine preservation. It rises in a ridge, ending in a precipice to the north. In places these fossil shells had been weathered out in immense numbers. The ridge was strewn with them, as thick as any seabeach I have ever seen….
I cannot describe my feelings as I stood on that ridge, that shore of an ancient ocean. How lonely and desolate! Who shall tell how many centuries, how many decades of centuries, have elapsed since these rocks resounded to the roar of breakers, and these animals sported in their foam? I picked up a bone, cemented in the rock with the shells. A feeling of awe came over me. Around me rose rugged mountains; no human being was within miles of me to break the silence. And then I felt overwhelmed with the magnitude of the work ahead of me. I was at work alone in the field work of this great state, a territory larger than all New England and New York, complicated in its geology.
Dear Los Angeles Page 6
