Dear Los Angeles
Page 8
2004
In the split second between sleeping and waking, before my eyes were opened, I sensed I wasn’t at home and felt deep undefined emotions. It was similar to the way I felt for months in 1986 waking up on location in Washington, D.C., each morning, away from home and disoriented, waking after the escape of sleep to the first moment of realizing that Gio was dead. This morning I realized I was in Los Angeles and when I was awake enough to define the emotion it was not pain I remember but happiness. Sofia won an Oscar last night.
ELEANOR COPPOLA
MARCH 2
1905
Joseph B. Lippincott, resident supervising engineer of the Geological Survey, has returned from an official trip to Washington, D.C., whither he was summoned on business connected with reclamation work on the Lower Colorado River and kindred projects. Mr. Lippincott brings word of plans in contemplation by the government for arid-land development.
Los Angeles Times
1938
It’s a real flood. And my worst sorrow is that we have no radio on hand and can’t [hear] all the minute to minute news….
Santa Monica Canyon is flooded and Santa Monica cut off, as also Malibu Topango [sic] and Laurel and most of the canyon places. The lights have taken to going off too, and the radio broadcasts urgent requests for people to stay at home and not to use the telephone except for emergency calls. Neglecting which [advice], when the rain [slows] down to a fine mist we tour out to see a movie, and a very bad one which I suppose serves us right. [There] are sandbags along the store fronts on Brand so the water must have topped the curbs and we hope Central—i.e. Lyons Storage—has better drainage luck, Edward’s negative box being on the floor of the ground floor.
CHARIS WILSON
MARCH 3
1935
The day cleared and the sky was like June, deep blue with great white clouds sailing about. The country is now so beautiful that I should be perfectly content but I am not. I feel separated from my kind. I think I could find them if I went back to New York, but they are either dead or grown indifferent to me. In going back I should carry my added years with me, and I would find them with an equal weight of added age. I should have gained a philosophy which would enable me to find solace in the flowers, birds, clouds and mountains of this marvelous land, but I haven’t.
HAMLIN GARLAND
1957
Frank Sinatra made his boyish entrance with not one but three standard Hollywood beauties, as if made to order, so perfect in every detail, “tirage en série,” that they seemed cut out of Playboy covers and advertisements, and I could not distinguish one from the other. His stance was one of pride in his triple conquest.
ANAÏS NIN
MARCH 4
1919
I am stranded here on the edge of the world’s backwaters for the next five or six weeks but hope to get to Santa Fe again about the middle of April. This is a great town in which to rest, though, so I suppose I ought to be satisfied. It looks a good deal like the folders they sell you on the train: “typical” California stuff: orange groves in the fore-ground, middle distance of pine trees, and blue and White Mountains beyond. If I had designed the place, however, I should have left out the palms. They march in single file down either side of the streets, parched and brown and dusty as the Sahara, with their hands clasped above their heads in an everlasting rain-prayer. I should call them a doubtful attraction to the real-estate agent’s happy hunting ground. The town’s chief attraction is an Airedale pup that lives about a block from where we are. He is the best specimen of his breed that I have ever seen—on a bench or off—this side of the Mississippi. I shall cultivate his acquaintance.
I tried my hand as a propagandist today—converted my barber to Socialism while he was cutting my hair—and was really amazed at the talent I displayed. I merely guided his flow of conversation—which started Republican, and ended redder than Max Eastman. My technique was impeccable.
YVOR WINTERS
1966
This is a city of plastic paradises wherein one true thing is left, a handmade doughnut.
LIZA WILLIAMS
1995
My car died today. I don’t care. It’s gone. I should have known that would happen. It was making all of these noises, but I just kept turning up the radio so I didn’t have to hear them and worry. I can be like that with my health too—if I see something wrong with me, I just cover it up, keep going, and try not to think about it.
AMY ASBURY
MARCH 5
1927
Arrived home. Mayor’s office clogged with divorces. Have to get rid of some of them before we can have any new marriages.
WILL ROGERS
1974
The sun has been shining here….
We are expecting a set of Britannica III any day, because it comes with a fee I got for doing the Los Angeles entry. We have no place to put it. Harriett has been calling a contractor about doing some remodeling. She figures that while everything is in such a high state of confusion, it would be a good time to have work done. It’s like having your appendix out while you’re under anesthetic for major surgery.
JOHN D. WEAVER, to John Cheever
MARCH 6
1850
Emigrants, when the phrensy of the mines has passed, will be strongly attracted to Los Angeles, the capital of the southern department. It stands inland from San Pedro about eight leagues, in the bosom of a broad fertile plain, and has a population of two thousand souls. The San Gabriel pours its sparkling tide through its green borders. The most delicious fruits of the tropical zone may flourish here. As yet, only the grape and fig have secured the attention of the cultivator; but the capacities of the soil and aptitudes of the climate are attested in the twenty thousand vines, which reel in one orchard, and which send through California a wine that need not blush in the presence of any rival from the hills of France or the sunny slopes of Italy. To these plains the more quiet emigrants will ere long gather, and convert their drills into pruning-hooks, and we shall have wines, figs, dates, almonds, olives, and raisins from California. The gold may give out, but these are secure while nature remains.
WILLIAM RICH HUTTON
1887
Mr. Baker and I went for a turn in the calesa. Arcadia and Nana went to Los Angeles and back in the afternoon. They went to the funeral of Estela’s baby. They say that small pox is increasing all over Los Angeles. Rather cloudy day. Very low tide all day.
DON JUAN BAUTISTA BANDINI
MARCH 7
1896
We took the electric cars to Altadena (Mr. and Mrs. Roy Barnhart’s home is at this place), thence up to Rubio canon, one of the most picturesque and beautiful canons in the Sierra Madre mountains, where is taken the great cable incline to the hotel among the mountains. On this electric cable incline, in the open “white chariot,” we were carried up fourteen hundred feet at an average of 59 per cent….
Immediately upon our arrival, after securing rooms, we went to the white dome of the Lowe observatory….After dinner we watched the search light flash over the cities of Pasadena and Los Angeles, whose electric lights, like stars, contrasted strangely with the world over our heads, which an hour later was shown to us through Professor Swift’s superb sixteen-inch refracting telescope. Jupiter and suns were admirably seen and the milky way with its I dare not say how many planets, no one has yet been able to count them. An evening with Music and Readings in honor of Professor Lowe, (who was at the hotel that evening, his magnificent home is on Orange Grove avenue, Pasadena), and the birthday of one of the guests, Miss Stevenson, of England, concluded our first day’s stay up in the sky.
LORAINE IMMEN
1936
Dottie [Dorothy Parker] and Alan have acquired a Picasso. It is one of a collection Stanley Rose, the bookseller, showed. I saw it at his place, thinking it and other Picassos singular
ly ugly. I never really noticed it on the Campbells’ mantelpiece till they gestured to it proudly. It led Thornton [Wilder]…to quote something [Picasso] said about the wife he is divorcing or has divorced, “When I beat her even her screams were artificial.”
Thornton also quoted Gertrude Stein—her explanation of a line which is apparently nonsense, “A rose is a rose is a rose.” She claims that poetry was in its beginnings the worship of the noun. In those days a poet could mention a noun and achieve clear beauty. That innocent day is past. Miss Stein claims that when she wrote “A rose is a rose is a rose,” for the first time in three hundred years a rose really smelled like a rose on the printed page.
CHARLES BRACKETT
MARCH 8
1851
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That for the purpose of ascertaining and settling private land claims in the State of California, a commission shall be, and is hereby, constituted…it shall be to superintend the interests of the United States.
THE LAND ACT OF 1851
1856
May we be governed by principle, not greed, and be comrades in our republics rather than slaves. We wish to be full members of society, not just props; human beings rather than simple shadows. May the rich not hamper the poor seeking to become rich, nor the poor become rich by stealing from the powerful. May the nobleman respect the common man, and may the common man accept the nobleman. May all governments take on the responsibility of promoting prosperity among the poor and honor among the virtuous, not the opposite.
Clearly, no one person should be of more value than any other because those who partake of excess destroy equality and those who allow excess conspire with those who seek it. Equality is harmony, and thereon rests peace in the Republic. Disrupting equality through excess is out of tune and what was once sweet music becomes simply noise.
Republics should have the same relationship with monarchs as the relationship the land…has with the sea….The two are intertwined, but the shoreline provides the land with a way of defending itself against the insolence of the sea, which is constantly threatening it, lapping upon its shores, trying to drown it and drink it up. And the land takes its due on the one hand, and hides on the other. The land, always firm and unmoveable, opposes the rowdiness and perpetual discord of the sea’s ever-changing nature. The sea rises up in fury at any gust of wind while the land increases its abundance. The sea is enriched by whatever the land offers her, and the land, with fishing hooks and nets, empties out the sea.
FRANCISCO P. RAMIREZ
1941
I do not yet know all the possibilities of Hollywood, because it’s a place where you never see anyone….
We live in a very pretty house, with a rather large garden, built on a hill which overlooks the whole city. It is in Hollywood which, it seems, is not very elegant at all. The high-class people live in Beverly Hills, or further west, towards the sea. The most expensive villas are in Santa Monica….
The streets here are very long. For example, we live at 8150 Hollywood Boulevard. And before you reach us, on our side of the street, there really are 8148 houses….
At the very end of this little area, which is the intersection of Laurel Canyon and Sunset Boulevard, is Schwab’s drugstore. One finds everything there, even medicine. They sell cigarettes, bras, newspapers, fountain pens, lingerie, sweets, dishes, wine, and alcohol. There is a huge counter where they serve you strange food. I will not tell you much about the food because I want you to be surprised. Americans cook like little girls playing with their toy plates, making themselves dishes with whatever they can steal from their mothers’ kitchens: raw carrots, a piece of chocolate, leftover cauliflower, and some currant jelly….
A few hours from here is a desert as beautiful as the Sahara. A little further are some Indian reservations which, it seems, have not changed. And above all, there remain some entirely Mexican areas which must be wonderful. In the old part of Los Angeles, one can see some far from ordinary characters.
JEAN RENOIR
MARCH 9
1935
There is no hope here. There is nothing but life as incredible as the place, and to that life and to that place a human becomes inured because nature refuses to let outraged senses and sensations and muscles react after they have been shocked to their limit. Else we should go mad.
So I am growing used to impossible snow-capped mountains, outrageous trees and lush gardens, heaven-blessed atmosphere and evening air impossibly laden with perfume of jasmine and orange blossoms. It is unjust that there should be such beauty in such a childish hellhole.
ERIC KNIGHT, to a friend
1968
I wonder if my signs shouldn’t be where I can touch them. Contact can be good. Love, Success, Control, Strength, Love.
OCTAVIA E. BUTLER
MARCH 10
1920
Dear Comrade and fellow-worker Debs:
Just a short letter to let you know that you have a comrade who think[s] of you tho I be an I.W.W. and locked tight into a cold steal sell at Los Angeles Cal. Just for my loyalty to the cause of industrial socialism and for running Red International Book’s my bail is twenty five thousand dollars and I don’t know just when my trial will be however I am not losing any sleep over it knowing as I do that there are no justice to be gotten from a capitalist court the enemy of the working class and here I am to face them not only as an IWW or Bolshevik but also as a yellow man from the far East where only real bad men can come from.
I am not well today my very life longs for a great big green world where I can breathe fresh air and bath into the warm light of the sun, I trust you are well and strong and will live to see the jail doors swing wide and we go marching on. I am giving this letter to a boy to mail for me who is going to get his freedom today. I hope he will mail it right away. I am yours always
J. W. NISHIDA, to Eugene V. Debs
1924
Coast road like dead snake in road—Malibu Beach—barbed-wire fence on both sides keeping people out from Mrs. Rindge’s Spanish land grant—ridge of rocks like iguanodon’s back going down to the sea—California horses and cattle on the tawny hills.
—John Barrymore’s wife a soft little doughnut.
EDMUND WILSON
1954
I have sampled the waters here briefly, and have reason to believe I shall be able to earn a living….Many of our old friends have given up writing entirely, and turned to other lines of work.
DALTON TRUMBO, to a fellow blacklistee
MARCH 11
1938
THE GARDEN OF ALLAH HOTEL, HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA
In the old days, when movies were a stringing together of the high points in the imagination of half a dozen drunken ex-newspapermen, it was true that the whole thing was the director. He coordinated and gave life to the material—he carried the story in his head. There is a great deal of carry-over from those days, but the situation of Three Comrades, where Frank Borzage had little more to do than be a sort of glorified cameraman, is more typical of today. A Bob Sherwood picture, for instance, or a Johnny Mahin script, could be shot by an assistant director or a script girl, and where in the old days an author would have jumped at the chance of becoming a director, there are now many, like Ben Hecht and the aforesaid Mahin, who hate the eternal waiting and monotony of the modern job.
This is a necessary evolution that the talkies brought about, and I should say that in seven out of ten cases, your feeling that the director or producer was the great coordinator no longer applies.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, to a journalist
1966
Taix’s manufactures a round, flat, hearth-baked sourdough bread. Cradle it on your chest, push it between your breasts, pull it apart and chew on its stretching crust, cheese, butter, taste it. A Mr. Felix mak
es German pumpernickel. Markets it in cellophane with his Victorian-perfect face on the label. Keep it in the fridge and eat it all week, full of grain, and dark sultry mountain-climbing taste, as though it were the last taste on earth.
I should like to sleep in a bed of Jewish doublewhipped cream cheese.
LIZA WILLIAMS
1968
Didn’t read the story tonight, the “King at the hospital” one….Lets work with. I think it can be saved.
OCTAVIA E. BUTLER
MARCH 12
1850
Our town has been some three months infested with a gang of rowdies and gamblers who alike set law and order at defiance. They have rendered the place a very unsafe one for the peaceable inhabitants….
The native population, unaccustomed to our laws, if called on would certainly be led on into excesses that would arouse national hatreds and lead to far worse evils….
Already, in two instances, sectional fights where firearms have been used have taken place between Californians and Americans, and we know not the hour when the difficulties of 1846 may not be renewed.