Dear Los Angeles
Page 16
As it is ten o’clock, the library is closing. I just stopped in to Noel’s on the way home. I stayed there fifteen minutes, then I went home with Johnny Bourjette. Just met Pa at the corner of Main and Third Street. He asked me to take a little walk. We went downtown. We went until the courthouse. Pa went into Jerry’s Chop House to eat some oysters. I did not eat any as I don’t like them.
MANNIE LOWENSTEIN
1935
Schoenberg teaches me counterpoint now. And I am very happy because my work seems to please him. Today he turned to the other two pupils and said: You see, I don’t even have to look at it (my exercises), I know they’re right. He is a teacher of great kindness and understanding and it is a rich comfort that he gives….
And now—, Xenia. All I know is that she will be here early in June; that there was a formal announcement (her sister’s idea) in order that “showers” might follow; and that I am, according to mother, as unprepared as if I were living on the streets (Xenia knows this and says she will accept even starvation with me “gracefully”)….
I ran into a lady who has a daughter. And she claims that although the injections are necessary that they alone will not do the thing, that diet is of supreme importance. She has taken the whole matter very scientifically. Vitamins…Yeast. A vegetable juicer.
JOHN CAGE, to Pauline Schindler
MAY 25
1888
Everyone is a Bohemian, a civilized nomad, and finds his meals wherever fate lands him. If he discovers the aching void while he is in the adobe town, he asks the handsome, dark-eyed señorita for hot tomales and chocolate. If he is in Chinatown he gets a cup of delicious tea and a bird’s nest. If he feels flush he crosses the elegant threshold of “Koster’s;” if poor he tries the “Silver Moon,” where, for twenty-five cents, you get soup, several kinds of meat, all vegetables in the market, ice-cream, pie and coffee. You can live like a prince, or you can dine luxuriously as a pauper.
There is an old cathedral down in adobe town, the “Cathedral of the Queen of the Angels,” where I rather like to find myself. It is built of adobe, and has no special architecture, being low and broad, with an ill-proportioned attempt at cruciform, and possessing an altogether familiar and undignified air, standing forth on Main Street like some rotund, worldly abbot, brushing his skirts against the sordid stream of human life. Passing through a graveled yard, with a great wooden paintless cross set in its center, you find the side entrance. The door is always open; you pass inside and see a wooden floor, worn into little shelving hollows by the friction of faithful feet. It is the oldest looking, darkest, dingiest sort of a church imaginable, though built in 1823, and comparatively in its prime. The straight-backed, wooden pews are cut and scarred, and boast neither cushions or stools. Against the low, white walls, the different stations of the cross are marked by crude lithographic representations….
I often punctuate my walks by a quiet seat in this unlovely sanctuary, for its very mustiness is redolent of those old days when the sun lay in long lazy bars across the clustering adobes; when the Mexican with his broad sombrero, and the senorita with gleams of bright gold swinging from her ears, lived their dreamy, purposeless lives, and weened not of the great city that was to spring up and crush out their sunny solving of existence.
HARRIET HARPER
1938
Going to breakfast along one of the alleys of the studio, I find a row of actresses waiting on camp chairs and benches outside one of the stages. They are young girls, mostly, and as I look at the faces I see (unsurprised) that they are very good-looking—I think one of them would create a stir in a restaurant or a bus, but all strung out like that, with their heavy make-up on, they mean no more than a lot of slick magazine covers. They are every bit as good-looking.
CHARLES REZNIKOFF
1941
E., the kids and I went to a British War Relief party at C. Aubrey Smith’s place on top of Coldwater Canyon. It was a large party filled with professional and non-professional character parts, and it was a grave troubled party—none of the British arrogance so irritating in times past, which would be so welcome now. I had a feeling that it was an odd and touching way to see an Empire shake, if not crumble, at a garden party in Hollywood.
CHARLES BRACKETT
MAY 26
1919
A few students were blowing horns about the campus & others were detonating anvils. Jubilation was in the air & I gave the word for an hour of it. They came from everywhere…with more shouting & cheering than they ever had in them before.
ERNEST CARROLL MOORE
MAY 27
1937
Edward [Weston] does century plants in the Krasnow backyard.
CHARIS WILSON
1960
We want all the leisure that man has given us (in printing, in moviemaking, even in the typewriter, the bicycle, the curtain wall), but we want the machine to stop in the other fellow’s case and handicraft-ism to prevail—and places to walk returned to us—hedgerows, the benches in Pershing Square. What serves the age and does the least damage to the spirit?
ESTHER MCCOY, to Ray Bradbury
MAY 28
1921
The freshness of the air. The sea wind. We drive onto the end of Beach Drive. Then back and park the car. Go to one of the best places and have sundaes, lemonades, etc. At 10:30 start back. Delightful air. How far flung L.A. seems. So plain that one could enjoy life here with the car. Back via Main, West 8th, West 7th, West 6th. Vermont, 3rd., Western and Sunset to Detroit. 11:30. We discuss the fun we had. To bed. Helen and I laugh at Myrtle & Grell. A fine, delicious round. To sleep.
THEODORE DREISER
1942
With lang, on the beach, thought about a hostage film (prompted by heydrich’s execution in prague). there were two young people lying close together beside us under a big bath towel, the man on top of the woman at one point, with a child playing alongside. not far away stands a huge iron listening contraption with colossal wings which turns in an arc; a soldier sits behind it on a tractor seat, in shirtsleeves, but in front of one or two little buildings there is a sentry with a gun in full kit. huge petrol tankers glide silently down the asphalt coast road, and you can hear heavy gunfire beyond the bay.
BERTOLT BRECHT
MAY 29
1943
Do you know Christopher Isherwood or like his work? I visited him last night at his monastery. He is going into one in Hollywood, of all places. It is a miniature copy, architecturally, of the Taj Mahal and when I entered about eight girls and three men, including one Hindu, were seated on cushions in a semi-circle about the fire-place, all with an absolutely expressionless silence….Isherwood suggested we go out for a walk. I cannot surmise his real attitude toward “the family”—he is English enough not to speak his mind very frankly—but I am wondering a little if he is not going to write a wonderful story of what is going on there.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, to his publisher
1965
If [Simon] Rodia [the creator of the Watts Towers] had set out to pick a place in which to build a huge work of art and avoid having it recognized, he could hardly have picked a better place than Los Angeles. In Los Angeles, a bizarre structure may not even be seen; for the city is, of course, a vast sprawl in which practically nobody walks anywhere and few people drive without having a particular objective in mind. Even if it is seen, it is likely to attract little attention; people in Southern California accept a profusion of lawn sculpture and miniature castles with moats as a natural product of a large retired population and a climate that permits outdoor hobbies.
CALVIN TRILLIN
MAY 30
1940
Now comes a retired United States army officer with a new war weapon which he says “is so effective it will blow up an entire community.”
We wonder whether he deserved a meda
l for his discovery or whether he should be blown up by and with his new weapon.
AL WAXMAN
1944
After my nap went to Ginger [Rogers’s] house, a hard one to find, and funny and unbelievable and elaborate and uncomfortable when one got there. Sat on one of two pale salmon-colored couches before a log fire and told her To Each His Own and, bless her, she loved it. Drank it in with exactly the reaction I had hoped, said she wanted to play it but needed a whale of a director. She said she’d been in enough mediocre pictures, this she thought could be superb. We embraced and I drove like a bat out of hell to Joan Crawford’s to have a cocktail with Joan and Phil. A cocktail proved to be two singularly strong Daiquiris in a room with a log fire, on a pale satin couch—all much more knowing than Ginger’s but of the same general sort. Two little blonde adopted children were put through their mannered paces.
CHARLES BRACKETT
2003
I am a man of simple pleasures, one of which is driving around Southern California with the windows down, searching for restaurants that throw off the right scent.
Several years ago, on Pico just east of Bundy in West L.A., I swerved to a stop after passing the Talpa. I may not know much, but I know how a proper Mexican restaurant is supposed to smell from the street, and this one had the right look, too. Very little money had been sunk into the exterior design.
Inside, the joint was just as unpretentious. Formica table tops, artificial plants, a mural of rural Mexico.
I headed for the bar and ordered a fat burrito and a cold beer from a man named Andres Martinez.
The Dodgers were on TV, a warm summer breeze was blowing in through the back alley, and I felt like a dog having its belly scratched.
I don’t get to Talpa often enough. But in bits and pieces for several years, usually during Dodger games, Andres has been telling me a story. It began when I told him I had lived in Philadelphia.
“Oh,” Andres said. “My daughter is in Philadelphia. She’s in medical school.”
He was obviously a proud papa, but his modesty kept him from gloating.
Over time, I picked up on the fact that he and his wife, Guillermina, were both working at Talpa to keep up with the cost of tuition.
On another visit, Andres, who has a sixth-grade education, told me his daughter was just about done with law school at Loyola.
“I thought she was going to be a doctor,” I said.
“That’s the other daughter,” Andres told me. “This one’s going to be a lawyer.”
He and his wife, who didn’t finish high school, were paying for that, too, on the proceeds from this little hole-in-the-wall restaurant. A doctor and a lawyer, I thought. That’s a lot of tacos.
“At $1.95 a taco?” Andres said. “Yes, that’s a lot of tacos.”
…“What happened to my kids is a real big thing,” he said. “When I went to Philadelphia for my first daughter’s graduation, and they announced her name, I cried. I was just a little guy from a small town in Mexico, San Gaspar de Los Reyes, Jalisco.”
Andres is 65 now, and with all the bills paid, I wondered if he and Guillermina would finally give themselves a break and sell the Talpa.
Maybe, he said, because although he loves his family of regular customers, 30 years is a long hustle.
But on the other hand, there’s no rush to retire. Cynthia has a child now, Andres said, and he and Guillermina are expecting big things for little Lucia, who is 8 months old.
“We’ve started a college fund for her,” he said.
STEVE LOPEZ
MAY 31
1939
The tree outside is sad. It will die, I think.
MALCOLM LOWRY
1970
In the afternoon we went with David to Griffith Park, where there was a Gay-in. Only it wasn’t very gay or very well attended. The police had been by, earlier, harassing them because they were distributing leaflets without a permit. Nobody got arrested but it scared a lot of people off….
Lee introduced to me an elderly man named Morris Kight who was wearing a silk dressing gown and a funny hat and who appeared to be directing the proceedings. He married two pairs of girls, explaining that this wasn’t a marriage but a “mateship.” We had to join hands and chant something about love. Kight also introduced me publicly and called on me to speak, so I said, in my aw-shucks voice, “I just came here because I’m with you and wanted to show it.”
CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD
JUNE 1
1910
I have been hidden down here in Los Angeles for a month or two and have managed to get off a little book to Houghton Mifflin, which they propose to bring out as soon as possible. It is entitled “My First Summer in the Sierra.” I also have another book nearly ready, made up of a lot of animal stories for boys, drawn from my experiences as a boy in Scotland and in the wild oak openings of Wisconsin. I have also rewritten the autobiographical notes dictated at Harriman’s Pelican Lodge on Klamath Lake two years ago, but that seems to be an endless job, and, if completed at all, will require many a year. Next month I mean to bring together a lot of Yosemite material into a hand-book for travelers, which ought to have been written long ago.
JOHN MUIR
JUNE 2
1930
The Zep[pelin] goes back home tonight, with Lady Drummond Hay, Karl von Wiegand—all the same passengers they always have. They ought to change the cast on that thing. People will get the idea that it can’t haul anybody else.
WILL ROGERS
1979
Out into Hollywood Boulevard. There is nothing of the breathtaking beauty of New York about this city. Low, flat, sprawling and laid-back—like a patient on a psychiatrist’s couch….Two limousines arrive to take us to the Bruin Theatre in Westwood where Brian is to be “sneak previewed.” At the theatre we find a full house and 1,000 people turned away. Meet the Warner’s executives who are, understandably, grinning pleasurably.
It’s a marvellous showing. Great laughs and applause on a scale we have not yet seen for Brian. At the end Eric leads the rush out—and gets into the wrong limousine—whilst Terry and I stand on the sidewalk and talk to one or two of the audience and those waiting—who are not of the tear-your-clothes-off fan type and want to talk quite unsensationally about the movie….Later in the evening TJ gets woken in his room by a present from Harry in the shape of a Los Angeles naughty lady.
MICHAEL PALIN
JUNE 3
1907
At last, word this morning from Cousin Jennie Graves, announcing that Clifford was a little better. It is a bad case of typhoid, complicated by Bright’s disease. He apparently died in a convulsion, on the 23rd, but his friend Dr. Moxon seized a knife and cut a blood-vessel. The blood was congealed and he cut a larger one—finally succeeded in drawing three pints—then injected a solution of salt. Life returned!
OLIVE PERCIVAL
1942
What do they think we are anyway? Oh well, I’m not going to school now. They’re sure anxious to keep us dumb just like morons. Golly! All my plans of going to college and all that are all gone. All I could think of now is be a dumb ox and not ever graduate high school.
The food is getting better now (It’s about time!) You know what happened? The other day district VI and VII all got diarrhea. 4:00 a.m….Man, it looks as if the whole camp got sick with the food. They ran out of toilet paper too, right in the middle of the night. Boy!…Woo P.U.! Those guards thought there was going to be a revolution.
SANDIE SAITO
1966
At a lecture I am asked to pronounce my name three times. I try to be slow and emphatic, “Anaïs—Anaïs—Anaïs. You just say ‘Anna’ and then add ‘ees,’ with the accent on the ‘ees.’ ”
ANAÏS NIN
JUNE 4
1926
HOTEL AMBASSADOR
>
Tell it not in Wardour Street, but I’m beginning to extract a certain sardonic amusement out of Hollywood. It takes itself so seriously, these days. And it’s so self-centered that one sometimes wonders, as one sits in the Cocoanut Grove, whether there is such a place as New York, or Chicago, or indeed the United States.