Dear Los Angeles
Page 21
NORMAN CORWIN, to the lyricist E. Y. “Yip” Harburg
1960
It’s like living on another planet down here. TV is the principal pursuit. You glue yourself to it. If you want to take a walk you get in your car. To go to the grocery or the liquor store you must have a car, though you could walk it in 20 minutes. Must confess one thing about the American—he’s awfully kind and courteous behind the counter. Amazing what you can ask them and have them do for you with a genuine smile. (Even to cashing a check.) “The client is always right.” Every house for miles around is a good one, costing from 20,000–100,000 dollars each. Nothing lacks, not even the garbage disposal in the sink, which makes a noise like giants being strangled under a hood. Frightening—but efficient….
…Watching TV I caught up on the ball games. Takes about 2 ½ for a game to unroll.
…If Kennedy dies in office will have Johnson from Texas, about the narrowest-minded group of people in America, Texans. He’s rich too, and proud of having been a school teacher. Can you beat that?
Three strikes and out! The Dodgers are in the lead.
HENRY MILLER, to Lawrence Durrell
1961
Last Saturday night went for the first time in my life to the Hollywood Bowl, the guest of Mr. and Mrs. Andre Kostelanitz [sic], taking with me as fellow guests Lilla Perry and Betty Peterman. It was a kind of a Grand Canyon of an audience, every seat taken, twenty thousand people, to hear an all-Gershwin program. A master of ceremonies named Cassidy at the intermission, before reporting coming events, suddenly was saying, “We have present with us this evening a man who has become a legend in his own time, Carl Sandburg.” On the instant a spotlight played on me and I stood up and stretched my right arm to this announcer and then to the twenty thousand innocent people assembled. So there we are, “A legend in our own time.” And what you and I have to say is, “Jesus, it could be worse!”
CARL SANDBURG, to his wife
1970
Today I wanted something to happen, something that would say—it has all been for this, leading to this, this is it, THIS IS WHAT IT IS ALL ABOUT.
Outside the smog glides by and the day passes from light to shade and the TV news is sodden and Sunday-minded and my stomach hurts in anticipation of my scheduled discharge and the electricity continues to work because we have paid the bill, paid all our bills, but there must be something else.
LIZA WILLIAMS
JULY 18
1939
Cooler!
Am resting a bit—in my very busy fashion. Rest for me is largely changing occupations. Transplanted a lot more herbs this morning, completing a big circle under one of the loquat trees.
…C. told me of the recent domestic strain. Her father has gone (great relief to her mother) to live his own separate, selfish life as before. She is to use his little house in the garden for his studio, much needed.
OLIVE PERCIVAL
1939
As I was dressing this morning, I had a disheartening concept of what my aging body requires. It is not only a poor, fumbling, tremulous machine; it is a decaying mass of flesh and bone. It needs constant care to prevent its being a nuisance to others. It stinks. It sheds its hair. It itches, aches and burns. It constantly sloughs its skin. It sweats, wrinkles and cracks. It was a poor contrivance at the beginning—it is now a burden. I must continue to wash it, dress it, endure its out-thrusting hair and fingernails and keep its internal cogworks from clogging. The best I can do for it is to cover it up with cloth of pleasing texture and color, for it is certain to become more unsightly as the months march on.
HAMLIN GARLAND
JULY 19
1870
Hauled dung all day to smoke out the grasshoppers.
HENRY DALTON
1964
I am beset by a kind of fantasy. I see men, healthy, well-fed, hefty, riding small creatures up a steep and rutted path. From the distance I cannot tell whether the beasts are lions or burros….
The creatures emit weak and halting sounds, difficult to comprehend; the riders make orations, wise, eloquent and powerful. Certainly, their remarks make more sense than the cries of the beasts.
When I come out of this fantasy and try to make sense of it, I realize that the novel has been captured and tamed, its makers seduced or intimidated by the critics….The novelists, lions grown mangy and toothless, have been brought in for display by the menageries of English departments. The position is undeniably attractive, secure with tenure, protected from the risk of the jungle of ordinary readers, given the meat of love and acceptance on classroom and lecture-hall schedule.
And even if the post is not made official, there is feeding in fellowships, grants and subsidies, administered by the critics and scholars who must be impressed.
ROBERT KIRSCH
JULY 20
1870
A DAY LATER
Hauled dung all day to smoke out the grasshoppers.
HENRY DALTON
1946
The other day a man came to my house representing a group of prominent Beverly Hills citizens who were circulating a petition which would place restrictive covenants barring all but Caucasians from the block in which I live. I read this list of sponsors very carefully, and found there the name of an actor who, like a good many people in motion pictures, has risen to affluence from the nickels and dimes paid into the box office by working people, including, I daresay, Negroes. It struck me so oddly that I began to laugh, and this man they had hired to pass the petition around said, “What are you laughing about?”
So I said, “You go and tell this actor that I am laughing about him sending this kind of a petition around.” Because, I said, it wasn’t so long ago that actors couldn’t buy property in nice neighborhoods either….
You go and tell that actor, I said to the man, that I’m getting up a petition too. And if he’ll sign mine, I’ll sign his.
DALTON TRUMBO
1961
Can I help it if my hair is short? Damn everyone who makes cracks at it….I feel like hell.
WANDA COLEMAN
JULY 21
1933
This morning every Jewish Job’s comforter of the orchestra came up to me and tried to dissuade me from playing Schoenberg. The argument is always the same—it drives away the crowd, Goossens played modern works and was never engaged again, there is no personal feeling against me, but it’s in my own interests etc. etc., in the same monotonous scale….
The radio people gave a talk about me this morning (I didn’t hear it) saying my concerts created a sensation. The fact is that when a resident conductor played Tuesday night, a program of “good” music, the attendance hit a low for the two weeks. They cannot reason that away—for my concert drew a larger crowd on an afternoon, and without a celebrated soloist. Well, this Sunday ought to be a cinch….
Capablanca called again and brought his book on chess. He is awfully nice and friendly.
NICOLAS SLONIMSKY
1934
We have a lovely home but almost no recreation. Zulime feels this more than I do. She is hungry for some sort of diversion but I hate the moving pictures with such bitterness that to go to them with her is to destroy all her pleasure in them. They all seem bent on showing the sexual organs of women. Somehow in every picture there is a disrobing scene or a dance which displays not merely legs and thighs but the female crotch. Seemingly no other object can be depended upon to interest our public.
HAMLIN GARLAND
JULY 22
1887
We went to Malibu in the morning with the intention of staying some days….We took a Chinese cook and a driver. Reached Malibu in the afternoon very tired and the carreta we came in was broken. Warm clear day.
DON JUAN BAUTISTA BANDINI
1907
Man
y people daily gather to watch the Hawaiians in the surf at Venice.
Santa Monica Daily Outlook
JULY 23
1847
This morning the 3rd. Fifty made a start for home….Travelled 20 miles to a ranch belonging to Gen Peko and encamp’d. This Rancho or farm seems to be the remains of an old Mission, several houses here covered with the old-fashioned English tile. Here are 2 large gardens and vineyards. One of these, I should think contained 200 acres. No grain raised in these enclosures but plenty of fruit such as grapes, figs, pears, apricots, cherries, plums, peaches, apples, and likewise black pepper, olive, date, palm tree and various others too numerous to mention.
HENRY STANDAGE
1887
Yesterday Mother through her new attorneys notified me she would not stand by her contract. This of course will lead to a very unpleasant law suit.
WILLIAM BANNING
1943
New York makes you hard and grubby, California relaxes you too much. Reading back through my journal to the summer I was here before, Laguna Beach in 1939, just before the war broke out in Europe—those far-away days….
During that summer I was care-taker on a chicken-ranch while the owners were away. For days I would forget to feed the chickens, life was so dreamy, then I would make up for it by feeding them too much. About half of them died, fell on their backs with their feet sticking rigidly up, and I left the ranch in disgrace for New Mexico.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, to his publisher
JULY 24
1855
The idea of liberty in the United States is truly curious….Certain people have no liberty at all. It is denied by the courts to every person of color….But there is the great liberty of any white man to buy a human being in order to arbitrarily hang him or burn him alive. This happens in states where slavery is tolerated and the vilest despotism runs wild. This, in the center of the nation that calls itself a “model republic.”
FRANCISCO P. RAMIREZ
1949
We spent this afternoon driving around the hills & the beach. L.A. is a weird town. For its size (much larger in area than New York) it’s got a very small central section. The rest is residential—poor like Coney [Island], middle-class like Flatbush, tony like Westchester—but the surroundings—high hills, almost mountains—are quite terrific. And the beach is beautiful—in places like the Riviera—other places like Asbury Park.
NORMAN MAILER
JULY 25
1933
There is a funny situation out here now. The sound men are on strike, and the other unions, camera men etc. are evidently going out with them. We “Writers” (a funny thing out here—when anyone asks you what you are you say “Writer”) have a new union and a very radical one, organized by such old “movement” men as Howard, Lawson, Ornitz, Weitzenkorn, Caesar, and practically every editor of The Call since Abraham Cahan’s day. But there’s no chance of our ever striking—behind the barricades we’ll go willingly enough, but organized labor action never. I went to a union meeting where there was some big talk, but at the slightest bit of Producer opposition we’ll fold like the tents of the Arabs. The strange thing is that almost all the members of the union admit it themselves. Today when I came to work there were pickets in front of the studio, and it felt queer to walk through them. A Writer, one of them shouted, and lip-farted.
NATHANAEL WEST, to Edmund Wilson
1950
I don’t want to conclude this letter without mentioning the great danger which the American nationalism might provoke. Will it not finally degenerate into anti-Semitism? We have seen such things.
ARNOLD SCHOENBERG, to Aaron Copland
JULY 26
1943
Don’t know why all my vitality is gone. Maybe this climate, maybe lack of creative interest. “The Caller” doesn’t excite me and nothing else does….
I don’t have the strength to move my literary pawns around the stage anymore. They are too heavy to push and they used to spring so lightly. And they have fallen into a sullen dumbness, after all their excited speech. Poor dummies! They sit and stare at me resentfully from the Shadowy Stage of my heart, and I can’t help them today.
Some day I will again.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS
1945
I’ve been here since June 7. In that time I have written one complete screen play, 145 pages. Two. Spent two weeks working at night and on weekends fixing up a picture for Ginger Rogers. Three. Spent two other weekends writing a 50-page story which we hope to sell to Howard Hawks. I’m doing all this to try to make enough money to get the hell out of this place and come back home and fix Missy’s room and paint the house and do the other things we need. Along with this I attend to matters at the farm by correspondence with James, giving him directions and solving his problems.
WILLIAM FAULKNER, to his wife
2004
And even more than my—these days near obsessional—devouring of words, la salvación está en esto: my feverish scratch scratch scratching of rust-colored, fat, felt-tip pen. ¡He aquí! Con este acto puedo—tengo que—expiar, extirpar la angustia. Mitigar. Paliar. What else to do?
SUSANA CHÁVEZ-SILVERMAN
JULY 27
1890
When my awful story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” comes out, you must try & read it. Walter says he has read it FOUR times and thinks it the most ghastly tale he ever read. Says it beats Poe, and Doré! But that’s only a husband’s opinion.
I read the thing to three women here however, and I never saw such squirms! Daylight too. It’s a simple tale, but highly unpleasant.
I don’t know yet where it will be. If none of the big things will take it I need to try the New York Ledger. Have you that in its new form? Kipling and Stevenson etc. etc. write for that now, so I guess I can.
CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN
1933
This place is not at all what I expected. It isn’t very fantastic, just a desert got up to look like Asbury Park. And so far I’ve bumped into none of the things I expected and was prepared for by reports and plays like Once in a Life Time. The studio I am working Columbia is a highly organized and very practical business place. Five minutes after I arrived I was given an assignment a picture called BLIND DATE and I have been working nine hours a day on it since then with a full day on Saturday.
NATHANAEL WEST
1955
Nobody’s spoken to me in less than a shout and I’ve been riding in nothing but Cadillacs and Thunderbirds. Fortunately, I am a level-headed, thoughtful sort of chap, and capable of being swayed by this sort of gaudy nonsense. Marilyn Monroe and I are just going to go ahead with our plans and get married, then settle down on her 12,000-acre citrus ranch, and make our own little world.
ELIA KAZAN
JULY 28
1939
Mrs. C. says now she is devoted to Genealogy—makes charts, etc. She comes of the best intellectual stock of old New England.
OLIVE PERCIVAL
1941
Most Hollywoodites are nice, but they have had to adopt a jungle attitude to exist….
…A man who makes five thousand a week considers a man who earns five hundred per week a pauper not good enough to associate with….
…Knowing the right people is more important in Hollywood than any place else. But being a relative of a big shot is even better….
…Publicity is the life blood of the industry and they will do anything for it—even behave like human beings….
…No matter how sappy the person, if he is a click he is worshipped. But a fine human being who is a flop is avoided like a disease….
…All the highest paid brains haven’t done as much for the celluloids as a sweater and a pair of sheer stockings and the right gals to fill them….
…Hollywood is an amazing little fair land ful
l of devils. An ermine-lined Hell. It is as colossal as it says it is; and it is as petty as its detractors claim. It’s a star-spangled ride to Paradise.
WALTER WINCHELL
1972
Last night we went to Henry Miller’s home. He limps and he is in pain, but he hesitates to undergo surgery. His mood was good….Of course we both carry in our minds images from the past. I always see him dynamic, walking forever all through Paris, joyous. He always sees me as I was, lively, a dancer….
Henry’s Japanese ex-wife was there. She never loved him; for this I dislike her….On one wall the shelves are filled with the translations of his books in fifteen or twenty languages.
ANAÏS NIN