Dear Los Angeles

by Dear Los Angeles- The City in Diaries

  OCTOBER 4

  1860

  At about seven a.m. we anchored opposite to San Pedro, four hundred and twenty miles from San Francisco, and the end of our voyage. Here we leave the steamer, which goes on to San Diego. At the edge of the water is a high bank, and from this the plain extends far as we can see. There are three adobe houses on the bank, and everything looks just as it did when Dana described it in his “Two Years before the Mast,” more than twenty years ago. We landed in the steamer’s boats, and after an unsavory breakfast at one of the houses, a wagon was produced, to which four half-broken California horses were harnessed. The men hung on to their heads, swayed about, and at times raised themselves off their feet as the animals struggled, till the signal for starting was given, when they sprang off, simultaneously, and the released animals dashed away at full speed. The driver occasionally looked in to ask us, on which side we wished to fall when we upset. This seemed to be his standing joke, and one which I thought it not improbable might become a serious question with us.

  The plains were covered with thousands of cattle and horses, quite reminding us of the descriptions of old California times. In the twenty-five miles of our journey, there were but two or three shanties, erected by squatters who were raising cattle, and not a fence or enclosure, except the corrals about them. We reached Los Angeles in about two hours and a half, having changed horses once on the way.

  As we approached the town there was a marked change from the treeless sterility of the plains. We found ourselves winding through the midst of vineyards and gardens, and on all sides saw workmen engaged in the manufacture of wine.

  WILLIAM INGRAHAM KIP

  1946

  A day on the dubbing stage. When I met Billy in the office I knew he was in one of his moods, and his mood proved to be the persecuted one. The Rebel discriminated against. This comes on him now and then—he craves occasional persecution as animals crave salt. With the passing of years, however, and his great success, it’s getting goddamned hard to find any persecution. The best he could do today was that John Farrow is allowed to drive his car on the lot and that whereas Bing Crosby is given $25,000 for saying one syllable on the screen, he and I were asked to speak two lines in Variety Girl for nothing. At first he said he would do so for an automobile, then only if $125,000 was given to the Jewish Blind. I may add that I’ve never known the Jewish Blind to haunt his conscience before.

  CHARLES BRACKETT

  OCTOBER 5

  1928

  I came near being bumped off today—but aside from a lame back where they bumped me, I am all right. And it was worth while, everything considered.

  …I quite detected cars coming from in front and about to turn—, but, a big car the other side came whizzing around, and though the man jacked her down mighty fast hit me in the small of the back pretty hard. Two feet more headway would have broken my back. He cussed me out.

  CHARLES LUMMIS

  1945

  Bad news at Warner Brothers Studio this morning in the strike. I drove out…around noon, but the pickets had vanished and all was quiet.

  CAREY MCWILLIAMS

  1961

  It was very thoughtful of you to send me a book explaining James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” All I need now is another book explaining this study by Stuart Gilbert who, if memory serves, painted the celebrated picture of George Washington which hangs in the Metropolitan Museum. I realize that there is some two hundred years’ difference in their ages, but any man who can explain Joyce must be very old and very wise.

  You disappeared rather mysteriously the other night, but I attribute this to your life of crime in the movies.

  GROUCHO MARX, to Peter Lorre

  OCTOBER 6

  1956

  Cecil Blount DeMille’s The Ten Commandments was previewed this week for a company of two hundred and sixty-three archangels in a temple of strawberry meringue especially built for the occasion on the Paramount back lot. Y. Frank Freeman led vespers with a reading from the letter of “a Protestant church leader” to the effect that “The first century had its Apostle Paul, the thirteenth century had St. Francis, the sixteenth had Martin Luther and the twentieth has Cecil B. DeMille.”

  After heaping portions of the Sacred Host had been served up in a rich sauce with seconds for everybody, de Mille himself, clad in the rosette of the Order of the Holy Sepulcher, appeared among them on a Technicolor screen to explain his affection for the Almighty. The picture was then revealed.

  DALTON TRUMBO, to a friend

  1964

  Every day I receive a letter from a librarian asking if I would not give the originals of the diary and letters to their library. They are not aware that because they did so little to contribute to my reputation as a writer, because they were passive spectators to my difficulties, the diaries are my only capital.

  ANAÏS NIN

  OCTOBER 7

  1933

  Now, the effigies of these beautiful young persons, with their fadeless smiles of satisfaction and delight, adorning pages of our leading periodicals or emblazoning the fences of our daily walks, and all revealing their lustrous and impeccable teeth, back to the ultimate molar,—must inevitably convince the present generation, even in periods of depression, that the declaration of Browning’s “Pippa” [“God’s in his Heaven / All’s right with the world!”] understates the truth.

  JULIAN HAWTHORNE

  1941

  I never really enjoyed strapping good health, but also scarcely ever have a serious illness; the organism is in good order, and basically I think that my constitution, by its whole tempo and character, tends to patience, endurance, a long pull; to carrying things to their end—not to say to perfection. It is this instinct that explains the urge toward a new establishment, toward building….

  …The house is making slow progress; the steel window and door casings were very long in arriving, and sometimes labor is short too. At best we shall be able to move in by the middle of December, but the architect advises us not to count on that. Oh well, patience is my strong point.

  THOMAS MANN, to a friend

  OCTOBER 8

  1542

  Came to the mainland in a large Bay…named it “Bahía de los Fumos” [Bay of Smokes] on account of the many dark billows seen there…engaged in intercourse with some Indians captured in a canoe….The bay is 35 degrees latitude; it is an excellent harbor and the country is good with many plains and groves of trees.

  JUAN RODRÍGUEZ CABRILLO

  2016

  Warm evening, after swimming at the Y. Sitting above Central Library, on a bench on the “Spanish Steps”—a replica of a historic place that is really this place, my perch above the library, half-moon rising, a sense of urban bustle: the security guard from the corporate tower, the pulsing beat from the new tourist attraction, the long glass slide to oblivion. Blade Runner–esque LED high-stepping video dancers now replace the Russian émigrés’ soulful portrait of Our Lady of Porciuncula, painted by hand in Renaissance hues. Santa Anas warm and dry on the skin. Water burbling from the fountain, below Robert Graham’s high-breasted bronze woman-child, austere in her perfection.

  My city. I am drawn to this perch at a particular moment late in the day, when there’s a shaft of sunlight straight below me extending through the axis of Central Library, entering through Fifth Street, exiting out the Hope Street doors onto the street where I was born. Hope Street.

  I sit still and let all the stories wash through me from Gordon Davidson’s funeral that morning at Leo Baeck Temple. Rabbi Beerman’s spirit was there too, waiting to take Gordon to a production of “Angels in America” in Heaven. Gordon just walks into the play. He already has a role, everyone knows who he is, the Moses of L.A. theater. Moses with a grin, Moses with a last view from his hospital bed of the marquee of the Kirk Douglas Theater.

  My throat is still sore from the
drip drip drip. A week where the city has exhausted me. Each lurch on the road, each discourtesy, sense of body confinement a distress. Note to self—always have an audio book in the car.

  In the shadow of the tallest building, U.S. Bank Tower, the “other” target of 9/11. The cause of all the bomb threats called into the library in the months and years after 9/11. All of us having to trundle out of the building, sometimes the only place you’d meet and mingle with someone who works on Lower Level 4, the History Dept stacks, everyone jovial. And the night when we hosted a Chilean novelist and the alarm sounded. We all had to move out of the post-lecture reception in the courtyard out onto 5th Street in the dark, leaving our keys and wallets behind. We were out there a half hour until the library security officer walked over to me and, motioning to our guest—could he speak with him? He asked the young novelist, “Do you have any known enemies? Anyone who would want to hurt you?” Alberto rolled his eyes and confessed, “Yes,” he said, “Gabriel Garcia Marquez hates my novels.” The security officer carefully wrote it down on his notepad.

  We were all looking for evidence in those days.

  LOUISE STEINMAN

  OCTOBER 9

  1947

  Billy has formed a habit when there are others about of saying with a sigh that it was I who kept him from enlisting at the outbreak of the war….When however a chance at a commission came and he did consider going to make moving pictures in a uniform, I advised him that I thought it would be just as well for him to make them in the studio—he was just getting his first chance as a director, he hadn’t enough authority to impress himself on the Army—and I thought it was time for him to press ahead, making pictures which because of their pleasure giving powers would do more good, because they expressed him more fully than any Army made picture could.

  CHARLES BRACKETT

  1962

  When I last saw swami, on the 4th, he asked about my meditation. I said I was finding it helpful to keep reminding myself how near my death may be. Swami then told me that Vivekananda had said: If you are trying to know God, you must imagine that death is already gripping you by the hair; but if you are trying to win power and fame, you must imagine that you will live for ever.

  CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD

  OCTOBER 10

  1940

  Mr. Hitler is a skyrocket whose fuse has already been lighted. He is a one-chance rocket. Soon he must fall and come to earth, fulfilling the nature of the rocket by spluttering to death in the dark. This does not mean he will not do great damage before he dies, probably by his own hand.

  CLIFFORD ODETS

  OCTOBER 11

  1927

  We went to see how a big mass scene on the square before Notre Dame de Paris was shot at the Universal studio. This involved about 600 people. There was much noise, animation, banal gesticulation, and swinging of hands. Barrymore himself, in the comic makeup mask of “the king of fools,” sitting on the head of a statue of a horse, played with full nerve, was brave, vivid, and graceful like a statue.

  SERGEI BERTENSSON

  1943

  Southern California is a retreat for all failures.

  SINCLAIR LEWIS

  OCTOBER 12

  1939

  Some day East Siders will wake up to the fact that we are entitled to representation in conjunction with our taxation. If the East Side is to be taxed equally with taxpayers in other sections in the city it seems to us that the East Side is due for an equal amount of representation in the various branches of government.

  AL WAXMAN

  1956

  I now go to football games to watch my son down there risking his very stern for good old Franklin High. We are the smallest school in the league, yet consider that we have already beaten Glendale and San Pedro, and you can see how good we are. I stand while the school song is sung at the conclusion of each game, and watch Chris out there on the turf with the team, standing reverently facing the stands, helmet off for the hymn, and bless my old soul if I don’t for a moment think that there are things one can believe in with all one’s heart. Although, when the hymn is over and I’ve returned to the house and sit with my first drink, I can’t for the life of me think what they may be.

  DALTON TRUMBO, to a fellow blacklistee

  1969

  I was stunned as one is when one reaches the fulfillment of a wish and finds it suddenly granted beyond one’s imagination. Of all the things which have been said, written about the Diaries, you wrote what has the deepest meaning for me—you answered as only someone who is a writer and a critic and a human being could.

  ANAÏS NIN, to Robert Kirsch

  OCTOBER 13

  1913

  I have made a contract under which Bosworth, Inc., has the rights to make moving pictures of all my works. Bosworth, Inc., has made a fine seven-reel picture of The Sea Wolf, authenticated over my signature with twenty-five feet of moving pictures of myself writing at my desk. All other films made by Bosworth, Inc., will be similarly authenticated.

  JACK LONDON

  1924

  Tonight is so beautiful. The moon is so big and yellow and looks like a picture through the trees in front of my window. I’m beginning to get romantic again in this warm climate.

  The two girls in my room are out—one with a boy friend and the other has to work nights as she is a telegraph operator.

  I didn’t mind staying here by myself today because there is an auditorium right next to my window and the opera singers here in Los Angeles are practicing for 2 weeks. They tell me that they practice here every day during their stay so that I expect to be entertained for nothing for the rest of the week.

  VALERIA BELLETTI, to a childhood friend

  OCTOBER 14

  1849

  Traveled 7 miles and came to San Graviell Mission, the most beautiful location that I have seen in this country, the garden filled with oranges and olives and other fruit trees. We then traveled 3 miles and camped.

  HENRY W. BIGLER

  1932

  Went to the house David Lewis and James Whale have taken, for dinner….It is very Spanish, with a red ruled living room whose long windows look out on magnificent views on three sides….Dorothy Arzner, the only woman director, came in later. A fine, sad, abstract-minded spinster. She drove me home, stopping en route to show me her house, a Greek house immensely appropriate to the Vestal of the Cinema.

  CHARLES BRACKETT

  OCTOBER 15

  1973

  Re:

  Your November issue, “On the Scene” section on Mr. Hunter S. Thompson as the creator of Gonzo Journalism, which you say he both created and named….Well, sir, I beg to take issue with you. And with anyone else who says that. In point of fact, Doctor Duke and I—the world famous Doctor Gonzo—together we both, hand in hand, sought out the teachings and curative powers of the world famous Savage [Robert] Henry, the Scag Baron of Las Vegas, and in point of fact the term and methodology of reporting crucial events under fire and drugs, which are of course essential to any good writing in this age of confusion—all this I say came from out of the mouth of our teacher who is also known by the name of Owl.

  OSCAR ZETA ACOSTA, to Hugh Hefner

  2002

  So Jon and I are parking the car, and the parking structure is monstrous, one of those structures that goes five floors underground, and the only empty spaces are on the fifth floor in a remote cavernous corner.

  And we don’t necessarily mind, because we’re going to see one of those arty movies that’s only playing at like three screens in the entire country, and parking doesn’t really matter when you get to see a movie that people in Oklahoma really want to see, but won’t get to see for a very long time because they don’t live in LA or New York. When you think about it, they live in Okla-fucking-homa, and I know that the wind sweeps down the plain and that everything is O-fucking-K, but th
ey really should be living in LA. We’ve got arty movies here.

  Anyway, we make our way to the elevator, and because we’re on the bottom floor of the monstrous parking structure, we have to wait a few minutes for the next ride. And Jon and I are looking at the three other people waiting with us, three complete strangers, and we’re all silent, and we’re all letting each other know through like telepathy or something that, yes, we’re all here for the arty movie. People like us, people like those who are waiting with us, we don’t have to talk about how cool we are. All you have to do is look at our arty vintage shoes.

  So the elevator finally arrives and we all clamber in, all five of us, and the doors close and we go up only one floor. And the doors open to let in those waiting on the fourth floor and there’s this couple standing there totally making out, groping and fondling and everything, his back to the door, she’s facing the elevator.