Dear Los Angeles

by Dear Los Angeles- The City in Diaries

  ANZA, JUAN BAUTISTA DE Basque explorer and governor of New Mexico under Spain. Quoted from Anza’s California Expeditions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1930).

  ARMSTRONG, HEATHER B. Blogger known as Dooce; one of the first to make a living at it. Posts from dooce.com appear here by gracious permission of the author.

  ASBURY, AMY Memoirist. Published in The Sunset Strip Diaries (Los Angeles: Estep & Fitzgerald Books, 2010).

  AUDUBON, JOHN W. Son of the naturalist, writer, and painter John James Audubon, author of Birds of America. Quoted from Audubon’s Western Journal: 1849–1850 (Cleveland: The Arthur H. Clark Company, 1906).

  BANCROFT, HUBERT HOWE The first great historian of California. Ran a virtual historiographic sweatshop, employing a phalanx of freelancers to help research and write his multivolume account of the state. Much reviled since, but patently unignorable. Quoted from History of California (San Francisco: The History Company, 1884–1890).

  BANDINI, DON JUAN BAUTISTA Long-lived diarist, descendant of Californios. As with Don Pio Pico, the world he was born into bore little resemblance to the one he departed. Diary of Juan Bautista Bandini, Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif.

  BANNING, WILLIAM Son of the entrepreneur Phineas Banning, who was known as the Father of the Port of Los Angeles for his indefatigable early efforts to move people and freight inland at a tidy profit. Banning Brothers Letters Collection, Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif.

  BEALE, E. F. American soldier stationed at Fort Tejon, and commander of America’s first Camel Corps.

  BEHAN, BRENDAN Playwright, author of Borstal Boy. The letter quoted is viewable on a wall in the Dublin Writers Museum.

  BELLETTI, VALERIA Secretary to Samuel Goldwyn and other studio heads, lovingly delivered from obscurity by film historian Cari Beauchamp. Quotations from Adventures of a Hollywood Secretary: Her Private Letters from Inside the Studios of the 1920s, used by kind permission of the editors, Cari Beauchamp and Margery Baragona (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).

  BENÉT, STEPHEN VINCENT Yale-educated author of The Devil and Daniel Webster and Western Star, a long narrative poem about Manifest Destiny that won the Pulitzer Prize before Benét could finish it. He never did. Quotations from Selected Letters of Stephen Vincent Benét, edited by Charles A. Fenton (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1960).

  BENNETT, ALAN Screenwriter, novelist, and playwright of, among other works, Talking Heads, An Englishman Abroad, The Madness of King George, and The History Boys. Bennett first came to prominence writing sketches and acting alongside Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller, and Dudley Moore in Beyond the Fringe, a hastily mounted late-night revue at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. They were the only four men in England brilliant enough to claim convincingly that they found one another boring. Bennett was the shy one and easily the most formidable dramatic writer of the three. In his fine script for Prick Up Your Ears, a hapless mortician tries to mingle the cremated remains of the British playwright Joe Orton and his partner, who has killed them both. The undertaker empties one urn into the other, then sprinkles some of those ashes back into the first. He looks about to make a project of it when Vanessa Redgrave, playing Orton’s agent and executrix, deadpans: “It’s a gesture, not a recipe.” Bennett has also kept a diary for most of his life. He chanced through Hollywood for at least one film premiere and left unbesotted. Quoted from Writing Home (New York: Random House, 1995).

  BERTENSSON, SERGEI Filmmaking factotum. Quoted from My First Time in Hollywood, edited by Cari Beauchamp (Los Angeles: Asahina & Wallace, 2015).

  BIGLER, HENRY W. Pioneer, present the year before at the discovery of gold at Coloma on the American River. Quoted from Journals of Forty-niners: Salt Lake to Los Angeles: with Diaries and Contemporary Records of Sheldon Young, James S. Brown, Jacob Y. Stover, Charles C. Rich, Addison Pratt, Howard Egan, Henry W. Bigler, and Others (Glendale, Calif.: Arthur H. Clark, 1954).

  BIXBY, AUGUSTUS SIMON Farmer from the famed Bixby dynasty, to whom the idyllic Rancho Los Cerritos once belonged. Diary of Augustus Simon Bixby, Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif.

  BOUTON, JIM Baseball player, author of Ball Four and its cruelly forgotten sequel, I’m Glad You Didn’t Take It Personally. Visited southern California in 1969 to play the Angels. Whether Ball Four robbed America of its heroes or, as many think, actually helped humanize the players in fans’ eyes, these funny, well-observed diaries made readers out of more than a few Little Leaguers who grew up to be writers, present company included. Quoted from Ball Four: My Life and Hard Times Throwing the Knuckleball in the Big Leagues, edited by Leonard Shecter (New York: World Books, 1970).

  BRACKETT, CHARLES Screenwriter-producer, longtime writing partner of Billy Wilder’s earlier, less raunchy, more urbane comedies. Quoted from It’s the Pictures That Got Small: Charles Brackett on Billy Wilder and Hollywood’s Golden Age, edited by Anthony Slide (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). Used by permission.

  BRADBURY, RAY Author of Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles; screenwriter of Moby-Dick. Among Bradbury’s ancestors was a Salem, Massachusetts, woman tried for witchcraft in the seventeenth century. His parents drove across the country to Los Angeles in 1934, with young Ray piling out of their jalopy at every stop to plunder the local library in search of L. Frank Baum’s Oz books. Two years later, Bradbury experienced a rite of passage familiar to most early science-fiction readers: the realization that he was not alone. At a secondhand bookstore in Hollywood, he discovered a handbill promoting meetings of the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society. Thrilled, he joined a weekly Thursday-night conclave that would grow to attract such science-fiction legends as Robert A. Heinlein, Leigh Brackett, and the future founder of Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard. Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451 on a rental typewriter in the basement of UCLA’s Lawrence Clark Powell Library, one invaluable dime at a time. Quoted from The Bradbury Chronicles: The Life of Ray Bradbury by Sam Weller (New York: William Morrow, 2005).

  BRECHT, BERTOLT Author of, among other plays, Galileo, Mother Courage, and The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. Fled Europe for Santa Monica. After World War II, fled Joseph McCarthy for Europe again. Quoted from Bertolt Brecht Journals, 1934–1955 (London: Methuen, 1993).

  BREMER, SYLVIA STRUM Newspaper columnist. Visited L.A. as a junketeer and, only occasionally starstruck, filed stories for the folks back home. Her reports were published in the Davenport, Iowa, Daily Times, in 1956.

  BREWER, WILLIAM H. Botanist on the first California Geological Survey; first chair of agriculture at Yale. Quoted from Up and Down California in 1860–1864: The Journal of William H. Brewer (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1930).

  BRIGGS, L. VERNON Pioneering forensic psychiatrist. Quoted from his Arizona and New Mexico, 1882; California, 1886; Mexico, 1891 (Boston: Privately printed, 1932).

  BRITTEN, BENJAMIN British composer of Peter and the Wolf, The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, and Peter Grimes, the latter inspired by his discovery of George Crabbe’s poems in a maddeningly unspecified Los Angeles bookstore. At the time, he was staying with Peter Pears at the Escondido home of a patron, working against the imminent world premiere in L.A. of his first string quartet. Published in Letters from a Life: Selected Diaries and Letters of Benjamin Britten, edited by Philip Reed and Donald Mitchell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).

  BRYANT, EDWIN Quoted from his What I Saw in California, Being the Journal of a Tour by the Emigrant Route and South Pass of the Rocky Mountains, Across North America, the Great Desert Basin in the Years 1846, 1847 (New York: Appleton, 1849).

  BUKOWSKI, CHARLES Poet, novelist, and “Notes of a Dirty Old Man” columnist for the Los Angeles Free Press. Quoted from Screams from the Balcony: Selected Letters, 1960–1970 (Santa Rosa, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press, 1993).

  BURMAN, JENNY Erstwhile author of the Echo Park blog Chicken Corner. Quoted by gr
acious permission of the author.

  BURROUGHS, EDGAR RICE Imaginatively gifted and lavishly prolific novelist, creator of Tarzan of the Apes and Princess of Mars, founder of Tarzana. All quotations from Edgar Rice Burroughs © 1975, 2017 Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. All rights reserved. Trademarks TARZAN® and Edgar Rice Burroughs® Owned by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc., and used by permission.

  BURTON, RICHARD Brilliant Welsh actor. Played Hamlet for Gielgud, married Elizabeth Taylor, costarred with her in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? for Mike Nichols, and enjoyed a long career in roles both great and awful. In L.A. occasionally for film work, doomed award nominations, and, improbably, to brush up his Spanish before shooting The Night of the Iguana in Mexico. Quoted from The Richard Burton Diaries, edited by Chris Williams (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2012).

  BUTLER, OCTAVIA E. MacArthur Fellowship–winning author of, among other works, Kindred and Parable of the Sower. Born and raised in Pasadena, which appears in disguised form in some of her work. Labored in solitude until she found camaraderie among other science fiction and fantasy writers, especially Harlan Ellison. Years after her death from a fall, her reputation continues to rise. Octavia E. Butler papers, The Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif.

  BUTLER, OCTAVIA M. Mother of Octavia E. Butler.

  CABRILLO, JUAN RODRÍGUEZ Mariner, explorer.

  CAGE, JOHN Composer, musician, Joycean. Born in Los Angeles. His mother wrote about society and classical music for the Los Angeles Times back when they were often the same thing. Studied under Arnold Schoenberg. His experimental “silent” sonata, 4'33", was the first of his pioneering works to be influenced by random chance. Absquatulated. Returned to L.A. late in life for a production of his Joyce-inspired “composition for museum,” Rolywholyover. Quoted from The Selected Letters of John Cage, edited by Laura Kuhn (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2016).

  CALVINO, ITALO Author of Invisible Cities and If on a winter’s night a traveler. Taught at UCLA for a semester. Did not go native. Quoted from Hermit in Paris: Autobiographical Writings (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007).

  CAMPBELL, JULIA Student at UCLA. Quoted from class diaries by gracious permission.

  CARR, HARRY Carr saw the city as it was, and L.A. loved him for it. The forgotten patron saint of Southland journalists, he scooped the world on the San Francisco Earthquake and rode with Zapata during the Revolution. Among the first telecommuting journalists, he was writing from home in Tujunga when he warned, apropos of Thelma Todd and John Gilbert’s recent passings, that “Death cuts down the famous by threes in Hollywood.” Hours later, Carr’s heart attack supplied the third. Quoted from Los Angeles, City of Dreams (New York: D. Appleton-Century Company, 1935).

  CARR, WILLIAM American immigrant to California in 1849. Witness to the Colorado River massacre at the heart of Cormac McCarthy’s novel Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West. Testimony published in Southern California Quarterly, vol. 6 (Los Angeles: Geo. Rice & Sons, 1904).

  CATHER, WILLA American author of novels including My Antonía, Death Comes for the Archbishop, and The Song of the Lark. Stayed in Long Beach and commuted to Pasadena to care for her ailing mother. Not predisposed to love the place, and didn’t. Quoted from The Selected Letters of Willa Cather (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013).

  CHANDLER, RAYMOND Author of The Big Sleep, creator of detective Philip Marlowe, co-screenwriter of Strangers on a Train. Directly or indirectly, Chandler has colored Angelenos’ perceptions of their city more than any other writer. Quoted from Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler, edited by Frank MacShane (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981).

  CHAVEZ, CESAR Co-founder of the United Farm Workers. Wielding the power of the hunger strike and the boycott, he fought for and won the first binding farmworker contracts ever negotiated in California. Apprenticed and flourished as a community organizer in Boyle Heights alongside Grapes of Wrath dedicatee Fred Ross, under the auspices of Saul Alinsky. Born in Yuma, he is buried at the National Chavez Center in Tehachapi, in the mountains that divide the state he did so much to unite. Quoted from The Crusades of Cesar Chavez: A Biography, by Miriam Pawel (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014).

  CHÁVEZ-SILVERMAN, SUSANA Los Angeles–born Spanglish writer, scholar; author also of Killer Crónicas. Quoted from Scenes from la Cuenca de Los Angeles y Otros Natural Disasters (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2010).

  CHEEVER, JOHN Novelist and short-story writer, author of the Wapshot novels, Bullet Park, and Falconer. Passed through L.A. en route to Manila in 1945 for the Signal Corps. Returned periodically, staying with friends John Weaver (q.v.) and his wife. Published in Glad Tidings: A Friendship in Letters. The Correspondence of John Cheever and John D. Weaver, 1945–1982 (New York: HarperCollins, 1993).

  CHURCHILL, WINSTON British politician, hero. As prime minister, rallied his countrymen to victory in World War II. Turfed out soon after. Awarded the Nobel Prize in literature for his history of the war. Visited L.A. a month before the 1929 Crash. Met Hearst, Chaplin, and a swordfish, to the latter’s cost. Published in Speaking for Themselves: The Personal Letters of Winston and Clementine Churchill, edited by Baroness Mary Soames (née Mary Spencer Churchill) (New York: Doubleday, 1998).

  COLEMAN, WANDA Fearsome doyenne of the L.A. poetry scene for decades. Fugitive from TV soap opera writing. Author of the National Book Award–nominated Mercurochrome. Quoted from The Riot Inside Me: More Trials & Tremors (Boston: David R. Godine, 2005).

  COOKE, ALISTAIR Broadcaster and author, best known for his long-running, only partly catalogued BBC Radio essays explaining the ways of Americans to the British. Returned to L.A. frequently to visit friends and file observations for the Beeb, including the horrific one quoted here. Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP.

  COPLAND, AARON Composer of Fanfare for the Common Man, Billy the Kid, and A Lincoln Portrait. Wrote scores for The Heiress, The Red Pony, and Of Mice and Men. A delightful photo survives of him poolside in Palm Springs, in shorts, at a typewriter, mountains looming behind him. Quoted from The Selected Correspondence of Aaron Copland (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006).

  COPPOLA, ELEANOR Writer-director of Paris Can Wait. Eloquent diarist of, among other experiences, the descent into genius of the screenwriter-director Francis Ford Coppola on the set of Apocalypse Now. Quoted from Notes on a Life (New York: Nan A. Talese, 2008).

  CORWIN, NORMAN Writer, radio scenarist of On a Note of Triumph, screenwriter of Lust for Life. Quoted from Norman Corwin’s Letters, edited by A. J. Langguth (New York: Barricade Books, 1994).

  COSTANSÓ, MIGUEL Catalan cartographer and cosmographer. Quoted from The Portola Expedition of 1769–1770: Diary of Miguel Costansó (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1911).

  COWARD, NOËL Playwright, actor, songwriter. Returned to L.A. periodically to see friends and perform for films and onstage. Quoted from The Noël Coward Diaries, edited by Graham Payn and Sheridan Morley (New York: Little, Brown, 1982).

  CRAFT, ROBERT Boswell to Igor Stravinsky’s Johnson. Quoted from Dialogues and a Diary, by himself and Stravinsky (New York: Doubleday, 1963).

  CRANE, HART Poet. Stayed over the winter from 1927 to 1928 visiting family, acting as companion to a wealthy Altadenan. Met Chaplin, drank with E. E. Cummings, was gay-bashed in San Pedro. Quoted from The Letters of Hart Crane, 1916–1932, edited by Brom Weber (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1965).

  CREASON, GLEN Map librarian at the Los Angeles Central Library. Quoted by gracious permission of the author.

  CRESPI, FRAY JUAN Expedition chaplain. Quoted from Fray Juan Crespi, Missionary Explorer on the Pacific Coast 1769–1774, edited by Herbert Eugene Bolton (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1927).

  CUMMINGS, E. E. American poet. Accepted Eric Knight’s entreaties to visit. Stayed two months and angled for Hollywood money,
to no avail. Quoted from Selected Letters of E. E. Cummings (New York: Harper, 1972).

  DALTON, HENRY Rancher and newspaper publisher. Papers of Henry Dalton, Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif.

  DANA, RICHARD HENRY Author of the first bestseller about California, Two Years Before the Mast, an account of his hitch as a midshipman up and down the Pacific Coast. Most editions contain his shorter account of a return visit twenty years later, when he found the state utterly transformed. Quoted from Two Years Before the Mast (New York: Library of America, 2005).

  DEAN, JAMES Actor, star of Rebel Without a Cause, Giant, and East of Eden. The letter quoted was sent to his sometime girlfriend Barbara Glenn and published at lettersofnote.com, edited by Shaun Usher.

  DE BEAUVOIR, SIMONE Author and groundbreaking feminist. Toured America, including Los Angeles. Liked what she saw of it. Quoted from America Day by Day (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).

  DE LA ASCENSIÓN, FATHER ANTONIO Missionary. Quoted from Spanish Exploration in the Southwest, 1542–1706, edited by Herbert Eugene Bolton (New York: Scribners, 1916).

  DEL OLMO, FRANK Newspaperman, longtime L.A. Times editor, columnist. Well remembered for a continuing series about his autistic son, Frankie. Inspiration to a generation of journalists. There’s a school named after him on First Street. It’s not enough. Quoted from Frank Del Olmo: Commentaries on His Times (Los Angeles: Los Angeles Times Books, 2004).

  DE MILLE, AGNES Dancer, choreographer, UCLA English major. Niece of the director Cecil B. DeMille (the silent and sound versions of The Ten Commandments) and granddaughter of the great California social economist Henry George (“What the Railroad Will Bring Us”). Quoted from No Intermissions: The Life of Agnes de Mille, by Carol Easton (Boston: Little, Brown, 1996).

  DE PORTOLÁ, GASPAR Explorer. Quoted from The Official Account of the Portolá Expedition of 1769–1770, edited by Frederick J. Teggart (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1909).