Dear Los Angeles

by Dear Los Angeles- The City in Diaries

  RUESS, EVERETT Free-spirited young man who left L.A. and wandered into the California wilderness, never to be seen again. Quoted from Everett Ruess: A Vagabond for Beauty, by W. L. Rusho (Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith, 1983).

  RUIZ DE RODRIGUEZ, DOÑA BERNARDA Uncredited contributor and compromise broker for the Treaty of Cahuenga, which ended the Mexican-American War. Quoted in “In a State of Peace and Tranquility,” by Hadley Meares, https://www.kcet.org/​history-society/​in-a-state-of-peace-and-tranquility-campo-de-cahuenga-and-the-birth-of-american (accessed May 28, 2018).

  RUSSELL, BERTRAND British philosopher, pacifist, anti-nuclear campaigner. Taught at UCLA for a term. Like most professors, left few traces of his sojourn. Someday someone will compile a roster of all the distinguished visiting faculty to grace Southern California campuses over the years, and what they said and did here. The list isn’t short. The talent is phenomenal. Quoted from The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell, Volume 2: The Public Years, 1914–1970, edited by Nicholas Griffin (New York: Routledge, 2001).

  SAITO, SANDIE Japanese American schoolgirl, internee. Quoted at http://ddr.densho.org/​ddr-janm-1-10/.

  SALVATOR, LUDWIG Archduke of Austria, son of the Duke of Tuscany. Visited Los Angeles in the winter of 1876, not long after the city was linked directly by rail to the East. While most of the ballyhooers in town were falling all over themselves comparing L.A. to Italy, an actual Italian princeling visited L.A. and saw that it was good. Quoted from his Los Angeles in the Sunny Seventies: A Flower from the Golden Land, translated by Marguerite Eyer Wilbur (Los Angeles: Bruce McCallister and Jake Zeitlin, 1929).

  SANDBURG, CARL American poet, Lincoln biographer, pioneering film critic. Sandburg went to Hollywood in 1960 for a year and a half to work on the script for The Greatest Story Ever Told, which fell well short of becoming the greatest movie ever made, but paid perhaps the best-loved poet in America $125,000. Quoted from The Letters of Carl Sandburg, edited by Herbert Mitgang (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1968).

  SANDERS, GEORGE Urbane, insinuating British actor, familiar from Rebecca, All About Eve, and scores more. Quoted from his Memoirs of a Professional Cad (New York: Putnam, 1960).

  SANDERS, SUE A. Traveler, correspondent. Quoted from her Journey to, on and from the “Golden Shore” (Delavan, Ill.: Times Printing Office, 1887).

  SAROYAN, WILLIAM Armenian American writer, son of Armenian immigrants. In his twenties, he romanticized a deprived childhood into the bestselling short-story collections The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze and My Name Is Aram. Within a few years, he added a similarly beloved semiautobiographical novel, The Human Comedy, and, in 1939, a play set in a San Francisco waterfront saloon: The Time of Your Life, which won the Pulitzer Prize. There’s a little bit of William Saroyan in every fine writer, but aggressive therapy can usually keep it in remission. Where most writers differ from Saroyan is that they also have at least some vestigial sense of proportion, or, failing that, a renewable lithium prescription. Sadly, the talented, versatile Saroyan had neither. Quoted from The Best of Rob Wagner’s Script, edited by Anthony Slide (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 1985).

  SAYLE, ALEXEI British stand-up comedian, actor, writer. Parachuted in to perform a less-painful-than-usual version of the obligatory Hollywood diary for The Guardian. Published as “Los Angeles Diary,” The Guardian, 1991.

  SCHALLERT, EDWIN L.A. Times critic, father of the beloved character actor William, grandfather of the educator-writer Brendan. Quoted from the Los Angeles Times.

  SCHEYER, GALKA Refugee, educator, pioneering art dealer for the European painters, including the Blue Four group—Wassily Kandinsky, Lyonel Feininger, Paul Klee, and Alexej von Jawlensky. Client of architect Richard Neutra. Quoted from Galka E. Scheyer and the Blue Four: Correspondence 1924–1945, edited by Isabel Wünsche (Salenstein, Switzerland: Benteli Verlags, 2006).

  SCHICKEL, ERIKA Gifted essayist, author of You’re Not the Boss of Me: Adventures of a Modern Mom (New York: Kensington, 2001). Quoted from LAObserved.com, 2012.

  SCHINDLER, RUDOLF Architect of landmark L.A. buildings including his namesake house on Kings Road. Quoted from Vienna to Los Angeles: Two Journeys: Letters Between R. M. Schindler and Richard Neutra + Letters of Louis Sullivan to R. M. Schindler, by Esther McCoy (Santa Monica, Calif.: Arts + Architecture Press, 1978).

  SCHOENBERG, ARNOLD Modernist “serial music” composer of, among others, Moses und Aron and Verklärte Nacht. Later a fairly acclimated refugee here, like his occasional tennis partner Stravinsky. When they were on the outs, the Brentwood Country Mart wasn’t big enough for both of them. Schoenberg taught at UCLA, where the music building is, at least for now, still named after him. Quoted from Schoenberg Remembered: Diaries and Recollections, by Dika Newlin (New York: Pendragon, 1980).

  SEABORG, GLENN T. Nobel Prize–winning physicist, co-discoverer of plutonium. Grew up in Southern California. “Glenn Theodore Seaborg Diaries, 1927–1946,” Box 951575, UCLA Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library.

  SELZNICK, DAVID O. Producer. Gone with the Wind had sixteen co-writers and several directors, but not a single co-producer. His memos are marvels of perspicacity and megalomania. Quoted from Memo from David O. Selznick, edited by Rudy Behlmer and Roger Ebert (New York: Grove Press, 1972).

  SERLING, ROD Television writer, producer, playwright. Wrote landmark teleplays for live television in New York, decried its move west, then followed it and created The Twilight Zone, the first television series that completely realized the medium’s potential. His writings are published by the Rod Serling Memorial Foundation at https://www.rodserling.com/​letter032064.htm.

  SHELLHORN, RUTH A celebrated landscape architect whose projects included, frustratingly for her, Disneyland. “Ruth Patricia Shellhorn Papers, 1909–2006,” UCLA Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library.

  SHIPPEY, LEE Columnist. Quoted from “The Lee Side o’ L.A.,” in the Los Angeles Times.

  SILLIMAN, BENJAMIN Yale-based scientist, first to distill petroleum. Quoted in What They Say About the Angels (Pasadena, Calif.: Val Trefz Press, 1942).

  SIRHAN SIRHAN Assassin of Robert F. Kennedy. At the time, a student at Pasadena City College. The line appears in his published notebooks, including in RFK Must Die by Robert Blair Kaiser (Woodstock and New York, N.Y.: Overlook Press, 2008).

  SLONIMSKY, NICOLAS Longtime editor of Baker’s Dictionary of Musicians. Lived to be 101, updating his invaluable compendium right to the end. Quoted from Dear Dorothy: Letters from Nicolas Slonimsky to Dorothy Adlow, edited by Electra Slonimsky Rourke (Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2012).

  SMITH, JACK Los Angeles Times columnist, author of God and Mr. Gomez and Spend All Your Kisses, Mr. Smith. His longtime good-natured rival Herb Caen was the Jack Smith of San Francisco. Originally published in the Los Angeles Times.

  SMITH, JEDEDIAH Explorer. A cartographer of the West. Furrier, too. Finally killed by Native Americans. Quoted from The Travels of Jedediah Smith: A Documentary Outline. Including the Journal of the Great American Pathfinder, edited by Maurice S. Sullivan (Santa Ana, Calif.: Fine Arts Press, 1934).

  SMITH, JOSEPH B. Record executive. Handled the Grateful Dead. Briefly. Published at lettersofnote.com, edited by Shaun Usher, http://www.lettersofnote.com/​2011/​02/​grateful-dead-has-many-problems.html.

  SONTAG, SUSAN Critic, essayist, novelist, author of Against Interpretation, Illness as Metaphor, and The Volcano Lover. Consummate New Yorker, but also the sweetheart of North Hollywood High. “Papers of Susan Sontag,” UCLA Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library.

  SPALDING, WILLIAM ANDREW Los Angeles newspaperman. Quoted from William Andrew Spalding: Los Angeles Newspaperman, edited by Robert V. Hine (San Marino, Calif.: The Huntington Library Press, 1961).

  SPENDER, STEPHEN British poet, contemporary of Christopher Isherwood and W.
H. Auden. Stopped for tea with the Hollywood Raj, including Isherwood. Quoted from his Journals 1939–1983, edited by John Goldsmith (London: Faber and Faber, 1985).

  STANDAGE, HENRY Member of the Mormon Battalion in the Mexican-American War. Quoted from The March of the Mormon Battalion from Council Bluffs to California Taken from the Journal of Henry Standage, by Frank Alfred Golder with Thomas A. Bailey and J. Lyman Smith (New York: The Century Co., 1928).

  STEELE, THE REV. JOHN Quoted from Echoes of the Past in California: In Camp and Cabin (Chicago: The Lakeside Press, 1928).

  STEIN, BEN Columnist, actor, game show host. Quoted from his Hollywood Days, Hollywood Nights: The Diary of a Mad Screen Writer (New York: Bantam Books, 1988).

  STEINBECK, JOHN Nobel Prize–winning author of The Grapes of Wrath and other novels. Lived for a time in a house uphill from the present-day Eagle Rock Plaza mall. Quoted from Steinbeck: A Life in Letters, edited by Elaine Steinbeck and Robert Wallsten (New York: Viking Press, 1975).

  STEINMAN, LOUISE Author of three books, including The Souvenir: A Daughter Discovers Her Father’s War, dancer, founding curator of the Library Foundation of Los Angeles’s long-running ALOUD literary series. Quoted by gracious permission.

  STENDAHL, EARL Art gallerist, chocolatier. It’s just possible that no one now alive visited Stendahl’s modest but elegant L.A. art gallery under a candy factory for the unveiling of the most important painting of the twentieth century, Picasso’s Guernica, brought to town by European exiles like Fritz Lang and art dealer Galka Scheyer (and New York exiles like Dorothy Parker) as a fund-raiser for Spanish Civil War orphans. Quoted by gracious permission of the family.

  STOCKTON, ROBERT F. Military commander of California. Signed but didn’t write the Treaty of Cahuenga ending the Mexican-American War. (See Ruiz de Rodriguez, Doña Bernarda.)

  STRAVINSKY, IGOR Illustrious twentieth-century composer of The Firebird, The Rite of Spring, and the Symphony in Three Movements, among other masterworks. Based in Los Angeles from the World War II years until his death. Quoted from Dialogues and a Diary, by himself and Robert Craft (New York: Doubleday, 1963).

  TAYLOR, BENJAMIN FRANKLIN Chicago-based war and travel correspondent. Quoted from his Between the Gates (Chicago: S. C. Griggs and Co., 1878).

  THOMAS, DYLAN Welsh poet, author of “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night,” A Child’s Christmas in Wales, and the story collection Adventures in the Skin Trade—the little-remarked titular precursor to William Goldman’s classic screenwriter’s-eye-view of Hollywood, Adventures in the Screen Trade. Lurched through Los Angeles on the American tour immortalized by Peter DeVries and Julius J. Epstein in the novel and film Reuben, Reuben. Quoted from Dylan Thomas: The Collected Letters, edited by Paul Ferris (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 2000).

  THOMPSON, HUNTER S. Journalist, political columnist, author of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail. For the hard-living or the famous, somebody’s always ready to spin suicide into a cautionary tale. It’s too easy to forget what a brilliant writer Thompson was. The signature Thompson speedball mixes grandiosity, paranoia, and pure poetry. He wrote about his nemeses, especially Nixon, with an invigorating lack of gentility. Met Oscar Zeta Acosta (q.v.), the inspiration for Dr. Gonzo in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, while reporting his firsthand account of the Chicano Movement and Moratorium. Quoted from “Strange Rumblings in Aztlan,” Rolling Stone, April 1971.

  THORNTON, HAZEL Juror, diarist. Quoted from Hung Jury: The Diary of a Menendez Juror (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995).

  THURBER, JAMES Writer and cartoonist, long at The New Yorker, author of My World and Welcome to It and the short story “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.” Thurber didn’t hate L.A. as much as he let on. He hated it more. Quoted from The Thurber Letters: The Wit, Wisdom, and Surprising Life of James Thurber, edited by Helen Thurber and Edward Weeks (Boston: Little, Brown, 1981).

  TRILLIN, CALVIN Journalist, long associated with The New Yorker and The Nation, author of Alice, Let’s Eat; Killings; Deadline Poet; and the underrated Floater. Much of the story of the Watts Towers comes down to us via variations on his May 29, 1965, New Yorker “Reporter at Large” feature. Quoted from that article.

  TRUMBO, DALTON Screenwriter, novelist, and the man who broke the blacklist. Author of the antiwar classic Johnny Got His Gun. In Spartacus, Trumbo has Kirk Douglas shout “I am Spartacus!” to reclaim his identity—just as Trumbo would reclaim his own, by securing screen credit after a decade on the blacklist. Quoted from the canonical Additional Dialogue: Letters of Dalton Trumbo, 1942–1962, edited by Helen Manfull (New York: M. Evans and Company, 1970).

  TYNAN, KENNETH Critic and author of Oh, Calcutta! Alongside Laurence Olivier, a presiding intelligence behind the birth of Britain’s National Theatre. Latterly, critic at large for The New Yorker. Moved to Southern California and revived his reputation with trenchant profiles of everyone from Louise Brooks to Johnny Carson for The New Yorker. Called himself “a climatic émigré,” but died of emphysema in Santa Monica. His daughter Roxana runs the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy. Quoted from Diaries of Kenneth Tynan, edited by John Lahr (New York: Bloomsbury, 2001).

  VALENTINER, WILLIAM R. Pivotal curator of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art during its pre–Wilshire Boulevard, Exposition Park era. Quoted from The Passionate Eye: The Life of William R. Valentiner (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1979).

  VANCOUVER, GEORGE British explorer of the Pacific Coast. Named Point Dume after his friend Francisco Dumetz, a Franciscan padre. Quoted from Captain George Vancouver (London: G. G. and J. Robinson, 1798).

  VENEGAS, DOLORES Quoted from Letters Home: Mexican Exile Correspondence from Los Angeles, 1927–1932, by María Teresa Venegas (Los Angeles: María Teresa Venegas, 2012). Department of Archives and Special Collection, William H. Hannon Library, Loyola Marymount University.

  VENEGAS, JOSÉ MIGUEL Quoted from Letters Home: Mexican Exile Correspondence from Los Angeles, 1927–1932, by María Teresa Venegas (Los Angeles: María Teresa Venegas, 2012). Department of Archives and Special Collection, William H. Hannon Library, Loyola Marymount University.

  VILLARD, OSWALD GARRISON Journalist and civil libertarian. Quoted from “Los Angeles Kaleidoscope,” The Nation, 1934.

  WAGNER, ROB This 1930s L.A. radical edited Script, the magazine some called a West Coast New Yorker, and published everybody from Chaplin to the unsung L.A. classical music writer José Rodríguez (q.v.). Quoted from The Best of Rob Wagner’s Script, edited by Anthony Slide (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 1985).

  WALLACE, EDGAR Prolific novelist, today best known for conceiving, with Merian C. Cooper, the idea for King Kong. Four days after confiding to his diary that he again felt “quite gay and bright now,” he died here of double pneumonia. Quoted from his My Hollywood Diary: The Last Work of Edgar Wallace (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1932).

  WALLACE, IRVING Novelist, USC undergrad, author of The Prize, The Man, The Plot, The Word, and the rest. Quoted from The Best of Rob Wagner’s Script, edited by Anthony Slide (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 1985).

  WARD, JOHN SHIRLEY Tennessee-born, San Bernardino–based newspaperman and alfalfa farmer. Gloriously described in his 1905 obituary as “Chesterfieldian in his intercourse with the weak and the poor as with the rich and the strong.” Beats “Services pending” any day. Quoted from “Death of a Prominent Resident of Southern California,” Los Angeles Herald, January 5, 1905.

  WARNER, JACK Co-founder with his brothers of the Warner Bros. film studio. Quoted from a company-wide memo in Warner Bros: The Making of an American Movie Studio, by David Thomson (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2017).

  WARREN, ROBERT PENN Poet, novelist, author of All the King’s Men. Stayed briefly in Santa Monica, later returned to sit in on the editing of Robert Rossen’s film of All the King’s Men. Quoted from Selected Letters of Robe
rt Penn Warren: The Apprentice Years, 1924–1934, vol. 1, edited by Randy Hendricks (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000).

  WAUGH, EVELYN Author of The Loved One, Brideshead Revisited, Scoop, and the Sword of Honour trilogy. Visited Los Angeles in 1947, essentially to keep Brideshead from being made into a movie, and succeeded beyond his fondest dreams: He came away with the material for The Loved One, his merciless dissection of Forest Lawn and, by extension, the embalmed lives of the expats around him. Quoted from The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh, edited by Michael Davie (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976).

  WAXMAN, AL Columnist and editor of the Eastside Journal in Boyle Heights; uncle of Congressman Henry Waxman. Quoted in Southern California: An Island on the Land by Carey McWilliams (New York: Duell, Sloan, & Pearce, 1946).