The City at Three P.M.

by LaSalle, Peter;

  I stand across the street from the Pa-Va-Sed Apartments (the name apparently came from a reworking of the Latin phrase for “small but nice”). I look at the place, then scribble some observations in my pocket notebook, remarking that while West might have changed the façade of the apartment house in the novel, as he did the name (the Pa-Va-Sed is mock Tudor, all yellow stucco and crisscrossing chocolate-brown beams on the front gable, a roof shingled with slate the hue of pigeon feathers, and the San Bernardino Arms in the novel opts for a Moorish motif, complete with swirly pink front columns, though both are basically exercises in Hollywood’s typical architectural whimsy, hopefully exotic)—true, while the façade is different, the rest of it is the same: after the false front, the functional blank walls of the building’s sides stretch far back for the three floors of it, exactly as described in the novel, something I checked in the book the night before: “It was an oblong, three stories high, the back and sides of which were of plain, unpainted stucco, broken by even rows of unadorned windows.”

  I cross the street, for a closer look. There’s trimmed shrubbery and a low brown brick wall, an open black wrought-iron gate. I decide I might enter the sidewalk courtyard and go up the stairs, peek into the lobby, where I see its oatmeal walls and a frosted central skylight and a single Mission-style easy chair upholstered in red beside the stairs, the long corridors of all three floors clearly visible and the Pa-Va-Sed unexpectedly neat within (I have my little notebook out again, am writing down with a Bic what I observe); I step aside when a young woman, a brunette in shorts carrying a big artist’s portfolio, comes out of the door and goes down the brown brick steps, and I do the same when a scruffy young guy, tall and wearing a ball cap, walks up the steps and through the door. Both nod to me, seemingly not surprised that there’s a gray-haired guy, me, standing on their front steps beside the panel of mailboxes and writing in a notebook (did they think I was leaving an important message for somebody?). I make a note that, as in West’s day, these kids who have apartments here are probably not unlike West’s characters, living in a cheap place and working—or at least trying to find work and make it—in Hollywood.

  I head back down the hill of Ivar, toward the Boulevard but not directly, wandering through more of the leafy quiet side streets for a while. (There’s a corner place, white stucco, called the Playboy Liquor Store—I like the name; there’s another older apartment building not unlike the Pa-Va-Sed, with a drooping banner out front, red on white, saying furnished units are available for $185 a week.) I guess I feel good about having identified the real Pa-Va-Sed as being, essentially, the imaginary San Bernardino Arms, and, not to get too far ahead of myself, this is the start of it all, what will lead this afternoon to the crazy scene across from the Chinese Theatre.

  But first maybe a little background—or “backstory” in movie parlance, which seems suitable here—is needed.

  The Day of the Locust was West’s last novel, published in 1939 and a year before his death. It came out while he was living in Hollywood, by then reasonably successful in writing for the movies. Returning from a weekend hunting trip to Mexico, West failed to stop at a rural intersection outside El Centro, California. He and his wife of less than a year, Eileen McKenney (a very pretty if somewhat eccentric young woman, subject of a series of New Yorker pieces that became the basis of a long-running Broadway show, My Sister Eileen), were killed when a car smashed full force into their wood-paneled Ford station wagon.

  Of course, there has never been much critical argument that The Day of the Locust, which received little attention when published, is the very best of that specific genre commonly known as the Hollywood novel, yet to categorize it as such, I think, is surely not to give it the credit it deserves. (A while back I read—or in some cases reread—through probably the entire canon of said genre in a single stretch, from Fitzgerald’s unfinished The Last Tycoon to Budd Schulberg’s overrated What Makes Sammy Run? to Joan Didion’s still absolutely stunning Play It as It Lays, one book to at least be mentioned in the same breath as The Day of the Locust, I’d say, along with the British writer Gavin Lambert’s hauntingly moving cult favorites about Hollywood, The Slide Area and The Goodbye People) Actually, The Day of the Locust is not simply a Hollywood novel, and it’s one of the high points in twentieth-century American fiction itself, admittedly overshadowed by West’s earlier novel Miss Lonelyhearts. Miss Lonelyhearts was never recognized as it should have been during his lifetime either, though today there’s no limit, it seems, to the respect it’s afforded. According to critic Harold Bloom (and whether or not you like the man’s bluster, you can’t deny his aesthetic acumen and unshakable standards): “The greatest Faulkner, of The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Absalom, Absalom! and Light in August, is the only writer of prose fiction in this century who can be said to have surpassed Miss Lonelyhearts”; probably the whole tradition of modern American black humor, reflecting an anxious, ever-looming absurdity in life, traces back to the book, with Flannery O’Connor, John Hawkes, and Thomas Pynchon all greatly influenced by it.

  It was a meandering road in life that brought West to the moment of his writing The Day of the Locust, one with many labels to define him along the way: privileged son of a well-to-do apartment house developer in New York City; high school dropout who managed to finagle admission to Brown University on the basis of a doctored grade transcript of somebody else who shared his name, Nathan Weinstein (which got changed to Nathanael West when he started publishing); desk clerk for two midtown Manhattan hotels after his father lost everything in the Crash, boring employment that turned out to be lucky, if only for the fact that while working in the hotels he sometimes had drinks with a reporter friend from the Brooklyn Eagle, who one night in a speakeasy showed him a bundle of painful letters to the paper’s personal-advice column and the letters became the basis for Miss Lonelyhearts; struggling Hollywood screenwriter, first brought there for a few brief months in 1933 when Columbia purchased film rights to Miss Lonelyhearts, as followed by a return to Hollywood in 1935 with no contract, West unemployed for a long stretch, broke, and living in a cubbyhole room in the Pa-Va-Sed, acute gonorrhea contracted from prostitutes not helping the situation; and finally established Hollywood screenwriter with steady and well-paid employment, first at Republic, a B-movie operation, then major studios, RKO and Paramount, before going back to Columbia. In his trademark Ivy League clothes and known for a quiet yet sarcastic manner, a wiry, military-mustached man, West did seem out of place in Hollywood, and he always frankly admitted that writing for the movies was inherently frivolous; nevertheless, turning out scripts came easy to him, plus the pay was extremely lucrative by Depression standards and the company was good (West spent considerable time with his old college pal S.J. Perelman, who wrote Marx Brothers films and married West’s sister, and he developed friendships with Fitzgerald and Faulkner, also working for studios during these years), but West still wanted to concentrate on his own fiction, reaching a point of total discouragement on that front when The Day of the Locust garnered few reviews and sold little more than a thousand copies. It was then that he wrote to an acquaintance back East, the poet and critic Malcolm Cowley, with that large question I affixed above as an epigraph, concerning the “ancient bugaboo,” all right: “Why write novels?”

  Or why write serious ones that aspire to being art and bona fide literature, anyway.

  At the time of his death, in fact, West wasn’t read much at all. One of the saddest things I came across in my own reading around in accounts of his life was an anecdote about how Jean-Paul Sartre, when he traveled to New York for the first time, after the War, kept asking anybody he ran into there if they knew anything about this magnificent American writer whose work Sartre had immersed himself in, Nathanael West. Nobody seemed to have heard of him, though Sartre got through by telephone to Random House, original publisher of The Day of the Locust, and an editorial employee thought the name sounded familiar; if I remember correctly, that prompted the employee
to check and eventually tell Sartre they had been forwarding mail to West at a P.O. box that the writer apparently kept in New York City—in other words, there were people in West’s own publishing house who didn’t even realize he was dead.

  And I suppose I think about something like that, too, while I keep walking around these neighborhoods in Hollywood this afternoon—not only residential but surprisingly sedate and everyday, considering they’re so close to the Boulevard—then I go back toward the Boulevard, with the mission to the Pa-Va-Sed—that confirmation, as said— accomplished.

  As impressive as the newly developed Metro system for L.A. is, what can be more striking is the way the city appears to have gotten graffiti largely under control (even much that lingers in the outlying neighborhoods often looks old and faded, including in Watts, where I will go during this stay to see at last the wild triplicated exercise in wire and ceramic fragments, prophetically postmodern, that is Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers); also always really noticeable is the successful solution to the pedestrian-motorist battle in L.A., the result of hefty tickets and strict enforcement of the law wherever there’s a light at an intersection. With nobody jaywalking, it allows you to overhear things as the bunched people wait for the signal on the Boulevard. I hear an overweight young wannabe hipster with a ponytail excitedly telling another guy waiting with him for the red to turn to green: “I mean, it’s a killer song, and the wild thing about it is that I wrote it last week in only an hour. It’s called, ‘Hey, Lardass!’ which is what the cops said to me when they arrested me that time.” He emits a grunting sound for the thump of a guitar chord, also pantomimes an axing sweep of one arm to hit the imaginary Fender, à la Pete Townshend, adding, “The opening downbeat is totally killer.” And then, right before the buildup at another intersection, there’s an older guy standing on the sidewalk—short, lean, and gray-mustached, wearing a crisp white T-shirt and blue jeans—and he’s publicly chewing out three scruffy kids, in their late teens or early twenties and all in ragged black, who seem to have everything they own with them there on the sidewalk, backpacks and duffle bags; he shouts that he’s already given them a lot—a place to stay, food to eat—and the lanky washed-out girl with stringy honey hair who is with the two boys (all of them standing there and doing their best to simply look at each other, ignore the older guy) flatly and sardonically says: “Yeah, tell it to your girlfriends, Walt.”

  Hollywood Boulevard, all right.

  Of course, I’ve already explored other spots that figure into the novel, on that other afternoon in Hollywood.

  I’ve been over to the location of the old Columbia Studios, just below Hollywood Boulevard on Sunset. Columbia moved elsewhere, but the walled-off few city blocks of offices and sound stages are painted a uniformly brilliant creamy hue, spindly mop-headed palms all around, for what is now the thriving, independent Sunset Gower Studios, used principally for TV. It was most likely here—an unidentified studio within walking distance of the Boulevard and the San Bernardino Arms Apartments—that the main character in The Day of the Locust works; he’s a recent Yale grad named Tod Hackett, a set designer living in the San Bernardino. Across from the studios, on the corner with Gower Street, is a small new strip mall with an Old West motif called Gower Gulch, built on the very site of that same name where cowboy extras looking for bit parts in Westerns—intimately known as “horse operas” in West’s day—used to gather, a spot also figuring prominently in The Day of the Locust. In the novel a cast of males are defined more or less in terms of their relationship to a central female presence, Faye Greener, who lives with her ex-vaudevillian father in the San Bernardino. Faye is a willowy, blond seventeen-year-old extra in the movies—and briefly a call girl—who dreams of being a star and, ever the flirting tease, already puts on the affected airs of a star, absurdly but alluringly so, too, to the degree that the male characters all move about her like minor planets in a slow, drugged orbit that can only lead to inevitable and dramatically explosive collision by the novel’s end. Among those enamored with her are both Tod, the sensitive Easterner who longs to paint seriously, and, of course, Homer Simpson (the popular prime-time cartoon show later slyly borrowed his name but certainly not his character) from Iowa and now in the sunshine of Southern California for his health, a nervously shy square of a retired middle-aged bookkeeper who beautiful Faye eventually goes to live with in his tiny rented bungalow—a Platonic deal, as she unabashedly takes complete advantage of his supporting her. And there’s also Faye’s occasional boyfriend Earle Shoop, a cowboy extra from Arizona—laconic and dumb and handsome—who daily stations himself there at Gower Gulch alongside his friends—other cowboy extras and a street-smart, wise-cracking Indian in full tribal dress peddling cheap souvenirs (he’s somebody known to fellow Gower Gulch habitués as—this is funny—“Chief Kiss-My-Towkus”). I’ve even been clear over to Western Avenue, and while there’s no locating today what might have been the Cinderella Bar, a campy nightclub built in the shape of a giant slipper and where several characters in The Day of the Locust go one evening to watch a gay drag show (Faye takes cruel satisfaction in embarrassing the awkward Homer there), I’ve seen how Western Avenue does still have some lively bars and clubs for the LGBT scene.

  Actually, this day I’d planned on ending up at the Musso and Frank’s Grill. It’s an iconic Hollywood eatery, upscale and on the Boulevard, where toward the end of the novel a distraught Tod, alone, orders a steak he hardly touches and tries to sort out his life. Musso and Frank’s is now a bar/restaurant that basks in the fact it’s in an undeniable time warp, a bronze plaque bolted to the putty-color stucco exterior (is everything in Los Angeles stuccoed?) saying “Est. 1919.” Just the overpriced look of the place from outside now deters me from my original idea of having a drink there; on my other afternoon in Hollywood, I discovered a small bar called the Powerhouse right on Highland and a block up from the Boulevard with surprisingly cheap bottles of Budweiser, more my kind of venue and an agreeable watering hole that if it’s iconic of anything it could be the life and times of Charles Bukowski—I figure I’ll go there again this day.

  Nevertheless, I want to see what Musso and Frank’s does look like inside, considering that it provides a setting in the novel.

  So I decide to work a ruse. I head from the brightness of the day into the air-conditioned dimness of Musso and Frank’s in late afternoon, immediately to be greeted by a smiling, really old guy—skinny and stoop-shouldered and wearing a dark suit with a dated wide tie, the shirt collar much too big for his bony neck; his voice is faint, a bit shaky even. He holds a stack of large menus in front of him in both arms, the way high school girls used to carry their books, and he asks me if he can direct me to a table.

  I look around, try to take it all in, and he looks at me again, saying: “Sir?”

  I glance at my watch (a ridiculous thing of translucent lime-green plastic that I bought at a dollar store, which keeps perfect time); I try to project the air that I’m pretty busy, somebody of perhaps consequence who is invariably pretty busy—let’s say a movie-business kind of citizen, because deals surely still go down here.

  “I was supposed to meet somebody here,” I say, looking around some more, “but I guess I’m early.”

  The guy steps aside, ushering me past him, as he advises that I check this room and also the room next to it. Everything is dark-paneled wood, with the chairs and booths upholstered with red leatherette and the tablecloths bright white, the decor probably unchanged since when West himself reportedly was a regular customer. There are maybe only two or three parties eating, and making a loop through the shadowy place, I already feel a little crummy for giving the line I did to the old guy, who seemed sweet and without question fragile; the middle-aged (and beyond) waiters in their red jackets, unbusy, nod to me, and I walk past the long eating bar in this room—in an alley of sorts, behind a dividing wall—and then past the longer polished-mahogany bar for drinks in the other, nobody sitting at either one of them. Up front
by the entrance, the old guy has already announced my plight to the cashier who’s fifty or so, a pudgily blond woman with a striking resemblance to the later Shelley Winters and validly part of the time warp herself. At her register she, too, is apparently concerned about my finding the person I’m supposed to meet; she asks me if I checked both rooms, to which I answer that I did, and the old guy suggests that maybe I would like to have a drink or a meal and wait.

  I tell him no, and that I’m probably way too early and will be back later, adding another overdone concerned glance at the dollar-store plastic watch. Outside again, I stop on the sidewalk, lean against the wall of Musso and Frank’s to write, jotting down some details about the interior I just saw—more confirmation.

  Going this way and that, the tourists are truly thick now.

  Which is when—slipping the notebook and pen into the black Levi’s back pocket, about to proceed to the Powerhouse Bar for that envisioned cold Budweiser—I notice something happening on the other side of the Boulevard, farther down and across from the Chinese Theatre, between the old Roosevelt Hotel there that formerly hosted the Oscars and the pillared, buff-stone façade, freshly sandblasted, of the so-called El Capitan Entertainment Center.

  I decide to postpone the beer for the moment and head over to see what the commotion is all about.

  The crowd on Hollywood Boulevard is always at its certifiably thickest right in front of the Chinese Theatre. People do all kinds of things with those imprints in the sidewalk’s cement—squatting low to lean over and try to place their own palms in the outlined palms, or standing beside a set of prints for a posed, and paid for, grinning photograph with one of the sizable bunch of twenty-somethings who work their own gig with the tourists, dressed up as Superman or Michael Jackson or—this outfit seems very popular, with at least three girls I see employing it—Catwoman, purring and pawing; however, now some of the crowd appears to have moved across the street, to see for themselves what’s going on.