Jessup's idea about the drawing power of teenage exploitation movies isn't unique. By the summer of 1955, other movie studios had already started making movies in that genre. Columbia, for example, at about the time of this story was producing Teenage Crime Wave, which would be released in November of 1955.
The idea of a studio that was solely devoted to that type of movie in many ways parallels the rise of American Independent Pictures. Founded in 1954, A.I.P. was headed by Samuel Arkoff who developed a formula for reaching his target audience: the nineteen-year-old male. Jessup is, in many ways, a stand-in for Arkoff.
The movie that Ben talks about seeing in previews is, of course, Rebel Without A Cause, which was released in late October of 1955.
The old Los Angeles County Courthouse, built in 1888 and known as the "Red Sandstone Courthouse," was condemned in 1933 after an earthquake and demolished in 1936. The new courthouse didn't open until 1959. During the intervening time, the downtown part of the Los Angeles County Superior Court was scattered among several buildings, including the old Hall of Records and the Hall of Justice. For the purposes of this story, I located everything involving the Superior Court and the L.A. County Sheriff inside the Hall of Justice at 211 West Temple Street for simplicity.
District Attorney Alexander Frankfurter is a fictional character. His last name is an homage to Ham(ilton) Burger, the district attorney in the Perry Mason novels and television shows.
Muscle Beach in 1955 was located just south of the Santa Monica Pier. It was centered around a park built by the Works Progress Administration in 1934 that included exercise equipment. The park was closed by the city of Santa Monica in 1959. Even though most of the action moved to Muscle Beach Venice (Ocean Front Walk between 18th and 19th Avenues in Venice Beach), the first Muscle Beach is still there, along with much of the original equipment.
Muscle House by the Sea was a boarding house run by Fleurette "Joy" Crettaz at 1659 Ocean Front Walk in Santa Monica.
Max Hoffman was an Austrian-born entrepreneur who fled Germany for France after the rise of the Nazi Party. Hoffman left France for the U.S. after the German invasion. He was the first person to import Mercedes-Benz automobiles into the U.S. after the war ended. He had a famous showroom on Park Avenue in Manhattan in the 1950s that not only featured Mercedes cars but also Jaguars. The showroom was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright who also built a house for Hoffman in Rye, New York. In looking for who might be selling Mercedes-Benz in Los Angeles in 1955, I could only find an office address at 6465 Sunset Boulevard (near Vine and a couple of blocks from the Hollywood Brown Derby) for something called "Mercedes-Benz Distributors, Inc." So, I decided to invent a small showroom for a Hoffman-esque character (Gunther Richter), have it also built by Wright (the cars tilted at an angle for easier inspection by customers was his idea), and put it at 9021 Santa Monica Boulevard, just west of Robertson and just outside of Beverly Hills in West Hollywood. Were it to be an actual address and still exist, today it would be next door to Charles Agapiou, Ltd., a Rolls-Royce and Bentley dealer.
Pola Negri, née Barbara Apolonia Chałupiec, was born in Lipno, Poland, in 1897. She began her performance career as one of the baby swans in Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake. After becoming a successful stage and screen actress in Warsaw, she moved to Berlin in 1917 where she met Ernst Lubitsch. He cast her as the lead in his 1919 production of Madame Dubarry (Passion in the U.S.). That film caught the attention of Jesse Lasky at Paramount who invited her to go to Hollywood in 1921 and placed her under contract in 1922. She was successful at Paramount, becoming one of the most popular Hollywood actresses of the 1920s and one of the wealthiest. Claiming that Rudolph Valentino was the love of her life, she fainted several times at his 1926 funeral. She made the transition to sound film after a brief retirement and spent much of the 1930s in France making films for UFA, the German production company where she'd met Lubitsch. Returning to the U.S. after the German invasion of France, she remained in Hollywood until 1958 when she moved to San Antonio with her close friend Margaret West, an oil heiress. Her final movie was 1964's The Moon-Spinners, a Walt Disney production starring Hayley Mills and Eli Wallach. She died in San Antonio in 1987.
Hedda Hopper, née Elda Furry, entered show business in the chorus on Broadway in the early 1900s. She began her career in Hollywood as an actress in the silent movies. She married DeWolf Hopper and changed her first name to Hedda after consulting a numerologist. She started her column, "Hedda Hopper's Hollywood," in the Los Angeles Times in 1938 and was an instant hit. From 1939 to 1951, she had a radio show on CBS, then ABC, back to CBS, and ending on NBC. She had several cameos, usually playing herself, in movies and on TV. She was a Republican, campaigning for Thomas Dewey in the 1944 Presidential election, and an outspoken supporter of the House Un-American Affairs Committee. Like other gossip columnists of the time, she often sent tips to the F.B.I. She was famous for her outrageous hats and her feud with fellow columnist Louella Parsons (who was published by the Hearst newspapers). She was the mother of William "Bill" Hopper who was cast as private detective Paul Drake in the Perry Mason TV series.
Errol Flynn was born in 1909 in Hobart, Tasmania in Australia. Before taking up acting, he was educated in Hobart, London, and Sydney. He then spent five years going back and forth between New Guinea and Sydney, trying to make money by planting tobacco and mining. His first role was the lead for In the Wake of the Bounty, an Australian film that was a dramatic re-enactment of the mutiny and a documentary of Pitcairn Island. Having been bit by the acting bug, he went to England and started working for Northampton Repertory Company where he spent a few months learning the craft of acting. In 1934, he was signed by Warner Brothers. He did one film for them in England and then moved to Hollywood. His first big picture was Captain Blood, released in 1935 by Warners. He was most famously in The Adventures of Robin Hood starring opposite Olivia de Havilland. His contract with Warners ended in 1953. He spent four years working in Europe before returning to Hollywood in 1957. He worked hard, lived hard, and played hard, dying suddenly in 1959 of a number of diseases, including cirrhosis of the liver, in Vancouver, British Columbia, at the age of 50.
Ontra Cafeterias had several locations all over the Los Angeles area, including the one at 1719 North Vine, just north of Hollywood Boulevard.
I believe that Stanley Mosk was serving as a judge in the L.A. County Superior Court downtown in 1955 but have not been able to verify that. He was appointed to the court in 1943. In 1947, Judge Mosk ruled in the case of a racial covenant case that "[t]here is no more reprehensible, un-American activity than to attempt to deprive persons of their own homes on a master race theory." This was not the same case that Roz refers to involving Hattie McDaniel. That case was settled in 1945. The U.S. Supreme Court in 1948 finally ended the legality of racial and religious covenants in the United States. In 1958, Mosk was elected California Attorney General, replacing Edmund G. "Pat" Brown who ran for and was elected Governor that same year. Mosk served five years as Attorney General before being appointed to the California State Supreme Court by Governor Brown in 1964 where he became the longest-serving justice to date, serving until his death for thirty-seven years. The L.A. County Courthouse was renamed in his honor after he passed away in 2001.
Nick and Carter's house off of Beverly Glen is fictional and located in approximately the same spot as Glen Centre, a small shopping center just south of Mulholland. I confirmed that it was likely above the smog line at the time from an essay by Alistair Cooke in Talk About America: 1951–1968. In Chapter 38, he writes:
I stayed with a friend who has just built a house on the top of the rim of the mountains that form a bowl in which sits Los Angeles. He himself is just above the smog line, so that on clear days you can see forever...
Anglo-Egyptian Sudanese Railway and Mutual National Bank are fictitious entities.
More Information
Nick Williams Mysteries
The Unexpected Heiress
The Amorous Attorney<
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The Sartorial Senator
The Laconic Lumberjack
The Perplexed Pumpkin
The Savage Son
The Mangled Mobster
The Iniquitous Investigator
The Voluptuous Vixen
The Timid Traitor
The Sodden Sailor
The Excluded Exile
The Paradoxical Parent
The Pitiful Player
Nick & Carter Stories
An Enchanted Beginning
Golden Gate Love Stories
The One He Waited For
Their Own Hidden Island
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The Pitiful Player (A Nick Williams Mystery Book 14) Page 36
