Dear Los Angeles
Page 1
Copyright © 2018 by David Kipen
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Modern Library, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
MODERN LIBRARY and the TORCHBEARER colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Permissions acknowledgments can be found starting on this page.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Kipen, David, author.
Title: Dear Los Angeles: the city in diaries and letters 1542 to 2018 / edited by David Kipen.
Description: First edition. | New York: The Modern Library, [2018] | Includes index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018018940 | ISBN 9780812993981 | ISBN 9780812993998 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Los Angeles (Calif.)—Civilization. | Los Angeles (Calif.)—Quotations, maxims, etc. | Los Angeles (Calif.)—History—Chronology. | Authors—California—Los Angeles—Anecdotes. | Pioneers—California—Los Angeles—Anecdotes. | Celebrities—California—Los Angeles—Anecdotes.
Classification: LCC F869.L85 K56 2018 | DDC 979.4/94—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018018940
Ebook ISBN 9780812993998
modernlibrary.com
randomhousebooks.com
Cover design: Rachel Ake
Cover photograph: Shutterstock
v5.4
ep
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Preface
January
February
March
April
May
June
July
August
September
October
November
December
About the Contributors
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Permissions Acknowledgments
By David Kipen
About the Editor
Los Angeles, give me some of you!
—JOHN FANTE, Ask the Dust
There it is. Take it.
—“CHIEF” WILLIAM MULHOLLAND, dedicating the Los Angeles Aqueduct
Real good documentation, this Californiana crap.
—THOMAS PYNCHON, The Crying of Lot 49
PREFACE
This book is a collective self-portrait of Los Angeles when it thought nobody was looking. Joyous, creative, life-giving. Violent, stupid, inhospitable to strangers. Cerebral, melancholy. Funny.
What makes L.A. what it is, anyway? What’s true of Los Angeles that isn’t true of anywhere else? In real estate parlance, look at the comparables. We’re a movie town, but so is Mumbai. The weather’s nice, but you can’t buy a decent windowscraper in Honolulu, either. Yes, we’re “so spread out,” but have you tried hoofing it across London?
We’re the Italy of America—no wait, we’re the capital of the Third World—hang on, now we’re the Ellis Island of the West. What next? Yesterday’s hyperbole is tomorrow’s ephemera. If, in some perverse urban version of orienteering, you blindfolded and dropped me in random cities with just a canteen and a compass, would I even recognize L.A. if I landed in it?
It might take a while. To my blinkered, biased eye, no other town scumbles together the best and worst of every other city in the world as profligately as L.A. does. It’s Heidelberg next door to Youngstown, hard by Positano. After all, what do Mumbai and Honolulu have in common? Other than L.A.’s resemblance to them, I can’t think what. Los Angeles is, for better and worse, the Los Angeles of Los Angeles.
This exceptionalism transcends the old postcard cliché of someone picking an orange and throwing a snowball on the same day. My favorite parlor trick is to ask a transplant what they miss most about where they’re from, and then try to come up with a Southern California approximation. It can be done, however dubiously. Nobody need ever feel homesick here—although, over the following pages, plenty of diarists and correspondents have managed it somehow.
Partly this homesickness stems from the natural propensity of visitors here to travel in packs. Too few of them know the natives, or the gone-natives, who could point them toward consolation. The other excuse for homesickness is that a lot of people enjoy it. When I’m out of town, I cherish the occasional pang as much as the next guy. Homesickness reassures us that we’re right to live where we do instead of wherever we’ve temporarily shanghaied ourselves to. Where’s my morning Times, my Dodgers broadcast, my jacarandas in June, a decent burrito? Only a return ticket away.
* * *
A reader’s first reaction to Dear Los Angeles might be, what’s with the hiccuping, date-by-date structure? Why not just march out all the entries in straightforward chronology, like Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations does? Who ever heard of a book that inches forward each day, only to ratchet back overnight, just as far or farther? Is this a daybook or the myth of Sisyphus?
The ungrateful answer is, it wasn’t my idea. Teresa Carpenter’s delightful New York Diaries provided the template. Oh, how I fought this. First I tried the traditional Bartlett’s approach, from 1542 up to the present, until I realized that we’d be at page 150 before getting to statehood—i.e., to any diarist that a lay reader had actually heard of. Chucking that, I had the bright idea of starting with the fulcrum year of 1935 and zigzagging back and forth in time from there, but the thing read more like a double-crostic than a book. At one point the manuscript even morphed into a coffee table–ready history of the city, complete with elaborate self-amused photo captions that still smirk at me from the depths of my hard drive. (I do miss that shot of Jack Nicholson arriving at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, hot off Chinatown and with, yes, the Department of Water and Power Building looming up behind him.)
And then it hit me. I could start with January 1 and just work forward one day at a time, complementary trying to juxtapose a few passages for each date. One step forward, two centuries back—the perennial, quixotic spectacle of L.A. forever finding fresh mistakes to make. In that moment, the whole deck of the book started shuffling into place.
I was so excited, it took days for me to realize I’d replicated Teresa’s schema all but exactly. I hope she hit upon it more efficiently than I did.
* * *
The biggest difference between Dear Los Angeles and New York Diaries is the addition of epistolary writing alongside the diary excerpts. Two reasons for this, the first one easy: I just kept finding such terrific L.A. letters, published or unpublished, from people who, in most cases, didn’t keep diaries, that I couldn’t bear leaving them out.
The other reason is that Manhattan circa 1609 has an unsporting century-and-a-half head start over Los Angeles in the diary-keeping department. Even allowing for that handicap, New York’s ever-endearing self-absorption gives it an unfair advantage. Historically, more New Yorkers’ diaries get published, for reasons both justifiable and not. I also suspect that more New Yorkers per capita keep a diary. Something has to pass the time there.
Trash-talking aside, I realized that another form of offhand writing had to pick up the slack. Once I incorporated letters (plus a few irresistible scraps of columnizing, tweets, blogs, and the odd oration)—essentially, any kind of L.A. writing with a date on it and no real posterity intended—my feared undersupply of material bec
ame a horn of plenty.
Apart from how it’s organized, and how letters crashed the diary party, a last unavoidable question to address here is what got in and what didn’t. You could spend a lifetime in libraries and archives and barely scratch the surface of what’s available. The only constraints are publisher patience and authorial liquidity. Within these parameters, my criteria for including an entry were basically 1) relevance to L.A., and 2) indefensible, undefinable editorial prerogative.
Mostly I liked these entries because they told me something about my city. For reasons hard to quantify, they played off each other in quirky, quarky, covalent ways. Some underscored how far we’ve come, others how far we still have to go. Ultimately, the entries had a hard time getting in if they didn’t make me laugh, or tick me off, or choke me up.
A shamefaced word here about those who didn’t make the cut often enough, i.e., poor people, minorities, women, and all the other Angelenos who’ve lived some fascinating but tantalizingly unrecorded lives. Historic reasons may exist for their relative oblivion. So, probably, do careless, myopic ones on my part. Those forgotten might or might not have cared that this book stints them, but I do, and I apologize for it.
That’s why I’m not done yet. Every day, dumpster-loads of family diaries and letters wind up in landfills. Descendants cherry-pick the antiques for estate sales and, regretfully or not, consign the rest to oblivion. Executors of Los Angeles, I implore you: Have pity on the social historians (and beachcombing pseudo-historians) of the future. Half-assed temporary preservation is easier than ever. Haul out your bubbe’s Saratoga trunk. Open up your abuelita’s closet. Read some of those yellowed notebook pages, those bundled love letters, even some of that “Sent Mail.” Then snap pictures of at least a good example or two. If you don’t have anywhere else to donate them, email them to me at kipend@gmail.com. I’m working to launch an initiative that’ll give your history a home. If you’ve shelled out for Dear L.A., it’s the least I can do.
* * *
You won’t be alone, either. To quote a lyric that Stephen Stills dashed off after the riot on the Sunset Strip, there’s something happening here. There always was, but it’s not just our secret anymore. Some megacities have started to look upon Los Angeles not as the cautionary bogeyman of old, but as a possible way forward. Resourceful, inventive homegrown scholars, peer-reviewed and otherwise, continue to emerge. Next to their labors, mine look less like research and more like vampirism. Developmentally, the city may finally be entering the mirror stage, starting to recognize its own reflection. Other mirrors, too, may now be called for—the funhouse variety, I hope, not excluded. This is Los Angeles. There’s always an alternate route.
Now’s the time to shut up and let hundreds of my neighbors get a word in—quick and dead alike, the habitués and the just passing through. L.A. is a mountain lion we only glimpse in shutter-quick flashes. A strong diary entry or letter makes as good a tripwire as any.
Way back when, for a lark, Angelenos used to plant “Now Entering Los Angeles City Limits” signs in faraway places and pose next to them for pictures. L.A. is so big, the joke went, that you could trek to the Himalayas and still never escape. L.A. had no limits.
But the joke cracks both ways. A driver only sees an “Entering Los Angeles” sign on the way into town, never the way out. Looked at this way, L.A. is the place Angelenos are forever approaching but can never quite get to. Like the city’s most salient, salable feature, you can’t look directly at it. On the right day, though, over the shoulder of a frank letter-writer or diarist, you can feel its radiance.
DAVID KIPEN, Los Angeles, Cal.
JANUARY 1
1853
I have not yet seen a gold mine! Few emigrants can say this. Nearly all rush to the mines on their first coming, as if there were no other pursuit worthy of attention. From this mania, however, they are fast recovering. Thus hope is reviving for this part of the country. A great revolution is silently going on.
JUDGE BENJAMIN HAYES
1923
On January the first, 1923, this mighty temple was opened. Since the break of day, surging multitudes had been gathering, filling the streets in every direction, waiting for the doors to open. At 2 o’clock in the afternoon, a scaffolding had been hastily erected in front of the Temple and draped with a great American flag. Loving hands, atremble with eagerness and the excitement of the moment, lifted me to the top of the scaffolding, from which the outside dedication service was held, and from which we read the story of the ancient Temple of Jerusalem.
SISTER AIMEE SEMPLE MCPHERSON
1934
Had awful flood in La Crescenta and Montrose. Many killed and injured and many homes washed away. Rained all Day. Stayed home & Quilted.
G. MCGRAMA
1941
I must really try to keep this journal more regularly. It will be invaluable to me if I do. Because this year is going to be one of the most decisive periods of the 20th century—and even the doings and thoughts of the most remote and obscure people will reflect the image of its events.
That’s a hell of a paragraph to start off with. Why are we all so pompous on New Year’s Day? Come off it—you’re not Hitler or Churchill. Nobody called on you to make a statement. As a matter of fact, what did you actually do?
Last night you…went on to the temple, where the Swami, wrapped in a blanket, read aloud from the sayings of Ramakrishna, the Vedas and the Bible, until a quarter past midnight. Then you came home and couldn’t sleep, so you reread most of Wells’s First Men in the Moon.
CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD
1985
Where is the life? Where are the people? Even though I know all of the answers, I am still not satisfied by the responses.
A Korean family bought the Ekins house. Yesterday they began to cut down every tree growing in the backyard. Peggy would turn over in her grave. Debby would cry. I was anguished.
What a city! Widen the streets! Tear down the past! Destroy the trees….
I’m having trouble building up the energy and commitment I need to form a committee to save 50’s architecture.
Oi.
AARON PALEY
JANUARY 2
1848
I will now give an account of Col Fremonts proceedings out here as well as the difficulty he had with Col Mason….
Col M said—Sir when I send for an officier whom I rank and command I expect him to obey me—Why did you not come Sir when I sent for you—I have a mind to put you under arrest Sir
—Col F replied my business was closed with you Sir was my reason for not comeing
—Col Mason immediately said—I want none of your insolence Sir
—Col Fremont [said], that is a term applied to a menial Sir and I hope you will wave your rank and give me an opportunity to wipe it out
—Col M answered within the hour Sir—at the same time telling him that double barrel shot guns must be the weapons
—some delay however occurred in sending the challenge and Mason had time to think of what he was doing and he sent a letter to Fremont asking that it might be put off for a while.
LIEUTENANT JOHN MCHENRY HOLLINGSWORTH
1932
Dinner in Santa Monica. Home in Rolls Royce. Jolly, futile, childish fun.
DAWN POWELL
JANUARY 3
1929
The Santa Monica Mountains are not big, as mountains run, but they are very picturesque. That is proven by the Lasky Ranch. Driving past that ranch yesterday we saw motion-picture sets for a cliffdwellers’ settlement, a Belgian village, a western mining town and a water-front scene, each in what seemed its natural setting. And doubtless those hills and valleys, chocolate-drop peaks and corrugated canyons have been seen by motion-picture patrons all over the world. It made us think of the two ex-doughboys talking of the trees of France. “Did they have any e
ucalyptus up in the war zone?” one asked. “I never saw any,” said the other, “but I notice in all the big war pictures the roads are lined with ’em.”
We have seen tropical jungles which could not compare with the hillsides of the Malibu range, which are covered with chemise brush tall as a man and so thick that you couldn’t even shoot a gun through it for more than fifty yards. Deer and coyotes can hardly penetrate except along broken paths…coveys of quail have to alight along the roadside in order to find open ground enough to spread out on, and continually whirr into the air before one’s approaching motor.
LEE SHIPPEY
1935
The hills are all intensely green, and from my window I awake to look at snow-capped mountains. The air is very gentle and the sunlight is brilliant and warm….
Mother says that I may buy a flute….Mother’s being on the newspaper makes it possible for her to get tickets for anything she wants to go to, so that I will be able to attend any concerts there are that I want to. I want to go to the Philharmonic whether I like the programs or not, because I think it is very necessary to hear as much music as I can.
I am also enjoying the records Henry gave me. I have a phonograph, not a very good one, but it goes around.