Dear Los Angeles
Page 14
HENRY STANDAGE
1928
After Bertha’s dance program on Olive Hill we went to Laurvik’s to a party, a perfect evening which was prolonged into the morning….I have not been joyfully borrachito in many moons.
EDWARD WESTON
1942
The searchlights go on in the evening and shine all night. We have to turn off our lights at ten and shut our radio at eight….
It’s real cold in the night. I caught a cold the first night and I can’t get rid of it….We have to get up early to eat or else they tell you to come back tomorrow morning. Goodby!
SANDIE SAITO
1969
New restaurants open and are suddenly full of people; where did they eat last week? I often think of the Cinema Theater, of how it used to be three, or was it four years ago. The midnight movies, a line outside all the way down the block past the O Sole Mio pizza restaurant where the owner painted on the window, THIS RESTAURANT FEATURED ON TV. The long line outside the theater made up of friends, it was getting there, into the films, that was half the fun. We would stand there, or rush up and down saying hello, Garry Taylor, his arms full of the then-struggling eight-page Free Press wandering by, hey buy the Free Press….
Inside the lobby, those who were friends of the manager, a smiling and enthusiastic supporter of the real underground movie makers, named Mike Getz, would welcome the regular crowd of freeloaders. We would sip the free lemonade from paper cups and chat about the week’s events. There was Jack Hirshman and his wife Ruth in her Garboesque hat and matching face….
Finally inside, the regular Saturday night show patrons gone, we wandered down the aisles, more hellos, sliding into our seats, eating the imported chocolate bars Mike sold from a little pushcart in the lobby. Then Mike’s disembodied voice over the microphone explaining things haltingly but with care, about the films, or places we should remember to go, like peace marches and poetry readings, and then, finally the films themselves….When it was over we would hang around some more, discussing what we had seen, planning to come again next week, seeing those friends we only saw on these occasions, but who were friends nevertheless.
It is all different now; Mike Getz is away in some woodsy retreat planning shows for a whole chain of theaters….But I understand, it is more businesslike, and more efficiently run, no more free lemonade, no more freeloaders, and surely more profitable, and will survive and flourish without us.
LIZA WILLIAMS
MAY 3
1927
I am afflicted with one of those dreadfully ambiguous names, and I am always put to the necessity, as I am at present, of correcting very logical, but erroneous, impressions about it. I would have preferred a name such as “George” or “John” or “Henry”—something unspeakably common but undeniably masculine.
CAREY MCWILLIAMS, to Mary Austin
1960
So, in sum, I am more concerned than angry, more irritated than exhilarated, by what I see encroaching upon us everywhere today. Commercialism and quack intellectualism, the twin demons, the dual evils of our time as in every other time. To kick them both in the balls is my desire.
RAY BRADBURY, to Esther McCoy
1968
Last night, 1.00 a.m., while taking a walk around the block suddenly a car stops short beside me and two teen agers, evidently on dope, begin to bully me, me, curse me. I wasn’t far from the house, so I just kept walking, they following. I thought at one point they would jump out and tackle me, but fortunately they didn’t. And I who talk about violence, do you know what was in my mind then? To let them follow me right to the house, let them follow in after me, and then I’d go get my razor sharp machete, which I keep handy, and cut them to ribbons. This sort of slaughter, you see, I regard as “justifiable.” Afterwards I began trembling. Not because of what they might have done to me, but what I might have done to them! Beware of the peace lovers, I always say. Beware of the just man! Do you know what it is to dance with rage? That’s what I do inwardly again and again. Fortunately I always wear my Buddha-like mask.
HENRY MILLER, to his wife
MAY 4
1883
We have just got back from our tour through the Indian villages: (18 in all) my opinion of human nature has gone down 100 per ct. in the last 30 days. Such heart sickening fraud, violence, cruelty as we have on earth here—I did not believe could exist in civilized communities—and “In the Name of the Law.”
If I were to write a story with that title,—all Indian—would you print it? I have never before felt that I could write an Indian story. I had not got the background, now I have, and sooner or later, I shall write the story. Has anybody used that title?—Is it not a good one? It seems to me so—If I could write a story that would do for the Indian the thousandth part what Uncle Tom’s Cabin did for the Negro, I would be thankful for the rest of my life.
HELEN HUNT JACKSON
1939
Let me be Los Angeles
JAMES JOYCE, in Finnegans Wake
MAY 5
1942
The rushes. Ginger not brilliant in the last scene. She was trying to give an Academy Award performance of an old lady, not the straightforward performance of a girl in love, forced to hide as an old lady. Worked at RKO all day.
CHARLES BRACKETT
1942
My body is shivering and will not stop. I wonder if a nervous breakdown is like this. I cannot afford to become ill, but after moving to the hotel, having to pay even more attention to my surroundings makes it even more difficult to sleep, and I am troubled….
This kind of evacuation seemed like a spur of the moment thing, and I felt I was being jerked around like a puppet. After five, six days, there probably won’t be a single Japanese remaining in Los Angeles.
…We, who until war broke out, thought we would live in America for the rest of our lives, became labeled as the enemy.
AOKI HISA
MAY 6
1936
Someone is building a house next door and all day I hear the slap of falling boards, the ring of saw and tap of hammers. To some people these sounds would be an irritation but to me they are pleasing. They have many delightful associations. They suggest the building of new towns and more intimately my own share [in] the several houses I have built or repaired. I think of my father’s house in Dakota, in 1881; of the additions I made to the house in West Salem; to my share in the enlargement of the Onteora homes. It all has definite meaning. I can tell by the stroke of the hammer whether the men are setting studding, laying floor or putting on roof boards. I can tell by the sound of the saw whether a plank or a beam is being cut. I enjoyed building. I do yet, and the smell of new lumber is still a joyous agent. It means homes, good wages, firesides.
HAMLIN GARLAND
1943
We live our by now deeply habituated waiting-room days among our palms and lemon trees, in social concourse with the Franks, Werfels, Dieterles, Neumanns—always the same faces, and if occasionally an American countenance appears, it is as a rule so strangely blank and amiably stereotyped that one has had enough for quite some time to come….
I have made up my mind to give the war time for one more novel, so that when it’s over Bermann can march in through the Brandenburg Gate with four unknown books of mine. The completion of the Joseph [and His Brothers] is already well in the past; it was finished in January….
Now I have something very different [Doktor Faustus] in mind, something rather uncanny, tending in the theological and demonological direction…the novel of a pathological, unlawful inspiration.
THOMAS MANN
MAY 7
1853
I am…satisfied that any treaty made with these Indians without their first feeling our power would be of no avail—How easy [it would be] for those interested to make up a party and pay them a visit
and convince them that they can no longer steal with impunity.
BENJAMIN DAVIS “DON BENITO” WILSON
1927
B. came, bringing me a dainty glass fish,—M., a rare visitor, arrived with gardenias, followed by K. with a passion flower. Another day of near complications!
EDWARD WESTON
1929
This is the most horrible, unreal place in the world, on a dreary curve of the coast, I have rheumatism dreadfully here, and never felt so down-and-out anywhere….I live at a hotel and taxi-cab out to see mother in the afternoon.
Oh, if only this dreadful thing had happened at home, in a human land, where mother would have had her lovely grandchildren to watch and work, where there were dear old friends, kind neighbors, memories, God. There is no God in California, no real life. Hollywood is the flower of all the flowers, the complete expression of it.
WILLA CATHER, to Dorothy Canfield Fisher
1992
And yet the neighborhood survives, mango vendors and paleta carts flourishing in the morning-after calm like the cheerful green shoots that sprout from a newly charred forest floor, noodle shops and dumpling houses, doughnut stands and taquerias that swept away the broken glass and were running again the morning after the troubled afternoon. A lone, well-lighted Salvadoran restaurant in a blocklong burned-out mall stands improbable sentinel, churning out pupusas and carne asada although surrounded on either side by ruined stores, smoking rubble and military patrols.
JONATHAN GOLD
MAY 8
1901
The President arrived at 2 and is staying at the hotel Van Nuys. Cloudy day.
DON JUAN BAUTISTA BANDINI
1901
I am glad to be in this great state, whose population today is more than one-third of the entire population of the United States over which the first president presided during eight years; and I cannot stand in this presence without recalling those splendid pioneers of American civilization. Kearney and Stockton and Fremont, who blazed the path of progress and of civilization and dedicated this mighty empire of the Pacific coast to liberty and union forever. You have now, residing in your beautiful city, that aged woman who shared with General Fremont in his early and later trials and triumphs. I am sure you will all join with me in reverent and affectionate regard….
They say liberty does not thrive under a tropical sun. Did liberty ever thrive more grandly than in the state of California and throughout our southland? I congratulate you upon the condition of the country in its entire extent from the bottom of my heart, for myself and for my associates, for this glorious welcome to this city, which I visit now for the second time. Twenty years ago, when I was here, you had a population of a little more than eleven thousand. Today you have a population of more than a hundred thousand, and in the last decade you have made a larger gain than any city of the country of fifty thousand inhabitants, a percentage, I believe, of over one hundred per cent. I congratulate you upon your local prosperity, and wish for you all love and contentment in your homes and prosperity in all your occupations. I beg to bid you good afternoon.
PRESIDENT WILLIAM MCKINLEY
1903
TWO YEARS LATER
Stayed at home all day. Thought of going to Los Angeles to see the parade for the Fiesta de las Flores and the arrival of President Roosevelt—the actual president of the nation visiting these parts—and at the moment I was leaving the house with Margarita, whom I was taking with me, Harry Gorham arrived to say that his father had died last night and as he had been such a close friend of mine he wanted me to be a pallbearer at 2 p.m. tomorrow. I felt so badly I didn’t go to Los Angeles.
DON JUAN BAUTISTA BANDINI
1903
I greet you and thank you for the enjoyment you have given me to-day. I cannot say how I have appreciated being here in your beautiful state and your beautiful city. I do not remember ever seeing quite the parallel to the procession I have just witnessed….
When I come to speak of the preservation of the forests, of the preservation of the waters, of the use of the waters from the mountains and of the waters obtained by artesian wells, I only have to appeal to your own knowledge, to your experience. I have been passing through a veritable garden of the earth yesterday and to-day, here in the southern half of California, and it has been made by the honesty and wisdom of your people, and by the way in which you have preserved your waters and utilized them. I ask that you simply keep on as you have begun, and that you let the rest of the nation follow suit. We must preserve the forests to preserve the waters, which are themselves preserved by the forests, if we wish to make this country as a whole blossom as you have made this part of California blossom.
In saying goodbye to you I want to say that it has been the greatest pleasure to see you, and I am glad, my fellow Americans, to think that you and I are citizens of the same country.
PRESIDENT THEODORE ROOSEVELT
1919
We eat and sleep Tarzan….The dog is named Tarzan, the place is Tarzana….
…A guy bobbed up day before yesterday with the plan of a whole village he wished to plant in my front yard—school, city hall, banks, business houses, motion picture theater—and it was labelled City of Tarzana, which sounds like a steamboat.
EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS
MAY 9
1850
Declarations Taken in Relation to the Massacre of Dr. Lincoln and His Party on the Colorado River.—Deposition of William Carr.
On this ninth day of May, in the year of Our Lord, Eighteen Hundred and Fifty, before me, Abel Stearns, first Alcalde of the District of Los Angeles, and Judge of the first instance in the criminal law, personally appeared William Carr, who being duly sworn, deposeth….
Deponent, since he has been in Los Angeles, has heard some reports in reference to Glanton, or others of said company, robbing or otherwise mistreating Americans and Sonoraians. He has been with said company from the beginning, and positively and unequivocally denies the truth of such reports….
As to the Indians, they always professed great friendship for the company, were continually about the premises, ate habitually in the houses, and were always treated with kindness personally.
WILLIAM CARR, as deposed by Abel Stearns
1901
Went to Los Angeles to see the floral parade. It was very large and very pretty headed by the President and his Cabinet. There was an enormous crowd. I have never seen so many people in the city. In the afternoon came to the Soldiers Home as the President was due to come there. He arrived at 3 p.m. and after seeing the retired soldiers drill he went back to Los Angeles.
DON JUAN BAUTISTA BANDINI
MAY 10
1856
In California there is no justice, no equality, no liberty. We ask in the name of reason and common sense if it would not be better for us to emigrate to the only asylum that guarantees our liberty.
FRANCISCO P. RAMIREZ
1926
I think I’m run down and I’ll just have to quit going out so much and look after myself a bit. Mr. Goldwyn has been very considerate during my indisposition, which came as rather a surprise because his former secretary had told me that unless a girl was well and fit, he could be annoyed with her.
VALERIA BELLETTI
MAY 11
1939
Out here we have a strong progressive movement and I devote a great deal of time to it. Yet, although this new novel is about Hollywood, I found it impossible to include any of those activities in it. I made a desperate attempt before giving up. I tried to describe a meeting of the Anti-Nazi League, but it didn’t fit and I had to substitute a whorehouse and a dirty film. The terrible sincere struggle of the League came out comic when I touched it and even libelous. Take the “mother” in Steinbeck’s swell novel—I want to believe in her and yet inside of myself I ho
nestly can’t. When not writing a novel—say at a meeting we have out here to help the migratory worker—I do believe it and try to act on that belief. But at the typewriter by myself I can’t.
NATHANAEL WEST, to a critic
1941
It’s the world’s most sophisticated boulevard but I’ve seen a barrel organist with peaked hat and dancing monkey steal the thunder from a world premiere….Half a block from my office I watched a mockingbird nest and raise her brood and the fledgling birds get more attention than Clark Gable….
Early last Christmas morning practically the whole boulevard belonged to a little wirehaired terrier. He was a dirty little waif of a dog but someone had tied a bright red Christmas bow around his tail. And conscious of the splendor, he carried himself with such solemn dignity that he had the whole street in fits of laughter….