Dear Los Angeles
Page 31
…In his interpretations Rothwell seemed at his best in the movements affording the opportunities for broader contrasts. His renditions of the symphonic poem, “Les Preludes” and Chabrier’s “Espana,” are the most distinct triumphs and were greeted with bravos. His effects were equally brilliant in the rapid movements of the Dvorak “New World Symphony.”
…You could realize at times that he was not getting the finer effects he desired, but that will be only a matter of rehearsals now, for everything indicated yesterday the certainty of a triumphal first season for the Philharmonic Orchestra.
EDWIN SCHALLERT, for the Los Angeles Times
1920
Work on An American Tragedy & letters. Helen collects $35.00 from Metro & gives it to me. Wonderful session in evening—after dinner at Petitfils. Helen has a streak of perversion in her. Makes me promise never to teach any other girl to osculate my penus as she does!
THEODORE DREISER
OCTOBER 26
1929
Last night I went to the Carthay Circle Theatre to see Will Rogers in his first talking picture, They Had to See Paris. Marvelous! I was astonished at Will Rogers’s work. To call him a comedian is unjust to his art—the word is too small. He is one of the greatest HUMORISTS I have ever seen, but he is also a great ACTOR! His characterization is not of one small-town garage-store owner in Oklahoma, but of every small-town garage-store owner in America.
ERNST LUBITSCH
1951
The Audrey Hepburn test you made is a fine piece of work, and I just wanted to tell you how much we liked it here at the studio. You gave us a good look at the girl’s personality and charm, as well as her talent. As a result of the test, a number of producers at Paramount have expressed interest in casting her.
I can’t say at the moment whether or not we will use Miss Hepburn in Roman Holiday, but if we don’t you may be sure it will not be because of anything in the test—which is as good as any I’ve seen in a long time.
WILLIAM WYLER, to a fellow director
1963
My friend, the forest ranger, decided I had been working too hard and needed diversion. “I’m going to take you to visit the oldest things on the planet.” As we drove north from Los Angeles, I assumed we were going to the redwoods….
…It seemed as though we had landed in a spaceship on another planet, the planet Mars. Out of great expanses of bare, white, bone-colored rock grew a few scattered trees, nothing else. The trees were short, stunted, twisted and gnarled, only a few green needles, a symbol of strength and defiance. The forester said they were bristlecone pines, the oldest known living things. Methuselah, the eldest, is 4,600 years old. Many were growing here when the Egyptians were building the Pyramids. He explained these trees are the only plants that can survive here, exposed to high winds, growing on very poor rocky soil with very little rainfall. They have been able to survive by allowing most of the tree to die so that a small part may live on in equilibrium with the harsh environment. They grow incredibly slowly, in one hundred years only one inch. Their twisted roots have been almost completely exposed by four hundred years of erosion. Many of the pines had been sculptured into objects of powerful beauty by wind-blown sand, by ice and by fire.
ANAÏS NIN
OCTOBER 27
1925
Last night on the way home from dinner, Ruth and I walked down our street and were remarking how beautiful it was. The sky was a deep blue and the stars were so twinkly—the street is a broad one and lined on both sides with huge palm trees. The houses are all set back with lovely lawns in front (everything is quite a new green now since the rain we’ve had) and the pale moon shining through the palms threw weird shadows on the lawns. It looked so enchanting. Ruth and I just stopped and drank in the beauty.
VALERIA BELLETTI
1934
I still have my fine office, I still have my emptiness: but I think it fairly well established by now that I am “not quite the man for the job.” For it is all a process of wearing down. It seems they expect you to come here with the ember of revolt glowing somewhere. They smile and wait for it to get dampened in the application of non-resistance blankets. They seem to say: “We will let this fellow make his protestations for his soul’s sake, and then, having made them, he can get to work.” But if you won’t let revolt die, then you’re not the “man for the job.” If desire goes on burning fiercely, you are an outcast.
ERIC KNIGHT, to a friend
1943
Done delightfully in the Palisades when I went out on my bicycle just now. Have gone to bed with cigarettes and a book, A life of Rimbaud.
Feel good. Ruin is still in abeyance. Good night. En avant, wherever you are!
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS
OCTOBER 28
1890
September was a blur of bodily and mental suffering. I am coming back, surely, to strength and nerve. I can walk—not yet alone for I need Lily’s arm, dear good child—a quarter of a mile. And daily I take an hour or two hours sometimes on the cable cars—they glide so smoothly they tire me less than a carriage. And then I am not obliged to speak, or say thank you as I must even to Mrs. Severance who is the only one I have seen. I get home tired, but wholesomely tired now. At first it was depressing. But there are unexplored depths in us that only solitude of heart can find—a weary exploration but leading nearer to Divine strength.
JESSIE BENTON FRÉMONT, to her nephew
1941
At the studio all day but too nervous about our Ball of Fire preview to do any effective work….motored to the Academy Theatre in Inglewood for the preview. It went well, slow at first, then getting into its full stride for a grand old-fashioned movie, with yells of laughter from the audience….Find myself feeling the pleasure of a complete amateur let in on momentous doing.
CHARLES BRACKETT
OCTOBER 29
1939
As you probably know, the punch line of Gone With the Wind, the one bit of dialogue which forever establishes the future relationship between Scarlett and Rhett, is, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”
Naturally, I am most desirous of keeping this line and, to judge from the reactions of two preview audiences, this line is remembered, loved, and looked forward to by millions who have read this new American classic….
As you know from my previous work with such pictures as David Copperfield, Little Lord Fauntleroy, A Tale of Two Cities, etc., I have always attempted to live up to the spirit as well as the exact letter of the producers’ code. Therefore, my asking you to review the case, to look at the strip of film in which this forbidden word is contained, is not motivated by a whim. A great deal of the force and drama of Gone With the Wind, a project to which we have given three years of hard work and hard thought, is dependent on that word….
I do not feel that your giving me permission to use “damn” in this one sentence will open up the floodgates and allow every gangster picture to be peppered with “damns” from end to end. I do believe, however, that if you were to permit our using this dramatic word in its rightfully dramatic place, in a line that is known and remembered by millions of readers, it would establish a helpful precedent.
DAVID O. SELZNICK, to a censor
2001
Yesterday morning at approximately 9:30 a.m. PST, a smallish rumbling earthquake hit Los Angeles and woke me from a drooling slumber. It was the first earthquake I’ve ever been awake or sober enough to experience, and like any other natural disaster frightened me into rabid cable news channel surfing and knuckle gnawing for the rest of the afternoon.
Rounding out the list of phobias that render me a paralyzed, shivering goose bump—fear of heights, rodents, spiders, and hairy toes to name just a few—is a mammoth anxiety over potential natural disasters, thoroughly aggravated in my youth by my older brother’s daily tortuous threat: “Do what I say o
r the tornado will come and get you.”
Tornado season in Tennessee starts in mid-March and continues through July, sometimes hiccupping into the latter part of September. When thunderstorms aren’t uprooting forests or rearranging acres of farmland, the South often suffers hailstorms, flashfloods and torrentially ghoulish winds during this season. Rarely is there a week not littered with severe thunderstorm warnings blinking in red Helvetica across the bottom of “Days of Our Lives.”…
18 years later and over 1000 miles from any weather conducive to tornado formation, I’ve got earthquakes to worry about and no siren-ific warnings or radar screens to issue me into the tub and into safety. I wonder how long I can stand under a doorframe before passing out.
HEATHER B. ARMSTRONG
2007
As I head down the Thompson Creek trail esta mañana, iPodless, tuning in, instead, to a chirpy sky just beginning to clear of post-fire smoke and ash—por apocalíptico que parezca, just the “typical” Califas fall conflagration—I do know one thing for sure. Si el Bruce was born to run, yo nací para escribir.
SUSANA CHÁVEZ-SILVERMAN
OCTOBER 30
1916
You ask when we expect to return. Have rented this house until June 4 and shall probably stay the limit. To my surprise I like it here very much. I do not know when I have been more contented. We have a very pretty little place with many flowers and trees, and a good lawn….The children are playing out in front now with no wraps, and wearing sox….
There are oodles of writers here, too….If I could establish a colony of human beings, it would be a nice place to live permanently.
EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS, to his editor
1926
This place is fit only for Christians. Its first gift to me was a nasty bronchitis. Every visitor, I hear, gets it, on account of the dry, idiotic climate.
H. L. MENCKEN, to his wife
OCTOBER 31
1927
Five people killed in plane yesterday and it is headlined today in every paper. Saturday in Los Angeles at one grade crossing seven were killed and six wounded and the papers didn’t even publish the names.
It looks like the only way you can get any publicity on your death is to be killed in a plane. It’s no novelty to be killed in an auto any more.
WILL ROGERS
1956
Dear Robert: Passed through LA with Gregory, alone, preceding Orlovsky brothers, to give reading for Anais Nin, [Stuart] Perkoff, silly Lawrence Lipton and 70 other assorted strangers from Coastlines magazine and friends of Lip and Nin. Someone heckled Gregory so I drunkenly screamed take off your clothes and be naked, which then realizing what I was saying I went and did myself, to my great surprise. They made me put them back on before reading Howl, which I read with great wildness and lovely abandon so the night turned out fine.
ALLEN GINSBERG, to a fellow poet
1956
…what are we to say, then, of a man
who takes off his clothes in someone else’s living room?
are we to applaud?
what is his nakedness to us?
what we care about his poems?
do you realize that he is in the lite? how can i
be expected to read?
he makes too much noise!
he says dirty words!
he needs a bath!
he is certainly
drunk!
i hope he soon realizes that this is, after all, now
& we have many wonderful things to amuse us
we want to see clowns
we go to the circus
is he gone yet? can i come out now?
STUART PERKOFF
NOVEMBER 1
1885
On the first of November of the said year two deputy sheriffs, one a Spaniard named Martin Aguirre, notified me that they had orders to deprive me of the place, and I answered them to do as the law commanded them. The officers were provided with a cart, which they loaded with furniture, seeds and a set of tools belonging to my trade, and at the distance of two miles, more or less, in the public road, threw these things out; in this way they made two or three trips. My wife and three other women followed the cart on foot. I remained in my house watching the saddest event of my life. The officers then asked me whether I would not leave the place. I answered to act according to their duty; then four persons took hold of me, put me in the wagon, and placed me with my family and goods.
In that sad situation we remained eight days and nights, not knowing what to do, for we had not the means of moving and did not know where to go; for all that vast country for many miles belonged to the man who had despoiled me of my property. I came to Los Angeles, and the Bishop promised to harbor me in one of the ruins of the mission while I considered what I should do. I could not move then because it began to rain, and the rain lasted four days. That rain weakened our bodies, as we had not the slightest shelter nor way in which to cook anything; for the little flour, sugar and other things the rain had spoiled.
The women were rendered helpless; my wife fell ill, and died in consequence of this. When the rain ceased, I moved to the mission with the little I had left, which was nothing.
My property on the land consisted of two adobe houses (made of sun-baked bricks), two of wood, about forty chickens, a black-smith’s forge, with all my iron and utensils by which means I supported myself; everything disappeared and the most cherished of my life, my dear companion.
ROGERIO ROCH
1919
Enroute from Salt Lake to Los Angeles. Awaken at dawn in berth with Helen. I insist on rutting here. She protests but kisses me & lets me….
The Orange Groves. Helen & I on the back platform. Her joy and beauty. We reach Los Ange. 7 p.m. Helen’s efficiency. Phones. The incident of the boys. We get off at the wrong corner. Finally reach the Stillwell at length & Grand Ave. Room 523. The nice service. We dress & go to a restaurant in Spring Street. Not much. Then back to hotel & spend a delicious night together. I am crazy about her.
THEODORE DREISER
NOVEMBER 2
1942
lang’s secretary called to say that shooting was starting and I was “invited, more than invited.” The first scene lang shot was one wexley and I had cut; the heroine is arguing with her aunt about her wedding dress—she wants a deeper décolleté. The heroine is cast with a fifth-rate English actress, a smooth doll with no character. The lord of the lens is sitting beside his camera, unapproachable, while beside me a german refugee doctor waits to give him his vitamin injections. Lang, of course, gives me an unconvincing wave and says half-audibly, “hi, brecht! You’ll be getting a script tomorrow!”
BERTOLT BRECHT
1978
Armistead [Maupin], on second acquaintance, impresses me greatly. He seems to be absorbing impressions constantly, which means that he is tremendously “responsive” in Kathleen’s use of the word, and kind of mediumistic in the way he has psychic feelers out, testing the atmosphere….
Today we had William Burroughs over to be drawn (brilliantly) by Don. Was not charmed when the gate buzzer buzzed and I opened to admit five people….Does Burroughs always go around in mobs?
We had, however, known that Paul Getty was coming….Indeed, Don and I had a joke. Don wanted me to ask about his kidnapping. “Say to him, if you’ll tell me about it, I’ll lend an ear.” Paul proved to be not only fairly pretty, though spotty and looking much older than twenty-two (his claimed age), but also really charming and genuinely interested in our collection of pictures. A mop of curly reddish hair concealed his ear-lack.
CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD
NOVEMBER 3
1888
Oh! who can describe the real estate agent of Southern California! And what would California be without
him? Notice him as he leans at his office door, with a flower in his button hole, while over his suave and seductive countenance ripple ravishing dreams of carloads of Eastern tourists wishing to buy lots.
HARRIET HARPER
1929
Out here somewhere prowling around is the Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Aviation. He was a naval ace of our late war. Just think of appointing a man that knew something about the business he was appointed to. I think that should call for a Senatorial investigation, knocking good politicians out of a job like that.
WILL ROGERS