Dear Los Angeles
Page 35
FATHER ANTONIO DE LA ASCENSIÓN
1826
Cattle skulls in rows on each side of the road conveying the Idea that we were approaching an immense slaughter yard.
JEDEDIAH SMITH
1826
We got ready as early as possible and started a W. course, and traveled 14 m. and enc. for the day, we passed innumerable herds of cattle, horses and some hundred of sheep; we passed 4 or 5 Ind. lodges, that their Inds. acts as herdsmen. There came an old Ind. to us that speaks good Spanish, and took us with him to his mansion, which consisted of 2 rows of large and lengthy buildings, after the Spanish mode, they remind me of the British barracks. So soon as we enc. there was plenty prepared to eat, a fine young cow killed, and a plenty of corn meal given us; pretty soon after the 2 commandants of the missionary establishment come to us and had the appearance of gentlemen. Mr. S. went with them to the mansion and I stay with the company, there was great feasting among the men as they were pretty hungry not having any good meat for some time.
HARRISON ROGERS, encamped with Jedediah Smith
NOVEMBER 28
1826
November 28th 1826. My party arrived and I had my things put into the room which I occupied. The Corporal who was called Commandant came to me and after a few preparatory compliments observed that the best thing I could do with my guns would be to put them in his charge where they would be safe for said the strangers visiting you will be constantly handling them they being a kind with which they are unacquainted. I thanked him for his kindness and gave him the arms though I knew he was influenced by a motive very different from the one assigned.
JEDEDIAH SMITH
1826
28TH. Mr. S. wrote me a note in the morning, stating that he was received as a gentleman and treated as such, and that he wished me to go back and look for a pistol that was lost, and send the company on to the missionary establishment. I complyed with his request, went back, and found the pistol, and arrived late in the evening, was received very politely, and showed into a room and my arms taken from me. About 10 o’clock at night supper was served, and Mr. S. and myself sent for. I was introduced to the 2 priests over a glass of good old whiskey and found them to be very jovial friendly gentlemen, the supper consisted of a number of different dishes, served different from any table I ever was at. Plenty of good wine during supper, before the cloth was removed sigars was introduced.
HARRISON ROGERS
1949
The mass yesterday with [conductor Harold] Byrnes was very good and attracted a good public. What a terrible hall that Wilshire Ebell Theatre!…All the voices sounded like behind the curtain.
IGOR STRAVINSKY
NOVEMBER 29
1826
At 11 O Clock the Father came and invited us to dinner. We accompanied him to the office adjoining the dining room and after taking a glass of Gin and some bread and cheese we seated ourselves at the table which was furnished with Mutton Beef Chickens Potatoes Beans and Peas cooked in different ways. Wine in abundance made our reverend fathers appear to me quite merry. An express had been forwarded by the Commandant to the Governor at San Diego. (My two indian guides were put in prison immediately on my arrival charged with being runaways from the Mission. They were about 16 years of age and from what I saw of them I thought them fine honest and well disposed boys.)
JEDEDIAH SMITH
1935
BANANA CENTER, CENTRAL PARK, EL-LAY
This became Pershing Square in the war-mad days, but it is still Central Park to me and still “Cannibal Island” to the skidway.
“May I speak to you?”
“Surely.”
“Have you been saved?”
“I’m sorry, but your subject doesn’t interest me.”
The young man bows and walks away, and I mentally collapse from astonishment. Such passivity before pagan resistance is unlike evangelical votaries.
Endless, endless movement.
Loitering figures—lingering, lurking.
Some have been heard to say that no respectable person would allow himself to be seen in the park after dark. Huh! I walk about under the thousand shadows of the bamboo and banana trees with utter unconcern.
HARRY PARTCH
NOVEMBER 30
1826
There was a wedding in this place today, and [the explorer Jedediah Smith] and myself invited; the bell was rang a little before sun rise, and the morning service performed; then the musick commenced serranading, the soldiers firing, etc., about 7 o’clock tea and bread served, and about 11, dinner and musick. The ceremony and dinner was held at the priests; they had an elegant dinner, consisting of a number of dishes, boiled and roast meat and fowl, wine and brandy or ogadent, grapes brought as a dessert after dinner. Mr. S. and myself acted quite independent, knot understanding there language, nor they ours; we endeavored to appoligise, being very dirty and not in a situation to shift our clothing, but no excuse would be taken, we must be present, as we have been served at their table ever since we arrived at this place; they treat [us] as gentlemen in every sense of the word….
Our 2 Ind. guides were imprisoned in the guard house the 2nd. day after we arrived at the missionary establishment and remain confined as yet.
HARRISON ROGERS
1943
I am being sued by the motor scooter company as I refuse to pay them for the scooter after it proved a Jonah. I had signed an un-read contract that held me responsible for the entire sum even with scooter returned. The sheriff has been sieging my Santa Monica apt. trying to serve papers on me but I have successfully evaded him so far. He hasn’t tracked me to Pasadena yet. I intend to return at midnight, pack up and be out before daybreak. I understand that if he doesn’t touch me with the papers I can escape the suit.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS
2007
Native-to-the-southwest plantas: la salvia. Always my homecoming scent. The soft dryness of mimosa-powdery dust bajo los eucaliptos y pinos.
SUSANA CHÁVEZ-SILVERMAN
DECEMBER 1
1924
I look around and hardly believe it can be me in this beautiful place. We pay $50 a month for it which includes gas, electricity and private phone. We have real silverware and all aluminum pots and pans….
We live near the big Fox studios and you run into some funny characters on the street. They come off the lot in their make up and outfits so that you see cowboys, old gents with long hair, looking like the 49’ers; men in society clothes and in fact all kinds of rig-outs. This sure is a queer burg, but I like it better than Los Angeles. It’s nearer the mountains and is higher so that the air seems better than in L.A. It takes me about 40 minutes to get into Los Angeles and the fare is only 5 cents.
VALERIA BELLETTI, to a childhood friend
1967
The taste of milk can be cut with larger swigs of Scotch. This news raises [Igor Stravinsky] out of the apathy—black melancholy, rather—into which he had fallen the day after his homecoming, when he had apparently expected to be able to skip rope. After dinner we listen to Opus 131 and the Dichterliebe, the first music heard in the house since he entered the hospital. And with the music he comes to life, grunting agreement with Beethoven at numerous moments in the quartet and beating time with his left hand, which is protected by an outsize mitten, like the claw of a fiddler crab.
ROBERT CRAFT
DECEMBER 2
1920
We would, all of us, like to be somebody in this great, indifferent, cruel swirl. And only see what in the main happens to us.
THEODORE DREISER
1949
All musical enterprises here are in an ultraprecarious situation at the moment. Only large and long-established organizations, with their committees, patrons and subscriptions, can survive. And, unfortunately, these societies offer only the most popular repe
rtory.
IGOR STRAVINSKY, to a friend
DECEMBER 3
1946
A long talk with a Dr. Hortense Powdermaker, who is working on a study of Hollywood from a purely anthropological point of view. At 4:30 Zoltan Korda and Aldous Huxley arrived, without the copy of the script they’d promised….
I’ve met Huxley before, but let me restate him again: tall, elegant, in an utterly careless way, quite beautiful of feature despite the one silvered eye and utterly beyond my power to like. Helplessly aloof from one….Frankly, I detest this writer, whose work I worship….Jokingly I say, “I expect the best thing since Euripides from you.” He smirks, and I realize that this goes into his experience as a comic saying of a Hollywood producer.
CHARLES BRACKETT
1950
I’ll be staying out till middle or late January, working on a script with John Huston, The African Queen, from [the] novel by C. S. Forester. If everything works out right, it could be a wonderful movie….The work is a great deal of fun: treating it fundamentally as high comedy with deeply ribald overtones, and trying to blend extraordinary things—poetry, mysticism, realism, romance, tragedy, with the comedy….
I haven’t read a book, heard any music to speak of, or seen a movie or but one play, since I have been out here. For the present, I don’t miss them either. I see a lot of people and like most of them. Compared with most of the intellectual literary acquaintances I avoid in New York (who are—wrongly—my image of New York) they are mostly very warmhearted, outgoing, kind, happy, and unpretentious—the nicest kind of company I can imagine.
JAMES AGEE, to an old teacher and friend
DECEMBER 4
1847
Everything is quiet though I think that the country is in a very unsettled state, things will not be so long there must be a change.
LIEUTENANT JOHN MCHENRY HOLLINGSWORTH
1860
We had been invited to a ranch and vineyard about nine miles east, and went with a friend on Tuesday evening. It lies near San Gabriel Mission, on a most beautiful spot, I think even finer than this. Mr. Wilson, our host, uneducated, but a man of great force of character, is now worth a hundred or more thousand dollars and lives like a prince, only with less luxury. His wife is finely educated and refined, and his home to the visitor a little paradise. We were received with the greatest cordiality and were entertained with the greatest hospitality. A touch of the country and times was indicated by our rig—I was dressed in colored woolen shirt, with heavy navy revolver (loaded) and huge eight-inch bowie knife at my belt; my friend the same; and the clergyman who took us out in his carriage carried along his rifle, he said for game, yet owned that it was “best to have arms after dark.”
Here let me digress. This southern California is still unsettled. We all continually wear arms—each wears both bowie knife and pistol (navy revolver), while we have always for game or otherwise, a Sharp’s rifle, Sharp’s carbine, and two double-barrel shotguns. Fifty to sixty murders per year have been common here in Los Angeles, and some think it odd that there has been no violent death during the two weeks that we have been here. Yet with our care there is no considerable danger, for as I write this there are at least six heavy loaded revolvers in the tent, besides bowie knives and other arms, so we anticipate no danger. I have been practicing with my revolver and am becoming expert….
Even here the San Fernando Valley looks fertile, yet you could take a patch in the middle of a hundred or a hundred and fifty thousand acres, where it does not touch the hills, where there would be no water for over half of the year. Hence the land is owned in large ranches, and those only in the more favored places. On these ranches, as there are no fences, the cattle are half wild, and require many horses to keep them and tend them. A ranch with a thousand head of cattle will have a hundred horses. The natives here are lazy enough, but are slowly giving way before the Americans, with whom they do not assimilate.
WILLIAM H. BREWER
1939
Coming back to the hotel from lunch in the only Hebe delicatessen in town with Laura, I just saw a lady of sixty strolling down the boulevard wearing a pair of shiny black silky teen pajamas with a lace collar and a brooch at the throat. She obviously wanted to tell me how much money her son was making, but I beat her to a stop light and hid behind a bougainvillea.
The temperature is about ninety-eight and everybody says we are in for another hot spell. The only thing Laura and I have accomplished thus far is to decide that this is really our last trip here, forever. If we can get the dough to make those changes in our house and repair that buckled bank balance, we hope to blow taps over a glorious career in this branch of the entertainment world. If our estimates are right and we have only one life to lead, it isn’t going to be led here.
S. J. PERELMAN
1952
Patsy and I and friends of hers went to Disneyland yesterday. It was simply divine and I longed for you to have been there. You get into a little launch on Jungle River and glide away past, crocodiles, gorillas, giant butterflies etc., and the divine young man at the helm (in very tight white ducks and jersey and a peaked cap) does a commentary of wonderful camp—now steady here, folks, it’s dangerous here—over the rapids, shooting off a pistol at intervals as a huge hippo rears its head into the boat, and rubber arrows go flying past, mad life-size clockwork (I suppose) animals and natives. I can’t tell you what fun. Then we went on two mad rides—the Snow White one with shrieking witches and sound effects, pitch dark passages, sailing through walls that open and close behind you, figures leaping out as you pass—and another Peter Pan, in which you go up a slope in a small boat through opening windows and appear to fly over London, model Big Ben and all, and descend at a hair-raising angle passing Hook and Smee and the Pirate Ship all posed and shaking their fists from the deck below—and a ridiculous mining train with the driver and guards in ten gallon hats (and jeans) puffing through caves and deserts and descending to a brilliant cavern of jewels and waterfalls. It really was a hilarious afternoon. And it is 85 degrees here in the daytime!, hotter than the South of France. So it is all rather fun but a bit exhausting too. The pace, and the cars and the mad ladies and sexy looking boys on every corner. If I ever do a picture here again you must come out. You would simply adore it.
JOHN GIELGUD, to his partner
1960
The hygienic boys go on merrily producing buildings of the most amazing inconvenience and inefficiency. I have bumped my head and then roasted in Niemayer’s Brazilian hotels—low ceilings plus glass walls in a tropical climate. What idiocy. And from India I hear bitter complaints (from the Indian ambassador most recently) of Corbusier’s entirely non-functional buildings in the new Punjabi capital. And see a recent Scientific American article in which the author contrasts the wonderful “performance” of primitive architects using mud and sticks and leaves with the folly of the skyscraper builders of New York, whose glass walls leak and impose (because of the greenhouse effect) unbearable strains on the cooling systems—not to mention the people.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, to the architecture critic Esther McCoy
DECEMBER 5
1932
Selznick is the big noise; he is young, massive, well-educated, and with tremendous vitality. The others, whom I can’t remember for the moment, were equally pleasant….
I was then picked up by a man named Perry Lieber, an awfully nice fellow who is at the head of the publicity department, and he took me into the block where the executive writers are kept chained up, and I was given a room, the key thereof, and the telephone book, which helps me to get into touch with everybody in the block….
Afterwards I saw Selznick in his office with Cooper, another member of the executive. He was the man who did “Chang” and “Four Feathers.” They want me to do a horror picture [King Kong] for them….
I find it so dry that my lips have to have
some kind of treatment. I think the thing to get is colourless lipstick….
I was photographed this morning twice at the desk, once with my feet up, telephoning, and once the conventional intense picture, writing.
The publicity man said: “I’ve never had anybody like you, Mr. Wallace, to deal with. You take three-quarters of my work off my shoulders.” I explained to him carefully that I was not a seeker of publicity, but that when it came I thought it ought to be done properly!
He told me that I had no idea of the trouble stars gave when they arrive by train and are snapped on the platform. Which is remarkable, remembering that these film stars owe a terrific lot to this kind of publicity.
The Beverly-Wilshire is famous in Los Angeles newspaper-land for the jealous care they show about protecting their guests from the Press, and you cannot get past unless the person to be interviewed is absolutely willing.
EDGAR WALLACE
1934