Dear Los Angeles
Page 37
LIZA WILLIAMS
DECEMBER 13
1847
We experienced a severe shock from an earth quake here last night at eight oclock and another this morning at day light—It shook me in my bed and made us all a little nervous—it was so soon after our gunpowder explosion—How much I miss poor Sargent Travers—he was a fine soldier and the only man I ever could get to feel the responsibility of his situation when on guard—poor fellow he has mounted his last—
LIEUTENANT JOHN MCHENRY HOLLINGSWORTH
1931
My first night in the new home was a very comfortable one. I slept very well. Everything is so dainty, and the sheets and linen generally are of such excellent quality. Robert brought me up my tea at a quarter to seven. I don’t think he went to bed very much, he was so thrilled with his new opportunity.
This morning, however, there was nearly a tragedy. We ran out of milk! We telephoned frantically to our friend and saviour, Guy Bolton, who turned up in a golf suit with a bottle of milk under each arm, having motored round from North Camden. It is about six blocks away.
I went out in the garden and had a look at it. There are two big orange trees, if not three, in full fruit. There is even a pomegranate tree, a lemon tree, but I could not find the avocado pears or apples or whatever they are. There are quite a number of flowers growing, including a brilliant six-starred flower the blooms of which are about nine inches across.
Having only got meat for one meal, the new cook decided to give us salad and a strange omelette for lunch. It was quite good. The new cook is about thirty-five, stoutish, coloured, and her name is Marie. She has large ivory earrings and a pleasant smile.
It was a most gorgeous sunrise, but it clouded up in the morning. Bob says it was a glorious sunset, but I was asleep. I have been working to-day at the new film, and have done twenty-seven pages of it. I hope to get the back of it broken to-night.
EDGAR WALLACE
1963
Aldous died quietly, without any pain in the end. He was absolutely clear, mentally. The day before he died, he finished dictating an article about Shakespeare. He wasn’t told of Kennedy’s shooting, which happened just a few hours earlier.
Personally, I was very pro-Kennedy; but I was still amazed at how much I minded. And, in this quite largely anti-Kennedy town, which has so little to unite it, it was amazing how much everybody minded. People just sat listening to the radio in their cars and sobbing. We were all in love with him, without knowing it.
CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD
DECEMBER 14
1929
Well, here I am! We got in last night & today I have eaten an orange, walked under palm trees, gone out to the studio, met dozens of people whose names I will never remember, been photographed with Mr. Griffith, dictated a lot of hooey to a stenographer, seen & heard screen-test of various Lincolns and Ann Rutledges etc. The sun is actually out, the roses & poinsettias in bloom in the lush hotel garden….
It is all quite mad. And everything is going well so far. And I’m lonelier than I can think about and miss you more than any words can say. Gee! Only—at the worst 83 days more. And by the time this gets to you it will be less. I don’t mean to crab and I’ll try not to. I like [D. W.] Griffith—he’s a human being—and he certainly has been extremely decent to me. He is capable—which I didn’t expect—and really laid himself out to be pleasant. We worked all the way out in the train and cut the thing about a third. Of course I imagine the final version—if there ever is one—will be entirely different. That seems to be the method. At present I’m giving my celebrated imitation of a piece of furniture. I don’t know why anything happens and I don’t try to find out. Tomorrow I am to be given an office—why? I don’t know. And I’m also apparently going down with Griffith for the weekend to visit some millionaires named [Spreckels]. I don’t know why I am doing that, either. Apparently, at the moment, Griffith likes to have me around as a sort of mascot. Things happen without sequence or consequence and I take them as they come. Tell Phil [Philip Barry] he really must see it. But not alone.
…We’re going to get a nice house out of this—concentrate on the house—I am. Kiss the children for me. I miss them. Love to Mother, Laura & Bill. My darling, my darling, I love you more than anything that ever was!
STEPHEN VINCENT BENÉT, to his wife
1931
Perhaps in my radio contract I shall insist upon the reservation to me of the interplanetary rights. Why not? Radio rights and sound and dialog rights would have seemed as preposterous twenty years ago; and with my intimate knowledge of conditions on Mars and Venus, I, of all men, should anticipate the value of broadcasting Tarzan to the eager multitudes that swarm our sister planets.
EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS
DECEMBER 15
1847
Lieut Davidson and Kit Carson returned from a scouting expedition to meet a body of mexicans that were coming into the Country to sell their goods,—they had but few arms and were friends to our cause—
LIEUTENANT JOHN MCHENRY HOLLINGSWORTH
1939
We went down in the afternoon and that evening saw Grapes at Twentieth-Century. Zanuck has more than kept his word. He has a hard, straight picture in which the actors are submerged so completely that it looks and feels like a documentary film and certainly it has a hard, truthful ring. No punches were pulled—in fact, with descriptive matter removed, it is a harsher thing than the book, by far. It seems unbelievable but it is true. The next afternoon we went to see Mice and it is a beautiful job. Here Milestone has done a curious lyrical thing. It hangs together and is underplayed. You will like it. It opens the 22nd of December in Hollywood. As for Grapes, it opens sometime in January. There is so much hell being raised in this state that Zanuck will not release it simultaneously. He’ll open in N.Y. and move gradually west, letting the publicity precede it. He even, to find out, issued a statement that it would never be shown in California and got a ton of mail, literally, in protest the next day. He has hired attorneys to fight any local censorship and is trying to get Thomas Benton for the posters. All this is far beyond our hopes….
I can’t tell you what all this means to me, in happiness and energy. I was washed up and now I’m alive again, with work to be done and worth doing.
JOHN STEINBECK, to his agent
1940
I am still in bed—this time the result of 25 years of cigarettes. You have got two beautiful bad examples of parents. Just do everything we didn’t do and you will be perfectly safe. But be sweet to your mother….the insane are always mere guests on earth, total strangers carrying around broken decalogues that they cannot read.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, to his daughter
1957
I am fifty-two years old, and I have three children who shall soon require expensive education. I have perhaps ten years of peak work capacity remaining to me. During these ten years, in addition to educating the children, I must somehow accumulate enough reserve capital to provide for Cleo and me in old age. Otherwise I shall become a public charge. I am absolutely alone in the world. All of my relatives, instead of giving me money or willing me money, have cost me money. There is no one to provide for me except me, and there never has been. About six months ago I decided to face up to these facts and to set myself a schedule of work which would absolutely guarantee me the freedom I need to do that work which I hope and think will solve my final problem….
In order to keep this madhouse going, I awaken each morning between 3 and 5 a.m., although rarely as late as five. I work steadily until about one. Then I take a half-hour nap. Work steadily until 7 or 7:30 p.m. After that I take three stiff belts of whiskey to uncoil on, eat dinner, and go to bed. This schedule is absolutely unfailing, Saturdays and Sundays included. I was never a social person, but I am much less so now than formerly. I dread going out because it means drinking and lowered vital
ity for tomorrow. We do, however, go out perhaps once a month. Certain people are angry with me for turning down simple dinner invitations on the plea of work. It is getting to be assumed that either I am (a) getting snobbish, or (b) crazed for money. I cannot help these impressions, and I don’t give a damn about them. I am doing not what is pleasing to me to do, but what I must and am determined to do.
DALTON TRUMBO, to a fellow blacklistee
1989
Breakfasted by the pool. The Sunset Marquis is small, low and laid-back. Many Brit guests and quite an assortment of rock musicians persevering with ’70s hairstyles. One band were from Canada and awestruck to meet me. “Your tapes, man….We play ’em all the time…they keep us going in the tour bus.” Shades of ’69/’70 all over again. Python and the rock world’s strange compatibility.
MICHAEL PALIN
DECEMBER 16
1937
Certain writers have become very lax in the hours they keep at the Studio, coming in late in the morning and leaving early in the afternoon. This is not true of all the writers, but it unfortunately makes it necessary for me to send out a general note of this nature.
It is not asking too much for a writer to be at his desk sometime between 9:00 a.m. and 9:45 a.m.; even the elite in any other business come to work earlier than that. Therefore, I must insist that more regular hours be kept in the future by those of you who have been coming in late and leaving early.
JACK WARNER, to his stable
1953
If you take up the subject of puns again, you might consider the Circumstantial Pun, which calls for a very special and often highly complex set of circumstances for its use.
For example, our Mr. Kaufman once had one in mind which he confessed he doubted he would ever be able to use. The locale would have to be somewhere in the Orient during a war with the Japanese. The season should be late autumn, and on a particular morning our forces would have hanged a small Japanese spy. If such were the case and Mr. Kaufman were there, he felt that he could not unreasonably remark, “There’s a little Nip in the air this morning.”
NUNNALLY JOHNSON, to Clifton Fadiman
DECEMBER 17
1927
Today on the beach a mile below here, at Venice, I found myself talking literature, Spengler, Kant, Descartes and Aquinas…to a Bostonian of French descent…He turned out to be one of the best scholars I’ve ever met.
HART CRANE, to a friend
1940
Not dead. Nor down with flu—as is half Los Angeles. But merely entangled in that unprofitable thing known as the show business—going out to Hollywood or Beverly Hills or Hollywood every morning and not getting back to the hotel until 12 or 1 or 2 o’clock at night—since those remote districts are from where I live just about like going from Harlem to Philadelphia—and in this charming democracy of ours there seems to be no place for Negroes to live in Hollywood even if they do work out there occasionally….
I do not enjoy this collective way of writing very much as I feel that when too many people are involved in the preparation of scripts, the material loses whatever individual flavor and distinction it might otherwise possess. That is probably what was the matter with ZERO HOUR. After everybody got their paragraph in, it was simply a depersonalized un-human editorial, well-meant but with none of the blood of life or the passion of mankind in it. I do not think plays, or even skits can be written by eight or ten people with various ways of feeling and looking at things.
LANGSTON HUGHES, to his agent
1981
Coming over the hill, the yellow haze was unexpected after the clean skies of the Valley. Off in the distance, the towers of downtown made their silhouettes known through the smog. A few new buildings had been added. The profile was a bit wider, but the same height, so it was beginning to look like one large rectangular mass….
I drove to Beverly Hills to drop off a letter for P. The isolation of that ghetto of wealth sets the whole thing off even more than the way it is in Paris or N.Y.
This could be Teheran or Athens—or any of those types of metropolises. I feel how it is with all of the poverty concentrated in the bidonville and all of the wealth in but a few sectors.
Los Angeles is a funny town. If New York escapes off the American map towards the mid-Atlantic, L.A. has a tendency to drift south and east—as if it was a clean recuperated 3rd world city…Cairo.
AARON PALEY
DECEMBER 18
1858
And you, imbecile Californians! You are responsible for the lamentable acts we are witnessing. We are tired of saying: “Open your eyes, now is the time to assert your rights and interests.” It is shameful, but necessary to admit that you are the sarcasm of humanity. When the time comes to vote, the first of your rights, you go about the streets in the carriages of [Democratic] candidates, and you will not cast your votes unless you are paid for them….You are cowardly and stupid, inspiring nothing but disdain….You might as well renounce once and for all noble sentiments and prepare to cast upon yourselves the yoke of slavery.
FRANCISCO P. RAMIREZ
1929
This is Wednesday. Let me recount a little more about this madhouse. In the first place Hollywood—Los Angeles, Glendale, Pasadena etc. etc.—is one loud, struggling Main-Street, low-roofed, mainly unskyscrapered town that struggles along for 25 miles or so, full of stop & go lights, automobiles, palm-trees, Spanishy—& God knows what all houses—orange-drink stands with real orange juice—studios—movie-theaters—everything but bookstores. I am the only person in the entire 25 miles who walks more than four blocks, except along Hollywood Boulevard in the evening. There are some swell hotels—up in the hills or between L.A. & Hollywood—& a few night-clubs.
But in general, everything is dead, deserted at 11.30 p.m. There is the continual sunlight—the advertised palms—coolness the minute the sun sets—and plenty of people with colds. The boys go around without hats. They look like prize ears of corn. The girls, ditto….
Last Monday, however, was D. W. Griffith night at the Roosevelt. I sat at the stag table with Griffith & a lot of the men who have at one time worked with him—and was included by the worried announcer in the list of those discovered by DWG, but nobody cared. But I stood up with the rest, had a spotlight played on me, and felt silly….
The place was packed & everybody talked about when they wanted to fire Mary Pickford from Biograph because she wasn’t pretty enough & when Chaplin got $5 a week—until I felt I had been there too….
Saturday I may go over to spend the weekend with the McClures. And then—Lord—it will be Christmas. I shall go out & look sad-eyedly at all the Christmas trees on Hollywood Boulevard. My Lord, how I miss you. Oh Eastern wind, when wilt thou blow?
STEPHEN VINCENT BENÉT, to his wife
DECEMBER 19
1939
They’re quarreling (out here in the movie world) as to which of 84 directors are entitled to the honor of filming that world’s masterpiece—Gone With the Wind. T.S. Stribling’s Trilogy—the source of most of it [—] is never mentioned.
THEODORE DREISER, to H. L. Mencken
1948
There are so many books and plays and stories I have to read—Here are just a few:
…Diary of a Writer—Dostoyevsky
Against the Grain—Huysmans
The Disciple—Paul Bourget
Sanin—Mikhail Artsybashev
Johnny Got His Gun—Dalton Trumbo
SUSAN SONTAG
DECEMBER 20
1993
All we have to do is decide whether we have a reasonable doubt or not—it’s up to the prosecution to prove there was a plan to kill.
HAZEL THORNTON
2004
I come swinging in from Phoenix, riding shotgun on the bus with ’Lish for the last two hours of a 15,750-mile jour
ney. We float down the I-10, cross over to the 134, past the sign for Occidental College (Terry Gilliam’s alma mater), coming on home from Pasadena. It all begins to feel familiar. Odd that this should now feel like home, but it does.
It is a wonderful sight to see my tour bus outside my own front gate at last.
Tania and Wee (our Thai wonder woman) come to the door bleary-eyed.
The Greedy Bastard is home.
ERIC IDLE
DECEMBER 21
1864
And now comes the curse of God on the land—two years no rain falls, and famine with her grim reality compels the surrender of lands rendered tenantless of hoofs & horns already. The old spell is broken & Southern California will now be regenerated. The few stout hopeful hearts who have found courage to stand out for years hoping for a change will be rewarded. The great and splendid Estates will be broken up into small farms & thrifty industrious farmers and associations of them will take the place of the brigands who have made Santa Barbara, Los Angeles and San Bernardino Counties infamous.