Dear Los Angeles

by Dear Los Angeles- The City in Diaries

  DICK, PHILIP K. Massively influential science fiction writer. Where Jules Verne predicted inventions, Dick foresaw entire societies. He didn’t just anticipate such modern amenities as robotic pets and Prozac, he imagined a future alienated enough to want them—a future that doesn’t look as comfortably like science fiction as it used to. The screenwriters Hampton Fancher and David Webb Peoples transplanted Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?—set in San Francisco—into 2021 Los Angeles to create the classic film Blade Runner. When he died of stroke-related heart failure at fifty-three (weeks after pronouncing himself thrilled with a rough cut of Blade Runner), he was living in Orange County, lured there a few years earlier by an admiring academic at Fullerton to donate his archive and original sci-fi pulps to the library. Maybe Dick wrote so convincingly of marginalized alternate worlds in part because he worked in two of them: the cultish shadowlands of pre–Star Wars science fiction, and the literary Siberia that is writing for the East Coast from California. Quoted from The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick, edited by Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011).

  DOHENY, E. L. Oil millionaire. With his partner Charles Canfield, struck a gusher at the corner of Patton and West State streets near Echo Park, inaugurating L.A.’s black gold rush. Homeowners rushed to sink wells in their backyards, but Doheny cornered much of the market and became ludicrously wealthy. Later implicated in the Teapot Dome scandal. Quoted from Hearst’s: A Magazine with a Mission (New York: International Magazine Company, 1919).

  DOS PASSOS, JOHN Novelist, epoch-making author of the USA Trilogy, which concludes with the centennial-ready, partly Hollywood-set 1919. Visited awhile to work unsatisfyingly with Josef von Sternberg and make mock. Quoted from The Fourteenth Chronicle: Letters and Diaries of John Dos Passos, edited by Townsend Ludington (Boston: Gambit, 1973).

  DREISER, THEODORE Author of Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy. Lived here lustily in the twenties with his beloved bride, Helen, while starting American Tragedy. Returned in the late thirties. Suffered fatal heart attack on December 28, 1945, after driving to the beach to watch the sunset. Buried at Forest Lawn. Quoted from The American Diaries, 1902–1926, edited by Thomas P. Riggio and James L. W. West III (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982).

  DRISCOLL, CHARLES B. American journalist and editor. Quoted from his “New York Day by Day” column. New York: McNaught Syndicate, 1939.

  DU BOIS, W.E.B. Pioneering African American writer and editor. Drawn here briefly by rumors of a post-racial paradise. Quoted from “Colored California,” the Crisis, 1913.

  DUNNE, PHILIP Well-regarded screenwriter, activist, son of the “Mr. Dooley” columnist, Finley Peter Dunne. Quoted from The Best of Rob Wagner’s Script, edited by Anthony Slide (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 1985).

  EINSTEIN, ALBERT Physicist, discoverer of the theory of special relativity. Time magazine’s “Man of the Century” for his involvement in the two most important cataclysms of the twentieth century: the splitting of the atom, to which his discoveries led, and the rise of Nazi Germany, from which, as a Jew, he sought refuge in America. Earlier, he’d spent a term at Caltech. Quoted from A Lone Traveler: Einstein in California, by William M. Kramer and Margaret Leslie Davis (Los Angeles: Skirball Cultural Center, 2004).

  ELIOT, T. S. Poet, author of “The Wasteland,” Four Quartets. The poet traveled to America briefly as a guest lecturer at, among other campuses, Pomona. Quoted from the Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. 6, edited by Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haffenden (London: Faber & Faber, 2016).

  FANTE, JOHN Author of, among other novels, Ask the Dust and Wait Until Spring, Bandini. Discovering Fante is like tasting garlic for the first time. Quoted from John Fante: Selected Letters, 1932–1981, edited by Seamus Cooney (Santa Rosa, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press, 1991).

  FAULKNER, WILLIAM Nobel Prize–winning author of, among other novels, Absalom, Absalom!, The Sound and the Fury, and As I Lay Dying. Co-adapted The Big Sleep and To Have and Have Not for Howard Hawks. Reputedly asked the studio if he could work from home, then took a favorable answer as permission to return to Mississippi. Wrote one great short story about L.A., “Golden Land.” Quoted from Selected Letters of William Faulkner, edited by Joseph Blotner (New York: Random House, 1977).

  FERLINGHETTI, LAWRENCE Poet and founder of San Francisco publisher and bookstore City Lights. Quoted from Writing Across the Landscape: Travel Journals 1950–2010, edited by Giada Diano and Matthew Gleeson (New York: Liveright, 2015). Used by generous permission of the author.

  FEYNMAN, RICHARD Nobel Prize–winning physicist affiliated with the Manhattan Project and Caltech. Quoted from Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track, edited by Michelle Feynman (New York: Basic Books, 2005).

  FISHER, M.F.K. Essayist, cook, novelist, author of Consider the Oyster and How to Cook a Wolf. Like her friend and admirer Julia Child, a Californian. She grew up surrounded by citrus groves in Whittier, a few miles southeast of Child’s native Pasadena. Her erudite father ran the local newspaper with every good small-town editor’s mix of intelligence, boosterism, and cheerful overqualification. Early culinary influences included a grandmother who regarded all flavor as sinful and an aunt who steamed fresh mussels in seaweed on their weekend jaunts to Laguna. Fisher wrote about the pleasures of the table with all the sensuous urgency of someone for whom other pleasures came less often and rarely lasted long. Lovers came and went, and she ruthlessly considered her own talent second-rank, but happiness was always just a good meal away. Quoted from M.F.K. Fisher: A Life in Letters, compiled by Marsha Moran, Patrick Moran, and Norah K. Barr (Berkeley: Counterpoint Press, 1998).

  FITZGERALD, F. SCOTT Author of The Great Gatsby, Tender Is the Night, and The Last Tycoon. If you want your child to be a writer, go bankrupt. Failing that, at least suffer a severe financial reversal, obliging your son or daughter to endure the social opprobrium of changed schools and dropped friendships. Do all this, and you may yet join an impecunious fraternity of writers’ parents that includes John Shakespeare, John Joyce, John Clemens, John Dickens, John Ernst Steinbeck—and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s father, Edward. (You might also want to consider changing your name to John.) Scott Fitzgerald’s early literary successes made him and his charming, mercurial wife, Zelda, celebrities of the Jazz Age—a term he coined. In 1925 the publishers Charles Scribner’s Sons came out with Gatsby, his most enduring work. Fitzgerald relocated in 1937 to write screenplays for Hollywood, where he began sustained work on his novel The Last Tycoon (1941). Tragically, his end came before the book’s did. Several chapters shy of finishing, Fitzgerald died of a heart attack in the apartment of his Hollywood companion, columnist Sheilah Graham, while listening to Beethoven’s Eroica symphony, eating a Hershey bar from Greenblatt’s, and reading the Princeton alumni magazine. Quoted from The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited by Andrew Turnbull (New York: Scribners, 1961).

  FLORES, GEN. JOSÉ MARÍA Mexican general in the Mexican-American War (www.lrgaf.org/​journeys/​flaco.htm).

  FONT, PEDRO Franciscan missionary. Quoted from Font’s Complete Diary: A Chronicle of the Founding of San Francisco, edited by Herbert Eugene Bolton (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1933).

  FOSTER, STEPHEN CLARK Mayor, 1854–56. Los Angeles has a weak-mayor system, and sometimes it seems Angelenos prefer them that way. You could call Stephen Foster a lot of things—vigilante, murderer, Yalie—but “weak” didn’t really enter into it. Think of the millions saved in liability costs if more mayors would kindly take a sabbatical like him before committing their felonies. Such was the case with Foster, a Yale-educated machine politician who abdicated the mayoralty just long enough to lead the lynch mob that strung up Dirty Dave Brown for murder. His responsibility as a private citizen thus fulfilled, his constituents voted him back into office two weeks later. Electing Foster got to be something of a habit with Los Angeles voters. In addition to
a term apiece as a city councilman and state senator, he served as mayor as many as four times, depending how you count his post-vigilante reelection and the term he served before cityhood. He declined to write his memoirs after leaving office, preferring to serve as county supervisor for another four terms. Quoted in Eternity Street: Violence and Justice in Frontier Los Angeles, by John Mack Farragher (New York: Norton, 2015).

  FOWLES, JOHN Author of The Collector (whose film adaptation occasioned his skeptical visit here), The French Lieutenant’s Woman, many others. Quoted from The Journals, Volume I: 1949–1965 by John Fowles, edited by Charles Drazin (New York: Knopf, 2005).

  FRANKAU, GILBERT Author, poet, verse novelist. Quoted from his My Unsentimental Journey (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1926).

  FRÉMONT, JESSIE BENTON Co-author of several books either with or for her husband, the explorer and first Republican presidential candidate John Frémont. Quoted from The Letters of Jessie Benton Frémont, edited by Pamela Lee Herr and Mary Lee Spence (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1992).

  FRYE, JACK President of TWA. Quoted in What They Say About the Angels (Pasadena, Calif.: Val Trefz Press, 1942).

  GARCETTI, ERIC Half-Jewish, half-Latino, half-Italian mayor of Los Angeles. Former city councilman, son of the photographer and former city attorney Gil Garcetti. The entry here was originally published in Slate and later included in The Slate Diaries, edited by Jodi Kantor, Cyrus Krohn, and Judith Shulevitz, with an introduction by Michael Kinsley (New York: Perseus Book Group, 2000). Copyright 2000 by Michael Kinsley. Reprinted by permission of PublicAffairs, a member of the Perseus Book Group.

  GARLAND, HAMLIN Glum midwestern Pulitzer-winning author of A Son of the Middle Border. Retired here. Hated every minute. Quoted from Hamlin Garland’s Diaries, edited by Donald Pizer (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library Press, 1968).

  GARRETT, GARET Isolationist, anti–New Deal newspaper columnist. Quoted from “Los Angeles in Fact and Dream,” The Saturday Evening Post, in What They Say About the Angels (Pasadena, Calif.: Val Trefz Press, 1942).

  GERSHWIN, IRA American lyricist, long in partnership with his brother George. Quoted from The George Gershwin Reader, edited by Robert Wyatt and John Andrew Johnson (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2004).

  GIANNINI, L. M. Son of A. P. Giannini, founder of S.F.-based Bank of America. Quoted from What They Say About the Angels (Pasadena, Calif.: Val Trefz Press, 1942).

  GIELGUD, JOHN Distinguished British actor on stage and latterly in films, including his early turn as Cassius in Julius Caesar, Arthur with Dudley Moore, and Peter Greenaway’s The Tempest. Quoted from Sir John Gielgud: A Life in Letters, edited by Richard Mangan (New York: Arcade, 2004).

  GILLESPIE, ARCHIBALD American officer in the Mexican-American War.

  GILMAN, CHARLOTTE PERKINS Writer and feminist, known best for her short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” published in The New England Magazine but written in California. Fled here from an unhappy marriage, began a writing career, returned often in later years. Suffering from breast cancer, she came back one last time to Pasadena, where she took her own life. Correspondence quoted from The Selected Letters of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, edited by Denise D. Knight and Jennifer S. Tuttle (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009).

  GINSBERG, ALLEN Poet, author of “Howl.” Active mostly in his native New York and the Bay Area, but visited family near Los Angeles in the 1950s, most memorably for a 1956 reading/disrobing, here recounted from three different perspectives. Quoted from his Journals Mid-Fifties, 1954–1958, edited by Gordon Ball (New York: HarperCollins, 1995).

  GISH, LILLIAN The first great actress of the screen. Who invented the close-up? D. W. Griffith? Or the woman he was filming? Quoted from The Best of Rob Wagner’s Script, edited by Anthony Slide (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 1985).

  GOLD, JONATHAN Writer, most influentially for the LA Weekly and the Los Angeles Times. Author of Counter Intelligence: Where to Eat in the Real Los Angeles. The first food critic to win the Pulitzer Prize, and—with apologies to Eloise Klein Healy, Luis J. Rodriguez, and Robin Coste Lewis—the everlasting poet laureate of modern Los Angeles.

  GRANT, RICHARD E. Sleek-haired, combustible British actor, familiar from Withnail & I and How to Get Ahead in Advertising. In Los Angeles to shoot the canonical L.A. pictures The Player and L.A. Story, among others. Quoted from his With Nails: The Film Diaries of Richard E. Grant (Woodstock and New York, N.Y.: The Overlook Press, 1998).

  GRAVES, JACKSON ALPHEUS Banker, orange grower, and oilman. Quoted from his My Seventy Years in California (Los Angeles: Times-Mirror Press, 1927).

  GRIFFIN, DR. JOHN S. Military physician turned early settler. Quoted from A Doctor Comes to California: The Diary of John S. Griffin, Assistant Surgeon with Kearny’s Dragoons, 1846–1847 (San Francisco: California Historical Society, 1943).

  GRIFFITH, GRIFFITH J. Journalist, industrialist, philanthropist, would-be uxoricide. Shortly before his death, Tolstoy actually answered Griffith’s letter as follows: “Dear sir: Thank you heartily for sending your book. I have only looked it through and I think it is a book that is most necessary in our time. I will read it with the greatest attention and will then express to you my more thorough opinion on it.” Quoted from the Los Angeles Herald, vol. 33, no. 91, 1910.

  GUTHRIE, WOODY Folksinger-songwriter. Born Woodrow Wilson Guthrie, he wrote a great song that too many people know only at the expense of his hundreds of other tunes almost as good: America’s folk national anthem, “This Land Is Your Land.” The composer he most recalls may be Mozart, with whom he shared a boundless immaturity—he once dried a dish with the nearest soiled diaper that came to hand—and a graphomanically prodigious rate of production. Fellow tunesmith Pete Seeger once said, “I can’t stand [Woody] when he is around, but I miss him when he’s gone.” Him and America both. (Found at https://www.loc.gov/​resource/​afc1940004.afc1940004_007/​?sp=2&st=text)

  HAMILTON, JAMES GILLESPIE Merchant. Quoted from Notebooks of James Gillespie Hamilton, a Merchant of Old Westport, Missouri (1844–1858) (Fresno: privately printed, 1953).

  HAMMETT, DASHIELL Author of The Maltese Falcon and other brilliant American crime fiction. His was a style like nobody else’s, least of all that of his perennial yokemate in publicist’s hyperbole, Raymond Chandler. A Hammett sentence is stingy with ornamentation, suspicious of sentiment but by no means immune to it, and facetious down to its very serifs. As one might expect of a guy who never named his most frequent alter ego—the San Francisco detective agency operative called, by default, the Continental Op—Hammett guarded his emotional life as if it were a flight risk. He wrote one paramour, “I, in a manner of speaking, love you, or words to that effect.” It’s playful, but not exactly unbuttoned. Hammett wrote most of his letters either to his wife—from whom he separated after the birth of their second daughter, but with whom he kept up a healthy, affectionate correspondence—his two beloved girls, or his lovers, chiefly the playwright Lillian Hellman, whom he’d met here during one of his periodic bouts of screenwriting. But he seemed happiest when thousands of miles away from any of them, stationed with a U.S. Army company in the Aleutian Islands after volunteering for World War II at the age of forty-eight. There he edited the base’s paper, turning a bunch of jarheads into journalists—some of them for life. Hammett returned to L.A. over the years to visit his children and grandchildren, by generous permission of one of whom these letters are gratefully excerpted. He died in 1961. Once interned in federal prison for contempt of Congress, he was interred at his request in Arlington National Cemetery for service to his country. Quoted from Selected Letters of Dashiell Hammett, 1921–1960, edited by Richard Layman with Julie M. Rivett (Berkeley: Counterpoint Press, 2001).

  HANNA, PHIL TOWNSEND L.A. journalist, historian, wag. Longtime editor of the Auto Club magazine Westways. Quoted from his California Through Four Centuries: A Handbook of Memorable D
ates (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1935).

  HARPER, HARRIET Paid a six-month visit to California with another young woman and privately printed an account of their travels. Quoted from her Letters from California (Portland, Me.: B. Thurston & Co., 1888).

  HARTWELL, DICKSON Author, executive with the public relations firm Hill & Knowlton. Quoted in What They Say About the Angels (Pasadena, Calif.: Val Trefz Press, 1942).

  HAWTHORNE, JULIAN Journalist, son of the writer Nathaniel Hawthorne. Convicted of mail fraud, later a crusader for the abolition of penal imprisonment.

  HAYES, BENJAMIN Lawyer, judge, memoirist of the city’s early years, and, like many a frontier judge before and after him, among the most learned men in town. He had arrived in Los Angeles via the Mormon Trail through San Bernardino with all the saddlebags full of lawbooks that two mules could carry. As a judge, a year before the U.S. Supreme Court got the Dred Scott decision wrong, Hayes got the Biddy Mason decision—effectively the same case—dead right. Quoted from Pioneer Notes from the Diaries of Benjamin Hayes: 1849–1875, edited and published by Marjorie Tisdale Wolcott (Los Angeles: Privately printed, 1929).

  HAYES, EMILY Wife and partner of jurist Benjamin Hayes. Quoted from Pioneer Notes from the Diaries of Benjamin Hayes: 1849–1875, edited and published by Marjorie Tisdale Wolcott (Los Angeles: Privately printed, 1929).

  HEROLD, DON American humorist, writer, and cartoonist. Quoted from The Best of Rob Wagner’s Script, edited by Anthony Slide (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 1985).

  HERRIMAN, GEORGE Pioneering newspaper cartoonist behind the Krazy Kat comic strip. Herriman lived most of his life between downtown L.A. and the Hollywood Hills, though few knew it at the time. (Nobody realized Herriman was a mixed-race Creole, either, and he took pains to keep it that way.) Beloved for both his wordplay and his draftsmanship by everybody from T. S. Eliot to Stan Lee, Herriman worked out his racial ambivalence in the anarchic continuing saga of an immortal black-and-white cat and his unrequited love for a brick-throwing mouse, Ignatz. Quoted from the Los Angeles Herald, 1912.