by Alice Bolin
But America in The Loved One is not only consumerist and unnatural; it is also dispossessed. Waugh is conscious of the ethnic diversity of American names as remnants of identities lost: there are characters named Otto Baumbein and Lorenzo Medici, Miss Mavrocordato and Mr. Van Gluck. Barlow’s American paramour, a cosmetician at Whispering Glades, is named Aimee Thanatogenos, which, if my French and Greek serve me, can be roughly translated as “the Loved One,” at least in the way Whispering Glades used the phrase. Aimee is Waugh’s quintessential American orphan, named by unreliable parents after legendary Los Angeles televangelist Aimee Semple McPherson.
In Waugh’s novel the United States is a land of transients, shorn of their previous identities and their history. Dennis is a World War II veteran, and he is “of a generation which enjoys a vicarious intimacy with death.” He is presumably drawn to Whispering Glades, however unwillingly, because it displays that same brazen comfort with death. In Ehrenreich’s essay, he describes how nineteenth-century Europeans rejected the earlier visibility of death in their culture, making it something “shameful and forbidden.” One reason Europeans continue to be so dumbfounded by Los Angeles’s enormous cemeteries is their spectacular resistance to the modern Western trend of making death and its reminders smaller, less grand, more separate from society. In Waugh’s depiction, Forest Lawn effaces death in other ways: by stopping the effects of decay, by simplifying ideas of the afterlife. But it is still “a necropolis of the age of the Pharaohs,” as Waugh wrote, “created in the middle of the impious twentieth century.” Perhaps it reflects American identity not only in its capitalist model, but in a comfort with death that reflects the two violent and contradictory centuries of the United States’s existence, where the dreams of the founders are still used to excuse every sin of conquest.
I was wandering Hollywood Forever again when I discovered the corner of the park dedicated to the Otis-Chandler family, the legendary owners of the Los Angeles Times. Harrison Gray Otis, the first successful publisher of the paper, is buried beneath a mammoth obelisk. His son-in-law and heir, Harry Chandler, gets a curving marble slab flanked with urns and a pair of bald eagles. And among the rosebushes and religious statues shading the Otis-Chandler graves, I found a disconcerting monument, another marble structure topped with a bronze sculpture of an eagle perched on its aerie, preparing for flight. our martyred men reads the adorning plaque, in memory of the men who “fell at their posts in The Times Building on the awful morning of October first, 1910—victims of conspiracy, dynamite and fire—The Crime of the Century.”
The what?
I had never heard about the Los Angeles Times bombing of 1910, in which twenty-one of the paper’s employees, “defenders of Industrial Freedom under Law,” as the plaque puts it, were killed by a bomb planted by the Structural Iron Workers Union. Neither had anyone I informally surveyed after my discovery: my mother, brothers, or boyfriend. I was perplexed that my entire education, which includes, for what it’s worth, a bachelor’s degree in history, had neglected a terrorist attack on a major U.S. newspaper, an attack so traumatic that it had once been considered “the crime of the century.” But it is starting to seem fitting to me that I found evidence of this trauma only in a graveyard. Monuments do not serve only to help us remember. They also allow us to forget and move on.
Howard Blum wrote about the attack in his 2008 book American Lightning, tracking three American icons as they converged at downtown Los Angeles’s Alexandria Hotel at the time of the bombing: Billy Burns, the “American Sherlock Holmes,” whose agency tracked down the bombers; Clarence Darrow, the great populist attorney, who defended the bombers; and D. W. Griffith, the father of American cinema. The most interesting parts of the book are the chronicles of Burns’s and his operatives’ remarkable (and for Burns, characteristically illegal) detective work. Burns connected bomb sites in Los Angeles and Illinois, tracked a suspect using a pile of sawdust, trailed anarchists for months in a colony on Puget Sound, used the first bugged microphone to listen in on jailhouse conversations, kidnapped and tortured witnesses, and extrajudicially extradited the bombers, J. J. McNamara and his brother J. B., to California.
Despite these compelling details, American Lightning draws shallow conclusions from the events it re-creates so vividly. The Times attack was the most dramatic in the Structural Iron Workers’ massive bombing campaign, in which they dynamited over a hundred scab sites all over the United States. They sought to economically devastate Harrison Gray Otis, the paper’s fervently anti-union publisher. Blum asserts that the McNamara trial ended the war between capital and labor and “helped move America into the modern world.” “Entrepreneurial opportunities took shape,” he writes breezily, “and they spread through the nation’s cities and towns as a more hopeful alternative to the desperation of violence.” Blum’s optimistic, restorative reading of the situation is even more bizarre considering that the bombing occurred ninety years before the crime of this century, and the two attacks bear a ghostly similarity.
Blum’s picture of twentieth-century America, which is built mostly on ideals rather than reality, finds a unique reflection in Los Angeles, the quintessential twentieth-century city. Much of American Lightning focuses on Otis, the publisher who helped to transform “a drab mud and adobe town of 11,000” in 1882 into a metropolitan center whose population was 900,000 at the time of the bombing. Otis was loathed by everyone who stood in the way of his dreams for Los Angeles, from the socialists whose unions he saw as obstructing industry to the farmers whose land he sought to develop as real estate. He figured himself as a military leader, calling himself “the General” and his house “the Bivouac,” leading a campaign of mini–manifest destiny that included Los Angeles’s annexing San Pedro and Wilmington in order to create its port.
Joan Didion, in “Times Mirror Square,” her 1990 essay on the history of the Los Angeles Times, writes how Otis and his descendants exerted tremendous influence, using the Times as a platform not only to champion the growth of the city but also to increase their personal wealth. Didion describes how the development of downtown L.A. and the San Fernando Valley, the Southern California aerospace industry, Caltech, the 1932 Olympics, the Hollywood Bowl, and the freeway system all have their origins in “the impulse to improve Chandler property.”
“The extent to which Los Angeles was literally invented by the Los Angeles Times and by its owners [ . . . ] remains hard for people in less recent parts of the country to fully apprehend,” Didion writes. This is a city begotten from an idea, as Forest Lawn was begotten from the mind of the Builder, and it relies heavily on the idea to sustain it. This founding concept is a dream of limitless growth, an acquisitive spirit sowing tract houses and strip malls across the desert just as Forest Lawn paves the hills of Glendale with bronze plaques. The dream intertwined from the start with the city’s most troubling aspects—its sprawl and its lack of natural resources—countering any difficulties these presented, so that image and reality are locked in eternal tension. This is why all true explorations of the Los Angeles condition express, as Didion writes, “how fragile the idea of the place was and how easily it could be lost.”
The spring of my second year in California, my boyfriend and I went to a massive exhibition of movie costumes put on by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. On display were Indiana Jones’s hat and whip, Holly Golightly’s little black dress, Mary Poppins’s umbrella, and the Dude’s pajama pants. The exhibition’s finale, after winding its way through costumes from Fight Club, The Hunger Games, Cleopatra, and Star Wars, was a little shrine set into the wall where visitors formed long lines to look at the ruby slippers Dorothy wore in The Wizard of Oz. I leaned into the glass in awe of the red sequin character shoes, so tiny and so fragile.
It occurs to me how much we resembled medieval pilgrims, traveling to see relics of our beloved teenage martyr, Saint Judy of the Yellow Brick Road. It is morbid to want to see things that famous people touched and wore, Charlie Chaplin’s b
owler and pleated pants containing the idea of his body the same way a sarcophagus would. This hoarding of artifacts seems like a natural activity for the guardians of the motion picture industry, who are in the business of collecting ghosts. The very technology of film carries a kind of resurrection, capturing the past with a scary depth and intimacy, fourteen-year-old Judy Garland still as adorable and vulnerable today as she was in 1939. If we look at it this way, Los Angeles takes on a necrophiliac quality: it is home to several of the largest cemeteries in the world and to the industry that both manufactures American celebrity and sweeps up its traces.
In American Lightning, Blum writes that D. W. Griffith’s groundbreaking 1915 film The Birth of a Nation “would help America—its art, its ideals, its imagination—move into the modern world.” He doesn’t attempt to reconcile this with his understanding of the film as regressive and disturbing, “an odd, sour, and disturbingly racist reinterpretation of the Civil War and Reconstruction.” American Lightning takes its name from Woodrow Wilson’s apocryphal review of Birth of a Nation, that it was like “writing history with lightning,” which does a lot to embody the film’s contradictions. Lightning is scary, beautiful, powerful, ephemeral, unreliable, dangerous, and mysterious: not a good thing, in other words, to write history with at all. A landmark of cultural innovation depicting a hateful revisionist history pushes irony to the point of combustion. Griffith was the person who brought the movies to Los Angeles, and the fraught spirit of the first Hollywood blockbuster still inhabits competing versions of L.A.: it is either a future city, constantly paving over its past, or an enormous archive or crypt, a dusty repository of American icons.
Early in American Lightning, Billy Burns describes a juicy theory of the Los Angeles Times bombing. It deals with the scheme to divert water from the Owens River Valley on the Nevada border 250 miles to Los Angeles. Los Angeles voters, after much passionate goading from the Times, had approved $22.5 million in bonds to fund the creation of the aqueduct, but at the time of the bombings, Harrison Gray Otis was about to double down on a water scheme that would make him and his business partners millions.
Otis, using the front of the Los Angeles Suburban Homes Company, had been buying and developing cheap land in the desert stretches of the San Fernando Valley, north of L.A. They would use water from the Owens aqueduct to make the valley habitable. But their plan had encountered obstacles: the aqueduct was still not finished, and citizens would have to approve more bonds for its completion. The Socialist Party was gaining traction with Los Angeles voters, and they disapproved of “handing the aqueduct water over to the land barons.” If Socialists prevailed in the 1911 mayoral election, Otis and the Suburban Homes Company would have no water for the houses they had spent so much to build in the valley. As Blum explains, Burns proposed that Otis himself was behind the bombing of the Times building. Otis had recently taken out a large insurance policy on it, money that would help buoy him while the aqueduct was completed. And by blaming labor for the bombing, he would tarnish the reputation of their Socialist allies, ruining their chances in the 1911 elections.
This was completely wrong, as it turns out. The McNamaras, radical labor activists, were behind the attacks, and they did hurt the Socialists’ place in Los Angeles politics, handing Otis his goal of a developed San Fernando Valley, a testament to his good luck. Still, it makes an irresistible story, a solution Blum probably would have chosen for his mystery if he hadn’t been constrained by fact. It has the hallmarks of a classic noir tale, all of which take place in cities where corruption is the rule, not an aberration. The only thing the story lacks is the noir impulse to, as Faye Dunaway memorably says in 1974’s Chinatown, “cherchez la femme.”
My roommate my first spring in Los Angeles was an actor and a carpenter who would leave for weeks at a time to film bit parts in B movies. I lodged myself in front of his giant TV during his time away, watching Chinatown in between seasons of The Mindy Project, treating the movie like the piece of broccoli a steakhouse gives you with your porterhouse: a grudging concession to good taste, if not tastiness.
Chinatown, though, played perfectly into the story of early Los Angeles that I was piecing together through its cemeteries. The film is a noir-ification of the plot to bring Owens River water to Los Angeles. In it, the chief engineer at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, Hollis Mulwray, is murdered after he publicly opposes plans to build a reservoir. Private detective Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson channeling Philip Marlowe), working with Mulwray’s widow, Evelyn, uncovers a complicated plot by Mulwray’s former partner and Evelyn’s father, Noah Cross. They plan to buy up land in the San Fernando Valley using the names of senile retirees and to covertly and illegally irrigate it using Los Angeles’s water. In the film’s ending, it trades a noir aesthetic for a Gothic one: Cross is a true villain who has raped Evelyn and fathered her daughter. Evelyn, as it turns out, is not a femme fatale. The film’s surprise is in how tightly the apparent system of power holds fast, how straightforward allegiances are and how little our heroes can do in the face of corrupt authority. Melodramatic as it is, Chinatown is a weirdly apt depiction of a city that was developed by a handful of powerful men who did not have much use for rules or ethics.
In American Lightning, Blum writes about the early triumph of Griffith’s short film A Corner in Wheat. It featured an ambitious parallel structure, following “farmers stoically working in a field; the Wheat King hatching his plot to control the market; and the city’s downtrodden poor hoping to buy bread,” sending a poignant message about the power imbalance in the relationship between America’s landowners, producers, and consumers. The film is based on The Pit, the second novel in what Frank Norris planned as an epic trilogy (he died before completing the third) that began with 1901’s The Octopus, a true California story that, in California fashion, is more complicated than the patterns A Corner in Wheat would distill from it.
In her 2004 meditation on California identity, Where I Was From, Didion spends significant time trying to make sense of The Octopus. On its surface, it is an anti-corporate novel about the megalithic power of the railroad to control and abuse the humble farmer. A pivotal scene involves a shootout between ranchers in the San Joaquin Valley and federal marshals hired by the Southern Pacific railroad to evict them. But these conflicts are not as allegorical as they may appear. Crucially, these ranchers were, as Didion writes, “in no sense simple farmers.” They were entrepreneurs who had come to California seeking a fortune from its fecundity in the same way Gold Rush spectators had tried to exploit its mineral resources, and their business plans were dependent on their proximity to railroad routes. “The only actual conflict in The Octopus,” Didion writes, “turns out to be between successful and failed members of the same entrepreneurial class.” This recalls incestuous themes in Chinatown, as parties that seem to be opponents were in fact closely aligned. The development of Southern California followed no traditional narratives: it was uniquely intentional, flowing from a singular energy, serving the interests of a certain small population of men, whether Harrison Gray Otis, Noah Cross, or the Railroad King. It occurs to me that these subverted narratives are what kept me wandering Los Angeles’s cemeteries, which, in their differences, all serve to memorialize these men and their philosophies, ironically bespeaking a belief in real estate, in staking your claim, in insisting on permanence if you can’t have eternity.
And the infighting among these men is another distraction from what has always been the real California conflict. As Didion succinctly explains,
the octopus, if there is one, turns out to be neither the railroad nor corporate ownership but indifferent nature.
This was what Burns knew when devising his theory that the L.A. Times bombing was an inside job. In Los Angeles, the imperative is not to cherchez la femme; it is to cherchez the water.
The Octopus begins on a day when “all the vast reaches of the San Joaquin Valley—in fact all South Central California, was bone dry, parched, and b
aked and crisped after four months of cloudless weather.” More than a century later, this description bears down on the San Joaquin like a death sentence. In the spring of 2014, a Los Angeles Times feature described how extreme drought conditions devastated families of migrant farmworkers. Waves of farmers fled to California from Oklahoma, Texas, Missouri, and Arkansas during the disastrous droughts of the 1930s; now farmworkers are migrating away from Southern California’s own dust bowl. Communities in the San Joaquin are fading, in danger of becoming ghost towns.
In summer 2014, drought covered 100 percent of California, with 76 percent of the state experiencing extreme drought conditions. These are remarkable and terrifying circumstances, prime for forest fires and agricultural devastation. But it is hard to look at a drought as an emergency—it quickly becomes the new normal. A farmworker in the Los Angeles Times article said, “Drought is different from other natural disasters because it doesn’t end.” My boyfriend laughed when we saw a sign on the 101 reading serious drought. don’t waste water. “I thought it said ‘serious thought,’” he said. Well, I reminded him, it is a serious thought.