West of Eden

by Jean Stein

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  DEBORAH JOWITT: I’ll tell you a story. Beginning midway through my third-grade year at school, I boarded five days a week at Marymount in Los Angeles. Our dorm had just two adjoining rooms separated by a shared bathroom. The rooms were on the second floor and had very pretty, big French-door-type windows that looked out on the lawn. The rooms were simple, with two single beds with iron headboards. Each bed had a chair beside it, and at night you put your underpants on the chair beside your bed, and you put your dirty socks over them in the form of a cross.

  I shared my room with a little girl my age named Leilani Owens, the daughter of Harry Owens, the bandleader. He wrote a popular song, a sort of pseudo-Hawaiian tune, “Sweet Leilani, Heavenly Flower.” She was kind of a chubby, confident little girl. And I didn’t care too much for her. In the other bedroom were two slightly older girls. One was a girl called Myra, and the other was Jane Garland.

  The nuns used to bathe us together, the two roommates. You would be let into your little bathroom and told to sit down together in a tub of hot or warm water. Madame Brenda, who seemed to be on night duty, would come around and scrub you with a little scrub brush, quite roughly. She was small and ferret-like, with a red face, sharp little features, and black snapping eyes. And she had a thin but prominent nose. She was not unkind, but she scrubbed us hard. I don’t remember how often we bathed, but it certainly wasn’t every day. I do remember very clearly that we did not have individual baths. I don’t know if Jane and Myra, being older, were bathed together.

  The nuns were kind and wore an amazing habit. They dressed in a hood that covered their heads snugly, and over that a white, stiff, peaked triangular thing that fastened under their chin. And over that, a black veil that didn’t cover their faces but came just under their chins. Their dresses were black with white collars. They were like blackbirds fluttering and swooping about, always hurrying and rushing, their skirts flowing behind, while the lightweight black veils, almost like a chiffon, flared out behind them.

  Jane was larger than I was and quite developed, meaning she had breasts, sort of, and was slightly chubby. She had a round face and very dark, reddish hair. And her skin was reddish and mottled, as if she had rosacea. It wasn’t like acne, but her skin looked kind of coarse. Her features were very pretty, with a little mouth and big eyes. I didn’t know her well, but I don’t remember her as a person who had problems.

  Jane Garland.

  My mother would pick me up Friday afternoon, and I would go home for the weekend and come back Sunday evening. I remember one weekend, I was bored at home and asked to be taken back to school early. And the few other boarders, including Jane, were playing in an olive grove. I have a feeling that she did not go home on weekends. I never saw anybody come for her.

  I remember her because of a very humiliating weird thing that happened to me but that didn’t seem to discompose Jane at all. Our rooms were mirror images of each other, with the bathroom in between. I often had to get up in the night to use the bathroom, and it was, of course, very dark. One morning when I woke up, to my utter shock and horror, I was in bed with Jane. I had evidently turned the wrong way going out of the bathroom and gone to the bed that would have been mine, the left-hand bed. Jane seemed slightly amused about it, a little taken aback but quite friendly. She didn’t say anything; she looked at me, kind of sleepy and bemused, like, “What’s going on?” And I was like, “My god, what am I doing here? I’d better go back to my own bed.” I got up quickly and went back to my room. The nuns found out about it and called my mother—whether they were asking if I was prone to sleepwalking or had lesbian tendencies, I don’t know. As far as I know, Jane was completely unfazed by it. She seemed normal. Not overly exuberant, not overly friendly, but doing all the things we did.

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  LYLA HOYT: My husband, Warren, who shared the same mother with Jane—Grace Garland had him when she was only nineteen years old—always said that Jane’s life was fairly normal until she fell into company with a cultlike group. She began drug use to some degree, with—or was given drugs by—several people who were questionable at the stable where her horse was kept.

  I don’t know quite how to identify them. They were several women who were very well schooled in how to develop guilt in teenage girls. I prefer not to say anything more about them. We always felt they used hallucinogenic drugs. And then during the time that she was under the influence of those drugs, they performed personal acts on her that left her with tremendous guilt. They used her because she had a sizable allowance from the bank, about $800 or $900 per month—approximately $6,500 to $7,500 today—before her trust funds came due. She had a new car then and a great deal of money for that period. After they had destroyed what semblance of hope she had of ever being a normal person, they left her on the steps at St. John’s hospital in Santa Monica. Destroyed her ego. Her person. I don’t know how else to describe it. I think it was physical and I think it was sexual. That’s who they were. Grace and Warren, Jane’s mother and her brother, were denied access to her the entire time she was with these women. And when Grace and Warren finally did discover Jane’s whereabouts, it was as I said. These women had left her totally incoherent, and I guess almost in a total kind of catatonic shock. As soon as she was twenty-one, they attempted to get hold of several hundred thousand dollars of her funds. They just lived a very high life until they could find their next victim.

  When my husband approached the sheriff in Malibu, he was told that it would be very difficult to get anyone to testify against these people because there were other girls that were kind of in on parts of it, and the families didn’t want their daughters implicated.

  Grace Garland was from Cleveland. She lived next door or in the same neighborhood as the Hoyt family and grew up with Warren Hoyt, Sr., who became her first husband. Grace and Warren were married possibly for nineteen or twenty years; nothing is very clear. He was not well off, but he was knowledgeable in wood preservation. He went to mines all over and estimated what kind of timber should be used to truss them up. He lived a comfortable life, but he did not have money per se.

  Suddenly Grace’s mother passed away, and she was so stricken with grief she wasn’t able to take care of herself and her son, named Warren after his father. Grace’s sister, Jane, was married and living in Los Angeles at the time, and so she came and just picked up the two of them and moved them to an apartment in the Los Angeles area. Grace’s husband followed later. And she healed there, got better, and met Bill Garland, I don’t know how or when. Now, there was some confusion about exactly when she divorced Warren Hoyt and married Bill Garland. Nobody knows for sure why she went ahead and married again before her divorce came through, but I think it was really because my father-in-law wasn’t ready to give up his wife and son. He just didn’t want to give her up.

  Once Bill Garland discovered that Grace wasn’t divorced from Warren Hoyt, he went to court to annul their marriage. At that point she divorced Hoyt, clearing the way for them—Garland and Grace—to remarry hardly a month later. Then in 1933 they built that house in Malibu. They took a great deal of pride in the way it was built, because it was one of those houses with a foundation of deep-sunk pilings, capable of handling any kind of storm activity from the ocean.

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  ALZOA GARLAND OTTO: My parents, William Joseph Garland and Alzoa Garland, his first wife, divorced when I was about ten years old, maybe a little younger, and it was very hard on me because I loved my father. He was adorable—but he had a temper. With my parents, it was a big fight all the time. They were married about ten years, and my mother tormented him. And my father was physically abusive. Once, he kicked her with his golf shoes on. I think that’s very unfair when you do that with your golf shoes. That’s just one incident. They were always in combat. I don’t know what caused it. There were some couples that do that.

  I thought it was a brilliant idea for my father to build that house in Malibu. It was a good place for a man to move to. I thin
k he started building it while my parents were getting their divorce since he needed a place to live. Our nurse took us down there a few times and we swam in the ocean. The house was on the water. It had a big light on the top that told his friends where the house was, a light that they used for ships.

  After the divorce, I didn’t see him much growing up. Our chauffeur took us, my little brother and myself, over to his house a couple of times to see him, and he came to school once to see me, and that’s about the only time I saw him. He had another life and my mother had another life.

  It was quite a scandal when Grace married my father, William Garland. I heard the gossip children listened to. I heard that he let her ex-husband live in an apartment downstairs while Daddy and she lived in an apartment above. I saw her one time. I was just a little child, ten years old, I think it was at the beach. She put her arms around him and kissed him, and I thought, Oh, you phony.

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  LYLA HOYT: Bill Garland died in 1940, when he was only forty-eight or forty-nine years old, from a kidney infection that led to uremic poisoning. This was before penicillin. He was wonderful to Grace. He was generous and they were very active socially and politically. Her life with Bill was something that we all would have liked to have lived.

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  ALZOA GARLAND OTTO: Women have to take care of their husbands. I felt that maybe that’s why my father died so young. We were in Hawaii when it happened. I was about fifteen when we heard about it. I felt really bad, but you know, young kids when they haven’t seen their father for years, they don’t really have a connection. My mother just told us, “Your father died.”

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  ED MOSES: Jane’s mother was a hideous woman. Tough and opportunistic. She was very mercenary. She didn’t have any values of any sort, or any intelligent stuff going on, just all the conservative clichés about minorities and the good old days. One of her heroes was General MacArthur, and she kept a framed photograph of him on the piano in the living room. William Garland had left all kinds of property to her and to Jane, including some huge ranch in Thousand Oaks somewhere; it was beautiful acreage. Apparently, he was originally in railroads and then diversified into real estate. I think he was in lumber, too. No reference was ever made to him. It was as if he hadn’t existed, as if Jane was some kind of oblique incarnation of madness laid on this family.

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  LYLA HOYT: The movie director Gregory La Cava lived a few doors down the beach from the Garlands. I don’t think it was a terribly long period of time after Bill Garland’s death, maybe only about five months, when Grace married Greg and he moved into her home. La Cava, according to my husband, could have charmed any woman to do anything. Grace didn’t even know she was breathing when she was with him—he had such an ability to hypnotize people around him to do whatever he wanted them to do.

  Greg would have liked Grace to be an extra in a few of his movies, but I don’t think he ever got her there. Jane was in one of his last movies, Lady in a Jam. She was about nine years old then.

  Lady in a Jam: A SCREENPLAY BY EUGENE THACKREY, FRANK COCKRELL, AND OTHO LOVERING; PRODUCED AND DIRECTED BY GREGORY LA CAVA; PRESENTED BY UNIVERSAL PICTURES.

  Jane Palmer…Irene Dunne

  Dr. Enright…Patric Knowles

  Stanley…Ralph Bellamy

  Mr. Billingsley…Eugene Pallette

  Dr. Brewster…Samuel S. Hinds

  Cactus Kate…Queenie Vassar

  Strawberry…Jane Garland

  Ground-Hog…Edward McWade

  Faro Bill…Robert Homans

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  LYLA HOYT: W. C. Fields was one of Greg La Cava’s buddies—they had made So’s Your Old Man and Running Wild together. Fields came to Grace Garland’s house in Malibu fairly often, and my husband told me about having to take care of him. When he was ill, he was brought from his home in Hollywood to stay with Grace and Greg for several days. And according to my husband, he brought along a huge brandy snifter, because his doctors had told him he could only have one drink a day. We kept several letters from W. C. Fields that he wrote to Grace. In one of them he asked her, “Why did you marry that crazy dago?” or words to that effect. They didn’t last long.

  FROM THE PROPERTY SETTLEMENT AGREEMENT BETWEEN GREGORY LA CAVA AND GRACE GARLAND, DATED MAY 2, 1944: EXHIBIT A, “A PARTIAL LIST OF THE SAID PERSONAL EFFECTS AND PERSONAL PROPERTY” GRANTED TO LA CAVA:

  Tools, saws, etc.

  Wheelbarrow

  Pool table, cues, balls, etc. (rack in closet)

  Movie camera, projector and screen

  Floodlight

  Oil painting in living room (gift from Queenie Vassar)

  Ping pong table (gift from Bill Fields)

  Barbecue motor and equipment for barbecue

  Miscellaneous clothing and personal effects

  Suitcase

  Cases of wine and various bottles of liquor

  Deep freezer

  Portable recording machine (gift)

  Bone handled set from Lombard

  Games (gifts of dominos, etc., from actors)

  Punching bag and gloves

  Bicycle (Ginger Rogers)

  Silverware set (monogrammed)

  Gold dishes (from Fields)

  Keys to box, and other keys

  Barbecue table, benches and cabinet

  Colt automatic and ammunition (miscellaneous)

  Electrolux vacuum cleaner

  1 Coldspot (from bar)

  Weighing Scales

  Writing desk

  Electric Roaster

  Electric Bean pot

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  ED MOSES: After Grace Garland’s divorce from Gregory La Cava, she married this guy Curly Lambeau, who was a football coach from someplace in Wisconsin. I saw a picture of him at the Malibu house—wide shoulders, a big guy probably. Looked like a real bullshitter.

  As soon as they got together, they started pissing away as much of Jane’s money as they could. By the time I was around I would say the mother looked like a typical sixty-five-year-old woman with dyed red hair and a face that had started to disintegrate, like all of us do. She kept herself relatively trim, but she had a tummy. She had one short leg, I don’t know what it was from, but she had a limp. She might have fallen on her hip. Curly may have busted the leg in five places! When they split up there was a divorce settlement and he absconded with a good wad of property. I don’t know how he did it but she was crazy for him, and he was a big tough son of a bitch. I think Curly got half the money and he hooked on to all the land he could get his hands on—whatever it was that she had. He took her to the cleaners.

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  LYLA HOYT: What’s the story about Curly? The first time Grace met him was at the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood. She kept a room there all the time, for when she was in town. If she were shopping or out for the night or something, she stayed there. She met him there, is my understanding, and he, too, had a way with women. After they married, Curly moved out to the Malibu house. But having one beautiful charming wife wasn’t enough. Like the sailors, he had a lady in every place that the Green Bay Packers played football, which was something that Grace could not possibly tolerate. I think that was when Grace had to give up a lot of her money, in their divorce settlement. They had bought a great deal of undeveloped land together. Do you know where Lake Sherwood is out in Thousand Oaks? That will give you an indication of how he could persuade her to do things. He talked her into starting a chicken ranch out there. Yeah! For the sale of eggs! When they divorced, they divided that ranch in half, and his half was the one that was on the lakefront, with the buildings. I’m sure that it was profitable.

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  ED MOSES: There was still plenty of money left, but it had been mismanaged. Most of it was tied up in trusts, and that was the money the psychiatrists and all those people were tapping into. Now Grace Garland was real-estate poor—she had all this real estate, but not a lot of cash. She was like the overseer, but she couldn’t get any bread out except for Jane�
�s care and minimal housekeeping. There was enough to pay me and Walter, and she still had a little money to maintain the house in a minimal state. And she did have limited ability through the bank to get hold of a specific amount of funds that she might need for Jane’s care. She couldn’t go out anymore and buy fur coats and do all the shit she wanted to do with her friends. I think that was the problem: only Jane’s money was left; Grace Garland was mad as a wet hen because there was all that gold out there and she couldn’t get her mitts on it.

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  WALTER HOPPS: The mother always treated Jane in a kind of saccharine and ultimately condescending way. She just didn’t understand her daughter. Even if she was nuts, Jane was obviously smarter, poor thing, and that made it tough for both parties. I think Moses got it right: there were trusts in place to take care of the daughter, and the mother’s hanging on for dear life. God, she just looked physically vulnerable all the time. She was a small, thin woman, and there was just a lot less physically to her than there was to Jane. She was a pretty woman who was under a lot of strain and kind of losing her looks but trying hard to hold on. In her prime, she might have looked like a starlet version of Gene Tierney. She looked scared. Thin and attractive and trying to hold it all together, and that was part of the sadness. She had essentially retreated to her room and was just hanging on.