A Bright and Guilty Place

by Richard Rayner

  As White was walking down Hollywood Boulevard, where flashing neon signs proclaimed the Music Box, the Vine Street Theater, the Egyptian, the Chinese, the Plaza, the Roosevelt, and other big theaters and hotels, an old man stopped him, asking, “Are you saved, brother?” Outside a church an advertisement proclaimed an upcoming appearance by Rin-Tin-Tin, “the canine motion picture actor.” Red streetcars rattled by and traffic lights gonged. Men in straw boaters and women in cloche hats bustled along the sidewalk. Everybody seemed breathless, White observed. Boxy Model T Fords were jammed into slant-wise parking slots. A jazz orchestra moaned ragtime in a dance hall.

  Downtown, on Broadway, White paid thirty-five cents to watch Charlie Chaplin in The Circus in the United Artists Theater, which boasted a $200,000 refrigeration system and “Certified Cool Comfort.” In the afternoon cool of another movie palace, he saw Ladies of the Mob, the very latest picture starring the “It” girl, Clara Bow, whom he liked. He was scarcely alone as a fan: Bow was then the world’s most famous movie star, the first mass-market sex symbol, the object of obsessive curiosity and the recipient of 8,000 fan letters a week. In one of the small black notebooks he used as a diary, White wrote: “Saw new Clara Bow. She meets a bunch of crooks and gets sent to Folsom! Still feeling a little weak, but good to be on my feet.”

  The fever of the Jazz Age had spread from New York across America and was reflected back, magnified and amplified, by Hollywood. It was the era of daring short-skirted flappers, of wild parties and bathtub gin, of everybody needing at least one automobile. The country was in the midst of “the greatest, gaudiest spree in history,” wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald. Young women, for whom a star like Clara Bow was both symbol and role model, smoked and wore lipstick and freely had sex outside marriage. Radio and the tabloid newspaper, entirely new phenomena, chronicled the national obsessions—crime, sex, sports, and God. This revolution in manners, morals, and fashion played out against the extraordinary experiment of Prohibition—the attempt to turn America into a dry Utopia, which came into effect nationwide on January 16, 1920. Nobody drank less. Outlaw liquor—smuggled or illegally brewed—flooded the country by hundreds of millions of gallons each year, filling the land with crime and its adjunct, graft, creating a spirit of rebellion and a subculture of speakeasies and bootleggers like Albert Marco. Prohibition, though, failed to prohibit in ways that differed from place to place, from city to city. What happened in Los Angeles in the 1920s couldn’t be more typically American, yet this history is also unique and particular.

  Leslie White arrived in the city toward the end of July 1928, when the boom was soaring to giddy heights and Los Angeles was not merely expanding but exploding beyond recognition. “In L.A. tomorrow isn’t another day,” said Los Angeles Times columnist Lee Shippey. “It’s another town.” Modernity had arrived, in an awful hurry. At night the downtown neon billboards were so plentiful and incandescent that visiting Harper’s correspondent Sarah Comstock said she longed “to hush them, to be rid of their blinding clamor, their deafening glare.” This, from a woman who lived in Manhattan.

  White saw scores of health cults and religious cults, churches of “Divine Power, of Divine Fire, of the Open Door, of the Blue Flames, of the Higher Things of Life.” There were Temples of Light, Chapels of Numerology, Truth Centers, Truth Studios. The frustrated Midwesterners who’d come to L.A. in droves, thinking that the city really was (as advertised by the Chamber of Commerce) “the white-spot on America’s industrial map,” sought almost any form of spiritual anchorage. Religion was what they knew, what they wanted; and religion in L.A. was like show business. Evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson had a radio station and was a star in her own right. With a husky voice hinting of sex, she entertained the “folks” with slide shows and healing sessions. She promised not fire and brimstone, but the overwhelming bliss of God’s love as she presided over an enormous congregation that was a stew of life, a fantastic human muddle, a “heart-hungry” multitude. In pageants at her Angelus Temple she wore filmy, flimsy dresses and chased the Devil with his own pitchfork.

  L.A. was a beacon to many, a nightmare for others, but already a phenomenon, not so much evoked as endlessly commented upon, by both locals and Easterners who arrived to work or indulge in a couple of weeks of intellectual tourism in this bewildering American city.

  “It is a young city, crude, wildly ambitious, growing; it has halitosis and osmidrosis; and to kill the stench it gargles religious soul-wash and rubs holy toilet-water and scented talc between its toes,” wrote Louis Adamic, a Slovenian immigrant who worked in the harbor pilot’s office at Long Beach. Great ocean liners glided behind him while he composed magazine sketches that established him as the city’s underground prophet and its first Boswell. “Los Angeles is America. A jungle. Los Angeles grew up suddenly, planlessly.”

  The city that now drew the eyes of the world seemed to have emerged out of nowhere, without much of a past. “The first 100 years were a kind of prehistory in which it moved from pueblo to cow town to hick town at a leisurely pace,” said Carey McWilliams, who came to L.A. from Colorado as a young man in the early 1920s and in time became the most influential historian of the city in this period. “Then suddenly, in the 1920s, it achieved great-city status through a process of forced growth based on booster tactics and self-promotion.”

  It’s true that L.A. evolved without an ordered architectural scheme such as Baron Haussmann brought to Paris or Christopher Wren to certain parts of central London, but in another way the growth of the city had been planned only too well—plotted rather, by a small group of men determined to create a metropolis and make money. Harry Chandler, generalissimo of the boom and publisher of the Los Angeles Times, and General Moses Sherman, the owner of the streetcar system, were among those who formed America’s first Chamber of Commerce and established land syndicates so they could sell real estate, drawing people to the city by constantly promoting merits of climate and crimelessness. Chandler and Sherman, for instance, acquired 108,000 acres of land in the San Fernando Valley before sponsoring the building of Mulholland’s aqueduct from the Owens River Valley. The aqueduct took the water from the Owens River Valley farmers and terminated, not in Los Angeles itself, but in the San Fernando Valley, thus irrigating the syndicate’s lands and earning its members in excess of $100 million. This iniquitous plot was kept secret for years but would in time form the basis of Robert Towne’s screenplay for the 1974 movie Chinatown. Towne set his story in 1937 so he could utilize the shapes of the private-eye story, a genre that didn’t exist in 1905–1913, when these events took place. Chinatown has taken on a totemic power; it’s a great movie, but misleading as history, a metaphor on many levels for the ways in which L.A.’s past tends to be hidden, erased, forgotten, rewritten, or present in our minds only through the filter of fiction. Chinatown does more than switch the dates; its replacement of social context by fictional construct creates a shimmer, a stylish and seductive surface beneath which run depths never spoken of. Thus the film’s true subject is not the mystery that hero Jake Gittes tries to unravel, but the way Los Angeles thinks about itself.

  “Los Angeles is a nut town run by rich bastards who hate the Wobblies like poison,” somebody said to Louis Adamic, drawing attention to the oddity that, since the dynamiting of the Times building in 1910, this place of monotonous sunshine had become the focal point of America’s anti-labor movement. By the 1920s L.A. was perceived in terms of its extraordinariness. Many tried to get a handle on the bursting city by looking toward its more outlandish manifestations. Edmund Wilson wrote of “the grooves of gorgeous business cathedrals,” “the blue Avocado Building, bawdy as a peacock’s tail, with its frieze of cute little cupids,” “the regal and greenish Citrus Building, made throughout of the purest lime candy, which has gone a little sugary from the heat,” “Aimee McPherson’s wonderful temple, where good-natured but thrilling native angels guard the big red radio-tower love-wand and see to it that not a tittle or vibration of their mistress�
�s kind warm voice goes astray as it speeds to you in your sitting-room and tells you how sweet Jesus has been to her and all the marvelous things she has found in Him.”

  Wilson, like Adamic, leaned toward socialism, but he was a cynic too, and L.A. got his glands going. “Nuestro Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de Los Angeles has more lovely girls serving peach freezes and appetizing sandwich specials with little pieces of sweet pickle on the side than any other city in the world,” he wrote, and we wonder whether the girls or the sandwiches excited him more. The girls were there for early Hollywood, dreams of fame and stardom having added a whole new register to the city’s palette of transformative possibility.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald made his first visit to L.A. at about this time, and wrote a treatment for a movie that was never made. In 1928, though, he published “Magnetism,” a Saturday Evening Post story using material he’d gathered from the trip. “This was perhaps the most bizarre community in the rich, wild, bored empire,” Fitzgerald wrote. “Everything in the vicinity—even the March sunlight—was new, fresh, hopeful, and thin, as you would expect in a city that had tripled its population in fifteen years.” Fitzgerald was no socialist but a sensitive and instinctively romantic observer. He fastened onto the oddness of the city’s topography. Los Angeles was growing fast but the wide mountain-bordered basin in which it had been plunked was still largely undeveloped. Freeways were decades in the future. The boulevards that ran from downtown to the beach communities were wide and empty. L.A. wasn’t yet the amorphous metropolitan area that it was to become, though already new neighborhoods mushroomed, geographically distant from what was then the undisputed center, the automobile making it easy for these suburbs to spin away from the pull of downtown. Movie studios were tactically positioned in the middle of nowhere, and Fitzgerald caught the sense of burgeoning sprawl: “George left and drove out by an interminable boulevard which narrowed into a long, winding concrete road and rose into the hilly country behind. Somewhere in the vast emptiness a group of buildings appeared,” he wrote.

  The movie business was a big part of the boom but not yet the dominant force in the city’s life. Hollywood was coming of age and coming into its own but existed, geographically and psychologically, a little to the side—already aspired to and envied, a magnet. The crowds that flocked to searchlight premieres in the theaters built by Sid Grauman or Alexander Pantages on Hollywood Boulevard longed to see the destruction of movie stars almost as much as their elevation. Or perhaps even more. Celebrity culture was being invented. It began, in 1921, with Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle. Arbuckle was a comedian, the “fat owl” of the silent screen. Hugely successful and famous, he threw parties abundantly fueled by bootleg booze and drugs. Nobody ever claimed that these parties were good clean fun. After one party that lasted for several days at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco, a young model and actress, Virginia Rappe, was found dead. The L.A. press took several days to get hold of the story, but then William Randolph Hearst’s Examiner started to dig, accusing Arbuckle of rape and murder. He was a “beast,” “a moral leper” who drove “freak cars” and once held a “wedding for his dogs.”

  At the time of the Arbuckle scandal four other daily papers, in addition to the Examiner, served the L.A. market: the Evening Express, the Evening Herald, the Evening Record, and the Times. A frenzy of gloves-off coverage quickly ensued, each paper vying to top the other. There was no television, of course, and radio news coverage was barely beginning. Movie newsreels appeared days or weeks after big events, whereas newspapers ran brash stories and lurid images only hours after the events they depicted. It was a golden age for the press, which ran the spectrum from great writing to gutter journalism, often in the same story and under the same byline. In its coverage of the Arbuckle scandal, the Examiner featured photographs of Rappe’s innocent face and her torn clothing. The Express noted that for Arbuckle “death would be too swift a penalty” and movie houses around the country dropped his films. Although a jury finally acquitted Arbuckle, noting that he was “entirely innocent and free from blame,” the damage and the injustice had been done. Arbuckle’s career was in ruins and would never bounce back. It was perhaps the first perfect mass-culture news story—involving sex, death, and the misdemeanors of a movie star.

  L.A. newspapers sold by the million, and a pattern emerged. Sensational crimes—some involving Hollywood, others not—would result in circus trials and days of gleeful headlines. Competing papers sold the news in a series of editions that were published throughout the course of the day: the morning and afternoon papers (“AMs” and “PMs,” Leslie White soon learned to call them) added “sunset” editions, “bulldog” editions, and “extra” editions if needed. When a big story hit, editors demanded fresh angles hourly and writers couldn’t afford to be scrupulous about how they provided them. One top reporter recalled hiring a messenger to deliver an anonymous murder threat in the course of a trial so he could write about the recipient’s reaction. Such shenanigans were the norm, and to study an entire day’s outpourings from the L.A. press during this period is to see an ongoing and ever-changing crime epic in progress. The detail is more than novelistic; it’s microscopic.

  “L.A. was the hottest news city in America, probably the world,” said Matt Weinstock of the Daily News, the tabloid that featured Gene Coughlin and had been launched in 1923 by twenty-year-old Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jr. The News—located in a building at the corner of Pico Boulevard and Los Angeles Street, downtown but farther south than the other papers—was new and fresh and different. Vanderbilt, the rich son of a famously rich family, loved the swift, jazzy tabloid style; but he tried to break away from the sensationalism that usually went with that style. He envisioned a penny paper that “may safely enter any home” and ordered his editors to look for international stories and human interest stuff that the great New York tabloids would ignore (“FOUR HUNDRED CHICKENS DISAPPEAR,” ran one News headline). Circulation rose to 200,000 within a year but then slumped. The News foundered in 1926, and was plucked from the bankruptcy court by Manchester Boddy, a former book publisher and sales manager for Encyclopaedia Britannica. Boddy had $750 in his pocket, but proved to be the perfect man to put the young tabloid back on the map. He immediately removed Vanderbilt’s quixotic ban on sex, scandal, and violent death, and circulation began to rise again.

  “Los Angeles had the finest murders ever,” wrote Carey McWilliams with a hint of pride. There was Walpurga Oesterreich, who kept her lover imprisoned in the attic for over fifteen years and then one day goaded him into killing her husband. There was college student Edward Hickman who kidnapped twelve-year-old Marion Parker and, having failed to extract a ransom, presented the corpse, with eyes and legs severed and eyelids sewn open, to the girl’s father, asking: “Do you think I’ll be as famous as Leopold and Loeb?” There was the murder of movie director William Desmond Taylor, shot through the heart with a single well-aimed bullet, perhaps having gotten on the wrong side of a dope dealer, or maybe one of the two gorgeous actresses he was bedding, or the mother of one of those actresses with whom he’d also been having an affair, or his ex-wife, or a gay lover. The bisexual Taylor, it transpired, had more people with reason to wish him dead than the victim in an Agatha Christie novel.

  “Ideas grow as rank, coarse, and odorless as geraniums in the freakish atmosphere,” wrote McWilliams. “When so many people have nothing meaningful to do with their time, nothing real with which to occupy their minds, they indulge in fantasy, in silly daydreams, in per-versions, and, occasionally, in monstrous crimes.” Incessant migration, rapid growth, and the swiftly repeated cycle of boom and bust and boom again had created a pathology of cults, cranks, and thousands of hastily improvised businesses and buildings—snakes for sale, frogs for sale, diners and stores that shot up in the shapes of owls, derby hats, shoes, airships, teakettles, windmills, and mosques.

  “Los Angeles is the kind of place where perversion is perverted and prostitution prostituted,” McWilliams observ
ed. The city could seem like a vast melodrama of maladjustment. Climactic episodes took on an addictive character, and civic rituals turned inevitably into gaudy spectacle. Much of this now centered at the new Hall of Justice, the thirteen-story Beaux-Arts building in spotless light-gray California granite that occupied an entire block at the corner of Temple and Spring.

  The Hall of Justice was, and is, an impressive structure—solid, dignified, and elegant. When it opened for business in 1926, it was placed atop a hill with a handsome park in front of it, and with the enormous letters HALL OF JUSTICE chiseled in stone above the lofty entranceways. It was designed and erected at a time when the fathers of this most recklessly modern and American of cities felt they needed a Parthenon, a statement of civic intent and seriousness.

  The Hall of Justice cost $6.5 million in 1920s dollars. A barrel-vaulted entrance foyer swept through the entire length of the building, and visitors, like the folks who worked there daily, couldn’t fail to be impressed by the gold marble walls, enormous marble columns, marble floors, and gold-coffered ceiling. Elevators rose to the offices of the District Attorney on the sixth and seventh floors, the courts on the eighth, and the jury and press rooms on the ninth. Above that was the County Jail, a full three floors of cells. Most days the place was a bustling hive. The people of L.A. demanded not only fictional but real-life entertainment. The Hall of Justice, envisioned for a cast of thousands, soon became not something Greek, but the city’s equivalent of the Roman Coliseum, a grand arena of life and death.