A Bright and Guilty Place

by Richard Rayner

  Chapter 8: Shots in the Night

  The first two-thirds of the story of E. L. Doheny is wonderfully told by journalist James C. Young in a long biographical study entitled “Doheny’s Napoleonic Career” (New York Times, February 17, 1924). The biographies by Margaret Leslie Davis (now the standard) and Dan La Botz (more abrasive) were very useful here, as were Roger Ansell’s book and the obituaries that appeared in the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times (September 9 and 10, 1935). The story of Teapot Dome is excellently told in the books by Burl Noggle, and more recently by Laton McCartney. Frederick Lewis Allen’s classic Only Yesterday is great on the oil scandals and gives remarkable period flavor.

  Chapter 9: Beverly Hills C.S.I.

  White’s memoir and his diaries were invaluable again here. The profile of Lucien Wheeler that appeared in the Los Angeles Times (May 23, 1911) is great. To study the coverage of the Doheny murder/suicide that appeared in the Times, the Examiner, the Express, and the Daily News in the days immediately following the tragedy is to be enthralled. It’s like stepping into Agatha Christie, but with motives and a blunt use of power that were beyond her ken. For information on the fascinating life of Miriam Lerner, I started with Hurewitz’s Bohemian Los Angeles and Lionel Rolfe’s Literary L.A.

  Chapter 10: Cover-Up

  I relied on White’s accounts as well as the Times and Examiner reports for the two days after the killings—page after page of coverage. Guy Finney and Jules Tygiel are good in their different ways on Buron Fitts, who painted handsome portraits of himself in Who’s Who in L.A. (1928, 1929, 1930). In his autobiography Cecil B. DeMille tells the story of how Doheny tried to recruit him as, in effect, a publicist—as if Bill Gates were to try to hire Steven Spielberg to make a biopic.

  Chapter 11: Good Time Charlie

  The Ned Doheny funeral received novelistic coverage in the Examiner, the Times, the News. The history of the brilliantly named Wellborn, Wellborn & Wellborn is recorded in W. W. Robinson’s Lawyers of Los Angeles. Robinson, himself an attorney, wrote many books of excellent local history. The report on the LAPD for 1924, commissioned by August Vollmer during his brief tenureship, gives background and interviews. Beverly Davis told her story in the riveting memoir Call House Madam.

  Chapter 12: Systems Under Siege

  Good additional information on Lucien Wheeler came from the F.B.I. and White’s diaries. Detail on the Jacobson case is from the Times and the Examiner. Edmund Wilson is excellent on Bob Shuler.

  Chapter 13: Reach for a Typewriter

  Alva Johnston’s Saturday Evening Post profile of Erle Stanley Gardner (Saturday Evening Post, October 5, 12, and 19, 1946) was very useful. The books by William Nolan and Ron Goulart are good on the history of Black Mask and the pulps. White’s first story, “Phoney Evidence,” appeared in Dragnet (February 8, 1930).

  Chapter 14: Raymond Chandler—Oil Man!

  I’ve drawn on Raymond Chandler’s marvelous letters, the Chandler papers held by UCLA Special Collections, and material concerning Joseph Dabney and the Dabney Oil Syndicate at the California Institute of Technology. There’s a lot of great writing about Chandler. Frank MacShane’s biography still remains the standard, and Judith Freeman’s recent book, though much more personal in approach, is a beautiful book. Philip Durham’s early study weaves in a lot of original Chandler material.

  Chapter 15: Entrapment of a News Hound

  Morris Lavine’s daughter still runs the law firm that bears his name in Los Angeles. She gave me great background on Lavine and the “melee” concerning the $75,000. The rest of this chapter draws largely on White’s various accounts.

  Chapter 16: Running with the Foxes

  The fallout from the lawsuit brought by Joseph Dabney and others is thoroughly charted in the L.A. Times. White recorded his version of the Crawford trial. The trial of Edward L. Doheny was a nationwide event. The New York Times colorfully evoked the courtroom scene.

  Chapter 17: Zig-Zags of Graft

  Buron Fitts released details of Clark’s promotion to the Times. The New York Times obituary gave background on James T. Malone and his family. Nancy Clark’s granddaughter gave me an interview—one of those moments when history seemed to reach forward and touch the writer. Herbert Asbury’s writings on Chicago are from his book Gem of the Prairie. White’s story of his trip to Chicago is enthralling. For Charlie Crawford’s sudden finding of God: the Times, the Examiner, the News, the Express all covered this event with glee.

  Chapter 18: Red Hot Bow

  Guy Finney’s quote is from his muckraking book Angel City in Turmoil. For Clara Bow (great fun to write about), I looked to Budd Schulberg, David Stenn’s excellent biography of Bow, F. Scott Fitzgerald, David Thomson, and books by Elizabeth Kendall and Jeanine Basinger. Background to the DeVoe/Bow trial is from the Times and the Examiner. The James Richardson story is recorded in his autobiography For the Life of Me. Great background on W. I. Gilbert, the famed attorney, is to be found in Robinson’s Lawyers of Los Angeles.

  Chapter 19: The Gutting of Clara

  Details of Dave Clark’s various trips to Agua Caliente emerged later, at his own trial. People v. DeVoe received exhaustive and colorful coverage in all the L.A. papers for the days following January 12, 1931. Budd Schulberg is incisive on how his father ruthlessly shrugged off the unwanted baggage that Bow had become.

  Chapter 20: Hard Times in Lotus-Land

  The Times and the Examiner recorded the premiere of City Lights. Charlie Chaplin’s autobiography is excellent here, likewise Charles Maland’s British Film Institute study. Dorothy Comingore gave her interview to Studs Terkel—it’s in his book Hard Times. Gene Coughlin writes about meeting Einstein in his memoir—it’s funny stuff. The statements about the Depression, and the apparent absence thereof, that were habitually made in the Times throughout the early 1930s strike us now as an extreme example of the willful sticking of the corporate head in very soggy sand. Leslie White’s son, Skip, remembers how his father told him stories of his L.A. experiences at this time—the almost comical gangland adventures that could have so easily resulted in death.

  Chapter 21: Double Death on Sunset

  In writing about the deaths of Charlie Crawford and Herbert Spencer, and the subsequent trials of Dave Clark, I constructed a detailed timeline from the trial transcripts of People v. David Harris Clark and from all the newspaper coverage I could lay my hands on (about three thousand pages in all) from the Times, the Examiner, the Express, and the Daily News. Gene Coughlin, lured back to the News by owner Manchester Boddy, wrote wonderfully about these events.

  Chapter 22: The Ballad of Dave Clark

  Robinson’s Lawyers of Los Angeles has good detail on prosecutor Joe Ford. Geoffrey Cowan’s “People v. Clarence Darrow” discussed Ford’s earlier career and his involvement in the jury-tampering prosecutions of Clarence Darrow following the bombing of the Times building in 1910.

  Chapter 23: They Can Hang You

  Here I relied on the trial transcript and my newspaper timeline. Interestingly, each of the major papers had, along with their chief reporters (like Coughlin), another reporter who sat in court and made a transcript of what was said during the most important moments of testimony. Human accuracy being what it is, these supposedly exact records differ in terms of nuance and how dialogue is recorded. There’s no real reason to suppose that the court stenographer was necessarily more accurate than these newspaper professionals—but when a discrepancy appears glaring, I’ve gone with the dialogue as in the trial transcript.

  Chapter 24: Telling It All

  Bob Shuler’s The Strange Death of Charlie Crawford is, as they say in the antiquarian trade, “a tough book”—in other words very difficult to find. UCLA’s copy has been stolen, likewise that belonging to USC. The Los Angeles Public Library’s copy was destroyed in a fire. I consulted the one at the California State Library in Sacramento.

  Chapter 25: Verdicts

  Again, I’ve relied here on the trial transcrip
ts and the timeline I made from the press coverage.

  Chapter 26: A Hooker’s Tale

  Much here is drawn from White’s diaries and Me, Detective. The Love Mart trial received extensive coverage in the Times, the Examiner, and the other papers. “Brick” Garrigues’s swashbuckling pamphlet “So They Indicted Fitts!” was also useful here. George Creel’s piece “Unholy City” appeared in Collier’s (September 2, 1939).

  Chapter 27: Music of the City

  I first came across the phrase “a bright and guilty place” in The Cinema of Orson Welles, a 1961 book by Peter Bogdanovich. I was lucky enough to meet Welles in London back in 1983. When asked about Los Angeles, he merely roared with laughter. More of Leslie White’s writing deserves to find its way back into print. Copies of Me, Detective are tough to find, and expensive.

  Chapter 28: Black Mask Merry-Go-Round

  This chapter is indebted to the Chandler sources detailed above. To the best of my knowledge, nobody has ever before spotted the connection between his early story “Spanish Blood” and the Spencer/Crawford killings. In his essay “Cracking the Cassidy Case” (a Chandler fictional case), Robert Moss drew the parallel between The High Window and the Doheny affair. The history of Black Mask is well recorded by both William F. Nolan and Otto Penzler. Horace McCoy’s papers are at UCLA.

  Chapter 29: Sad Song

  That Dave Clark’s wanderings and misbehavings should continue to be the subject of reportage not only in Los Angeles but in New York, too, is a mark of the huge impact those trials made in 1931. His end is haunting, and Nancy Clark’s descendants attest that she loved him to the end.

  Chapter 30: Lives Go On

  In tracing the future histories of my characters, I relied on interviews, newspaper obituaries, and the mentioned biographical sources. The surface of Los Angeles evolves by the moment, and there is something in the flatness of the customary daytime light that dissuades the viewer from contemplating the city’s past. But it’s there, if you look long enough.

  Chapter 31: A Personal Note

  Bill Buford, back in the days when he was editing Granta, called me when the Rodney King riots kicked off and demanded that I hit the streets and do some reporting. I suggested to him that he wanted me to get myself killed. Bill paused before replying: “No. Injured would be good.” The piece I wrote prompted Kyle Crichton, then an editor on the New York Times Magazine, to ask me to write about the LAPD and whether, in the wake of everything that had happened, the department could be fixed. A simple magazine assignment turned into months of work and a 40,000-word first draft delivering a simple enough answer: probably not. The photographer, Joe Rodriguez, and I became so obsessed that we just disappeared into the story. We got to know the guys at the Rampart precinct so well we were simply showing up at the bunker-like car park and jumping in the back of squad cars. For the public relations department of the LAPD, this was no doubt a nightmare, but for Joe and me it was a transformative eye-opener. We saw bad cops, dumb cops, violent cops, and great cops too. The city came alive for me, and the story, which appeared on the cover of the New York Times Magazine, prompted an ACLU investigation. It was David Ulin who switched me on to Myron Brinnig’s extraordinary novel in which, at a moment of ultimate climax, Los Angeles simply slides into the Pacific. It probably won’t happen, but then in L.A. you never can tell.

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