ACOSTA, OSCAR ZETA Chicano lawyer, activist, memoirist, novelist. Author of Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo and the un-squashable Revolt of the Cockroach People. Inspiration for the Samoan lawyer Dr. Gonzo in Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Also immortalized in Thompson’s Rolling Stone article about the Chicano movement, “Strange Rumblings in Aztlan.” Like Ambrose Bierce before him, disappeared into Mexico. Quoted from Oscar “Zeta” Acosta: The Uncollected Works, edited by Ilan Stavans (Houston: Arte Publico, 1996).
ADAMIC, LOUIS Pioneering immigrant author of Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence in America and Laughing in the Jungle. Lived for a time in a pilothouse at the mouth of San Pedro Bay. Quoted from Laughing in the Jungle: The Autobiography of an Immigrant in America (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1932).
ADORNO, THEODOR Refugee philosopher. Wrote The Psychological Technique of [L.A.-based preacher] Martin Luther Thomas’ Radio Addresses and most of Minima Moralia while exiled on the Westside. Quoted from Letters to His Parents: 1939–1951 (Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley, 2006).
AGEE, JAMES Film and book critic, author of A Death in the Family and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Screenwriter of The African Queen and The Night of the Hunter. Visited Los Angeles periodically in the forties and fifties to interview filmmakers for Time and to work on screenplays, both produced and un-. These included one for Chaplin about the Little Tramp after a nuclear apocalypse, and African Queen for John Huston, whose demands for revisions and tennis games helped give Agee a heart attack. Quoted from Letters of James Agee to Father Flye (New York: Melville House, 2014).
AINSWORTH, ED Los Angeles Times columnist. Also ghostwriter of The California I Love, the autobiography of Leo Carrillo, who played the Cisco Kid on television and may well be the first person born in Los Angeles ever to become nationally famous. Quoted from the Los Angeles Times.
ALPERSTEIN, ELLEN Los Angeles journalist, blogger, and longtime contributor to laobserved.com, where this entry first appeared. By gracious permission of the author.
ANZA, JUAN BAUTISTA DE Basque explorer and governor of New Mexico under Spain. Quoted from Anza’s California Expeditions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1930).
ARMSTRONG, HEATHER B. Blogger known as Dooce; one of the first to make a living at it. Posts from dooce.com appear here by gracious permission of the author.
ASBURY, AMY Memoirist. Published in The Sunset Strip Diaries (Los Angeles: Estep & Fitzgerald Books, 2010).
AUDUBON, JOHN W. Son of the naturalist, writer, and painter John James Audubon, author of Birds of America. Quoted from Audubon’s Western Journal: 1849–1850 (Cleveland: The Arthur H. Clark Company, 1906).
BANCROFT, HUBERT HOWE The first great historian of California. Ran a virtual historiographic sweatshop, employing a phalanx of freelancers to help research and write his multivolume account of the state. Much reviled since, but patently unignorable. Quoted from History of California (San Francisco: The History Company, 1884–1890).
BANDINI, DON JUAN BAUTISTA Long-lived diarist, descendant of Californios. As with Don Pio Pico, the world he was born into bore little resemblance to the one he departed. Diary of Juan Bautista Bandini, Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif.
BANNING, WILLIAM Son of the entrepreneur Phineas Banning, who was known as the Father of the Port of Los Angeles for his indefatigable early efforts to move people and freight inland at a tidy profit. Banning Brothers Letters Collection, Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif.
BEALE, E. F. American soldier stationed at Fort Tejon, and commander of America’s first Camel Corps.
BEHAN, BRENDAN Playwright, author of Borstal Boy. The letter quoted is viewable on a wall in the Dublin Writers Museum.
BELLETTI, VALERIA Secretary to Samuel Goldwyn and other studio heads, lovingly delivered from obscurity by film historian Cari Beauchamp. Quotations from Adventures of a Hollywood Secretary: Her Private Letters from Inside the Studios of the 1920s, used by kind permission of the editors, Cari Beauchamp and Margery Baragona (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).
BENÉT, STEPHEN VINCENT Yale-educated author of The Devil and Daniel Webster and Western Star, a long narrative poem about Manifest Destiny that won the Pulitzer Prize before Benét could finish it. He never did. Quotations from Selected Letters of Stephen Vincent Benét, edited by Charles A. Fenton (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1960).
BENNETT, ALAN Screenwriter, novelist, and playwright of, among other works, Talking Heads, An Englishman Abroad, The Madness of King George, and The History Boys. Bennett first came to prominence writing sketches and acting alongside Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller, and Dudley Moore in Beyond the Fringe, a hastily mounted late-night revue at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. They were the only four men in England brilliant enough to claim convincingly that they found one another boring. Bennett was the shy one and easily the most formidable dramatic writer of the three. In his fine script for Prick Up Your Ears, a hapless mortician tries to mingle the cremated remains of the British playwright Joe Orton and his partner, who has killed them both. The undertaker empties one urn into the other, then sprinkles some of those ashes back into the first. He looks about to make a project of it when Vanessa Redgrave, playing Orton’s agent and executrix, deadpans: “It’s a gesture, not a recipe.” Bennett has also kept a diary for most of his life. He chanced through Hollywood for at least one film premiere and left unbesotted. Quoted from Writing Home (New York: Random House, 1995).
BERTENSSON, SERGEI Filmmaking factotum. Quoted from My First Time in Hollywood, edited by Cari Beauchamp (Los Angeles: Asahina & Wallace, 2015).
BIGLER, HENRY W. Pioneer, present the year before at the discovery of gold at Coloma on the American River. Quoted from Journals of Forty-niners: Salt Lake to Los Angeles: with Diaries and Contemporary Records of Sheldon Young, James S. Brown, Jacob Y. Stover, Charles C. Rich, Addison Pratt, Howard Egan, Henry W. Bigler, and Others (Glendale, Calif.: Arthur H. Clark, 1954).
BIXBY, AUGUSTUS SIMON Farmer from the famed Bixby dynasty, to whom the idyllic Rancho Los Cerritos once belonged. Diary of Augustus Simon Bixby, Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif.
BOUTON, JIM Baseball player, author of Ball Four and its cruelly forgotten sequel, I’m Glad You Didn’t Take It Personally. Visited southern California in 1969 to play the Angels. Whether Ball Four robbed America of its heroes or, as many think, actually helped humanize the players in fans’ eyes, these funny, well-observed diaries made readers out of more than a few Little Leaguers who grew up to be writers, present company included. Quoted from Ball Four: My Life and Hard Times Throwing the Knuckleball in the Big Leagues, edited by Leonard Shecter (New York: World Books, 1970).
BRACKETT, CHARLES Screenwriter-producer, longtime writing partner of Billy Wilder’s earlier, less raunchy, more urbane comedies. Quoted from It’s the Pictures That Got Small: Charles Brackett on Billy Wilder and Hollywood’s Golden Age, edited by Anthony Slide (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). Used by permission.
BRADBURY, RAY Author of Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles; screenwriter of Moby-Dick. Among Bradbury’s ancestors was a Salem, Massachusetts, woman tried for witchcraft in the seventeenth century. His parents drove across the country to Los Angeles in 1934, with young Ray piling out of their jalopy at every stop to plunder the local library in search of L. Frank Baum’s Oz books. Two years later, Bradbury experienced a rite of passage familiar to most early science-fiction readers: the realization that he was not alone. At a secondhand bookstore in Hollywood, he discovered a handbill promoting meetings of the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society. Thrilled, he joined a weekly Thursday-night conclave that would grow to attract such science-fiction legends as Robert A. Heinlein, Leigh Brackett, and the future founder of Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard. Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451 on a rental typewriter in the basement of UCLA’s Lawrence Clark Powell Library, one invaluable dime at a time. Quoted from The Bradbury Chronicles: The Life of Ray Bradbury by Sam Weller (New York: William Morrow, 2005).
BRECHT, BERTOLT Author of, among other plays, Galileo, Mother Courage, and The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. Fled Europe for Santa Monica. After World War II, fled Joseph McCarthy for Europe again. Quoted from Bertolt Brecht Journals, 1934–1955 (London: Methuen, 1993).
BREMER, SYLVIA STRUM Newspaper columnist. Visited L.A. as a junketeer and, only occasionally starstruck, filed stories for the folks back home. Her reports were published in the Davenport, Iowa, Daily Times, in 1956.
BREWER, WILLIAM H. Botanist on the first California Geological Survey; first chair of agriculture at Yale. Quoted from Up and Down California in 1860–1864: The Journal of William H. Brewer (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1930).
BRIGGS, L. VERNON Pioneering forensic psychiatrist. Quoted from his Arizona and New Mexico, 1882; California, 1886; Mexico, 1891 (Boston: Privately printed, 1932).
BRITTEN, BENJAMIN British composer of Peter and the Wolf, The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, and Peter Grimes, the latter inspired by his discovery of George Crabbe’s poems in a maddeningly unspecified Los Angeles bookstore. At the time, he was staying with Peter Pears at the Escondido home of a patron, working against the imminent world premiere in L.A. of his first string quartet. Published in Letters from a Life: Selected Diaries and Letters of Benjamin Britten, edited by Philip Reed and Donald Mitchell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).
BRYANT, EDWIN Quoted from his What I Saw in California, Being the Journal of a Tour by the Emigrant Route and South Pass of the Rocky Mountains, Across North America, the Great Desert Basin in the Years 1846, 1847 (New York: Appleton, 1849).
BUKOWSKI, CHARLES Poet, novelist, and “Notes of a Dirty Old Man” columnist for the Los Angeles Free Press. Quoted from Screams from the Balcony: Selected Letters, 1960–1970 (Santa Rosa, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press, 1993).
BURMAN, JENNY Erstwhile author of the Echo Park blog Chicken Corner. Quoted by gracious permission of the author.
BURROUGHS, EDGAR RICE Imaginatively gifted and lavishly prolific novelist, creator of Tarzan of the Apes and Princess of Mars, founder of Tarzana. All quotations from Edgar Rice Burroughs © 1975, 2017 Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. All rights reserved. Trademarks TARZAN® and Edgar Rice Burroughs® Owned by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc., and used by permission.
BURTON, RICHARD Brilliant Welsh actor. Played Hamlet for Gielgud, married Elizabeth Taylor, costarred with her in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? for Mike Nichols, and enjoyed a long career in roles both great and awful. In L.A. occasionally for film work, doomed award nominations, and, improbably, to brush up his Spanish before shooting The Night of the Iguana in Mexico. Quoted from The Richard Burton Diaries, edited by Chris Williams (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2012).
BUTLER, OCTAVIA E. MacArthur Fellowship–winning author of, among other works, Kindred and Parable of the Sower. Born and raised in Pasadena, which appears in disguised form in some of her work. Labored in solitude until she found camaraderie among other science fiction and fantasy writers, especially Harlan Ellison. Years after her death from a fall, her reputation continues to rise. Octavia E. Butler papers, The Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif.
BUTLER, OCTAVIA M. Mother of Octavia E. Butler.
CABRILLO, JUAN RODRÍGUEZ Mariner, explorer.
CAGE, JOHN Composer, musician, Joycean. Born in Los Angeles. His mother wrote about society and classical music for the Los Angeles Times back when they were often the same thing. Studied under Arnold Schoenberg. His experimental “silent” sonata, 4'33", was the first of his pioneering works to be influenced by random chance. Absquatulated. Returned to L.A. late in life for a production of his Joyce-inspired “composition for museum,” Rolywholyover. Quoted from The Selected Letters of John Cage, edited by Laura Kuhn (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2016).
CALVINO, ITALO Author of Invisible Cities and If on a winter’s night a traveler. Taught at UCLA for a semester. Did not go native. Quoted from Hermit in Paris: Autobiographical Writings (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007).
CAMPBELL, JULIA Student at UCLA. Quoted from class diaries by gracious permission.
CARR, HARRY Carr saw the city as it was, and L.A. loved him for it. The forgotten patron saint of Southland journalists, he scooped the world on the San Francisco Earthquake and rode with Zapata during the Revolution. Among the first telecommuting journalists, he was writing from home in Tujunga when he warned, apropos of Thelma Todd and John Gilbert’s recent passings, that “Death cuts down the famous by threes in Hollywood.” Hours later, Carr’s heart attack supplied the third. Quoted from Los Angeles, City of Dreams (New York: D. Appleton-Century Company, 1935).
CARR, WILLIAM American immigrant to California in 1849. Witness to the Colorado River massacre at the heart of Cormac McCarthy’s novel Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West. Testimony published in Southern California Quarterly, vol. 6 (Los Angeles: Geo. Rice & Sons, 1904).
CATHER, WILLA American author of novels including My Antonía, Death Comes for the Archbishop, and The Song of the Lark. Stayed in Long Beach and commuted to Pasadena to care for her ailing mother. Not predisposed to love the place, and didn’t. Quoted from The Selected Letters of Willa Cather (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013).
CHANDLER, RAYMOND Author of The Big Sleep, creator of detective Philip Marlowe, co-screenwriter of Strangers on a Train. Directly or indirectly, Chandler has colored Angelenos’ perceptions of their city more than any other writer. Quoted from Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler, edited by Frank MacShane (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981).
CHAVEZ, CESAR Co-founder of the United Farm Workers. Wielding the power of the hunger strike and the boycott, he fought for and won the first binding farmworker contracts ever negotiated in California. Apprenticed and flourished as a community organizer in Boyle Heights alongside Grapes of Wrath dedicatee Fred Ross, under the auspices of Saul Alinsky. Born in Yuma, he is buried at the National Chavez Center in Tehachapi, in the mountains that divide the state he did so much to unite. Quoted from The Crusades of Cesar Chavez: A Biography, by Miriam Pawel (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014).
CHÁVEZ-SILVERMAN, SUSANA Los Angeles–born Spanglish writer, scholar; author also of Killer Crónicas. Quoted from Scenes from la Cuenca de Los Angeles y Otros Natural Disasters (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2010).
CHEEVER, JOHN Novelist and short-story writer, author of the Wapshot novels, Bullet Park, and Falconer. Passed through L.A. en route to Manila in 1945 for the Signal Corps. Returned periodically, staying with friends John Weaver (q.v.) and his wife. Published in Glad Tidings: A Friendship in Letters. The Correspondence of John Cheever and John D. Weaver, 1945–1982 (New York: HarperCollins, 1993).
CHURCHILL, WINSTON British politician, hero. As prime minister, rallied his countrymen to victory in World War II. Turfed out soon after. Awarded the Nobel Prize in literature for his history of the war. Visited L.A. a month before the 1929 Crash. Met Hearst, Chaplin, and a swordfish, to the latter’s cost. Published in Speaking for Themselves: The Personal Letters of Winston and Clementine Churchill, edited by Baroness Mary Soames (née Mary Spencer Churchill) (New York: Doubleday, 1998).
COLEMAN, WANDA Fearsome doyenne of the L.A. poetry scene for decades. Fugitive from TV soap opera writing. Author of the National Book Award–nominated Mercurochrome. Quoted from The Riot Inside Me: More Trials & Tremors (Boston: David R. Godine, 2005).
COOKE, ALISTAIR Broadcaster and author, best known for his long-running, only partly catalogued BBC Radio essays explaining the ways of Americans to the British. Returned to L.A. frequently to visit friends and file observations for the Beeb, including the horrific one quoted here. Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP.
COPLAND, AARON Composer of Fanfare for the Common Man, Billy the Kid, and A Lincoln Portrait. Wrote scores for The Heiress, The Red Pony, and Of Mice and Men. A delightful photo survives of him poolside in Palm Springs, in shorts, at a typewriter, mountains looming behind him. Quoted from The Selected Correspondence of Aaron Copland (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006).
COPPOLA, ELEANOR Writer-director of Paris Can Wait. Eloquent diarist of, among other experiences, the descent into genius of the screenwriter-director Francis Ford Coppola on the set of Apocalypse Now. Quoted from Notes on a Life (New York: Nan A. Talese, 2008).
CORWIN, NORMAN Writer, radio scenarist of On a Note of Triumph, screenwriter of Lust for Life. Quoted from Norman Corwin’s Letters, edited by A. J. Langguth (New York: Barricade Books, 1994).
COSTANSÓ, MIGUEL Catalan cartographer and cosmographer. Quoted from The Portola Expedition of 1769–1770: Diary of Miguel Costansó (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1911).
COWARD, NOËL Playwright, actor, songwriter. Returned to L.A. periodically to see friends and perform for films and onstage. Quoted from The Noël Coward Diaries, edited by Graham Payn and Sheridan Morley (New York: Little, Brown, 1982).
CRAFT, ROBERT Boswell to Igor Stravinsky’s Johnson. Quoted from Dialogues and a Diary, by himself and Stravinsky (New York: Doubleday, 1963).
CRANE, HART Poet. Stayed over the winter from 1927 to 1928 visiting family, acting as companion to a wealthy Altadenan. Met Chaplin, drank with E. E. Cummings, was gay-bashed in San Pedro. Quoted from The Letters of Hart Crane, 1916–1932, edited by Brom Weber (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1965).
CREASON, GLEN Map librarian at the Los Angeles Central Library. Quoted by gracious permission of the author.
CRESPI, FRAY JUAN Expedition chaplain. Quoted from Fray Juan Crespi, Missionary Explorer on the Pacific Coast 1769–1774, edited by Herbert Eugene Bolton (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1927).
CUMMINGS, E. E. American poet. Accepted Eric Knight’s entreaties to visit. Stayed two months and angled for Hollywood money, to no avail. Quoted from Selected Letters of E. E. Cummings (New York: Harper, 1972).
DALTON, HENRY Rancher and newspaper publisher. Papers of Henry Dalton, Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif.
DANA, RICHARD HENRY Author of the first bestseller about California, Two Years Before the Mast, an account of his hitch as a midshipman up and down the Pacific Coast. Most editions contain his shorter account of a return visit twenty years later, when he found the state utterly transformed. Quoted from Two Years Before the Mast (New York: Library of America, 2005).
DEAN, JAMES Actor, star of Rebel Without a Cause, Giant, and East of Eden. The letter quoted was sent to his sometime girlfriend Barbara Glenn and published at lettersofnote.com, edited by Shaun Usher.
DE BEAUVOIR, SIMONE Author and groundbreaking feminist. Toured America, including Los Angeles. Liked what she saw of it. Quoted from America Day by Day (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
DE LA ASCENSIÓN, FATHER ANTONIO Missionary. Quoted from Spanish Exploration in the Southwest, 1542–1706, edited by Herbert Eugene Bolton (New York: Scribners, 1916).
DEL OLMO, FRANK Newspaperman, longtime L.A. Times editor, columnist. Well remembered for a continuing series about his autistic son, Frankie. Inspiration to a generation of journalists. There’s a school named after him on First Street. It’s not enough. Quoted from Frank Del Olmo: Commentaries on His Times (Los Angeles: Los Angeles Times Books, 2004).
DE MILLE, AGNES Dancer, choreographer, UCLA English major. Niece of the director Cecil B. DeMille (the silent and sound versions of The Ten Commandments) and granddaughter of the great California social economist Henry George (“What the Railroad Will Bring Us”). Quoted from No Intermissions: The Life of Agnes de Mille, by Carol Easton (Boston: Little, Brown, 1996).
DE PORTOLÁ, GASPAR Explorer. Quoted from The Official Account of the Portolá Expedition of 1769–1770, edited by Frederick J. Teggart (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1909).
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 Dates (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.
HESTON, CHARLTON Actor, star of The Ten Commandments, The Omega Man, Will Penny, and Planet of the Apes. Quoted from The Actor’s Life: Journals, 1956–1976, edited by Hollis Alpert (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1978).
HILL, JEREMIAH Indian fighter. Quoted from “Origin of the Trouble Between the Yumas and Glanton. Deposition of Jeremiah Hill,” The Quarterly (journal of the Historical Society of Southern California), vol. 6, p. 62 (1904).
HISA, AOKI Wife, mother, World War II internee, writer. Quoted from White Road of Thorns, edited by Mary Y. Nakamura (Los Angeles: Xlibris, 2015).
HOLLINGSWORTH, LIEUTENANT JOHN MCHENRY A Baltimore-born great-grandson of Justice Samuel Chase, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. Later the superintendent of George Washington’s Mount Vernon home for many years. He left a widow, no children, and perhaps our best record of life in Los Angeles on the verge of statehood. Quoted from Journal of Lieutenant John McHenry Hollingsworth of the First New York Volunteers [Stevenson’s Regiment] September 1846–August 1849. Being a recital of the voyage of the Susan Drew to California; the arrival of the regiment in 1847; its military movements and adventures during 1847-1848-1849; incidents of daily life, and adventures of the author in the gold mines (San Francisco: California Historical Society, 1923).
HOPPER, HEDDA Gossip columnist. Longtime rival of Louella Parsons. When she typed, Hollywood quaked. Quoted from her column, “Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood.” New York: Hearst Newspapers, 1941.
HUGHES, LANGSTON Poet, vital contributor to the Harlem Renaissance. In and out of Hollywood before World War II, working on songs and sketches for liberal revues. Was picketed at a Pasadena Hotel by the evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson and her congregants, then ungently escorted out of a potentially lucrative book luncheon by police. Quoted from Selected Letters of Langston Hughes, edited by Arnold Rampersad, David Roessel, and Christa Fratantoro (New York: Knopf, 2015).
HURSTON, ZORA NEALE Author of the epochal novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, with its ageless opening line, “Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board.” Born in Notsaluga, Alabama, in 1891, Hurston wanted to write great literature about African American lives, and she succeeded. Came to Hollywood in 1941 as a story consultant for Paramount. Lived in West Adams, almost across the street from the William Andrews Clark mansion, later home to some of the UCLA Library’s rarest collections. Quoted from Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston, by Valerie Boyd (New York: Scribners, 2003).
HUSTON, JOHN Great adapter and director of literature from The Maltese Falcon through The Dead.
HUTTON, WILLIAM RICH Artist and surveyor. Quoted from Glances at California, 1847–1853: Diaries and Letters of William Rich Hutton, with a Brief Memoir and Notes by Willard O. Waters (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library Press, 1942).
HUXLEY, ALDOUS British author of Brave New World, After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, and The Doors of Perception. Relocated to Los Angeles originally for eye treatment and eventually for enlightenment, both chemical and not. Quoted from Selected Letters of Aldous Huxley, edited by James Sexton (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2007).
IDLE, ERIC Writer, lyricist, performer, Python. Long resident in Southern California. Quoted from his The Greedy Bastard Diary: A Comic Diary of America (New York: HarperCollins, 2005).
IKEDA, TOMOKO Japanese American schoolgirl, internee. Quoted courtesy of the Japanese American National Museum (2000.378).
IMMEN, LORAINE Elocutionist and clubwoman. Visited California in the winter and spring of 1896. Quoted from Letters of Travel in California (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Privately published, 1896).
ISHERWOOD, CHRISTOPHER Author of The Berlin Stories and A Single Man, screenwriter, with Don Bachardy, of Frankenstein: The True Story, pioneering chronicler of gay life. Even a cursory reading of his work discloses a master stylist whose undeniable importance to gay literature, California literature, and the literature of pre–World War II Germany tends to obscure his contribution to literature, full stop. He caught this place as few have. Quoted from the three volumes of his Diaries (New York: Harper, 1996, 2010, 2012); and The Animals: Love Letters Between Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux). All edited and introduced by Katherine Bucknell.
JACKSON, HELEN HUNT Author of Ramona, advocate for Native American rights. Quoted from The Indian Reform Letters of Helen Hunt Jackson, 1879–1885, edited by Valerie Sherer Mathes (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998).
JACKSON, WILLIAM HENRY Saddle tramp, later an influential Western photographer. Quoted from The Diaries of William Henry Jackson, Frontier Photographer, edited by LeRoy R. Hafen and Ann W. Hafen (Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark, 1959).
JAMES, CLIVE Critic, literary essayist, polymath. Here on a visit, filmed for broadcast. Quoted from Flying Visits (London: Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1984).
JARRELL, RANDALL Poet, critic, novelist. Lived here in the twenties with his paternal grandparents. Quoted from Randall Jarrell’s Letters: An Autobiographical and Literary Selection, edited by Mary Jarrell (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985).
JEFFERS, ROBINSON “The great poet of the American West Coast,” per California’s poet laureate, Dana Gioia. Went to Occidental, where he wooed his beloved Una away from her husband, and cribbed the idea for his dramatic Tor House from writer-stonemason Charles Lummis’s “El Alisal.” Quoted from Collected Letters of Robinson Jeffers, with Selected Letters of Una Jeffers, edited by James Karman (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009).
JEFFERS, UNA KUSTER Wife of above; muse, mainstay. An Angelena until she and Jeffers fled scandal to Carmel. Quoted from Collected Letters of Robinson Jeffers, with Selected Letters of Una Jeffers, edited by James Karman (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009).
JOHNSON, NUNNALLY Screenwriter-producer best known for The Grapes of Wrath. Quoted from The Letters of Nunnally Johnson, edited by Dorris Johnson and Ellen Leventhal (New York: Knopf, 1981).
JOHNSTON, ALVA Pulitzer-winning, Sacramento-born, New York–employed, California-posted journalist. Biographer of, among others, Samuel Goldwyn, Erle Stanley Gardner, and, more to the point, Edgar Rice Burroughs (q.v.). He numbered among the generations of East Coast correspondents who really corresponded, writing descriptive letters home to their readers (and editors), taking care not to sound as if they were having too good a time. Quoted in Edgar Rice Burroughs: The Man Who Created Tarzan, by Irwin Porges (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 1975).
JONES, JAMES Author of From Here to Eternity and The Thin Red Line. Caught his breath here after finishing Eternity. Quoted from To Reach Eternity: The Letters of James Jones, edited by George Hendrick (New York: Random House, 1989).
JOYCE, JAMES Author of Dubliners, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake. Never visited Los Angeles, but it’s my book. Quoted from Finnegans Wake (New York: Viking Press, 1939).
KAPLAN, SAM HALL Urban planner, first ever architecture critic of the Los Angeles Times. Quoted from his L.A. Follies: Design and Other Diversions in a Fractured Metropolis (Malibu, Calif.: Cityscape Press, 1989).
KAZAN, ELIA Stage and film director of On the Waterfront, East of Eden, and A Face in the Crowd. Quoted from The Selected Letters of Elia Kazan, edited by Albert J. Devlin with Marlene J. Devlin (New York: Knopf, 2014).
KELLOGG, CAROLYN Book editor, Los Angeles Times. Kellogg works in a large for-profit company, the Los Angeles Times, and does a job not commonly thought to be all that creative, i.e., assigning and editing book coverage. But she finds young, raw writers and somehow turns them into cogent, graceful critics. Her matchmaking skills between reviewer and material are impeccable. The indicator species for literary culture, and quite possibly American daily journalism, is book coverage. Kellogg keeps it alive and lively. Quoted by gracious permission.
KEROUAC, JACK Author of On the Road and The Dharma Bums. Rode a northbound freight through town. Quoted from Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac 1947–1954, edited by Douglas Brinkley (New York: Viking, 2004).
KIP, WILLIAM INGRAHAM Yale-educated first bishop of California. Great-great-grandfather of the political financiers the Koch brothers. Quoted from his The Early Days of My Episcopate (New York: T. Whittaker, 1902).
KIRSCH, ROBERT Book critic, novelist. Patriarch of the Kirsch book-reviewing dynasty that includes son Jonathan and grandson Adam. He reviewed a book every morning in the Los Angeles Times for decades and, like his opposite number at the San Francisco Chronicle, Joseph Henry Jackson, read himself into an early grave. Quoted from his Lives, Works & Transformations (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Capra Press, 1978).
KNIGHT, ERIC This Yorkshire-born screen- (and brilliant letter-) writer of the 1930s, after almost losing his sanity doing thankless hackwork for the studios, walked away one day and built a farmhouse with his bare hands in what’s now the San Fernando Valley. His equilibrium gradually restored, he started writing again and wound up turning out an unsung classic noir, You Play the Black and the Red Comes Up, and another novel that became one of the most beloved kids’ movies of all time. Few realize that the Yorkshire-born title character was really based on Toots, the lovable best friend he found in Northridge. We know her better as Lassie. Knight also wrote acclaimed patriotic documentaries for Frank Capra before dying tragically in a World War II plane crash. Quoted from Down and Out in Hollow-Weird: A Documentary in Letters of Eric Knight, by Geoff Gehman (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 1985), and Portrait of a Flying Yorkshireman: Letters from Eric Knight in the United States to Paul Rotha in England, edited by Paul Rotha (London: Chapman & Hall, 1952).
L’AMOUR, LOUIS Beloved, prolific author, primarily of westerns, including the influential Hondo, and some early L.A. crime fiction. Lived and wrote here later in life, finally coming to rest at Forest Lawn. Quoted from The Best of Rob Wagner’s Script, edited by Anthony Slide (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 1985).
LAWRENCE, D. H. Groundbreakingly frank British novelist. Author of Women in Love, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, The Rainbow, many others. Cruised through L.A. during his New Mexico years. Subject of Geoff Dyer’s terrific reluctant biography, Out of Sheer Rage. Quoted by Carey McWilliams in “Tides West,” the books column for Westways, the magazine of the Automobile Club of Southern California.
LECOUVREUR, FRANK Prussian immigrant, later a county clerk, surveyor, and businessman. Quoted from From East Prussia to the Golden Gate, translated by Julius C. Behnke (New York and Los Angeles: Angelina Book Concern, 1906).
LENNON, JOHN Musician, poet, Beatle. A regular visitor for concerts, with and without the Beatles. Quoted from John, by Cynthia Lennon (New York: Crown/Archetype, 2010).
LEOVY, JILL Author of Ghettoside, versatile Los Angeles Times journalist, especially about crime. Inaugurated the paper’s acclaimed murder blog, memorializing each new homicide victim in the city. Diary entry originally published in Slate, later included in The Slate Diaries, edited by Jodi Kantor, Cyrus Krohn, and Judith Shulevitz and 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.
LEWIS, SINCLAIR First American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Author of Babbitt, Main Street, Elmer Gantry, Dodsworth. Debated publicly in L.A. whether fascism could happen here, at the Philharmonic Auditorium for Rabbi Herman Lissauer’s sadly unremembered Modern Forum. Quoted in The War Between the State, by Jon Winokur (Seattle: Sasquatch Books, 2004).
LINDSAY, VACHEL Major American poet, also author of The Art of the Moving Picture. Wrote his most famous poem, “General William Booth Enters into Heaven,” in Los Angeles. Quoted from Letters of Vachel Lindsay (New York: Lenox Hill Publishing, 1979).
LIVERIGHT, HORACE Publisher and co-founder of the Modern Library. Tried to reinvent himself in L.A. late in life, alas without success. Quoted from Firebrand: The Life of Horace Liveright, by Tom Dardis (New York: Random House, 1995).
LONDON, JACK Author of The Call of the Wild, Martin Eden, and The People of the Abyss. Used to come down to watch prizefights and duck creditors. Quoted from The Letters of Jack London: 1913–1916, edited by Earle Labor, Robert C. Leitz, and Milo Shepherd (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1988).
LOPEZ, STEVE Newspaper columnist, novelist. Maybe Northern Californians get L.A. better than the natives do. First there was Joan Didion, blowing south out of Sacramento like some neurasthenic tule fog, writing the books that color how we see Los Angeles even today. Now Angelenos have Steve Lopez, a bread-truck-driver’s son from Pittsburg, California, whose city-side column may be the best thing to appear in the Los Angeles Times since Nixon’s hometown op-ed page demanded his impeachment. Quoted from “A Bright Future Bought with Hard Work and Lots of Tacos,” Los Angeles Times, May 30, 2003.
LOVE, MIKE Beach Boy; songwriting partner and cousin of Brian Wilson. Lyric from “The Warmth of the Sun,” published by Irving Music, affiliated with BMI.
LOWENSTEIN, MANNIE Shopkeeper. Quoted from Mannie’s Crowd: Emanuel Lowenstein, Colorful Character of Old Los Angeles, and a Brief Diary of the Trip to Arizona and Life in Tucson of the Early 1880s, by Norton B. Stern (Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark, 1970).
LOWRY, MALCOLM Author of Under the Volcano. Met his wife here. Worked on Under the Volcano at the Normandie Hotel—later a cannabis hostel, now a boutique inn with the storied Cassell’s Hamburgers grilling again on the ground floor. Quoted from Selected Letters of Malcolm Lowry, edited by Harvey Breit and Margerie Bonner Lowry (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1965).
LUBITSCH, ERNST Director of Ninotchka and other sophisticated comic romances. Quoted from The Best of Rob Wagner’s Script, edited by Anthony Slide (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 1985).
LUMMIS, CHARLES Newspaperman, city librarian, archaeologist, and founder of the Southwest Museum. Also a booster, self-promoter, windbag, mountebank, and rapscallion. Diaries in the Charles Fletcher Lummis Papers, 1850–1929. Braun Research Library Collection, Autry Museum of the American West; MS.1.
MACDONALD, ROSS Author of The Chill, the surprisingly contemporary Black Money, and other novels featuring detective Lew Archer. Quoted from Meanwhile There Are Letters: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and Ross Macdonald, edited by Suzanne Marrs and Tom Nolan (New York: Arcade, 2015).
MAGAÑA, BENEDICTA M. Eastside Angelena. Personal letter to her brother.
MAGON, RICARDO FLORES Mexican revolutionary and journalist, briefly resident in Edendale. Lived near Red Hill in Echo Park while on the lam from the Mexican government. Did time as a guest of the local constabulary. Quoted from Dreams of Freedom: A Ricardo Flores Magon Reader, edited by Chaz Bufe and Mitchell Cowen Verter (Oakland, Calif.: AK Press, 2005).
MAILER, NORMAN Novelist, journalist, filmmaker, author of The Naked and the Dead and The Armies of the Night—and a Palm Springs–set Hollywood novel, The Deer Park. Covered the 1960 Democratic Convention at the Sports Arena when JFK won the nomination. Returned on book tours, granting voluble interviews to journalists including this one. Quoted from Selected Letters of Norman Mailer, edited by J. Michael Lennon (New York: Random House, 2014).
MANN, THOMAS Nobel Prize–winning German author of The Magic Mountain, Buddenbrooks, and Doktor Faustus. Fled Hitler for Pacific Palisades, where the modernist home he built now houses a cultural center dedicated to democracy. Quoted from Letters of Thomas Mann, 1889–1955, selected and translated by Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Knopf, 1971).
MARCHESSEAULT, DAMIEN Mayor of Los Angeles. Wrote the note quoted here and then fatally shot himself in City Hall. Los Angeles Semi-Weekly News, January 21, 1868.
MARQUIS, DON Creator of the newspaper feature “archy and mehitabel.” Came to L.A. to write scripts. Hated it. Went home. Quoted from Selected Letters of Don Marquis, edited by William McCollum, Jr. (Stafford, Va.: Northwoods Press, 1982).
MARX, GROUCHO Comedian and star, with his brothers, of, among others, Animal Crackers, Horsefeathers, and the immortal Duck Soup. Quoted from The Groucho Letters (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987).
MCCARTHY, BRANDON Ex-Dodger pitcher, aphorist, and heir to Jim Bouton (q.v.). From his delightful Twitter feed (https://twitter.com/bmccarthy32/status/877412303209021440?lang=en).
MCCOY, ESTHER Architecture critic, author of the indispensable Five California Architects. In Reyner Banham’s words, “No one can write about architecture in California without acknowledging her as the mother of us all.” Quoted from Piecing Together Los Angeles: An Esther McCoy Reader, edited and with an essay by Susan Morgan (Valencia, Calif.: East of Borneo Books, 2012).
MCGRAMA, G. Diarist during what then-Angeleno Woody Guthrie’s great ballad memorialized as L.A.’s “New Year’s Flood” of 1934. Quoted at http://oldmcgramasmohairfarm.blogspot.com/2014/01/memory-is-elusive-capture-it-grandmas.html.
MCKINLEY, WILLIAM President of the United States, assassinated in 1901, succeeded by Theodore Roosevelt (q.v.). Passed through L.A. four months before the anarchist Leon Czolgosz murdered him and elevated Theodore Roosevelt to the presidency. Quoted from the San Francisco Chronicle, May 9, 1901.
MCLUHAN, MARSHALL Public intellectual, professor, philosopher futurist. Courted his future wife, Corinne, while living in Pasadena and researching the Elizabethan pamphleteer Thomas Nashe at the Huntington Library. Quoted from Letters of Marshall McLuhan, edited by Matie Molinaro, Corinne McLuhan, and William Toye (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).
MCPHERSON, SISTER AIMEE SEMPLE Evangelist, broadcaster, faith healer. For years perhaps the most famous Angeleno this side of Mickey Mouse. Tarnished by her disappearance and subsequent discovery in a beachfront love nest. Once, no out-of-towner could call a trip here complete without a visit to her Angelus Temple, across the street from Echo Park. Buried at Forest Lawn, supposedly with a telephone for communication from the beyond. Quoted from This Is That: Personal Experiences, Sermons and Writings (Los Angeles: McPherson/Bridal Call, 1921).
MCWILLIAMS, CAREY Historian, journalist, activist, author of Southern California: An Island on the Land and California: The Great Exception. McWilliams reported and editorialized on California’s most important battles for social justice of the last century. He also helped organize committees that won several of them. Other fights, such as the one to get the government to admit its mistake in interning Japanese Americans during World War II, were won only after his death. A contagiously jovial writer, McWilliams found the stupidity of politicians not only unconscionable but risible. His merry takeouts on California’s water wars and ecology have left writers as varied as Robert Towne and Mike Davis in his debt. Diaries preserved in the UCLA Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, and published here by gracious permission of his scholar granddaughter.
MENCKEN, H. L. Newspaperman and author of a series of gleeful ragbags titled Prejudices, the much-revised landmark The American Language, even a youthful translation of Ibsen. Mencken’s biliously quotable prose is the culmination of all the Twain and Wilde that Mencken ingested from childhood—Twain for sand, Wilde for silk—and the disappointment he must have felt when nobody else measured up. He said such wonderful things as “A horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms. It is not only more effective; it is also vastly more intelligent.” Enjoyed his brief reporting visit here like a mountain lion enjoys a mule deer. Quoted from Mencken and Sara: A Life in Letters: The Private Correspondence of H. L. Mencken and Sara Haardt, edited by Marion Elizabeth Rodgers (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1987).
MERRITT, RUTH WOLFFE Douglas Aircraft worker here in World War II. Quotation published by gracious permission of her granddaughter-in-law.
MILLER, HENRY Author of Tropic of Cancer, The Cosmological Eye, and The Air-Conditioned Nightmare. Relocated from the cliffs of Big Sur to the bluffs of Pacific Palisades to spend his last years here. Quoted from Letters by Henry Miller to Hoki Tokuda Miller, edited by Joyce Howard (New York: Freundlich Books, 1986).
MILLIKAN, ROBERT Caltech president, Nobel Laureate for measuring the charge of an electron, and eventual anticommunist informer for the FBI. Quoted from “The Creation of LA’s ‘Most Recognizable and Beloved’ Building,” by Hadley Meares, posted at https://la.curbed.com/2014/12/17/10011026/the-creation-of-las-most-recognizable-and-beloved-building-1 (2014).
MINGUS, CHARLES Pathbreaking black–Chinese–German–Native American jazz composer and musician. Raised in Watts playing classical cello, then found the double bass and jazz. Quoted from his memoir Beneath the Underdog: His World as Composed by Mingus (New York: Knopf, 1971).
MIX, TOM Movie cowboy, valiant hero to a generation of American boys. Quoted from The Best of Rob Wagner’s Script, edited by Anthony Slide (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 1985).
MONROE, MARILYN Actress and star of Some Like It Hot and The Misfits. Quoted from Marilyn Monroe Day by Day, by Carl Rollyson (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014).
MOORE, ERNEST CARROLL Co-founder of UCLA. Quoted from UCLA: The First Century, by Marina Dundjerski (Los Angeles: Third Millennium Publishing, 2011).
MORA, BISHOP FRANCIS Bishop of Los Angeles. Personal letter at http://www.jmaw.org/bernard-cohn-jewish-la/.
MOTLEY, WILLARD F. African American author of the social-protest novel Knock on Any Door, adapted into the Humphrey Bogart film. Later moved to Mexico. Nephew of the artist Archibald Motley. Didn’t stay long, but plenty of journalists have stayed longer and seen less. Quoted from “Small Town Los Angeles,” Commonweal (June 30, 1939).
MUIR, JOHN Writer, naturalist. There had been California writers before Muir, just as there had been American writers before Emerson. But not until Muir met Emerson on a Sierra mountaintop did he find his own voice. Muir’s first published essay, “Yosemite Glaciers,” appeared just seven months after they met. Returned often to visit family and to hike and write about the San Gabriel Mountains, most memorably in “The Bee-Pastures,” chapter 16 of The Mountains of California. Quoted from John Muir in Southern California, by Elizabeth Pomeroy (Pasadena, Calif.: The Castle Press, 1999).
NABOKOV, VLADIMIR Russian-born author of Lolita, Pnin, and Pale Fire. Nabokov’s prose is beautiful—and often uproarious—in ways that no native English speaker would think to write. He knew English from lessons and books, but his arrival in the United States in 1940 may have marked his first real opportunity to hear English spoken badly. The evidence suggests that he found the sound intoxicating. Always oblique yet never obscure, Nabokov sounds like English on the morning of its birth, with every word equally available to him, and all ruts of habit gone suddenly smooth. In 1960, he took a rented villa at 2088 Mandeville Canyon in Los Angeles to work on a screenplay of Lolita for the young director Stanley Kubrick. Not much of Nabokov’s work remains in the finished film, but he liked the unorthodox screenplay he wrote enough to publish it later. Graciously, he also spoke well of Kubrick’s version, but retained sole screen credit for himself. According to biographer Brian Boyd, “He and Vera would have been ready to settle permanently in ‘charming semitropical’ California if their son had not been singing in Milan.” In 1963, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences nominated Vladimir Nabokov in the Best Adapted Screenplay category. There’s no indication that he returned to Los Angeles for the Oscar ceremony, alas. Nabokov lost to Horton Foote for To Kill a Mockingbird. Quoted from Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya: The Nabokov-Wilson Letters, 1940–1971, edited, annotated, and with an introductory essay by Simon Karlinsky (New York: Harper & Row, 1979).
NASH, OGDEN Poet and wit. Came for the movies, missed his family too much to stay long. Quoted from Loving Letters of Ogden Nash, edited by Linell Nash Smith (Boston: Little, Brown, 1990).
NIN, ANAÏS Frenchwoman of letters, author of Delta of Venus. Led parallel lives with her husband in New York and her longtime paramour in Sierra Madre. Quoted from The Diaries of Anaïs Nin, vols. 6, 7, edited by Gunther Stuhlmann (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976, 1980).
NISHIDA, J. W. Jailed Communist bookseller. Quoted from Gentle Rebel: Letters of Eugene V. Debs, edited by J. Robert Constantine (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1995).
ODETS, CLIFFORD Pioneering playwright and screenwriter of American social drama. Author of plays including Waiting for Lefty, Awake and Sing!, Golden Boy, and several films, among them Sweet Smell of Success and The Big Knife, from his play about compromise in Hollywood. In 1940 he kept his only journal, which he himself called “the daily diary, often naïve, sometimes crude, occasionally pompous, prejudiced, mannered, unfair, even conceited and arrogant. Its pages cover almost a full year in the personal life of a ‘successful’ writer living in a very ‘successful’ country.” He died on August 14, 1963, on the same day and in the same hospital where I was born. Quoted from The Time Is Ripe: The 1940 Journal of Clifford Odets, with an introduction by his son, Walt Whitman Odets (New York: Grove Press, 1988).
OJEDA, EVELYN Gold medalist in the 1932 Olympic Games. Quoted in Andrew Bell, “Female Gold Medalist from 1932 Olympics Turns 100,” USA Today.
O’MELVENY, HENRY Lawyer, city father, founder of O’Melveny & Myers. Quoted from History of the Law Firm of O’Melveny & Myers, by William W. Clary (Los Angeles: Privately printed, 1966).
PALEY, AARON As much as anybody, Paley is the urbanist most responsible for L.A.’s recent renaissance. Co-creator of CicLAvia, the quarterly Sunday happening during which all automobile traffic is banished from some of this city’s most traffic-choked boulevards. Every three months—monthly, if Paley ever gets his way—Angelenos now reclaim their streets on foot, on bicycles, on rickshaws, you name it. The result has fairly transformed the way L.A. thinks of itself. Quoted by gracious permission.
PALIN, MICHAEL Author, actor, Python, screenwriter of A Fish Called Wanda. Has slithered into Los Angeles whenever his career obliged him, including for the Pythons’ triumphant stand at the Hollywood Bowl. Quoted from his Diaries, 1969–1979: The Python Years (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2007).
PARKER, DOROTHY Witty, tragicomic writer of magazine feuilletons, book reviews, poems, and short stories including “Big Blonde.” Lived here off and on writing scripts, including her Oscar-nominated, delightful adaptation, with S. J. Perelman, of Around the World in 80 Days. Quoted from You Might as Well Live: The Life and Times of Dorothy Parker, by John Keats (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970).
PARTCH, HARRY Avant-garde composer. Lived here in the twenties and thirties. Dropped out of USC to compose. Ushering for the Philharmonic helped keep body and soul together. Designer of irreproducible musical instruments. Alumnus of the WPA’s Federal Writers Project in California. Quoted from Bitter Music: Collected Journals, Essays, Introductions, and Librettos, edited by Thomas McGeary (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2000).
PATTON, GEORGE Attorney, father of General George S. Patton. Descended from pioneer Don Benito Wilson. Quoted from General Patton: A Soldier’s Life, by Stanley P. Hirshson (New York: HarperCollins, 2002).
PEARS, PETER Opera singer, partner of the composer Benjamin Britten. Quoted from The Travel Diaries of Peter Pears, 1936–1978, edited by Philip Reed (London: Boydell & Brewer, 1999).
PEGLER, WESTBROOK Newspaper columnist. Stopped here to file the once-obligatory hatchet job. Quoted from his column “Fair Enough,” The Washington Post, etc., King Features Syndicate, 1939.
PERCIVAL, OLIVE Writer, regional historian, and botanist. Olive Percival Papers (Collection 119), UCLA Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library.
PERELMAN, S. J. Dyspeptic writer, satirist, screenwriter. He and Nathanael West married sisters and lived here in the thirties. Visited L.A. periodically to write scripts, including his Oscar-nominated adaptation with Dorothy Parker of Around the World in 80 Days. Returned later in life as writer-in-residence in sadly knish-less Santa Barbara. Quoted from Don’t Tread on Me: The Selected Letters of S. J. Perelman, edited by Prudence Crowther (New York: Viking, 1986).
PERKOFF, STUART Poet, beatnik. Stuart Z. Perkoff Papers (Collection 1573), UCLA Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library.
PHILLIPS, D. L. Diarist who brought his consumptive son to California. Quoted from his Letters from California (Springfield: The Illinois State Journal, 1877).
PICKERING, EDWARD CHARLES American astronomer. Published as “Edward Charles Pickering’s Diary of a Trip to Pasadena to Attend a Meeting of Solar Union, August 1910,” edited by Howard Plotkin, Southern California Quarterly (Spring 1978).
PLATH, SYLVIA American poet (Ariel) and novelist (The Bell Jar). If only Sylvia Plath could have married Leonard Woolf, and Virginia Woolf could have married Ted Hughes, maybe everybody would have lived happily ever after. Plath visited California on a road trip to see her aunt in Pasadena, whose bountiful garden made a strong impression—though not as strong as an ornery bear she met in Yosemite. Quoted from Letters Home: Correspondence 1950–1963, edited by Aurelia Schober Plath (New York: Harper & Row, 1975).
POWELL, ANTHONY British novelist, author of the towering “Dance to the Music of Time” dodecalogy. Summoned from England to L.A. as a consultant on A Yank at Oxford. Quoted from To Keep the Ball Rolling: The Memoirs of Anthony Powell (New York: Penguin, 1984).
POWELL, DAWN Great “lost” writer of the mid-twentieth century, championed into rediscovery largely by Gore Vidal. Happy to visit here, but her heart was in New York. Quoted from The Diaries of Dawn Powell, edited with an introduction by Tim Page (South Royalton, Vt.: Steerforth Press, 1995).
PRATT, ORVILLE C. Jurist, traveler. Quoted from The Journal of Orville C. Pratt, 1848 (Utah: Hafen & Hafen, 1954).
PYNCHON, THOMAS RUGGLES, JR. American writer, born May 8, 1937, in Glen Cove, Long Island. Between the 1960s and the 1980s, spent some time in California, where three of his novels are set. Others range all over the globe and throughout history, often in the same book. Many pit a plucky heroine or poor, priapic, paranoid schnook against some bureaucratic, merciless conspiracy. The voice in his occasional nonfiction is postdoctoral yet cheerfully sophomoric, sad yet undespairing, as expressive in its alternation of long notes with short as an SOS. It’s an instrument tuned and retuned in more than half a century of occasional essays, reviews, and liner notes—forming one of the great uncollected anthologies in American letters. In fiction or nonfiction, Pynchon’s underlying verbal music stays ever recognizable, unique as a great reed player’s embouchure. He remains the archpoet of death from above, comedy from below, and sex from all sides, ringing endless fresh variations on the same two questions: What happened to the country we wanted? And can its original promise ever be redeemed? No one rivals Pynchon’s range of language, his elasticity of syntax, his signature mix of dirty jokes, dread and shining decency. (Letter quoted from the Stephen Michael Tomaske Collection of Thomas Pynchon, Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif., by gracious permission.)
RAMIREZ, FRANCISCO P. Pioneering prodigy of bilingual Los Angeles journalism, lovingly resurrected in A Clamor for Equality: Emergence and Exile of Californio Activist Francisco P. Ramirez, by Paul Bryan Gray (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2012). Translations by Gray and me.
REAGAN, RONALD President, actor. Quoted from The Reagan Diaries, edited by Douglas Brinkley (New York: HarperCollins, 2007).
REID, HUGO Early Scotch settler, author in the Los Angeles Star of the “Indian Letters,” calling attention to wretched conditions for Native Americans in post-statehood L.A. Quoted from the Los Angeles Star, 1852.
RENOIR, JEAN Screenwriter-director of The Rules of the Game and Grand Illusion. Directed Swamp Water and The Southerner for Hollywood. Unfailingly amused by his sojourn here. Died in Beverly Hills. Quoted from his Letters, edited by Lorraine LeBianco and David Thompson (London: Faber & Faber, 1994).
REXROTH, KENNETH San Francisco–based poet, critic, translator, and radio commentator. Occasionally came down from San Francisco to L.A. for public appearances and broadcasts, and to disparage the restaurants. Later taught in Santa Barbara, where he died of a coronary so massive that his heart monitor blew a fuse. Published by permission of the Kenneth Rexroth Trust. With thanks to the Bureau of Public Secrets, Berkeley, 2017.
REYNOLDS, RYAN Actor, known for Buried and Deadpool, among others. Witty tweeter (https://twitter.com/vancityreynolds/status/817799908937736192?lang=en).
REZNIKOFF, CHARLES Poet. Worked as a script reader. Selected Letters of Charles Reznikoff, 1917–1976, edited by Milton Hindus (Santa Rosa, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press, 1997).
RICE, HARVEY Ohio newspaper publisher, father-in-law of Orange County patriarch James Irvine, Sr. Stayed a week at his son-in-law’s Rancho San Joaquin. Quoted from his Letters from the Pacific Slope (New York: Appleton, 1870).
RICHARDSON, ROBERT A Times man. Shared a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the Watts riots while still the classified advertising messenger, venturing where police officers, firefighters, and staff reporters feared to tread. That was his last night in the ad department. Quoted from “ ‘Get Whitey,’ Scream Blood-Hungry Mobs,” the Los Angeles Times, August 14 and 15, 1965.
RIVERS, JOAN Self-deprecating, insult-reliant, pioneering comedian. Quoted from her Diary of a Mad Diva (New York: Berkley, 2014).
ROCH, ROGERIO Dispossessed Californio. Quoted from The Condition of Affairs in Indian Territory and California: A Report, by Charles Cornelius Painter (Philadelphia: Indian Rights Association, 1888).
RODDENBERRY, GENE Beloved creator of Star Trek, former driver for LAPD chief William Parker. “Star Trek” Collection, UCLA Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library.
RODERICK, KEVIN Newspaperman, founding editor of LAObserved.com. Quoted by gracious permission.
RODRIGUEZ, JOSÉ Guatemalan American classical music impresario. Went to Manual Arts High School in L.A. Studied music. Found a mentor in the left-wing editor Rob Wagner, the editor of a magazine in the 1920s and 1930s called Script, which some East-Coast-centric people called a West Coast version of The New Yorker. Rodriguez wrote mostly about music and wound up programming for both the Hollywood Bowl and the L.A. Philharmonic. He also became a host and music director for local radio stations, especially KFI, driven by a democratic, leveling, truly Angeleno vision for the potential of radio. Commissioned a striking Neutra house that still stands in Glendale. Quoted from The Best of Rob Wagner’s Script, edited by Anthony Slide (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 1985).
ROGERS, HARRISON Member of the Jedediah Smith expedition through California. Quoted from The Ashley-Smith Explorations and Discovery of a Central Route to the Pacific 1822–1829, edited by Harrison Clifford Dale (Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark, 1918).
ROGERS, WILL Humorist, entertainer, and newspaper columnist. Lovingly published at willrogers.com/writings.
ROOSEVELT, ELEANOR First Lady of the United States, shoulder to shoulder with her husband, Franklin, in the White House from 1933 to 1945. Peace advocate and social activist. Visited Los Angeles several times on goodwill tours to benefit the less fortunate. Champion of the New Deal, which paved roads and built bridges that Angelenos still drive every day. The Eleanor Roosevelt First Street Bridge, anybody? “My Day,” The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Digital Edition (2017), accessed Oct. 29, 2017 (https://www2.gwu.edu/~erpapers/myday/displaydoc.cfm?_y=1946&_f=md000295).
ROOSEVELT, THEODORE President of the United States and uncle of the above. The fatal shooting of President William McKinley on September 6, 1901, may well be the only political assassination in history that actually worked out for the best. In McKinley’s place, we got the indefatigable Teddy Roosevelt. It’s startling to realize just how many strains in contemporary American political thought trace their origins, under different names, to Roosevelt. His unprecedented efforts to conserve the country’s natural resources, inspired by his naturalist friends John Muir (q.v.) and John Burroughs, we now recognize as federal environmentalism in embryo. His trustbusting of Big Oil, Big Sugar, and Big Coal we wouldn’t hesitate to call anti-corporatism today. And Roosevelt’s overall progressive agenda looks uncannily like what people used to call modern liberalism, until the stigma attached to that word now has us calling it progressivism all over again. Amid all the nostalgia for Roosevelt the statesman—coupled with some revulsion against Roosevelt the imperialist—it’s easy to overlook Roosevelt the writer. But TR, as his hardy band of acolytes generally call him, worked at writing as he did at so much else in his life: prodigiously, brilliantly, tirelessly, and probably more than was good for him. Quoted from A Compilation of the Messages and Speeches of Theodore Roosevelt, vol. 1, edited by Albert Henry Lewis (New York and Washington: Bureau of National Literature and Art, 1906).
RUESS, EVERETT Free-spirited young man who left L.A. and wandered into the California wilderness, never to be seen again. Quoted from Everett Ruess: A Vagabond for Beauty, by W. L. Rusho (Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith, 1983).
RUIZ DE RODRIGUEZ, DOÑA BERNARDA Uncredited contributor and compromise broker for the Treaty of Cahuenga, which ended the Mexican-American War. Quoted in “In a State of Peace and Tranquility,” by Hadley Meares, https://www.kcet.org/history-society/in-a-state-of-peace-and-tranquility-campo-de-cahuenga-and-the-birth-of-american (accessed May 28, 2018).
RUSSELL, BERTRAND British philosopher, pacifist, anti-nuclear campaigner. Taught at UCLA for a term. Like most professors, left few traces of his sojourn. Someday someone will compile a roster of all the distinguished visiting faculty to grace Southern California campuses over the years, and what they said and did here. The list isn’t short. The talent is phenomenal. Quoted from The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell, Volume 2: The Public Years, 1914–1970, edited by Nicholas Griffin (New York: Routledge, 2001).
SAITO, SANDIE Japanese American schoolgirl, internee. Quoted at http://ddr.densho.org/ddr-janm-1-10/.
SALVATOR, LUDWIG Archduke of Austria, son of the Duke of Tuscany. Visited Los Angeles in the winter of 1876, not long after the city was linked directly by rail to the East. While most of the ballyhooers in town were falling all over themselves comparing L.A. to Italy, an actual Italian princeling visited L.A. and saw that it was good. Quoted from his Los Angeles in the Sunny Seventies: A Flower from the Golden Land, translated by Marguerite Eyer Wilbur (Los Angeles: Bruce McCallister and Jake Zeitlin, 1929).
SANDBURG, CARL American poet, Lincoln biographer, pioneering film critic. Sandburg went to Hollywood in 1960 for a year and a half to work on the script for The Greatest Story Ever Told, which fell well short of becoming the greatest movie ever made, but paid perhaps the best-loved poet in America $125,000. Quoted from The Letters of Carl Sandburg, edited by Herbert Mitgang (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1968).
SANDERS, GEORGE Urbane, insinuating British actor, familiar from Rebecca, All About Eve, and scores more. Quoted from his Memoirs of a Professional Cad (New York: Putnam, 1960).
SANDERS, SUE A. Traveler, correspondent. Quoted from her Journey to, on and from the “Golden Shore” (Delavan, Ill.: Times Printing Office, 1887).
SAROYAN, WILLIAM Armenian American writer, son of Armenian immigrants. In his twenties, he romanticized a deprived childhood into the bestselling short-story collections The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze and My Name Is Aram. Within a few years, he added a similarly beloved semiautobiographical novel, The Human Comedy, and, in 1939, a play set in a San Francisco waterfront saloon: The Time of Your Life, which won the Pulitzer Prize. There’s a little bit of William Saroyan in every fine writer, but aggressive therapy can usually keep it in remission. Where most writers differ from Saroyan is that they also have at least some vestigial sense of proportion, or, failing that, a renewable lithium prescription. Sadly, the talented, versatile Saroyan had neither. Quoted from The Best of Rob Wagner’s Script, edited by Anthony Slide (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 1985).
SAYLE, ALEXEI British stand-up comedian, actor, writer. Parachuted in to perform a less-painful-than-usual version of the obligatory Hollywood diary for The Guardian. Published as “Los Angeles Diary,” The Guardian, 1991.
SCHALLERT, EDWIN L.A. Times critic, father of the beloved character actor William, grandfather of the educator-writer Brendan. Quoted from the Los Angeles Times.
SCHEYER, GALKA Refugee, educator, pioneering art dealer for the European painters, including the Blue Four group—Wassily Kandinsky, Lyonel Feininger, Paul Klee, and Alexej von Jawlensky. Client of architect Richard Neutra. Quoted from Galka E. Scheyer and the Blue Four: Correspondence 1924–1945, edited by Isabel Wünsche (Salenstein, Switzerland: Benteli Verlags, 2006).
SCHICKEL, ERIKA Gifted essayist, author of You’re Not the Boss of Me: Adventures of a Modern Mom (New York: Kensington, 2001). Quoted from LAObserved.com, 2012.
SCHINDLER, RUDOLF Architect of landmark L.A. buildings including his namesake house on Kings Road. Quoted from Vienna to Los Angeles: Two Journeys: Letters Between R. M. Schindler and Richard Neutra + Letters of Louis Sullivan to R. M. Schindler, by Esther McCoy (Santa Monica, Calif.: Arts + Architecture Press, 1978).
SCHOENBERG, ARNOLD Modernist “serial music” composer of, among others, Moses und Aron and Verklärte Nacht. Later a fairly acclimated refugee here, like his occasional tennis partner Stravinsky. When they were on the outs, the Brentwood Country Mart wasn’t big enough for both of them. Schoenberg taught at UCLA, where the music building is, at least for now, still named after him. Quoted from Schoenberg Remembered: Diaries and Recollections, by Dika Newlin (New York: Pendragon, 1980).
SEABORG, GLENN T. Nobel Prize–winning physicist, co-discoverer of plutonium. Grew up in Southern California. “Glenn Theodore Seaborg Diaries, 1927–1946,” Box 951575, UCLA Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library.
SELZNICK, DAVID O. Producer. Gone with the Wind had sixteen co-writers and several directors, but not a single co-producer. His memos are marvels of perspicacity and megalomania. Quoted from Memo from David O. Selznick, edited by Rudy Behlmer and Roger Ebert (New York: Grove Press, 1972).
SERLING, ROD Television writer, producer, playwright. Wrote landmark teleplays for live television in New York, decried its move west, then followed it and created The Twilight Zone, the first television series that completely realized the medium’s potential. His writings are published by the Rod Serling Memorial Foundation at https://www.rodserling.com/letter032064.htm.
SHELLHORN, RUTH A celebrated landscape architect whose projects included, frustratingly for her, Disneyland. “Ruth Patricia Shellhorn Papers, 1909–2006,” UCLA Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library.
SHIPPEY, LEE Columnist. Quoted from “The Lee Side o’ L.A.,” in the Los Angeles Times.
SILLIMAN, BENJAMIN Yale-based scientist, first to distill petroleum. Quoted in What They Say About the Angels (Pasadena, Calif.: Val Trefz Press, 1942).
SIRHAN SIRHAN Assassin of Robert F. Kennedy. At the time, a student at Pasadena City College. The line appears in his published notebooks, including in RFK Must Die by Robert Blair Kaiser (Woodstock and New York, N.Y.: Overlook Press, 2008).
SLONIMSKY, NICOLAS Longtime editor of Baker’s Dictionary of Musicians. Lived to be 101, updating his invaluable compendium right to the end. Quoted from Dear Dorothy: Letters from Nicolas Slonimsky to Dorothy Adlow, edited by Electra Slonimsky Rourke (Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2012).
SMITH, JACK Los Angeles Times columnist, author of God and Mr. Gomez and Spend All Your Kisses, Mr. Smith. His longtime good-natured rival Herb Caen was the Jack Smith of San Francisco. Originally published in the Los Angeles Times.
SMITH, JEDEDIAH Explorer. A cartographer of the West. Furrier, too. Finally killed by Native Americans. Quoted from The Travels of Jedediah Smith: A Documentary Outline. Including the Journal of the Great American Pathfinder, edited by Maurice S. Sullivan (Santa Ana, Calif.: Fine Arts Press, 1934).
SMITH, JOSEPH B. Record executive. Handled the Grateful Dead. Briefly. Published at lettersofnote.com, edited by Shaun Usher, http://www.lettersofnote.com/2011/02/grateful-dead-has-many-problems.html.
SONTAG, SUSAN Critic, essayist, novelist, author of Against Interpretation, Illness as Metaphor, and The Volcano Lover. Consummate New Yorker, but also the sweetheart of North Hollywood High. “Papers of Susan Sontag,” UCLA Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library.
SPALDING, WILLIAM ANDREW Los Angeles newspaperman. Quoted from William Andrew Spalding: Los Angeles Newspaperman, edited by Robert V. Hine (San Marino, Calif.: The Huntington Library Press, 1961).
SPENDER, STEPHEN British poet, contemporary of Christopher Isherwood and W. H. Auden. Stopped for tea with the Hollywood Raj, including Isherwood. Quoted from his Journals 1939–1983, edited by John Goldsmith (London: Faber and Faber, 1985).
STANDAGE, HENRY Member of the Mormon Battalion in the Mexican-American War. Quoted from The March of the Mormon Battalion from Council Bluffs to California Taken from the Journal of Henry Standage, by Frank Alfred Golder with Thomas A. Bailey and J. Lyman Smith (New York: The Century Co., 1928).
STEELE, THE REV. JOHN Quoted from Echoes of the Past in California: In Camp and Cabin (Chicago: The Lakeside Press, 1928).
STEIN, BEN Columnist, actor, game show host. Quoted from his Hollywood Days, Hollywood Nights: The Diary of a Mad Screen Writer (New York: Bantam Books, 1988).
STEINBECK, JOHN Nobel Prize–winning author of The Grapes of Wrath and other novels. Lived for a time in a house uphill from the present-day Eagle Rock Plaza mall. Quoted from Steinbeck: A Life in Letters, edited by Elaine Steinbeck and Robert Wallsten (New York: Viking Press, 1975).
STEINMAN, LOUISE Author of three books, including The Souvenir: A Daughter Discovers Her Father’s War, dancer, founding curator of the Library Foundation of Los Angeles’s long-running ALOUD literary series. Quoted by gracious permission.
STENDAHL, EARL Art gallerist, chocolatier. It’s just possible that no one now alive visited Stendahl’s modest but elegant L.A. art gallery under a candy factory for the unveiling of the most important painting of the twentieth century, Picasso’s Guernica, brought to town by European exiles like Fritz Lang and art dealer Galka Scheyer (and New York exiles like Dorothy Parker) as a fund-raiser for Spanish Civil War orphans. Quoted by gracious permission of the family.
STOCKTON, ROBERT F. Military commander of California. Signed but didn’t write the Treaty of Cahuenga ending the Mexican-American War. (See Ruiz de Rodriguez, Doña Bernarda.)
STRAVINSKY, IGOR Illustrious twentieth-century composer of The Firebird, The Rite of Spring, and the Symphony in Three Movements, among other masterworks. Based in Los Angeles from the World War II years until his death. Quoted from Dialogues and a Diary, by himself and Robert Craft (New York: Doubleday, 1963).
TAYLOR, BENJAMIN FRANKLIN Chicago-based war and travel correspondent. Quoted from his Between the Gates (Chicago: S. C. Griggs and Co., 1878).
THOMAS, DYLAN Welsh poet, author of “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night,” A Child’s Christmas in Wales, and the story collection Adventures in the Skin Trade—the little-remarked titular precursor to William Goldman’s classic screenwriter’s-eye-view of Hollywood, Adventures in the Screen Trade. Lurched through Los Angeles on the American tour immortalized by Peter DeVries and Julius J. Epstein in the novel and film Reuben, Reuben. Quoted from Dylan Thomas: The Collected Letters, edited by Paul Ferris (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 2000).
THOMPSON, HUNTER S. Journalist, political columnist, author of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail. For the hard-living or the famous, somebody’s always ready to spin suicide into a cautionary tale. It’s too easy to forget what a brilliant writer Thompson was. The signature Thompson speedball mixes grandiosity, paranoia, and pure poetry. He wrote about his nemeses, especially Nixon, with an invigorating lack of gentility. Met Oscar Zeta Acosta (q.v.), the inspiration for Dr. Gonzo in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, while reporting his firsthand account of the Chicano Movement and Moratorium. Quoted from “Strange Rumblings in Aztlan,” Rolling Stone, April 1971.
THORNTON, HAZEL Juror, diarist. Quoted from Hung Jury: The Diary of a Menendez Juror (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995).
THURBER, JAMES Writer and cartoonist, long at The New Yorker, author of My World and Welcome to It and the short story “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.” Thurber didn’t hate L.A. as much as he let on. He hated it more. Quoted from The Thurber Letters: The Wit, Wisdom, and Surprising Life of James Thurber, edited by Helen Thurber and Edward Weeks (Boston: Little, Brown, 1981).
TRILLIN, CALVIN Journalist, long associated with The New Yorker and The Nation, author of Alice, Let’s Eat; Killings; Deadline Poet; and the underrated Floater. Much of the story of the Watts Towers comes down to us via variations on his May 29, 1965, New Yorker “Reporter at Large” feature. Quoted from that article.
TRUMBO, DALTON Screenwriter, novelist, and the man who broke the blacklist. Author of the antiwar classic Johnny Got His Gun. In Spartacus, Trumbo has Kirk Douglas shout “I am Spartacus!” to reclaim his identity—just as Trumbo would reclaim his own, by securing screen credit after a decade on the blacklist. Quoted from the canonical Additional Dialogue: Letters of Dalton Trumbo, 1942–1962, edited by Helen Manfull (New York: M. Evans and Company, 1970).
TYNAN, KENNETH Critic and author of Oh, Calcutta! Alongside Laurence Olivier, a presiding intelligence behind the birth of Britain’s National Theatre. Latterly, critic at large for The New Yorker. Moved to Southern California and revived his reputation with trenchant profiles of everyone from Louise Brooks to Johnny Carson for The New Yorker. Called himself “a climatic émigré,” but died of emphysema in Santa Monica. His daughter Roxana runs the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy. Quoted from Diaries of Kenneth Tynan, edited by John Lahr (New York: Bloomsbury, 2001).
VALENTINER, WILLIAM R. Pivotal curator of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art during its pre–Wilshire Boulevard, Exposition Park era. Quoted from The Passionate Eye: The Life of William R. Valentiner (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1979).
VANCOUVER, GEORGE British explorer of the Pacific Coast. Named Point Dume after his friend Francisco Dumetz, a Franciscan padre. Quoted from Captain George Vancouver (London: G. G. and J. Robinson, 1798).
VENEGAS, DOLORES Quoted from Letters Home: Mexican Exile Correspondence from Los Angeles, 1927–1932, by María Teresa Venegas (Los Angeles: María Teresa Venegas, 2012). Department of Archives and Special Collection, William H. Hannon Library, Loyola Marymount University.
VENEGAS, JOSÉ MIGUEL Quoted from Letters Home: Mexican Exile Correspondence from Los Angeles, 1927–1932, by María Teresa Venegas (Los Angeles: María Teresa Venegas, 2012). Department of Archives and Special Collection, William H. Hannon Library, Loyola Marymount University.
VILLARD, OSWALD GARRISON Journalist and civil libertarian. Quoted from “Los Angeles Kaleidoscope,” The Nation, 1934.
WAGNER, ROB This 1930s L.A. radical edited Script, the magazine some called a West Coast New Yorker, and published everybody from Chaplin to the unsung L.A. classical music writer José Rodríguez (q.v.). Quoted from The Best of Rob Wagner’s Script, edited by Anthony Slide (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 1985).
WALLACE, EDGAR Prolific novelist, today best known for conceiving, with Merian C. Cooper, the idea for King Kong. Four days after confiding to his diary that he again felt “quite gay and bright now,” he died here of double pneumonia. Quoted from his My Hollywood Diary: The Last Work of Edgar Wallace (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1932).
WALLACE, IRVING Novelist, USC undergrad, author of The Prize, The Man, The Plot, The Word, and the rest. Quoted from The Best of Rob Wagner’s Script, edited by Anthony Slide (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 1985).
WARD, JOHN SHIRLEY Tennessee-born, San Bernardino–based newspaperman and alfalfa farmer. Gloriously described in his 1905 obituary as “Chesterfieldian in his intercourse with the weak and the poor as with the rich and the strong.” Beats “Services pending” any day. Quoted from “Death of a Prominent Resident of Southern California,” Los Angeles Herald, January 5, 1905.
WARNER, JACK Co-founder with his brothers of the Warner Bros. film studio. Quoted from a company-wide memo in Warner Bros: The Making of an American Movie Studio, by David Thomson (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2017).
WARREN, ROBERT PENN Poet, novelist, author of All the King’s Men. Stayed briefly in Santa Monica, later returned to sit in on the editing of Robert Rossen’s film of All the King’s Men. Quoted from Selected Letters of Robert Penn Warren: The Apprentice Years, 1924–1934, vol. 1, edited by Randy Hendricks (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000).
WAUGH, EVELYN Author of The Loved One, Brideshead Revisited, Scoop, and the Sword of Honour trilogy. Visited Los Angeles in 1947, essentially to keep Brideshead from being made into a movie, and succeeded beyond his fondest dreams: He came away with the material for The Loved One, his merciless dissection of Forest Lawn and, by extension, the embalmed lives of the expats around him. Quoted from The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh, edited by Michael Davie (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976).
WAXMAN, AL Columnist and editor of the Eastside Journal in Boyle Heights; uncle of Congressman Henry Waxman. Quoted in Southern California: An Island on the Land by Carey McWilliams (New York: Duell, Sloan, & Pearce, 1946).
WEAVER, JOHN D. Author, magazine editor. Occasionally some editor will lift his eyes to the heavens and wish for a good single-volume history of Los Angeles, unaware that Weaver already wrote one, The Enormous Village. A little outdated, but so is any single-volume history after a decade. The first two hundred years of it are golden. Quoted from Glad Tidings: A Friendship in Letters. The Correspondence of John Cheever and John D. Weaver, 1945–1982, edited by John D. Weaver (New York: HarperCollins, 1993).
WEST, NATHANAEL Author of the novella Miss Lonelyhearts and the great Hollywood novel The Day of the Locust. Found L.A. a nice place to write about, but he didn’t want to live here—until he did. His unexpected happy marriage might well have ruined him for satire, but the couple perished in a car crash that same year, just a day after the death of his friend and admirer F. Scott Fitzgerald. Quoted from Nathanael West: Novels and Other Writings, edited by Sacvan Bercovitch (New York: Library of America, 1997).
WESTON, EDWARD Celebrated photographer best known for his Western landscapes and nudes. Early in his career, Weston set up shop in Glendale. He wooed a prodigious cavalcade of women, squiring many to the Philharmonic of an evening. Finally he shacked up with his beloved Charis—all the while refining, and redefining, modernist photography. Diaries published in The Daybooks of Edward Weston; Two Volumes in One: I. Mexico, II. California, edited by Nancy Newhall (New York: Aperture, 1991).
WILDER, LAURA INGALLS Author of Little House on the Prairie, Farmer Boy, and other beloved, underrated books about her childhood homesteading on the South Dakota plains. Quoted from The Selected Letters of Laura Ingalls Wilder, edited by William Anderson (New York: HarperCollins, 2016).
WILLIAMS, LIZA Sadly under-remembered, coolly neurasthenic columnist for the Los Angeles Free Press. Quoted from her Up the City of Angels (New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1971).
WILLIAMS, TENNESSEE Playwright, author of A Streetcar Named Desire and The Glass Menagerie, the latter more or less begun in Santa Monica during an otherwise unproductive—albeit highly sociable—screenwriting stint. Deflowered years earlier in Laguna Beach, to his mortification. Quoted from The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams, Volume 1, 1920–1945, edited by Albert J. Devlin and Nancy M. Tischer (New York: New Directions, 2000).
WILSON, BENJAMIN DAVIS “DON BENITO” City father and L.A.’s second mayor. Arrived with the first party of overland settlers. Owned land from Westwood to Riverside, from Altadena to Wilmington. Led U.S. Army troops in the Mexican-American War, as would his grandson, George S. Patton, in World War II. Quoted from Don Benito Wilson: From Mountain Man to Mayor, Los Angeles 1841 to 1878, by Nat B. Read (Santa Monica, Calif.: Angel City Press, 2008).
WILSON, BRIAN Presiding genius of the Beach Boys. Quoted lyrics published by Irving Music, affiliated with BMI.
WILSON, CHARIS Author, model, diarist, and once the wife and muse of photographer Edward Weston. Quoted from “Charis Wilson journal, letters and notes documenting the Whitman trip with Edward Weston, 1936–2009,” Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
WILSON, EDMUND Critic, historian, essayist, man of letters. Like Mencken and many other great American critics, he gave up on American fiction (except his own) too soon and pursued other curiosities. The rest of his career consistently altered the world’s understanding of whatever caught his fancy, from the history of Communism to the Dead Sea Scrolls. Visited Southern California once. Unimpressed. Stayed in L.A. only long enough to write about the evangelists Aimee Semple McPherson and Bob Shuler, then decamped south to file “The Jumping-Off Place” about San Diego, then among the suicide capitals of the world. Quoted from his The Twenties: From Notebooks and Diaries of the Period, edited by Leon Edel (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1975).
WILSON, WOODROW President of the United States celebrated for his worst achievement, humiliating Germany in World War I, and ridiculed for one of his best, trying to bring about world peace. Glimpsed in his biography by Palisades High’s own A. Scott Berg actually clicking his heels aboard the presidential sleeping car on the morning after his second wedding night. Most of us picture Wilson, provided we can even keep him and the mediocrities who succeeded him straight, as a picklepuss, a hypocrite who ran on a peace platform and within months took us to war, a racist who threw a black civil-rights activist out of the Oval Office, a sap who bet his presidency on a gossamer sand castle called the League of Nations and lost. How to reconcile that Wilson with the virile, adoring husband who wrote from the road to his doomed first wife, “I am madly in love with you….Are you prepared for the storm of love making with which you will be assailed?” Wilson’s best biography is Berg’s, his weirdest by Sigmund Freud. He whisked through L.A. on a campaign tour just long enough to give an anti-corporate speech to the since-disappeared Jefferson Club and, wistfully, look up an old flame. Quoted from A Day of Dedication: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Woodrow Wilson, edited by Albert Fried (New York: Macmillan, 1965).
WINCHELL, WALTER Terrifyingly influential newspaper gossip and political columnist. Quoted from “Hollywood Americana.” New York Daily Mirror, among others, 1941.
WINTERS, YVOR Underappreciated poet and professor. Quoted from Selected Letters of Yvor Winters, edited by R. L. Barth (Athens, Ohio: Swallow Press, 2000).
WODEHOUSE, P. G. Comic author of the Jeeves and Wooster novels. Wodehouse passed through and wrote the Hollywood-set novel Laughing Gas, nine short stories, and many mostly unused scenes for reputedly unmemorable movies. He also cleared $104,000 and complained about it in an L.A. Times interview, thus killing the golden goose for himself and not a few other screenwriters too. Quoted from A Life in Letters, edited by Sophie Ratcliffe (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2013).
WOODS, REV. JAMES The first Presbyterian pastor in L.A. Lasted less than a year. Diaries published in The Reverend James Woods, Recollections of Pioneer Work in California (San Francisco: Joseph Winterburn & Co., 1878).
WOOLLCOTT, ALEXANDER Waspish actor and wit. Quoted from The Letters of Alexander Woollcott, edited by Beatrice Kaufman and Joseph Hennessey (New York: Viking Press, 1944).
WPA GUIDE TO LOS ANGELES, THE Idea bin for historical novelists, cribsheet for fact-checkers, God’s gift to narrative historians, Los Angeles: The City and Its Environs is a wayback machine for retrophile Angelenos everywhere. Also not above the occasional April Fool’s joke that eluded the D.C. office, as seen here. Quoted from Los Angeles in the 1930s: The WPA Guide to the City of Angels, introduced by this volume’s author (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).
WRIGHT, FRANK LLOYD Architect of Hollyhock House, La Miniatura, and other landmark buildings in Los Angeles and around the country. His reputation has aged better than his buildings, as anyone over six feet tall can tell you. But he improved American architecture even more than L.A. improved him, and that’s saying plenty. Quoted in What They Say About the Angels (Pasadena, Calif.: Val Trefz Press, 1942).
WYLER, WILLIAM Film director of The Best Years of Our Lives, Roman Holiday, and the Great World War II documentary Memphis Belle. As detailed in Mark Harris’s landmark book Five Came Back, Wyler went to war a light entertainer and came back a tragedian. Quoted at http://starsandletters.blogspot.com/2013/12/.
ZANUCK, DARRYL Head of 20th Century-Fox, once a story man on Rin Tin Tin silents. Quoted from The Grove Book of Hollywood, edited by Christopher Silvester (New York: Grove Press, 1998).
ZORINA, VERA Dancer on stage and film, a muse of the choreographer George Balanchine. Quoted from her Zorina (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986).