We watched the new Douglas Fairbanks film The Black Pirate. The whole film is made up of Fairbanks’ favorite tricks and has nothing in it with regard to content.
The scenes, taking place on a big sailing ship, are staged quite well. The ship itself, the sea—all those look very beautiful and real. You can imagine my surprise when in the yard of the studio I saw that very ship and its real size standing in a very large pool without water? It turned out that the pool would be filled with water, and it would replace the sea.
SERGEI BERTENSSON
From the steep mountains on the east side of the lake, one could look west at endless rows of purple mountains around the Griffith Park Observatory. One behind another. They looked like a Japanese screen….Every color shone like a jewel for a moment and then dissolved; and even the gray clouds, the smoky scarves, were iridescent. For a few instants, all the sunsets of the world, Nordic, tropical, exotic, condensed over Silver Lake, displaying their sumptuous spectacle.
There was a house being built on the side of a mountain facing the sunset and the lake….There was a desert rose terrace, a garden being planted, a place carved in the garden for a pool overlooking the lake. There was a magnificent fireplace like that of a castle.
I discovered the architect was Eric Wright, the son of Lloyd Wright and grandson of Frank Lloyd Wright.
ANAÏS NIN
I’m trying to like California. I wish I could put on paper what it’s like. The countryside, dusty pepper trees, rolling hills, serrated mountains, is all curiously divided into planes. I couldn’t see why at first, but I suddenly solved it the other night. It’s the lack of rains. It’s so dry here all is dust. The dust lies at the end of the day hovering over the land. The light hits the dust clouds, and gives that curious hazy separation to the planes of distance….
I try to rationalize this whole country, and excuse it. If the people are nuts, it is because after the flat middle lands this is Heaven to them. If they strew the place with the ostentatious vulgarity of palm trees, it’s because they still can’t believe in the miracle of landing in a land where palms will grow. If their houses are cheap-jack, it is because they’re afraid of earthquakes which crumble brick and stone buildings. If they dress like fools, it’s because this is the tropics in a way, and anyhow our own sane clothes are about as foolish as could be conceived for such living conditions. So the women wear pants and shorts, and everyone lives in a sort of cheap-jack fugitiveness as if all this would vanish suddenly and they’d have to live back on earth again. A temporary feeling everywhere—waiting for what? Earthquakes, some sectarian Domesday, the collapse of the motion picture industry, the millennium? I don’t know. I only know that I believe in film, and must stick to that as long as I can.
ERIC KNIGHT, to a friend
The carcase is almost what the medical books call ambulant, and I’ve said good bye to Paramount, so I feel very much better. It’s not exactly anything to be unhappy about (except when you find all the money going to pay back debts) but it’s nothing to feel very good about either—it’s like endorsing absorbine junior or Beauty Rest mattresses—Working in the movies as part of the technical staff would be more interesting but it’s a life. I’ve been in bed ever since I got here talking to the studios over the phone and listening to Epic, Angelus Temple and the Christian Hebrew Synagogue on the air—California’s a great place right now. You can look out the window and watch the profit system crumble.
JOHN DOS PASSOS, to a critic
Today was very hot. It reminded me a little of the days off Guatemala last year, when my bones felt gone from the flesh, leaving a limp yawning emptiness. But today I felt sleepy, and all afternoon fought against drowsing by changing my position often and violently as I lay on the chaise longue….
Upstairs I can hear Dave taking a shower. He is growing used to football practice again. For two weeks or so after it started, he was so tired that he was far from civil—and he still expresses disapproval or grouchiness by a discarding of all politeness. He is a fine boy and a charming one, but when he is sullen there are few humans more unattractive.
M.F.K. FISHER
PLEASE ANSWER ABOUT TUITION MONEY STOP YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW MUCH A HUNDRED DOLLARS MEANS NOW
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, to his agent
At about seven a.m. we anchored opposite to San Pedro, four hundred and twenty miles from San Francisco, and the end of our voyage. Here we leave the steamer, which goes on to San Diego. At the edge of the water is a high bank, and from this the plain extends far as we can see. There are three adobe houses on the bank, and everything looks just as it did when Dana described it in his “Two Years before the Mast,” more than twenty years ago. We landed in the steamer’s boats, and after an unsavory breakfast at one of the houses, a wagon was produced, to which four half-broken California horses were harnessed. The men hung on to their heads, swayed about, and at times raised themselves off their feet as the animals struggled, till the signal for starting was given, when they sprang off, simultaneously, and the released animals dashed away at full speed. The driver occasionally looked in to ask us, on which side we wished to fall when we upset. This seemed to be his standing joke, and one which I thought it not improbable might become a serious question with us.
The plains were covered with thousands of cattle and horses, quite reminding us of the descriptions of old California times. In the twenty-five miles of our journey, there were but two or three shanties, erected by squatters who were raising cattle, and not a fence or enclosure, except the corrals about them. We reached Los Angeles in about two hours and a half, having changed horses once on the way.
As we approached the town there was a marked change from the treeless sterility of the plains. We found ourselves winding through the midst of vineyards and gardens, and on all sides saw workmen engaged in the manufacture of wine.
WILLIAM INGRAHAM KIP
A day on the dubbing stage. When I met Billy in the office I knew he was in one of his moods, and his mood proved to be the persecuted one. The Rebel discriminated against. This comes on him now and then—he craves occasional persecution as animals crave salt. With the passing of years, however, and his great success, it’s getting goddamned hard to find any persecution. The best he could do today was that John Farrow is allowed to drive his car on the lot and that whereas Bing Crosby is given $25,000 for saying one syllable on the screen, he and I were asked to speak two lines in Variety Girl for nothing. At first he said he would do so for an automobile, then only if $125,000 was given to the Jewish Blind. I may add that I’ve never known the Jewish Blind to haunt his conscience before.
CHARLES BRACKETT
I came near being bumped off today—but aside from a lame back where they bumped me, I am all right. And it was worth while, everything considered.
…I quite detected cars coming from in front and about to turn—, but, a big car the other side came whizzing around, and though the man jacked her down mighty fast hit me in the small of the back pretty hard. Two feet more headway would have broken my back. He cussed me out.
CHARLES LUMMIS
Bad news at Warner Brothers Studio this morning in the strike. I drove out…around noon, but the pickets had vanished and all was quiet.
CAREY MCWILLIAMS
It was very thoughtful of you to send me a book explaining James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” All I need now is another book explaining this study by Stuart Gilbert who, if memory serves, painted the celebrated picture of George Washington which hangs in the Metropolitan Museum. I realize that there is some two hundred years’ difference in their ages, but any man who can explain Joyce must be very old and very wise.
You disappeared rather mysteriously the other night, but I attribute this to your life of crime in the movies.
GROUCHO MARX, to Peter Lorre
Cecil Blount DeMille’s The Ten Commandments was previewed this week for a company of two hundred and sixty-three archangels in a temple of strawberry meringue especially built for the occasion on the Paramount back lot. Y. Frank Freeman led vespers with a reading from the letter of “a Protestant church leader” to the effect that “The first century had its Apostle Paul, the thirteenth century had St. Francis, the sixteenth had Martin Luther and the twentieth has Cecil B. DeMille.”
After heaping portions of the Sacred Host had been served up in a rich sauce with seconds for everybody, de Mille himself, clad in the rosette of the Order of the Holy Sepulcher, appeared among them on a Technicolor screen to explain his affection for the Almighty. The picture was then revealed.
DALTON TRUMBO, to a friend
Every day I receive a letter from a librarian asking if I would not give the originals of the diary and letters to their library. They are not aware that because they did so little to contribute to my reputation as a writer, because they were passive spectators to my difficulties, the diaries are my only capital.
ANAÏS NIN
Now, the effigies of these beautiful young persons, with their fadeless smiles of satisfaction and delight, adorning pages of our leading periodicals or emblazoning the fences of our daily walks, and all revealing their lustrous and impeccable teeth, back to the ultimate molar,—must inevitably convince the present generation, even in periods of depression, that the declaration of Browning’s “Pippa” [“God’s in his Heaven / All’s right with the world!”] understates the truth.
JULIAN HAWTHORNE
I never really enjoyed strapping good health, but also scarcely ever have a serious illness; the organism is in good order, and basically I think that my constitution, by its whole tempo and character, tends to patience, endurance, a long pull; to carrying things to their end—not to say to perfection. It is this instinct that explains the urge toward a new establishment, toward building….
…The house is making slow progress; the steel window and door casings were very long in arriving, and sometimes labor is short too. At best we shall be able to move in by the middle of December, but the architect advises us not to count on that. Oh well, patience is my strong point.
THOMAS MANN, to a friend
Came to the mainland in a large Bay…named it “Bahía de los Fumos” [Bay of Smokes] on account of the many dark billows seen there…engaged in intercourse with some Indians captured in a canoe….The bay is 35 degrees latitude; it is an excellent harbor and the country is good with many plains and groves of trees.
JUAN RODRÍGUEZ CABRILLO
Warm evening, after swimming at the Y. Sitting above Central Library, on a bench on the “Spanish Steps”—a replica of a historic place that is really this place, my perch above the library, half-moon rising, a sense of urban bustle: the security guard from the corporate tower, the pulsing beat from the new tourist attraction, the long glass slide to oblivion. Blade Runner–esque LED high-stepping video dancers now replace the Russian émigrés’ soulful portrait of Our Lady of Porciuncula, painted by hand in Renaissance hues. Santa Anas warm and dry on the skin. Water burbling from the fountain, below Robert Graham’s high-breasted bronze woman-child, austere in her perfection.
My city. I am drawn to this perch at a particular moment late in the day, when there’s a shaft of sunlight straight below me extending through the axis of Central Library, entering through Fifth Street, exiting out the Hope Street doors onto the street where I was born. Hope Street.
I sit still and let all the stories wash through me from Gordon Davidson’s funeral that morning at Leo Baeck Temple. Rabbi Beerman’s spirit was there too, waiting to take Gordon to a production of “Angels in America” in Heaven. Gordon just walks into the play. He already has a role, everyone knows who he is, the Moses of L.A. theater. Moses with a grin, Moses with a last view from his hospital bed of the marquee of the Kirk Douglas Theater.
My throat is still sore from the drip drip drip. A week where the city has exhausted me. Each lurch on the road, each discourtesy, sense of body confinement a distress. Note to self—always have an audio book in the car.
In the shadow of the tallest building, U.S. Bank Tower, the “other” target of 9/11. The cause of all the bomb threats called into the library in the months and years after 9/11. All of us having to trundle out of the building, sometimes the only place you’d meet and mingle with someone who works on Lower Level 4, the History Dept stacks, everyone jovial. And the night when we hosted a Chilean novelist and the alarm sounded. We all had to move out of the post-lecture reception in the courtyard out onto 5th Street in the dark, leaving our keys and wallets behind. We were out there a half hour until the library security officer walked over to me and, motioning to our guest—could he speak with him? He asked the young novelist, “Do you have any known enemies? Anyone who would want to hurt you?” Alberto rolled his eyes and confessed, “Yes,” he said, “Gabriel Garcia Marquez hates my novels.” The security officer carefully wrote it down on his notepad.
We were all looking for evidence in those days.
LOUISE STEINMAN
Billy has formed a habit when there are others about of saying with a sigh that it was I who kept him from enlisting at the outbreak of the war….When however a chance at a commission came and he did consider going to make moving pictures in a uniform, I advised him that I thought it would be just as well for him to make them in the studio—he was just getting his first chance as a director, he hadn’t enough authority to impress himself on the Army—and I thought it was time for him to press ahead, making pictures which because of their pleasure giving powers would do more good, because they expressed him more fully than any Army made picture could.
CHARLES BRACKETT
When I last saw swami, on the 4th, he asked about my meditation. I said I was finding it helpful to keep reminding myself how near my death may be. Swami then told me that Vivekananda had said: If you are trying to know God, you must imagine that death is already gripping you by the hair; but if you are trying to win power and fame, you must imagine that you will live for ever.
CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD
Mr. Hitler is a skyrocket whose fuse has already been lighted. He is a one-chance rocket. Soon he must fall and come to earth, fulfilling the nature of the rocket by spluttering to death in the dark. This does not mean he will not do great damage before he dies, probably by his own hand.
CLIFFORD ODETS
We went to see how a big mass scene on the square before Notre Dame de Paris was shot at the Universal studio. This involved about 600 people. There was much noise, animation, banal gesticulation, and swinging of hands. Barrymore himself, in the comic makeup mask of “the king of fools,” sitting on the head of a statue of a horse, played with full nerve, was brave, vivid, and graceful like a statue.
SERGEI BERTENSSON
Southern California is a retreat for all failures.
SINCLAIR LEWIS
Some day East Siders will wake up to the fact that we are entitled to representation in conjunction with our taxation. If the East Side is to be taxed equally with taxpayers in other sections in the city it seems to us that the East Side is due for an equal amount of representation in the various branches of government.
AL WAXMAN
I now go to football games to watch my son down there risking his very stern for good old Franklin High. We are the smallest school in the league, yet consider that we have already beaten Glendale and San Pedro, and you can see how good we are. I stand while the school song is sung at the conclusion of each game, and watch Chris out there on the turf with the team, standing reverently facing the stands, helmet off for the hymn, and bless my old soul if I don’t for a moment think that there are things one can believe in with all one’s heart. Although, when the hymn is over and I’ve returned to the house and sit with my first drink, I can’t for the life of me think what they may be.
DALTON TRUMBO, to a fellow blacklistee
I was stunned as one is when one reaches the fulfillment of a wish and finds it suddenly granted beyond one’s imagination. Of all the things which have been said, written about the Diaries, you wrote what has the deepest meaning for me—you answered as only someone who is a writer and a critic and a human being could.
ANAÏS NIN, to Robert Kirsch
I have made a contract under which Bosworth, Inc., has the rights to make moving pictures of all my works. Bosworth, Inc., has made a fine seven-reel picture of The Sea Wolf, authenticated over my signature with twenty-five feet of moving pictures of myself writing at my desk. All other films made by Bosworth, Inc., will be similarly authenticated.
JACK LONDON
Tonight is so beautiful. The moon is so big and yellow and looks like a picture through the trees in front of my window. I’m beginning to get romantic again in this warm climate.
The two girls in my room are out—one with a boy friend and the other has to work nights as she is a telegraph operator.
I didn’t mind staying here by myself today because there is an auditorium right next to my window and the opera singers here in Los Angeles are practicing for 2 weeks. They tell me that they practice here every day during their stay so that I expect to be entertained for nothing for the rest of the week.
VALERIA BELLETTI, to a childhood friend
Traveled 7 miles and came to San Graviell Mission, the most beautiful location that I have seen in this country, the garden filled with oranges and olives and other fruit trees. We then traveled 3 miles and camped.
HENRY W. BIGLER
Went to the house David Lewis and James Whale have taken, for dinner….It is very Spanish, with a red ruled living room whose long windows look out on magnificent views on three sides….Dorothy Arzner, the only woman director, came in later. A fine, sad, abstract-minded spinster. She drove me home, stopping en route to show me her house, a Greek house immensely appropriate to the Vestal of the Cinema.
CHARLES BRACKETT
Re:
Your November issue, “On the Scene” section on Mr. Hunter S. Thompson as the creator of Gonzo Journalism, which you say he both created and named….Well, sir, I beg to take issue with you. And with anyone else who says that. In point of fact, Doctor Duke and I—the world famous Doctor Gonzo—together we both, hand in hand, sought out the teachings and curative powers of the world famous Savage [Robert] Henry, the Scag Baron of Las Vegas, and in point of fact the term and methodology of reporting crucial events under fire and drugs, which are of course essential to any good writing in this age of confusion—all this I say came from out of the mouth of our teacher who is also known by the name of Owl.
OSCAR ZETA ACOSTA, to Hugh Hefner
So Jon and I are parking the car, and the parking structure is monstrous, one of those structures that goes five floors underground, and the only empty spaces are on the fifth floor in a remote cavernous corner.
And we don’t necessarily mind, because we’re going to see one of those arty movies that’s only playing at like three screens in the entire country, and parking doesn’t really matter when you get to see a movie that people in Oklahoma really want to see, but won’t get to see for a very long time because they don’t live in LA or New York. When you think about it, they live in Okla-fucking-homa, and I know that the wind sweeps down the plain and that everything is O-fucking-K, but they really should be living in LA. We’ve got arty movies here.
Anyway, we make our way to the elevator, and because we’re on the bottom floor of the monstrous parking structure, we have to wait a few minutes for the next ride. And Jon and I are looking at the three other people waiting with us, three complete strangers, and we’re all silent, and we’re all letting each other know through like telepathy or something that, yes, we’re all here for the arty movie. People like us, people like those who are waiting with us, we don’t have to talk about how cool we are. All you have to do is look at our arty vintage shoes.
So the elevator finally arrives and we all clamber in, all five of us, and the doors close and we go up only one floor. And the doors open to let in those waiting on the fourth floor and there’s this couple standing there totally making out, groping and fondling and everything, his back to the door, she’s facing the elevator.
And as the doors open she realizes that five people are watching this detailed reproductive display, so she stops kissing the guy and tells him to stop, stop, cut it out, stop, the elevator is here. But he really doesn’t care, he’s trying to get his game on, so he continues to grope and he’s very earnest about the groping.
And she’s getting annoyed, so she finally forces his hands off her body and stops him with one final “cut it out!” So he reluctantly gives up the groping and turns to enter the elevator and as he turns around all five of us in the elevator realize that this gallant groper is none other than Giovanni Ribisi.
And he realizes, shit, there are five people standing there watching this and he knows that we all know who he is, and so he gives us this pleading, furrowed brow that says, please, for the love of god, don’t ask me about the Mod Squad, I don’t know what I was thinking, can I please just have my dignity?
And all five of us are cool enough that we know better than to call attention to a celebrity. You just don’t do that here.
HEATHER B. ARMSTRONG
Preparations for my next picture Shanghai Deadline have not quite reached what I might call the “Hell—Let’s Shoot It” stage and consequently there are numerous story conferences, at which tremendous attention to the minutest detail of dialogue and characterization is paid by all concerned, and advance scripts marked “Revised Temporary Final” are issued to the principals. It never pays, however, to read these scripts as the entire story is invariably rewritten on the set, the dialogue improvised by the players, and the characterization moulded by the Director in accordance with his day-to-day moods, whims and fancies.
GEORGE SANDERS, to his father
Why Dick,
…At the moment I am in LA, or possibly only think I am, and who knows for how long…
later,
Pyn~chon~
THOMAS PYNCHON
It is a hard job, this cross-country driving. We got into the traffic at Hollywood last night and it is frightful. There and here the traffic policeman keeps hurrying the cars to drive faster.
LAURA INGALLS WILDER, to Almanzo Wilder
An old acquaintance of mine, James Agee, many years the movie reviewer on Time and latterly engaged in doing a script for John Huston on The African Queen, is also on the beach and occupying a room in Dotty’s house (no romantic connection; he spends his time drooling over some unseen dame Dotty calls The Pink Worm). Parker says Agee consumed three bottles of scotch unaided last Friday. I didn’t get Agee’s closing quotations on Parker’s consumption. They both exist in a fog of crapulous laundry, stale cigarette smoke, and dirty dishes, sans furniture or cleanliness; one suspects they wet their beds. All this, added to an absolutely manic pitch of fear out here on everyone’s part that he’s about to get about to be jugged by the FBI—and people are being [thus] jugged and blacklisted—makes for a Hollywood that is nothing like any I ever knew, a combination of boom town gone bust and Germany in 1935. By Monday I was in such a dreary frame of mind I was strongly tempted to cry frig to my various assignments and jump the eastbound plane.
S. J. PERELMAN
I want you to know this is a literary family. Tony came home from school the other day with a composition entitled “Why I Must Not Talk in Class,” for me to read and sign. His father, on the other hand, is sending you his compositions for you to read, sign, and return. Find, enclosed, unless some crook with excellent taste has rifled the envelope looking for first edition material that he can sell as hot goods to the Huntington Library.
The pieces are from a book to be called Overkill and Megalove which World Publishing has scheduled for spring publication, always allowing that there will be any paper or people by then. Tell me frankly what you think and why you believe they are great….
Fuck the New York Yankees.
NORMAN CORWIN, to E. Y. “Yip” Harburg
Somewhere out in an undesignated space my friend Turtle is watching the stars. He sent me a message of greetings last week and an invitation to “come and see us”—the us being a commune in the hillsides, full of sweet smiles and good vibes. But I can’t because tomorrow comes and I come with it fully charged with the pursuit of career and achievement and excitement that is doing something in the city.
LIZA WILLIAMS
The neighbor’s dog (a very gentle, affectionate doggie—white with yellow spots) was killed yesterday by a motor car, at top of the hill. We are very lonely, as he came to us to be fed regularly—his owner feeding him nothing but vile-smelling chicken-food.
OLIVE PERCIVAL
There is no Los Angeles face. Almost any other great city will have an imaginable characteristic physiognomy….The Los Angeles picture, nevertheless, would be a very remarkable thing—namely, the truest conceivable representation of the whole American face, urban, big town, little town, all together.
GARET GARRETT
I visited Henry Miller after serious surgery, fourteen hours and eight hours on separate days. He was so weak and frail. He is blind in his right eye from being too long on the operating table. He does not hear well. When he asked to have the pillows removed so he could slide into bed and rest, I felt almost as if he was going to curl up and sleep forever….
I don’t want to live as Miller has, limping, in pain, not able to travel and now for the second time undergoing major surgery. Henry once so healthy, joyous, lively. Tireless walker, hearty eater.
But let the sun shine on a beautiful autumn day, let me have a morning free of engagements when I can work on Volume Six and I am light again. Stay alive, Anaïs.
ANAÏS NIN
Picked out the suit Sam Goldwyn is giving me (one also for Billy) for the script.
CHARLES BRACKETT
I drove to the studio this morning to visit the set. Inside a huge stage at Columbia Studios a grand Victorian mansion had been built. I loved seeing the furnishings, all the rich silks and brocades in a perfect harmony of muted color. Francis took my hand and said, “Come see this.” He led me to the bedroom to look at the large round headboard for Lucy’s bed with its carved bat designs and thick tassels.
The room opened onto a terrace overlooking the garden. We walked down two flights of wide stone steps to a fountain and a pond with water lilies blooming. Beyond, I could see the entrance to the crypt and a hill with family gravestones. There was a rose arbor and a maze of high hedges. Francis said, “All this garden is built in the pit of the stage where Esther Williams’ swimming pool once was.”
ELEANOR COPPOLA
We’ve been to Catalina for two days, San Diego and Tia Juana for four days. I went to the races but lost $2.50. Played roulette and lost—played the money machines and lost—in fact luck is just against me it seems, but I’m not worried. I feel ever so much better than in N.Y. and that’s something to be thankful for. The weather is simply marvelous—so warm and sunshiny. We’ve only had one cloudy day since I’ve been here….
Tomorrow I am going to really make an earnest effort to get a job and if I can’t get a job at the studios I’ll go downtown [to] Los Angeles in some law office temporarily.
VALERIA BELLETTI, to a childhood friend
I think I have had all about all of Hollywood I can stand. I feel bad, depressed, dreadful sense of wasting time, I imagine most of the symptoms of some kind of blow-up or collapse. I may be able to come back later, but I think I will finish this present job and return home. Feeling as I do, I am actually afraid to stay here much longer….
My books have never sold, or [are] out of print; the labor (the creation of my apocryphal county) of my life, even if I have a few things yet to add to it, will never make a living for me. I don’t have enough sure judgment about trash to be able to write it with 50% success.
WILLIAM FAULKNER, to his agent
6 hours at the carpenter’s bench which resulted in my putting the grille in Bertha’s door and hanging it on its hinges. Poor Amate had his fingers eaten up with the sulfuric acid in the cement and sat around and lent me his moral support while I toiled; and Keith lent me his immoral support and asked me 17,000 questions by count (he counted) in a voice that I used instead of a bit when I had to bore any holes in hard wood.
CHARLES LUMMIS
Had dinner upstairs with Luther and Sylvia [Sidney], after this going for a walk down Hollywood Boulevard. They told me of a scene that happened in Ciro’s nightclub here the other night. [Anatole] Litvak, director, and [Paulette] Goddard, actress, were drunk there together. They have been sleeping together, in public, for weeks. Drunk at Ciro’s, sitting at a ringside table, he took out her breasts and kissed them passionately. They were stopped by the help but later continued the same thing on the dance floor. For this the management banished them to the outer sanctum of the bar. There A. Litvak suddenly disappeared, finally was discovered under the bouffant skirt of Miss Goddard on his knees, kissing the “eagerly sought triangular spot” with the blissful unawareness of a baby at a bottle.
For my part, I told Sylvia, I would rather be like Litvak than lead a life of wooden caution.
A warm feeling came to me when I began to think about the trio play this evening. I hope to come to it again with real excitement. Part of the theme of this play is about how the men of our country irresponsibly wait for the voice and strong arm of authority to bring them to life, etc. So comes fascism to a whole race of people. Danger ahead—I see it all over, even in myself. Nothing stands for authority and I wait for its voice! There is something in men in the world over today that welcomes dictatorship; the children are seeking for the father to arrange their lives for them!
CLIFFORD ODETS
I don’t know why I’m starting a new volume at this point. The day isn’t auspicious—nothing memorable but the death of Cezanne. And today is foggy. Rather snug, as foggy days are in the Canyon….
A whole week of no work, except preparations for the reading I gave last night at the Garden Grove High School auditorium. (This was looked on by the organizers as a historic event, because it was the first lectures given under the auspices of the future Irvine branch of the U.C., UCI, which has at present no buildings, no students, almost no faculty except the chancellor and some other administrators, nothing but one thousand acres of land.) I have got to get on with Ramakrishna. And I must keep at the novel, just for the sake of provoking a breakthrough.
CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD
It’s hard to convey the tranquility and normalcy of these neighborhoods—the skateboarding kids, the Pizza Huts, the garage sales—while still presenting a truthful picture of their crime problems.
In fact, what many people in Los Angeles think of as this city’s “bad neighborhoods” are in many ways indistinguishable from those with milder reputations. They brim with aspiration and middle-class comfort, even as they distill every kind of despair. I pass blocks of graffiti on Slauson Avenue in the morning before stopping in at the bright new Western Avenue Starbucks, inevitably full of well-dressed commuters listening to cutting-edge blues. This is just northwest of where the 1992 riots broke out, and the area is now booming, construction everywhere: a new Gigante grocery store, a new Subway sandwich shop.
But just across the street is the permanent swap meet where a shootout broke out recently amid a crowd in daylight.
JILL LEOVY
Here I got the first news of the discovery of gold—obtained it from a negro—It seems incredible—They say that men in some instances have made as high as $50. a day—It seems incredible! But, they insist here it is true.
ORVILLE C. PRATT
2000 words today and all good.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
There has been a Chinese massacre…a most disgraceful affair, the like of which is fortunately not on American records. Some members of different Chinese secret societies fought over the possession of a woman….
A few Celestials were taken to jail in consequence. The disturbance was thought to have ended and the jailbirds were taken the next day before the police court for preliminary hearing….
No sooner had the court set the day for trial than the Mongolians repaired to their own quarters, where a new fight ensued, which soon attracted a multitude of Mexicans and Americans from that vicinity….
The heathens fought desperately and an officer, Robert Thompson, who attempted to quell the riot, was killed and his deputy, Bilderain, was wounded, which naturally roused the boundless anger of the white mob….
One of the heathens ventured into the street and was at once caught by his pursuers, taken about four squares and hanged to the doorway of a corral amid the abjurations of the enraged spectators. Having tasted the blood of the almond-eyed stranger, the combined mob of Americans and Spaniards now largely reinforced, began the real massacre. As the beleaguered heathen had barricaded doors and windows, a crowd of hoodlums in desperate frenzy climbed upon the roofs, broke holes through and shot the inmates, males, females, young and old….
It may seem amazing that so-called civilized communities should have to witness the frenzied destruction of nearly a score of human lives, even though the provocation was very great. When quiet was restored, there were eighteen bodies found dangling in mid air, some from window casings, some from lamp posts, while one or two had actually been tied to the seat of farm wagons and others to awnings, among these the body of a child!
FRANK LECOUVREUR
I anxiously await Saturdays so that I can see your little letters, my love. All week I’ve been waiting to see if you show up, from my cell through the window on the alley, which is the third window….
When you all pass by the third window on the alley, stop if only for a half minute so that I can see you well. My dear: I feel that you are feeling a bit of pain. Would some of my kisses where you hurt make it well? I would give them so tenderly that you would feel no discomfort. I know, my life, I understand that you miss me as much as I miss you. But what can be done? More than the tyrants, it is our friends who are keeping us in jail, because their laziness, their indolence, their lack of initiative has tied them up, and they do nothing. I believe that they love us and have us in their hearts; but this isn’t enough to rescue us. What’s needed is that they work in an effective manner for our liberation, and they’re not doing that. Everyone comes forth in manifesting their sympathy for us and deploring our situation. We are devoting ourselves to putting an end to the tyrant in Mexico and nobody will lift an arm to stop the tyrant’s henchmen. There is much that could be done in our favor, but little or nothing is being done, and nothing, of course, is being gained. There should be a commission that is constantly after the press so that something could appear favorable to the prisoners, as much in the local press as that outside of California….
Goodbye my love, look closely and you’ll see that it is our friends who are keeping us prisoner through their apathy. Receive my immense love and adoration, you, the only woman who makes my heart beat. What I’ve told you isn’t a reproach for you, my angel. You’re doing everything you can, and I thank you from my soul. If you don’t win in this struggle against despotism and do not rescue your Ricardo who loves and adores you, it won’t have been for lack of effort on your part. With all my soul, your Ricardo kisses you tenderly.
RICARDO FLORES MAGON, to his beloved
Convincingly proving his ability to weld into shape a new organization and his capacity for realizing both the musical and artistic content of his programme, Walter Henry Rothwell, as conductor of the Philharmonic Orchestra, yesterday startled Los Angeles out of her symphonic slumbers and introduced what might be termed a new epoch in local musical history. The concert was [the] first afternoon event of the series to be given at Trinity Auditorium. The audience was not especially notable as to size, the glamour of a premiere was not broadly apparent, but the people who were there represented musical taste, and their appreciation, particularly after they were fully convinced that the result was real, brilliantly testified the triumph achieved by the musicians under the scholarly, and at the same time, unconventional leadership of the new conductor.
It was evident as soon as the orchestra members had assumed their places on the stage that the backers of the enterprise have spared nothing money can buy in their effort to give a new importance to music in this city. No doubt, the chief credit for this belongs to W. A. Clark, Jr., who officially and unofficially is the sponsor of the enterprise. And don’t worry about Mr. Clark not taking an active interest in his prodigy, because he has been watching its growth ever since the first rehearsal, and he was there yesterday and as proud as any sponsor should be over a prodigy’s debut.
…In his interpretations Rothwell seemed at his best in the movements affording the opportunities for broader contrasts. His renditions of the symphonic poem, “Les Preludes” and Chabrier’s “Espana,” are the most distinct triumphs and were greeted with bravos. His effects were equally brilliant in the rapid movements of the Dvorak “New World Symphony.”
…You could realize at times that he was not getting the finer effects he desired, but that will be only a matter of rehearsals now, for everything indicated yesterday the certainty of a triumphal first season for the Philharmonic Orchestra.
EDWIN SCHALLERT, for the Los Angeles Times
Work on An American Tragedy & letters. Helen collects $35.00 from Metro & gives it to me. Wonderful session in evening—after dinner at Petitfils. Helen has a streak of perversion in her. Makes me promise never to teach any other girl to osculate my penus as she does!
THEODORE DREISER
Last night I went to the Carthay Circle Theatre to see Will Rogers in his first talking picture, They Had to See Paris. Marvelous! I was astonished at Will Rogers’s work. To call him a comedian is unjust to his art—the word is too small. He is one of the greatest HUMORISTS I have ever seen, but he is also a great ACTOR! His characterization is not of one small-town garage-store owner in Oklahoma, but of every small-town garage-store owner in America.
ERNST LUBITSCH
The Audrey Hepburn test you made is a fine piece of work, and I just wanted to tell you how much we liked it here at the studio. You gave us a good look at the girl’s personality and charm, as well as her talent. As a result of the test, a number of producers at Paramount have expressed interest in casting her.
I can’t say at the moment whether or not we will use Miss Hepburn in Roman Holiday, but if we don’t you may be sure it will not be because of anything in the test—which is as good as any I’ve seen in a long time.
WILLIAM WYLER, to a fellow director
My friend, the forest ranger, decided I had been working too hard and needed diversion. “I’m going to take you to visit the oldest things on the planet.” As we drove north from Los Angeles, I assumed we were going to the redwoods….
…It seemed as though we had landed in a spaceship on another planet, the planet Mars. Out of great expanses of bare, white, bone-colored rock grew a few scattered trees, nothing else. The trees were short, stunted, twisted and gnarled, only a few green needles, a symbol of strength and defiance. The forester said they were bristlecone pines, the oldest known living things. Methuselah, the eldest, is 4,600 years old. Many were growing here when the Egyptians were building the Pyramids. He explained these trees are the only plants that can survive here, exposed to high winds, growing on very poor rocky soil with very little rainfall. They have been able to survive by allowing most of the tree to die so that a small part may live on in equilibrium with the harsh environment. They grow incredibly slowly, in one hundred years only one inch. Their twisted roots have been almost completely exposed by four hundred years of erosion. Many of the pines had been sculptured into objects of powerful beauty by wind-blown sand, by ice and by fire.
ANAÏS NIN
Last night on the way home from dinner, Ruth and I walked down our street and were remarking how beautiful it was. The sky was a deep blue and the stars were so twinkly—the street is a broad one and lined on both sides with huge palm trees. The houses are all set back with lovely lawns in front (everything is quite a new green now since the rain we’ve had) and the pale moon shining through the palms threw weird shadows on the lawns. It looked so enchanting. Ruth and I just stopped and drank in the beauty.
VALERIA BELLETTI
I still have my fine office, I still have my emptiness: but I think it fairly well established by now that I am “not quite the man for the job.” For it is all a process of wearing down. It seems they expect you to come here with the ember of revolt glowing somewhere. They smile and wait for it to get dampened in the application of non-resistance blankets. They seem to say: “We will let this fellow make his protestations for his soul’s sake, and then, having made them, he can get to work.” But if you won’t let revolt die, then you’re not the “man for the job.” If desire goes on burning fiercely, you are an outcast.
ERIC KNIGHT, to a friend
Done delightfully in the Palisades when I went out on my bicycle just now. Have gone to bed with cigarettes and a book, A life of Rimbaud.
Feel good. Ruin is still in abeyance. Good night. En avant, wherever you are!
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS
September was a blur of bodily and mental suffering. I am coming back, surely, to strength and nerve. I can walk—not yet alone for I need Lily’s arm, dear good child—a quarter of a mile. And daily I take an hour or two hours sometimes on the cable cars—they glide so smoothly they tire me less than a carriage. And then I am not obliged to speak, or say thank you as I must even to Mrs. Severance who is the only one I have seen. I get home tired, but wholesomely tired now. At first it was depressing. But there are unexplored depths in us that only solitude of heart can find—a weary exploration but leading nearer to Divine strength.
JESSIE BENTON FRÉMONT, to her nephew
At the studio all day but too nervous about our Ball of Fire preview to do any effective work….motored to the Academy Theatre in Inglewood for the preview. It went well, slow at first, then getting into its full stride for a grand old-fashioned movie, with yells of laughter from the audience….Find myself feeling the pleasure of a complete amateur let in on momentous doing.
CHARLES BRACKETT
As you probably know, the punch line of Gone With the Wind, the one bit of dialogue which forever establishes the future relationship between Scarlett and Rhett, is, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”
Naturally, I am most desirous of keeping this line and, to judge from the reactions of two preview audiences, this line is remembered, loved, and looked forward to by millions who have read this new American classic….
As you know from my previous work with such pictures as David Copperfield, Little Lord Fauntleroy, A Tale of Two Cities, etc., I have always attempted to live up to the spirit as well as the exact letter of the producers’ code. Therefore, my asking you to review the case, to look at the strip of film in which this forbidden word is contained, is not motivated by a whim. A great deal of the force and drama of Gone With the Wind, a project to which we have given three years of hard work and hard thought, is dependent on that word….
I do not feel that your giving me permission to use “damn” in this one sentence will open up the floodgates and allow every gangster picture to be peppered with “damns” from end to end. I do believe, however, that if you were to permit our using this dramatic word in its rightfully dramatic place, in a line that is known and remembered by millions of readers, it would establish a helpful precedent.
DAVID O. SELZNICK, to a censor
Yesterday morning at approximately 9:30 a.m. PST, a smallish rumbling earthquake hit Los Angeles and woke me from a drooling slumber. It was the first earthquake I’ve ever been awake or sober enough to experience, and like any other natural disaster frightened me into rabid cable news channel surfing and knuckle gnawing for the rest of the afternoon.
Rounding out the list of phobias that render me a paralyzed, shivering goose bump—fear of heights, rodents, spiders, and hairy toes to name just a few—is a mammoth anxiety over potential natural disasters, thoroughly aggravated in my youth by my older brother’s daily tortuous threat: “Do what I say or the tornado will come and get you.”
Tornado season in Tennessee starts in mid-March and continues through July, sometimes hiccupping into the latter part of September. When thunderstorms aren’t uprooting forests or rearranging acres of farmland, the South often suffers hailstorms, flashfloods and torrentially ghoulish winds during this season. Rarely is there a week not littered with severe thunderstorm warnings blinking in red Helvetica across the bottom of “Days of Our Lives.”…
18 years later and over 1000 miles from any weather conducive to tornado formation, I’ve got earthquakes to worry about and no siren-ific warnings or radar screens to issue me into the tub and into safety. I wonder how long I can stand under a doorframe before passing out.
HEATHER B. ARMSTRONG
As I head down the Thompson Creek trail esta mañana, iPodless, tuning in, instead, to a chirpy sky just beginning to clear of post-fire smoke and ash—por apocalíptico que parezca, just the “typical” Califas fall conflagration—I do know one thing for sure. Si el Bruce was born to run, yo nací para escribir.
SUSANA CHÁVEZ-SILVERMAN
You ask when we expect to return. Have rented this house until June 4 and shall probably stay the limit. To my surprise I like it here very much. I do not know when I have been more contented. We have a very pretty little place with many flowers and trees, and a good lawn….The children are playing out in front now with no wraps, and wearing sox….
There are oodles of writers here, too….If I could establish a colony of human beings, it would be a nice place to live permanently.
EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS, to his editor
This place is fit only for Christians. Its first gift to me was a nasty bronchitis. Every visitor, I hear, gets it, on account of the dry, idiotic climate.
H. L. MENCKEN, to his wife
Five people killed in plane yesterday and it is headlined today in every paper. Saturday in Los Angeles at one grade crossing seven were killed and six wounded and the papers didn’t even publish the names.
It looks like the only way you can get any publicity on your death is to be killed in a plane. It’s no novelty to be killed in an auto any more.
WILL ROGERS
Dear Robert: Passed through LA with Gregory, alone, preceding Orlovsky brothers, to give reading for Anais Nin, [Stuart] Perkoff, silly Lawrence Lipton and 70 other assorted strangers from Coastlines magazine and friends of Lip and Nin. Someone heckled Gregory so I drunkenly screamed take off your clothes and be naked, which then realizing what I was saying I went and did myself, to my great surprise. They made me put them back on before reading Howl, which I read with great wildness and lovely abandon so the night turned out fine.
ALLEN GINSBERG, to a fellow poet
…what are we to say, then, of a man
who takes off his clothes in someone else’s living room?
are we to applaud?
what is his nakedness to us?
what we care about his poems?
do you realize that he is in the lite? how can i
be expected to read?
he makes too much noise!
he says dirty words!
he needs a bath!
he is certainly
drunk!
i hope he soon realizes that this is, after all, now
& we have many wonderful things to amuse us
we want to see clowns
we go to the circus
is he gone yet? can i come out now?
STUART PERKOFF