Somewhere there must surely be a folk saying, not in Poor Richard’s Almanack perhaps, but of equal logic and simplicity, about how every life has at least one fairy palace in its span. Usually these miracles happen when a person is young, but still wide-eyed enough to catch the magic that older people have forgotten or pushed away. For countless children, Disneyland has it, like Tivoli in Copenhagen. For both tourists and natives, the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace does well … prancing horses, flashing sabers, plumes and capes and trumpets in the fog … the Palace is in safe hands, a solid dream.
Sometimes people can know two palaces before Lady Luck calls it quits, but of course they are never of equal enchantment. This happened to me, and all of it before I was about ten. It was an early proof of my good fortune.
The lesser of the two palaces was the Pig ’n’ Whistle, a stylish ice-cream parlor in Los Angeles. Mother would take Anne and me there for a treat, after we had bought long black winter stockings or Easter hair ribbons at Robinson’s, and looked at yardage in Coulter’s long aisles lined with ancient clerks who murmured to Mother about things like prostate pangs and broken arches. The Pig ’n’ Whistle was on Broadway near the Orpheum Theatre, I think, and convenient to the Pacific Electric Depot, where we would catch the Red Car back to Whittier after refreshment and revival. Anne and I understood that we must order only plain ice creams, not expensive sundaes, since my little sister had inherited her grandmother’s Nervous Stomach, and concoctions at the Pig ’n’ Whistle were notoriously exotic.
This scarlet den of sin and iniquity, as one of my later friends who had been a Rough Rider with Teddy Roosevelt used to call any place with wall-to-wall carpeting and soft lights, had wide shiny windows out onto the street with the insigne of a capering little pig playing a golden whistle as he danced and smiled. He was lovable.
Inside, his palace was a wonderland of quiet elegance. The paneled walls were a soft grey, after one passed the long marble counters where people drank through straws from tall silver goblets, and there was lots of gold on the carved edgings and the magical little lights that glowed down onto at least a hundred pictures that had been bought in a cultural frenzy after the Exposition held in 1915 in San Francisco. They were misty and vague, mostly of young women gazing at butterflies or looking down at their Secret Diaries or perhaps a love letter. They were discreet girls, almost piled with filmy clothes, but there was a fine sunniness about them.
Anne and I were permitted to walk silently over the thick carpeting to peer up at these artifacts, except where people might be sitting in the booths that lined three walls below them. We whispered in the dim beauty, and she held my hand trustingly, being two years younger and very aware of the social amenities, as we moved languorously back to Mother’s booth and our melting scoops of ice cream in their long silver boats.
Once a spendthrift kinsman took us on an Easter Sunday afternoon to the Pig ’n’ Whistle, along with several of his own children. He must have been a nice man, because he plainly loved to look around the bulging boothful of omnivorous youngsters and say grandly, “Now, you order anything you want!”
We did, of course, almost stunned by such unaccustomed largesse. I can’t remember what the four or five cousins wanted, but Anne and I asked for the Easter Special. It cost forty-five cents, right at the head of the menu, and on top of several kinds of ice cream and sauces and chopped nuts, there was a little yellow cotton chicken. We pulled these decorations out, licked their wire stems carefully, and stowed them in our coat pockets. Nobody paid any attention to the cultural assurance of all the pink-green-watery pictures on the glowing walls, but the air, even on that Easter debauch, stayed soft and supremely elegant. The Pig ’n’ Whistle was a fairy palace, all right.
It could not compare, of course, with the Riverside Mission Inn. That magical place will always be for me a dream, awesome but built of pure delight.
When Father bought the Whittier News and we settled into our house on North Painter, in early 1912, he was something of a maverick, and a lot of other things the Quaker community was not. He wanted to know all about everything, and went far afield to learn it, and one of his goals was the Mission Inn. This was because of Frank Miller, who had founded the place. It was because Frank Miller had welcomed Booker T. Washington to his hostel when he could find no other lodgings open to him. It was because Frank Miller would house and feed broken-down circus performers and notorious ex-convicts and labor leaders and Indian chiefs as proudly as he would famous politicians and writers.
In other words, Father had a schoolboy crush on Old Mr. Miller, as he was called in family privacy, and we headed many times, on Sundays, toward the long stretches of hills and vineyards between Whittier and Riverside. The rows of eucalyptus trees near Cucamonga cooled us as the dusty air grew drier, toward the desert.
Once at the Inn, its magic spread over and into my little sister and me. We went up to Mrs. Miller’s apartment, through halls unlike any others in our lives. We made our manners. Soon, we knew, Mrs. Miller would say, “Perhaps you two young ladies can have an hour together, if your mother agrees.” This was all part of the ritual, and we could hardly wait for Mother’s set speech: “Oh, how very nice! Stay together, children, and don’t make any noise. Don’t touch anything. Come back when you hear the bells ring twelve.” And off we’d go, to step softly once again into the true, the real, the only palace.
We could go anywhere except the kitchens. We could climb any stairs, both narrow and twisting or wide and hung with dim old Mexican and Spanish portraits a million light-years from the ones in the Pig ’n’ Whistle. We did not touch anything. We did not open any doors, especially ones with numbers on them. But the palace was ours.
Itself, it was a constant marvel, no matter how well we came to know its amazing structure, all quirky and unexpected. On the third and top floor, for instance, there would be a little courtyard, with a tinkling wall fountain and a beautiful stone cherub bathing in it and a thousand sweet-smelling plants. (Several decades later this hidden patio was made into a kind of memorial to dead pilots who had trained at March Field, I think. I went there often, no longer holding Anne’s hand in mine.)
Or we would peek through a half-opened door and look up, or perhaps down, a narrow winding staircase made of roughly whitewashed adobe, perhaps with some crude paintings of the Sun and the Moon on the walls. We would take it, up or down, unafraid of the steps with their wide and narrow ends. (Is this why I have always loved circular staircases and longed to live with one?) Or we would go, almost dizzy with bliss and astonishment, down long cool corridors with huge dark wooden chests and armoires and pictures along the sides, and then armor standing as if real men breathed within, and at the end a grave golden Buddha with soft lights shining …
Once we went down a steep straight staircase and through a half-opened curtain, because we heard the sound of an organ playing and followed it to its right place. We were on the stage of a theatre, where “An Hour of Sabbath Meditation” was going on. The organ whuddered louder, and perhaps fifty people sat in front of us, some with heads in their hands, some upright with their eyes closed, or at least not seeing us on the stage.
No doubt the organist knew we were there, and no doubt he sent us some kind of message as his hands and feet made light sounds, and we squatted without fear on the floor, and listened until we heard one of the many bells in the Mission Inn ring twelve times. The soft music stopped, people rustled quietly to their feet, and we all went our chosen ways. Anne and I tiptoed up the stage stairs again, and did not report the concert until we were heading back to Whittier, after a delicious luncheon in Mrs. Miller’s apartment. It always ended with orange sherbet from Mr. Miller’s trees.…
He was, from the faint way I now remember him, tall and thin, with bushy white eyebrows and moustache, and keen bright eyes. He and Father would talk together, off in a corner. It was plain to us assorted females that the younger man was in love with every word he spoke. His wife, a short remote woman as I can now think of her, seemed to enjoy talking with Mother. Anne and I never said anything but “Yes, please” and “Thank you.” We were in a kind of trance, from our secret wanderings through the fairy palace. We snoozed on the back seat of the topless Model T, all the way home.
The deep carpeting in the fabulous ice-cream parlor was like clouds to us, but there were glittering or softly glowing tiles everywhere in the Mission Inn, even on the steep steps of the circular staircases. The wide corridors had rugs laid over their tiles, all from Spain, Morocco, Mexico. They felt cool. We walked softly on them, as if they might chip or crack. (And that may be why I have chosen for much of my life to stay in houses with tiled floors. And of course many of the walls of the inn were of plastered adobe, whitewashed, so that even now I can look at paintings most easily when they hang against some such surface.)
When I grew up, Mrs. Miller was still alive, but although I went often to the Mission Inn, I did not present myself to her. I am not sure why there was this lapse in what seems common courtesy. She was very old. I felt shy and unwilling to intrude as an adult into the apartment I had quietly savored as a little girl. I had never gone back with Anne and my parents after old Mr. Miller died, although in several later phases of my life I felt almost like an habituée in the dim spy-ridden bar, the moonlit balconies looking down from their bedrooms into unsuspected patios, all with their fountains splashing.
It would be easy to verify a few things like dates: when Old Man Miller started the Mission Inn; who were some of his legendary guests. But this report is a private matter, and I know what I know about magical places, both good and evil. And what I know about this good one is more real than any statistics can ever tell me.
—Glen Ellen, 1980