A Bright and Guilty Place: Murder, Corruption, and L.A.'s Scandalous Coming of Age (27 page)

31

A Personal Note

O
n a furnace-hot day late in October 2007, when birds were catching flame in the air above the fires that had been burning for days in Malibu, when houses were exploding and vanishing into ash and the smoke drifting across the city had turned the sun smoggy and yellow, I saw a man waiting for a bus on Ocean Park Boulevard turn his body sideways so he could step into the narrow slot of shadow thrown by a telegraph pole. It was one of those moments when I thought: How can people live here, so close to the edge? More to the point, I thought: Why do I live here, in a place that can be so hellish?

Long before I first came to Los Angeles, or ever dreamed that I would, when I was a teenager in the north of England, I stumbled upon the novels of Raymond Chandler, green-spined Penguins, in a local bookstore. I can’t remember which I read first, The Big Sleep or Farewell, My Lovely. At first, like most readers, I fell in love with the verve of Chandler’s language, the show-stopping one-liners. “She was a blonde,” said Marlowe, “a blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window.” Of another woman, less fortunate in appearance, Marlowe observed: “She was as cute as a washtub.” I enjoyed Marlowe himself—the romantic loner, the sad knight with a .38 who treated rich and poor, powerful and weak, with the same cynical and self-protecting detachment. He knew the world but couldn’t be bought. He solved the murders even if he missed bringing to justice the bad guy, or more usually, the very bad woman who tried to sit in his lap while he was standing up, or gave him a smile he could feel in his hip pocket.

Even then I realized that in Chandler’s writing something more than bullets and dames was going on. Marlowe’s heroism was noble yet careworn and sad. “I brushed my hair and looked at the gray in it. There was getting to be plenty of gray in it. The face under the hair had a sick look. I didn’t like the face at all.” And here was Marlowe at night, heading into one of the Santa Monica canyons. “There was loneliness and the smell of kelp and the smell of wild sage from the hills. A yellow window hung here and there, all by itself, like the last orange. Cars passed, spraying the pavement with cold white light, then growled off into the darkness again. Wisps of fog chased the stars down the sky.”

This wasn’t just action writing. Marlowe lived in a beautiful world that had gone wrong, a paradise that would never be restored and in whose existence he had long since ceased to believe. He lived in Los Angeles.

I first came to L.A. in the early 1980s, just before the Olympics were staged here for the second time, when Mayor Tom Bradley claimed that L.A. was becoming “world class.” On the freeways it was still sometimes possible, as the grumpy father insists in the movie Clueless, to get from “anywhere to anywhere in twenty minutes.” The city welcomed me with its polyglot dazzle; people I met seemed energized and friendly, up for “it”—meaning enthusiasm, change, openness, everything that London, where I was then living, no longer represented for me. In the years that followed I returned to L.A. again and again—for work, for romance, for vacations, for whatever reason I could invent—until finally in 1991 I shattered my English life for good and came to live here, permanently I sometimes fear, planning a six-month stay that has turned into seventeen years. Something happened. The city took hold.

In the beginning my wife and I rented an apartment, part of a large Spanish villa that had been built by Cecil B. DeMille in the 1920s. It featured floors of gleaming oak, high timbered ceilings, baronial fireplaces, and a mosaic-tiled fountain in the interior courtyard. On foggy autumn nights, with walnut and pine crackling in the grate, I felt a tingling connection with the city’s romantic past. We’d rented a piece of the history that people in L.A. weren’t supposed to concern themselves with. I could imagine that Marlowe himself might have visited this very building. I doubt that I’ll ever live anywhere more beautiful.

It turned out that the building was two blocks away from Yucca and Wilcox, known as crack alley, one of the worst drug-dealing neighborhoods in the city—a fact the realtor had omitted to mention to two European greenhorns. Thundering LAPD helicopters woke us at night and the spectral blue beams of their searchlights probed our bedroom. Then in April 1992, the Rodney King riots rolled to our doorstep and we watched looters trash and empty the local stores. We moved to Venice, only for the Northridge earthquake to shake the foundations of our 1921 bungalow, make its flimsy walls waft and wave, but somehow leave it standing. Our children were born here, on the sixteenth floor of the Santa Monica Hospital, delivered by an Armani-clad über-doctor who, while slipping into his scrubs, gazed out of the window and espied an apartment building that he owned, muttering: “I’m looking at my money.” For months I reported on the LAPD for the New York Times Magazine, speeding around Rampart and South Central in the back of rattling black and whites. In MacArthur Park, beneath a tree that stank as though a hundred horses had pissed on it, a man died in front of my eyes. He had a blade in his hand and a bullet in his eye, prompting a watching cop to adopt a laconic pose and utter a line that perhaps did spring from the streets but had been recycled in a dozen movies and TV shows: “Guy brought a knife to a gunfight.” It was a question of life imitating art imitating life, or maybe just life imitating art—this was L.A., after all.

The innocent eyes with which I once viewed the city put on dark glasses and I saw that to get “from anywhere to anywhere” might take a lot longer than twenty minutes—might, in fact, take a lifetime. It occurred to me that a modern version of Kafka’s The Castle could feature a character, an English writer say, drawn to L.A. for what seem simple reasons, but who finds himself staying and staying and staying, unable to escape while the city eats his soul and he crumbles away. I was overstating the case, but in perceiving myself as lost and adrift in the city was conforming to what the historian Norman Klein calls a “noir imaginary,” a ghost version of L.A. that can nonetheless control the patterns of real life that people weave for themselves. So much sun here, so much light, so much boredom and despair. Where had it come from, I wondered, this anomie—“a type of blight that answers none of the classical descriptions,” said the great Austrian architect Richard Neutra, who came here in the late 1920s—and why did it belong to Los Angeles in particular? This book has been an attempt to explore that question.

In 1933, at the height of the Depression, the now forgotten writer Myron Brinnig, fresh to the city from Montana, closed his novel The Flutter of an Eyelid with an earthquake and a fantastic, perhaps prophetic, vision: “Los Angeles tobogganned with one continuous movement into the water, the shoreline going first, followed by the inland communities. The small pink and white blue and orange houses of the shore were blown like colored sands into the tempest.” Brinnig seemed to convey that sliding into the Pacific and sinking without trace was an inevitable and desirable result for the city.

The young John Fante, meanwhile, recently arrived from Colorado, was living in a cheap hotel on Bunker Hill and working as a busboy while gathering material for Wait Until the Spring, Bandini and Ask the Dust, the two Depression-era novels that would make his reputation. Fante saw the “futile palm trees standing like dying prisoners” and the city boosters who, “in spite of all the evidence, whooped it up for the sunny south.” He saw the “tens of thousands of vagrants” and “the old folk from Indiana and Iowa and Illinois, from Boston and Kansas City and Des Moines—they sold their homes and their stores, and they came here by train and by automobile to the land of sunshine, to die in the sun, with just enough money to live until the sin killed them.” At the same time, however, Fante found L.A. irresistible and wrote about the city in terms of jubilant sexual desire: “Los Angeles, give me some of you! Los Angeles come to me the way I came to you, my feet over your streets, you pretty town I loved so much, you sad flower in the sand, you pretty town.”

Fires, earthquakes, floods, murders, the lofty palms that bend torturously back upon themselves as the gentle ocean beach surrenders to a pitiless Santa Ana: these are part of the local imagination. But they’re not the whole story. Unthinking optimism and the blind, unreasonable belief that lives can be remade are forces that drew people to L.A. in the first place, and still do. It’s the Great Gatsby of American cities, as historian Kevin Starr has said, magnifying dreams and expectations before it twists and perhaps trashes them; a mood disorder afflicts L.A. like a revolutionary dialectic, swinging through freedom at one end of the cycle to hysteria at the other.

I’ve tried to evoke the time when these aspects of the city’s personality, embedded from early on, came into sudden definition, sharp against the brittle brightness. In the early 1930s innocence was swept away once and for all by a mature yet troubled duality. A personality was fixed, and a plethora of future scenarios would grow as if set in place like bad seeds in the Garden of Eden. The Manson murders could only have happened in Los Angeles, likewise the O. J. Simpson murders, and the Menendez brothers’ murder of their parents, and the Night-Stalker murders, and the Phil Spector murder, and so on, and on. The actor Robert Blake, when accused of a murder that happened in his car in the San Fernando Valley, threw up his hands and pleaded that he hadn’t been there. At the moment the shooting occurred he’d been heading back into the restaurant where he and the victim had just eaten, to collect a gun he’d left on the table. That was his alibi, and when asked about the oddity of this he shrugged, as if murder is merely the price to pay for a life based on ambition and fantasy.

Such cases, and the public glee that greets them, are psychic manifestations, just as the riots of 1965 and 1992 were angry social ones. For sure L.A. will always get great murders; the subconscious of the city demands them like box office. It’s guaranteed, too, that these violent cul-de-sac dramas will be counterpointed by the SoCal flipside, playing out against some exhilarating soundtrack, such as the Beach Boys wanting “Fun, Fun, Fun.” The Eagles exhort us with such bright brio to check into the dismal confines of the Hotel California. Los Angeles is never just light or dark; it’s always both at the same time.

Acknowledgments

So many people lent a hand during the writing of A Bright and Guilty Place that it’s tough to know where to begin. My particular thanks go to “Skip” and Kathy White, the children of Leslie White, for their help and encouragement.

Vicki Steele and Simon Elliott and everybody else at UCLA Special Collections were unfailingly diligent and generous. Likewise Fernando Sauceda and Carolyn Cole at the magnificent Los Angeles Public Library’s photo collection. Charles Johnson, historian, perched in his timbered aerie in the lovely building that formerly housed the Ventura County Museum, was brilliant. Archivist J. C. Johnson was my guide to the Leslie T. White Collection in the Howard Gottlieb Center at Boston University. John Wilkman, in the process of completing a documentary film about the St. Francis Dam disaster, gave me invaluable pointers. Russell Johnson, lecturer at the University of Otago in New Zealand, graciously let me see his research on Clara Bow. Thanks to Michael Parrish for sharing his insights and knowledge concerning the L.A. County District Attorney’s office, where Sandy Gibbons, in the press office, always returned my calls and helped me find the Dave Clark trial documents. My friends at the Santa Monica Library Used Book Store helped me track down many books of local history.

This subject has haunted me for years. During that time I’ve had useful, inspiring, suggestive conversations with many friends and colleagues: David Ulin, Nick Owchar, D. J. Waldie, Carolyn See, Ric Burns, Paul Greengrass, Cressida Leyshon, Dave Smith, Jonas Goodman, Dan Conaway, Norman Klein, Tom Curwen, Bruce Hentshall, Judith Freeman, Peter Loewenberg, Tom Tomlinson, Matthew Snyder, Pete Micelli, Taylor Hackford, and Pico Iyer. Thanks to all.

Bill Thomas commissioned the book at Doubleday. Kris Puopolo edited it and made it about a hundred times better. Her careful readings and suggestions were always on the money and inspirational. Many thanks also to editor Kate Henderson and to Stephanie Bowen. My agent, Jeff Posternak at the Wylie Agency, was as always a sounding board, a support, and a great friend.

Sources

In researching the book I’ve conducted interviews and used archive material, trial transcripts, newspaper reports, and books to construct mosaics of the various incidents. When I refer to the
Times
, I mean the
Los Angeles Times
.

I’ve relied on reports from the
Los Angeles Illustrated Daily News
, generally referred to as simply the
Daily News
, for March 20, 1931, and later. Charlie Crawford’s relationship with Kent Parrot is outlined by Tom Sitton in “The Boss Without a Machine: Kent K. Parrot and Los Angeles Politics in the 1920s” (
Southern California History
, Summer 1985). Matt Weinstock’s quote is from his book
My L.A.
For information about him, and the history of the
Daily News
in general, I consulted the Matt Weinstock papers held by UCLA Special Collections. Robert Rosenstone’s essay on “Manchester Boddy and the L.A. Daily News” (
California Historical Quarterly
, December 1970) was useful; and Rob Leicester Wagner’s book
Red Ink, White Lies
is terrific on the L.A. Press and this period generally. The Leslie White material comes from
Me, Detective
; the D. J. Waldie quote from a conversation with the author. The building figures are drawn from the Federal Writers Project Guide to Los Angeles.