City of Nets (3 page)

Little did he know the ingenuity of the founders of Hollywood. The “Trust,” as Edison's company came to be known, kept filing lawsuits in New York against all would-be pirates, but who could track down and enjoin all the violators of New York court orders in obscure suburbs of Los Angeles? Movies could be shot in a few days, and production companies could be dissolved and recreated almost as quickly. “The whole industry . . . is built on phony accounting,” David O. Selznick once remarked. And if every other evasion failed, the Mexican border was only about a hundred miles away.

Years before Bertolt Brecht ever came to Hollywood, he had something like this in mind when he wrote the opening of
The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny.
Somewhere in an America of Brecht's own imagining, a battered truck carrying three fugitives from justice broke down and sputtered to a halt “in a desolate region.” “We can't go on,” said Fatty, the bookkeeper. “But we've got to keep going,” said Trinity Moses. “But ahead of us is only the desert,” said Fatty. “You know, gold is being discovered up the coast,” said Moses. “But that coastline is a long one,” said Fatty. “Very well, if we can't go farther up, we'll stay down here . . .” said the Widow Begbick. “Let us found a city here and call it ‘Mahagonny,' which means ‘city of nets.' ”

 

It should be like a net,

Stretched out for edible birds.

Everywhere there is toil and trouble

But here we'll have fun. . . .

Gin and whiskey,

Girls and boys. . . .

And the big typhoons don't come as far as here.

 

If Brecht's vision of an unknown future was prophetic, so was that of the Hollywood Board of Trustees. In 1910, it officially banned all movie theaters, of which it then had none. That same year, however, the town of Hollywood was jurisdictionally swallowed up by Los Angeles, which saw no particular virtue in restricting the newcomers' enterprises.

 

Thornton Wilder, ordinarily a friendly soul with a rather jaunty manner, was going out to dinner with some old friends in Hollywood one evening when he suddenly began to describe a vision of utter devastation. “You know, one day someone is going to approach this area and it will be entirely desert,” the playwright told his friends, Helen Hayes and her husband, Charles MacArthur. “There will be nothing left standing, stone upon stone. . . . God never meant man to live here. Man has come and invaded a desert, and he has tortured this desert into giving up sustenance and growth to him, and he has defeated and perverted the purpose of God. And this is going to be destroyed.”

The prospect of cataclysm is one of Los Angeles' oldest traditions. The threat lies in the earth itself, in the sweet-smelling tar that still oozes up out of the La Brea pits, the hungry graveyard for generations of goats and deer, and also the saber-toothed tigers that pursued them to their death. The skeletons of a hundred lions have been unearthed here, and more than fifteen hundred wolves, and one human being, a woman who is believed to have been twenty-five or thirty years old when her skull was mysteriously smashed in about nine thousand years ago.

The first Spanish explorers, led by Don Gaspar de Portolá, riding westward in the summer of 1769 along what is now Wilshire Boulevard, took awed note of “some large marshes of a certain substance like pitch . . . boiling and bubbling,” and wondered whether that hellish swamp was the cause or the consequence of the half-dozen earthquakes that had shaken the area during the previous two days. Don Gaspar rode on, and another two years passed before Franciscan missionaries returned to found the San Gabriel Mission, and then, a decade later, El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles de Porciuncula, the Town of the Queen of Angels.

The city that now numbers more than ten million inhabitants is built atop the San Andreas fault, and when one of the eight-lane freeways cracks open, the traffic simply streams on. Earthquakes are commonplace, and so are the landslides that carry $500,000 hillside homes crashing down into Topanga or Mandeville canyon. But if the trembling and splitting of the insubstantial earth seems fundamental to southern California's half-suppressed sense of fear, there is something even more primal in the sense of desert, aridity, desiccation, burning heat, and hence fire. The very life of the city derives from a thin vein of water, built with vast expense and corruption across the desert from the Rockies. And in the mountains that surround Los Angeles, every autumn brings drought and fire. In 1961, the brushfires blazed out of control and destroyed 460 homes, then worth more than $25 million, in the Bel Air region; in 1976, nearly 168,000 acres throughout the state went up in smoke; in 1978, another 200 homes were destroyed near Malibu. In November of 1980, winds of up to 100 miles an hour drove fires all across the hillsides, fire in Carbon Canyon, fire around Lake Elsinore, fire in Bradbury, near Duarte, fire in Sunland, in the Verdugo Hills. In the streets of downtown Los Angeles, people could smell the odor of charred chaparral and scrub oak and sumac. In the summer of 1983, fire even swept through the Paramount Studios and destroyed the half-century-old “New York Street” set that had provided scenes for
Going My Way
and
Chinatown
and, of all things,
The Day of the Locust.

The droning voices on the car radio brought constant reports of fire in the mountains as Maria Wyeth sped aimlessly along the freeways in Joan Didion's
Play It as It Lays.
The news was both a sign of larger disaster and a sign of nothing at all. “The day's slide and flood news was followed by a report of a small earth tremor centered near Joshua Tree . . .” Maria noted as she sat in a rented room, preparing herself for divorce and abortion, “and, of corollary interest, an interview with a Pentecostal minister who had received prophecy that eight million people would perish by earthquake on a Friday afternoon in March.”

Miss Didion ascribed both the fires and the hysteria partly to the Santa Ana, a hot wind that comes whistling down from the northeast, “blowing up sandstorms out along Route 66, drying the hills and the nerves to the flash point.” The Santa Ana brings dread and violence, she wrote in
Slouching Towards Bethlehem,
because “the city burning is Los Angeles' deepest image of itself. . . . At the time of the 1965 Watts riots what struck the imagination most indelibly were the fires. For days one could drive the Harbor Freeway and see the city on fire, just as we had always known it would be in the end. Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse. . . .”

Nathanael West had seen the same prophecy in fire. Tod Hackett, the central character in
The Day of the Locust,
kept planning and sketching an epic painting to be entitled “The Burning of Los Angeles.” “He was going to show the city burning at high noon, so that the flames would have to compete with the desert sun and thereby appear less fearful, more like bright flags flying from roofs and windows than a terrible holocaust. He wanted the city to have quite a gala air as it burned, to appear almost gay. And the people who set it on fire would be a holiday crowd.”

West was thirty-five, scarcely more than a year from his absurd death in an automobile crash, when
The Day of the Locust
burst forth and then disappeared in the spring of 1939. He had hoped that its success would free him from the drudgery of Hollywood scriptwriting, but despite the praises of Scott Fitzgerald, Edmund Wilson, and Dashiell Hammett, the novel sold exactly 1,464 copies. That brought West's earnings from four novels over the course of nearly a decade to a total of $1,280, less than a month's pay at his weekly rate of $350 at RKO, which promptly put him back to work writing a remake of
Tom Brown of Culver.
“Thank God for the movies,” West wrote to Bennett Cerf, publisher of
The Day of the Locust.

Like most writers of his time, West was familiar with failure and financial ruin. His father, a somewhat diffident building contractor, sank into bankruptcy during the late 1920's while West was in Paris savoring the pungencies of the surrealists. Back in New York, West could support himself only by working as a night clerk in a hotel partly owned by relatives. That was hardly the role in which he had imagined himself. Born Nathan Weinstein, the young West had repeatedly experimented with new identities, acquired the nicknames “Pep” and “Trapper.” He forged a high school transcript to enter Tufts, transferred to Brown with the transcript of a different Nathan Weinstein, then began signing himself Nathan von Wallenstein Weinstein. “He loved custom-tailored clothes . . . first editions and expensive restaurants,” his college friend and future brother-in-law S. J. Perelman wrote in
The Last Laugh.
“He fancied himself a Nimrod and fisherman, largely, I often suspected, because of the colorful gear they entailed. . . . For a brief interval, he even owned a red Stutz Bearcat, until it burst into flames and foundered in a West Virginia gorge.”

Perelman, who first went to Hollywood to write the scripts for the Marx Brothers'
Monkey Business
and
Horse Feathers,
described the movie capital as “a dreary industrial town controlled by hoodlums of enormous wealth,” but he was capable of making marvelous fun of it. “The violet hush of twilight was descending over Los Angeles as my hostess, Violet Hush, and I . . . headed toward Hollywood,” he wrote in
Strictly from Hunger.
“In the distance a glow from huge piles of burning motion-picture scripts lit up the sky. The crisp tang of frying writers and directors whetted my appetite. How good it was to be alive. . . .” West's description was more bleak. “This place is just like Asbury Park, New Jersey,” he wrote to Josephine Herbst. “The same stucco houses, women in pajamas, delicatessen stores, etc. There is nothing to do except tennis, golf or the movies. . . . All the writers sit in cells in a row and the minute a typewriter stops someone pokes his head in the door to see if you are thinking. Otherwise, it's like the hotel business.”

West came to Hollywood in 1933 because Darryl Zanuck's new Twentieth Century Pictures had paid him four thousand dollars for the movie rights to his novel
Miss Lonelyhearts.
This was the era when producers frightened by the advent of talking pictures offered contracts to almost any playwright or novelist or newspaperman who gave any evidence of knowing how to write sharp dialogue. And they all came—William Faulkner, Robert Sherwood, Aldous Huxley, Dorothy Parker, even Maurice Maeterlinck. . . . Twentieth Century proceeded, of course, to turn West's brilliant and bitter satire into what it called a “comedy-melodrama” entitled
Advice to the Lovelorn.
West himself never worked on the project but got himself a job as a junior writer at Columbia. His first assignment,
Beauty Parlor,
was never produced; neither was his next one,
Return to the Soil.

West worked hard, did as he was told, and seemed not to mind the triviality of his assignments. From the start, he was more interested in exploring the peripheries of Hollywood. He told friends of his encounters with gamblers, lesbians, dwarfs. He began writing a short story about three Eskimos who had been brought to Hollywood to star in an adventure movie and were stranded there after its failure. As the narrator from the studio's publicity department remarked, “It was about Eskimos, and who cares about Eskimos?”

Hollywood jobs were as transitory as Hollywood itself. During a long siege of unemployment, made worse by sickness, West lived in a shabby apartment hotel off Hollywood Boulevard called the Pa-Va-Sed, tenanted by a raffish assortment of vaudeville comics, stuntmen, and part-time prostitutes. He began frequenting the city's Mexican underworld, going to cockfights at Pismo Beach. He began imagining all these figures as the characters in a novel that he planned to call “The Cheated.” He told a friend about a newspaper story, perhaps imaginary, of a yacht named
The Wanderer,
which had sailed for the South Seas with a strange assortment of passengers: movie cowboys, a huge lesbian, and, once again, a family of Eskimos.

These were the outcasts who eventually peopled
The Day of the Locust.
There was no Jean Harlow or Rita Hayworth in West's Hollywood, only Faye Greener, with her “long, swordlike legs,” whose invitation “wasn't to pleasure but to struggle, hard and sharp, closer to murder than to love.” In her one movie role, as a dancing girl in a Damascus seraglio, she “had only one line to speak, ‘Oh, Mr. Smith!' and spoke it badly.” In this Hollywood, there was no Gary Cooper either, only Earl Shoop, the inarticulate cowboy who survived by poaching game in the hills while he vaguely hoped for a job as a movie extra. And instead of the Zanucks and Selznicks, West introduced Honest Abe Kusich, the dwarf bookmaker, complete with black shirt, yellow tie, and Tyrolean hat. And, of course, the Gingos, a family of Eskimos.

The Hollywood that attracted these outcasts remained always beyond their grasp, rich and tantalizing. West insisted on demonstrating that their city of dreams was really nothing more than “the final dumping ground,” a “Sargasso of the imagination.” Searching for Faye, who had found a bit part in a movie about Waterloo, Tod Hackett got lost in the back lots and wandered through a tangle of briers past the skeleton of a zeppelin, an adobe fort, a Dutch windmill, a Trojan horse, and “a flight of baroque palace stairs that started in a bed of weeds and ended against the branches of an oak.” By following a red glare in the sky, Tod eventually found his way to the new set that was being built for the battle of Waterloo, but just as he reached the slopes of an artificial Mont St. Jean, the whole set collapsed under the charging cuirassiers. “Nails screamed with agony as they pulled out of joists. . . . Lath and scantling snapped as though they were brittle bones. The whole hill folded like an enormous umbrella and covered Napoleon's army with painted cloth.”