Unscripted Paradise

My parents and their five children came to Los Angeles in 1917 (the train trip from Chicago took three nights and four days) and settled in a stone-studded and rather homely house on Kingsley Drive. Shortly we moved to a larger one on Mariposa with a rose garden and fruit trees and a blue wisteria vine that all but covered the roof of the garage. In this haven for invalids, my father must have seemed a prime example of the “unhappy sick” coming west to be healed. Even then a campaign was mounting to keep Los Angeles from becoming a refuge for the ill and the decrepit. We didn’t fit that category exactly, but all the same I was instructed to say to anyone about my father’s disability that he was recovering from a “nervous breakdown.”

Plenty of people then--not just the smart urbanites on the Eastern Seaboard--regarded Los Angeles as an overgrown country town full of hicks and yahoos from mid-America. My Los Angeles was a low-keyed unscripted paradise spiced with manageable hazards, a city already in thrall to and enthralled by the automobile but still relatively empty on the eve of the post-1918 westward migration.

In the rainy months, we sloshed through the flooded streets in rubber boots and put on sou’westers. You could feel the chill in the mornings, especially if you rode sweaterless to school on a bicycle. I stayed outside from morning to dusk when I could. The neighborhood had a plethora of empty lots where you could build forts and dig trenches and stage battles. Mud-slingers (springy wands tipped with clumps of clay), homemade slingshots, and (on occasion) BB guns were the favored weapons. I survived these skirmishes without losing an eye, had my share of memorable fistfights and joined the Dare-Devil Club. To get in you had to slide down the guy wire of a telephone pole, jump from one garage roof to another, hang on the edge of one of them and then drop to the ground.

My Los Angeles was a city under construction. Small houses and bungalows mushroomed in predictable styles, Spanish and “Mediterranean” mainly, but most of them betraying evidence of architectural miscegenation. Stories of their flimsiness (they looked as if they had been slapped together) provoked a lot of haw-haws, yet they were sturdy and elastic enough to withstand the quakes that periodically jolted the city. Half-built houses were places to rummage around in after the carpenters had left for the day and to savor the smells of green lumber sweating resin, of rolls of tar paper, kegs of nails, sawdust and lathes.

Los Angeles was still a manageable city, easy to walk and bike in or to crisscross on the fat yellow streetcars, with nothing more dangerous to face than our own home-made violence or the air assaults of red-winged blackbirds at nesting time. Patches of wooden oil derricks weren’t far off, nor were Griffith and Westlake parks and Chutes Park, home field of the Los Angeles Angels. At the end of a game, small gangs of boys would run through the empty stands ransacking Cracker Jack boxes for baseball cards of Pacific Coast League players.

Baseball players bulk larger retrospectively in my memory than the teachers, most of them women, at the Cahuenga and Alta Loma grammar schools of whom hardly a wrack remains. Outside the classroom, but still within its precincts, primitive rituals were enacted without adult supervision. Once I found myself trapped in a club of obscure origin, easy to join but hard to get out of. Every morning, on spotting another member in the playground, you had to shout “Bulgers” or risked getting “conked” on the shoulder. Since it was legal to approach a member from behind and hit him with your fist before he could see you, and since the game favored wide-awake pummelers over the absent-minded pummeled, I finally opted to resign. This could be managed only by walking down to the handball court with an escort of fellow members, cutting your finger with a pocket knife until the blood flowed (a pinprick wouldn’t do) and holding it up for inspection.

My mates, most white Caucasians, had little truck with the kids of alien races and nationalities. One exception was the school pet, a little boy affectionately dubbed Sambo whose parents had come to Los Angeles before the start of the African American westward hegira. The only black child in the school, he might well have been cast in one of those “Our Gang” comedies where cute colored urchins and freckled towheads unselfconsciously socialized. That option wasn’t open to most of the Asian and Mexican kids. School lore had it that “Japs” were secretive and enigmatic (who knows what was going on behind those oriental masks) and “Chinamen” (peddlers of fruit and vegetables when not killing each other in tong wars) usually peaceable. Hispanics, on the other hand (“greasers” in popular discourse and in the racist westerns of the Zane Grey school), were treacherous and cowardly backstabbers. Gangs of these toughies invaded the “nice” neighborhoods on Halloween and smacked the gringos with sootbags. Nothing came of these occasional encounters. We might compete against them at city track meets but stuck without reflection to our tribe and our code. Those outside our space might have been living on the moon.

Sinclair Lewis’ “Babbitt,” published in 1922 when I was 10 years old, classically expressed what was already a European cliche about America’s suffocating sameness. In Babbitt-land, a sane standardization prevails. Home is everywhere, and no real American need ever feel alone, yet one has only to look at photographs and rotogravures of the ‘Teens and ‘Twenties to spot the variety in the uniformity, even in standardized products that at first glance hardly differ. Golf clubs in my father’s day bore names, not numbers--niblick, driver, brassie, mashie, spoon, cleek. They had character of an uncertain kind, like the costumes worn by golfers as different as withered John D. Rockefeller, William Howard Taft (his knickers emphasizing his rotundity) and the international Bobby Jones.

In 1917 my father bought a Cadillac touring car and exchanged it two years later for a new 1919 model. The Cadillac had big tires susceptible to “blow outs” and punctures, canvas curtains with isinglass windows sewn in and jump seats behind the driver. From a distance it resembled a Peerless, but when you got close enough, you could see that it lacked the Peerless’ telltale sign, the semi-circular lines of metal grafted on the back. All cars were cousins, but if you paid attention to the distinctive shapes and tilts of running boards, hoods, fenders, headlights, hubcaps, you caught their striking or subtle differences. Evocative names of cars came tripplingly off the tongue: Auburn, Stutz, Hudson, Reo, Marmon, Hupmobile, Franklin, Paige, Winton, Daniels, Jordan, McFarland, Kissel, Maxwell, Stanley Steamer. Bread-and-butter familiars succeeded them: Chevrolets, Studebakers, Fords, Dodges, Chryslers. Occasionally on the streets and displayed more often in the advertisements of soigne magazines were the rakish exotics, the Dusenbergs festooned with creeping aluminum coils, Issota Fraschinis, Hispano Suizas and Daimlers and the more down-to-earth Packards and Pierce-Arrows.

I took vicarious rides in racing cars with the film star Wallace Reid, in movies like “Double Speed” and “Excuse My Dust,” and actual ones in a slinky Locomobile sports car painted battleship gray. The owner, Will Connery, an inheritor of a coal fortune and devoted to my parents, once drove me to Vernon to see a prize fight. Vernon, now part of Los Angeles, was a factory town where people went to drink and gamble and to watch four-round “exhibition” bouts (state law banned prize-fighting) in a ramshackle arena. That day I sat with Mr. Connery and two of his friends: H.C. Witwer, a thin sharp-faced man whose popular magazine series, “The Leather-Pushers,” was being filmed, and Jess Willard, the U.S. heavyweight champion until Jack Dempsey knocked him out. The arena was thick with smoke. During one of the bouts, a woman held up a swaddled infant and screamed at one of the fighters that her baby could lick him.

Just before and immediately after the armistice, Los Angeles bloomed with flags and uniforms. I wore puttees and an aviator’s overseas cap (one of my uncles was in the Air Corps) and sailor suits. I owned an arsenal of toy guns and bought Thrift Stamps.

Walking on the sidewalks, you acted out the chant, “Step on a crack, you break your mother’s back” (careful leaps to avoid that catastrophe). “Step on a crack, you break the Kaiser’s back” (determined stamping). The war meant eating potato bread. It meant two soldiers in our house convalescing from a gas attack and army songs like “Pull Your Shades Down, Mary Ann” and “Good Morning, Mr. Zip, Zip, Zip” and one mournful one ending with the refrain, “You can always find a little sunshine in the YMCA.” My slant on the war came pretty much from my older brother’s “Boy Allies” series and from books like “With Joffre on the Battle Line.” But it was most vividly incarnated in propaganda films like D.W. Griffith’s “Hearts of the World” (1918) and the grisly “Behind the Door” (1919), a story of revenge.

Both were instructive. In the former, the Huns wearing spiked helmets brutalized two nice French girls. This wasn’t surprising, really, given the Boche partiality for saw-bayonets, so unlike the needle-like clinical bayonets of the French, and their inhuman treatment of nuns, whom they used as bell-clappers. In “Behind the Door” (the details of the plot are a little cloudy now), a U-Boat captain shoots the wife of an American naval officer (Hobart Bosworth) out of a torpedo tube. Hobart Bosworth captures the German captain and exacts terrible retribution: He skins him alive. Of course the procedure was performed off-screen (hence the title of the film), and the last shot, as I remember it, simply a smear of red.

Some of these films, including Charlie Chaplin’s war parody, “Shoulder Arms” (1918), were projected against a large window shade in our living room, which leads credence to my father’s alleged “interests” in the movie business. No one ever spelled out what these were, and yet memorabilia of moviedom in our house, the actors of both sexes we saw and occasionally met and Mr. Connery’s acquaintance with sundry film people suggest at least a casual connection.

Among my parents’ movie friends were the Japanese actor Sessue Hayakawa and his wife, Tsuru Aoki. I associate them with a wooden chest stuffed with fan mail from all over the world that for some reason ended up in the hallway of our house. The stamps from these letters started my first collection. At this time Hayakawa headed his own production company and played “Asian” characters in films that appealed strongly to a broad international audience. The Hayakawas left California a year before we did and vanished from my scope until his emergence as the fanatical Japanese officer in “The Bridge on the River Kwai.” I had hoped to look him up on my first visit to Japan and talk with him about the Los Angeles days, but he died shortly before I got there.

Movies were still being shot in the streets, and the film stars weren’t fixed in the firmament: Often they came down to Earth and mingled with mortals. Tom Mix, wearing his white sombrero, waved to me on my 10th birthday as I and some friends were en route to watch Douglas Fairbanks in “Robin Hood.” A tipsy Mabel Normand rang the bell of our inelegant beach house between Venice and Playa del Rey and asked to use our telephone. Alice Joyce and her then husband, Tom Moore, lived across the boardwalk from us. (One night she materialized as a blond fairy queen shimmery in sequins and paused to talk to her pretty daughter and to us before taking off grandly for somewhere.) Mack Sennett occupied a large establishment nearby. I watched his black cook decapitate a goose held trussed up in a gunny sack and was much impressed by the gusher of blood. Mr. Albert Christie of Christie Comedies promised to put me into one of his pictures if I acquired one more freckle.

Thanks to a neighborhood friend, whose father, a Warner Bros.executive, had “discovered” Rin Tin Tin, I was able to get into the studio and see the famous German shepherd hurl himself at the wire enclosure that separated us. And I was one of a bunch of kids brought in to play with a bored Jackie Coogan, two years my junior. At the premiere of “The Covered Wagon,” searchlights swept the skies over Grauman’s Egyptian Theater. Limousines deposited celebrities, and heaps of Indians, imported from reservations, held powwows on the flat Egyptian roof and danced in war bonnets to beating drums. An elaborate stage prologue preceded the main event. Off in the distance, a train of tiny covered wagons slowly wound its way down until it debouched from the wings onto the stage, where the pioneers sang “Oh! Susanna” and danced hoedowns and the Indians bellowed their war chants. At last the epic movie, in which there was something for everyone. Burning arrows ignited the prairie schooners; old frontiersmen squirted tobacco juice; young fathers propped their rifles on the spokes of wagon wheels and aimed at the circling Red Skins; mothers in poke bonnets clutched their children--or so I remember.

Other than faded recollection of Grauman’s Egyptian fantasy, of amusement parks at Venice and Ocean Park, and a pastiche of eye-catching gas stations and hot dog stands, my architectural memories are few and tenuous and mysteriously retained: a row of steps flanked by two stone lions leading to the entrance of the house occupied by Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks; the Alexandria Hotel (I stand on a chair in the curtained dining room and observe in a loud voice that a woman at the next table is smoking); the wood mansions in Pasadena.

Strange things happened in Pasadena, then the site of Huntington Hall, a boarding school my oldest sister was attending when the recently dismissed groundskeeper got drunk, shot his wife and set the school on fire. Pasadena also sponsored the annual Tournament of Roses (a dreary New Year’s Day parade of flowering floats) to which I was taken. Years later, during one of my scholarly forays, I stayed at the Athenaeum and dined with A.L. Rowse, historian of All Souls and self-declared intimate of “Winnie” Churchill. One day on the grounds of the nearby Huntington Library, a mighty coyote holding a rabbit in its jaws whizzed past me and soared over a high stone wall. I strolled in the lunar landscape of the great cactus garden--a wonder.

When the Ambassador Hotel was under construction between 1919 and 1921, the section of Wilshire Boulevard west of it was a “dirt road.” Before its excavation, my older brother and his friends had colonized that chunk of swampy land--it was part of family lore--and had discovered “secret papers” there. I was 10 when the hotel opened, on hand because I lived so close to it and had monitored its evolution. And I was old enough, too, to marvel at its lawns and gardens, to gawk at the well-groomed beasts and riders about to perform for the hotel’s guests and to get a good look at Marshal Ferdinand Poch, former commander in chief of the Allied Armies and now a short stout man dressed in a blue uniform, as he stood waiting for an elevator in the shining lobby.

I left Los Angeles in 1924 and never entered the Ambassador again until June 5, 1968. On that day I flew in from San Francisco hoping to see Robert Kennedy, whose stand on the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and opposition to President Johnson’s Vietnam policy made me one of his qualified supporters. While waiting for the senator to arrive, my sister-in-law and I meandered down a long corridor to watch Orange County Republican zealots celebrate the victory of their candidate, Max Rafferty. As we sourly observed the festivities, cries of either joy or lamentation--we couldn’t tell which--mounted in ever larger waves. Soon we knew they were the sounds of disaster and learned of the murder. Eventually the weeping and hysteria subsided and, after being detained for several hours, the stunned crowds dispersed.

During the uproar, I gave no thought to the implications of the murderous act, although it stirred feelings akin to those I had experienced decades earlier in our Mariposa house when an earthquake sent my bed scooting across the floor and drove me downstairs in my pajamas to join the guests in the dining room.