A Bright and Guilty Place: Murder, Corruption, and L.A.'s Scandalous Coming of Age by Richard Rayner Read Free Book Online

had become the focal point of America’s anti-labor movement. By the 1920s L.A. was perceived in terms of its extraordinariness. Many tried to get a handle on the bursting city by looking toward its more outlandish manifestations. Edmund Wilson wrote of “the grooves of gorgeous business cathedrals,” “the blue Avocado Building, bawdy as a peacock’s tail, with its frieze of cute little cupids,” “the regal and greenish Citrus Building, made throughout of the purest lime candy, which has gone a little sugary from the heat,” “Aimee McPherson’s wonderful temple, where good-natured but thrilling native angels guard the big red radio-tower love-wand and see to it that not a tittle or vibration of their mistress’s kind warm voice goes astray as it speeds to you in your sitting-room and tells you how sweet Jesus has been to her and all the marvelous things she has found in Him.”
    Wilson, like Adamic, leaned toward socialism, but he was a cynic too, and L.A. got his glands going. “Nuestro Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de Los Angeles has more lovely girls serving peach freezes and appetizing sandwich specials with little pieces of sweet pickle on the side than any other city in the world,” he wrote, and we wonder whether the girls or the sandwiches excited him more. The girls were there for early Hollywood, dreams of fame and stardom having added a whole new register to the city’s palette of transformative possibility.
    F. Scott Fitzgerald made his first visit to L.A. at about this time, and wrote a treatment for a movie that was never made. In 1928, though, he published “Magnetism,” a Saturday Evening Post story using material he’d gathered from the trip. “This was perhaps the most bizarre community in the rich, wild, bored empire,” Fitzgerald wrote. “Everything in the vicinity—even the March sunlight—was new, fresh, hopeful, and thin, as you would expect in a city that had tripled its population in fifteen years.” Fitzgerald was no socialist but a sensitive and instinctively romantic observer. He fastened onto the oddness of the city’s topography. Los Angeles was growing fast but the wide mountain-bordered basin in which it had been plunked was still largely undeveloped. Freeways were decades in the future. The boulevards that ran from downtown to the beach communities were wide and empty. L.A. wasn’t yet the amorphous metropolitan area that it was to become, though already new neighborhoods mushroomed, geographically distant from what was then the undisputed center, the automobile making it easy for these suburbs to spin away from the pull of downtown. Movie studios were tactically positioned in the middle of nowhere, and Fitzgerald caught the sense of burgeoning sprawl: “George left and drove out by an interminable boulevard which narrowed into a long, winding concrete road and rose into the hilly country behind. Somewhere in the vast emptiness a group of buildings appeared,” he wrote.
    The movie business was a big part of the boom but not yet the dominant force in the city’s life. Hollywood was coming of age and coming into its own but existed, geographically and psychologically, a little to the side—already aspired to and envied, a magnet. The crowds that flocked to searchlight premieres in the theaters built by Sid Grauman or Alexander Pantages on Hollywood Boulevard longed to see the destruction of movie stars almost as much as their elevation. Or perhaps even more. Celebrity culture was being invented. It began, in 1921, with Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle. Arbuckle was a comedian, the “fat owl” of the silent screen. Hugely successful and famous, he threw parties abundantly fueled by bootleg booze and drugs. Nobody ever claimed that these parties were good clean fun. After one party that lasted for several days at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco, a young model and actress, Virginia Rappe, was found dead. The L.A. press took several days to get hold of the