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ANNOUNCER: Welcome to the ALOUD Podcast. I'm Louise Steinman curator of the ALOUD series. Presented by The Library Foundation of Los Angeles.
ALOUD is a series of dynamic lectures, readings, performances and discussions that take place in the Mark Taper Auditorium at the historic Downtown Central Library in the heart of Los Angeles. To learn more about ALOUD, and learn how you can help The Library Foundation of Los Angeles support the Los Angeles Public Library, please go to our website www.aloudla.org. The ALOUD program you are about to hear was produced in 2009.
LOUISE STEINMAN: Good evening and welcome to ALOUD at Central Library. Can you all hear me?
I think this is on. Great.
I'm Louise Steinman the program director for The Library Foundation of Los Angeles, which makes all of these ALOUD programs, free ALOUD programs, possible. So, yes.
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If you are already supporting ALOUD and the other great work of The Library Foundation from adult literacy to children's reading clubs, I thank you heartily. And if you're not and want to find out more we have information in the lobby and you're also we really appreciate your donations, for this evening's program. They really do help us keep this program going.
Tonight's program will be a conversation between author Richard Rayner and David Ulin. After their conversation, they will invite you to join in questioning. We will circulate a mic for you, so please wait until it comes to you as we do record for Podcast and also we have C SPAN Book TV recording tonight, so you may see yourself on the air in the future. Please turn off your cell phones and pagers before we start. And afterwards Richard will be signing his book in the lobby, courtesy of our library store, and if you do buy a book here it does also help also support the program and the library.
Richard Rayner, a British expat is the author of eight books of fiction and nonfiction. As he puts it, about California in general and Los Angeles in particular.
He's reported on the Rodney King riots for the literary magazine, Granta. On the Northridge earthquake for the UK Guardian. On various movie stars for The New Yorker and on the LAPD for The New York Times Magazine. And his first novel in a footnote, Los Angeles Without a Map, published back in 1988 was later turned into the least famous film ever to feature Johnny Depp.
I like that.
[LAUGHTER]
His new book, a wonderful book, A Bright and Guilty Place: Murder, Corruption, and L.A. Scandalous Coming of Age is set in Los Angeles in the roaring '20s, and as historian Kevin Starr writes, “L.A. the place, L.A. the novel, and L.A. the film are fused into a tour de force of L.A. noir. Here's a panorama of corruption galore an inner woven narrative of L.A.'s most notorious scandals in a region hallowed out by economic collapse and in the throes of intense religious fervor.”
In conversation with Richard tonight is David L. Ulin, whom most of you know from many ALOUD programs here and is our book editor of The Los Angeles Times. David is the author of The Myth of Solid Ground: Earthquakes, Prediction, and the Fault Line Between Reason and Faith. And like Richard Rayner he knows a thing or two about Los Angeles, as he's the editor of Another City: Writing from Los Angeles and Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology, which won a California Book Award. He's written for many publications including The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, The New York Times Book Review and he can be heard on NPR's National All Things Considered. It's my great pleasure to welcome Richard Rayner and David L. Ulin to The L.A. Public Library. Thank you.
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RICHARD RAYNER: Wow, full house.
DAVID L. ULIN: Hi. So, we're going to talk for a while and then we're going to turn it over to you guys. This is an interesting for me because Richard and I have been talking about sort of L.A. and noir and what it means for a long time.
So with that in mind, I want to start by asking a question that has absolutely nothing to do with L.A. or noir. The first time you and I spoke a long time, you talked about I think you called it the British model of literary life, the sort of belles lettres approach, you know, you write a couple of novels, you write some nonfiction books, you write -- do some journalism, maybe a little film work and you kind of piece together a career. And I think your career is an exemplar of that sort of style of approach. So I wanted to ask you about that as a kind of way to conceptualize the writing life.
RICHARD RAYNER: Yeah, why has it gone so well?
I think that the, you know, the literary life in London was you go to university. You come out of university with this unfocused ambition to be a writer. You start writing typically for magazines, and getting kind of gigs for newspapers and with the hope of writing a book. And my sort of career as a writer really began I had been working for kind of Rock 'N Roll, Time magazines and interviewing pop stars and movie stars, stuff like that, all of which was good fun, and writing book reviews. And it came together in a kind of more focused way, and to this man, I kind of owe a lot of both good and bad things when this guy called Bill Buford, who was then editing a literary magazine called Granter out of a hairdresser’s above a hairdresser’s saloon in Cambridge in England, invited me to go to work for him. And I published a story about a love affair I had, believe it or not, with a Playboy Bunny. It was a long time ago.
[LAUGHTER]
And Bill encouraged me to, A, get serious about writing and editing and that story became a book. And then kind of launched me on this piecemeal career. And so, yes, it has been that I've patched together something in America that resembled what I had in London, which is to say bits of this, bits of that. Whereas here, I think that especially in this town, the expectation is that you either write for a newspaper, or you write more hopefully for books or TV, or you can be this other kind I'm sorry, for TV or film or you can be this other kind of alien species in L.A. who is this book writer.
DAVID L. ULIN: Right.
[LAUGHTER]
RICHARD RAYNER: And you get looked at balefully, by these people who are earning, you know, a gazillion times more money than you are.
And who sort of say, oh well, you know, I guess you write too.
[LAUGHTER]
DAVID L. ULIN: Right. Right. And then you become the book writer who writes books about Los Angeles or in some -- not exclusively but a number of your books have been about Los Angeles.
RICHARD RAYNER: Right.
DAVID L. ULIN: I guess, I'm interested in sort of the you touch on it in the last chapter of this book, which is a personal note, where you kind of contextualize what this story means --
RICHARD RAYNER: Right.
DAVID L. ULIN: -- for you. And talk about your early experiences of L.A., some of which, I think are come out in L.A. Without a Map and sort of how you kind of got almost got seduced against your will by Los Angeles. I wonder if you can talk a little bit about the mysterious allow of the city.
RICHARD RAYNER: Right. You know, we've my wife and I have lived here now for 18 years and our kids were born in Santa Monica, so you know, they are Los Angelenos. And I have never quite been able to explain to myself what the nature of my connection to the place is, which is why I think I've gone on writing and writing about it. But I know the connection is powerful and it's changed.
And it's -- like a lot of people when I first came here, which was in the early '80s, just before the Olympics, which is around the time of the Olympics. I looked around and thought, oh god this place is so great, everybody is so up for it. It's not so not like London. It's so not like Bradford and I'm going to come here and just have a terrific time and I did. And we came to live here, at the beginning of the '90s.
And then, this was when it already had this period of time working for Granter and the Rodney King riots kicked off.
And Bill Buford called me from London and said "Get yourself out on the streets." And I said, “Bill you want me to get killed?” He said, “No, but injured would be good.”
[LAUGHTER]
And so I did. And I wrote a story for Granter about the riots that was published in a lot of places and indeed you know, wonderfully put it in one of your anthologies and that lead to getting a lot of gigs for The New York Times Magazine. And they put it together that because I had this -- what Americans erroneously perceive as this charming English persona –
[LAUGHTER]
DAVID L. ULIN: It's the accent.
RICHARD RAYNER: That I got sent into these kind of situations with institutions and the first institution was the LAPD. And The New York Times Magazine in that way that grand way they do, they said Richard well we want you to go around and ride around in the back of police cars for three months and decide what Willie Williams is doing can work. So Joe Rodriquez, the photographer and I, did just that. And we spent a lot of time unsurprisingly observing that you know, the LAPD wasn't going to change so much after the Rodney King riots.
But getting to know a lot of cops, and the photographer was this tough Puerto Rican guy, and one of the cops we got to know was this black homicide detective called Cedric Wilder, who was an ace dude. And he had been watching us for several days and Cedric said, “You know, I figured it out what you guys are doing.
Its good cop bad cop.”
[LAUGHTER]
He said, “But there's a twist. People think Richard's the good cop.
[LAUGHTER]
But really he's the bad cop.”
But having these experiences of writing about the riots and writing about the LAPD, made me feel very differently about the city. I started to see its dysfunctionality. And I really enjoyed the fact that I saw it in a darker way. It began to explain itself better to me. And then over a period of time -- and this is really what the source of you know, this book has narratives that are layered on top of it and it's very kind of specific about the period of time that it's covering and the stories that it's telling, but one of the things that it's trying to do, or that the thing that's most meaningful to me that it's trying to do is to explain to myself why it is that I feel that this is such a dark place in so many ways and how that feeling has evolved through history, and when it crystallized.
And the argument of the book whether it's right or not, is that that feeling, let's call it for the sake of argument "Noir" crystallized in Los Angeles as the boom years of the '20s, turned into the early years of The Depression.
DAVID L. ULIN: Right. And I think one of the things that's interesting about this book and also about – or about it in line with your writings about Los Angeles, you play on the one hand the glamor and then you see the sordidness underneath and that seems to me to be the roots of noir and it comes out here in terms of, you know, Mulholland and the dam, in terms of Doheny and the murder of his son. In terms of even the central, I don't know how much we want to give away, but the central sort of event at the heart of the book, which I'll let you give that away, if anyone's going to give away, I think we'll see their pictures up there at a certain point. But it's all about illusion on the one hand, appearance on the one hand, and this much darker, more complicated thing that’s happening underneath and who has the power and who has the access and how they get it.
RICHARD RAYNER: Right. The central story of the book, really concerns this and he's such a Angeleno prototype, this very if you that's the former chief of the LAPD, J. Edgar Davis, and there's also wonderful shot that you'll see at some point where he's leading he was a crack marksman. And the LAPD pistol shooting team was constantly winning world championships, which was one of Davis' big concerns. Anyway, there's a nice shot that will come up of Davis literally organizing a turkey shoot. So you see these LAPD guys blazing away at a couple of hapless turkeys. But the central of the story is about this guy called Dave Clark. And as I piece together the way in which he was connected too many of the other stories that are in the book, I realized that he was kind of in some ways a symbol for me of what L.A. is.
So that he was this guy, very handsome, looked like Clark Gable, tall, slim, tan, had a very pretty wife. He fought in World War I, was a flier, came out of World War I. He’d grown up – in around downtown. Went to USC. Didn't actually graduate in law, but took the California Bar before doing that, which was kind of more routine then. And went to work for a firm, a downtown firm, which primarily represented law oil interesting, a law firm called Wellborn, Wellborn and Wellborn, a splendidly Dickensian name.
[LAUGHTER]
And Clark had a bit he wanted the fast track.
He married a very glamorous girl who was the daughter of a famous New York judge. He went to work for the DA's office in 1926. Soon before, Baron Fitz became DA in an attempt to reform the civic corruption of the city, a process that would really go on throughout the '30s and some would argue, way way beyond that.
Clark is a prosecutor who was involved in these high profile cases. Busting gangsters. He was involved in a big case with the movie star Clara Bow. And then himself in 1931 was put on trial for double murder having rubbed out then head of the L.A. underworld.
So it's really sort of a Michael Corleone story, of this guy who for reasons that -- you know, are still mysterious to me to some extent, just got seduced by the darker side of himself, and also, it was something to do with wanting it all too fast.
DAVID L. ULIN: And I mean, in the book you talk about this, but this reflects back to what you were saying before, what about this story is so quintessentially Los Angeles?
I mean, you say that as you were kind of doing the research and piecing together the information, Clark kept coming up.
RICHARD RAYNER: Right.
DAVID L. ULIN: He had these connections everywhere and you were looking for a way to explore this moment where L.A.'s sort of adult personality, let’s say catalyze. What was it about Clark that made him so representative?
And what is it exactly that you think he was representative of?
RICHARD RAYNER: Well, he was so glamorous. He was very well connected. He was moving between these different worlds, which seemed not to be connected, but in fact are.
So, the world of L.A. law.
The world of downtown power.
The world of Hollywood celebrity. And the world of the L.A. underworld, which then meant sort of gambling and bootlegging and prostitution and the racquets. And the tightness of the connection between those elements and Clark's particular character, which had a real kind of hard sheen to it. So that he was very brilliant, very suave, very debonair, and really hard to read.
And the scariest thing about him is that after he was arrested for the double shooting that being a lawyer he had the presence of mind to make no statements to any legal authority for two months.
And I just thought, well, wow, that someone could actually kind of be able to hold themselves together with that sort of power.
DAVID L. ULIN: Well, he actually even says to the press at one point, you know, I’ve been on enough of these cases and seen people actually hang themselves by saying too much so I'm not going to say anything.
RICHARD RAYNER: Right. And I thought he was sort of – he was self aware in a kind of modern character in that way. And as I say that felt to me that it was, you know, something typically like L.A.
DAVID L. ULIN: Now, the other thing that one of the other things that's interesting about this case, it is kind of central, it was a huge case, you described it as at one point at the OJ Simpson trial at its time.
RICHARD RAYNER: Right.
DAVID L. ULIN: And yet, it's sort of been lost to history in some sense. I had not known about this case until I read the book. We could poll the room and see who knew about it.
You know, why do you think that is?
What do you think is the nature of L.A. and its relationship to its history that even these big events in a particular moment end up being kind of glossed over or sanded over in some way?
>>RICHARD RAYNER: Right. I think they get forgotten because other ones come along.
[LAUGHTER]
And you know that if what was fascinating in looking at the Clark murder trials. There were two, because the first one was a hung jury, and which was much more frequent back then, we've seen with Phil Specter that happens today too. That, um, it was huge. And we're talking about a time when L.A. had 10 newspapers. And -- morning editions, evening editions, bulldog editions, extra editions, and this constant precession of print with these wonderful writers cranking out, you know, like, you just given me a copy of James Elroy's new book, but these guys wrote in that way. This really tense hard-boil, vivid way. And it was as if the town was demanding it.
And in the same way that the town has gone on demanding those huge celebrity trials. These huge celebrity events where crime and fame and sex and power all mix together. And then once, once one has happened is the nature of this place that it gets forgotten about, because there's another one.
DAVID L. ULIN: Right.
[LAUGHTER]
RICHARD RAYNER: And then there's another one, and then there's another one. And we see the kind of pattern of these kinds of crimes and events just replicate themselves throughout. And there are these, you know, great anthologies of L.A. true crime. Um, Craig Rice, the mystery writer did one back in the '40s and then there's that good anthology Fallen Angels, which catalogs the 20 or 30 of the great L.A. crimes.
And, you know, in the case of Clark, no one had really ever put it together before, which was just amazing that, you know, why why was no one interested in doing this, that two months before he shot Charlie Crawford and Herbert Spencer in a room in Hollywood, he had been up in court with her and defending or actually prosecuting Daisy DeVoe who was Clara's secretary who was blackmailing Clara Bow for $150,000 and if Clara Bow didn't give Daisy DeVoe $150,000, Daisy DeVoe was going to go to the press and explain to them how Clara had been banging John Wayne, had been -- Marion
DAVID L. ULIN: Morrison [sic].
RICAHRD RAYNER: Morrison --
DAVID L. ULIN: -- who was at the time a USC football.
RICHARD RAYNER: Some had said she had banged the entire USC football team. And she was a naughty girl, Clara, who liked all sorts of things. And Clara being spunky refused to let Daisey DeVoe blackmail her. Prosecuted Daisy DeVoe. The prosecution was then carried out by Clark, and it wrecked Clara Bow's career, because indeed all of that information did came out. And B.P. Schulberg, the head of Paramount, who made his career off the discovery of this Brooklyn girl, dropped her like a stone.
And no one had ever really looked into Clark's life enough to notice that two months before he shot these two dudes, he'd been involved in this other celebrity trial, but on the other side of the fence. And I thought, well, who is the character?
Who was this guy who could on the one hand be doing that and pulling that off, i.e., the Clara Bow trial. And then so soon afterwards, he was up to his neck in some angle of the racquets which has caused him to be in an argument in a small heavily defended room in Hollywood and shoot two people.
DAVID L. ULIN: Now, I wonder how much you think this has to do, we've talked about the notion that L.A. as a city is very much like a small town.
RICHARD RAYNER: Right.
DAVID L. ULIN: Luis Adamic called it “The enormous village,” um, Richard Metzler has called it, “The biggest hick town in all of the hick world.”
[LAUGHTER]
Do you I mean, A, do you subscribe to that view?
It does seem to me a city where all of those sort of separate circles of power could come together because there aren't that many people running the show.
RICHARD RAYNER: Right.
DAVID L. ULIN: And I'm curious about that your take on that and also how much that had to do with the story of a guy like Clark or even the story of L.A. maturing in that period in the late '20s and early '30s.
RICHARD RAYNER: I think that's certainly true. I mean, we have to kind of, you know, stop for a moment and think about what Los Angeles actually was in 1920.
It was a city with a population of about 500,000.
Through the ‘20s that population would grow to about 1.2 million.
And we're talking about, you know, a boom -- the fastest growing city in the world at that point.
And a city that was controlled and had indeed been called into being by a very small cadre of powerful men who were concerned to make money by making the city grow.
And
DAVID L. ULIN: And this goes back, I mean, really to the Owen's River Valley.
RICHARD RAYNER: To the Owen’s River Valley. So, we all know the story that Los Angeles doesn't have any water, so Henry Huntington and Harry Chandler and Mulholland, and a group of others cook up a plan that we're going to take the money -- take the water from the Owen’s River Valley. That is set in motion about 1970s brought into completion in 1913 when the money -- water arrives.
DAVID L. ULIN: It's also – it’s preceded -- it’s the same consortium buys up most of the valley --
RICHARD RAYNER: San Fernando Valley.
DAVID L. ULIN: -- which is completely worthless --
RICHARD RAYNER: -- until the water --
DAVID L. ULIN: -- until they irrigate it with the water they’ve stolen.
RICHARD RAYNER: And the water arrives not in the Los Angeles but in the San Fernando Valley and thus making for these people some say $300 million, something like that.
And then L.A. has the ecological ability to grow and they encourage people to come here, to buy the land that they have irrigated that's suddenly become much more valuable than it was before.
But the hub of the place is still downtown. And downtown is in 1920 was still looking at that, so there's not really much between downtown and Santa Monica. Hollywood is starting to grow up. Beverly Hills is starting to grow up, but you know, if you would if you drove down Wilshire from downtown to the ocean in 1920, you're going to see a lot of orange groves, a lot of bean fields and stuff like that, and not much in between.
So, we're talking about a place that's I know you you always cut out of my copy when I write this, that it seems to me almost a science fictional environment back then, it’s so unimaginable different -- it's distant. And the power is in the hands of a small group of people.
Mike Davis has that wonderful line "Power lines" and it seems to me that's still it was definitely true about L.A. then that the power lines were narrow and interconnected, and seems to me to be still true to some extent. That it was a place that, because it had been small was controlled by small number of people, and as it became big, which it did very quickly, was still controlled by a lot of the same groups of guys. Although, you had the arrival of the movie industry, which then created its own separate power line through the kind of late teens and '20s and into the '30s and, of course, you know, beyond that to now.
DAVID L. ULIN: Right. And then you also had, I guess the movie business was sort of west-side Jewish power, and then the oil interests and the money interests were downtown WASP power. So you had some kind of competing power structures there.
RICHARD RAYNER: Right.
DAVID L. ULIN: But they had to play together in a certain sense.
RICHARD RAYNER: Right. And the major power structure in the '20s was oil.
DAVID L. ULIN: Right.
RICHARD RAYNER: And somewhere back there, they'll come up short of the Signal Hill Oil Fields area down by Long Beach, with just a pepper pot of oil rigs. And one of the most extraordinary statistics that I have in the book is that through the 1920s, Los Angeles create -- not quite the right word -- but brought up 25% of the world's oil.
Yeah, it's amazing. It's one of those who knew kind of things.
But Doheny who had first found oil in the late 1880s in the La Brea Tar Pits, was at the time, the richest man in America, briefly in early 1920s, E.L. Doheny, made the first kind of nugget of his fortune through the discovery of oil in L.A. but then realized that actually the way to get really really really rich was to control the entire oil production of Mexico, which is basically what Doheny did from about 1905 until the time of the Mexican Revolution.
So, yes, the power lines were centered around the boosters, the landowners, The L.A. Times, enormously powerful. And then oil, which at that time, you know, Doheny money, was sort of establishment L.A. money. In other words, it was 10, 15 years old, which back then seemed like, or indeed was a very long period of time in the city's history. And then we have – I was talking to D.J. Walding -- the wonderful writer D.J. Walding, about the arrival of Hollywood and the immigrant, the different sort of immigrant influx. So you mentioned Adamic earlier. Adamic was this Slovenian guy who came to Los Angeles in the late teens, and would serve the city's first Boswell. And he wrote a wonderful book, which is almost impossible to find and long out of print, called: Laughing in the Jungle.
DAVID L. ULIN: Laughing in the Jungle, yeah.
RICHARD RAYNER: And which is a series of essays and collects kinds of diaries that he had written of his early experiences in Los Angeles. And he says it's a city full of old people.
And in the early 1920s that was true.
DAVID L. ULIN: Right.
RICHARD RAYNER: It was the people who had been come from the Midwest and been encouraged to come here with their retirement money, because it was warm and you could kind of die in comfort, and warmth, listening to Aimee Semple McPherson on the radio.
And all of these points is that in some way Los Angeles called Hollywood into being, because it needed young people to come here.
So it has this kind of flip idea of the usual explanation, which is that the film makers came here because Lawrence Weschler says is 18x more light or whatever it is.
So this lovely idea that Walding has is that we actually, in order to again for the city to continue to grow, it needed younger people.
DAVID L. ULIN: That's a kind of vampiric vision.
RICHARD RAYNER: Right.
[LAUGHTER]
DAVID L. ULIN: But it's interesting because I think the other thing that you get at in the book and I mean, because Adamic got this at this and Carey Mc Williams and certainly Fante and Nathanael West wrote about it in Ask the Dust and The Day of the Locust is the emptiness of that. That Midwestern retiree life that there was no spiritual or civic core.
RICHARD RAYNER: Right.
DAVID L. ULIN: No sense of connection. So that there was this enormous amount of boredom and unfocusness to it. And you sort of talk about that, the roots or the role of that in the roots of noir and the roots of some of the kinds of, you know, horrific and unimaginable crimes, you talk about the woman who had her lover in the cage for 15 years in the attic and finally let him out so he could kill her husband.
RICHARD RAYNER: Right.
[LAUGHTER]
DAVID L. ULIN: That's an only in LA kind of event, you know.
RICHARD RAYNER: Walburga Oesterreich is the name of the wonderful lady.
DAVID L. ULIN: She wasn't the tiger
RICHARD RAYNER: No, that's the different one, Clara “Tiger Woman” Phillips is the woman who was the one who beat to death her the rival for her lover with a claw hammer.
But Carey Mc Williams, who wrote, I think, the great book about the early history of Los Angeles, Island on the Land. Said proudly -- wrote proudly, Los Angeles has the best murders ever.
[LAUGHTER]
And I think we still do. And in the '20s there was this parade of them. So there was Walburga Oesterreich, who as you say the lover locked away upstairs until he's allow to come, kind of come down and kill her husband. Clearly all of this is kind of feeding into, you know, a James and Cane scenario. “Tiger Woman” Phillips who is kills the other woman with the claw hammer, escapes from jail, goes down to Honduras, is tracked down by this wonderful figure who reports for The Examiner called Morris Lavine, who gets to her hotel in Honduras and says his rational for making him back here for getting her story is, who are you really?
Are you going to hide away here?
Or are you really Clara “Tiger Woman” Phillips?
In which case, you'll come back with me to Los Angeles and greet the popping flash bulbs, and enjoy the fame you that you undoubtedly have. She came back.
[LAUGHTER]
DAVID L. ULIN: I'm ready for my close up.
RICHARD RAYNER: Right. Exactly. And you know the Hickman murder. The guy who kidnapped the little girl. He thought that this was the time when people were pre-Lindbergh, but when kidnapping seemed as though something that people could actually get away with. So he kidnapped this girl, and then was holding the family for ransom, and showed up at a meeting with the girl's father. This is an awful story. And by this time he had killed the girl, but he sewed her eyelids up to her skull so it looked as though she was in the car with her eyes open alive. And when he was finally caught, um, said I’m as famous and Leopold and Loeb.
And it was really just to kind of precession of these tales through the '20s. And I think that -- what I believe is that sort of Los Angeles the ethos of Los Angeles somehow needs them. And that we you still see it now, like the things the stories are so outlandish. Like the Robert Blake murder case. That so there's this shooting and Blake's story is that when the shooting took place, “I was on my way back into the restaurant to collect a gun that I left on the table,” and that's his alibi.
[LAUGHTER]
The town needs these events, and I you know, what I did in the book, I think what I was trying to do was try to get at why it is that that generation of writers who started to write in The Depression, we're talking about Cane, we're talking about Horace Mc Coy, we're talking about obviously Raymond Chandler. They were all here and they were fueled to create this type of writing not just by the development of a kind of style, but that there was a lot more reportage in what they were doing than we now assume.
So, I wanted to kind of step back from that into some of the real events that may have actually caused them to write what they did.
And I almost fell off my chair when I realized, you know, at some point I had to go back and read a lot of Chandler, which was, you know, no great burden to have to do that, because he remains, you know in many ways, the greatest kind of poet of what I'm talking about.
And, you know, found that he had indeed in kind of a throw-away scene in one of the early short stories actually described what was clearly the Dave Clark case.
>>DAVID L. ULIN: Yeah, that was fascinating. And I also think what was interesting because as a reader say Chandler or Cane or any of those writers of the '30s, and not the hard boil writers but to bring it back to Fante and West. Right. Because The Day of the Locust, Ask the Dust, and The Big Leap all came out in the same year, 1939. And all share a hard-boiled noir ish point of view, there's a great riff in Ask the Dust, where Fante talks about, you know, he had a letter from the landlady paying the rent, it was a letter requiring serious attention so he went to sleep, which could come right out of Chandler.
And I always wondered, you know, it wasn't so there had to be something in the air. That it doesn't that Chandler was creating L.A. noir any more than say Hammett wasn't creating noir. It wasn't a style it had to be a response to something that they were that these writers were experiencing on the ground.
RICHARD RAYNER: Yeah, I think that's very true and very very well put. That there was when you talk about those three writers you're talking about writers who feel, you know, at this distance to be really different kinds of writers.
DAVID L. ULIN: And I don't think at least in 1939 could have known each other, or would have known each other. I've never been able to see a point of intersection come together.
RICHARD RAYNER: No, I don't think so. I think the kind of Fante moved in it's hard to imagine that West and Chandler would have known each other and I don't think they did. And Chandler is Judith Freeman writes so well about the weirdness of his life in Los Angeles and her book The Long Embrace, and he was kind of older than them, and already sort of kind of more disappointed figure in 1939, even though that was the moment when he was just starting to achieve his fame, which is one of the kind of really fascinating things about Chandler.
And West was really a much more sort of glamorous figure who who, you know, was connected with Paramount through marriage and was more of a sort of New York literary figure, and probably published Miss Lonelyhearts back in New York, I would have thought.
DAVID L. ULIN: Before he came out in the '30s and was chided by Edmund Wilson. He was friendly with Edmund Wilson, and Wilson used to write him letters telling he was burning out his talent by hacking it out for the studios.
RICHARD RAYNER: Right. And yet that book does have that distilled nightmarish -- that book being The Day of the Locust -- that distilled nightmarish, noir-ish quality, which is what we're talking about. This thing that where you stand on the street in blazing sunlight -- I don't know if you've seen this shot back here yet, but there's a picture of Dave Clark -- there's a sun lit street scene, which says to me everything that the book's about, which is this -- the brilliant hard light of Los Angeles and the shadow and when you just feel that sort of 2 o'clock in the afternoon that awful emptiness that are what the heck am I going to do?
Which is a feeling that I've never quite had in any other city in the world in the way that I've experienced it here, which is that sort of scary, you know, almost sort of despairing feeling that I just never had in London, certainly never had in New York or Helsinki or other places, I know. Where there seems to be nothing to do here and no reason to be here.
Los Angeles seems so oppressive and so awful.
[LAUGHING]
And I think that this is an experience, these kind of moments of shattering sun lit horror that writers, you know, throughout the history of literary L.A. have had.
DAVID L. ULIN: And yet the other side of it, which I would be remiss, I wanted to talk about Leslie White a little bit, because he represents the other sides -- sort of the other it. He’s sort of the opposing poll of the story to Dave Clark. And he's a guy who, you know, it was really was a land of opportunity in a lot of ways. Financially certainly, but also in terms of possibilities, life choices, opportunities of things to do. This is a guy who started out as a photographer -- I mean you can tell his story a little bit, but kind of ended up being everywhere --
RICHARD RAYNER: Right.
DAVID L. ULIN: -- of importance during this 5- or 6-year period, in all sorts of roles.
RICHARD RAYNER: This is really -- and the book kind of pairs these two guys, White and Clark as the kind of the light and dark. And White was this guy who had come out of Canada, originally and his family had moved to Ventura County, and he had a succession of worked in a gas station, had a succession kind of low level law enforcement jobs and by 1928 was a photographer in Ventura.
And Mulholland having realize that the water that had been taken from the Owen's River Valley actually wasn't going be enough, and there was a drought in the '20s. So Mulholland built two dams. One the Hollywood reservoir dam, which is still there. And another one up in the I always have trouble stammering on this, the San Francisquito Canyon, I think I got it approximately right, just northeast of Ventura. And one night in 1928 this dam gave out.
So wall of water 200 feet high. It's a story really like the Titanic. So this wall of water 200 feet high is released and spends three hours beating its way down to the ocean. And as it does that, and you imagine when a dam bursts, okay, it must be happening fast, and this wall of water in fact is the moments of original release is moving 18 miles an hour. So it's fast but it's not that fast. So people on motorbikes are out racing it trying to warn people down the valley of the disaster that's about to hit them.
So this wall of water sweep downs to the ocean. Many people are killed. Nobody really knows how many, because a lot of the people were immigrant farmers who were, then as now, needed, then as now, here illegally, so no one was really too interested in their fate, but the death figure is between 400 and 700, depending on which book you read and depend on who you talk to.
But White who is a photographer who is gets a call in the middle of the night, saying, you know, there's an airplane waiting the St. Francis dam just gave out. And White said, “What's the Francis dam?” He had never ever heard – or heard of it vaguely. It was 30, 40 miles away. So he flies up in the airplane and his book, Me, Detective, writes about seeing as dawn breaks seeing the specks down in the foaming waters below and realizing that the human figures either dead or human figures still struggling to survive. And this is kind of a hot topic in Ventura County today because L.A. County water killed Ventura County people.
And the first thought in the minds of the powers that be in Ventura County was lawsuit, lawsuit, lawsuit. And so they started assembling evidence, and White was recruited to help compile a citizen's report. So he had to take morgue pictures of bodies as they were found -- to as an evidentiary component of the report that was being put together.
And eventually I tracked down these pictures proudly. None of them have ever been published, and I was one of the very first people I think to ever kind of bother to try to find them. And, you know, some of the bodies were found the next day. So White's pictures are as if someone's just gone to sleep. Some of the bodies were found 3 months later. And then you're talking about real kind of waxworks horror stuff.
And I probably got all of these public pictures never been seen by anybody, sent them to Doubleday, we can't publish those. They actually were just to -- too harrowing. But as a result of this work, White's lung hemorrhaged. And he came to Los Angeles as a lot of people did at that time believe it or not for his health and landed a job because he had this forensic experience with the DA's office, which had then you know we mentioned Baron Fitz before, was taken over by Fitz. And Fitz was in the process of reshaping it and recreating the District Attorney's investigative unit, and White got a job as a forensic's guy.
And this is when his life starts to intersect a bit with Clark's. They're working in the same building down there in the Hall of Justice and White works the Doheny murder/suicide case. He had known in Ventura a well known Ventura County lawyer who he met again in Los Angeles who said you've got this great material, magazines they're all over
DAVID L. ULIN: He it was a classic L.A. moment he had this crisis he didn't want to do it anymore and this guy said this is great material.
RICHARD RAYNER: And the guy who said that was Erle Stanley Gardner. Who White had known in Ventura. So while White is working for DA's office starts to turn himself into a pulp fiction writer. And is publishing, you know, in Black Mask and many of the other pulps, while he's still working at the DA's office. And indeed one of the cases in which he's this is a great L.A. moment that I didn't really give too much of in the book, but in one of the cases that he was giving evidence for, the attorney smartly said, “Well, Your Honor, this guy publishes fiction. He's just making all of his evidence up. He's just concocting a plot and a story in a way that he does in the way when he submits something to one of these tawdry pulps.” And White disillusioned by what he sees in the DA's office, eventually packs it in and becomes a full time writer, which actually through the early part of the '30s, he's doing much much more successfully than Raymond Chandler was at that time. So he's publishing books with Hard Core Brace.
DAVID L. ULIN: His mentor is Lincoln Steffens.
RICHARD RAYNER: Lincoln Steffens. He's encouraged to write his memoirs, which I would love to try to get someone to reprint. He wrote this excellent memoir which Carey Mc Williams’ references in his book, which is how I think I first heard about it.
Me, Detective. Me comma Detective is White's memoir. And a couple of novels, which he really likes the early police procedurals and he was a kind of gung ho, very excitable kind of writer, but he had a real knack for storytelling.
And he's one of these guys who just kind of went on re inventing himself. So he had been a photographer. He became an investigator. He became a writer. And at first he was a crime writer, because that was what he knew. Then he became a kind of gossip mongering magazine editor. Then he became a historical romance writer and finally having kind of gone to live in Connecticut, this is my favorite detail about this guy, and having raised a family on a farm and or the second family that he had by his second wife, he becomes the editor of The National Model Railway Association Magazine.
[LAUGHTER]
DAVID L. ULIN: It's a classic L.A. story.
[LAUGHTER]
So this raises one last question or it's a two related last questions, I guess, and then we'll turn it over to questions from the audience. But in the first place, this is really in some ways what you're uncovering here is shadow history of Los Angeles, both in terms of say of White and Clark, but also in terms of the literature of L.A., you know, there all of these books you talk about, you talk about a lot of them here, whether it's White stuff, which is long out of print and no one has seen in a long time or Myron Brining, The Flutter of an Eyelid, which is one of my favorite books that nobody’s ever read, which are great books and really fascinating and illuminating windows on the culture of the city and both in their moment and now, basically for all intents and purposes don't exist.
But at the same time, it's very much like the culture we're living in now, you know, even the description at L.A. at that time, it's a time of economic disaster, massive unemployment, ethnic tensions, immigration issues, corruption, or at least government that isn't doing what it’s supposed to be doing. And in some ways I think when you describe the newspapers the way the newspapers worked with the extras that that was the emerging technology. Those newspapers function I mean you could follow the Michael Jackson funeral motorcade yesterday on the Internet on various websites point-by-point, because they were updating constantly. So it feels like there are all of these echoes back and worth forth. So on one hand its shadow history but on the other hand it’s really profoundly relevant. I just wanted to get your sense of that. Your thoughts on that on how that works and whether that's really a quintessentially Los Angeles thing, this loss of history or this history of forgetting -- notion more so than in other cities or do you think we've entered into a culture where that’s more broadly -- where L.A. culture forgetting has taken over the world?
RICHARD RAYNER: Well, I think the latter point may be true that, you know, the Norman Klein's beautiful book The History of Forgetting, is the history of Los Angeles is being his kind of thesis and this part of the city's DNA about how we seize on these moments and transform them into needed public skeptical and then instantly dispose of them. That seems to me to be something that's still true.
And it may be that what's happened actually is that the rest of the world has just started behaving like that also as, you know, it's one of Los Angeles great gifts to civilization, maybe. But that seems like that could be the case.
DAVID L. ULIN: Um, well, let's turn it over to you guys for a little bit.
We have microphones. We have microphones, raise your hand and someone with a microphone will come. We have one in the front row.
Oh, there's your picture.
RICHARD RAYNER: Yeah, that's Clark, is the tall guy three from the left. This is Albert Marco who is a gangster and you see him there shortly after being involved in a fight at The Shit Cafe that was a cafe on Venice pier.
DAVID L. ULIN: Covered in blood.
RICHARD RAYNER: Well, Marco, you know, kind of trying to disguise the extent of his wrong doing had removed his shirt, because his shirt had too much blood on it.
[LAUGHTER]
But still got quite a bit anyway.
And Marco was this plug ugly gangster who was a henchman of Charlie Crawford who is the man who Clark eventually rubs out.
DAVID L. ULIN: There's a hand up over there.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Richard, I like to hear about your research process. Where are the real archival sources for the '20s and '30s?
RICHARD RAYNER: Well, that's sort of they're all over. It depends on what your um, I've done things that have been archived in different ways. So that the previous nonfiction narrative history to this was a book, I wrote about a Depression Era conman where there were a lot of prison records and I got those through a friend -- or guy who became a friend of The National Archives. You just realized that he has people are valuable resources when you find them. A lot for this, obviously there were trial transcripts and then just a lot of going through and it seems to me what this book is an attempt to connect certain dots that no one had really ever bothered to try to connect before.
So, there was I did a lot of constructing very detailed timelines of by looking at newspaper stories and just went sort of you know, even with the Clark murder day – at that moment in the timeline in the book, it is hour-by-hour, where was he at that moment, according, you know, to what did The Illustrated Day News say about. What did The Examiner say about it? What did The L.A. Times say about it? What did The Express say about it? What did The Herald say about it? And then comparing that with his own testimony to sort of weave together a narrative. So, you know, I try and read as much, look at as much. I love having old photos in my hand and old documents that something kind of very exciting about that process. So, and really you can just go on and on and on. There's never any end to research. And you realize that oh, um, you know, my god I should have I should have actually done that extra trip somewhere else. But you know, eventually the moment comes when you just sort of -- you’ve got the narrative and the writing takes over and the research stops.
So, um, but it’s very involved but fun, I love doing research.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Mr. Rayner, you mentioned a lot of really great books that were published in the 1930s and are out of print. I'm curious if you're familiar with one called Los Angeles by Marrow Mayo, and if that had any effect with what you're writing about because it has to do a lot with the period and the scandalous --
RICHARD RAYNER: Sure.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: -- beginnings of Los Angeles.
RICHARD RAYNER: Right. Yeah, I think that's a wonderful book. And especially, in it’s telling of the Owen's River Valley story. He gets that I know it's not a favorite of yours is that book is it?
DAVID L. ULIN: Uh, it’s okay. I like Cedric Belfrage telling of that story better, because it's, you know, it’s very read.
RICHARD RAYNER: Right. Mayo was -- I think was a New York journalist who came out here and then pulled together that book kind of quite it has the energy of being written kind of quite quickly and is a big clunky, but nonetheless he sort of realized he had seized on this amazing stuff that had never really been written about before. But I guess that book got superseded quickly. But as I say, I like that book, but it’s superseded by the Carey Mc Williams’ book.
DAVID L. ULIN: By about 10 or 12 years.
RICHARD RAYNER: There's no question that the Mc Williams’ book is a lot more thoughtful and better done.
DAVID L. ULIN: Yeah, the interesting thing about the Mc Williams’ book, even 60 some years later, right, because it came out in '46 it's still completely right on.
RICHARD RAYNER: It's a genius book.
DAVID L. ULIN: We recommend it highly to everyone who hasn't read it.
There's a hand up in the back.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Can you confirm or deny a story about the Food Emporium next door to Central Market. About 15 years ago the lady manager and her boyfriend disappeared and were found a few months later in the meat locker and there had been a city meat inspection in the process I mean, in the period of time between the disappearance and the discovery.
It's worthy of a movie, I think.
[LAUGHTER]
RICHARD RAYNER: I think that might be my next book. Yeah.
[LAUGHTER]
I'm sorry, I don't know anything about that, but it's great though.
[LAUGHTER]
DAVID L. ULIN: You want to get the guy in the --
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Since this was about or it seems to be in the '20s, the roaring '20s, and I don't know much about that time, but we seem to perceive it as decadent and free flowing and everything going. Was it tempered by -- this kind of behavior was it tempered by The Depression or has we been crazy for the last 80 years?
RICHARD RAYNER: Well, I think it's interesting, you know, throughout the '20s and the '30s that that sort of decadence is answered always as it is in L.A. by the way by a form of Puritanism, which came from the ethnic that the Midwestern’s brought here with him and then in the period in terms of the book, we're talking about the early days of radio, and the most powerful influences in radio at that time were the evangelists.
So, you have Aimee Semple Mc Fearson who is actually seeing her kind of bizarre version of love. Love through God. And then the other great '20s evangelist was the Reverend Fighting Bob Shuler. He used radio as a political tool. He was the first person to do that. And what he seized upon, was the fact what his flock wanted to hear about was how awful and decadent the movie folk were. And you know, how we must hold up the flag for the values that we represent. There are the true American values and I see that those that tension has always been and especially then, is a part of what the city was and still is to that extent and I'm not sure whether that pattern of behavior changes through economic changes. I don't think it really does. I think that tension sort of runs beneath whether we're in a prosperous moment or an impoverish one.
DAVID L. ULIN: Gentlemen in the front.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: I don't really know anything about LA history and I find it interesting that a DA would end up killing a couple gangsters.
RICHARD RAYNER: An Assistant DA.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: All right. What ever happened to him?
Did he get away with it since they were gangsters?
RICHARD RAYNER: It's a good question. He did get away with it. He got away with it on self defense.
And he this is Dave Clark, the main character in the book. So he held his nerve. Never told his tale. Legal procedure was different than. He could arrive in court on the day when everybody knew he was going to tell the story having never uttered a breath of it.
People don't really believe him. He’s this handsome dude. He's managed to get lots of women on the jury. He wants women on the jury. So he gets acquitted finally after the first trial. It’s a hung jury and then the second trial he's acquitted.
And he becomes a mouthpiece, you know, he becomes in effect a gangster's lawyer. He works for this guy called, Guy MacPhee. And Clark's career prosperous through the '40s with MacPhee, which who I'm sure is the model for Eddie Mars in Chandler's The Big Sleeve.
But the sad tale about Clark is that his glamorous life kind of spirals down into the '50s, and he's still a lawyer but he's not doing well, and he's staying with a friend. And as veterans we can -- they both got blasted, that was a guy he was in USC with in the '20s, and now we're in the 1950s. And Clark wakes up his friend and says, “I think I just killed your wife.” And the wife had got involved in while her husband had passed out, she'd been accusing Clark of mooching off of them. Clark reached for a shotgun in a rage and blown her away.
At that moment, 20 years on, everybody realizes Clark murdered Crawford and Spencer.
And the tragic thing about the story is that his own wife, who by then had divorced him. Nancy, the pretty lady who's standing by him in the jail cell, always held a candle for Clark. This I got from Nancy's granddaughter even when they were separated.
When Nancy hears the story of the second murder, she herself soon has a heart attack and dies. It’s very very sad that – um. So but as to kind of what happened to him, you know, how does someone get eaten away like that? I don't really know. But he did.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: If you look at all of the images on the screen, fascinating images but they're all images of white people.
RICHARD RAYNER: Right.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: And I only bring that up not for political correctness, but to ask you if you think that something fundamental is happened to change L.A. with the with the immigrations. Particularly of the '70s and the '80s. And the fact that the city is now a plurality Latino city. Whether we're looking at at a world that's gone with the wind or whether you still think all of the factors that created your work are still operative.
RICHARD RAYNER: Well, that's a very very excellent question.
And whether I think there are -- Mike Davis, you know, may be one of those people who would say that the kind the idea of L.A. as a noir place is a specifically white concern. And that may be so. And you know, there was, of course, the Latino immigration was I don't know what the percentages were, but we're talking, you know, that still would have been very very substantial back then. But really you’re talking about when Adenine talks about it he describes a very white place, I think it was a very white city. And I guess the African American influx really starts in the '30s and '40s, doesn't it with
DAVID L. ULIN: Yeah, the war -- prewar late '30s, I mean, you have what's his name, Lummis, Charles Fletcher Lummis, who was the city editor of The L.A. Times but also the head of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce who wrote ad copy describing Southern California as a paradise for the Saxson homemaker.
RICHARD RAYNER: Yeah, it’s called –
[LAUGHTER]
DAVID L. ULIN: To draw white people from Midwestern cities.
RICHARD RAYNER: And you know, that's triggering something with me, it's called "The White Spot" of America. That indeed that was a selling point.
DAVID L. ULIN: Okay. We have time for one more.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: You guys have referenced an amazing number of obscure forgotten books and made this really good point about how the history of Los Angeles exists this these books that don't exist anymore. I just have to ask you if either of you know a 1932 novel called Praise the Lord by Dillwyn Parrish, because it's getting very obscure, but it's about an Iowa family that comes to Los Angeles and essentially goes insane one person at a time.
[LAUGHTER]
Seriously the mother is a disciple of Aimee Semple
Mc Pherson, who is a different name in the book and she takes the abuse from her husband for only so long and the she kills him and goes to prison and dies in prison. Their daughter gets knocked up by the soda jerk. The son becomes a kind of drifter around town and ends up owning a gas station in Santa Monica Canyon. A great book.
I recommend it.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: It sounds like it. I don't know it. It's interesting how Aimee Semple McPherson, or some Aimee Semple Mc Pherson-esque figure appears in these novels.
Do you know the book?
RICHARD RAYNER: As you describe that plot, that book has kind of crossed my radar at some point. But you're right though, it's sort of it's The Flutter of an Eyelid --
DAVID L. ULIN: She has the great line about love and says, “The love is in the scotch.” Because god's love is everywhere.
[LAUGHTER]
Well, on that happy note, thank you all for coming. I would like to thank my good friend Mr. Rayner for
[APPLAUSE]
and go by his book, please. And also if you are so inclined, there are jars, yes? There is a jar for donations to the ALOUD series to The Library Foundation. Please give generously so Louise can keep this great program going.
Thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]
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