Land of Smoke and Mirrors: A Cultural History of Los Angeles 9780813554587

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Land of Smoke and Mirrors


A Cultural History of Los Angeles

Vincent Brook

ru tg e r s u n i ve r s i t y p r e s s n e w b ru n s w i c k , n e w j e r s e y, a n d l o n d o n

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Brook, Vincent, 1946– Land of smoke and mirrors : a cultural history of Los Angeles / Vincent Brook. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–8135–5457–0 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978–0–8135–5456–3 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978–0–8135–5458–7 (e-book) 1. Los Angeles (Calif.) — History. 2. Hollywood (Los Angeles, Calif.) — History. 3. Popular culture — California — Los Angeles — History. 4. Los Angeles (Calif.) — In literature. 5. Los Angeles (Calif.) — In motion pictures. 6. Motion picture industry — California — Los Angeles — History. 7. Cultural pluralism — California — Los Angeles — History. 8. Minorities — California — Los Angeles — History. 9. Los Angeles (Calif.) — Social conditions I. Title. F869.L857B76 2012 979.4’94 — dc23 2012009902 A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. Copyright © 2013 by Vincent Brook All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. Visit our website: http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu Manufactured in the United States of America Typesetting: Jack Donner, BookType

For Karen always and forever

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments Prologue 1 Introduction 5

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PA RT I

Original Si(g)n 1

The Ramona Myth

2

Ramona Revisited

25 43

PA RT I I

Si(g)n City 3

“City with Two Heads”

67

4

What Price Hollywood?

83

PA RT I I I

L.A. Noir 5

Bright and Guilty Place

6

Neo-noir

105

126

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Contents PA RT I V

Multicultural L.A. 7

LAtinos

153

8

bLAcks

170

9

LAsians

189

10

LAnglos and LAGBTs Conclusion Notes

243

Index

281

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book grew from a course on the “Rhetoric of Los Angeles” I have been teaching at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School of Communication since 2006. Ur-thanks thus go out to the Annenbergians who provided the opportunity: Sarah Banet-Weiser, Larry Gross, Abby Kaun, and Imre Mezsaros. Two of my teaching assistants in the course, Peter Chow-White and George Villanueva, from whom I learned a great deal, deserve special mention. Myriad others contributed in myriad ways to the book’s completion, including (with apologies to those I inadvertently omitted): Joe Abbott, Bernie Acuna, Cecilia Acuna, Conrad Acuna, Charles Alvarez, Cindi Alvitre, Sandra Ball-Rokeach, Cynthia Becht, Maria Benitez, Tiffany Bowers, Lisa Boyajian, John Cahoon, Marilyn Campbell, Linda Candelaria, Lena M. Chao, David Delacruz, Victor Dominguez, Mary Feirro, Matt Gracia, Rene Garcia, Brian Gatlin, Brian Glover, Felix Gutierrez, Marsha Hagadorn, Margaret Hardin, John Harris, Celone Hawkinson, Stephen Holguin, Vincent Holguin, Stephen C. Jett, Wes Joe, John Johnson, Robert Johnson, Claudia Jurmain, David Kipen, Jim Landry, Beau Layne, Bill McCawley, Doris McKently, Rose Mitchell, Rachel Morales Jackson, Andy Myers, Summer Myers, Jane Nakasako, Octavio Olvera, Rene Ortiz, Liz Perez, Pamela Peters, Gary Phillips, Carmen Ramirez, Irene Reynoso, Barbara Robinson, Al Sanchez, Christopher Shaw, Barbara Sherlock, Jonathan Stein, Alison Stenger, Dace Taube, Bud Thomas, Mark Thompson, Cynthia Vallejo, Anita Venegas, and Michelle Weling. Institutions that helped with photo acquisition include the A C Bilbrew Los Angeles County Library, Bison Archives, the Japanese American Museum, the Los Angeles County Natural History Museum, the Los Angeles Public Library, Mission San Gabriel Arcangel, the National Archives, ONE Archives, Photofest, and the University of Southern California Special Collections Library.

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Acknowledgments

I am especially grateful to Leslie Mitchner, editor in chief at Rutgers University Press, whose unwavering trust in the project saw me through some rough spots. Most of all, hugs, kisses, and much more to my dear wife, Karen, whose inspiration, research, guidance, and love made the entire endeavor possible and—for me and hopefully the reader as well—worthwhile.

Land of Smoke and Mirrors




PROLOGUE

Nowhere has the discrepancy between Los Angeles’s rhetoric and historical record been more pronounced than in La Fiesta de Los Angeles birthday celebration. First held in 1894 and running in fits and starts through the 1930s, this “carnival, pageant, parade, fandango,” commemorating La Reina de Los Ángeles’s founding as a Spanish colonial outpost in 1781, epitomizes what D. J. Waldie calls the “city of self-inflicted amnesia.”1 Organized by the largely probusiness, virulently antiunion Merchants (later Merchants and Manufacturers) Association—a body composed largely of Anglo Protestants and German Jews—the initial La Fiesta served two interrelated purposes: as a “commercial boon and tourist lure” and as a diversion during the Pullman railroad strike then at its peak.2 “As an icon in the invention of regional tradition,” William Deverell elaborates, “the event proved a brilliant advertising stroke, boosting the city it simultaneously explained”—but also explained away.3 For in concocting “an entire artificial landscape” from its mythic Spanish-Mexican past, this paean to the city’s origins made a mockery of them. The fiasco was seemingly most glaring in regard to the local Tongva Indians, whose participation in the celebration masked the confiscation of their lands, the changing of their name (to the quasi-Spanish “Gabrielino”), the devastation of their culture, and the continued lack of legal standing among the few who had survived their people’s near-total annihilation. If some representation is better than none, then another flagrant foul was committed against African Americans, who were excluded from the event altogether. This despite the fact that blacks and mulattos had made up the majority of the pueblo’s first forty-four pobladores (settlers), along with Spaniards, Mexican Indians, and mestizos.4 Technically, however, the most fundamental lacuna pertains to the (mis)identification of the region’s first settlers themselves, who were neither Africans nor Indians—although, in this instance, little blame can be attached to La Fiesta’s organizers. Indeed, in spite of the latest archaeological tools, and extensive ongoing investigation, 1

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still only a rough outline exists today of the true aboriginals of the Western Hemisphere in general, and Southern California in particular.5 A treasure trove of artifacts recently excavated in a Texas flood plain now dates the earliest known human habitation in the Americas at circa 15,000 BP (Before Present).6 Given that northwestern North America was still ice-covered at that time, the Texas finds, combined with previous discoveries in Monte Verde, Chile, dating from circa 14,700 BP, scuttle the long-held theory that the first humans, upon migrating across the Beringian ice bridge from Siberia, passed down an inland route through Alaska and western Canada. The latest archaeological evidence now posits two more likely routes: a coastal, water-borne passage, via East Asia and Beringia, southward along a so-called kelp highway; or sea-borne entry into South America, possibly from Australia via now inundated Pacific islands.7 Another theory proposes traversal to the East Coast from the Iberian Peninsula across ice sheets along the northern Atlantic.8 A less likely but plausible fourth course was by way of Antarctica’s northern fringe, which during this period reached almost to Tierra del Fuego.9 The earliest human skeletal remains on the West Coast—discovered on Santa Rosa Island off the coast of Santa Barbara, attributed to so-called Arlington Springs Man, and dated at circa 13,500 BP—affirm Paleolithic watercraft passage.10 The oldest inland remains found so far in Southern California are those of so-called Los Angeles Man, from the Ballona Creek area of West Los Angeles and dated at circa 11,000 BP, and of La Brea Woman, from the La Brea Tar Pits and dated at circa 10,000 BP. Further complicating the hypothesis of a single migration from the north, evidence of human occupation and substantial cranial variation among the earliest Paleoamericans suggest multiple points of entry. These individuals were as different from each other as they are different from modern groups. Some suggest as many as three or four significant migrations, with the earliest evidence of human habitation found in the southeastern United States and the southern tip of South America. Technologically more sophisticated groups may have absorbed smaller groups or pushed them to the margins. Warfare and diseases may have eliminated groups entirely.11 Anthropologist Stephen C. Jett elaborates: I am inclined to think that the Late Pleistocene Paleoamericans came from the same basic pre-Mongoloid coastal East Asian pool as did the ancestors of the Ainu of Japan and of one kind of early Australian/New Guinean native. There may also have been a significant later influx of ainoid humans to North America, travelling coastally and then inland via rivers, using bark canoes and occurring between 15,000 and 10,000 BP. The principal ancestors of American Indians appear to me to have entered significantly later, from Siberia via Beringia, moving southward beginning around 7000 BP (perhaps following a long sojourn in Alaska), and in most cases genetically swamping the small populations of previous arrived Paleoamericans. These early post-Pleistocene ancestral Indians seem likely to have traveled via the interior, using the rivers and perhaps skin-covered bullboats. . . . As to where these people originated,

Prologue

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I would guess east-central Siberia. Physically, ancestral Indians differed from Paleoamericans in being much more Mongoloid, resembling some contemporary Siberian and Inner Asian populations.12

In differentiating migratory trajectories among Indian groups, linguistic rather than skeletal analysis has been the key. Such evidence points to the Chumashanspeaking Chumash, now centered in coastal areas just north of Los Angeles County, as having preceded the Uto-Aztecan/Takik-speaking Tongva into the region, perhaps as early as 5000 BP.13 Estimates of the Tongvas’ arrival vary widely, but recent skeletal analysis indicates that they likely replaced or absorbed the Chumash from the Southern Channel Islands around 2500 BP, and the “replacement surely would have been earlier on the mainland.”14 Almost certainly by 500 c.e. (Common Era), the Tongva would have developed a culture and society similar to that which the Spanish explorers encountered, and proceeded to dismantle.15 These “first Angelinos” inhabited an area of twenty-five hundred square miles, extending from the islands and coastline in the south, to Topanga Canyon in the northwest, to the base of Mount Wilson in the north, to San Bernardino in the east, and to Aliso Creek in the southeast.16 Their total population at the time of European contact numbered about five thousand. El Pueblo de Los Ángeles would be founded at the site of but one of about fifty to one hundred loosely connected Tongva settlements, of from fifty to two hundred people, dispersed along the coast and across the inland valleys.17 Besides the linguistically distinct Chumash along the northern coast, other Tongva-related Shoshonean tribes ringed the region: Tataviam and Kitanemuk to the north; Taaqtam (Serrano) to the northeast; Iviatim (Cahuilla) and Acjacheman (Juaneño) to the east and southeast.18 Alfred Kroeber, one of the founders of cultural anthropology, described the Tongva as having been “the wealthiest and most thoughtful of all the Shoshoneans of the State,” while culturally and politically, contemporary historian William McCawley avers, the tribe was “the most impressive of the [pre-Columbian] UtoAztecan groups.”19 Although recent studies have challenged exaggerated notions of the “ecological Indian” in perfect harmony with the environment, positing periods of ecological “overexploitation” that might have forced indigenous populations “to shift to less productive food types,” the Tongva are credited with “impressive achievements in pre-industrial technology and economics, as well as religion and oral literature.”20 The native Tongva apparently had comparatively fair skin and light hair, at least in the view of early Spaniards, who called them “white Indians”—though they were apparently dark enough to regard the Spaniards, in return, as “of nasty white color and ugly blue eyes.”21 Whether a compatibility of complexion reduced the colonizers’ sense of alienation from the locals, the Mediterranean-type climate and geography surely did. “It is likely,” Paula Shiffman observes, “that similarity between the California environment and the landscapes of Spain was a major reason why Spanish settlers in California were so successful in establishing

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self-sustaining settlements.”22 Yet what was “self-sustaining” for the Spanish proved devastating for the Tongva. The most fertile and productive land in California, with a rich variety of wild animal and plant life, including herds of antelope roaming the plains, was irreversibly damaged or vanished completely under European-style agriculture and land management. The common European image of Southern California’s Indians as unspoiled and primitive clashed with reality as well. Far from “constrained to comparatively simple, passive, and contented cultural reactions to existence in a natural huntergatherer paradise,” the Tongva had been manipulating their surroundings for centuries through controlled burning, small-scale cultivation, broadcast seeding, and coppicing.23 These minimally invasive practices were unable to withstand “the massive and lasting ecological effects initiated by the Europeans,” however, which, starting in the 1770s, not only radically reduced the productive land available to the nonmission Indians and corrupted beyond reclamation much that remained but within a few short generations also led to the complete “disappearance of the Los Angeles prairie.”24 Livestock grazing produced the greatest damage: directly, from a reduction in native vegetation and in the herds of antelope, deer, and other wild animals that fed upon it; indirectly, through the spreading of the seed of alien species, introduced by the Spaniards, which also happened to be more adaptable to grazing. “The displacement of natives by aliens,” Shiffman concludes, “means that the few relic prairies in California are thoroughly contaminated by Mediterranean annuals.”25 The repercussions of the “contamination” extend to the present. As recent mega-windstorms have shown, even enlightened reforestation efforts have been subverted by shallow root systems and overwatering, leaving the region’s vegetation (alien and native alike) “like so much glitter tossed on hard-packed desert sand.”26 Angelinos “cry when thousand-year-old oaks fall,” Gale Holland observed after “Arborgeddon” wrought havoc in late 2011. “But our attachment is nostalgic, a futile gesture to hold on to a lost California Eden that perhaps never existed, of leafy oaks and spreading orchards. The reality is that our urban forest is an artificial landscape created to serve agriculture and development interests.”27 Whether one accepts Shiffman’s environmentalist or Holland’s materialist assessment, two of their corollaries are irrefutable. First, the “paradise lost” that Los Angeles boosters sought to recover through La Fiesta and other mythic elaborations of a Spanish Fantasy Past was always already several steps removed from its primeval source. Second, the “disappearance of the Los Angeles prairie” through “displacement and contamination of natives by aliens” all too closely mirrors the fate of the Tongva and other American Indians at the hands of the Europeans. The dialectical relation between these two strands—the one based in exploitation of peoples and nature, the other in evacuation of history—frames this study of the rhetoric of Los Angeles.


Introduction No other American metropolis can claim to be so elaborately constructed, so much a creation of its inventors’ projections and desires. —David Ulin, Looking at Los Angeles

Yaanga, Yang-na, Yabit, El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de Los Ángeles del Rio Porciúncula, City of Angels, City of Demons, City of Chaos, Sin City, City of Dreams, City of Desire, Sunshine City, City of Blight, Bright and Guilty Place, the White Spot, the Enormous Village, La La Land, City of the Future, City of Forgetting, Nowhere City, Equivocal City, Fragmented Metropolis, Chameleon Metropolis, Mestizo City, Capital of the Third World, City of Metaphor, City of Lies, City of Quartz, Postmodern Cosmopolis par Excellence—Los Angeles has been called all these things and more, out of pride, love, envy, hype, hubris, fear, denial, disgust, mis- and in-comprehension. This book exhumes the many faces, facets, and feces of Los Angeles by viewing the Tongva-village-turned-world-city as a rhetorical text. That is, the physical spaces and genealogical traces of Los Angeles (as city, county, and region) will be explored via the myriad, often contradictory, images of Los Angeles that have been projected from within and without its geographical and psychological borders. Images are meant here in their broadest sense, referring not merely to visual imagery or media representations but to sundry cultural signs ranging from the literary to the architectural to the natural, from the high to the folk to the popular. Los Angeles lends itself uniquely to image-based analysis not only because of its real-and-imagined status as the world’s image factory but because no other world city has been as constructed on constructedness: a “gigantic improvisation . . . that created its past,” Carey McWilliams suggested; “unviewable save through the fictive scrim of its mythologizers,” Michael Sorkin concurred.1 Unlike Gertrude Stein’s Oakland, there is a there there—a multitude of “theres,” to paraphrase Dorothy Parker—but reality has intersected with rhetoric in Los Angeles to an inordinate degree.2 “Other cities have histories. Los Angeles has legends,” John Buntin proclaimed, then complained that the “preoccupation with a mythic past has obscured something important—the [city’s] true 5

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Land of Smoke and Mirrors

history.”3 The point that Buntin misses is that L.A.’s history is inextricably bound to its mystification, that most of its legends “are true,” as John Russell Taylor puts it, “even when they’re contradictory.”4 Unlike other urban centers’ more forthrightly mythic origins—Rome’s via Romulus and Remus or Mexico City’s via the god Huitzilopochtli—Los Angeles’s inception and raison d’être emerged from a smoke-and-mirrors process both literal and figurative, real and imagined, material and metaphorical, physical and textual. Smoke and mirrors does not solely conjure the tricks of the trade and funhouse distortions of the Hollywood dream factory, or the legerdemain by which the city’s nineteenth-century boosters recast semidesert terrain into a bucolic idyll and a tumbleweed cowtown into an urban megalith. The trope contains a kernel of truth. More than two centuries before the Spanish named the colonial outpost La Reina de Los Ángeles (Queen of Angels) in 1781, Juan Cabrillo’s expedition of 1542 had dubbed the coastal region “Bay of Smokes” (Baía de los Fumos), “on account of the many smokes they saw there.”5 The resident Tongva Indians started these fires, as they would those that “rose on the beaches” sixty years later to greet Sebastian Vizcaino’s expedition of 1602, as welcoming signs. But “Valley of Smoke” had long been the local people’s assignation for the heavy fog, low clouds, hazy sunshine, and plumes from control burns that frequently shrouded the area.6 Since the spread of European civilization, less congenial, but no less emblematic, “smoke signals” came to define the region. The smog that Los Angeles bequeathed to the world—as neologism (smoke + fog) and phenomenon—continues to land the city atop the nation’s heap of most air-polluted urban centers.7 Increasingly prevalent and disastrous wildfires, as well, now count as one of the area’s “four seasons” (along with floods, droughts, and earthquakes). To the list of natural disasters must be added several of the human-made variety, given L.A.’s propensity for class-fueled, racially charged eruptions from the earliest to recent times, and its serial immolation in sci-fi and disaster films, from The War of the Worlds (1953), Earthquake (1974), and The Terminator (1984) to Independence Day (1994), Volcano (1997), and Battle: Los Angeles (2011), to name only a few. Mirrors relate preternaturally and pragmatically to Los Angeles as well: from the motion picture camera’s reflex mechanism to automobiles’ rearview mirrors.8 The latter especially—through their experiential fusion of past, present, and future; metaphoric relation to motion pictures; and basic equipment for the city’s iconic conveyance, the car—have become, as Reyner Banham proposed in his Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies and Joan Didion practiced in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, the ideal way to “read” Los Angeles.9 The city’s freeway system, in particular—a “secular communion” (Didion) in which “illusion plays as large a part . . . as it does in other parts of ” the city (Banham)—functions as the Autopian ecology in Banham’s four-part schema, which also comprises Surfurbia (beach communities), Foothills (Santa Monica Mountains, Hollywood Hills) and Plains of Id (vast, nondescript flatlands).10 The Steve Martin comedy L.A. Story (1991) has literalized Autopia in a way that could serve as a model for this book’s sign-based methodology.11 Forced onto

Introduction

7

a freeway shoulder by engine trouble, protagonist Harris Telemacher (Martin) strikes up a “conversation” with an electronic freeway sign while his fashionista girlfriend preens herself in the window-flap mirror. Both touchingly “human” (it texts Telemacher to hug it) and otherworldly (it cryptically prophesies his future), the sign, configured as Telemacher’s guardian angel, must be “read”—that is, deciphered—to be fully comprehended. A magical sign communicating in mystical sign language to a media sign-maker (Telemacher is a television weatherman)—only in L.A.! While all cities, extrapolating from Benedict Anderson, are “imagined communities,” none has been as steeped in self-representation as the City of Signs.12 From its nineteenth-century promotion as a white Protestant mecca with a Spanish Catholic past, to its twentieth-century transformation into the world’s multimedia and multicultural capital, Los Angeles’s urtext and driving force have been the arts and sciences of signification. More recent prefab cities such as Las Vegas and Celebration, Florida, may have taken virtuality to its hyperreal extreme, but these urban simulacra are themselves L.A.’s progeny: Vegas, as the godchild of Los Angeles gangster Bugsy Siegel and, per D. J. Waldie, a “new suburb of Los Angeles”; Celebration (and its planned-community cousins), as the Disneylandish dream of Uncle Walt himself.13 Further contributing to the uniqueness of Los Angeles’s Stadtbild (city image) has been its grounding in rhetorical ambivalence, which, in spite and because of the attendant hype, has accrued to the city’s advantage. A “bi-polar city of bright surfaces sharply bounded by shadows,” Waldie has deemed this schizoid aspect—an abstraction again grounded in physical reality.14 The city’s storied “unreal” quality of light and an unhinged climate (bring on Harris Telemacher) not only reverses its axis unpredictably (well before global warming) from desertdriven, Santana (“devil”) winds one day to fog-drenched marine layer the next.15 It can also lead to thirty-degree temperature shifts, in a single day, from shivering beachside to smoldering inland valley. Just as the meteorological extremes add spice to clichés of seasonless torpor, so does the antimyth of celebrity scandal, gangland violence, and natural disaster make the flip side of fame, fortune, and golden statuettes that much more enticing—as double-edged monikers such as City of Angels and Demons, Paradise and Noir, New Jerusalem and New Babylon attest. Noir and New Babylon, in particular, evoke the quintessential signifier of a placeless place and image production, as well as the real-and-imagined embodiment of Si(g)n City: Hollywood. The Hollywood sign, by extension, is not only the calling card for Los Angeles as a whole, its “signature mental image.”16 In its symbolic character and largely generic relation to the media industries, the sign also epitomizes L.A.’s smokeand-mirrors quality. The string of white block letters is unique among American architectural icons, Leo Braudy observes, because while it signifies a certain place, it is one step removed from that place. Its own physicality is delimited by its comparative inaccessibly to the viewer, whose experience of it is most commonly

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by sight, and from a distance. “Unlike icons like the Statue of Liberty or Mt. Rushmore, the sign doesn’t depict a human image. Nor, like the Liberty Bell or the Washington Monument, is it a familiar object. . . . Instead it is a group of letters, a word on the side of a hill. . . . Its essence is almost entirely abstract, at once the quintessence and the mockery of the science of signs itself.”17 The Hollywood sign’s self-mockery goes hand in hand with L.A.’s branding as a “landscape of fantasy.” In relation to the city’s claim to motion picture capitaldom, however, this logo is more (or less) than an abstraction; it’s an obfuscation.18 Beyond the fact that of the major movie studios that once actually resided in Hollywood proper (Paramount, Fox, Warner Bros., RKO, Columbia, even Universal and Disney in their early years), only Paramount remains in the district today. A larger fallacy, in today’s global media age, is that the Hollywood sign “obscures the fact that film production has largely dispersed from Hollywood to a range of locations and factories around the world,” which, together with the ubiquity of computer-generated imagery (CGI), makes moot the notion of a singular film production center.19 Then again, in prototypical Los Angeles fashion, such obfuscation reveals as much as it conceals. Whether films are actually manufactured in L.A. or in cyberspace, an unmistakable Hollywoodism—in industrial mode and stylistic practice—prevails. The Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings franchises, for example, despite their non-American narrative sources and largely non-American casts, production teams, and locations, still carry—in their video-game aesthetic, commercial and technical quality, and distribution networks—a “Made in America” stamp. 20 Transnational marketplace notwithstanding, Hollywood remains—as it has been since it garnered control of the world’s movie screens and colonized the collective unconscious in the 1920s—a global phenomenon and a state of mind.21 Or to invert Ian Frazier’s metaphor for Siberia, which, rather than “a place itself,” is “a figure of speech . . . for cold, remoteness and exile,” Hollywood has become a trope for heat, romance, and everyplace.22

Save the Peak For all its potency as an emblem of Los Angeles’s fractured relation to physical space and material reality, the Hollywood sign is inscribed, after all, “on the side of a hill”—and not just any hill, but one whose comparative wildness, as visual and conceptual backdrop, has become an essential component of the sign’s iconicity. Just how essential was demonstrated in spring 2010, when a luxury housing development planned for Cahuenga Peak, another “undeveloped” hill just west of the sign, was averted by a “Save the Peak” fund-raising campaign sponsored by the Hollywood Sign Trust, the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, and the Trust for Public Land (TPL). With more than two thousand donors from fifty states and ten countries; twenty-eight thousand Facebook fans; large bequests from entertainment industry bigwigs; and an eleventh-hour, $900,000 donation

Introduction

9

from Playboy founder Hugh Hefner; TPL was able to purchase the coveted land for $3.2 million from a Chicago investment firm.23 That the “integrity” of the Hollywood sign had been preserved at the expense of a development project is rife with irony, for the sign had originally been conceived in the name of development. Yet the irony, again, is apropos, as L.A.’s “primal mythmakers,” Waldie reminds us, “are its real estate agents.”24 Spelled “HOLLYWOODLAND” and erected atop Mount Lee in 1923, the sign was the brainchild of real estate tycoon and L.A. Times publisher Harry Chandler as an advertisement for an upscale housing project (fig. 1).“Intended to appeal,” as early L.A. debunker Louis Adamic (who worked on the project as a day laborer) observed, “to movie stars, directors, oil millionaires, high-powered evangelists, wealthy widows, and divorcees from the East,” the subdivision in Beachwood Canyon directly below the sign remains a thriving, if less high-powered, residential district to this day.25 But the historical traces go deeper. Indeed, the recent effort to maintain the sign’s pristine mise-en-scène for what essentially remains a promotional billboard cuts to the heart of the conflicted relation between L.A.’s historical and rhetorical record—to its fundamental status, in Waldie’s words, as a “moral sign.”26

Figure 1. The Hollywoodland sign, 1928. Bison Archives.

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Mount Lee and Cahuenga Peak are part of the Hollywood Hills section of the Santa Monica Mountains, a low-lying coastal range that, despite extensive development and imported vegetation, retains a trove of native flora and fauna. A good deal of the wildlife resides in Griffith Park—at 4,210 acres, the largest urban wilderness park in the world, and along whose southwestern fringe the Hollywood sign is located. The park also houses, on its northern, San Fernando Valley side, caged animals in the Los Angeles Zoo and a memorial to the Wild West in the Autry National Center, a museum complex named for singingcowboy star Gene Autry. Unconfined by iron bars and glass cases, the park’s free-roaming animals—coyotes, raccoons, snakes, skunks, deer, opossums—spill over into the residential areas, not only along Banham’s Foothills but miles into the urbanized Plains of Id. Mountain lions reside in the Santa Monica Mountains and Burbank foothills as well, with at least one killed every year crossing the freeways.27 The merging of wildness with the cityscape (no matter how “contaminated”) is another rare, if less heralded, aspect of Los Angeles: how many other major metropolises feature as unfettered a living reminder of the feral past within a few short miles of the civic center? Indeed, if one adds to the mix the La Brea Tar Pits—that extraordinary central-city reliquary of mammalian fossils dating back to the Pleistocene era—the Hollywood sign becomes emblematic of greater Los Angeles not only because of its abstract relation to the natural world but also because of its intrinsic relation to it. As focal point for the intersection of urban and rural, mythic and mundane, primeval and hyperreal, the Hollywood sign and its immediate surroundings reinforce L.A.’s position as poster child for the postmodern condition.

Palimpsest: Theorized Another, less-laudable postmodern motif relates to what is missing, or at least blurred to the point of illegibility, in the Hollywood sign’s semiotics—namely, the Tongva and other tribal Indians that inhabited the area for thousands of years before the European incursion, of whom several thousand descendants reside in greater Los Angeles at the present time.28 Where, for example, in the Save the Peak campaign, or the reporting on it, was any mention that the peak’s name, Cahuenga, derives from the Tongva name Kaweenga?29 Traces of this and other contributions of the Tongva are preserved marginally in the history books, taxidermically in the Autry museum’s artifacts, and hereditarily in the Indian people’s living remnant.30 The Tongva’s place in the public imaginary, however, like much of the region’s multilayered past, is as concreted over as the Los Angeles River’s army-engineered storm channel. “Whitewashed adobe” is William Deverell’s more evocative descriptor for the city’s obfuscation and exploitation of its Indian (as well as Spanish and Mexican) patrimony.31 But the master metaphor for representing the cover-up and the “bleeding through” of L.A.’s historical layers is the palimpsest.32

Introduction

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Palimpsest—literally, from the Greek and Latin, “scraped clean and used again”—historically describes ancient and medieval manuscripts that have been written on, erased, and written over again. Palimpsests were motivated economically as a form of recycling, culturally as a sign of intellectual advancement, and spiritually as a means of sanctifying pagan writings with Christian ones; their enduring value rests in the traces of overlaid writings that remain decipherable (increasingly, thanks to modern technology), providing archaeological access to the texts’ transformations over time. Echoing its literal embodiment of multitiered meaning, the palimpsest as metaphor is now applied in a variety of fields such as architecture, astronomy, medicine, and history. The palimpsest’s connotations were not lost on Freud, who used the concept— in the form of the mystic writing pad—to characterize the operations of the unconscious. “I am working on the assumption,” Freud wrote to Wilhelm Fliess in the 1920s, “that our psychical mechanism has come about by a process of stratification: the material present in the shape of memory-traces is from time subjected to a rearrangement in accordance with fresh circumstances—is, as it were, transcribed. Thus what is essentially new in my theory is the thesis that memory is present not once but several times over, that it is registered in various species of ‘signs.’ ”33 Contemporary psychologist David Barash expands on this notion in refuting the behaviorist concept of the mind as a tabula rasa, or blank slate. “By contrast,” Barash avers, “it is much more likely that living things are palimpsests, tablets that are far from blank, because natural selection has written upon them, then crossed out and rewritten, doing this again and again, passing down our ‘nature’ as a heavily edited evolutionary bequeathal, a much written tablet of DNA.”34 Beth Archer Brombert merges the psychological and metaphorical in her application of the term to impressionist painting, specifically that of Edouard Manet, whose “complex process of overpainting . . . might be likened to a palimpsest.” Despite Manet’s (and impressionism’s) “legendary spontaneity,” Brombert asserts, “nothing was left to chance.” Manet constantly reworked his canvases, and “each new layer added something where something else had been painted over. Over each effacement, partly visible or discovered through X ray, another ‘text’ was superimposed. This layering, like the overwriting of a palimpsest, made possible as many subconscious insertions as conscious pentimenti.”35 Banham was the first to apply the notion of the palimpsest directly to Los Angeles, specifically to a “transportation palimpsest” whose traces were both latent and manifest in the city’s vast freeway system.36 Almost as iconic as the Hollywood sign and even more essential to L.A.’s centrifugal development, the freeways span the same basic grid as the hallowed El Camino Real, the “royal road” that connected Alta (as opposed to Baja) California’s twenty-one missions, four presidios, and three pueblos (San Francisco and Monterey were the other two).37 During the early Yankee boomtown period of the late 1800s, the old road provided ready-made routes to Los Angeles for the Union Pacific, Southern Pacific, and Santa Fe railroads. Finally, as the automobile superseded (or usurped) the train

12

Land of Smoke and Mirrors

in the mid-1900s, the freeway system’s concrete conveyer belts replaced, or were constructed next to, the railroad tracks. William David Estrada maps Banham’s transportation palimpsest back even further, to the Tongva’s “understanding and respect for the natural landscape, especially the force of the Los Angeles River. Those who came later built on that sense of place. Consequently, as Los Angeles slowly evolved from pueblo to ciudad to metropolis . . . , the basic infrastructure of the city, from roads and railroads to freeways, its geography, and its mythology were built upon its indigenous past.”38 Neo-Banhamian William McClung engages the palimpsest in regard to L.A.’s seemingly random and raucously eclectic agglomeration of architectural forms. In its “mixing of styles and half-achieved projects . . . but also by the layering of intended and envisioned alternative cities[,] L.A. is a palimpsest of such cities . . . the declaration of the city and its culture as a complete object and a sign for itself . . . like a classical column, topped by an eagle, put up in 1895 and composed of 13,873 oranges.”39 While McClung’s conflation of culture, nature, patriotism, and commerce trades on L.A.’s “blunt and naive” ahistoricism, Banham’s transportation palimpsest neatly aligns transformations in the city’s circulatory system with some of its main historical strands.40 In tying these strands to the physical landscape, his analysis emerged from, and contributed to, the New Urbanism of the 1960s and 1970s—an environmentally conscious movement which itself derived, to a large degree, from the Amerindians’ worldview then undergoing a major revival. The wellspring of the indigenous outlook is a holistic connection to “the land,” which may always already have been palimpsestian but which, in the “Indian diaspora” of twenty-first-century Los Angeles, has become so by default.41 And one needn’t take the word of a second-generation Angelino born to GermanJewish immigrants (such as myself). To the mind of present-day Tongva Cindi Alvitre, professor of American Indian Studies at California State University, Long Beach, “Los Angeles exists as layers of history stacked one on top of the other, each layer as real as the buildings and streets that stand today. . . . Past and present coexist. I don’t see these rectangular blocks of asphalt and concrete. I see earth and villages.”42

Thirdspace The spatial dimension Alvitre injects into her overview of Los Angeles history also grounds Edward Soja’s Lefebvrean construction of the city as the quintessential “thirdspace”—that is, a physical location where “real [first-space] and imagined [second-space] narratives overlap . . . and disrupt binary and linear historical understandings of [a] place and its people.43 “Palimpsest” is in fact the descriptor Soja attached to the thirdspace-inspired exhibit on Los Angeles and Paris he helped mount in 1989, commemorating the bicentennial of the French Revolution, at UCLA’s Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning. One

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13

portion of the exhibit rhetorically twinned Los Angeles and Paris via a timeline of political and cultural “turning points” in the history and geography of the two cities. The result—for Los Angeles, at least—was a provocative counternarrative in the tradition of Louis Adamic (and later, Mike Davis) that sought to reclaim and revive the city’s progressive legacy. The exhibit’s geopolitical “staging ground” was “El Pueblo” (a.k.a. the Plaza), which, at several historical junctures, “resonates with the radical changes taking place in Paris.”44 Relocated at least twice because of flooding and earthquakes in the Spanish and Mexican periods, and today the capstone of the Olvera Street ethnic theme park, the Plaza, as the symbolic location of the city’s founding, in Soja’s words, “has been the primordial PALIMPSEST of the City of Angels, prepared from its origins to be written upon and erased over and over again in the evolution of urban consciousness and civic imagination” (fig. 2).45 Given Soja’s emphasis on the Plaza as palimpsest, one that “simultaneously serves to abolish histories and cultures and to discover them anew in ‘other spaces,’ ” the exhibit’s elision of one of this site’s most striking historical and cultural abolitions, and rediscoveries, is curious. In 1932 the director of the Plaza Art Center gallery on Olvera Street, F. K. Ferenz, with the endorsement of the “mother” of modern Olvera Street, Christine Sterling, commissioned renowned Mexican artist David Alfaro Siqueiros to paint an outdoor mural on the secondstory wall of Italian Hall on Olvera Street. The selection of Siqueiros by the

Figure 2. Present-day Plaza with Pico House (built in 1864) and City Hall (built in 1928). Author’s photo.

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Land of Smoke and Mirrors

politically conservative Ferenz and Sterling was even more counterintuitive than that of Diego Rivera by Nelson Rockefeller the same year, to paint a mural in the lobby of the Radio Corporation of America building in New York. Like Rivera, Siqueiros was an avowed communist who “considered his art a political tool and vehicle of revolutionary thought, with concepts inseparable from aesthetics.”46 Rivera’s first two American murals, however, painted in San Francisco in 1930, had been politically muted and controversy-free, including one at the local stock exchange. Siqueiros practiced what he preached right from the start.47 He completed his first Los Angeles mural in July 1932 at the Chouinard Art Institute, where he’d been hired, as a political exile, to teach fresco painting. Titled Street Meeting, this “agitational and propagandistic” piece, depicting a workers’ meeting and, most provocatively, a black man standing beside a white woman, elicited an immediate outcry and a public rebuke from the Los Angeles Times.48 Undeterred, perhaps even emboldened by the reaction to Street Meeting, Siqueiros went even further in La América Tropical, as the Olvera Street mural he unveiled on October 8, 1932, was titled (fig. 3). Featuring a Mayan Indian crucified on a double cross, a rapacious eagle poised to do battle with an armed Peruvian Indian and a Mexican campesino, La América Tropical’s indictment of U.S. imperialism and call for revolution “outraged local civic leaders” and provoked an “instant scandal.”49 “It has been asked that I paint something related to tropical America, possibly thinking that this new theme would give no margin to create a work of revolutionary character,” Siqueiros admitted. “On the contrary, it seems to [me] that there couldn’t be a better theme to use.”50 Nor could there have been a better excuse for the local culture police to exercise hegemony. Mirroring the fate of Rivera’s anticapitalist mural for Rockefeller in New York, which was draped over and later destroyed, La América

Figure 3. La América Tropical shortly before its whitewashing. USC Special Collections Library.

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15

Tropical was literally whitewashed (painted over with white paint) “and for decades largely forgotten”—but not destroyed, and therein lies the palimpsest.51 The Plaza, throughout its history, as Devra Weber reminds us, has been “a space of contested memories, forgotten histories and their reclamation.”52 One of the latest reclamation efforts, to uncover La América Tropical (and the counterhistory it represents and exposes), began in the late 1960s. Siqueiros himself worked on a replacement figure of the central crucifixion image, left unfinished upon his death in 1974.53 Conservation efforts resumed in 1988, through the involvement of the Getty Foundation, and picked up steam in 2004 with the election of Antonio Villaraigosa, the first Los Angeles mayor of Mexican descent since the 1870s. Finally, on September 8, 2010, as ground was broken on the Siqueiros visitor center on Olvera Street (scheduled for completion in fall 2012), “what was hidden by ideology, paint and neglect was slowly reappearing.”54 Additional palimpsestian ironies prevail. “The mural,” according to Ruben Martinez, “was beginning to reveal itself even before the campaign to save it began in earnest. Time, the elements and decades of L.A. smog helped expose enough of the artwork for the outlines to emerge in ghostly fashion from the chalky surface.”55 More astoundingly, the white paint used to bury Siqueiros’s subversive vision actually helped preserve it. The mural certainly suffered over the years from exposure to sunlight, pollution, and earthquakes—as it would have in any event. The white paint, however, cocooned the mural, shielding its surface from the worst effects of the elements.56 As for the formal unveiling of the mural, also scheduled for fall 2012, this is to be enhanced, given the mural’s still only faintly visible contours, by digital projection that reproduces—if only virtually and ephemerally—the mural’s original coloration. “Imagine,” Martinez mused in 2011, “standing before the vast wall—18 feet high and 82 feet wide—and watching it morph from its ghost state into the furious color we know Siqueiros used. Then the color would bleed away, in a cycle mimicking the creation, whitewashing and reemergence of the mural. It would also symbolize the city’s troubled relationship with its own past.”57

Mexico Meets Hollywood While the proposed digital rendering of La América Tropical is, on one level, another simulacrum, it also approximates the actual techniques Siqueiros used in creating all three of his Los Angeles murals. True to his philosophy “to be of one’s own time,” Siqueiros embraced the latest methods—even if they stemmed from Hollywood.58 His crew of assistants, recruited from his Chouinard class and dubbed the Bloc of Mural Painters, included several movie industry artists.59 Some of these likely suggested Siqueiros’s pioneering photo-mural techniques— photographing subjects and projecting drawings onto the wall—which resembled those that Hollywood art directors had introduced as a more economical means of producing backdrops than those rendered by scene painters.60 The Hollywood connection extended to the patron of Siqueiros’s final, politically charged L.A.

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mural, titled Portrait of Mexico Today, painted at the Pacific Palisades home of film director Dudley Murphy in October and November of 1932. Siqueiros’s entrée to Murphy stemmed from their mutual friendship with Sergei Eisenstein, whom Siqueiros had met in Mexico in 1930 while the Soviet director was filming Que Viva Mexico! and whose notion of dialectical montage clearly influenced his own approach, both in content and style.61 The anti-imperialist fervor of Siqueiros’s Los Angeles murals was further stoked by the deplorable, largely segregated conditions of the city’s Mexican immigrant and Mexican American communities, both segments of which were being subjected to mass deportation in the early 1930s. This deeply traumatic event, besides eerily resembling the World War II internment of Japanese Americans to come, would reduce by one-third a Mexican population in the county that had surged from 8,000 to 368,000 between 1900 and 1930. Siqueiros was not only privy to the deportations but would experience his own variation on them. In late November 1932, shortly after completing his mural for Dudley Murphy, Siqueiros’s visa extension was denied. He left Los Angeles the next day.62 Abolished histories discovered “anew in ‘other spaces,’ ” indeed—and the rediscoveries go further. In October 2010, one month after the groundbreaking on the América Tropical visitor center, an opera by Oliver Mayer and David Conte, titled America Tropical, held its Los Angeles premiere at the Plaza, followed by performances at the nearby University of Southern California (USC) and at the Autry Museum. Beginning with the mural’s preparation and then time-hopping across two hundred years of Los Angeles history from the city’s founding to the 1992 civil unrest, the opera uses the mural as “a thematic nucleus for the city’s racial strife” and “explores race and class as twin themes joined at the hip.”63 The opera’s production, performed by USC students, coincided with an exhibition of Siqueiros’s landscapes at the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach and a multimedia exhibit at the Autry titled “Censorship Defied: Siqueiros in Los Angeles.” The most “thirdspatial” of the three cultural productions, the Autry exhibit both contextualizes Siqueiros’s Los Angeles murals historically and chronicles their creator’s impact on later generations of Latino artists. “Siqueiros’s coming to Los Angeles meant as much as did the Surrealists’ coming to New York in the 1940s,” B. H. Friedman opined in 1972, during the heyday of L.A.’s Chicano art movement.64 The Autry exhibit concurs: “He and the city would never be the same. . . . His technical and creative breakthroughs opened a new vision for his life, for the future of Los Angeles, and for art in public places.”65 Drawing on Siqueiros’s legacy, Chicano artists of the 1960s and 1970s began using “street murals to define community identity, depict social justice and cultural issues, educate a community without access to local media, and create a strong visual presence in a city that had written them out of local history.”66 More recent artists such as Judy Baca and Barbara Carrasco have continued the tradition of creating murals “that deal with the whitewashed history of

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17

the Chicano and other ethnic communities in Los Angeles.” Unfortunately, they have also met with resistance similar to that which confronted Siqueiros: “censorship by the same civic agencies that had funded them.”67 Indeed, despite the exhibit’s intention of “using Siqueiros as a lens to look at the identity of the city and trace the recognition of its Latino identity, very contested in the 1930s and now celebrated,” the most recent information the exhibit provides is not uplifting.68 In a video featuring interviews with currently practicing Latino muralists, we learn of a city ordinance that does Siqueiros’s Los Angeles saga one better (or worse): as a deterrent to graffiti art, the law (in effect since 2002) bans the painting of new murals on private property, even with the owner’s consent.69 The dialectics of Los Angeles’s “real and imagined narratives” pertain not only to the city’s Latino identity, however. They course through its various first-, second-, and third-spatial configurations and emanate not solely from cultural expression but from the land itself. Land and landscape, in their most primal, organic form, grounded the Tongvas’ and other native people’s culture and society, as well as encouraging the archipelago of “loosely connected settlements” that prefigured Los Angeles’s multicentered development.70 In subdivided, studioconstructed, and computer-generated form, land and landmarks remain the lifeblood of (post)modern Los Angeles’s primary industries—real estate, entertainment, and tourism (with theme parks and celebrity home tours combining all three of these). Not merely the lay of the land but the laying out of the land, as Thom Andersen strikingly conveys in his documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003), have made Los Angeles an extraordinarily slippery signifier whose geographical markers, just as its rhetorical constructs, can never be taken at face value. Whether as anonymous backdrop or “main character” in myriad films and television shows, or as cinematic stand-in for countless other real and imagined places, Los Angeles, as subject and object, has colonized not only the world’s consciousness but its own as well.

Palimpsest: Applied Los Angeles’s cultural-historical palimpsest structures the remainder of this book, each of whose four main parts focuses on one or more of eleven major epochal strata. Although some of these epochs have been formally designated (Spanish Colonial, Mexican Ranchero) and others more arbitrarily constructed (Yankee Boomtown, L.A. Noir), none (certainly not those pertaining to the Tongva or Chumash) implies a complete cutoff or break. Rather, each era or layer indicates a time period in which particular peoples, cultures, or socioeconomic forces were most prominent, if not dominant, in the Los Angeles area. The layers also “penetrate” to the present in varying degrees. The Paleoamerican layer, for example, has been almost completely “erased” and the Tongva layer drastically “written over”; whereas, Hollywood and L.A. Noir, mutatis mutandis, remain as distinctive as ever.

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The “Los Angeles as Palimpsest” graphic is an imaginative “top view” of Los Angeles history, with an emblematic symbol (identified in a side legend with corresponding time period) for each cultural-historical layer. The relative size and darkness of each symbol approximates each layer’s relative “imprint,” on the city’s collective memory, long-term influence, and contemporary activity. In my prologue I touched on the primordial and early Indian periods. Part I expands on the latter, charting the collision of the Tongva people and the Spanish conquistadors, and the subsequent uses and abuses of the Indian legacy in the Mission, Mexican Ranchero, Transitional, and early Yankee Boomtown periods.71 Helen Hunt Jackson’s 1884 novel Ramona provides this section’s rhetorical anchor. The book’s mythologizing of history and function as foundational myth for L.A.’s phenomenal late nineteenth-century economic expansion and population growth compels the “reading” of this seminal work forward and backward in time. The Ramona myth’s contemporary relevance is explored in the second chapter through visits to the San Gabriel and San Fernando missions, close readings of the book’s screen adaptations, attendance at the Ramona Pageant, and interviews with present-day Tongva. Part II pivots around the year 1910, an epochal turning point in the city’s history resulting from the repercussions of the L.A. Times building bombing and the emergence, at the same point in time, of Los Angeles/Hollywood as a film production center. Following a historical gloss of its origins as the movie capital, Hollywood’s function as industry, geographical entity, and state of mind is traced through several paradigmatic, self-referential films: What Price Hollywood? (1931), Sunset Blvd. (1950), Singin’ in the Rain (1952, set in the 1920s), The Player (1992), and The Truman Show (1998). Part III backtracks to L.A. noir, a subset of Hollywood film and of the larger film noir genre, to which Sunset Blvd. and The Player also belong. Like film noir as a whole, L.A. noir is usefully divided into a classical noir (circa 1940s and 1950s) and a neo-noir phase (late 1960s to the present). The classical phase is mapped here across its earliest literary antecedents (Don Ryan’s Angel’s Flight [1927]; Raoul Whitfield’s Death in a Bowl [1931]; and Paul Cain’s Fast One [1932]) and key film adaptations (Double Indemnity [1944]; Detour [1945]; The Postman Always Rings Twice [1946]; and Kiss Me Deadly [1955]). Chinatown (1974), as the urtext of (post)modern Los Angeles, obligatorily dominates the neo-noir section, with additional detailed treatment of Point Blank (1967), Blade Runner (1981), L.A. Confidential (1995), Crash (2005), and Drive (2011). Part IV’s focus is the city’s (and nation’s) comparatively recent multicultural turn. This crucial paradigm shift is examined in relation to the overlapping events that propelled it: the 1965 Immigration Reform Act; the political turmoil in countries whose restrictive immigration quotas the Act substantially relaxed; the identity politics and multicultural movements from the mid-1960s and ongoing; and L.A.’s geopolitical preeminence vis-à-vis the Pacific Rim and Mesoamerica. Granting the arbitrary and constructed nature of all ethnoracial categories, but also of their historical reality and rhetorical potency, each of the area’s main

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ethnic groups (Latinos, blacks, Asians, and Anglos), as well as the Lesbian/Gay/ Bisexual/Transgender (LGBT) community, is covered here. Cultural representations include: for Latinos, Like Water for Chocolate (1992, set in the 1910s) and Mi familia (1995); for blacks, Devil in a Blue Dress (1995, set in the 1940s), Killer of Sheep (1977), and Boyz N the Hood (1992); for Asians, Charlotte Sometimes and Better Luck Tomorrow (both 2002); for Anglos, Falling Down (1992); and for LGBTs, Fireworks (1947), Totally F***ed Up (1993), The Kids Are All Right (2010), and (also for Latinos), Quinceañera (2006).

The Dream Center More than the Dream Center’s name or its location, in the former Queen of Angels hospital in Silver Lake, the place brings this introduction full circle, and to the cutting edge. Not to be confused with the dream factory, though not entirely divorced from the Hollywood scene, the Dream Center is a Christian social services ministry that is also home to the L.A. Gang Tours. A seeming parody of the celebrity-mansion tours but actually deadly serious, the Gang Tours have offered monthly guided bus rides through gang turf in Pico Union, South Central, and Watts since early 2010. The brainchild of Assemblies of God pastor Matthew Barnett, the Dream Center is also affiliated with, and holds services at, Angelus Temple in neighboring Echo Park, home to the Foursquare Church, through whose association with founder Aimee Semple McPherson the rhetorical circle is literally squared. Sister Aimee, as the charismatic, Canadian-born, media-savvy preacher was called, attracted Hollywood stars to her pioneering megachurch’s highly theatrical services in the 1920s, some featuring live animals and an actual airplane. Becoming a radio star herself (with her own radio station), Sister Aimee, according to biographer Matthew Avery Sutton, “found no contradiction between her rejection of Hollywood values and her use of show business techniques. She would not hesitate to use the devil’s tools to tear down the devil’s house.”72 In Sister Aimee’s case his tools nearly razed her temple. In a Hollywood Babylon scandal and later trial that attracted the likes of H. L. Mencken, the celebrity evangelist mysteriously disappeared in 1926—either, as she later claimed, the victim of a kidnapping, or, as the tabloids trumpeted and evidence supports, for an adulterous tryst with her married radio-engineer lover. Foursquare Church survived—indeed, both it and the Dream Center are thriving—as has Sister Aimee’s promotional spirit and social gospel. L.A. Gang Tours upholds the dual legacy by tapping the city’s global tourist appeal to address gang-related problems. The Gang Tours were initiated and organized by Chicano gangbanger-turned-ministry-director Alfred Lomas. Lomas leads the tours along with other former and current gang members, whose street cred produced the “safe passage” that enables the potentially treacherous route (though liability waivers are still required of all participants). Informing passengers of the difference between gang members and gangbangers (the “5 percenters” who

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Figure 4. L.A. Gang Tours leader Alfred Lomas. Author’s photo.

commit most violent crimes) is one of the tour’s prime educational goals. Its larger, social-service mission, as Lomas explains at the outset, is three-pronged: saving lives, by curbing gang violence; creating jobs, through the funds and raised awareness generated by the tour; and sustaining change, through the education (of outsiders) about gangs and intervention (among gangbangers) to encourage more productive lifestyles. “Culture changes culture,” was Lomas’s optimistic concluding remark on the day I took the L.A. Gang Tours in 2010 (fig. 4). “Not always for the better,” is the caveat I would add, not about the Gang Tours but as a lead-in to the cultural historical tour of Los Angeles that follows.

PA R T O N E




Original Si(g)n

chapter 1




The Ramona Myth

Los Angeles didn’t have to wait for Hollywood’s Houdinis to cast its own magic spell. The earliest Christian conversion of the Tongva Indians in the late 1700s was realized not only by military means but also through the arts and sciences of signs. Friar Francisco Palou, an aide to Father Junipero Serra, chief overseer of the California missions, reported the miraculous effect of sacred images in the Spaniards’ first encounters with the Indians. As Serra’s contingent prepared to break ground in 1771 on Mission San Gabriel, the first mission in the Los Angeles area, Palou wrote: A great multitude of gentiles [pagan Indians] came up, all armed and under the direction of two captains [chiefs] who, with blood-curdling yells, tried to hinder the proceedings. As the Fathers feared that a battle was imminent which would surely result in the death of not a few, one of them produced a canvas on which was painted the image of Our Lady of Sorrows and held it up in view of the barbarians. He had scarcely done this when they all, subdued by the vision of this beautiful image, threw down their bows and arrows and came running hastily forward. . . . The sight of the image of Our Lady produced a wonderful change upon the gentiles surrounding the Mission of San Gabriel, and [consequently] . . . there was no opposition to the gentle yoke of the Evangelical Law.1

With however many drops of holy water this description must be taken, it is more than counterbalanced by other firsthand accounts of a far less “gentle” conversion process—one of which Palou himself provided. Later in his otherwise sanguine chronicle, he describes a violent incident that erupted at the mission, an incident that was defused not by sacred iconography but by force of arms. When a Spanish soldier “committed a sin” against the chief ’s wife, and the enraged chief, together with a band of warriors, attacked the offending soldier, Palou writes, “The latter immediately aimed his gun at the Indian . . . and discharging his piece, 25

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Original Si(g)n

killed him on the spot. As soon as the others saw the deadly force of this new weapon, whose effect they had never before experienced, and when they also saw that their arrows did no harm [against the soldiers’ leather jackets], they turned and fled. . . . The pagans, little by little, came to forget the deed of the soldier and the death of their chief, and to bring in some of their children to be baptized.”2 As callously self-righteous as Palou’s description now reads, my concern here is less with moral relativism than with the representational process involved in the image-induced, militarily enforced conversion of the Indians that the good friar recounts—a process that would become a troubling pattern in the rhetoric of Los Angeles. For it was not so much the Indians who “forgot” the egregious sins committed against them but rather the Spanish colonizers, Mexican rancheros, and, most of all, American settlers who partly forgot, but mostly transubstantiated, the sins into a God-given, economically driven mandate for the subjugation, exploitation, and, if all else failed, eradication of the “heathens.” The hideous motto “the only good injun’s a dead injun” (a crude variant of U.S. General Philip Sheridan’s actual words: “The only good Indian I ever saw was dead”) aptly captures American animus toward the “Diggers,” as California Indians were pejoratively dubbed in the mid-1800s (from their practice of digging for food but also likely with African American overtones).3 After statehood the animus was translated into government policies that stripped Indians of all legal rights; sanctioned their indentured servitude; shunted them onto comparatively unproductive land that was later confiscated; and, as a “Final Solution,” endorsed a “war of extermination” prosecuted through bounty hunting, “justifiable homicide” (of uppity Diggers), and tribal massacres.4 Violent conflict, culture shock, economic privation, and European-imported disease (inflicted, in the case of syphilis) had drastically reduced the Indian population in the mission and ranchero eras; ethnic cleansing became the default setting in the American period. Although estimates vary, from 1830 to 1850 the California Indian population dropped from circa eighty-three thousand to seventy-two thousand (seventeen thousand to fourteen thousand in Southern California); from 1850 to 1865 it plummeted to twenty-three thousand overall (five thousand in Southern California); and by 1880 had fallen to fifteen thousand (three thousand in Southern California).5 After attrition and genocide had taken their toll, symbolic annihilation continued the onslaught, poignantly evoked in Carey McWilliams’s phrase “the Indian in the closet.”6 Ironically, it would be a work of social-conscience fiction, intended to expose and meliorate the Indians’ plight, which would keep the skeletons of the past under lock and key for generations to come.

Paradise Recovered Politicized by a lecture she attended in 1879 on the mistreatment of American Indians, Helen Hunt Jackson, by then already “one of the best paid writers of her time,” devoted almost all of her subsequent literary efforts to the Indian cause.7 Disappointed by the tepid response to her nonfiction polemic A Century

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of Dishonor (1881)—“I tried to attack their consciences directly, and they would not listen”—she accepted a commission from Century magazine to write a series of articles on California, through which she hoped to gain background material for a fictional novel on the region’s Indians.8 Some of the articles were collected in 1883 in another nonfiction book, Glimpses of California and the Missions. The following year her government-sponsored “white paper” on Indian reform, coauthored with Abbot Kinney (future founder of Venice, California), led to a congressional reform bill, and her novel on California’s Indians was published.9 While the reform bill languished, Jackson’s novel, titled Ramona, was an instant success—though her death from cancer the following year prevented her from glorying in it, much less from witnessing the reform bill’s ultimate passage in 1891. In both cases Jackson would have been gravely disheartened at the ramifications of what she had wrought. The novel—a tragic romance set in the 1870s between a half-Gabrielino woman, Ramona, and a full-blooded Luiseño man, Alessandro—revolves around dispossession, displacement, and death. Ramona, from her love of an Indian, is cast from the Moreno ranchero where she was raised; Alessandro, for lack of “legal” claim to the land, is driven, along with his entire tribe, from his Temecula rancheria (Indian settlement). A series of banishments by the land-hungry Yankees ensue, pushing the star-crossed lovers ever farther into the wilderness. When their first child dies after an Indian Agency doctor refuses treatment, Alessandro spirals into madness, mistakenly “exchanges” horses with an American rancher, and is gunned down for horse stealing. Ramona returns with her second child to the Moreno estate and eventually marries the heir to the rancho, the gallant Californio (Mexican Californian) Don Felipe. Sensing that, like the Indians’, the Californios’ days are numbered, the couple moves to Mexico to start a new life. Jackson’s tale of forbidden love, cast against a nostalgic backdrop of rancheroera California, became a national and worldwide sensation, one that “would forever change southern California’s landscape and social memory.”10 Yet while the fictional Ramona would become “the most important person in the history of southern California who never lived,” and the novel “a watershed in the region’s ‘self-consciousness,’” its mythic status would be achieved at the expense of, indeed contrary to, its social justice message.11 “If I can do one-hundredth part for the Indian as Mrs. Stowe did for the Negro, I will be thankful,” Jackson had written in 1884, and on her deathbed she still held out hope that her work might “strike the first steady blow toward lifting the burden of infamy from our country and righting the wrongs of the Indian race.”12 In the manner of the then-reigning regionalist genre, however, Jackson’s idealization of a pastoral Californio lifestyle doomed by rapacious American civilization tended to overshadow her urgent, if sentimentalized, plea on behalf of the beleaguered Indians. Moreover, the plea is itself compromised by the allegorical “killing off ” of the Indians, as is her brief on behalf of the Californios undermined by Ramona and Don Felipe’s “return” to Mexico. As for the reform bill of 1891, this “Act for the Relief of the Mission Indians of California” largely repeated the misguided attempt, and disastrous

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results, of the Spanish missions’ “civilizing” of the Indians. Beyond the internment camp conditions of the reservations established under the bill’s provisions, the government-sponsored Indian schools, one even named for Ramona, removed Indian children from their families, silenced their native tongues, force-fed them Christianity, and altogether extirpated their traditional values and practices.13 What resonated most for contemporary readers of Ramona was not its political subtext but its colorful portrait of a California paradise lost but retrievable—if only in the landscape of the imagination. “It was a picturesque life,” the novel professes, “with more of sentiment and gayety in it, more also that was truly dramatic, more romance, than will ever be seen on those sunny shores. The aroma of it all lingers there still; industries and inventions have not yet slain it; it will last out the century—in fact, it can never quite be lost, so long as there is left standing one such house as the Señora Moreno’s.”14 The tragic irony for Jackson, and her Arcadian vision, is that the Ramona myth ultimately reaffirmed not Spanish or Mexican but Anglo-American superiority, reinforced neglect of the Indians, and, most ironically, given the book’s celebration of “a simple feudal society,” fostered “an industrially driven mass society.”15 Prior to Ramona, newly arrived Americans “largely disdained the region’s [Spanish-Mexican] past,” which they regarded as “dirty, primitive, and populated by lazy people.”16 What they prized, rather, as Phoebe Kropp explains, were “the markers of Eastern-style civilization, like hotels, railroads, and city blocks or natural features like the climate, the Sierras, and redwood trees.”17 These aspects lent themselves more to tourism than permanent settlement, however. What the “breakthrough popularity” of Ramona’s Spanish Fantasy Past provided was a means for white Americans “to make sense of their adopted region” through a “reinvented narrative” that became the official public memory.18 The Californios did not “disappear, ignored of the world,” in the late 1800s, as Mariano Vallejo, a prominent rancher/politician in the Mexican and American periods, had feared.19 Rather, thanks to the Ramona myth, as historian Leonard Pitt relates, “no sooner had they died than the gringo practically immolated himself upon their graves. The ‘Spaniards’ went into apotheosis; ‘Spanish California’ became a cult.”20 The city’s white Protestant boosters, led by Los Angeles Times publisher Harrison Gray Otis and editor Charles Fletcher Lummis, nurtured the cult. A committee formed by Otis and Lummis went so far as to ask Mexican California’s last governor, Pio Pico, to appear at the 1893 Chicago Columbian World Exposition (at which Frederick Jackson Turner delivered his “Frontier in American History” address), as “the last of the California dons.” Pico impolitely refused, “for two good reasons: The first is because I am too poor, and the second is because I do not intend to go to the big show to be one of the animals on exhibit” (fig. 5).21 Lummis, who would spearhead restoration of the missions and succeed in preserving relics of the Indian past in the Southwest Museum he founded in 1903, was, to his credit—unlike the openly racist Otis—a true Californio-phile. Given his fluent Spanish, self-dubbed nickname “Don Carlos,” and penchant for Spanish-themed attire, he might have proposed himself as a stand-in for

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Figure 5. Pio Pico at age seventy in 1881. USC Special Collections Library.

Pico at the Chicago Exposition. Instead, he resumed his ardent championing of Ramona and the ranchero lifestyle it purveyed, which had an impact on him “as potent as a religious conversion.”22 The impact on Otis and other Los Angeles hucksters was of a more pecuniary nature. By giving them the usable past and foundational myth to burnish a city image languishing in San Francisco’s shadow since the Gold Rush, Ramona, rather than serving as a vehicle for social reform, became a mother lode for L.A.’s fledgling tourist and real estate trades. Other factors certainly contributed to the region’s rapid growth at the turn of the century—favorable climate, agricultural bounty, an oil boom, rail connections, the construction of a navigable harbor—but the novel’s commercial exploitation was “the most important catalyst” in the city’s precipitous jump in population from a little more than 11,000 in 1880 to circa 50,000 in 1890, 102,000 in 1900, and 324,000 in 1910.23 The latter year, which also marked the onset of the westward shift of the U.S. movie industry from the East Coast to Los Angeles, would also see the first of four American film versions of Ramona, directed by D. W. Griffith and starring Mary Pickford. This major movie production for the time, with three more to

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come (the last a 1936 Technicolor spectacular starring Loretta Young and Don Ameche), only hints at the Ramona myth’s transcultural scope. The aforementioned La Fiesta de Los Angeles of 1894 owed its inspiration to Ramona, as did John McGroarty’s Mission Play, staged at Ramona’s “birthplace,” the San Gabriel Mission, since 1912 and (like La Fiesta) running through the 1930s. The novel itself remained required reading in California schools into the 1950s, while the Ramona pageant, launched in 1923 in Hemet, a small town east of Los Angeles, continues to draw tourist crowds every spring (fig. 6).24 Even the Olvera Street tourist strip in downtown L.A., founded as an homage to “Old Mexico” in 1928 and still going strong, bears Ramona’s stamp.25 The full extent of the book’s commercial synergies will be elaborated below. To grasp how the co-optation of Jackson’s original intent ties into Ramona as the Original Si(g)n of Los Angeles, one must first unpack the novel’s unwitting, if unsurprising, consequences from its own mythic constructions.

Figure 6. The 2011 Ramona (Cesaria Hernandez) and Alessandro (Duane Minard). Jolynne Photography and C-D Design Custom Graphics and Print Design.

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Prelapsarian Conundrum Jackson herself spoke of a “double sight” in her creative process, stemming from an “unfortunate” persistence “in seeing both sides of a thing.”26 In her perceptive analysis of the Ramona novel Karen Ramirez extends the doubling notion to the hermeneutics of the text. This reveals not so much a double consciousness as a bifurcated ideological stance, which, despite the author’s best intentions, ends up both critiquing and reinforcing “American racist expansionism.”27 If Jackson, however ingenuously, planted the seeds of Ramona’s transmogrification, the cultural soil was well primed. The Eurocentric view of California’s Indians—as of all aboriginal peoples—has always been ambivalent and contradictory. The negative stereotype of the barbarous heathen vies for sovereignty with its binary opposite, the prelapsarian innocent, with the approach-avoidance complex captured, and seemingly resolved, in the bipolar archetype: Noble Savage. Neither demonization nor fetishization acknowledges a people’s full humanity, however, or removes the exclusionary stigma of the Other. Thus did the romanticized Californios fall victim to racialized othering as well, in Ramona and American society as a whole. Ramirez aptly applies Edward Said’s notion of “Orientalism” to Jackson’s depiction of the Californios. Just as the Orientalist, from his position as the “imperial party” within the dominant culture, “textually creates the subordinate group,” Jackson displaces the “real” Californios and “makes [their] mysteries plain” to her Anglo-American readership.28 The Orientalist analogy carries over into some of Jackson’s other work, as well, perhaps most self-consciously into her earlier Glimpses of California and the Missions: “Simply out of sunshine there had distilled in [the old Mexicans and Californians] an Orientalism as fine in its way as that made in the east by generations of prophets, crusaders, and poets. With no more curiosity than was embodied in ‘Who knows?’—with no thought or purpose for a future more defined than ‘Some other time; not to-day’—without greeds, and with the unlimited generosities of children—no wonder that to them the restless, inquisitive, insatiable, close-reckoning Yankees seemed the most intolerable of all conquerors to whom they could surrender.”29 Jackson’s characterization of the Californios as children echoes the Spanish missionaries’ description, and treatment, of their Indian converts—that is, when they weren’t calling them “ignorant” and “stupid,” deeming their traditional customs and beliefs “horrible” and “ludicrous,” and comparing them collectively “to a species of monkey.”30 Jackson, whose object, after all, was to redeem the Spaniards and the Indians in the Anglos’ estimation, refrains from reporting such crude epithets. Indeed, perhaps as overcompensation, she embraces the “White Legend” that pictured Spanish-Indian relations as largely positive and Spanish missionaries “as especially humane, just, enlightened, and energetic.”31 The friars’ “success,” she effuses in Glimpses, in transforming the Indian “from the naked savage, with his one stone tool . . . to the industrious tiller of soil, weaver of cloth, worker in metals, and singer of sacred hymns,” is “vivid and

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thrilling.”32 Ramona’s fictional Alessandro, analogously, was raised at Mission San Luis Rey, where his father, Pablo, a former Luiseño chief, “had been the leader of the choir in the last years of its splendor.”33 And while Jackson allows, at least in Glimpses, that the Gabrielino Indians, compared to other tribes, “seem to have been a superior race” with a “musical language,” an admirable ethical system, and a vibrant spiritual and cultural life, she echoes Father Palou in averring, “To a people of such customs as these, the symbols, shows, and ceremonies of the Catholic Church must have seemed especially beautiful and winning.”34 Too well informed to entirely dismiss critical accounts of the mission era, Jackson’s approach was to relegate them to the margins. In a few swift strokes, in Glimpses, she refutes the charges, “sometimes advanced,” of the Indians’ forced conversion and subjugation, maintaining “that there was little active hostility on the part of the savage tribes.”35 Reference in Ramona to the mission Indians’ plight is similarly slight, and even more dismissive. Addressing the subject for the first time in a conversation with Ramona two-thirds of the way into the novel, Alessandro relates that while his own experiences at Mission San Luis Rey were positive, “My father says that at some of them there were dreadful things, when bad men had power.”36 But even this mildly damning, “rotten apples” indictment is undercut by an addendum: “The Indians did not all want to come to the Missions; some of them preferred to stay in the woods, and live as they always had lived; and I think they had a right to do that if they preferred. . . . It was stupid of them to stay and be like beasts, and not to know anything; but do you think they had the right?”37 If Alessandro’s self-critical (self-hating?) judgment seems incompatible with Jackson’s laudatory description of the Gabrielinos in Glimpses, it also clashes with the consensus of firsthand historical accounts of the Indians’ mission experience, from within and without the mission system. Most external observers viewed the mission Indians as “victims of an oppressive institution, as slaves whose rights [to liberty and property] were violated, . . . [whose] daily lives were made miserable by frequent and harsh corporal punishment . . . , [and whose] rapid depopulation [in] coastal California was the direct result of Spanish missionization.”38 “They were saving souls at the inevitable cost of lives,” anthropologist Alfred Kroeber pithily summarized.39 Even Father Lasuen, who assumed control of the missions in 1785, following the death of Junipero Serra (and a brief interregnum of Father Palou), wrote in 1797: “The majority of our neophytes [converted Indians] have not yet acquired much love for our way of life. Were it not for the soldiers, most of the neophytes would return to their villages.”40 A fellow friar went further: “The Indians live well free, but as we reduce them to a Christian community life, their health declines, they fatten, sicken and die.”41 Little wonder that the fugitivism rate among all California Indians over the course of the mission period consistently averaged about 12 percent—40 percent if one counts those “who tried to escape at least once but were captured by soldiers and brought back.”42 Jackson’s claim of “little active hostility on the part of the savage tribes” similarly succumbs to historical scrutiny. According to Scottish ranchero Hugo Reid’s

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letters to the Los Angeles Star in 1852, based on information gleaned from his Gabrielino wife, Victoria, and her family, baptism “was looked upon” by the nonChristian Indians as “ignominious and degrading” and the neophytes as a “lost caste” among their people.43 Consequently, if not justifiably, many unconverted Indians sought redress. The violent incident resulting from the rape of the chief ’s wife, related by Father Palou, occurred the day after Mission San Gabriel was founded in 1771. The first full-fledged Indian revolt took place in 1775 at Mission San Diego, when eight hundred Diegueno burned down the mission and executed its priest; three years later the same mission was attacked again. In 1785, in the most astounding assault, a twenty-four-year-old Gabrielino female shaman named Toypurina recruited warriors from several nearby Indian villages for a siege of Mission San Gabriel. The campaign might even have succeeded had the mission guard not been forewarned of the plot. Toypurina and twenty other fighters were captured, punished with lashes, and sentenced to from two to six years’ confinement. Following her release in 1787, and perhaps fearing reprisals by the Spanish, Toypurina converted to Christianity, renounced her Indian marriage, and “was exiled to Mission San Carlos in Monterey, where she married a soldier of the presidio and raised a family of four children” (fig. 7).44 Toypurina’s abortive revolt did not bring peace to the missions, however. Warfare continued to rage at Santa Clara and San Juan Bautista in the 1790s, to the point that “the El Camino Real became a highway of death.”45 As a chastened Father Palou, then head of Mission San Francisco, lamented, “No journey is possible without a military escort, even between one mission and its neighboring mission. In traveling from one to the other, we are constantly under the attack of pagans who occupy the territory in between.”46

Figure 7. Artist’s rendering of the female shaman warrior Toypurina. Courtesy of Mission San Gabriel Museum.

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It wasn’t only “pagans” that Palou and his compadres had to fear. Another massive revolt was staged against Mission San Gabriel in 1810, this time including neophytes, with the total number of participants estimated at eight hundred.47 The “largest Indian rebellion in California history” occurred in the Santa Barbara region in 1824. Chumash warriors burned down Mission Santa Barbara and battered Missions La Purisma and Santa Ynez. Neophytes again joined in the battles, many “running away to join the rebels, while the neophytes at San Gabriel were showing alarming signs of revolt.”48 Major hostilities died down after a truce later the same year but flared again in the 1830s, one incident led by two former neophytes from San Gabriel. Mission revolts—not battles with gentiles, which continued into the American period—only fully subsided with the secularization of the missions by the Mexican provincial government in 1834. The most resounding rebuttals to the White Legend come from the Indians themselves: such as the testimony of an old Indian woman who told a friar at Santa Ana that gentiles would rather “be eaten by coyotes” than be converted.49 Or, most poignantly, that of the rebel Estanislao, an ex-neophyte from Mission San Jose, who, when ordered to surrender after being trapped in the forest by Spanish soldiers, yelled out that his people preferred “the quick death of a bullet to the slow death of civilization.”50

Trains, Tragedy, and Tourism On September 16, 1885, Mexican Independence Day, California state senator Reginaldo del Valle delivered the keynote address marking Mexico’s liberation from Spain and the completion of a train line to Pasadena that brought a second transcontinental line (the first had been completed in 1882) within striking distance of Los Angeles. “The Little One,” as the son of Mexican ranchero and former state senator Ygnacio del Valle was called, trumped even the White Legend in his rose-colored gloss of the area’s history since the Spanish incursion. In his own and his father’s time, Reginaldo blithely recounted, Southern California “had burgeoned from an Indian hunting ground to a mission pasturage, then to a rancho empire, and was now sprouting farms, orchards, and towns.”51 But what signaled a momentous day for the region also symbolized the end of an era, for lost in translation, in Reginaldo’s triumphal oration, were several solemnities. The first, as Leonard Pitt describes, was that the son of a Californio “born in the American period paid tribute to Mexican liberty by speaking in English to a gringo crowd about Yankee progress”—progress that had come at the expense of nearly one-half of Mexican territory through the Mexican War of 1846–48. Second, while peppering his speech with humor, “the unfunny fact was that the same railroad he was commemorating would obliterate practically everything that remained of the pastoral ranchero era, even his own political career.”52 Third, the railroad ties were but the final spike in an obliteration process, underway since the annexation of California by the United States in 1848, that reduced the once gargantuan Spanish and Mexican land grants to a fraction of their

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original size through property taxes, legal fees, government fiat, natural disaster (floods and droughts), and Yankee (and Mexican) squatters. The del Valle family’s own, once-imposing Rancho Camulos estate had to be mortgaged to an Anglo landowner and saw its acreage sliced, by the 1880s, from a prestatehood total of forty-eight thousand to fifteen hundred acres.53 And finally, the Little One’s speech neglected to mention the death, just the month before, of Helen Hunt Jackson, whose best-selling novel, in taking up the Californios’ cause, had also represented its last hurrah. The failure to acknowledge Jackson’s passing was a personal snub as well. As part of her extensive research for Ramona the author not only had visited Reginaldo and his family at Rancho Camulos, but this vestige of the hacienda heyday, located near Santa Paula, likely served as a model for the novel’s fictional Moreno estate—though apparently not the only one. Once the Ramona tourist craze began, its various prospective beneficiaries wasted no time in exploiting the book’s ancillary potential. As early as 1886, in a campaign for a new townsite named Ramona, the Los Angeles Times heralded the novel’s namesake subdivision as “The Greatest Attraction Yet Offered in the Way of Desirable Real Estate” and, in another feature article, singled out Rancho Camulos as “The Real Home of Helen Hunt Jackson’s ‘Ramona.’”54 Charles Lummis went further, publishing a pro-Camulos book titled The Home of Ramona—“the first free-standing publication relating a place, person, or event to the novel.”55 Lummis’s privileging of the Camulos connection was apparently motivated at least partly by his (ultimately stymied) love for the del Valle’s seventeen-year-old daughter Susana Carmen.56 The Times’ main designs were to bolster regional bragging rights, as another “heir apparent” to the Moreno estate’s inspiration soon emerged: Rancho Guajome in San Diego. Jackson’s also having visited Guajome prior to writing the novel bolstered the site’s counterclaim, which Rural California magazine touted in a lead article: “Rancho Guajome: The Real Home of Ramona.”57 The first public dramatizations of the novel swung the pendulum back to Camulos but in a manner that highlights Ramona’s uncanny knack for blurring fact and fiction in the popular imagination. The book’s first stage version, produced in 1897, was titled Ramona, or the Bells of Camulos. Virginia Calhoun’s 1905 play, though simply titled Ramona, has characters who refer to Camulos rather than Moreno. The first film version, directed in 1910 by the star of Calhoun’s drama, D. W. Griffith, although its intertitles reference Moreno, was shot at Camulos and gave the site the first-ever screen credit for a film location.58 The Ramona Pageant as well, at least in its current incarnation, confuses Rancho Moreno with Camulos.59 Actually, both locations likely served as partial models for Rancho Moreno: Camulos for its hacienda building, Guajome for the surrounding countryside. And both places ultimately reaped the financial benefits, together with the two railroad companies along whose separate routes the ranchos were situated—Camulos along the Southern Pacific’s, Guajome along the Santa Fe’s—each of which was granted a special tourist stop in honor of Ramona’s “real home.”60

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It was the least the train companies could do and scant compensation for the devastation the companies, aided by the state government they controlled, had caused the ranchos. Yet the absence of any mention of the railroads is another glaring anachronism in Ramona. To preserve her fable’s pastoral setting, Jackson focuses on two corollary culprits: the American settlers who either squatted on rancho lands or gained dubious deeds of ownership, and the U.S. Land Commission that granted the deeds. The commission, under the Land Act of 1851, had reassessed all land claims from the Spanish and Mexican periods and, as with the allegorical Morenos, had disallowed or truncated most of them. The actual del Valles, and other prestatehood landowners, were forced to mortgage or sell property to pay for legal fees incurred in defense of their claims. Monopoly capitalism, which in late nineteenth-century California meant the train trust, did the rest. In the 1870s, the period in which Ramona is set, the state of California granted millions of erstwhile Californio, Indian, and even Anglo acreage to the Central Pacific cartel controlled by the state’s Big Four power brokers: Charles Crocker, Mark Hopkins, Collis Huntington, and Leland Stanford. Dubbed “the Octopus” by Frank Norris in his 1901 muckraking classic of that name, the Big Four dominated California business and politics from the 1870s through the early 1910s. Their role in regard to the Californios further compounds the irony in Reginaldo del Valle’s Mexican Independence Day speech. For just as train-enhanced tourism helped propel Ramona’s popularity at the expense of its social message, so would trains, tourism, and Ramona extend Rancho Camulos’s shelf life—as a gift-shop curio.

“The Truth May Be Doubtful but the Myth Is Real” “The 1880s marks an important transition both in the history of tourism in the United States and in the history of southern California,” Dydia DeLyser reminds us.61 Previously an expensive pastime available only to the wealthy, tourism in the late nineteenth century became a middle-class pursuit. This popular expansion was made possible by the greater accessibility and lower prices that transcontinental train, and later automobile, travel provided, and it was fueled by an emergent patriotic discourse that linked “domestic travel with the very notions of citizenship and the construction of America as a nation.”62 Rather than generating the tourist phenomenon, then, Ramona was propitiously situated to benefit from it—particularly in the Southern California region. Jackson’s novel was far from the first to attract outsiders to the area. The siren’s call had gone out centuries before, in the 1510 novel Las sergas de Esplandián (The Adventures of Esplandián), by the Spaniard Garci Ordóñez de Montalvo—an urtext of its own, for the Age of Exploration. A riff on the myth of El Dorado written when the myth seemed, at long last, realizable, Las sergas de Esplandián, in imagining a golden isle ruled by a dark-skinned Amazon-warrior queen named Calafia, inspired the first European explorers, and, of course, gave the Spanish and Mexican province (and later the American state) its name. Subsequent eye-

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witness accounts—by explorers, missionaries, and observers—both advanced and challenged the primal California myth. Several of these palimpsestian layers, as we have seen, bled into Ramona; and one of them, the residue of Hugo Reid’s Los Angeles Star letters, actually rubbed off on it. Reid, a one-time Scottish seaman, and his Gabrielino Indian wife, both of whom Jackson interviewed prior to writing her novel, match the Ramona character’s mixed-race genealogy to a tee.63 Two popular works of the late ranchero era—Richard Henry Dana’s fictional Two Years Before the Mast (1840) and Alfred Robinson’s memoir Life in California (1846)—in their “Black Legend” depictions of Mexican California as anachronistic and inefficient, and therefore ripe for Anglo expansion, would serve as foils for Ramona’s pro-Spanish revisioning. Two widely read books of the early American period, meanwhile—Charles Nordhoff ’s California: For Health, Pleasure, and Residence. A Book for Travellers and Settlers (1872) and John Rollin Ridge’s The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit (1854)—come closest to Ramona in romanticized rhetoric and exploitive impact. Nordhoff ’s self-help manual, by limning the idyllic landscape and climate that Ramona would color in and populate, offered one of the first tourist guidebooks to the Los Angeles area and provided real-world and real-time grounding for Ramona’s mythic fable. Ridge’s book, although a putative historical account, describes, like Jackson’s novel, “more a territory of the imagination than a real place. It also reads like a plausible screenplay for an early Hollywood western,” for which both the Murieta and Ramona myths would provide primary, if contrasting, early sources.64 Conceived by the half-Indian Ridge (a.k.a. “Yellow Bird”) as a Mexican patriot rather than a ruthless bandit, Murieta, like Jackson’s Moreno family, sought to retouch Americans’ conventionally harsh portrait of California’s Hispanic heritage. Ridge’s lower-class Mexican cholos (ruffians), however, while colorful and exciting, are a far cry from Jackson’s noble Californio gente de razón (landed gentry). His Wild West backdrop rife with horse chases, gunfights, and desperados, though a later staple of the western genre, also differs significantly from Jackson’s view of the region. Ramona, as Ramirez explains, “molded new ways of envisioning and feeling about the West and its inhabitants. . . . [It] presents Californios as rightful landowners and their Catholic culture as an admirable, communitarian heritage; it depicts a West defined by community and home, not by movement, wilderness, or emptiness; and it portrays Indians as subjects whose inherent human rights are being denied by American law.”65 As with Ramona, however, the Murieta myth would be exploited for commercial rather than reformist purposes. “Murieta’s” head became a museum piece, was taken on a world tour, and—in an age of P. T. Barnum “freak shows” and Buffalo Bill’s “Indian scalp collections”—returned a sizable profit before going under in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.66 Taken as the symbol of Mexican revenge at Yankee injustices, Murieta inspired other novels, a play, a comic strip, and several film and television homages. On the big screen the legendary bandito appeared as “himself ”—beginning with The Gay Defender in 1927—and even

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more frequently, in movies and television, as the model for the Los Angeles–based “gay blade,” Zorro.67 Also similar to Ramona, only in reverse, the difference between rhetoric and reality in Murieta’s case is moot. Whereas, for the Ramona character, real-life referents were concocted after the “fact,” the putatively historical but phantomlike Murieta’s existence was “questionable” from the get-go. As Leonard Pitt recounts, “He may have been nothing more than a collective representation, created by a hundred anonymous truth tellers around a hundred campfires.”68 Moreover, Murieta’s smoke-and-mirrors relation to history would become a template for a Wild West ethos suffused with hyperbole and a tenuous grip on historical truth. A classic quote from the newspaperman in John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) both captures and justifies the western con-fusion of reality and illusion: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” Or as Pitt concludes about Murieta—applying exponentially to Ramona (and Los Angeles)—“The truth may be doubtful but the myth is real.”69 While the Murieta myth’s appeal, like that of the western genre it helped spawn, remained more on the mediated plain, Jackson’s literary bonanza would be mined for every tourist enticement and product line its mother lode would yield. As with the Moreno estate, the battle over Ramona’s real-life model boasted several contenders and went beyond newspaper and magazine sparring to a 1900 book, The Real Ramona of Helen Hunt Jackson’s Famous Novel.70 Both Rancho Camulos and Guajome proposed candidates, while The Real Ramona hedged its bets by choosing a woman who had been in the service of both houses. This woman’s credentials, however, as well as those of the only aspirant to bear her

Figure 8. The “real” Ramona: Ramona Lugo (1886). USC Special Collections Library.

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literary counterpart’s name, Ramona Lugo, were ultimately compromised by, of all things, their “Indianness.” Compared to the aristocratic bearing and saintly beauty of Jackson’s (half-Anglo) heroine, The Real Ramona described its erstwhile pretender as greasy, slovenly, and inarticulate.71 Newspaper accounts dropped all civilized pretense, referring to the woman whose Indian husband actually had suffered from spells of madness and was killed by a white man for alleged horse theft (information Jackson had come upon during the novel’s writing) as nothing more than a “big, fat, ugly squaw” (fig. 8).72 As for Ramona’s “stations of the cross,” these expanded beyond Rancho Camulos and Guajome to include Ramona and Alessandro’s “marriage house” (situated, by default, in San Diego), her “birthplace” (specified in the novel as Mission San Gabriel), and her “grave” (Ramona Lugo’s). Guidebooks charted every step of the doomed lovers’ travels to the point that it became, in Ramonaphile Edwin Clough’s words, “impossible to discriminate the true from the false, the real from the unreal—and what matters it, after all?”73 Just how impossible, and how much it mattered, is captured in the title of the most “authoritative” of the guidebooks, written in 1908 by George Wharton James, a minister whose strenuous effort to separate fact from fiction only further conflates them: Through Ramona Country: A History of Its Old Missions and of Its Indians; a Survey of Its Climate, Topography, Deserts, Mountains, Rivers, Valleys, Islands and Coast Line; a Description of Its Recreations and Festivals.74 Ultimately, Ramona’s commercialization would reach proportions the Star Wars saga would be hard-pressed to match. As DeLyser summarizes: In southern California between 1885 and the 1960s, a tourist could visit Ramona’s home(s), her marriage place, her birthplace, and her grave; take the Ramona Freeway to Ramona Boulevard; shop at the Ramona Pharmacy, Ramona Jewelry, or the Ramona Beauty Shoppe; play with a Ramona doll, or go to the arcade and play Ramona pinball; see Ramona on the silver screen, on the stage, or in an outdoor amphitheater; listen to “Ramona” at 78 or 45 rpm, with Paul Whiteman and Bix Beiderbeck or the Four Tops; play “Ramona” on the piano or the ukulele; refresh with Ramona drinking water, Ramona beer, Ramona brandy, or Ramona wine tonic; eat Ramona brand lemons, tomatoes, or pineapples, and eat them with Ramona cutlery (or a Ramona souvenir teaspoon) from a Ramona bowl; have Ramona roof tiles on a home on Ramona Terrace, or in the Ramona tract, or in the town of Ramona; cook like Ramona, dress like Ramona, and even smell like Ramona. Southern California had been transformed into a region that was powerfully “Ramona conscious.”75

Black Legend versus Spanish Fantasy Past Another intriguing companion piece to Ramona, even more richly analogous than Ridge’s Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta, is Maria Ampara Ruiz de Burton’s novel The Squatter and the Don.76 Published one year after Ramona, in 1885,

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also set in the 1870s, and offering a similar social problem message packaged as interethnic romance—here between a Californio maiden and a Yankee squatter’s son—The Squatter and the Don differs significantly from Ramona in ideological orientation and commercial afterlife. The most salient difference is that Ruiz de Burton—“tied by blood and marriage to . . . leading Californio families” and married to a U.S. Army captain—focuses on the Mexicans’ plight to the total neglect of the Indians’.77 This elision severely compromises the book’s claim, as Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita propose in their introduction to the 1997 edition of the novel, to be “a counter-history of the subaltern.”78 To privilege the gente de razón as “a subjugated and marginalized national minority” in Anglo-era California, as Ruiz de Burton does, not only ignores the Indians’ incomparably greater suffering during this time; it also glosses over, as does Jackson, the Indians’ mistreatment by the Californios themselves, in the American and Mexican periods.79 The mission lands were technically held in trust for the Indians and were intended to revert back to them once the “Hispanicization” process was complete. Yet scant property had been distributed to the Indians by the time the missions were secularized in 1834, nor would more than 10 percent of it ever be, under the land disbursement policy of the Mexican provincial government.80 What emerged, rather, was a crony system that favored well-connected Californios and resulted in near total expropriation, akin to that which the Californios would experience under the Americans—with two major caveats. First, unlike the former mission Indians, “torn tragically between a secure, authoritarian existence and a free, anarchic one . . . in a kind of twilight zone between freedom and slavery,” the gente de razón, as impoverished and humiliated as many eventually became, had far more resources, personal and financial, to fall back on.81 Second, postmission Indian existence was not entirely “free.” While not as forcibly confined as they had been under the mission system— indeed, slavery was abolished in Mexico in 1829—Indians found themselves subjected, under the Mexican regime, to a similarly oppressive peonage system. “Before the Indian could move about,” a contemporary Anglo observer reported, “he was required to have a properly signed discharge showing that he was not in debt to his employer. . . . [A] range of devices of varying degrees of harshness were used to assemble the Indian labor supply . . . [including] outright seizure and force.”82 A striking similarity between the rancho and southern plantation systems was the two-tiered division of labor, wherein, much as the distinction between “house Negro” and “field Negro,” neophyte Indians were hired “primarily as vaqueros [field hands] and house servants, with most of the unskilled labor being performed by gentile Indians.”83 Altogether, Leonard Pitt concludes, California’s Indians, both on the ranchos and in towns like Los Angeles, “remained a demoralized class, alternately prey to disease, liquor, violence, submissions, and exploitations.”84 As for the gente de razón, the dethronement of the padres had elevated them to lords over a new social order and a vast agricultural empire.85 Compared to

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a mere twenty Spanish land grants during the entire mission period, more than five hundred were granted (mostly to the Californios) by the Mexican authorities after secularization—thirty new ones, between 1841 and 1844, in the Los Angeles area alone.86 Roughly eight hundred men carved up eight million prime hectares, with an oligarchy of forty-five men and twenty-five families reaping the lion’s share.87 This elite group was not quite as exclusive or as powerful as the Big Four railroad barons, perhaps, but close—at least until statehood. After the Mexican War, these “‘principal men’ of the old regime” would become principal victims of “California’s only social revolution”—though more for how far they fell than for where they landed.88 As Pitt summarizes, the Californios after statehood “were a ruling class militarily conquered, bereft of national sovereignty and a constitutional framework. . . . They had retained little else besides their religion and a thin residue of honorary political influence.”89 The Squatter and the Don’s detailed treatment of the Big Four’s role in the Californios’ ignominious decline is the novel’s other striking difference from Jackson’s—here, to Ruiz de Burton’s benefit. Ramona consciously ignores the train trust and the class interests they represented; The Squatter and the Don foregrounds both. Class issues of any sort figure only nominally in Ramona, mainly via the Hyer family, poor white farmers from Tennessee who befriend Ramona and Alessandro and through whom, Chon Noriega argues, “Jackson conflates Indians and working-class whites.”90 The novel’s overarching solidarity, across class and race, is accomplished through religion—specifically, Christianity—without whose common denominator the Hyers never would have bonded with the Indian couple, nor would Ramona and Alessandro have been drawn to one another. The Squatter and the Don, however—as the title implies—turns on class. Conflict between Yankee and Californio is partially “resolved” through intermarriage, which mediates ethnic contradictions. But ethnoracial hybridity is subsumed to class in both families’—indeed, the entire community’s—antipathy toward a common class enemy: the monopoly capitalists, epitomized by the Big Four.91 The book even features an imagined confrontation between an allied group of onetime squatters and dons and one of the Big Four, Leland Stanford, who is portrayed as the ruthless, unethical businessman (and politician) he apparently was.92 Whether or not its capitalist critique was partly to blame, The Squatter and the Don never achieved the broad popularity of Ramona (neither did Ridge’s book, by the way; a pirated newspaper version some years later jump-started the Murieta myth).93 The Squatter and the Don’s antibusiness animus (not to mention its prime setting in San Diego) certainly detracted from its ability to serve as a boosterist vehicle for Los Angeles. But its failure to achieve Ramona’s mythic status lies less in its politics than in its representational strategy. Both novels subvert Richard Henry Dana’s and Alfred Robinson’s Black Legend, which posited a cruel and backward Spanish/Mexican feudal inheritance as justification for American domination. Jackson’s and Ruiz de Burton’s works also invert the Manifest Destiny–infused dichotomy that opposed “energetic, kind-hearted,

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moral, virtuous” American Protestants to “greedy, despotic, treacherous, immoral” Spanish Catholics.94 When it comes to the Hispanophilic Spanish Fantasy Past, however, for which Ramona served as prime progenitor and promulgator, The Squatter and the Don demurs. The Spanish Fantasy Past shared with the Black Legend a belief in the inevitable Social Darwinist triumph of a capitalist system better suited, indeed “naturally selected,” to develop a bountiful land “kept from reaching its full potential by” an, at best, aristocratic and inefficient, at worst, “lazy and corrupt [Spanish/Mexican] race.”95 But, as Louise Pubols explains, in a postranchero era when “real MexicanAmericans could no longer pose a serious threat to Anglo domination of the economy or political system of California, this narrative took on a nostalgic” coloration.96 Yet in The Squatter and the Don, as Sánchez and Pita explain, “Unlike the ‘dapper Dons’ of a pastoral arcadia who are often represented as having little interest in modernization and even fewer skills as businessmen,” those in Ruiz de Burton’s novel are presented as possessing “foresight” and the ability “to adapt to a new reality. . . . The Californio is thus presented as patrician but enterprising, accommodating and pragmatic.”97 Moreover, as Pubols reveals in her revisionist study of the powerful de la Guerra family of Santa Barbara during the Mexican period, such qualities were already prevalent in the ranchero era. Prominent Californios, through proactive trade relations, far from resisting merchant capitalism, had engaged it from the start. Even Mexican Anglo intermarriage, which contemporary boosters (and later historians) derided as a shortsighted, “complicitous” practice that “eventually opened the door to conquest and assimilation,” underestimates the Californios. While intermarriage clearly served Anglo interests, Pubols argues, it “fit into a larger strategy” for the Californios as well—“a strategy that used the family to advance economic standing in the context of merchant capitalism.”98 Unlike Ramona, then, which ultimately affirms Manifest Destiny by symbolically exterminating the Indians and “reconstituting the ‘Great Spanish household,’” albeit in Mexico, The Squatter and the Don, by granting the Californios (if not the Indians) reduced but ongoing participation in California life, diffuses but does not remove their threat to Anglo domination.99 On the one hand, this more assertive stance toward Mexican Americans, combined with its anticapitalist animus, cost The Squatter and the Don at the “box office”—no plays, pageants, Hollywood films, or any of Ramona’s myriad other confabulations were forthcoming. On the other hand, this very lack of commercial success also spared Ruiz de Burton’s novel the exploitation that Jackson’s underwent—exploitation, paradoxically, that leaves Ramona without peer as the Original Si(g)n of Los Angeles.

chapter 2




Ramona Revisited

Though the novel is no longer required reading in local schools and the two surviving film versions are now mainly of academic interest, Ramona’s mythic traces remain a fixture of the Los Angeles palimpsest: in Spanish Fantasy Past manifestations such as Olvera Street; in the Ramona Pageant held each spring in nearby Hemet; and, most indelibly, in the area’s part theme park, part reliquary, part still religiously functioning colonial-era missions. Befitting Ramona’s “birthplace,” Mission San Gabriel Arcangel, situated in the city of San Gabriel, nine miles northeast of downtown Los Angeles, lies at the intersection of Mission Drive and Ramona Street. Across from the mission is a small, storefront Ramona Museum. On the sidewalks to either side of Ramona Street, and leading up to the mission entrance, is a “Walk of Fame” with embedded colored tiles designed by school children on a mission theme. A variation on the long-standing California elementary-school assignment to construct scale models of the missions, the tiles also literalize D. J. Waldie’s notion that, in parts of Los Angeles, “the pedestrian and the sacred are still there.”1 Affirming the mission’s tourist function as a stop on the California Historic Mission Trail, the visitor entrance proceeds through a gift shop. In the mission courtyard, by a gate leading to the chapel, a large sign erected in 1961 parrots the Spanish Fantasy Past: “SALUDOS AMIGOS: We witness here the beginning of a new civilization wherein Christianity was introduced to a pagan sphere some 190 years ago. For nearly two centuries this garden of peace has been a haven for the weary travelers, adventurous pioneers and builders of the magical desert. . . . Here trod the daring redskin, the blithe-spirited Mexican, the valiant Spanish soldier, and the venturesome American.” The mission museum fares better at balancing public relations with historical accuracy. It also directly references the Ramona myth. One display case is devoted entirely to Helen Hunt Jackson, her famed novel, and the tourist craze it ignited, including photos of Ramona-inspired visitors to the mission from the late 1880s and early 1890s. The mythic theme is extended via a purple-prose tribute to 43

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Ramona-phile extraordinaire John McGroarty: “Congressman, historian, California poet laureate, and California’s beloved son, who has chronicled her history, who has written her poetry, and who has woven the colorful beginning into the world’s greatest pageant, The Mission Play.” Two nearby displays chronicle the mission’s celebrity guests, which included President Gerald Ford and presidential candidate Robert Kennedy (two days before his assassination), and a raft of famous actors including silent-era superstar (and Ramona-portrayer) Mary Pickford, pictured together with the 1910 Ramona movie’s director, D. W. Griffith. Pickford’s and Griffith’s 1910 mission visit was not on account of Ramona, however, but for another film they made together earlier the same year, The Thread of Destiny—touted here as “the first picture that was begun and completed out west.” Besides two framed photographs of mission Indians flanking a large wooden crucifix, the museum devotes only one of its several rooms to the mission’s main inhabitants. The “Indian Room” does at least begin to address the mission era’s more problematic legacy. It features a photo (see fig. 7) of the rebel leader Toypurina, for example, though its caption gives only half the story: “Toypurina: the leader of an aborted Indian rebellion of 1785, pardoned and baptized by Father Miguel Sanchez in 1787.” Another display, documenting events held at the mission in 2008, is more forthright. A clip from the local Tidings newspaper reports a “rededication” ceremony in which members of the Gabrielino/Tongva Tribe of San Gabriel, one of several organized Tongva groups, planted native plants and built an Indian thatched dwelling, or kiiy, on the mission grounds (fig. 9). The article also mentions a large crucifix flanked by two Indian figures in the mission cemetery, erected in 1935 “to commemorate the 6,000 Tongva buried within the mission walls” and part of an “ongoing effort to raise the visibility of Native Americans and to acknowledge their contributions.” Most redemptively, presiding Claretian Father Ralph Berg is reported to have publicly admitted to the mission’s “complex history,” which “included forced labor, compulsory Christianity, and deaths due to European-borne illnesses. . . . We can’t undo the painful history, but we can recognize the injustices, and look to the future. . . . This is your mission. It was made for Indians by the Indians.” Anthony Morales (a.k.a. Chief Red Blood) spoke on behalf of his Gabrielino/ Tongva group: “It is important for Tongvas to maintain a strong connection to the missions. Otherwise our ancestors would have died in vain. . . . This time in history is about healing, visibility, connection with others, and striving for unity.”2 Although likely lost on most non-Tongva at the rededication, Morales’s call for unity unfortunately applied to the surviving Tongva themselves. Since the early 2000s, three splintered Tongva factions have been embroiled in bitter infighting, stemming largely from their desire, or aversion, to building an Indian-run casino in Los Angeles. I will elaborate on this internecine struggle later in this chapter, but less-volatile issues continue to separate tribal members as well, including their attitudes toward the missions themselves. Missionization

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Figure 9. A replica of the traditional Tongva home, or kiiy, constructed at Mission San Gabriel in 2008. Author’s photo.

was a watershed event in Tongva history, fracturing tribal sovereignty and splintering its members’ identity. The Indians’ categorization by the missionaries as either Christian or pagan, neophyte or gentile, mission or wild Indian “created new points of divergence” among the Tongva that persist to the present.3 Claudia Jurmain and William McCawley’s conversations with presentday Tongva, transcribed in O, My Ancestor, illustrate the “complex and often contradictory” legacy of the mission experience for older and younger Indian generations. For some, Jurmain and McCawley write, “the mission is a powerful symbol, a point of origin for their people as a community and a tribe, and a connection to their past in a world where almost everything else has been taken from them.”4 This view is implicit in Morales’s speech above, and is reinforced in O, My Ancestor by Desiree Martinez, then a Tongva graduate student in anthropology at UCLA: “My grandmother has an attachment to San Gabriel Mission, and sees it as a point of origin, . . . because [the tribe] didn’t exist until the mission was created,” but grew from the consolidation, however coercive, “of the many smaller, independent village-based lineages.”5 Professor Cindi Alvitre similarly sees the mission, by virtue of its originary status, as both a “historical” and a “sacred place.”6 Tribal member Janice Ramos points to the mission’s practical benefit in helping the Tongva adjust to the “new economy that was emerging in California. . . . As negative as the missions were in so many ways, they allowed my great-great-great-grandmother to survive. They gave her the skills to survive in the world that was becoming.”7 Other tribal members are less forgiving. “We always hated any acknowledgment of San Gabriel [Mission],” says Linda Gonzales, a Gabrielino-Tongva. “We have a revulsion. Usually if it’s mentioned, or any of the missions, it would be with a sneer from my parents.”8 An even stronger indictment comes

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from Victor Dominguez, former council member of the Gabrielino-Tongva Tribe, one of the factions at odds with the San Gabriel group. Echoing Carey McWilliams’s observation a half-century earlier, that “the Franciscan padres eliminated Indians with the effectiveness of [the] Nazis,” Dominguez told me in a 2010 telephone interview: “The missions were concentration camps. Our Auschwitz. I have nothing against Catholicism or Christianity—in fact, I’m a Catholic. But the mission land should be returned to the Indians. It’s a sacred burial ground where thousands of Indians died and are buried. The fact that they hold regular religious services in a place that contributed to genocide is blasphemy.”9

Blasphemy Squared If Mission San Gabriel is the Tongvas’ Auschwitz, one wonders what epithet Dominguez might apply to Mission San Fernando Rey, the other Los Angeles–area mission that interned the Tongva and other local Indians. Despite its occlusions and obfuscations, Mission San Gabriel—in its Indian outreach, speeches by Father Berg, and rededication ceremonies—at least has begun to deal with the crimes against humanity made in the name of the Lord. Mission San Fernando, as of my visit there in 2011, had taken no such steps. To the contrary, more than ignoring or denying the atrocities, it has transformed them into a Fantasy Past worthy of Hollywood’s foremost schlockmeisters. Mission San Fernando’s buildings and grounds are immaculate, and its museum actually outdoes San Gabriel’s in the amount of information devoted to the Indians. In historical inaccuracy and political incorrectness, however, San Fernando takes the booby prize. Nothing is wrong in principle, for example, with the mission’s museum photo commemorating Iron Eyes Cody’s addition to the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1983. Cody, who died in 1999, appeared in more than two hundred western films and TV shows, portrayed the “crying Indian” in the famous “Keep America Beautiful” public service announcement, and was recognized by the Indian community for his contributions to Native American life in 1995. In 1996, however, Cody was disclosed to be of Sicilian, not of American Indian, descent. As with Mission San Gabriel’s 1961 welcoming sign, a clarification seems long overdue. More than clarification is required to redeem a series of colored prints, some of which could serve as illustrations to Jackson’s Glimpses of California and the Missions. The caption to one of these, titled “Fathers Assigning Daily Tasks to Indians,” reads: “The relationship between the Fathers and the Indians was like that between parent and child and tasks were assigned with regard to individual capacity.” Another is titled “Fathers Teaching Indians to Plow and Plant,” while a third doesn’t merely distort history but reverses it: “Fathers Teaching the Indians to Make Adobes.” Illustrations of rancho life, meanwhile, are straight out of

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Ramona, depicting the haciendas’ daily regimen as one big fiesta full of gaiety and Old World glamour. The “historical” videos on view in the mission theater, particularly the one on mission overseer Junipero Serra, extend the insults. Oblivious to the “forced labor, compulsory Christianity, and deaths due to European-borne illnesses” that began under Serra’s watch, much less to contemporary California tribes’ staunch (and successful) opposition to Serra’s proposed sainthood in 1987, the film is sheer hagiography.10 Since the film was produced no later than 1977—its narrator, Bing Crosby, died that year—omission of the sainthood controversy can be excused. Crosby’s involvement, however, throws the mission’s moral compass further off point. The actor-crooner’s notorious lack of personal saintliness is not the issue; indeed, his casting makes intertextual sense: Crosby starred as a Catholic priest in Going My Way, the Best Picture Oscar winner of 1944, and in the 1945 sequel, The Bells of St. Mary’s. What tips the scales is “der Bingle’s” association with his Road picture sidekick Bob Hope, whose problematic connection to Mission San Fernando far exceeds that of his film partner’s pusillanimous voice-over. Across the mission grounds from the museum lies the chapel. Well appointed and, like San Gabriel’s, still used for services, the chapel opens onto a vast, modernly landscaped pocket park. Replete with rockwork and a running stream, more lavish than anything else at the mission complex, and identified by a plaque as the “Bob Hope Memorial Garden,” the site doubles as a private mausoleum for Hope and his wife Dolores, whose elegant marble sarcophagi are tucked inside an enormous (Hollywood?) bowl-shaped tomb. The astounding incongruity is highlighted by a nearby memorial cross, framed by soldier’s lances and erected in a narrow “no-man’s land” between the Hope garden and the chapel, whose modest plaque reads: “In memory of the 2,425 Native Americans who were interred in this cemetery of San Fernando Rey de España between 1797 and 1852 . . . Anno Domini 1997.”11 Morality may have bottomed out, but surrealism hasn’t yet peaked. One can almost picture the mission’s all-Latino maintenance crew, which one encounters manicuring the greenery and patching the walls, dressing up in Indian garb for another rededication ceremony. The Dadaist cake is taken, however, by the “Workshop” rooms. In one of these, alongside tools the mission Indians used in their daily grind, stands a display case stuffed with photos, books, magazine covers, golf balls, and a golf hat—all belonging, of course, to Mission San Fernando Rey de España’s patron saint, Bob Hope (fig. 10).

Ramona’s “Real Home” The two rivals for Ramona’s “residence,” Ranchos Camulos and Guajome, have since become national historic landmarks: Camulos as a private museum, Guajome as part of a county park. Both have dropped exclusive proprietary claims to the Moreno estate’s inspiration, but the Spanish Fantasy Past still resonates

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Figure 10. Mission San Fernando’s patron saint. Author’s photo.

in Camulos’s well-preserved grounds and in its promotional copy: “where the history, myth and romance of old California still linger.” 12 The similarly well-preserved Guajome more specifically, and modestly, references Jackson and her creation: “Noted author Helen Hunt Jackson stayed at Guajome while she gathered material for her novel Ramona.”13 Another former Californio estate, Rancho Los Alamitos in Long Beach, although not directly tied to the Ramona myth, has become, owing to its unique reflection of the region’s genealogy, more relevant to the real-and-imagined history of Los Angeles than either Camulos or Guajome. The Rancho Los Alamitos visitor’s brochure does not, for a change, understate or whitewash the facts: “The history of Rancho Los Alamitos parallels the history of Southern California: the Native American culture, the colonial imperatives of the mission and rancho systems, the devastation and financial ruin wrought by the droughts of the 1860s, the boom settlements of the 1880s, patterns of immigration, the discovery of oil, the shift from an agrarian to an urban environment, World War II and its aftermath of housing developments, and the impact of industry, freeways and automobiles. These and many other waves of change irrevocably altered the destiny of Rancho Los Alamitos and the region.”14 The first of the Alta California land grants, Los Alamitos, originally named Rancho Los Coyotes, was issued to a Spanish soldier, Manuel Nieto, in 1790. The three-hundred-thousand-acre tract did not have to wait for mission secularization, the U.S. Land Act, railroad barons, or Yankee squatters to whittle it away. Mission San Gabriel took more than half the acreage in the 1790s, and Nieto’s heirs split what remained into five smaller ranchos in 1806. One of these, at about 28,500 acres, and located three miles from the Pacific Ocean, was named Los Alamitos (little cottonwoods).15 In the Mexican period California governor

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Jose Figueroa purchased the property, and in 1842 Abel Stearns, a wealthy Anglo migrant married to Californio Alberto Bandini’s daughter Arcadia, bought it from the government. The Stearns era, which extends into the early American period, exemplifies the historical pattern of opportunistic intermarriage between Anglos and Californios that Ruiz de Burton allegorizes in The Squatter and the Don. When Stearns was forced to liquidate his holdings following the great drought of 1862–64, and John Bixby, in partnership with Isaias Hellman, acquired the land in 1878, further layers were added to the rancho’s palimpsest.16 Hellman, a Bavarian Jew who arrived in Los Angeles as a seventeen-year-old in 1859, represents, directly and by extension, all the developments delineated in the rancho brochure, from the “boom settlements” through “the shift from an agrarian to an urban environment.”17 Although L.A.’s Jews would make their biggest cultural mark on the city in the Hollywood era (discussed in Part II), Hellman epitomizes their substantial economic influence decades earlier. The city’s first banker, Hellman became one of L.A.’s (and California’s) biggest real estate developers, dominated the region’s wine industry, helped bring the Southern Pacific railway to Los Angeles, and cofounded the University of Southern California. He also played a seminal role in the post-Ramona business boom, bankrolling Harrison Gray Otis’s Los Angeles Times in the mid-1880s, Edward Doheny’s and Charles Canfield’s oil wells in the early 1890s, Henry Huntington’s Los Angeles Railway in 1898, and Moses Sherman’s Pacific Electric Railway in 1901. His vast and varied investments extended to the region’s water, gas, and electric companies, which, along with the Times, became the city’s preeminent power brokers. Eventually moving to San Francisco, where he added the Nevada and Wells Fargo banks to more than a dozen others he headed, Hellman, by the early twentieth century, was dubbed California’s “king of finances” and “the richest man in the West” (fig. 11).18 While Hellman was propelling Los Angeles into the corporate-capitalist future, it fell to Bixby—no financial slouch himself, with sizable real estate, ranching, and oil interests—to preserve what remained of Los Alamitos’s Spanish Fantasy Past. Renovation of the much dwindled grounds and neglected ranch house, begun under the elder Bixby, was expanded in 1906 by his son Fred and Fred’s wife, Florence, who added extensive gardens and a tennis court. Ironically, the urban encroachment the Bixby family helped finance further chipped away at the rancho’s edges, so that when Fred and Florence’s heirs ceded the site to the City of Long Beach in 1961 as a regional historic and cultural preserve, only 7.5 acres remained. This is the Rancho Los Alamitos—situated atop a low-lying plateau encircled by a private gated community, a veteran’s hospital, and the California State University Long Beach campus—that I visited in summer 2010. I was not a passive observer. Jurmain (the rancho’s curator) and McCawley’s O, My Ancestor had alerted me to another, more primal, historical layer lurking at Rancho Los Alamitos: the ancient Tongva village of Povuu’ngna. Established around 500 c.e., Povuu’ngna was not just any tribal village but the Tongvas’ main

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Figure 11. “The richest man in the West”: Isaias Hellman. USC Special Collections Library.

spiritual, cultural, and trading center. “A sacred place then and now,” Jurmain writes, “Povuu’ngna is where the first [Tongva] people emerged, where Ouiot, the omnipotent first chief, was born, and where Chinigchinich [the Creator God] appeared to give the people their ways.”19 Although much of Povuu’ngna now lies buried beneath modern buildings, lawns, and parking lots, the rancho preserve and portions of the California State University campus offer tangible traces of the site’s ritual function. Its core midden area, or domestic center, O, My Ancestor explains, “includes part of the [rancho house’s] front lawn and extends to the far east edge of the gardens where it is still visible in the Jacaranda Walk.”20 “Visible” is a comparative term, for without my tour guide’s pointing out “the evidence beneath your very feet, tiny flakes of white shell embedded throughout the dense, ash-gray soil,” I doubt that anyone but an archaeologist would have noticed the broken shards, much less regarded them as “reminders of centuries of Indian life at this unique place.”21 Through its tours, brochure, and especially O, My Ancestor, however,

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Figure 12. Rancho Los Alamitos, 2010. Author’s photo.

new millennial Rancho Los Alamitos casts light on an Indian past that the missions, and even sympathetic historians, have tended to gloss over (fig. 12). The densest surviving midden is situated not on the rancho property but on the Cal State campus below, where “at least ten different areas show evidence of archaeological deposits amongst the buildings and walkways.” 22 The campus also bears the mark of the most volatile convergence of ancient and contemporary Tongva history. Inspired by the larger identity politics of the 1960s and 1970s, Indian activists began fighting to preserve their people’s legacy at Cal State Long Beach. Through their efforts, ancient burial remains unearthed during construction of a school building in 1972 were housed in the university’s archaeology lab, and the site itself was designated a national historic place (LAn-235) in 1974. In 1992, plans for construction of a strip mall on the only remaining undeveloped campus land led to a protracted struggle with activists and other supporters who, through a lawsuit and public protests, gained a moratorium on the construction in 1994—“although this decision is non-binding on future university administrations.”23 Commemorating the legal victory but also as a memorial to Povuu’ngna, Chinigchinich, and “these people who lived here,” a wooden, cross-like sign, festooned with triangular banners and topped with deer antlers, was placed among large stones on the spared parcel. Through the combined successes of the anti–strip mall campaign and the reconsecration of Povuu’ngna, the significance of the sacred site has, once again, transcended its physical borders, becoming a major symbol of Tongva resistance and “a rallying point for the Tongva’s efforts to preserve other sacred sites throughout their territory. Subsequent successful protests have been organized over construction of other coastal sites, including burial grounds at Playa Vista in Westchester, Hellman Ranch in Seal Beach, and Harbor Cove in Newport Beach.”24

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Another major struggle and eventual triumph occurred in the early 1990s, over a planned parking lot at the sacred Kuruvungna springs site at the University High School campus in West Los Angeles. Declared a state historical landmark, the site now also serves as the gathering place for an annual Before Columbus Day event celebrating local Indian history and culture prior to, and surviving, the European invasion.25 Taken together, the various Indian-originated intercessions at Rancho Los Alamitos, Playa Vista, Kuruvungna, and—as discussed in later chapters, at the founder’s Plaza itself—serve notice that the Tongva are no longer willing to take the Ramona myth lying down.

Ramona, the Movie(s) Only two of the four Ramona film adaptations have withstood the frailties of nitrate film stock and the vicissitudes of time: D. W. Griffith’s 1910 and Henry King’s 1936 versions. The earlier, silent version, thanks to Griffith’s enduring significance to cinema history, has recently been released on DVD as the third part of a classic-film series: Treasures III: Social Issues in American Film, 1900–1934. The 1936 Technicolor sound spectacular, starring Loretta Young and Don Ameche, is also now available on DVD. The two “missing links,” both silent films, were released in 1916 and 1928: the first directed by Donald Crisp, starring Adda Gleason and Monroe Salisbury; the second directed by Edwin Carewe, starring Dolores del Rio and Warner Baxter. The Carewe version is unique among the four films in having been directed by an Indian, and having Ramona, at least, played by someone of part-Indian descent, the Mexican del Rio. The two extant Ramona films made no such concession to realism. Anglos Mary Pickford and Henry B. Walthall, two of Griffith’s stock players at Biograph Studios, played the leads in 1910; while by the time 20th Century–Fox settled on contract players Young and Ameche for the 1936 version, “redface” casting had become de rigueur.26 Both films also play fast and loose with the novel’s content, leaving out Ramona’s eventual marriage to Don Felipe and the couple’s move to Mexico, and ignoring entirely the Moreno estate’s reduction in size during the American period. These (over)simplifications can be attributed partly to the exigencies of compacting an epic novel into a feature-film format—especially, in the 1910 film’s case, when what passed for feature-length extended to no more than a single reel, or between ten and fifteen minutes in duration.27 A less justifiable, if more revealing, discrepancy with its source occurs in the two films’ portrayal of Alessandro. Jackson, in accordance with the novel’s romantic demands and her own pro-mission-Indian bias, depicts Alessandro as both intelligent and savvy. Decidedly the hard-bitten realist to Ramona’s romantic naif, he is the one who must educate her about the injustices his people have suffered and the dangers they still face. After Yankees confiscate their land a second time, it is he, not she, who is unsurprised: “You see, it is as I said, Majella [his pet Indian name for Ramona, meaning “wood dove”]. There is no place safe. We can do nothing! We might better be dead!” When she still

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holds out hope, he chastises her: “Majella talks like a dove, not a woman. . . . It is the beginning. To-morrow may come ten more [Yankee settlers], with papers to show that the land is theirs. We can do nothing, any more than the wild beasts. They are better than we.”28 Griffith’s and King’s versions reverse the roles, turning Ramona into the realist and Alessandro into the naif, thereby enhancing the story’s Social Darwinist thrust. In the 1910 version, as Chon Noriega (drawing on Roberta Pearson) points out, the “superiority” of the white “race” is revealed primarily through performance codes. Henry B. Walthall’s Alessandro acts, toward the end, “in the unchecked histrionic [rather than verisimilar] code, and it is this shift in codes (and behaviors)—and not his race—that justifies his removal ‘from the face of the earth in the cold-blooded way that nature eliminates the unfit.’ Alessandro is ‘unfit’ because he ‘submits like a weakling’ and fails to make ‘a manly effort’ in the course of ‘business.’ ”29 The role reversal in the 1936 version relies more on narrative causality than performance style, a change in modus operandi tied to the imperatives of the star system. While Walthall, and especially Pickford, were recognizable personalities to movie audiences by 1910, they did not receive star billing, much less screen credit, for the star system had not yet been established.30 By 1936 it was one of the inviolable props of Hollywood cinema, and for a romantic leading man to shift into the “unmanly” histrionic code, except for comedic purposes, was unthinkable. The romantic hero image also dictated that Ameche’s Alessandro, unlike Walthall’s (and the novel’s), not go insane (another sign of “unmanliness”). Thus desperation, not a crazy spell, compels him to “borrow” a horse in the end when his own goes lame, to speed the delivery of medicine to his critically ill child. Ameche’s image as an Indian, however, faced no such rhetorical obstacles. Thus we find that when the Yankee interlopers appear in the 1936 film, coded instantly by the music as villainous, it is Ramona, not Alessandro, who senses the dire threat they pose. Alessandro blithely welcomes the gruff-looking and -speaking strangers to his humble abode, offers them food and drink, and, most “unfitly,” informs them that he will be leaving for San Diego (and thus rendering his property, and family, vulnerable) the next day. While the white men raise an eyebrow and exchange cynical glances at the news—and Ramona, holding her newborn daughter, looks on with concern (fig. 13)—Alessandro prattles on about the fertility of his farmland: “Anything will grow here, Señores!” Noriega explains the 1910 Ramona’s reinforcement of Social Darwinism in neo-Marxist terms. He rightly presumes that many contemporaneous audience members would likely have read the novel or at least been privy to the Ramona myth, then approaching its zenith. More provocatively, he suggests that the film “marks (if not effects) a crucial shift in the ideal audience for the ‘texts of Ramona’ from primarily White women to businessmen.” Seeming to confirm such a shift, reviewers and Griffith’s own advertisement emphasized the role of Ramona in the class reorientation of cinema itself, from ‘unthinking elements’ to ‘serious

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Figure 13. Madonna and child: the 1936 Ramona (Loretta Young), a faithful but hardbitten realist. Frame grab.

patrons.’ ”31 Through the movie’s bloodline to a world-class novel, in other words, Griffith and Biograph sought to raise the cultural capital of motion pictures generally, thus expanding their appeal to a wealthier clientele willing and able to pay higher ticket prices than the largely working-class audience that dominated the nickelodeon era. Ramona, by this reckoning, marked (if not effected) the embourgeoisement of the movies. Although this analysis may place more historical weight on Ramona than this single film can bear, it is supported by a concurrent report in the trade paper Motion Picture World. Reviewer Louis Reeves Harrison described Ramona as a “special feature” and its audience as “unusually large,” “quiet,” “rather above than below the average in quality,” and composed largely of “earnest-looking . . . businessmen . . . who ordinarily stay away from exhibitions of motion pictures.”32 If, indeed, Griffith’s Ramona contributed to the “refined upper-class bejeweled audiences” that began “arriving at the theater in automobiles” in the 1910s, the film’s role in “lifting the movies from the gutter,” while adding an extra–Southern California dimension to the Ramona myth, also circles back, via Hollywood, to the land of smoke and mirrors.33 By the release of the fourth Ramona film, in 1936, not only most American movies but greater than 80 percent of those screened around the world were coming from the Hollywood dream factory—or its appendages in North Hollywood and Burbank (Universal, Warner Bros., Disney), Culver City (MGM), and West L.A. (20th Century–Fox). The embourgeoisement of the movies was also a done deal, with between eighty and ninety million Americans (of a total

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population of circa 150 million) going to the movies each week. As a Technicolor, and therefore comparatively big-budget, “A” film, and one based on a still-esteemed literary work with less topical but increased historical resonance, the 1936 Ramona was decidedly one of 20th Century–Fox’s “special features” for the year. Yet with the adult western trend still a Stagecoach (1939) away and the Mission Play and La Fiesta de Los Angeles in mothballs, what might have been the special appeal to a major studio of another (albeit the first sound) version of Jackson’s novel? Some attraction residually accrued to the Spanish Fantasy Past and the romantic Latin type. Of more immediate impact was a shift in the “national interest.” Franklin Roosevelt’s Depression-motivated Good Neighbor Policy, proposed in his inaugural address of 1933, urged a more equable stance toward Latin America than had characterized U.S. policy since the Monroe Doctrine. “Brownface” casting notwithstanding, Hollywood seemed to take the president’s reorientation to heart. Flying Down to Rio (1933), the first of the Fred Astaire– Ginger Rogers musicals, costarred Dolores del Rio. Bordertown (1935) featured a struggling yet sympathetic barrio youth. The Robin Hood of El Dorado (1936) reprised the saga of Joaquin Murieta. The Californian (1937) echoed Ramona’s critique of the mistreatment of the Californios in the early American period. And Juarez (1939) all but sainted the eponymous Mexican patriot. Moreover, given Fox chief Darryl F. Zanuck’s open support of FDR (rare among the studio moguls), his 1936 Ramona likely reflected, more consciously than most of the Latinophilic films, the “Good Neighbor” zeitgeist. Indian issues were another story. Although social problem films would become Zanuck’s forte at Fox—migrant farmers in The Grapes of Wrath (1940), antiSemitism in Gentleman’s Agreement (1947), racism in Pinky (1949)—the Indian question had ceased to be a pertinent political topic by the 1930s. This was a far cry from 1910, as the subtitle to Griffith’s Ramona emphasized: A Story of the White Man’s Injustice to the Indian. But the “old” West, as Noriega reminds us, “was still just a generation removed” in 1910; thus Griffith’s “Ramona—like other ‘Westerns’—spoke to the recent past . . . while it carried strong connections to the present.”34 By 1936, as Pare Lorenz’s Dust Bowl documentary The Plow That Broke the Plains tragically reaffirmed, the frontier, and with it the American Indian, had long since been “cleared.”

Hyphen versus Slash As for Ramona’s “fellow” Gabrielinos, the Los Angeles Times had declared them doubly extinct some fifteen years before. “Race Vanishes as Junico [sic] Dies,” the Times’ February 10, 1921, headline announced. Jose de los Santos Juncos, an Indian living at Mission San Gabriel, had died in his sleep at 106 years of age, the paper reported, and “with him died the last vestige of personal remembrance of the golden age of the California Missions.” Juncos’s death, the article reiterated, “marked the passing of a vanished race.”35 “What must the scores of surviving

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Tongva have thought,” Jurmain and McCawley ask in O, My Ancestor, “upon hearing the news that their ‘vanished race’ was extinct?”36 As fallacious as the Times article patently was, the local Indian extinction myth has proven remarkably resilient, grounded not only in physical and symbolic annihilation but in hereditary dissolution as well. As early as the 1850s, the D. B. Wilson Report had stated that the Indians of San Juan Capistrano, which included Tongva, “are now nearly extinct, from intermarriage with the Spanish.”37 The “one drop of Spanish blood” rule was no solace in this case, either to the “vanishing” Indians or to the “mongrelized” Mexicans. But the denigration and denial of identity was especially traumatic for the Tongva and haunts their descendants to this day. Bea Alva, a present-day Tongva, recalls a Labor Day parade in Los Angeles from the 1950s, when “I heard this master of ceremonies say that the Indians were extinct. The Gabrielino Indians were extinct. . . . So we decided that year to put in children and adults of Indian ancestry. . . . We wanted to show ourselves in the parade to say that we were here.”38 Denise Martinez relates a similar experience, as late as the 1980s, when “in the fourth grade, we went to the Southwest Museum and they said the Gabrielinos were extinct. A lot of my friends didn’t believe I was Gabrielino because they would look at the dioramas and see that they were living in traditional housing and half naked. They’re like, ‘Well, you’re one of us. You live in a house, you wear clothes, so you can’t be an Indian.’ ”39 Nor did matters improve for her in junior high. During an in-class census of ethnic backgrounds, Martinez answered, “Oh, I’m Native American Gabrielino,” to which her teacher responded dismissively, “Well, your last name is Martinez,” implying, of course, that she was Mexican, not Indian.40 Another present-day Tongva, David Campio—an educator, a potter, and since 2008 a member of the Ontario-Montclair School District Board of Trustees— remembers a bitter incident from his elementary school days: “When the teacher started talking about the San Gabriel Mission, I stood up proudly and I said, ‘I’m Gabrielino Indian.’ She laughed at me: ‘There are no Gabrielino Indians left. Sit down and be quiet.’ I got sent to the principal’s office that day.” Embarrassed to admit this humiliation to his parents, he only confided in his grandfather, who advised, “You’re going to get this treatment the rest of your life. If somebody asks you, just say we’re businessmen. We’ll keep our identity here in our backyard in the pottery shop.”41 In the past few decades a more defiant approach to tribal identification (some of it described above) has taken hold among the Tongva. An unfortunate sidebar to this encouraging development has been inter- and intratribal rivalry revolving around tribal recognition. As long overdue, and self-evident, as such recognition may seem, politics continue to inveigh against it for the Tongva, both from the government and the Indian side. For the Tongva, besides the boost to individual and collective self-esteem, recognition would open the door for lucrative casinos in the massive, and still untapped, metropolitan Los Angeles market. But as the windfall for the Tongva would likely siphon

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off casino profits from neighboring tribes, resistance to Tongva recognition has emerged among these politically well-connected groups. Most tragically, the recognition and casino issues, rather than bolstering solidarity among the Tongva themselves, have stirred internal conflict. “The point is being recognized,” says Arthur Morales of the Gabrielino/Tongva Tribal Council of San Gabriel. “It would mean a lot. It’s hard to describe—just the fact that we would be federally recognized. There doesn’t have to be anything else to go with it.”42 For the other two main Tongva groups—the Gabrielino-Tongva Tribe and the Gabrielino-Tongva Nation—it’s very much about what goes with it. Casino support or resistance has not been the only bone of contention among the groups. “Acrimony has become a way of life for the [Tongvas],” the LA Weekly reported in 2004, “a tribe whose progress is hindered by one major obstacle: It has no land.”43 The land issue has a long and tortured history. Between 1851 and 1853, three U.S. treaty commissioners appointed by President Millard Fillmore signed the so-called eighteen “lost treaties,” setting aside 8.5 million acres in California for Indian reservations in return for the Indians’ quitclaim to seventy-five million acres of California land. The U.S. Senate refused to ratify the treaties, however, which were finally discovered in a locked desk drawer in the Senate Archives in 1905. The California Jurisdiction Act of 1928 finally authorized adjudication of the Gabrielinos’ land claims. The Bureau of Indian Affairs subsequently recognized hundreds of Gabrielino tribal members individually in the California Indian Rolls of 1928 and 1950, and in 1972 the bureau awarded meager monetary compensation of $633 per person. Crucially, however, the government did not recognize the Gabrielinos as a tribe or grant them a land base. In 1994 the State of California recognized the Gabrielino Tongva “as the aboriginal tribe of the Los Angeles Basin.” But federal recognition remains elusive ostensibly because, in a catch-22, of the tribe’s geographic dispersal yet more likely predicated on the sizable outlays for social services, especially during hard economic times for the nation at large, for which the disproportionately impoverished Tongva would then qualify.44 Lack of a collective land base thus has proved a double-edged sword: facilitating absorption into mainstream society for the Tongva, on the one hand; forestalling privileges accorded reservation-based tribes and exacerbating intratribal claims to lineage, on the other. “Squabbles over bloodlines” caused the first major splintering of the Tongva in 2001.45 In 2003 the conflict entered the courtroom, with the San Gabriel (or “slash”) group and the “hyphen” group (then still a single entity) each accusing the other of seeking sole representation of the tribe in order to hoard future casino revenues. Superior Court Judge Soussan Brugera refused to rule in the case, alleging—inconsistently, given the recognition gap—“that the government had no authority over the internal affairs of a sovereign Indian tribe.” 46 In 2006 the hyphen group itself splintered over accusations of fiscal improprieties between tribal secretary Sam Dunlap and tribal attorney Jonathan Stein, a non-Tongva, whom Dunlap had originally recruited to spearhead the casino

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project. And in 2007 the slash group fractured over the handling of tribal burial remains unearthed at the Playa Vista development site. The remains have since been reinterred in a formal ceremony at the site, which also will soon include an educational center devoted to Tongva history and culture, organized and maintained by Loyola Marymount University. The three-way intratribal schism unfortunately persists as of this writing, with pursuit of a casino, according to tribal attorney Stein, “on hold until the [downtown football] stadium issue is resolved.”47

“More Than Just a Love Story” On my May 2011 visit to the Eighty-Eighth Ramona Pageant at the Ramona Bowl in Hemet, California, ninety miles east of Los Angeles, I was prepared for the worst—something between the whitewashing of the Ramona movies and the defamation of the San Fernando mission. What I encountered offered some hope, on the cultural plane, for the Indians of Southern California. Outside the pageant amphitheater, along a slope of the Hemet Hills, stands an introductory plaque. Rather than a sop to the Spanish Fantasy Past or tribute to a movie star, the sign (dedicated in 1981 by the Daughters of the American Revolution) identifies, with simple dignity, “the Indian peoples, who in the distant past, established villages in this area—the Huachippah, Corova, Pahsitnah, Ivah, Pochea, Ararah and Sobobas.” Another nearby plaque, emplaced in 1983 by the California State Department of Parks and Recreation, San Jacinto History Museum, Hemet Area Museum Association, Ramona Pageant Association, and Billy Holcomb, elaborates: “Pochea Indian Village was one of a cluster of Indian villages forming the very large settlement of Pahsitnah, which extended along the ridge east and west of Ramona Bowl. Pahsitnah was thriving when the Spanish first passed by in 1774. A tragic story tells of the natives contracting smallpox from the Europeans, a terrible epidemic spreading, and some survivors fleeing to the area of the present Soboba Reservation.” Descendants of the survivors are not only etched in bronze. A group of Soboba adults and children perform traditional songs and dances before the play begins, and other Indians and Latinos have major roles in the play itself, including the two leads. Alessandro was played, for the third consecutive season, by a full-blooded member of the Paiute tribe, Duane Minard; and for the sixth straight year, Cesaria Hernandez costarred as Ramona (see fig. 5). Ramona Bowl itself, nestled among craggy foothills speckled with yellowflowered Spanish broom, captures the novel’s pastoral aura. The purplish, snow-crested San Jacinto Mountains to the east, where Ramona and Alessandro were driven by the Yankees’ encroachment, provide a resonant backdrop. The low-slung Moreno hacienda at the base of the hills, with a small chapel to one side, a lawn with a love seat and pepper tree to the other, and an altar to the

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Virgin Mary in the center, forms the main “stage.” The idyllic setting signals that the pageant may yet devolve into mythic folderol, but the program notes contain more welcome surprises. One is an endorsement from Alessandro’s “tribe,” the Luiseño Indians: “Our roots are sunk deep into the land. The ashes of our ancestors cover this place where the sun is. . . . The Pachenga Band of Luiseno Indians has called Temecula valley home for more than 10,000 years. Life on earth began in this valley, Exva Temmeku, the place of the union of Sky—father, and Earth—mother (Tuukumit’pi Tamaayowit). The Temecula Indians (Temeekuyam) lived at Temeekunga—the place of the sun. And 10,000 years from now, tribal elders will share with tribal youth as they do today the story of the tribe’s creation.” The remainder of the brochure neither eschews, nor wallows in, “the tragic history of Southern California’s native people.” 48 Its purpose seems rather to reclaim Ramona’s social gospel underpinning from its romantic veneer. A commentary on the play by Phil Brigandi, pageant historian, titled “More Than Just a Love Story,” articulates the revisionist line: Many who read “Ramona” or witness the Ramona Outdoor Play still see it only as a love story; but it is much, much more. Jackson’s message still haunts us. She asks us to look at the wrongs of the past so that we might try to change the future. In the Ramona Pageant [though not in the novel] perhaps Father Gaspara says it best: “And as for you [Americans] . . . hear now the words of truth. You stand on law, on might and the power of wealth. On these things justice can never grow. Beware the time when your great people rule the world only by wealth. The Indian is now driven out—so Christ will be! Take the Indians’ land yet they hear the sacred word: ‘What shall it profit a man if he gains the world and loses his own soul!’ ”49

All is not liberation theology, however. Hollywood trappings color the proceedings. A banner outside the bowl announced “Welcome to Carol Channing!” and, lo and behold, the nonagenarian is introduced before the start of the play as “Special Guest Star”—an honorary sobriquet, as Channing simply says a few words and exits. Additional “foreplay” consists of mariachi players and horseback riders bearing the Californian, Mexican, and Soboba Indian flags. Then a trumpet’s heraldry, and the play’s narrator, Juan Canito, an old man on crutches (listed in the credits as Overseer of the Camulos Rancho), sets the scene: in medias res, with Don Felipe ailing, problems for the Indians stirring, and everything at the rancho “going badly.” Subsequent action hews more closely to the book than to the Ramona films in several key respects. Alessandro is by no means ignorant of, or indifferent to, his people’s plight. When Margarita, a flirtatious Mexican servant, tells him, “You are so different from all the others, not so dirty”—he retorts, “We are all the same.” And when Ramona, not yet informed of her half-Indian heritage, says she wishes

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she could roam free like the Indians and calls them “a beautiful people”—he counters, “You would not like being like our poor people. The Americans say we have no rights to our land.” The sympathetic Padre Salvadierra is more ominous: “These are times of trouble!” Trouble begins for Ramona and Alessandro when Señora Moreno catches them embracing and orders the “dirty Indian” from the premises. And while the first act closes on a happy note, with a crowd-pleasing fiesta celebrating Don Felipe’s recovery, a shadow is cast by the marginalized Indians looking on from the nearby hills. The religiosity of the book and 1936 film turns supernatural in the pageant’s second act. When the señora informs Ramona of her Gabrielino Indian mother but still forbids her to marry Alessandro, the angered but unfazed Ramona exclaims, “May God punish you!” and poof—the señora instantly falls ill and is never heard from again. Emboldened by her newfound powers, Ramona steals the sculpted baby Jesus from the Virgin’s arms, vows that she won’t return the child until Alessandro is returned to her, and presto—her lover pops up and descends from the hills. But Alessandro bears tragic news: “My people are no more.” The Americans have killed his father and destroyed the Indian village in Temecula. Fearing that Ramona “will face the sorrows that have lately come to us,” he only reluctantly, at her insistence, rides off with her on horseback into the hills. We jump ahead a year. Ramona and Alessandro are now happily married and have a child, named “Eyes of the Sky.” The baby’s birth is celebrated in a colorful, crowd-pleasing Indian ceremony that more than compensates, in duration and elaboration, for the Luiseños’ exclusion from the Mexican fiesta. The climax of the ceremony, and of the pageant, occurs when, on a signal from the Indians below, the hills come alive—not only with the sound of music but with more Luiseños! As if sprouting from the earth itself, scores of traditionally dressed men, women, and children shoot up from behind the rocks like a fresh blanket of wildflowers. As everyone thrusts arms to the sky in unison, a shaman, standing on the hilltop, lets out a series of chants that are echoed by the Indians below. “Then the Americans came!” Juan Canito intones. “A nation moving westward toward its destiny—to reap, to civilize, to expand. But with this expansion came broken treaties that robbed a great people of dignity, heritage, and rightful pride.” Cowboys on horseback, brandishing firearms, thunder onto the stage. Father Gaspara delivers his “gain the world and lose your soul” speech but to no avail. One of the cowboys, James Farrar (as in the book, not in either film), tries to rape Ramona. The other horsemen declare Alessandro’s land deed from the Mexican period “out of date” and once more confiscate his land. The token “good” Americans, Aunt Ri and her young son, make an appearance, but it’s too little too late. As in the book and the Griffith film, Alessandro goes crazy, and Farrar shoots him for “borrowing” Farrar’s horse. Then, unlike book or either film, the play takes a Panglossian turn. Rather than Farrar’s getting away

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with murder, a cowboy posse takes off after the ruffian, pointing to fairy-tale (or at best, long-delayed) justice to come. Cut to the Moreno estate, where, in an abridgement of the book’s coda, Don Felipe, letter from Ramona in hand, delivers a postmortem for the Indians, and, most resignedly, for the Californios: “Memories must be buried here. I am sad. But I will return to the land of my people [ironic emphasis mine]. Let us sing of Life and Love!” To musical accompaniment Juan Canito adds a more politically correct, if still pietistic, postscript: “Splendid snow-capped hills. Americanos come, Mexicans depart. Where once Music played, now Silence reigns. Justice—for those who once reigned supreme! God, send the Indians justice. So may it be—the future lies with God. Ring out the old church bells.” That the audience got the message (as many had gotten the Spanish-spoken “in-jokes”) was clear from the “curtain call.” In contrast to loud cheers for all the Mexican and Indian characters, the cowboys were roundly booed. Yet for me, a nagging discomfort remains. Although I was heartened by the play’s social conscience and thrilled by the spectacular Indian “moment,” my heart goes out to the Tongva Indians who, as usual, were left in the cold. More power to the Soboba band of Luiseño Indians, who were not. But good intentions notwithstanding, one must assume that the Sobobas’ representational good fortune stems, at least partly, from the increased economic status and political clout they gained from the Soboba Casino (opened in 1995) and PGA-quality Soboba Springs Country Club (opened in 2009). If so, is this another argument, perhaps, for offering similar opportunities to the Tongva?

Sometimes a Great Nation So far I have offered mainly my own secondhand, white man’s impression of the Ramona myth and its repercussions. But what of the Tongva themselves? What do they make of this cultural phenomenon’s immeasurable impact on their historical treatment and current situation in greater Los Angeles? In an attempt to balance the ledger I contacted various tribal members and was fortunate to be invited to the Gabrielino-Tongva Tribe’s semiannual gathering in Elysian Park in fall 2010, where I was allowed to screen the 1936 film version of Ramona and get audience responses in a group surrounding. Most of the event, attended by more than one hundred people, was devoted to picnicking, performing traditional ceremonies, and having members apply for blood-quantum testing through the Bureau of Indian Affairs, a prerequisite to becoming a “card-carrying” Tongva (one-sixteenth tribal heritage is required). During the informational portion, as background for an update—and incentive builder—for the casino project, tribal councilmember Linda Candelaria spoke of the disastrously high 30 percent unemployment rate and 80 percent poverty rate among the Tongva. The film was screened at the very end, to a depleted audience of about ten

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people. I offered some historical background beforehand, as hardly anyone had even heard of Ramona (book, film, or myth)—not surprising, as most non-Indians, from my experience, are unfamiliar with it. Postscreening responses, while expressing deep sadness over the Indians’ mistreatment, also tended to view it as something in the past that had been overcome: “It showed how hard life was for us back then”; “it showed the racism back then.” One person took the film’s dark view as a wake-up call and spur to action: “It showed what we had to go through, how hard it was, and what we need to do to get back what we lost.” One person criticized the film itself: “I wasn’t happy with it, with the Indians dying. It was like our Schindler’s List—everyone dies at the end.” To expand my reception study, I sent DVD copies of the film to several individual Tongva, along with some historical material and a series of questions. These dealt with the treatment of the film’s characters (within the film and by the filmmakers), the handling of religion, and the significance of Ramona for the Tongva and Los Angeles in general. Of the half-dozen e-mail responses I received, all deplored the treatment of the Indians, by non-Indians in the film, as “second-class, uneducated citizens,” as “heathens or uncivilized persons,” and “much like undocumented people are treated today.” Opinions about the filmmakers’ approach differed widely. Some applauded the sympathetic exposure of the Indians’ mistreatment and their presentation as “peaceful and hard-working,” as “religious, smart, and very caring for the family,” and as less “stereotyped than the normal ‘Hollywood’ novels and films from that era.” One respondent, however, complained about the Indians being shown as “naive,” and others protested the “Anglo” casting, one in great detail: “Ramona and Alessandro did not appear to display what I would consider an accurate depiction of California Indian language, culture, or traditions. For instance, Ramona sings what her cousin calls an ‘old Indian song’ on a guitar in English. That may be contemporary but definitely not traditional or ‘old.’ ” Views also diverged on the film’s pro-Christian bias. While the “religious and smart” conflation above indicates sympathy for this approach, others saw it as propagandistic and patronizing. The film “influences the audience to be ‘Christian,’ ” one suggested, while another decried the Christian religion being “used as a weapon, to control and discipline the ‘savage’ Indians and turn them into laborers and servants.” The question of Ramona’s lasting significance brought out the most extended responses, one of which, from Irene Reynoso, deserves quoting in its entirety and without commentary: I feel the Ramona influence was a blessing and a curse for the Gabrielinos. The book Ramona exposed many of the injustices against the Native American and the Mexican people. By now you would think that better treatment and respect would be given to the Gabrielinos’ Native American and Mexican descendants. Instead the Gabrielino and Mexican influence gave Los Angeles more character and, along with the best weather and fertile lands, made

Ramona Revisited it more attractive to people coming from everywhere, who in return are now not willing to return what was taken away long ago. After all the history books and evidence that has been uncovered about the Gabrielinos being here for thousands of years, you would think that the Gabrielinos would be the most respected, powerful, self-reliant, federally recognized of all Indian tribes. The Gabrielinos would be able to help the community to prosper, creating great employment and businesses. Instead we are still being treated like second-class citizens and outcasts, like before. It is sad to me that the Gabrielinos have struggled so long for their birthright. It is a shame that the Gabrielinos have no “State Reservation,” put aside to bury the hundreds of remains of our presently excavated ancestors. Some are being sent to other neighboring reservations for burial. Gabrielinos living in San Bernardino County are being forced to go to other tribes and beg for services like medical, food, and jobs because our own tribe has no benefits and has not been federally recognized, due to “Government Bureaucracy.” Last but not least, but the most sad to me, is that now the people doing the most petitioning are from wealthy “special interest” groups from nearby tribes. There is a season and a purpose for everything. One day the Gabrielinos will again become one of the most powerful Indian Nations.50

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Si(g)n City

chapter 3




“City with Two Heads”

Mike Davis’s description of Los Angeles after World War II as a “city with two heads” aptly captures the region’s bifurcated power structure, whose two main “growth coalitions” divided along demographic and geographic lines: between a downtown-based, gentile (Christian) old guard tied to the Chandler family’s L.A. Times, and an upstart group of Westside Jewish megadevelopers.1 A dichotomy prior to World War I, however, spawned by the westward migration of the movie industry, grounds the one that Davis highlights. Moreover, the gulf between the WASP elite of Harrison Gray Otis’s day and the Jews who invented Hollywood was even wider than that between their latter-day descendants, both of whose groups’ stock and trade was real estate and whose ethnoreligious differences were fading in the post–World War II, post-Holocaust world.2 The East Coast movie-industry interlopers, top-heavy with European Jewish immigrants and other hyphenated Americans, were a different breed entirely from the staid midwesterners who had come to dominate Los Angeles by the turn of the century. Their still loosely organized, if increasingly lucrative, motion picture business, as well, was not only starkly different but ostensibly at odds with the city’s more stolid economic base in agriculture, oil, construction, and tourism. Most distressingly, the film companies that gravitated to California around 1910 also came with a soiled reputation. Civic leaders and Progressive-era reformers, from the beginning of the movies in the late 1890s, had viewed the “fl ickers” as an amusement park novelty at best, pornography at worst. Not only the “bawdy, risqué, lowlife films” met with opprobrium, but the shabby storefront theaters, catering mainly to working class audiences, did as well.3 Dens of iniquity, the inner-city nickelodeons were called “dark, unsanitary holes where unsavory men, unchaperoned women, and unsupervised children partook of unlicensed entertainment.”4 Responding to growing public concern over the “open exhibition of depravity,” New York Mayor George McClellan temporarily closed all of the city’s nickelodeons in 1908 and revoked their licenses.5 67

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To shore up the industry’s reputation and fend off a growing censorship movement, the major film companies formed an alliance with the upstanding National Board of Review in 1908. The same year they also formed a business trust or cartel, named the Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC), aimed at countering mounting competition from upstart independent film companies. The monopolistic ploy, however, well before the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional in 1915, had quite the opposite effect. The largely Jewish-owned independent firms wrested control of the movie business from the largely gentile-dominated MPPC soon after the West Coast move around 1910, thereby creating a demographic and geographic mix that would prove an additional obstacle to the industry’s acceptance. Jews had dominated the exhibition side of the U.S. film industry from its inception, as theater owners and managers, and, above all, as the most avid and numerous of the movies’ ethnic audiences.6 As many Jews gained control of the means of production as well, the anti-Semitism that had shunted Jews, especially Jewish immigrants, into this “disreputable” business in the first place came back to haunt them. The term mogul—derived from the pejorative Mongol—was coined specifically in reference to the Jewish studio heads’ alleged Asiatic (read: alien) provenance and appearance, perceived boorish (read: uncivilized) behavior, and admittedly aggressive (read: unscrupulous) business practices.7 In Los Angeles the mogul invasion was especially discomfiting, not only for the WASP establishment but also for an earlier generation of German Jewish immigrants who had bought into the establishment in more ways than one, having financed much of it.

Jew versus Jew Nine Jews, out of a non-Indian population of 1,610, resided in the newly minted American city of Los Angeles in 1850. By 1870 the number had risen to 150, still only a scant 2.7 percent of the city’s total population of 5,778. 8 As in emancipated areas of central Europe, however (and in the United States today, where Jews still make up only about 2 percent of the total population), Jewish influence in Los Angeles far surpassed its numerical presence. Already by the late 1850s, non-Jew Horace Bell recounted in his Reminiscences of a Ranger (1882), “most of the [city’s] merchants were Jews, and all seem to be doing a paying business . . . [and] getting rich.”9 In 1865 regional animus and anti-Semitism meshed in a neighboring Wilmington resident’s characterization of Los Angeles as a “Jew town.”10 Stripped of bigotry, both claims were not far off the mark. By the 1860s a preponderance of Bavarian, Prussian, and French Jewish immigrants—driven to the United States by the midcentury political upheavals in central Europe—indeed had come to “mold the financial destiny” of the city.11 With Harris Newmark, Eugene Meyer, Charles Jacoby, Louis Levin, Solomon Lazard, Leopold Harris, H. W. Frank, Herman Hellman, and especially Herman’s older brother Isaias leading the way, Jews were among Los Angeles’s largest store

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owners, real estate investors, and financiers from the 1850s through the early twentieth century. Isaias Hellman, whose business career “was unsurpassed in importance during the nineteenth-century history of Los Angeles,” also exemplifies the social integration, and disintegration, of the city’s German Jewish community during the Mexican/American and Yankee Boomtown periods.12 Predating by three-quarters of a century Will Herberg’s ecumenical manifesto Protestant, Catholic, Jew (1955), Hellman joined with the Irish Catholic John Downey and Protestants Ozro Childs and Robert Widney in founding the University of Southern California in 1880. USC’s establishment as a Methodist institution also presaged the larger city’s Protestant turn, a shift that Hellman himself facilitated through a loan that enabled Harrison Otis’s mid-1880s purchase of the Los Angeles Times.13 Largely through the Times’ relentless promotion of the city as a WASP preserve, “the native white Protestant American came to typify Los Angeles society,” while the previously “widespread acceptance of Jews in Los Angeles [began] to ebb.” 14 Though hardly as devastating or thoroughgoing as that which befell the Californios after American statehood, the social decline of L.A.’s Jews from the 1890s on was quite dramatic. Anti-Semitic currents that ebbed and flowed wherever Jews and gentiles interacted had never bypassed Los Angeles, as the “Jew town” epithet indicates. Hellman himself—who once confided to a gentile associate, “I have to be a better man than you are, because I am a Jew”—had personally been branded “an old Jew peddler” in his abortive run for the Democratic Senate candidacy in 1886.15 In 1891, as a buffer against a rising anti-Jewish tide, Hellman and other prominent local Jews started the nonexclusive but Jewish-geared Concordia Club. They did so none too soon, it turned out, as Jews would be barred from the city’s newly formed Jonathan Club in 1895 and, in 1897—despite its creation by a former banking associate of Hellman’s—from the Los Angeles Golf and Country Club as well.16 Historians Max Vorspan and Lloyd Gartner observe that by the end of the decade the exclusionary pattern “became complete. Exceptions could still be made for the Jewish . . . cornerstone [or] foundation Jews, . . . but even their children were kept outside the fathers’ clubs. A fashionable Jewish club hardly compensated.”17 The anti-Jewish tendency was neither limited to Los Angeles nor directed primarily at Jewish businessmen. It reflected a national trend sparked by the massive late nineteenth-century, early twentieth-century wave of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, including hundreds of thousands of Jews from the ghettos and shtetls of Poland and Russia.18 The first surge of eastern European immigration to Los Angeles occurred in the early 1900s, facilitated by New York City’s Industrial Removal Office, which sought to relieve the “fearful congestion” of Jewish immigrants in New York and other eastern cities.19 More than two thousand Jews moved to Los Angeles in the first decade of the twentieth century, a number almost equal to the entire Jewish population of twenty-five hundred in 1900 (out of a city total of 102,479).20

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The influx of their ostensible Ashkenazi cousins only compounded the insecurity of Los Angeles’s established German Jews. Besides the more recent arrivals’ largely working-class status, their exotic customs and attire were troubling reminders of the German Jews’ not-so-distant ghetto roots. Adding to the culture clash was its dark mirroring of that which the two groups had faced in the Old Country, where the only recently (since the 1800s) and still precariously “emancipated” Westjuden (German and Austrian Jews) had regarded the unreconstructed Ostjuden (eastern European Jews) as an embarrassment and a threat. When the pogroms of the late 1800s drove masses of Ostjuden into Germany, the Westjuden, like their American Jewish counterparts faced with a similar influx in the United States, may have wanted to help the Ostjuden, but “nobody wanted them in his own country.”21 “Brothers and strangers” is how Steven Aschheim characterizes the two Jewish groups’ deeply ambivalent relations, and the ambivalence cut both ways. How could the immigrant Ostjuden of Los Angeles help but feel resentful of the assimilated Westjuden, who, when they weren’t shunning the newcomers in public, were describing them as “schnorrers” (petty thieves) and “uncouth Asiatics” whose “invasion from the East . . . threatens to undo the work of two generations of American Jews.”22 “A Russian Jew or a descendant was like a barbarian to [the German Jews],” Rabbi Edgar Magnin, himself the scion of wealthy German Jews in San Francisco, admitted.23 Magnin, who would become chief rabbi at Los Angeles’s prestigious Wilshire Boulevard Temple in the 1920s, was being selfcritical, and he could afford to be. For the Ostjuden in his congregation consisted mainly not of the “great unwashed” that continued pouring into Los Angeles through the 1910s, boosting the city’s Jewish population to more than twenty thousand by 1920 (out of a city total of 576,000), but rather of the well-heeled Jewish moguls and their movie studio minions.24 The social parity attained in the synagogue by the (heavily Ostjüdische) Hollywood Jews quickly dissipated in the street, however, where they “stood apart,” socially and geographically, not only from the German Jews of then fashionable downtown Los Angeles but also from the lower-class, eastern European Jews who were turning once-upscale WASP Boyle Heights into a downscale Jewish enclave.25 “The Boyle Heights Jews ignored [the Hollywood Jews],” Neal Gabler explains. “The German Jews were rankled by them, since their visibility gave them importance out of all proportion to their numbers. To the German Jews, these newcomers from the East were no better, and in some respects worse, than the Eastern Europeans they reviled. They were the vulgar nouveau riche.”26 When German Jews built Hillcrest Country Club as a replacement for the decaying Concordia Club in 1920, they showed their disdain, and Jewish self-hatred, by denying membership to the Hollywood Jews. The intraethnic exclusion lasted until the 1930s, and even then, economic factors—a steep decline in membership caused by the Depression—rather than a change of heart propelled the new policy.27

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The Sheriff of Sin City Issues unrelated to internecine conflict also figured into Hillcrest’s initial snubbing of the Hollywood Jews. Concurrent with its westward migration, the film business confronted a new crisis of respectability unrelated to its theaters or studio heads but soon inseparably associated with them: the movie star. Upon American actors’ emergence from anonymity in 1910, the rhetoric and reality of star power, and its alliterative adjuncts—glamour, glitz, and gossip—vastly enhanced the box-office and merchandising potential of motion pictures. The aura of the stars’ onscreen images, combined with offscreen “access” to their sex lives and lavish lifestyles in advertisements and fan magazines, produced a chain of desire irrepressibly linked to consumer demand. But the inevitable frustration of desire coupled with the obligatory excesses of stardom also generated deep-seated resentment between idol and idol worshipper that required the sporadic sacrificial lamb. The first to be offered up was Charlie Chaplin, whose immense popularity survived his serial “jail-bait” marriages and affairs.28 So did that of superstars Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, whose “marriage of the century” overcame the stigmas of divorce and an (unproven) bigamy charge. Less fortunate were Mary’s brother Jack Pickford and Wallace Reid, marquee actors who both died from the effects of drug addiction; and director William Desmond Taylor, whose unsolved, sex-and-drug-embroiled murder crippled the careers of starlets Mabel Normand and Mary Miles Minter. Most tragic of all was the “scandal of the century” that befell Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle. Though acquitted in the “death-byrape” of wannabe starlet Virginia Rappe at a Prohibition-flouting bash in 1921, Arbuckle was convicted in the press and banned from the screen for life in 1922. The graver tragedy occurred ten years later: on the verge of a comeback after the lifting of the ban at the dawn of the sound era, the forty-six-year-old former superstar (and opera-quality singer) died of a heart attack. Arbuckle’s banning and pardon were the work of the industry’s new morals enforcer, Will Hays, whom the Hollywood moguls had hired during the Arbuckle flap. Hays had resigned his position as postmaster general in the Harding Administration to head the newly formed Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) and, in effect, became the sheriff of Sin City (fig. 14). The branding of the movies as immoral was nothing new, but the mixing of Wild West and biblical metaphors to impugn its production center was. Sodom and Gomorrah and New Babylon were other biblically tinged epithets that henceforth clung to Hollywood—as industry, geographical site, and state of mind—in the wake of the movie-star scandals. As much as the city’s old guard may have wished to dissociate itself from the Sin City epithet, images of lawlessness and depravity that attached themselves to Hollywood actually stretched back to Los Angeles’s pueblo origins. Noted for excessive ribaldry from its founding in the early Spanish period, Los Angeles devolved in the Mexican ranchero era into a parody of a Wild West town—a

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Figure 14. “Sheriff ” Will Hays, 1928. USC Special Collections Library.

“den of thieves, bursting with bordellos, gambling, and saloons.”29 Leonard Pitt compared the ciudad at this time to a Siberian work camp or Jamestown-like penal colony, where convicts “in a state of wretchedness exceeded only by the Indians” were sent to populate a desolate region regarded by the “upstanding citizens” of Mexico as “the end of the world.”30 After statehood the influx of Mexican and American ruffians passing through on their way to the Gold Rush tarred the city’s molting image beyond that of “any gold rush town; northern detractors thought of the place as combining jaded opulence with rampant drinking, murder, and brutality.”31 Nicknames such as “Lost Angels,” “Los Diablos,” and “Hell Town” came to describe “the toughest and most lawless city west of Santa Fe.”32 Banditry, vigilante justice, and murder (at least one every ten days in the early 1850s, in a city of fewer than three thousand) were commonplace.33 “With all our natural beauties and advantages,” the Los Angeles Star lamented, “there is no country where human life is of so little account.”34 The “pandemonium of races, gambling. vice, and crime” that made Los Angeles one of the “roughest, crudest cities in the United States” into the 1870s reached

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its peak, or nadir, in 1871.35 The Chinese Massacre of October 24, 1871, fueled by racism and xenophobia (and abetted by the police and even some of the city’s elite), left twenty-one Chinese dead and scores injured in the old Chinatown section near downtown.36 Adding injustice to injury, the handful of Anglo and Mexican perpetrators who were brought to trial, and convicted of manslaughter, had their verdicts reversed by the California Supreme Court, based on an 1863 law that prevented Chinese (as well as blacks and Indians) from testifying against whites. Moreover, the court’s ruling, indeed the massacre itself, actually heartened racist elements of the city, who, along with the Star, cheered the “glorious victory” over the “uncivilized barbarians” and “fiends in our midst” who “value life so lightly.”37 For the city’s more far-sighted, though not necessarily less-racist, boosters, the massacre was a public relations disaster. “Blood-stained Eden” was not the most promising way for the City of Angels to make headline news—for the first time— around the world.38 Damage control ensued, as in an Agricultural Association campaign counseling citizens “on the necessity of extending hospitality to [all] visitors.”39 This referred to all except for the immigrant other, of course—a caveat that would become more explicit in the Ramona-inspired booster campaigns of the 1880s and 1890s, culminating in Otis’s L.A. Times coronation of the city as the “white spot.”40 As hypocritical as the boosters’ agenda clearly was, it also overcompensated for the city’s near-century-long history of anarchic violence and debauchery, in which the Chinese Massacre, so the boosters hoped, would go down as “the last gasp of localized lawlessness.”41 From this perspective Hollywood’s latter-day Sin City evocation might have seemed a monstrous return of the repressed for the WASP elite, had its effect on the overall business climate not proved quite the opposite. The spate of movie-star scandals, and the licentiousness they evoked, only enhanced L.A.’s overall appeal, adding a seductive new element of mystery and allure. A modicum of decorum had to be maintained, however, and no one was better suited for the job than Will Hays, whose political pedigree and connections, but most of all his religious credentials, ideally positioned him to clean up Hollywood’s act. The film industry’s rapid rise from peripheral to core cultural enterprise by the 1920s had forced the issue of Jewish “control” onto center stage. As a politically connected Presbyterian and a deacon of the church to boot, Hays provided a pitch-perfect shield against the increasingly anti-Semitic attacks on the movie business, not only from fringe groups but also from respected religious and business leaders. Auto magnate Henry Ford led the charge, regularly reviling, in his Dearborn Independent newspaper, an industry that was “exclusively under the control of the Jewish manipulators of the public mind” and whose producers, because of their “Oriental view [that] is essentially different from the Anglo-Saxon . . . don’t know how filthy their stuff is—it is so natural to them.”42 Episcopalian minister and head of the International Reform Bureau William Sheafe Chase invoked God and country in accusing “the few producers who

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control the motion picture who are all Hebrews” with using “a marvelous power for good or evil in the world . . . for selfish commercial and unpatriotic purposes, even that it has been prostituted to corrupt government, to demoralize youth, and break down Christian religion.”43 A shaggy dog story of unknown vintage (abridged here) cuts to the chase of anti-Hollywoodism: God informs the heavenly host that the level of sinfulness in three cities—Paris, New York, and Hollywood—has reached Sodom and Gomorrah proportions. Saint Theresa pleads for mercy, claiming that as vile as these places may be, surely some good people reside there and should be spared. God agrees to hold the fire and brimstone if Saint Theresa can find even one such person. After a few days in Paris, and a few weeks in New York, she rings the Lord in Heaven: “Hello, God, this is Saint Theresa. You were right, both Paris and New York are wretched beyond belief, but a few brave souls in Paris, and one couple in New York, have bucked the trend.” God agrees to spare the two cities. After many months in Hollywood, still no word from Saint Theresa. God is getting worried. Finally, the phone rings and a languorous voice purrs, “God . . . this is Teri.”

Jokes were not about to placate the anti-Semites, nor was Hays able to silence them entirely; nothing short of a Stalinist purge of Hollywood’s Jewish element could have accomplished that. The Czar of all the Rushes, as Hays was dubbed, did manage, through his persona and his policies, to help the industry weather the puritanical storm. Not that he effected any appreciable change in the stars’ lifestyles or, until the 1930s, in film content (as we will see in the next chapter). But a morals clause added to actors’ contracts, a publicity campaign showing stars at their best behavior, and a list of “Don’ts and Be Carefuls” encouraging narrative restraint at least put a reformist stamp on the industry. The Sin City image stuck, however—and why the hell not, when the excitement it generated boosted box-office returns and tourist revenues. Moreover, with the movies’ appeal now extending to all classes, once wary Wall Street came aboard as well. The industry began swimming in capital, and the nouveau riche moguls found themselves hobnobbing with presidents, entertaining foreign royalty, and commanding the highest executive salaries in the nation—the highest in the case of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s production chief, Louis B. Mayer. Even L.A.’s old-money elite, enamored neither of filmdom’s practitioners nor its product but never above bending principle for profit, began to readjust its sights (and sites).44 Hollywood had become, in effect, a “silent Chamber of Commerce” in 1920s Los Angeles, as Harry Chandler’s Hollywoodland housing project demonstrates.45 A partial joining of the city’s two heads—if not quite a meeting of the minds—had taken place. By the 1930s, whatever embarrassment Hollywood had offered the city’s boosters was ancient history. As Stephanie Frank has detailed, a feud between the Hollywood district and the burgeoning Westside film center of Culver City

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(home of MGM) erupted in the mid-1930s. The conflict was not over any threat posed by the movies, however. To the contrary, it stemmed from Culver City’s proposed changing of its name to Hollywood. Boasting that it now produced 30 percent of motion pictures, Culver City adopted a municipal seal in 1936 proclaiming it “The Heart of Screenland,” then went further the following year with a slogan: “Culver City, Where Hollywood Films Are Made.” When its chamber of commerce proposed a full name change in July 1937, the city of Los Angeles stepped in. The L.A. City Council passed an ordinance in September 1937 establishing Hollywood’s legal boundaries—the first and only such designation in the city until the establishment of neighborhood councils in the 2000s.46

“Home of Contented Labor” As fortuitous as the bonding of Hollywood and Los Angeles may seem, a flashback to the movie capital’s genesis reveals how un-estranged the bedfellows had been from the start. Nopalera (from the nopal cactus that dotted the terrain) was the Mexican name for the hills and dales eight miles northwest of downtown L.A., combining sections of the Rancho Los Feliz and Rancho La Brea land grants, that would become the modern-day district of Hollywood. Incentive for turning Nopalera into a township began with the speculative real estate frenzy that gripped the region in the 1860s. Various agricultural tracts sprang up—Colegrove, Cahuenga, Sherman, among others—and a settler known as Greek George brought “the first hint of strangeness” to the place when he used camels to deliver supplies and mail from Fort Tejon in the northern Tehachapi Mountains.47 The second hint came when Harvey Wilcox filed a tract map with Los Angeles County in 1887 for a slice of central Nopalera he named Hollywood. The moniker itself wasn’t odd, possibly derived from a Chicago-area estate of that name, which Harvey’s wife Daieda learned about on a cross-country train trip.48 What is bizarre, though consistent with the “city with two heads” motif, is that the Wilcoxes were ardent prohibitionists who envisioned their soon-to-be-subdivided, still comparatively pastoral parcel as a “God-fearing suburb with a country club feel”(fig. 15).49 So much the stranger that the movie business actually helped foster the founders’ abstemious vision. When the Chicago-based Selig Polyscope Company opened L.A.’s first film studio downtown in 1909, the newly incorporated (since 1903) municipality of Hollywood housed not a single production company. Contra the Wilcoxes, however, two alcohol-serving establishments, the Six-Mile House (a.k.a. Casa Cahuenga) and Blondeau’s Tavern, had set up shop on the town’s fringes near the corner of Sunset and Gower. When David Horsley’s Nestor Film Company leased Blondeau’s Tavern as Hollywood’s first studio in 1911, one of the blemishes to the town’s puritanical image had been wiped clean, only to be defaced by an even nastier stain. The film studios that began flocking to Hollywood and environs in the months and years that followed, making mainly low-budget westerns and slapstick comedies in the streets and open fields, utterly disrupted Hollywood’s once

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Figure 15. Hollywood before Hollywood, circa 1890s. USC Special Collections Library.

tranquil atmosphere. Moreover, actors of any sort, much less movie actors, had never been held up as models of moral rectitude. “No dogs or movies,” the latter an epithet for anyone involved in the film business, appeared in local rental signs and advertisements. “I knew what it meant to be discriminated against,” choreographer Agnes de Mille, daughter of director William de Mille (and niece of Cecil B. DeMille), recalled in an interview, “because I was a ‘movie,’ you see.”50 As a concession to the teetotalers, movie companies banned liquor, as well as cigarettes and cigars, from studio lots (though the bans were seldom enforced).51 As for after-hours entertainment, movie people were obliged to travel to bars and clubs in other parts of Los Angeles, which the Hollywood Citizen newspaper branded—in an ironic nod to the larger city’s past but also to Hollywood’s future—“villages of commercialized hell.”52 The reason movie studios settled on such a seemingly uninviting locale in the first place can be capsulized in two words, “open shop,” and one year: 1910. California’s advantages in general, over similarly sunny-climed regions in Florida, Arizona, Texas, or even Cuba (all of which served as interim production sites) lay primarily in the Golden State’s unmatched breadth and beauty of terrain. The first feature film partly shot in a Hollywood studio, Cecil B. DeMille’s Squaw Man (1914), for example, had found its desert, mountain, oceanfront, and hillside locations within a hundred miles of Los Angeles. Why the movie industry gravitated to southern California, rather than to the San Francisco Bay area, is more counterintuitive.

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In 1910 the state’s most populous and sophisticated city, San Francisco also counted a prominent industry lobbyist, newspaper magnate, and movie producer, William Randolph Hearst, in its camp. What drew the studios to Los Angeles was an elixir more potent than media influence or political clout: its long-held and recently affirmed position as “the nation’s leading open-shop, non-union city.”53 L.A’.s antilabor climate, plus a steady supply of minority immigrant workers more tolerant of lower pay and harsher working conditions, “kept wages low, from a fifth to a third below the prevailing rates in San Francisco, and in some cases half the wage levels in New York.”54 That L.A.’s industrial growth hinged on a non-Anglo labor force that threatened the city’s vaunted racial “purity” was a contradiction the “white spot” could (and would) manage through segregated housing.55 As for a fledgling film industry on the verge of expansion, and with increasing need for skilled craftspeople, “lower costs became an increasingly important factor in locating production in Los Angeles.”56 But the city’s bargain-basement wages came at a price. Keeping a lid on labor during the union movement’s ascension at the turn of the century was no easy task. Thus, along with its business-friendly aura came notoriety as “the bloodiest arena in the Western World for Capital and Labor.”57 Los Angeles hadn’t started the “class war,” whose coinage Louis Adamic dates to 1826 and credits to evangelist Frances Wright, who preached in New York City against “the social and economic evils of the period.”58 The battlefront shifted in the 1860s to the mining fields of Pennsylvania, and in the 1870s to the stockyards of Chicago, culminating in the Haymarket Riots of 1886. But the bomb blast that sparked the Chicago riots, killing seven police and injuring sixty, with casualties among the workers “perhaps twice, possibly three times that many,” eerily foreshadowed events in downtown Los Angeles on October 1, 1910.59 A 1909 article in the Socialist Journal, commemorating the twenty-second anniversary of the Haymarket bombing, declared, “No more powerful blow was ever struck for capitalism than when the bomb was thrown on Haymarket Square. It set the labor movement of America back a generation, and its effects have not yet disappeared.”60 The dynamite that exploded at the Los Angeles Times building the following year, killing twenty Times workers and injuring one hundred, was, for Adamic, even more dramatic, “if not the most important episode in the history of the American labor movement.”61 A ceasefire in what the Times called the “Forty Year War” of capital and labor followed the Los Angeles bombing and the subsequent conviction of the confessed union-activist brothers John J. and James B. McNamara.62 And for a change, the Times’ hyperbole was an understatement: in Los Angeles, at least, the ceasefire turned to outright surrender (fig. 16). The class war’s climaxing at the Times building was no coincidence. L.A. had become the nation’s antiunion bulwark in the 1890s largely through the efforts of Times owner Otis, “the most savage and effective enemy of labor unionism in the country.” 63 General Otis, as he called himself (even before actually attaining that rank in the Spanish American War), relished the class war’s military accoutrements. He named his Wilshire Boulevard mansion “the

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Figure 16. The bombed L.A. Times building, 1910. USC Special Collections Library.

Bivouac,” “mounted a cannon on the hood of his limousine,” and modeled the Times building on a fortress, “complete with battlements, sentry boxes, and firing holes.”64 Otis’s son-in-law and assistant publisher Harry Chandler became the general’s devoted military aide-de-camp, and the Merchants and Manufacturers Association (M&M), composed of the city’s top bankers and business leaders (including several German Jews), his joint chiefs of staff.65 The avowedly openshop Citizens’ Alliance aided in recruitment, and within weeks six thousand militant antiunion employers joined the campaign. The prounion San Francisco Bulletin succinctly described the M&M’s modus operandi: “The Merchants and Manufacturers Association has only one confession of faith, one creed: ‘We will employ no union man.’ The M&M has only one command: ‘You shall employ no union man.’ The penalty for disobedience to this command is financial coercion, boycott, and ruin.”66 Union organizers’ acceptance of the Otis-M&M connection as an article of faith is evidenced in the discovery of dynamite, after the Times bombing but before detonation, at both Otis’s Bivouac and the home of M&M secretary Morris Zeehandelaar.67 The Fiesta de Los Angeles of 1894, organized by the M&M as a Ramona-esque promotional spectacle, also served as partial distraction from “the fi rst major outburst of the city’s emerging labor movement.”68 As colorful floats paraded down Main Street, a nationwide railroad strike of Pullman workers immobilized Los Angeles and left recently harvested crops rotting. Once the festival was

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over, rioting broke out, with the Times building “the center of the conflict.”69 The deployment of six armed U.S. infantry battalions was required to stop the bloodshed, thereby also blasting to smithereens the boosters’ specious city motto: “Home of Contented Labor.” In 1903 a Central Labor Council, representing every labor group in the city and controlled by San Francisco labor leader (and future mayor) Patrick McCarthy, was formed, with the express purpose of raising Los Angeles’s wages to San Francisco’s union levels. Dozens of strikes broke out, as did a war of words between the rival anti- and prounion cities. Otis attacked “the henchmen of the corrupt San Francisco labor bosses” and urged “all decent people” to “rally around the flag of industrial liberty in this crisis when the welfare of the whole city is at stake.” “If the San Francisco gorillas succeed,” Otis ominously concluded, “Los Angeles will be another San Francisco—dead!”70 Senator (later Governor) Hiram Johnson, a San Franciscan and California’s leading Progressive Republican politician, shot back: “We have nothing so low, nothing so debased, nothing so infamous in San Francisco as Harrison Gray Otis. . . . He is the one thing that all California looks at when in looking at southern California they see anything that is disgraceful, corrupt, crooked and putrescent.”71 By 1907 the threat Otis and his cohorts posed to organized labor had taken on national significance. That year’s American Federation of Labor’s (AFL) convention singled out Otis and the M&M as “the spearhead of an orchestrated campaign to destroy the entire American labor movement,” with “‘unlimited financial backing’ from capitalists throughout the country.” As a countermeasure, the AFL established a “war fund” specifically “for use in attacking the Los Angeles Times.”72 Taking their cue from the AFL, San Francisco’s laborites, according to Adamic, “decided to dynamite the Los Angeles Times,” and by framing Otis for the deed, “they would blow him up and capture the city.”73 Indeed, before the McNamaras’ eleventh-hour confessions, socialist mayoral candidate Job Harriman had been favored to win the race, based on widespread suspicion that Otis was behind his own building’s bombing. What the explosion ended up capturing, however, besides its chief perpetrators, was the imagination of the country.

The Trial of the Century Even without the devastating blow the Times-bombing trial dealt to the local labor movement (and boost it gave to the fledgling film industry), the trial would rank among the most epochal in the history of American jurisprudence. The cast of characters alone reads like a Who’s Who. Clarence Darrow, renowned “attorney of the damned”—so dubbed by Lincoln Steffens for Darrow’s defense of Eugene Debs during the Pullman strikes, and later of Leopold and Loeb and John Scopes—held the brief for the McNamaras.74 Another eminent attorney, Earl Rogers, whose near-perfect record in murder trials inspired fictional super-lawyer Perry Mason, served as special prosecutor, and also acted as liaison between the M&M and the prosecution’s chief detective, Billy Burns. A superhero in his own

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right, Burns was deemed, by the New York Times, “the only detective of genius whom the country has produced,” and by the London Spectator, “the American Sherlock Holmes.” In the bombing case, Burns invented the first “bug” for secretly recording conversations, and in 1921 he would become the first head of the (later Federal) Bureau of Investigation.75 Celebrity muckraker Lincoln Steffens also made a cameo appearance, one that both reinforced and defied his radical provocateur’s image and proved crucial to the trial’s resolution. Initially arguing, in an article titled “Justifiable Dynamiting,” that labor had been driven to desperate measures by the conspiracy of capital, Steffens eventually brokered a deal with the M&M (who were desperate to prevent Harriman’s mayoral election) to accept prison terms (rather than death sentences) for the McNamaras, in exchange for their confessions.76 As if the A-list cast and thriller plot weren’t Hollywood enough, the emergent Los Angeles film industry actually came into play. This uncanny convergence of theatrical elements wasn’t lost on author Howard Blum, who turned them into a screenplay-like historical novel based on the Times bombing, American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, the Birth of Hollywood, and the Crime of the Century. Blum emphasizes the presence of D. W. Griffith in Los Angeles at the time of the bombing and trial, and the influence of these events on the pioneering director’s work. Griffith had indeed moved his Biograph company operations to downtown Los Angeles in 1910. The same year he even shot scenes in the Hollywood Hills and in the Cahuenga Pass for In Old California, “making it the first dramatic film shot in Hollywood proper.”77 Also in 1910, as previously described, Griffith directed the first film version of Ramona. Like Darrow at the trial bench, Griffith behind the camera relentlessly (if prejudicially, in his 1915 pro-South Civil War epic The Birth of a Nation) championed the underdog.78 Besides Ramona’s brief for the American Indian, Griffith’s Child of the Ghetto (1910) and The Lily of the Tenements (1911) deplored slum conditions, and A Corner in Wheat (1909) and The Usurer (1910) indicted capitalist finance.79 Although he may have sided with the defense in the Times bombing trial, Griffith’s work intersected, at least indirectly, with the prosecution as well. While in New York in 1909, Blum reports, Griffith made a short film—replicating a reallife kidnapper’s modus operandi—that helped Billy Burns catch the culprit.80 His posttrial Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912), however, veered back toward the defense. Credited as the first American gangster film, the movie bore traces of the bombing trial in its sympathetic treatment of the film’s mobster antihero, who, though a criminal, could not “be truly guilty” if he “never had the opportunity to be innocent.”81 But the Hollywood connection to the Times bombing goes beyond Griffith. In the midst of the bombing trial, the AFL had produced its own film, A Martyr to the Cause (1911), specifically in support of the beleaguered McNamaras. A docudrama on the bombing case, the film portrays the accused brothers as innocent victims “of open shop militants” and urges the public to withhold its judgment “until opportunity for a full and fair defense has been afforded.”82 Inspired by

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the AFL film, Frank Wolfe, a socialist L.A. city council candidate and editor of the prolabor Los Angeles Daily Herald, opened the Socialist Movie Theater downtown, pledging to show only films “depicting the real life and ideals of the working class.”83 In 1913, too late to save the McNamaras or the socialist cause, Wolfe nevertheless wrote and directed his own bombing-related film, From Dusk to Dawn, starring Darrow as himself. Although it accurately references Darrow’s own acquittal of bribery charges stemming from the bombing case (his defense lawyer in the two bribery cases was none other than Earl Rogers), the film’s ending, in which a falsely convicted laborite is elected California governor, was classic Hollywood—in more ways than one.84 The irony of From Dusk to Dawn’s use of Hollywood tropes to bolster a prounion cause, whose setback crucially spurred Hollywood’s emergence as the movie capital, could not be starker. The L.A.-based business’s windfall may have come at labor’s expense, yet the movies’ ability to be all things to all people cut across class lines as no mass medium had done before. Out of the smoke and ashes of the class war had risen the smoke-and-mirrors industry par excellence, one that comported remarkably with Los Angeles’s hucksterist history. What Ramona and the Spanish Fantasy Past had been to the region’s Yankee boosters, the Wild West and the American Dream became for Hollywood, nowhere more so than in early U.S. cinema’s most popular genre, the western (to which Ramona also belongs). Southern California’s open spaces and rugged terrain had been one of the primary lures for the swath of film companies, large and small, that specialized in westerns in the first decades of the twentieth century. The classical western ethos of rugged individualism and the taming of the frontier also replicated the region’s Social Darwinist narrative of capitalism’s inevitable conquest of Indian heathens and Hispanic feudal lords. And just as the boosters had preserved the missions and revived the El Camino Real, in their own image and largely as tourist enterprises, Hollywood studios reconstructed western towns as backdrops for popular entertainment and patriotic spectacle.85 Their mutual penchant for boosterist hyperbole is perhaps Los Angeles’s and Hollywood’s most natural fit. Compare, for example, the M&M’s slogans for the region in the 1920s—“Land of Eternal Spring,” “Where Nature Helps Industry Most,” “The Climactic Capital of the New World”—with the preamble to a 1914 William S. Hart oater: “The West! The Land of vast golden silences where God sits enthroned on the purple peaks and man stands face to face with his soul.”86 Just how well the city’s two heads learned to sing a cappella is exemplified in the fate of noted socialist Upton Sinclair’s California gubernatorial bid in 1934. Eerily echoing, in reverse, From Dusk to Dawn’s Hollywood ending, Sinclair’s run for governor, on behalf of his End Poverty in California (EPIC) campaign, would be derailed by Hollywood, with the backing of the Times’ Harry Chandler (Otis died in 1917). A seeming electoral shoo-in, as Job Harriman had been before the McNamara confessions, Sinclair would fall victim to a last-ditch smear campaign orchestrated by MGM’s Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg. Chandler’s paper

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had taken care of the local propaganda, but only a movie studio had the means to beam the message statewide. MGM did so through bogus newsreels and documentaries warning of armies of hobos gearing to invade California once Sinclair’s Soviet-style regime began offering tax-payer-funded largesse to the masses. Studio employees, in addition, were coerced into donating a day’s pay to Sinclair’s, ultimately triumphant, Republican rival.87 The anti-Sinclair campaign may have been a (momentary) last hurrah, given that the tide was turning toward labor on a national level by the mid-1930s, even making inroads in Hollywood with the addition of actors, directors, and writers guilds to the already extant crafts unions. What the campaign did bring into stark relief, given continuing hostility to unionism, and progressive politics in general, at most of the studios, was a city with two heads within the film industry itself. The bifurcation here, as with any mass medium—between the bourgeois and bohemian, commercial and creative, popular and populist—had always been part of the movie business. With Hollywood’s rise to world prominence in the 1920s, and especially as the studio system reached its apogee in the 1930s and 1940s, this Janus-faced aspect would come increasingly to the fore.

chapter 4




What Price Hollywood?

“Nobody dreamed that a day was close at hand,” Anita Loos recalled from her days as a silent-era screenwriter, “when that one word Hollywood would express the epitome of glamour, sex, and sin in their most delectable forms.” 1 This tantalizing image not only enhanced the marketability of Hollywood’s films, film stars, and physical location; it all but ordained that the movie capital itself become the object of cinematic scrutiny. A few comedy shorts depicting Los Angeles as a prelapsarian “land of cinematic make-believe,” such as Mabel Normand’s Mabel’s Dramatic Career (1913) and Charlie Chaplin’s A Film Johnnie and The Masquerader (both 1914), cropped up alongside Hollywood’s rise to prominence as the nation’s new production center. 2 The plots of these early self-reflexive films, much as the boomtown boosterism of the late 1800s, Leo Braudy observes, “emphasized the movies as the potential realization of dreams of psychic as much as physical health in the land of perpetual sun. The performers may have been stars, but they were also in some way normal and accessible, just as Hollywood presented itself as a heightened mirror of normal America.”3 In the wake of the movie-star scandals of the late 1910s and early 1920s a series of films, such as Souls for Sale (1923), Hollywood (1923), Merton of the Movies (1924), and Ella Cinders (1927), “balanced a celebration of Hollywood’s romance with recognition of the potential pitfalls of its vanity and material wealth.”4 Cameo appearances by actual stars added “realistic” embellishment to several of these films, such as Hollywood and Show People (1928), the former featuring “some eighty familiar and not-so-familiar movie faces.”5 The effects of the Depression, on Hollywood and the country at large, necessarily rubbed off on the self-reflexive films of the 1930s, some of whose plots began to dwell on the industry’s seamier side. A newly introduced character contributed substantially to the gloomier tone: the has-been or creatively frustrated actor or director, who, while not negating the Hollywood aspirant’s glamorous rise to the top, cast a pall on it nevertheless.6 83

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What Price Hollywood? (1932) is a key example of the darkening trend. Lighthearted lampooning and happy ending notwithstanding, the film betrays a rotten core. Based on a story by reporter Adela Rogers St. John (daughter of attorney Earl Rogers) and starring Constance Bennett, Lowell Sherman, and Neil Hamilton, What Price Hollywood? is also the first of the A Star Is Born series. Three remakes with that title were released: in 1937 (starring Janet Gaynor and Fredric March), in 1954 (starring Judy Garland and James Mason), and in 1976 (starring Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson). All four films pivot on the meteoric rise of a movie star (music star, in Streisand’s case) and concurrent decline of her movie-star/rock-star husband (director-friend in What Price, Hollywood?), who eventually commits suicide.7 The main difference between What Price Hollywood? and its Star Is Born progeny is that the latter compress the former’s two “significant others”—the suicide victim, Max Carey (Sherman), and the husband, Lonnie Borden (Hamilton)—into a single character. While the compaction tightens the narrative and raises the dramatic stakes of the suicide, it also tilts the suicides’ causality toward career and gender rivalry and away from Hollywood itself. Dual blows to their celebrity and masculinity clearly motivate the three Star Is Born husbands’ alcoholism and suicides. Carey’s depression and heavy drinking precede his “discovery” of the ingénue, Mary Evans (Bennett), and his career slide, leaving a motivational gap for his downward spiral that begs to be filled by the Hollywood system. What Price Hollywood? offers a few hints, besides its title, at the culture industry’s complicity in Carey’s emotional breakdown. Showing contempt both for the dream factory’s glitzy trappings and its low-cultural demands early on, Carey punctuates a radio interview at his movie’s Grauman’s Chinese premiere by mimicking flatulence; later he tells his semiliterate studio head, Julius Saxe (Gregory Ratoff), that he refuses to do “another magic kingdom picture—get some other boob to direct it.” Thus, while What Price Hollywood? ends not with the director’s death but with a reconciliation between Mary and her briefly estranged husband, Carey’s Hollywood-inspired suicide adds a troubling note that the film’s improbably happy denouement cannot entirely mute, indeed only further amplifies. A later wave of anti-Hollywood novels such as The Day of the Locust (Nathanael West, 1939), Hope of Heaven (John O’Hara, 1939), What Makes Sammy Run? (Budd Schulberg, 1941), and The Little Sister (Raymond Chandler, 1949), and films such as Sunset Blvd. (1950), In a Lonely Place (1950), The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), and The Goddess (1958), would paint the movie industry in ever more “pustular shades of Dorian Gray.”8 But Carey’s tragic figure in What Price Hollywood? provided the undercoat for the antimyth of Hollywood, as “the epitome of everything that is meretricious in American life,” that would become “a permanent part of our national folklore.”9

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House of Mirrors If the backstory to Carey’s alcoholism in What Price Hollywood? is the film’s structuring absence, mirror symbolism is its narrative excess. The mirror’s metaphoric relation to doubling and splitting, reality versus illusion, and the film identification process is compounded in any self-reflexive Hollywood film. In What Price Hollywood? it proliferates to mise en abyme (infinitely reflective) proportions. The opening scene in Mary’s modest, prestardom apartment introduces the mirror’s multiple facets in a set piece that could be captioned “In the movies was where you wanted to be.”10 With hand and dressing-table mirrors as props, Mary plays movie star. Mimicking fan magazine ads for “sheer silk lingerie” and “kissable lipstick,” she slides on hose and paints her lips. As a capper, she covers Greta Garbo’s face in a magazine two-shot with Clark Gable and, puckering her lips to the mirror image of her screen idol, coos with a Swedish accent: “I love you, I do!” The mirror motif ’s less glamorous side is introduced, appropriately, in its first connection to the suicidal Carey. Following his drunkenly flatulent night at the Grauman’s premiere, Carey is so horrified at the dissipated image staring back at him next morning in his bathroom mirror that he knocks over a whiskey bottle and nearly cuts his foot on the broken glass (fig. 17). Later, in a climactic déjà vu, after Mary bails him out of jail, Carey’s confrontation with his even more ravaged mirror image in Mary’s house triggers a montage of memory flashes and the gunshot that ends his life. The mirror’s identification with the media brings out its most sinister aspect. Portrayed via sleazy gossip hounds and paparazzi and as a venal, bottom-feeding institution, the media—more specifically, the Hollywood Mirror newspaper—emerges as the film’s archvillain. The studio’s stifling of Carey’s creativity may have spelled the director’s doom, but the yellow press’s gluttony for celebrity dirt gobbles up everyone in its path—even Mary. The Mirror’s running commentary on her alleged affair with Carey, while a circulation bonanza for the paper, leads to a near career-ending scandal for Mary after his death in her mansion. Mirror symbolism even extends to the name of one of the characters, studio boss Julius Saxe’s secretary, Miss Spiegel—Spiegel meaning “mirror” in German. The German aspect carries additional significance for Saxe, given his character’s construction—Jewish name, loud voice, thick foreign accent—as the archetypal immigrant mogul. Asked to say a few words for the radio audience at the premiere, Saxe personalizes the mogul parallel by paraphrasing Louis B. Mayer’s recent Academy Award acceptance speech: Mayer: “I’m proud to be the recipient of this award and proud to be the head of a studio.” 11 Saxe: “I’m very proud of this picture of mine, and I’m very proud to be the head of an organization that produces pictures like this.” That Saxe is a mogul composite rather than a dead ringer for Mayer is disclosed when he immediately commits

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Figure 17. A horrified Max Carey (Lowell Sherman) mirrored in What Price Hollywood? Frame grab.

two Goldwynisms (malapropisms in the manner of producer Samuel Goldwyn): He introduces Carey to the radio audience as the “genuous” behind the picture and asks him to say a few words “into the microscope.” Beyond the comic relief Saxe provides, his overall portrait, and by association that of the Jewish studio head, is sympathetic. He is shown as hardworking (eating a lunch of milk and crackers at his desk while poring over a script) and hard-nosed (he eventually fires Carey for his alcoholism), but not hard-hearted. When Mary implores him to give Carey another chance, Saxe demurs, “I’ve let sentiment interfere with good sense for too long a time.” Sentiment and good sense, at least from a business standpoint, combine in the film’s deus ex machina ending, which, precisely in failing to mirror reality, is a perfect fun-house reflection of the mainstream Hollywood film. Recently divorced, with her career jeopardized by the Carey scandal, and fearful that Lonnie may try to take custody of their infant son, Jackie, Mary flees (replicating Lonnie’s reason for leaving her) “as far from Hollywood and all its inmates” as possible. Lonnie locates her at her French retreat, however, and kidnaps Jackie—or so it seems. Actually, it was only a ploy to get to Mary so that he could tell her how much he loves her. He also relays Saxe’s story idea for Mary’s movie comeback: about a woman who goes to jail for the man she loves. As if the film-imitating-film scenario weren’t Hollywood-ending enough, Lonnie and Mary’s reconciliatory kiss seals the deal.

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Reconciling High and Low Beyond honoring classical Hollywood’s narrative contract with the audience, Lonny and Mary’s curtain-closing smooch served a broader ideological function. Similar to the Depression-era screwball comedy’s resolution of class confl ict through romantic coupling of members of the upper and lower classes, the classbased battle of the sexes in What Price Hollywood? speaks to cultural conflict specific to Hollywood-era Los Angeles. Lonnie is East Coast old money: wellbred, cultured, and refined; Mary, even as a movie star, can’t shake her common origins, and, like many of early Hollywood’s parvenus, remains untutored in upper-crust taste. Lonnie is introduced on a polo field, a venue that serves two rhetorical purposes: first, it references the reality of the moguls’ own meteoric rise “from Poland to polo in a single generation”; second, it allows for the millionaire playboy who “hates Hollywood blondes” and the tawdry business they represent to be knocked off his high horse.12 Lonnie is clearly a stand-in for L.A.’s eastern and midwestern WASP elite that initially turned up its nose at “the movies,” only to eventually accept the business, if not the businessmen, as a lucrative addendum to the city’s boosterist agenda. Mary represents the Hollywood everygirl, first as a microcosm of the movies’ mass audience and later in her “America’s Pal” movie-star persona. What Price Hollywood? supports some of Lonnie’s qualms about Tinseltown; indeed, they’re copped to by its own inhabitants. On the announcement of his engagement to Mary, Saxe exclaims, “Who is going to be foolish enough to marry a picture star!” To which Carey adds, half-jokingly, that a movie star’s marriage has as much chance to last as “my liver.” Doing the standard Hollywood doubletake, however, Saxe turns the intimate wedding Mary and Lonnie had planned into a media circus in “the biggest church in Beverly Hills,” where, to the mogul’s delight, “we broke all the house records!” The wedding is further marred when the crowd, driven to a frenzy by celebrity fetishism and the newsreel cameras, nearly stampedes the newlyweds, causing Mary to faint. Sax then delivers the coup de grâce, demanding that she and Lonnie postpone their honeymoon for the sake of some reshoots: “Release dates don’t wait on weddings.” Even the couple’s attempt at a stolen kiss is cut short by a paparazzo’s camera flash. Lonnie’s frustration builds in the reshoot scene, whose purpose, again, is twofold: showcasing Mary’s (and Constance Bennett’s) acting chops but, equally important, exposing the enormous effort, considerable expertise, and massive number of workers that goes into making movie magic. As often shabby and superficial as its product may be, the scene proclaims, Hollywood is, in the best sense, an industry. As Mary sings a Marlene Dietrich–style chanson in a nightclub set filled with extras, we cut, documentary-style, to the large crew of craftspeople pulling the puppet strings: cameraman, focus puller, dolly grip, boom operator, sound recorder, best boy et al. The long hours required of star and subaltern alike

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are indicated when, as Carey stubbornly calls for yet another take as midnight approaches, Lonnie complains that the theater tickets he and Mary had for the night have gone to waste. A subsequent discussion about taste and etiquette between Mary and Lonnie reveals that the opposites that initially attracted—WASP aristocracy and Hollywood nouveau riche—remain at odds. Mary is reading Emily Post because “there are so many things I don’t know,” but she also takes umbrage at Lonnie’s snobbish attitude toward her show business friends: “They’re human and kind and you don’t have to be so darn snooty about them!” Lonnie’s snootiness turns boorish in the next scene. Annoyed by the crassness of a fan-magazine interviewer (“Do you sleep in separate bedrooms?”“Was your love the thoughtful, reasoning kind, or the blind, passionate, uhhh kind of love?”), Lonnie dishes out some crassness of his own. When the interviewer, Miss DuPont, asks whether he has a picture displaying his “wonderful physique,” Lonnie retorts, “No, but I have my appendix in a bottle in the next room!” and stomps out. Miss DuPont gets the message. Her published article on “The Lives of Famous Screen Lovers” places photos of Mary and Lonnie on separate pages, foreshadowing their estrangement to come. “Filthy rag!” Lonnie sneers, not at the magazine but at the latest Hollywood Mirror insinuation about Mary and Carey. And the alleged peccadilloes have their effect. When the incorrigible Carey barges in on Lonnie and Mary’s bedroom in the middle of the night, the now ex-director’s comment, “Nothing’s funny to that bird—he doesn’t understand people like us,” is affirmed by Lonnie’s farewell address to Mary: “I’m going as far from Hollywood and all its inmates as I can get! We don’t live in the same world!” “The world I live in, people are human beings, not stuffed shirts!” Mary counters. But Lonnie has the last word: “You live in a world where people are cheap and vulgar without knowing it, and if you weren’t cheap and vulgar yourself, you couldn’t stand it!” Voila and abracadabra, after Carey’s suicide and Mary’s scandal-provoked escape to France, Lonnie has learned to “stand it.” Hollywood’s rhetorical pull was too strong. Just as Los Angeles’s old guard, from necessity and its own interests, ended up making peace with the film business, Lonnie, in merging heads and touching lips with Mary’s in the final image, has given in to the classical Hollywood system’s narrative demands.

Delusions of Grandeur Just how resilient the demands remained, but also how ripe for revision they had become, is evident in two self-reflexive Hollywood fi lms from the early post–World War II period: Sunset Blvd. and Singin’ in the Rain (1952). Both films reflect, though in opposite ways, the postwar crisis in the movie industry. During Hollywood’s “golden age” (1930–46), movies not only rode out the Depression and World War II but experienced their greatest box-office boom. After the war the situation was reversed. While the nation at large experienced an economic

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upswing, Hollywood underwent near financial collapse. Owing to a variety of factors—suburbanization, the baby boom, the forced divestiture of studio-owned theaters, and, most devastatingly, the advent of television—domestic movie attendance dropped by 50 percent from the late 1940s to the mid-1950s, with no end to the downward trend in sight.13 Sunset Blvd.’s response to the industry’s decline was to view it through a glass darkly, in the process producing one of the first film noirs about Hollywood. Singin’ in the Rain chose to hype Hollywood with Hollywood. By parodying an earlier industrial crisis—the late-1920s transition to sound, from which the golden age emerged—it posited a 1950s overcoming of adversity and a triumphant return to form. Richard Lehan identifies two similar opposing strands in the Hollywood novel of the classical through early decline periods. The one, spawned by West’s The Day of the Locust and elaborated in Chandler’s The Little Sister, tends toward the violent and apocalyptic. The other, associated most with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon (1941), waxes nostalgic. In West’s and Chandler’s dystopian vision Hollywood, as industry and place, is where “fantasies warmed by the sun . . . give way to violence and death.”14 The facade, or false front, is, for West and Chandler, a master metaphor for the dream factory’s “metaphysical deception.”15 Hollywood, like Los Angeles as a whole, is seen as “a city of surfaces,” “a metropolis of lies,” “an empire built on a spurious foundation, decked in tinsel, and beguiled by its own illusory promises.”16 Drawn to the film capital by its “promise of high salaries and steady work,” once they arrived, David Fine observes, the “symbolic center” of West’s writing, especially, became “the movie studio.” The region’s landscape “appears as a vast annex to the back lot, a spillover onto the city streets of what [West] calls the ‘dream dump.’”17 The inevitable broken dreams and disillusionment from all the hyperbole and heightened expectations produced “a capacity for violence [in their work] that is almost atavistic, as if all restraint had given way at the edge of the Pacific.”18 Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon, in contrast, “is one of the few American novels to deal seriously and positively” with the film business—counterintuitive considering that Fitzgerald would lie dying in Malibu, “attended only by [gossip columnist] Sheilah Graham, while he ground out college-weekend movies.”19 Although he duly acknowledges the fraudulence and deceit of the “kingdom of illusions,” the “theatrical impermanence” and the “counterfeit architectural design” (of the movie capital and the larger city), Fitzgerald’s disappointment with classical-era Hollywood is more bittersweet than embittered; the decrepitude he observes is creeping rather than chronic, bathed in a forlorn but romantic glow. Still holding a torch for a time when Hollywood was seemingly a nobler place, Fitzgerald sees it “as neither Eden nor Gomorrah, but as an insular, provincial community in which real people live and work.”20 His most devastating critique is reserved for those who would condemn Hollywood without understanding it. Despite their literary cachet, none of the above Hollywood novels would be adapted for the screen anytime close to their publication dates. The Day of the Locust and The Last Tycoon wouldn’t be filmed until 1976; and The Little Sister,

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unlike Chandler’s several other L.A. noirs, has yet to be made. The rhetorical impact of the novels thus remained muted during the periods in which they were written. The forked paths they charted would be traversed cinematically instead by Sunset Blvd. and Singin’ in the Rain. If the real and illusory are “fused” in The Little Sister, as Liahna Babener remarks, Sunset Blvd. has the ontological advantage of the film medium’s “built-in” bond with physical reality.21 Indeed, it is imperative to Sunset Blvd.’s indictment of Hollywood’s shallowness and fakery that it be grounded in the real world. True to the genre, What Price Hollywood? generously sprinkled self-reflexivity with iconic Tinseltown locations: the Brown Derby restaurant, Grauman’s Chinese Theater, Hollywood Hills mansions, and an actual, if fictionally named, movie studio. Sunset Blvd., befitting the hard-bitten Hollywood times and a social realist turn toward grittier themes, tilts toward less-glamorous Hollywood locations such as Schwab’s Drugstore and a moth-eaten movie-star mansion. The stars that play themselves—Buster Keaton, Anna Q. Nilsson, and H. B. Warner—are all over the hill. And two of the main characters—former silent screen star Norma Desmond and once famed film director Max von Mayerling—are played by reallife analogues Gloria Swanson and Erich von Stroheim. In a striking reversal of the mirror imagery at the start of What Price Hollywood? reality and disillusion collide in Sunset Blvd.’s opening scene. The film begins on the eponymous symbol of Hollywood glamour, displayed not in flashing neon or a dignified street sign, but in faded painted letters on a grimy, leaf-strewn curb one step from the gutter. Next to be cut down to size are the media, which, though not quite the archvillains they played in What Price Hollywood?, are vile enough. As police cars arrive at the Sunset Boulevard mansion whose obligatory swimming pool contains murdered screenwriter Joe Gillis (William Holden)—eerily captured “from below” via a mirror placed beneath his body in the pool (fig. 18)—Gillis’s otherworldly voice-over proceeds to fill in the backstory: “You’ll read about it in the late editions, I’m sure. You’ll get it over your radio and see it on television. But before you hear it all distorted and blown out of proportion, before those Hollywood columnists get their hands on it, maybe you’d like to hear the facts, the whole truth.” Cecil B. DeMille (playing himself) picks up the media-bashing theme midway into Gillis’s flashback-related tale of how, as a groveling screenwriter, he became Desmond’s reluctant lover and script doctor on a film project she hoped would prove her return ticket to stardom. When Desmond meets with DeMille, whom she mistakenly believes is interested in the script, and an assistant brings up her reputation for being a terror on the set, DeMille corrects him: “Only towards the end. You know, a dozen press agents working overtime can do terrible things to the human spirit.” Gillis’s narration near film’s end supplies the coup de grâce to the publicity hounds. After the deranged Desmond, unable to face Gillis’s leaving her (“No one leaves a star—that’s what makes one a star!”), shoots him in the back and he topples into the pool we found him in at the outset, his disembodied self shows uncommon mercy. Wrath is directed instead at the army of reporters

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Figure 18. The murdered Joe Gillis (William Holden) mirrored in Sunset Blvd. Photofest.

and newsreel crews that descend on the murder scene: “Those heartless so-andsos, what would they do to Norma? Even if she got off in court—crime of passion, temporary insanity—those headlines would kill her: ‘Forgotten Star a Slayer,’ ‘Aging Actress,’ ‘Yesterday’s Glamour Queen’!” The lethal pejoratives also apply, allegorically, to Sunset Blvd.’s overall portrait of postwar Hollywood. Rather than a has-been actor or director as counterpoint to a rising star, as in the Star Is Born series, Sunset Blvd. gives us three has-beens and their counter as the sole point. Desmond manages to survive on memories of past (and dreams of future) glory but only through Mayerling’s intercession. The ex-director, once the equal of Griffith and DeMille (actually the case, for Stroheim), also discovered Desmond, made her a star, and became the first of her three husbands. Now, pathetically, he serves as her butler—partly to be near his “creation” but also to continue to “direct” her delusions of grandeur (sending her phony fan letters and shielding her from the outside world).22 The dispirited Gillis, meanwhile, who had never risen above the B-film rung as a writer, derides the hopes of the latest crop of Hollywood newcomers, who are “so like all us writers when we first hit Hollywood, itching with ambition, planning to get our names up there—‘Screenplay by,’ ‘Original Story by.’” Death, decay, and dissolution are Sunset Blvd.’s master motifs for a Hollywood on the skids. Gillis likens Desmond’s run-down mansion to that of Miss Havisham in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, “falling apart in slow motion, out of beat

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with the rest of the world.” There’s a tennis court, “or rather the ghost of a tennis court, with faded markings and a sagging net”; Gillis, in more ways than one, is himself a “ghostwriter”; and Desmond’s bridge-playing coterie (Keaton, Nilsson, and Warner), he calls her “waxworks.” As for Gillis’s final resting place, the swimming pool—“who didn’t have one then?”—its emptiness, until Desmond has it filled expressly for him, clearly foreshadows the tomb it will become. Overt references to the film industry’s postwar decline permeate the film as well. Desmond, from her skewed, anti–sound era perspective, is characteristically blunt about the movies’ moribund state: “They’re dead, they’re finished. . . . They’ve tied a rope of words and strangled this business.” On a more objective plane, besides Gillis’s own has-been status and his jibe at the naive optimism of the newcomers, Paramount Studios itself has clearly seen better days. Sheldrake (Fred Clark), the “big-shot producer”—to whom Gillis unsuccessfully pitches a story idea, then begs for any work whatever—explains: “I haven’t got a thing. There’s nothing, honest”; he then complains that he’s so in debt himself that he can’t even extend Gillis a small loan to keep the repo men at bay. The legendary final scene sums up Hollywood’s postwar predicament. Rather than a star-studded premiere or celebrity wedding grabbing the world’s attention, a homicide by a onetime glamour queen now generates “as much hoop-tee-do as we get in Los Angeles when they open a supermarket.” Finally, as newsreel cameras grind (under Mayerling’s makeshift direction) and a deranged Desmond “does a scene” from Gillis’s doctored script, “the dream she clung to so desperately enfolded her.” Just as the close-up she’s “ready for . . . , Mr. DeMille,” dissolving into the ghostly white screen, merges reality and delusion for her and “those wonderful people out there in the dark.”

“Dignity, Always Dignity!” Rather than flouting Hollywood’s con-fusion of fact and fantasy, Singin’ in the Rain flaunts the fun-house mirror effect for all the musical comedy its worth. Opening with a What Price Hollywood?–like movie premiere and radio interview, the discrepancy between what “we” (extrafilmic viewers) see and hear, compared to what “they” (diegetic fans and radio audience) hear but don’t see, establishes the unmasking of Hollywood fakery as Singin’ in the Rain’s primary theme. As the premiere’s costar Don Lockwood (Gene Kelly) relates his rise to fame from humble beginnings into the radio microphone, a flashback montage flatly contradicts his professed “dignity, always dignity” motto. Rather than having performed for “all of mum and dad’s society friends,” being raised “on the finest of the classics,” receiving “musical training at the academy of fine arts,” embarking on a national tour where “audiences adored us,” and having Hollywood movie offers “pouring in,” the montage shows Lockwood and his buddy, Cosmo Brown (Donald O’Connor), dancing for pennies in a pool room and sneaking into a nickelodeon as kids, and as adults playing a juke joint, booed in a burlesque house, and stranded outside a studio’s gates in the rain. All the while, however, we

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(outside viewers) can’t help but be impressed, especially in the burlesque number, at how exceptionally talented the two characters (and actors who play them) are—thus deserving of their success both in the fictive world of the film and in the factual world outside. A dialectic of reality and illusion is thereby established, and one of sight and sound as well. Indeed, the two hoofers’ visualized rags-toriches rise reinforces, far better than Lockwood’s spoken puffery, Hollywood’s, and the nation’s, Horatio Alger myth. The image/sound disparity is reversed in the rest of the film, mainly through the dubbing of actors’ voices that don’t match their star personas. Lockwood’s regular onscreen (and falsely rumored offscreen) lover, Lina Lamont (Jean Hagen), is the comical case study here. Thus, when we watch Lockwood’s true love interest, Kathy Selden (Debbie Reynolds), do the dubbing of Lamont’s speaking and singing voice for her first sound film, what we see rather than hear in the finished film-within-the-film registers as counterfeit. For all of Singin’ in the Rain’s ostensible disclosure of the mechanics of Hollywood moviemaking, however, from its publicity machine to its lip-synching process, the demystification of the cinematic apparatus, as Richard Maltby observes, also “remystifies it.”23 Pulling the curtain on the Wizard of Oz may have disillusioned Dorothy, but lifting the veil on Hollywood’s special effects, but not on the system, rather than “alienating” the audience (in the Brechtian sense), supplies surplus entertainment value by granting privileged access to the smoke-and-mirrors process. So, too, at the climax of Singin’ in the Rain, when the curtain is pulled to reveal Selden singing live onstage for Lamont in her postpremiere appearance, the audience at the premiere laughs at the hoax, their embarrassment at having been taken for fools leavened by insider knowledge. We, the paying audience, similarly get our money’s worth by seeing the truly gifted Selden, who was to be denied screen credit, turned into “the real star of the picture.” Hollywood may be meretricious, Singin’ in the Rain ultimately proposes, but it is also meritorious. Talent, and technology, triumph in the end. The remystification goes deeper, however. Debbie Reynolds, except in the curtain-raising finale, actually provided neither the speaking nor the singing voice for Lina Lamont. The speaking voice belonged to none other than Jean Hagen herself, creating the uncanny, if unacknowledged, spectacle of Hagen dubbing for Reynolds dubbing for Hagen. As for the singing voice, this was provided, also sans screen credit, by professional playback singer Betty Noyes. Although the anonymity of playback singers—“ghost singers,” in industry parlance—was the price they paid for propping up the star system, Noyes’s lack of formal recognition in Singin’ in the Rain is hypocritical. Much is made in the film of the injustice of Selden’s lack of screen credit, in deference to Lamont. At one point Lockwood promises to undo the slight: “I’m going to let Lina know. I’m going to let the whole world know!” And though Lamont manages to (temporarily) undo the undoing, one assumes that after her exposure at the premiere, justice, like talent and technology, will prevail. Instead, dissimulation, and a two-tiered Hollywood system is allowed

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to continue unchallenged. Rather than becoming the Rosa Parks of playback singers, Betty Noyes remained part of a shadow industry of second-class performers. Other prominent ghost singers—for the likes of Rita Hayworth, Eleanor Powell, Vera-Ellen, Leslie Caron, Cyd Charisse, Ava Gardner, Joan Crawford, and Audrey Hepburn—include Nan Wynn, Betty Wand, Annette Warren, India Adams, and the “Ghostess with the Mostess” (a.k.a. the “Voice of Hollywood”), Marni Nixon.24 The inside joke of Nixon’s “Voice of Hollywood” nickname conjures both Freud and Fredric Jameson in its lifting of the ideological veil from the film industry’s political unconscious.25 When combined with Joe Gillis’s double ghostwriter role in Sunset Blvd., the joke’s acknowledgment of the ghost singer’s unacknowledged ventriloquism resonates with another layer of Hollywood’s historical palimpsest. Hollywood’s financial crisis in the postwar years was in some ways overshadowed by an ethical crisis, this one of its own (un)doing. Beginning with the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) hearings of 1947 and lasting, in its most virulent phase, through the mid-1950s, hundreds of Hollywood personnel, stigmatized by their (past or present) membership in the Communist Party or purported leftist leanings, fell victim to the entertainment industry’s infamous blacklist, which affected television and radio as well. Among above-the-line talent, only a few screenwriters, using pseudonyms or a surrogate “front,” managed to find work in their chosen field. The clandestine screenwriting system was publicly “revealed” in 1957, when a script for The Brave One, written by blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo (under the name Robert Rich), won an Academy Award that no one took home. Even more analogous to the ghost singers’ invisibility was the deletion of any screenwriting credit altogether, an ignominy that befell blacklistees Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson on the Oscar-winning The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) and Wilson on Lawrence of Arabia (1963). Awards were presented to their rightful recipients and omitted writers’ (and producers’) names restored to the films’ credits decades later, but atonement for the slights to Foreman, Wilson, and Trumbo, in particular, only compounded them. Foreman’s and Wilson’s awards were presented posthumously. Trumbo received his Brave One statuette a year before his death in 1976. But a second “stolen” Oscar, for Roman Holiday (1953), also was presented posthumously and his screen credit only restored in 2011.26 Further aggravating and perpetuating the initial cover-up, none of the belated mea culpas took place during the internationally televised Oscar ceremony with its billion-plus audience. The atonement ceremonies were held (as for most “technical” and other less-prestigious awards), once again, behind the scenes, at untelevised, industry-insider events.27

Commercial Intertext Although the fallout from the blacklist was fading in the early 1960s, Hollywood’s box-office doldrums continued. Weekly attendance plummeted to an average of

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twenty million, an all-time Hollywood low all the more striking given the postwar population growth. The effects of the long-term box-office decline were felt not only in the film industry but in Hollywood proper as well. Unlike the larger city of Los Angeles, buoyed by a postwar (and Cold War) boom in the construction, automobile, aerospace, and defense industries, geographical Hollywood was broadsided by the bear market in the movie business and the simultaneous rise of Las Vegas as a rival resort and recreational mecca to L.A.’s nightlife hub along the Sunset Strip. The Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, in an attempt to rebrand the movie capital’s image and reboot its tourist appeal, countered with a double whammy of its own: renovation and official abridgement of the Hollywood (née Hollywoodland) sign in 1949, and the inauguration of the Walk of Fame along Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street in 1958. Hollywood’s ultimate salvation, however, on both the geographical and industrial fronts, came not from the chamber’s makeovers but from the industry’s prime business rival: television. Although the movie studios’ full transition to TV production would not take place until the mid-1950s (regular TV broadcasting began in 1948), and was driven by economic necessity, conflict between the two industries had always been more fabricated than foreordained. The federal government’s prevention of the film studios from forming broadcast networks to compete with the radio-derived, New York–based triopoly (CBS, NBC, and ABC) forced Hollywood to look on as the new medium not only diverted its main revenue stream but “threatened to displace the motion picture as the preeminent cultural commodity in twentieth-century America.” 28 The overdetermined blow to the company coffers and collective egos produced overcompensatory responses. Once-powerful producer David O. Selznick (Gone with the Wind, Rebecca, Duel in the Sun) deemed the 1950s the film industry’s Dark Ages.29 Jack Warner, who joined other studio heads in refusing to produce shows for TV, to sell the networks any movies, or to make stars available for guest appearances, went so far as to forbid TV sets from appearing in Warner Bros. films.30 Columbia was the first major studio to make the transmedial leap, with the hit series The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin (1954–1959) and the quintessential 1950s sitcom Father Knows Best (1954–1963). Warner Bros. got over its TV allergy in 1955, and by the end of the decade had become “the largest source of network series.”31 Walt Disney’s Disneyland (1954–1958, airing under different names through 2008) proved the biggest breakthrough, not only in structural convergence but in the show’s cross-promotion of Disney films, merchandising, and, most of all, the eponymous Anaheim theme park, which opened in 1955. As the prototype of what Eileen Meehan terms the “commercial intertext,” for the synergistic interplay of media-based commodities, Disneyland also heralded, as it helped reproduce, the postmodern era. 32 Coinciding with the heightened consumerism, blurring of cultural boundaries, and shift from industrial- to information-based economies in the post–World War II period, postmodernism embraces a dizzying array of

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concepts and has been applied to a wide range of fields, from philosophy and politics to popular culture and the fine arts. One notion that cuts across the vast terrain is the breakdown of hierarchies and rejection of absolute truths in favor of multiple, fluid, and contingent meanings.33 Pastiche, parody, and ironic self-consciousness are the favored cultural designs in a world increasingly more virtual than real. The “hyperreality of the simulation” is how Jean Baudrillard characterizes a postmodern world of “simulacra,” in which reality has been reduced to representation and where modernism’s (and motion pictures’) “scene and mirror no longer exist; instead there is a screen and network.”34 Baudrillard’s postmodern theorizing emerged in the late 1970s, well before the Internet and just as the term was gaining currency in cultural fields such as architecture and dance (soon to be applied to all the arts). He dated the epoch’s inception backward to the 1950s, a decade that saw the invention of the credit card, the rise of (advertisingbased) television, and Disneyland’s opening of its gates on the Magic Kingdom. “Television was the ultimate and perfect object for this new era,” Baudrillard proclaimed, and taken together, “Disneyland and television . . . constituted America’s reality.”35 Given the mid-1950s shift of TV production to Hollywood and Disneyland’s location in greater Los Angeles, Hollywood and Los Angeles constituted, by Baudrillard’s reckoning, the geographical and rhetorical nexus of the postmodern condition. Disneyland’s internal structures, moreover, underscore the collation. Movie-themed sets, performers, and rides are the stars of the show, with some of these (more recently) cycled into movie franchises and recycled back into updated rides. The hyperreal dimension extends to the means of production. Park workers are called “cast members” (not employees), wear “costumes” (not uniforms), play “roles” (not work jobs), for “guests” (not customers), and produce “box office returns” (not revenue).36 Even the City of Angels gets into the act, albeit in a supporting part, via Tomorrowland’s Autopian mini-freeway system. Banham had observed, in his Autopian ecology chapter, how Disneyland’s transportation systems provided options, such as the monorail, unavailable beyond the park’s boundaries.37 Baudrillard went further, suggesting that Disneyland’s entire playbill (and by extension, the postmodern condition) “functions as an ‘imaginary effect’ concealing that reality no more exists outside than inside the bounds of the artificial perimeter.”38

“Do Places like This Really Exist?” By the late 1980s, as postmodernism attained critical mass in academia and the fine arts, the concept’s association with Los Angeles congealed as well. Fredric Jameson, in “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” singled out the John Portman–designed, downtown-situated Bonaventure Hotel as iconically postmodern. Edward Soja, in Postmodern Geographies, echoed Baudrillard: “With

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exquisite irony, Los Angeles has come to resemble more than ever before a gigantic agglomeration of theme parks, a lifespace composed of Disneyworlds.” And John Caldwell, in Televisuality and Production Culture, writing later but applying the observation retroactively, showed how an increasingly theoretically savvy Hollywood “production culture” had long been absorbing postmodern concepts and thrusting them back into the mass-cultural marketplace. “Hyperconsciousness,” Jim Collins’s term for “a hyper-awareness on the part of the text itself of its cultural status, function, and history, as well as of the condition of its circulation and reception,” became the name of the game.39 The first self-reflexive Hollywood film to raise the postmodern stakes to the hyperconscious level was The Player (1992). The film opens with clapper sticks and an offscreen call for “Action” as we pull back from a painting of Cecil B. DeMille on a film set onto an actual (20th Century Fox) movie lot; it ends with the disclosure that the film we have just seen was always already a “forthcoming” film called The Player. If this uroboric conceit seems vaguely nouveau romanish, with Last Year at Marienbad (1963) as its nouvelle vague apotheosis, the analogy only goes so far. For the nouveau roman (new novel), and its nouvelle vague (new wave film) equivalent, exists in a self-contained and self-sufficient world of the imagination. The Player, taking one of its many cues from Sunset Blvd., is anchored in a (putative) reality. The list of actual stars playing themselves competes with Hollywood’s “eighty familiar and not-so-familiar movie faces,” and the references to actual films and filmmakers is unsurpassed. This is more than mere pastiche, however, for the litany of allusions also serves to highlight the incestuous nature of the dream factory itself. “Do places like this really exist?” his girlfriend (Greta Scacchi) asks studio exec Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins) at an exclusive desert hideaway. “Only in the movies,” Mill replies. The movies were all there was for Norma Desmond as well: “This is my life; it always will be—there’s nothing else!” But Desmond was psychotic. When the sane, if beleaguered, Griffin Mill admonishes his underlings over lunch at the studio commissary, “Can we talk about something other than movies for a change? We’re educated people!”—deafening silence is the punch line. Conversely, while the Paramount backlot that Joe Gillis and screenwriting partner/love interest Betty Schaefer (Nancy Olson) meander through in Sunset Blvd. may have been “all cardboard, all hollow, all phony, all done with mirrors,” the couple could still tell the difference. The Player’s players can’t seem to anymore—nor, sometimes, can we. Throughout the film’s opening scene, set in the studio parking lot and adjoining offices and shot in a seven-minute-long take, various personnel enthuse about long takes; extol classic sequence shots in Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil, Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope, and Bernardo Bertolucci’s Sheltering Sky; and decry the MTV tendency to “cut-cut-cut!” The self-reflection turns to self-abnegation when the classic films lauded one moment are dismissed the next—as dated, foreign, or artsy, and not to be taken seriously compared to the “movie movies” Mill’s studio produces.

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Ultimately, the reality/delusion and art/schlock distinctions are rendered moot. In his pitch to Mill, British wannabe art-film director Tom Oakley (Richard E. Grant) insists that his high-minded thriller, Habeas Corpus, which he describes as “not really an American film,” should contain neither stars, Schwarzenegger stick-ups, nor—most important—a happy ending. The non-American film’s female love interest, sentenced to death for a crime she didn’t commit, must die at the end because—“That’s reality!” (fig. 19). Near the end of The Player, after Mill himself has gotten away with the murder of a writer he thought was harassing him with hate mail, we see the finished cut of Oakley’s film, which Mill had shepherded. It now stars (the actual) Julia Roberts and Bruce Willis, features action-film heroics, and ends with Willis’s last-minute rescue of Roberts from the gas chamber capped by a cutesy exchange: “What took you so long?”—“Traffic was a bitch.” When a lower-level exec (Christina Stevenson) accuses Oakley of “selling out,” Oakley fires back: “We showed it to an audience in Canoga Park and they hated it. Now everybody loves it. That’s reality!” Name symbolism may not be to everybody’s liking. The studio’s top brass, besides Mill, are fellow vice president Larry Levy (Peter Gallagher) and studio head Joel Levison (Brion James). No longer eastern European immigrants, as were the original moguls and What Price Hollywood?’s Julius Saxe, Levy and Levison nonetheless point to (statistically supported) Jewish continuity in Hollywood’s upper echelons. Griffin Mill, while less explicitly Jewish, is a more multilayered signifier. “Griffin’s” association with the like-named mythic monster fits his “shit-bag” producer tag to a tee. “Mill’s” multiple interpretations include:

Figure 19. “That’s reality!” Tim Robbins, Richard E. Grant, and Dean Stockwell in The Player. Photofest.

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Cecil B. DeMille, of opening image fame; “mill,” as in (dream) factory mill; and “mill,” short for “million,” per the big bucks Mill makes, spends on movies, and hopes to take in at the box office. The pejorative depiction of studio bigwigs in The Player—neither Levy nor Levison is a positive role model—indicates a downward turn in this archetype’s portrayal in the postmodern period. Julius Saxe, for all his gruffness, is a mensch; and Sunset Blvd.’s Sheldrake, though ineffectual, means well. Even in earlier exceptions to the basically decent studio chief—Jonathan Shields (Kirk Douglas) in The Bad and the Beautiful; Stanley Shriner Hoff (Rod Steiger) in The Big Knife (1955)—the onus was on a rotten individual rather than the system. The over-thetop obnoxious Jake Lipkin (Michael Lerner) in Barton Fink (1993) might qualify as a broad indictment of the culture industry, were it not that the film is a 1930s period piece and that Lipkin comes off as a composite of classical-era gross-out moguls such as Louis B. Mayer, Jack Warner, and Harry Cohn. “I was an asshole; it comes with the job,” Griffin Mill admits to David Kahane (Vincent D’Onofrio), the writer he eventually murders. Murdering the creative process—implicitly in the case of David (versus Goliath) Ka(ha)ne, complicitly in the case of would-be art film Habeas Corpus—is the blame to be laid at Mill’s “New Hollywood” feet. Following hard on the so-called Hollywood Renaissance (mid1960s to late 1970s), a New Wave–influenced period of unparalleled cinematic boldness to which Player director Robert Altman crucially contributed, mainstream U.S. filmmaking experienced (for many film historians) a “return to the myth” and general creative decline.40 Financially, however, thanks to front-loaded, presold marketing of effects-laden, action-heavy franchises to a postcountercultural, increasingly international youth audience, Hollywood finally pulled out of its decades-long box-office slump. Coinciding with Reagan-era deregulation, what emerged by the mid-to-late 1990s was a culture industry controlled by six megaconglomerates—Disney, General Electric, News Corp., Sony, Time-Warner, and Viacom. The Big Six together owned (and largely still own) not merely all the major movie studios, and TV broadcast and cable networks, but the major music companies and theme parks; a sizable portion of the biggest book publishing houses, newspapers, and magazines; and a growing interest in the Internet (to name only the media holdings).41 As for David Kahane, the writer Mill kills with impunity, he turns out to have been the wrong guy. The actual harasser phones Mill, now studio head, at the end of the film to pitch a script about a “shit-bag producer” who kills the wrong writer he thought was harassing him—and gets away with it. Mill says he’ll green-light the script if the writer can guarantee a happy ending. Muttering the prospective film’s title, “The Player, I think I like that,” Mill is greeted at his Beverly Hills mansion by the murdered writer’s onetime girlfriend (Scacchi), now Mill’s pregnant wife. The power couple’s exchange is an anti-Autopian capper to a movie perpetually in conversation with itself: “What took you so long?”—“Traffic was a bitch.”

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The Truman Show A prophetic satire of reality television in the hyper-New Hollywood era, The Truman Show (1998) takes postmodernism (and its Los Angeles referents) to the point of no return. The film doubles as a reality-TV series called “The Truman Show,” starring Truman Burbank (Jim Carey). The hyperreal twist is that, despite his being the show’s eponymous star, Truman is unaware that his whole life, since birth, has been broadcast live, 24/7, to millions of people around the world; his hometown of Sea Haven Island is actually a giant Hollywood studio set; and his wife, parents, best friends, and the rest of Sea Haven’s residents are all actors (or extras) privy to the giant hoax. Sea Haven’s Lego-like architecture (patterned after Walt Disney’s Celebration and actually shot in Celebration-like Seaside, Florida) appears frozen in time, an objective correlative to postmodernism’s “eternal presentness.” 42 Hyperreality merges with hyperconsumerism in the show-within-the-show called “Tru-Talk,” airing when action is minimal, that mixes factoids (the number of cameras used: about five thousand; the show’s budget: surpassing that of many countries) with infomercials (actors’ wardrobes, food products, and prefab homes are all available for purchase). Product placement is ubiquitous, as is ancillary merchandising in the “Truman Show” sports bars that sell “Truman Show” mugs, T-shirts, and other paraphernalia. Postmodernism’s “logic of late capitalism” (per Jameson) is taken to its logical extreme in “Tru-Talk’s” matter-of-fact reminder that Truman “was the first child to be legally adopted by a corporation.”43 Truman’s “wife,” Meryl (Laura Linney), in a “Tru-Talk” interview, revels in the postmodern blurring of boundaries: “For me, there is no difference between the public life and the private life. My life is ‘The Truman Show.’” Truman’s lifelong “buddy,” Marlon (Noah Emmerich), in another interview, finesses the notion of absolute truth: “It’s all true, it’s all real, nothing you see here is fake. It’s merely controlled.” Or as the show’s creator, Christof (Ed Harris), puts it: “There’s nothing fake about Truman himself. No scripts, no cue cards; it isn’t always Shakespeare, but it’s genuine.” Name symbolism is postmodernism personified. Truman, of course, is the “truest” man on the show. “Was anything real?” he asks Christof, upon uncovering the hoax. “You were real,” a Jovian voice reverbs from the clouds above; “that’s what made you so good to watch.” Burbank, nicknamed Hollybank for its collection of studios that now outnumber those in Hollywood proper, is the physical site (across the hills from the Hollywood sign) of the Sea Haven set. The wannabe Meryl (Streep) and Marlon (Brando) evoke a moviestar motif carried through the various street and site names: (James) Stewart Street, (Burt) Lancaster Square, (Cecil B.) DeMille Plaza, (Orson) Welles Park. But the haughty, beret-sporting Christof takes the allegorical cake. Combining Christ the Savior with the environmental artist Christo, he is

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literally the all-seeing (“I’ve watched you all your life”), all-knowing (“I know you better than you know yourself ”), and all-powerful (“I am the Creator . . . of a television show”) Artist/God who literally rules from on high in his lunar control booth atop the giant studio shell. Going beyond Habeas Corpus director Oakley’s rationalizing of reality in The Player, überauteur Christof regards “The Truman Show” as a higher order of reality altogether. “The world, the place you live in, is the sick place,” he tells a caller on “Tru-Talk” who accuses him of making a mockery of Truman’s life. “Sea Haven is how the world should be.”

Mirror Shot If Christof is The Truman Show’s (and “The Truman Show”’s) New Hollywood spinmeister, Truman’s bathroom mirror is its postmodern hypertrope. Exceeding the motif ’s self-revelatory functions in What Price Hollywood?, Truman’s medicine-cabinet mirror serves as alter ego not only for him but for Baudrillard’s “screen and network”—that is, for the representational process itself. Whenever Truman looks at himself in the bathroom mirror, he also peers (unknowingly, for most of the film) directly into one of “his” show’s five thousand cameras, and thus directly at the show’s (and movie’s) viewers. He is not, however, at least initially, given his ignorance of the setup, breaking the “fourth wall.” Indeed, it is his very obliviousness to being in the public eye that allows him to “act natural” before the mirror, as he does in the opening scene, mugging and making jokes. It is precisely in its uneven distribution of the gaze, and in its prompting and exposure of Truman’s private thoughts and feelings, that the one-way/see-through mirror becomes a combination psychoanalyst’s couch and interrogation room. The surveillance motif carries through the show (and Truman’s life), via the myriad hidden cameras, including “button-cams” on characters’ clothing, all controlled panoptically, and viewed on banks of video monitors, from Christof ’s Olympian observation post. The psychoanalytic effect is more ambivalent. As a means of keeping Truman on the island, Christof had manufactured a traumatic childhood event, through which, after his “father’s” “drowning” in a boating accident, Truman becomes deathly aquaphobic. The ploy unravels, however, when the father, embittered over having been written out of the show, breaks onto the set years later, enabling Truman, now freed of Oedipal guilt, to read between the lines of his scripted existence. And the one-way mirror becomes a two-way street. “Geez, you think he knows?” a production assistant wonders, suspecting that Truman’s wackierthan-usual mirror performance might be disingenuous. Indeed, when Truman draws a soapy outline of an astronaut’s helmet around his face, adds a flag with the letter “T,” and proclaims a new planet “Trumania of the Burbank galaxy,” not only is his own but the political unconscious revealed (fig. 20). Solipsism

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Figure 20. The televised Truman Burbank (Jim Carey) mirrored in The Truman Show. Photofest.

has become interchangeable with the New Hollywood and postmodern society at large, an epiphany both underscored and undercut by the film’s kicker. After Truman manages to escape the island (by sea, on a dinghy named the Santa Maria) and the plug is pulled on the show, one of its most devoted fans, a parking-lot attendant we’ve been observing intermittently throughout, reaches for the TV Guide and, with an air of ennui, asks his fellow attendant/fan: “What else is on?”

PA R T T H R E E




L. A. Noir

chapter 5




Bright and Guilty Place

“The rough beast that is film noir . . . slouched toward Los Angeles to be born,” Alain Silver and James Ursini declare in L.A. Noir: The City as Character.1 Los Angeles provided “the quintessential dramatic ground of film noir,” “the essential elements in the invocation of the noir mood,” not because it was darker, meaner, or more hellish than other urban areas but because of its chameleon nature: its ability to combine, as Raymond Chandler himself encapsulated, “mean streets” with “a special brand of sunshine,” natural fecundity with a “wet emptiness,” a “beatific Our Lady Queen of Angels” with the city as femme fatale—indeed, “the most alluring femme fatale imaginable.”2 The dialectic of opposites—light/dark, good/evil, reality/nightmare—which distinguishes film noir from the gardenvariety gangster or crime film, found its apotheosis in this “bright and guilty place.”3 Historical developments in the film industry, Los Angeles, and the world at large primed the pump for L.A. noir as well. In Hollywood a brief loosening of movie censorship in the early 1930s, before the founding of the Production Code Administration in 1934, sanctioned a cycle of gangster and “fallen-woman” films that foreshadowed the classical noir cycle of the 1940s and 1950s. In Los Angeles as a whole, “something happened in the 1930s,” Kevin Starr suggests. “A sense of brooding evil just beneath the movie-tone surface of Southern California life . . . rushed in upon the American consciousness . . . a feeling of moral depravity and unending doom . . . a mood of excess and disaster, strange and sinister, like flowers rotting from too much sunshine, pervaded the city.”4 If the “rush” began in the 1930s, the pall had begun to spread some years before. The oil-boom-fueled Great Los Angeles Bubble of the 1920s, whose bursting in 1927 preceded the Wall Street Crash, blew the boosters’ cover and epitomized the “excess and disaster” of the Roaring Twenties. Two high-profile murder cases of the early 1930s, connected to the oil swindle, capped the city’s decade-long descent into moral turpitude, violence, and death. And Hollywood was embroiled in both the financial and homicidal crimes. Besides its ties to 105

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the city’s interlocking business, political, and underworld elites, the overblown oil venture, concocted by Canadian huckster C. C. Julian, counted among its investors some of Hollywood’s crème de la crème, including director Cecil B. DeMille, producer David O. Selznick, and mogul Louis B. Mayer. The two main murder victims—top banker Motley Flint (“a Santa Claus to Los Angeles”) and mob kingpin Charlie Crawford (L.A.’s Al Capone)—also combined starring roles in the oil scandal with supporting roles in Hollywood.5 Flint, as president of Los Angeles’s First National Bank, had organized the Cinema Finance Company in 1917, one of the chief financial backers of Hollywood at a time when Wall Street fi rms remained at arm’s length from the Jewishdominated industry. Flint later formed “a close personal relationship with Jack Warner,” helping Warner’s then-struggling studio avert bankruptcy in 1920.6 The trial at which Flint was shot point-blank by a disgruntled small-time investor, Frank Keaton, revolved around a suit brought against First National Bank by then RKO chief David Selznick. The Hollywood connection for Crawford, whose casinos and bordellos were favored haunts of the rich and famous, was largely posthumous. His shooting by “movie-star-handsome” Dave Clark, a rising-star prosecutor, “would inspire pulp fiction,” “replace L.A.’s reckless optimism with a new cynicism,” and provide true-crime underpinning for the hard-boiled stories that hard-wired film noir.7 Far from belying its sunny-side-up aspect, the gangster-tinged scandals of the 1920s and 1930s, like those of the movie stars, only heightened the larger city’s all-or-nothing image as a place where sunshine and klieg lights both illuminated and blinded, and the high life cloaked a netherworld of corruption and murder. Turbulent international events also played into a noir sensibility. Though the artistic benefit in no way compensates for the cost in human lives and suffering, the Nazi terror proved an unexpected boon for American cinema, and film noir in particular. The treasure trove of European artists and intellectuals who escaped to Southern California in the 1930s and 1940s included an extraordinary cache of émigré filmmakers. Unlike the aforementioned migrant American screenwriters, or an earlier wave of Austro-German “import” directors in the 1920s, the (mainly Jewish) refugee filmmakers of the 1930s were not lured to Hollywood but driven there by Hitler. We “didn’t come because we were invited,” Billy Wilder quipped. “We came to save our lives.”8 They also came with a special bent for the “black film.” The bleak worldview and expressionist aesthetic of Weimar cinema, on which the émigrés had cut their teeth and which became hallmarks of film noir, found overdetermined resonance among the likes of Wilder, Fritz Lang, Otto Preminger, Robert Siodmak, Edgar Ulmer, and John Brahm, among others, who would help jump-start film noir and make several key L.A. noirs.9 As for the psychological and moral ambivalence of the noir universe, who could possibly have experienced this dichotomy more profoundly than these “wholly assimilated” German and Austrian Jews whose Mutterland/Vaterland (for Austrians, their cultural patrimony) had rejected not only them but the humanistic tradition of Western civilization as well. The

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ambivalence was compounded once the United States entered the war, as Jewish refugees now found themselves allied, patriotically speaking, with the potential perpetrators of matricide/patricide. Separating good parent (German Kultur) from bad (Nazism) helped mitigate the crime, but the stigma remained. Further internecine duality resulted from the émigré directors’ entry into the Hollywood film industry, where their confrontation with the Ostjüdische moguls generated much the same conflict as it had for Los Angeles’s German Jewish elite in the early 1900s, with a crucial difference. Rather than rubbing shoulders with the moguls in shul, the Westjüdische directors were taking orders from them at the studio. The upshot, as Lawrence Weschler describes, “was a ritual of class revenge. Back in Europe the highbrow cultural figures of Vienna and Berlin had looked upon these peasants and shopkeepers with disdain, and now they were getting a touch of their own treatment.”10 As Wilder sardonically summarized, “We went from Adolf Hitler to Adolph Zukor [head of Paramount studios].”11 The émigrés’ animus toward America, meanwhile, was exacerbated by a superiority complex and critical stance similar to that which grounded their disdain for the Ostjuden. Émigré anti-Americanism had both cultural and political roots, perhaps most cogently expressed in the critical theory of Jewish émigré political philosophers Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. The “germ of regression” that had led to the fascist outbreak in Central Europe was also apparent in the institutional structures of the United States, the two critical theorists argued in Dialectic of Enlightenment.12 Thus, despite their cognizance of and gratitude for America’s involvement in the war against fascism, Adorno and Horkheimer “were eager to point out similarities in the forms of mass control and mass entertainment used in Nazi Germany and the United States.”13 As for Los Angeles, specifically, this capital of sunshine and noir was, on the one hand, a “model of the modern city” that “shared with Berlin the exile’s uprootedness, modernity, artificiality, and a constant flow of newcomers in a never-ending process of renewal and transformation.”14 But, on the other hand, it was for many a cultural backwater, “a wasteland, anything but a civilized place to the cultivated Europeans,” with schlocky Hollywood representing the epitome of vulgarity and philistinism.15 Yet these “two competing mythologies”—“between innocence and corruption, unspoiled nature and ruthless development, naiveté and hucksterism, enthusiasm and shameless exploitation”—also made L.A. an ideal place, and noir an ideal medium, for negotiating these complex psychological, sociocultural, and philosophical tensions.16 L.A. noir, specifically, allowed émigré directors (like the French critics who coined the term film noir) “to love [Los Angeles] while criticizing it, or more exactly to criticize it in order to love it.”17 As a challenge to both classical Hollywood cinema and U.S. society, and through its associations with Weimar cinema’s artistic aspirations, film noir offered exiled filmmakers the nearest thing to dialectical exchange with the culture industry as was possible from within the belly of the beast. The moguls, conversely, found a viable compromise in a film cycle that combined cultural cachet with comparatively low budgets and decent box-office returns. In all, Jewish émigré filmmakers

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and film noir proved a natural fit—both for the immigrant moguls who benefited from their co-religionists’ artistic aura, and for the émigrés who found in noir an outlet and partial anodyne for their experience, on multiple levels, of traumatic dislocation, frustration, and loss.18

“A Spectacle Beyond Improvement” H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan’s Black Mask magazine served as the literary incubator both for fi lm noir in general and L.A. noir in particular. Dashiell Hammett’s seminal crime fiction of the late 1920s and early 1930s (Red Harvest, The Maltese Falcon, The Glass Key, the last two turned into film noirs in the 1940s) debuted in Black Mask.19 The first major hard-boiled writing set in Los Angeles, Raoul Whitfield’s Death in a Bowl, appeared in Black Mask in 1930; and Paul Cain’s Fast One (published as a story collection in 1932) was serialized there in 1931. Technically, both Whitfield and Cain were beaten to the punch in homegrown pulp by Leslie White, an actual LAPD detective who began transmuting his inside dope into protonoir in 1929.20 Preceding White were authors of somewhat loftier literary ambition whose L.A.-based work, while neither hard-boiled nor crime-infested, already by the early 1920s had begun to plumb the city’s moldy core. For Mark Lee Luther’s Los Angeles, crime was more aesthetic than homicidal. His facetiously titled The Boosters (1923) scraped off L.A.’s huckster gloss (“garden spot of the globe,” “wonder city of the world”), beneath which he catalogued a bizarre urban landscape “dominated by junkyards, orange juice stands, cheap souvenir shops, and parking lots,” where the “faults of structure were surpassed only by the sins of decoration,” and the “prevailing taste was one of costly and ugly gloom.”21 For Louis Adamic, who was mugged on his first day in Los Angeles in 1921 and palled around (though never partnered) with a gang of rumrunners, the city’s graver sins were sociopolitical. The “jungle democracy” that the United States represented in the abstract for the Serbian immigrant, L.A.’s “enormous village” embodied in the flesh. “Los Angeles is America. A jungle . . . a fantastic human muddle,” Adamic wrote in Laughing in the Jungle (published in 1932, but whose L.A. section is based on diary entries from the 1920s). Melding unionist rants with Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street, Adamic found the city “a nut town . . . a scab town . . . full of scissor-bills . . . run by rich bastards . . . a bigger and better Gopher Prairie . . . [where] success is a religion, a fanaticism . . . measured, for the most part, in dollars and cents.” The double-edged imagery in a 1923 diary entry presages the paradigmatic first-person narration of L.A. noir: “From Mount Hollywood, Los Angeles looks rather nice, enveloped in a haze of changing colors. Actually, and in spite of all the healthful sunshine and ocean breezes, it is a bad place—full of old and dying people, and young people who were born old of tired pioneer parents, victims of America—full of curious wild and poisonous growths, decadent religions and cults and fake science, and

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wildcat business enterprises . . . doomed to collapse and drag down millions of people.”22 In keeping with L.A.’s (and noir’s) “bipolar disorder,” neither Luther’s nor Adamic’s Los Angeles is irredeemably horrid; rather, as David Fine suggests, it “is both the best and the worst of places.”23 For Luther “the land of the fast buck promoter and the simple-minded and race-conscious civic booster” is “also the place that holds out the redemptive possibility of a new American landscape and identity forged by the impact of East and West.” 24 Adamic, meanwhile, “was glad I had come to Los Angeles, not so much for the climate, which was agreeable enough to me, but because the place was endlessly absorbing and entertaining . . . a futile, elaborate muddle, but vastly interesting as a spectacle—as a spectacle beyond improvement.”25

“Factory Chimneys Smirching the Mirror of the Sky” No pre-noir L.A. novel evinces the city’s “double life” more than Don Ryan’s Angel’s Flight.26 Unjustly neglected in overviews of proto-L.A.-noir literature, written in a hallucinatory style that mingles “Pan and Beethoven and Nietzsche and J. K. Huysmans” with street patter and jungle jazz, the book actually begins—and proceeds through its first fifty-odd pages—on a high-pitched, hardboiled note.27 “Starving except for the oranges so easy to steal in California,” Ryan’s down-on-his-heels reporter Will Pence begins his picaresque tale on L.A.’s skid row, where “a hoarse croaking . . . takes the place of laughter” and “the sun displays Los Angeles Street in barren decrepitude.”28 Before an orange is peeled, Pence is involved in a gangland killing, accompanying mobsters by car at night past the central Plaza, through Chinatown and the factory district along the “invisible Los Angeles River,” and finally to a beachside mansion, where “eminent businessman” (cum rumrunner) Earle Haley succumbs to a “big society murder.”29 Not only the grisly events but their crazy-quilt description, whose point of view shifts among various characters, including Haley’s bullet-riddled corpse lying across his driveway, reek of noir: “The light slanted on the barrel of a shotgun,” “shadows on the high bank drawing closer, dodging from tree to tree,” “the machine gun barks loudly in the night,” “something is creeping out of the darkness,” “the night still holds its secret.” As does the underworld patois: “Send the lunger in the morning to mope around an’ case the joint. See if he can get a earful. Th’ dicks don’t know him yet.”30 Murder and mayhem are not Angel’s Flight’s raison d’être, however. In a genre mash-up that would make a postmodernist proud, the novel careens away from the mob killing. This is partly because the upstanding LAPD “decided to lay off in the Haley affair.” Mainly it’s because of Pence’s new job for the Citizen newspaper—a onetime “organ of the working class” in a city with “no working class to speak of ”—where his assignment is to chronicle the human interest side of a metropolis his editor calls “the greatest side show on earth. More variegated than Ben Hecht’s Chicago. A hundred times more bizarre than your New York.”31

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Human interest does not preclude crime; in fact, the first side show Pence covers, in a chapter/column titled “Court Carnival,” is L.A.’s criminal “justice” system. “It is all good-natured fun,” he reports, including the death by hanging of an eighteen-year-old whose sentencing a “crowd has come to see” and to which it responds “in high good humor.” Henceforth Pence returns only sporadically to the “palsied” side of the city: such as in a “Hard-boiled Interlude,” in which an adulterous insurance salesman shoots himself; in “the backfire of an automobile [that] frequently turned out to be the pop of an automatic”; and in an “epidemic of bank robberies” perpetrated by “bands of outlaws” and abetted by constitutionally protected lawyers burning “with fervent devotion . . . for the cause of the professional criminal.”32 The bulk of the book leaves gallows humor behind, embarking instead on a magical mystery tour of Circus City that leads the journalist-poet to ever more kaleidoscopic confabulation. “Los Angeles, the city with aspirations for the Los Angelicizing of the world!” begins one particularly Whitmanesque passage. “City of oranges, ostriches, lemons, alligators, olives, missions, sardines, aqueducts, harbors, tunas, bungalows, abalones, loquats, casabas, horned toads, snowy peaks, burros, eucalyptus, pepper trees, Thanksgiving celery and Christmas strawberries—Los Angeles the optimistic, the positive, the vociferous—Jazz Baby of the Golden West.” But just as all of L.A.’s glitter can turn with a coin flip into Adamic’s “race for money,” so is Whitman’s plentitude punctured by Poe’s “pathos of hope”: “Destruction and desire—misery and mirth so much together—with color and craft in the streets.”33 Prefiguring Banham, Pence chooses motorized transport as the ideal way to “read” Los Angeles. True to the period, however, Pence’s “car” is public rather than private, cable-driven rather than gas-powered, and confined to downtown rather than traversing the city writ large. Angel’s Flight funicular railway was, from its construction in 1901 until its dismantling in 1969, the most practical way to scale the heights of a densely populated Bunker Hill district that, as Chandler’s Philip Marlowe quipped, “used to be a choice place to live . . . now people live there because they have no choice.”34 Marlowe’s “now” was the 1940s, but his flip account of the area’s residential downscaling already applied in Ryan/Pence’s tumultuous 1920s. For Citizen Pence, however, Angel’s Flight does not signify economic decline; it inspires instead another Whitman-like yawp. On his first trip up the steep hillside slope, the “groaning cable car” lands him “above the tops of brittle palms and loquat trees,” where “perhaps, beyond, another sign will tempt a rebellious angel to try his wings.” Veni vidi vici, at the summit the Sign of Signs appears—a boxlike structure labeled Camera Obscura. Pence enters the “dark room,” the “toy of Leonardo da Vinci,” the mechanism on which all photography (still and motion picture) is based. Once his eyes adjust to the darkness, figments of the outside world, projected upside down through a pinhole, emerge from the “pleasant haze of thought . . . moving on the white surface in front of me. Colors appearing—faintly. Shadows taking form. It is a reflection in miniature of the city above which I am hovering. . . . Crawling

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things moving palely across the screen . . . pygmies taking on life in the streets below . . . lacing car tracks among which automobiles flit like moths. . . . I feel something of the divine laughter. If I am not an angel, then I am a little lower than the angels. . . . The Camera Obscura has given me wings!”35 Soaring to the city’s near-heavenly heights becomes a regular rite of passage for Pence, but all the images the Camera Obscura projects do not provoke divine laughter. Some present “a sun, vulgar, brazen, insistent as a real estate salesman,” in “a nightmare world of cogs and grease and smoke and clamor.” This “shrieking, crazy, inflammatory life of workaday Los Angeles” moves him, on occasion, to pine for “a place where there are no telephone wires torturing the horizon and no factory chimneys smirching the mirror of the sky.” Pence is no antimodernist in the mold of puritanical author Mrs. Laura Hackensorter, whom he hears lambast Gloria Swanson’s dresses for being “too thin” and the “highbrow critics” for whom “nothing is realism unless somebody is breaking the law . . . this redmeat stuff—this caveman stuff.”36 Like the City of Angels and Demons his Citizen columns describe, Pence is a connoisseur of ambivalence—making Hollywood, as foreshadowed in the Camera Obscura (and Swanson’s dresses), the ideal centerpiece of his Los Angeles diorama. Actual figures and events are glimpsed throughout Angel’s Flight—Swanson and Charlie Chaplin, Harrison Gray Otis and William Randolph Hearst, the Mexican-quarter quarantine and oil-industry bubble. History dominates the penultimate Hollywood section. Thinly disguised through a pseudonym, the Austrian director who gives Pence a job as an extra on his latest film, The Siren, Karl von Stechmann, is clearly fashioned on Erich von Stroheim. If Stechmann’s nationality, flamboyance, and director/actor status only offer clues to the real-life model, his description as “the prince of villains on the screen” and the reasons for his firing from The Siren expose the ruse. Stechmann claims that his termination was due to “The immorality clause— profane language on the set. Unwarranted expenditures. But chiefly—‘Gold.’”37 Stroheim, who was notorious for his risqué, egomaniacal behavior and budget overruns, had been fired by Universal production head Irving Thalberg on Merry-Go-Round (1923). Stechmann’s film Gold, meanwhile, is an obvious reference to Stroheim’s Greed (1924). Based on Frank Norris’s classic anticapitalist novel, Stroheim’s adaptation, like Stechmann’s film à clef, “was to have been his masterpiece.” As with Gold, however, the studio heads found Greed’s extreme length (close to eight hours) unreleaseable. Stechmann, like Stroheim, reluctantly cut the film down to (a still unusually long) four hours and refused to cut any further. The studio thence cropped Gold/Greed to standard feature (under-two-hour) length.38 Pence’s paean to Stechmann’s uncut version clearly doubles as a eulogy for Stroheim’s pièce de résistance: “an epic of life—life brilliant, sordid, saccharous; ringing, whining, snorting; wailing, guffawing, trumpeting; smug, droll, innocent, vile, painful, pleasant; smelling of attar and cooking odors, gasoline, violets and steaming stable boots.” “I told them the truth,” Stechmann/Stroheim laments, “but they didn’t want it. Not only did

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they cut it—they changed it—prettified it. . . . And when they released it in New York the other day, it flopped.”39 The allusion to Stroheim and Greed is far from gratuitous. Greed has become the gold standard of the lost or destroyed cinematic masterpiece, and its butchering the paradigmatic example of Hollywood’s sacrificing art for profit—doubly ironic given the film’s anti-Mammon theme and box-office drubbing. Stechmann’s reference to the moguls as “buttonhole-makers” additionally frames Pence/Ryan’s anti-Hollywood rhetoric in self-hating Jewish terms. Stechmann’s ethnoreligious identity is not specified; Stroheim, however, was born to observant Jews. The Ostjude/Westjude “class conflict” applied in his case as well, again with ironic overtones. Himself of lower-middle-class origins—indeed, his father was a hat maker!—Stroheim claimed to be Count Erich Oswald Hans Carl Maria von Stroheim und Nordenwall, the son of Austrian nobility, much like the characters he played. Stroheim’s überperfectionism, insistence on near-total artistic freedom, and the high cost of his films led to dwindling directing opportunities. After another over-budget and uncompleted film, Queen Kelly (1928), starring Gloria Swanson—in which, per The Siren, Stroheim was accused of inserting “indecent subject matter into the film’s scenario”—he gave up directing. In a form of reverse exile Stroheim acted on and off in Europe and the States, cast mainly as German nobility or military officers, including Field Marshall Rommel in Billy Wilder’s Five Graves to Cairo (1943).40 Wilder, as we saw in the last chapter, would milk the Swanson and Queen Kelly connections for black humor in Sunset Blvd. For Ryan, Stechmann versus Hollywood serves two main purposes. It allows him to conclude the Los Angeles portion of his novel on a noir note. It also sends Pence into quasi exile in New York City, where The Siren, to keep the film out of Stechmann’s hands, will be recut, and where Pence, secretly selected by Stechmann, will write the intertitles: “They’re getting a smart literary guy who knows a lot of expensive words, cheap.” New York fails to stray far from L.A. in other ways as well, as it supplies the narrative with a deus ex machina ending right out of the Hollywood storybook. In Greenwich Village Pence reconnects both with his long-lost daughter, Carmen, and his own inner artist. Under Carmen’s bohemian influence and that of her avant-garde milieu, Pence resolves the high/low cultural tension that had plagued him in L.A. “You’re not going to let yourself stay buried with these old gods,” Carmen prods. Indeed not: “Years of hissing, hooting, mauling, booing and belaboring jazz and suddenly I love it. Years of criticizing, deprecating, exporbating and objurgating the machine age and suddenly I wonder if it isn’t all right.” The contradiction is that it takes New York to accomplish the epiphany. The Land of Smoke and Mirrors that Pence left behind was not only as rife with jazz and the machine age as any other American city; it provided the primary source material for his (and Ryan’s) rhapsody in blue. Thus, as Pence’s resurrected play treads the boards somewhere in upstate New York, the City of Fallen Angels still

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haunts the Big Apple, as it does Angel’s Flight’s denouement: “There are sunny spots where gnats may buzz. Overripe oranges in the galvanized can by the stage door. . . . Each orange a world to buzz over.”41

Nowhere to Go If Angel’s Flight nips at the edges of L.A. noir, Death in a Bowl and Fast One bite off big chunks. Though never adapted to the screen, Raoul Whitfi eld’s Death in a Bowl was the first noir tale to be set in the “dream dump.” Besides the titular Hollywood Bowl crime scene and the unusual suspects, including a film director and a movie star, the private-eye protagonist, Ben Jardin, has an office near Grauman’s Chinese Theater and lives in Hollywood-adjacent Laurel Canyon. Most locations and a few Hollywood personages—Charlie Chaplin, Greta Garbo—retain their real (or stage) names; otherwise, as with Karl von Stechmann, see-through masks are employed. Immigrant German director Ernst Reiner combines the names and personae of Stroheim again but also of Ernst Lubitsch and Joseph von Sternberg; producer Lew Maskey more than approximates Paramount’s cofounder Jessie Lasky; and Maskey’s “Famous Studios” abbreviates Paramount’s one-time alias, Famous Players in Feature Plays. The notion of Los Angeles and Hollywood as shadow images of each other is a given: the former is dubbed “a rotten police town,” the latter a place where it was difficult “to distinguish truth from publicity” and where “money will buy almost anything.”42 The European-American culture clash is foregrounded as well. Director Reiner, who lured his conductor brother Hans from Europe to play the Bowl, tells Jardin, “He didn’t want to come. It isn’t exactly a cultural center out here.”43 The reason he should not have come is existential as well as cultural. The Bowl—whose Hollywood setting for classical music conflates low and high culture—is where Hans Reiner’s fatal shooting, during a Brahms tone poem, gives the book its title. The only discordant (if historically resonant) note in this otherwise solid L.A. noir debut is the murderer’s Jewish identity. The cultivated Ernst and Hans Reiner are only implicitly Semitic. The streetwise American Max Cohn—Jardin’s assistant and the little man with the “shrewd brain” who killed the conductor—is not only explicitly identified as a Jew but bears the name of the boorish, Mussoliniidolizing mogul Harry Cohn to boot. To fellow L.A. noir writers Raymond Chandler and Denise Hamilton, Paul Cain—to be distinguished from his namesake and fellow hard-boiler James M. Cain (Double Indemnity, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Mildred Pierce)—was the “hardest-boiled of them all” and his Fast One “the high point in the ultra hardboiled.”44 Venality and violence are no prologue to poetic whimsy or a sidebar to a classical concert in Fast One—they’re the whole shebang. The line between corrupt politicians, corrosive gangsters, conniving businessmen, and collusive policemen, which even Death in a Bowl still tenuously maintained, has disappeared.45 City

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government sex scandals, Italian/Jewish mob rivalries, gambling rings and rumrunning rackets, and a police chief on everybody’s payroll may leave room for a jazz riff or two, but Pan and Beethoven and Nietzsche? Not on your life. As for Fast One’s noir protagonist, not until Mickey Spillane’s sadistic womanizer Mike Hammer, introduced in the mid-1940s, would there be as macho-maniacal an antihero as self-described playboy Gerry Kells. Hammer’s private-eye profession at least placed him on the fringes of the law; and even Jardin, though deemed “tough as hell” and “hard on women,” still treated the “fairer sex” with respect.46 Kells is introduced off the bat as a gambler and gunman whose first contact with a woman friend is to kiss her then knock her unconscious. Not as steeped in the specifics of L.A. history as Angel’s Flight or Death in a Bowl, Fast One surpasses Ryan’s and Whitfield’s efforts in the particularities, and political economy, of place. Although he claims not to be “commercially inclined,” Kells lives at the swank Ambassador Hotel, home of the moviestar-frequented Cocoanut Grove nightclub and a stone’s throw from Hollywood proper, where much of the gritty action takes place. 47 The scene shifts among the then-classy Knickerbocker Hotel on Hollywood Boulevard, “in” restaurants such as the Brown Derby and Musso & Frank’s, upscale residences in Whitley Heights and the Los Feliz hills, and car chases along mostly familiar (thanks to the movies) streets: Sunset, Highland, La Brea, Cahuenga, Ivar, Franklin, Santa Monica. As Carolyn See notes, however, “The characteristic Hollywood descriptions are missing: there are no flowers, fruits, clear skies, movie stars.”48 The goings-on are rather more gruesome than glamorous, the few movie actors we do meet are on the skids, and the main clientele for the illicit operations live in Beverly Hills—hardly a picture pleasing to morals custodian Will Hays—or, for that matter, to Kells himself. Cain’s ultranihilistic rendering denies Kells “even the redemption of that surrounding landscape . . . which ministers to the wounded spirits of his jaded successors in Chandler and [Ross] MacDonald,” Paul Skenazy observes. “Instead of the region’s untamed sense of possibility, Cain takes advantage of land’s end to represent Los Angeles as an execution chamber.”49 The morbid metonymy extends to Catalina Island and to the docks of San Pedro and Long Beach, which function not as vacation retreats or tourist ports of call but as mobster hangouts and gambling-boat staging areas. Downtown makes a more typically sordid appearance: as the venue for a fixed prizefight at Olympic Auditorium and in a cameo that winks sardonically at the city’s “arrival” as a major metropolis. Having parked illegally “on Fourth Street between Broadway and Hill,” Kells pleads clemency to a traffic cop by pretending to be a stranger in town. When the cop asks where he’s from, Kells lies, “San Francisco.” “You’re in the big city now, buddy,” the cop sneers, then lets him off with a warning: “All right, now you know.”50 The parking scrape is the last one Kells will emerge from unscathed. In a downward spiral that sets a high bar for an obligatory noir trope, the gamblergunman henceforth will be knocked unconscious himself several times, plugged

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in the shoulder by a pistol round, stabbed in the back by an ice pick, nearly crippled by a shotgun blast, have his “prosecution complex” confirmed when he’s framed for all the killings, and finally—after an attempted getaway with the faux femme fatale—will die alongside her in a fiery car crash at the bottom of a Pacific Coast Highway cliff.51 An ocean setting for this ultra-hard-boiled’s tragic ending, and the automotive means to it, could not be more archetypal. The Auto Club, forerunner of the Automobile Association of America (AAA), was founded in Los Angeles in 1900. By the 1920s the city had by far the highest per capita car ownership in the nation, with 1 of every 2.5 Angelinos owning a car compared to one of four Californians and one of seven Americans.52 When boosters proclaimed L.A. “the city on wheels” in the 1930s, it was high time for L.A. noir to turn the car into a “symbolic death instrument.”53 As for the conjoining of automobile and ocean, David Fine remarks, “The fast car on the Coast Highway came to represent the betrayed promise of freedom and high-speed mobility . . . the collapse of the West Coast dream. . . . Where the continent comes to an abrupt end against the cliffs bordering the Pacific, the road, and with it the dream, comes to an end as well.”54 For Kells specifically, Skenazy concludes, “the meeting of ocean and road confirms that there is no turning back. . . . The faster one travels, the more one realizes that there is nowhere to go.”55 The begetting of Los Angeles’s antimyth was thus doubly foreordained. The “bloated image of Southern California as the golden land of opportunity and the fresh start” was doomed from the start not only by its fraudulent premise but, as westward expansion ran up against the roadblock of the Pacific Ocean, by geophysical reality.56 One response to the disillusionment and arrested progress was to fall back onto oneself. “When the West was filled, the expansion turned inward, became part of an agitated, overexcited, superheated dream life,” Norman Mailer wrote. “The film studios threw up their searchlights as the frontier was finally sealed, and the romantic possibilities of the old conquest of land turned into a vertical myth, trapped within the skull.”57 This revised, movie-world myth begat its own antimyth, in the form of L.A. noir, and carried its own dueling ironies. First, most of the genre’s literary progenitors—Whitfield, the Cains, Chandler, et al.—themselves had succumbed, as screenwriters, “to the siren allure of Hollywood.”58 Second, several of their counternarratives, written partly from frustration with and as assaults on the Hollywood dream, ended up being turned into mainstream Hollywood films.

Automobility “It can be argued,” as Mark Osteen does in “Noir’s Cars: Automobility and Amoral Space in American Film Noir,” that “film noir begins with Double Indemnity’s opening scene.”59 Osteen grounds his claim in the scene’s and overall fi lm’s obsession with cars and car motifs, which would “figure prominently throughout the noir cycle.”60 Although the automobile already served an archetypal purpose

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in L.A. noir fiction of the 1930s, Osteen finds its function in the L.A. noir films of the 1940s additionally responding to larger historical factors. The curbs on car production during World War II were followed by the massive promotion of car sales after the war. “Automobility,” as an antidote to “economic and social malaise,” came to symbolize “social mobility and expanded identity. . . . Newly purchased cars became signs of restored consumer power and renewed possibility—of a refurbished American dream.”61 Edward Dimendberg diagnoses an L.A.-specific symptom of automobility in the city’s “suburbanization and decentralization,” especially in its unique “centrifugal [outward-directed] spatiality.” Automobility becomes a “perceptual modality” in Los Angeles, additionally, through an urban environment that “reconfigures bodily experience and valorizes speed.” Dimendberg similarly privileges Double Indemnity, from a “noirs cars” perspective, in the film’s proposing “the speed of automotive travel as the fundamental experience of travel through the city.”62 What Double Indemnity proposes, however, its opening scene disposes. Protagonist Walter Neff ’s (Fred MacMurray) car swerving through L.A.’s downtown streets is not only speeding but, like its driver, out of control. Running a red light, barely missing an oncoming truck, the car pulls up to Neff ’s workplace, the Pacific All-Risk Insurance Company. Let in by the night watchman, and “leaking blood” from a gunshot wound, Neff Dictaphones an after-hours confessional to the company’s claims manager, Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson). Though his car is parked outside, its ghost haunts Neff ’s lurid, flashbackillustrated tale of adultery and murder. His own risky business began literally with the auto insurance he came to sell femme fatale Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) at her Los Feliz hills home a few months before. Both the site and modus operandi of the murder Neff and Phyllis plot and pull off together, to claim her husband’s accident insurance, involve a car. Neff strangles Mr. Dietrichson (Tom Powers) in the passenger seat of Phyllis’s car, while the signals that the coast is clear for the killing and for the getaway are three honks of the horn and two flashes of the headlights, respectively. If space in L.A. film noir in general “has mutated,” as Dimendberg suggests, “into an abstract centrifugal space organized around the automobile and its uniquely mobilized gaze,” in Double Indemnity this space is organized around auto-motivated speech as well. 63 Neff tells his secretary at the office, after handing her his briefcase, to “park this for me, will you.” He tells the night watchman/elevator operator, “Let’s ride.” And a car-driven punchline caps the first flirtatious exchange between Neff and Phyllis (fig. 21), when, sitting across from her in her living room, he can’t help but ogle her shapely calves: Neff: I wish you’d tell me what’s engraved on that anklet. Phyllis: Just my name. Neff: As, for instance? Phyllis: “Phyllis.” Neff: “Phyllis,” eh? I think I like that.

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Phyllis: But you’re not sure. Neff: I’d have to drive it around the block a couple of times. Later in the same, now classic exchange, as Neff ’s desire for Phyllis clearly overtakes his interest in selling her car insurance, she puts on the brakes: Phyllis: There’s a speed limit in this state, Mr. Neff. Forty-five miles an hour. Neff: How fast was I going, officer? Phyllis: I’d say around ninety. Neff: Suppose you get down off your motorcycle and give me a ticket? Phyllis: Suppose I let you off with a warning this time? Neff: Suppose it doesn’t take? Phyllis: Suppose I have to whack you over the knuckles? Neff: Suppose I bust out crying and put my head on your shoulder? Phyllis: Suppose you try putting it on my husband’s shoulder. Neff: That tears it. Along with the adulterous couple’s relationship, the real and metaphorical engines only start running in unison after Neff hatches the murder plan. As

Figure 21. “I’ll have to drive it around the block a couple of times”: Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity. Photofest.

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Phyllis revs her sedan and pulls away from Neff ’s apartment, his voice-over recalls the moment: “That was it, Keyes. The motor had started. The gears had meshed. The machine was rolling and there was nothing that could stop it.” But Los Angeles’s significance in Double Indemnity is more than the sum of its auto parts. Dimendberg claims that in addition to the car’s associative identification with L.A., the film’s views of the city per se are experienced “often through the window of Neff ’s automobile.”64 Actually, only the corner of Vermont and Franklin, where Neff drives Phyllis’s stepdaughter, Lola, to her tryst with her boyfriend Nino Zachetti, and the beach to which Neff takes Lola to distract her after her father’s killing, are viewed from a car’s-eye view. The Los Angeles–ness of all other venues, whether merely referenced (Inglewood, Long Beach, Santa Monica, Westwood, Pasadena, Lake Arrowhead) or situated (Neff ’s Wilshire district apartment, Phyllis’s Los Feliz home, the bowling alley at Third and Western, the Glendale train station, the hills behind the Hollywood Bowl), achieve their autonomy sans automobile. Indeed, the opening scene described above begins not on the speeding car that sets the story in motion but on a construction sign for the Los Angeles Railway Corp. The sign’s inscription all but adds the city to the casting credits. However, as Neff ’s car veers around the construction site and hurtles toward his office building, the sign also establishes a public/private transportation binary around which the narrative pivots. The film is set in 1938, one year after the opening of L.A.’s elegant Union Station, the last major urban train depot in America, and one year before the opening of Arroyo Seco Parkway, the city’s first, and nation’s second, urban freeway. While inner-city freeways offered little competition for inter-city train travel, the onslaught of the automobile (as satirized in Who Framed Roger Rabbit[1988]) would prove the death knell of Los Angeles’s once vaunted and extensive streetcar system. “Already decrepit and ailing by 1944,” Dimendberg avers, L.A.’s “public transportation system no doubt struck many contemporaneous viewers [of Double Indemnity] as in need of permanent repair, if not retirement.”65 In the film, however, public transport gets the last laugh. The automobile may have jurisdiction over adultery and murder, but the train and trolley preside over Morality and Fate. Neff and Phyllis’s murder-for-money plot may well have panned out had they not greedily succumbed to his double-indemnity insurance scheme, whose success depended on the victim’s dying on a train. And who better to dispense curbside justice via the train trope than claims manager Keyes, whose position, he tells Neff, is that of “a doctor and a bloodhound and a cop and a judge and a jury and a father confessor all in one.” Having intuited that Phyllis and a “somebody else” have committed the crime, Keyes explains the dire consequences to Neff: “They’ve committed a murder and it’s not like taking a trolley ride together where each one can get off at a different stop. They’re stuck with each other. They’ve got to ride all the way to the end of the line. And it’s a one-way street and the last stop is the cemetery.” Haunted by the transport image, Neff reiterates it twice, once into the Dicta-

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phone: “I remembered what you had told me, Keyes, about that trolley car ride, and how there was no way to get off until the end of the line, where the cemetery was.” And a second time at his last meeting with Phyllis, where he planned to kill her and pin it on Zachetti: “I have a friend who’s got a funny theory. He says when two people commit a murder they’re kind of on a trolley car. . . . They’re stuck with each other. They have to go riding clear to the end of the line, and the last stop is the cemetery.”

Double or Nothing /Three of a Kind Neff ’s repeating Keyes’s trolley-car simile twice is no coincidence. Doubles and splits are as fundamental to film noir as to schizoid Los Angeles, and nowhere is this “dialectic of opposites” more compulsively applied than in Double Indemnity. Beyond the title and dialogue references, doubles motifs pervade the “plot” (in both senses). Two murders are committed, the first by two murderers; the insurance policy Neff sells the Dietrichsons is on “your two cars, the La Salle and the Plymouth”; the signal for the getaway is two flashes of the (two) headlights; and at their fateful last meeting Neff comments on the déjà vu of their seating arrangement—“Just like the first time I was here. We were talking about auto insurance. And you were thinking about murder.” On a lighter note Neff jokes at the outset that his name has “two f ’s, like in Philadelphia, if you know ‘The Story.’” One of Phyllis’s double entendres in their flirtation scene is a “warning” about Neff ’s doubling the speed limit, from fortyfive to ninety. Keyes’s hats-off to Neff for his topping the semiannual sales report twice in a row splits the difference; as does his complaint that “I had dinner two hours ago, and it’s stuck halfway.” A chain of character couplings creates a square dance in the round: Neff and Phyllis, Phyllis and Mr. Dietrichson, Mr. Dietrichson and Lola, Lola and Zachetti, Zachetti and Phyllis, Neff and Lola, Neff and Keyes, Keyes and his “Little Man.” A nickname for Keyes’s moral compass or conscience, the Little Man is what enables him to crack the insurance-fraud cases that stack up on his desk and allegedly drive him crazy. But this metonym for the Law of the Father actually causes the claims manager the most pain, filling his belly, in the Dietrichson case, with “concrete” so that “I can’t eat.” One can take this psychosomatic “ailment” two ways: first, as a sign that Keyes subconsciously sympathizes with the id-driven “criminals” his superego demands be brought to justice; second, à la police detective Porfiry in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, that Keyes’s uncanny ability to get to the bottom of insurance fraud is due to his own repressed criminal tendencies. Either way, Keyes’s ego is caught in a double bind. Automobility and split personalities are not the sole factors for granting Double Indemnity pride of place in the L.A. and film noir canons. Raymond Chandler, who cowrote the screenplay, and James M. Cain, on whose novel the film is based, reign supreme as literary sources for L.A. noir, while director and cowriter Billy Wilder hails from the group of Jewish émigré filmmakers so critical to the cycle’s

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formation. Each of the triumvirate’s creative hands is discernible in the finished film: from Wilder’s cynical tone to Chandler’s metaphoric language to Cain’s Clytemnestra plot, obsessive doubling, and automophilia. Even the act of reading Cain’s work evokes an automotive theme, as Tom Wolfe, in his introduction to Cain × 3 (a collection of The Postman Always Rings Twice, Mildred Pierce, and Double Indemnity), suggests: “Picking up a Cain novel is like climbing into a car with one of those Superstockers who is up to forty by the time your right leg is in the door.”66 Two of Cain × 3’s titles foreground doubling in their titles. The Postman Always Rings Twice, published two years before Double Indemnity, in 1934, was even filmed twice—in France as Le dernier tournant (The last bend in the road [1939]) and in Italy as Ossessione (Obsession [1942])—before a somewhat more lenient but still PCA-bound Hollywood got around to adapting it in 1946. Soliciting audience sympathy for Postman’s adulterous murderers still posed problems for the PCA (as it had for Double Indemnity). But the antiheroes’ comeuppance, via a Pacific Coast Highway smash-up (à la Fast One), and the changing postwar times—in Hollywood and the nation at large—helped push the film through.67 The “postman” of the title, as vagabond protagonist Frank Chambers’s (John Garfield) voice-over informs us, refers not to an earthly mail carrier but to the Fates that ultimately land him on death row. For a reader of noir’s literal and figurative signs, Chambers’s doom was sealed from the get-go. The car that gives him a ride and drops him off at the “Twin Oaks” roadside diner on the outskirts of Los Angeles is driven by the district attorney who will later put Chambers away. The “Man Wanted” sign that gives Chambers a pretext to stay on as hired help at the diner doubles as the siren’s call of the diner’s sexy wife, Cora (Lana Turner)—the real reason he trades in his traveling shoes. Two deaths, as in Double Indemnity, ensue (of Cora’s husband and herself), both, in this case, car-related. Where Postman veers most from Double Indemnity’s take on automobility, however, is in Chambers’s peripatetic character, who, at least at the outset, is not in the driver’s seat. “The figure of the hitchhiker,” Osteen explains, “challenges the aura of ownership by embodying risk, the intrusion of chaos, and the fragility of . . . prosperity and security that automobiles represent. Although they . . . seem to epitomize individualism, . . . hitchhikers both exemplify the American dream’s individualist ideology and challenge its faith in unlimited upward movement.”68 Chambers’s downfall results less from challenging the American dream than from buying into its automotivation, as illustrated in his rationalization for choosing thumbing over auto theft as the way to run off with Cora: “Stealing a man’s wife, that’s nothing. But stealing his car, that’s larceny.” And stealing away together on the open road, that’s murder. The “circular path is the highway,” David Fine affirms, “doubling back on itself, betraying its promise of mobility, and leading not to freedom, but to Frank’s and Cora’s death.”69 Although metropolitan Los Angeles plays only a peripheral geographical role in Postman, its metaphysical presence is pervasive. Like Keyes’s Little Man turned

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loose, the city represents both id and superego, transgression and the Law. Desire and retribution are prefigured, L.A. style, when Chambers’s fling with a female lion tamer (Audrey Totter), whom he meets in the city, lands him in the doghouse with Cora. The corruption and hypocrisy of the justice system is personified in the shyster lawyer Keats (Hume Cronyn) and his two-bit gangster “secretary” Kennedy (Alan Reed). Keats, who hides from the court a written confession he wangles out of Chambers, gets the couple off the hook in their L.A.-based trial for the murder of Cora’s husband (fig. 22). But when the couple’s notoriety, and Cora’s ambition and business smarts, turns the diner into a thriving beer garden, Kennedy returns from the repressed with the confession as blackmail bait. Chambers dispenses with Kennedy, but he can’t shake Fate: it snatches Cora in a Pacific Highway car crash and sends Chambers to the gas chamber for the one crime he didn’t commit. “Fusing automobility and domesticity,” the third of the Cain × 3 collection, Mildred Pierce (published in 1941), puts the geographical character of Los Angeles back behind the wheel.70 A suburban melodrama with an eponymous female protagonist and no central murder plot (the 1946 film version inserted one), this quasinoir adds a consumerist twist to the L.A.-automobility conceit. Mildred’s chain of eateries in Pasadena, Beverly Hills, and Laguna Beach, like Cora’s Twin Oaks Tavern, David Fine points out, “are precursors of the drive-in restaurants, which beginning in the thirties became major enterprises in Southern California’s

Figure 22. Hit-and-run driving: Cecil Kellaway, John Garfield, and Lana Turner in The Postman Always Rings Twice. Photofest.

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‘linear cities.’ Along with the new streamlined supermarkets (built around parking lots) and drive-in theaters, they became the characteristic commercial structures in an age dedicated to the marriage of business and the automobile.”71 Apropos of the business angle, the marriage breakup in Mildred Pierce, unlike in Postman and Double Indemnity, is precipitated less by adulterous desire (associated not with Mildred but with her bad-seed daughter, Veda) than by Southern California’s “material dreams” of upward mobility.72 Befitting its economic base, the third of Cain’s noir trilogy is also more class-conscious and historically situated than its predecessors. Mildred’s developer-husband’s business failure exemplifies “the twenties image of the good life shattered by the depression,” while her own success accurately indicates that the effects of the depression “were felt less severely and more briefly” on the West Coast than in the East and Midwest.73 Mildred’s own subsequent fall from grace, though regressively readable as patriarchal containment, also posits a (Los Angeles) Growth Machine, personified in Mildred’s daughter Veda’s “unmitigated selfishness and cruel opportunism,” that carries the seeds of its own destruction. Mostly it serves as another of Cain’s evocations of “a cynical [Southern California] landscape where hope was often just another con.”74

Convertibility Another key hitchhiker noir, adapted by Martin Goldsmith from his own Caininspired novel and directed by Jewish émigré Edgar G. Ulmer, Detour (1945), as Paul Cantor points out, not only “revolves around the automobile” but includes “two distinctively American [and quintessentially Los Angeles] automotive spaces: the used car lot and the drive-in restaurant.”75 Cantor might have added a third, even more dominant, car-related chronotope: the roadside diner, situated somewhere in limbo between New York and Hollywood, whence ex-nightclub pianist Al Roberts (Tom Neal) relates his improbable tale.76 Again, as if by fiat, two “homicides” take place, for which, despite his (voice-over-professed) innocence, Roberts is the likely suspect. The ambiguity of the murders is mirrored in Roberts’s own fractured identity, which assumes that of his first “victim,” Charles Haskell Jr. (Edmund MacDonald)—who gave Roberts a ride but then died of apparent heart failure—and terminates in total anonymity after Roberts accidentally kills Vera (Ann Savage)—a woman he picked up while posing as Haskell. The film’s Kafkaesque conflation of anonymity and anomie, dream and nightmare, and its double-identity theme, resonates on multiple levels with Los Angeles—that duplicitous place “where nothing looked like anything.”77 The City of Angels’ (de)construction as the fata morgana of fata morganas is made palpable in the predicating of Roberts’s ill-fated westward trek on a reunion with his nightclub-singing girlfriend Sue (Claudia Drake), who herself had gone to Hollywood to grab the brass ring and ends up slinging hash. For émigré director Ulmer, the theme of an artist of high-cultural ability and ambition crashing on Hollywood’s shoals (Roberts is a classically trained pianist who was stuck playing second fiddle

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for Sue) also mirrored his own devolution from set designer on some of Weimar cinema’s greatest films to churning out B-noirs along Tinseltown’s Poverty Row. In Detour, both in content and form, Ulmer “manages to bridge high culture and kitsch, while also foregrounding their dialectical relation to the Hollywood film industry and his own place in it.”78 Roberts’s film-ending voice-over, from Ulmer’s Jewish refugee perspective, echoes his people’s timeless plaint rendered genocidal by contemporaneous events: “How many of you would believe the killing [of Vera] wasn’t premeditated? Everyone of you on the jury would say I murdered her! . . . I was cooked, done for.” A third L.A. noir of the hitchhiking kind, and one of the last noirs in the classical cycle (1940s through 1950s), Kiss Me Deadly (1955), also marks, for Osteen, “the apotheosis of noir’s cars.”79 The film’s opening credits, like Detour’s, offer a car-travel prologue. Besides appearing over sado-macho protagonist Mike Hammer’s (Ralph Meeker) speeding Jaguar, they crawl downward, evoking streetsurface signage as viewed from a moving car. The credits’ reversed direction reflects a plot reversal as well, as the hitchhiker here is not the main character but a messenger/martyr figure named Christina (Cloris Leachman), whose cryptic communiqué takes Hammer down the deadliest of open roads. Haskell/Roberts’s convertible in Detour had introduced a new element to noir’s cars. Marketed from its inception as a symbol of “youth, freedom, and rebellion,” the convertible, in its association with transformation and reinvention, represented the ne plus ultra of automobility: convertibility.80 Both of Hammer’s cars in Kiss Me Deadly (the Jaguar gets smashed up and is replaced by a Corvette) are sports convertibles (fig. 23). Though the souped-up trope, and its manifestation in the City of Transformation, cranks convertibility up a notch, the reinvention it represents is hardly Autopian. The film traverses a broad spectrum of class-inflected haunts: a Bel Air mansion and a Malibu beach house on one end; an inner-city boxing gym, Central Avenue nightclub, and decaying Bunker Hill tenements on the other. But the mansion and beach house are owned by gangsters. And while the black gym and nightclub, as well as ethnic characters—Nick, the Greek mechanic (Nick Dennis), and poor Italian tenants—broaden the demographic, Hammer’s high-rise digs, “hypermodern” answering machine, and shiny sports cars set an antiseptic tone.81 Mid-1950s Los Angeles “has mutated,” Osteen observes, “from the sleepy suburbia of Double Indemnity into a city filled with human bumper cars . . . where humans have become machines.” Mirroring the postmodern city’s “soul-destroying hollowness,” Hammer, whom Christina pegged right off as someone “who thinks about nothing but his clothes, his car, himself,” has “accepted as fait accompli the commodification of everything. He has internalized the automobile’s amoral space.”82 Not content merely to investigate extramarital affairs, Hammer uses his girl Friday (Marian Carr) to induce them. He doesn’t slug her, as Kells might have, but she might wish that he did for all the interest he shows. Even the police hold their noses in the “bedroom dick’s” presence, snidely suggesting that a window be left open—to let out the stink.

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Figure 23. Convertibility: Gaby Rodgers and Ralph Meeker in Kiss Me Deadly. Photofest.

Not all the stench can be laid at Hammer’s feet, however. His hedonistic lifestyle and technoconsumerist accoutrements reflect Cold War changes traceable to the military-industrial layer of Los Angeles’s palimpsest. When the bombing of Pearl Harbor “signaled that war efforts would henceforth be bicoastal,” Los Angeles, building on its emergence as a major aerospace center in the 1920s, was poised to dominate the defense industry.83 As Janet Abu-Lughod recounts, “New York’s [wartime] role, which was restricted to shipping, some aircraft construction, and a few defense industries, was modest compared to Chicago’s, and both were dwarfed by Los Angeles’s role. Los Angeles became home to the most lucrative war contracts, especially in the newer technologies associated with airpower.”84 As will be discussed at greater length in chapter 8, wartime labor demands, especially in the defense industries, led to a massive influx of African Americans to Los Angeles, a demographic shift to which Kiss Me Deadly’s boxing gym and nightclub scenes responded. As for Hammer’s high living, postwar prosperity and the nation’s reorientation toward hyperconsumerism produced a materialist

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orientation 180 degrees from Depression-era deprivation and wartime self-sacrifice.85 Cold War rivalry, however, and its mass-destructive corollary, the Bomb, put a radioactive damper on the “good life”—one from which convertibility offered only partial respite and no protection. “Va-va-voom! Pretty pow!” is Nick the Greek’s running-gag description of Hammer’s sports car engines, connoting both their sexual potency and explosive potential (Nick removes two bombs from the Corvette). And when cars, sex, and politics come together in the “Great Whatsit”—a suitcase containing fissionable material that the femme fatale Gabrielle (Gaby Rodgers) opens at the end—the consequences are truly cataclysmic. “She doesn’t know,” screenwriter A. I. Bezzerides explained in an interview. “She thinks it’s something precious, that can be measured in dollars and cents, when it has to do with security, and the future, and man’s existence.”86 The nuclear blast Pandora unleashes at the beach house marks not only the end of the film, and symbolically the end of the world, but arguably the end of classical noir as well. As Paul Schrader mused about Kiss Me Deadly’s Armageddon: “It obviously ends with the holocaust. Someone finds the bomb and the world is over. . . . You really can’t go much further.”87

chapter 6




Neo-noir

Though it may have taken film noir to a narrative cul de sac, Kiss Me Deadly was not quite the generic endpoint Paul Schrader suggested. The cycle straggled on, with Touch of Evil (1958)—shot in Venice, California (as a stand-in for a Calexico border town), with an opening scene capped by a car bomb—marking the consensus expiration date. Even the “postnoir” interim of the early to mid-1960s, Foster Hirsch has shown, “far from being a limbo for noir, was a particularly rich period”: Psycho (1960), Blast of Silence (1961), Cape Fear, The Manchurian Candidate (both 1962), Shock Corridor (1963), The Naked Kiss (1964), and Brainstorm (1965).1 By the late 1960s, however, a confluence of historical, industrial, aesthetic, and cognitive changes produced a noir phase divergent enough from its classical forebear to warrant a new name: neo-noir. New “rips in the social fabric” caused by the Vietnam War and the counterculture provided a newly darkened social backdrop; the replacement of the Production Code by a more permissive ratings system enabled foregrounding of noir’s telltale sex and violence; stylistic innovation inspired by the European new waves encouraged formal experimentation; and, perhaps most significant, a hyperawareness of noir conventions promulgated by increasingly influential film schools engendered a generic self-consciousness utterly absent in the classical period among filmmakers, critics, and filmgoers alike. One thing that remained constant, however, was L.A.’s status as privileged noir site.

Film Soleil The geographical constancy is particularly striking when comparing the “point of no return” of the classical period Kiss Me Deadly with the “first truly new post-noir noir,” Point Blank (1967).2 On opposite poles of the classical and neonoir spectrums, the two films are veritable companion pieces in their relation to L.A. noir, starting with their exemplification of the noir subset D. K. Holm terms “film soleil” (film sun).3 Favoring sunny, daytime settings as counterpoint to its 126

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shadowy, nightmarish themes, film soleil is preternaturally drawn, by default, to the bright and guilty place. As for the City of the Future’s exemplification of postmodern sterility, Point Blank takes Kiss Me Deadly’s early milking of the trope to new-wave extremes. Late1960s L.A. is “introduced” via a seemingly endless, kitsch-moderne airport corridor, along which the one-named protagonist Walker (Lee Marvin) strides, his trek intercut—to the rhythm and overlapped sound of his footsteps—with flash-forwards of his crosstown destination.4 Subsequent icons of alienation include a sleek downtown office tower (occupied by a conglomerate called “The Organization”); a Hammer-like Santa Monica upscale apartment building (with Ramona-like “Gates of Spain” restaurant); a hip Sunset Strip nightclub (replete with psychedelic light show and robotic go-go dancers); a high-tech Valley restaurant (patronized by glazed-eyed humanoids); an open sewer-like section of the L.A. River (at which two deadly shootings take place); and a Hollywood Hills mansion retreat overlooking Banham’s Plains of Id (“gridded with endless streets, peppered endlessly with ticky-tacky houses clustered in indistinguishable neighborhoods, slashed across by endless freeways . . . and so on . . . endlessly”).5 Cars make their obligatory appearance, if in pointedly mock-Autopian fashion. Walker, befitting his name, sends up both cars and freeways—most hilariously in the test drive of one of Big John’s new cars. With the eponymous mobster/car dealer riding shotgun, Walker pulls up at a freeway underpass and rams the car back and forth into the concrete pilings—though not just as a gag. Walker was double-crossed and left for dead in one of the mob-run Organization’s heists and is hell-bent on revenge. But like Hammer’s amoral gumshoe, Walker’s crusading gunman differs little from the inhabitants (or the surroundings) of this “souldestroying” city. As Nicholas Christopher puts it, films like Point Blank (and Kiss Me Deadly) are “populated by characters so cold-blooded, existentially blank, and alienated—sundered, actually, from the disintegrating society around them—that the metallic, splashily lit nightmare cities of steel and glass they wander in seem most chilling for their matter-of-factness. They are presented not as heightened reality but as the norm.”6 The very unreality of the “norm” is the most uncanny resemblance between Point Blank and Kiss Me Deadly. Both the classical and the neo-L.A. noir share a protagonist who “is apparently killed at the outset before entering a labyrinth as a dead man—or as a ghost entering the underworld.”7 Walker was left for dead in a deserted Alcatraz prison cell; Hammer appeared still to be in the car that exploded after going over the cliff with Christina. Thus a case can be made (and the New Wave–inspired Point Blank lends it the most credence, not least in its title), that the subsequent narratives be taken either as allegory or hallucination or both—as “a dying man’s epiphanic nightmare.”8 Nouvelle vagueness on the one hand, postmodern pointlessness on the other—both are commensurate with L.A.’s “big, sprawling, shapeless, slobbering . . . metropolis of peculiarity.”9

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For all its resemblance to Kiss Me Deadly, however, Point Blank is a neonoir—indeed, per Hirsch, “the first neo-noir in America to use color and wide screen to conjure an environment of enclosure and entrapment, [where] open spaces of the film’s unpopulated, depersonalized mise-en-scene become as ominous as the traditional mise-en-scene of classical noir.”10 To create noir’s paradigmatic prison-bar effect, for example, achieved in classical noir prototypically through Venetian blinds and staircase railings, Point Blank substitutes polyester-curtain creases and plastic window-shade slats. Most resonant with 1960s Los Angeles is the film’s idiosyncratic color symbolism. While paying obeisance to red as the “master color” for sex and violence, Point Blank’s dominant color is not red but yellow (and kindred hues of gold and golden brown). Clothing, hair color, wall paneling, and other décor all display variations on the yellow-gold theme, for which film soleil associations with “sunny California” and the Golden State obviously apply. But the corrupt big-business theme also demands that gold be taken at “face value”—as an analogue for money at best, “filthy lucre” at worst, and rubbing off on Los Angeles once again. Wall Street may still have been (and remains) the nation’s financial hub, but L.A.’s cultural and military-industrial capital had made it the pinnacle of corporate wealth and power in the Cold War era. “Crime [in Point Blank] is now corporate,” Hirsch notes, “conducted not in side-street back rooms at night but from nine to five in brightly illuminated steel-and-glass skyscrapers. The top criminals Walker hunts are men in gray flannel suits, power brokers with their place in a vast pyramid, the Organization that is never clearly defined.”11

Defining the Organization Chinatown (1974) is more than just another film soleil and the next major L.A. neo-noir. What Ramona, novel and myth, is to the city’s nineteenth- and early twentieth-century history, Chinatown, movie and myth, is for the (post)modern era: urtext and Original Si(g)n. Like its literary forebear, Chinatown also operates backward and forward in time. A period piece set in 1937, the film bridges the classical and neo-noir periods and compresses four decades of Los Angeles’s past—a past that resonates with the time the film was made and reverberates to the present. Chinatown’s anachronistic rendering of historical events further aligns it with Ramona. Not all events are temporally realigned. The film clearly conjures, while not directly naming, the corruption scandal that forced the city’s mayor and police chief from office in 1937. It also maintains the basic time frame, while changing the name, of the St. Francis Dam disaster that killed more than 450 people in 1928. Where the scenario takes the most license is in substituting a fictional controversy and scandal over a new dam’s construction in the late 1930s with the city’s early twentieth-century imbroglio over the Owens Valley Aqueduct, constructed between 1905 and 1913. The main historical players are composited also—a seeming imperative given the temporal conflation, number

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of players involved, and complexity of their interrelations. The real-life narrative is so convoluted, in fact (and fictionalization), that before proceeding to a discussion of Chinatown, a legend for the legend, a key to the film à clef, is required. The Aqueduct “There it is! Take it!”—Water Department superintendent William Mulholland’s oft-cited but underscrutinized declamation at the grand opening of the aqueduct on November 5, 1913—stands as an epigraph for an era. Directed at the fortythree thousand citizens at the ceremony and the four hundred thousand other Angelinos who stood to reap the benefits of the city’s bountiful new water supply, the chief engineer’s sound bite, on a deeper level, addressed a select group whose benefit, while alloyed to the water, went far beyond its drinking or irrigation use (fig. 24). This group, composed of much of the city’s power elite, had finagled, if not initially conspired, to gain ownership of vast undeveloped tracts of land in the San Fernando Valley. Not part of Los Angeles proper when aqueduct construction began and thus not entitled to its water, the then sparsely populated valley, once annexed to the city, would reap the irrigational rewards—and its landowners, the financial windfall. Indeed, rather than use the water for agricultural purposes, as

Figure 24. “There it is! Take it!!” Owens Valley Aqueduct grand opening, 1913. USC Special Collections Library.

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many, including Mulholland, thought most feasible, the power brokers planned to gain additional liquidity through the area’s residential and business development, and commensurate spike in property values.12 The site of “the largest single land development in Los Angeles history” was a two-hundred-thousand-plus-acre future Plain of Id spread between the Santa Monica Mountains to the south and the Santa Susanna and San Gabriel mountains to the north.13 The land boom generated by the aqueduct’s delivery of water and the valley’s annexation to the city in 1915, which nearly tripled metropolitan Los Angeles’s area, was likened to a municipal Louisiana Purchase.14 Though the Thomas Jeffersons of this giant land grab may have hidden their ulterior motives (and insider knowledge), their identities would become an open book. Incorporated into overlapping entities such as the Los Angeles Suburban Homes Company and, most redolent of the Ramona myth, the San Fernando Mission Land Company, the land syndicate’s formation and fire power were disclosed by newspaper whistleblowers. Syndicate members included railroad baron E. H. Harriman; trolley tycoons Henry Huntington and Moses Sherman (the latter also a Water Commission member); Huntington’s partner in Pacific Light and Power, W. G. Kerchoff; bankers Leslie Brand, Otto Brant, and Joseph Sartori; the “Great Developer” H. J. Whitley; Los Angeles Express publisher Edwin Earl; and, last but not least, the tentacles without which any local Octopus would be incomplete, the L.A. Times’ Harrison Gray Otis and Harry Chandler.15 Rumors of drought, the city’s rapid growth, and a massive promotional campaign overrode conspiratorial concerns, however, and the first bond measure for the aqueduct was resoundingly approved by voters in 1905. A nabob conspicuously missing from the media watchdog’s purported A-list was Fred Eaton. A former mayor and Mulholland’s one-time superior at the then privately owned (1868–98) Los Angeles City Water Company, Eaton was no minor player in the aqueduct project. Indeed, the outsized idea of transporting water 250 miles from the Owens River at the base of the Sierra Nevadas through mountains and desert to the L.A. basin was Eaton’s brainchild, one that Mulholland initially rejected as impractical.16 Meeting the city’s water needs, ever its Achilles heel, turned the tide in Eaton’s favor. “All that is wanted naturally to make [Los Angeles] a paradise is water, more water,” agriculture professor William Henry Brewer lamented in 1860, about a town of fewer than three thousand people.17 When historian William Smythe, executive secretary of the National Irrigation Congress, concluded in 1900 that he saw “no future” for the growing metropolis of more than one hundred thousand, Mulholland’s reluctance gave way.18 “A city quickly finds its level, and that level is its water supply,” he subsequently opined.19 Mountains would indeed be moved, the prophet Mulholland declared, for the city “where God clearly never intended large numbers of people to live” but where “dreams are put to the final test.”20 While Mulholland’s lofty goal of matching the city’s water resources to the needs of its citizens was largely public-spirited, Eaton’s aims strayed in the selfaggrandizing direction. A wildcatter rather than a syndicalist, Eaton bilked the

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city early on by buying up land along the aqueduct route on his own and selling it back to the city at inflated prices, while holding on to a prospective reservoir site as a hedge. Playing both sides against the middle, he also served as a city agent, teaming with U.S. Reclamation Service official Joseph Lippincott (in a clear conflict of interest) to acquire all-important rights of way from unsuspecting farmers in the Owens Valley.21 When Los Angeles passed the bond issue in 1905 to begin construction of the aqueduct, understandably enraged Owens Valley residents protested all the way to President Theodore Roosevelt at “being robbed of our water by a few moneyed men.”22 As righteous as the complaints may have been at the time, just a few decades earlier, in another tragic parallel with Ramona, the water tables had been turned. Paiute Indians had inhabited the Owens Valley, in comparative harmony with the environment, into the 1860s—until a report by an American military expedition attracted white settlers, miners, and cattlemen who made war on the Paiutes and nearly exterminated them, not to mention disrupting the region’s ecology.23 Nor were Owens Valley residents the sole robbery victims in 1905; Angelinos, and their descendants, also were being fleeced, and not merely by San Fernando Valley land grabbers. The greater public interest, to the city’s megaboosters, had always meant an ever-expanding Los Angeles. An ever-expanding Los Angeles meant, after the Owens River was tapped out, new bond measures to access the Colorado and (eventually) the Sacramento Rivers, and—since L.A. “has always been and always will be thirsty for water”—the River Styx if need be.24 Outlying areas bore the brunt of a hell’s-the-limit Los Angeles. Thus when severe drought prompted pumping additional groundwater from the Owens Valley in 1919, renewed hardship and outrage moved columnist Will Rogers to commiserate: “Ten years ago this was a wonderful valley with one quarter of a million acres of fruit and alfalfa. But Los Angeles had to have more water for its Chamber of Commerce to drink more toasts to its growth, more water to dilute its orange juice and more water for its geraniums to delight the tourists, while the giant cottonwoods here dried. So, now this is a valley of desolation.”25 When the city resorted to “wholesale purchases of land and water rights,” violence erupted, including the commandeering of a strategic spillway gate by an armed Owens Valley contingent in 1924, and the periodic dynamiting of sections of the aqueduct through much of the decade. “California’s Little Civil War” came to a head in the late 1920s.26 Despite armed guards at all the conduits, horseback patrols along the pipeline, and even the dispatching of federal agents and Pinkertons by President Calvin Coolidge, assaults on the aqueduct continued. When violence threatened to spread to the St. Francis Dam, the last remaining reliable source of water for the city, Mulholland moved to cut off the insurgency at its root.27 The investigation he launched in 1927 of its chief organizers, the brothers Wilfred and Mark Watterson (owners of the Inyo County Bank and holders of mortgages on most of Owens Valley’s farms and ranches), led to charges of embezzlement. The Wattersons were handed a tenyear prison sentence, and with their bank’s and the local economy’s demise, the

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resistance movement abated—but did not collapse. A new flurry of dynamiting led to another arrest, of the so-called Inyo Gang, with a preliminary hearing set for March 12, 1928.28 The Dam Disaster Shortly before midnight on the day of the Inyo Gang’s hearing, “the world’s safest dam’s” concrete holding wall ruptured.29 Twelve billion gallons of water surged down San Francisquito Canyon, demolishing farms, ranches, bridges, and several towns along a sixty-mile swath through Ventura County to the Pacific Ocean. Including all of the dam’s seventy-four residents, the final death toll in the St. Francis Dam disaster rose to more than 450, with property damage exceeding $20 million.30 Although his own life and personal wealth were spared, William Mulholland’s reputation, and mental and physical health, were irreparably damaged. The man who “broke rocks and brought a river to the thirsty land,” who “moved a river and made a desert bloom,” that “awe-inspiring glimpse of perfection” who “like Moses . . . had been granted a vision of his people’s deliverance,” became the object of death threats and newspaper attacks.31 He also found himself on trial for manslaughter. On the witness stand his words were slurred and his hands shook, perhaps from guilt or shame but also from early stage Parkinson’s disease. Although absolved of criminal charges by the coroner’s jury (and by history, as a 1992 report determined that a reactivated Paleolithic landslide, impossible to detect at the time, precipitated the break), Mulholland was rebuked by the court for incompetence and negligence in the dam’s construction.32 “Few individuals in American history,” Margaret Davis states, “have risen to the heights of fame and achievement that Mulholland had secured, only to suffer such extreme public disgrace and personal sorrow.”33 For Los Angeles’s movers and shakers the man who had become as integral a part of the city’s psyche and esteem as the aqueduct itself became “a liability that could no longer be sustained.”34 A broken man, Mulholland retired in November 1929. His chief assistant, Harvey Van Norman, replaced the “great self-made engineer” as head of the newly named Department of Water and Power—the “power” an overdue acknowledgment of the publically owned electrical plants that “Mulholland’s Ditch” had additionally bequeathed the city and that further propelled its growth.35 The City Hall Scandal On April 26, 1928, two weeks after the verdict in the Mulholland hearing, the city’s boosters “turned to a promotion that had served them well in the past” as damage control—“a civic parade.”36 Outdoing the pomp and circumstance of 1884’s union-busting La Fiesta, surpassing 1924’s three-day-long, aqueduct violence–distracting dedication of Mulholland Highway (fig. 25) (now Mulholland Drive), “the largest civic procession ever seen west of Chicago” celebrated

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the new Los Angeles City Hall.37 “A sheer gleaming tower of white symbolizing a new era of progress and accomplishment for the Pacific Southwest,” the ziggurattopped structure incorporating Greek, Roman, and Renaissance elements may have cauterized the wound caused by the St. Francis Dam disaster. What remained badly bruised was city government’s institutional integrity. Corruption in Los Angeles, as in other major American cities, followed hard on the heels of Prohibition. In order for bootlegging and its ancillary businesses (prostitution, gambling, and bookmaking) to thrive, an underworld alliance with police and local government became de rigueur. With its ideal coastal location along the Canadian-Mexican booze-trade route and as the culmination of the Bootleg Highway (Texas–Tijuana–San Diego–L.A.), the City of Angels quickly became the West Coast’s Shangri-la of Vice.38 Although initially at odds with Harry Chandler and company’s “above-board” profiteers, whose bounty depended on a more virtuous city image, the rumrunners eventually joined with the boosters in a gentleman’s agreement dubbed the Combination. “The deal was simple,” John Buntin explains. “The [L.A.] Times would launch no anti-vice crusades, [underworld lawyer Kent] Parrot would not interfere with the operations of the [LAPD’s antiunion] Red Squad. To seal the agreement, the two sides agreed on a police chief who would satisfy both parties: James ‘Two Guns’ Davis, an intense, blue-eyed Texan who had spent much of his career as a member of

Figure 25. Breaking ground on Mulholland Highway, 1928. USC Special Collections Library.

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the vice squad.”39 City hall, whose actions if not its policies would be dictated by the Combination, provided political cover. The “alliance of politics, police, and crime,” after a brief (and ineffectual) reformist interim under Mayor John Porter, reached its (similarly short-lived) apotheosis with Mayor Frank Shaw’s election in 1933. Seemingly an ideal front for the police/underworld/city hall arrangement, the Shaw/Davis teaming instead fueled a more formidable reform movement that would capsize city hall and the Combination along with it.40 The assault on the Combination began with a report by the Citizens Independent Vice Investigating Committee (CIVIC), organized by puritanical/populist cafeteria owner Clifford Clinton, which reported “600 brothels, 300 gambling houses, 1,800 bookie joints, and 23,000 slot machines” operating in the city.41 CIVIC further charged that “‘underworld profits’ were being funneled to the campaigns of ‘city and county officials in vital positions’” and, most devastatingly, that the “principal law enforcement agencies in the city, county, and district attorney’s office, the sheriff ’s department, and the LAPD, ‘work in complete harmony with the activities of important figures in the underworld.’”42 The L.A. Times, the Combination-controlled grand jury, and lackey Mayor Shaw not only summarily dismissed CIVIC’s findings but turned Clinton himself into “Public Enemy #1.”43 Personal attacks turned potentially lethal when a bomb exploded during the night at Clinton’s Los Feliz home, sparing the family only because the blast occurred on the opposite side of the house from their bedrooms. Another near-miss victim of the powers that be was Harry Raymond, a former San Diego police chief and a former LAPD vice officer with connections to the old Combination. Panicked that the rogue-cop-turned-whistleblower’s disclosure of police/underworld collusion “would blow the lid off Los Angeles,” the Combination barely failed to take Raymond out with a car bomb.44 The LAPD further damaged its already dubious reputation when Chief Davis assigned the chief suspect in the bombing, Police Captain Earl Kinette, to the case. Compounding the affront, the case would be prosecuted by notoriously corrupt District Attorney Buron Fitts. Chamber of Commerce director Frank Doherty summed up the tragicomedy: “a near psychopathic district attorney is investigating a crooked police department . . . [that is] trying to dispense of or frighten a former crooked member of their crooked force who was spying into their crooked activities.”45 Kinette’s subsequent trial in April 1938, besides affirming his complicity in the bombing, revealed a secret spy squad engaged in wiretapping of Mayor Shaw’s political opponents. Chief Davis’s attempts at exculpation, once again, only aggravated the assault on his and the department’s integrity. The surveillance was justified, the chief declared (presaging Cold Warriors J. Edgar Hoover and Joseph McCarthy) because “all these men”—liberal county supervisor John Anson Ford, Hollywood-Citizen News publisher Harlan Palmer, crusader Clinton—“are criminals . . . subversive elements” as demonstrated by their “attempting to destroy confidence in the police department.”46

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Six months later, a recall election deposed Mayor Shaw. He was replaced by reformist judge Fletcher Bowron. In November 1938 Chief Davis and the entire police commission resigned under pressure from Bowron. Through the aid of underworld figure Tony Cornero, the likely model for Paul Cain’s Italian mobster in Fast One, Bowron gained the names of twenty-six “compromised police officers,” which (illegal) wiretapping evidence confirmed.47 When the twentysix fingered cops resigned, followed by a dozen more within six months, the Combination had finally been cracked. Bowron’s breakup of “the most powerful ring that ever held an American city in its grip” hardly spelled the end of the city’s underworld crime, government corruption, or police malfeasance, however, as subsequent events (and L.A. noir) would amply demonstrate.48

Water and Power Robert Towne’s Chinatown screenplay was not, as were most classical and many neo-noirs (including Point Blank, from a Donald Westlake novel), an adaptation. Though steeped in the Hammett/Chandler private-eye tradition and suffused with 1970s malaise, Towne’s original script was inspired most by a sense of disillusionment with Southern California. What set his antimyth perspective apart from that of most noir writers was that he was a native Angelino, not a transplant. The “central crime,” “the truly murderous act,” the “sin” in the film, Towne wrote in “Preface and Postscript to Chinatown,” is not the greed and corruption tied to water and power but rather “the wanton destruction of the past . . . laying waste to land and to fragile communities [by] . . . a vision as grand and expansive as a cancer.”49 Towne’s prelapsarian nostalgia for a primal, unspoiled Los Angeles is reinforced in the script’s (and film’s) biblical allusions, specifically to Genesis (namely, characters Noah Cross and Evelyn Mulwray), which turn the three dark chapters in L.A. history limned above into a single “twisted creation myth.”50 If the biblical conceit and epic scope of Towne’s retelling produced a “noir legend that would not die,” a “Chinatown syndrome” that still haunts the region’s water departments—as the film’s most ardent debunker, Steven P. Erie, avers—this antimyth is amply supported by the historical, and rhetorical, records.51 Never a city to shy away from hyperbole, either of the bright or guilty sort, the “rape of the valley” and “water imperialism” sagas had become conventional wisdom long before Towne reconfigured them. Nor was biblical imagery in short supply. “The City of Angels moved through the Valley like a devastating plague. It was ruthless, stupid, cruel, and crooked,” Morrow Mayo paraphrased Exodus in 1933. “Today there is a saying in California about this funeral ground, which may well remain its epitaph: ‘The Federal Government of the United States held Owens Valley while Los Angeles raped it.’”52 As for Mosaic figures, William Mulholland, “the man who struck rock to bring forth water,” and who stood on Mount Nebo and pointed to the Promised Land, had frequently been likened, prior to the dam disaster, to God’s Chosen One.53 Mulholland himself invoked the Bible to support the water project, recalling that

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Hezekiah, king of Judah, a pioneer in public waterworks, had “made the pool and the conduit and brought the water into the city [of Jerusalem]. He stopped the upper water course of Gihon and brought it straight down to the west side of the City of David, and Hezekiah prospered in all his works.”54 Finally, there was the “real” Moses, Moses Sherman, who prospered not through good works but through betrayal of the public trust as water commissioner cum land syndicator; and Joseph B. Lippincott, Fred Eaton’s accomplice in the Owens Valley boondoggle, whom Owens Valleyites memorialized with a New Testament nickname: “Judas B.”55 From the contemporary leftist quarter, Norman Klein has faulted Towne’s mythopoeic license, not for its indictment of the water project but for the allegorical cover it gives to actual criminals. But already in the 1980s it was possible to take issue with the screenwriter’s (unwitting) fudging of some important facts as well.56 The factual discrepancies stemmed from Towne’s primary historical source, Carey McWilliams’s otherwise authoritative Southern California: An Island on the Land. McWilliams had relied, uncritically, on the writings of late 1920s aqueduct debunker Andrea B. Nordskog, who had drawn liberally on the contemporaneous accounts of Los Angeles News editor Samuel T. Clover and muckraking author W. T. Spilman.57 As William Kahrl painstakingly documented in 1982, however, Clover’s alarmist charges that the aqueduct water was polluted arose not from the evidence but, ironically, from the self-interest of the land syndicate’s Huntington and Kerckhoff, who had only recently purchased Clover’s struggling paper. As owners as well of Pacific Light and Power, one of the city’s major energy producers threatened by the aqueduct’s public power stations, Huntington and Kerckhoff had “a proprietary fear of public power” only partially assuaged by “the private gain they stood to make through the land syndicate.”58 Spilman’s charges were just as spurious and even more self-interested. Again according to Kahrl, “Spilman constructed an elaborate conspiracy in which Mulholland and Lippincott were seen as fabricating drought conditions in 1904 by draining the city’s reservoirs through the sewers, while the San Fernando land promoters raced to sell off their properties before the polluted aqueduct water arrived to render them worthless.” That “much of his reasoning was specious and his statistical references ranged from incomplete to irrelevant” is unsurprising, given that Spilman Suburban Water Company, “which dominated water services in the heart of the San Fernando Valley . . . would soon be absorbed by the city’s water program” after annexation. Spilman’s unsupported allegations, which “can be found echoing as well throughout all the attacks . . . that in later years made up the popular legend of the ‘rape of the valley,’” made their way, via McWilliams, into Chinatown.59 Questionable veracity notwithstanding, the overall thrust of the “rape of the valley” legend still holds water, and so does Chinatown’s radical reimagining of it—in the larger context of Honoré de Balzac’s durable, if paraphrased, adage that “all great fortunes are based on a crime.”60 Even Chinatown-debunker Erie allows that Eaton “misled Owens Valley residents” for his own personal and the

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city’s collective gain; that the land syndicate’s exploitation of insider knowledge, especially that of Moses Sherman, was “an egregious breach of public trust”; and that, at least to some extent, in the overall Owens Valley project, “the public good” was “prostituted for private greed.”61 Undeniably, Towne conflated events and composited and fragmented historical figures. The aqueduct issue is conjoined with the city hall scandal three decades later. The Owens and San Fernando Valleys are conflated and renamed Alta Vallejo. Land syndicate and Combination members are condensed into the singular, and singularly monstrous, Noah Cross (John Huston). William Mulholland is split into noble Water and Power chief Hollis Mulwray (Darrell Zwerling) and mobster muscle Claude Mulvihill (Roy Jensen).62 Evelyn Cross Mulwray (Faye Dunaway) is multiply and most profoundly split. As Hollis’s wife and eventual widow; Cross’s daughter and incest victim; private eye Jake Gittes’s (Jack Nicholson) adversary, then client and lover; and finally as biblical allusion/faux femme fatale—Evelyn’s figure vacillates between biography and geography, mythology and history, Old Testament and film noir. Gumshoe Gittes, meanwhile, as a mash-up of literary and filmic antecedents springing full-blown from the head of Noir, is both the film’s most down-to-earth and most purely mythic character. The eponymous Chinatown location, though present largely as a structuring absence, is another major character whose more detailed description below (along with those mentioned above) is required to match the film’s historical base to its fictional superstructure. Noah Cross Archvillain and power behind the city’s throne, Cross’s absolute corruption is cross-referenced in several ways: as a “crossover” to the various historical syndicate and Combination members; as at “cross purposes” with former partner Hollis Mulwray; and as grand “double-crosser” of the city of Los Angeles. His last name even “crosses out” the first, as this Noah, rather than saving humanity from a flood, contributed to one.63 As Evelyn tells Jake, Hollis never forgave her father for egging him into building the Vanderlip (read: St. Francis) Dam, a notion that loosely gibes with history if we disaggregate Cross into Mulholland’s onetime partner, Fred Eaton. Eaton’s extortionist asking price for his Long Valley ranch (the “hedge” referred to earlier, as the ideal place for the reservoir Mulholland desperately needed in the wake of the aqueduct bombings) led to the fateful alternative choice of Francisquito Canyon.64 Information that Chinatown’s Water and Power secretary (Fritzi Burr) reluctantly offers Jake also loosely meshes with the Eaton/Mulholland conflict. Cross and Mulwray jointly owned the water company, she relates, but “Mr. Mulwray thought the public should own the water. I don’t think Mr. Cross felt that way.” Eaton and Mulholland never owned the water company, though they did work together there and served, at different times, as the company’s superintendents. Mulholland became a strong advocate of public ownership and even acted as

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an intermediary with banker Isaias Hellman to secure the transfer. 65 But his water dispute with Eaton occurred not over the transfer but over the aqueduct property, which Eaton had purchased and intended to hold on to and lease to the city. When Walsh (Joe Mantell), Jake’s “associate,” says that he caught Cross and Mulwray in “one hell of an argument by the Pig ’n’ Whistle,” this mirrors heated exchanges Eaton and Mulholland reportedly had over the years concerning the land issue.66 But Cross’s doubling as Eaton only takes us so far. Eaton died, after a series of strokes, in 1934, three years before the film is set. Cross’s implied position as head of the land syndicate, in which Eaton played no role, links him more with syndicate overlord Harry Chandler, Moses Sherman, and other boondogglers. And his overarching role in what passes, unnamed, for the Combination—with which Eaton also had little or no connection—is made abundantly clear when Evelyn, in response to Jake’s plea at the end to “let the police handle this,” cries out, “He owns the police!” (fig. 26). Hollis Mulwray Mulholland died one year after Eaton and, as mentioned earlier, had quit the Water (later Water and Power) Department after the St. Francis Dam disaster. Chinatown’s Mulwray, however, heads Water and Power in 1937, until he is murdered for uncovering Cross’s scheme to exploit a proposed reservoir and

Figure 26. “He owns the police!” Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway) tries to protect her daughter/sister (Belinda Palmer) in Chinatown. Photofest.

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dam for private gain.67 Where Mulwray veers most from Mulholland, and must be reconciled with his evil twin, Mulvihill, is in his vehement opposition to the building of the new dam, for which, to soil his reputation, he is framed in a bogus extramarital affair (with his step-daughter), which Jake is fooled into “exposing.” The new dam, however—given its association with the land grab, its alleged need to combat a drought, and a bond issue’s need to assure construction—clearly stands in for the aqueduct project, which Mulholland had championed. Other claims about Mulwray—by his successor Yellburton (John Hillerman), that “Hollis was the best department head the city’s ever had,” and by Cross, that through his groundwater conservation methods “Hollis made this city!”—while hypocritical given the sources (Yellburton is in league with Cross), hew closer to historical analogy. Evelyn Mulwray Evelyn’s character is fractured even before we meet her: a woman (played by Dianne Ladd) poses as Mrs. Mulwray to entice Jake into spying on the innocent Hollis. Evelyn herself was raped by her father, Noah Cross, when she was fifteen, and is thus both mother and sister to Katherine (Belinda Palmer), whom Evelyn had hidden away in Mexico after the incest but who now, as a young woman, has returned so that Evelyn can “take care of her.” Evelyn’s initial construction through costuming, lighting, and demeanor as the femme fatale, together with the linkage of her physical rape with the metaphorical violation of Southern California (both perpetrated by her “Founding Father”), underscore her synecdochic relation to Los Angeles as a whole. Her inability to escape Cross’s clutches in the end—she is shot dead by one of “his” police officers as she attempts to flee by car to Mexico—both refutes automobility and reverses the Ramona myth. In Jackson’s tale Ramona and Don Felipe’s late nineteenth-century “return” to Mexico at least offered some succor for their newly constituted family. In mid-twentieth-century Chinatown, with Evelyn’s bloodied face slumped over the steering wheel and Katherine whisked away by the diabolical Cross, La Reina de Los Ángeles has become the Land of No Return. Jake Gittes Although Jake’s cop-turned-private eye, as Foster Hirsch suggests, reverses classical noir conventions in his “inability to control the crimes his detective work unveils,” in other ways he simply takes Kiss Me Deadly’s Mike Hammer’s cockiness, bedroom-dick occupation (“matrimonial work,” in Jake’s parlance), and material success to a neo-noir level.68 Jake’s classic convertible, “spanking white suits and spats,” expansive office with pretty secretary and two associates, and most of all, his “air of a movie star,” lend him a postmodern gloss rife with reflexivity.69 When Jake reproaches Walsh for the poor quality of the snapshots he took of the Cross-Mulwray quarrel, Walsh snaps back, “You ask me to take pictures,

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I take pictures!” Jake himself employs cameras as part of his voyeuristic trade, captures Mulwray’s “affair” on film, and shows his acting chops by posing as Yellburton to gain access to an off-limits reservoir and as an anti-Semitic family man to penetrate a Cross-controlled Mar Vista old-folks home. The proximity of the name Jake to Jack is no coincidence either. Towne, who previously had written the Nicholson-starring The Last Detail (1973), conceived the detective’s role specifically with his actor-friend in mind.70 No need for inside knowledge, however; Jake’s barber lets the celebrity connection out of the bag after Mulwray’s affair hits the front page, when he blubbers, “You gotta be blasé about it, but let’s face it, Jake—you’re practically a movie star!” Chinatown A costar of the picture, though it makes only a cameo appearance at film’s end, the Chinatown district of Los Angeles is like the monster in an old-time movie: though out of sight, it’s on everybody’s mind. Conflating Freud and Jung, it also represents, with all their “monstrous” dread and taboo titillation, the repository of the repressed and the shadow side of the individual/collective unconscious.71 “It bothers everyone that works there,” Jake recalls from his own former police days, “because you can’t always tell what’s going on.” Chinatown is an especially accursed place for Jake, personally, because that is where, not once but twice, he tried to “keep someone from getting hurt and . . . ended up making sure she was hurt.” Yet in granting Chinatown pride of antiplace, the film again resorts to historical sleight of hand. With its “narrow, dirty, vile-smelling” streets; opium dens; suntan and mah-jongg parlors; gambling houses; and brothels, whose only competition came from the nearby Sonoratown Mexican section, Chinatown had indeed long been the “center of the city’s underworld.”72 But that was from the 1870s through the 1920s (fig. 27), before the neighborhood was refashioned in the 1930s (similar to Olvera Street in the late 1920s) into an ethnic theme park. It was during the earlier period, most egregiously during the Chinese massacre of 1871, that the police—in general, but especially those assigned to Chinatown—“didn’t fight organized crime. They managed it.”73 Chinatown, the movie, alludes to this institutional neglect in a postcoital conversation between Jake and Evelyn: Evelyn: What did you do there [in Chinatown, as a police officer]? Jake: As little as possible. Evelyn: That’s what they told you to do? Jake: They did in Chinatown. By 1937, however, the Chinatown described in Chinatown no longer existed. It had been razed, beginning in 1933, to make way for the new Union Station train depot, which opened in 1939. By 1938, a few blocks to the northwest of the old Chinatown, not one but two new Chinatowns had sprung up (one called

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Figure 27. Dragon Parade in Old Chinatown, 1885. Seaver Center for Western History Research, Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History.

China City), both places worlds away from the hellhole described in the film. The new Chinatown that eventually took root (and remains in place today) was spearheaded by Peter Soo Hoo, a former resident of old Chinatown, with input from the Chinese community. The shorter-lived China City, conceived by the founder of Olvera Street, Christine Stevenson (with the same touristy intent), was patterned not on the old or other U.S. Chinatowns but on movie sets for the Hollywood film adaptation of Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth (1937). Taking the smoke-and-mirrors conceit to its Pacific Rim extreme, The Good Earth sets used in the construction of Stevenson’s China City had themselves been imported from China.74 Although the police did “as little as possible” in the historical and filmic Chinatown, its primary inhabitants (along with other working-class nonwhites) did much of the heavy lifting in greater Los Angeles. The film remarks on this ethnoclass divide through Evelyn’s domestic help, all of whom—butler, maid, gardener, chauffeur—are Chinese. The repressed returns here with a vengeance, through a merging of the ethnic other and “glass” motifs. Second only to water as a key to the film’s multilayered meanings, glass relates reflexively to Jake’s camera and binocular lenses, as well as to the several shots double-framed by car windshields or rearview mirrors. It also, as a pun, contributes to Jake’s “breaking” the case via the cracked stopwatch glass that determines how long Mulwray remained at a reservoir, and through a smashed door-window that enables Jake not to have to break and enter Evelyn’s imposter’s apartment. Most crucially, glass turns Evelyn’s Asian gardener into Jake’s Dr. Watson through a Freudian slip he utters, not once but twice, at the Mulwray mansion’s fishpond. When the gardener remarks that

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the pond’s water is “bad for glass,” Jake snickers at the mispronunciation of the word grass. But the misspeak bespeaks the truth—as is revealed the second time when the gardener adds that saltwater is what’s killing the “glass,” then pulls a pair of bifocals from the pond. Since an autopsy showed that Mulwray had saltwater in his lungs, Jake puts two and two together: Cross dropped his spectacles into the pond while drowning Mulwray.75

“Who’s the Midget?” Jake aims this politically incorrect query at the diminutive mobster, played by director Roman Polanski, who catches him snooping around a reservoir at night. The dapperly dressed little man promptly slices open Jake’s nose, then adds with a smirk, “Next time I’ll cut off the whole thing, and feed it to my goldfish.” The mobster’s casting, like Jake’s, was not coincidental. While Chinatown’s merging of the personal and the political may have originated with Towne, the material spoke most profoundly to Polanski. A rare throwback, among neo-noir filmmakers, to the Jewish émigré noirists of classical noir, Polanski updated and intensified his forerunners’ fraught European experiences and ambivalent attitudes toward America. In one of the most harrowing of “survivor” tales, Polanski, born in 1933, lost his mother to the Holocaust and barely escaped it himself, Painted Bird fashion, through the sanctuary offered by courageous Christian families. Transcending postwar poverty and communist oppression, he managed, through the success of his first feature film, Knife in the Water (1962), to defect to France in 1963. Moving on to England and then to the United States, his auteurist stature was sustained by a series of Hitchcockian horror and suspense films, culminating in the smash hit Rosemary’s Baby (1968). Later the same year, that film’s Satanic possession theme was gruesomely reenacted in real life when his pregnant wife, actress Sharon Tate, was among those murdered by the Manson family. Vowing never to return to Los Angeles, Polanski worked in Europe until 1973, when Towne and producer Robert Evans convinced the director to come back to the City of Demons, and perhaps exorcise some of them, by directing Chinatown. Life and art, once again, had other ideas. Vying with Evelyn’s killing for the film’s most chilling moment, Jake earlier had asked Cross about his sense of guilt over his daughter’s rape and Hollis’s murder. “I don’t blame myself,” the monster responds. “You see, Mr. Gitts [sic], most people never have to face the fact that at the right time and the right place, they’re capable of . . . anything!” Three years after the film’s release, Polanski was charged with the statutory rape of a thirteen-year-old girl he had invited to Nicholson’s Mulholland Drive mansion for a Vogue photo shoot. After a judge reneged on a plea bargain and threatened him with a longer jail sentence (he had already served forty-two days), Polanski fled to France. Despite a subsequent financial settlement with the adult rape victim and her dropping all charges, the L.A. district attorney’s office has refused to bury the case, and Polanski remains a fugitive.76 He received his Best Director Oscar for The Pianist (a film about the Holocaust) in absentia in 2006 and, based

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on a newly issued warrant, was placed under house arrest in Switzerland from September 2009 to July 2010—after which Swiss authorities declared Polanski a “free man.”77 Although the ill-starred director has not yet been granted full immunity, neither—thanks partly to the Chinatown syndrome—has Los Angeles. Besides its damaging (if distorted) historical revelations, the film’s allegorical exposure of corruption at the highest levels of government resonates (given the film’s 1974 release) with the then-unfolding Watergate scandal. Chinatown may even have sparked renewed protest among unforgiving Owens Valley residents. A spill-gate explosion forced the shutdown of the aqueduct system for two full days in 1976. Two years later, in another apparent aqueduct-related protest, “an arrow tied with sticks of dynamite pierced the breast of a commemorative statue of William Mulholland in a Los Angeles park.”78 Social critics have continued to view Chinatown as both “a noir allegory about the primal secrets of blind greed” and as “the Ur-text for L.A. political history.” More ominously, for Norman Klein (writing in 1997), the film serves as a reminder “that in L.A. the powerful families who ‘bought’ the future in 1906 may still run something like a [backroom operation] today.”79 Or as Mike Davis expressed in more explicitly Marxist terms around the same time, “the windfall profits of these [Chinatown-like] operations welded the ruling class together and capitalized lineages of power (notably, the Times-Mirror empire) that remain in place today.”80 If Polanski’s personal involvement is factored in, Foster Hirsch suggests an even graver indictment: “Jake’s failure to rescue Noah’s daughters has been interpreted as a metaphor of Polanski’s inability to save his pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, from the Manson ‘family’ and his mother from the Nazis. In this autobiographical reading, Noah Cross would be a combination of Charles Manson and Adolf Hitler, who unlike the real-life monsters, endures.”81 Even Towne, who only reluctantly deferred to Polanski on the film’s deeply disturbing ending, subsequently acknowledged the director’s better judgment.82 Having Cross get away with double rape and murder, gain custody of his incestuous daughter/granddaughter and Los Angeles’s future, and leaving Jake traumatized by his abetting the death of another woman he loved, clearly resonated not only with the city’s but with Polanski’s own experience. One can’t help superimposing Polanski’s likely horrified reaction to Sharon Tate’s murder onto Jake’s devastated expression as he stares at Evelyn’s limp body in the driver’s seat. As for the palimpsestian ironies embedded in Walsh’s legendary last line—“Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown”—these reverberate well beyond the film’s, and the city’s, ghettoed confines.

Apocalypse, Now and Then If Point Blank is L.A. neo-noir’s prologue and Chinatown its urtext, then Blade Runner (1982) is its coda. Not the last of the L.A. noirs chronologically, this futurenoir hybrid nevertheless takes the subgenre to a metanarrative terminus from

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which, similar to Kiss Me Deadly, you really “can’t go much further.” Not content to use darkness as a foil for L.A.’s sunbaked imago, Blade Runner’s Los Angeles in the year 2019 has become a black hole from which no light can emerge. The sun never rises, acid rain perpetually falls, and the golden promise of the “aspiring city” has migrated not to inland empires, foreign shores, or even inward, but to distant galaxies in outer space.83 Parodying the boosterism of yore, a robotic voice from a video-beaming blimp repeats ad nauseam L.A.’s most cherished logo: “A new life awaits you in the off-world colonies—where you’ll have a golden chance to begin again in a land of opportunity and excitement!” Noah Cross’s ultimate goal in Chinatown, he tells Jake, is not money or power, of which he’s surfeited—it’s “the future, Mr. Gitts [sic], the future!” In Blade Runner’s future noir Cross’s goal has been hyperrealized. People are largely detritus in a 2019 Los Angeles turned “city dump.”84 As if Chinatown’s underworld ghetto has metastasized to engulf all of L.A., the megalopolis in all its “glittering and decadent” grotesquerie is no mere costar; it has become the “central presence in the film.”85 The centrifugal, multicentered space Dimendberg ascribed to the city has contracted, folded back on itself, becoming “literally exhausted.”86 Yet precisely because “the postmodernist city is experienced as having no centre,” Vivian Sobchack paradoxically suggests, or, alternatively, as “decentred by being all centre . . . its activities dispersed in every direction,” Blade Runner’s identification with Los Angeles is preordained.87 Blade Runner’s opening image, a neo-Expressionist reimagining of Lang’s subterranean Moloch in Metropolis (1927), is an icon of hell: a phalanx of industrial furnaces belching fireballs into the perpetual pitch-black night.88 The incessant toxic drizzle is “the mark of the devil . . . the smog finally destroying the desert climate itself.”89 What space isn’t stuffed with skyscrapers, air and street traffic, broken (but still blaring) traffic signals, and a teeming, multicultural stew, is capped by a ubiquitous, pill-popping Geisha Girl in a blimp-copter video ad, “presiding as a kind of postmodern deity.”90 The city is denuded of foliage and bereft of most animal life, except for that which has been genetically engineered, like the rebel android “replicants” that the police (state) has hired the film’s protagonist, Deckard (Harrison Ford), to “retire.” Pollution has taken its toll on the human horde as well, as indicated by their mainly scabrous complexions compared to the manufactured perfection of the replicants (aptly dubbed “skin jobs”), who, in other ways—strength, intelligence, emotion—have become (as advertised) “more human than human.” As with Chinatown’s period allegory, Blade Runner’s futuristic fable has its real-world referents. While Klein bemoans the historical amnesia in the film’s superimposition of a multicultural downtown on the ethnic enclaves displaced in the 1960s to make way for Dorothy Chandler’s upscale music center, the more insidious political incoherence lies elsewhere.91 The film’s heteroglossia of peoples and cultures—Asian, Latino, North African, German—creates a bazaar-like atmosphere as polyglot and ethnically diverse as anything the old Bunker Hill or Boyle Heights neighborhoods had to offer. (Even the film’s pet ostriches have

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antecedents in the Los Angeles Ostrich Farm of the early 1900s.) The multiethnic profusion is not amnesiac, however, but true to the city’s burgeoning diversity in the Multicultural Era. Nevertheless, to imply, as Blade Runner surely does, that the minoritarian turn has led to the city’s devolution from an Edenic “white spot” to a chthonic “failed state” is highly problematic. And what to make of the seeming disappearance of African Americans from Los Angeles altogether? Even if one takes the pervasive blackness of the miseen-scène and the “white” skin jobs’ subaltern state as ethnoracial analogues, it appears that all black people have either gone to the off-world colonies or become extinct. As for the ubiquitous Geisha Girl and other signs of Japanese “colonization,” these clearly relate to the “yellow peril” panic in the 1980s and early 1990s, in Los Angeles and the country as a whole, over Japan’s large-scale but hardly unique (Europeans, Canadians, and Arabs were “guilty” of the same or more) acquisition of American real estate and financial assets. Yet for all the degradation, dehumanization, and racism, for all the aestheticizing of poverty and creation of “an amusement park about urban decay,” Blade Runner, already in 1982, was not seen solely as dystopian, or even as another boost to Los Angeles’s ambivalent allure, but as “a paradigm for the future of cities.”92 Critics hailed the film’s postmodern hybridization of noir and sci-fi, the pastiche of Mayan motifs in the future noir buildings, the experience of the city not as “base and degraded” but as a “blend of hysteria and euphoria,” as the overall triumph of “style over substance, or style over story.”93 Even those who disparaged the film’s fetishism of material culture, its alchemizing of urban squalor into “a delight to the eyes, when expressed in commodification,” had to grant the film a niche in the postmodern pantheon by virtue (and vice) of its transmutation of “the alienation of daily life” into “a strange new hallucinatory exhilaration.”94 A box-office disappointment, the film soon became a cult classic and a crossover hit among the local cognoscenti. By 1990 architect Frank Gehry’s “postapocalyptic” architecture was being praised for its “Blade Runner inventiveness,” and in a public lecture series at West Hollywood’s Pacific Design Center the same year, “three out of five leading urban planners agreed that they hoped L.A. would someday look like the film.”95 Further demonstrating L.A. noir’s ability to convert “negative tropes into touristic affirmations of native cool,” the downtown revival of the 2000s brought the pro–Blade Runner planners’ dreams closer to fruition.96 Spurred by Staples Center arena in 1999, Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall in 2003, the L.A. Live entertainment complex in 2007, and developer Tom Gilmore’s conversion of “skid row buildings into an urban living oasis,” the stage was set for “Blade Runner–esque Signage On Downtown Towers.”97 In March 2011 the L.A. City Council, ignoring warnings “that such brightly lighted images would degrade the look of the city[,] . . . created a new one-block sign district” allowing for the display of “flashing signs, illuminated graphics and moving texts” on the new Wilshire Grand towers at Seventh and Figueroa.98 Councilmember Dennis Zine was “amazed that anyone could oppose this,” and councilmember Ed Reyes

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praised the “architectural lighting” scheme, effusing, “It is art. And I believe it adds more culture” to Los Angeles.99 Culture imitating culture, might have been more accurate. Or perhaps this is just the latest example of L.A.’s gift for turning g(u)ilt into gold, Apocalypse into Second Coming.

Chinatown’s Children Blade Runner may have been the end of the line for apocalyptic noir, but L.A. noir in general has undergone multiple resurrections. Classical-period remakes, updates, homages, and spoofs have predominated, most often tied in some way to Chandler or Cain. Chandler’s progeny include Marlowe (1969), The Long Goodbye (1973), Farewell, My Lovely (a.k.a. Murder, My Sweet) and Peeper (both 1975), The Big Sleep (1978), Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and Brick (both 2006). Cain’s brood: Double Indemnity (1973, TV movie), The Postman Always Rings Twice and Body Heat (both 1981, the latter a remake of Double Indemnity, set in Florida). Towne adapted and directed John Fante’s Ask the Dust (2006), and reteamed with Nicholson (as director-star) on a Chinatown sequel, the Two Jakes (1990). Other Chinatown-wannabes, all seeking (with mixed results) to dredge another “noir legend” from a period-era swamp, include Devil in a Blue Dress (1995, to be discussed in chapter 8), Mulholland Falls (1996), L.A. Confidential (1997, discussed below), The Black Dahlia and Hollywoodland (both 2006), and The Changeling (2008). Even Crash (Best Picture Oscar winner for 2005), though an unabashed noir’s cars descendant, couldn’t—or deliberately didn’t—escape Chinatown’s shadow. A literal head-on collision with L.A.’s rebranding as multicultural mecca, Crash also postmodernizes Paul Masson Fotsch’s Frankfurt School take on automobility. Employing Double Indemnity and Sunset Blvd. as prima facie evidence, Fotsch argues that in its 1941 regional parkway plan’s “affirming the primacy of the automobile as a form of transportation in the city,” Los Angeles also underwrote a form of “rational alienation” that became “a problem at the very center of the Los Angeles lifestyle: the problem of isolation.”100 Crash rotates the wheels by positing car crashes as the sole means of bringing L.A.’s new millennial population into contact. Punctuated throughout with smash-ups, the film also reverses, less facetiously, Chinatown’s despairing ending. Besides closing with a car accident that plays as comic relief, the last crash, on a Chinatown street, preceded the freeing of smuggled Southeast Asians headed for the city’s sweatshops or worse—as fairy-tale snowflakes (or is it wildfire ash?) fall on the scene. The latest in the noirs cars series, Drive (2011), while leaning in its title to Crash, is more thematically akin to another earlier installment, Collateral (2004). In the latter film, Max (Jamie Foxx), an L.A. taxi driver, hits the cabbie’s jackpot—with one big hitch. His lucrative, all-night fare around the inner city’s multicultural enclaves turns him into an unwilling and inescapable accomplice to mob hit man Vincent’s (Tom Cruise) serial revenge killings. Drive both expands and contracts the driver/mobster connection. The film’s unnamed protagonist (Ryan Gosling)

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also drives for a living but in a manner that intersects, mostly by choice, with L.A.’s underworld. A getaway driver (“wing-man,” in street lingo) for big-time heists, the Driver’s day jobs include stunt driving for Hollywood movies, working as an auto mechanic in the Valley, and, at least potentially, stock-car racing. “You put this kid behind the wheel,” his stunt-agent/garage-boss Shannon (Bryan Cranston) boasts, “there’s nothing he can’t do!” Drive’s most original, and historically resonant, conceit is in linking all the Driver’s car-related pursuits to organized crime, and organized crime to a conflicted multiculturalism. The mobsters’ front, a tacky mini-mall eatery named Nino’s, where more deals than meals go down, is a multiethnic olio of America’s most prominent mob “families”: Italian, Jewish, Irish, with a smattering of Chinese. The messiness of the mix is highlighted when the character Nino (Ron Perlman) barges in on a deal being negotiated, over Chinese food, between the Irish American Shannon and Nino’s mob partner Bernie Rose (Albert Brooks).101 “What’re you doing eating Chink food in my fucking restaurant!” Nino taunts. “What’s a Jew doing running a pizza joint?” the Jewish Rose retorts. The reason is clarified later, when Nino whines to Rose that “the Family [read: the mafia] still calls me a kike!” Rose’s link to Shannon Judaizes the Hollywood-mob connection. In a selfmocking nod to Brooks’s own directorial career (of mainly satirical comedies), Rose tells the Driver, “I used to produce movies, in the eighties, kind of like action films, sexy stuff. One critic called them European. I thought they were shit.” But what neither Rose nor anyone else thinks is shit is cars—which combine the glamour and cachet of the movies with the animal magnetism of sex. Nino waxes positively orgasmic as he eyes a red Mustang convertible he wants the Driver to take on the stock-car circuit: “Now this—this is one mother-fucking, fine-ass pussy-mobile!” After the car-racing deal falls through, Rose nearly breaks down from disappointment: “I was getting excited about this—my name on a car!”

L.A. Noire Though not as exciting as a car, L.A. noir has gotten its name on a high-class video game, the e at the end of the title an apparent nod to film noir’s French coinage and a play on “electronic.” L.A. Noire (2011), the game, harkens most retro-chicly to the Chinatown-inflected film L.A. Confidential.102 The intertextuality is telling, as the game, much like the film adaptation of James Ellroy’s novel, turns “history into a fashion show,” its primary appeal, per James Naremore, lying in “its stylish ‘look’” and “period charm.”103 An added postmodern attraction, online reviewers asserted, was the game’s being “indistinguishable from a film,” with an extra bonus coming from gamers’ option “to view in black and white for greater authenticity.”104 “We are trapped in a hall of mirrors of our own devising”—Nicholas Christakis’s take on the postmodern condition—seems not a critique but a selling

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point for a 2011 video game with an optional 1940s look, drawn from a 1997 film adaptation of a 1990 novel, and set in a quasi-early 1950s Los Angeles.105 L.A. Noire also begs the rhetorical question John Buntin poses about Los Angeles in general: “Is Our Lady Queen of the Angels the dark angel, or do we bring our own darkness to her.”106 Roman Polanski certainly brought his own darkness to Robert Towne’s already ebony Chinatown, as did Ellroy, in spades, to L.A. Confidential and the other three books in his L.A. noir quartet: The Black Dahlia (1987, filmed in 2006), The Big Nowhere (1988), and White Jazz (1992). Ellroy’s mother was brutally murdered in Los Angeles in 1958 when he was ten years old, a Black Dahlia–like tragedy made all the more traumatic because (as Ellroy publicly confessed a half-century later)—he had placed a curse on his mother shortly before her death.107 Further heightening the Black Dahlia associations, his mother’s murder, like that of Elizabeth Short, was never solved. Ellroy believes that this was because her killing coincided with the higher-profile stabbing of Lana Turner’s lover Johnny Stompanato by the movie star’s daughter, Cheryl Crane. Ellroy’s obsession with gruesome murder, police corruption, and Hollywood complicity ensued, as well as a late-blooming, neo-hard-boiled reputation as the “Demon dog of crime fiction.”108 In L.A. Confidential especially, Ellroy’s penchant for “postmodern historiographic metafiction” resonates with Chinatown’s “confounding of . . . illusion with real life.”109 Eschewing Towne’s exclusively film a clef approach, however, L.A. Confidential (book and film) mixes character disguises with the real McCoy. Ray Dieterling, an entertainment mogul cum theme-park pioneer, is Walt Disney en masque; Johnny Stompanato and fellow gangster Mickey Cohen are mentioned by name. The “Bloody Christmas” police beatings of 1951 targeting Latinos are directly referenced; the Badge of Honor cop show and Hush Hush scandal sheet mimic the Dragnet TV series (1951–59) and Confidential magazine (1952–78). “The play between historical reality and its fictional copy,” Hirsch says, “is epitomized in a stable of prostitutes who are cut to resemble Hollywood divas of the day. While the real Lana Turner [played by Brenda Bakke] makes a cameo appearance, fake versions of Veronica Lake, Ava Gardner, and Rita Hayworth are among the simulacra the customers of a brothel can select. The masquerade motif is Ellroy’s metaphor for L.A. itself, a city of illusions.”110 L.A. Confidential’s “indictment of a city in which the police, gangsters, politicians, and movie moguls are locked in a web of deceit and collusion” more closely matches Chinatown’s historically based, if temporally contorted, presentation.111 The unholy alliance of Hollywood and the LAPD, in which film industry–related crimes went unsolved and their celebrity perpetrators uncharged, had a long legacy. It extended from the deaths of William Desmond Taylor and Thomas Ince in the scandal-prone 1920s into the 1950s, when gay stars were “picked up by the LAPD, but never booked . . . [and] Howard Hughes and Busby Berkeley were rumored to have been involved in auto accidents that resulted in deaths, but managed never to go to jail.”112 Where Ellroy “goes to Towne,” historically

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speaking, is in his outsized portrayal of Hollywood-mob interaction and of police corruption at the highest levels of the department. Police-mob connections certainly hadn’t ceased with Chief Davis’s resignation in the wake of the city hall/police scandals of the late 1930s. Fletcher Bowron’s mayor’s office may have remained largely aboveboard, but neither the LAPD nor the Hollywood studios could say the same. A “Jew wave” of mobsters, headed by Bugsy Siegel and Mickey Cohen, filled the underworld vacuum, and United Artists chief Joseph Schenck was indicted and (briefly) imprisoned in the early 1940s for his links to the mafia-infested International Association of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) crafts union.113 The LAPD’s ties to the mob, which had been countenanced if not abetted by (post-Davis) Chief Clemence M. Horrall, culminated in Horrall’s indictment and resignation in 1949.114 When William H. Parker took over as chief in 1950, though the department’s militaristic tactics persisted (indeed, were institutionalized), top-down corruption was ferreted out. Parker may have been as racist, sexist, homophobic, and anticommunist as they come, but no longer would his officers “be bought for a ten-dollar bill.”115 In a reversal of Chinatown’s whitewashing of Water and Power chief Hollis Mulwray, however, L.A. Confidential demonizes Parker’s double, LAPD Captain Dudley Smith (James Cromwell), who, minus the biblical allusions, is the Noah Cross of the piece (fig. 28).

Figure 28. Badge of corruption: Capt. Dudley Smith (James Cromwell) in L.A. Confidential. Photofest.

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Chief Parker’s guilt by association is not where the film falls most short of the Towne/Polanski masterpiece, however. Indeed, given that Parker laid much of the kindling for the Watt’s riots of 1965, and only further enflamed race relations thereafter, his allegorical indictment in L.A. Confidential is perhaps less than he deserves. The broader issue, as Naremore opines, is that unlike Chinatown, “L.A. Confidential uses the past superficially and hypocritically. On the one hand, it attacks Hollywood of the 1950s, making easy jokes about the ‘reality’ behind old-style show business; on the other hand, it exploits every convention of the dream factory . . . [which] may explain why, upon its release, the tributary media of the consumer economy—magazines, trade bookstores, radio shows, and CD recordings—were flooded with reminiscences of film noir, all of them designed to profit from a trend.”116And the trend continues, as L.A. Noire illustrates, with the new-media network entangling L.A. Confidential in more webs than one.

PA R T F O U R




Multicultural L.A.

chapter 7




LAtinos

The sixteenth-century novelist Garci Ordóñez de Montalvo, whose mythic description of California as an island paradise inspired the first Spanish explorers, was not far off the mark. “Although physically attached to North America, California is still most accurately thought of as an ecological ‘island,’” explain historians Richard B. Rice, William A. Bullough, and Richard J. Orsi. “Its geographical history is distinct from that of the rest of the continent. Winds, currents, mountains, and deserts isolate the region biologically as effectively as if it were girded by an ocean moat.”1 Extending the metaphor, Southern California, which Helen Hunt Jackson a century earlier had likened to “an island on the land, . . . shut off from the rest of the continent,” can be thought of as an island within an island, with similarly “diverse and distinctive life forms unmatched elsewhere on the continent”—including human beings.2 Rhetorical flourishes aside, since its founding as a colonial outpost in 1781, Los Angeles has always already been uniquely multicultural. The twenty-two adults among the first forty-four pobladores consisted of one español (native Spaniard), one Criollo (born in New Spain of Spanish ancestry), one mestizo (mixed Spanish and Indian), two Negroes (blacks of African ancestry), eight mulattos (mixed Spanish and black), and nine Indios (Indians).3 If we recall that American Indians themselves are likely of Paleolithic Asian ancestry, the ethnoracial spectrum is complete. A Tongva village until 1781, a Spanish pueblo until 1822, a Mexican ciudad until 1848, and in its first three decades as an American city still ethnoculturally Hispanic, Los Angeles, for all the whitewashing of its heritage, is rainbow-colored to the core.4 Moreover, each of these primary “colors” (red, brown, black, yellow, and white) has its own story to tell—or rather several, interrelated stories. Native Americans, Latinos, African Americans, Asians, and Anglos, beyond their instability and social constructedness as ethnoracial categories, can be broken down or disaggregated into a dizzying number of subcategories. Taking only the “Hispanic, Latino, Spanish” box in the 2010 U.S. census, for example, after 153

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identifying three primary subgroups (“Mexican/Mexican American/Chicano,” “Puerto Rican,” and “Cuban”), and an “Other” category (with space to write in a specific group), lists “Argentinean, Colombian, Dominican, Nicaraguan, Salvadoran, Spaniard, and so on.” In Los Angeles, the city with the highest percentage and second-highest number of Latinos in the United States (to New York), the list, broken down by percentage of L.A.’s total population in 2010, looks like this: Mexican (31.9), Salvadoran (6), Guatemalan (3.6), Honduran (0.6), Nicaraguan (0.4), Puerto Rican (0.4), Peruvian (0.4), Cuban (0.4), Colombian (0.3), Argentinean (0.2), and Ecuadoran (0.2).5 Following the city’s historical trajectory, and given that the book’s first two chapters are devoted to the Tongva, the first multicultural chapter deals with Latinos—more specifically, with the earliest arriving, most populous, and most significant subgroup from a sociocultural perspective: Mexicans/Mexican Americans/Chicanos.

The Four Mexicos Each of L.A.’s ethnic stories has a backstory. For Mexican Americans it begins in the land, now sovereign nation, of Mexico, to which California and Los Angeles once belonged. As with any country, a complex mixture of cultural and historical strands, Mexico usefully lends itself, for analytical purposes, to a division into the four most dominant of these: Indian, Spanish colonial, revolutionary, and modern/American.6 Each strand, as with those of Los Angeles’s palimpsest, has a primary historical epoch—Indian, b.c.–1521; Spanish colonial, 1521–1821; revolutionary, 1910–1930; modern/American, 1930–present. Unlike L.A.’s several buried, forgotten, or distorted layers, those of the four Mexicos have been better integrated while also remaining more autonomous, and surviving more intact to the present. Indian Strand The Aztec Empire succumbed to the conquistadors two-and-a-half centuries before California’s Indians became subjects of New Spain in the late 1700s and almost four centuries before the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890 marked the end of the military phase of the American Indian wars.7 Yet despite violence and discrimination comparable to that perpetrated against indigenous peoples by the Americans, Indians and Indian culture ultimately were absorbed into Mexican society to a far greater extent than in the United States. While legal and social barriers kept open racial mixing to a minimum in the British-American colonies and later in the United States (Maryland instituted the continent’s first antimiscegenation law in 1664), Spaniards and Indians procreated freely in Mexico, and with official sanction, from the start. The country’s very origin myth involves the coupling of Hernan Cortez, leader of the Mexican conquest,

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with his indigenous translator and mistress, Dona Marina (a.k.a. the allegedly treacherous “La Malinche”), from whose union Mexico’s “first mestizo,” Martin Cortez, was born. “Mexican mestizaje—racial and cultural synthesis,” George Rodriguez explains, “may have begun in a violent conquest, but it didn’t end there. Interracial love and attraction . . . [created] a society in which race was a malleable category. Mexicans developed—in the words of poet Gloria Anzaldúa—‘a tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity,’ particularly in the realm of race and culture.”8 Not all Mexican Indians (or Spaniards) intermarried, of course, nor was every aspect of Indian culture hybridized. Pre-Columbian ruins remain national treasures; tribal languages, practices, and beliefs thrive openly and underground; and of the foods considered most distinctively Mexican—rice, beans, corn, peppers, squash, tortillas—only rice did not originate with the native peoples. Even the predominant Catholic religion bears strong Indian traces. The Christian God(s) did not entirely replace indigenous deities but merged with some of them in a form of theological mestizaje, a process likely encouraged by Spanish missionaries to foster conversion. The most striking religious syncretism involves the Virgin Mary, whose Christian veneration as Holy Mother corresponded to the Aztecs’ deification of Tonantzin (Our Revered Mother), a collective title for various creation and earth goddesses.9 The seventeenth-century Basilica of Guadalupe, located near an alleged sighting of the Virgin by indigenous peasant Juan Diego in 1531, was constructed on the site of an ancient temple of Tonantzin. The Virgin of Guadalupe’s iconic image itself, held to have miraculously appeared on Juan Diego’s cloak, contains coded Aztec referents. The blue-green color of the Virgin’s mantle relates to the divine couple Ometechuhtli and Omecihuatl; a cross-shaped image inscribed beneath her sash, called nahui-ollin, symbolizes the cosmos; and the rays of light radiating from her double as maguey spines—maguey being the source of the sacred beverage pulque, also known as “the milk of the Virgin.”10 Spanish Colonial Strand Excluding food and drink, the Spanish cultural imprint in Mexico is unsurpassed. Whatever the Indians’ pre-Columbian remnants, the Catholic religion largely superseded indigenous faiths in name, precepts, church structure, and ritual practice. However complemented (and resisted) by Indian languages, Mexico is a predominantly Spanish-speaking country in the vernacular, official, and literary senses. Ever-present through the central plaza configuration of its towns and cities (which La Reina de Los Ángeles also originally followed), the baroque style of its civic buildings, and the Churrigueresque ornamentation of its cathedrals (religion again), Spanish colonial architecture dominates the country’s built environment. On a more ambivalent note, colonialist economic structures and social hierarchies survived well beyond Mexican Independence, contributed greatly to the revolution, and persist today.11

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Revolutionary Strand With roots in the War of Independence from Spain in the 1810s, extending into the neocolonial struggles of the 1850s and 1860s, and culminating in the Mexican Revolution of the 1910s and 1920s, radical progressive politics and violent resistance to tyranny permeate the country’s history and consciousness. Commemorated in the figures of Father Hidalgo, Benito Juarez, Pancho Villa, and Emiliano Zapata, and culturally transmitted most famously through the triumvirate of socially conscious muralists Jose Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, and David Alfaro Siqueiros, revolutionary principles are even inscribed (oxymoronically) in the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI, or Institutional Revolutionary Party) that governed Mexico from 1930 to 2000. The most recent revolutionary reminders have come in reaction against, rather than support of, the PRI, most notably in the student and worker protests of the 1960s, brutally quashed by the government in 1968, and in the peasant uprising in the southern state of Chiapas in the 1990s. Acknowledging the Mexican Revolution in its name, Ejercito Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (Zapatista Army of National Liberation) and led by the charismatic Subcomandante Marcos, the Chiapas rebellion revolved around land reform and indigenous rights issues that remain largely unresolved.12 Modern/American Strand From the hegemonic Monroe Doctrine to the breakaway Texas Republic to the confiscation of an additional third to a half of its territory in the Mexican War, Mexico could hardly ignore the United States even if it wanted to.13 In the twentieth century (and into the twenty-first), while interaction between the neighboring countries has continued to go both ways, especially in the American Southwest, Mexican modernization has become virtually synonymous with Americanization. Material progress has invariably meant striving for a standard of living modeled after the gringos, while colonization of Mexican consciousness, begun in the 1920s when Hollywood movies flooded a Mexican market still recovering from the revolution, has never stalled.14 Not all movies in Mexican theaters have been American, of course, and an occasional Mexican film has had crossover success in the United States and internationally. One of the most successful of these, Like Water for Chocolate (Como agua para chocolate, 1992), a veritable primer on the four Mexicos, brings up another aspect of the modern/American strand: the Brain Drain. The siphoning of artists and intellectuals from Mexico, and other developing countries, to the United States is rarely factored into the immigration equation, which focuses on the detrimental effects of immigration on the host country as a result of an influx of poor, uneducated people who allegedly put a strain on resources. Like Water for Chocolate offers a counterview, positing a net gain for the United States and net loss for Mexico caused by the depletion of the latter’s “talented tenth.”

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Like Water for Chocolate A magic-realist period piece based on a novel (and screenplay) by Laura Esquivel, directed by her then-husband Alfonso Arau, Like Water for Chocolate ends in 1934 with a Mexican wedding reception for a young Mexican woman (Sandra Arau) and an American man (Andreas Garcia Jr.). Largely absent from the film’s primary setting during the revolutionary period, Americanization is identified at the reception through an upgrade in kitchen appliances and plumbing, a caravan of Model-T Fords, and most explicitly, in the switch from mariachi music to Dixieland jazz. Although the intermarriage initially connotes cultural and ethnic hybridity, the newlyweds’ announced move to “El Norte,” where the husband will be studying at Harvard, points to an exchange, on both scores, ultimately favoring the United States. Nor was the cost-benefit analysis lost on director Arau, who, following his film’s international success (including the winning of the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar), began making pictures in Hollywood. The film renders the American strand ambivalently in other ways. The Harvard-bound husband is the son of a sympathetic Texas physician, Dr. Brown (Mario Evan Martinez). Part Anglo, Brown (the name itself an ethnic signifier) is the grandson of a Kickapoo Indian medicine woman (Farmesio de Bernal)—from whom, it is strongly hinted, his healing powers and better instincts derive. American food, meanwhile—in a film whose magic stems largely from the culinary arts—is denigrated; and the only other significant Americans are Wild Bunch–like mercenaries who rape one Mexican woman and kill another.15 Depictions of the other three Mexicos are equally pronounced, and judgmental. The mestizo protagonist Tita (Lumi Cavazos) acquires her magical cooking and healing skills not from her tyrannical, Europeanized mother (Regina Torne) but from the wise and compassionate Indian servant Nacha (Ada Carrasco) and the spirit of the Kickapoo shaman. The Indian strand is promoted over the colonial strand in other ways. While Spanish is the language of choice for everyday speech, Nacha’s native tongue takes over for the magic spells. A Catholic wedding ceremony and funeral are performed, but a buffoonish Catholic priest breaks his vows of celibacy while under a magic spell; and when Tita is forced into the role of midwife for her pregnant sister, she prays to Nacha before calling on the Lord. The similarly valorized revolutionary strand benefits further from its proIndian/anticolonial proclivities. One of Nacha’s magic recipes causes Tita’s part-African half-sister Gertrudis (Claudette Maille) to join the revolution, where she rapidly rises to the level of general. The raised class and feminist consciousness Gertrudis gains from her revolutionary experience eventually rubs off on Tita, who is finally able to tell off her oppressive mother and become more independent and assertive with her lover, Pedro (Marco Leonardi). In his classic film of the Mexican “golden age,” María Candelaria (1944), director Emilio “El Indio” Fernandez turned the titular figure, a poor Indian woman driven to prostitution and a tragic death, into the martyred heroine of

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the piece. In so doing, he both reversed the anti-Indian bias of the La Malinche myth and affirmed his pro-indigenismo (pre-Columbian) stance in the postrevolutionary debate concerning mexicanidad (authentic Mexican-ness).16 Like Water for Chocolate reengages the debate and reaffirms Fernandez’s position on the relative merits of the four Mexicos.

Mexicanidad, Los Angeles–Style Another primer on the four Mexicos, but from across the border, the U.S. film Mi familia (My Family, 1995) demonstrates mexicanidad’s transnational pertinence. An epic saga ranging from the 1920s to the 1980s, the film focuses on three generations of a Mexican American family living just across the east side of a Los Angeles River bridge. Associating Chicanos with East Los Angeles has become a cliché, but it accurately reflects an east/west (and south/west) ethnoracial divide that has been in place since the early 1900s. As historian George Sánchez has shown, restrictive real estate covenants and a city zoning ordinance in 1908 that “made Westside L.A. the first urban area in the United States exclusively reserved for residential land use . . . meant that the area of downtown Los Angeles was marked as middle class and a zone of whiteness. Eastside and Southside Los Angeles, on the other hand, were allowed to develop industrial sites, and immigrants followed these to take up residence near work opportunities.”17 The Eastside’s specifically Mexican character was driven, negatively, by the influx of refugees fleeing the Mexican Revolution and, positively, by labor needs generated by Los Angeles’s industrial spurt of the 1910s and 1920s. Although by 1929, with ninety thousand residents of Mexican descent, East Los Angeles “had gained fame as the largest Mexican community in the United States,” not all of East L.A. could be considered a barrio (Mexican enclave).18 Boyle Heights, for example, the eastern area closest to downtown and the L.A. River, had become heavily working-class Jewish by the 1920s, with a smaller mix of Mexican and non-Mexican ethnicities. As late as 1940, according to Sánchez, “the Jewish population of Boyle Heights totaled about 35,000, the Mexican population about 15,000, and the Japanese population approximately 5,000, with smaller numbers of Italians, Armenians, African Americans, and Russian Molokans.”19 Mi familia’s portrayal of an Eastside Mexican ghetto as early as the 1930s is thus taking Chinatown-like liberties. Allegorical proclivities are further evidenced in the names of the family’s patriarch and matriarch: Jose (Jacob Vargas/Eduardo Lopez Rojas) and Maria (Jennifer Lopez/Jenny Gago). The character of Los Angeles, however, rather than blown out of proportion, is cut down to size. When Jose migrates in the 1920s from Mexico to Los Angeles, he first must learn to distinguish the California city from several Mexican towns of the same name. Similarly true to the times are his reasons for leaving his home country: to escape social instability, to find work, and because he has an uncle, nicknamed “El Californio” (Leon Singer), with a house in East L.A. The next history lesson, and first indication of “ambivalent Americanism,” comes when El Californio insists that

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he be buried in the backyard and have his epitaph read: cuando yo naci aqui / esto era mexico / y donde yo descanso / esto es todavia mexico (When I was born here, this was Mexico; where I lie, this is still Mexico). Portrayed as an eccentric loner, El Californio is actually representative of a vocal faction in the city’s Chicano community of the 1920s struggling to maintain its ethnic identity in the face of assimilationist pressures and discrimination. The conflict crested in 1927 in the East Los Angeles district of Belvedere, over plans to incorporate the district into a municipality. Proposed by the business elite as a boon for the local economy, the upshot of the plan was the “ethnic cleansing” of the nonwhite community. Through the raising of taxes for city services after incorporation, the largely immigrant, working-class residents would be forced to sell their property to middle-class Anglos, thereby raising property values and creating a San Fernando Valley–like windfall for investors.20 Local activist Zeferino Ramirez led a group opposed to the exploitation of the community. Paradoxically, however, the group was also opposed to the naturalization of Mexican immigrants, whose lack of American citizenship would disqualify them from voting against incorporation.21 The Spanish-language newspaper La Opinion and the Mexican consulate joined Ramirez in this seemingly contradictory, El Californio–like stance. But to Ramirez and his allies, Sánchez suggests, “negation of Mexican citizenship would have been a larger crime than that being perpetrated on the residents of Belvedere [by the boondoggle].”22 As Mi familia goes on to illustrate, worse crimes than assimilation or displacement were on the horizon. Living in the home he inherited from El Californio and with a regular job as a gardener on the Westside, Jose marries the Mexican American Maria (who works as a nanny for a Westside family), and has six children by her. Demonstrating how indispensable Mexican labor could be to Los Angeles one moment and disposable the next, Maria, while pregnant with their third child and despite her U.S. citizenship, is rounded up with other brownskinned Angelinos as part of the early-1930s mass deportation of Mexicans and Mexican Americans. The resulting attrition of the city’s Mexican residents by a third during this period mirrored an even greater proportional reduction during the early American period, when the Mexican population dropped from 90 percent of the city’s total in 1850 to 10 percent in 1900. The earlier turnaround was mainly due to the influx of Anglos. The more recent reduction, though set in motion by the Depression, had been foreshadowed in the mid-1910s, when the influx of refugees from the Mexican Revolution, “along with alleged radicals and ‘labor agitators,’ became scapegoats for various social and economic dislocations.”23 The “brown scare” peaked again in the mid-1920s, when an outbreak of bubonic plague in a downtown barrio, long neglected by the health department, resulted in a quarantine of the area. “Even after the plague’s containment,” William Estrada reports, “a general fear of Mexican depravity became ingrained in the public consciousness, owing in part to the close proximity of the [Mexican] community to downtown industry and business.”24

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Vying with the “Mexican problem,” only in reverse, a postrevolutionary “flowering of cultural relations between the United States and Mexico” contributed to a “Latin Lover” craze in Hollywood (Rudolph Valentino, Antonio Moreno, et al.) and “an enormous vogue” for Mexican art and architecture.25 Both sides of the peso are evident in the Olvera Street project, “the first theme park in the world,” which on its opening in 1930 sanitized and prettified a portion of the Sonoratown district.26 One of several historical omissions in Mi familia, Olvera Street is never mentioned in the film, despite its crucial significance to the city’s Latino and overall history. Christine Stevenson and Harry Chandler, the project’s prime movers and shakers, in the best Ramona myth tradition, envisioned the “Mexican Street of Yesterday in a City of Today” as a “mixture of romance and capitalism.”27 Architecture was even altered “to conform to the popular ‘Ramonaland’ narrative,” such as by adding a bell tower to the old Plaza church “to make it look like a California mission.”28 But “urban renewal” of an ethnic slum whose nearby central Plaza had traditionally served as a soapbox for radicals—including exiled Mexican revolutionary leaders Ricardo and Enrique Flores Magon—had political benefits as well. The Magon brothers had actually served the power elite’s purposes after the Times bombing in the 1910s, when Otis and Chandler tried to link the McNamara brothers with the Mexican revolutionaries as part of an anarchist plot (fig.29).29 But the Plaza’s viability as a safety valve for subversive ideas, “which become harmless when exposed and freely voiced, but become dangerous when smothered and restrained,” waned in the early Depression years when anticapitalist activity resurfaced. 30 The changing ideological climate makes the choice of avowed communist David Siqueiros to paint a mural at Olvera Street all the more surprising and all the more ironic, given that Siqueiros began his anti-imperialist mural just as Mexicans (and Mexican Americans) were being rounded up at the Plaza for deportation, eventually including the famed muralist himself. Siqueiros conceivably could have been in the cattle car that transports Mi familia’s Maria deep into the Mexican heartland—where she regains contact with her Mexican roots but also with the Indian strand of the four Mexicos. The indigenous element, introduced though Indian flute and percussion music in the opening credits, becomes a leitmotif in the film. During Maria’s Mexican exile, narrative elements expand the Indian subtext. Once her infant son is old enough to travel, she sets out on an arduous journey back to the United States. Along the way she gets a blessing from two Indian shamans and takes a daylight owl as a sign from a river spirit that her child, saved from drowning in the crossing of the raging torrent, is only living on borrowed time. Upon Maria and her son’s safe return to Los Angeles and a joyous reunion with Jose, we jump forward to the mid-1950s. Jose and Maria are now middle-aged, and five of their six children are grown, with the sixth, Jimmy (Jonathan Hernandez/ Jimmy Smits), in mid-adolescence. While the children are all largely assimilated—grooving to rock music, playing baseball, serving in the navy, watching I Love Lucy on TV—a hybridized Mexican American lifestyle and consciousness,

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Figure 29. Ricardo Flores Magon (left) and famed graphic artist/activist Ricardo Guadalupe Posada. Poster (2010) by Santiago Armengod, www. justseeds.org.

a “betwixt and between” attitude, prevails.31 The most ambivalent American in the family is Chucho (Esai Morales), the son “spared” by the river spirit. The gang-affiliated Chucho also represents a newly aggressive Chicano consciousness. In a city that by 1928 had become the Chicano capital of the United States, “the sons and daughters of the immigrant generation,” George Sánchez explains, cognizant of their rising numbers but having grown up in the shadow of the deportations and frustrated by ongoing discrimination, “were made keenly aware

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of the fragility of their social position.”32 Another shadow haunting Pachuco gang members like Chucho are the Zoot Suit Riots of the 1940s. Another of the film’s historical elisions, that of the Zoot Suit Riots is justified, or at least explicable, by the film’s original release in 1995. Given that the stage and film versions of Luis Valdez’s Zoot Suit (1978, 1981) and Edward James Olmos’s film American Me (1992) were not yet distant memories, audiences for Mi familia’s original release were likely to have been somewhat informed about this dark passage in Los Angeles (and U.S.) history. Present-day audiences, and readers, may need a brush-up. Although the pendulum had swung back to welcoming Mexicans as a muchneeded labor force during World War II, their communities were still segregated, and relations between the LAPD and barrio youth, especially, had long been strained. In August 1942 tensions flared anew when twenty-two Thirty-eighth Street gang members were arrested for the killing of a rival gang member in the so-called Sleepy Lagoon Murder. The trial that followed gained national attention “and provoked new anti-Mexican sentiments” among the city’s Anglo community.33 Three defendants were found guilty of first-degree murder and nine of second-degree murder in a trial that exposed the raw racism in the city, including that of the trial judge, and was fueled by the press. All the convicted men were eventually freed on appeal, after two years in prison, thanks to the efforts of the partly communist-organized Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee. In the interim, with the Sleepy Lagoon murder and world war as a backdrop, violence erupted in L.A.’s downtown streets in June 1943. The Zoot Suit Riots—so-named for the Mexican American variation on the African American–inspired attire then popular among barrio youth—began when Anglo soldiers and marines joined sailors and civilians in beating and stripping “zoot suiters” and raping some of their women, while the LAPD looked on or arrested Mexicans rather than whites (fig. 30). African Americans, Filipinos, and other peoples of color that happened to be in the area “became victims of similar acts of violence.”34 Spurred by international notoriety and pressure from the Mexican government to stop the rioting, the federal government finally intervened when “it appeared that local Los Angeles officials would not.”35 Though it fails to deal with the Sleepy Lagoon Murder or Zoot Suit Riots directly, Mi familia alludes to them, after the fact, in several ways. Chucho’s name is one letter from “Chuco,” a shortening of the word Pachuco, the self-chosen name of Mexican American gang members.36 His fetishistic obsession with the crease in a pair of elegant white pants echoes the clothes-consciousness of the zoot suiters, whose attire was banned by the L.A. City Council after the riots.37 Chucho accidentally kills a rival gang member in a knife fight, then is gunned down by a police brigade that enters his Eastside barrio like U.S. marines invading a foreign country. Observing the brutal shooting, and through his presence ironically commenting on it, is Chucho’s brother Paco (Benito Martinez/Edward James Olmos), on leave from the navy. Anglo sailors, who considered barrio youth draft dodgers, had been the prime instigators and perpetrators of the Zoot Suit Riots.

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Figure 30. The archetypal El Pachuco (Edward James Olmos) in the 1981 film version of Zoot Suit. Photofest.

In fact, “Mexican Americans accounted for one-fifth of the total casualties from Los Angeles in World War II, although they comprised one-tenth of the city’s population.”38 Chucho’s killing, like the Zoot Suit Riots, “symbolized a central American dilemma,” Sánchez asserts: “the Anglo American cultural intolerance of racial and cultural differences, and the special difficulties of a generation of [Chicano] youth suspended between two cultures.”39 The dilemma came to the fore in an earlier, climactic confrontation between Chucho and his father, Jose. Shocked that Chucho has been dealing drugs, Jose is horrified at his son’s invoking the “American way” as justification for his behavior: “The only thing they understand in this country is money, and it doesn’t matter how you get it, just so long as you get it!” As for the “Mexican way,” this is rebuked in a manner eerily resonant with the father-son disputes in Zoot Suit and American Me, and clearly still relevant at the time of Rudolfo Acuna’s study of Chicano identity, Anything but Mexican: Chicanos in Contemporary Los Angeles.40 Before dragging his father to the floor

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and stopping just short of slugging him, Chucho spits out his rejection of Jose’s immigrant values of humility and hard work: “Most of all, I don’t want to be like you!” A more constructive, if still only partial means of resolving the betwixtand-between dilemma, Mi familia suggests, were hybridized cultural practices. One of these—a customized Chicano take on Autopia—the film turns into a major set piece. Revolving literally around Chucho’s fire-engine-red Chevy (fig. 31), it begins with his cleaning the car to the rhythm of a transistor radio’s American rock music—itself shown as hybridizable when the “real” Rosie and the Originals, an actual Chicano group of the period, later perform their hit song “Angel Baby” at a local hop. Here, however, as young children gravitate to the car, Chucho switches to a Mexican station’s Latin beat, instructs the kids in some mambo steps, and leads them in an Indian-like circle dance around the sparkling red sedan. The Chevy’s privileged place in 1950s Chicano culture is reiterated when Chucho’s gang’s lineup of red Chevies both mirrors and is matched against his rival gang’s black Chevy caravan; the car-based hierarchy is underscored when the police that come to kill Chucho are all driving Fords. Following Chucho’s killing, the film’s third major historical lacuna accompanies its second temporal leap: from the 1950s into the 1980s. Lost in the shuffle are the identity politics movements of the 1960s and 1970s, in which California’s and L.A.’s Chicanos played a leading role. Preceding the formation of both the

Figure 31. Ambivalent Americanism: Chucho (Esai Morales) and Chevy. Photofest.

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National Organization of Women (NOW) and the Black Panther Party, both formed in 1966, Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers, founded in 1965, gave a Mexican American face to the country’s rising social consciousness. The Brown Beret and Chicano Movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s, driven by students and artists and propelled by opposition to the Vietnam War (in which Mexican Americans, as in previous wars, suffered disproportionate casualties), were both centered in Los Angeles. Events with lasting resonance and still commemorated include the student walkouts of 1968 in protest of the underfunding of East L.A.’s schools, and the Chicano Moratorium of 1970, which drew thirty thousand antiwar demonstrators and culminated in the tragic killing of L.A. Times and KMEX-TV journalist Ruben Salazar. Salazar, whose life appears to have been threatened by the LAPD for his vociferous antiwar stance, was struck in the head by a tear-gas projectile fired by a police officer after the demonstration. Officially ruled an accident, strong suspicions of criminal intent persist—partially assuaged, partially fueled, by the only partial release of classified sheriff ’s department documents in 2011. On the cultural front Siqueiros- and Ricardo Guadalupe Posada–inspired muralists, Self Help Graphics, the Asco (“nausea”) street artists, and the “Los Four” art collective (the latter three founded in 1973) “were soldiers in the battle,” Los Four’s fifth member, Judith Hernandez, declared. “We served the cause through art.”41 The University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), meanwhile, became a training ground in the 1970s for Chicano filmmakers, who started what Chon Noriega calls the cultural nationalist phase of Chicano cinema, followed by a more internationalist orientation in the early-to-mid-1980s, and eventually turning more mainstream—à la Mi familia.42 Attempting to synthesize the “weapon” and “formula” models Noriega ascribes to the earlier and later cinematic phases, Mi familia ultimately offers the four Mexicos as a potentially holistic cure for Chicanos’ alienated condition. As steeped in Indian pantheism as Maria clearly is (accepting Chucho’s death as foreordained by the river spirit), she is also an ardent Catholic, overjoyed when her daughter Toni (Constance Marie) decides, in the 1950s section, to become a nun. Toni, for her part, ends up combining the Spanish and revolutionary strands when, in the 1980s section, she renounces her vows, marries a former Anglo priest (Scott Bakula), and joins with him to fight for immigrant and refugee rights. Toni’s “conversion” is shown not as a renunciation of Catholicism, however, but as an expression of its liberation theology adjunct, exemplified in real-life Los Angeles of the 1980s by Father Luis Olivares, who turned the Plaza’s Our Lady Queen of Angels (La Placita) Church into a sanctuary for political refugees and the undocumented. Even the criminally inclined Jimmy—who goes “bad” after witnessing Chucho’s killing—catches the revolutionary bug. Toni convinces him to marry the Salvadoran refugee Isabel (Elpidia Carrillo) to prevent her deportation to El Salvador—where, as the daughter of a union activist during the country’s civil war, she would likely be killed.

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The introduction of Isabel is telling in multicultural terms as well, as it points to the widespread diversification and expansion of the city’s Latino community during this period, especially from the influx of Central Americans fleeing domestic turmoil. In contrast to the pre-1965 period, when Mexicans were, as they had been since the city’s founding, by far the most numerically and culturally dominant Latino group in Los Angeles, the city now boasts sizable Central American, South American, and Caribbean communities, in some cases surpassed in population only by the largest cities in their countries of origin. Filmmakers Gregory Nava and Anna Thomas (he a Chicano, she an Anglo) were well aware of the ethnic differences among Latinos. Indeed, they had highlighted them in their first film, El Norte (1983), whose main characters are Guatemalan political refugees who must navigate the geographical and cultural divides of both Mexico and the United States on their treacherous escape route to Southern California. While duly acknowledging inter-Latino differences, Mi familia also suggests a point of cultural and political convergence between the Central American and Chicano experiences. Jimmy, whose marriage to Isabel was one of convenience at best, warms to her, sexually, in a scene that mirrors, in reverse, Chucho’s mambo dance around the red Chevy. Replacing Jimmy’s American rock on the tape deck with a salsa tune as he works on his car, Isabel gets him to dance, then into bed, with her. He is drawn to her emotionally, and politically, when he realizes the tragedies they both have suffered, directly or indirectly, at the hands of the Americans. Just as his brother was murdered by the racist LAPD, Isabel’s father was killed by a U.S.-supported Salvadoran death squad. The brain drain is more than a trickle in the film as well. Memo (Enrique Castillo), “the pride of the family,” has graduated from UCLA law school, opened a private practice on the Westside, and has a blond-haired fiancée whose parents live in Bel Air. Educational achievement, career success, and upward mobility are not the issue—nor is intermarriage, as Tina, a proud Chicana, proves. That Memo has sold his ethnic soul to the gringo, become an agringado or pocho (assimilated or faded Mexican), is made painfully clear when he invites his trophy bride-to-be and future in-laws across the bridge to meet his family. Insisting that his name is Bill rather than Memo and calling El Californio’s burial in the backyard a myth, he betrays his Indian heritage as well in berating Jimmy for failing to control his five-year-old son Tamalito’s (Emilio Rivera) wildness. Tamalito’s (Mexican) Indian “blood” was coded from the start: he is introduced shooting a toy bow and arrow at a neighbor’s rear end while wearing an Aztec-style headdress. He displays his indigenismo to the Westsiders by hooting and hollering warrior-style, while running circles around them in the nude. Perhaps the strongest bond among the four Mexicos, and the family members, is Jose’s cherished cornfield in the front yard. The most intimate conversations between family members, as well as fabulous tales that amuse and fascinate the youngsters, occur among this resilient Indian Mexican food plant thriving on Mexican American soil. The cornfield is also where Jose reunites with Jimmy after his prison release(s) and where Jimmy and his estranged son Tamalito bridge their

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differences in the end, just as the L.A. River bridge beside which father and son were bonding was showing signs, by the 1980s, of becoming more than a one-way street for greater Los Angeles as well.

The Age of the Hispanic The turnaround in Latino and Anglo relations is reflected in a wide range of cultural, political, and demographic developments of the last three decades. Besides Mi familia, Zoot Suit, El Norte, and American Me, several other post1980s mainstream films and television shows featuring more favorable, or at least multidimensional, Latino-based characters—the vast majority situated in Los Angeles—have made it onto large and small screens. These include La Bamba and Born in East L.A. (both 1987), Stand and Deliver and Colors (both 1988), Mi vida loca and Blood In, Blood Out (both 1993), Selena (1997), Bread and Roses (2000), Tortilla Soup (2001), Real Women Have Curves (2002), Resurrection Blvd. (2002–2004), American Family (2002–2004), The George Lopez Show (2002–2007), A Day Without a Mexican and Spanglish (both 2004), Quinceañera and Walkout (both 2006), Ugly Betty (2006–2010), and A Better Life (2011). The Fernandomania sports craze of the 1980s, ignited by L.A. Dodgers Mexican pitching sensation Fernando Valenzuela, salved wounds left by the late-1950s eviction of Chicano families from Chavez Ravine to make way for Dodger Stadium (fig. 32), and transformed the team into a megafavorite for Mexican Americans. Professional basketball brought black and “brown” together in the teaming of Spanish star Pao Gasol and African American supernova Kobe Bryant, among other Los Angeles Lakers, a winning combination affirmed by the Lakers back-toback National Basketball Association (NBA) championships in 2009 and 2010. Although high levels of poverty, gang-related crime, and high-school-dropout rates continue to plague Latino communities, the return of the repressed Spanishspeaking peoples turned the 1980s into the so-called Decade of the Hispanic and, through an ongoing influx in the 1990s and 2000s, has remade Los Angeles, after a little more than a century, into a Latino city. Pushing against the multicultural tide, a nativist backlash led to a series of statewide anti-immigrant/antiminority initiatives. Proposition 184 (passed in 1994), until struck down by the California Supreme Court in 1997, proposed eliminating social services for undocumented immigrants; Prop. 209 (1996) successfully banned affirmative action programs in public institutions; and Prop. 227 (1998) outlawed bilingual education programs in public schools. The federal Border Protection, Anti-Terrorism, and Immigration Control Act of 2006, however, which sought to criminalize undocumented immigrants and their families, spurred a pushback of its own, capped by a massive proimmigrant protest in downtown Los Angeles that drew an estimated one million people. The production and reception of a public artwork by nationally acclaimed Chicana artist and activist Judy Baca illustrates both sides of the multiculture wars. Commissioned by the largely Latino municipality of Baldwin Park and

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Figure 32. Aurora Vargas forcibly evicted from her Chavez Ravine home, 1959. USC Special Collections Library.

installed at a Metrolink station there in 1993, Baca’s monument to “the different voices of the community,” titled Danses Indigenes, elicited a delayed oppositional outcry in 2005. Fired by the anti-immigrant movement, a group called Save the State protested, unsuccessfully, to have certain “offensive passages” inscribed in the monument removed.43 These included one from Indian folklore, “It was better before they came,” and another from author Gloria Anzaldúa that echoes Mi familia’s El Californio: “This land was Mexico once, was Indian always and is, and will be again.”44 The various anti-immigrant actions seem increasingly last-ditch, given demographic trends not only in Los Angeles and California but in the country as a whole. Latinos became the largest minority group in the United States in 2003 and in California are projected to become the majority by 2042. Their percentage of the nation’s population rose from 12.5 to 16 percent from 2000 to 2010 and is projected to reach 29 percent by 2050. In Los Angeles County Latinos outnumbered Anglos by one million in 1998, and by 2005 they made up a majority of the population of the city and county.45 The success of the “Justice for Janitors” campaigns in the 1990s and especially in 2000—“with a county supervisor holding a mop, a state assemblyman holding a broom and a prominent downtown building owner donning a strike cap”—was a watershed for working-class Latinos and a reminder of how much the city’s

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political and economic landscape has changed.46 A reminder of how much still needs to be changed, a woeful lack of public funding for gang intervention has partly been compensated for by Father Gregory Boyle’s Homeboy Industries, Connie Rice’s Advancement Project, A Better LA, and the aforementioned Dream Center, among other social service groups.47 As for political office, while Latinos still only accounted for one of five county supervisors and five of fifteen city council members by the early 2010s, Lee Baca’s having served as L.A. County sheriff since 1998 and Antonio Villaraigosa’s 2005 election as L.A.’s first Hispanic mayor since Christobal Aguilar in 1872 somewhat even the score.48 The list of other influential positions held by Latinos is impressive as well. The L.A. County Federation of Labor, the area’s largest local union, is headed by Maria Elena Durazo. The city’s heavily Latino Catholic archdiocese, the largest in the nation, obtained its first Latino bishop, Jose Horacio Gomez, in 2011. Legendary Spanish tenor Placido Domingo is president of the increasingly prestigious Los Angeles Opera; and the baton of the L.A. Philharmonic orchestra was handed to Venezuelan wunderkind Gustavo Dudamel in 2009. Further highcultural progress is evident in the founding of the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach in 1996; the establishing of a Chicano and Latino Art Center, as part of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, in 2004; the opening of La Plaza de Cultura y Artes, a museum adjacent to the Plaza and devoted to the city’s Mexican American experience, in 2011; and the planned unveiling of the un-whitewashed América Tropical in 2012. For all the advances, another of the city’s Latino treasures, L.A. Times columnist and author Hector Tobar, in an article on the new Plaza museum, points to the perhaps insurmountable challenge of compensating for past rhetorical abuses in an increasingly multicultural Los Angeles. A native Angelino of Guatemalan descent, Tobar is fully aware “that Mexicans and Mexican Americans are at the center of my city’s history” and understands why a Mexican American museum, “by default, celebrates Mexican American accomplishments.” Indeed, upon entering the building, Tobar sensed “that this new center is an important addition to the city’s heart.” What disappoints him, at least at this early stage in the museum’s formation, is that its exhibits fail to represent “that the Plaza was a culturally diverse place” and that “people of European, Asian, and Mexican heritage interacted there. . . . How nice it would be,” he concludes, “to have one museum that could tell the full, rich, variegated story for the city they built together.”49

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To fill the multicultural gap Hector Tobar finds at the new Plaza museum, more than only Europeans and Asians need to be included. Blacks deserve a place at the table as well, if not at the very head. Not just a few but a majority of the pueblo’s original forty-four pobladores (ten of the twenty-two adults; sixteen of the twenty-two children) were either of full or part African descent. One of the pueblo’s first alcaldes (Spanish equivalent of mayor), Francisco Reyes, appointed in 1793, was a mulatto.1 Yet at the city’s first major public celebration of its origins, the La Fiesta de Los Angeles of 1894, blacks were allowed to participate (along with “Caucasians, Mongolians, red men,” and representatives of the “Spanish American” population).2 But their preeminent role went unacknowledged—as it would remain for close to a century. The special fiesta of 1931, celebrating the city’s sesquicentennial, seemed an apt time for atonement. Instead, the historical whitewashing expanded, engulfing even the “Spanish Americans.” The city’s founders now “were thought of as Europeans,” William Estrada notes; “Los Angeles had become the new Jamestown.”3 At least one contemporary observer of the festival, John D. Weaver, “wondered about the complexion” of the white adults and children masquerading in the procession as “the 44 black and brown pobladores.”4 The city’s Anglo elite “understood the need to recast local history” as part of their increasingly tenuous campaign to uphold Los Angeles, in Mayor John Porter’s words, as the “last stand of nativeborn Protestant America.”5 For a change, however, a non-WASP “talked back.” Loren Miller, feature writer for one of L.A.’s major black newspapers, the California Eagle (founded in 1879), derided the fiesta’s self-serving revisionism for blatantly ignoring the citizens “from whose ranks [Los Angeles] drew more than fifty percent of its founders and [for attempting] . . . to change the color of its founders’ skins one hundred and fifty years after their death.”6 The racial politics of historical exclusion continued to rankle an African American community long subjected to second-class citizenship (and worse). The conflict over the role of blacks in the city’s founding eventually extended beyond 170

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the press and public events to the public schools and academia. In 1946 L.A. Unified School District superintendent Vierling Kersey attempted to set the record straight, at least in the schools’ textbooks, about the city founders’ racial makeup. Kersey consulted with longtime residents and local historians, “especially Miriam Matthews, the city’s first black librarian and an expert on the African American origins of Los Angeles,” and black people’s participation in the founding became part of the curriculum—for a time.7 In 1951, however, new superintendent Alexander Stoddard authorized a bowdlerizing of the Kersey-era textbooks, thereby igniting another firestorm of criticism in the black community. Charlotta Bass, legendary publisher (since 1912) of the California Eagle, denounced the new textbooks’ elimination of “all reference to the racial composition of the founders; the words ‘Negro’ and ‘colored’ do not appear anywhere.” Even worse was one book’s visual depiction of the pobladores “as Caucasian or white,” giving students the impression “that Los Angeles was founded by whites.”8 In 1953 historian Glenn Price, on behalf of the state parks system and in preparation for the designation of the Plaza as a State Historic Park, created a plaque that correctly listed the “colored” backgrounds of the pobladores. Price’s attempt to display the plaque in front of the Avila Adobe on Olvera Street, however, met a similar fate to that of Siqueiros’s América Tropical mural a few buildings away. On orders from Christine Sterling, the plaque was “immediately removed” and possibly burned.9 Most discouragingly, some descendants of the pobladores—most, by the mid-twentieth century, fully assimilated and European in appearance through intermarriage—eagerly supported efforts “to instill an Anglo birth legend for the city.”10 The most outspoken in the denial of her heritage was Ana Begue de Packman, whose post as secretary of the Historical Society of Southern California did not prevent her, into the 1960s, from proclaiming her ancestry, despite its mulatto lineage, as “pure Castilian.”11 The liberal turn in the 1960s and 1970s (including Otis Chandler’s stunning transformation of the L.A. Times from a right-wing rag into a respectable, center-left paper) created a climate more open to confronting the city’s multiracial, and racist, past. In 1974, with the Times’ endorsement, Tom Bradley became L.A.’s first elected black mayor (Francisco Reyes, an ancestor of none other than Begue de Parkman, had been appointed).12 Finally, in 1981, the year of the city’s bicentennial, Miriam Matthews spearheaded an effort to rectify “generations of misinformation and organized denial of the original founders.”13 A bronze plaque, rising from the ashes of Glenn Price’s likely incinerated plaque of three decades prior, was placed at the apogee of the Plaza circle—listing the names, ages, familial connections, and ethnoracial identities of all forty-four pobladores.

Black Is . . . Black Ain’t Begue de Parkman’s bill of divorcement from her African ancestry contained a measure of historical truth. After all, the African Americans who fought for

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and finally achieved rhetorical justice with the founder’s plaque in 1981 were several immigrant waves away from the Negro and mulatto pobladores the plaque commemorated. As Paul Robinson has shown, the high level of African descent among the pueblo’s first settlers was no accident. The original and other early residents of Los Angeles came mainly from western Mexican regions—Sonora, Sinaloa, Baja California—“where the Spanish empire relied heavily on African and mulatto populations as soldiers (black militiamen), and laborers in agriculture and mining. . . . Estimates have placed Africans and mulattoes at greater than 25 percent of the overall population living in these regions in the eighteenth century.”14 Besides Los Angeles’s first black mayor (and ranchero) Francisco Reyes, two California provincial governors, Manuel Victoria (1831–1832) and Pio Pico (1832, 1845–1846), were of African ancestry. Slavery was formally abolished in Mexico after independence in 1829, and the absence of antimiscegenation laws (on the books, in some states, until 1967 in the United States) further facilitated assimilation into mainstream life. With California statehood and the influx of American settlers “the situation changed drastically.”15 Angelinos of African heritage, whether they “looked” black or European, considered themselves Mexican. However, that they had little in common with the English-speaking African Americans, least of all with the slaves brought along by their southern masters, held no stock with the migrant Yankees. Although Mexican blacks avoided outright enslavement, which persisted in Los Angeles owing to lax enforcement of California’s “free state” status, institutionalized racism affected black residents across the board. Egregious policies, which applied to Chinese and Indians as well, included the Separate Schools Act, the White Witness Law (preventing nonwhites from testifying in court), and “exemption from the right to suffrage”—the latter two restrictions lasting until passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments in 1868 and 1870.16 The city’s first wave of industrialization in the late nineteenth century increased employment opportunities, but job discrimination limited these for blacks primarily to “menial services (janitors, porters, waiters, or house servants).”17 Despite the enormous obstacles, a small middle and even upper-middle class emerged and, as in other “liberated” black areas, a rich social and cultural life developed. Robert Owens, Biddie Mason, Joshua Smart, and their families became wealthy entrepreneurs and community activists in the late 1800s. John Niemore started the city’s first black newspaper, the California Eagle, in 1879, and Jefferson Edmonds published the Pasadena Searchlight in 1896 and the Liberator in 1900. Major political organizations included the Los Angeles Forum, founded by Edmonds, Frederick Jacobs, and the Reverend J. E. Edwards in 1903, and the Sojourner Truth Club, formed by Margaret Scott in 1904. All this vibrant civic activity was accomplished with a population of only 9,424 blacks by 1910, which, despite a substantial increase from the reported 15 blacks living in Los Angeles in 1850, still only accounted for less than 3 percent of the city’s total population.

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The comparatively small numbers didn’t deter W.E.B. Du Bois, cofounder, in 1910, of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), from visiting Los Angeles in 1913. Actually, Du Bois was urged to come by local black leaders, who had written him: “Problems and grievances arise constantly demanding attention by someone on behalf of the race. No one is charged with the duty and few can afford to take it singly. . . . We begin to see the necessity of an organization such as yours.”18 The letter’s urgent tone countered the common label for the period as a golden era for Los Angeles blacks. It also clashed with the Liberator’s roseate claim that “the colored people in California are the best fixed in the United States,” and with statistics that showed 36.1 percent of black Angelinos owning their own homes by 1910, compared to 2.4 percent in New York, 11 percent in New Orleans, 14.1 percent in Dallas, and 29.5 percent in Oakland.19 Du Bois himself found much to praise in the city. “Los Angeles is wonderful,” he began a report on his visit in The Crisis. “Nowhere in the United States is the Negro so well and beautifully housed, nor the average efficiency and intelligence of the colored population so high. . . . Out here in this matchless Southern California there would seem to be no limit to your opportunities, your possibilities.”20 But Du Bois was no Hollywood flack, and all that he witnessed on his Los Angeles stopover was not sunshine and oranges—at least for black people. “Los Angeles is no paradise,” he closed with a thump. “The color line is there and simply drawn. Women have had difficulty in having gloves and shoes fitted at stores, the hotels do not welcome colored people, the restaurants are not for all that hunger.”21 The double standard went further, and it had legal backing. Although Progressive-era California had just passed a state civil rights act, in Los Angeles the infamous “Shenk Rule” of 1912–13, named for city attorney John Shenk, gave store owners the right “to charge a negro more for an article than a white man.”22 The Liberator led an unsuccessful campaign to stop eateries from using the cover of the Shenk rule to demean “our women and girls by charging five dollars for a dash of ice cream.”23 By the end of 1913, black leaders’ call to Du Bois had been answered, and Los Angeles was granted a local NAACP chapter. Racial discrimination momentarily took a backseat to World War I, but returning black soldiers who had helped make the world “safe for Democracy” found a postwar city (and country) rife with revived bigotry and nativism, affecting all foreigners (including Hollywood’s Jews), but especially people of color. L.A.’s swimming pools were open to “coloreds” but only one afternoon a week, after which the pools were emptied and refilled. “Keep the Neighborhood White” campaigns reified the city’s segregated housing patterns (described in the last chapter), which for blacks meant increased shunting, in the 1920s, to a south Los Angeles swath along Central Avenue.24 The inward turn had its rewards. Already the “main thoroughfare for Black Los Angeles” by 1910, “the Avenue” in the 1920s became the hub of a musical and literary movement that mirrored New York’s Harlem Renaissance.25 “What set Los Angeles apart,” Johnny Otis recalls, “was the fact that Black performers

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throughout the country, and especially in the South, perceived Los Angeles as a kind of promised land, with many glamorous night spots, sunny weather, and a more benign form of racism than in most American cities.”26 Popular music venues included the Barrelhouse Club, Black Dot McGee’s, Brother’s, Club Alabam, the Cricket Club, Down Beat, Jack’s Basket Room, Joe Morris’s Plantation, Johnny Cornish’s Double Vee, the Jungle Room, the Last Word, the Oasis Club, and Stuff Crouch’s Back Stage. De jure discrimination kept pace with the jazz tempo, however. Local courts gave their stamp of approval to the racist swimming pool policy in 1926; the California Supreme Court validated “whites only” neighborhoods in 1929; and the Watts district of south Los Angeles, to prevent its incorporation as a “black” township, was annexed to the city by the end of the decade.27 Responding to the rampant racism but also to Central Avenue’s status as the cultural and business hub of the black community, John Somerville built what would become, through the 1950s, the Avenue’s jewel. The Hotel Somerville (later renamed and better known as the Dunbar Hotel), in matching the elegance of the city’s finest hotels, offered accommodations not available, even to black celebrities, at “whites only” establishments. Both in spite of and because of the Depression, black migrants, drawn by California’s image as the hope of last resort and by the vacuum left by the Mexican deportation, almost doubled the African American population of Los Angeles: from 38,844 in 1930 to 63,774 in 1940. World War II, however, blew away all previous in-migrations. Inscribing the military-industrial layer of the city’s historical palimpsest, President Franklin Roosevelt’s Executive Order 8802 of 1941, lifting race-based discrimination in the defense industries (not in the military), prompted a wartime surge of blacks into Los Angeles—not by the tens but by the hundreds of thousands. Yet, as with every increase in the city’s minority population, racial strife crested with the wartime wave. Rehearsing the Zoot Suit Riots of two years later, white-on-black student violence erupted at Fremont High School in 1941, and pitched downtown battles in 1943 followed blacks’ torching of a white-owned café that had refused them service.28 Two California Supreme Court decisions of the early postwar period offered renewed hope for L.A.’s blacks, who by 1950 had catapulted to 8.7 percent of the city’s population: Mendez v. Westminster (1946) outlawed racial segregation in state schools, and Shelley v. Kraemer (1948) banned restrictive housing covenants.29 Lax enforcement of the first decision, however, until Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, and of the second until the Fair Housing Act of 1968, rendered both decisions essentially moot, except for the racist backlash: the housing decision led to “a wave of cross burnings, shootings, and bombings . . . directed at the property of those pioneer black families who attempted to make their homes in the restricted white communities.”30 Black anger at the latest “dream deferred” reached a fever pitch as well. The bombing of William Bailey’s house “just outside the westernmost part of the ghetto” in 1952 stoked the outrage, and it reached the breaking point with

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“the failure of police and judicial action in the Bailey case.”31 Just how close the city came to a full-scale explosion a decade before the Watts riots is illustrated in a statement issued by the local chapter of the NAACP in response to the Bailey case. “The indifference of official Los Angeles to the serious lack of police protection for Negroes moving into the ‘new’ areas in the city is a problem that will explode into a race riot the next time an act of violence is visited upon a Negro family.”32

Black Noir Manthia Diawara has proposed that if classical film noir is, as its first theorists, Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton, suggest, “purely a style that uses the tropes of blackness as metaphors for the white characters’ moral transgression and falls from grace,” its African American variant “focuses the noir style on black people themselves.”33 More than merely upsetting the color balance, “noir by noirs” realigns the balance of power, foregrounding “less an aesthetic state of affairs than a way of life that has been imposed on black people through social injustice, and that needs to be exposed to the light.” Most crucially, black noir, for Diawara, “uses the conventions of the genre to subvert its main tenet: that blackness is a fall from whiteness.”34 Rather than a strategy “of artistic othering meant to surmount the cynicism, meaninglessness, and psychosis” of existence, the living hell that black noir protagonists inhabit correlates to their being “trapped in the darkness of white captivity, and the light shed on them is meant to render them visible, not white.”35 Although Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) laid the foundation for black crime fiction, it lacks the urban environment essential to noir. Chester Himes’s If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945) stands as the urtext of black noir, not least because of its setting in the seminal noir site, Los Angeles. Himes’s 1940s sojourn in L.A. coincided with the Second Great Migration of blacks to the city for work in the wartime defense plants, which is where the protagonist of both his L.A. novels (Lost Crusade [1947] is the other) are employed. The bitterness that the frustrated and disillusioned white noir writers felt at L.A.’s broken promise and shattered dreams Himes experienced on a gut level. Although he, too, worked briefly as a screenwriter, Jack Warner rejected him not for his literary conceits but because “I don’t want no god-damned niggers on this lot.”36 Of the city’s racism in general, Himes wrote in his autobiography: “I had lived in the South, I had fallen down an elevator shaft, I had been kicked out of college, I had served seven and one half years in prison, I had survived the humiliating last five years of Depression in Cleveland; and still I was . . . not bitter. But under the mental corrosion of race prejudice in Los Angeles I became bitter and saturated with hate.”37 The black rage instilled by and directed toward Los Angeles is Himes’s prime contribution to the L.A. noir canon. The City of Demons he portrays—like that of Cain, Chandler, and Horace McCoy—is “a nightmarish place, with corruption and violence bubbling just under the surface”; but above all it is a white-dominated

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metropolis whose racial oppression is palpable.38 If He Hollers traffics in “noir’s cars,” but its deconstruction of automobility as a “trope of freedom” emphasizes both a black hope at the car’s potential and a black despair at its failure to deliver.39 Violence is directed in the book not solely at double-crossing crooks and dangerous women but at “obstacles to freedom and economic empowerment.”40 Doubling and splitting motifs in general are not solely philosophical or psychological constructs but reflect Du Bois’s “double consciousness”: an awareness and a survival tactic, borne of having “to think and see ‘double,’ within the constraints of an oppressive, racist system.”41 Most pertinent to L.A. noir, Himes focuses on identifiable black neighborhoods (Watts, Central Avenue, the black Westside), and on black lifestyles, attitudes, and behaviors, which altogether (re)produce “black culture as a distinct American style,” or what Ed Guerrero calls, “the funkier side of noir.”42 Himes, who moved to Paris in the 1950s, and later to Spain, wrote a series of Harlem-based detective novels in the late 1950s and 1960s, featuring “black dicks” Coffin Ed Johnson and Gravedigger Jones. Beginning with A Rage in Harlem (1957) and including The Real Cool Killers (1959) and Cotton Comes to Harlem (1965), these books would exert enormous influence on a younger generation of black noir writers that came to the fore in the 1990s and 2000s. The more recent work divides roughly into two strands: one grounded in the prison and ghetto experience, the other detective-based. The prison-ghetto strand, while infused with the identity politics of activist writers Eldridge Cleaver, George Jackson, and LeRoi Jones/Akira Baraka, gained its most immediate impetus, and example, from incarcerated crime writers Clarence Cooper (The Scene, 1960), Nathan Heard (Howard Street, 1968), Iceberg Slim/Robert Beck (Pimp: The Story of My Life, 1970), and Donald Goines/Al C. Clark (Dopefiend, 1971). Slim’s work contributed most overtly to the blaxploitation film cycle of the early 1970s, and Goines’s to the “ghetto-noir” films of the 1990s, whose L.A.-based contingent begins with Boyz N the Hood (1991) and includes South Central, Juice (both 1992), and Menace to Society (1993). The detective strand has been carried forward by the likes of Walter Mosley, Gary Phillips, Gar Anthony Haywood, James Sallis, Paula Woods, Pamela Samuels Young, Valerie Wilson Wesley, and Eleanor Taylor Brand, among others. Although some of these writers’ mysteries are set in different parts of the country—Sallis’s in New Orleans, Wesley’s in Newark, Brand’s in Waukegan, and Mosley’s later ones (like Himes’s) in New York—literary (and film) noir’s preferential place remains Los Angeles. Mosley and Phillips, especially, have grounded their L.A. noir series in historical events of particular significance to the local black populace. Their (and most of the others’) reliance on a recurring detective (Easy Rollins for Mosley, Ivan Monk for Phillips), while veering toward a Chandleresque retro noir on the one hand, allows, on the other, for a subversion of genre conventions missing from the ghetto noirs. Although Haywood’s first Aaron Gunner mystery, Fear of the Dark (1988), preceded Mosley’s first Rollins novel, Devil in a Blue Dress (1990), the latter got the L.A. black detective strand rolling. Set in 1948 and with

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an ex-aircraft machinist protagonist, Devil in a Blue Dress unabashedly offers itself as a neo-noir sequel to Himes’s L.A. stories, composited with Chinatown. It is also the only L.A. noir novel of the Himes-inspired black writers (not to mention Himes himself) to have been made into a major motion picture.

Fall from (G)race Devil in a Blue Dress (1995) registers the funkier side of noir, L.A. style, in the opening credits, which appear over a mural depicting “the Avenue” in its heyday as T-Bone Walker bewails, “I’ve got a Westside baby, she lives way cross town.” The blues are what the recently laid-off Ezekiel “Easy” Rollins (Denzel Washington) is feeling as he sits in an empty bar along otherwise bustling Central Avenue. His generic blues immediately expose their black underpinning in a flashback to the scene of his firing, which shows Easy alleging a racial double standard at the aircraft factory where he worked, and his supervisor lending it credence by calling him “fella.” Easy’s refusal to take the inequities and insults lying down, while not rising to the socially conscious level of Himes’s work, demonstrates a fighting spirit befitting postwar black America and Easy’s subsequent detective’s role. Easy has gumshoeing thrust upon him at the outset: “I ain’t no detective,” he protests to a prospective client. By the end, juiced by the excitement and big bucks but mostly by entree into the workings of “the system” the job affords, he considers going into the “business” full-time (as he would in Mosley’s ten subsequent Easy Rollins novels). “If you’re mixed up in something, you better be mixed up to the top,” double-dealing gangster Dewitt Albright (Tom Sizemore) had counseled Easy—a bit of Chinatown-like advice he takes to heart. From one of L.A.’s “well and beautifully housed” blacks, who struggles to pay the mortgage on his segregated Watts one-bedroom, Easy becomes a man “ready to start fighting back, ’cause I believed somehow that I could live through this bad dream I was having—about pretty girls and gangsters and standing face to face with the richest man in town.” Chinatown’s composited, top-down corruption infuses Devil in a Blue Dress, as well, but with a black noir twist. One of the city’s two mayoral candidates, Matthew Terell (Maury Chaykin), a professed “friend of the Negro,” is actually a Noah Cross kin who favors pederasty to incest. Terell’s rival Todd Carter (Terry Kinney), though he resembles Hollis Mulwray in looks and integrity, here not only survives but triumphs, albeit through a devastating compromise that forms the crux of the story. The devil is in the blue dress—that is, in Carter’s Evelyn Mulwray-ish fiancée Daphne Monet (Jennifer Beals). Daphne’s “evil,” however, lies not in her faux–femme fatale conceit but in white supremacist power relations. Already coded as “off-white” by her “predilection for jazz, dark meat, and pig’s feet,” Daphne’s exposure as a “tragic mulatto” (her mother was a Creole, her father white) nixes her marriage to Carter (fig. 33). Devil’s postwar periodization is telling in regard both to the interracial marriage issue and Easy’s pride in home ownership. The year 1948 saw not only

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the California Supreme Court decision banning racial discrimination in housing but also another abolishing the state’s antimiscegenation law. That residential barriers remained in place is evident in a ribbon header above a newspaper’s main headline: “Negroes Angered by New Property Restriction.” Carter’s fear that crossing the color line with Monet will put him “out of the race” shows that in matters of the heart, as well as the home, legality lagged behind everyday experience. Spatial and sexual taboos are conflated in two other scenes. In the first, Easy’s dread of venturing to the Malibu pier materializes when white punks accost him for being there in the first place and—horror of horrors—deigning to speak to a white woman. In the second, Easy acknowledges the overdetermined audacity of his chauffeuring the still passing-for-white Monet through the Hollywood Hills: “Was I nervous? Here I was in the middle of a white neighborhood with a white woman in my car. No, I wasn’t nervous, I was stupid.”

Figure 33. Jennifer Beals and Denzel Washington in Devil in a Blue Dress. Photofest.

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L.A.’s vaunted automobility is obviously little comfort—indeed poses considerable danger in a city whose Deep South racism seems to confront Easy at every turn. Two LAPD Ku Klux Klanners play a game of “Cops and Niggers” with Easy, beating him to a pulp in the interrogation room and threatening to frame him for murder because “a white man was dead now and, guilty or not, somebody was going to have to pay.” He has to sneak into the back of the Ambassador Hotel because Monet, in her Lauren Bacall pose, is staying in the “whites only” section. Nowhere is the abjection of racism more poignantly displayed than in Monet’s fall from (g)race. From an exclusive suite in the Ambassador to a dingbat ghetto apartment. From Chandleresque sex appeal (Easy: “What do you use as a weapon?”—Monet: “Why don’t you search me and find out?”) to run-of-the-mill mulatto. Late-1940s Los Angeles has beaten the French impressionist preciousness and high-priced stuffing out of Daphne Monet. It hasn’t yet knocked the daylights out of Easy Rollins. In an unexpected, perhaps unprecedented, turn for a noir, black or white, Devil in a Blue Dress ends on a hopeful, uplifting note. Foster Hirsch goes so far as to suggest that the ending serves as a corrective to the “standard representation of black life in crime movies made by black, as well as white, filmmakers.”43 When viewed in the context of the film’s time period (1948) and release date (1995), however, Devil’s upbeat ending can only be taken as highly ironic. Subsequent decades, as Mosley’s historical cycle of Easy Rollins novels themselves attest, witnessed signifi cant progress but also stubborn resistance and harrowing backsliding in L.A.’s African American communities. In 1995, moreover, the still smoldering memory of the 1992 civil unrest, with its embedded reminder of the 1965 Watts riots, exploded any notion of an “easy” life ahead for Easy or his black neighbors, much less for Angelinos in general. Easy’s last line, “I sat with my friend, on my porch, and we laughed a long time,” over an image of “well-tended homes in a world of . . . palm trees and golden, pre-smog California sun,” certainly clashes with Himes’s notion of a city that induces mental corrosion, bitterness, and hate. On this level the Panglossian final impression bespeaks an attitude of historical obliviousness on Easy’s part, one that his character fully admits in the novel.44 If one takes Mosley himself as a “double agent,” however, as Gilbert Muller would have him, a more ambiguous picture emerges. From this parallax view, Easy’s clinging to the American Dream, despite the contravening evidence, becomes, on the one hand, a canny survival tactic informed by Du Bois’s double consciousness. It conjures Langston Hughes’s “dream deferred,” Martin Luther King Jr.’s “dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed,” and Eldridge Cleaver’s deployment of the American Dream as a way “to struggle against the American nightmare.”45 On the other hand, it points to a fraught and complex but undeniable historical reality—that discrimination, in some ways, benefited black communities. Restrictive covenants induced and maintained class heterogeneity in L.A.’s segregated areas, which out-migration, enabled by integration and driven by civil unrest, substantially diminished. Central Avenue’s historic jazz era, the Dunbar

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Hotel’s monument to “black achievement in the city,” and the surge in race enterprises (black-owned and -operated businesses) all occurred, as Reginald Chapple has shown, “at the same time Jim Crow sentiments were on the rise, and, the two trends were related.” As white prejudice, and white flight, increased from the 1930s through the 1950s, “black Los Angeles took advantage of this abandonment and staked its [business and] homeownership claim on Central Avenue. The complex dance of race, space, and place was ever present and would continue as the black center shifted along Central Avenue,” and beyond.46 Unintended beneficial consequences from racist policies do not justify them, much less argue for a return to them. They do suggest—as black nationalists from Martin Delaney to Marcus Garvey to Malcolm X have argued, and self-generated ethnic enclaves have shown—that self-sustaining, ethnically defined communities can offer economic and psychological advantages to groups on the margins of society. Segregated communities created by fi at are another story. Coerced cohesiveness tends to produce, as it clearly did in Los Angeles, “neighborhoods with wounds rubbed raw by rage, poverty, envy, and insanity. And by Bill Parker’s police department.”47 Necessity may have proved the mother of invention in the ghetto and made “Next year in New Jerusalem!” its rallying cry. But in L.A.’s Fourth World context, Easy Rollins’s film-ending laughter—like his ghetto halfwit’s gratuitous axing of neighbors’ trees—also served to keep the tears at bay and the rage from swallowing him whole.

Black Sheep/White Ghosts “White supremacy may be scientifically dead, but its ghost still walks the streets of Los Angeles,” John Somerville wrote in 1949.48 Throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s those ghosts wore the black uniforms of Parker’s LAPD. As ghetto jobless rates in the 1960s doubled and even tripled those in the rest of the city, crime rates—and police brutality—rose to unprecedented heights. Between 1963 and 1965 cops killed sixty black Angelinos, twenty-seven of them shot in the back.49 When the Urban League surrealistically reported in 1964 that Los Angeles was “the most desirable city in America for black people,” it was either parroting the Liberator’s roseate claim of 1913; hailing Du Bois’s “talented tenth” in the cushy confines of Baldwin Hills, View Park, and Ladera Heights; or stoned out of its mind.50 Other signs, besides the appalling poverty and crime statistics, underscored the absurdity of the Urban League’s assessment. The passage of Proposition 14 in 1964, which repealed the state Rumford Fair Housing Act of 1963, although later struck down in the courts, showed even middle-class blacks that “they were not wanted in White Los Angeles.”51 The Watts riots of 1965, the deadliest and most destructive urban uprising in U.S. history to that time, set off a chain reaction of ghetto revolts across the country, signaled a shift from civil rights to militant multiculturalism, and added a new facet to L.A.’s smoke-and-mirrors image. Heretofore projected, from without

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and within, alternately as earthly Eden or purveyor of false hopes and crooked dreams, the city now could lay claim to baring the ugly truth—about itself and the nation at large. White Los Angeles, again however, chose to look, and move, the other way—as did increasing numbers of upwardly mobile blacks released from ghetto confinement by the federal Fair Housing Act of 1968. Black flight, in turn, further impoverished the ghettos and did little to reduce white racism, which Sam Yorty exploited to win the mayor’s race over African American Tom Bradley in 1969. Black relations with the LAPD, meanwhile, only grew more combative with the rise of Black Power, whose political agenda posed an even graver threat to the white establishment, as evidenced in President Richard Nixon’s Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) targeting the Black Panther Party. L.A.-based media dealt with the turbulent times in three distinct ways. Network television, in its advertising-based dependence on the broadest possible audience, played it every which way but loose. In a scenario as fanciful and even more bizarre than the Urban League’s pre-riots prognosis, The Mod Squad (1967–73) featured a trio of would-be counterculturalists—surfer dude, female hippie, and Afro-haired politico—all “doing time” as undercover agents for the LAPD. A Hollywood film industry in financial crisis rolled the dice with its blaxploitation cycle. Though set mostly in New York in its mainstream phase, the cycle was jump-started by the independent, L.A.-situated Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971). Hugely popular but hotly debated in the black community, Sweet Sweetback, as much blaxploitation, also played it both ways. Rejecting civil rights–era assimilation for “counter-counter-contrast conceptions,” the film, for critic Lerone Bennett, was “neither revolutionary nor black,” representing “image confusion” rather than a progressive “black aesthetic.” Romanticizing the ghetto rather than offering an alternative, and reiterating rather than redefining ultraviolent/hypersexualized black stereotypes, Sweet Sweetback offered a “Wonderland” that traded on and catered to black nationalist and white racist fantasies.52 A “third way” emerged from the so-called Los Angeles school of black filmmakers. Founded among black American and African film students at UCLA in the early 1970s, this politicized group, opposed both to the white mainstream and blaxploitation, sought an alternative that was “unique to their historical situation and cultural experience, a form that could not be appropriated by Hollywood.”53 With influences ranging from Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin, White Masks (translated in 1963 and 1967, respectively) to the Third Cinema movement and French and British documentary, Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep (1977) is the classic of the Los Angeles school.54 Shot in black and white in a rough, documentary style, the film is anecdotally “structured around various forms of rituals: of the family, of childhood, of oppression, of resistance to oppression.”55 Neither romanticizing nor demonizing ghetto life, the film plumbs the depths of despair, and deep wells of resilience, in a South Central neighborhood reimagined as desert island. Set adrift from white

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Los Angeles and enveloped in a sea of silence, the dirt-poor black community is part On the Beach ghost town, numbly awaiting nuclear fallout. Along its fringes, however, the place is churning with life, supplied by ubiquitous youth cavorting amid abandoned buildings and dusty alleys. An occasional adult utterance pierces the overall ennui: “No, I ain’t gonna kill myself,” Stan (Henry Gayle Sanders), the closest thing to a protagonist, mutters while fixing the kitchen sink. “I have the feeling I might do somebody else some harm though.” The sound track provides pungent commentary. Ironic counterpoint derives from Paul Robeson’s soulful rendering of “What is America to me—a name, a map, a place I see; a certain word, ‘democracy’?”—over images of Stan’s slaughterhouse job at the Solano Meat Company. Subjective sympathy is conveyed in Dinah Washington’s doleful, “This bitter earth, what fruit it bears, what good is love, that no one shares?”—over the long take of Stan dancing close with his wife (Kaylee Moore), before pulling away. Incompletion is a major motif, on the personal and mechanical levels. Not until 1992’s Falling Down would automobility be as tragicomically parodied. In Killer of Sheep Stan and a friend (Ollie?) purchase an old car motor left stranded in someone’s living room, laboriously drag it, Laurel & Hardy–style, down two flights of stairs, and finally manage to hoist it onto the back of a pickup— only to have the motor crash to the street as they start to pull away, damaged beyond repair. Later, the dynamic duo’s planned day trip with their families in a rickety car is cut short when a flat tire, and lack of a spare, makes further travel impossible. The film’s title relates most directly to Stan’s job, whose butchery (that we see) consists solely of sheep. Cinematically, his bloody occupation sets off a chain of associations. The most immediate connection is to Georges Franju’s surrealist slaughterhouse documentary Blood of the Beasts (1949), which pointedly draws on Christian (and anti-Christian) symbolism. Another allusion (enhanced by the slapstick scenes) is to the opening of Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1935), which juxtaposes a corralled flock of sheep to a herd of work-bound New York City pedestrians. From Chaplin it’s a short jump to the urtext of associational montage, Sergei Eisenstein’s Strike (1924), in which the climactic massacre of workers by czarist troops is crosscut with the butchery of cattle. The black twist in Killer of Sheep is that Stan is one of the butchers, and the sheep are all white (fig. 34). If this signifies a revenge fantasy, its psychological and physical benefits are in short supply. Not only does Stan display no jouissance on the job; it seems to drain him of libido at home as well. The pull-away after the “Bitter Earth” dance is one of many instances of his (quite attractive) wife’s frustrated attempts to arouse him. Nor does the film’s closing shot offer any easy solution to Stan’s, or the black ghetto’s, seeming impotence. Still, as Stan whips the sheep toward a door, Washington’s reprised last line—“But while a voice within me cries, I’m sure someone may answer my call, and this bitter earth, may not be so bitter after all”—leaves the door open on a less bitter end for the (black) sheep as well.

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Figure 34. Henry Gayle Sanders in Killer of Sheep. Photofest.

Boyz N the Hood Responding to the surge of gang-related violence in the 1980s, and the boost to black filmmaking from Spike Lee’s breakthrough crossover hit Do the Right Thing (1989), a “neo-blaxploitative” or ghetto-noir phase began in the early 1990s.56 John Singleton’s Boyz N the Hood (1991), set in South Central L.A., was among the first of the new breed. It was also the most critically acclaimed, most commercially successful, and most influential of a trend of films Manthia Diawara (drawing on Himes) terms “black rage” films, and Foster Hirsch calls “a new crime movement.”57 Unlike classical-era blaxploitation films such as Shaft (1971) and Super Fly (1971), which modeled themselves “on the private-eye drama of classic noir,” Boyz N the Hood, befitting its prison-ghetto literary and musical legacies (the title is taken from a 1987 gangsta-rap hit), “follows the narrative pattern designed around a protagonist’s descent into crime.”58 The film’s opening inscription—“One out of every twenty-two black males will be killed . . . at the hand of another black male”—takes “up where Do the Right Thing’s racial discourse left off.”59 Functioning as both prequel and sequel to Do the Right Thing’s fictional Bedford-Stuyvesant race riot, Boyz reiterates that even Killer of Sheep’s tenuous dream of a “way out” for ghetto blacks would have to be deferred. Adopting a form of “sign” language analogous to the color and hand symbolism of urban gangs, the film opens, in 1984, on a blood-red STOP sign—patently a plea for an end to gang violence “with its monthly ‘body counts’ in the dozens.”60

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The next “message board” is posted by a group of black school children, who detour from their usual route home to check out a dead body in an alley.61 Ignoring the LAPD’s yellow-taped warning, “Police Line—Do Not Cross,” the kids pass a large wall poster of a beaming Ronald Reagan in a Stetson hat. As one of the boys flips the cowboy president a bird (and gunshot sounds are heard), we move in on the poster, which is actually bullet-riddled. Although black hostility toward the man responsible for cutting services to minority communities under the banner of a “colorblind” society is clearly signified, and justified, the larger socioeconomic and political forces driving black rage get somewhat lost in the shuffle. White and black flight, flagging inner-city investment, and increasingly aggressive policing under atavistically racist chief Darryl Gates were only three of the Reagan-era factors contributing to heightened tensions in Los Angeles ghetto areas. Stagflation, globalization, deindustrialization, and immigration delivered an additional quadruple whammy to blue-collar communities in L.A. and the rest of the country.62 Crack-cocaine-driven gang violence—itself a symptom of the social ills but also of the political vacuum left by President Nixon’s destruction of the Black Panthers in the 1970s—provided additional tinder for an urban uprising that, while presaged in Boyz N the Hood, seemed preordained (fig. 35).63 Omens of impending disaster punctuate the film. The ghetto children’s paintings of police choppers and shootouts displayed at young Tre’s (Desi Arnez Hines II) elementary school derive not from TV series or action movies but the kids’ daily lives. Tre’s father, Furious Styles (Laurence Fishburne), wears his black rage on his name. The ball-bearings that Furious compulsively rolls back and forth in

Figure 35. Doughboy (Ice Cube, second from left) and other Boyz N the Hood. Photofest.

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his hand more ambiguously signify the sexuality and violence he sublimates in his one-man mortgage broker business, his single-fathering of Trey, and the black nationalist ideals he preaches but lacks the political means to fulfill. Through the small loans he brokers for black customers, he does his bit. Mostly, he is left to rant against the military—“There’s no place for a black man in the white man’s army”—and gentrification. Another visual aid helps illustrate the latter bugaboo. Taking teenaged Trey (Cuba Gooding Jr.) and his buddy Rick (Morris Chestnut) to a vacant lot in Compton, Furious gathers a black crowd in front of a billboard for “Seoul Realty.” Combining the South Korean capital and a homonym for “soul,” the sign, in a real-estate context, cannily conveys global capital’s exploitation of the black community. In relation to South Central, it more specifically references the post-1965 acquisition of grocery and liquor stores in black neighborhoods by immigrant Koreans, whose lack of fluency in English, unfamiliarity with black culture, and residency outside the neighborhood created increasing interethnic friction. In March 1991, two weeks after the Rodney King beating and four months before Boyz was released, Korean store-owner Soon Ja Du shot black teenager Latasha Harlins in the back of the head after a squabble over the girl’s alleged shoplifting of a bottle of orange juice. Gangsta rapper Ice Cube, who made his acting debut in Boyz as Rick’s half-brother Doughboy, besides his group N.W.A. (Niggaz With Attitude) having recorded the film’s title-inspiring song, recorded another about the Harlins shooting, “Black Korea,” on his 1991 solo album Death Certificate. The April 29, 1992, acquittal of four police officers in the first Rodney King case was the immediate cause of the “‘uprising’ against a white-dominated police force.” But blacks’ shock over Soon’s reduced sentencing—from sixteen years in prison to probation, community service, and a fine—catalyzed what Mike Davis deemed a “‘pogrom’ against Korean merchants.”64 Points the film scores in raising the black-Korean issue it forfeits in regard to Latinos. Although Doughboy and his crew’s Crenshaw Boulevard cruising in a customized Chevy pays homage to Chicano culture, hardly a Latino face appears in the film. This despite a steady demographic shift in South Central, since the 1980s, that halved the African American population from 1990 to 2010 and made Latinos the majority ethnoracial group by 2000.65 In most other respects Boyz’s more realistic view of L.A. ghetto life, certainly than had been the rule in Hollywood films, shines through. Du Bois’s “well and beautifully housed” black Los Angeles residents still describes the film’s sunlit South Central streets with their palm trees that “add a touch of tropical glamour.”66 But the contradictions of paradise, unlike in Devil in a Blue Dress, now come from inside rather than outside the black community; and Easy Rollins’s laughter has long since been drowned out by chopper blades, machine-gun fire, and mothers’ tortured screams. Even the police brutality we witness in the film is supplied not by a white cop but by his self-hating black partner. Bent on lessening “the number of niggers in the world,” the black cop gets lots of help from the Oresteian revenge cycle in the ghetto itself. By the time Tre heeds the Eumenides’ call, the cycle will have claimed

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both Rick (cutting short a promising college football career) and Doughboy (whose Crips-style revenge-killing of a rival Blood will be matched in kind). Tre and his girlfriend, Brandi (Nia Long), are the two black sheep that escape the slaughterhouse—without, however, turning their backs on black life. Tre goes to college at Morehouse, Brandi to its black women’s counterpart Spellman, both in Atlanta, Georgia. Despite the hopeful sign, reiterated in the closing “Increase the Peace” inscription, Doughboy/Ice Cube has the final say. And well he should. N.W.A.’s chart-topping album Straight Outta Compton (1988) pioneered gangsta rap, redefined the gangster lifestyle, and shifted rap’s center of gravity from the East to the West Coast.67 Whether he represents the vanguard of the “revolutionary lumpenproletariat,” as Mike Davis and (to a lesser extent) Todd Boyd would have it,68 Ice Cube speaks with some authority in his end-credits riff, “How to Survive in South Central,” to the collective black rage that was only a Simi Valley verdict away from eruption: No you can’t find—the shit in a handbook. Take a close look—at a rap crook. Rule Number One—get yourself a gun. Now if you’re white—you can trust the police. But if you’re black—they ain’t nothin but beasts!

Up from the Ashes What was most surprising in the 1992 civil unrest, less than a year after Boyz’s release (which itself sparked violence in twenty theaters the first week), was not the property damage (estimated at $70 million, nearly half suffered by Koreans) or physical carnage (fifty-three deaths, hundreds injured) but its unprecedented multiethnic character (besides black-Korean conflict, more Latinos than blacks were arrested) and multiarea expanse (violence spread far beyond the ghetto epicenter, flaring even in Beverly Hills).69 What was most evident in the aftermath was that if “all” Angelinos were to “get along,” as Rodney King’s television appeal admonished, the first person to get along was LAPD chief Darryl Gates. Averse not only to blacks but to anyone not straight, white, male, and reactionary, Gates was a relic of the General Otis era. His paramilitary tactics and inflammatory rhetoric may not have made him the sole target of the uprising, but the ghost of white supremacy he represented surely put him in the line of fire. Mayor Tom Bradley, himself culpable in the conflagration through benign neglect, accepted Gates’s resignation in June 1992 and chose not to run for a sixth consecutive term in 1993. The police chief and mayoral replacements in the wake of the unrest indicated how tentative Los Angeles remained in its slouch toward Bethlehem. The appointment of the moderately liberal African American Willie Williams as Gates’s replacement was balanced politically (and racially) by the post-Bradley election

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of the moderately conservative Anglo, Richard Riordan, over the liberal Chinese American Michael Woo. Subsequent successions have reversed the racial orientation and political affiliation of the two offices. A conservative African American, Bernard Parks (before becoming a city councilperson), briefly succeeded Williams; his watch was marred by the 1997 Rampart scandal, which showed that police misconduct, while no longer endemic, had not been completely ferreted out.70 The two white chiefs that followed Parks, William Bratton and Charlie Beck, have proved, in their competence and multicultural sensitivity, the most anti-Gates chiefs on record. As for the mayor, under the new two-term limit, moderate white Democrat James Hahn (riding the black-friendly coattails of his county supervisor-father, Kenneth Hahn) succeeded Riordan, but Hahn was defeated after one term by Chicano Democrat (and organized-labor favorite) Antonio Villaraigosa. The County Board of Supervisors, the City Council, and the L.A. Unified School District Board also have come to reflect (with the exception of Asians) the region’s changing demographics, and Democratic candidate Barack Obama garnered 69.3 percent of L.A. County’s presidential vote in 2008. Poor minority areas have continued to be pounded, however. Well before the 2008 financial crash, the end of the Cold War in 1991 had proved a mixed economic blessing, not only but especially for working-class Angelinos. The breakup of the Soviet Union, while (momentarily) relieving concerns of Armageddon, also signaled the end of a military-industrial era whose factories had generated the Second Great Migration and subsequently proved vital to blacks’ (and other minorities’) financial security. Renewed white and black flight following the 1992 uprising further depleted tax revenues and human capital in the abandoned areas. Repercussions of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) of 1994, the Welfare Reform Act of 1996, the market-driven job-migration to less-developed countries and human immigration from them, also disproportionately affected Los Angeles districts already at the bottom of the economic totem pole. That the Crips-Bloods rivalry personalized in Boyz N the Hood would turn into a black-brown gang war as the 1990s wore on is unsurprising, given the shifting demographics and continuing, woefully inadequate, response to the root causes. Less explicable has been the steady decline in homicidal and other violent crimes in the city since the mid-2000s, to a forty-year low in 2010—all the more astounding given the spike in unemployment and steep cuts in social services since the Great Recession. Strides have been made in other ways as well. African Americans have increasingly integrated middle-class and upper-middle-class areas, and the Crenshaw, Baldwin Hills, Leimert Park, and other already more upscale black-dominant districts continue to thrive. Leimert Park, especially, has developed a uniquely “self-conscious reconstruction of the city’s black history” since the 1992 unrest, with direct linkages to previous cultural centers such as Central Avenue and the Watts Writers’ Workshop, itself a creature of the 1965 uprising.71 As for us “all getting along”—Rodney King’s plea is still a pipe dream, one that black playwright-performer Anna Deveare Smith regards as dangerously déjà vu.

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Smith had explored the reasons for and fallout from the Rodney King upheaval in her acclaimed one-woman show Twilight: Los Angeles 1992. In 2011 she returned to L.A. with an updated assessment titled Let Me Down Easy, similarly culled from interviews across the racial and political divide. “The economic disparities that were at the heart of the 1992 explosion haven’t gone away,” Smith observed in an interview about the play. “Probably the person who said the only color in L.A. is green was right.” In Los Angeles, as in much of the country, “There’s been this extraordinary increase in the gap between those who have and those who don’t.”72 Statistics showing poverty levels and income disparities between the sagging middle class and soaring super-rich at fifty-year highs amply support Smith’s assessment—as did the national Occupy Movement of late 2011. Goaded by political resistance to addressing the economic divide, the largely youthful protestors that staged a months-long tent-in at L.A.’s City Hall and other public spaces around the country (and around the world) offered a countercultural déjà vu of their own. The city’s (and country’s) racial divide, while perhaps not as gaping as the class-based disparity, hasn’t closed either—as continued red-lining, de facto job and housing discrimination, and disproportionately high high-school dropout rates among poor people of color attest—and portend.73 Urban League surveys in 2002, indicating a shrinking “opportunity gap” between blacks and whites in Los Angeles and nationally, fortunately have not proved as off the mark as their 1964 panegyric. Also undeniably, “More and more African Americans in California and nationwide are achieving comfortable standards of living in integrated communities and sending their children to integrated schools.”74 But the downturn of 2008, as all such financial shocks, has once again hit lower-income families (and thus also a substantial portion of black families) hardest. “We believed [in 1958] . . . that L.A. was akin to Hollywood and Disneyland— no racism, no playing field that couldn’t be leveled,” Genethia Hudley Harris, a former school board official, black civil rights activist, and then-newcomer to the city, facetiously observed in 2007.75 Given a “dominant narrative” (and sluggishly rebounding economy) in 2012, which still places “black people in the ghetto, their children at constant risk of being swept up by drug and gang culture, and their dreams for a ‘better tomorrow’ permanently on hold,” Hollywood, Disneyland, and Staples Center may be the only places in Los Angeles where a level playing field—of dreams—can be realized.76

chapter 9




LAsians

Accepting that the Paleoamerican and Amerindian migrations embarked from the Asian continent, and not counting the African origins of Homo sapiens, the Asian connection to Los Angeles is the most primordial. By the time of the European incursion in the 1500s, however, this line had become a faint trace in the genealogical palimpsest, long since absorbed into the Chumash, Tongva, and other Amerindian strains. A more recent Asian and Pacific Island imprint was etched courtesy of the Spanish conquests, which included the Philippines, and enabled the Mexican Filipino Antonio Miranda Rodriguez to qualify as a quasi pobladore. Quasi because (as noted in chapter 7), though Rodriguez and his daughter were slated to join the motley settlers who founded La Reina de Los Ángeles, his daughter fell ill and Rodriguez stayed behind to care for her, only arriving in the pueblo, after the child’s death, two years later.1 Either to honor their original intent or expecting their imminent arrival, Los Angeles listed both Miranda and his daughter, Juana Maria, in its census of December 31, 1781.2 The first modern wave of Asian migration to the city occurred in the mid1800s. A confluence of events—the Taiping Rebellion, Opium Wars, Gold Rush, and American railroad construction—drove and lured masses of Chinese immigrants to California. By the 1860s, a Chinese enclave had been established in Los Angeles along Calle de los Negros (Negro Street), so-named for its darkskinned Mexican residents and later dubbed (by racist Anglos) Nigger Alley.3 Lacking Mexican Americans’ link to the Spanish Fantasy Past and their European connection to whiteness, the Chinese found themselves even more at odds with the city’s American construction as a white Protestant mecca. Owing to their exploitation as cheap immigrant labor, Chinese also became scapegoats for the economic insecurity generated by the roller-coaster boom and bust cycles of the late 1800s. Racially tinged violence eventually erupted all along the coast, culminating, in Los Angeles, in the infamous Chinese massacre of 1871. Denied naturalized citizenship and other legal rights similar to those denied to Indians (and, for 189

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legal rights, to African Americans as well), Chinese immigrants also confronted unique federal restrictions based on their “alien” race. The Page Act of 1875 effectively barred Chinese women from entry to the United States, allegedly to curtail prostitution but actually to limit population growth, and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 barred further Chinese immigration altogether. Just as federal policies were deterring Chinese procreation, however, geopolitical forces were spurring Asian disaggregation. The U.S. annexation of the Philippines after the Spanish American War brought a “second wave” of Filipinos to America; Japan’s late nineteenth-century modernization and early twentiethcentury expansion into Korea boosted both Japanese and Korean immigration. In Los Angeles the labor vacuum caused by Chinese exclusion “was largely filled by Japanese,” who (as with Mexicans) found a comparatively job-friendly, if no less racist, climate in the notoriously open-shop city.4 In prounion San Francisco, by contrast, organized labor’s antipathy toward the newly ascendant Japanese led to the formation of an Asiatic Exclusion League in 1905, and in 1906 both Japanese and Koreans were banned from integrating San Francisco schools. The city’s massive earthquake the same year, combined with the discriminatory policies, led more Japanese to move to Los Angeles, which by 1910 became “the metropolis of Japanese America.”5 Ultimately, no place in the United States offered any Asian group a safe haven, much less a land of opportunity. The so-called Gentleman’s Agreement with Japan in 1907 effectively shut off Japanese immigration; Asian Indians were formally excluded in 1917; and the Immigration Act of 1924 turned Koreans into personae non grata. The Philippines’ status as an American territory deferred their people’s formal exclusion but only until 1934. Along with the denial of naturalized citizenship that accompanied exclusion, Alien Land Laws in 1913 and 1920 barring ownership of property further marginalized, humiliated, and caused economic hardship for Asian immigrants.6 Pejorative stereotypes played a crucial role, as they did for all minority groups, in the ostracism of the Asiatic other, which is where Hollywood, once again, comes into play. The movies didn’t create the demeaning images, many of which stemmed from Europe, went back centuries, and populated literature and live theater as well. But the film medium’s “mechanical reproduction” broadened the scope and deepened the impact, and faux-Asian casting (similarly borrowed from the theater) added another invidious dimension.7 An 1899 Edison Company reenactment of a battle between American soldiers and Filipino insurgents underscored its pro-Anglo bias by having African Americans play the Filipinos.8 “Yellowface” performance would persist well into the sound era, most infamously in the Fu Manchu (1929–1969), Charlie Chan (1931–1949), and Mr. Moto (1937–1939) series. A few Asian actors, notably native Japanese Sessue Hayakawa and Chinese American Anna May Wong, broke through the color barrier, though mainly in villainous or otherwise disparaging roles. Geopolitical considerations heavily determined which particular Asian group was singled out for defamation at any one time, with Japanese and Chinese, especially, trading places according

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to each country’s political or economic standing vis-à-vis the United States. To follow the to-and-fro of this rhetorical ping-pong match, a historical gloss of the main Asian stereotypes and their function in American culture is required.

Asian Stereotypes Yellow Peril The roots of the yellow peril lie in the medieval Mongol hordes of Genghis Khan. Renewed fear of Asiatic peoples arose in the late nineteenth century from racial and political panic directed at “the large population size of East Asia, China’s potential military and economic prowess, and Japan’s rise as an imperial power.”9 In the United States, colonial ambition, economic crisis, and neo-nativism stoked xenophobic fever, including against swarthy-skinned, non-Protestant Europeans, but especially against those considered most unassimilable, unacculturable, and hostile to Western interests.10 Curbing Chinese immigration reduced one “yellow menace,” but Japan’s expansionism, impressive victories in the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese wars, and annexation of Korea quickly turned the Land of the Rising Sun into the new Tamerlane.11 The first U.S. feature film to fully articulate the yellow peril stereotype in its Japanese guise was Cecil B. DeMille’s The Cheat (1915), starring Sessue Hayakawa. Though his character’s identity was changed in a later rerelease to a Burmese (during Japan’s brief alliance with the United States at the end of World War I), Hayakawa’s financially and sexually predacious art collector, Tori, is yellow peril personified.12 The suave and seductive Tori shows his true (yellow) colors when, as collateral for a wealthy (white) socialite’s (Fannie Ward) unpaid debt, he literally brands her with a symbol of a Japanese gate (called a torii, in Japanese), signifying both female objectification and foreign ownership, then attempts to rape her. Resurrecting the intersection of blacks and Filipinos in Edison’s 1899 battle film, the rape scene in The Cheat mirrors the rape scene in Griffith’s racist epic The Birth of a Nation, in which a mulatto politician (George Steigmann) forces himself on a virginal white woman (Lillian Gish). Also much like Birth’s crosscutting of the interracial rape with the Ku Klux Klan’s rescue of a white southern family besieged by integrated northern troops, The Cheat’s climactic court scene—in which the woman bares her branded shoulder for the jury—conflates race, sexuality, and patriotism. When the courtroom crowd morphs into a lynch mob at the sight of soiled white womanhood, the film not only “warns against the horrors of miscegenation,” but, as Sumiko Higashi suggests, it also proclaims “the impossibility of assimilating ‘colored’ peoples, no matter how civilized their veneer.”13 Fu Manchu and Emperor Ming Tori’s dispatch at the end of The Cheat cut short his yellow peril serialization, but there were no lack of heirs apparent. These tended, until the resumption of

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Japanese expansionism in the 1930s, toward their Chinese variant. The master Oriental criminal archetype, pioneered by the Long Sin, Wu Fang, and (a rare Asian Indian) Ali Singh characters in cliffhanger film series of the late 1910s, had become a fixture by the 1920s.14 The evil genius Fu Manchu, of Sax Rohmer’s popular British crime series beginning in 1913, subsumed the various anti-Sinitic traits of its predecessors. Adapted in England as early as 1923, the first American Fu Manchu film appeared in 1929, starring non-Asian Warner Oland (who would later play Hawaiian Chinese detective Charlie Chan). Other yellowface Fu Manchus included Boris Karloff, Henry Brandon, Christopher Lee, and Peter Sellers. Identified by a sinister glare and the drooping moustache he gave its name, Fu Manchu expanded the scope of the yellow peril stereotype by more radically encapsulating its binary extremes: “superhuman intellect and ambition” and “subhuman immorality and ruthlessness.”15 As Japanese armies advanced into Mongolia in 1932, so did the yellow peril in the United States. Hollywood registered the escalating geopolitical threat, somewhat contradictorily, with an even more formidable master criminal type: Ming the Merciless, diabolical ruler of an evil empire threatening humanity’s very survival. The booming-voiced, black-caped and -goateed Ming, played by nonAsian Charles B. Middleton, battled apocalyptically with blond, All-American Flash Gordon (Buster Crabbe) in the comic-strip-inspired, Star Wars–inspiring Flash Gordon (1936) serial.16 That the name Ming is clearly Chinese rather than Japanese seems, on the one hand, to reverse the political polarities, as Japan, not China, then posed the greater of the yellow perils. On the other hand, it reinforces the racial con-fusion inherent in the yellow peril concept. Until actually confronting Asians on the battlefield, or in the marketplace, Anglo Americans—and their Hollywood proxy—had no cause to differentiate among the various Asian nationalities. Charlie Chan and Mr. Moto The first Charlie Chan novel, by American author Earl Derr Biggers, appeared in 1925, and the first Hollywood film in 1931.17 The avuncular, faux-Confuciusspouting detective served as a partial antidote to the monstrous Fu Manchus and Emperor Mings. Benefiting from a general “anti-Asiatic catharsis” from the 1924 Immigration Act’s reaffirmation of Asian exclusion, a more sympathetic Chinese portrayal, specifically, also corresponded to the geopolitical ebb and flow.18 As China became a target, and in 1937 a victim, of Japanese expansionism, the seesawing pattern, pro and con, of the two Asian countries began. Despite his hero’s rather than villain’s role, however, Charlie Chan was not an unmitigated boon for Asian representation. First, although an actual Chinese American (Keye Luke) played Charlie Chan’s “Number One Son,” Lee Chan, Warner Oland and later another non-Asian, Sidney Toler, played Charlie Chan himself. Second, adding phony speech to the phony look, Charlie Chan spoke in “yellow-voice”— broken English, an exaggerated accent, and fortune-cookie aphorisms. Third, and

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most problematic, the arcane adages, part of Charlie Chan’s cryptic crime-solving technique, perpetuated the stereotype of “inscrutability”—an Orientalist mix of the exotic, mysterious, and untrustworthy—the West persists in projecting onto Asianness. Though Asian Americans largely suppressed their ambivalence toward Charlie Chan during his heyday, more vocal criticism has emerged in the multicultural era.19 A revival of Charlie Chan films on the Fox Movie Channel in 2003 was shown only after an agreement with media monitoring groups that a panel discussion on racial issues be aired as well. Controversy swirled anew in 2010 around a TV screening of a forty-two-year-old documentary on Charlie Chan, which aroused painful memories in Asian Americans. Seventy-one-year-old Bill Chu, for example, recalled the racial taunts, growing up in Los Angeles and Philadelphia, “inspired by the fake Confucian quotations of Chan.”20 Mr. Moto, the Japanese Charlie Chan, never faced the critical scrutiny or negative fallout of his Chinese forerunner. This is largely because the Moto series, adapted from the novels of John Marquand and making its film debut in 1937, fell victim to ever-worsening U.S.-Japanese relations and was “interned” after eight films in 1939. By then Moto had added the Jewish émigré Peter Lorre to the list of yellowface actors and further inscribed Asian inscrutability in the popular imaginary. Changed in the film versions from a Japanese imperial spy to an Interpol agent, Moto, given to well-appointed Western dress and speaking impeccable English, was a master of disguise. Physically unimposing and seemingly harmless, he didn’t shrink from violence and, as a master of jujitsu, could hold his own in a fight. Anticipating the Asian martial arts hero stereotype of more recent vintage, Mr. Moto’s physical prowess did at least offer a rare and welcome corrective to other, less physically imposing, Asian stereotypes that possessed just the opposite attributes. Coolie Etymologically tied to notions of servitude and slavery, the term coolie, in the 1700s and 1800s, referred to menial laborers of Asian Indian or Chinese descent. Americans in the mid-1800s applied it to the Chinese immigrants who toiled on the railroads and docks, in the mines and agricultural fields. Its connotations of meekness and servility stemmed from the coolies’ humble manner. Not a particularly endearing trait to the American proletarian to begin with, the culture clash was aggravated by the coolies’ willingness to work for wages that undercut those of U.S. workers—leading to California’s Anti-Coolie Act of 1862, which taxed foreign miners.21 The Page Act and other gender-based bans, which reduced women’s proportion of the U.S. Chinese population to no higher than 7 percent throughout the 1800s, added a stigma of effeminacy to the docile, kowtowing coolie stereotype.22 Concentrated into so-called bachelor societies and forced, especially in the cities, into “women’s work” such as laundry, restaurants, domestic help, and

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other service-sector jobs, Chinese men came to occupy—at least until 1943, when Chinese exclusion was lifted—“a ‘feminized’ position in relation to white male citizens.”23 Too ineffectual (and emasculated) to recommend himself for either hero or villain roles in Hollywood films, the coolie type acted as background “color” or servant “boy” in the classical period, as the period-set Chinatown wryly acknowledges.24 Lotus Flower/Butterfly and Dragon Lady In the constellation of male Asian archetypes, the coolie also served an important ideological function. As obligatory flipside of the dreaded yellow peril, the cowering coolie created a submission/subjection binary for Asian male characters that would be mirrored, for Asian women, in the lotus flower/butterfly and dragon lady. The men and women portraying these similar types differed in one significant aspect: their respective casting in Hollywood films. All the male actors who established the Fu Manchu, Charlie Chan, and Mr. Moto characters were non-Asian. Though several white female stars—Katharine Hepburn, Myrna Loy, Luise Rainer, Lana Turner, Loretta Young—played Asian characters at some point in their careers, the lotus flower/butterfly and dragon lady types were defined on film by one Asian American actor and one alone: Anna May Wong. The fact that the Los Angeles–born and –raised Wong proved convincing in both types of roles is testament as much to the ambiguity of the dichotomy as to Wong’s acting skill. Wong combined lotus flower and butterfly in her first starring role as the so-named Lotus Flower in The Toll of the Sea (1922), a nonmusical variation of Puccini’s 1904 opera Madame Butterfly. In the film Wong’s willowy Lotus Flower falls for and becomes impregnated by a white merchant (Kenneth Harlan), who abandons her for his Anglo wife (Beatrice Bentley). True to the opera but also to the racial biases (and laws) of the time, Lotus Flower, though not her white lover, is obliged to die for her “crime.” Wong’s high visibility yet tragic fate in this and other of her lotus flower films, such as Java Head (1934) and Dangerous to Know (1938), compared to the marginalization of her male counterpart, the coolie, testifies to the considerable sexual allure, and concomitant threat, of the passive/submissive/masochistic Asian female archetype. The “Asian mystique” of the dragon lady, the Far Eastern femme fatale— whom Wong introduced in her next major film, The Thief of Bagdad (1924)— makes her all the more titillating, and dangerous.25 Though the female variant of the yellow peril, like Madame Butterfly, is a wholly Western concoction, her Orientalism is overdetermined by her basis in an actual person: Tzu Hsi, the last empress of China. Tzu, then in her seventies, was portrayed in the early 1900s, preposterously by “yellow” journalists, “as an evil manipulator who”—while Peking burned—“killed off her rivals with poison cakes and indulged her sexual obsessions with a stable of male courtiers in the Forbidden City.”26 Wong’s slave girl/Mongol spy in The Thief of Bagdad is no Asian Nero. But this role and her

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other fictional dragon lady depictions, such as in Daughter of the Dragon (1931), Shanghai Express (1932), and Daughter of Shanghai (1937), implanted a more plausible, and indelible, image of the dragon lady than Tzu’s in the Western imaginary. Postwar Potpourri Wild swings of the geopolitical, and representational, pendulum during and after World War II demonstrated the durability, and flexibility, of the yellow peril syndrome. The internment of 110,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans, under FDR’s Executive Order 9066 of 1942, proclaimed that Fu Manchu had come home to roost. This blot on U.S. history also tarnished Los Angeles in several ironic ways. A disproportionate number of those rounded up for internment lived in Los Angeles, including native Angelinos, whose fate eerily echoed that of the previous decade’s deported Mexicans and Mexican Americans, and not only in its racial animus and manifest injustice. The Mexicans and Chicanos had been herded into cattle cars for deportation. The Japanese were held in horse stalls at Santa Anita race track just east of Pasadena, and sent from there to camps in Manzanar—itself located in Owens Valley, of water wars fame (fig. 36). Little Tokyo in downtown Los Angeles became a ghost town, and briefly, owing to an influx of African Americans, was relabeled Bronzeville. Chinese immigrants, meanwhile, cast momentarily as mild-mannered Charlie Chans, reaped the benefits of the Magnuson Act of 1943. While leaving property-ownership

Figure 36. Evacuees of Japanese ancestry at the Santa Anita Assembly Center (a.k.a. Santa Anita Race Track), April 1942. National Archives, photo by Clem Albers.

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restrictions in place, the wartime legislation replaced outright Chinese exclusion with (still quite modest) immigration quotas. Postwar rehabilitation of Japan and the rise of the People’s Republic of China turned rouge to noir (or jaune) and vice versa. Japanese (and Korean) lotus flowers, courtesy of American GIs and Miyoshi Umeki’s geisha girl (the Japanese butterfly) in Sayonara (1957), were now in full bloom. Nor did the China doll disappear. Having sprouted three Cold War heads—the People’s Republic, Taiwan, and Hong Kong—the Chinese, via the British colonial port and Nancy Kwan’s The World of Suzie Wong (1960) and Flower Drum Song (1961), brought the butterfly back to life. Fears that Fu Manchu might only be in hiding were revived by none other than Sessue Hayakawa, as the brutal World War II colonel in Bridge on the River Kwai (1957). And as Japan’s economy picked up, so did its collective scapegoating, subtextually in Blade Runner (1981), unabashedly in Rising Sun (1993)—both films set in Los Angeles. As for post-Maoist China’s emergence as the yellow peril du jour, its political and media stigmatization has thus far partially been deflected by its consumer market potential and U.S. deficit financing dependency. Spiritual Guru and Martial Arts Hero The multicultural era exponentially expanded the numbers and nationalities of Asian immigrants, as it did with Latinos. A tsunami of newcomers from the Pacific Islands and Southeast Asia to southern Asia and the Middle East arrived in the United States, with rising tides of “first- and second-generation” groups as well: Koreans, Asian Indians, Taiwanese, Filipinos. In 1965 less than 7 percent of all immigrants to America came from Asia. By 1970 the figure had risen to 25 percent, and by 1980 to 44 percent. In Los Angeles, the “gateway of the Pacific Rim,” Asians have been the fastest-growing segment of the population, jumping from 240,000 in 1970 to 1.3 million by 1990. At 9 percent of L.A.’s total population, the Asian segment far surpassed “other major Asian centers such as San Francisco-Oakland, Honolulu, and New York,” and the percentage increase in the area during the twenty-year span even topped that of Latinos: 451 to 236.27 The greatest individual Asian group increases have come from nationalities with smaller existing bases: Koreans and Asian Indians. Already established groups such as Chinese and Filipinos have also increased dramatically, as have Southeast Asians driven by regional conflict: Vietnamese, Thais, Cambodians, and Laotians. The only nationality not to benefit, population-wise from the post-1965 Asian influx have been the Japanese, who accounted for 51 percent of the region’s Asian population in 1970. Reduced immigration and a low fertility rate from the Japanese, combined with “new immigration” trends that transformed Asian American Los Angeles “into a multi-ethnic community,” have ended Japanese “demographic predominance.”28 Benefiting from the Asian influx and the overall ethnophilic turn, two somewhat more positive Asian types emerged in the multicultural era: the spiritual guru and the martial arts hero. Although the guru’s American manifestation is

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quite recent, his Westernized roots extend to the early 1900s, with specific ties to Los Angeles. Carey McWilliams famously satirized L.A.’s openness to unconventional religious practices: the “Mecca of the Miraculous,” he called the place, where “prophets, like its geraniums, grow large, rank, and garish,” where “strange influences, occult and psychic, esoteric and mundane . . . emerge from the smoke of dreams, the cloudy occultism of California.”29 Yet less garish, more traditional forms of “occultism” sprouted along with the garden variety. Imported by Indian monks to Southern California between 1899 and 1900, Vedanta (from the Sanskrit, meaning “the end of all knowledge”) took root in the Hollywood Hills. The Vedanta Center, founded by Swami Trigunatitananda and still located at 1946 Vedanta Place, attracted some of the city’s most prominent artists and intellectuals, including Aldous Huxley and Christopher Isherwood. Others who visited the center, to seek guidance from its swamis or from explorative interest, included Edmund Teske, James Whitney, Henry Miller, Greta Garbo, Tennessee Williams, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Somerset Maugham.30 Maugham’s novel The Razor’s Edge (1944), adapted for the screen in 1946 and remade in 1984, famously features an Asian holy man, in this case a Tibetan lama.31 The spiritual guru gained renewed sustenance from the New Age spirituality of the 1960s and 1970s. The media-savvy Asian Indian Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, with the help of celebrity acolytes such as the Beatles and Donovan, made the biggest splash. But purported avatars such as Sai Baba, Baba Muktananda, and Guru Maharaji, each with his own high-profile entourage, made inroads in the West as well.32 The (generally male) guru’s gentleness and passivity, however, left him, like the coolie, less prone to Hollywood imagineering—by himself. He was more likely to act as guide for or to fuse with the martial arts hero, providing a spiritual foundation and moral legitimacy for the jump-kick justice (and action-packed visuals) the latter dispenses. The East Asian–based martial arts hero “crossed over” in the 1970s and 1980s via Hong Kong film stars Bruce Lee, Jet Li, Jackie Chan, and Chow Yun Fat. Blockbuster movies drawing sustenance from the type included the Star Wars saga (1977, 1980, 1983, 1999, 2002, 2005), The Karate Kid series (1984,1996, 1989, 1994, 2010), the Rush Hour franchise (1998, 2001, 2007), and Kill Bill: Volumes I and II (2003, 2004). With its mixture of spirituality and physicality, its sanctioning of heroism in a strong Asian male, and its more recent female manifestations (via Zhang Ziyi and Lucy Liu), the martial arts hero has much to offer as a redemptive Asian countertype. But just as lotus flower and dragon lady are both “hypersexualized, but the former is passive and subservient, and the latter is aggressive and ‘exudes exotic danger,’” the martial arts hero runs the risk, through his or her identification with hyperviolence, of becoming a Kung Fu-Manchu.33 Another of the type’s undeniable strengths, its emanation from Asia rather than imposition from the West, is adulterated as well. More than any other immigrant group, Asian Americans, as the exclusion acts and Japanese internment demonstrate, have been the least accepted as fully American. Western embrace of the spiritual guru and martial arts hero, therefore, while demonstrating greater openness to

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Asian culture and ideals, retains, indeed requires, the same tinge of otherness that grounded the earlier, American-generated, anti-Asian types. Model Minority Although residually from “elsewhere,” this “most influential and pervasive” of Asian stereotypes in the multicultural era would seem to have shed much of the foreignness stigma.34 Indeed, an alternative label for the model minority, that of the “new Jews,” implies ultimate absorption into the white mainstream.35 The comparison is double-edged, of course. Beyond its anti-Semitic associations, the “new Jew” characterization has historical parallels, for Asian Americans have found themselves confronting university enrollment quotas along the lines Jews were subjected to from the 1910s into the 1960s.36 Scholars Yuko Kawai, from a dialectical perspective, and Lucie Cheng and Philip Q. Yang, from a demographic one, offer additional reasons to question whether the model minority stereotype is “good for the Asians.” Kawai points to the new designation’s “two-faced” aspect, in which model minority and yellow peril, “although at apparent disjunction, form a seamless continuum,” the former “a complementary benign image” of the latter.37 The model minority myth, while presenting Asian Americans as “silent and disciplined,” as docile and feminized, also constructs them as alien and masculinized, “as a new yellow peril.”38 This dialectic, in turn, performs an ideological function as the fulcrum in a racial triangulation, whereby Asian Americans are viewed “as ‘aliens’ and ‘outsiders’ with regard to White Americans but as ‘superior’ in relation to African Americans.” The “alien-outsider” side of the triangle “describes Asian Americans as ‘foreigner foreigners’ who divert from U.S. dominant cultural norms, are economic competitors, and thereby undermine the American nation.” The “superior-minority” flipside champions Asians, “who, unlike other racial minority groups, move ahead with their own effort in U.S. society.”39 Racial triangulation thus helps maintain both the bamboo ceiling limiting Asian American advancement, and the “colorblind” agenda reducing social services for poor blacks and other minorities. It comes as no surprise, in this regard, that the model minority association with Asians’ “strong family ties” was constructed in the mid-1960s, at a time of racial upheaval and concurrent with Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s influential 1965 book The Negro Family, which attributed poverty in African American communities to blacks’ alleged dysfunctional family structures.40 Cheng and Yang base their deconstruction of the model minority on statistical analysis. Focusing on Los Angeles, where the greatest post-1965 Asian immigration occurred, surveys show that between 1970 and 1990 “two migration streams from diverse Asian countries converged. The first was made up of highly educated Asian immigrants who joined the local professional-managerial class.” The second stream filled “the semi-skilled and unskilled jobs in manufacturing and

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services.”41 Beyond its speciousness, the image of a singularly successful model minority “bloc” among Asian Americans is doubly detrimental. The difficulty in living up to the stereotype among less-privileged second-stream Asians (not to mention among first-streamers) induces resentment and a sense of inferiority. Within the larger society the myth of Asian Americans’ uniform and monolithic success taps into the model minority/yellow peril dialectic Kawai highlights. More specifically, Cheng and Yang assert, “The visibility and high profile of [Asians’] residential enclaves and occupational niches in particular have tapped into undercurrents of racism and nativism deep in the American psyche.” 42 Enrollment quotas and bamboo ceilings are racism’s top-down manifestations. Bottom-up sociocultural conflict “aggravates already strained economic relations between Asians and other disadvantaged minorities”—as the Latasha Harlins/Soon Ja Du case and subsequent black-on-Korean “retribution” indicate.43 When combined with economic competition from Asian countries (some tellingly dubbed the “Asian Tigers”), bottom-up resentment can spread to Anglos as well, as a laid-off white autoworker’s 1982 killing of Chinese American Vincent Chin (whom he mistook for a Japanese) tragically demonstrates.44 As with most stereotypes, the model minority has some basis in fact. Los Angles statistics confirm the national pattern among Asians “of high levels of education and disproportionate representation in universities and colleges.”45 A Confucian cultural tradition valorizing learning and scholarly achievement and a strong and stable family structure are the most commonly advanced, “new Jewish” explanations for the phenomenon. Cheng and Yang offer two, more historically contingent factors: the impetus for minority groups, in a racially charged environment, to find their own “special channel of social mobility”; and “the selectivity of highly educated Asian immigrants”—again qualified by “significant variations across groups” in education and economic levels.46 In 1990, for example, Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans “ranked ahead of native-born whites, [but] Filipinos fell slightly behind and Vietnamese and other Asians fell substantially behind whites, with educational levels similar to or lower than those of native-born blacks and Hispanics.”47 As of 2005 “the poverty rate of Americans of Southeast Asian descent [was] still as high as or higher than other racial minority groups.”48 In the Greater Los Angeles region, specifically, the poverty rate in 2009 among Korean Americans in Orange County, a group held up as prime exponents of the model minority, was higher than the county average.49 “I think racism is like a chronic illness that can be treated, but not cured,” African American writer Debra Nunnally Beaupre observes from painful experience.50 Dismantling stereotypes is no easy task either—perhaps hardest of all for those who have been their object. The damage wrought by demeaning images, hateful speech, violent acts, and governmental policies is not only external but also internalized and turned against the self. The resulting self-hatred, as Richard and Mamie Clark’s famous 1947 experiment showed (in which black girls preferred white dolls over black dolls), and two recent Asian American films discussed below further illustrate, can prove as ineradicable as any other kind.51

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Charlotte Sometimes Eurasian writer-director Eric Byler’s low-budget indie Charlotte Sometimes (2002) is set almost exclusively in the bohemian district of Silver Lake. Situated roughly between Chinatown and Hollywood, Silver Lake’s Greenwich Village vibe serves, in the film, as a bridge between the Asian and movie-industry tropes of the neighboring towns. The protagonist, Michael (Michael Aki), is a resurrected and deconstructed coolie who both upholds and challenges the model minority stereotype. As an auto “mechanic who reads,” he also sends up DWA (Driving While Asian), another recent construct that places Asian drivers in a pejorative pigeonhole once reserved for women. Most of all, Michael, despite his “masculine” profession, is overly passive, quiet as a mouse, and desexualized to an extreme. Overt ties to his Asian roots include Michael’s weekend meals with his immigrant Japanese aunt (Shizuko Hoshi), whom he drives to church every Sunday, and reference to the duplex he owns but which (similar to L.A.’s once dominant Japanese Angelino population) “always used to be one house.” Now the lower half is occupied by Chinese American Lori (Euquenia Yuan) and Eurasian Justin (Matt Westmore), and preoccupied with their highly vocal sex. This embarrasses Michael, when it isn’t driving him nuts—but not because he’s a prude. Michael has feelings for Lori, and she for him, though his hyperpassivity and her butterfly submissiveness (to Justin) prevent either one from acting on them. Enter the dragon lady (Jacqueline Kim). Actually Lori’s sister Charlotte, but masquerading as a stranger in town named Darcy, Charlotte/Darcy’s sinisterseductive “Asian mystique” is worn on her sleeve. She plays sexual aggressor with the titillated but timid Michael and is the life of the party at a Thai restaurant with Lori and Justin, where she jokes, “Michael, be quiet!” Dragon lady is the Asian Tiger in the room when Lori admonishes her sister to “stay away” from Justin and “keep it real” with Michael. To which Charlotte responds, “You really do see me as a monster,” and Lori retorts, “I’ve seen what you can do!” And she does it again—toying with Michael and having motel sex with Justin. Yet her betrayal, in the end, is more a self-sacrifice. Voicing the self-hatred Michael mutely emits, she laments after sex, more to herself than to Justin: “Does it wait anymore? Does it wait till afterward? I feel it even as I’m coming—this wave of loneliness, disgust. I hate it so much! I wish I didn’t have to do this!” And she doesn’t. For though the dragon lady’s nature, like the scorpion’s, is to deliver a deadly sting, Charlotte/Darcy’s soul-bearing confession is a talking cure for Lori and Michael. Having shown Lori that Justin was, as Lori had feared, “just a user,” Charlotte/Darcy becomes the catalyst for change—for butterfly and for coolie—with the mechanical assistance, that is, of the garage door’s remote control. A running Autopian gag tied thematically to Michael’s car mechanic’s job, the remote’s misplacing had powered much of the film’s interpersonal conflict. In the end, as Lori finds the gadget and opens the garage door, the door to her relationship with Michael opens as well. If dragon lady is the messianic messenger in disguise, part-Anglo Justin is the

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film’s missing link. Charlotte/Darcy had exposed Justin’s mixed-race otherness at the Thai restaurant as sadistically as she had outed Michael’s coolieness. After asking “what side” of him was Asian (his mother’s), she praised how well he’d “learned” to use chopsticks (he says he didn’t have to “learn”). Then she mocked the whole “identity thing,” taunting, as the foursome posed for a restaurant photo: “Everybody smile—real Asian!”(fig. 37). Of course, what it means to be “real Asian” in a multicultural world is Charlotte Sometimes’s Big Question. One tentative answer it supplies is that as Asian Americans differentiate (Michael Aki is of Japanese descent, Euquenia Yuan of Hong Kong-Chinese, Jacqueline Kim of Korean, and Matt Westmore of Indonesian) but also assimilate (through osmosis or intermarriage), Asianness becomes more fragmented and diffused yet conversely strives to maintain authenticity and reclaim common ground. For the Chinese-European Byler, the dialectics of assimilation and identification, especially as they relate to intermarriage, no doubt took on added poignancy. Exogamy has become an increasingly touchy subject in Asian communities, as out-marriage rates have risen dramatically among younger, second-generation Asian Americans. Wide interethnic discrepancies prevail here as well, with rates for Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, and Filipinos well above 50 percent, and for Asian Indians and Vietnamese well below.52 But when Cody ChesnuTT’s opening credits ballad keens, “Something is killing me. My breakdown is on its way!”—the lyrics can be read, retroactively, as alluding as much to racial dissolution as to the damage wrought by stereotypes. Mixed-race Justin may be a magnificent physical specimen and a sexual dynamo, but he is also the true villain of the piece. His muscular physique and pass-for-Anglo good looks may fit Hollywood’s romanticlead and action hero molds, but machismo doesn’t pass muster in liminal Silver Lake. Michael’s modesty, sensitivity, and “Asian” bookishness are what win the

Figure 37. “Everybody smile—real Asian!” Euquenia Yuan, Matt Westmore, Jacqueline Kim, and Michael Aki in Charlotte Sometimes. Frame grab.

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day. Even his vengeful lashing out at Charlotte, after learning her true identity, “I want to fuck you so hard you scream!”—registers as a parody of Justin’s roughtrade bedroom style. If the film is indeed valorizing Asian meekness over Anglo bravado, and bemoaning depletion of the Asian “stock” through intermarriage, the “new Jews” nickname is once again instructive. Jewish males also have been stigmatized, historically, as physically weak and feminized, an image the Zionist Muskeljude (muscle Jew) was devised to counter.53 Daniel Boyarin, however, has questioned both the etiology of the puny Jew and its pejorative valence, arguing that the sensitive, introspective yeshiva bokhur (Talmudic scholar) developed in the early rabbinic period as a prized alternative to the more physical and aggressive masculinity of the largely hostile gentile society.54 Given that Asian societies, from a position of dominance rather than alterity, have traditionally privileged gentleness and scholarly pursuit, Jews might rather be deemed the “new Asians” than the other way around.55 As for ethnic diffusion, rising Jewish intermarriage in the United States, approaching 50 percent by 2000 and surpassing the “threshold of no return” by 2010, has moved some Orthodox Jewish survivalists to decry a “Silent Holocaust” among a group with a scant 2 percent of the U.S. population.56 All this is not to suggest that Charlotte Sometimes proposes a retreat to Coolieville or Dragon Lady Land. Cody ChesnuTT’s additional opening credits plaint, “Sometimes I feel I got all the limitations,” is given a fair hearing in the film as well. Recall, as a prime example, Charlotte/Darcy’s postcoital confession. Michael’s response to Lori, moreover, when she bugs him, early on, to get a date—“I’m not afraid to be alone”—indicates both a comfort level with the better angels of his Asian nature and a partial defense against both prejudice and selfloathing—no foolproof solution to the identity dilemma, certainly, but not a bad option for a Japanese Angelino caught between Chinatown and Hollywood.

Better Luck Tomorrow The rigidity of geographical and cultural borders is at the crux of Chinese American Justin Lin’s 2002 reimagining of the 1992 so-called Honor Roll Murder in the suburban netherlands of Orange County. Foothill High School senior Stuart Tay, a Chinese American, was beaten on New Year’s Eve with a sledgehammer and baseball bats in a Buena Park house garage, then was forced to swallow rubbing alcohol with his mouth taped shut to finish the job. The body was buried in the backyard. The killing, masterminded by Sunny Hills High senior Robert Chan, also Chinese American, was tied to Tay and Chan’s mutual criminal activities but reputedly also to a love triangle involving Tay’s girlfriend. Both Tay and Chan came from well-to-do families and were viewed as “model kids and academic standouts.”57 Three of Chan’s four accomplices were Asian American: Mun Kang and Charles Choe, seventeen; and Kirn Kim, sixteen. Abraham Acosta, a sixteenyear-old Latino, rounded out the gang. Chan, before his arrest and sentencing

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to life imprisonment (Kang and Choe received twenty-five years to life; Kim and Acosta, youth authority), had been selected valedictorian of his graduating class, and both he and Tay were headed for Ivy League schools. Model minority, in short, had gone majorly out of control. The suburban Orange County milieu is key to the alienation and ennui that drives the film’s historically based characters to petty crime and murder. It also replicates the shift in Asian lifestyles in Greater Los Angeles’s multicultural era. Though the city’s Chinatown, Little Tokyo, and Historic Filipino Town still qualify as ethnic enclaves, and Koreatown and Thai Town districts have more recently emerged, these are neither the only nor necessarily the main residential or business centers for their respective ethnicities. As Los Angeles became “the destination point for the largest number of post-1965 immigrants,” a greatly expanded and diverse Asian population has dispersed throughout the region.58 The first “suburban Chinatown,” Monterey Park, about ten miles east of downtown L.A., became in 1990 “the only city in the continental United States the majority of whose residents [56 percent] are of Asian background.”59 Other new Asian enclaves include Chinese-dominated communities along the San Gabriel Valley corridor; “a mixed settlement of Japanese, Filipinos, and Vietnamese” in the South Bay; and Korean and Filipino clusters in the San Fernando Valley, northeastern foothills, and far eastern portion of L.A. County.60 Asian expansion into Orange County has been particularly striking. In the 2010 census 17.9 percent of the Orange County population identified itself as Asian, compared to 13.7 percent of L.A. County’s.61 The largest Orange County concentrations, including those of the Chinese and Korean ethnicities involved in the Honor Roll Murder, are in Santa Ana and Fullerton (where Foothill and Sunny Hills high schools are located), in Buena Park (where the murder took place), in Orange (where the Tay family’s house was built), as well as in Huntington Beach, Anaheim, Westminster, and Garden Grove.62 Better Luck Tomorrow begins in a bright and shiny, but also oppressively monotonous, red-tile community that writer-director Lin, who himself grew up in “the OC,” calls “Anywhere USA.”63 Ben (Parry Shen) and Daric (Roger Fan), the two characters that combine to replicate Robert Chan, reside in the cookiecutter tract, along with their public-high-school chums and partners in crime, Virgil (Jason Tobin), Han (Sung Kang), and Jesus (Ryan Cadiz). Stuart Tay’s stand-in Steve Choe (John Cho) lives in a McMansion in an exclusive beachside community and attends a private school—class elements that in the film (and possibly in real-life) partly motivate the murder. On one score the boys are united, including upper-class Steve: they all “can’t wait to leave this hell-hole.” Yet they also all buy into the model minority paradigm, taking for granted the obligation, and their ability, to get into a top-tier university whose occupational perquisites will probably land them not far from where they started. Ben, who narrates the film and governs the point of view, is Robert Chan’s “better half,” in the feminized sense. A quintessential coolie—pathologically passive, frustrated in love, and “always getting shat on”—he is also a quintessential

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Type-A(sian) whose superlative grades are only the start. Obsessively geared to his college applications, he manages to fit in—even during the downward crime spiral—an after-school job; community service; basketball team and academic decathlon practice; and, to max out the language portion of his SAT, memorization of a vocabulary word a day. The words double as signifiers for Ben’s mood swings and as quasi-chapter headings for the film: “punctilious,” “temerity,” “quixotic,” “temperance,” “inextricable.” Daric, no slouch academically and more imposing physically, is Chan’s Fu Manchu side, the sinister brains behind the gang’s crime spree (starting with cheat sheets and escalating to dealing drugs and stealing computers) and of Steve’s “wake-up call” gone bad. Initially conceived to teach the stuck-up “rich boy” a lesson, the plan devolves when Ben’s pent-up jealousy over Steve’s girlfriend, Stephanie (Karin Anna Cheung), returns from the repressed at the murder scene. Archetypally split in half, Stephanie plays butterfly with Steve and dragon lady with Ben. The song “Butterfly” (by the Fontanelles) even accompanies her and Ben on their prom date, which Ben was only granted because Steve doesn’t “go in for all that bullshit.” But it’s mainly around Steve that she becomes Miss Submissive. With Ben she tends to play butch boss, scolding him for not recognizing her independence, telling him she plans to be a cop, and literally pricking his finger (for a blood sample) in science lab. The double dose of emasculation Ben receives from Stephanie and Steve rises up in Jesus’s garage on New Year’s Eve. Seemingly out of left field, he smashes Steve’s head with a baseball bat—a weapon both historically accurate and rhetorically resonant as an (Asian-appropriated) all-American symbol. The trope’s transnationalism is significant. In Charlotte Sometimes the individual and collective identity crises unfolded in an Asian Angelino bubble. In Better Luck Tomorrow’s Anywhere, USA, residual “foreignness” is the issue. At a party Daric and the boys crash, his letterman’s jacket—which Ben told us not to be fooled by, “it’s for tennis”—doesn’t fool the Anglo jocks. “What’s up, boys? Bible study’s next door,” one of them taunts—leading to a fight in which Daric “cheats” by pulling a gun and pistol-whipping the jock, and Virgil overcompensates by kicking him in the gut. This martial arts hero fling proves just that, as on the open road, a Latino gang’s Uzi-brandishing drive-by reminds the Young Tongs of their place in the street-gang hierarchy. Self-reflexive allusions to Asian American otherness resound as well. At a sidebar gathering of the boys at a New Year’s party before the killing, Steve and Daric do a stand-up routine: Steve: This is where the Asians hang out. Daric: Yeah, the library’s closed. Steve: You’re a funny guy, for an Oriental.

Unfunny last words for Steve. History is destiny for him, though not quite for Daric, Ben, and the gang. Whereas the police tracked down Robert Chan and

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accomplices after three days, their Better Luck Tomorrow surrogates remain in town and at large after more than a week, which is where the film leaves them. “You think you can get away with anything, don’t you?” Stephanie had told Ben when he talked his way out of eating pizza in a mall boutique. Ben’s narration had rationalized Daric’s “Chinese Mafia” as simply “putting the laws of supply and demand into practice—my Econ teacher would have been proud.” “More human than human, that’s our motto,” the corporate creator of the replicants in Blade Runner had boasted. “More American than American,” seems to be Better Luck Tomorrow’s moral about the model minority—a moral reinforced by its missing link: Asian parents. We see only one set of parents in the entire film: Stephanie’s Anglo adoptive mother and father, and even they only appear via a framed family photo. Absent parenting, with its implied lack of oversight and nurturance, is even implicated in the murder, as Steve’s killing is directly linked to his hiring Daric and the gang to rob his AWOL parent’s McMansion. On the one hand, the parental lack would seem to let the model minority off the hook by deleting the “strong and stable family structure” posited as its underpinning. It also contradicts the conventional image, affirmed in the recent bestseller Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (2011), of the overly present, overbearing Asian parents who constantly push their children toward overachievement.64 On the other hand, the film’s missing parents point to a generational reality, whereby first-generation model minority parents, themselves on achievement overdrive, neglect their children not from spite but from their own Sisyphean compulsion to be more American than American. From this perspective the model minority syndrome, in its no-holds-barred drive for material success, carries—like unbridled capitalism itself—the seeds of its own destruction (fig. 38).

Figure 38. Model minority at a crossroads: Sung Kang, Roger Fan, Jason Tobin, and Parry Shen in Better Luck Tomorrow. Frame grab.

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Burden of Representation Better Luck Tomorrow’s critique of Asian all-Americanness generated considerable controversy at the film’s Sundance Film Festival premiere in 2003. During a postscreening discussion, a non-Asian man played the self-hatred card in asking writer-director Lin, “How could you make a film that was so denigrating to your race?” Before Lin could respond, critic Roger Ebert sprang to his defense. “You wouldn’t say that to a White filmmaker!” Ebert shouted, standing on a chair. “Asian Americans should be free to take any types of roles they choose without fear of representing the entire community.”65 As “color blind” as Ebert’s clarion call for equal-opportunity denigration may have been, it also misses the point. The manner in which minority groups are portrayed is precisely the issue, and the manner’s “value” is determined not by denigration or free speech but by the “burden of representation.” Because of their historical and ongoing under- and misrepresentation, compared to the white majority, a special onus is placed on minority imagery. The Three Stooges, Hannibal Lecter, or Adolf Hitler can be portrayed without any fear of their being taken as stand-ins for the white “race.” Their moronic or monstrous effect results, to the contrary, from their perceived deviance from the norm. Minority characterizations have no such leeway. The part tends to stand for the whole. Sapphire, the black author of the novel Push, on which the Oscar-nominated film Precious (2009) was based, invoked the burden of representation in a radio interview upon the film’s release. She recalled having rejected film offers upon the book’s publication in 1996 because she felt the country “wasn’t ready” for a contemporary story of an obese, sexually abused black child. A dozen years later, in the “Obama era” and with improved media diversity, she was willing to take the chance.66 The film still met with some controversy in the black community, but it also gained strong support (not to mention Academy Award recognition), affirming Sapphire’s sense that self-critical African American imagery had become viable. Sapphire’s Obama reference is apposite in relation to Better Luck Tomorrow. Along with the mainstream media (TV news anchors excepted), the political arena has been one in which Asian Americans, like the parents in Better Luck Tomorrow, have gone missing, including in increasingly Asian-populated Los Angeles. Monterey Park’s suburban Chinatown is an exception, now boasting three Asians out of four council members and an Asian mayor.67 But in metropolitan Los Angeles, city and county, despite Asians’ numbering 10 and 13.7 percent of the population, respectively, there has been only one Asian city councilperson, Mike Woo (1985–1993), and no county supervisor. This lack of political representation stands in stark contrast to other ethnicities. As of 2012, besides the city’s Latino mayor, Latinos have five city council members and African Americans three (out of a total of fifteen), and Latinos and blacks (and Jews) have long had one

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member each on the five-member board of supervisors. Moreover, while Latinos have been clamoring for a slice of the political pie that more closely matches their near 50 percent of the city and county populations, Asians have been less vociferous about their lack of even a place at the table.68 They have not been entirely quiescent, however. The 1992 civil unrest served notice, especially for Korean Angelinos (the largest Asian group in the city), “that the community’s lack of political representation caused it to suffer the grossly disproportionate amount of economic damage. Korean American political leaders of all stripes,” Edward Park recounts, “argued that mainstream political institutions, including the police, made conscious decisions to sacrifice the politically marginal and ‘disconnected’ Koreatown as a buffer zone while scrambling to save more politically important and ‘connected’ communities such as Hollywood.”69 Koreans further asserted their solidarity by giving their own name to the unrest, sa-i-gu (literally 4–2-9, for April 29, “following the Korean tradition of naming key historical events after their dates”). 70 Despite the election of Korean American Jay Kim, a conservative Republican, to Congress in 1992, however, and progressive efforts at coalition building, a culture of “ethnic insularity,” Park suggests, has tended to keep Korean Angelinos (and other Asian American communities) from “pushing the boundaries of political involvement beyond the narrowness of homeland politics or protecting economic interests.” 71 A reverse burden of representation, once again tied to the “new Jew” analogy, may play a role in Asians’ comparative ineffectuality on the larger political front. Given their perceived and actual predominance behind the scenes of the media industries, and the history and persistence of anti-Semitism, Jews, until quite recently, avoided appearing “too Jewish” onscreen.72 A similar defensiveness, drawn from the model minority/yellow peril dialectic, may be informing Asian reluctance to make a political, or media, “scene.” Justin Lin’s experience in financing Better Luck Tomorrow supports this view. Just as the Hollywood moguls notoriously insisted on de-Judaizing characters—“converting” them, even when based on historical figures, from Jewish to gentile or ethnically neutral—Lin’s prospective Asian investors “were the ones asking to change these characters to Caucasian characters.”73 A sign that Koreans in Los Angeles are starting to find their political voice is evident in the community’s response to the city council district reapportionment process. After the Redistricting Commission’s initial proposal in early 2012 that Koreatown be divided between two council districts, one resident at a public hearing spoke out: “As an Asian American living in the city of Los Angeles, I feel voiceless.”74 According to the L.A. Times, a Korea Times editorial “attacked lawmakers for treating Koreatown like a ‘cash register’ by taking campaign contributions from the neighborhood but not fighting for it.”75 Hundreds of others, the L.A. Times reported, “urged the commission to unite the neighborhood in a single district, which they argued would improve chances that the area would

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get the attention and services it deserves.”76 Thousands more were prepared to participate in the commission’s ongoing series of hearings—in vain, it turns out. The final boundaries, approved by the city council in March, failed to satisfy the protesters’ demands. Edward Park argued that Koreatown activists would have been better off focusing “on issues like housing and less on ‘who can we get elected to the City Council that looks like us.’”77 Nevertheless, for “a community not known for its engagement with city hall, it’s been an impressive showing,” the Times concluded. One of the commissioners concurred, describing the community’s protest as “Koreatown’s coming of age.”78

chapter 10




LAnglos and LAGBTs

If many of the city’s Latinos and African Americans still lack economic parity, and the Asian community a political voice, its Anglo population, while no longer all-powerful, has not been left in the cold. The L.A. Times, “inventor” of the modern-day metropolis, no longer reigns supreme. The Committee of Twentyfive, an unofficial, all-white chamber of commerce that “held sway through the 1950s and early 1960s,” has long since loosened its clandestine grip. And the city of “two heads” (WASP and Jewish) has sprouted a few more, not all exclusively white.1 Yet, by the late 1990s/early 2000s, as Edward Soja and Julian Murphet pointed out, “while as many as eighty thousand homeless men and women look for shelter every night,” and “the most severe housing shortage crisis in America affects half a million more,” “the top 10 percent on the ladder of wealth is disproportionately white.”2 West magazine’s 2006 “Power Issue,” a list of the 150 people who purportedly “wield the most influence over Southern California,” affirmed the continuing Anglo tilt.3 Jewish power brokers topped the list with sixty-one individuals (40.7 percent); non-Jewish whites followed closely with fifty-seven (38 percent); Latinos were a distant third with seventeen (11.3 percent); and blacks and Asians pulled up the rear with eight (5.3 percent) and seven (4.7 percent), respectively. Taken together, according to West, whites accounted for 118 (78.7 percent) of Greater Los Angeles’s new-millennial movers and shakers. As for the gender gap, this looked familiar also: 134 powerful men (89.3 percent) to 16 women (10.7 percent). If a power elite is what gives a city its direction, then an added geographical disparity lies in what D. J. Waldie points out in a sidebar to the “Power Issue”: that the city’s richest people “don’t all live in Los Angeles; the very rich don’t live anywhere specifically.” Power, like place, “has moved off world, so to speak—into the no-place of the Net.”4 As cyberspatial as the workings of wealth have become, the off-world rich still make their presence felt. Their power is still “divided and withheld,” and the Great White Male account of history, despite some revision, prevails—around its “primal mythmakers,” real estate developers.5 Albeit 209

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corporatized and globally leveraged, a “new Octopus” of fifteen or twenty major development firms, Mike Davis reported in City of Quartz, governs the region’s economic growth.6 Indeed, despite its broadening the power grid to encompass cultural, religious, labor, and other non-“moneyed” interests, the 2006 “Power Issue” still counts five developers or financiers among its top ten, and twenty-five among its top one hundred, kingpins (all men). If one imagines, as Waldie does (and I elaborate), a Power-Elite Museum devoted to the city’s historical upper crust, a consistent pattern emerges.7 In the Yankee Boomtown Gallery, portraits of Harrison Gray Otis and Harry Chandler dominate, flanked by the likenesses of Edward Doheny, Isaias Hellman, John Downey, Henry Huntington, Moses Sherman, and Gaylord Wilshire, among others—all white males, all in one way or another tied to real estate. Masters of “unreal estate,” the mostly Jewish moguls, lord it over the Classical and New Hollywood Rooms: Carl Laemmle, Adolph Zukor, Louis B. Mayer, among others, in the former; Lew Wasserman, Arthur Krim, Michael Eisner, among others, in the latter. Adjacent to the New Hollywood Room but off limits to Jews, the Star Chamber, subtitled the Committee of Twenty-five, features Harry Chandler’s son Norman; a business cohort of Asa Call, Henry Salvatori, Kyle Palmer, Dan Bryant, James Beebe, and Justin Dart, among others; and education chieftains Norman Topping, president of USC, and Franklin Murphy, president of UCLA. Norman Chandler’s wife, Dorothy, and son, Otis, would grace the entrance to the museum’s Liberal Wing of the 1960s and 1970s, which would contain a sketch of Mayor Bradley but showcase painted profiles of developers Howard Ahmanson and developer Mark Taper, facing one another. The arrangement would symbolize the joining of Los Angeles’s Westside and downtown business communities (and Jewish and WASP elites) in the building of the Music Center, whose three main structures are named for Ahmanson, Taper, and the woman who negotiated the geoethnic rapprochement, Dorothy Chandler. In a niche of the Liberal Wing would hang watercolors of the so-called Malibu Mafia—Stanley Sheinbaum, Harold Willens, Max Pavlevsky, Norman Lear, and other New Hollywoodites—whose Jewish political alliance with Otis Chandler’s gentile liberal contingent proved crucial to the African American Bradley’s mayoral election. Finally, the Octopus Room would be dedicated to the postmodern megadevelopers. Here a kinetic sculpture of an octopus, its tentacles encircling a model of City Hall, would have eight top developers’ faces serving as the tentacles’ suction cups and a head bearing the visage of Eli Broad (pronounced Brode). Then again, the entire collection might be housed in Broad’s own new museum, currently under construction beside Walt Disney Concert Hall, whose financing Broad helped broker, and across from the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), whose demise his deal-making averted. Broad, in his late seventies, has emerged in the 2000s as the ne plus ultra of cultural philanthropy. One might even call him the new Isaias Hellman, were it not for his high-profile rather than behind-the-scenes style. Besides his rescue operations for Disney Hall and MOCA,

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a portion of his massive modern art collection is already housed in the Broad Wing of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); his funds helped build the Broad Art Center at UCLA and the Broad Stage in Santa Monica; and the Frank Gehry–designed, commercial portion of the Grand Avenue project, currently on hold, is essentially Broad’s baby. Changing the name of Broadway Boulevard to Broad Way would hardly seem to do Eli’s neoboosterism justice. Los Broadgeles, anyone? One problem with all the Broadomania, as far as this chapter’s heading is concerned, is the stretch required to fit Eli Broad, of Lithuanian Jewish descent, and other non-WASPs, into the Anglo mold. Although Anglo, in a Latino context, applies generically to all Europeans, its residual Anglo-Saxon root conceptually excludes those of the European Continent. The more expansive term European has its own limitations. Peoples technically considered white—those from the Middle East, for example, including Persians (20 percent of Beverly Hills’ population, with a “Tehrangeles” enclave in Westwood), and Armenians (27.6 percent of Glendale’s population, with a Little Armenia in Hollywood)—would be excluded.8 Peoples of Spanish descent, meanwhile, would have to be included, thereby rendering racial distinctions moot not only between Spaniards and Mexicans but between Spaniards and the various Central, Caribbean, and Latin American peoples with Spanish admixtures. Expanding the European rubric to Spaniards, moreover, would also send the continental divide down a slippery slope, requiring that special attention be paid to the various Euro-nationalities that reside in Los Angeles: Germans (4.5 percent of the total population), Irish (3.9), Italian (2.8), Russian (2.6), Polish (1.6), French (1.2), Scottish (0.8), Swedish (0.6), and so on.9 Resorting to the conceptual catchall of whiteness creates its own category crises, as the vicissitudes of history have shown. The ancient Greeks, long extolled as the font of civilization, saw lighter-skinned peoples as “barbaric.”10 The Tongva Indians had similar druthers about the fair-skinned Europeans. After whiteness won out in the Americas, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848 granted its privileges—de jure if not de facto—to all Mexicans, no matter the degree of mestizaje (racial mixing). By the 1960s and 1970s, however, Latinos would themselves reject whiteness, then in the 2010 census be welcomed back into the fold. The Irish, as well as southern and eastern Europeans (Italians, Greeks, Jews), also would go through a funnel of “off-whiteness” and come out the other end as “fully” white.11 Those of Middle Eastern appearance—Turks, Arabs, Persians, Pakistanis, even Israelis—especially post-9/11, have yet to be fully reconciled to whiteness. As for the flimsiness of the black/white binary, one need look no further than a 1983 court case, in which a Louisiana woman sued to be declared officially white, rather than accept the black status she held as a result of her 1/32nd black lineage. A sociologist, testifying on the woman’s behalf, stated that, based on the “one drop of black blood” rule, most Louisianans, in having “at least 1/20th ‘Negro’ ancestry,” could be considered black.12

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Biologically speaking, of course, racial distinctions of any sort are meaningless. No race gene exists, and greater phenotypic variation can be found within people of the same “race” than among peoples of different “races.” The United Nations affirmed these scientific findings as early as 1950; in “Statement on Race” it declared that the notion of “‘race’ is not so much a biological phenomenon as a social myth”—a myth, however, with very real social, economic, political, and psychological consequences.13 In light of this socially constructed reality the following caveats are in order. First, the interchangeable uses of the terms Anglo and white in the discussion that follows (as in that which has preceded) are a matter of convenience. Second, the very malleability and contingency of these terms, rather than compromising the rhetoric of Los Angeles, reinforce two of its foundational principles: the confusion of fact and fiction, and the myth that “Southern California was the Anglo-Saxon’s destined place.”14

Falling Down “Where’d you pick up this tea-drinking—you’re not from England, are you?” Walter Neff asks Phyllis Dietrichson on their first meeting in Double Indemnity. “No,” Phyllis replies, “native Californian, born right here in Los Angeles.” “I thought all Californians came from Iowa,” Neff retorts—and he wasn’t alone. Already by the early 1900s, Kevin Starr explains, Los Angeles “for all its Mediterranean suggestions was in its essential life a colony of Iowa, Kansas, and Illinois.”15 The “new Eden of the Saxon homeseeker,” Charles Lummis called the place in his magazine Land of Sunshine; the “White Spot,” Otis/Chandler’s L.A. Times expanded (and narrowed) the concept.16 By the mid-1920s, hagiography matched demography: Los Angeles “was a predominantly white city.”17 Of a total population of 1.3 million, in the census of 1926, Asians numbered circa thirty thousand (2.3 percent), blacks thirty-three thousand (2.5 percent), Latinos forty-five thousand (3.5 percent), Jews seventy-five thousand (5.8 percent), European Catholics three hundred thousand (23 percent), and WASPs eight hundred thousand (63 percent). Though not all Jews or Catholics measured up to the whiteness paradigm, greater than 90 percent of L.A.’s permanent residents were of European descent.18 This is not the Los Angeles Bill Foster (Michael Douglas) encounters on a hot, smoggy day in the early 1990s in the film soleil Falling Down. Beginning with a parody of the opening of Fellini’s 8½ (1963), unemployed defense-industry engineer Foster finds himself in the middle of “Carmageddon.” The alarmist term, coined in July 2011 to describe the potentially dire (actually uneventful) consequences of a single weekend’s closing of a stretch of the 405 Freeway, is less of an overstatement here.19 Foster is more than caught in the granddaddy of freeway traffic jams: he’s stuck in L.A.’s pre-Multicultural Era. Literally wearing whiteness on his short-sleeved business shirt, sporting a crew cut straight from the 1950s, Foster’s Anglo-American Dream has turned rancid along with the power and privilege it afforded. White Los Angeles, Starr further noted about the city in its Anglo heyday, “divided itself into three discernible groups: Oligarchs, Babbitts,

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and Folks.”20 An aspiring Babbitt within shooting range of the Oligarchs (he lives with his mother in old-moneyed Pasadena), Foster, as the name suggests, is now just plain folks (with a small f ). Leaving the clogged freeway underpass and his car behind, Foster violates one of L.A.’s hoariest taboos: he sets off on foot, announcing Wizard of Oz–style, “I’m going home.” The Yellow Brick Road leads not back to Pasadena, however, but to Venice Beach, where his ex-wife, Beth (Barbara Hershey), and daughter, Adele (Joey Hope Singer), live together in a modest clapboard. The two places are not only on opposite poles of the city spatially and culturally but historically as well. Patrician Pasadena, with its Rose Parade, Craftsman architecture, and Huntington Library and Gardens, combines rustic Americana with the Belle Epoque. Carnivalesque Venice—named for Abbott Kinney’s short-lived, early 1900s Italianate resort complete with gondoliered canals—had turned bohemian in the 1950s, hippie-ish in the 1960s, and by the 1990s, especially along the fringy Boardwalk where Beth and Adele reside, entered its own countercultural time warp. The notorious “sixties,” and the fraying social fabric he believes the period spawned, are Foster’s Public Enemy Number One—a phantom rival he will tilt at not with a lance but with an escalating arsenal, and body count, on his hell-bent hike from the Plains of Id to Surfurbia. As his customized “D-FENS” license plate proclaims, and Foster’s mother (Lois Smith) tells the police detective, Prendergast (Robert Duvall), hot on Foster’s trail: “He’s building important things to protect us from the Communists.” Maybe he did at one time, but this is 1992. The Soviet Union is no more, China is helping keep America afloat, and missile-builder Bill Foster is obsolete. Or “economically unviable,” as Foster himself describes his condition—quoting a black loan-seeker he meets on his cross-city trek, who has been protesting red-lining before being hauled off by the cops. Foster’s bonding with a marginalized black man (and two young black boys later on) seemingly reiterates the trope Manthia Diawara decried in much film noir—“that blackness is a fall from whiteness”—a shortcoming one assumes would cross the nonwhite spectrum. 21 Foster’s relationship is anything but amicable, however, with an immigrant Korean storeowner and two Latino gangbangers he crosses swords with on his urban odyssey. The difference in treatment stems partly from the “foreignness” Foster perceives in Asians and Latinos, as opposed to a shared “nativism” he senses with blacks. His alienation from the storeowner, Mr. Lee (Michael Paul Chan), is revealed, literally, right off the bat. Lee’s refusal to provide Foster with telephone change prompts a xenophobic rant over Lee’s broken English: “You come to my country, you take my money, and you don’t even have the grace to learn to speak my language?!” When Lee, in the scuffle that ensues, reaches for a baseball bat in self-defense, Foster wrestles it away and wields it to smash the store’s “overpriced” merchandise. But not before clarifying the historical basis for the rampage: “I’m rolling back prices to 1965, what d’ya say to that?!” The mid-1960s are Foster’s dividing line: when the rise of the counterculture “led” to the breakdown of the family (including his own), and the Immigration

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Reform Act “turned” L.A. into a Third World city and him into an endangered species—as his linguistic dispute over land rights with two Latino gangbangers (Agustin Rodriguez and Eddie Frias) further attests.22 Taking respite on a concrete slab in an abandoned lot the film facetiously renames “Angel’s Flight Hill,” Foster is accosted by the Latinos for not heeding a sign on the slab. When Foster refers to the spray-painted scrawls as graffiti, one of them corrects, “No, man, that’s not fucking graffiti, that’s a sign. I’ll read it for you. It says, ‘This is fucking private property—no fucking trespassing—this means fucking you!’” Foster’s stab at humor—“Maybe if you wrote it in fucking English I could fucking understand it”—misses the mark. As does his backhanded attempt at conciliation: “We’re having a territorial dispute, hmm? I’ve wandered into your pissing grounds, or whatever this damn thing is, and you’ve taken offense at my presence, and I can understand that. I wouldn’t want you people in my backyard either.” When one of the Latinos pulls a switchblade and demands Foster’s briefcase as a “toll,” Foster swings Mr. Lee’s baseball bat and sends the young men running; he then picks up the switchblade (and later their automatic weapons) as collateral (fig. 39). Occupational history further solidifies Foster’s “alliance” with African Americans, and his preference for them over other peoples of color. Blacks since World War II, and Foster since the Cold War, have ties to the D-FENS industry; and both have suffered, economically and ideologically, from its demise. “I’m the bad guy?” Foster rhetorically asks Prendergast, in their face-off on the Venice pier at film’s end. “How’d that happen? I did everything they told me to. Did you know I build missiles, I help protect America?” Of course, he doesn’t anymore, and the signs of his fall from grace are all around. The concrete slab’s “No Trespassing” sign accentuates a semiotic motif that had begun at the freeway underpass. Realigning noir’s cars for auto-immobility, Falling Down reads the traffic jam not through Banham’s rearview mirror but through license plates and bumper stickers: “D-FENS” for the former; “Financial Freedom,” “He Died for Our Sins,” “How Am I Driving? EAT SHIT” for the latter. Other auto-related signs reinforce the gridlock: construction signs indicating men at work or redundantly flashing “DELAY,” and a “Hawaiian Tropic” billboard that mocks L.A.’s island paradise image and whose “White is for Laundry” slogan takes Foster’s Anglo identity to the cleaners. Mr. Lee’s baseball bat does the murder weapon in Better Luck Tomorrow one better. In the struggle with Foster it similarly subsumes America’s pastime to violent aggression. Shortly after Foster’s trashing of Lee’s store, it implicates the entertainment industry as well, when young Adele is shown shooting a squirt gun at a TV Toon flailing with a wooden club. The fast-food industry, another La-la-land staple, comes to grief at the violent-sounding Whammy Burger drivethru, which Foster terrorizes with one of the guns grabbed from the gangbangers. Triggering his tirade this time is the mismatch between the pictures of “plump, juicy, three-inch-thick” burgers on the wall and the “sorry, miserable, squished” things the place actually serves. Hollywood action movies are literally sent up at yet another construction site, when a black boy, having learned how to use the

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Figure 39. William Foster (Michael Douglas) on Angel’s Flight Hill, in Falling Down. Photofest.

weapon from TV and believing Foster to be shooting a film, shows him how to fire the bazooka he commandeered from a neo-Nazi—leading to a gas-propelled explosion. Another Tinseltown claim to fame is mocked when Foster hides out in a plastic surgeon’s Westside mansion and laments, “I guess I’m in the wrong racket.” Foster’s climactic western-style confrontation at the Venice pier is the film’s most reflexive, and ambiguous, Hollywood allusion. “It’s perfect,” Foster tells Prendergast. “The showdown, between the sheriff and the bad guy—it’s beautiful.” Then a classic draw, on the count of three, and Foster, having reached the end of the line generically and geographically, takes a bullet to the chest and topples off the pier into the polluted Pacific Ocean. So polluted, Prendergast informs us (and twenty years later, the indictment generally holds), that you can’t eat the fish or swim in the water.23

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Prendergast’s environmentalism is no mere sidebar; it’s a key to the redemption of the Great White Male. Foster was Prendergast’s shadow side: an atavistic appendage that became gangrenous and required amputation. But he was also the animus to Prendergast’s anima: a masculine organ that had atrophied in the overly sensitive cop and required reconstruction. Prendergast, who was supposed to be whiling away his last day on the force, is heckled from the get-go by his fellow police officers as a pussy-whipped desk jockey and denounced by his Darryl Gates–like captain (Raymond J. Barry) as not a “real man” because he doesn’t curse. A backstory about the premature death of Prendergast’s only child, and the tragedy’s effect on his high-strung wife, Amanda (Tuesday Weld), doesn’t boost his self-esteem or his cowboy-hero status. This can be achieved only through action—in the domestic and public spheres. He reaffirms his manhood at home by finally telling Amanda to shut up and to “leave the skin on the chicken!” At his precinct’s retirement party, sporting a toy cowboy hat, he coldcocks the sexist detective (D. W. Moffett) who dared to insult Amanda. And on the streets of the Wild West town, he becomes the wily sheriff who uses both psychology and bravado to get his man. He even gets it both ways with the captain, telling him in front of a TV news crew, as Mr. Macho is hypocritically praising Prendergast on camera: “Fuck you, Captain Yardley, fuck you very much!” Falling Down, in classical Hollywood style, gets it both ways as well. White masculinity is redeemed, as is multiculturalism. A Blade Runner–like inferno only in Foster’s eyes, the city’s ethnoracial and gender conflict is institutionally rehabilitated, just as Prendergast personally compensates for Foster, by an integrated LAPD. For every less-than-sympathetic female character or character of color, a more sympathetic alternative is provided. The surly Korean, Mr. Lee, is balanced by Brian (Steve Park), a Japanese American police officer.24 The Latino gangbangers are countered by Prendergast’s best friend, the capable and attractive Det. Sandra Torrez (Rachel Ticotin), and by another “good” Hispanic, Det. Sanchez (Richard Montoya). The shrewish Amanda is mirrored in reverse by Foster’s wife, Beth. Black characters, as indicated, are the least burdened by the burden of representation. The film’s title, meanwhile, brings it all back to the future. Angry Anglo Foster takes the “fall” for his inability to change with the times. Gentler/tougher Prendergast rises to the occasion and acts as the main carrier of the title’s multiple meanings. To pacify Amanda, he had agreed to retire prematurely and move to Lake Havasu City, a resort town in the Arizona desert whose main attraction is the London Bridge the city acquired (and reconstructed) in 1967. At one point Prendergast winds up a music box that plays London Bridge and sings a few bars to his sobbing wife: “London Bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down. . . .” As London also stands for the English (read: Anglo) capital, a resurrected London Bridge in the American Southwest symbolizes—and even materializes, through the tourist traffic—a return to WASPness.25 The remasculinized Prendergast, however, decides to blow off the London Bridge, and Amanda, not only by canceling his retirement and staying on with the LAPD but by exchanging his

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desk job for one that puts him back on the street and in harm’s way. His name will be “Mud,” at least with his wife, he tells Adele. But perhaps this is the price one pays for a fall from whiteness.

Swish Alps Although they posed at least as big a threat to white masculinity as people of color or liberated women, gays make only a cameo appearance in Falling Down. Two gay customers are harassed by the neo-Nazi surplus-store owner, whose bazooka Foster confiscated after blasting the “sick asshole.” Their meager screen time is somewhat compensated for, however, by the location in which they appear: the corner of Hyperion Avenue and Sunset Boulevard in the Silver Lake district of Los Angeles. Named for Herman Silver, the water commissioner who oversaw construction of the like-named reservoir in 1907, Silver Lake is part of a cluster of hillside communities just north of downtown including Echo Park, Franklin Hills, and Los Feliz. Once officially subsumed in the catchall township of Edendale, this is the place, not Hollywood, where the Los Angeles film industry first took root. Selig Polyscope moved to Edendale from downtown in 1909, and two other “majors,” Kalem and Essanay, set up shop there in the early 1910s. Silent comedy king Mack Sennett’s Keystone studios and cowboy star Tom Mix’s Mixville were located in Edendale, and D. W. Griffith not only had a studio there but filmed the Babylonian sequence of his epic Intolerance (1916) at the intersection of Sunset and Hollywood Boulevards, just up the street from Falling Down’s surplus store. Warner Bros. and Walt Disney’s early studios were located in Edendale as well. Besides housing movie companies, a host of major and minor movie-industry players—onscreen and behind the scenes—lived in the area. The louche air cultivated by the movie colony, as well as the area’s hilly charm and comparative isolation from yet proximity to both Hollywood and downtown, attracted artists, intellectuals, politicos, and others who tended toward the unconventional of mind and sexual orientation. Nicknames such as “Red Hill,” “Mt. Moscow,” and the “Swish Alps” reflected and reinforced this offbeat cum radical reputation.26 Edendale, from the 1920s on, consequently became another of Los Angeles’s prominent “third spaces”: a site, like the Plaza, “at the margins of society . . . where new identities, actions, and opportunities can be constructed.”27 Edendale and the Plaza even intersected, politically and artistically: politically via Edendale activists’, including the Magon brothers’, use of the Plaza’s public forum for political speechifying, protesting, and organizing; artistically (and politically) via Edendale painters’ participation in Siqueiros’s Chouinard Art Institute and Olvera Street murals of the 1930s. Many members of Siqueiros’s “mural collective” actually hailed from Chouinard, located in Westlake Park at Edendale’s southern edge, where Siqueiros’s first controversial mural, Street Meeting, was created, and possibly destroyed.28 The collective learned another political lesson firsthand. Their own “portable political murals,” inspired aesthetically and ideologically by

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their Marxist mentor, met a similar fate as his two L.A. murals. Not bothering with whitewashing, the LAPD’s Red Squad raided the collective’s exhibition in 1932, “shooting at and bashing in some of their paintings.”29 Edendale was not the first of Southern California’s bohemian centers. Lummis’s high-toned and proudly Anglo-Saxon “Arroyo Set” near Pasadena dated from the 1890s, and a “seething art colony” had formed in Laguna Beach at the turn of the century. But Edendale’s agglomeration of avant-garde and leftist impulses was the most attuned to the progressive pulse of the city.30 As Davis’s City of Quartz emphasized and Daniel Hurewitz’s Bohemian Los Angeles elaborates, Los Angeles in the Otis/Chandler era may have been a bastion of racist reaction, but oppositional forces persistently rattled the gates and occasionally breached the walls. From Job Harriman, Frank Wolfe, Louis Adamic, Morrow Mayo, and Mary Austin to Jake Zeitlin, Carey McWilliams, Miriam Brooks Sherman, Dorothy Healey, Harry Hay, and myriad others, far from all Anglos bought into the white-spot, übercapitalist paradigm. A sizable cohort—much of it concentrated in Edendale—wrote, painted, sculpted, composed, built, taught, organized, and lived in resistance to power. The “homophile” (pro-gay and lesbian) facet of this Los Angeles counternarrative began to gel and eventually came to fruition through a dynamic convergence of time (Depression, World War II, Cold War), place (Edendale), and person (Harry Hay).

Making Hay Born in England in 1912, Hay moved with his family to Los Angeles in 1919, where young Harry had his first homosexual encounter at fourteen and his first “sustaining” same-sex relationship at eighteen. Hay’s precociousness extended to rejection of then-standard prognoses of homosexuality as a form of sexual “inversion” or “degeneracy” and to considering whether his orientation might reveal something “essential” about him.31 Expanding personal identity into an identity-political community, as Hay ultimately accomplished with the Mattachine Society he founded with four other gay men in Silver Lake in 1950, grew from the avant-garde arts and leftist political scene he became involved with in Edendale in the 1930s (fig. 40). Art and activism were linked in Edendale well before the Depression. Socialist millionaire Aline Barnsdall brought Frank Lloyd Wright to Los Angeles in the early 1920s to build an arts and theater collective on Olive Hill along Edendale’s western rim. Though the radical project was never realized, it left behind the first of Wright’s distinctive Maya-inspired mansions, Barnsdall’s “Hollyhock House.” Wright’s son Lloyd Wright lived and worked in Edendale, designing, besides modernist residences, an early, ultimately defining version of the Hollywood Bowl. Wright’s assistant on the Barnsdall project, Rudolph Schindler, together with fellow Austrian Jewish immigrant (and leftist) Richard Neutra, dotted the Swish Alps “with visionary designs that became icons of California modernism,” including Neutra’s own Silver Lake home.32 Other Jewish immigrants, who became

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the core of the communist contingent that gave the region its Red Hill moniker and greatly contributed to its “bohemian flavor,” began flocking to Edendale from the erstwhile Jewish enclave of Boyle Heights in the late 1920s and 1930s.33 Harry Hay’s personal introduction to L.A.’s “Left Bank” came courtesy of communist, and later blacklisted, actor Will Geer, with whom he had an affair and performed agitprop theater around the city in the 1930s. Riding the wave of radicalism spurred by the Depression and the rise of fascism in Europe (and America), Hay joined the Communist Party and participated in the united-front support of socialist gubernatorial candidate Upton Sinclair in 1934 (which failed) and of liberal Democrat Culbert Olson in 1938 (which succeeded).34 The lesson Hay learned about social change, that it depended as much on organizing for change as combating resistance to it, would infuse the purpose and structure of the Mattachine Society. The 1938 campaign to recall Mayor Frank Shaw brought the proactive and reactive forces to a head. Backing the recall pushed the Left into an “unholy alliance” with blue-nose conservatives, whose antivice and corruption crusade was directed as much at homosexuality as at the Combination-controlled Shaw administration. And the unholiness spread both ways when the recall campaign,

Figure 40. Harry Hay, 1985. Photo by Mark Thompson/DRKM.

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in folding “together concern about homosexuality” not only with communism but “with broader anxieties about moralism,” ensnared conservative recall leader Clifford Clinton.35 Clinton’s efforts, as described in chapter 5, ultimately swept Shaw and Police Chief Davis from office, crippled the Combination, and ushered in the reformist administration of Mayor Fletcher Bowron. But Clinton’s vendetta against all manner of “vice,” including homosexuality, led to charges—encouraged if not instigated by the Combination—that his “prurient fascination with issues of excessive desire,” besides a distraction from more pressing city problems, demonstrated his own moral turpitude.36 As preposterous as attributing either homosexuality or communism to the virulently homophobic, antilabor Clinton was, “the anxiety about moralizing” conflated the fear of communism with that of sexual perversion.37 The formation of a (short-lived) Sex Squad within the LAPD in 1938, a variant on the decades-old Red Squad, confirmed the perceived communist-homosexual conjunction. Harassment of homosexuals rose sharply during and after World War II, peaking in the early Cold War period.38 Just as L.A.’s Sex Squad found common cause with the Red Squad in the 1930s, a Lavender Scare went hand in hand with the Red Scare in the late 1940s and 1950s. The McCarthyist witch hunts put added strain on gay-communist relations, which had never been problemfree owing to the Communist Party’s organizing focus on a working class not noted for its homophilia. The additional security risk homosexuals posed in the McCarthy period, given their greater vulnerability to arrest, tilted the party toward outright expulsion of its homosexual members. The loss of a former ally proved an unintended boon for Mattachine. The double whammy of state-sanctioned oppression and Communist Party estrangement provided the final impetus for Hay’s pioneering homophile-based identity politics. The idea was not entirely new. Notions of organizing around homosexuality had been bubbling since the Jazz Age, and not only in Los Angeles. As an adolescent in Minneapolis in the 1920s, future Mattachine member Chuck Rowland concluded that it was “perfectly obvious that what we have to do is organize.”39 Henry Gerber started the short-lived Society for Human Rights in Chicago in 1925, which abruptly ended with the arrest of its members and “lurid headlines naming them as homosexuals and thus criminals.”40 The Depression and World War II shelved further organizational plans. But in 1945 “ex-GIs formed an underground social organization, the Veterans Benevolent Association,” and the first Kinsey report, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, published in June 1948, supplied key emotional and theoretical grounding.41 Hay’s first attempt at forming a gay group, called Bachelors Anonymous, came just two months after the Kinsey report.42 Though Bachelors Anonymous failed to catch on, the report’s “mixed effect” on homosexuals would crucially affect Hay’s later, longer-lasting, Mattachine Society.43 Kinsey’s findings of a sizable proportion of homosexuals (up to 10 percent) among the general population exacerbated the national crackdown on homosexuals by magnifying the threat they allegedly posed to the country at large.44 This increased persecution, however,

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also reinforced Hay’s, and Mattachine’s, foundational principle: that gays and lesbians were an oppressed minority. The 10 percent finding was also a personal and organizational confidence builder, as it indicated, in Hay’s words, that “rather than a few isolated misfits lurking about the red-light districts of the largest cities, there were, in fact, millions of homosexuals—everywhere.”45 In Hay’s Los Angeles not only gay men were feeling emboldened. Predating both the Kinsey report and Bachelors Anonymous, an RKO studios secretary named Edythe Eyde (later changed to “Lisa Ben,” an anagram of “Lesbian”), beginning in mid-1947, self-typed and hand-stapled, on the sly in her Hollywood office, the first homosexual publication in the United States. 46 Titled Vice Versa: The Gayest American Magazine, Eyde’s creation folded after nine issues in early 1948. But on November 11, 1950, Hay’s newly formed Mattachine Society held its inaugural meeting at Hay’s home at 2328 Cove Avenue in Silver Lake. The other founding “Mattachinos,” as they called themselves, were Chuck Rowland, Bob Hull, Dale Jennings, and Hay’s lover, Rudi Gernreich, an Austrian Jewish émigré and avant-garde fashion designer who would pioneer “anti-clothing” with the topless swimsuit (in 1964) and the thong (in 1979).47 The name Mattachine derived from a French, medieval, all-male theater troupe, Société Mattachine, which wore masks and whose leader dressed as a woman.48 Communist principles and organizational strategies were retained in a “preliminary concept” calling for “androgynes of the world” to unite, and in the group’s secretive, underground, cell-like structure to maintain anonymity.49 But a non-Eurocentric cultural model, with uncanny connections to early Los Angeles, also prevailed. Southern California’s indigenous queer roots are another written-over facet of its historical palimpsest. The Spanish explorers and missionaries discovered, to their horror, that many of the local Indian tribes, including the Tongva, not only were tolerant of members who engaged in same-sex practices but often revered those who “wore clothing of the opposite gender.”50 These berdaches (or “two-spirit people,” in the anthropological literature) “took on a variety of magic social roles,” including that of shaman or spiritual healer.51 Though the Spanish observed primarily male homosexual behavior, “female same-sex relations,” as we know from the myth of Queen Calafia, “was the stuff of fantasy for them.” The dark-skinned Calafia, after all, lived on her mythical island of California “with her beloved subjects,” all of them Amazonian women warriors like herself.52 While Hay may not have been aware of the specific regional associations, his research into the berdache and its spiritual implications substantially informed his sense of Mattachine’s mission.53 The Native American influence is palpable in Mattachine’s inclusion, early on, of ceremonial rituals—“performances of identity, sanctified at the level of myth, . . . bordering on the transcendental or sacred”—which “the Mattachinos often referred to as ‘magic.’”54 Following Dale Jenning’s landmark victory in a lewd conduct case in Los Angeles in 1953, Mattachine’s membership grew substantially. The influx of more politically moderate members proved a double-edged sword for the group’s

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radical founders, however. Hay and the core contingent were purged from the leadership in 1953, victims of a gay-power/integrationist rift similar to that which befell the black civil rights movement a decade later. Mattachine’s Los Angeles chapter would fold in 1961, and the group’s importance to the gay rights struggle would largely be buried beneath the Stonewall riots and gay liberation movement whose seeds were planted by Mattachine.

The Black Cat The Stonewall rebellion itself, which occurred in New York City on June 28, 1969, was preceded by a public protest in Mattachine’s hometown of Silver Lake two and half years earlier. On February 11, 1967, following frequent harassment at a gay bar on Sunset Boulevard called the Black Cat, “possibly the largest gay protest to be held in this country up to that time” took place.55 Reacting to the conviction of six men arrested for exchanging New Year’s kisses at the Black Cat on January 1, 1967, and to the police brutality that followed, four hundred to five hundred gays and gay sympathizers staged a nonviolent protest at the site, and demonstrations continued for several days. The protests were organized by another seminal L.A. gay organization, PRIDE (“probably the first application of the word to gay politics”), founded in 1966 by Steve Ginsberg.56 Despite the incident’s historical significance, the media largely ignored the event. So did historians, until—four decades and a queer revolution later—Lillian Faderman and Stuart Timmons’s Gay L.A.: A History of Sexual Outlaws, Power Politics, and Lipstick Lesbians finally acknowledged “the crucial spark that ignited . . . the modern gay civil rights movement.”57 Two years after Gay L.A.’s publication, gay community activist and Silver Lake resident Wes Joe launched a campaign to obtain Cultural Monument status for the Black Cat. This was granted by the L.A. City Council in 2008 and was celebrated at the site, since renamed Le Barcito, later the same year (fig. 41).58 Mattachine’s legacy survives in practical ways as well. The Los Angeles–centered gay organization ONE, Inc., and the magazine ONE, cofounded by Jennings in 1952 and 1953, have themselves spawned the Homosexual Information Center (HIC) and the Institute for the Study of Human Resources (ISHR). Hay himself cofounded the Radical Faeries in 1978. Closer to “home,” again through the efforts of Wes Joe, the city council officially designated the Cove Avenue staircase, beside Harry Hay’s former residence in Silver Lake, the Mattachine Steps in 2011. On April 7, 2012, the centennial of Hay’s birth (he died in 2002), a sign was unveiled with full regalia—a stone’s throw from where “true history was made” (fig. 42).59

Look Back in Anger Perched another stone’s throw from the Mattachine Steps is another major facet of homosexual history. Julian Eltinge, the king—or better, queen—of female impersonation in the early 1910s, who began making movies in Hollywood in

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Figure 41. Wes Joe in front of the former Black Cat, 2012. Author’s photo.

1917, built a Swish Alps chalet, Villa Capistrano, in 1918—on the same hill as Harry Hay’s more modest abode. The irony of the two prominent gay figures’ close proximity lies not so much in geographical contiguity. Edendale, after all, was home both to queer political and cultural persuasions (and Hay himself had worked as an actor). It stems rather from historical contingency. “From its very beginnings,” Faderman and Timmons relate, the Mattachine Society, belying its title and behind the scenes shenanigans, “eschewed men who affected a ‘swishy’ style because the Mattachine founders, as radical as they were, felt compelled to present a conservative public face.”60 Female impersonators, to be distinguished from drag queens, had long been a fixture in vaudeville and were considered wholesome family entertainment into the 1920s. By the 1930s, however, as the homosexual came to be seen as “part of a social system that haunted mainstream society,” and the homosexual connotations of male effeminacy gained currency, Hollywood decreed homosexuals “an extinct species,” and what was “a cause for humor” in the 1910s and 1920s “dropped from the screen.”61 The industry’s Production Code of 1930 banned the words fairy, nance, pansy, and sissy and specified, “No hint of sex perversion may be introduced into a screen story. The characterization

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Figure 42. City Council member Eric Garcetti and State Assemblyman Mike Gatto (to Garcetti’s left) officiate at the unveiling of the Mattachine Steps sign. Author’s photo.

of a man as effeminate, or a woman as grossly masculine, would be absolutely forbidden for screen portrayal.”62 Homosexual restrictions were less all-encompassing, if more humiliating, in the nightclubs of Los Angeles, where the Sex Squad began requiring impersonation licenses, for which “performers needed to submit to a ‘character analysis’ and be interviewed by a department psychiatrist.”63 Hollywood film directors managed to skirt the Code by “coding,” rather than explicitly identifying, characters as sexually androgynous. Certain actors, such as Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Peter Lorre, and Laird Cregar—all of whom were same-sex-oriented offscreen as well—specialized in such roles, though a double standard prevailed. While the queered females managed to retain (if not enhance) their romantic appeal, the males tended to be denigrated: Lorre as a “perfumed fop with lace hankies” in The Maltese Falcon (1941); Cregar as a psychotic killer in The Lodger (1944) and in Hangover Square (1945); Farley Granger and John Dall as the Nietzschean übermurderers in Rope (1948), based on the Leopold and Loeb case.64 The only true escape from Hollywood’s “celluloid closet” was the avant-garde.

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Although the avant-garde film movement of the 1920s had dissipated with the transition to sound, a few iconoclasts continued to operate on Hollywood’s fringes. Kenneth Anger, the Harry Hay of gay cinema (or vice versa), was one of the boldest of these. Anger’s (and possibly the world’s) first overtly homophilic film, Fireworks, was made in Los Angeles in 1947, a year before Hay’s Bachelors Anonymous (and the same year as Edythe Eyde’s Vice Versa). A fourteen-minute short, Fireworks opens with a sailor cradling a young man (played by the seventeen-year-old Anger) in a “Pieta-like” pose.65 The iconic significance of the sailor for gays, but also for post–Zoot Suit Los Angeles, is alluded to in a 1975 comment by Anger: “That’s a part of history now, but the sailor was a kind of sex symbol on one level, and on another level there was a great deal of ambivalence and hostility, and fear in the image.”66 The ambivalence in the emblematic sailor shot, as in the rest of Fireworks and Anger’s work as a whole, is key to the “modern camp” sensibility Anger pioneered, in which the dark side is invariably laced with humor. Susan Sontag, in her seminal “Notes on Camp,” distinguished classical camp, which disdained vulgarity and “sought rare sensations, undefiled by mass appreciation,” from modern camp, which relishes lowbrow forms and mass culture.67 The incongruity infuses Fireworks’ fractured narrative, which flits surrealistically from photo snapshots strewn across the floor like motion picture frames to a seeming massive erection (actually an African sculpture tucked under Anger’s bedcovers), and culminates at a wharf-side bar where “violence and ribaldry collide.”68 In the end Anger is pummeled by a gang of sailors who commence to splatter his face with a milky, orgasmic substance—“or is the true climax the lighting of an eponymous firecracker thrust from the lead sailor’s fly?”69 Anger’s next Los Angeles–based, pre-Mattachine film, Puce Moment (1949), begins with a “Hollywood” ode to Oscar Wilde’s Salome (1891), as a “starlet” (Yvonne Marquis), patterned after silent-era divas Colleen Moore and Clara Bow, does a direct-address dance of the seven veils with motley items of women’s clothing. The video-box notes, written by Anger, give a sense of the six-minute “period piece”: “A lavishly colored evocation of the Hollywood now gone, shown through an afternoon in the milieu of the 1920s star.”70 As if the film’s punning title wasn’t “queer” enough (puce as “gay” color and play on “pussy”), its popcultural allusions, mock-serious tone, and play on androgyny make the gay and camp associations palpable. Although Mattachine’s relation to camp remained closeted, Anger’s overt evocation clearly resonates with the Society’s inspiration in a medieval troupe of transvestites, its embrace of ceremonial rituals, and its “performances of identity, sanctified at the level of myth.” Where Hay’s and Anger’s sensibilities further intersect is in their incorporation of shamanistic magic and fascination with pagan cultures. Hay’s interest stemmed from his study of American Indians’ openness to queerness and reverence of the berdache, or “two-spirit” person, who, if also a shaman, was regarded as more spiritual and powerful than “ordinary people.”71 Anger was attracted to paganism from an earlier age and became a

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follower of British occultist Aleister Crowley, whose spiritual teaching, called “Magick,” invoked “the spirits” by various ritualistic means: drugs, the use of occult objects, magic spells, and so on.72 Anger “documented” this mystical process most extensively in his moderncamp tour(s) de force Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954, 1958, 1966, 1986). The latest version, and the only one available on video, is essentially the 1966 version, with a new sound track.73 As the version’s title and subtitle—“Sacred Mushroom Version: Lord Shiva’s Dream”—indicate, the unusually long (for Anger), thirty-eight-minute film is a psychedelic, high-/low-cultural kaleidoscope, for which Anger’s video-box notes offer a synopsis: “A convocation of magicians assume the identity of gods and goddesses in Dionysian revel. Lord Shiva, the magician, awakes. The Scarlet Woman, whore of heaven, smokes a big fat joint. Astarte of the Moon brings the wings of snow. Pan bestows the grapes of Bacchus; Hecate offers the sacred mushroom, sage, wormwood brew. The vintage of Hecate is poured. Pan’s cup is poisoned by Lord Shiva. The orgy ensues—a magick masquerade at which Pan is the prize.”74

The Kids Are All F***ed Up Mainstream Hollywood would continue to shun gays and lesbians (or subtextually degrade them) into the 1960s, when the age of sex, sacred mushrooms, rock ’n’ roll, identity politics, and the end of the Production Code (in 1966) began to realize Hay’s political and Anger’s “magickal” vision. Queer cinema, as it came to be known, flourished in the underground film movement of the 1960s. Andy Warhol and Factory’s avant-garde, B-exploitation films of the period, by bridging the art museum and grindhouse theater, even extended modern camp’s high/low cultural aesthetic into the exhibition mode. By the end of the decade, as “exploitation, sexploitation, hardcore pornography, foreign film styles, and experimental film practice were increasingly blurring into one another,” clear lines of sexual demarcation were breaking down as well.75 But what “could have been a new beginning” in postclassical Hollywood, what “might have made homosexuality something more than a dream or a sideshow,” Richard Barrios bemoans, “through fear and ignorance and a penny-mongering philosophy, . . . made gayness to seem more irrelevant and unappealing than ever.”76 Vito Russo concurs: “For lesbians and gay men in America, the Hollywood horror show was a part of life in the 1970s. . . . The gay audience, recently defined as a ‘new’ market by publishing, music, and the theater, was courted by every medium . . . [which] challenged gay stereotypes even in the face of political backlash. But not motion pictures.”77 The burden of representation has been particularly onerous for lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgenders (LGBTs). Unlike (straight) women or people of color, LGBTs’ sexual orientation, gender identity, or sex change does not always go without saying. To be recognized as sexual outliers, they must either “demonstrate their difference” or “come out,” as Ellen DeGeneres did with a flourish on her TV

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show in 1997. In general, as Russo explained in the mid-1980s, “The problem then [in the 1970s] as now is how to explore on film the gay ghetto and its implications without embracing and seeming to reinforce the stereotypes that exist and flourish there.”78 The late 1980s and 1990s “New Queer Cinema” of Gregg Araki, Lizzie Borden, Cheryl Donye, Todd Haynes, Tom Kalin, Jennie Livingston, Marlon Riggs, and Gus Van Sant (to name only the main American directors), albeit still largely on the indie fringe, attacked the representational problem head-on, with “irreverence, brashness, and defiance.”79 Japanese American Araki’s “teen apocalypse trilogy”—Totally F***ed Up (1993), The Doom Generation (1995), and Nowhere (1997)—was the chief Los Angeles salvo in the New Queer Cinema’s frontal assault. Responding to the Reagan era’s antigay backlash generally, and the AIDS and gay-teen suicide epidemics specifically, Araki turns L.A.—especially in Totally F***ed Up—into a manifesto of “the bored and disenfranchised,” as one of the film’s Godardian intertitles announces. Unlike the other postpunk, “nihilistically cool” films in the trilogy, Totally F***ed Up is no mere “horny, druggy, conspiracy-fueled college comedy.”80 Though streaked with black humor, the film is dead serious about the life-threatening issues gay and lesbian youth faced at the dawn of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” age. Shot in semidocumentary, part video-diary style, the film follows six interracial Gen-Xers (four gay men and two lesbians), who form an alternative family as a carapace against a hostile society. Their living in or near West Hollywood’s gay mecca is small consolation. “Hooray for Hollywood,” the bleakest of the bunch, Andy (James Duvall), snidely remarks, as he and his would-be true love, Ian (Alan Boyce), wander through L.A.’s queer answer to San Francisco’s Castro and New York’s Chelsea. “The whole town is a big fag farm,” Andy adds, as Ian reads a newspaper item about a father who said his son would be better off dead than queer. The scene’s Edward Ruscha–like location underscores the gay men’s Hobson’s choice in a Hobbesian world: a deserted Chevron gas station at night, whose battalion of red-white-and-blue, army-badge logos weds L.A.’s car culture to the country’s bloated militarism (fig. 43). The anticar-antimilitary motif is pervasive. Scenes at car washes and in empty parking structures recur nightmarishly, including one that feels “like somebody dropped a neutron bomb and nobody noticed.” Andy recalls observing (and implicitly identifying with) a seagull that flew too low to freeway traffic and “got sucked in by the vacuum of all the speeding cars and couldn’t fly out. It was flapping its wings like mad, exhausted, terrified, trying to keep from getting splattered like a bug against some truck’s front grill.” Car- and gaybashing go hand in hand in a scene that crosscuts a “child’s” mutilation in a crash-simulation film with Tommy’s (Roko Belic) battered face after having told his father he was gay. Deric’s (Lance May) commiserative response echoes Ian’s better-dead-than-queer newspaper article: “That fucking all-American, homophobic, NRA dirt ball! It’s a wonder he didn’t blow Tommy’s head off with an AK-47!” Deric, who is black, later demonstrates that antigay violence is not confined to the home when he is brutally beaten by a gang of white youths.

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Figure 43. Ode to Ed Ruscha in Totally F***ed Up. Frame grab.

Nor is the media’s provocation of hate crimes ignored, through an actual clip of a TV evangelist cheering the AIDS scourge. But Araki saves the coup de grâce for L.A.’s tropical-paradise trope. Andy is shown in mid-film diving into a pool and swimming underwater à la one of David Hockney’s pool-series paintings. Like Hockney’s work, the scene is both serenely beautiful and strangely unnerving, not quite evoking Los Angeles as “the alienation capital of the world,” as Tommy calls it during one of the parking structure scenes, but nonetheless hinting at some imminent horror. Andy’s suicidal, film-ending plunge into the pool (after swallowing kitchen cleanser), in following his seagull story’s trajectory and the film’s “doom generation” arc, comes as no surprise. What is uncanny is how the image, in its interfacing with both (the gay) Hockney’s A Bigger Splash (1967) and the swimming-pool murder in (gay icon) Sunset Blvd., meshes the tragedy of gay-teen suicide with the inescapable ambivalence of Los Angeles. Lisa Cholodenko’s Obama-era dramedy The Kids Are All Right (2010) takes a much lighter swipe at L.A.’s self-righteous veneer. The “kids” in question—the straight, white fifteen-year-old son and eighteen-year-old daughter of a middleaged, middle-class lesbian couple—have their problems, but they’re more of the teen-soap than cinéma vérité variety. The implications of Tommy’s prediction in Totally F***ed Up, that given “the greenhouse effect, acid rain, nuclear dumping, no ozone layer left—I give the planet five years max,” are not lost on the SoCal characters in Kids. They’re smart enough to realize that the science

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that powers their smart phones also undergirds the Big Bang, evolution, and global warming. If anything, they’re all a bit too hip for their own good. In its liberal-pluralist normalizing of queerness, Kids illustrates the case Bob Nowlan makes in a chapter of Coming Out to the Mainstream: New Queer Cinema in the 21st Century. Echoing the radical versus liberal dispute that haunted Mattachine (and the civil rights movement), Nowlan frets over a mainstream postqueer culture that “challenges nothing, threatens nothing in the existing organization of social relations,” but rather devolves from “absorption and incorporation” into “a particular fashion of consumption.” 81 Indeed, Kids could just as well be renamed Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), after the “breakthrough” Hollywood film about interracial marriage that shocked no one but the White Citizens Council, largely because of its comforting casting (Sidney Poitier as the black suitor) and (upper-middle-class) milieu. Kids adopted a similar preemptive casting strategy (Annette Bening and Julianne Moore as the lesbians) while lowering the class level a notch. The main difference—and a telling one—is that the intended shock in Kids comes not, as in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, from the black guest being introduced to his white would-be parents-in-law, but from the lesbian hosts’ meeting the straight sperm donor of their two children, at the latter’s behest. The guest/host reversal further normalizes the lesbian-led family, especially given that the donor, Paul (Mark Ruffalo), in his swinger lifestyle and easy-rider character, is the most unconventional of the bunch. Roles are further reversed, though more queer correctly, in Paul’s “food services” profession (he owns a restaurant) compared to Nic’s (Bening) gynecologist and Jules’s (Moore) aspiring landscape architect. The most multilayered queer-straight turnaround applies to the spatial and historical coordinates of the city of Los Angeles. While New York Times reviewer Manohla Dargis gushed that the characters in Kids “are as honest as the movie’s Los Angeles locations,” this assessment is only half true on one level and utterly false on another.82 Half truth: Paul’s rough-hewn hillside home and upscale funky restaurant in Echo Park aptly reflect his motorcycle bohemianism and the area’s recent gentrification, and Nic and Jules’s tree-lined suburban tract house fits their helicopter parenting to a tee—but the Swish Alps, not the San Fernando Valley, is the city’s Lesbos. Utter falsehood: Queerness returns from the geographically repressed, not in the film’s world but in reality—as Nic and Jules’s house was not actually located in the Valley or other noted tract area but rather in D-FENS’s antipode: Venice.83 If the film strains not to pigeonhole lesbianism, it overcompensates by caricaturing “cutting edge” Los Angeles—disparaging, as National Public Radio’s Ella Taylor puts it, “the boomer culture, with its compulsive hyper-parenting and narcissistic introspection on the one hand, and its devoted pursuit of selfgratification on the other.”84 The film is a dramedy, after all, so some cheap, anti-L.A. shots are in order. These reasonably cultured Angelinos aren’t reduced to discussing turning right on a red light, as Woody Allen quipped (in Annie Hall

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[1977]) was L.A.’s idea of serious conversation. They are, however, prone to every cliché of the foodie-and-Frappuccino set. Paul’s neighborhood veggie plot keeps his eatery’s cuisine “kind of organic and local and simple American,” to which his “daughter” Joni (Mia Wasikowska), named after Joni Mitchell, burbles, “I’m so into local.” Jules’s design plans for Paul’s backyard are a send-up of postmodern speak (cum bisexual proposition): “We could do a secret garden, trellis-y kind of thing, or go Asian-y, minimalist. I’m not feeling minimalist, I’m liking ‘more is more.’ Let’s try to take this space, let it be like lush, overgrown, fecund.” Nic, who is the butt of the hyperparenting parody (Joni: “I did everything you wanted! I got all A’s, got into every school I applied. Now you can show everyone what a perfect lesbian family you have!”), plays the straight man in the neo–New Age satire: “Acai fruit cake, hemp milk, organic farming, heirloom tomatoes—we’re composting now! It’ll turn into this organic mulch, and then we’ll all feel good about ourselves.” But even Nic’s well-taken critique of the food “revolution” (whose laudable goals are marred by privileged access and micro solutions to macro problems) is itself undercut by the diatribe’s motivation in Nic’s jealousy of Paul and her own yuppie weakness for vintage wine.85 Ultimately, however, charges of conservatism in Kids—based on its übernormalization of lesbianism or its “ringing endorsement of the traditional family”—seem beside the point. In a country in which thirty states, including California, have recently passed constitutional amendments outlawing same-sex marriage and a like number have not even extended antidiscrimination laws to cover sexual orientation, any small step for gay rights is a giant leap for mankind.86 Allegations of the film’s “inauthenticity”—based on a purported straight angle on the queer material—are also open to question, given Cholodenko’s longtime openly lesbian relationship and her own experience of sperm donorship.87 The film is unquestionably more realistic, in queer terms, than the Showtime TV series The L-Word (2004– ), which, though a wildly guilty pleasure for lesbians and straight males alike, presents virtually all of Los Angeles as totally, glamorously, polymorphously lesbian and not the least f***ed up for it.

Echo Parque Kids’ main flaw, from an L.A. standpoint, lies not in its geographical con-fusion or Bo Bo-bashing but in its tenuous treatment of race and class. The film includes a few token characters of color: Joni’s Indian American heartthrob Jai (Kunal Sharma), Paul’s black lover Tanya (Yaya Da Costa), and Jules’s Latino day laborer Luis (Joaquin Garrido). The latter especially, however, is marginalized by class, stereotyped as comic relief, and ruthlessly discarded (fired without cause) in the narrative. Most of all, Luis’s tertiary presence in Echo Park grossly misrepresents a community with not only a long-standing queer but also Latino presence and which, despite recent gentrification, retains a sizable Hispanic population.

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The low-budget indie Quinceañera (2006), the title drawn from the Mexican coming-of-age ritual for fifteen-year-old girls, supplies a refreshing demographic corrective (fig. 44). The Sundance prizewinning film was written and directed by Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland, two gay white males who had themselves recently bought a house in Echo Park.88 Two colorful quinceañeras bookend the film, which revolves around the family crisis caused by fourteen-year-old Magdalena’s (Emily Rios) “non-penetrative conception” from her boyfriend’s errant hand job. The film’s gist is a self-lacerating look at the race- and classtinged divisions produced when an Anglo gay couple buys an Echo Park duplex with the intent of making both a real estate (the area is “hot” right now) and sexual (“they love their Latino boys”) killing. When the couple evicts the octogenarian Tomas (Chalo González) from the cottage he has turned into a shrine to the Virgin of Guadalupe, and sexually exploits Tomas’s great-great-nephew and Magdalena’s cousin, the gay gangbanger Carlos (Jesse Garcia), the Anglos’ actions reiterate the displacement and debasement of the indigene and extend the Spanish Fantasy Past into the Latino Reality Present.

Figure 44. Emily Rios in Quinceañera. Photofest.

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While the demonizing of the gay gentrifiers certainly raises a representational issue, this is mitigated, first, by the codirectors’ self-deprecation and, second, because not all privileged white queers in the film are predators. Gary (David W. Ross), one of the gentrifiers, although he ultimately caves to his older partner James (Jason L. Wood), appears to have genuine feelings for Carlos. And a lesbian landlord who has lived in Echo Park for some time (thereby also acknowledging its Swish Alps past) cuts a deal to allow Magdalena, Tomas, and Carlos to move into her upgraded apartment. But even gentler/kinder gentrification doesn’t get a blank check. Magdalena implicates the practice’s homogenizing component in a comment about the area’s recent rent hikes: “The whole neighborhood is the same. Everyone who moves in is, well—white.” And well before the 2008 housing crash would give the opportunistic interlopers their comeuppance, Carlos sets Gary straight on Echo Parque’s true identity: Gary (in response to Carlos’s Latino gang affiliation): Wow, you really live in a whole other world, don’t you? Carlos: No, you do.


Conclusion

Gentrification (and its “ethnic cleansing” adjunct) is not the sole province of Echo Park. Its most powerful effects, since the 2000s, have been felt downtown. As I suggested in chapter 6, Blade Runner–inspired retro chic and postmodern gloss have transformed a noir inner “city of regret,” a governmental center that once “emptied every night,” into a cultural, entertainment, and upscale residential in-spot, largely for affluent whites.1 Hollywood, of course, has played the transformation both ways. The first film in the Transformers franchise (2007) and TV series such as NCIS: Los Angeles (2009– ) have mined the burnished inner city for Babes in Toyland action finales. The Soloist (2009), a docudrama based on L.A. Times columnist Steve Lopez’s befriending of a black homeless man whose mental condition masks a gifted violinist, dredges skid row for spiritual uplift but at least reminds us such a place exists. Marc Webb’s 2009 love letter to downtown, (500) Days of Summer, stakes a middle ground. An L.A. answer to Woody Allen’s Manhattan (1979), the film both engages and disavows the inner city’s upward mobility. Viewed through an aspiring architect’s faux-nostalgic lens, what we glimpse at street level nods to downtown’s newly hip lifestyle. What we get to see of the skyline is blinkered: all beaux-art and pre–high modern, with scarcely a steel-and-glass building or concrete freeway on-ramp in sight—perish the thought of Disney Hall. This is Spanish Fantasy Past turned Downtown Past Perfect. The Downtown Art Walk provides a real-life appraisal of the central core’s renaissance. A grassroots event inaugurated at Biddy Mason Park in 2003, the Walk drew an average of seventy-five people to makeshift galleries its first couple of years. By 2011, a Gallery Row of more than forty art venues, as well as theaters and eateries, between Main and Spring, Second and Ninth streets, was attracting monthly crowds of more than thirty thousand people.2 Demographic surveys further support a downtown revival but also reinforce Soja’s and Murphet’s claim that the city’s spoils remain unevenly apportioned and tilted toward whites. As opposed to a pre-2000s inner-city population 233

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composed of Latino and Asian immigrants, a plurality of the city’s homeless, and a smattering of artists and hipsters, a 2011 study revealed a majority (53 percent) white population, compared to 22 percent Asian, 18 percent Latino, and 6.5 percent black; and a median household income of $86,300, compared to an L.A. County average of $55,500.3 An irony related to the Art Walk that Mike Davis would appreciate occurred in summer 2011. In acknowledgment of the fiftieth anniversary of the building of the Berlin Wall on August 13, the Walk featured an “Across the Wall” exhibit, outside the Old Bank District on Main Street, of sixteen portraits from Culver City’s Wende Museum’s collection of Soviet paintings.4 “Even as the walls have come down in Eastern Europe,” Davis had observed in 1992’s City of Quartz, “they are being erected”—via a phalanx of gated communities—“all over Los Angeles.” The “fortress effect” was Davis’s term for what he deemed a “deliberate socio-spatial strategy . . . which has its roots in Los Angeles’s ancient history of class and race warfare”—a polemical assessment he didn’t soften in his 1998 sequel, Ecology of Fear, and which an event I attended in 2012 lent some credence.5 As part of a Los Angeles City Historical Society lecture series titled “Crafting the Image of Historic L.A.—The Myth & the Reality,” Tom Zimmerman, author of Paradise Promoted: The Booster Campaign That Created Los Angeles, 1870–1930, focused on the region’s paradisiacal climate and unique geographical diversity as the boosters’ chief selling points. Although Zimmerman made passing, nonjudgmental reference to business leaders’ and the L.A. Times’ milking of the city’s open-shop reputation, he avoided mentioning their notorious branding of Los Angeles as the country’s “white spot.” When I brought up this “missing link” and its racial implications in the postlecture Q&A, Zimmerman brushed aside the charge by claiming that “white spot” referred solely to the city’s climate. Fortunately, Zimmerman’s blind spot does not extend to his excellent book or to the Historical Society, as evidenced in its honoring of William Deverell, author of Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past, which I have cited extensively and whose title alone makes clear its revisionist intentions. Nor is the city’s current Chamber of Commerce or its last remaining major newspaper prone to similar historical myopia. To the contrary, General Otis’s once dreaded bastion of racism and reaction has maintained its center-left turnaround for half a century. If editorially “only” moderately liberal, it features, as of 2012, a critical mass of weekly columnists who lean further left, among them two Latinos (Steve Lopez and Hector Tobar) and one African American woman (Sandy Banks).6 And the Times’ makeover is more than cosmetic. While not quite extirpating the city’s reactionary roots, it points to a tectonic shift whose fault lines lie deep in Los Angeles’s collective memory (which Mike Davis himself helped jog)—“of left-leaning activism that has been pushing the city forward for a century.”7 Redeeming the progressivism of Job Harriman, Ricardo Flores Magon, Charlotta Bass, Karl Goso Yoneda, Dorothy Healy, Harry Hay, Bert Corona, and legions of others, the onetime center of the class war is now the “focal point of

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the new labor movement, and the role of immigrant workers has been central to this revitalization.”8 Indeed, just as national union membership has declined steadily since the 1980s, and from 2009 to 2010 dropped again from 12.3 to 11.9 percent of the total workforce, L.A.’s unionized workers rose from 15 percent in 2005 to 16.5 percent in 2010.9 The immigrant-union connection was dramatized in 2006, when the massive downtown demonstration against the newly enacted federal anti-immigration bill was followed by “the largest May Day celebration in U.S. history.”10 The critical theory and revisionist history of the so-called Los Angeles School of Urbanists, of which Davis was a charter member, has been crucial to the progressive revival. Among its analytical achievements has been to “rediscover” and update those of the past, such as in Michael Dear’s and Edward Soja’s postmodernist reworking of Reyner Banham’s classic study.11 One-upping the count of Banham’s geographically grounded schema (Surfurbia, Foothills, Autopia, and Plains of Id), Dear emphasizes five political-economic, multicultural, and environmental forces impacting “LA’s efflorescent urban ecologies”: Globalization (linked hierarchies of world cities as command control centers), Network Society (global media connectivity), Social Polarization (socioeconomic divide), Hybridization (ethnoracial mixing), and Sustainability (environmental consciousness).12 Soja’s six visions for Los Angeles raise the count and the neo-Marxist thrust of Dear’s five forces: Flexicity (post-Fordist techno society), Cosmopolis (globalization), Exopolises (edge cities, outer cities, and postsuburbia), Metropolarities (socioeconomic divide), Carceral Archipelagos (Davis’s fortress cities and surveillance technologies), and Simcities (Baudrillard’s hyperreal simulacra).13 Theory has translated into practice in three institutional offshoots of the L.A. School that emerged in the late 1990s and 2000s. Geopolitically apropos, given its Westchester bluffs location above Playa Vista, where hundreds of Indian burial remains were discovered during a development project in the 1990s, Loyola Marymount University (LMU) has been proactively engaged with local Tongva in preservation and education efforts. Along with its Dorothy Leavey Center for the Study of Los Angeles and its extensive collection of local Indian artifacts and documents, LMU helped broker a resolution, in 2008, of the controversy surrounding the exhuming of the ancient remains. The school also contributed financially and organizationally to the construction of Ballona Discovery Park in Playa Vista, adjacent to the Ballona Wetlands. Set to open in summer 2012, the park’s mission of bringing “science, education, and community together” through environmental and traditional Indian displays will be bolstered by an even more ambitious, ongoing program, again cosponsored by LMU, to restore and preserve the ecologically fragile, now state-owned wetlands themselves.14 Occidental College’s “21-Point Agenda,” developed in 2001 as part of the Urban Environment Policy Institute’s (UEPI) Progressive Los Angeles Network Project (PLAN), brought “progressive organizers, activists, researchers, and policy practitioners together across issues, constituencies, geography, class, race and gender to forge a common public policy agenda for the Los Angeles region.” The agenda

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included specific “action plans on issues ranging from transportation, the urban environment, and food and nutrition, to economic development, housing, and workers’ rights.” Though partly stymied by the Great Recession, several of the proposals “to make LA a more just, livable, and democratic place,” such as a living wage, metro-rail extension, more parks and green space, green-construction provisions, a housing trust fund, and a low-income housing requirement—though not all directly attributable to PLAN’s efforts—have been implemented.15 The USC Annenberg School of Communication’s Metamorphosis project, founded by Sandra Ball-Rokeach in 1998, took a more grassroots, “communication ecologies” approach to social change. “Instead of looking only at the economic, political, and socio-structural factors that shape community,” Ball-Rokeach wrote in a 2001 “White Paper,” Metamorphosis “investigated how members of a community communicate among themselves and with others—how they forge the ‘ties that bind.’”16 Clearly grounded in L.A. School theory, the project’s mission “is to understand the transformation of urban community under the forces of globalization, new communication technologies, and population diversity.” Based on a three-pronged “communication infrastructure”—family, community organizations, and “geo-ethnic media” (local media aimed at a particular geography or ethnicity)—the project proposes a “storytelling network” that can be used “by residents, practitioners, and policy makers to improve the quality of family and community life.”17 Eleven “major residential areas” have been focused on thus far, with particular interest paid to the area’s ethnic or multiethnic composition. The eleven areas and their predominant ethnic compositions: Alhambra (Chinese, Latino, Anglo), East Los Angeles (Mexican), Glendale (Armenian, Latino, Anglo), Greater Crenshaw (African American), Greater Monterey Park (Chinese), Koreatown (Korean), Northeast Los Angeles (Latino, Chinese, Filipino, Anglo), Pico Union (Central American), South Figueroa Corridor (African American, Latino), South Pasadena (Anglo, plurality Protestant), Westside (Anglo, plurality Jewish).18 An especially encouraging development on the grassroots level has been the increased interethnic coalitioning among previously proprietary or antagonistic ethnoracial groups. A March 2012 “Roundtable Report on Multiracial Collaboration in Los Angeles,” sponsored by USC’s Program for Environmental and Regional Equity (PERE) and the Center for American Progress, analyzed the “important role that multiracial coalitions play in countering . . . the city’s reputation as a hotbed of urban strife.” Highlighting a “rich history of multiracial coalitions” beginning with the Bradley mayoral campaign in the early 1970s, the report points to several factors driving L.A.’s emerging “once again . . . ahead of the curve” in collaborative initiatives: a more settled immigrant population; rapid growth of the youth population; and one of the largest populations of mixedrace individuals in the country.19 While not downplaying socioeconomic and political competition between African American and immigrant populations, the report also found that labor exploitation and human rights created “a potential cross-community organizing frame,” such as in the Coalition to Abolish Slavery

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and Trafficking (CAST), founded by Asians in 1995 but which resonated with the progressive black community as well.20 Labor- and youth-based organizing has made the most substantial inroads: prominently, for the former, in UNITE HERE’s Diversity Task Force, which trained black workers for union hotels; for the latter, in the Community Coalition (CoCo), which focuses on bridging black and brown youth, and the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA), which emphasizes bonds between the immigrant rights and black civil rights movements.21 Edward Park regards the 1992 civil unrest as a major catalyst for the interethnic convergence. “With the apparent break-up of the Civil Rights Coalition [black/white/Jewish] in the aftermath of the Civil Unrest, racial politics in Los Angeles . . . entered a state of enormous flux,” from which two multiracial coalitions eventually coalesced. The more conservative of these, the “Establishment Coalition,” sought to curb crime and foster a probusiness environment. The more liberal “Progressive Coalition” sought “economic and racial justice.”22 An example of the latter, the Multi-Cultural Collaborative (MCC), founded in 1993, underscored its multiethnicity through a diverse group of cochairs: the Korean American Cindy Choi, the Latino Ruben Lizardo, and the African American novelist and political activist Gary Phillips.23 By the end of the millennium even Hollywood was feeling the effects of the Progressive Coalition. Minority groups had been monitoring television images since the early 1970s, each appraising its own group’s images and separately pressuring the networks to improve its members’ representation. After a period of incremental success, especially following the crossover hit The Cosby Show (1984–1992), a so-called Lily White controversy arose in 1999 over the various groups’ perception that the fall lineup displayed significant backtracking in minority casting for starring and recurring roles. Rather than protest separately this time, “an unprecedented multiethnic coalition of African Americans, Latino, Asian/Pacific Islander, and Native American groups converged to deal with the issue.”24 Not only did the increased clout lead to a “mad dash to diversity” on the part of the networks, but a new monitoring system was established.25 The networks began meeting with the groups semiannually (since reduced to once a year), and each group issues a year-end report card, based on the group’s representation onscreen and in behind-the-scenes above-the-line positions (writing, directing, producing). Hollywood as geographical site and state of mind has also, with less prodding, evinced some third-spatial awareness. In my introduction I highlighted the Save the Peak campaign to preserve the Hollywood sign’s “pristine” backdrop. The Four Ladies Statue, centerpiece of the Hollywood La Brea Gateway, itself a cornerstone of a 1993 project to revive the Hollywood Boulevard tourist strip, peels back some of the racial and gendered layers of the movie capital’s checkered past. Ultra postmodern in its (modern camp?) melding of high culture and kitsch, the statue’s four silver caryatids (three of which are identifiable as “people of color”) serve, on the one hand, as a “reminder of Hollywood’s tendency to absorb and

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commodify female ethnicity.” On the other hand, the nude women’s multicultural modeling after Hollywood stars from the classical era—the Mexican Dolores del Rio, the African American Dorothy Dandridge, the Chinese American Anna May Wong, and the Anglo (and camp icon) Mae West—also underscores, and somewhat eases, the movie capital’s burden of representation.26 On the fine arts front, Los Angeles’s expanding cadre of world-class art museums and galleries, and increasing draw for world-class artists, is evidence enough of its rising status as a global cultural center. Ever insecure, however, the city, in the fall of 2011, launched “Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A., 1945–1980” (PST), as “a long-needed accounting of the emergence of the region as an art capital in the same league as New York, Berlin and London.”27 Organized by the Getty Center, PST’s mammoth series of more than sixty shows held at venues throughout Southern California, and running through spring 2012, struck many, inside and outside L.A., as a boosterist throwback and “largely unnecessary.”28 In an “art world that has become global,” even the New York Times admitted, “Los Angeles these days has more than its share of ambitious museums, adventurous art galleries, wealthy collectors, top-notch art schools and—perhaps most important—young artists drawn here by relatively cheap rents, abundant light and an atmosphere that encourages experimentation.”29 As for the residential “White Wall” that continues to cleave Los Angeles, bookstore owner David Kipen is chipping away.30 A Jewish writer and bibliophile raised on the Westside, Kipen, in 2010, opened the Libros Schmibros used bookstore and lending library in the once heavily immigrant Jewish, now predominantly working-class Latino, enclave of Boyle Heights.31 Then, through a “pop-up” store in the lobby of the Hammer Museum in Westwood, funded by the museum for several months in 2011, he undertook an “experiment in bridging together L.A.’s two halves.” 32 Los Angeles Times columnist Hector Tobar played lab assistant by spotlighting the project. Tobar wondered whether Kipen’s Westside upbringing had given him “insights into L.A.’s perpetual Eastside/Westside debate, its geographic and psychic opposites, its Eastside ying and Westside yang.” Kipen—for whom “everything east of the Pacific Ocean is Los Angeles”—replied, “I think it’s an arbitrary division. The city isn’t like two halves of a walnut. There’s so much incomprehension in L.A. It holds us back.”33 Tobar’s journey to both of Kipen’s bookstores tended to reify rather than blur the line between the city’s rhetoric and reality: “The Westside location is inside the Hammer, downstairs from its collection of paintings by Degas and Van Gogh, and down the street from towering Wilshire Blvd. condos. The Eastside location sits a few hundred feet from the 5 Freeway, near rail yards and the aging colossus of L.A.’s oldest general hospital.”34 The clash of locales mirrors the class divide. Libros West’s customers tended toward the well-heeled and white, Libros East’s toward the proletarian and “overwhelmingly Latino.” But the superficial contrast also deceives. Westwood, Tobar points out, now also contains a sizable immigrant community, of Persians, that has turned a section along Westwood Boulevard into

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Tehrangeles. And Boyle Heights, as Libros itself indicates, may be on the verge, as a spillover from downtown, of its own minigentrification. Tobar ended on a hopeful note, drawing inspiration from a map of literary L.A. at Libros West. While not erasing the city’s “deep divisions of income, property values and ethos,” the map shows authors “Luis J. Rodriguez and John Fante to the east, and William Faulkner and Ray Bradbury to the west, among others, all linked by pencil lines representing Wilshire Blvd. and the 10 Freeway.”35 Kipen is not alone in envisioning Boyle Heights as a point of harmonic convergence for Los Angeles. Historian George Sánchez’s seminal 2004 essay, “‘What’s Good for Boyle Heights Is Good for the Jews’: Creating Multiculturalism on the Eastside During the 1950s,” revived interest in the district as a model for diversity. Once dubbed L.A.’s “Lower East Side” during its Jewish working-class heyday as a hub of radical politics and trade unionism, the area’s multiethnic population made it a demographic anomaly as well.36 As racial ideology shifted in the 1930s and 1940s toward a homogenization of whiteness, a category that embraced various European ethnics along with Jews, Boyle Heights became “a target for government social engineering designed to separate the races geographically.”37 The Federal Housing Authority, for example, “gave its lowest possible rating to Boyle Heights specifically because its racial diversity supposedly made it a bad risk for housing assistance.” As the Authority’s report in 1939 baldly stated, “This is a ‘melting pot’ area and is literally honeycombed with diverse and subversive racial elements. It is seriously doubted whether there is a single block in the area which does not contain detrimental racial elements and there are very few districts that are not hopelessly heterogeneous.”38 By the mid-1950s, heterogeneity was no longer necessarily a bad word. A 1954 Fortnight magazine article hailed increasingly Latino Boyle Heights as an “example of democratic progress,” whose diversity made it “as ethnically dynamic, religiously and politically tolerant, and community proud” as any district in the country.39 A 1955 Frontier magazine article, “U.N. in Microcosm,” was equally enthusiastic, singling out the Chicano-dominated Community Services Organization (CSO) as “the most vibrant organization” in the district and praised Jewish groups for “instilling a spirit of working together across ethnic lines.”40 That Boyle Heights’s multiracial history has now largely been forgotten Sánchez attributes to forces from the right and the left. The persecution and purges of the McCarthyist 1950s “began the process of making sure the history of leftist multiracial organizing in Boyle Heights would be erased. . . . Yet, it was the ethnic nationalisms of the 1960s, with their focus on empowerment from the grass roots that would be drawn from single ethnicities, that insured the ‘forgetting’ of this multiracial movement.”41 Although a more recent movement is under way to restore the Breed Street Shul in Boyle Heights, this effort itself, Sánchez believes, somewhat distorts the largely secular orientation of the Jewish radicals who fostered the area’s multiracialism. The intention to turn the shul into a museum and community center rather than a functioning synagogue (an impracticality, as most Jews have long since moved from the

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district) offers some hope, along with Libros Schmibros, that Boyle Heights’s history of multiracial progressivism might yet be preserved. Yet another stab at reviving Boyle Heights’s rich history occurred on a midsummer’s night in August 2011. A performance held at Bunker Hill’s California Plaza, titled “A Night at the Phillips Music Company,” paid trilingual (Spanish-EnglishJapanese) homage to the district’s multiracial legacy. Spoken-word tributes by George Sánchez and Ruben Martinez, among others, provided historical context for music from a half-dozen bands, “many with Eastside roots,” including Little Willie G., Ollin, Ruben Guevara and the Eastside Luvers, and the groups Hiroshima, La Santa Cecilia, and Ceci Bastida.42 The star of the show was a music store started in Boyle Heights in the “hopelessly heterogeneous” 1930s by Bill Phillips, a New York Jew. The store, which remained a cultural hub of the community through the 1980s, wasn’t just a place to buy instruments and check out music that matched the district’s demographics: Latin jazz, classical, rock, Cuban mambo, Yiddish swing. “It was also a kind of community living room,” USC professor Josh Kun explains, “a bricks and mortar embodiment of this mythic, utopian, Jewish-Mexican-Japanese enclave that marked time before and after World War II to a klezmer-mariachi-taiko beat.” Seeing the store as a historical metonym for Boyle Heights, Kun takes up Sánchez’s torch in proclaiming the district a model for the future of the larger city: “Boyle Heights is the poster neighborhood for deep community in Los Angeles, and of the possibility of working out, finding a way to live side by side and speak each other’s language.”43 A few blocks from California Plaza and a week after “A Night at the Phillips Music Company,” another event took place, at the founder’s Plaza, which brings this cultural history full circle: Los Angeles’s 230th, city-sponsored “birthday” celebration, held on September 4, 2011. Since L.A.’s bicentennial in 1981, the annual commemoration of the pueblo’s founding has included a History Walk, organized by Los Pobladores 200, a group made up of descendants of the original forty-four settlers and four escolta (escort soldiers). Starting from the San Gabriel Mission and including, besides Los Pobladores members, history buffs, public officials, and a police escort, the Walk traverses a ten-mile stretch from the mission to downtown Los Angeles, where a ceremony is held at the Plaza bandstand. Because of budget cuts (and loss of the police escort), the History Walk was cut short for the 230th birthday.44 Festivities began with a short parade from Union Station to the Plaza, led by Mayor Villaraigosa, council members Tom La Bonge and Jose Huisar (in whose district the Plaza lies), and Miss California, Wendy Walker. Once ensconced with other guests of honor at the bandstand, Plaza general manager Robert Andrade introduced the first speaker. Appropriately, she was neither the mayor nor a representative of Los Pobladores but Gabrielino-Tongva Tribal Councilmember Linda Candelaria, whose words were not celebratory. Candelaria reminded the audience that Tongva Indians had inhabited Southern California for thousands of years before the Spaniards arrived, that close to two thousand descendants continue to live in the area, and that their

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sole compensation for broken treaties, stolen land, and other depredations has been a meager $623 per descendant, paid out by the government in 1972. “Welcome to our Homeland!” fellow Tribal Councilmember Bernie Acuna picked up the thread. Emphasizing the continuity of Indian tradition, Acuna recalled the downtown area’s indigenous name, Yang-na. In a proudly defi ant but also hopeful vein he spoke of the “wisdom of the past” informing the “future of the children” and closed with a traditional Indian blessing to the Four Directions.45 Proceeding in palimpsestian order, the Reverend Carlos Ledesma of the Plaza’s Iglesia Metodista Unida (United Methodist Church) likewise dispensed with mission-era platitudes. Sounding more like a firebrand from the Plaza’s radical political days, he urged the crowd “to help the people drowning in poverty and need, and those denied a quality education” owing to economic and political circumstance—the latter referring to undocumented children, raised in the United States, who are being denied access to higher education.46 “The substandard social and economic life of these people is unforgivable in this great city of ours,” the reverend continued, and ended with a plea “to unite in this struggle for justice for people of all colors, all checkbooks, and all budgets.” The politicians toned down the rhetoric but kept it “real.” Mayor Villaraigosa admitted that “our history has not always been one we can be proud of, particularly regarding the treatment of the Tongva and other Indians in this country. But we can be proud of where we’ve come, in embracing all people, and that Los Angeles now has the largest urban Indian population in the U.S. [twenty-eight thousand in the city, seventy thousand in L.A. County].”47 He hailed the city’s cosmopolitanism, with residents from 140 countries and speaking 200 languages—one of which he showcased for the benefit of L.A.’s largest ethnic constituency (and the TV cameras of local Spanish-language Channel 52). Mexican-born councilmember Huisar also delivered a portion of his speech in Spanish, then seconded the mayor’s multicultural motion: “I’m proud to be Mexican, but also to be an American, a country that allows me to celebrate being Mexican.” Councilmember La Bonge, a third-generation Angelino, added a touch of disaggregated whiteness by paying homage to his Irish and German immigrant roots. Pobladores 200 president Maria Benitez trumped La Bonge’s and all but Candelaria’s and Acuna’s historical ties to Los Angeles. In a welcome corrective to past pobladores’ denial of their multiethnic heritage, Benitez proudly traced her ancestry to the family of Luis and Maria Quintero, a mulatto and an Indian, respectively.48 She also pointed, literally, to the mishandling of the Mexican and Indian burial remains uncovered during construction of the new Plaza de Cultura y Artes museum across the street. Miss California, the most incongruous of the dignitaries (except to add Hollywood frosting to the birthday cake), was introduced but did not speak. “Happy Birthday” was sung, cake was served, and musical accompaniment was provided by an Aztec dancing troupe and mariachi players.

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One thing missing from the celebration (which attentive readers may recall from my prologue and chapter 8) was the oversight that marred the first La Fiesta of 1894, made a mockery of the 1931 sesquicentennial, corrupted local school textbooks in 1951, and haunted the establishment of the Plaza State Historic Park in 1953. Although they received passing oral acknowledgment, no black person was on the bandstand to put a public face to the majority African makeup of the pobladores. Sin of omission notwithstanding, the 230th birthday celebration was an additional sign that Los Angeles has come a long way since the days when Indians were slaughtered, Chinese massacred, Mexicans deported, Japanese interned, blacks brutalized, gays and lesbians harassed, and all groups symbolically annihilated. The City of Angels is finally blowing away some of the smoke of its “not always proud” past and rhetorically adjusting its rearview mirrors. Finding “a way to live side by side and speak each other’s language” is one of the many challenges that remains.

NOTES

Prologue 1. William Deverell, Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 53. D. J. Waldie, “How Do We Make Our Home Here?” Los Angeles Times, Aug. 8, 2010, A31. 2. Deverell, Whitewashed Adobe, 53; Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York: Vintage, 1992), 26. 3. Deverell, Whitewashed Adobe, 89. 4. Davis, City of Quartz, 26; John L. Mitchell, “Diversity Gave Birth to L.A. ,” Los Angeles Times, Aug. 22, 2007, A1, A19. 5. The following information is drawn from personal interviews and e-mail contact with the following individuals: Dr. John Harris and Dr. Christopher Shaw, of the Page Museum in Los Angeles; Cleone Hawkinson, of Friends of America’s Past; Dr. Stephen C. Jett, of the University of California, Davis; Dr. John Johnson, curator of anthropology, Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History; and Dr. Alison Stenger, of the Institute for Archaeological Studies in Portland, Oregon. Books consulted include Jeffrey H. Altschul and Donn R. Grenda, eds. , Islanders and Mainlanders: Prehistoric Context for the Southern California Bight (Tucson, AZ: SRI Press, 2002); James C. Chatters, Ancient Encounters: Kennewick Man and the First Americans (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001); Nancy Yaw Davis, The Zuni Enigma (New York: Norton, 2000); Thomas D. Dillehay, The Settlement of the Americas: A New Prehistory (New York: Basic Books, 2000); Brian Fagan, Before California: An Archaeologist Looks at Our Earliest Inhabitants (Lanham, MD: Rowan and Littlefield, 2003); Terry L. Jones and Kathryn A. Klar, eds. , California Prehistory: Colonization, Culture, and Complexity (Lanham, MD: Rowan and Littlefield, 2007); Claudia Jurmain and William McCawley, O, My Ancestor: Recognition and Renewal for the Gabrielino-Tongva People of the Los Angeles Area (Berkeley, CA: Heyday, 2009); William McCawley, The First Angelinos: The Gabrielino Indians of Los Angeles (Banning, CA: Malki Museum Press, 1996); and David J. Metzler, First Peoples in a New World: Colonizing Ice Age America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). Websites include http://anthropology.si.edu/anthro_staff.htm; www.friendsofpast.org; www.pathsacrossthepacific.org; and www.prehistorics.org. 6. Thomas H. Maugh II, “Theory of North Americans Is Upended,” Los Angeles Times, March 26, 2011, A19. The “present” in BP is actually 1950, chosen because the first radiocarbon dates were calculated in December 1949. 7. Stephen C. Jett to the author, e-mail, Sept. 6, 2010.

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8. The East Coast theory stems from the work of Dennis Stanford of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History. 9. Jett, e-mail, Sept. 6, 2010. Jett also mentions that the Monte Verde site gives “indications of human presence there at over 30,000 BP.” 10. The remains were discovered in 1959–60. Though reassessed at one point as those of a woman, they were reassessed again in 2006 as those of a man. 11. Cleone Hawkinson offered this information (in an e-mail to the author, Sept. 15, 2010), gleaned from the work of her mentor, Dr. Richard L. Jantz of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. 12. Jett, e-mail, Sept. 6, 2010 (enhanced by a later e-mail from Jett to the author on Jan. 24, 2012). 13. The 5000 BP figure is according to John Johnson, as “judged by at least one linguist.” Victor Golia, while asserting that the linguistic divergence within the family “is probably only a couple of millennia,” also states that “the language family most likely had a much longer presence in the region” (Johnson to the author, e-mail, Sept. 30, 2010). 14. E-mail from John Johnson; see also Michael A. Glassow, Lynn H. Gamble, Jennifer E. Perry, and Glenn S. Russell, “Prehistory of the Northern California Bight and the Adjacent Transverse Ranges,” in Jones and Klar, California Prehistory, 191–213, 210. 15. Jurmain and McCawley, O, My Ancestor, xv; McCawley, The First Angelinos, 3. 16. McCawley, The First Angelinos, 3. 17. Twenty-seven distinct Tongva communities existed in the Los Angeles valley plains: ten in the San Fernando Valley, nine in the San Gabriel Valley, and eight in the San Bernardino Valley (Paula M. Shiffman, “The Los Angeles Prairie,” in Land of Sunshine: An Environmental History of Metropolitan Los Angeles, ed. William Deverell and Greg Hise [Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005], 38–51, 41). 18. See McCawley, The First Angelinos; James J. Rawls, Indians of California: The Changing Image (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1984). During the mission period the Spanish not only renamed the tribes but further disrupted their identities by mixing two or more tribes together under the name of the mission to which they were assigned, or by separating tribes among two or more missions. Those Tongva, but also Iviatim (Cahuilla) and Taaqtam (Serrano), who ended up at Mission San Gabriel, for example, were lumped together as Gabrielinos, while Tongva, Tataviam, and Kitanemuk at Mission San Fernando were called Fernandenos. 19. McCawley, The First Angelinos, 3; Kroeber is quoted in ibid., 3. 20. L. Mark Raab, “Political Ecology of Prehistoric Los Angeles,” in Land of Sunshine, 23–37, 33; McCawley, The First Angelinos, 3. 21. Ron Elmer, Ghosts of Echo Park: A Pictorial History (Los Angeles: Echo Park Publishing, 1999), 1. 22. Shiffman, “The Los Angeles Prairie,” 39. 23. Raab, “Political Ecology of Prehistoric Los Angeles,” 27. 24. Shiffman, “The Los Angeles Prairie,” 47. 25. Ibid., 44. 26. Gale Holland, “Lessons of ‘Arborgeddon,’” Los Angeles Times, Dec. 15, 2011, A2. 27. Ibid.

Introduction 1. Carey McWilliams, Southern California: An Island on the Land (1946; Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith Books, 1973), 13; Sorkin’s quote is from Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York: Vintage, 1992), 20.

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2. Gertrude Stein, Everyone’s Autobiography (1937; New York: Vintage, 1973; Parker legendarily dismissed Los Angeles as “seventy-two suburbs in search of a city,” quoted in Great Hollywood Wit: A Glorious Cavalcade of Wisecracks, Zingers, Japes, Quips, Slings, Jests, Snappers, and Sass, ed. Gene Shalit (New York: St. Martin’s, 2002), 96. 3. John Buntin, L.A. Noir: The Struggle for the Soul of America’s Most Seductive City (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2009), ix. 4. John Russell Taylor, Strangers in Paradise: The Hollywood Émigrés, 1933–1950 (London: Faber and Faber, 1983), 33. 5. The longer name often cited as the city’s official Spanish original—El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de Los Ángeles del Rio Porciúncula (The Town of Our Lady Queen of Angels of the Porciuncula River)—is the result of subsequent misinterpretation and inflation. For a list of substantiating sources see William Alexander McClung, Landscapes of Desire: Anglo Mythologies of Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 76, 250. 6. The “Baía de los Fumos” appellation was reported in a journal of the Cabrillo expedition, reprinted in translation in Henry R. Wagner, Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, Discoverer of the Coast of California (San Francisco: California Historical Society, 1941), 46–47. The smoke signal conjecture is from William McCawley, The First Angelinos: The Gabrielino Indians of Los Angeles (Banning, CA: Malki Museum Press, 1996), 3. The Vizcaino reference is from Henry R. Wagner, Spanish Voyages to the Northwest Coast of America in the Sixteenth Century (San Francisco: California Historical Society, 1929), 236. 7. Claudia Jurmain and William McCawley, O, My Ancestor: Recognition and Renewal for the Gabrielino-Tongva People of the Los Angeles Area (Berkeley, CA: Heyday, 2009), 81. 8. Smoke of course relates mechanically to moviemaking also, via the smoke machine. 9. Reyner Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984); Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968; New York: Noonday, 1990). 10. Joan Didion, The White Album (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979), 83; Banham, Los Angeles, 220. 11. Mick Jackson directed the film; Steve Martin wrote and stars in it. 12. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (New York: Verso, 2006). 13. Waldie actually calls both Las Vegas and Phoenix “new suburbs of Los Angeles” (Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir [1996; New York: Norton, 2005], 186). 14. D. J. Waldie, “Hot Rods and Hedonism,” Los Angeles Times, Sept. 18, 2011, E16. 15. Although they do not emanate from that Orange County city, the desert winds are now more commonly, and euphemistically, called Santa Ana winds. 16. McClung, Landscapes of Desire, 181. 17. Leo Braudy, “Letters on a Hill,” Los Angeles Times, May 6, 2010, A23. See also Leo Braudy, The Hollywood Sign (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011). 18. Paul Grainge, Brand Hollywood: Selling Entertainment in a Global Media Age (London: Routledge, 2007), 4. See also Allison Trope, Stardust Monuments: The Saving and Selling of Hollywood (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2011). 19. Ibid. 20. Patrick Goldstein, “U. S. Films on a Foreign Mission,” Los Angeles Times, Jan. 10, 2012, D1, D6. 21. For more on Hollywood’s global industrial dominance see Grainge, Brand Hollywood; Paul MacDonald and Janet Wasko, eds. , The Contemporary Hollywood Film Industry (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008); Toby Miller, Nitin Govil, John McMurria, and Ting Wang, eds. , Global Hollywood: No. 2 (London: BFI, 2005).

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22. Ian Frazier, Travels in Siberia (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), quoted in Joshua Hammer, “Cold Case Files,” New York Times Book Review, Oct. 31, 2010, 14. 23. Braudy, The Hollywood Sign, 183–86. The land was purchased in 1940 by Howard Hughes to build a house for his movie-star girlfriend Ginger Rogers. Other entertainment industry donors have included the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, CBS Corporation, Creative Artists Agency, The Entertainment Industry Foundation, Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson, Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall, Norman Lear, the Lucasfilm Foundation, NBC Universal, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Steven Spielberg, 20th Century Fox, Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. and Time Warner Inc. , and The Walt Disney Company Foundation. 24. Waldie, Holy Land, vii. 25. Louis Adamic, Laughing in the Jungle: The Autobiography of an Immigrant in America (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1932), 208. 26. Waldie, Holy Land, 187. 27. Of these wild animals, only the opossum is nonnative to the landscape; see Paula M. Shiffman, “The Los Angeles Prairie,” in Land of Sunshine: An Environmental History of Metropolitan Los Angeles, ed. William Deverell and Greg Hise (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005), 38–51, 51. Regarding the mountain lions, see “Map: Where the Mountain Lions Live in the Santa Monica Mountains,” http://laist.com/2009/06/10/ map_where_cougars_live_in_the_santa. php; and “Mountain Lion Killed on LA Freeway,” www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/01/mountain-lion-killed-on-1_n_944402.html. 28. Approximately two thousand registered Gabrielino-Tongva reside in or around Los Angeles County (www.gabrielinotribe.org/Members/Members.cfm). 29. McCawley, The First Angelinos. 30. As I mentioned in the prologue, the Spanish renamed the tribes according to the missions to which they were assigned. Present-day Gabrielino-Tongva (or Gabrielino/ Tongva) acknowledge this checkered history in their chosen hybridized appellation. 31. William Deverell, Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). 32. The term “bleeding through” is derived from Rosemary Cornella, Norman Klein, and A. Kratky, Norman Klein: Bleeding Through: Layers of Los Angeles, 1920–1986 (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2003). Also in DVD-ROM form, produced by the Labyrinth Project at the University of Southern California, 2003. 33. Sigmund Freud, The Origins of Psychoanalysis: Letters to Wilhelm Fliess, trans. Eric Mosbacher and James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 1954), 173 (my emphasis). 34. David P. Barash, “B. F. Skinner, Revisited,” Chronicle of Higher Education, April 1, 2005, B10. 35. Beth Archer Brombert, Edouard Manet: Rebel in a Frock Coat (Boston: Little, Brown, 1996), 88. 36. Banham, Los Angeles, 57–76. 37. The presidios were located in San Diego, Santa Barbara, San Francisco, and Monterey. The missions consisted of San Diego de Alcala, San Luis Rey de Francia (in Oceanside), San Juan Capistrano, San Gabriel Arcangel, San Fernando Rey de España (Mission Hills), San Buenaventura (Ventura), Santa Barbara, Santa Inez (Solvang), La Purisma Conception (Lompoc), San Luis Obispo de Tolosa, San Miguel Arcangel, San Antonio de Padua (Jolon), Nuestra Señora de la Soledad, San Carlos Borromeo de Carmelo (Carmel), San Juan Bautista, Santa Cruz, Santa Clara de Asis, San Jose, San Francisco de Asis, San Francisco de Solano (Solano), San Rafael Arcangel. 38. William David Estrada, The Los Angeles Plaza: Sacred and Contested Space (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008), 40–41.

Notes to Pages 1 2 –16

2 47

39. McClung, Landscapes of Desire, 27. 40. Ibid. 41. Jurmain and McCawley, O, My Ancestor, 101. 42. Cindi Alvitre, quoted in ibid., 138. 43. Edward W. Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1996), 5. For more on the conceptual basis of “thirdspace” see Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991). 44. Soja, Thirdspace, 220. 45. Ibid., 228. 46. Shifra M. Goldman, Dimensions of the Americas: Art and Social Change in Latin America and the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 89. 47. Laurance P. Hurlburt, The Mexican Muralists in the United States (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989), 98; Philip Stein, Siqueiros: His Life and Works (New York: International Publishers, 1994), 74. 48. Hurlburt, The Mexican Muralists in the United States, 146; Stein, Siqueiros, 75. Stein claims that the Red Squad destroyed Street Meeting shortly after its completion, but the Siqueiros exhibit at the Autry Museum held that uncertainty reins as to whether the mural was destroyed by human hands or exposure to the elements (“Censorship Defied: Siqueiros in Los Angeles,” exhibit at the Autry National Center, Los Angeles, Sept. 24, 2010–Jan. 9, 2011). 49. Estrada, The Los Angeles Plaza, 211; David Ng, “L.A. in Opera’s Libretto,” Los Angeles Times, Oct. 22, 2010, D1, D12. 50. Quoted in Daniel Hernandez, “‘America Tropical’: A Forgotten Siqueiros Resurfaces in Los Angeles,” Los Angeles Times, Nov. 27, 2010. 51. Ruben Martinez, “Uncovering L.A.’s Whitewashed History,” Los Angeles Times, Sept. 19, 2010, A37. 52. Devra Weber, “Foreword,” in Estrada, The Los Angeles Plaza, ix. 53. “Censorship Defied” (see note 48 above) 54. Martinez, “Uncovering L.A.’s Whitewashed History.” 55. Ibid. 56. Joyce Gregory Wyels, “Los Angeles Tropical,” Americas 52, no. 1 (Jan. /Feb. 2000): 29. 57. Martinez, “Uncovering L.A.’s Whitewashed History.” 58. Quoted in “Censorship Defied” (see note 48 above). 59. Ibid. 60. Desmond Rochfort, Mexican Muralists: Orozco, Rivera, Siqueiros (New York: International Publishers, 1994), 147. Siqueiros also consulted architects Richard Neutra and Sumner Spaulding on the problems related to painting on an exterior surface. Their input possibly contributed to his pioneering use of cement, rather than the standard plaster, for the mural’s surface, and an airbrush for its greater speed of application. 61. Hurlburt, The Mexican Muralists, 213. Eisenstein’s theoretical influence is evidenced in a lecture Siqueiros delivered at the John Reed Club in Hollywood, titled “The Vehicle of Dialectic-Subversive Painting” (Stein, Siqueiros, 79). 62. Estrada, The Los Angeles Plaza, 209, 212. Portrait of Mexico Today, originally titled “Delivery of the Mexican Bourgeoisie Born of the Revolution into the Hands of Imperialism,” is the only one of his three L.A. murals that survives intact. The mural, which “expresses a sense that Mexico had betrayed the ideals of the revolution,” was moved to the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in 2001 (“Censorship Defied” [see note 48 above]). 63. Ng, “L.A. in Opera’s Libretto,” D1. The opera initially premiered in San Francisco in 2007.

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64. B. H. Friedman, Jackson Pollock (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972), 11. 65. “Censorship Defied” (see note 48 above). 66. Ibid. 67. Ibid. 68. Quoted in Suzanne Muchnic, “More Than an Activist,” Los Angeles Times, Sept. 13, 2010, E2. 69. As of this writing, the city is considering an ordinance to lift the ban (or moratorium) on the painting of murals on private property. 70. Shiffman, “The Los Angeles Prairie,” 41. 71. The Chumash, as discussed in the prologue, appear to have been displaced by the incoming Tongva from their island habitation off the Southern California coast around 500 b. c. . Their core population thence shifted further north, to where it currently resides, in Ventura County. 72. Matthew Avery Sutton, Aimee Sempel McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). The paperback cover features the Hollywood sign.

Chapter 1 — The Ramona Myth 1. Francisco Palou, “Founding Mission San Gabriel” (1787), in Los Angeles: Biography of a City, ed. John and Laree Caughey (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 54–57, 55–56. Mission construction in Baja (lower) California preceded that in Alta California, where twenty-seven (eighteen Jesuit and nine Dominican) were built between 1683 and 1834. 2. Ibid., 56. 3. Jerry Stanley, Digger: The Tragic Fate of the California Indians from the Missions to the Gold Rush (New York: Crown, 1997), 2. 4. For a more detailed description of the genocidal policies and actions see ibid. 5. See, e. g. , ibid. ; James Rawls, Indians of California: The Changing Image (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988); Carey McWilliams, Southern California: An Island on the Land (1946; Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith Books, 1973); Leonard Pitt, The Decline of the Californios: A Social History of the Spanish-Speaking Californians, 1846–1890 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971); and William McCawley, The First Angelinos: The Gabrielino Indians of Los Angeles (Banning, CA: Malki Museum Press, 1996). 6. McWilliams, Southern California, 21. 7. Dydia DeLyser, Ramona Memories: Tourism and the Shaping of Southern California (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 7. 8. Letter of Jackson, Jan. 22, 1885, quoted in Valerie Sherer Mathes, The Indian Reform Letters of Helen Hunt Jackson, 1879–1885 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), 341. 9. DeLyser, Ramona Memories, 9. 10. Ibid., 11. 11. Ibid., ix; Phoebe S. Kropp, California Vieja: Culture and Memory in a Modern American Place (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 45. 12. Letter of Jackson, Jan. 1884, quoted in Valerie Sherer Mathes, “Helen Hunt Jackson: Official Agent to the California Mission Agents,” Southern California Quarterly 63 (spring 1981): 64–82, 75; letter of Jackson, Aug. 8, 1885, quoted in Mathes, The Indian Reform Letters of Helen Hunt Jackson, 352. 13. Karen E. Ramirez, Reading Helen Hunt Jackson’s “Ramona” (Boise, ID: Boise State University, 2006), 34.

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14. Helen Hunt Jackson, Ramona (1884; New York: Avon, 1970), 15. 15. Kevin Starr, Inventing the American Dream: California Through the Progressive Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 85. 16. Phoebe S. Kropp, “All Our Yesterdays: The Spanish Fantasy Past and the Politics of Public Memory in Southern California, 1884–1939” (PhD diss. , University of California, San Diego, 1999), 16. 17. Kropp, California Vieja, 41. 18. Kropp, “All Our Yesterdays,” 16. 19. Quoted in Pitt, The Decline of the Californios, 284. 20. Ibid. 21. Quoted in William D. Estrada, The Los Angeles Plaza: Sacred and Contested Space (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008), 106. 22. Edwin R. Bingham, Charles Fletcher Lummis: Editor of the Southwest (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library,1955), 9 (quoted in Pitt, The Decline of the Californios, 289). 23. Kropp, “All Our Yesterdays,” 17. 24. Deborah Small and David Avalos, Ramona: Birth of a Mis*ce*ge*NATION, a “Bookin-Progress” video installation, 1993. Cited in Chon A. Noriega, “Birth of the Southwest: Social Protest, Tourism, and D. W. Griffith’s Ramona,” in The Birth of Whiteness: Race, and the Emergence of U. S. Cinema, ed. Daniel Bernardi (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 203–26, 205. 25. www.olvera-street.com 26. Helen Hunt Jackson, “By Horse Cars into Mexico,” Atlantic Monthly, March 1883, 350–63, 351 (quoted in Ramirez, Reading Helen Hunt Jackson’s “Ramona,” 49). 27. Ramirez, Reading Helen Hunt Jackson’s “Ramona,” 49. 28. Ibid., 46. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 20–21. 29. Helen Hunt Jackson, Glimpses of California and the Missions (1883; Boston: Little, Brown, 1907). 30. Quoted from missionary chronicles in James L. Rawls, Indians of California: The Changing Image (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988), 27. 31. Ibid., 43. 32. Jackson, Glimpses of California and the Missions, 34. 33. Jackson, Ramona, 51. 34. Jackson, Glimpses of California and the Missions, 32. 35. Ibid., 35. 36. Jackson, Ramona, 222. 37. Ibid., 223. 38. Rawls, Indians of California, 34. 39. Quoted in ibid., 18. 40. Quoted in Stanley, Digger, 40. 41. Quoted in numerous texts, among them Douglas Monroy, Thrown Among Strangers: The Making of Mexican Culture in Frontier California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 85. 42. McWilliams, Southern California, 33; Stanley, Digger, 41. The problem of recruiting Indians for the missions is also indicated by the twenty-six-year delay between the building of the San Gabriel and San Fernando missions (McCawley, The First Angelinos, 190). 43. Quoted in McCawley, The First Angelinos, 195. 44. Ibid., 199. 45. Stanley, Digger, 45. 46. Quoted in ibid., 47.

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47. McCawley, The First Angelinos, 199. 48. Ibid. 49. Ibid., 195. 50. Quoted in Stanley, Digger, 48. 51. Pitt, The Decline of the Californios, 274. 52. Ibid. 53. Ibid., 251. 54. DeLyser, Ramona Memories, 44. 55. Ibid., 72. 56. Ibid. 57. Ibid., 85. 58. Lewis Jacobs, The Emergence of Film Art (New York: Hopkinson and Blake, 1969), 51. 59. The 2011 staging of the pageant play, which I attended (more on this in chapter 2), identifies the Moreno family as residing in the “Camulos Rancho.” 60. DeLyser, Ramona Memories, 75, 90–91. 61. Ibid., 31. 62. Ibid., 32. 63. Another Gabrielino Indian, Eulalia Perez, former head housekeeper at San Gabriel Mission, provided a testimonio (oral interview) of her mission experiences in 1877. Testimonios related to the Mexican period are legion, thanks largely to the Herculean efforts of Hubert Howe Bancroft, who compiled them in his massive, seven-volume History of California (San Francisco: A. L. Bancroft, 1884–90). 64. William Alexander McClung, “The Anglo Invention of Los Angeles,” in The Literature of Los Angeles, ed. Kevin R. McNamara (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 23–33, 24. 65. Ramirez, Reading Helen Hunt Jackson’s “Ramona,” 18–19. 66. Pitt, The Decline of the Californios, 82. 67. Ibid., 284. 68. Ibid., 80–81. 69. Ibid., 81. 70. D. A. Hufford, The Real Ramona of Helen Hunt Jackson’s Famous Novel, 4th ed. (Los Angeles: D. A Hufford, 1900). 71. See DeLyser, Ramona Memories, 126. 72. Lugo’s description is a composite of accounts quoted in ibid., 128–29. Jackson’s admission of having learned about Lugo’s situation halfway through the writing of Ramona appears in a letter to the editor of the Atlantic Monthly, Dec. 1, 1884, quoted in Valerie Sherer Mathes, Helen Hunt Jackson and Her Indian Reform Legacy (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), 81. 73. Edwin H. Clough, “Ramona’s Marriage Place: The House of Estudillo (Chula Vista, CA: Denrich Press, 1910), quoted in DeLyser, Ramona Memories, 115. 74. George Wharton James, Through Ramona Country: A History of Its Old Missions and of Its Indians; a Survey of Its Climate, Topography, Deserts, Mountains, Rivers, Valleys, Islands and Coast Line; a Description of Its Recreations and Festivals (Boston: Page, 1914). The claim for the book’s authoritativeness is in DeLyser, Ramona Memories, 69. 75. DeLyser, Ramona Memories, 169. 76. María Ampara Ruiz de Burton, The Squatter and the Don (1885; Houston: Arte Publico, 1997).

Notes to Pages 40 –4 8

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77. Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita, “Introduction,” in Ruiz de Burton, The Squatter and the Don, 7–49, 10. 78. Sánchez and Pita, “Introduction,” 7. 79. Ibid. 80. Stanley, Digger, 58. 81. Pitt, The Decline of the Californios, 9; Rawls, Indians of California, 5. 82. Quoted in McWilliams, Southern California, 40. 83. Ibid. 84. Pitt, The Decline of the Californios, 10. 85. Ibid. 86. McWilliams, Southern California, 38; Pitt, The Decline of the Californios, 10. 87. Pitt, The Decline of the Californios, 10, 278. 88. Ibid., 278. 89. Ibid. 90. Noriega, “Birth of the Southwest,”210. 91. Much of this analysis is drawn from Sánchez and Pita, “Introduction.” 92. See Frank Norris, The Octopus (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1958); and Oscar Lewis, The Big Four (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1938). Besides his role in the train trust, Stanford served as California governor from 1861 to 1863 and as one of its senators from 1885 until his death in 1893; he founded Stanford University in 1885. 93. Pitt, The Decline of the Californios, 284. 94. Sánchez and Pita, “Introduction,” 9. 95. Louise Pubols, The Father of All: The de la Guerra Family, Power, and Patriarchy in Mexican California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 3. 96. Ibid. 97. Sánchez and Pita, “Introduction,” 22. 98. Pubols, The Father of All, 106. 99. Noriega, “Birth of the Southwest,” 218.

Chapter 2 — Ramona Revisited 1. D. J. Waldie, Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996; New York: Norton, 2005), 186. Waldie’s reference was specifically to his suburban hometown of Lakewood. 2. “Rededication,” Tidings, July 4, 2008, 8. 3. Claudia Jurmain and William McCawley, O, My Ancestor: Recognition and Renewal for the Gabrielino-Tongva People of the Los Angeles Area (Berkeley, CA: Heyday, 2009), 13. 4. Ibid., 18. 5. Quoted in ibid., 18–19. 6. Quoted in ibid., 136. 7. Ibid., 136–37. 8. Quoted in ibid., 18. 9. Carey McWilliams, Southern California: An Island on the Land (1946; Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith Books, 1973), 29; Victor Dominguez, telephone interview by the author, July 7, 2010. 10. Jerry Stanley, Digger: The Tragic Fate of the California Indians from the Missions to the Gold Rush (New York: Crown, 1997), 90. 11. Friars from the mission era are commemorated by individually named tiles on the chapel floor. 12. See the Rancho Camulos Museum website, www.ranchocamulos.org. 13. See www.historyandculture.com/guajome/index.html.

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14. “Rancho Los Alamitos Historic Ranch and Gardens” visitor’s brochure, 2010. As for the shift from an agrarian to an urban environment, the Lakewood tract-house development, built in 1950 and “the second oldest ‘new’ suburb in the nation” (to the 1946-built Levittown on Long Island), is located just a few miles south of the present Rancho Los Alamitos and on former rancho lands (Waldie, Holy Land, 35). 15. “Rancho Los Alamitos Historic Ranch and Gardens” visitor’s brochure. 16. John Bixby’s brother Llewellyn, already in 1866, had purchased Rancho Los Cerritos, another of the five ranchos carved up from Rancho Los Coyotes. 17. Frances Dinkelspiel, Towers of Gold: How One Jewish Immigrant Named Isaias Hellman Created California (New York: St. Martin’s, 2008), 4. 18. Ibid., 118, 289, 326. 19. Jurmain and McCawley, O, My Ancestor, xv. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid., 107. 22. Ibid., 108. 23. Ibid., 106. 24. Ibid., 111. 25. Seth Roberts, “Before Columbus Day Celebrates Indigenous Roots,” Wildcat, Oct. 13, 2006. 26. Apparently, the 1936 version almost opted for a modicum of realism in casting the part-Spanish Rita Hayworth (née Cansino) as Ramona, in what would have been her debut role. But according to Joel W. Finler (The Hollywood Story [New York: Crown, 1988], 95), when Darryl Zanuck took over as production chief at 20th Century–Fox, “he dropped her from the picture and failed to take up her contract, a move he was to regret a few years later when she became the top star at Columbia.” 27. Indeed, Griffith apparently shot a scene of Ramona and Felipe’s marriage, but this had to be cut “in order to meet Biograph’s standard length of one thousand feet” (fifteen minutes). Chon A. Noriega, “Birth of the Southwest: Social Protest, Tourism, and D. W. Griffith’s Ramona,” in The Birth of Whiteness: Race and the Emergence of American Cinema, ed. Daniel Bernardi (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 203–26, 218. 28. Helen Hunt Jackson, Ramona (New York: Avon, 1970), 249. 29. Noriega, “Birth of the Southwest,” 221–22. Noriega quotes from Roberta E. Pearson, Eloquent Gestures: The Transformation of Performance Style in the Griffith Biograph Films (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 117. 30. Carl Laemmle’s IMP (Independent Motion Picture) studios (later Universal) would steal actress Florence Lawrence from Vitagraph and turn her into the first “official” American movie star in 1910. Pickford herself would leave Biograph Studios later in 1910 to become one of the next big stars—eventually, of course, the biggest of them all. 31. Noriega, “Birth of the Southwest,” 220. 32. Quoted in ibid., 220 (drawn from Louis Reeves Harrison, review of Ramona, Moving Picture World, June 4, 1910, 942). 33. Eileen Bowser, History of the Cinema 2: The Transformation of Cinema, 1907–1915 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 120. 34. Noriega, “Birth of the Southwest,” 220. 35. Quoted in Jurmain and McCawley, O, My Ancestor, 5. 36. Ibid., 6. 37. Quoted in ibid. 38. Quoted in ibid., 38. 39. Quoted in ibid., 181–82.

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40. Quoted in ibid., 181. 41. Quoted in ibid., 6. 42. Quoted in ibid., 49–50. 43. Christine Pelisek, “Casino Nation: Indians and Tribal War over a Club in Compton,” www.laweekly.com/2004–04–08/news/casino-nation/, 1. 44. The historical material was gleaned from the Gabrielino-Tongva Tribe’s website, www.gabrielinotribe.org/TribalHistory/tribal_history.cfm. 45. Pelisek, “Casino Nation,” 1. 46. Ibid. 47. Personal conversation with Stein at L.A. ’s 230th birthday celebration, Sept. 4, 2011. The two hyphen groups are the Gabrielino-Tongva Nation (Dunlap’s group) and the Gabrielino-Tongva Tribe (Stein’s). 48. Phil Brigandi, “More Than Just a Love Story,” program notes in Ramona: The Official California State Outdoor Play, 2011 souvenir program. 49. Ibid. 50. Irene Reynoso to the author, e-mail, Jan. 30, 2011. Other e-mail quotes are from Rachel Morales Jackson (March 9, 2011) and Vincent Holguin (March 14, 2011).

Chapter 3 — “City with Two Heads” 1. Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York: Vintage, 1992), 105. 2. Neal Gabler, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (New York: Crown, 1998). 3. Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of the United States (New York: Vintage, 1994), 24. 4. J. Hoberman and Jeffrey Shandler, “Nickelodeon Nation,” in Entertaining America: Jews, Movies, and Broadcasting, ed. J. Hoberman and Jeffrey Shandler (New York: Jewish Museum, 2003), 15–22, 16. 5. Ibid. The immediate cause of the mayor’s edict was the collapse of a movie theater balcony that killed one person and injured fifteen, including several children. 6. See Dennis B. Klein, “The Movies: Notes on the Ethnic Origins of an American Obsession,” in Jews and American Popular Culture, vol. 1, Movies, Radio and Television, ed. Paul Buhle (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007). Prominent Jewish studio heads in the first decade of the twentieth century include Selig Polyscope’s William Selig, Lubin Manufacturing Company’s Sigmund Lubin, and Essanay’s Max Aaronson, the latter doubling as western star “Bronco Billy” Anderson. 7. Gabler, An Empire of Their Own. 8. Max Vorspan and Lloyd P. Gartner, History of the Jews of Los Angeles (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1970), 4, 32. Frances Dinkelspiel, Towers of Gold: How One Jewish Immigrant Named Isaias Hellman Created California (New York: St. Martin’s, 2008), 46–47, 60, lists the number of L.A. Jews in 1870 at about 350, but this figure most likely applies to L.A. County, where it would still work out to a little more than 2 percent of a total population of about fifteen thousand. See also Phil Blazer and Shelly Portnoy, Wrestling with the Angels: A History of Jewish Los Angeles (Sherman Oaks, CA: Blazer, 2006), 20. 9. Quoted in Vorspan and Gartner, History of the Jews of Los Angeles, 6. 10. Ibid., 47. 11. Ibid., 37. 12. Dinkelspiel, Towers of Gold, 326; Vorspan and Gartner, History of the Jews of Los Angeles, 39.

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13. Dinkelspiel, Towers of Gold, 112–13. 14. Vorspan and Gartner, History of the Jews of Los Angeles, 91; Dinkelspiel, Towers of Gold, 160. 15. Dinkelspiel, Towers of Gold, 127, 92–93. 16. Vorspan and Gartner, History of the Jews of Los Angeles, 40–41, 81; Dinkelspiel, Towers of Gold, 160–61. 17. Vorspan and Gartner, History of the Jews of Los Angeles, 103. 18. Howard M. Sachar, A History of the Jews in America (New York: Vintage, 1993), 131. 19. Vorspan and Gartner, History of the Jews of Los Angeles, 109, 111. 20. Ibid., 111. 21. Steven E. Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German Consciousness, 1800–1923 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), 33, 34. 22. Vorspan and Gartner, History of the Jews of Los Angeles, 110; Dinkelspiel, Towers of Gold, 181. 23. Quoted in Gabler, An Empire of Their Own, 268. 24. Having succumbed to competition from the upstart companies, most of the MPPC companies were either defunct or failing by the time the Supreme Court ruled the Trust unconstitutional in 1915. 25. Gabler, An Empire of Their Own, 271. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid., 274–75; see also Marion Werle, “Jews and Hollywood: The Studio Moguls,” Roots-Key: Journal of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Los Angeles 30, no. 2 (summer 2010): 27–29. 28. Chaplin, in 1918 at age twenty-nine, married sixteen-year-old Mildred Harris, whom he divorced in 1920. In 1924 he married sixteen-year-old Lita Grey, his then costar in The Gold Rush. 29. Leonard Pitt, The Decline of the Californios: A Social History of the Spanish-Speaking Californians, 1846–1890 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 148. 30. Ibid., 6. 31. Ibid., 154. 32. William David Estrada, The Los Angeles Plaza: Sacred and Contested Space (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008), 60. 33. Several contemporary accounts, such as those of Harris Newmark and Horace Bell, claim a homicide count as high as one a day (see Blazer and Portnoy, Wrestling with the Angels, 33; and Vorspan and Gartner, History of the Jews of Los Angeles, 7). Pitt, based on newspaper reports, cites “the astronomical total of forty-four homicides” in thirteen months between 1850 and 1851, which works out to 3. 3 per month (The Decline of the Californios, 149). 34. Quoted in Pitt, The Decline of the Californios, 154. 35. Vorspan and Gartner, History of the Jews of Los Angeles, 7; Estrada, The Los Angeles Plaza, 61. 36. John Johnson Jr. , “The Chinese Massacre: How Los Angeles Covered Up the Biggest Mass Murder in Its History,” L.A. Weekly, March 11–17, 2011, 17–20. 37. Quoted in Estrada, The Los Angeles Plaza, 76. 38. Harris Newmark, Sixty Years in Southern California, 3rd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Riverside, 1930). 39. Quoted in ibid., 76. 40. Bill Boyarsky, Inventing L.A.: The Chandlers and Their Times (Santa Monica, CA:

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Angel City Press, 2009); see also the 2009 documentary of the same name, directed by Peter Jones. 41. Estrada, The Los Angeles Plaza, 74, 77. 42. Quoted in “Henry Ford,” in Hoberman and Shandler, Entertaining America, 51–52. Ford, also in the 1920s, reprinted the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an anti-Semitic canard, concocted by the Russian secret police in 1903 and long discredited, purporting a Jewish conspiracy for global domination. The Nazis, building on Ford’s resuscitating of the Protocols, used them as a primary justification for the Holocaust. Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World-Conspiracy and the “Protocols of the Elder of Zion” (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), 32–36. 43. “Catechism on Motion Pictures,” quoted in Hoberman and Shandler, Entertaining America, 53. 44. Along with oil, citrus, and airplanes, tourism and the movies ranked among L.A. ’s top five industries in the 1920s (Tom Zimmerman, Paradise Promoted: The Booster Campaign That Created Los Angeles, 1870–1930 [Santa Monica, CA: Angel City Press, 2008], 171). 45. Charles Clarke, Early Film Making in Los Angeles (Los Angeles: Dawson’s Books, 1976), 19–20 (quoted in Janet L. Abu-Lughod, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles: America’s Global Cities [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999], 154). 46. Stephanie Frank, “Claiming Hollywood: Boosters, the Film Industry, and Metropolitan Los Angeles,” Journal of Urban History 38, no. 1 (Jan. 2012): 77–88. Long before the 2000s, of course, Hollywood had relinquished its position as the city’s geographical film center—not to Culver City but to the city of Burbank, which is now commonly, if unofficially, referred to as “Hollybank.” 47. Gregory Paul Williams, The Story of Hollywood: An Illustrated History (Los Angeles: BL Press, 2005), 11, 7. 48. Leo Braudy, The Hollywood Sign: Fantasy and Reality of an American Icon (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 17. Braudy hedges his bets on the name’s derivation, but several other sources, including Williams’s The Story of Hollywood, unequivocally credit the town’s naming to Daieda and the Chicago estate. 49. Williams, The Story of Hollywood, 15. 50. From “Hollywood: The Beginning,” episode in the documentary film series Hollywood (1979), produced by Kevin Brownlow and David Gill. DeMille, who was also part Jewish, would have felt doubly discriminated against had she seen the boarding room signs that screenwriter Frances Marion recalled, which added Jews to the restricted list (Braudy, The Hollywood Sign, 12). Adding blacks and other people of color would have been redundant, as their exclusion from “white” areas was taken for granted. 51. Williams, The Story of Hollywood, 73. 52. Quoted in ibid. 53. Sklar, Movie-Made America, 68. 54. Ibid. 55. Estrada, The Los Angeles Plaza, 109–10. 56. Sklar, Movie-Made America, 68. 57. Quoted in Howard Blum, American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, the Birth of Hollywood, and the Crime of the Century (New York: Crown, 2008), 20. 58. Louis Adamic, Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence in America (1931; Edinburgh: AK Press, 2008), 7. 59. Ibid., 17, 53. 60. Quoted in ibid., 60.

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61. Ibid., 133. 62. Davis, City of Quartz, 31. Unlike the seven union activists in the Haymarket case, who were executed under questionable circumstances, John and James McNamara received a fifteen-year and a life sentence, respectively. 63. Ibid., 145. 64. Blum, American Lightning, 22. Otis had risen to the rank of captain in the Civil War. 65. Vorspan and Gartner, History of the Jews of Los Angeles, 93. H. W. Frank, of the Harris and Frank department stores, was M&M president in 1896; Jacob Waldeck, M&M secretary; and Max Meyerberg and D. A. Hamburger, members of the board. 66. Quoted in Blum, American Lightning, 22. 67. Ibid., 59. 68. Zimmerman, Paradise Promoted, 22; Estrada, The Los Angeles Plaza, 107. 69. Blum, American Lightning, 23. 70. Quoted in ibid., 25. 71. Ibid. 72. Ibid., 26. 73. Adamic, Dynamite, 147. 74. Quoted in Wendy Smith, “Towering and Imperfect,” review of Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned, by John Farrell, in Los Angeles Times, June 26, 2011, E9. 75. Quoted in Blum, American Lightning, 4. 76. Ibid., 257–66; Adamic, Dynamite, 166. 77. Marc Wanamaker and Robert W. Nudelman, Images of America: Early Hollywood (Charleston, SC: Arcadia, 2007), 31. 78. Irrevocably marring Griffith’s progressive credentials, the cinematically magisterial but blatantly racist The Birth of a Nation romanticizes slavery, tars and feathers Reconstruction, degrades African Americans, and glorifies the Ku Klux Klan as the gallant “saviors of the South.” 79. For more on Griffith’s social-problem films see Kevin Brownlow, Behind the Mask of Innocence—Sex, Violence, Prejudice, Crime: Films of Social Conscience in the Silent Era (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990); and Steven J. Ross, Working-Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998). 80. Blum, American Lightning, 10, 12–13. 81. Ibid., 255. Blum stretches credulity, however, by insisting, on no clear evidence, that Griffith’s Birth of a Nation “grew not just out of his southern childhood but also from his recent years in Los Angeles. He wanted to make a movie that was a ‘true history’ of the Civil War, but many of his ideas were inspired by the near second civil war he had lived through in that city, the raging battle between capital and labor that had culminated in the crime of the century” (American Lightning, 308). 82. Brownlow, Behind the Mask of Innocence, 432. 83. Blum, American Lightning, 233. 84. Among other sources see Boyarsky, Inventing L.A. , and the like-named Jones documentary. 85. For more on the El Camino Real revival see Phoebe S. Kropp, California Vieja: Culture and Memory in a Modern American Place (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). 86. Zimmerman, Paradise Promoted, 22; The Bargain (Reginald Barker, 1914). 87. Sklar, Movie-Made America, 244.

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Chapter 4 — What Price Hollywood? 1. Anita Loos, A Girl Like I (New York: Viking, 1966), 77. 2. Mark Shiel, “The Southland on Screen,” in Literature of Los Angeles, ed. Kevin R. McNamara (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 145–56, 146. 3. Leo Braudy, The Hollywood Sign: Fantasy and Reality of an American Icon (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 47. 4. Shiel, “The Southland on Screen,” 147. Merton of the Movies was based on a popular novel and Ella Cinders on a comic strip. 5. Braudy, The Hollywood Sign, 49–50. 6. Ibid., 104. 7. A comic rendering of the Star Is Born plot, among several other self-conscious references, grounds the narrative of the Oscar-winning The Artist (2011). 8. Robert Lloyd, “Playing One’s Self Takes an Act of Real Character,” Los Angeles Times, Feb. 6, 2011, D21. 9. Mark Royden Winchell, “Fantasy Seen: Hollywood Fiction and the West,” in Los Angeles in Fiction: A Collection of Essays, ed. David Fine, rev. ed. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995), 165–86, 167, 168. 10. Braudy, The Hollywood Sign, 101. 11. Mayer’s quote is from a newsreel clip in the documentary Hollywood: An Empire of Their Own (a.k.a. Hollywoodism: Jews, Movies and the American Dream [Simcha Jacobovici, 1998]). 12. Narration in ibid. for the first quote; the second is from the film. 13. Average weekly attendance dropped from about ninety million per week in 1946 to about forty-five million per week in 1954, finally stabilizing at about twenty million in the mid-to-late 1960s and rising, only slightly, to about twenty-five million (albeit with a far larger general population and higher ticket prices) since. 14. Richard Lehan, “The Los Angeles Novel and the Idea of the West,” in Fine, Los Angeles in Fiction, 29–41, 33. 15. Gerald Locklin, “The Day of the Painter; the Death of the Cock: Nathanael West’s Hollywood Novel,” in Fine, Los Angeles in Fiction, 67–82, 72. 16. Liahna K. Babener, “Raymond Chandler’s City of Lies,” in Fine, Los Angeles in Fiction, 127–49, 128. 17. David Fine, “Introduction,” in Fine, Los Angeles in Fiction, 1–26, 3–5. Chandler, unlike West and other early noir writers, such as Horace McCoy and John Fante, did not migrate to L.A. to work in film. He was already there, working in the oil industry, and segued into crime writing. 18. Lehan, “The Los Angeles Novel and the Idea of the West,” 33; Babener, “Raymond Chandler’s City of Lies,” 127. 19. The first quote is from Winchell, “Fantasy Seen,” 170; the second (quoted in Winchell) is from Nathanael West, The Complete Works (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1957), 353. 20. Babener, “Raymond Chandler’s City of Lies,” 127; quoted (from Christopher Isherwood, unspecified) in Paul Vangelisti, “Introduction,” in L.A. Exile: A Guide to Los Angeles Writing, 1932–1998, ed. Paul Vangelisti and Evan Calbi (New York: Marsilio, 1999), 7–19, 7. 21. Ibid., 131. 22. Although DeMille actually discovered Swanson, Stroheim did direct her in Queen Kelly (1928), a classic Stroheim extravaganza that almost broke Film Booking Offi ce

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(FBO), the studio run by Swanson’s lover at the time, Joseph P. Kennedy. The Queen Kelly connection is referenced in Sunset Blvd. when this “happens” to be the film that Desmond and Gillis view in her living room, with Mayerling serving as projectionist. 23. Richard Maltby, Hollywood Cinema, 2nd ed. (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003), 67. 24. Susan King, “Heard but Not Seen Is No Longer the Rule,” Los Angeles Times, Jan. 14, 2011, D17. 25. See Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905), trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1960); Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981). 26. Eriq Gardner, “WGA Restores Dalton Trumbo’s Screenwriting Credit on ‘Roman Holiday,’” Hollywood Reporter online, Dec. 21, 2011, www.hollywoodreporter.com/ thr-esq/wga-restores-dalton-trumbos-screenwriting-275911. 27. In the vast and ever-burgeoning literature on the Hollywood blacklist, a good place to start is Victor S. Navasky, Naming Names (New York: Hill and Wang, 2003). Among several documentaries on the subject, Legacy of the Hollywood Blacklist (Judy Chaikin, 1987) is the only one I know that gives a glimpse of Michael Wilson’s posthumous award ceremony. 28. Christopher Anderson, Hollywood TV: The Studio System in the Fifties (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994), 2. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid., 5. 32. Eileen Meehan, “‘Holy Commodity Fetish, Batman’: The Political Economy of the Commercial Intertext,” in The Many Lives of Batman, ed. Roberta E. Pearson and William Uricchio (New York: BFI-Routledge, 1991), 47–65. 33. Vincent Brook, “Introduction: Seeing Isn’t Believing,” in You Should See Yourself: Jewish Identity in Postmodern American Culture, ed. Vincent Brook (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006), 1–15. 34. Jean Baudrillard, “The Ecstasy of Communication,” in Hal Foster, The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (Seattle: Bay Press, 1983), 126–34, 128, 126; also Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman (New York: Semiotext (e), 1983). 35. Baudrillard, “The Ecstasy of Communication,” 126; see also Stuart Sim, “Postmodernism and Philosophy,” in The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2005), 3–23. 36. David M. Boje, “Stories of the Storytelling Organization: A Postmodern Analysis of Disney as ‘Tamara-Land,’” Academy of Management Journal 38, no. 4 (Aug. 1995): 997–1035, 1015. 37. Reyner Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984). 38. S. M. Fjellman, Vinyl Leaves: Walt Disney World and America (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992), 301. 39. Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Culture” (1988), in The Culture Turn (London: Verso, 1998); Edward E. Soja, Postmodern Geographies (New York: Verso, 1989), 246; John Thornton Caldwell, Televisuality: Style, Crisis, and Authority in American Television (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994); John Thornton Caldwell, Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); Jim Collins, “Postmodernism and Television,” in Channels of Discourse, Reassembled: Television and Contemporary Criticism, ed. Robert C. Allen (Chapel Hill: University ofNorth Carolina Press, 1992), 327–51, 335.

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40. Before it was eclipsed by the horror and sci-fi blockbusters of the mid-to-late 1970s and early 1980s (Jaws, Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E. T. ), the Hollywood Renaissance had itself been dubbed the New Hollywood. To distinguish between the two periods, the earlier era has since been renamed. 41. Gerald Mast and Bruce F. Kawin, A Short History of the Movies, 11th ed. (New York: Longman, 2011). In 2011 General Electric sold its NBC television network and Universal Studios to Comcast. 42. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999). 43. Ibid.

Chapter 5 — Bright and Guilty Place 1. Alain Silver and James Ursini, L.A. Noir: The City as Character (Santa Monica, CA: Santa Monica Press, 2005), 12. 2. The Chandler quotes are from Silver and Ursini, L.A. Noir, 12, 14; and John Buntin, L.A. Noir (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2009), ix. The final “femme fatale” quote is from Denise Hamilton, “Introduction: Toiling in the Dream Factory,” in Los Angeles Noir 2: The Classics, ed. Denise Hamilton (New York: Akashic Books, 2010), 11–14, 11. 3. Richard Rayner, A Bright and Guilty Place: Murder, Corruption, and L.A. ’s Scandalous Coming of Age (New York: Doubleday, 2009). 4. Kevin Starr, “It’s Chinatown,” New Republic, July 26, 1975, 31. 5. Jules Tygiel, The Great Los Angeles Swindle: Oil, Stocks, and Scandal During the Roaring Twenties (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 4. 6. Ibid., 5. 7. Rayner, A Bright and Guilty Place, book jacket. 8. Quoted in Gene D. Phillips, Exiles in Hollywood: Major European Film Directors in America (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 1998), 13. 9. L.A. noirs by émigré directors include Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944) and Sunset Blvd. (1950); Lang’s The Blue Gardenia (1953); Preminger’s Whirlpool (1949) and Angel Face (1953); Siodmak’s Criss Cross (1949); Ulmer’s Detour (1946) and Murder Is My Beat (1955); Brahm’s The Brasher Doubloon (1947); Max Ophuls’s The Reckless Moment and Caught (both 1949); Fred Zinnemann’s Act of Violence (1949); and W. Lee Wilder’s (a.k.a. Willy Wilder, Billy’s brother) The Glass Alibi (1946), Once a Thief (1950), and The Big Bluff (1955). 10. Lawrence Weschler, “Paradise: The Southern California Idyll of Hitler’s Cultural Exiles,” in Exiles and Émigrés: The Flight of European Artists from Hitler, exhibition catalogue, ed. Stephanie Barron and Sabine Eckmann (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1997), 350. 11. Quoted in Philip K. Scheuer, “Wilder Seeks Films ‘with Bite’ to Satisfy ‘Nation of Hecklers’” (1950), in Billy Wilder: Interviews, ed. Robert Horton (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001), 15–20, 17. 12. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (1944), trans. Edmond Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), xvi. The quote is gleaned from Ehrhard Bahr, Weimar on the Pacific: German Exile Culture in Los Angeles and the Crisis of Modernism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 36. 13. Bahr, Weimar on the Pacific, 36. 14. Michael Meyer, “Refugees from Hitler’s Germany: The Creative Elite and Its MiddleClass Audience in Los Angeles in the 1930s and 1940s—Film Noir and Orders of Sunny-Side

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Up,” in Festschrift for Julius H. Schoeps, ed. Willi Jasper (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 2002), 361. 15. Ibid. 16. Bahr, Weimar on the Pacific, 26. 17. Marc Vernet, “Film Noir on the Edge of Doom,” in Shades of Film Noir: A Reader, ed. Joan Copjec (New York: Verso, 1993), 1–31, 6. 18. For more on the Jewish émigré noir phenomenon see Vincent Brook, Driven to Darkness: Jewish Émigré Directors and the Rise of Film Noir (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009). 19. Although The Maltese Falcon had been filmed already once before, in 1931, this version, unlike the one in 1941, lacks the darker thematic and aesthetic attributes associated with classical film noir. 20. For more on Leslie White see Rayner, A Bright and Guilty Place. 21. Fine, “Introduction,” 6; Mark Lee Luther, The Boosters (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1923), 8–9, 21. 22. Louis Adamic, Laughing in the Jungle (1932; New York: Arno Press and The New York Times, 1969), 220, 205, 219, 216, 210, 216, 220. 23. Fine, “Introduction,” 6. The “bipolar disorder” notion is from Deepak Narangh Sawhney, “Journey Beyond the Stars: Los Angeles and the Third World,” in Unmasking L.A.: Third Worlds and the City, ed. Deepak Narangh Sawhney (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 1–20, 13. 24. Fine, “Introduction,” 6. 25. Adamic, Laughing in the Jungle, 216, 284. 26. See Sawhney, “Journey Beyond the Stars,” 5. 27. Neither Kevin McNamara’s Literature of Los Angeles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) nor Fine’s Los Angeles in Fiction gives Ryan’s Angel’s Flight the slightest mention. 28. Don Ryan, Angel’s Flight (New York: Bonnie and Liveright, 1927), 1. 29. Ibid., 13, 14, 32. 30. Ibid., 24, 25, 33, 28, 27. 31. Ibid., 49, 44. 32. Ibid., 47, 108, 63, 58. 33. Ibid., 82. 34. Drawn verbatim from Chandler’s 1942 novel The High Window, Marlowe’s fl ip description of Bunker Hill is part of his character’s voice-over narration in the film noir adaptation The Brasher Doubloon. 35. Ryan, Angel’s Flight, 45, 44, 65, 46. 36. Ibid., 191, 166, 193, 166, 139, 141. 37. Ibid., 203, 239. 38. The film was partially reconstructed in 1999 and extended to about 140 minutes. 39. Ryan, Angel’s Flight, 239, 240. 40. http://en. wikipedia.org/wiki/Erich_von_Stroheim. The entry relies heavily on two biographies by Richard Koszarski: The Man You Loved to Hate: Erich von Stroheim and Hollywood (London: Oxford University Press, 1983); and Von: The Life and Films of Erich von Stroheim (New York: Limelight Editions, 2001). 41. Ryan, Angel’s Flight, 240, 271, 296. 42. Raoul Whitfield, Death in a Bowl (1931; Blackmask.com edition, 2004), 14, 7. For more on Whitfield’s life and work see Peter Ruber and Victor A. Berch, “Raoul Whitfield: Black Mask’s Forgotten Man,” www.blackmaskmagazine.com/bm_17.html.

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43. Ibid., 26. 44. Hamilton, “Introduction,” 11; and Raymond Chandler, cover blurb to Paul Cain, Fast One (Black Mask Books, an imprint of Disruptive Publishing, www.blackmaskbooks. com, no date). 45. Buntin, L.A. Noir, ix. 46. Whitfield, Death in a Bowl, 40, 109. 47. Cain, Fast One, 172. 48. Carolyn See, “The Hollywood Novel: The American Dream Cheat,” in Tough Guy Writers of the Thirties, ed. David Madden (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1968), 203. 49. Paul Skenazy, “Behind the Territory Ahead,” in Fine, Los Angeles in Fiction, 103–25, 109. 50. Cain, Fast One, 19. 51. Ibid., 156. 52. Ricardo Romo, East Los Angeles: History of a Barrio (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983), 79. For more on L.A. ’s automotive history see Scott L. Bottles, Los Angeles and the Automobile: The Making of the Modern City (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). 53. Fine, “Introduction,” 16. 54. David Fine, “Beginning in the Thirties,” in Fine, Los Angeles in Fiction, 43–66, 44. 55. Skenazy, “Behind the Territory Ahead,” 109. 56. Fine, “Beginning in the Thirties,” 44. 57. Norman Mailer, “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” in Smiling Through the Apocalypse, ed. Harold Hayes (New York: McCall, 1969), 13. 58. Mark Royden Winchell, “Fantasy Seen: Hollywood Fiction Since West,” in Fine, Los Angeles in Fiction, 166–86, 167. 59. Mark Osteen, “Noir’s Cars: Automobility and Amoral Space in American Film Noir,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 35, no. 4 (winter 2008): e-journal version, 1–17, 2. Adding to Double Indemnity’s—and Jewish émigré noir directors’—distinction, the film was one of seven U. S. films that led French critic Nino Frank to coin the term film noir in 1946. The others, three of which were directed by Jewish émigrés, were The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1941), This Gun for Hire (Frank Tuttle, 1942), Laura (Otto Preminger, 1944), Murder My Sweet (Edward Dmytryk, 1944), The Woman in the Window (Fritz Lang, 1945), and The Lost Weekend (Billy Wilder, 1945). 60. Osteen, “Noir’s Cars,” 2. 61. Ibid. 62. Edward Dimendberg, Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 168, 169 (my emphasis). 63. Ibid., 222. 64. Ibid., 173. 65. Ibid. 66. Tom Wolfe, introduction to Cain × 3: “The Postman Always Rings Twice,”“Mildred Pierce,”“Double Indemnity” (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969), v–viii, v. 67. Several movie censorship studies deal with the PCA’s machinations on Postman and Double Indemnity. A good place to start is Leonard J. Leff and Jerold L. Simmons, The Dame in the Kimono: Hollywood, Censorship, and the Production Code from the 1920s to the 1960s (New York: Anchor, 1990). 68. Osteen, “Noir’s Cars,” 3. 69. Fine, “Beginning in the Thirties,” 49.

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70. Ibid., 55. 71. Ibid. For more on the supermarket’s relation to Los Angeles see Richard Longstreth, The Drive-In, the Supermarket, and the Transformation of Commercial Space in Los Angeles, 1914–1941 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999). (The “Drive-In” of the title refers to drive-in markets, not restaurants. ) 72. See Kevin Starr, Material Dreams: Southern California Through the 1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). 73. Fine, “Beginning in the Thirties,” 54; Janet L. Abu-Lughod, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles: America’s Global Cities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 13. 74. Fine, “Beginning in the Thirties,” 57. 75. David L. Ulin, “The Promise of California,” Los Angeles Times, Jan. 1, 2012, E4; Paul A. Cantor, “Film Noir and the Frankfurt School: America as Wasteland in Edgar G. Ulmer’s Detour,” in The Philosophy of Film Noir, ed. Mark T. Conard (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006), 139–61, 154. Goldsmith openly acknowledges his debt to Cain in an on-camera interview in the “Film Noir” episode of the television documentary series American Cinema (Alan Klarer, 1995). 76. For more on the chronotopal aspects of film noir see Vivian Sobchack, “‘Lounge Time’: Post-War Crises and the Chronotope of Film Noir,” in Refiguring American Film Genres: History and Theory, ed. Nick Browne (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 129–70. 77. Ella Deakers, quoted in Catherine Mulholland, William Mulholland and the Rise of Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 13. 78. Brook, Driven to Darkness, 156–57. Ulmer also made several classic Yiddish films during a mid-1930s to early1940s stay in New York. 79. Osteen, “Noir’s Cars,” 12. 80. Ibid., 13. 81. James Naremore, More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 153. 82. Osteen, “Noir’s Cars,” 13. 83. Abu-Lughod, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, 13. 84. Ibid. 85. Many of Southern California’s large postwar residential tracts were constructed around defense plants, such as Douglas Aircraft in Lakewood and Lockheed in Burbank. 86. A. I. Bezzerides, interview in “Film Noir” (see note 75 above). 87. Paul Schrader, interview in “Film Noir” (see note 75 above). Automobility’s connection to the bomb is made more explicit in the Kiss Me Deadly–inspired Repo Man (1984), also set in L.A. , in which the suitcase with the radioactive material is found, where it largely remains, in the trunk of a repossessed car.

Chapter 6 — Neo-noir 1. Foster Hirsch, Detours and Lost Highways: A Map of Neo-noir (New York: Limelight), 17. 2. Ibid., 17. 3. D. K. Holm, Film Soleil (North Pomfret, VT: Trafalgar Square Publishing, 2005). 4. The satirical comedy The Graduate (1969) took a similar tack (and track) in its opening-credits long take. 5. Reyner Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), 161.

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6. Nicholas Christopher, Somewhere in the Night: Film Noir and the American City (New York: Henry Holt, 1997), 60. 7. Ibid., 27. 8. Ibid. 9. Westbrook Pegler, “Civic Idiot” (1938), in What They Say About the Angels, comp. W. W. Robinson (Pasadena, CA: Val Trefz Press, 1942), 59. 10. Hirsch, Detours and Lost Highways, 169. 11. Ibid., 166. 12. Margaret Leslie Davis, Rivers in the Desert: William Mulholland and the Inventing of Los Angeles (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), 128. 13. Ibid., 101. 14. Ibid., 127. 15. Ibid., 28, 101. 16. William L. Kahrl, Water and Power: The Conflict over Los Angeles’ Water Supply in the Owens Valley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 47. 17. William Henry Brewer, “Water Wanted” (1860), in Robinson, What They Say About the Angels, 25–26, 25. 18. Kahrl, Water and Power, 26. 19. Quoted in Davis, Rivers in the Desert, 26. 20. Kahrl, Water and Power, 14; Jack Hicks, The Literature of California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), quoted in Larry Gordon, “Mining the State’s Literary Vein,” Los Angeles Times, Jan. 2, 2012, A9. 21. See Davis, Rivers in the Desert; and Kahrl, Water and Power. 22. Quoted in Kahrl, Water and Power, 129. 23. Ibid., 33–34. 24. Ibid., 142; Pierson Hall quoted in Davis, Rivers in the Desert, 240. 25. Quoted in Davis, Rivers in the Desert, 139. 26. Ibid., 151. 27. Ibid., 164. 28. Ibid., 202. 29. Ibid., 171. 30. Ibid., 171, 218. 31. Quoted in Catherine Mulholland, William Mulholland and the Rise of Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 5; quoted in Davis, Rivers in the Desert, 107, 8. 32. Davis, Rivers in the Desert, 263. 33. Ibid., 212. 34. Ibid., 211, 212. 35. Ibid., 35; Janet Abu-Lughod, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles: America’s Global Cities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 11, 151. 36. Davis, Rivers in the Desert, 242. 37. Quoted in ibid., from the Los Angeles Times, April 26–29, 1928. 38. John Buntin, L.A. Noir: The Struggle for the Soul of America’s Most Seductive City (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2009), 12. 39. Ibid., 30. 40. August Vollmer, quoted in ibid., 50 (epigraph). 41. Buntin, L.A. Noir, 71. 42. Ibid., 72. 43. Ibid. ; see also Starr, The Dream Endures, 168–69.

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44. Buntin, L.A. Noir, 73. 45. Quoted in ibid., 74. 46. Quoted in ibid., 74–75. 47. Ibid., 77. 48. Mayor Fletcher Bowron, quoted in ibid., 78. 49. Robert Towne, “Preface and Postscript to Chinatown,” in Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology, ed. David L. Ulin (New York: Library of America, 2002), 677–83, 679. 50. David L. Ulin, “Robert Towne,” introduction to Ibid., 677. 51. Steven P. Erie, Beyond “Chinatown”: The Metropolitan Water District, Growth, and the Environment in Southern California (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 41, 47. 52. Morrow Mayo, Los Angeles (New York: Knopf, 1933), 245–46. 53. Erie, Beyond “Chinatown,” 39. 54. Quoted in Mulholland, William Mulholland, 59. 55. Ibid. 56. Norman M. Klein, The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory (New York: Verso, 1997), 247. 57. Erie, Beyond “Chinatown,” 42; see also Kahrl, Water and Power; and Mulholland, William Mulholland. 58. Kahrl, Water and Power; Davis, Rivers in the Desert, 155. 59. Kahrl, Water and Power, 184, 185. 60. Often attributed to Balzac, the line is actually a paraphrase in Richard O’Connor, The Oil Barons: Men of Greed and Grandeur (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971), of a line in Balzac’s Le Père Goirot (1935): “Le secret des grandes fortunes sans cause apparente est un crime oublié, parce qu’il a été proprement fait” (The secret of great fortunes without cause is a crime forgotten, for it was properly done). 61. Erie, Beyond “Chinatown,” 38, 36, 33. 62. The nobility of the one, as the nastiness of the other, are reinforced through their first names: Hollis (holy-s) and Claude (clod). 63. An in-joke also relates to Huston’s casting. Huston had played Noah in the 1966 film The Bible, which he also directed. 64. See Kahrl, Water and Power; Davis, Rivers in the Desert. 65. Frances Dinkelspiel, Towers of Gold: How One Jewish Immigrant Named Isaias Hellman Helped Create Los Angeles (New York: St. Martin’s, 2008), 208. 66. For more on the Eaton/Mulholland relationship see Davis, Rivers in the Desert; Kahrl, Water and Power; and Mulholland, William Mulholland and the Rise of Los Angeles. 67. According to Erie, Beyond “Chinatown,” 33–34, before becoming Water and Power, the Water Department (1903–11) became the Department of Public Service (1911–25). 68. Hirsch, Detours and Lost Highways, 152. 69. Ibid. 70. Statement by Robert Towne at a Chinatown postscreening panel held at the USC School of Cinematic Arts in November, 2010. 71. For more on the monster’s function from a psychoanalytic perspective see Patrice Petro, Joyless Streets: Women and Melodramatic Representation in Weimar Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989). 72. Buntin, L.A. Noir, 12, 13. 73. Ibid., 31. 74. William David Estrada, The Los Angeles Plaza: Sacred and Contested Space (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008), 220–21.

Notes to Pages 142 –1 45

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75. In a gallery exhibit at the REDCAT Theater downtown in March and April 2012, Singapore-born, Berlin-based artist Ming Wong presented a twenty-minute film titled Making Chinatown, in which he wryly comments on the marginalized Asian representation in Chinatown by playing all the main roles himself, sometimes more than one in the same shot. 76. For more on Polanski’s statutory rape case see the documentary Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired (Marina Zenovich, 2008). 77. Michael Cieply, “Swiss Reject U. S. Request to Extradite Polanski,”New York Times, July 12, 2010,www.nytimes.com/2010/07/13/movies/13polanski.html?src=mv. 78. Davis, Rivers in the Desert, 265, drawn from John Walton, Western Times and Water Wars: State Culture and Rebellion in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 231. 79. Klein, The History of Forgetting, 247. 80. Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York: Vintage, 1992), 114. The Times-Mirror Corporation, a creatíon of family scion Otis Chandler in 1975, was sold to the Tribune Company of Chicago in 1998, thereby becoming the first major U.S. city daily not to be locally owned. After Sam Zell purchased Tribune in 2006, the company quickly slipped into bankruptcy, a status in which it remains as of this writing. 81. Hirsch, Detours and Lost Highways, 153. 82. Towne has tipped his hat to Polanski about the ending in several interviews, as well as in two postscreening panels I attended, including the one referenced in note 70 above. 83. Vivian Sobchack, “Cities on the Edge of Time: The Urban Science Fiction Film,” in Alien Zone II: The Spaces of Science Fiction, ed. Annette Kuhn (London: Verso, 1999), 123–43, 135. 84. Ibid. 85. Hirsch, Detours and Lost Highways, 315. 86. Sobchack, “Cities on the Edge of Time,” 136. 87. Ibid., 135–36. 88. The underground factory city in Metropolis is identified in an opening scene with the biblical monster Moloch. 89. Klein, The History of Forgetting, 97, 98. 90. Hirsch, Detours and Lost Highways, 315. 91. Klein, The History of Forgetting, 96–97. 92. Ibid., 96, 95. 93. Ibid., 95; Sobchack, “Cities on the Edge of Time,” 136. 94. Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review, no. 146 (July-Aug. 1984): 53–94, 76 (quoted in Sobchack, “Cities on the Edge of Time,” 135). 95. Klein, The History of Forgetting, 93, 94. 96. Julian Murphet, Literature and Race in Los Angeles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 8. (Murphet’s quote, as he duly acknowledges, is a reworking from Klein, The History of Forgetting). 97. Juliette, “OBD-X LA Block Party,” http://dtlabuzz.com/obd-x-la-block-party/; Dennis Hathaway, “L.A. Planners Ask for Major Limits to Blade-Runner-esque Signage on Downtown Towers,” Dec. 12, 2010, http//:banbillboardblight.org/?p=5858, 1. 98. David Zahniser, “L.A. City Council Approves Array of Lights, Graphic Displays on Proposed Wilshire Grand Towers,” L.A. Times online March 29, 2011.

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99. Quoted in ibid. 100. Paul Fotsch, “Film Noir and Automotive Isolation in Los Angeles,” Cultural Studies/ Critical Methodologies 5, no. 1 (Nov. 1, 2005): 103–25, 103, 104. 101. The Chinese-mob connection is bolstered in a later deal-making scene in a Valley restaurant named “The Great Wall.” 102. The Hammett/Chandler link was asserted in an online video review on the game’s launch. 103. James Naremore, More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 275; Steve Boxer, “LA Noire—Review,” online video review on the game’s launch. 104. Steve Boxer, “LA Noire—Review.” 105. Nicholas A. Christakis, “Jumping to Conclusions,” review of Duncan J. Watts, Everything Is Obvious, Once You Know the Answer, in New York Times Book Review, June 26, 2011, 10. 106. Buntin, L.A. Noir, xii. 107. James Ellroy, The Hilliker Case: My Pursuit of a Woman (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010). 108. The Demon Dog of Crime Fiction (Reinhard Jud, 1993), documentary film. 109. John C. Tibbets and James M. Walsh, Novels into Film: The Encyclopedia of Movies Adapted from Books (New York: Checkmark Books, 1999); Hirsch, Detours and Lost Highways, 140. 110. Hirsch, Detours and Lost Highways, 140. 111. Ibid., 139–40. 112. Joe Domanic, To Protect and to Serve: The LAPD’s Century of War in the City of Demons (New York: Pocket Books, 1995), 121. 113. Gus Russo, The Outfit: The Role of Chicago’s Underworld in Shaping Modern America (New York: Bloomsbury: 2001). 114. See Domanic, To Protect and to Serve; and Buntin, L.A. Noir. 115. Domanic, To Protect and to Serve, 107. 116. Naremore, More Than Night, 275.

Chapter 7 — LAtinos 1. Garci Ordóñez de Montalvo, Las sergas de Esplandián, referenced in Richard B. Rice, William B. Bullough, and Richard J. Orsi, The Elusive Eden: A New History of California (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1988), 8. 2. Helen Hunt Jackson, Glimpses of California and the Missions (1883; Boston: Little, Brown, 1907), 214; Rice, Bullough, and Orsi, The Elusive Eden, 8. 3. Doyce Blackman Nunis Jr. , The Founding Documents of Los Angeles: Bilingual Edition (Los Angeles: Historical Society of Southern California, 2004), 73–109. The December 1781 census also listed, under the category of “Chino” (mulatto/Indian or Filipino), a Filipino Mexican named Antonio Miranda Rodriguez. Though slated to join the original pobladores, Miranda remained behind to tend a sick child and didn’t arrive in Los Angeles until 1783. 4. Los Angeles didn’t officially became a ciudad (city) until 1835. 5. The bulk of New York City’s Latinos hail from the Caribbean; Mexicans and Central Americans predominate in Los Angeles. 6. Joanne Hershfield, Mexican Cinema/Mexican Woman, 1940–1950 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996). The modern American strand is my contribution.

Notes to Pages 154 –160

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7. “Aztec” is the name the Spanish gave to the empire. Among the indigenous people it was called “Mexica” (Meh-shee-kah). 8. Gregory Rodriguez, “In the Beginning,” Los Angeles Times, Oct. 21, 2007, M1, M11. 9. Jacques La Faye, Quetzalcoatl and Guadalupe: The Formation of Mexican National Consciousness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976). 10. Kay Marie Porterfield and Emory Dean Keoke, American Indian Contributions to the World: 15,000 Years of Inventions and Innovations (New York: Checkmark, 2003). See also David M. Jones and Brian Molyneaux, The Mythology of the Americas (New York: Lorenz, 2001). 11. Although it was made in and focuses on Argentina, see the “third-cinema” classic by Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas, La hora de los hornos (The Hour of the Furnaces, 1968), for a scathing indictment of the lingering vestiges of colonialism (and U. S. imperialism) in Latin and Mesoamerica. 12. Monica Schuster, The Effects of Adult Women Education: Impact Evaluation of a Program in Chiapas (Norderstedt, Germany: Books on Demand, 2008). 13. The one-half figure applies if one includes Texas, whose establishment of an independent republic, following war with Mexico in 1835–36, had been recognized by the United States but not by Mexico. 14. Joanne Hershfield and David R. Maciel, Mexico’s Cinema: A Century of Films and Filmmakers (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1999). 15. An irony here is that Arau, a onetime Mexican matinee idol who has acted in American films as well, played a Mexican villain in The Wild Bunch (1968). 16. In the mexicanidad debate, indigenismo vies with hispanismo (glorifying the Spanish heritage) and mestizaje (celebrating the racial mix of the majority of the population) (see Hershfield and Maciel, Mexico’s Cinema, 81–87). Like Water for Chocolate alludes to La Malinche also. When Gertrudis runs off to join the revolution, she initially takes shelter in a brothel, a “sacrilege” for which she is disowned by her mother. 17. George J. Sánchez, “‘What’s Good for Boyle Heights Is Good for the Jews’: Creating Multiculturalism on the Eastside During the 1950s,” American Quarterly 56, no. 3 (Sept. 2004): 633–61, 635. 18. Ricardo Romo, East Los Angeles: History of a Barrio (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983), 3. 19. Sánchez, “‘What’s Good for Boyle Heights Is Good for the Jews,’” 635. 20. George J. Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 3. 21. Largely because of the proximity of the Mexican border to Los Angeles, Mexicans’ naturalization rates were far lower than other immigrants,’ and “even second- and thirdgeneration Mexican Americans continued to express strong attachment to Mexico” and to maintain “old country customs and ties considerably longer than Europeans” (Romo, East Los Angeles, 11). 22. Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American, 4. 23. William David Estrada, The Los Angeles Plaza: Sacred and Contested Space (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008), 142. 24. Ibid., 173. 25. Ibid., 184. Valentino, of course, was Italian, not Mexican; and another of the 1920s Latin Lovers, Ricardo Cortez (né Jacob Krantz), was a New York Jew. 26. David Rieff, Los Angeles: Capital of the Third World (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991), 72. William Estrada, in The Los Angeles Plaza (192), regards Abbott Kinney’s

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Venice, California, resort, which opened in 1905, as predating Olvera Street’s theme park concept. 27. William Wilcox Robinson, Los Angeles from the Days of the Pueblo: A Brief History and Guide to the Plaza Area (San Francisco: California Historical Society, 1981), 95. 28. Estrada, The Los Angeles Plaza, 250–51. 29. Ibid., 141. 30. City Councilman Haimes W. Reed, quoted in ibid., 153 (from the Los Angeles City Council Minutes [1913–14], vol. 94, 562–63). 31. Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American, 9. 32. Ibid., 12. 33. Romo, East Los Angeles, 166. 34. Estrada, The Los Angeles Plaza, 234. 35. Romo, East Los Angeles, 167. 36. Ibid., 166. 37. Estrada, The Los Angeles Plaza, 234. 38. Romo, East Los Angeles, 167. Romo gleaned the military information from Raul Morin, Among the Valiant: Mexican Americans in World War II and Korea (Alhambra, CA: Borden, 1966), 11, 54–56. 39. Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American, 167. 40. Rudolfo F. Acuna, Anything but Mexican: Chicanos in Contemporary Los Angeles (New York: Verso, 1995). 41. Wall quote at the Los Angeles Plaza de Cultura y Artes, viewed in 2011. 42. Chon Noriega, “Between a Weapon and a Formula: Chicano Cinema and Its Contexts,” in Chicanos and Film: Representation and Resistance, ed. Chon Noriega (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 141–67. 43. Sarah Schrank, Art and the City: Civic Imagination and Cultural Authority in Los Angeles (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 1. 44. Quoted in ibid. 45. Estrada, The Los Angeles Plaza, 265. 46. Nancy Cleeland, “Justice for Janitors: Janitors’ Victory Galvanizes Workers Across the Nation,” Los Angeles Times, April 25, 2000, www.commondreams.org/headlines/042500– 02.htm). For more on Justice for Janitors and the L.A. labor movement see Ruth Milkman, L.A. Story: Immigrant Workers and the Future of the U.S. Labor Movement (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2006). 47. For more on the gang situation see Connie Rice, Power Concedes Nothing: One Woman’s Quest for Social Justice in America, from the Courtroom to the Kill Zones (New York: Scribner, 2012). Connie Rice is a second cousin of former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice. 48. As of 2012, Gloria Molina was the Chicana supervisor; Richard Alarcon, Tony Cardenas, Eric Garcetti (one of whose grandparents is from Mexico), Jose Huisar, and Ed Reyes were the Chicano council members. 49. Hector Tobar, “A Valuable New L.A. Asset,” Los Angeles Times, April 22, 2011, A2.

Chapter 8 — bLAcks 1. William David Estrada, The Los Angeles Plaza: Sacred and Contested Space (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008), 250. 2. William Deverell, The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Spanish Past (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 58. 3. Estrada, The Los Angeles Plaza, 204.

Notes to Pages 170 –175

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4. John D. Weaver, El Pueblo Grande: A Non-fiction Book About Los Angeles (Los Angeles: Ward Ritchie Press, 1973), 79. 5. Estrada, The Los Angeles Plaza, 204–5; the Porter quote is in Joe Domanic, To Protect and to Serve: The LAPD’s Century of War in the City of Dreams (New York: Pocket Books, 1994), 32. 6. Loren Miller, “The Failure of the Fiesta,” California Eagle, Sept. 4, 1931, 8 (quoted in Estrada, The Los Angeles Plaza, 205). 7. Estrada, The Los Angeles Plaza, 248. 8. Charlotta Bass, Forty Years: Memoirs from the Pages of a Newspaper (Los Angeles: Privately published by Charlotta Bass, 1960), 2 (quoted in Estrada, The Los Angeles Plaza, 249). 9. Estrada, The Los Angeles Plaza, 248. 10. Ibid., 249. 11. Ibid., 250. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid., 259. 14. Paul Robinson, “Race, Space, and the Evolution of Black Los Angeles,” in Black Los Angeles: American Dreams and Racial Realities, ed. Darnell Hunt and Ana-Christina Ramon (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 21–59, 22. 15. Ibid., 27. 16. Tomás Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 38. 17. Robinson, “Race, Space, and the Evolution of Black Los Angeles,” 35. 18. Delilah Beasley, Negro Trailblazers of California (New York: Negro University Press, 1969), 132. 19. Quoted in Lonnie G. Bunch, “A Past Not Necessarily Prologue: The Afro-American in Los Angeles,” in Twentieth Century Los Angeles: Power, Promotion, and Social Conflict, ed. Norman Klein and Martin J. Schiesl (Claremont, CA: Regina Books, 2000), 100–130, 101 (from the Los Angeles Liberator, June 13, 1913, 1); the statistics are from Negro Population in the United States, 1790–1915 (New York: Arno/New York Times, 1968), cited in Bunch, “A Past Not Necessarily Prologue,” 103–4. 20. W.E.B. Du Bois, “Colored California,” The Crisis, Aug. 1913, 192. 21. Ibid., 194. 22. Quoted in Bunch, “A Past Not Necessarily Prologue,” 106. 23. Quoted in ibid. (from the Liberator, May 30, 1913). 24. Bunch, “A Past Not Necessarily Prologue,” 110. 25. Ibid., 110, 112. 26. Johnny Otis, Upside Your Head! Rhythm and Blues on Central Avenue (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1993), 4. 27. Bunch, “A Past Not Necessarily Prologue,” 114–15. 28. Ibid., 118. 29. Ibid., 119. 30. Robinson, “Race, Space, and the Evolution of Black Los Angeles,” 42. 31. Ibid. 32. Quoted in George O’Conner, “The Negro and the Police in Los Angeles” (master’s thesis, University of Southern California, 1955), 139. 33. Manthia Diawara, “Noir by Noirs,” in Shades of Noir: A Reader, ed. Joan Copjec (London: Verso, 1993), 261–78, 262. 34. Ibid., 263.

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35. Eric Lott, “The Whiteness of Film Noir,” American Literary History 9, no. 3 (autumn 1997), 542–66, 543; Diawara, “Noir by Noirs,” 263. 36. Quoted in Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York: Vintage, 1992), 43. 37. Chester Himes, The Quality of Hurt: The Early Years, the Autobiography of Chester Himes (New York: Doubleday, 1973), 76. 38. Robert E. Skinner, “Streets of Fear: The Los Angeles Novels of Chester Himes,” in Los Angeles in Fiction: A Collection of Essays, ed. David Fine, rev. ed. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995), 227–38, 228. 39. Diawara, “Noir by Noirs,” 269. 40. Ibid., 268. 41. Ed Guerrero, “A Circus of Dreams and Lies: The Black Film Wave at Middle Age,” in The New American Cinema, ed. Jon Lewis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 328–52, 346. 42. Diawara, “Noir by Noirs,” 271; Guerrero, “A Circus of Dreams and Lies,” 346. 43. Foster Hirsch, Detours and Lost Highways: A Map of Neo-noir (New York: Limelight, 1999), 304. 44. Gilbert H. Muller, “Double Agent: The Los Angeles Crime Cycle of Walter Mosley,” in Fine, Los Angeles in Fiction, 287–301, 295. 45. Darnell Hunt, “Introduction: Dreaming of Black Los Angeles,” in Hunt and Ramon, Black Los Angeles, 1–17, 5. 46. Reginald Chapple, “From Central Avenue to Leimert Park: The Shifting Center of Black Los Angeles,” in Hunt and Ramon, Black Los Angeles, 60–80, 65. 47. Domanic, To Protect and to Serve, 176. 48. Quoted in Bunch, “A Past Not Necessarily Prologue,” 119. 49. Domanic, To Protect and to Serve, 176. 50. Josh Sides, L.A. City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 4. 51. Robinson, “Race, Space, and the Evolution of Black Los Angeles,” 45. 52. Lerone Bennett Jr. , “The Emancipation Orgasm: Sweetback in Wonderland,” Ebony, Sept. 1971, 106–17, 108, 114 (quoted in Ed Guerrero, Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film [Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993], 88, 89). 53. Ntongela Masilela, “The Los Angeles School of Black Filmmakers,” in Black American Cinema, ed. Manthia Diawara (New York: Routledge, 1993), 107–17, 108. 54. Other members of the L.A. school’s “first wave” included Abdosh Abdulhafiz, Ben Caldwell, Larry Clark, Jama Fanaka, Haile Gerima, Pamela Jones, and John Reir. “Second wave” members included Julie Dash, Alile Sharon Larkin, Bernard Nichols, and Billy Woodbury (Ibid., 107). 55. Ibid., 112. 56. Guerrero, Framing Blackness, 182. 57. Diawara, “Noir by Noirs,” 264; Hirsch, Detours and Lost Highways, 292. 58. Hirsch, Detours and Lost Highways, 292. 59. Guerrero, Framing Blackness, 182. 60. Hector Tobar, “A Lingering Twilight in L.A. ,” Los Angeles Times, July 29, 2011, A2. 61. Boyz’s often heavy-handed sermonizing is parodied in the ghetto-film spoof Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood (1996). 62. See Josh Sides, “Straight into Compton: American Dreams, Urban Nightmares, and

Notes to Pages 184 –190

27 1

the Metamorphosis of a Black Suburb,” American Quarterly 56, no. 3 (2004): 583–605; and Sides, L.A. City Limits. 63. Laura Pulido, Black, Brown, Yellow and Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). See also two documentaries on black gangs, Bastards of the Party (Cle Shaheed Sloan, 2005); and Crips and Bloods: Made in America (Stacy Peralta, 2008). 64. Tobar, “A Lingering Twilight in L.A.” (partly quoting Mike Davis). 65. Estrada, The Los Angeles Plaza, 265. 66. Hirsch, Detours and Lost Highways, 295. 67. Todd Boyd, “The Small Introduction to the ‘G’ Funk Era: Gangsta Rap and Black Masculinity in Contemporary Los Angeles,” in Rethinking Los Angeles, ed. Michael J. Dear, H. Eric Schockman, and Greg Hise (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996), 127–46. 68. The “revolutionary lumpenproletariat” notion, derived from Davis’s City of Quartz, is applied to rap in Boyd, “The Small Introduction,” 139. 69. Edward J. W. Park, “Our L.A.? Korean Americans in Los Angeles After the Civil Unrest,” in Dear, Schockman, and Hise, Rethinking Los Angeles, 153–68, 154. 70. The 2012 film Rampart deals with the 1997 scandal. 71. Eric Gordon, “Fortifying Community: African American History and Culture in Leimert Park,” in The Sons and Daughters of Los: Culture and Community in L.A. , ed. David E. James (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003), 63–84, 63. The Watts Writers Workshop, started with the assistance of Jewish novelist and screenwriter Budd Schulberg, was eventually infiltrated by the FBI and, much like the Black Panther Party, harassed into submission. A nine-room house where the Watts writers lived and worked, which they named the Frederick Douglass House, “was burned to the ground by one of these informants, and the Workshop was left penniless.” The Workshop, however, “developed a community of artists in Watts and in the Crenshaw area that outlived the organization itself ” (Gordon, “Fortifying Community,” 79). 72. Quoted in Tobar, “A Lingering Twilight in L.A.” 73. “High School Dropout Rates for Minority and Poor Students Disproportionately High,” Huffington Post, Oct. 20, 2011, www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/20/high-shooldropout-rates_n_1022221.html. 74. Sides, L.A. City Limits, 205. 75. Quoted in Chapple, “From Central Avenue to Leimert Park,” 73. 76. Hunt, “Introduction,” 2.

Chapter 9 — LAsians 1. Donald Teruo Hata Jr. and Nadine Ishitani Hata, “Asian-Pacific Angelinos: Model Minorities and Indispensable Scapegoats,” in 20th Century Los Angeles: Power, Promotion, and Social Conflict, ed. Norman M. Klein and Martin J. Schiesl (Claremont, CA: Regina Books, 2000), 61–99, 65. 2. The census information is included in the personal papers of Zoeth Eldridge, contained in the Bancroft Library special collections at the University of California, Berkeley. The information can be viewed online at www.sfgenealogy.com/spanish/cen1781.htm. 3. Hata and Hata, “Asian-Pacific Angelinos,” 65. 4. Ibid., 70. 5. Ibid., 71.

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6. William David Estrada, The Los Angeles Plaza: Sacred and Contested Space (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008), 170. 7. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936), in Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1969), 217–51. 8. Charles Musser, Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 146. 9. Yuko Kawai, “Stereotyping Asian Americans: The Dialectic of the Model Minority and the Yellow Peril,” Howard Journal of Communications 16 (2005): 109–30, 112. 10. Sumiko Higashi, “Ethnicity, Class, and Gender in Film: DeMille’s The Cheat,” in Unspeakable Images: Ethnicity and the American Cinema, ed. Lester D. Friedman (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 112–39, 124. 11. Kawai, “Stereotyping Asian Americans,” 112. 12. Ibid., 127. 13. Ibid., 130. 14. Eugene Franklin Wong, “The Early Years: Asians in the American Films Prior to World War II,” in Screening Asian Americans, ed. Peter X. Feng (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 53–70, 56. 15. T. P. Fong, The Contemporary Asian American Experience: Beyond the Model Minority, 2nd ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2002), 190. 16. Max von Sydow played Ming in a 1980 one-off, big-budget feature. 17. Charlie Chan had appeared as a secondary character in The House Without a Key (1926). 18. Wong, “The Early Years,” 59. Chan’s filmic portrayal was less “uppity,” more “gentle and self-effacing” than his literary version (Ken Hanke, Charlie Chan at the Movies [Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1989], 111). 19. Asians’ complex reaction to Charlie Chan is not only similar to that of African Americans to the Amos ’n’ Andy television series of the early 1950s, but arguably the most objectionable character in the Chan films was not an Asian but an African American. Birmingham Brown, Chan’s black chauffeur in several of the films, was played by comic actor Mantan Moreland with a minstrelsy buffoonishness exceeding that of Amos ’n’ Andy’s lead players. 20. Pradnya Joshi, “A Charlie Chan Film Stirs an Old Controversy,” New York Times, March 8, 2010, www.nytimes.com/2010/03/08/business/media/08chan.html. 21. Angelo N. Ancheta, Race, Rights, and the Asian-American Experience (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006), 352–71. 22. Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 187. 23. Ibid., 10–11. 24. Cheng Huan (Richard Barthelmess), the hypergentle protagonist in Griffith’s Broken Blossoms (1919), is a rare exception to the rule. 25. Sheridan Prasso, The Asian Mystique: Dragon Ladies, Geisha Girls, and Our Fantasies of the Exotic Orient (New York: Public Affairs, 2005). 26. Seth Faison, “The Butterfly Effect,” review of Prasso’s The Asian Mystique, Los Angeles Times, May 22, 2005, R6. 27. Lucie Cheng and Philip Q. Yang, “Asians: The ‘Model Minority’ Deconstructed,” in Ethnic Los Angeles, ed. Roger Waldinger and Mehdi Bozorgheimer (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1996), 305–44, 308. 28. Ibid. 29. Carey McWilliams, “Mecca of the Miraculous” (1947), in Fool’s Paradise: A Carey McWilliams Reader (Santa Clara, CA: Santa Clara University, 2001), 3–78, 17.

Notes to Pages 197 – 202

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30. Nithila Peter, “Unorthodox Mystics: Swans That Flock to the Vedanta Society of Southern California,” in The Sons and Daughters of Los: Culture and Community in L.A. , ed. David James (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003), 211–30, 221. 31. Although the 1946 film version of The Razor’s Edge went the usual yellowface route, casting Cecil Humphreys in the lama’s role, the 1984 remake cast an actual Asian for a change: Kunchuck Tharching. Another major Hollywood guru film from the classical period was 1937’s Lost Horizon, based on the James Hilton novel and, typically, with non-Asian Sam Jaffe as the “High Lama.” 32. For an overview of the New Age guru phenomenon see the documentary Aliens from Spaceship Earth (Don Como, 1977). 33. Chyng Feng Sun, “Ling Woo in Historical Context,” in Genre, Race, and Class in Media: A Text Reader, ed. Gail Dines and Jean M. Humez (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2003), 656–64, 659. 34. Kawai, “Stereotyping Asian Americans,” 109. 35. Jennifer Rubin, “The New Jews?” Weekly Standard, Sept. 1, 2008, www.weeklystandard. com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/015/463ufyzo.asp?page=2. 36. For more on Asian quotas at elite universities see Daniel Golden, The Price of Admission: How America’s Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges—and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates (New York: Crown, 2006). 37. Kawai, “Stereotyping Asian Americans,” 110. 38. Ibid., 115. 39. Ibid., 110. 40. Ibid., 117; see also Cheng and Yang, “Asians,” 312, 343. 41. Cheng and Yang, “Asians,” 306. 42. Ibid., 307. 43. Ibid. 44. The Asian Tigers originally referred to Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan, with later “Tiger Club” members including Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and the Philippines. Vincent Chin’s confessed killer, Ronald Ebens, had second-degree murder charges reduced to manslaughter, served no jail time, and paid only a $3,000 fine. He was cleared of federal hate crime charges in 1987. Civil suits continued into the late 1990s to secure financial damages. For more on the case see the documentary Who Killed Vincent Chin? (Renee Tajima and Christine Choy, 1987). 45. Cheng and Yang, “Asians,” 316. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid., 312–13. 48. Kawai, “Stereotyping Asian Americans,” 127. 49. Mimi Ko Cruz, “On the Contrary: Study Finds Paradoxes in Korean American Community,” Inside (California State University, Fullerton, online newsletter), http//: calstate.fullerton.edu/news/inside/2009/oc-korean-american-study.html. 50. Debra Nunnally Beaupre, “Feeling like a Tourist: Being Black in New England,” vpr. net/npr/140467269. 51. The doll experiment provided crucial underpinning for the Supreme Court’s 1954 (aptly titled) Brown v. Board of Education decision, which put an end to racial segregation in public schools. 52. Cheng and Yang, “Asians,” 336, 340. 53. See Sander Gilman, The Jew’s Body (New York: Routledge, 1991). 54. Daniel Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). See also Daniel Boyarin,

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Daniel Itzkovitz, and Ann Pellegrini, eds. , Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). 55. For more on the Asian-Jewish connection see Jeff Yang, “The Asian-Jewish Connection: Is It Really Kosher to Call Asians the ‘New Jews’?” San Francisco Chronicle, Feb. 25, 2010. 56. See Ellen Jaffe McClain, Embracing the Stranger: Intermarriage and the Future of the American Jewish Community (New York: Basic Books, 1995). 57. Sally B. Donnelly, “The Honor Roll Murder,” Time, Feb. 1, 1993. 58. Edward J. W. Park, “Our L.A.? Korean Americans in Los Angeles City After the Unrest,” in Rethinking Los Angeles, ed. Michael J. Dear, H. Eric Schockman, and Greg Hise (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996), 153–68, 155. 59. Timothy P. Fong, The First Suburban Chinatown: The Remaking of Monterey Park, California (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 3. 60. Cheng and Yang, “Asians,” 335, 337, 338. 61. “U. S. Census Bureau: State and County QuickFacts,” http://quickfacts. census. gov/qfd/states/06/06059.html. 62. “OC Almanac,” www.ocalmanac.com. Other OC locations used in the film, according to the end credits, include Cypress, Newport Beach, Placentia, and Tustin. 63. Interview with Oliver Wang, “The Sundance Kid,” Mother Jones, Sept.–Oct. 2002, http://motherjones.com/media/2002/09/sundance-kid. 64. Amy Chua, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (New York: Penguin, 2011). 65. Quoted in Ryan J. Downey, “‘Better Luck Tomorrow’ Gets People Talking About Asian-American Stereotypes,” MTV.com, April 2004, www.mtv.com/news/articles/1471010/ better-luck-tomorrow-gets-ebert-screaming.jhtml. 66. Author’s recollection of 2009 National Public Radio (NPR) interview. 67. Fong, The First Suburban Chinatown, 3. 68. Rong-Gong Lin II, “Ethnic Coalition Backs Knabe in Face of Redistricting Plan,” Los Angeles Times, Aug. 10, 2011,http://articles. latimes.com/2011/aug/10/local/la-me-countyredistrict-20110810. 69. Park, “Our L.A.?” 157. As mentioned in chapter 8, Koreans suffered nearly half of all property damage in the civil unrest. 70. Ibid. 71. Ibid., 158. 72. See Vincent Brook, Something Ain’t Kosher Here: The Rise of the “Jewish” Sitcom (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003). 73. Wang interview (see note 63 above). 74. Kate Linthicum, “Proposed Koreatown Redistricting Debated,” Los Angeles Times, Feb. 1, 2012, AA1. 75. Ibid. 76. Ibid. 77. Quoted in ibid. 78. Ibid.

Chapter 10 — LAnglos and LAGBTs 1. The documentary Inventing L.A.: The Chandlers and Their Times (Peter Jones and Mark A. Catalena, 2009); Kevin Starr, “The New Power Brokers?” Los Angeles Times, Sept. 12, 1994, M1. 2. Edward W. Soja, “Los Angeles, 1965–1992: From Crisis-Generated Restructuring to Restructuring-Generated Crisis,” in The City: Los Angeles and Urban Theory, ed. Allen

Notes to Pages 209 – 216

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Scott and Edward W. Soja (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 445–46; Julian Murphet, Literature and Race in Los Angeles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 2. 3. “The Power Issue,” West, Aug. 13, 2006, cover, 16–49. The magazine features a top–one hundred list but “honorably mentions” an additional thirty people. I have further revised and expanded the list by updating certain institutional figures (for example, replacing Esa Pekka Salonen with Gustavo Dudamel, and Archbishop Roger Mahoney with Jose Gomez) and including all members of the L.A. City Council and County Board of Supervisors. The division between Jewish and non-Jewish whites is necessarily an approximation, based partly on common knowledge, partly on last name. 4. D. J. Waldie, “The Men Who Made the City,” West, 54. 5. Ibid., 35; D. J. Waldie, Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (New York: Norton, 2005), vii. 6. Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York: Vintage, 1992), 133. 7. Waldie, “The Men Who Made the City,” 54. 8. “Overview of Race and Hispanic Origin—United States Census Bureau, March 2001” (Document C2KBR/01–1, p. 2); “Living in Tehrangeles: L.A. ’s Iranian Community,” npr. com; “Armenian Population Up: Valley, Glendale and Burbank Show Big Percentage Hikes,” Thefreelibrary.com, Sept. 8, 2002. 9. “Selected Social Characteristics in the United States: 2006–2008: Los Angeles city, California.”2006–2008 American Community Survey, United States Census Bureau. 10. Nell Irvin Previn, The History of White People (New York: Norton, 2010). 11. For more on shifting classifications for southern and eastern Europeans see Karen Brodkin, How the Jews Became White Folks . . . and What That Says About Race in America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998). 12. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1994), 53. 13. “UNESCO Statement Issued 18 July 1950,” http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0012/ 001282/128291eo.pdf. 14. Kevin Starr, Inventing the Dream: California Through the Progressive Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 89. 15. Ibid., 65. 16. Quoted in ibid., 89. 17. Kevin Starr, Material Dreams: Southern California Through the 1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 120. 18. Ibid. 19. As with the 1984 Olympics, in which a similar calamity had been predicted, just the opposite occurred. People either went out of town or stayed close to home, rendering freeway and street traffic uncommonly light. 20. Starr, Material Dreams, 120. 21. Manthia Diawara, “Noir by Noirs: Towards a New Realism in Black Cinema,” in Shades of Noir, ed. Joan Copjec (New York: Verso, 1993), 261–78, 263. 22. Foster Hirsch, Detours and Lost Highways: A Map of Neo-noir (New York: Limelight, 1999), 243. 23. Tony Barboza, “Sport Fish Contaminated Along California’s Urban Coastline,” L.A. Times blog, May 26, 2011, http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/greenspace/2011/05/widespreadcontamination-in-sport-fish-along-californias-urban-coastline-survey-finds-.html. 24. A curious irony here is that although Lee castigates Foster for mistaking him for Chinese, the actor who plays him, Michael Paul Chan, is Chinese, not Korean. And Brian,

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who upbraids Prendergast for not realizing that he is Japanese, is played by Steve Park, who is Korean. 25. Long Beach, California, had banked on a similar double dividend in its 1967 purchasing of the Queen Mary ocean liner, now a stationary theme park and one of the port city’s main tourist lures. 26. Daniel Hurewitz, Bohemian Los Angeles and the Making of Modern Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 161. As a resident of Silver Lake since 1978, I have come across these nicknames several times. 27. Ibid., 13. 28. Ibid., 106–8. As I have mentioned, it remains unclear whether the elements or the Red Squad destroyed Street Meeting. 29. Ibid., 108; “Censorship Defied: Siqueiros in Los Angeles,” exhibit at the Autry National Center, Los Angeles, Sept. 24, 2010–Jan. 9, 2011. 30. Arthur Miller, “Laguna’s Art Nabobs Do It Again,” Los Angeles Times, May 8, 1938, quoted in Hurewitz, Bohemian Los Angeles and the Making of Modern Politics, 83. 31. C. Todd White, Pre-gay L.A.: A Social History of the Movement for Homosexual Rights (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 11; Hurewitz, Bohemian Los Angeles and the Making of Modern Politics, 238. 32. Hurewitz, Bohemian Los Angeles and the Making of Modern Politics, 82. 33. Ibid., 83. According to Hurewitz, the Communist Party in Los Angeles in the 1930s was “almost entirely white and easily half Jewish” (208). 34. Ibid., 164. 35. Ibid., 117. 36. Ibid., 127. 37. Ibid., 128. 38. Annual Report of the Police Department, Arrest and Disposition tables, 1911–54 9 (in Hurewitz, Bohemian Los Angeles and the Making of Modern Politics, 140, 141). 39. Quoted in Lillian Faderman and Stuart Timmons, Gay L.A.: A History of Sexual Outlaws, Power Politics, and Lipstick Lesbians (New York: Basic Books, 2006), 109. 40. Ibid., 110. 41. Ibid. 42. Another, interracial gay group, primarily a social club and short-lived, was founded in L.A. around the same time: the Cloistered Order of Conclaved Knights of Sophistocracy, commonly known as the Knights of the Clock (Ibid., 112. ) 43. Vincent Brook and Allan Campbell, “‘Pansies Don’t Float’: Gay Representability, Film Noir, and The Man Who Wasn’t There,” in Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, no. 46 (2003): 20. 44. John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Community in the United States, 1940–1970, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 37. 45. Ibid.; quote from Harry Hay, Radically Gay: Gay Liberation in the Words of Its Founder, ed. Will Roscoe (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), 60. 46. White, Pre-gay L.A. , 1–2. 47. Ibid., 16, 17; Faderman and Timmons, Gay L.A. , 106–8. 48. White, Pre-gay L.A. , 18; Hurewitz, Bohemian Los Angeles and the Making of Modern Politics, 246. The French mattachine comes from the Italian mattachino, the name of a court jester character in commedia dell’arte; and mattachino, in turn, stems from the Arab mutawajjihin, meaning “mask wearer” (Warren Johansson and William A. Percy, Outing: Shattering the Conspiracy of Silence [New York: Hayworth Press, 1994], 92).

Notes to Pages 2 2 1 – 2 2 6

27 7

49. White, Pre-gay L.A. , 17, 15. 50. Jim Kepner, Rough News, Daring Views: 1950’s Pioneer Press Journalism (New York: Harrington Park Press, 1998), 1; quoted in White, Pre-gay L.A. , 6. See also Faderman and Timmons, Gay L.A. , 9–14. 51. Kepner, Rough News, 1. 52. Faderman and Timmons, Gay L.A. , 10. 53. White, Pre-gay L.A. , 14–15. 54. Barbara G. Myerhoff, Number Our Days (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1979), 32; quoted in White, Pre-gay L.A. , 19. 55. Wes Joe, “The Black Cat Bar: Sources and Acknowledgment,” unpublished manuscript, 2008, 1. Faderman and Timmons’s Gay L.A. was the first homosexual history to correct the oversight. 56. Faderman and Timmons, Gay L.A. , 157. 57. The quote is a combination of one from Faderman’s letter of support to the City of Los Angeles Cultural Heritage Commission, May 5, 2008, a copy of which is included in Joe, “The Black Cat Bar,” 5; and another from a letter of support from Mark Thompson, April 27, 2008, in Joe, “The Black Cat Bar,” 4. 58. Le Barcito was sold in 2011. As of 2012 a non-gay-oriented club, renamed the Black Cat, was slated to take over the space. 59. Mark Thompson letter. 60. Faderman and Timmons, Gay L.A. , 113. 61. Anthony Slide, “The Silent Closet,” Film Quarterly 52, no. 4 (summer 1999): 24–31, 31; Hurewitz, Bohemian Los Angeles and the Making of Modern Politics, 146. 62. Quoted in Slide, “The Silent Closet,” 31. The retreat in gay and lesbian representation mirrored the fact, and hypocrisy, of a similar shying away from screen treatment of Jews during the same period, given both groups’ disproportionate involvement, often in the same person, in all facets of the film industry. 63. Hurewitz, Bohemian Los Angeles and the Making of Modern Politics, 147. 64. Vito Russo, The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies, rev. ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1987), 46. 65. Richard Dyer, Now You See It: Studies in Gay and Lesbian Film (New York: Routledge, 1990), 123. 66. Quoted in Robert A. Haller, Kenneth Anger (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1980), 2. 67. Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” in Against Interpretation (New York: Dell, 1964), 274–92, 285. 68. Vincent Brook, “Puce Modern Moment: Camp, Postmodernism, and the Films of Kenneth Anger,” Journal of Film and Video 58, no. 4 (winter 2006): 3–15, 6. 69. Ibid. 70. Kenneth Anger, Kenneth Anger’s Magick Lantern Cycle, vol. 3, videocassette (Mystic Fire Video, 1986). 71. Faderman and Timmons, Gay L.A. , 12. 72. Dyer, Now You See It, 118. 73. P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943–1978, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 124. 74. Kenneth Anger, Kenneth Anger’s Magick Lantern Cycle, vol. 2, videocassette (Mystic Fire Video, 1986). 75. Harry M. Benshoff and Sean Griffin, Queer Images: A History of Gay and Lesbian Film in America (Lanham, MD: Rowan and Littlefield, 2006), 134.

278

Notes to Pages 2 2 6 – 23 4

76. Richard Barrios, Screening Out: Playing Gay in Hollywood from Edison to Stonewall (New York: Routledge, 2003), 316. 77. Russo, The Celluloid Closet, 184–86. 78. Ibid., 188. 79. B. Ruby Rich coined the term in “New Queer Cinema,” Sight and Sound 2, no. 5 (Sept. 1992): 31–34. The “irreverence” quote, derived from Benshoff and Griffin, Queer Images, 220, borrows from Rich as well as Michelle Aaron, “New Queer Cinema: An Introduction,” in New Queer Cinema: A Critical Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), 3. Major British New Queer Cinema filmmakers include Derek Jarman and Isaac Julien. 80. Steve Rose, “Film-Maker Gregg Araki Is Back with a Kaboom,” Guardian online, June 2, 2011, www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/jun/02/gregg-araki-back-with-a-kaboom. 81. Bob Nowlan, “Queer Theory, Queer Cinema,” in Coming Out to the Mainstream: New Queer Cinema in the 21st Century, ed. JoAnne C. Juett and David M. Jones (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2010), 2–19, 13. 82. Manohla Dargis, “Don’t Smirk, Sundance’s Roots Do Show,” New York Times online review, Jan. 28, 2010, www.nytimes.com/2010/01/29/movies/29sundance.html. 83. “Set Pieces: The L.A. Look in ‘The Kids Are All Right,’” July 22, 2010, http://latimes blogs latimes.com/home_blog/2010/07/the-kids-are-all-rght.html. 84. Ella Taylor, “‘The Kids Are All Right’ Puts the ‘Fun’ in ‘Dysfunction,’” July 6, 2010, www.npr.org/templates/story/story. php?storyId=128266739. 85. On practical problems with the food “revolution” see Lisa Miller, “Divided We Eat,” Daily Beast, Nov. 22, 2010, www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2010/11/22/what-food-saysabout-class-in-america.html. 86. Taylor, “‘The Kids Are All Right’ Puts the ‘Fun’ in ‘Dysfunction.’ ” California’s antisame-sex marriage initiative, passed by a small margin in 2010, was struck down by an appeals judge but is still being adjudicated. 87. Several younger lesbians I spoke with made the inauthenticity charge, although they admitted to also getting guilty pleasure from the film. 88. Peter Bowen, “Birthday Girl,” Filmmaker magazine online, spring 2006, www.film makermagazine.com/issues/spring2006/features/birthday_girl.php.

Conclusion 1. D. J. Waldie, “Remembering Downtown,” in Real City: Downtown Los Angeles, Inside/ Out (Santa Monica, CA: Angel City Press, 2001), 8, 9. 2. Jimmy Lee, “A Walk on the Artsy Side,” KoreAm magazine online, Jan. 6, 2010; Lindsay Taub, “Art Weekend Launches in Downtown L.A. ,” Pamela’s Punch online, Jan. 26, 2011. 3. “Downtown Los Angeles: Demographic Study 2011,” www.downtownla.com/survey2011-results.asp; “2011/Los Angeles, California/Median household income,” www. countyhealthrankings.org/california/los-angeles/63. A Center for the Study of Los Angeles survey, based on a broader geographical area, found greater ethnoracial balance in downtown’s residential population (see Rebecca Trounson and Joel Rubin, “Angelenos Feel Safer, Poll Finds,” Los Angeles Times, April 12, 2012, AA1, 4). 4. “News and Events: The Wende Museum,” Aug. 11, 2011, http://downtownartwalk.org/ the-wende-museum/. 5. Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York: Vintage, 1992), 228, 229; Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998). However accurate Davis’s assessment may have been at the time, to hold gated communities as the city’s sociospatial paradigm in 2012 is no longer

Notes to Pages 234 – 237

279

tenable. Although still controversial and no done deal, a mass-transit/mixed-use approach, responding to pressing ecological and quality-of-life concerns (and the dire fiscal consequences they portend), has become L.A. ’s planning model du jure. 6. A definite step back, however, was the dumping of leftist journalist Robert Scheer from the Times op-ed section in 2005, a controversial move that was “balanced” by the simultaneous firing of right-wing cartoonist Michael Ramirez. 7. Robert Gottlieb and Regina Freer, “Keep Moving Forward, Keep Moving Left,” Los Angeles Times, Jan. 23, 2005, M2. See also Robert Gottlieb, Mark Valliantos, Regina M. Freer, and Peter Dreier, The Next Los Angeles: The Struggle for a Livable City (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). 8. Kent Wong and Victor Narro, “Educating Immigrant Workers for Action,” Labor Studies Journal 32, no. 1 (March 2007): 113–18, 113. Yoneda, a Japanese American communist labor organizer since the 1920s, helped form the International Longshore and Warehouse union. Corona, nicknamed “El Viejo” (the old man) by young Chicano activists in the 1960s, had been a prominent union and civil rights leader since the 1940s. 9. Jim Newton, “Labor’s L.A. Success Story,” Los Angeles Times, Sept. 5, 2011, A15. 10. Ibid. 11. Michael Dear, “Rediscovering Reyner Banham’s Los Angeles,” http://dornsife.usc. edu/la_school/in_the_news/reyner_banham.html. Other members of the L.A. School, most of whom were affiliated with either USC or UCLA, included Dana Cuff, Margaret FitzSimmons, Rebecca Morales, Allen Scott, Michael Storper, and Jennifer Wolch. See Michael Dear, “The Los Angeles School of Urbanism: An Intellectual History,” Urban Geography 24, no. 6 (Aug. -Sept. 2003): 493–509. 12. Dear, “Rediscovering Reyner Banham’s Los Angeles.” 13. Edward W. Soja, “Six Discourses on the Postmetropolis,” adapted from a keynote address presented at the annual meetings of the British Sociological Association, Leicester, April 12, 1995,4–5; see also Edward W. Soja, “Los Angeles, 1965–1992: From Crisis-Generated Restructuring to Restructuring-Generated Crisis,” in The City: Los Angeles and Urban Theory at the End of the Twentieth Century, ed. Allen Scott and Edward W. Soja (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 445–46. 14. See “A Museum Without Walls,” www.lmu.edu/cures/Discovery_Park.htm. 15. “The Progressive Los Angeles Network’s 21 Point Agenda,” http://departments.oxy. edu/uepi/plan/publications/21pointagenda.htm. 16. Sandra Ball-Rokeach, “Metamorphosis, White Paper #1: Community Storytelling, Storytelling Community: Paths to Belonging in Diverse Los Angeles Residential Areas” (Los Angeles: Annenberg Center for Communication, 2001), 6. 17. “Mission: Metamorphosis: Transforming the Ties That Bind,” www.metamorph. org/pages/mission. 18. Ball-Rokeach, “Metamorphosis, White Paper #1,” 8. 19. Julie Ajinkya, “Toward 2050 in California: A Roundtable Report on Multiracial Collaboration in Los Angeles” (Washington, D. C.: Center for American Progress, 2012), 3, 10, 5. 20. Ibid., 11. 21. Ibid., 13–15. 22. Edward J. W. Park, “Our L.A.? Korean Americans in Los Angeles After the Civil Unrest,” in Rethinking Los Angeles, ed. Michael J. Dear, H. Eric Schockman, and Greg Hise (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996), 153–68, 157. 23. For the results of their work see Cindy Choi, Ruben Lazardo, and Gary Phillips, Race,

280

Notes to Pages 237 – 2 4 1

Power, and Promise in Los Angeles: An Assessment of Responses to Human Relations Conflict (Los Angeles: Multicultural Collective, 1995). 24. Vincent Brook, “Convergent Ethnicity and the Neo-platoon Show: Recombining Difference in the Postnetwork Era,” Television and New Media 10, no. 4 (July 2009): 331–53, 339. 25. Ibid. 26. Diane Negra, Off-White Hollywood: American Culture and Ethnic Female Stardom (New York: Routledge, 2001), 1. 27. Adam Nagourney, “Los Angeles Stakes Its Claim as a World Art Center,” New York Times online, Oct. 12, 2011. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid. 30. Davis, City of Quartz, 160. 31. A longtime journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle, Kipen has also translated the Cervantes novella Dialogue of the Dogs (2008), written the introduction to Los Angeles in the 1930s: The WPA Guide to the City of Angeles/Federal Writers Project of the Work Progress Administration (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), and authored The Schreiber Theory: A Radical Rewrite of American Film History (Hoboken, NJ: Melville House, 2009). 32. Hector Tobar, “Bridging Two Halves of L.A. ,” Los Angeles Times, Sept. 2, 2011, A2. 33. Ibid. 34. Libros Schmibros moved its Boyle Heights location in early 2012 t0 1711 East First Street, by the Gold Line at Mariachi Plaza. 35. Tobar, “Bridging Two Halves.” 36. George J. Sánchez, “‘What’s Good for Boyle Heights Is Good for the Jews’: Creating Multiculturalism on the Eastside During the 1950s,” American Quarterly 56, no. 3 (Sept. 2004): 633–61, 635. 37. Ibid., 636. 38. Quoted in ibid., 637. 39. Quoted in ibid., 633. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid., 656. 42. Reed Johnson, “A Morsel of Boyle Heights History,” Los Angeles Times, Aug. 27, 2011, D1, D9. 43. Quoted in ibid. 44. A few diehard Pobladores 200 members, minus the escort, made the commemorative trek that day (interview with Los Pobladores president Maria Benitez, Sept. 4, 2011). 45. All quotes and descriptions are from notes taken by the author at the event. 46. Although still floundering in Congress, the California legislature, in 2011, passed a state version of the so-called Dream Act, expanding aid to undocumented students raised in the United States. 47. “U.S. Census Bureau: State and County QuickFacts,” http://quickfacts.census. gov/ qfd/states/06/06037.html. 48. Ms. Benitez provided the information about her relatives’ ethnicity in a conversation with the author after the official celebration.

INDEX

Aaronson, Max (a.k.a. Bronco Billy Anderson), 253n6 ABC (American Broadcasting Company), 95 Abdulhafiz, Abdosh, 270n54 Abu-Lughod, Janet, 124 Acjacheman (Juaneño) Indians, 3 Acosta, Abraham, 202, 203 “Across the Wall” (art exhibit), 234 Acuna, Bernie, 241 Acuna, Rudolfo, 163 Adamic, Louis, 9, 13, 77, 79, 108–10, 218 Adams, India, 94 Adorno, Theodor, 107. See also Frankfurt School Adventures of Rin Tin Tin, The (television series, 1954–59), 95 African Americans, 14, 20, 124, 145, 153, 158, 162, 167, 170–88, 190, 191, 195, 198, 206, 209, 211–14, 216, 222, 227, 229, 230, 233, 234, 237, 255n50, 256n78, 272n19; and black flight, 181, 184; and gangs (see also Bloods; Crips), 183–88, 268n47; and Koreans, 185, 186, 199, 237; and Latinos, 182, 187, 237; and pobladores, 1, 153, 170, 171, 242; Second Great Migration, 174, 175, 187. See also Black Panther Party; Black Power movement; blaxploitation; Central Avenue; L.A. noir; Los Angeles School of black filmmakers; South Central; Watts; individual films Age of the Hispanic, 167–69 Agricultural Association, 73 Aguilar, Christobal, 167 Ahmanson, Howard, 210

AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome), 227, 228 Ainu people, 2 Aki, Michael, 200, 201, 201ill Alarcon, Richard, 268n48 Alien Land Laws, 190 Allen, Woody, 229, 233 Alva, Bea, 56 Alvitre, Cindi, 12, 45 Ambassador Hotel, 114, 179 Ameche, Don, 30, 52, 53 American Dream, 81, 116, 120, 179, 212 American Family (television series, 2002–4), 167 American Federation of Labor (AFL), 79–81 American Me (Edward James Olmos, 1992), 162, 163, 167 América Tropical, La (mural, David Alfaro Siqueiros), 14–16, 14ill, 169, 171 America Tropical (opera, Oliver Mayer and David Conte), 16 Amos ’n’ Andy (television series, 1951–53), 272n19 Anaheim, 95, 203 Andersen, Thom, 17 Anderson, Benedict, 7 Anderson, Bronco Billy (Max Aaronson), 253n6 Andrade, Robert, 240 Angel’s Flight (Don Ryan), 18, 109–14, 260n27 Angel’s Flight funicular railway, 110–11 Angelus Temple, 20 Anger, Kenneth, 225–26

281

282 Anglos (European Americans/Yankees), 4, 11, 17, 18, 19ill, 20, 27, 28, 31, 34, 35, 37, 40, 41, 48, 49, 52, 53, 58, 59, 60, 67, 81, 153, 154, 157, 159, 166, 168, 169–72, 189, 191–93, 198, 199, 201, 209–18, 267n21. See also White Anglo-Saxon Protestants; whites, whiteness; individual films Annie Hall (Woody Allen, 1977), 229 Anti-Coolie Act (1862), 193 anti-miscegenation laws, 154, 172, 178, 191 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 155, 168 Arabs, 145, 211 Araki, Gregg, 227, 228 Ararah Indians, 58 Arau, Alfonso, 157, 267n15 Arau, Sandra, 157 Arbuckle, Roscoe “Fatty,” 71 Arlington Springs Man/Woman, 2, 244n10 Armand Hammer Museum, 238 Arroyo Seco Parkway, 118 “Arroyo Set,” 218 Aschheim, Stephen, 70 Asco (artists’ group), 165 Asians, Asian Americans, 2, 3, 20, 141, 144, 146, 153, 169, 170, 189–209, 212, 213, 230, 234, 265n75, 272n19, 273n31, 273n36, 274n55; and Asiatic Exclusion League, 190; Asian Indians, 190, 196, 201; and Asian Tiger nations, 199, 273n44; and blacks, 185, 186, 199, 237; Cambodians, 196; Chinese, 73, 141, 147, 172, 187, 189–96, 199–203, 205, 236, 238, 242, 266n101, 275n24; Filipinos, 162, 189–91, 196, 199, 201, 203, 236, 266n3, 273n44; and Hong Kong, 196; Japanese, 2, 16, 145, 158, 190–93, 196, 199–203, 216, 227, 240, 242, 276n24, 279n8; Koreans, 185, 186, 190, 191, 196, 199, 201, 203, 207, 213, 216, 236, 237, 273n44, 274n69, 275n24; Laotians, 196; Malaysians, 273n44; as “New Jews,” 198, 202, 207; and People’s Republic of China, 196; and Taiwan, 196; Thais, 196, 200, 201, 203, 273n44; Vietnamese, 196, 199, 201, 203; and “yellowface,” 190, 192–94, 272n16, 273n31. See also Alien Land Laws; Asian stereotypes; Chinatown; Chinatown; Chinese Exclusion Law; Chinese Massacre; Gentleman’s Agreement; Japanese internment; Koreatown; Magnussen Act; Page Act; Vietnam War; individual films Asian stereotypes, 190–208; Charlie Chan, 192–95, 272n17, 272n19; China Doll, 196; coolie, 193, 194, 197, 200–3; dragon lady, 194, 19, 197, 200, 202, 204; Emperor Ming, 191, 192, 272n16; Fu Manchu, 190–92, 194–97, 204; geisha girl, 196; lotus flower/

Index butterfly, 194, 200, 204; martial arts hero, 193, 196, 197, 204; model minority, 198, 199, 200, 203, 205, 205ill, 207; Mr. Moto, 192–94; spiritual guru, 196, 197, 273n31; and yellow peril, 145, 191, 192, 194–96, 198, 199, 207. See also Charlie Chan; Fu Manchu; Mr. Moto; individual films Ask the Dust (Robert Towne, 2006), 146 Astaire, Fred, 55 Automobile Association of America (AAA) (a.k.a. Auto Club), 115 automobiles, 6, 11, 36, 48, 54, 95, 109–11, 114–23, 125–27, 134, 139, 141, 146, 147, 157, 164, 166, 176, 178, 182, 200, 213, 214, 227, 262n87; and automobility, 115–25, 139, 146, 176, 179, 182, 262n87; and Carmageddon, 212; and convertibility, 122–25; 124ill; “noir’s cars,” 115, 123, 146, 170, 214. See also Banham, Reyner: and Autotopia; L.A. noir Autry National Center, 10, 16, 247n48 avant-garde, 112, 218, 221, 224–26 Avila Adobe, 171 Aztecs, 3, 154, 155, 166, 241, 267n7 Baca, Judy, 16, 167 Baca, Lee, 169 Bachelors Anonymous, 220, 221, 225 Back Stage (club), 174 Bad and the Beautiful, The (Vincente Minelli, 1952), 84, 99 Bailey, William, 174, 175 Bakke, Brenda, 148 Bakula, Scott, 165 Baldwin Hills, 180, 187 Baldwin Park, 167 Ballona Creek, 2 Ballona Discovery Park, 235 Ballona Wetlands, 235 Ball-Rokeach, Sandra, 236 Balzac, Honoré de, 264n60 Bandini, Alberto, 48 Bandini, Arcadia, 48 Banham, Reyner, 6, 10, 11, 12, 110, 127, 214, 235; and Autopia, 6, 96, 99, 123, 127, 164, 200, 235; and Foothills, 6, 10, 235; and Plains of Id, 6, 10, 127, 213, 235; and Surfurbia, 6, 213, 235 Banks, Sandy, 234 Baraka, Akira (formerly LeRoi Jones), 176 Barash, David, 11 Barnett, Pastor Matthew, 20 Barnsdall, Aline, 218 Barrelhouse Club, 174 Barrios, Richard, 226 Barry, Raymond J., 216 Barthelmess, Richard, 272n24

Index Barton Fink (Joel Coen, 1993), 99 Bass, Charlotta, 171, 234 Battle: Los Angeles (Jonathan Liebesman, 2011), 6 Baudrillard, Jean, 96, 101, 235 Baxter, Warner, 52 Beals, Jennifer, 177, 178ill Beatles, The (musical group), 197 Beaupre, Debra Nunnally, 199 Beck, Charlie, 187 Beebe, James, 210 Begue de Parkman, Ana, 171 Bel Air, 123, 166 Belic, Roko, 227 Bell, Horace, 68, 254 Bells of St. Mary, The (Leo McCarey, 1945), 47 Belvedere, 159 Bening, Annette, 229 Benitez, Maria, 241 Bennett, Constance, 84, 87 Bennett, Lerone, 181 Bentley, Beatrice, 194 berdaches (“two-spirit people”), 221, 225 Berg, Father Ralph, 44, 46 Berkeley, Busby, 148 Bernal, Famesio de, 157 Better Life, A (Chris Weitz, 2011), 167 Better Luck Tomorrow (Justin Lin, 2002), 20, 202–7, 205ill, 214 Beverly Hills, 87, 99, 114, 121, 186, 211 Bible, The (John Huston, 1966), 264n63 Biddy Mason Park, 233 Big Four (railroad trust), 36, 40, 41, 251n92. See also individual members Biggers, Earl Derr, 192 Bigger Splash, A (painting, David Hockney), 228 Big Knife, The (Robert Aldrich, 1955), 99 Big Sleep, The (Michael Winner, 1978), 146 Biograph studio, 52, 53, 80, 252n27, 252n30 Birth of a Nation, The (D. W. Griffith, 1915), 80, 191, 256n78, 256n81 Bixby, Florence, 49 Bixby, Fred, 49 Bixby, John, 49, 252n16 Bixby, Llewellyn, 252n16 Black Cat (bar), 222, 223ill, 277n58 Black Dahlia, The (Brian de Palma, 2006), 146 Black Dahlia murder (1958), 148 Black Dot McGee’s (club), 174 “Black Korea” (song, Ice Cube), 185 Black Legend, 37, 39, 41, 42, 123 Black Mask (magazine), 108 Black Panther Party, 165, 181, 184, 271n71 Black Power movement, 181

2 83 blacks. See African Americans Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1981), 18, 143–46, 196, 205, 216, 233 Blast of Silence (Allen Baron, 1961), 126 blaxploitation, 176, 181, 183 Bloc of Mural Painters, 15, 217, 218 Blondeau’s Tavern, 75 Blood In, Blood Out (Taylor Hackford, 1993), 167 Blood of the Beasts (Georges Franju, 1949), 182 Bloods (gang), 187 Bloody Christmas attacks (1951), 148 Blum, Howard, 80, 256n81 Body Heat (Lawrence Kasdan, 1981), 146 Bonaventure Hotel, 96 Boosters, The (Mark Lee Luther), 108 Borde, Raymond, 175 Borden, Lizzie, 227 Border Patrol, Anti-Terrorism, and Immigration Control Act (2006), 167 Bordertown (Archie Mayo, 1935), 55 Born in East L.A. (Cheech Marin, 1987), 167 Bow, Clara, 225 Bowron, Fletcher, 135, 149, 220 Boyarin, Daniel, 202 Boyce, Alan, 227 Boyle Heights, 70, 144, 158, 219, 238–40, 280n34 Boyz N the Hood (John Singleton, 1992), 20, 176, 183–87, 184ill, 270n61 Bradbury, Ray, 239 Bradley, Tom, 171, 181, 186, 210, 236 Brahm, John, 106, 259n9 Brainstorm (William Conrad, 1965), 126 Brand, Eleanor Taylor, 176 Brand, Leslie, 130 Brando, Marlon, 100 Brandon, Henry, 192 Brant, Otto, 130 Bratton, William, 187 Braudy, Leo, 7, 83, 285n48 Brave One, The (Irving Rapper, 1956), 94 Bread and Roses (Ken Loach, 2000), 167 Breed Street Shul, 239 Brewer, William Henry, 130 Brick (Rian Johnson, 2006), 146 Bridge on the River Kwai, The (David Lean, 1957), 94, 196 Brigandi, Phil, 59 Broad, Eli, 210, 211 Broad Art Center, 211 Broad Stage, 211 Broken Blossoms (D. W. Griffith, 1919), 272n24 Brombert, Beth Archer, 11 Bronzeville, 195

284 Brooks, Albert, 147 Brother’s (club), 174 Brown Beret movement, 165 Brown Derby restaurant, 90, 114 Brown v. Board of Education (1954), 174, 273n51 Bryant, Dan, 210 Bryant, Kobe, 167 Buck, Pearl, 141 Buena Park, 202, 203 Bullough, William A., 153 Bunker Hill, 110, 123, 144, 240, 260n34 Buntin, John, 5, 6, 133, 148 burden of representation, 206, 207, 216, 226, 238 Bureau of Indian Affairs, 57, 61 Burns, William “Billy,” 79, 80 Bureau of Investigation (later Federal Bureau of Investigation), 80 Burr, Fritzi, 137 Byler, Eric, 200, 201 Cabrillo, Juan, 6 Cadiz, Ryan, 203 Cahuenga Boulevard, 114 Cahuenga Pass, 80 Cahuenga (a.k.a. Kaweenga) Peak, 8, 10 Cahuenga township, 75 Cain, James M., 113, 115, 119–22, 146, 175, 262n75 Cain, Paul, 18, 108, 113–15, 135 Calafia (Amazon warrior queen), 36, 221 Caldwell, Ben, 270n54 Caldwell, John Thornton, 97 Calhoun, Virginia, 35 California, 3, 4, 27, 28, 30–32, 34, 36, 37, 40–45, 48, 49, 58, 59, 67, 76, 79–82, 109, 115, 128, 131, 135, 153, 154, 158, 164, 168, 172–74, 179, 188, 189, 193, 197, 212, 221, 230, 251n92, 278n86, 280n46; Alta California, 11, 48, 248n1; Baja California, 11, 172; Southern California, 24, 26, 27, 34, 36, 39, 48, 54, 58, 59, 76, 81, 105, 106, 115, 121, 122, 135, 139, 153, 166, 171, 173, 197, 209, 212, 218, 221, 238, 240, 248n71, 262n85. See also California Indians; California Jurisdiction Act; California Land Act; California Supreme Court; Californios; missions; Ramona; other organizations California Eagle, 171–72 California Indians, 4, 26, 27, 31, 32, 34, 40, 43, 47, 55, 57, 59, 62, 154, 240, 248n71; Chumash, 3, 17, 34, 189, 248n71; Diggers, 26; Luiseños, 27, 32, 58, 59, 60, 61; and “redface” casting, 52. See also Jackson, Helen Hunt; Ramona (novel, films, and

Index play); Ramona Pageant; Tongva Indians; other Indian tribes California Jurisdiction Act (1928), 57 California Land Act (1851), 36, 48 California Plaza, 240 Californian, The (Gus Meins, 1937), 55 California State Department of Parks and Recreation, 58 California State University, Long Beach, 12, 49, 50, 51 California Supreme Court, 73, 167 Californios, 27, 28, 31, 34–37, 40–42, 48, 49, 55, 61, 69, 158, 166, 168. See also California; Los Angeles: Mexican provincial/ranchero period; Los Angeles: Mexican/American transitional period; Los Angeles: Yankee boomtown period; Mexican Americans/Chicanos; Ramona Call, Asa, 210 Calle de los Negros (Negro Street), 189 Campio, David, 56 Candelaria, Linda, 61, 240, 241 Canfield, Charles, 49 Canoga Park, 98 Cantor, Paul, 122 Cape Fear (J. Lee Thompson, 1962), 126 Cardenas, Tony, 268n48 Carewe, Edwin, 52 Carey, Jim, 100, 102ill Caron, Leslie, 94 Carr, Marian, 123 Carrasco, Ada, 157 Carrasco, Barbara, 16 Carrillo, Elpidia, 165 cars. See automobiles Castillo, Enrique, 116 Castro district (San Francisco), 227 Catalina Island, 114 Catholic Church/Catholicism, 7, 32, 37, 42, 69, 155, 157, 165, 169, 212. See also missions; individual missions and priests Cavazos, Lumi, 157 CBS (Columbia Broadcasting System), 95, 246n23 Celebration, FL, 7, 100 Central Avenue, 123, 173, 174, 176, 177, 179, 180, 187. See also African Americans; individual clubs Central Labor Council, 79 Century of Dishonor, A (Helen Hunt Jackson), 126–27 Ceci Bastida (musical group), 240 Chaykin, Maury, 177 Chan, Jackie, 197 Chan, Michael Paul, 213, 275n24 Chan, Robert, 202–204 Chandler, Dorothy, 144, 210

Index Chandler, Harry, 9, 67, 74, 78, 81, 84, 130, 133, 138, 160, 210, 212, 218. See also Los Angeles Times Chandler, Norman, 210 Chandler, Otis, 171, 210, 265n80 Chandler, Raymond, 84, 89, 90, 105, 110, 113–15, 119, 120, 135, 146, 175, 176, 179, 257n17 Changeling, The (Clint Eastwood, 2008), 146 Channel Islands, 3 Channing, Carol, 59 Chaplin, Charlie, 71, 83, 111, 113, 182, 254n28 Chapple, Reginald, 180 Charisse, Cyd, 94 Charlie Chan (film series, 1931–49), 190, 192–94, 272n17, 272n19 Charlotte Sometimes (Eric Byler, 2002), 20, 200–202, 201ill, 204 Chase, Rev. William Sheafe, 73 Chaumeton, Etienne, 175 Chavez, Cesar, 165 Chavez Ravine evictions (1959), 167, 168ill Cheat, The (Cecil B. DeMille, 1915), 191 Chelsea district, 227 Cheng, Lucie, 198, 199 ChesnuTT, Cody, 201, 202 Chestnut, Morris, 185 Cheung, Karin Anna, 204 Chiapas, Mexico, 156 Chicago, 9, 28, 29, 75, 77, 109, 124, 132, 220, 265n80 Chicano Moratorium (1970), 165 Chicanos. See Mexican Americans Child of the Ghetto (D. W. Griffith, 1910), 80 Childs, Ozro, 69 Chin, Vincent, 199, 273n44 Chinatown, 73, 109, 137, 140, 141, 141ill, 144, 146, 200, 202, 203, 206 Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974), 18, 128–44, 138ill, 144, 146–50, 158, 177, 194, 265 Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), 190, 196 Chinese Massacre (1871), 73, 140, 189 Chinigchinich (Tongva god), 50, 51 Cho, John, 203 Choe, Charles, 202, 203 Choi, Cindy, 237 Cholodenko, Lisa, 228, 230 Chouinard Art Institute, 14, 15, 217 Chow Yun Fat, 197 Christakis, Nicholas A., 147 Christopher, Nicholas, 127 Cinema Finance Company, 106 Citizens Independent Vice Investigating Committee (CIVIC), 134 Civil Rights Coalition, 237

285 civil unrest/uprising (a.k.a. Rodney King riots; sa-i-gu) (1992), 16, 179, 186–88, 207, 237, 274n69 Clark, Dave, 106 Clark, Fred, 92 Clark, Larry, 54 Clark, Mamie, 199 Clark, Richard, 199 Cleaver, Eldridge, 176, 179 Clinton, Clifford, 134, 220 Cloistered Order of Conclaved Knights of Sophistocracy (a.k.a. Knights of the Clock), 276n42 Clough, Edwin, 39 Clover, Samuel T., 136 Club Alabam, 174 Coalition for Human Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA), 237 Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking (CAST), 236, 237 Cocoanut Grove (club), 114 Cody, Iron Eyes, 46 Cohen, Mickey, 148, 149 Cohn, Harry, 99, 113 Cold War, 95, 124, 125, 128, 134, 187, 196, 214, 218, 220 Colegrove, 75 Collateral (Michael Mann, 2004), 146 Colorado River, 131 Colors (Dennis Hopper, 1988), 167 Columbia studios, 8, 95, 252n26 Columbus, Christopher, 52 Combination, the, 133–35, 137, 138, 219, 220 Comcast, 259n41 Committee of Twenty-five, 209–10 communism, Communist Party, 14, 94, 142, 149, 160, 162, 213, 276n33, 279n8; and homosexuals, 219–21. See also Hay, Harry Community Coalition (CoCo), 237 Concordia Club, 69, 70 Confidential (magazine), 148 Confucianism, 192, 193, 199 Conte, David, 16 Coolidge, Calvin, 131 Cooper, Clarence, 176 Corner in Wheat, A (D. W. Griffith, 1909), 80 Cornero, Tony, 135 Cornish, Jack, 174 Corona, Bert, 234, 279n8 Corova Indians, 58 Cortez, Hernan, 154 Cortez, Martin, 155 Cortez, Ricardo, 267n25 Cosby Show, The (television series, 1984–92), 237

286 Cotton Comes to Harlem (Chester Himes), 176 counterculture, 126, 213 Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO), 181 Crabbe, Buster, 192 Crane, Cheryl, 148 Cranston, Bryan, 147 Crash (Paul Haggis, 2005), 18, 146 Crawford, Charlie, 106 Crawford, Joan, 94 Cregar, Laird, 224 Crenshaw Boulevard, 185, 187, 236, 271n71 Cricket Club, 174 Crips (gang), 186, 187 Crisis, The (magazine), 173 Crisp, Donald, 52 Crocker, Charles, 36. See also Big Four (railroad trust) Cromwell, James, 149, 149ill Cronyn, Hume, 121 Crosby, Bing, 47 Crouch, Stuff, 174 Crowley. Aleister, 226 Cruise, Tom, 146 Cuff, Brian, 279n11 Culver City, 54, 74, 75, 234, 255n46 Cypress, 274n62 Da Costa, Yaya, 230 Dall, John, 224 Dana, Richard Henry, 37, 41 Dandridge, Dorothy, 238 Dangerous to Know (Robert Florey, 1938), 194 Danses Indigenes (monument, Judy Baca), 168 Dargis, Manohla, 229 Darrow, Clarence, 79–81 Dart, Justin, 210 Dash, Julie, 270n54 Daughter of Shanghai (Robert Florey, 1937), 195 Daughter of the Dragon (Lloyd Corrigan, 1931), 195 Daughters of the American Revolution, 58 Davis, Margaret, 132 Davis, Mike, 13, 67, 143, 185, 186, 210, 218, 234, 235, 278n5 Davis, James, 133–35, 149, 220 Day of the Locust, The (John Schlesinger, 1976), 89 Day Without a Mexican, A (Sergio Arau, 2004), 167 Dear, Michael, 235 Dearborn Independent (newspaper), 73

Index Death in a Bowl (Raoul Whitfield), 18, 108, 113, 114 Debs, Eugene, 79 DeGeneres, Ellen, 226 de la Guerra family, 42 Delaney, Martin, 180 del Rio, Dolores, 52, 55, 238 del Valle, Reginaldo, 34–36 del Valle, Susana Carmen, 35 del Valle, Ygnacio, 34–36 DeLyser, Dydia, 36, 39 De Mille, Agnes, 76 DeMille, Cecil B., 76, 90–92, 97, 99, 100, 106, 191, 257n22 De Mille, William, 76 Dennis, Nick, 123 dernier tournant, Le (Pierre Chenal, 1939), 120 Detour (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1945), 18, 122, 123, 259n9 Deverell, William, 1, 10, 234 Devil in a Blue Dress (Walter Mosley), 176, 177 Devil in a Blue Dress (Carl Franklin, 1995), 20, 146, 177–80, 178ill, 185 Diawara, Manthia, 175, 183, 213 Dickens, Charles, 91 Didion, Joan, 6 Diego, Juan, 155 Dietrich, Marlene, 87, 224 Dimendberg, Edward, 116, 118, 144 Disney, Walt, 7, 100, 148, 217. See also Walt Disney Studios Disneyland (television series, 1954–58, and under different names through 2008), 95 Disneyland/Disney World, 7, 95–97, 188 Dodger Stadium, 167 Doheny, Edward, 49, 210 Doherty, Frank, 134 Domingo, Placido, 169 Dominguez, Victor, 46 D’Onofrio, Vincent, 99 Donovan (singer), 197 Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Juice in the Hood (Shawn and Marlon Wayans, 1996), 270n61 Donye, Cheryl, 227 Doom Generation, The (Gregg Araki, 1995), 227 Dorothy Leavey Center for the Study of Los Angeles, 235 Do the Right Thing (Spike Lee, 1989), 183 Double Indemnity (James M. Cain), 113, 119, 120 Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944), 18, 115–20, 117ill, 122, 123, 146, 212, 259n9, 261n59, 261n67

Index Double Vee (club), 174 Douglas, Kirk, 99 Douglas, Michael, 212, 215ill Douglas Aircraft, 262n85 Down Beat (club), 174 Downey, John, 69, 210 Downtown Art Walk, 233, 234 Downtown Los Angeles, 30, 43, 58, 67, 70, 73, 75, 77, 80, 81, 96, 110, 114, 116, 127, 144, 145, 158, 159, 162, 167, 168, 174, 195, 203, 210, 217, 233, 235, 240, 241, 265n75, 278n3; revival, 145, 233, 239 Dragnet (television series, 1951–59), 148 Drake, Claudia, 122 Dream Act (CA, 2011), 280n45 Dream Center, 20, 21ill, 169 Drive (Nicolas Winding Refn, 2012), 18, 146, 147 Du Bois, W.E.B., 173, 176, 179, 180, 185 Dudamel, Gustavo, 169, 275n3 Duel in the Sun (King Vidor, 1946), 95 Dunaway, Faye, 137, 138ill Dunbar Hotel (a.k.a. Hotel Somerville), 174, 179–80 Dunlap, Sam, 57, 253n47 Durazo, Maria Elena, 169 Duvall, James, 227 Duvall, Robert, 213 Earl, Edwin, 130 Earthquake (Mark Robson, 1974), 6 East Los Angeles/Eastside, 158, 159, 162, 165, 167, 236, 238–40 Eastside Luvers (musical group), 240 Eaton, Fred, 130, 136–38 Ebens, Ronald, 273n44 Ebert, Roger, 206 Echo Park (a.k.a. Echo Parque), 20, 217, 229–33 Edendale (a.k.a. Swish Alps), 217–19, 223, 229, 232 Edison Company, 190, 191 Edmonds, Jefferson, 172 Edwards, Rev. J. E., 172 8 1/2 (Federico Fellini, 1963), 212 Eisenstein, Sergei, 16, 182, 247n61 Eisner, Michael, 210 El Camino Real, 11, 33, 81 El Dorado, 36, 55 Ella Cinders (Alfred E. Green, 1927), 83, 257n4 Ellroy, James, 147, 148 El Norte (Gregory Nava, 1983), 166, 167 Eltinge, Julian, 222, 223 Elysian Park, 61 Emmerich, Noah, 100 Erie, Steven P., 135, 136 Essanay company, 217, 253n6

287 Establishment Coalition, 237 Estrada, William David, 12, 159, 170, 267n26 Evans, Robert Executive Order 8802 (banning racial discrimination in the defense industry) (1941), 174 Executive Order 9066 (authorizing Japanese internment) (1942), 195 Eyde, Edythe (a.k.a. Lisa Ben), 221, 225 Faderman, Lillian, 222, 223, 277n55 Fairbanks, Douglas, 71 Falling Down (Joel Schumacher, 1992), 20, 182, 212–17, 215ill Famous Players in Feature Plays (film company), 113 Fan, Roger, 203, 206ill Fanaka, Jama, 270n54 Fante, John, 146, 239, 257n17 Farewell, My Lovely (Dick Richards, 1975), 146 Fast One (Paul Cain), 18, 108, 113–15, 120, 135 Father Knows Best (television series, 1954–63), 95 Faulkner, William, 239 Federal Fair Housing Act (1968), 174, 181 Federal Housing Authority, 239 Ferenz, F. K., 13, 14 Fernandez, Emilio, 157, 158 Figueroa, Jose, 48 Fillmore, Millard, 57 Film Johnnie, A (George Nichols, 1914), 83 film noir. See L.A. noir Fine, David, 89, 109, 115, 120, 121 Fireworks (Kenneth Anger, 1947), 20, 225 First National Bank, 106 Fishburne, Laurence, 184 Fitts, Buron, 134 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 89 FitzSimmons, Margaret, 279n11 Five Graves to Cairo (Billy Wilder, 1943), 112 (500) Days of Summer (Mark Webb, 2009), 233 Flash Gordon (film serial, Frederick Stephani Taylor, 1936), 192 Flash Gordon (Mike Hodges, 1980), 272n16 Flint, Motley, 106 Flying Down to Rio (Thornton Freeland, 1933), 55 Fontanelles (musical group), 204 Foothill High School, 202 Ford, Gerald, 44 Ford, Harrison, 144 Ford, Henry, 73, 235, 255n42; and Fordism, 235 Ford, John, 38 Ford, John Anson, 134

288 Foreman, Carl, 94 Fotsch, Masson, 146 Four Ladies statue (a.k.a. La Brea Gateway), 237, 238 Fox Movie Channel, 193 Foxx, Jamie, 146 Franju, Georges, 182 Frank, H. W., 68, 256n65 Frank, Nino, 261n59 Frank, Stephanie, 74 Frankfurt School, 146. See also Adorno, Theodor; Horkheimer, Max Franklin Hills, 217 Frazier, Ian, 8 Frederick Douglass House, 271 Fremont High School riots (1941), 174 Freud, Sigmund, 11, 94, 140, 141 Frias, Eddie, 214 Friedman, B. H., 16 From Dusk to Dawn (Frank Wolfe, 1913), 81 Fullerton, 203 Fu Manchu (film series, 1929–32; 1940; 1956; 1965–69, 1980), 190, 191, 192, 194 G., Little Willie, 240 Gabler, Neal, 70 Gabrielino Indians. See Tongva Indians Gabrielino-Tongva Nation, 57, 253n47 Gabrielino/Tongva Tribal Council of San Gabriel, 44, 57, 246n30 Gabrielino-Tongva Tribe, 46, 57, 61, 240, 246n28, 246n30, 253n47 Gago, Jenny, 158 Gallagher, Peter, 98 Garbo, Greta, 85, 113, 197, 224 Garcetti, Eric, 224ill, 268n48 Garcia, Andreas Jr., 157 Garcia, Jesse, 231 Garden Grove, 203 Gardner, Ava, 94, 148 Garfield, John, 120, 121ill Garland, Judy, 84 Garrido, Joaquin, 230 Gartner, Lloyd, 69 Garvey, Marcus, 180 Gasol, Pao, 167 Gates, Darryl, 184, 186, 187, 216 Gatto, Mike, 224ill Gay Defender, The (Gregory La Cava, 1927), 37 Geer, Will, 219 Gehry, Frank, 145, 211 General Electric (GE), 99, 259n41 Gentleman’s Agreement (1907), 190 Gentleman’s Agreement (Elia Kazan, 1947), 55 gentrification, 231–33

Index George Lopez Show, The (television series, 2002–7), 167 Gerber, Henry, 220 Gerima, Haile, 270n54 Gernreich, Rudi, 221 Getty Center, Getty Foundation, 15, 238 Gilmore, Tom, 145 Glass Key, The (Stuart Heisler, 1942), 108 Glatzer, Richard, 231, 232 Gleason, Adda, 52 Glendale, 118, 211, 236 Glimpses of California and the Missions (Helen Hunt Jackson), 27, 31, 32, 46 Goddess, The (John Cromwell, 1958), 84 Goines, Donald (pseud. Al C. Clark), 176 Going My Way (Leo McCarey, 1944), 47 Gold Rush, Californian, 29, 72, 189 Gold Rush, The (Charlie Chaplin, 1925), 254n28 Goldsmith, Martin, 122, 262n75 Gomez, Bishop Jose Horacio, 169, 275n3 Gone with the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939), 95 Gonzales, Linda, 45 González, Chalo, 231 Good Earth, The (Sidney Franklin, 1938), 141 Gooding, Cuba Jr., 185 Good Neighbor Policy, 55 Gosling, Ryan, 146 Graduate, The (Mike Nichols, 1969), 262n4 Graham, Sheilah, 89 Granger, Farley, 224 Grant, Richard E., 98, 98ill Grapes of Wrath, The (John Ford, 1940), 55 Grauman’s Chinese Theater, 84, 85, 90, 113 Great Depression, 55, 70, 83, 87, 88, 122, 125, 159, 160, 174, 218–20 Great Los Angeles Bubble (1920s), 105, 111 Greed (Erich von Stroheim, 1924), 111, 112 Greek George (early L.A. settler), 75 Grey, Lita, 254n28 Griffith, D. W., 29, 35, 44, 52, 80, 191, 217, 256n78, 256n81 Griffith Park, 10 Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? (Stanley Kramer, 1967), 229 Guevara, Ruben, 240 Hagen, Jean, 93 Hahn, James, 187 Hahn, Kenneth, 187 Hamburger, D. A., 256n65 Hamilton, Denise, 113 Hamilton, Neil, 84 Hammett, Dashiell, 108, 135, 266n102 Hangover Square (John Brahm, 1945), 224

Index Harlan, Kenneth, 194 Harlins, Latasha, 185, 199 Harriman, E. H., 130 Harriman, Job, 79–81, 218, 234 Harris, Ed, 100 Harris, Genethia Hudley, 188 Harris, Leopold, 68 Harris, Mildred, 254n28 Harris and Frank (department store), 256n65 Harrison, Louis Reeves, 68 Hart, William S., 81 Hay, Harry, 218–26, 219ill, 234. See also Mattachine Society Hayakawa, Sessue, 190, 191, 196 Haymarket Riots (Chicago, 1887), 77, 256n62 Haynes, Todd, 227 Hays, Will, 71–74, 72ill, 114 Haywood, Gar Anthony, 176 Hayworth, Rita, 94, 148, 252n26 Healy, Dorothy, 234 Heard, Nathan, 176 Hearst, William Randolph, 77, 111 Hefner, Hugh, 9 Hellman, Herman, 68 Hellman, Isaias, 49, 50ill, 68, 69, 138, 210 Hemet, 30, 43, 58 Hemet Area Museum, 58 Hepburn, Audrey, 94 Hepburn, Katharine, 194 Herberg, Will, 69 Hernandez, Cesaria, 30ill, 58 Hernandez, Jonathan, 160 Hernandez, Judith, 165 Hershey, Barbara, 213 Hidalgo y Costilla, Father Miguel, 156 Higashi, Sumiko, 191 Hillcrest Country Club, 70, 71 Hillerman, John, 139 Himes, Chester, 175–77, 179, 183 Hines, Desi Arnez III, 184 Hiroshima (musical group), 102 Hirsch, Foster, 126, 128, 139, 143, 148, 179, 183 Hispanics. See Latinos Historical Society of Southern California, 171 Historic Filipino Town, 203 History Walk, 240 Hitler, Adolf, 106, 107, 143, 206 Hockney, David, 228 Holden, William, 90, 91ill Holland, Gale, 4 Hollyhock House, 218 Hollywood: and Asian stereotypes, 190–99; early history, 67–82, 105, 106; and film industry, 6–8, 15, 18, 20, 25, 37, 42, 46,

289 49, 53–55, 59, 62, 67–102, 105, 112, 113, 115, 120, 122, 123, 141, 147–50, 156, 157, 160, 173, 181, 185, 188, 201, 214–16, 221, 229, 233, 241, 245n21, 257n13, 273n31; geographical location, 8, 9ill, 71, 74–76, 76ill, 80, 83, 84, 90, 95, 100, 113, 114, 122, 200, 202, 207, 211, 217, 237, 238, 255n46, 255n48; Hollywood Renaissance, 99, 259n40; and Jews, 49, 67–74, 106–8, 173, 207, 210, 253n6, 255n50, 277n62; and LGBTs, 222–27; New Hollywood, 99–102, 210, 259n50; and novels, 84, 89, 90, 111; and postmodernism, 95–102; and scandals, 71, 73, 83, 106; self-reflexive films about, 83–102; and smoke-andmirror symbolism, 6, 54, 81, 85, 86ill, 88, 90, 91ill, 92, 93, 96, 97, 101, 102ill; and television, 95–97, 100–102. See also Hollywood Bowl, Hollywood Chamber of Commerce; Hollywood Hills; Hollywoodland; Hollywood sign; Hollywood Walk of Fame; individual films Hollywood (James Cruze, 1923), 83, 97 Hollywood Boulevard, 95, 114, 217, 237 Hollywood Bowl, 47, 113, 118, 218 Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, 8, 95 Hollywood Citizen (newspaper), 76 Hollywood-Citizen News, 134 Hollywood Hills, 6, 10, 80, 90, 127, 178, 197, 246n23 Hollywoodland (development), 9, 9ill, 74, 95 Hollywoodland (Allen Coulter, 2006), 146 Hollywood sign, 7–11, 9ill, 95, 100 Hollywood Walk of Fame, 46, 95 Holm, D. K., 126 Homosexual Information Center (HIC), 222 Honor Roll Murder (1992), 202, 203 Hoover, J. Edgar, 134 Hope, Bob, 47, 48ill Hope, Dolores, 47 Hopkins, Mark, 36. See also Big Four (railroad trust) Horkheimer, Max, 107. See also Frankfurt School Horsley, David, 75 Hoshi, Shizuko, 200 House Committee on UnAmerican Activities (HUAC), 94 Huachippah Indians, 58 Hughes, Howard, 148, 246n23 Hughes, Langston, 179 Huisar, Jose, 240, 241, 268n48 Hull, Bob, 221 Huntington, Collis, 36. See also Big Four (railroad trust) Huntington, Henry, 49, 130, 136, 210

290 Huntington Beach, 203 Huntington Library and Gardens, 213 Hurewitz, David, 218, 276n33 Huston, John, 137, 261n48, 264n63 Huxley, Aldous, 197 Ice Cube, 184ill, 185, 186 Iglesia Metodista Unida (United Methodist Church), 241 I Love Lucy (television series, 1951–57), 160 Immigration Reform Act (1965), 18, 214 In a Lonely Place (Nicholas Ray, 1950), 84 Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (Kenneth Anger, 1956, 1958, 1966, 1986), 226 Ince, Thomas, 148 Independence Day (Roland Emmerich, 1994), 6 Inglewood, 118 In Old California (D. W. Griffith, 1910), 80 Institute for the Study of Human Resources (ISHR), 222 International Association of Theater and Stage Employees (IATSE), 149 International Longshore and Warehouse Union, 279n8 Intolerance (D. W. Griffith, 1916), 217 Inyo County Bank, 131 Inyo Gang, 132 Isherwood, Christopher, 197 Ivah Indians, 58 Iviatim (Cahuilla) Indians, 3, 244n18 Jackson, George, 176 Jackson, Helen Hunt, 18, 26–28, 30–32, 35–43, 46, 48, 52, 55, 139, 153. See also Ramona; Ramona Pageant; individual films and plays Jackson, Mick, 245n11 Jacobs, Frederick, 172 Jacoby, Charles, 68 Jaffe, Sam, 273n31 James, Brion, 98 James, George Wharton, 39 Jameson, Fredric, 94, 96, 100 Japanese internment, 16, 195, 195ill, 197 Jarman, Derek, 278n79 Java Head (Thorold Dickinson and J. Walter Ruben, 1934), 194 Jennings, Dale, 221, 222 Jensen, Roy, 137 Jett, Stephen C., 2, 244n9 Jews: and anti-Semitism, 68, 69, 73, 74, 113, 198, 207, 210, 255n42, 255n50; and Boyle Heights, 70, 158, 219, 238–40; eastern European (Ostjuden), 67, 69, 70, 107, 112, 211; and Hollywood, 49, 67–74,

Index 106, 173, 267n25, 277n62; mobsters, 114, 147–49; moguls, 55, 68, 70, 71, 74, 85–87, 98, 99, 106–8, 112, 113, 207, 210, 253n6; “New Jews,” 198, 199, 202, 207; western European (German/Austrian, Westjuden), 1, 12, 68–70, 78, 106, 107, 112, 119, 122, 123, 142, 193, 218, 221, 261n59; and Westside, 67, 236, 238; and whites, 206, 209–12, 237, 275n3, 276n33 Joe, Wes, 222, 223ill Johnson, Hiram, 79 Jonathan Club, 69 Jones, Pamela, 270n54 Juarez, Benito, 55, 156 Juarez (William Dieterle, 1939), 55 Juice (Ernest R. Dickerson, 1992), 176 Julian, C. C., 106 Julien, Isaac, 278n79 Juncos, Jose de los Santos, 55 Jung, Carl, 140 Jungle Room (club), 174 Jurmain, Claudia, 45, 49, 55 Justice for Janitors movement, 168 Kahrl, William, 136 Kalem Company, 217 Kalin, Tom, 227 Kang, Mun, 202, 203 Kang, Sung, 203, 205ill Karate Kid, The (film series, 1984, 1986, 1989, 1994, 2010), 197 Karloff, Boris, 192 Kawai, Yuko, 198, 199 Keaton, Buster, 90, 92 Keaton, Frank, 106 Kellaway, Cecil, 121ill Kelly, Gene, 92 Kennedy, Kathleen, 246n23 Kennedy, Joseph P., 258n22 Kennedy, Robert F., 44 Kerchoff, W. G., 130 Kersey, Vierling, 171 Keystone studios, 217 Khan, Genghis, 191 Kids Are All Right, The (Lisa Cholodenko, 2010), 20, 228–30 Kill Bill: Volumes I and II (Quentin Tarentino, 2003, 2004), 197 Killer of Sheep (Charles Burnett, 1977), 20, 181–83, 183ill Kim, Jacqueline, 200, 201, 201ill Kim, Jay, 207 Kim, Kirn, 202, 203 Kinette, Earl, 134 King, Henry, 52, 53 King, Rodney, 185–87. See also civil unrest/ uprising

Index King, Martin Luther Jr., 179 Kinney, Abbot, 27, 213, 267n26 Kinney, Terry, 177 Kinsey report (Sexual Behavior in the Human Male), 220, 221 Kipen, David, 238, 239, 280n31 Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (Shane Black, 2006), 146 Kiss Me Deadly (Robert Aldrich, 1955), 18, 123–28, 124ill, 139, 144, 262n87 Kitanemuk Indians, 3, 244n18 Klein, Norman, 136, 143, 144 KMEX-TV, 165 Knife in the Water (Roman Polanski, 1962), 142 Korea Times (newspaper), 207 Koreatown, 203, 207, 208, 236 Krim, Arthur, 210 Kristofferson, Kris, 84 Kroeber, Alfred, 3, 32 Kropp, Phoebe, 28 Ku Klux Klan (KKK), 179, 191, 256n78 Kun, Josh, 240 Kuruvungna springs, 52 La Bamba (Luis Valdez, 1987), 167 La Bonge, Tom, 240, 241 La Brea Tar Pits, 2, 10 La Brea Woman, 2 L.A. Confidential (Curtis Hanson, 1995), 148–50 Ladera Heights, 180 Laemmle, Carl, 210, 252n30 La Fiesta de Los Angeles, 1, 4, 55, 132, 170, 242 L.A. Gang Tours, 20, 21, 21ill Laguna Beach, 121, 218 La Hora de los Hornos (The Hour of the Furnaces) (Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas, 1968), 267n11 Lake, Veronica, 148 Lake Arrowhead, 118 Lake Havasu City, 216 Lakewood, 251n1, 252n14, 262n85 L.A. Live (entertainment complex), 145 La Malinche (a.k.a. Dona Marina), 155, 158, 267n16 Land of Sunshine (magazine), 212 Lang, Fritz, 106, 261n59 L.A. noir, 17, 18, 90, 105–50; and black noir, 175–86; and classical noir, 115–25; color symbolism in, 128; doubling/splitting in, 109, 111, 119, 120, 122, 127, 137, 138, 141, 143; and film soleil, 126, 128; historical backdrop, 105–7; and neo-noir, 126–50; and noir novels, 108–15, 148, 175, 176. See also individual films L.A. Noire (video game, 2011), 147, 148, 150

291 La Opinion (newspaper), 159 La Plaza de Cultura y Artes museum, 169, 170, 241 Larkin, Alile Sharon, 270n54 La Santa Cecilia (musical group), 240 Lasky, Jesse, 113 L.A. Story (Mick Jackson, 1991), 6 Last Detail, The (Hal Ashby, 1973), 140 Last Tycoon, The (Elia Kazan, 1976), 89 Last Word, The (club), 174 Last Year at Marienbad (Alain Resnais, 1963), 97 Lasuen, Father Fermin, 32 Las Vegas, NV, 7, 95, 245n13 Latinos, 16, 17, 20, 40, 47, 55, 58, 81, 144, 153–69, 185, 186, 196, 199, 202, 204, 206, 207, 209, 211–14, 216, 230–32, 234, 236–39; and Caribbean Islanders, 154, 166, 211, 266n5; and Central Americans, 154, 165, 166, 169, 266n5; and South Americans, 154, 166, 169. See also Mexican Americans/ Chicanos; Mexicans/Mexico; Spain/Spaniards; individual films Laurel & Hardy, 182 Lawrence, Florence, 252n30 Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962), 94 Lazard, Solomon, 68 Leachman, Cloris, 123 Lear, Norman, 210, 246n23 Le Barcito (bar), 222, 223ill, 277n58 Ledesma, Rev. Carlos, 241 Lee, Bruce, 197 Lee, Christopher, 192 Lee, Spike, 183 LeFebvre, Henri, 12 Leimert Park, 187 Lerner, Michael, 99 lesbians/gays/bisexuals/transgenders (LGBTs), 20, 148, 217–32, 242, 276n42, 277n62; and queer cinema, 226, 227, 229, 278n79. See also Anger, Kenneth; Black Cat; Edendale; Eltinge, Julian; Hay, Harry; Mattachine Society; Silver Lake; individual films and organizations Levin, Louis, 68 Lewis, Sinclair, 108 Li, Jet, 197 Liberator (newspaper), 172, 173, 180 Libros Schmibros bookstore, 238–40, 280n34 Like Water for Chocolate (Alfonso Arau, 1992), 20, 156–58, 267n16 Lily of the Tenements, The (D. W. Griffith, 1911), 80 “Lily White” controversy (1999), 237 Lin, Justin, 202, 206, 207 Linney, Laura, 100

292 Lippincott, Joseph, 131, 136 Little Armenia, 211; and Armenians, 158 Little Tokyo, 195, 203 Liu, Lucy, 197 Livingston, Jennie, 227 Lizardo, Ruben, 237 Lodger, The (John Brahm, 1944), 224 Lomas, Alfred, 20, 21, 21ill Long, Nia, 186 Long Beach, 12, 16, 48, 49, 51, 114, 118, 169, 276n25 Long Goodbye, The (Robert Altman, 1973), 146 Loos, Anita, 83 Lopez, Jennifer, 158 Lopez, Steve, 233, 234 Lopez Rios, Eduardo, 158 Lorenz, Pare, 55 Lorre, Peter, 193, 224 Los Angeles: boosters, 73, 79, 81, 105, 133, 234; Chumash period, 3, 17, 19ill, 34, 189, 248n71; demographics of, 61, 68, 154, 159, 168, 172–74, 187, 193, 196, 201–3, 206, 207, 209, 234–36, 241, 253n8; ecology/environment of, 3, 4, 9, 10, 12, 48, 49, 76, 131, 215, 216, 235, 236; founding, 1, 3, 13, 16, 29, 71, 73, 153, 166, 170–72, 189, 240, 266n3; and labor unions, 76–82, 108, 132, 133, 159, 169, 187, 190, 220, 234–37, 239, 256n81, 279n8; and L.A. County, 3, 5, 16, 75, 134, 168, 169, 187, 203, 206, 207, 234, 241, 246n28, 253n8, 275n3; Mexican/American transitional period, 19ill, 34–36, 39–42, 48, 49, 52–55; Mexican provincial/ranchero period, 17, 18, 19ill, 26, 27, 29, 32, 34, 36, 37, 39–42, 48, 49, 60, 71, 172, 250n63; military industrial period, 19ill, 95, 124, 128, 162, 174, 175, 187, 212, 214, 262n85; multicultural period, 7, 18, 19ill, 45, 146, 153–232, 235, 238, 239, 241; Paleoamerican period, 2–4, 19ill, 17, 189; as palimpsest, 10–13, 15, 17, 18, 37, 43, 49, 94, 124, 143, 154, 174, 189, 221, 241; as Sin City, 5, 71–74; and smoke-and-mirror symbolism, 6, 7, 38, 54, 81, 83, 111, 112, 141, 147, 180, 197, 242, 245n6, 245n8; Spanish colonial/mission era, 1, 6, 17, 19ill, 32, 41, 43, 44, 48, 53, 76, 154–57, 241, 244n18, 251n11; and “thirdspace,” 12–16; Yankee boomtown period, 11, 17, 18, 19ill, 28–30, 34–42, 48, 49, 69, 210. See also Hollywood; L.A. noir; Ramona; individual films, groups, locations, organizations Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, 131, 134, 234 Los Angeles City Council, 75, 81, 145, 162, 169, 187, 206–8, 222, 224ill, 268n48, 275n3

Index Los Angeles City Hall, 13ill, 132–34, 137, 149, 188, 208, 210 Los Angeles City Historical Society, 234 Los Angeles City Water Company, 130 Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, 169, 187, 207, 268n48, 275n3 Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, 169 Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), 211 Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (a.k.a. Water Department), 132, 135, 137, 138, 149 Los Angeles Daily Herald, 81 Los Angeles Dodgers, 167 Los Angeles Express, 130 Los Angeles Forum, 172 Los Angeles Golf and Country Club, 69 Los Angeles Lakers, 167 Los Angeles Man, 2 Los Angeles News, 136 Los Angeles Opera, 169 Los Angeles Ostrich Farm, 145 Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, 169 Los Angeles Plays Itself (Thom Anderson, 2004), 17 Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD): and corruption, 108, 109, 113, 114, 128, 133–35, 138–41, 138ill, 148, 149, 220; and homophobia, 220, 222; and racism, 73, 162, 164–66, 175, 179–81, 184–87, 207; Red Squad, 133, 218, 220, 247n48, 276n28; Sex Squad, 220, 224. See also Bloody Christmas attacks; individual police chiefs Los Angeles Railway Corporation, 49, 118 Los Angeles River, 10, 12, 109, 127, 158, 167 Los Angeles school of black filmmakers, 181, 270n54 Los Angeles School of Urbanists, 235, 236, 279n11 Los Angeles Star, 33, 37, 72 Los Angeles Times, 9, 14, 18, 28, 35, 49, 55, 67, 69, 73, 77, 78ill, 79, 130, 134, 165, 169, 171, 207, 212, 233, 234, 238. See also Chandler, Harry; Chandler, Norman; Chandler, Otis; Otis, Harrison Gray Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), 171, 187 Los Feliz, 114, 116, 118, 134, 217 Los Four (artists’ group), 165 Los Pobladores 200, 240, 280n44 Lost Horizon (Frank Capra, 1937), 273n31 Loy, Myrna, 194 Loyola Marymount University, 58, 235 Lubin, Sigmund, 253n6 Lubin Manufacturing Company, 253n6 Lubitsch, Ernest, 113

Index Lucasfilm Foundation, 246n23 Lugo, Ramona, 38ill, 39, 250n72 Luke, Keye, 192 Lummis, Charles Fletcher, 28, 35, 212, 218 Luther, Mark Lee, 108, 109 L-Word, The (television series, 2004– ), 230 Mabel’s Dramatic Career (Mack Sennett, 1913), 83 MacDonald, Edmund, 122 MacDonald, Ross, 114 MacMurray, Fred, 116, 117ill Madame Butterfly (opera, Giacomo Puccini), 194 Magnin, Rabbi Edgar, 70 Magnuson Act (1943), 195 Magon, Ricardo, and Enrique Flores, 160, 161ill, 194, 234 Maharaji, Guru, 197 Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, 197 Mahoney, Archbishop Roger, 275n3 Mailer, Norman, 115 Maille, Claudette, 157 Malcolm X, 180 Malibu, 89, 123, 178 “Malibu Mafia,” 210 Maltby, Richard, 93 Maltese Falcon, The (Roy Del Ruth, 1931), 260n19 Maltese Falcon, The (John Huston, 1941), 108, 224, 260n19, 261n59 Manchurian Candidate, The (John Frankenheimer, 1962), 126 Manet, Edouard, 11 Manhattan (Woody Allen, 1979), 233 Manifest Destiny, 41, 42 Manson family, 142, 143 Mantell, Joe, 138 Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The (John Ford, 1962), 38 Manzanar internment camp, 195 Mao Zedong, 196 March, Fredric, 84 Marcos, Subcomandante, 156 Maria Candelaria (Emilio Fernandez, 1943), 157 Mariachi Plaza, 280n34 Marie, Constance, 165 Marlowe (Paul Bogart, 1969), 146 Marquand, John, 193 Marquis, Yvonne, 225 Martin, Steve, 6, 7, 245n11 Martinez, Benito, 162 Martinez, Denise, 56 Martinez, Desiree, 45 Martinez, Mario Evan, 157 Martinez, Ruben, 15, 240

293 Marvin, Lee, 127 Martyr to His Cause, A (American Federation of Labor, 1911), 80 Mason, Biddy, 172 Mason, James, 84 Masquerader, The (Charlie Chaplin, 1914), 83 Mattachine Society, 218–223, 225, 229, 276n48 Mattachine Steps, 222, 224ill Matthews, Miriam, 171 Maugham, Somerset, 197 May, Lance, 227 Maya Indians, 14, 145 Mayer, Louis B., 74, 81, 85, 99, 106, 210 Mayer, Oliver, 16 Mayo, Morrow, 135, 218 McCarthy, Joseph/McCarthyism, 134, 220, 239 McCarthy, Patrick, 79 McCawley, William, 3, 45, 49, 55 McClellan, George, 67 McClung, William, 12 McCoy, Horace, 175, 257n17 McNamara, James B. and John J., 77, 79–81, 160, 256n62 McPherson, Aimee Semple, 20 McWilliams, Carey, 5, 26, 46, 136, 197, 218 Meehan, Eileen, 95 Meeker, Ralph, 123, 124ill Menace II Society (Hughes brothers, 1993), 176 Mencken, H. L., 20, 108 Mendez v. Westminster (1946), 174 Merchants Association (a.k.a. Merchants and Manufacturers Association, M&M), 1, 78–81, 256n65 Merry-Go-Round (Erich von Stroheim, 1923), 111 Merton of the Movies (James Cruze, 1924), 83, 257n4 Metamorphosis project, 236 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) studio, 54, 74, 75, 81, 82 Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927), 144, 265n88 Mexican Americans/Chicanos, 17, 20, 42, 69, 153–69, 185, 187, 189, 195, 239, 268n48; ambivalent Americanism of, 158, 160, 162, 164ill, 166, 267n21; and art movements, 16, 165, 169; barrios for, 55, 158, 159, 162; black relations, 182, 187, 237; and “brown scare,” 159; and bubonic plague, 159; and car culture, 164, 164ill, 166, 185; deportation of, 16, 159–61, 165, 174, 195; and Dodgers, 167; and gangs, 20, 21, 161, 162, 163ill, 164, 165, 167, 169, 187, 204, 213, 214, 216; as Latin Lover, 160, 267n25;

294 Mexican Americans/Chicanos (continued), and military, 162, 163; and political activism, 165, 279n8. See also Californios; East Los Angeles; Latinos; Mexicans/ Mexico; individual films Mexican Revolution, 14, 154–60, 165, 247n62, 267n16 Mexicans/Mexico, 6, 15, 16, 27, 30, 31, 40, 42, 52, 56, 61, 72, 139, 154, 159, 160, 162, 166, 168, 169, 172, 190, 195, 211, 242, 267n21; and brain drain, 156, 166; four Mexicos, 154–58, 160, 165, 166. See also Californios; Latinos; Mexican Americans/Chicanos; Mexican Revolution; Mexican War of Independence; individual films Mexican War (1846–48), 34, 41, 156, 267n13 Mexican War of Independence (1810–21), 34, 36, 155, 156, 172, 247n62 Meyer, Eugene, 68 Meyerberg, Max, 256n65 Middleton, Charles B., 192 Mi Familia/My Family (Gregory Nava, 1995), 20, 158–68, 164ill Mildred Pierce (James M. Cain), 113, 120 Mildred Pierce (Michael Curtiz, 1945), 121 Miller, Henry, 197 Miller, Loren, 170 Minard, Duane, 30ill, 58 Minter, Mary Miles, 71 Mission La Purisma, 34, 246n37 Mission Play (John McGroarty), 30, 44, 55 missions, 11, 25, 31, 46, 27, 55, 57, 160, 221, 246n37, 248n1. See also individual missions Mission San Carlos, 33, 246n37 Mission San Fernando Rey de España, 18, 46–47, 48ill, 58, 244n18, 246n37, 249n42 Mission San Francisco, 33 Mission San Gabriel Arcangel, 25, 33, 34, 39, 43–46, 48, 55, 244n18, 249n42 Mission San Jose, 34, 246n37 Mission San Juan Bautista, 33, 246n37 Mission San Luis Rey, 32, 246n37 Mission Santa Barbara, 34, 246n37 Mission Santa Clara de Asis, 33, 246n37 Mission Santa Ynez, 34, 246n37 Mi Vida Loca (Allison Anders, 1993), 167 Mix, Tom, 217 Mixville studio, 217 Modern Times (Charlie Chaplin, 1935), 182 Mod Squad, The (television series, 1967–73), 181 Moffett, D. W., 216 Molina, Gloria, 268n48 Monroe Doctrine, 55, 156 Monterey Park, 203, 206, 236 Monte Verde, Chile, 2, 244n9 Montoya, Richard, 216

Index Moore, Colleen, 225 Moore, Kaylee, 182 Moore, Julianne, 229 Morales, Anthony (a.k.a. Chief Red Blood), 44, 45 Morales, Arthur, 57 Morales, Esai, 161, 164ill Morales, Rebecca, 279n11 Moreland, Mantan, 272n19 Moreno, Antonio, 160 Morris, Joe, 174 Mosley, Walter, 176, 177, 179 Motion Picture Patents Company (MPCC), 68, 254n24 Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), 71 Mount Hollywood, 108 Mount Lee, 9, 10 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 198 Mr. Moto (film series, 1937–39), 193, 194 Muktananda, Baba, 197 Mulholland, William, 129–32, 135–39, 143 Mulholland Drive (a.k.a. Mulholland Highway), 132, 133ill, 142 Mulholland Falls (Lee Tamahori, 1996), 146 Muller, Gilbert, 179 Multi-Cultural Collaboration (MCC), 237 Murieta, Joaquin, 37–39, 41 Murphet, Julian, 209, 233 Murphy, Dudley, 16 Murphy, Franklin, 210 Museum of Latin American Art, 16, 169 Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), 210 Music Center (Performing Arts Center of Los Angeles County), 114, 210 Musketeers of Pig Alley, The (D. W. Griffith, 1912), 80 Musso & Frank’s restaurant, 114 Mussolini, Benito, 113 Naked Kiss, The (Sam Fuller, 1964), 126 names, symbolism of, 90, 98–101, 111–13, 135, 137–40, 158, 162, 182, 184, 213, 264n60 Naremore, James, 147, 150 Nathan, George Jean, 108 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 173, 175 National Board of Review, 68 National Organization of Women (NOW), 165 NBC (National Broadcasting Company), 95 NBC Universal, 246n3 NCIS: Los Angeles (television series, 2009– ), 233 Neal, Tom, 122

Index Negro Family, The (Daniel Patrick Moynihan), 198 Nestor Film Company, 75 Neutra, Richard, 218, 247 Newmark, Harris, 68, 254n33 Newport Beach, 51, 274n62 News Corp., 99 New York, 14, 16, 67, 69, 74, 77, 80, 95, 109, 112, 124, 154, 173, 181, 182, 196, 222, 227, 238, 240, 266n5, 267n25 New York Times, 80, 229, 238 Nichols, Bernard, 270n54 Nicholson, Jack, 137, 140, 142, 146 Niemore, John, 172 Nieto, Manuel, 48 Niggaz With Attitude (N.W.A.) (musical group), 185 Nilsson, Anna Q., 90, 92 Nixon, Marni, 94 Nixon, Richard M., 181, 184 Nordhoff, John, 37 Nordskog, Andrea B., 136 Noriega, Chon, 41, 53, 55, 165 Normand, Mabel, 71 Norris, Frank, 36, 111 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 187 Northeast Los Angeles, 236 Nowhere (Gregg Araki, 1997), 227 Nowlan, Bob, 229 Noyes, Betty, 93, 94 Oasis Club, 174 Obama, Barack, 187, 206, 228 Occidental College, 235 O’Connor, Donald, 92 O’Hara, John, 84 Oland, Warner, 192 Old Bank District, 234 Olivares, Father Luis, 165 Olive Hill, 218 Ollin (musical group), 240 Olmos, Edward James, 162, 163ill Olson, Culbert, 219 Olson, Nancy, 97 Olvera Street, 13–15, 30, 43, 140, 141, 160, 171, 217, 268n26. See also América Tropical, La; Plaza, the; Siqueiros, David Alfaro; Sterling, Christine Olympic Auditorium, 114 Olympics (1984), 275n19 Ometechuhtli and Omecihuatl (Aztec deities), 155 ONE, Inc., 222 On the Beach (Stanley Kramer, 1959), 182 Ophuls, Max (a.k.a. Max Ophüls), 259n9 Opium Wars (1839–42, 1856–60), 189

295 Orange County (a.k.a. the OC), 199, 202, 203, 245n15. See also individual cities Ordóñez de Montalvo, Garci, 36, 153 Orientalism, 31, 194 Orozco, Jose Clemente, 156 Orsi, Richard J., 153 Ossessione (Luchino Visconti, 1942), 120 Osteen, Mark, 115, 116, 120, 123 Otis, Harrison Gray, 28, 29, 49, 67, 73, 77–79, 81, 111, 130, 160, 171, 186, 210, 212, 218, 234, 256n64. See also Los Angeles Times Otis, Johnny, 173 Ouiot (Tongva chief), 49 Our Lady Queen of Angels church (a.k.a. La Placita), 165 Owens Valley, 131, 135, 136, 143, 195; aqueduct, 128–32, 129ill, 137. See also Chinatown Pachenga Indians, 58, 59 Pacific Coast Highway, 115, 120 Pacific Design Center, 145 Pacific Electric Railway, 49 Pacific Light and Power, 130, 136 Pacific Ocean, 48, 76, 108, 115, 132, 153, 215, 238 “Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A., 1945–1980” (PST) (exhibit), 238 Page Act (1875), 190, 193 Pahsitnah Indians, 58 Paiute Indians, 58, 131 Paleoamericans, 2, 3 Palmer, Belinda, 138ill, 139 Palmer, Harlan, 134 Palmer, Kyle, 210 Palou, Father Francisco, 25, 26, 32–34 Paramount Pictures, 8, 92, 97, 107, 113 Park, Edward, 207, 208, 237 Park, Steve, 216, 276n24 Parker, Dorothy, 5, 245n2 Parker, William H., 149, 150, 180 Parks, Bernard, 187 Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), 156 Pasadena, 34, 118, 121, 195, 213, 218, 236 Pasadena Searchlight (newspaper), 172 Pavlevsky, Max, 210 Peeper (Peter Hyams, 1976), 146 Perez, Eulalia, 250n63 Perlman, Rob, 147 Phillips, Bill, 240 Phillips, Gary, 176, 237 Phillips Music Company, 240 Pianist, The (Roman Polanski, 2005), 142 Pickford, Jack, 71 Pickford, Mary, 29, 44, 52, 53, 71, 252n30

296 Pico, Pio, 28, 29, 29ill, 172 Pico House, 13ill Pico Union, 20, 236 Pig ’n’ Whistle restaurant, 138 Pinky (Elia Kazan, 1949), 55 Pita, Beatrice, 40, 42 Pitt, Leonard, 28, 34, 38, 40, 41, 72, 254n33 Placentia, 274n62 Plantation, The (club), 174 Playa Vista, 51, 52, 57, 235 Player, The (Robert Altman, 1992), 18, 97–99, 98ill, 101 Plaza, the (a.k.a. El Pueblo), 13, 13ill, 15, 16, 52, 109, 160, 165, 169–71, 217, 240–42. See also América Tropical, La; Olvera Street; Siqueiros, David Alfaro; Sterling, Christine Plow That Broke the Plains, The (Pare Lorenz, 1936), 55 Pochea Indians, 58 Point Blank (John Boorman, 1967), 18, 126–28, 135, 143 Poitier, Sidney, 229 Polanski, Roman, 142, 143, 148, 265n82 Porter, John, 134, 170 Portman, John, 96 Posada, Ricardo Guadalupe, 161ill, 165 Postman Always Rings Twice. The (Tay Garnett, 1946), 18, 120–22, 121ill, 261n67 Postman Always Rings Twice, The (Bob Rafaelson, 1981), 146 Povuu’ngna (Tongva village), 49–51 Powell, Eleanor, 94 Precious (Lee Daniels, 2009), 206 Preminger, Otto, 106, 259n9, 261n59 Price, Glenn, 171 PRIDE (organization), 222 Production Code Administration (PCA), 105, 120, 126, 223, 224, 226. See also Hays, Will Program for Environmental and Regional Equity (PERE), 236 Progressive Coalition, 237 Progressive era, 67, 79, 173 Progressive Los Angeles Network Project (PLAN), 235 Proposition 14 (1964), 180 Proposition 184 (1994), 167 Proposition 209 (1996), 167 Proposition 227 (1998), 167 Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), 126 Puce Moment (Kenneth Anger, 1949), 225 Pullman railroad strike (1894), 1, 78, 79 Queen Kelly (Erich von Stroheim, 1928), 112, 257–58n22 Queen Mary (ocean liner), 276n25

Index Quinceañera (Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland, 2006), 20, 167, 231, 231ill, 232 Quintero, Luis and Maria, 241 Radical Faeries, 222 Rainer, Luise, 194 Ramirez, Karen, 31, 37 Ramirez, Michael, 279n6 Ramirez, Zeferino, 159 Rampart (Oren Moverman, 2011), 271n70 Ramona (Helen Hunt Jackson), 18, 27–32, 35–42, 46, 48, 59, 61–63, 128, 250n72; and myth, 18, 25–44, 47–49, 52, 53, 61, 63, 78, 81, 127, 128, 130, 131, 139, 160. See also Jackson, Helen Hunt; Ramona Pageant; individual films and plays Ramona (D. W. Griffith, 1910), 29, 44, 52–55, 58, 59, 61, 80, 252n27 Ramona (Donald Crisp, 1916), 52 Ramona (Edwin Carewe, 1928), 52 Ramona (Henry King, 1936), 52–55, 54ill, 58, 59, 61–63, 252n26 Ramona, or the Bells of Camulos (play), 35, 250n59 Ramona Pageant, 18, 30, 30ill, 35, 43, 58–61 Ramos, Janice, 45 Rancho Camulos, 35, 36, 38, 39, 47, 59, 250n59 Rancho Guajome, 35, 38, 39, 47, 48 Rancho La Brea, 75 Rancho Los Alamitos, 48–52, 51ill, 252n14 Rancho Los Ceritos, 252n16 Rancho Los Coyotes, 48, 252n16 Rancho Los Feliz, 75 Rappe, Virginia, 71 Ratoff, Gregory, 84 Raymond, Harry, 134 Razor’s Edge, The (Edmund Goulding, 1946), 197, 273n31 Razor’s Edge, The (John Byrum, 1984), 197, 273n31 Reagan, Ronald, 99, 184, 227 Real Women Have Curves (Patricia Cardoso, 2002), 167 Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940), 95 Reed, Alan, 121 Reid, Hugo, 32, 37 Reid, Victoria, 33 Reid, Wallace, 71 Reir, John, 270n54 Repo Man (Alex Cox, 1984), 262n87 Resurrection Blvd. (television series, 2002–4), 167 Reyes, Ed, 145, 268n48 Reyes, Francisco, 170–72 Reynolds, Debbie, 93

Index Reynoso, Irene, 62 Rice, Richard B., 153 Ridge, John Rollin, 37, 39, 41 Riggs, Marlon, 227 Riordan, Richard, 187 Rios, Emily, 231, 231ill Rising Sun (Philip Kaufman, 1993), 196 Rivera, Diego, 14, 156 Rivera, Emilio, 166 RKO (Radio Keith Orpheum) Pictures, 8, 221 Robbins, Tim, 97, 98ill Roberts, Julia, 98 Robeson, Paul, 182 Robin Hood of El Dorado, The (William A. Wellman, 1936), 55 Robinson, Alfred, 37, 41 Robinson, Edward G., 116 Robinson, Paul, 172 Rodgers, Gaby, 124ill, 125 Rodriguez, Antonio Miranda, 189, 266n3 Rodriguez, Augustin, 214 Rodriguez, Gregory, 155 Rodriguez, Juana Maria, 189 Rodriguez, Luis J., 239 Rogers, Earl, 79, 81, 84 Rogers, Ginger, 55, 246n23 Rogers, Will, 131 Rohmer, Sax, 192 Roman Holiday (William Wyler, 1953), 194, 258n26 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano (FDR), 55, 174, 195 Roosevelt, Theodore, 131 Rope (Alfred Hitchcock, 1948), 224 Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968), 142 Rosie and the Originals (musical group), 164 Ross, David W., 232 Rowland, Chuck, 220, 221 Ruffalo, Mark, 229 Ruiz de Burton, Maria Ampara, 39–42, 49 Rumford Fair Housing Act (1963), 180 Ruscha, Edward, 227, 228ill Rush Hour (film series, 1998, 2001, 2007), 197 Russo, Vito, 226, 227 Russo-Japanese War (1904–5), 191 Ryan, Don, 18, 109, 110, 112, 114, 260n27 Sacramento River, 131 Sai Baba, 197 Said, Edward, 31 sa-i-gu. See civil unrest/uprising Salazar, Ruben, 165 Salisbury, Monroe, 52

297 Sallis, James, 176 Salonen, Esa Pekka, 275n3 Salvatori, Henry, 210 San Bernardino, 3, 63, 244n17 Sánchez, George J., 158, 159, 161, 163, 239, 240 Sanchez, Father Miguel, 44 Sánchez, Rosaura, 40, 42 Sanders, Henry Gayle, 182, 183ill San Diego, 33, 35, 39, 41, 53, 133, 134, 246n37 San Fernando Valley, 10, 129–31, 136, 137, 159, 203, 244n17. See also Mission San Fernando San Francisco, 11, 14, 29, 33, 37, 49, 70, 76, 77, 79, 114, 190, 196, 197, 227, 246n37, 247n63 San Francisco Bulletin, 78 San Francisquito Canyon, 132, 137 San Gabriel, 43, 44, 46, 57. See also Mission San Gabriel San Gabriel Mountains, 130 San Gabriel Valley, 203, 244n17 San Jacinto History Museum, 58 San Jacinto Mountains, 58 San Juan Capistrano, 56, 246n37 San Pedro, 114 Santa Ana, 34, 203, 245n15 Santa Anita Assembly Center, 195ill Santa Anita Race Track, 195, 195ill Santa Barbara, 2, 34, 42, 246n37 Santa Barbara Museum, 247n62 Santa Fe, 72 Santa Fe Railroad, 11, 35 Santa Monica, 118, 127, 211 Santa Monica Mountains, 6, 10, 130 Santa Paula, 35 Santa Rosa Islands, 2 Santa Susanna Mountains, 130 Sapphire (pseud.), 206 Sartori, Joseph, 130 Savage, Ann, 122 Save the Peak campaign, 8–10, 237, 246n23 Sayonara (Joshua Logan, 1957), 196 Scacchi, Greta, 97, 99 Scheer, Robert, 279n6 Schenck, Joseph, 149 Schindler, Rudolph, 218 Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg, 1993), 62 Schrader, Paul, 125, 126 Schulberg, Budd, 84, 271n71 Schwab’s Drugstore, 90 Scott, Allen, 279n11 Scott, Margaret, 172 Seaside, FL, 100 See, Carolyn, 114 Selena (Gregory Nava, 1997), 167 Self Help Graphics, 165 Sellers, Peter, 192

298 Selig, William, 253n6 Selig Polyscope Company, 75, 217, 253n6 Selznick, David O., 95, 106 Separate Schools Act, 172 Serra, Father Junipero, 25, 32, 47 Shaft (Gordon Parks, 1971), 183 Shanghai Express (Joseph von Sternberg, 1932), 195 Sharma, Kunal, 230 Shaw, Frank, 134, 135, 219, 220 Sheinbaum, Stanley, 210 Shelley v. Kraemer (1948), 174 Sheltering Sky, The (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1990), 97 Shen, Parry, 203, 205ill Shenk, John, 173 Shenk Rule, 173 Sheridan, Gen. Philip, 26 Sherman, 75 Sherman, Lowell, 84, 86ill Sherman, Miriam Brooks, 218 Sherman, Moses, 49, 130, 136–38, 210 Shiffman, Paula, 3, 4 Shock Corridor (Sam Fuller, 1963), 126 Show People (King Vidor, 1928), 83 Siegel, Bugsy, 7, 149 Silver, Alain, 105 Silver, Herman, 217 Silver Lake, 20, 200, 201, 217, 218, 221, 222, 276n26. See also Edendale Sinclair, Upton, 81, 82, 219 Singer, Joey Hope, 213 Singer, Leon, 158 Singin’ in the Rain (Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, 1952), 18, 88–90, 92, 93 Sino-Japanese War (1894–95), 191 Siodmak, Robert, 106, 259n9 Siqueiros, David Alfaro, 13–17, 156, 160, 165, 171, 217, 247n48, 247n60. See also América Tropical, La; Olvera Street Six-Mile House (a.k.a. Casa Cahuenga), 75 Sizemore, Tom, 177 Skenazy, Paul, 114, 115 Sleepy Lagoon Murder (1942), 162 Slim, Iceberg (a.k.a. Robert Beck), 176 Smart, Joshua, 172 Smith, Anna Deveare, 187, 188 Smith, Lois, 213 Smits, Jimmy, 160 Smythe, William, 130 Sobchack, Vivian, 144 Soboba Indians, 58, 59, 61 Social Darwinism, 53 Socialist Movie Theater, 81 Society for Human Rights, 220 Soja, Edward W., 12, 13, 96, 209, 233, 235 Sojourner Truth Club, 172

Index Soloist, The (Joe Wright, 2009), 233 Somerville, John, 174, 180. See also Dunbar Hotel Sontag, Susan, 225 Sony Corporation, 94, 246n23 Soo Hoo, Peter, 141 Soon Ja Du, 185, 199 Sorkin, Michael, 5 Souls for Sale (Rupert Hughes, 1923), 83 South Central, 20, 181, 183, 185, 186 South Central (Stephen Milburn Anderson, 1992), 176 Southern Pacific Railroad, 11, 35 South Pasadena, 236 Southwest Museum, 28, 56 Spain/Spaniards, 7, 10, 31, 37, 56, 61, 127, 156, 157, 167, 169, 170, 176, 211, 240, 241, 252n26; in colonial era, 1–4, 6, 13, 17, 18, 25, 26, 28, 34, 36, 41, 42, 48, 58, 71, 153–55, 159, 172, 189, 221, 245n5, 267n7, 267n16. See also Black Legend; Latinos; Mexicans/Mexico; missions; Spanish Fantasy Past; White Legend; individual missions Spanglish (James L. Brooks, 2004), 167 Spanish American War (1898), 77, 190 Spanish Fantasy Past, 4, 28, 39, 42, 43, 47, 49, 55, 58, 81, 189, 231, 233 Spaulding, Sumner, 247n60 Spielberg, Steven, 246n23 Spillane, Mickey, 114 Spilman, W. T., 136 Spilman Suburban Water Company, 136 Squatter and the Don, The (Maria Ampara Ruiz de Burton), 39–42, 49 Squaw Man, The (Cecil B. DeMille, 1914), 76 Stagecoach (John Ford, 1939), 55 Stand and Deliver (Ramon Menendez, 1988), 167 Stanford, Leland, 36, 251n92 Stanwyck, Barbara, 116, 117ill Staples Center, 145, 188 Star Is Born, A (William A. Wellman, 1937), 84 Star Is Born, A (George Cukor, 1954), 84 Star Is Born, A (Frank Pierson, 1976), 84 Starr, Kevin, 105, 212 Star Wars (film series, 1977, 1980, 1983, 1999, 2002, 2005), 39, 192, 197, 259n40 Stearns, Abel, 48, 49 Steffens, Lincoln, 79, 80 Stein, Gertrude, 5 Stein, Jonathan, 57, 58 Sterling, Christine, 13, 14, 171 St. Francis Dam, 128, 131–33, 137, 138 St. John, Adela Rogers, 84 Stockwell, Dean, 98ill

Index Stoddard, Alexander, 171 Stonewall rebellion/riots (1969), 222 Storper, Michael, 279n11 Straight Outta Compton (album, N.W.A.), 186 Street Meeting (mural, David Alfaro Siqueiros), 14, 217, 247n48 Streisand, Barbra, 84 Strike (Sergei Eisenstein, 1924), 182 Sundance Film Festival, 206, 231 Sunny Hills High School, 202, 203 Sunset Blvd. (Billy Wilder, 1950), 18, 84, 88–92, 94, 97, 99, 112, 146, 228, 258n22, 259n9 Sunset Strip, 95, 127 Super Fly (Gordon Parks Jr., 1971), 183 Sutton, Matthew Avery, 20 Swanson, Gloria, 90, 111, 112, 257n58 Sweet Sweetback’s Baadassssss Song (Melvin Van Peebles, 1971), 181 Taaqtam (Serrano) Indians, 3, 244n18 Taiping Rebellion (1850–64), 189 Taper, Mark, 210 Tataviam Indians, 3, 244n18 Tate, Sharon, 142, 143 Tay, Stuart, 202, 203 Taylor, Ella, 229 Taylor, John Russell, 6 Taylor, William Desmond, 71, 148 “Tehrangeles,” 211, 239 Temecula Indians, 27, 59, 60 Terminator (James Cameron, 1984), 6 Teske, Edmund, 197 Texas, 2, 76, 133, 156, 267n13 Thai Town, 203 Thalberg, Irving, 81, 111 Tharching, Kunchuck, 273n31 Thief of Bagdad, The (Raoul Walsh, 1924), 194 Third Cinema movement, 181, 267n11 Thirty-eighth Street gang, 162 “This Bitter Earth” (song, Clyde Otis), 182 Thomas, Anna, 166 Thread of Destiny, The (D. W. Griffith, 1910), 44 Ticotin, Rachel, 216 Times-Mirror Corporation, 143, 265n80 Time-Warner, 99, 246n23 Timmons, Stuart, 222, 223 Tobar, Hector, 169, 170, 238, 239 Tobin, Jason, 203, 205ill Toler, Sidney, 192 Toll of the Sea, The (Chester M. Franklin, 1922), 194 Tongva Indians (a.k.a. Gabrielino, Gabrielino-Tongva, Gabrielino/Tongva),

299 1, 3–6, 10, 12, 17, 18, 19ill, 25, 27, 32, 33, 37, 44–46, 45ill, 49, 51, 52, 55–58, 60–63, 153, 154, 211, 221, 235, 240, 241, 244nn17, 18, 246n28, 246n30, 248n71, 250n63, 253n47. See also California Indians; missions; Mission San Fernando; Mission San Gabriel; Ramona; individual Tongva groups Tonantzin (Aztec goddess), 155 Topanga Canyon, 3 Topping, Norman, 210 Torne, Regina, 157 Tortilla Soup (Maria Ripoll, 2001), 167 Totally F***ed Up (Gregg Araki, 1993), 20, 227, 228, 228ill Totter, Audrey, 121 Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, 1958), 97, 126 Tournament of Roses Parade (a.k.a. Rose Parade), 213 Towne, Robert, 135–37, 140, 142, 143, 146, 148, 150, 265n82 Toypurina (Gabrielino shaman), 33, 33ill, 44 Transformers (Michael Bay, 2007), 233 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), 211 Tribune Company, 265n80 Trigunatitananda, Swami, 197 Truman Show, The (Peter Weir, 1998), 18, 100–102, 102ill Trumbo, Dalton (a.k.a. Robert Rich), 94 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 28 Turner, Lana, 120, 121ill, 148, 194 Tustin, 274n62 20th Century Fox, 8, 52, 54, 55, 97, 246n23, 252n26 “21-Point Agenda” (Occidental College), 235 Twilight: Los Angeles 1992 (play, Anna Deveare Smith), 188 Two Jakes, The (Robert Towne, 1990), 146 Tzu Hsi, 194, 195 Ugly Betty (television series, 2006–10), 167 Umeki, Miyoshi, 196 Union Pacific Railroad, 11, 35 Union Station, 118, 140, 240 United Farm Workers, 165 United Nations, “Statement on Race,” 212 United States Land Commission, 36 United States Reclamation Service, 131 UNITE HERE Diversity Task Force, 237 Universal Studios, 8, 54, 111, 246n23, 252n30, 259n41 University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), 12, 45, 165, 166, 181, 210, 211, 279n11

300 University of Southern California (USC), 16, 69, 210, 240, 264n70, 279n11; Annenberg School of Communication, 236 Urban Environmental Policy Institute (UEPI), 235 Urban League, 180, 181, 188 Ursini, James, 105 Usurer, The (D. W. Griffith, 1910), 80 Valentino, Rudolph, 160, 267n25 Valenzuela, Fernando, 167 Vallejo, Mariano, 28 Van Norman, Harvey, 132 Van Sant, Gus, 227 Vargas, Jacob, 158 Vedanta Center (of Hollywood), 197 Venice, 27, 126, 213–15, 229, 268n26 Ventura, 246n37 Ventura County, 132, 248n71 Vera-Ellen, 94 Veterans Benevolent Association, 220 Viacom, 99 Vice Versa: The Gayest American Magazine, 221, 225 Victoria, Manuel, 172 Vietnam War, 126, 165 View Park, 180 Villa, Pancho, 156 Villa Capistrano, 223 Villaraigosa, Antonio, 15, 169, 187, 240, 241 Virgin Mary, 58, 60, 155; as Virgin of Guadalupe, 155, 231 Vitagraph Studios, 252n30 Vizcaino, Sebastian, 6 Vogue (magazine), 142 Volcano (Mick Jackson, 1997), 6 von Sternberg, Joseph, 113 von Stroheim, Erich, 90, 111, 112 von Sydow, Max, 272, 16 Vorspan, Max, 69 Waldeck, Jacob, 265n65 Waldie, D. J., 1, 7, 9, 43, 209, 210, 245n13, 251n1 Walker, T-Bone, 177 Walker, Wendy (Miss California), 240 Walkout (Edward James Olmos, 2006), 167 Walt Disney Concert Hall, 145, 210, 233 Walt Disney Studios, 8, 54, 95, 99, 217, 246n23 Walthall, Henry B., 52, 53 Wand, Betty, 94 Ward, Fannie, 191 Warhol, Andy, 226 Warner, H. B., 90, 92 Warner, Jack, 95, 99, 106, 175 Warner Bros., 8, 54, 95, 106, 217

Index Warner Bros. Entertainment, 246n23 Warren, Annette, 94 Washington, Denzel, 177, 178ill Washington, Dinah, 182 Wasikowska, Mia, 230 Water Department. See Los Angeles Department of Water and Power Watterson, Mark and Wilfred, 131 Watts, 20, 174, 176, 177; Watts Riots, 65, 175, 179–81; Watts Writers Workshop, 187, 271n71 Weaver, John D., 170 Weber, Devra, 15 Weld, Tuesday, 216 Welfare Reform Act (1996), 187 Wende Museum, 234 Weschler, Lawrence, 107 Wesley, Valerie Wilson, 176 West, Mae, 238 West, Nathaniel, 84, 89, 257n17 West (magazine), 209, 275n3 Westchester, 51, 235 western films, 37, 38, 46, 55, 75, 81, 214, 253n6 West Hollywood, 145, 227 Westlake, Donald, 135 Westlake Park, 217 West Los Angeles (a.k.a. Westside), 2, 52, 54, 67, 74, 158, 159, 166, 176, 177, 210, 215, 236, 238 Westminster, 174, 203 Westmore, Matt, 200, 201, 201ill Westmoreland, Wash, 231 Westwood, 118, 211, 238 What Price Hollywood? (George Cukor, 1932), 18, 84–88, 86ill, 90, 92, 98, 101 White, Leslie, 108 White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs), 1, 7, 28, 42, 67–70, 73, 87, 88, 170, 189, 209–12, 216, 236. See also Anglos; whites, whiteness White Legend, 31, 34 whites, whiteness, 3, 7, 8, 28, 39, 41, 53, 55, 61, 73, 131, 153, 158, 162, 170, 171, 173–75, 177–82, 184–89, 191, 194, 198, 199, 206, 209– 17, 227–29, 231–34, 237–39, 241, 255n50, 275n3, 276n33; and Keep Neighborhood White campaigns, 173, 174; white flight, 184, 187; “white spot,” 5, 7, 28, 69, 73, 145, 180, 181, 189, 212, 234; “White Wall,” 238; and whitewashing, 10, 14ill, 15, 16, 48, 58, 149, 153, 169, 170, 218, 234. See also Anglos; White Anglo-Saxon Protestants White Witness Law, 172 Whitfield, Raoul, 18, 108, 113, 114 Whitley, H. J., 130 Whitley Heights, 114

Index Whitman, Walt, 110 Whitney, James, 197 Who Framed Roger Rabbit (Robert Zemeckis, 1988), 118 Widney, Robert, 69 Wilcox, Daieda, 75, 255n48 Wilcox, Harvey, 75 Wild Bunch, The (Sam Peckinpah, 1968), 157, 267n15 Wilde, Oscar, 225 Wilder, Billy, 106, 107, 112, 119, 120, 259n9, 261n59 Wilder, W. Lee (a.k.a. Willy), 259n9 Willens, Harold, 210 Williams, Gregory Paul, 255n48 Williams, Tennessee, 197 Williams, Willie, 186, 187 Willis, Bruce, 98 Wilshire, Gaylord, 210 Wilshire Boulevard, 70, 77, 118, 145, 238, 239, 265n98 Wilson, D. B., Report, 56 Wilson, Michael, 94, 258n27 Wilson, Rita, 246n23 Wizard of Oz, The (Victor Fleming, 1939), 213 Wolch, Jennifer, 279n11 Wolfe, Frank, 81, 218 Wolfe, Tom, 120 Wong, Anna May, 190, 194, 238 Wong, Ming, 265n75 Woo, Michael, 187 Wood, Jason L., 232 Woodbury, Billy, 270n54 Woods, Paula, 176

301 World War I, 67, 173, 191 World War II, 16, 48, 67, 88, 95, 116, 162, 163, 174, 195, 196, 214, 218, 220, 240 Wounded Knee Massacre (1890), 154 Wright, Frances, 77 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 197, 218 Wright, Lloyd, 218 Wright, Richard, 175 Wynn, Nan, 94 Yaanga (a.k.a. Yang-na, Yabit), 5, 241. See also Tongva Indians Yang, Philip Q., 198, 199 Yoneda, Karl Goso, 243, 279n8 Yorty, Sam, 181 Young, Loretta, 30, 52, 54ill, 194 Young, Pamela Samuels, 176 Yuan, Eugenia, 200, 201, 201ill Zanuck, Darryl F., 55, 252n26 Zapata, Emiliano, 156 Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), 156 Zeehandelaar, Morris, 78 Zeitlin, Jake, 218 Zell, Sam, 265n80 Zhang Ziyi, 197 Zimmerman, Tom, 234 Zine, Dennis, 145 Zinnemann, Fred, 259n9 Zoot Suit (Luis Valdez, 1981), 162, 163, 163i11, 167 Zoot Suit Riots (1943), 162, 163, 174 Zukor, Adolph, 107, 210 Zwerling, Darrell, 137

A B O U T T H E AU T H O R

Vincent Brook was born and raised in the San Fernando Valley and has lived in Silver Lake for more than thirty years. He teaches at USC, UCLA, Cal State LA, and Pierce College, and has authored or edited the following books: Something Ain’t Kosher Here: The Rise of the “Jewish” Sitcom (2003); You Should See Yourself: Jewish Identity in Postmodern American Culture (2006, editor); and Driven to Darkness: Jewish Émigré Directors and the Rise of Film Noir (2009).