West of Eden : an American place

333 Pages·2016·21.95 MB·English

by  Stein

CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
PROLOGUE:
WELCOME TO LOS ANGELES
I THE DOHENYS
905 Loma Vista Drive
Beverly Hills
II THE WARNERS
1801 Angelo Drive
Beverly Hills
III JANE GARLAND
22368 Pacific Coast Highway
Malibu
IV JENNIFER JONES
1400 Tower Grove Road, Beverly Hills
22400 Pacific Coast Highway, Malibu
22368 Pacific Coast Highway, Malibu
V THE STEINS
1330 Angelo Drive
Beverly Hills
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
Dedication
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Text Credits
Photograph Credits
By Jean Stein
About the Author
PROLOGUE:
WELCOME TO LOS ANGELES
MIKE DAVIS: When I was a younger man, I made an arrangement with Gray Line
Tours that would allow me to drive in the evenings and on weekends (it was
called “working the extra board”). Their business included tours of Marineland
of the Pacific, Forest Lawn cemetery, Hollywood Park, and Universal Studios,
as well as shuttling conventioneers around downtown. Most of the time,
however, I was punching the clock on the hugely popular tour of Hollywood and
Beverly Hills. We dressed up like airline pilots from a Mel Brooks comedy.
Oddly the company did not provide any information for the tours. There was a
fixed route, of course, but otherwise new drivers were expected to purchase
celebrity addresses and the tour “rap” from older drivers. But I was a tightwad so
I just winged it. I’d pick out a big house and lie about who lived there. Usually
this was no problem, but now and then a veteran fan caught me. I remember one
time exuding “Here she is—I Love Lucy! There’s her house. We’ll slow down so
you can take photos.” Then some lady in the back absolutely freaks out. “I’ve
been on this tour enough times to know that’s not Lucille Ball’s house. She lives
three blocks away.”
Beverly Hills was no big deal. But driving the tourists from Iowa down
Hollywood Boulevard was the most hallucinatory part of the job. This was
Hollywood in the early seventies: post–flower-power, post-Manson. The
sidewalks teemed with runaway kids, teenage prostitutes (male and female),
people raving, heroin addicts with two weeks to live—the absolute epicenter of
human misery. It was an awful place, especially on the Hollywood at Night tour.
I used to pull up around the corner from Grauman’s Chinese and kick the tourists
out to go venerate the footprints. I’d lock myself in the bus. I’d close the
windows, saying to myself: “Okay, zombies! You can’t get me. Go eat the
tourists!” The weird part is that the tourists would get out and, surrounded by
misery, gasp, “Ava Gardner’s footprints!” I mean there would be someone lying
naked or ODing, foaming at the mouth, and they’d walk over the body and say,
“Oh! Victor McLaglen, I remember him!” They were ecstatic and I was
mortified. Instead of being distressed by the huge moral discrepancy between the
myth of Hollywood and its current reality, most of them only saw what already
had been fixed in their minds. It was absolutely eerie and sent me right back to
The Day of the Locust. The point that Nathanael West made, of course, is that
the masses ultimately want to kill and devour, to cannibalize their celebrity gods.
Fortunately there were some dramatic exceptions. The Longshoremen’s Union
used to bring tours of Japanese American, Filipino American sugarcane workers
from Hawaii. I’d always get those tours. They were wonderful people and they
liked to hear stories and jokes. They were interested in history, including the
tidbits of radical history. Then there were the guys I truly despised: the
fortysomething drunk white conventioneers with their libidos hanging out of
their pants. These leering, hypocritical bastards automatically assumed that
every Gray Line driver was a pimp (unfortunately several were) who could set
them up with a fifteen-year-old girl. It was all the more disgusting since you
knew that most of these Babbitts were upstanding family men and Kiwanis
members from some middle-sized city in the Midwest.
Gray Line had two kinds of buses. The normal tour bus was a secondhand
American Eagle retired from Greyhound. But for shuttling conventioneers and
the like we used ancient municipal transit buses without a luggage compartment,
what we called “flat bottoms.” We’d take sometimes six, seven, eight buses up
to Universal Studios. Universal was fun because we didn’t have to do anything.
We just dropped the tourists off in the parking lot. The drivers would hang out
together in one bus, sometimes passing a bottle back and forth. Half of them
were pimping girls or selling shit out of the back of the buses. So one day we’re
sitting in my bus, and we see one of these buses slowly rolling by and picking up
speed. Now buses, like heavy-duty trucks, have a “maxi brake”—looks like a big
red button—that welds your wheels in place when you park. I guess the driver
didn’t realize that the huge Universal parking lot has a very slight slope. So his
bus started rolling backwards, very slowly at first, then gaining speed. “Open the
door, Mike!” the drivers shouted. I opened the door, let them out, and we all ran
after the bus, but it was too late. We watched in a kind of fascinated horror as
that old flat bottom just kept rolling down and then off the embankment onto the
Hollywood Freeway.
I
THE DOHENYS
905 Loma Vista Drive, Beverly Hills
Credit 1.1
Greystone, built for the son of Edward L. Doheny.
A winding driveway dropped down between retaining walls to the
open iron gates. Beyond the fence the hill sloped for several miles.
On this lower level faint and far off I could just barely see some of
the old wooden derricks of the oilfield from which the Sternwoods
had made their money….A little of it was still producing in groups
of wells pumping five or six barrels a day. The Sternwoods, having
moved up the hill, could no longer smell the stale sump water or the
oil, but they could still look out of their front windows and see what
had made them rich. If they wanted to. I didn’t suppose they would
want to.
—RAYMOND CHANDLER, The Big Sleep
RICHARD RAYNER: The nature of scandals is that once Pandora’s box has been
opened, it always ends up murkier, more intestinal, more twisted, and much
bigger and longer than anyone could have imagined before they opened the box.
And the story of Edward L. Doheny is centered around a Pandora’s box that
unleashed an extraordinary sequence of events, enthralling the nation for a
decade. It involved the fall and death of a president. It involved millions and
millions of dollars paid to some of the most gifted lawyers in the country. It
involved two slayings intimately connected to Doheny in circumstances that are
still very murky. And it ended in the fall from grace for Doheny—at one point
the richest man in America—who died in 1935 broken and disgraced, very much
by his own actions and his determination to protect himself.
—
PATRICK “NED” DOHENY: My great-grandfather was shocked at the way that
everything spun out. When you think about a guy that strong being broken, you
have to wonder what it must have been like to have had to deal with all those