Nuestro Pueblo, March 31, 1939

Posted on March 31, 2009 by lmharnisch

Posted in Architecture, Nuestro Pueblo, Religion | Comments Off

Found on EBay — L.A. Streetcars

Posted on March 30, 2009 by lmharnisch

This lot of books about streetcars has been listed on EBay and includes several on the Pacific Electric Railway and one on pre-Huntington cars. The books are listed as best offer or Buy It Now for $150.

Posted in books, Transportation | 1 Comment

Matt Weinstock — March 30, 1959

Posted on March 30, 2009 by lmharnisch

Back on Canopus …

Another election is only a week away and the air is heavy with confusion, obscurantism and apathy — mostly apathy. The confusion belongs to the voters. Many of them are recent arrivals who don't understand our dual government — city and county.

For that matter, many people who have lived here all their lives don't understand it either but in another way. They don't understand why they should pay for duplicating functions. New and old alike wonder why we go to the expense and bother of such an election as this one. Couldn't it be included in some other one, they ask.

The obscurantism — political double-talk — belongs both to the incumbents and aspirants bent on knocking the incumbents out of the box. As an example, one councilmanic candidate states in his literature that if elected he plans to become a veritable tiger in solving the smog, tax and transportation problems. It so happens that the council, although it absorbs much of the blame, has nothing to do with any of these three. The smog and tax matters are county problems. The MTA or bus mess is a weird creation of the state Legislature.

And so it goes. Bert Leson Taylor, the Chicago Tribune columnist of another day, said it best:

When quacks with pills political would dope us,
When politics absorbs the livelong day,
I like to think about the star Canopus,
So far, so far away.

A HOLLYWOOD bartender named Joe, born in South San Francisco of Portuguese descent, tells it on himself.

During WWII he was in naval intelligence, assigned to counterspy duty in Portugal. For six months he went out on the boats with fishermen, never speaking English, always Portuguese, gathering information on the Germans, who were in cahoots with Franco of Spain.

He thought he was doing fine and had escaped detection until one night in a Lisbon bar he got to talking with two men he knew to be German agents. One said casually, "How's everything in South San Francisco, Joe?"

WHILE IN New York recently, Marc Lawrence, noted for his sinister movie gangster roles, was invited to come up and see how the bulls and bears were doing in the Stock Exchange on Wall Street. He was standing on the floor of the famous place in the midst of the orderly confusion, watching the buying and selling by the passing of slips of paper, when someone handed him a piece of paper. On it was written, "Drop the gun, Louie."

ONLY IN L.A. — A stranger, about 45, came into Izzy Moidel's law office and said he'd like to know how much a divorce would cost. He told how much money he made and detailed his property holdings, which were considerable. In turn, the workings of the divorce court were explained to him and he was given an estimate of what a judge normally would award his wife. He got up, put a $100 bill on the desk and started out.

"What about the divorce?" Moidel asked.

"Oh, I guess I'll marry the girl and take a chance," he said. Turned out he was a cautious bachelor contemplating matrimony and wanted to know the worst first.

ONLY IN MALIBU — A man who for several years has been driving cars with automatic shifts recently acquired a foreign job with a gear-shift lever and he's entranced with it. "It gives me something to do while I'm driving," is the way he puts it.

MISCELLANY — Milt Forrest calls them radioactive divorces. After all, they're the result of fallout … After deep desperate deliberation, Jack Perkins has figured out a simple solution to the awful freeway traffic. Just make them toll roads … Roberta Morgan has put her hex on the TV villains who give a long commercial spiel, then add, "And now a word from next week's sponsor" … Day after Easter note: Well, what'll it be for dinner — creamed eggs, deviled eggs or egg salad?

Posted in Columnists, Matt Weinstock | Comments Off

Paul Coates — Confidential File, March 30, 1959

Posted on March 30, 2009 by lmharnisch

Confidential File

Operas Recalled … the Sudsy Kind

You really want to know what’s bothering me? Or are you just asking to be nice?

What’s bothering me is this gnawing feeling that I’m not in the swim any more.

I’ve lost touch with the little folksy things in life.

That’s
what comes, I suppose, of trying to be an egghead and subscribing to
the Saturday Review of Literature instead of the Saturday Evening Post.

For instance, it occurred to me that I haven’t even listened to a radio soap opera since Ma Perkins was a girl.

It occurred to me, as a matter of fact, while I was accidentally listening to a soap opera on my car radio the other day.

I’m
aware, now, that it takes a certain amount of orientation before you
are fully able to comprehend the subtleties in this type of melodrama.
Apparently it’s far more intricate than a Greek tragedy.

Once, I
had the necessary orientation. There was a time, shortly after the era
of the crystal set, when I dug each and every little nuance of Just Plain Bill’ s dialogue.

Just Plain Bill would murmur to his daughter Nancy things like:

"Nancy, honey, don’t you be upset because that promising young country prosecutor, Mark Shoreham,
with whom you are in love, is planning to indict me for the murder of
the elderly widow Blake, whom I befriended, and therefore she left a
mite of property in my name. There’s nothing for you to worry about,
Nancy, honey. I’m not worried."

Plain Bill Easy to Dig

But in those days I could tell by the way he said it that Plain Bill was damn well worried. He was just covering up for Nancy.

I could also determine, by the merest inflection in her voice, that Myrt was really mad at Marge for carrying on with that saxophone player and was just not saying anything about it.

But my talent as a listener has diminished to the vanishing point. I realized that when I tuned in on soap opera the other day.

Of
course, it should be said in my behalf that I tuned in late. And even
if you come in at the beginning it’s difficult to unravel the story of
the tangled lives involved.

At any rate, the male lead had a deep, syrupy voice that had to be Don Ameche.
He was talking, but mostly listening, to the feminine lead, whose name,
I think, was Melinda. Things, he was telling her, would improve.

Things, she was telling him, better improve.

Is He Really Hiding Melinda?

"I’m
sick of this ‘backstreet’ life," was the way she put it. "Sick of it.
Are you ashamed of me? Do you have to hide me from people?"

"Darling,"
he whispered in that persuasive voice he once used to tell Mr. Watson
to come here, "you know I’m not ashamed of you. You know I don’t LIKE
to hide you from people. I’d LIKE to shout it from the rooftops."

"Don’t do me any favors," she said, in effect. "Don’t shout it from rooftops. Just tell Cara about us."

Well,
it doesn’t take a bomb to fall on me. I figured that neat, little
mathematical design out in a hurry. Wife, husband and girlfriend.

Melinda Struts Stuff in Kitchen

After the commercial, the plot thickened to the consistency of glue. Melinda went to Don Ameche’s
house while Cara was away for the evening. She wanted to prove to him
that she could whip him up a dinner just like any housewife. And she
had to clean up the dishes and get out before Cara came home. I mean,
how would it look?

As if that situation weren’t bad enough, I got the impression through further snatches of dialogue that Don Ameche wasn’t really married to Cara. Of course, it was just an impression. I don’t know it for a fact.

However,
rather than get involved in that parlay, I switched the dial to Al
Jarvis. I don’t understand him either. But, at least, he keeps his nose
clean.

Posted in broadcasting, Columnists, Paul Coates | Comments Off

In the Theaters — March 30, 1983

Posted on March 30, 2009 by lmharnisch

Posted in Film, Hollywood | Comments Off

Trouble Was His Business — Raymond Chandler

Posted on March 30, 2009 by lmharnisch

A historic passion

* Author Judith Freeman researched Raymond Chandler’s marriage.

November 07, 2007

By Graham Fuller, Special to The Times

Twenty years ago, Judith Freeman became "obsessed," as she puts it, with Raymond Chandler, whose novels featuring the private detective Philip Marlowe still make up the most iconic literary portrait of Los Angeles. When, in 2003, Freeman began writing "The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved," she found herself on a quest leading in many different directions.

The author of a short-story collection and four novels, Freeman was raised in Utah. She had moved to Los Angeles in the late ’70s and was living in one of Chandler’s old neighborhoods when she began reading his letters. She became captivated by Chandler’s wife Cissy. A fey, ethereally beautiful sophisticate with a past as a nude model in New York, Cissy was living with her second husband on South Vendome when she and Chandler met around 1913. Their affair began after he’d returned from the Great War, and they married in 1924. At the time, Chandler was 35 and thought his bride was 43. Only gradually did he learn she was 18 years his senior.

It was the absence of information in Chandler’s letters and Frank McShane’s 1976 biography that made Cissy an enigma in Freeman’s eyes and prompted her decision to "possibly bring her to life." As she tried to fathom the nature of the Chandlers’ 30-year marriage — which incorporated elements of courtly love and withstood his alcoholism, philandering, and her long decline into invalidism — she was confronted with the couple’s itinerant lifestyle.

They changed addresses over 30 times in Los Angeles and Southern California. They lived downtown and in Hollywood, in Santa Monica, Pacific Palisades, San Bernardino, Monrovia, Idyllwild and Cathedral City, in the mountains and the desert, sometimes changing residences twice a year. They were as restless as an alley cat on a velvet cushion.

Why they couldn’t stay put is a mystery that might have baffled Marlowe, at least temporarily. Without donning a trench coat, Freeman had a crack at solving it.

"I think Ray was constantly searching," she said, "but they also liked this idea of mobility, the fact that you could get a new car and go to Big Bear for the summers, to the desert for the winters, and if, you didn’t like it, to Santa Monica or Arcadia, Brentwood or Silver Lake. This possibility was introduced not just by the automobile, but by their sense of general detachment from any kind of past family."

Asked if she feels there was a neurotic element in the Chandlers’ nomadism, Freeman said "there is something deeply unsettled about it. In A.A. meetings they use the term ‘going geographic’ of an alcoholic personality to describe that idea of constantly moving, running, probably trying to escape and find at the same time."

"I don’t know if Chandler was running from something," said David Thomson, who wrote a monograph on Howard Hawks’ film of Chandler’s "The Big Sleep." "Maybe he was a kind of hotel writer — a little like Nabokov — in that he never had much need to be ‘at home.’ He had a hero who seems to live in a very plain room and waits to be invited out by fate. I think of him as someone who found his dream and so inhabited it as much as he could."

The Chandlers nearly parted in 1932 when Ray’s persistent drunkenness and workplace affairs cost him his executive job at Dabney Oil.

"This was the major disruption in his life," said Alain Silver, the coauthor of "Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles." "His peripatetic lifestyle became more urgent. The simplest reason he was constantly moving was that the rent would go up. By the time he could support himself and Cissy with his writing, the moving had become a habit. It maintained the displacement he’d known as a youth." He and his mother had been abandoned by his father when he was 7.

The marriage was threatened again when Chandler was lured to Hollywood in 1943 to write "Double Indemnity" with Billy Wilder. But over the long course, Freeman said, husband and wife sustained each other. Freeman says Chandler was "very conscious" of his knightly code. "I think it was forcibly instilled in him at Dulwich College in England. Then Cissy gave him the wonderfully strange nickname of Gallibeoth" — redolent of Galahad– "when they were still having an affair. This was a persona he adopted and that she completely embraced and reaffirmed, 12 years before he wrote his first short story. She became the enabler of his vision of the private eye who functions as a rescuer of humanity."

Freeman asserts that Cissy provided Chandler with a haven from the corruption, vice and brutality he considered endemic to Los Angeles — and which fueled his finest writing. "They created this little island of civility within this wacky crackpot capital of the world, as Chandler called it. I think he must have been seduced by the city at first, but by the time he got through the studio system he was sick of it.

"There was a kind of banal quality to life that he detested, a lowbrow feeling, and he wanted to get out, and they did. But then, of course, he began to hate the place he found himself in, La Jolla, because of its Cadillac-and-chauffeur atmosphere. Like every other place he had run to, it wasn’t going to be the answer to anything, and he began to regret that he ever left L.A."

Freeman visited all of the Chandlers’ homes that were still standing. Particularly moving are her descriptions of Ray’s study and Cissy’s bedroom in their ocean-side house in La Jolla, where they lived from 1946 to 1954, when Cissy died.

It was there he wrote "The Long Goodbye," in which Marlowe’s isolation, echoing Chandler’s, becomes palpable. He rejects the humdrum existence of his hometown, Santa Rosa, and the decadence of the gated community in "Idle Valley." "I’ll take the big sordid dirty crooked city," he says. "A city no worse than others, a city rich and vigorous and full of pride, a city lost and beaten and full of emptiness."

Freeman’s passion for her material can be off-putting for some. Ben Tarnoff in the San Francisco Chronicle writes that she "spends too much time reflecting on her own encounter with the material to offer a vivid portrait of the Chandlers’ life together." But Richard Rayner, writing in The Times, sees her quest as more poignant, making the book "ache with emotion and loneliness — her loneliness and Chandler’s, the loneliness of following a trail, of a marriage, of writing itself."

Chandler died of pneumonia, brought on by his drinking, in La Jolla in 1959. A wanderer to the end, he spent his last years seemingly looking for another Cissy to protect — and to protect him.

"Their marriage gave him meaning and kept him together," Freeman said. "He romanticized it as almost perfect. But I do think they were happy."

Note: To mark the 50th anniversary of Raymond Chandler’s death, the Daily Mirror is revisiting some of The Times’ stories about his life and influence. We invite the Daily Mirror’s readers to share their thoughts.

Posted in books, Film, Hollywood, Raymond Chandler | 1 Comment

Voices — Maurice Jarre, 1924-2009

Posted on March 30, 2009 by lmharnisch

Q & A MAURICE JARRE

Ode to David Lean

August 8, 1993

By SUSAN KING, TIMES STAFF WRITER

Oscar-winning
composer Maurice Jarre leads the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in a
special salute to his frequent collaborator, the late director David
Lean, in "Great Performances: Lean by Jarre," premiering Monday on PBS.
Highlighting the hourlong concert are suites from "Lawrence of Arabia,"
"Dr. Zhivago"–including the famous "Lara’s Theme"–"Ryan’s Daughter"
and "A Passage to India." Recorded at London’s Barbican Hall, the
special features clips and behind-the-scenes footage from those classic
films.

Jarre, 69, had composed the music for more than 40 films,
including "The Longest Day," before he was hired by "Lawrence of
Arabia" producer Sam Spiegel to compose that film’s now-legendary score.

Lean,
who died in 1991 at age 83, encouraged Jarre in the use of electronic
and ethnic instruments in film music. Today, the French composer is
recognized as a pioneer in that field. Jarre has received 10 Academy
Award nominations and received Oscars for "Lawrence," "Zhivago" and
"India." His most recent screen credits include "Witness" and "Ghost."

Jarre discussed Lean and the art of film music with Times Staff Writer Susan King.

Was the tribute to Lean your idea?

Yes.
When he died I wanted to do a concert, a tribute to him, in London.
When we recorded "Passage to India" it was with the Royal Philharmonic
Orchestra in London. We decided to do this tribute to David Lean with
the orchestra. Exactly eight days before the concert somebody from a
video company said why not try to videotape this concert because it
will definitely be something we should have an account of. In one week,
they managed to organize the thing. I think everybody was very
concentrated, very professional. These musicians wanted to play better
than just for a normal concert. We did it for David.

You got very emotional at the conclusion.

Yeah,
because when I heard all of this applause, I knew that was not only for
the orchestra and me, but it was for David Lean. So at that point I
almost broke up. His work was really applauded as much as mine.

Is it true you had very little time to compose the music for "Lawrence of Arabia"?

It
was real panic time. I had six weeks to compose two hours of music and
record it. The problem was David was editing the second part of the
movie before the first part, so when I was doing the music I couldn’t
start the music in a chronological order. I had to start the second
part imagining what I was to do in the first part. That was really
another challenge. To make a working schedule perfect, I managed to
sleep every three hours for 10 minutes. I could go just days and nights
without stopping. After that, I had three or four months to recuperate
just sleeping and doing nothing.

I hope your schedule was easier with the other Lean films.

In
the first place, with "Lawrence of Arabia," I arrived at the end of the
picture. With "Dr. Zhivago," I was involved from the beginning and that
was much better. I read the book and the script. I went on location
with David. He was always insisting after "Lawrence of Arabia" for me
to be involved from the beginning and to go on location to have a
little flavor of the artist’s concept for the film. I went to Ireland
for three months for "Ryan’s Daughter" to work on the music there.
"Passage to India," unfortunately … I couldn’t go to India but I was
not too keen on going to India. I like to see India from photos and
films, but it’s not a country I am very interested to see because I
don’t feel comfortable in a tropical climate.

Do most directors you work with want you to go with them on location?

Sometimes
when you work for the first time with the director, the film is
finished and they decide to hire a composer. If I work with a director
more than once, the second time, if he likes what I did with the first
collaboration, he asks me to go on location with him. That’s what I did
sometimes with Peter Weir or Visconti or even John Huston. That’s much
better. When they ask you when the film is finished, you are confronted
with the problem that you have to digest the concept of the director
and the story in a few weeks. Sometimes they work on the film for two
years. How can you in a few weeks be on the same wavelength as the
director and the producer?

Music always seemed to play such an
important part in Lean’s films, even the ones you weren’t involved in
like "The Bridge on the River Kwai" and "Brief Encounter.

Absolutely.
Also with David, it was very interesting. When he was writing the
script with Robert Bolt or by himself, he always put the music cues in
the script. These notes about the music are extremely thorough and
precise. David Lean never had a big musical culture. He loved music and
had tremendous intuition about music, but he never really had musical
references like Visconti or Peter Weir. By the way, Peter Weir, I
think, has the largest spectrum of musical culture I have ever met in a
director. He knows very well classical music, modern music, electronic,
new wave, opera. It’s amazing.

What’s your favorite score you composed for a Lean movie?

Well,
sentimentally I think it’s "Lawrence of Arabia." I met David because of
that. I liked very much "Ryan’s Daughter" because we tried a lot of
little experiments in the sound, music and concept.

Posted in classical music, Film, Hollywood, Music, Obituaries | Comments Off

‘Ma’ Duncan

Posted on March 30, 2009 by lmharnisch

Photograph by John Malmin / Los Angeles Times

Defendants Augustine Baldonado, left, and Luis Moya stand during the arraignment of Elizabeth Ann Duncan, with attorney S. Ward Sullivan, in Ventura County.

By Catriona Lavery

Elizabeth Ann Duncan hired two men to kill her pregnant daughter-in-law, jealous that the young mother-to-be threatened her incestuous relationship with her son Frank, 30. Duncan is one of four women executed in California’s gas chamber.

Olga Kupczyk Duncan disappeared in November 1958. She was seven months’ pregnant, 30 years old and newspapermen didn’t hesitate to call her attractive.

Elizabeth Duncan first drew suspicion when police discovered she had illegally obtained an
annulment for her son and his wife. Elizabeth Duncan and Ralph Winterstein, 25, hired by Duncan, secured the separation by posing as
the young couple in court.

Nearly a month after the woman’s disappearance, investigators found her body in the Casitas Pass of Carpinteria, Calif., after Augustine Baldonado, 25, confessed that he and Luis Moya, 22, had been offered $6,000 by the victim’s mother-in-law. The two men beat the young woman with a pistol, strangled her and buried her body in a shallow grave. Coroners investigations found that she was still alive when buried.

Elizabeth Duncan’s bizarre past and penchant for dramatics made the trial a sensation.

Inconsistencies abound

She had been married at least 11 times.

When cross-examined, she admitted to 10 marriages and said, “there might
have been an 11th…. I’m afraid to count the others: they didn’t mean that much to me.” At one point, prosecutors alleged she married 16 times. Duncan conned young men into marrying by telling them she needed a husband in order to inherit a great fortune, promising them a cut.

At first, Duncan maintained she had two children — Frank and a daughter,
Patricia, who died at 15. However, Duncan later admitted she had four other children — three daughters and a son. When Prosecutor Roy Gustafson asked if she loved Frank more than the others, she said yes.

An unnatural love

Despite being married, he still slept at his mother’s home. In his testimony, Frank Duncan proudly admitted he had lived with his mother almost his whole life. Their incestuous relationship and his mother’s subsequent jealousy became the basis of motive in the case.

Newspapers at the time approached the relationship cautiously. The Times only mentions the mother’s “overwhelming love” for her son. The Mirror News refers to an “unnatural love” between the two, but stopped short of calling it incest.

Elizabeth Duncan also admitted to planning to kidnap her son. “Frankie had just lost his mind over Olga,” she testified. “So I called my sister in Los Angeles and told her to rent an apartment for me. I was going to tie him up and take him down there to try to talk some sense into him. I didn’t want to lose Frankie. I couldn’t stand life alone and I knew it.”

The jury took just four hours and 51 minutes to find her guilty.

Elizabeth_duncan_1959_0114_crop_2

Photograph by the Los Angeles Times

Frank Duncan and his mother, Elizabeth Ann.

Her execution was delayed twice. Both times Duncan’s lawyers argued “sensational publicity” and other circumstances prevented their client from receiving a fair trial. In 1962, the court refused to hear another appeal.

Frank Duncan, also a lawyer, fought for his mother until the end. At the time of her execution, he was in San Francisco, pleading her case before the U.S. Court of Appeals. The court refused
to take action, and she was executed on August 8, 1962.

Ladies

Elizabeth Ann Duncan was the last of four women executed by gas chamber in California. The others were “the Dutchess” Ethel Juanita Spinelli (1941), Louise Peete (1947) and Barbara Graham (1955). Almost 200 men have died in the same way.

Peete offered one reason for the unrepresentative number. Just before her execution, Peete was convinced she would not die. She said, “The governor is a gentlemen — and no gentleman could sentence a lady to her death.”

Look through the recent columns of Paul Coates and Matt Weinstock for more articles about Elizabeth Ann Duncan.

Posted in #courts, Homicide | Comments Off

New Light on ‘Dark Shadows’

Posted on March 29, 2009 by lmharnisch

[Did we misspell Barnabas all the way through this story? Yes.–lrh]

Frid, Minus Fangs, to Read in O.C.

Performance: The actor has less than fond memories for his years as vampire Barnabus Collins on TV’s ‘Dark Shadows.’

October 26, 1991

By JESS BRAVIN, SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

Like
other artists weary of uncertain careers, Jonathan Frid was about to
cash in the actor’s life and become a teacher. Then the big break came
and spoiled his plans.

In 1967, the Yale-trained Frid, a
sometime Shakespearean who had toured public schools performing the
Lincoln-Douglas debates, won the part of Barnabus Collins, a courtly
vampire on the ABC-TV daytime serial "Dark Shadows." The soap opera
with gothic overtones would run through 1971, spawn two feature-length
movies and a small marketing phenomenon and also earn Frid a footnote
in the annals of popular culture.

Frid, who never cared for
horror movies as a child (he recalls sneaking off to see matinees of
musicals) would forevermore share Barnabus’ curse: Like the vampire who
spent 175 self-hating years sucking blood, Frid would find his career
kept alive by a predicament he hates.

"Everywhere I go," sighs Frid, now 66, "I get a few morons who expect to see the vampire."

And,
Halloween notwithstanding, he warns that those who expect to see the
vampire tonight will be sorely disappointed when Frid, sans fangs,
appears at Yorba Linda’s Forum Theatre to read a set of short stories
under the somewhat cumbersome title of "Jonathan Frid’s
Fridiculousness."

The program, which Frid describes as "readers
theater," leans heavily on wits from the first half of the 20th
Century, including Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker and Groucho Marx. He
adds a few items by writers known for somewhat heavier work–Somerset
Maugham and Robert Frost–as well as a couple of modern pieces,
including one by illustrator and humorist Gahan Wilson. "Jonathan
Frid’s Fridiculousness" also contains a few items by its eponymous
performer: a humorous genealogy of his name titled "Freaks, Frights and
Fridians," and a set examining the frustrations of modern telephone
usage.

As a seasonal courtesy, Frid does plan to end each half
of the program with a story drawn from what might be called genre
fiction. "Here There Be Tygers" by Stephen King concludes the first
act, and "The Tell-Tale Heart" by Edgar Allan Poe wraps up the show.

"It is," Frid allows, "what’s expected of me."

Frid,
a native of Canada, insists that recent years spent on tour with his
one-man act "have been the happiest time of my life in show business"
but that, inevitably, he finds himself recalling the "Dark Shadows"
that defined his career.

And recalling the program’s
hallmarks–turgid dialogue, shoddy production values and metaphysical
mumbo jumbo–Frid is less than charitable.

"It was just garbage,
just preposterous; even for its day, it was awful," he says. "All of
us, and especially the vampire, would be given these long, convoluted
sentences that go on forever. It was a show that tried to be different,
but most of the time it fell flat on its face.

"Some people try
to apologize for it, saying that’s how television was done in the ’60s.
Well, there was a lot of brilliant television in those days, and we
weren’t a part of it, I’m afraid."

The program’s success–and the continuing fascination that Barnabus holds for thousands of fans–befuddles Frid.

"I
guess there was something vulnerable about the character, if you accept
the idiotic premise of coming out of a coffin after 175 years. It must
have been the vulnerability–I was so humiliated all the time, maybe
there was a bit of humility in my work."

But roles for
ex-vampires were few after the series was canceled in 1971, so Frid
began the odyssey that eventually would lead him to Yorba Linda.

Through
the 1970s, Frid won an occasional small film role, but he largely
remained out of public sight. Unable to shake his "Dark Shadows"
lineage, he finally consented–in exchange for room, board and air fare
to Los Angeles–to attend one of the innumerable conventions staged for
fans of the program.

"They’re a strange lot," he said of the
fans. "I feel like a Martian when I’m among them. Let’s face it: Most
of the people who work in this world, the haves and the achievers,
don’t watch soap operas."

Nevertheless, Frid said he enjoyed the
free travel and so continued to attend "Dark Shadows" conventions
through the 1980s. Tired of answering the same questions over and again
at these events, Frid proposed instead to present readings. First, his
programs consisted entirely of poetry written by "Dark Shadows" fans.

"Most
of it’s not very good," he said, "but some of it, at least, wasn’t bad.
They were mostly romantic things based on Barnabus the lovable vampire,
the romantic antihero, you know, the longing and yearning of this man
who was condemned by this curse, the longing and yearning, the longing
and the yearning," Frid says. "Please don’t ask me to repeat any of it."

After
Frid was cast in a 1986 New York revival of "Arsenic and Old Lace," he
regained enough stature to book himself outside of "Dark Shadows"
conventions. Juggling several programs, he now offers different
versions of his readers theater, based on humor, horror or Shakespeare,
playing mainly at schools, colleges and corporate functions.

Frid
finds himself in particular demand this time of year. A New York
foundation engaged him to read a horror story at one of its public
events, and MCI, the long-distance company, hired him to read a
three-minute condensation of "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" as part of a
Halloween promotion.

Still, Frid recalls a 1963 tour of Pittsburgh’s
inner-city schools as the highlight of his career. "We put on the
Lincoln-Douglas debates in every classroom," he says. "The kids were
poor, and they were tough, but by God they were sharp. It was the most
thrilling thing I’ve ever done."

So then, has Frid given any thought to picking up his long-delayed ambition to be a teacher?

"Well,
I’m almost 70," he says. The former vampire adds without a hint of
irony: "I’m getting a little long in the tooth for that."

Lengthening ‘Shadows’

* The gothic
soap opera is long gone from network TV but not forgotten. As the
series finds new fans in reruns, a festival to celebrate it opens
Friday.

July 6, 2000

By SUSAN KING, TIMES STAFF WRITER

"Dark Shadows" has seemingly endured about as long as its most beloved character, the 175-year-old vampire Barnabas Collins.

Well,
maybe not that long. But the daytime gothic soap opera, which premiered
on ABC on June 27, 1966, and continued until 1971, simply won’t die. In
fact, the show has found new blood in reruns–first in syndication,
then on PBS and now on the Sci-Fi Channel.

This weekend, an
estimated 5,000 fans are expected to attend the annual "Dark Shadows"
Festival, to be held Friday through Sunday at the Los Angeles Airport
Marriott Hotel.

Among the original series actors scheduled to
appear are David Selby, Lara Parker, Kathryn Leigh Scott, John Karlen,
Nancy Barrett and Mitchell Ryan.

The festivals attract all age
groups, says Parker, who played Angelique. "We have lots and lots of
new fans," she says. "There are people who show up who name their
children Angelique. There are people who have been coming back for 20
years, and they all know each other. For them it’s a real pastime. It’s
based on ‘Dark Shadows,’ but they all know each other and enjoy being
together."

New generations have access to the 30-year-old
program, with all 1,225 episodes available on MPI home video. The
series’ creator, Dan Curtis of "The Winds of War" fame, is even
preparing a stage musical based on the series, and the second "Dark
Shadows" feature film, 1971’s "Night of Dark Shadows," is slated to be
restored.

"Sometimes fans wait for an hour and half just to say
hello," Parker says of the autograph-signing sessions. "They give us
presents. They talk about their experiences and what it meant to them
to be watching the show as teenagers and how much the characters meant
to them. Sometimes it’s quite touching."

"We take it pretty serious," says Scott, who played Josette. "’We raise tons of money for charity."

Though
they played enemies on the series, Scott and Parker are the best of
friends. In fact, the cast is closer now than when they did the series.
"We were young and we were very career-oriented," Scott says. "One of
the reasons why we love going is because there are all of these new
fans who keep coming to the show because of cable. What they are really
interested in is what we are doing now. It would be stultifying if we
went to one of these things and we were lost in some retro world. It
would be horrible."

Scott formed her own publishing company,
Pomegranate Press Ltd., 15 years ago when she wrote her first book, "My
Scrapbook Memories of Dark Shadows." She’s published 43 books,
including five "Dark Shadows" tomes. Her latest, "Dark Shadows Almanac:
The Millennium Edition," which she co-wrote with Jim Pierson, is
currently in stores. And Parker is writing her third "Dark Shadows"
novel for HarperCollins.

"We have all had careers and, actually, acting careers that have gone on gratifyingly long," Scott says.

About
20 cast members, says Scott, normally show up at the festivals.
Jonathan Frid, who played Barnabas and once complained about his
identification with the character, is noticeably absent. "Jonathan
hasn’t come in the last couple of years," Scott says. "He’s been
touring with his one-man show and he lives in Canada. He’ll return.
Others come in from wherever–we get them all."

Scott and Parker say their feelings toward the "Dark Shadows" cult following have changed over the years.

"It
was my first job, and so my feeling was onward and upward" after the
show was canceled, Parker says. "I came to Hollywood feeling extremely
confident that I had done five years on a very successful series. Of
course, I said, ‘I’m putting this all behind me. I am never even going
to think about this show again. I’m going to get on with my life and
become a famous movie star.’ "

Though she never achieved that
stardom, Parker says "Dark Shadows" never "stood in my way at all. I
got to play an awful lot of roles on TV, but I never got another big
series. It just turned out that the thing that gave me the greatest
number of opportunities was ‘Dark Shadows.’ I have come to appreciate
it."

Scott believes she’s put her finger on the enduring appeal
of "Dark Shadows," which premiered the same year as another cult
sensation, "Star Trek."

"It’s always my feeling that ["Star Trek" creator] Gene Roddenberry was a genius like Dan Curtis," she says.

"Gene
Roddenberry went ahead in time, and we went back in time. Both of the
series borrowed liberally from the great classics–from Melville to
Henry James to the Bible. They told universal morality tales. They are
the kind of stories told around the campfire, the kind of stories
children adore and the stories that adults gravitate to."

http://www.darkshadowsfestival.com

Posted in broadcasting, Film, Hollywood, Television | 4 Comments

In the Theaters — March 29, 1980

Posted on March 29, 2009 by lmharnisch

Posted in Film, Hollywood | Comments Off

Trouble Was His Business — Raymond Chandler

Posted on March 29, 2009 by lmharnisch

Two true loves

* The Long Embrace Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved Judith Freeman Pantheon: 354 pp., $25.95

November 04, 2007

By
Richard Rayner, Richard Rayner’s new book, "The Associates: Four
Capitalists Who Created California," is due out in January. His column
Paperback Writers appears monthly at latimes.com/books.

"I used
to like this town. A long time ago. There were trees along Wilshire
Boulevard. Beverly Hills was a country town. Westwood was bare hills
and lots offering at eleven hundred dollars and no takers. Hollywood
was a bunch of frame houses on the inter-urban line," Raymond Chandler
wrote, in the voice of his detective hero, Philip Marlowe, in 1949.
"Los Angeles was just a big dry sunny place with ugly homes and no
style, but good-hearted and peaceful. It had the climate they yap about
now. People used to sleep out on porches. Little groups who thought
they were intellectual used to call it the Athens of America."

Chandler
first came to Los Angeles in 1912, a time so distant in the city’s
history as to seem almost unreal. The population had only just climbed
above 300,000. L.A. was still shaking from the dynamiting of The Times
by the McNamara brothers, and Clarence Darrow was on trial for alleged
bribery. William Mulholland’s titanic aqueduct was incomplete and no
water had as yet come from the Owens River Valley. Speedy, efficient
streetcars connected downtown with the recently incorporated city of
Hollywood and the distant beach towns. Chandler himself belonged to a
little intellectual group, the Optimists, formed by his friend Warren
Lloyd and meeting weekly at Lloyd’s house on South Bonnie Brae Street.
Music was played, poetry declaimed, literature and philosophy discussed.

At
one of these soirees, Chandler first met Julian Pascal, a concert
pianist and music professor, and Pascal’s wife, Cissy. "Sexy and
experienced, witty and confident, she was everything a young man could
want in an older woman," writes Judith Freeman in "The Long Embrace:
Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved." "He was sexually repressed
and shy, inexperienced with women. Little wonder he found her
irresistible."

And irresistible she was. "Cissy was a raging
beauty, a strawberry blonde with skin I used to love to touch,"
Chandler would say later. "I don’t know how I ever managed to get her."
It took awhile: Cissy, twice-married, a former New York model who liked
to do housework in the nude, kept him at arm’s length at first.

Chandler
enlisted in a Canadian regiment and went off to fight in World War I,
in no small part, Freeman argues, "because he found himself in the
untenable position of being in love with another man’s wife." He came
back, or was drawn back, to Los Angeles in 1919. After much argument
and discussion, Julian Pascal agreed to bow out of the picture, but
Cissy and Chandler didn’t marry until 1924, when Chandler’s mother —
with whom he’d been living — died at last from an agonizing cancer.
Only then, or a little later, did Chandler learn that Cissy was not
eight years older than him, as he’d thought, but eighteen. He was 35,
and he’d married a woman of 53.

"All this is the stuff of
passion and novels," noted Patricia Highsmith, whose first book,
"Strangers on a Train," Chandler would help adapt for the 1951
Hitchcock movie of the same name. "But little of the formidable
emotional material that Chandler had at his disposal actually found its
way into his writing."

That’s not quite true. All his life,
Chandler was a divided soul. He was an American, born in Chicago in
1888, yet he grew up mostly in England and received an education at
snooty Dulwich College. He longed to live freely yet had a strict moral
code. He was too troubled ever to be truly happy, and too inhibited and
mannerly to be a freely autobiographical writer.

And yet, this
worked for him, in its own way. His heightened sense of his own
pleasures and dismays passed into how he caught the atmosphere and
moods of L.A. His marriage to Cissy endured, and Los Angeles became a
metaphor for the torture and disappointment he sometimes felt.

"The
Long Embrace" is an exploration of these two relationships — Ray and
Cissy, Chandler and L.A. It is a beautiful and original book, in which
Freeman becomes a double detective, telling the story of this strange
yet loving marriage while also tracking down and visiting everywhere
that the Chandlers lived in Southern California. That’s no small task
because Chandler needed movement like he needed air to breathe. "I kept
the long list of Chandler addresses taped to the wall next to my desk
where I could see it every day: Bonnie Brae Angels Flight Bunker Hill
Loma Drive Vendome Catalina Stewart Leeward Longwood Gramercy
Meadowbrook . . ." writes Freeman. "The list read like a plainsong of
wandering, the liturgy of a long search for a home."

Freeman
sits in bars and drinks gimlets, because Chandler claimed a gimlet
"beat a martini hollow." She waits outside apartment buildings in the
rain and sun. She spends months visiting UCLA’s Special Collections and
the Bodleian in Oxford, going through the Chandler archives. "I felt I
was becoming a bit strange to myself," she tells us. Her quest turns
into an obsession, and "The Long Embrace" starts to ache with emotion
and loneliness — her loneliness and Chandler’s, the loneliness of
following a trail, of a marriage, of writing itself.

Chandler is
so much a part of the furniture that we tend to forget how great he is.
The plots of "The Big Sleep," "Farewell, My Lovely" and "The High
Window" are swift and workably complex, but they didn’t bring much that
was new to the crime story, even in their own time. He despised the
lazy arrogance of wealth and power but lacked the rigor with which
Dashiell Hammett viewed social and political corruption.

No,
Chandler was a romantic, more like F. Scott Fitzgerald than the worldly
Hammett, and through the character of Marlowe he became a haunting poet
of place, this place, Los Angeles, whose split personality of light and
dark mirrored Chandler’s own. He caught the glaring sun, the glittering
swimming pools, the cigar-stinking lobbies of seedy hotels, the
improbable mansions, the dismal apartment buildings, the sound of tires
on asphalt and gravel, the sparkling air of the city after rain and how
the fog smells at the beach at night.

Frank MacShane published
the standard Chandler biography more than 30 years ago, and until now,
no other book has made us view this great American writer afresh. "The
Long Embrace" does. "To take care of Cissy. That was his driving life
force," Freeman writes. Chandler worked in the oil business for Cissy,
and he turned himself into a crime writer for his wife, while feeling
he never "wrote a book worthy of dedicating to her." Through booze, he
rebelled against this bondage but never really wanted to break free.
Freeman speculates, plausibly, that Chandler might have longed for men.
"In ‘The Big Sleep,’ " she writes (she means "The Long Goodbye"),
"there’s simply no question Marlowe had loved Terry Lennox — he moons
after him."

Freeman traces the ups and downs of the marriage and
career with utmost delicacy. We spend time with Billy Wilder and John
Houseman, although "The Long Embrace" offers much more than a mere
retelling. Spurred by Chandler’s restlessness, Freeman writes about
L.A. with a tender precision and yearning that borders on the
religious. "I headed out Sunset Boulevard, past Hollywood High School
and the cheap divey hotels with the leggy hookers out front, past the
Chateau Marmont, where Belushi died of an overdose and the gargantuan
billboards loom over the strip, the Marlboro man and his horse like
gods high in the sky," she notes, describing a drive oceanward. "The
farther you travel the more the air begins to change and become infused
with a marine freshness. A mist develops. A faint fog appears, shot
through with sunshine. A hazy light that says you’re almost to the
beach. You smell the coast long before you see it. You sense you’re
coming to the end of the land."

That’s lovely, a haunting homage
to a man whose own end was bleak. After Cissy died, Chandler burned her
letters, perhaps wishing to keep her to himself forever. He was lost,
and age dumped its garbage on him. He made an unsuccessful suicide
attempt and embarrassed himself with younger women.

"[H]e became
unmoored — some might say unhinged," writes Freeman, who finds herself
repeating again and again variants of the sad phrase: "He began
drinking again." In "The Long Embrace," though, magic has occurred.
Freeman’s identification with her subject is so complete we feel we’re
there with Chandler too. We even believe her when she enters his dying
mind, saying: "I always was a man without a home. . . . Still am."

Note: To mark the 50th anniversary of Raymond Chandler’s death, the
Daily Mirror is revisiting some of The Times’ stories about his life and
influence. We invite the Daily Mirror’s readers to share their thoughts.

Posted in books, Film, Hollywood, Raymond Chandler, Real Estate | Comments Off

Actress Near Death After Beating; Gehrig in Decline, March 29, 1939

Posted on March 29, 2009 by lmharnisch

Dewitt Clinton Cook, who admitted attacking actress Delia Bogard, was executed Jan. 31, 1941, in the fatal beating of Anya Sosoyeva. Bogard died in 1995 in Los Angeles at the age of 74.

Ouch! A Duesenberg Model J sedan for $395 ($5,839.47 USD 2007), the same price as a 1936 Ford deluxe sedan.

At left, Assemblyman Ralph Dills (D-Compton) reads a news article to legislators stating that drinking cow’s milk gives children lower voices–“more like a calf’s than a human’s.”

W.C. Fields blows his lines on Dick Powell’s radio show!

“Apple Mary,” the precursor of “Mary Worth,” drawn by Martha Orr.

Lou Gehrig’s decline was becoming evident, although the cause was still unknown.

The Times ran a wire story from Florida that polled writers covering the Yankees about Gehrig’s status and how it might affect the team’s chances. A few days earlier, the paper had published the news that Gehrig was benched in a spring training game, out of the Yankees’ lineup for the first time since 1925.

“Gehrig has looked pitifully rusty” in spring training, the Associated Press story said.

The story about the writers was tacky, even considering that no one knew the severity of Gehrig’s condition. “I don’t think Gehrig has much to do with the Yankees winning. I don’t think he helped them an awful lot last year,” said Rud Rennie of the New York Herald Tribune.

Gehrig’s consecutive games streak would finally end in May when he pulled himself out of the lineup. “The consecutive game record always was meaningless to me and now that I have ended it you newspaper guys will believe me,” he said. Asked about his return, Gehrig said he hoped
“the arrival of warm weather will enable me to hit my stride.”

— Keith Thursby

Posted in #courts, Comics, Film, Front Pages, Hollywood, Homicide, LAPD, Nuestro Pueblo, Sports | Comments Off

Found on EBay — 1905 Performance of ‘Parsifal’

Posted on March 28, 2009 by lmharnisch

Listed on EBay: An usher’s ribbon from the 1905 performances of "Parsifal" in Los Angeles. Bidding starts at $9.99.

The 1905 performance of "Parsifal" was such a significant event that The Times published the names of what appears to be everyone who attended. The performance by Conreid’s Metropolitan Grand Opera had most of the Met’s opening night cast, including conductor Alfred Hertz and Alois Burgstaller (Parsifal).

Posted in #opera, classical music, Music | Comments Off

Matt Weinstock — March 28, 1959

Posted on March 28, 2009 by lmharnisch

No Martians — Yet

All
right, relax, everyone. You too, Mary Louise. Those cryptic numerals
and markings on streets and sidewalks were not made by slithering
invaders from another planet plotting our destruction.

Perhaps
you too have seen them. Some are long, yellow-painted arrows on streets
with mysterious numbers and letters plus signs on them. A logical
interpretation of the uninformed is that the houses to which they point
are in for it, when the little green men take over.

Then there
are the white markings on sidewalks, usually at corners. Things like 3
AB 3:00 followed by 3 A 2:40 and so on in a lessening scale as are
visible near Audubon Junior High and 37th Street Elementary School

WELL, they’re
simply designations for proposed work on sewers, storm drains, gas,
water and power lines. Some are survey markings by the city engineering
department for upcoming street resurfacing. It seems there’s more to it
than burning off the top, dumping a load of macadam and letting a
mechanical roller smooth it out. First there has to be what is known as
a profile survey designating the existing elevations.

Next question.

EITHER SOMEONE lowered the chinning crossbar on a Beverly Hills school playground or Bill Ritzi,
deputy D.A., was riding too tall in the saddle. Anyway, he crashed into
it while riding his English bicycle and suffered a broken nose, a bad
gash on the forehead and some loosened teeth.

His doctor, stitching his face, asked what happened.

"I wrote my bicycle into a bar," Bill answered.

"I don’t smell liquor on your breath," the doc said.

So Bill, who doesn’t drink, explained.

ADDITIONAL HOLIDAY

We always celebrate Easter twice,
The first time, of course, on Sunday.
The second time we hunt for eggs
Is after we tally up on Monday.

–JUNE ROSS DRUMMOND

Miles Davis and John Coltrane,
April 1959

OCCASIONALLY another
slice of music comes along that adds to the already imposing repertoire
of proof that modern jazz is not a meaningless cacophony, as the
unconvinced contend.

The familiar names in creative jazz are Ellington, Kenton, Basie. More recent ones are Brubeck, Hamilton, Shearing, Hefti, Rugolo
and the Mulligan-Baker groups — again to tap the surface. Not long ago
there was Gil Evans’ LP "New Bottle, Old Wine." The other night I heard
"Miles Ahead" with Miles Davis, also arranged by Gil Evans, and went
ecstatic over numbers titled "Maids of Cadiz" "Lament" and "The Duke."

Ask your favorite disc jockey to play them. Maybe he won’t, but ask him anyway. They’re great.

IT IS a
well-established fact that those who live by the telephone shall die by
the telephone, so to speak, which is a prelude to an exchange between a
lady named Harriett and her husband on his return home from the office.

"What kind of day did you have?" she asked.

"The phone
murdered me all day," he said. "I had four
He’s-away-from-his-desk-for-a-few-minutes and three
He-just-stepped-outs."

FOOTNOTES — Penciled
scrawl on a piece of brown paper bag: "Whose picture you using now? One
day the guy smirks over his left shoulder, the next day he smirks over
his right shoulder. When you going to let him smirk down the middle?
Why don’t you use your own picture? The one you took the day you had
the terrible toothache? Three Cushion Mac." You can’t win them all …
Isn’t it awful about the terrible weather the Vero Beach Dodgers are having down there? … All anyone can say is what the others are saying, that George Stevens’ "Diary of Anne
Frank" is a magnificent accomplishment, combining devastating impact
with restraint. Incidentally, a woman who lived through a similar
ordeal had nightmares after seeing it.

Posted in Columnists, Matt Weinstock | 1 Comment

Paul Coates — Confidential File, March 28, 1959

Posted on March 28, 2009 by lmharnisch

Confidential File

Mash Notes and Comments

(Press Release) "Americans are too modest!

"Branded as braggarts by the rest of the world, we nevertheless suffer from a highly sensitized cultural inferiority complex.

"We
consider ourselves peerless in science, technology and industrial
know-how, but when it comes to art forms and culture, we meekly take a
back seat to the Old World.

"Let’s stop underselling ourselves.
Let’s realize that we, too, have names to be proud of–names like
Gilbert Stuart, John Singleton Copley, Thomas Sully, JamesMcNeill
Whistler, Winslow Homer, Charles M. Russell and Frederic Remington.
They prove that American art is second to none, and that we can be as
elated about our pictorial representations as the Europeans are about
theirs."

"Our committee was formed to bring these facts home to
Americans everywhere. We emphasize Western Americana because too many
pseudo-intellectuals tend to frown upon this great art form as mere
‘cowboys and Indians.’ " (signed Committee for the Restoration of
American Western Art, New York City.

–If you haven’t played it, don’t knock it.

"Dear Paul,

"The
other night on the ‘Bob Hope Show’ Julie London did a sketch with Hope
during which she kept calling him ‘Adam.’ Unfortunately this has had
serious repercussions for a member of one of our client’s family.

"How
can this be? you are probably asking yourself. Well, Paul, actress
Jewell Lain has a giant (135 pounds) French poodle named Adam. He was
dozing peacefully in the bedroom that fatal evening of the Hope show
when, suddenly, his ears perked up at the melodic call of Miss London
calling "Oh, Adam’ (which was really to Hope on the TV screen).

"The
dog thought it was his owner calling him so he trotted into the living
room only to find her engrossed in the program and paying no attention
to him at all. So he went back to the bedroom.

"Again came the
plaintive call of Julie London, ‘Oh, Adam.’ so the animal trotted
happily into the living room expecting to find his mistress anxious to
see him. But, alas, he was sadly disappointed.

"Two more times
it happened and on each occasion the disillusioned poodle sulkily
returned to the bedroom. When the program was finally over and Jewell
did call him he wouldn’t come. To this very day he won’t respond to her
call." (signed) Dodge, Heigh & Associates, Beverly Hills.

–Neither will I. but one call from Julie London and I’d bark

"Dear Mr. Coates,

"Welcome
to the Low Cholesterol Club! Oh, I’m not going to rub it in, the fat, I
mean. I just want to say it isn’t as bad as all that.

"It may
take a while to get used to no butter on the bread and you’ll die when
you smell the restaurant odors. But you’ll get over it and feel better.
Oh, well,Pollyanna, get it over with.

"I just wanted you to
take this to your wife and tell her that veal is low in fat and when it
or chicken are cooked down in a little wine it is pretty darned good.

"Anyway,
Paul, if you can stand it, yogurt makes a wonderful dressing on salad
(spiked up for variations) and we have learned to prefer a piece of
toast slathered with yogurt over a thin film of jelly. You see, we
voluntarily cut out cholesterol foods because I adore my husband and I
wish to keep him for as long as possible.

"I’m sure your wife feels the same way." (signed) Lenore Nicholson, Hollywood.

–About your husband?

Posted in Columnists, Paul Coates | Comments Off

In the Theaters — March 28, 1978

Posted on March 28, 2009 by lmharnisch

Posted in Film, Hollywood | 1 Comment

Trouble Was His Business — Raymond Chandler

Posted on March 28, 2009 by lmharnisch

Tour Casts New Light on Raymond Chandler’s Old L.A.

* A Minnesota couple trace the steps of the novelist’s best-known character.

April 4, 2004

By Erika Hayasaki, Times Staff Writer

Bonnie
Olson stood in the lobby of the Oviatt Building on Olive Street
downtown on Saturday, beneath the ceilings adorned with triangular
glass, and read a passage from the Raymond Chandler novel "The Lady in
the Lake," in which he described this very setting.

"The
sidewalk in front of it had been built of black and white rubber
blocks. They were taking them up now to give to the government, and a
hatless pale man with a face like a building superintendent was
watching the work and looking as if it were breaking his heart," she
read, explaining that the structure was called the Treloar Building in
the book.

"The images he’s able to evoke of Los Angeles and the
past are powerful, maybe more powerful than actually seeing it in
reality," said Olson, who led eight people on a walking tour of
settings for Chandler’s books.

Olson and her husband, Brian,
were in town — from Minnesota of all places — to lead tours based on
their new guide, "Tailing Philip Marlowe."

The self-published
guide, available at Caravan Books on Grand Avenue, points out sites
mentioned in Chandler’s books, whose best-known character was private
detective Philip Marlowe.

Olson said she admires Chandler’s work
because of his poignant storytelling, language and dialogue. He is
studied along with great poets, writers and essayists, she said. Many
consider him to be one of Los Angeles’ quintessential writers, who
weaved real places, people and events into his fiction, a strength that
inspired fellow mystery writer Ross MacDonald to write: "Chandler wrote
like a slumming angel and invested the sun-blinded streets of Los
Angeles with a romantic presence."

For several decades, Olson,
an English teacher, and her husband, who works for the city of
Minneapolis, have been enchanted by Chandler’s descriptions of Los
Angeles, like the steps of City Hall, where Marlowe lighted a cigarette
as the cold wind blew in "Trouble Is My Business." Then there was the
Bradbury Building on South Broadway about which Chandler wrote: "The
dark narrow lobby was as dirty as a chicken yard" in "The High Window,"
in which the structure was called the Belfont Building.

The 2
1/2-hour tour began at the Oviatt Building and continued toward the Los
Angeles Public Library, which Chandler mentioned in "The Long Goodbye."

The
group headed to Bunker Hill, stopping at the top of the mothballed
Angels Flight cable trolley, which Chandler described in "The High
Window."

The group hiked to the 2nd Street tunnel, which
Chandler compared to the barrel of a gun in "The Big Sleep": "The
muzzle of the Luger looked like the mouth of the Second Street tunnel."

When
the couple visited Los Angeles three years ago, they wanted to explore
places mentioned in the novels, which captured the city in the 1930s
and ’40s. But they said they could not find a guide. So they returned
home and combed through all of Chandler’s stories, flagging
descriptions of settings with Post-it notes.

Then the Olsons
visited Los Angeles again, searching for the sites, and spent hours in
the library researching the city’s architectural history.

The
couple put together the 112-page guidebook with the help of family
members and a printer in Fargo, N.D., thinking they could use the books
as Christmas gifts.

"We did it to have fun together," Bonnie Olson said. "We had no idea it was going to be such a niche."

Australian
native Heath Ryan, 32, a fan of Chandler’s book "Playback," moved to
Los Angeles three years ago. He said he already had an idea of what the
city was like from Chandler’s descriptions.

"You get here and feel almost familiar with this place, even though you have never been here," Ryan said.

Ray Chin, 32, a downtown resident, said Chandler’s work has helped him understand how the city has evolved.

"It
isn’t so much the images of the city," Chin said. "It’s the historical
knowledge he gives about the city. It’s fascinating to see all of the
changes."

On Saturday, those on the tour hiked up to Bunker
Hill, where they rested on rows of marble benches in a courtyard
overlooking a pond, surrounded by towering skyscrapers. The outdoor
cafe tables were mostly empty, and a hair salon was closed. Beneath the
courtyard, homeless men and women slept on the grass, and the stairs
smelled like urine.

Many years ago, Chandler described the
setting, in "The High Window," like this: "Bunker is old town, lost
town, shabby town, crook town…. Out of the apartment houses come
women who should be young but have faces like stale beer; men with
pulled-down hats and quick eyes that look the street over behind the
cupped hand that shield the match flame; worn intellectuals with
cigarette coughs and no money in the bank; fly cops with granite faces
and unwavering eyes; cokies and coke peddlers."

Olson read that
passage and her husband explained that this was the neighborhood where
Marlowe found a dead body in an apartment.

"It was a romantic
time, a different time," Ryan said. "There were no freeways. It was the
center of the city. Now it feels a bit dead."

Note: To mark the 50th anniversary of Raymond Chandler’s death, the
Daily Mirror is revisiting some of The Times’ stories about his life and
influence. We invite the Daily Mirror’s readers to share their thoughts.

Posted in books, Downtown, Film, Hollywood, Raymond Chandler | 1 Comment

Dodgers Give Angels the Silent Treatment, March 28, 1969

Posted on March 28, 2009 by lmharnisch

The Dodgers and Angels were playing each other again and at least the Angels were doing their best to rebuild the rivalry.

"Peter O’Malley has instructed all his personnel not to say anything
about the Angels. That’s the word I get. They’re apparently afraid of
something." The Times’ Ross Newhan attributed the quote to a former
Dodger now working for the Angels. There were four possibilities:
general manager Dick Walsh, director of player personnel Lefty
Phillips, scout Kenny Myers and minor league manager Norm Sherry.

The teams last played each other in 1964, when the Angels were still
tenants of Dodger Stadium. The Angels had won the last five games in a
row.

On the record, Walsh said the Angels could talk about their
opponents: "This organization believes in free speech." It’s hard to
believe that The Times couldn’t find a Dodger willing to say something,
anything, to balance the Angel camp. Where was Tom Lasorda?

— Keith Thursby

Posted in Dodgers, Sports | 1 Comment

Lemuel S. Ellis — Early Los Angeles Photographer

Posted on March 28, 2009 by lmharnisch

Daily Mirror readers may recall from one of the posts on "Spring Street Revisited" the sad story of early Los Angeles photographer Lemuel S. Ellis, left, who died in 1902.

I recently heard from EBay vendor Tiffany Hadley of Columbia, Ky., who has listed six photos by Ellis. The photos are listed separately with bidding starting at $9.95. Let me make it perfectly clear that I have nothing to gain in any of the EBay items I feature. The point is always to draw attention to bits of Los Angeles history changing hands in the world’s biggest flea market. As with any EBay item, people should investigate an item and the vendor’s rating before submitting a bid.

Photograph by Lemuel S. Ellis

This is an adobe home on what appears to be Carr Lane. A notation says it’s on Broadway, although Carr and North Broadway don’t intersect on my earliest map.

Photograph by Lemuel S. Ellis

This is a home somewhere on Figueroa, according to a notation on the back.

Photograph by Lemuel S. Ellis

A notation identifies this as "Flint’s Home." This could be Thomas Flint Jr., a California legislator from Hollister.

Posted in Architecture | Comments Off

Found on EBay — Elvis Presley

Posted on March 27, 2009 by lmharnisch

This isn’t just any Elvis pin. According to the EBay vendor, this was purchased during Elvis Presley’s appearances at the Pan-Pacific Auditorium. Although the dealer gives the concert date of 1958 (when Presley was actually inducted into the Army) the notorious performances were in 1957. Bidding starts at $25.

Posted in Music, Rock 'n' Roll | Comments Off

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Back on Canopus …

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Confidential File

Operas Recalled … the Sudsy Kind

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A historic passion

* Author Judith Freeman researched Raymond Chandler’s marriage.

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Q & A MAURICE JARRE

Ode to David Lean

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Frid, Minus Fangs, to Read in O.C.

Performance: The actor has less than fond memories for his years as vampire Barnabus Collins on TV’s ‘Dark Shadows.’

Lengthening ‘Shadows’

* The gothic soap opera is long gone from network TV but not forgotten. As the series finds new fans in reruns, a festival to celebrate it opens Friday.

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Two true loves

* The Long Embrace Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved Judith Freeman Pantheon: 354 pp., $25.95

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No Martians — Yet

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Confidential File

Mash Notes and Comments

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Tour Casts New Light on Raymond Chandler’s Old L.A.

* A Minnesota couple trace the steps of the novelist’s best-known character.

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* The gothic
soap opera is long gone from network TV but not forgotten. As the
series finds new fans in reruns, a festival to celebrate it opens
Friday.