July 7, 1949: Charles Stoker surrenders his police badge to defense attorney S.S. Hahn after being accused of burglary by Policewoman Audre Davis.
In this story, Davis admitted lying to win the conviction of Hollywood madam Brenda Allen. She accused Stoker of stealing nude photos of her, as well as a check with a forged signature.
Gen. Harry M. Vaughan threatens to punch photographers in the nose if they take one more picture.
Tokyo Rose liked the glamour of her World War II propaganda work, according to a prosecutor in her treason trial.
Baseball always seemed a simple game to me, but Al Wolf's coverage of the Hollywood Stars' 12-0 victory over the San Francisco Seals required some explanation. Or translation.
Wolf turned the Stars into the Twinks (a familiar nickname often used in headlines) and the homebreds. Pinky Woods wasn't just the winning pitcher. He right-handed his way to victory.
The game was played in Hollywood so the fans were the Gilmore Gardens gazers. Hits were round-trippers or two-ply wallops. Runs were markers or tallies.
The opposition became the no-so-sassy Seals.
The best part of the story didn't have any goofy names. Wolf noted that a game later that week had been deemed "Television appreciation night," with a $500 set to be given as a door prize.
Guess the winner could gaze at a round-tripper leaving Gilmore Gardens.
A large lot of cocktail napkins from the 1940s, including several from the Florentine Gardens, left, and quite a few from San Diego, has been listed on EBay. Bidding starts at $9.99.
There's a lot of rambling, self-important navel-gazing in "Holy Barbarians" and although these meandering insights are vital to the people in the book, they can be fairly tedious reading.
But there are also rewards. Here's an account of a group of people tending to a gay man who was evidently beaten by the police after a raid on a gay club called the Casbah. In this instance, author Lawrence Lipton's "I Am a Tape Recorder" approach brings us into this tiny converted garage in Venice where several people are nursing Ron Daley.
Page 120-123, "Holy Barbarians"
(Scene: Ron Daley's pad. A made-over garage. Ronny has fitted it out
with redwood panel walls and laid straw mats over the cement floor wall
to wall. Two mattresses on the floor are covered with Japanese fabrics
and strewn with cylindrical and three-cornered cushions of pastel
colors. The bookcases are boards and glass bricks. Two lamps hang from
the ceiling, parchment lantern shades of modern design derived from the
Japanese. The components of the hi-fi are unenclosed. In one corner, a
triangular private shrine holding a single rosebud in an Oriental vase,
over it a rice paper print of the Buddha in contemplation, a Buddha of
Zen simplicity. Partitioned off with bamboo and rice paper screens is a
tiny kitchenette, all the utensils neatly hung on the wall, copperware,
shiny bright, and the dishes set up on the shelves, a spartan kitchen,
clean, monastically clean).
Ronny is lying on the bed,
swathed in bandages. He was brutally beaten up by vice squad officers
during questioning at the police station after a raid on the Casbah, a
gathering place for homosexuals, and is out on bail. Gilda Lewis has moved in to do nursing
duty. She is busy in the kitchen making some broth for Ronny. He is
telling me about the incident. His voice, always low and modulated, is almost a whisper.)
RON: It wasn't like anything I had ever experienced
before, Larry. His eyes were hazel, with little golden flecks in them.
I must have been pretty high at the time and I guess he was, too. But
it wasn't the pot altogether, I'm sure of that. It wasn't physical so
much as it was spiritual, something inside us or outside, out there,
who knows what it is, really? drawing us together. And he was talking.
Art. Music. Philosophy. Poetry. I can't recall what he said, exactly.
It wasn't what he was saying. It was a kind of spiritual presence. I
felt as if I had finally found someone who was like that other dark
side of me, myself, and I was looking at myself as in a mirror. And
discovering myself in ways I had never known before. I'm sure it isn't
a unique experience. Others must have known it -- I remember vaguely having read about such a meeting once in was it Shelley? Or something in Gide?
(Gilda comes in with a cup of broth. I help to prop him while she
spoon-feeds him, slowly and very gently. His face is badly cut up under
the bandages. The doctor told me as he was leaving that he might be
badly disfigured for life. After the broth he continues with his story.
So far he has said nothing about the police beating, only about the
young man he met at the Casbah that night and what happened before the
raid.)
RON: There was something in his voice that I
remember. It seemed to be coming from somewhere far out. And I was
enveloped in it, like a palpable thing. Like he was an extension of
myself ... the mystical being ... the Other ... Narcissus' reflection
in the pool come to life and assuming an existence of its own. And
yet separate and different in some wonderful, mystical way ...
Something I had always dreamed might happen to me....
(He
goes on like this for some time, his voice trails off into silence. He
may be asleep. About the police beating nothing now or at any time
since then, to me or anyone that I know of. Angel Dan Davies is at the
door with Dave Gelden and Rhonda Tower, the chick Angel has been making
it with lately. They take off their sandals and leave them at the door
before entering, as Ron always does. Rhonda has bad news. The prominent
lawyer she knows has refused to take Ron's case.)
RHONDA: You could have knocked
me over with a feather. Like I was sure he'd take the case. He's taken
other cases where there wasn't any money. Liquor cases and labor cases,
things like that. But when I told him how the vice squad goons beat up
Ronny and the homosexual thing man, he just flipped. What kind of a friend was I, trying to drag him into a scene like this!
DAVE:
Like I told you, you were wasting your time going to a cat like that.
He's a square, man, and you don't catch a square sticking his neck out.
RHONDA(to me): Do you know any hip lawyers? (I shake my head and smile) See, you've got to go to a square in a case like this, whether you like it or not. They've got you over a barrel.
GILDA: Even the doctor was afraid to come when I told him what it was, and where it was.
ANGEL: It's
like money. Did you ever try sounding a square for money? He'll take
you to a fancy restaurant and spend ten bucks but you can't sound him
for money to buy food for your wife and kids. They'll buy you drinks in
a bar but sound them for a buck to buy groceries and they'll act like
they're embarrassed they'll hem and haw and Christ! -- You'd think
you'd asked them to take their pants off in public or something.
DAVE: That's
what it is, man. Like they can't admit it, even to themselves, that
there's such a thing as real starvation in the world. Or like this
lawyer the cat can't face it, that a couple of cops will beat up on a
cat just because he's a homosexual. They've got to prove it to
themselves and to each other that they're real he-men.
RHONDA: Do you suppose the Civil Liberties Union lawyers might do something?
ANGEL: The
Liberals? The political cats? They're the biggest squares of all when
it comes to sex. Homosexuals yet -- wow! We got to find a lawyer who
isn't prominent, or political or social. Some shyster who's mixed up in
the rackets, maybe. He's the only kind that'll have the guts to
mix it up with the cops in a police-beating case. He's beat, in a way,
so he doesn't have to worry what the country club boys or the PTA is
going to say about him. He doesn't have any illusions about justice or
civil rights or the Constitution.
RHONDA: I know a prostitute that works up on the Strip --
DAVE: Now you're talkin, Get ahold of this chick and she'll know what to do, who to go to.
ANGEL: Like
when I was on the road and I landed in a town broke, I learned one
thing: never go to the local minister or the rabbi or the social
agencies. All they'll want to know is who you've got back home that
they can ship you back to if somebody back home is willing to wire
them the money. Go to the first whorehouse you can find and talk to the
madam, or to some saloonkeeper in the slum part of town, I remember a
whore in Terre Haute once--
DAVE: They're the original
hipsters the outlaws, the outcasts. The square, like he's got all these
official lies he's got to believe, the schoolbook story and the church
story and all that shit --
(Ronny stirs a little. Angel
lights a stick of tea and holds it to Ronny's lips to take a drag on.
Ronny smiles and tries to nod his thanks. It hurts.)
DAVE: (looks over at me and shakes his head):
Like I told you, Larry. The squares talk about their religion, their
laws, their justice, their charity, but sooner or later it always turns
out to be the man with a gun on his hip.
The reading list at the Daily Mirror HQ is long and quirky: "Never So Few"
and "Go Naked Into the World" by Tom T. Chamales, "Muscatel at Noon" by
Matt Weinstock and EBay's latest contribution to my shelf of books by
W.W. Robinson. Then there's the desiderata, like "The Bridal Night of
Ronald and Thusnelda."
What jumped to the top of the list is Lawrence Lipton's "Holy
Barbarians," a 1959 chronicle of the Beats in Venice, which I encountered
somewhere in the clips, possibly a Weinstock column, although I
can't find it now.
The
book
showed up in the mail a few days ago courtesy of EBay, so I've been
playing Charlie Parker, Miles Davis and some Coltrane all weekend to
create the
right mood while I read it. To do the job right, I suppose I should
have a set of bongo drums somewhere, hang netting and sea shells on the
walls and fill the place with stale marijuana smoke, but I'm not that
much of a stickler for authenticity.
The former husband of mystery novelist Craig Rice, Lipton was born in
1898, so he was about 60 when he wrote the book, roughly the twice the
age of the beatniks who considered him an elder statesman of their
disaffiliated generation.
Lipton
was the Boswell of these Beats, capturing their lives in exquisite and
often excruciating detail. It's fair to say that the book wasn't
written as much as it was tape-recorded. Many conversations, some of
them quite long, are merely transcribed from tapes Lipton made of his
friends.
Behold, actual hipster talk (Page 102):
"It
isn't art or intellectualism, it isn't genius that's got me hooked.
It's the life. Do you have any idea what it's like out there? Sure, it
isn't Main Street any more. Sinclair Lewis' Gopher Prairie is a thing
of the past. So is Zenith City, for that matter.Squareville is modern
now. It's got network television and Life magazine culture. You can
tune in the Metropolitan opera on the radio. You can stay out late and
come home drunk once in a while without being hounded out of town. You
can play around a little, if you're discreet about it, without too much
talk. The drugstores carry paperback editions of Plato and Lin Yutang.
"But
the tension! Wages go up three cents and coffee goes up ten. So they
pipe sweet Muzak into the supermarkets and you go around in a daze
loading up that cute little chromium-plated cart without looking at the
price tags. And let most of it rot in the refrigerator before you get
to it. Last year's car is out of style before you finish paying for the
tail fins. It's a rat race. Who's got time to laze around in the sand
for an hour, or take a quiet walk by the ocean in the evening, or watch
a sunset?
"Here I can get away from it for a while, at least
evenings and weekends. I can do without things. God! do you know what a
relief that is? Not to have to keep up with anybody. Nobody to show off
for. The people at the office, they don't even know where I live. I
tell them I live in Santa Monica. That's close enough, and it sounds
respectable. It's got the same telephone exchange as Venice, so nobody
suspects anything.
"This is the one place I've ever lived
where you can take your skin off and sit around in your bare bones, if
you want to. Only the rich, surrounded by acres of land and iron
fences, can enjoy anything like that kind of privacy. That's what I
mean by being hip. And staying cool."
Barbara Lane is part
time square and part time hipster, but her heart is in Venice West. "In
town, at the office, I work. Here I live," she will tell you. "It's
like having one foot on each side of the tracks. But that's the only
way I can make it."
Notice that there isn't a single "daddy-o." In fact, there isn't one in the entire book. If you think James Ellroy's novels are written in authentic hipster talk, you'll be shocked that their speech is so ordinary -- though they do ramble.
I
have more to say about "Holy Barbarians," but I'm only halfway through
it. You might want to read along. The book is available for free from
archive.org in pdf and plain text format.
Is it worth reading? Consider these gems:
Page 20: By which I meant, I suppose, pretty much the same thing that
[Kenneth] Rexroth meant when he wrote, apropos of Bird and Dylan,
"Against the ruin of the world, there is only one defense -- the creative
act."
Page 103: Like Jack Kerouac says in On the Road, "Mexico is a whole nation of hipsters!"
This menu from the Florentine Gardens nightclub on Hollywood Boulevard has been listed on EBay. Most of the Florentine Gardens menus offered for sale feature a cowgirl in an abbreviated costume. This style is a bit more uncommon. Bidding starts at $9.99.
When I saw this headline, I thought it was a joke. It's not.
Iraq drops a polite note to the American Embassy saying no thanks to U.S. aid because it conflicts with Iraq's neutrality.
Lots of comics made fun of beatniks, including "Nancy." Now it's "Judge Parker's" turn. View this page
"Shake Hands With the Devil."
Above, the Post was a slick, large-format magazine of news and short fiction found in many homes. The editors certainly had a knack for picking the issues that concerned middle America. Think Norman Rockwell. Or "Hazel."
An auction house has contacted me with information about a group of photos tangentially related to the Black Dahlia case.
Mark Hansen, a partner in the Florentine Gardens nightclub, was a suspect in the Black Dahlia killing because he let Elizabeth Short stay with him off and on in the last half of 1946. These photos are evidently from his estate and several of them are inscribed to him. None of them show Short, known as the Black Dahlia.
News accounts from the 1940s describe his home as being loaded with pictures like this. If I were going to bid on these items (which I'm not) I would want to make sure that they were from his home on Carlos Avenue behind the Florentine Gardens and not the home he kept separately for his wife as they seem a little passe for the late 1940s. The auction is May 30 at 10 a.m. More information from the San Rafael Auction Gallery is here>>>.
Below, Strangler Lewis vs. Toots Mondt at the Philharmonic, Aug. 14, 1924. Notice the byline: Braven Dyer, who retired from The Times in 1964 and died in 1983 at the age of 83.
At left, a page from an Earl Carroll's nightclub menu that has been listed on EBay. I'll leave it to others to compare these measurements with today's women. Bidding starts at $14.99.
Gangster Squad Officer J.J. "Jack" O'Mara calls on Joe Sica with a subpoena. Unfortunately, the runover of the story didn't get microfilmed. But the sidebar ran in sports.
California leads the nation in car registration -- 7 million in 1958. Teamsters chief Jimmy Hoffa threatens a nationwide shutdown if Congress approves anti-trust laws for unions.
And a Senate panel narrowly approves President Eisenhower's nominee for secretary of Commerce. Sen. Clair Engle (D-Calif.) urges the president to withdraw the name of Lewis L. Strauss to avoid repeating the sort of bitter dispute that was fought over Clare Boothe Luce.
The LAPD charges that there is "outside influence" in boxing. Subpoenas are issued to Louis Dragna ... View this page
... boxing manager Don Nesseth and Jack Leonard, boxing promoter at Hollywood Legion Stadium. View this page
Back in the day when police officers had nicknames like "Lefty" and "Roughhouse."
Streetcars, you are doomed.
Which cartoon strip is more bizarre, "Nancy" or "Ferd'nand?"
The alternative universe occupied by "Nancy" is well-known and the spartan esthetics of artist Ernie Bushmiller are widely appreciated ...
..but I think "Ferd'nand" lives in its own parallel world that's just as odd. For example, there's something seriously wrong with this car's windshield.
Larry Harnisch. The leading Black Dahlia expert and a collaborator in the 1947project, Harnisch has been a copy editor at The Times since 1988. He has appeared on many TV shows discussing the Dahlia case, notably "James Ellroy's Feast of Death."
Join him for a spin through old Los Angeles in the Mirror's radio car. Keep your eyes open for Mickey Cohen and Tempest Storm. It's quite a ride.
The reporter's badge belonged to Sid Hughes (1908-1958), legendary reporter who worked at nearly every newspaper in Los Angeles.
Keith Thursby. Keith has been an editor at The Times in news, sports and design since 1986. The Rams moved to St. Louis on his first day as assistant sports editor of the paper's Orange County edition. He grew up in Norwalk and lives in Irvine.
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Larry Harnisch. The leading Black Dahlia expert and a collaborator in the 1947project, Harnisch has been a copy editor at The Times since 1988. He has appeared on many TV shows discussing the Dahlia case, notably "James Ellroy's Feast of Death."
Join him for a spin through old Los Angeles in the Mirror's radio car. Keep your eyes open for Mickey Cohen and Tempest Storm. It's quite a ride.
The reporter's badge belonged to Sid Hughes (1908-1958), legendary reporter who worked at nearly every newspaper in Los Angeles.
Keith Thursby. Keith has been an editor at The Times in news, sports and design since 1986. The Rams moved to St. Louis on his first day as assistant sports editor of the paper's Orange County edition. He grew up in Norwalk and lives in Irvine.