Paul V. Coates – Confidential File, Dec. 1, 1959

Arab League bans Elizabeth Taylor’s movies! Jerry Lewis at Bat for Actor Robinson     Strange guy, Jerry Lewis.     I've known him for years.  I knew him when he was a kid on Broadway, when he had a partner named Martin, and when they were lucky if -- between them -- they had a sandwich to split.     I remember when they hit the top and split themselves.     I recall, at the time I blamed Jerry in print for the break, and this couldn't please him at all.     But we still keep in touch.     I hear from him now two, maybe three times a year.     The conversations aren't always pleasant.  In fact, half the time his calls are inspired by something I said -- in print or on TV -- which he didn't like.     He's the caricature of the irate subscriber.  He picks up the phone and lets you know.      Lewis has another emotion in common with the average newspaper reader.  He hates to see a man who's down get kicked.      This is the trait that is responsible for the other 50% of my contact with him.     Off hand I don't recall the specific instances in the past where he's volunteered to help somebody I wrote about, but my memory is keen on the Hollywood types who offer assistance one day and are too busy to live up to their word the next.     Jerry Lewis isn't a member of that clique.     He follows up his pledges.     That much I do remember.     And that's why I'm confident that I'm not acting prematurely in reporting to you something that's going to happen in a few weeks.     It concerns an actor named Jay Robinson.     Possibly you saw the story the papers carried about him on Thanksgiving.     "Hollywood's forgotten man sat on the bare floor of his empty mansion," it began.     It detailed Robinson's real life rise and fall in the Celluloid City.  It told his downhill slide from a $3,000-a-week "genius" at the age of 23 to his conviction, last June, for possession of narcotics.      At 29, Robinson was flat busted and finished.     The evening the story appeared, I interviewed Robinson on television.  After the program, I got a call from Jerry Lewis.     "I've seen that guy act," he said tersely.  "Get in touch with him for me, will you?  Tell him to come by and see me."     As an afterthought, Lewis added: "So the guy made one mistake."     I passed the message on to Robinson.     Yesterday he went to see Lewis and after the meeting the hungry "forgotten man" called me back.     He was a far different person from the one I'd interviewed only a few nights before on my show.     He talked with confidence and self-assurance.     He told me how Lewis was working on a show when he arrived for the meeting and how the comedian turned to the rest of the cast and said," We'll have to hold up for about 20 minutes.  I've got to talk to this man.  It's very important." Jerry Doesn't Judge     Lewis obviously fed Robinson where the hunger was the greatest.  Around the ego.     For the next half-hour, he told the young actor how appalled he was to learn what had happened to him.  He didn't ask him once if he was innocent or guilty of the charge that ruined his career.     He just told him that a talent like his deserved a second chance.     Then he offered it -- a substantial part in his next picture.     Like I say, Jerry Lewis is a strange guy.  Especially strange in a town like Hollywood.

LAPD Disputes FBI Crime Statistics

Dec. 1, 1959: You may recall that there was mutual animosity between FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and Police Chief William H. Parker. One reason was that Parker thought the bureau’s national crime statistics were inaccurate and distorted Los Angeles’ records compared to other cities.

A Kinder, Simpler Time Dept.: Your Movie Columnist

Dec. 1, 1938: “Mary Pickford in black velvet and sable was the guest of honor at the Women's Press Club in Washington. Mary spoke for an hour and a half on world peace, when all they wanted was Hollywood gossip. Nice going, Mary!”

Garvey Ranch to Be Sold

The death of Richard Garvey Jr., last direct heir of the ranching family, brings the auction of his personal belongings and the sale of the land.

Oct. 18, 1949: My search for Coyote Pass in the previous post turned up this story about the demise of the Garvey Ranch, and it’s too good not to share.

Body Found in Well

Officers try to retrieve a body from an abandoned well at Coyote Pass. View Larger Map As nearly as I can determine from the clips, this is the general area of Coyote Pass. Times stories say Garvey Avenue went through the pass, now named Monterey Pass, but it’s unclear precisely where it was. Of course, a century ago, everybody knew where it was.

Dec. 1, 1909: Stories in this era didn’t lack for gruesome details. Investigators were never able to determine if the body was that of W.H. Welch.

Found on EBay: the Great White Fleet

A piece of sheet music commemorating the Great White Fleet has been listed on EBay. The fleet’s visit was one of the major events in Los Angeles in 1908. This sheet music was sold at Bullock’s. Bidding starts at $18.

Matt Weinstock, Nov. 30, 1959

The Education Race     Ever since the Russians launched their first Sputnik there has been a furor in American education.     It has been charged that students graduate from high school without a knowledge of fundamentals necessary in today's society.     It has also been stated that they are coddled and that schooling to most of them is little more than a pleasant social experience.  If we are to meet Russia on equal terms, the outcry goes, we must tighten up, particularly in math and science.     Let us now pay attention to the mother of a child in a west side junior high school.     The school has an extremely high IQ average.  As a result, this mother says, the courses have been geared to the talents of the "brains" -- the 15% who excel.  She says this is unfair, unkind and undemocratic.     "You would be surprised at the number of students at this school who are being tutored, just to make a C," she says.  "Of course, the parents of some students can't afford it.  Some tutors ask $5.50 an hour."     She goes on:     "One mother took her eighth-grade daughter to a physician because of the girl's nervous state caused by her inability to keep up with her studies.  Now the girl takes tranquilizers."     The parents, by the way, don't blame the teachers, who frequently sympathize with the youngsters.  They blame "the system." ::      IT'S IMPOSSIBLE to  keep up with the accounts of increased real estate values but Ralph Jester has a little beauty.  Ralph, who designed the costumes for Yul and Gina in "Solomon and Sheba," moved to Portuguese Bend in 1934.  Five years ago a parcel of land he knows about there was priced at $800 an acre.  It is now offered at $35,000 an acre.  No, he didn't snap up any of it. ::     UP TO DATE The modern girl is not     impressed With knights in shining     hardware, She likes to see her     suitors dressed In styles the avant     garde wear.         --EDITH OGUTSCH ::     A FEW DAYS AGO a plaintive cry went out from here.  Emil Cuhel had photographed a pretty Eskimo gal -- well, anyway, a pretty gal in a parka -- for a Christmas card.  But no one, not even the people at the libraries, knew how to say "Merry Christmas" in Eskimo.  So the question was asked here.  After all, Alaska is now the 49th state and must assume its proper share of the Christmas madness.     Well, Hedda Sherman saw the item and suggested that the Eskimos brought down from Alaska for the film "Ice Palace," which her husband Vincent is directing at Warner Brothers, might know.  Sure enough, Chester Seveck, 70, chief herder of the government's 5,500 reindeer near Pt. Hope, has come through.  Merry Christmas in Eskimo is "Chreeseema Ek Pin." ::      THE WAY Betsy Duncan tells it, a jet transport en route from New York to Los Angeles was somewhere over the Southwest when the pilot came on the intercom and said quietly, "Ladies and gentlemen, I think you should know that we have lost most of our power.  We're at 5,000 feet and we're losing 100 feet a second.  However, I have contacted Phoenix airport and a foam coating has been put on the runway.  Ambulances from as far as Tucson are on the way and fire engines all the way from Wickenburg.  I want to assure you that every precaution has been taken for your safety . . . This is a recording." ::     AT RANDOM -- The movie and TV scene that irks Leonard Schulman is the one in which the hero, driving a car, unnecessarily twists and turns the steering wheel as if he were on a narrow, winding mountain road.

Paul Coates – Confidential File, Nov. 30, 1959

Nothing, but Nothing Is Sacred Any More     It's every reporter's dream to lay aside his battered old felt hat, shred his press card into confetti, turn his World War II surplus trench coat over to the Salvation Army, take his smudgy copy pencils one by one and snap them into little pieces, and -- casting a defiant look at his city editor as he leaves -- go home, strip down to his waist, put on his imported silk smoking jacket, retreat up to the attic with his favorite pipe, wipe the dust off his lonely, long-idle portable, sit down, squeeze into his slippers, and knock out the great American novel.     (And if his novel includes one sentence like the above, he might just as well forget the whole thing.)     Anyway, that's every reporter's dream -- but mine.     I could do it.  I'm perfectly capable.  I got plots and subplots and protagonists and themes bottled up inside me till they're coming out of my ears.     But I won't do it.  And I have good reason.     It used to be, before this age of scandal-mongering and expose, that a fellow could bat out a literary classic with reasonable assurance that when he died, he'd be remembered by future generations with some reverence.     It used to be, I say.  But nothing is sacred any more.      Look what they did to Shakespeare.     Who knows how many hours he sweated over a line like this, "Alas, poor Yorick!  I knew him well."     I don't know what it means, but it's obviously solid prose.     Yet, since he's passed on, they've advanced the rumble that a ham named Bacon really wrote his material.     Oscar Wilde is another example.  He was a literary genius, but you know what they did to his reputation.  They didn't come right out and say it.  But those little insinuations.  Those damnable little insinuations.      Then there's the great Irish playwright, Brendan Behan.  He isn't even dead yet and they're already calling him a drunk.     That people blasphemed this trio of tremendous talents never really bothered me much.  In fact, I've been on the verge of believing the whisper campaigns against them.     But last week, the character assassins went one step beyond credulity.     A London actor named Felix Aylmer published a book called "Dickens Incognito," in which he charged that Sir Charles attacked the morals of the Victorian age merely to cover up an affair he was having with a starlet named Ellen Ternan.      According to an Associated Press dispatch of last Friday, Aylmer claims that Dickens and Ellen conducted their illicit trysts by sneaking off to Slough, which no decent couple would do.     I mean, after all -- "Sneaking off to Slough!"  It's like sneaking off to Miami when the summer rates are in effect.     And I'm personally offended at the charge.  It happens that my family, for generations, has been raised on Dickens' "A Christmas Carol."     My grandmother read it to my mother.  My mother read it to me.  And I, every holiday season, take it off the shelf to instill the true spirit of Christmas in my own children.     (To those of you who are a bit fuzzy on the book, its hero, Scrooge, a jolly merchant, teaches the rest of the shiftless townfolk the importance of thrift.) Now Here's a Custom     It's been my custom, each Christmas Eve, to sit in front of the hearth, with my children gathered around me, roasting betel nuts and reading Dickens.     I've raised them to believe that Dickens was the champion of the Victorian underdog.     Now, I don't know.  If they read Aylmer's book, they're likely to grow up with the gnawing doubt that is suddenly developing within me that Oliver Twist might not have been a pitiful, hungry, mistreated little tyke.     He might have been a goldbrick who was just looking for sympathy and wasn't pitching in to do his share with the rest of the kids at the orphanage.

A Kinder, Simpler Time Dept.: Your Movie Columnist

Feb. 13, 1938: Hedda Hopper starts writing for The Times.

Drug Addicts Blamed for Crime Wave

"Ninety-nine percent of the present series of holdups, burglaries, armed robberies and other deeds of violence being committed nightly in this city and sometimes referred too as the 'crime wave' are the work of drug fiends seeking to get narcotics either directly or in order to secure money with which to buy them." "Few better examples of the drug fiend as criminal are known to the police than George Leaf, alias Alfred Nyland, who fired a bullet into his own brain after being wounded six times in a gunfight with police Detectives Parsons and Barnes and police Sgt. Cahill and patrolman Lane. The battle took place near 719 S. Olive Street on Sept. 28 of this year."

Nov. 30, 1919: Albert F. Nathan profiles Los Angeles drug addicts and their crimes. Nathan was a reporter who worked at The Times for 30 years, mainly on the police and court beats. A veteran of both world wars, Nathan died in 1945 at the age of 52. April 5, 1945: The Times reports the death of Albert F. Nathan. In contrast to current newspapers, in which almost every story has a byline, they were quite rare in the first half of the 20th century and were reserved for the more distinguished writers, notably newswomen Alma Whitaker and Sydney Ford and movie critics Edwin Schallert and Philip K. Scheuer. Nathan covered many famous crimes, including the William Desmond Taylor and Louise Peete cases, but has less than 50 bylines in The Times archives.