Architectural Rambling, R.M. Schindler

Photo by Susanne Hayek Photography

The 1941 Jose Rodriguez house at 1845 Niodrara Drive in Glendale, designed by R.M. Schindler, has been listed at $2,475,000. The home is an official Glendale landmark. Read more>>> This home sold for $550,000 in 1999 and for $2 million in 2005, according to Property Shark.

Found on EBay -- Batchelder Fireplace

An entire Batchelder fireplace has been listed on EBay. The fireplace is located in Fullerton, Calif. Bidding starts at $20,000.

Found on EBay -- Catalina Tile

This Catalina Tile table has been listed on EBay. As with all EBay listings, investigate the item and the vendor thoroughly before submitting a bid. Bidding starts at $99.95.

Trouble Was His Business -- Raymond Chandler

A historic passion * Author Judith Freeman researched Raymond Chandler's marriage. November 7, 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 co-author 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.

Trouble Was His Business -- Raymond Chandler

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.

Found on EBay -- Batchelder Tile

A set of six Batchelder Mayan tiles has been listed on EBay. For whatever reason, I seem to see more of the Mayan pattern on EBay than anything else. Bidding starts at $9.99.

Found on EBay -- Batchelder Tile

This Batchelder tile has been listed on EBay. As I recall, a tile similar to this one is part of the fireplace at the Angelus Temple museum, which was formerly the home of Aimee Semple McPherson. When I get a chance I'll post a picture that I took during the recent L.A. Conservancy tour, "Seekers." Bidding on the tile at left starts at $9.99.

Burbank Time Capsule Revisited

Cinda Cates, Burbank public information specialist, passes along the images that were recovered from the 1959 time capsule placed in the Magnolia Boulevard Bridge. The anonymous photographer recorded the city's civic buildings (City Hall, a fire station, etc.) and took quite a few pictures of the new bridge. Spend a moment on the predictions of Kenneth E. Norwood of Burbank's Planning Department. He envisioned a city where only 12% of the people lived in single-family homes, with 88% in multi-unit garden apartments made of plastic that were incorporated in commercial complexes. "These complexes are supposed to be the ultimate in urban living, combining offices, hotels, apartments, shops, restaurants, etc., in one continuous complex of buildings, malls and arcades," he wrote. There would be no overhead wires or antennas, he said. Instead, Burbank would use underground atomic power with electricity distributed by waves. "Rapid monorail routes connect metro centers, with pickup stations at the Lockheed Air Control Center, and at each of the main malls in Burbank," Norwood wrote. "Unlike auto parking in 1959, there is no parking on streets or open lots but in fully automatic parking units located at each main destination point."

Nuestro Pueblo -- March 17, 1939

Below, 2062 N. Highland via Google maps' street view. View Larger Map

Found on EBay -- St. James Park

View Larger Map

This postcard of St. James Park has been listed on EBay. Bidding starts at $8.99. St. James Park is in the Adams district near Scarff Street. According to The Times (Jan. 5 1896), St. James Park was established in 1892 and cost $6,049.40 ($137,939.94 USD 2007) for three-quarters of an acre.