A Bright and Guilty Place Read online

  For a while White considered joining the LAPD, a job that wouldn’t go away and came with a pension; but, within weeks of his son’s birth, he was called upon to investigate a murder. A Mexican teenager, Christobal Silvas Sierra, had been found dead in an empty lot with two bullets in his back. Apparently he’d been shot by a friend, Robert Ocana. But White and the D.A.’s office soon discovered that Sierra had in fact been killed by an LAPD officer, Bill Bost, a beat cop with a nasty drinking habit and a berserk temper. Bost’s LAPD comrades at the Boyle Heights station had covered up for him, framing Ocana.

  Bost was tried, but convicted only of manslaughter. White felt he should have hanged. Under the circumstances, though, the manslaughter verdict was a victory, and White received pats on the back and a letter of commendation from Fitts. He was struck by how unsurprised everybody seemed. This very nasty case attracted little press, the LAPD’s clannishness being regarded, perhaps, as a necessary evil, or a problem too engrained to tackle.

  Joining the LAPD was thus removed as a possibility. White doubted his ability to stay in line or even alive within the organization. But he still faced the problem of how to plot his future. Needing advice, he called a friend in Ventura, and when the friend’s business next brought him to L.A., the two men met in a cafeteria on Broadway, down the hill from the Hall of Justice.

  Over coffee White found himself looking into a round, moon-like, almost bland face with unexpectedly sharp eyes that squinted and glittered at him from behind wire-frame glasses. His friend’s name was Erle Stanley Gardner. In appearance Gardner was nondescript, like somebody’s uncle, but White knew the man had the energy of a bursting dam. For years—Gardner had just turned forty—he’d toiled in the courts and law libraries of Ventura and Oxnard. In L.A. he was known to be a clever and determined attorney, a country boy who came to town and occasionally bested the metropolitan legal stars. But White didn’t want to talk to him about law; he wanted to talk about writing. He knew that Gardner supplemented his income to the extent of $15,000 a year by creating fiction. Gardner slept as little as three hours a night, instead staying at his typewriter until he had produced the 4,000-word daily target he set for himself. Gardner was a writing machine, a story industrialist. He had yet to create Perry Mason, the character that would make him famous—and for a long time, the world’s bestselling author—but in recent years he’d hammered out millions of words and sold hundreds of stories: about Speed Dash, human fly; Sidney Zoom and his police dog; Ed Jenkins, the phantom crook; confidence men Lester Leith and Paul Pry; Key-Clew Clark, consulting criminologist, and Major Copely Blane, freelance diplomat; the Patent Leather Kid; Hard Rock Hogan; Señor Arnaz de Lobo; and a host of others.

  White had always wanted to write. It seemed to him the ideal sort of existence: a chance to think as he liked, to travel, to escape the sordid side of life. But he’d been afraid to mention it to Gardner until now, and was still nervous about doing so. Instead he poured out his frustrations about the Doheny case, about the LAPD, about money. In Ventura, Gardner’s office had been just down the street from White’s photographic studio. The two had met while Gardner had been fighting, and winning, a pro bono case on behalf of a farm laborer sentenced to hang. White admired Gardner’s energy and go-getting practical attitude.

  “I’m thinking about trying fiction,” White blurted out finally. “But I have no education. I don’t know where to start.”

  Gardner regarded White with brusque impatience. “Forget about education. You’ve got a whole library of stories inside you,” he said. His voice was calm but forceful. “That ‘sordid filth’ you say you want to get away from—it’s material.”

  Erle Stanley Gardner would remain a friend, and this brief conversation would change Leslie White’s life. White was by nature an enthusiast. In later years he turned himself into an expert on the breeding of beef cattle and the building of model railways, about which he wrote Scale Model Railroading, a standard text. He threw himself into things. Having received this encouragement from Gardner, he went home to Glendale that night and walked out to a newsstand to buy some of the publications Gardner was writing for and selling to: the pulps, so called because they were printed on rough, wood-pulp paper, not expected to last. White found them crowding the newsstand, hundreds of magazines, seven by ten inches with gaudy covers and trashy titles: Thrilling Detective, Dime Detective, Crime Busters, The Shadow, The Underworld, The Whisperer, Weird Tales, and so on. It was a different America: millions read these all-fiction magazines every week, and hundreds of writers made money selling stories to them, at one to three cents a word. The pulps had usurped the dime novel’s place in the culture.

  White began his studies with Black Mask, the best in the market, founded in 1920 by H. L. Mencken and George Nathan, but by then under the editorship of the legendary Captain Joseph T. Shaw. White saw that Gardner himself had a story, titled “Spawn of the Night,” in the current issue, for August 1929. Also advertised was the upcoming serial of Dashiell Hammett’s new novel, The Maltese Falcon. Gardner had told White that Hammett was Black Mask’s ace performer, a private eye who had learned about writing, not a writer who was faking it. Hammett wrote in a style that was lean and stripped down. His stories had plausible hooks and twists and convincing motivation. He showed the underbelly of American life without illusion. He was creating a whole new kind of crime fiction.

  White set up his typewriter on the kitchen table, at the far end of the house from where the baby was sleeping. He rolled in a sheet of paper, paused for a moment, and began to tap away. He found, to his surprise, that the words came easily. He finished a story in a single burst, mailed it out the next day, and watched it come back over subsequent weeks with a series of rejection slips, from Black Mask and other pulps. It didn’t really matter, because by then he’d already written several more stories and sent them out too. On November 3, 1929, he found a letter from New York in his mailbox. “Dear Mr. White,” wrote editor Harry Goldsmith. “I enjoyed reading your story, ‘Phoney Evidence,’ and it is an accept for DRAGNET. In your letter you asked for suggestions, but the story was very good in every direction. Please keep working along the lines which you have started and I am confident you will sell to DRAGNET regularly.” Enclosed was a check for $50.

  White was on his way. From then on he made regular sales. He was no stylist like Hammett, but his stories moved quickly. In “Phoney Evidence,” a doctor covers up a murder by daubing another man’s blood on the face of his victim—shades of E. C. Fishbaugh. In “The City of Hell!,” a story that White did sell to Black Mask, renegade cops take down a crime machine that has an unnamed city by the throat; the cops kidnap racketeers, lawyers, the chief of the grand jury, and a judge, and hold vigilante trials in the sewers. Then they save the state and taxpayers a lot of money, shortcutting the necessity of more formal legal proceedings with a staged nightclub shoot-out: “All hell broke loose! With the deafening chatter of the twin machine guns, came the screams of stricken men.”

  The speed at which White wrote these early stories revealed the nature and limitations of his talent. He had verve and a quick gift for story. He leaned in the direction of hokum and melodrama. Like any crime writer, he gave away parts of his inner fantasy. Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade takes several steps further the cynical bastard Hammett hoped he was. Georges Simenon’s Maigret provides the answer to a question Simenon posed himself: What if I were a decent man? White’s detectives have none of the depth of these characters. He didn’t write realistic versions of himself or Lucien Wheeler or Blayney Matthews. Instead he created comic book avengers, upright and merciless conquerors of wrong, as if on the page he wanted to fix and make right a world he was coming to regard as irreparable.

  During the day, working for the D.A.’s office, White’s attitude changed. He gave up worrying about making a mistake in forensics or in court. The trickier and more sensitive the case, the more he wanted to get involved. He was no longer merely an odd kind of cop; each morning, as
he entered the Hall of Justice, striding through the barrel-vaulted entrance hall that ran the entire length of the building, he knew something else was going on beside the investigative challenges he faced with a new eagerness. He was researching, gathering material. He was writing pulp fiction.

  14

  Raymond Chandler—Oil Man!

  In the summer and fall of 1929, Raymond Chandler, who would get to know Leslie White and within a few years easily surpass him as a writer, was further removed from a literary career than at any time in his life. He was forty-one years old and his marriage was on the rocks. He was drinking heavily, and one day checked into a downtown hotel room and called his wife to tell her that he was going to jump from the window. This suicide threat (and there were others) wasn’t perhaps entirely serious but more a tortured cry for attention from an unhappy alcoholic subject to wild swings of mood. Yet Chandler was a professional success, earning in excess of $13,000 yearly at a time when rent for a decent apartment was $50. Chandler earned more than, say, Buron Fitts, and Chandler’s prosperity had nothing to do with writing. A photograph of the time shows him dressed in a suit at the Bureau of Mines and Oils Annual Banquet at the Biltmore Hotel. He was a high-placed executive in the oil business and about to involve himself in the seemingly never-ending saga of Julian Pete. He was helping bring a lawsuit.

  Chandler, when he achieved fame, would say that he was conceived on the high plains of the West, in the frontier town of Laramie, Wyoming; but he was born on July 23, 1888, in Chicago, Illinois, and spent most of his childhood in England, where he was educated at Dulwich College, a fancy public (that’s to say fee-paying) school. This background in part accounts for Chandler’s lifelong restlessness and his divided personality. He was an American who loved England, a snob who understood low-life and base instincts, a man who could be both hardboiled and sentimental, a man attracted to women yet frightened of them.

  Chandler first arrived in L.A. in 1912, when the population had just climbed over 300,000. Mulholland’s aqueduct was unfinished and no water came as yet from the Owens River Valley. The streetcars with their hundreds of miles of track connected the downtown center to the newly incorporated city of Hollywood and distant Santa Monica and Venice Beach. Downtown street corners had hitching posts and watering troughs. Bel-Air, Brentwood, and Pacific Palisades were unheard of. Pico and Olympic Boulevards were barley fields. A few primitive automobiles smoked and roared through the streets, but L.A. was still mostly propelled by horse and buggy. This was a time so distant as to seem almost science-fictional. The city still reverberated from the dynamiting of the Times building by iron worker unionists on October 1, 1910, an explosion that killed twenty people and injured many more, the result of a desperate and increasingly violent struggle between capital and labor. At stake was the future of the city and, in a way, its very soul. Would L.A. become socialist or remain the businessman’s creation? For a while the question was real, the result uncertain. Battle lines were drawn, and two men, John J. and James B. McNamara, came to trial for the act of terror. Across the country many believed the McNamaras had been framed. The legendary trial lawyer and labor attorney Clarence Darrow was persuaded, at great expense, to defend them. But during the course of the proceedings, Darrow was himself accused of bribing a juror and the McNamaras changed their plea to guilty, giving socialism in Southern California, and arguably in America as a whole, a blow from which it would never recover. Capital won the day, and a key chapter in Los Angeles history was written. Trials arising from the case dragged on well into the time when Raymond Chandler was already in L.A., showing him how power worked in the city and perhaps already starting to shape his vision of what only looked like paradise.

  “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 offered at eleven hundred dollars and no takers. Hollywood was a bunch of frame houses on the inter-urban line,” Chandler’s fictional hero, the detective Philip Marlowe, would remember much later, in 1949. “Los Angeles was just a big dry sunny place with ugly homes and no style, but goodhearted 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 himself belonged to one such group, The Optimists, formed by his friend Warren Lloyd, a lawyer with money from oil who had befriended Chandler on a boat coming over from Europe and had invited him to L.A. The Optimists met weekly at Lloyd’s house on South Bonnie Brae Street. Music was played, poetry declaimed, literature and philosophy discussed, and at one of these soirees Chandler first met Julian Pascal, a concert pianist and music professor, and Pascal’s wife Cissy.

  “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 a while, because Cissy resisted Chandler for years.

  Chandler fought in France in WWI and came back (or was drawn back) to L.A. in 1919. Julian Pascal agreed, after much argument and discussion, 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, it seems, did Chandler learn that Cissy was not eight years older than he, as he’d thought, but eighteen. He was then thirty-five, and he’d married a woman of fifty-three.

  “All this is the stuff of passion and novels,” noted Patricia Highsmith in an essay. Highsmith’s first book, Strangers on a Train, would be adapted by Chandler for a 1952 Alfred Hitchcock movie. “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. Chandler was too troubled ever to be truly happy, and too inhibited and mannerly to be a freely autobiographical writer. This, for him, was good; his heightened sense of his own pleasures and dismays would translate into the way he captured L.A. in his writing, the changing city that wouldn’t let him go. But that was in the future.

  In the early 1920s Warren Lloyd helped Chandler secure a job with the Dabney Oil Syndicate, a group of companies that operated one hundred fields in the city that was then producing so much of the world’s oil. Chandler’s boss, Joseph Dabney, was a multimillionaire, a native Iowan who had roamed west and struck oil, developing big fields in Ventura County and at Signal Hill in Long Beach. Dabney, like many a rich man before and since, soothed his conscience and bought a reputation through charity, making big cash donations to the Salvation Army and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), the future home of scientific geniuses such as Albert Einstein and Richard Feynman. Chandler would eventually characterize Dabney as a petty tyrant, though this was later, after their relationship went sour. For years Chandler was one of Dabney’s most important employees. He’d been with Dabney only a short time when he realized that the company’s auditor had stolen $30,000. “His method would only be possible in a badly organized office,” Chandler wrote. “But I found him out and at his trial I had to sit beside the Assistant DA and tell him what questions to ask. The damn fool didn’t know his own case.”

  Chandler rose quickly, was promoted out of accounting “to become a director of eight companies and a president of three … They were small companies but very rich.” He had two cars—one a big eight-cylinder Hupmobile, a very upscale automobile—and his handsome salary. He wore slick, custom-made suits. He had a big office and a team of secretaries in the Bank of Italy building on South Olive Street. He hired and fired the staff and reckoned himself an excellent judge of character. As an executive, Chandler could err on the side of arrogance. He managed the services of six lawyers. “Some were good at one thing, some at another. Their bills always exasperated the chairman,” he wrote.

  Much later Chandler would remark that business was tough and he hated it, but business—what he saw business do, and what business did to him—was key to the writer he became. Business possessed
L.A., and because he was a part of a business machine, he came to know the city so well that it started to belong to him too. Business taught Chandler cynicism, revealing to him the inner workings of power. A part of him grew up and became hardboiled. He later wrote about one experience in particular that contributed to his education:

  I remember one time when we had a truck carrying pipe in Signal Hill (just north of Long Beach) and the pipe stuck out quite a long way, but there was a red lantern on it, according to law. A car with two drunken sailors and two girls crashed into it and filed actions for $1,000 apiece. They waited almost a year, which is the deadline for filing a personal injury action. The insurance company said, “Oh well, it costs a lot of money to defend these suits, and we’d rather settle.” I said, “That’s all very well. It doesn’t cost you anything to settle. You simply put the rates up. If you don’t want to fight this case, and fight it competently, my company will fight it.” “At your own expense?” “Of course not. We’ll sue you for what it costs us, unless you pay without that necessity.” He walked out of the office. We defended the action, with the best lawyer we knew, and we proved that the pipe truck had been properly lighted and then we brought in various bar men from Long Beach (it took money to find them, but it was worth it) and showed that they had been thrown out of three bars. We won hands down, and the insurance company paid up immediately about a third of what they would have settled for, and as soon as they did this I cancelled the policy and had it rewritten with another company.