A Bright and Guilty Place: Murder, Corruption, and L.A.'s Scandalous Coming of Age (24 page)

Trials that catch the public imagination respond, like movies, to a public need. Los Angeles, in that hot and dark summer of 1931, needed Dave Clark to walk. He had enormous charisma and in those months became a vehicle of people’s longing for glamor and integrity. They wanted to believe in his looks, his tan, his family, his wife, his basic decency, the possibilities in his future. He didn’t look like a murderer so the city’s nascent and embattled Midwestern values raised their heads one more time, calling for him to be innocent. An odd swoon of the zeitgeist ensured his acquittal.

“He is one of our finest Americans,” said Alice Thomas, who’d been forewoman of the jury in the first trial and attended the final day of the second, to embrace Dave and Nancy Clark and talk to the press once more. “I think he’s grand.”

26

A Hooker’s Tale

I
see they acquitted Dave. It was in the cards. A lot of people don’t believe his story but I wish him the best,” Leslie White recorded in his diary on October 27, 1931. By then, however, White had more on his mind than Dave Clark’s welfare. He, too, faced a crisis, a defining moment.

In the thirty or so months since joining the D.A.’s office, White had worked on more than 200 cases, a couple of which, like the murder/suicide at Greystone and the Crawford/Spencer shootings, had shaken the city. But no previous case consumed him like the Love Mart trial, featuring as it did White’s gut hatred of the millionaire John P. Mills and his growing respect for the prostitute Olive P. Day, the witness he’d found and was determined to protect. The dismay that swept over him crystallized as he watched events unfold and contemplated operations of the justice system in which he had a tiny part.

On March 31, 1931, the case against Mills was continued until April 30. On April 30, it was continued until June 18. On June 18, it was continued until July 1. On July 1, it was continued until September 15. This was unusual back then, when trials happened fast. Leslie White’s reading of Olive Day’s diary had triggered the investigation two months before Clark killed Crawford and Spencer; and now that Clark had been acquitted, Love Mart was still dragging on. Buron Fitts himself agreed to the continuances sought by Mills’s defense, puzzling White and making Olive Day nervous. She liked White but didn’t trust the D.A.’s office and felt that, some way or another, she’d end up holding the bag. Such had been her experience in life and the world, growing up as a hooker on the streets of Hollywood. White sought to reassure her. He’d been given a free hand in the case so far, and reckoned his superiors would support the promises and choices he made. He told Day everything would be fine.

Then, in the middle of the night, Leslie White got another of those phone calls. An operator down in Long Beach asked if he’d accept reverse charges. Puzzled, White agreed, and moments later found himself talking to Olive Day. Now he was astounded because Day should have been in her cell on the eleventh floor of the Hall of Justice. She begged him to come see her as soon as possible in Long Beach and made him swear not to reveal her whereabouts to anyone.

Next day, on arriving at work, White found himself in the midst of a hue and cry. Olive Day had vanished, he heard. Nobody knew where she was. Apparently goons from Mills’s defense team had gotten to her and spirited her away, another example of the kind of witness tampering and removal that Joe Ford reckoned had influenced the Clark trial, especially with regard to June Taylor. White kept quiet, but slipped from the Hall of Justice as soon as he could, got into his car, and sped down to Long Beach.

He found Olive Day hiding in a storeroom, scared out of her wits. She said she’d been awakened around midnight the previous night. It had been the jail matron, telling her that her bail had been posted and she was free to go. Olive Day at once feared a trap. She said she didn’t want to leave, but the matron ordered her out. The Hall of Justice was hushed and empty. She rode down in the elevator and was walking through the marbled vault of the lobby when a man stepped from the shadows and asked if she was Olive Day. “No,” Day replied, and ran. She got out into the street and jumped in a cab, telling the driver to take her as far toward Long Beach as the two dollars she had in her purse would allow. When the cabbie dumped her, she thumbed a ride on a milk truck, got the rest of the way to Long Beach, and found this hiding place. “I called you, Mr. White, because you’ve shot square with me,” she said. “I honestly believe I’ll be killed if the other side gets hold of me.”

Had White played by the book, he would have taken Olive Day back to the Hall of Justice. Instead, believing her fear, he made arrangements to hide her, taking her first to a hotel in Glendale. That night he introduced Day to his wife, and the three went to dinner and to a movie. They talked, not about the Love Mart case, but about politics, the weather. Afterward Day burst into tears, telling White she was unused to being treated with such courtesy or respect. The next day White drove this troubled woman to Ventura County and checked her into a small hot springs hotel where he knew she’d be safe. Lucien Wheeler’s men were still scouring Los Angeles for her, and White waited a few days before telling Fitts that he knew where the now-celebrated witness was. A surprised Fitts agreed that Olive Day should be placed under protective guard out in Ventura County, and nodded when White said the D.A.’s office should meet Day’s expenses. Thereafter White spent a lot of time with Olive Day, hearing of her plans to help the young girls she’d served up to John P. Mills. There was one who could get work as a beautician, she said—another who was quick and might become a stenographer. White was impressed. “The sulphur springs had cleared her complexion and as she practically lived in a bathing suit on the edge of the swimming pool, she looked well, talked well, and thought well,” he said.

On September 15, 1931, the Love Mart trial began. This time the defense sought no continuance. Instead Buron Fitts appeared personally in court and asked that the case against Mills be dismissed, declaring he intended to use Mills as a witness against Jobelman and Day under a separate charge. The judge denied the motion. Fitts then produced a letter from one of the young girls in the case, Clarice Tauber, who had married a few weeks ago and was trying to create a new life for herself. In the letter she’d begged not to be called upon to testify, Fitts said, waving the piece of paper while being careful not to let anybody actually see it. Fitts pleaded that this little girl, now age seventeen, this new bride, should be spared the indignity of having her name in the headlines again.

Again, the judge was unimpressed. He refused to dismiss the case, and Fitts stormed to no avail. The judge ordered him to call his witnesses.

“I have no witnesses,” Fitts said. “The girl refuses to testify.”

Leslie White, sitting in court, was both furious and mystified. What game was Fitts playing? Later White would observe that this was the moment when the light bulb went on at last and he realized that Buron Fitts had joined the “citywide carousel of graft” and it was “utterly impossible to work in the D.A.’s office and retain any semblance of personal integrity.”

The judge was angry, too, but had no choice but to discharge all three defendants on this particular charge. Mills, Jobelman, and Olive Day walked out of the court, apparently free. John P. Mills stepped on out of the Hall of Justice, into his V16 Cadillac, and back into his life, while Jobelman and Day were arrested again at the door. Jobelman promptly turned state’s witness so only Day was prosecuted. Within a month she’d been found guilty and was sentenced to five years, indeed left holding the bag as she’d suspected she would all along.

“Don’t talk to me about justice. Don’t talk to me at all,” she told Leslie White. “I should have known better than to trust a cop.”

She called him Judas, and White squirmed.

A few weeks later a colleague of Gene Coughlin’s on the
Daily News
, a reporter named Charles “Brick” Garrigues, lifted the lid on a stink that would linger around Buron Fitts for the rest of his life. Shortly after being hired by John P. Mills, Lucien Wheeler, Buron Fitts’s friend, the former head of the D.A.’s investigative unit and one time presidential bodyguard, had taken $18,000 from Mills and used it to buy a plot of land in Claremont, a seven-acre orange grove valued at $9,000. The title of the orange grove belonged to Buron Fitts’s sister. It had been while the sale was being finalized that Fitts had agreed to the numerous trial continuances, and after the sale had been completed that he had sought dismissal of the charges against Mills.

Fitts had taken a bribe. He’d spend the next three years fending off charges, using his investigators as thugs to intimidate his increasing number of enemies, turning his office into an embattled fiefdom while he slogged through trials, never being convicted, but never clearing his name either.

It was a dark time, and an ironic retrospective triumph for Charlie Crawford. After the brief interruption of Mayor Porter’s regime, the L.A. System came back in force, working in just the same way as before, though Guy McAfee had surplanted Crawford as the chief who connected City Hall to the underworld. Kent Parrot helped put in place a new mayor, Frank Shaw, who rode in with the customary promises of reform and quickly outdid his predecessors in political and police corruption. Shaw’s brother, Joe Shaw, openly sold favors and jobs from City Hall. An LAPD captaincy could be had for $500; unsurprisingly, the department was still riddled with officers owned by the rackets. A secret political police squad was set up to harass, spy upon, and kick around people who dared to indicate they didn’t like what was going on. Phones were tapped; wires installed. Gambling and prostitution flourished as never before.

“Big time establishments were about as secret as the Washington Monument,” wrote George Creel in an article titled “Unholy City” for Collier’s, counting 600 brothels by the decade’s end, plus 300 casinos running full blast, and 1,800 bookies. Clubs were furnished with the glitz and elegance of movie sets. Crime went on seamlessly pervading L.A.’s body politic, and much of what Charlie Crawford predicted came to pass, in terms of the underworld “running things as they’ve never been run before.”

Crawford got one crucial detail wrong, of course: he was no longer around to pull the strings and run the show. Whether with direct intent or not, Dave Clark played the role of king-making assassin, guaranteeing that power passed conclusively, if temporarily, to his friend and patron Guy McAfee.

“This isn’t a city, this is a conspiracy,” George Creel wrote, a situation that only started to change when the boodling Shaw brothers were finally handed their hats late in 1938, and Guy McAfee was forced to depart for new pastures.

27

Music of the City

I
t was Orson Welles who called Los Angeles “a bright and guilty place.” In his 1948 film Lady from Shanghai the heroine, who is also the villain, a classic femme fatale, played by Welles’s ex-wife Rita Hayworth, says to the bewildered hero, played of course by Welles himself: “Everything’s bad, Michael. Everything. You can’t escape it or fight. You’ve got to get along with it, make terms.”

The Love Mart case embittered Leslie White, and the fraying rope of his idealism snapped for good. Some of his friends—like Casey Shawhan, the reporter—regarded the civic structure as a gigantic farce and the public as suckers. “But while they jeered, they paid taxes and did not recognize the public as a collective group of which they were a part,” White wrote. “The reformers, ‘we,’ rode into office like a roaring lion and cast out … individuals. We did not alter the structure which made these individuals crooked.”

White talked things over with his wife, then went to see Buron Fitts and quit. “I liked the work, most of it,” he said to Fitts. “But I hate politics.”

Fitts asked why.

“You can’t stay in it and be honest,” White said. “You’ve got to barter in politics, and that’s the beginning of corruption. Sooner or later you get jammed up. You know that, better than I do.”

Buron Fitts went red in the face.

White was lucky and didn’t have to “make terms.” Writing gave him another option. He went to New York, met with editors, and was soon cranking out more for the pulps: “Dynamite Molls” and “Lucky Crash” for Detective Story Magazine, “The Phantom Killer” for Far East Adventure Stories, and “C.I.D.: Secret Inks” for Detective Action Stories were all published in the final months of 1931. He created tough, honest cops who treated their job like a religion. In “The Last Wayne,” published in the Saturday Evening Post, he wrote: “Big Terry Wayne went into a basement hideout after several mugs of the Ritter mob. Since there were only five of the gang present, Big Terry barged in alone. Ordinarily, that would have been alright, but one of these five guys was carrying a load of cocaine when Big Terry pushed his foot through the door panel. And when a rodman is high, even a Wayne doesn’t look impregnable, so the snowbird went for his gun and managed to sink a slug through Big Terry’s ribs.”

This is pretty silly writing, but not without gusto. White, tireless, turned his hand to nonfiction too. He wrote a series of articles for Better Homes and Gardens about the buying, training, and caring for Scottish terriers. “I’m getting along in years now; not old, you understand, but I’ve sure seen a lot of doggy friends come and go,” ran one piece, written from the point of view of Sandy, White’s own dog. He covered flying, deep-sea diving, forensics, and the investigative process for the Saturday Evening Post. “The average American citizen regards the work of the police as a major sporting proposition, akin to baseball. He views it objectively, as though it were of no personal concern,” he wrote, though he himself was no longer an average citizen and knew that the effects of police work were not akin to those of sport. White studied his markets with care and made good as a writer. He missed the adventure of investigation, but earned more money now. Called upon to address Rotary Clubs, he trotted out stories of derring-do. He moved out of Los Angeles, heading north to Santa Cruz where he bought a place and named it “Mystery Ranch.”

White’s life changed further when he began visiting the aging Lincoln Steffens in Carmel; theirs turned into an important friendship. “Leslie White, former detective, cultural troglodyte, and Red-baiter, drove down frequently from his ranch near Santa Cruz,” wrote Justin Kaplan in his 1974 biography of Steffens, a funny if somewhat unfair snapshot. “White underwent a complete transformation, found himself radicalized and considerably heightened in awareness, perception and self-confidence.”

Steffens lived a hundred yards from the ocean in a house with a wild, irregular garden; it was in this house that he’d written his already famous Autobiography, published in 1931. White had read this book that, in its questioning of wealth and power, turned many leftward during the Depression. Steffens gave context to White’s dissatisfactions. He told him: “You can commit any crime, break any rule of etiquette, violate any custom, but they will never forgive you for using your head, for thinking.” Steffens listened to White’s stories and suggested that he write a book about his time in law enforcement. He fixed up White with his own publisher—Harcourt, Brace—and even gave White a title for the book.

White’s memoir, Me, Detective, was published by Harcourt, Brace in 1935. It’s easily his best work, a jazzy account of his experiences in Ventura County and with the D.A.’s office. White grappled with his growing disillusion and drew admiration from Carey McWilliams, as well as others. The memoir did well, prompting Harcourt, Brace to commission two novels, Harness Bull and Homicide, which White wrote quickly, although with more thought than his pulp stories. These books were published in 1936 and 1937 respectively, and like Me, Detective still await a reprint. They’re early police procedurals, notable for neat and clever construction.

Harness Bull takes place in a day, a night, another day. It’s prefaced by a glossary, a guide to cop and lowlife vernacular, “S’Language,” as White calls it. Thus: “fish” = prisoner; “bindle” = small quantity of narcotics; “croaker” = physician; “typewriter” = machine-gun; “foreign talent” = crooks from other cities; “noble” = boss strike-breaker; “show-up” = parade of prisoners for observation; “yegg” = tough character; “whips and jingles” = case of nerves. The action concerns the routine of a police captain, Barnaby, and the pressures he’s under. “The constant attendance at the shrine of politics was starting to wear on his nerves,” White writes. “A machine-appointed mayor put in a police commissioner whom he could control and who in turn commanded the police department.” Barnaby’s cases involve a jewelry heist, a bank-job, the attempt to enroll police support to break a strike. “Everything was confused and intricate in its workings, plain in its manifestations,” White notes, and he knows this world; he’s describing the L.A. System, even though he never names the city and the writing sometimes makes us feel it through cotton wool, if not blocks of wood. “It was her very earnestness that caused her to assume that air of almost maternal protectiveness and in the four years that she had been his secretary, Jenny had made herself indispensable,” goes one passage. “Chuckling softly, he wondered how Mrs. Kenner would react to the square-hulled sergeant.”

Homicide is cast in the form of a documentary of an investigation, with crime scene reports, witness interviews, trial transcripts, radio bulletins, newspaper clippings, and autopsy details. All these are framed in a series of letters from a fictional detective, Steve Muttersbach, who writes in a vaguely Runyonesque style. The letters, and all the other materials, are presented as if sent to Leslie White himself on his Mystery Ranch at Santa Cruz. “The defense fought like hell to get a lot of middle-aged dames on the jury, on the theory that a motherly dame would not order the hemp for a pretty looking boy,” notes Muttersbach, and White was remembering Dave Clark. The form of the book was original for the time and, like all White’s stuff, gallops along.

Writers don’t really write what they know; they write what they can. White had a quick, agile mind and an undauntable temperament. He didn’t look too deep but moved restlessly on. He was thorough and inquisitive, capable of making himself expert in whatever caught his imagination; but his fiction brings with it no feeling of danger and no whiff of the physical presence of Los Angeles whatsoever. Harness Bull and Homicide made almost no use of the notorious cases in which White had been involved. Nor do they show any interest in scene or place or mood. It was as if, having escaped L.A., White refused to let the city again affect or infect him.

Others, though, soon caught the disease. With the development of talking pictures, and the onset of the Depression, writers from all over the English-speaking world swarmed to L.A. Hoping to work for the studios, they found themselves assailed by the city’s color, flora, and climate—its unique atmosphere. A few, such as Daniel Fuchs, extolled California’s “happy, lazy days.” Most found their material in the shadows. Charles G. Booth arrived from the north of England, yet his 1933 Black Mask story “Stag Party” is a direct reflection of the struggle for control of the rackets that involved Guy McAfee and Charlie Crawford, right down to the names of the characters. Paul Cain drew upon this same background in “Fast One,” depicting a savage hardboiled world of racketeers, molls, losers, blighted buildings, political infighting, and gambling ships.

Horace McCoy came to L.A. from Texas in 1931, hoping for a career as an actor. By then he’d been a flyer and had already published a number of stories in Black Mask, action-packed shoot-’em-ups about a Texas Air Ranger named Jerry Frost. In L.A. his acting career amounted to only a few bit parts, but he landed a job as a contract writer for RKO, then one of the big studios, and a new wife—his third—Helen Vinmont, the daughter of a wealthy oil man. The existential absurdities of low-and high-life in Los Angeles then became his subject. He began a short story, “Marathon Dance,” later expanded to novella length and retitled They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, featuring a pair of Hollywood wanna-bes who starve and degrade themselves through the hundreds of hours of a dance marathon, such contests being a grisly symptom of the Depression. The contest takes place in a barn-like hall at the end of the Santa Monica pier while the surf rolls and crashes beneath. “It’s peculiar to me,” says Gloria, the heroine, “that everybody pays so much attention to living and so little to dying.” She wants to commit suicide but doesn’t have the guts, so the exhausted hero does the job for her, shooting her in the head with a revolver he pitches into the oblivious depths of the Pacific.

They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? was published in 1935, and Charlie Chaplin wanted to film it at once. The material was too bleak, however, too closely representative of its time, showing a society traumatized by unemployment yet still driven by bogus myths of success and freedom. It reads with the intensity and inevitability of a nightmare, written in a stark simplicity and despair that in no way resembles McCoy’s earlier writing, as if what McCoy saw and felt in the first months after his arrival in L.A. acted on him like a blow to the head.

The historian Carey McWilliams said he had to keep pinching himself as a reminder to get down on paper the city’s abnormal world, but he could never break out of the trance long enough to do it. The shock of arrival, the newness and strangeness of what struck them, stirred writers like McCoy. Others were impressed, released almost, by what they heard—the sound of California, the direct, accentless, and immediate way people spoke. James M. Cain, a former managing editor of The New Yorker, a womanizer and a drunk, arrived, like McCoy, in 1931. In his pocket he had a Paramount contract, though he would never achieve much as a screenwriter. Instead he unexpectedly found his fictional voice. The loose energy of Southern California’s language and the intensity of its psychic geography released Cain’s fascination with tabloid murder into the urgent first-person confessionals of The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), Double Indemnity (1936), and Serenade (1937). The later and slightly different Mildred Pierce (1941) actually opens in 1931, the year Cain rolled into town, with a guy clipping his hedge in Glendale, unable to accept that he’s been wiped out in the crash and still dreaming of the “vast deeds he would do when things got a little better.” Cain’s stories are driven by frustration, disappointment, and a bluntly amoral lust for transformative cash that seems very particular to L.A., both then and perhaps still. Murder might just be a necessary step along the way.