A Bright and Guilty Place: Murder, Corruption, and L.A.'s Scandalous Coming of Age (29 page)

Chapter 22: The Ballad of Dave Clark

Robinson’s
Lawyers of Los Angeles
has good detail on prosecutor Joe Ford. Geoffrey Cowan’s “
People v. Clarence Darrow
” discussed Ford’s earlier career and his involvement in the jury-tampering prosecutions of Clarence Darrow following the bombing of the
Times
building in 1910.

Here I relied on the trial transcript and my newspaper timeline. Interestingly, each of the major papers had, along with their chief reporters (like Coughlin), another reporter who sat in court and made a transcript of what was said during the most important moments of testimony. Human accuracy being what it is, these supposedly exact records differ in terms of nuance and how dialogue is recorded. There’s no real reason to suppose that the court stenographer was necessarily more accurate than these newspaper professionals—but when a discrepancy appears glaring, I’ve gone with the dialogue as in the trial transcript.

Bob Shuler’s
The Strange Death of Charlie Crawford
is, as they say in the antiquarian trade, “a tough book”—in other words very difficult to find. UCLA’s copy has been stolen, likewise that belonging to USC. The Los Angeles Public Library’s copy was destroyed in a fire. I consulted the one at the California State Library in Sacramento.

Again, I’ve relied here on the trial transcripts and the timeline I made from the press coverage.

Chapter 26: A Hooker’s Tale

Much here is drawn from White’s diaries and
Me, Detective
. The Love Mart trial received extensive coverage in the
Times
, the
Examiner
, and the other papers. “Brick” Garrigues’s swashbuckling pamphlet “So They Indicted Fitts!” was also useful here. George Creel’s piece “Unholy City” appeared in
Collier’s
(September 2, 1939).

I first came across the phrase “a bright and guilty place” in
The Cinema of Orson Welles
, a 1961 book by Peter Bogdanovich. I was lucky enough to meet Welles in London back in 1983. When asked about Los Angeles, he merely roared with laughter. More of Leslie White’s writing deserves to find its way back into print. Copies of
Me, Detective
are tough to find, and expensive.

This chapter is indebted to the Chandler sources detailed above. To the best of my knowledge, nobody has ever before spotted the connection between his early story “Spanish Blood” and the Spencer/Crawford killings. In his essay “Cracking the Cassidy Case” (a Chandler fictional case), Robert Moss drew the parallel between
The High Window
and the Doheny affair. The history of
Black Mask
is well recorded by both William F. Nolan and Otto Penzler. Horace McCoy’s papers are at UCLA.

That Dave Clark’s wanderings and misbehavings should continue to be the subject of reportage not only in Los Angeles but in New York, too, is a mark of the huge impact those trials made in 1931. His end is haunting, and Nancy Clark’s descendants attest that she loved him to the end.

In tracing the future histories of my characters, I relied on interviews, newspaper obituaries, and the mentioned biographical sources. The surface of Los Angeles evolves by the moment, and there is something in the flatness of the customary daytime light that dissuades the viewer from contemplating the city’s past. But it’s there, if you look long enough.

Bill Buford, back in the days when he was editing
Granta
, called me when the Rodney King riots kicked off and demanded that I hit the streets and do some reporting. I suggested to him that he wanted me to get myself killed. Bill paused before replying: “No. Injured would be good.” The piece I wrote prompted Kyle Crichton, then an editor on the
New York Times Magazine
, to ask me to write about the LAPD and whether, in the wake of everything that had happened, the department could be fixed. A simple magazine assignment turned into months of work and a 40,000-word first draft delivering a simple enough answer: probably not. The photographer, Joe Rodriguez, and I became so obsessed that we just disappeared into the story. We got to know the guys at the Rampart precinct so well we were simply showing up at the bunker-like car park and jumping in the back of squad cars. For the public relations department of the LAPD, this was no doubt a nightmare, but for Joe and me it was a transformative eye-opener. We saw bad cops, dumb cops, violent cops, and great cops too. The city came alive for me, and the story, which appeared on the cover of the
New York Times Magazine
, prompted an ACLU investigation. It was David Ulin who switched me on to Myron Brinnig’s extraordinary novel in which, at a moment of ultimate climax, Los Angeles simply slides into the Pacific. It probably won’t happen, but then in L.A. you never can tell.

Bibliography

Adamic, Louis. Laughing in the Jungle. New York: Harper, 1932.

Adamic, Louis. My America. New York: Harper, 1938.

Allen, Frederick Lewis. Only Yesterday. New York: Harper, 1931.

Ansell, Martin R. Oil Baron of the Southwest. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998.

Asbury, Herbert. Gem of the Prairie. New York: Knopf, 1940.

Baker, Carlos. Ernest Hemingway. New York: Scribner, 1969.

Baker, Lorin L. That Imperiled Freedom. Los Angeles: Graphic Press, 1932.

Banham, Reyner. Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies. New York: Harper, 1971.

Basinger, Jeanine. Silent Stars. New York: Knopf, 1999.

Beecher, Daniel. A Study of the Office and Problems of the District Attorney of the County of Los Angeles. Los Angeles: Law Library of L.A. County, 1931.

Bessie, Simon Michael. Jazz Journalism. New York: Dutton, 1938.

Birmingham, Stephen. California Rich. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980.

Bogdanovich, Peter. The Cinema of Orson Welles. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1961.

Bonelli, William G. Billion Dollar Blackjack. Beverly Hills: Civic Research Press, 1954.

Brooks, Louise. Lulu in Hollywood. New York: Knopf, 1982.

Brownlow, Kevin. The Parade’s Gone By. New York: Knopf, 1968.

Caughey, John, and Laree Caughey, eds. Los Angeles—Biography of a City. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977.

Chaplin, Charles. My Autobiography. London: The Bodley Head, 1964.

Cooper, Stephen. Full of Life: A Biography of John Fante. New York: North Point, 2000.

Coughlin, Gene. How to Be One Yourself. New York: A. S. Barnes, 1961.

Davis, Beverly, as told to Serge G. Wolsey. Call House Madam. San Francisco and New York: Martin Tudordale, 1954.

Davis, Margaret Leslie. Dark Side of Fortune: Triumph and Scandal in the Life of Oil Tycoon Edward L. Doheny. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

———. Rivers in the Desert: William Mulholland and the Inventing of Los Angeles. New York: HarperCollins, 1993.

Davis, Mike. City of Quartz. London, New York: Verso, 1990.

DeMille, Cecil B. The Autobiography of Cecil B. DeMille. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1959.

Domanick, Joe. To Protect and to Serve. New York: Pocket Books, 1994.

Durham, Philip. Down These Mean Streets a Man Must Go: Raymond Chandler’s Knight. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1963.

Federal Writers Project. The WPA Guide to California. Introduction by Federal Writers Project. The WPA Guide to Los Angeles. New York: Hastings House, 1941.

Finney, Guy. Angel City in Turmoil. Los Angeles: American Press, 1945.

———. The Great Los Angeles Bubble. Los Angeles: Forbes, 1929.

Freeman, Judith. The Long Embrace. New York: Pantheon, 2007.

Friedrich, Otto. City of Nets. New York: Harper & Row, 1986.

Gardiner, Dorothy, and Kathrine Sorley Walker. Raymond Chandler Speaking. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962.

Garrigues, Charles Harris. So They Indicted Fitts! Los Angeles: C. H. Garrigues, 1936.

———. You’re Paying for It! A Guide to Graft. New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1936.

Garrigues, George L. He Usually Lived with a Female: The Story of California Newspaperman Charles Harris (Brick) Garrigues. Austin, Texas: Quail Creek Press, 2006.

Gebhard, David, and Harriette Von Breton. L.A. in the Thirties: 1931–1941. Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith, 1975.

Giesler, Jerry. The Jerry Giesler Story. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960.

Gottlieb, Robert, and Irene Wolt. Thinking Big: The Story of the Los Angeles Times. New York: Putnam, 1977.

Goulart, Ron. Cheap Thrills: An Informal History of the Pulp Magazines. New York: Arlington House, 1972.

Gregory, James N. American Exodus: Dust Bowl Migration. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Gross, Miriam, ed. The World of Raymond Chandler. New York: A & W Publishers, 1977.

Gwendolyn Wright. Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America. New York: Pantheon, 1984.

Hecht, Ben. A Child of the Century. New York: Donald I. Fine, 1985.

Henstell, Bruce. Sunshine and Wealth. San Francisco: Chronicle, 1984.

Hiney, Tom. Raymond Chandler. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1997.

Hiney, Tom, and Frank MacShane, eds. The Raymond Chandler Papers. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2000.

Hoopes, Roy. Cain. New York: Holt Rinehart Winston, 1982.

Horne, Gerald. Class Struggle in Hollywood, 1930–1950. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001.

Hundley, Norris. The Great Thirst. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.

Hurewitz, Daniel. Bohemian Los Angeles and the Making of Modern Politics. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008.

Jennings, Dean. We Only Kill Each Other. New York: Prentice Hall, 1967.

Johnson, Diane. Dashiell Hammett. New York: Random House,

1983. Kahrl, William L. Water and Power. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. Kaplan, Justin. Lincoln Steffens. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1974. Kendall, Elizabeth. The Runaway Bride. New York: Knopf, 1990.

Klein, Norman. The History of Forgetting. London, New York: Verso, 1997.

La Botz, Dan. Edward L. Doheny. New York: Praeger, 1991.

Lambert, Gavin. The Dangerous Edge. New York: Grossman/Viking, 1976.

Layman, Richard, ed. with Julie M. Rivett. Selected Letters of Dashiell Hammett, 1921–1960. New York: Counterpoint, 2001.

Layman, Richard. Shadow Man: The Life of Dashiell Hammett. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1981.

MacShane, Frank, ed. Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler. New York: Columbia University Press, 1981.

MacShane, Frank. The Life of Raymond Chandler. New York: Dutton, 1976.

McCann, Sean. Gumshoe America. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000.

McCartney, Laton. The Teapot Dome Scandal. New York: Random House, 2008.

McDougal, Dennis. Privileged Son: Otis Chandler and the Rise and Fall of the L.A. Times Dynasty. Cambridge, Mass: Perseus, 2001.

McWilliams, Carey. The Education of Carey McWilliams. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979.

———. Louis Adamic & Shadow America. Los Angeles: Whipple, 1935.

———. Southern California: An Island on the Land. Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith, 1973.

Maland, Charles. City Lights. London: British Film Institute, 2007.

Messick, Hank. The Beauties & the Beasts. New York: McKay, 1973.

Moore, Charles, Peter Becker, and Regula Campbell. Los Angeles: The City Observed. New York: Vintage, 1984.

Moss, Robert, ed. Raymond Chandler: A Literary Reference. New York: Carroll & Graf, 2003.

Mulholland, Catherine. William Mulholland and the Rise of Los Angeles. Berkeley: University of California, 2000.

Nichols, Chris. The Leisure Architecture of Wayne McAllister. Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith, 2007.

Noggle, Burl. Teapot Dome: Oil and Politics in the 1920s. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1962.

Nolan, William F. The Black Mask Boys. New York: Morrow, 1985.

O’Brien, Geoffrey. Hardboiled America. New York: Da Capo, 1997.

Outland, Charles. Man-Made Disaster: The Story of the St. Francis Dam. Spokane, Wash.: A. H. Clark, 2002.

Parrish, Michael. For the People. Los Angeles: Angel City Press, 2001.

Pinkerton, Roy. The County Star: My Buena Ventura. Ventura, Calif.: Pinkerton, 1962.

Pitt, Leonard, and Dale Pitt. Los Angeles A to Z. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

Rappleye, Charles, and Ed Becker. All American Mafioso: The Johnny Roselli Story. New York: Doubleday, 1991.

Reisner, Marc. Cadillac Desert. New York: Viking, 1986.

Robinson, W. W. Lawyers of Los Angeles. Los Angeles Bar Association, Los Angeles, 1959.

Reid, Ed, and Ovid Demaris. The Green Felt Jungle. New York: Pocket Books, 1964.

Rice, Craig. Los Angeles Murders. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1947.

Richardson, James. For the Life of Me. New York: Putnam, 1954.

Robinson, W. W. The Story of Ventura County. Los Angeles: Title Insurance and Trust Company, 1955.

Rolfe, Lionel. Literary L.A. Los Angeles: California Classic Books, 2002.

Russo, Gus. Supermob. New York: Bloomsbury, 2006.

St. Johns, Adela Rogers. Final Verdict. New York: Doubleday, 1962.

———. The Honeycomb. New York: Doubleday, 1969.

Sante, Luc. New York Noir. New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 1999.

Sante, Luc, and others. Unknown Weegee. New York: ICP/Steidl, 2006.

Schulberg, Budd. Moving Pictures: Memories of a Hollywood Prince. New York: Stein and Day, 1981.

Server, Lee, and others. The Big Book of Noir. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1998.

Server, Lee. Encyclopedia of Pulp Fiction Writers. New York: Facts on File, 2002.

Shippey, Lee. The Luckiest Man Alive. Los Angeles: Westernlore Press, 1959.

Sitton, Tom. Los Angeles Transformed. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005.

Starr, Kevin. Endangered Dreams: The Great Depression in California. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

———. Material Dreams: Southern California Through the 1920s. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

Steffens, Lincoln. The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1931.

———. The Shame of the Cities. New York: Hill and Wang, 1992.

Stenn, David. Clara Bow: Runnin’ Wild. New York: Doubleday, 1988.

Stoker, Charles. Thicker’n Thieves. Santa Monica, Calif.: Sidereal, 1951.

Terkel, Studs. Hard Times. New York: Pantheon, 1970.

Thomson, David. The Big Sleep. London: British Film Institute, 1997.

———. In Nevada. New York: Knopf, 1999.

———. A New Biographical Dictionary of Film. New York: Knopf, 2002.

Trope, Michael Lance. Once upon a Time in Los Angeles: The Trials of Earl Rogers. Spokane, Wash.: Arthur H. Clark, 2001.

Tygiel, Jules. The Great Los Angeles Swindle. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

Tyler, Gus. Organized Crime in America. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962.

Ulin, David, ed. Writing Los Angeles. New York: Library of America, 2002.

Vollmer, August. Law Enforcement in Los Angeles: A Report on the LAPD. Los Angeles: LAPD, 1924; reprinted in New York: Arno Press, 1974.

Wagner, Rob Leicester. Red Ink, White Lies. Upland, Calif.: Dragon-flyer Press, 2000.

Weinstock, Matt. My L.A. New York: Current Books, 1947.

Werner, M. R., and John Starr. Teapot Dome. New York: Viking, 1959.

White, Leslie. Me, Detective. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1936.

Wilkman, Jon, and Nancy Wilkman. Picturing Los Angeles. Layton, Utah: Gibbs Smith, 2006.