A Bright and Guilty Place: Murder, Corruption, and L.A.'s Scandalous Coming of Age (13 page)

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Raymond Chandler—Oil Man!

I
n 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 lowlife 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.

A nice drama, and a foreshadowing of Double Indemnity, the James M. Cain novella that Chandler would later help turn into a screenplay. In London, back at the turn of the century, Chandler had written poetry that was wistful and sadly noble. Now he lived and worked in a highly ignoble city where drunk people smashed into a car and, having taken out an opportunistic lawsuit, expected to cheat the insurance company and get away with it.

Chandler took pride in his clear-sighted victories. He enjoyed jousting with insurance men and attorneys, finding some refuge from his personal unhappiness at the office. He played tennis with work colleagues and journeyed with them up the coast to college football games. He chased show girls at gala dinners and his weekend-long benders became notorious. This desperate behavior suggests F. Scott Fitzgerald, with whom Chandler has more in common than might at first be supposed. He was a Jazz Age guy in crisis, though at this point he still held his high-level job.

Joseph Dabney had lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in the Julian Pete debacle. Unlike most who’d been bilked, he was an enormously rich man with power to seek redress. Opportunity came along in the shape of Arthur Loeb, a Julian Pete victim who nursed a special grievance, having lost an eye during a struggle at a stockholders’ meeting. Loeb had been on an unsuccessful mission of vengeance ever since. Now he was looking for partners to contribute the $20,000 he needed to pay a lawyer and initiate a suit that would charge numerous brokerage houses, and the Los Angeles Stock Exchange itself, with continuing to sell Julian Pete shares long after they knew of the over-issues. Dabney told his right-hand man Raymond Chandler to look into the matter. Having met with Loeb and Loeb’s attorney, a former Superior Court judge named Guy Crump, Chandler advised Dabney to go ahead, and Crump went to court on behalf of Dabney, Loeb, and various other Julian Pete stockholders.

This lawsuit, demanding $15 million, would end in blackmail, robbery, fraud, and several murders: Leslie White would be sucked into its aftermath, as would Charlie Crawford and Dave Clark. Unwittingly, Raymond Chandler became a prime mover in a chain of action whose bloody consequences would later inspire episodes in his fiction.

The lawsuit was filed on October 8, 1929. Three weeks later, on October 29, 1929, the day now known as Black Tuesday, Wall Street crashed. Stocks lost $24 billion in paper value in a single day—ten times the federal budget, more than the government had spent on WWI. “The market went over the edge of Niagara,” wrote historian Frederick Lewis Allen. “Orders to sell came in faster than human beings could conceivably record or deal with them.” More than 16 million shares were sold in one trading session. The value of major stocks like General Motors and United States Steel was cut by half. Westinghouse fell from 290 to 102. Warning signals had been there, largely ignored. The previous week, bankers at J. P. Morgan and elsewhere had pumped more than $240 million into the market, trying to shore up confidence. Even this desperate remedy failed. Universal prosperity and consumer utopia, as promised by the seemingly unstoppable bull market, were no longer around the corner. Instead the country knew the bitter taste of panic. America’s economic structure cracked wide open. Thousands of investors lost all their capital within a day. The hopes of a decade were smashed.

Louis Adamic, the first literary debunker of the golden myth of Los Angeles, was in New York at the time, writing Dynamite!, his book about class violence in America. At its center would be a telling of the story of the Times building bombing. Adamic was so deep into his writing that he barely noticed the headlines about the Wall Street disaster. But, soon after, he was turning a corner onto Park Avenue when he heard a woman shriek. She stood on the sidewalk, mouth agape and half-hysterical. She’d seen a man leap to his death from the top of an apartment building. “Park Avenue was not safe to walk on any more. There were too many ruined financiers and speculators,” Adamic wrote.

At first the crash seemed to many a temporary setback. “Investors may continue to purchase carefully but with the utmost confidence,” reported the New York Times, while Irving Fisher, economics professor at Yale and the possessor of another cloudy crystal ball, noted that the market was merely “shaking out the lunatic fringe.” “WALL ST LAYS AN EGG,” said the headline in Variety, not exactly fearing the end of the world. We know now that the wipeout of October 29 presaged a wider collapse, the crumbling of American confidence and prosperity, hard times. The shock would be delayed but America’s optimism was broken. A cycle of mass thinking was over, and the slide into the Great Depression had begun. The booming L.A. of the 1920s had been a parody of the frontier spirit. Now farce was about to turn into a darker reality.