City of Nets Read Online Free PDF Page A

badly.” In this Hollywood, there was no Gary Cooper either, only Earl Shoop, the inarticulate cowboy who survived by poaching game in the hills while he vaguely hoped for a job as a movie extra. And instead of the Zanucks and Selznicks, West introduced Honest Abe Kusich, the dwarf bookmaker, complete with black shirt, yellow tie, and Tyrolean hat. And, of course, the Gingos, a family of Eskimos.
    The Hollywood that attracted these outcasts remained always beyond their grasp, rich and tantalizing. West insisted on demonstrating that their city of dreams was really nothing more than “the final dumping ground,” a “Sargasso of the imagination.” Searching for Faye, who had found a bit part in a movie about Waterloo, Tod Hackett got lost in the back lots and wandered through a tangle of briers past the skeleton of a zeppelin, an adobe fort, a Dutch windmill, a Trojan horse, and “a flight of baroque palace stairs that started in a bed of weeds and ended against the branches of an oak.” By following a red glare in the sky, Tod eventually found his way to the new set that was being built for the battle of Waterloo, but just as he reached the slopes of an artificial Mont St. Jean, the whole set collapsed under the charging cuirassiers. “Nails screamed with agony as they pulled out of joists. . . . Lath and scantling snapped as though they were brittle bones. The whole hill folded like an enormous umbrella and covered Napoleon’s army with painted cloth.”
    Theater people have traditionally taken delight in the artifices of their calling, fondly citing Shakespeare’s reflections on the world as a stage and all the men and women merely players, but West saw the artificialities of Hollywood as part of a sinister California pattern that eventually became clear only in our time, when San Clemente and Pacific Palisades emerged on the national political landscape. It was a pattern partly of physical extremes, of burning deserts and alkali flats, but also of the spiritual extremes that West derided as the Church of Christ Physical, where “holiness was attained through the constant use of chest weights and spring grips,” the Tabernacle of the Third Coming, where a woman in man’s clothing preached the “crusade against salt,” and the Temple Moderne, where the initiates taught “brain-breathing, the secret of the Aztecs.”
    The pattern of California extremism became manifest in an atmosphere of rancor and disappointment and ultimately violence. West saw this spirit in the swarms of middle-class migrants who had retired to southern California in the hope of finding some kind of pleasure before they died. They were the people who waited restlessly at a movie premiere at Grauman’s—or Kahn’s Persian Palace Theatre, as West called it—and who finally burst into mindless rioting. “Until they reached the line,” West wrote, “they looked diffident, almost furtive, but the moment they had become part of it, they turned arrogant and pugnacious. . . . All their lives they had slaved at some kind of dull, heavy labor, behind desks and counters . . . saving their pennies and dreaming of the leisure that would be theirs when they had enough. . . . Where else should they go but California, the land of sunshine and oranges? Once there, they discover that sunshine isn’t enough. They get tired of oranges, even of avocado pears and passion fruit. Nothing happens. They don’t know what to do with their time. . . . They have been cheated and betrayed. They have slaved and saved for nothing.”
    There was a Gary Cooper in West’s Hollywood after all, but only as an unseen figure rumored to be somewhere nearby. Two women caught in the milling mob tried to figure out how the chaos began. “The first thing I knew,” said one, “there was a rush and I was in the