Some summer reading books for all you Golden State lovers:
“WEST OF EDEN: AN AMERICAN PLACE”
Jean Stein’s “West of Eden: An American Place” (Random House Publishing Group, $13.43) is a juicy, often shocking oral history of Los Angeles focused on six eccentric, essentially doomed families. The stories are told entirely through the voices of witnesses, participants, screenwriters, actors, relatives, and observers.
Edward L. Doheny, of Beverly Hills’ Greystone Mansion, created the LA oil industry. The story of his family involved millions of dollars, two murky murders, and “a Pandora’s box that unleashed an extraordinary sequence of events, enthralling the nation for a decade.”
Jack Warner, also of Beverly Hills, co-founded Warner Bros. Studios. After his brother Sam’s death, he clashed with and betrayed his other brothers, then went on to a 55-year career in Hollywood marked both by thundering success and massive controversy.
Jane Garland (1933-2016) was a schizophrenic child actress heiress whose parents decided to treat her by hiding her away in a Malibu mansion and hiring a succession of attractive young male artists, among them Ed Moses and Walter Hopps, to act as minders, taking her out to restaurants and dances so as to simulate a “normal” social life.
The career of Jennifer Jones (1919-2009) was launched when she starred in “The Song of Bernadette,” for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress in 1944. But her life was marked by two disastrous marriages, the suicide of a daughter, a highly publicized, possibly staged, suicide attempt of her own, and surreal excess and dysfunction.
The author’s own father, Jules Stein, founded the media conglomerate MCA. Themselves members of Hollywood royalty, the family lived in a Beverly Hills mansion formerly owned by Katherine Hepburn. Her father was domineering and emotionally distant; her mother an alcoholic and controlling.
In the final chapter, the Rupert Murdoch family buys the Stein mansion and attempts to preserve certain features of it as a kind of legacy mausoleum.
The good news: Jean escaped the closed circle of Beverly Hills, sanity intact, with enough distance to write this fascinating book.
“HOLY LAND: A SUBURBAN MEMOIR”
D.J. Waldie, born in 1948, was raised in the LA suburb of Lakewood, a planned suburb of 17,000 homes incorporated in 1954 and the first of its kind in the West. In 1996, when “Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir” (W. W. Norton and Company, $10.94) was published, he still lived in the family home (his parents had died) and worked as a city planner at Lakewood City Hall.
The book is divided into 316 sections, some as short as “The grid is the plan above the earth. It is a compass of possibilities.”
The author of several other books, Waldie writes and speaks widely on the culture of Los Angeles. On one level, “Holy Land” is history, geography, sociology.
We learn of the three Jewish developers who envisioned and built Lakewood, the 30-man construction crews, the concrete-mixing trucks that waited in a mile-long line to erect as many as 500 homes a week, the eucalyptus and red crape myrtles planted at precise intervals along the identical streets, the post-WWII homebuying frenzy.
On another level, “Holy Land” is deeply personal. Referring to himself in the third person, Waldie writes:
“He could not choose to deny his father, even less his father’s beliefs. These have become as material to him as the stucco-over-chicken-wire from which these homes are made.”
“ ‘I am still here,’ he often tells himself. This is how he has resurrected his father’s obligations, which he sometimes mistakes for his father’s faith.”
He is not the first to observe the desperation, dysfunction, and tragedy spawned beneath our sunny Southern California skies. But while other, more “apocalyptic” Southern California writers tend to view such bumblers with ironic disdain, Waldie conveys compassion. This is you, he seems to say. This is me.
“THE WHITE HEART OF MOJAVE: A CLASSIC DEATH VALLEY JOURNEY”
In the early 1920s, Edna Brush Perkins, a Cleveland socialite, and her pal Charlotte decided to come to California.
“Charlotte and I knew the outdoors a little. Though we were middle-aged, mothers of families and deeply involved in the historic struggle for the vote, we sometimes looked at the sky.”
Gazing at a map, Edna saw “a great empty space just east of the Sierra Nevada Range and the San Bernardino Mountains vaguely designated as the Mojave Desert.”
In those days, there were no paved roads into the Mojave. And when they arrived in LA and aired their plan to explore it, they were met with discouragement on every side.
“Our friends drew a dismal picture of us sitting out in the sagebrush beside a disabled car and slowly starving to death."
“The White Heart of Mojave” (John Hopkins University Press, $25.49) is Perkins’ lyrical, comic memoir of the trip that, to her and Charlotte’s everlasting credit, they took anyway. Along the way they had to ditch their borrowed red roadster, hire a couple of shady guides, and go in on a pack mule. But they made it to Death Valley.
“We walked on and on, full of a strange, terrible happiness. … We stood listening to the silence. It was immense and all enveloping. No murmur of leaves, nor drip of water, nor buzz of insects broke it. It brooded around us like a live thing."
‘Do you hear the universe moving on?’ Charlotte whispered.
‘It is your own heart beating,’ I told her, but I did not believe it. We had found Mojave.”
