Dream a Little Death, page 25
High Tower Court, 2181 Broadview Terrace, Hollywood, CAAt the end of a steep hill not far from the Hollywood Bowl is a small complex of homes and apartment buildings designed by architect Carl Lay between 1935 and 1956, whose original walk street layout was meant to evoke Positano, Italy. None of the residences is accessible by car. Instead, there are garages at the base of the hill. After parking your car, you can puzzle your way through the labyrinth of stairs, walkways, and bridges hidden behind shady trees and climbing vines, or you can talk your way into the five-story private elevator concealed inside a campanile that Kay built when his wife got sick of taking the stairs. High Tower Court is where Elliott Gould’s laid-back Philip Marlowe lives in Robert Altman’s fantastic 1973 The Long Goodbye, which deftly pushes against the noir genre, while embracing its subterranean romanticism.
The Dietrichson Residence, 6301 Quebec Drive, Hollywood Hills, CAYou know the story. Poor Walter Neff was just making a house call, to one of those California Spanish houses that everybody was nuts about ten or fifteen years earlier. Must’ve cost Mr. Dietrichson $30,000, if he was finished paying for it, that is. Anyway, the guy’s car insurance was about to lapse and Neff made his living getting people to renew. Inside, Neff catches one glimpse of the wife, Phyllis Dietrichson, in a towel, slippers with pom-poms, and that honey of an anklet, and boom, he’s a goner. Actually, it’s Mr. Dietrichson who’s the goner. That, in a nutshell, is Double Indemnity, everybody’s favorite film noir. Though the Dietrichson residence is supposed to be in Los Feliz, the shooting location was actually in Beachwood Canyon, and is virtually unchanged since 1944. Better hurry, though.
Formosa Cafe, 7156 Santa Monica Blvd., West Hollywood, CABugsy Siegel kept a safe under his favorite booth of this legendary cocktail lounge. Is there anything else to say? Oh, yeah. The safe was sealed after he was gunned down by rivals in 1947, but in 2000, it was drilled open. What was inside? “Rust, lots and lots of rust, not even a paper clip,” according to the grandson of the man who’d installed it. The Formosa has been featured in countless films, including the unforgettable “a hooker cut to look like Lana Turner is still just a hooker” scene in L.A. Confidential.
Villa Primavera, 1300–1308 Harper Avenue, West Hollywood, CAThe earliest surviving example of the eight courtyard complexes designed by the husband-and-wife team of Arthur and Nina Zwebell, Villa Primavera (1923) has been home to many stars including Katherine Hepburn and James Dean, as well as director Nicholas Ray. The latter liked the Spanish Revival ambience so much that he had a replica built on a Columbia Studios backlot to be used as the set for his 1950 noir, In a Lonely Place, starring Humphrey Bogart and Ray’s wife at the time, Gloria Grahame. Now it gets weird. Halfway through the shoot, Ray’s marriage blew up when the director caught Grahame in bed with his thirteen-year-old son from a previous marriage. After that, the director packed his bags and moved onto the set—a simulacrum of his own bachelor apartment—for the duration of shooting.
Greystone Mansion, 905 Loma Vista, Beverly Hills, CAA fifty-five-room Tudor Revival mansion designed by architect Gordon Kaufmann and completed in 1928 as a gift from oil tycoon Edward Doheny to his son, Ned. Widely thought to have been ex–oil man Raymond Chandler’s model for the palatial Sternwood Manor, which Philip Marlowe visits in the opening pages of The Big Sleep: “I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.” If only money bought happiness. When he gets hired by Colonel Sternwood, Marlowe enters a maelstrom of jealousy, blackmail, and murder. The Dohenys would have known something about that. Four months after Ned, his wife, and their five children moved into Greystone, Ned died in a guest bedroom in a murder-suicide with his secretary, Hugh Plunket. The official story, that Hugh did the shooting, didn’t exactly jibe with the fact that Ned’s gun was the weapon. But what do I know?
Sheats-Goldstein House, 10104 Angelo View Drive, Los Angeles, CAWith its slippery glass walkways and no railings around the patios and outdoor hallways, this landmark John Lautner house is perhaps not the best place to tie one on. An example of American organic architecture, it was built in 1961 directly into the sandstone of the hillside and intended to mimic a cave, which might explain why it was chosen by the Coen Brothers to be the party house of pornographer Jackie Treehorn in their noir throwback The Big Lebowski. Recently donated to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the house is currently being restored.
If you’re game for more things noir, here are two side trips:
Mount Hope Cemetery, 3751 Market Street, San Diego, CAFifty years after their deaths, Raymond Chandler and his wife were finally reunited here. Cissy Chandler died at eighty-four, after thirty years of marriage. Her much-younger husband, who died five alcohol-soaked years later, had wanted to be buried next to the woman who’d inspired him to write. But he’d never completed the documents. So her ashes remained at a nearby mausoleum, while he was interred at Mount Hope. A few years ago, some Chandler fans began a campaign to have the oversight corrected. They convinced a judge, and Cissy’s ashes were transferred to her husband’s grave in 2011, on Valentine’s Day. When you visit, bring roses, and read aloud from Chandler’s letters. “Everything I’ve ever done,” he once wrote about Cissy, “was just a fire for her to warm her hands at.”
Bracken Fern Manor, 815 Arrowhead Villa Road, Lake Arrowhead, CABracken Fern was originally part of a sprawling private resort which was comprised of three buildings housing a gambling club, a brothel, a speakeasy, luxury guest quarters, tennis courts, an Olympic-sized pool, a barbershop, a private gas station, a ski lift, horse stables, and that Depression-era all-essential: a supply of artesian well water, used in the making of moonshine. The property cost $1.3 million to construct in 1929, so one can only imagine how lavish it must have been. Nothing but the best for Bugsy Siegel. It’s haunted, too. Don’t take my word for it. Check out Violet’s room. Or better yet, Episode 12, Season 2, of the Travel Channel’s Ghost Adventures, in which paranormal investigator Zak Bagans and his team uncover the secret tunnels below Bracken Fern. You know. The ones where the demons are lurking.
About the Author
An Agatha, Edgar, and SCIBA nominee, SUSAN KANDEL is the author of the nationally bestselling and critically acclaimed Cece Caruso series, the most recent of which, Dial H for Hitchcock (Morrow), was named by NPR as one of the five best mysteries of the year. A Los Angeles native, she was trained as an art historian, taught at NYU and UCLA, and spent a decade as an art critic at the Los Angeles Times. When not writing, she volunteers as a court-appointed advocate for foster children, and loves to explore secret, forgotten, and kitschy L.A. She lives with her husband in West Hollywood.
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Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
dream a little death. Copyright © 2017 by Susan Kandel. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins Publishers. For information, address HarperCollins Publishers, 195 Broadway, New York, NY 10007.
Digital Edition MAY 2017 ISBN: 978-0-06-267499-9
Print Edition ISBN: 978-0-06-267500-2
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Susan Kandel, Dream a Little Death
