On the essays shelf:
Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays
In this 1995 essay for Vanity Fair, about the history of Sunset Boulevard, Hitchens gives Joan Didion a run for her money in delving into the history (social, cultural, architectural) of California. As a matter of fact, Hitchens references Didion’s works repeatedly. You kind of have to, if you are talking about California. Nobody said it better than Didion, and Hitchens knew that.
But Hitchens talks to a lot of people. People who remember when it all started, when the strip came to life. Also, what was there before. I have joked that in Rhode Island, you are often given directions based on what USED to be there. “So go to the next light, and then take a right where the Karate Studio used to be.” And, in some cases, said karate studio hasn’t been there for 25 years. But if you grew up in Rhode Island, you’d nod and go, “Oh yes, the karate studio, thanks!” The present lays over the past, and sometimes, if you squint, you can see through the layers. I know it’s commonly said that California has no history, it’s a youngish state, blah blah, but in the time I have spent there, I am totally impressed with its architecture, the Art Deco memories, the huge signs on sticks on tops of buildings, a look from another time and era.
Like this photo I took in 2009.
That’s not a 21st century look and feel. That’s a 1920s look and feel. I spend the majority of my time in New York City, where things change so quickly you never get attached to anything. This city has almost no sense of history. So if you like something, or love something, take a freakin’ picture, because two weeks later, it’ll be gone. Los Angeles seethes with history. Its in its look and feel. I find it to be a very poetic place. I love it there.
Christopher Hitchens travels the length of Sunset Boulevard. He talks about what used to be there, what is there now. He talks to people. He talks about “the strip,” and how it came to be, what it signified, what it still meant. It’s fascinating.
But best of all, the whole essay opens with his confession that he drove the length of Sunset Boulevard in the company of legendary director Billy Wilder, who, of course, directed Sunset Boulevard (1950).
In my most recent post on Supernatural, I talked about Norma Desmond’s famous line from Sunset Boulevard: “We had faces then.” I talked about what it meant then, and what it means now (especially in the context of Supernatural, but it has wider implications.)
Wilder died in 2002. Some of the stories he tells are well-worn anecdotes, honed to sharp edge, and certainly featured in Cameron Crowe’s wonderful book Conversations with Wilder
Hitchens asked Wilder what he thought of Sunset Boulevard, the musical. Wilder replied, “I thought, ‘This would make a great movie someday.'”
Here’s an excerpt from Hitchens’ conversation with Wilder.
Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays
All things considered, I’m glad that I took my cruise along the strip – in the company of the great Billy Wilder – in torrential rain. One can forget that Wilder’s imperishable Sunset Boulevard, which opens with a stencil of the title on the edge of a dingy pavement, is shot partly in a downpour: “a great big package of rain,” as the deceased narrator puts it, “oversized – like everything else in California.” Mr. Wilder consented to give me the tour on day one of what became the great Los Angeles flood of 1995. the few heroic sluts on this great working-girl turf looked as if they might offer to wash our windshield instead, and through the deluge I swear I glimpsed a sodden hustler clutching a soggy sign reading: WILL DIRECT FOR FOOD.
The torrents were a reminder that you never step into the same stream twice, and no observant person has ever seen identical Sunsets. Its nature is protean. Mr. Wilder is one of its archaeologists and historians. He sees it clearly, but he can see it as it once was. “When I came here in 1934 – stayed at the Chateau Marmont for seventy bucks a month – half of this wasn’t even paved. There was a bridle path from Hollywood to Holmby Hills. Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford bought their place in Beverly Hills as a hunting lodge.”
Everything that Wilder sees reminds him of something else. “That was Ciro’s,” he says, pointing at what is now the Comedy Store. “There was a big scandal there when it was reported that Paulette Godard was doing it on the table and on the dance floor with Anatole Litvak: I never asked her – she was married to Charlie Chaplin and Erich Maria Remarque – but I asked him on his oath and he swore that her shoulder strap just slipped and all he did was kiss her on the breast.”
We approach the Virgin Megastore, former site of Schwab’s drugstore (known in Sunset Boulevard as “headquarters”). “Mervyn LeRoy told me that he didn’t discover Lana Turner there, no matter what you read. He found her in another drugstore, just across from Hollywood High School.”
Here are, and were, the clubs that defined what was hot for those who liked it that way. “There was a lot of illegal gambling and drinking at the Clover Club in the 1930s,” says Wilder semi-fondly. “I saw David Selznick boozing it up in there before he made Gone with the Wind.”
At Le Dôme, the power-lunch parlor where Barry Diller created panic in 1992 by snacking with David Geffen right after he left Fox, Wilder talks about pictures. “Expensive as they are now, studios try and keep ’em popular. They’re either very broad or very cautious – they like it best if it’s a picture they’ve already seen. That was always true, but we made hundreds of pictures. Even then, they liked to do test-marketing, only they did it with preview cards. One card for The Lost Weekend told me it was a great movie but I should take out all the stuff about drinking and alcoholism. Another time I went to Long Beach with Ernst Lubitsch for a preview of Ninotchka and he was reading the cards in the car on the way home. Started laughing and wouldn’t tell me why, but finally passed me the card that said, ‘Great movie. I laughed so hard I peed in my girlfriend’s hand.'”
Wilder was a part of “the emigration of genius,” the exodus of gifted anti-Nazi Germans and Austrians that brought Thomas Mann and Theodor Adorno and Bertolt Brecht to the California coast. Had he met these heroes? “I was introduced to Mann at a Kaffeeklatsch for exiles run by Salka Viertel, who was married to the director. I was so impressed – he’d won the Nobel Prize in the twenties – that I don’t remember what he said or if I said anything.”
He reminisces briefly about Will Rogers, who made the transition from vaudeville and silent pictures to talkies, and about Howard Hughes, who shared the Rogers passion for the new fad of aviation and once crashed a plane within earshot of Sunset. And then it’s time to go back out into the rain.
Returning to the bar to relish the memory of lunch for a few moments, I am hailed from a good table by a very handsome black man who looks familiar. “I love your work, man,” he says, leaving me quite undone. I ask a waiter discreetly. “That’s Billy Dee Williams,” he whispers hoarsely. “He was in Lady Sings the Blues and …” The whole screen career and credits follow. Sunset – where every waiter is a producer/director. And you should see the signed star pix by the till at Gil Turner’s liquor store on the corner of Doheny.
I reflect, after the great Wilder has left me, that at least in his day there must have been less talk about how great it all used to be. You couldn’t hold forth about how everybody should have been here thirty or forty years earlier, because nobody really had been. Yet, on further reflection, all of Sunset Boulevard is about glory days departed. “I am big,” responds Norma Desmond when Joseph Gillis tells her she used to be big. “It’s the pictures that got small.” Sunset may have been a great developer’s idea for a name, but it does have the infallible connotation of the blazing hours just before darkness falls. Between the blaze and the noir falls the lengthening shadow. You can catch it in conversation. What if the Japanese wise up? What if the Japanese go broke? Hurry it up, buster. The strip is changing faster than you are.
Lost Angeles. That’s it in a phrase. Some of the sites are easy to spot. Down the road is that health-nut hangout the Source, where Woody Allen was so hilariously discomfited in Annie Hall, vindicating his suspicion that L.A.’s only cultural advantage was the permission to make a right on red. There’s the Chateau Marmont, where John Belushi OD’s, just after Michael Eisner’s wife had seen him watching one of his reruns and found herself thinking … Sunset Boulevard.
