A Bright and Guilty Place: Murder, Corruption, and L.A.'s Scandalous Coming of Age Hardback - 2009

Excerpt

1
The Mystery Is Announced

"CHARLIE CRAWFORD AND EDITOR SLAIN!" screamed the headline in the Los Angeles Illustrated Daily News. The date was Thursday, March 20, 1931. At about 4:30 P.M. the previous afternoon the fifty-four-year-old Crawford, nicknamed "The Gray Wolf" because of the silvery-gray hair that waved and curled across his head, had been gunned down in his office on Sunset Boulevard. Also killed was Herbert Spencer, a veteran journalist who'd been with Crawford in the room. "EX-BOSS FALLS TO LONG-FEARED GUNMAN BULLET," the News went on. "Crawford, kingpin politician, lived until 8:32 P.M. last night, a little more than four hours after the shooting. He died without revealing the identity of his assailant, according to detectives . . ."

Crawford had been, and many believed he still was, a "boss," a key player in what was known as "The System," a low-profile but all-powerful syndicate that ran the gambling, prostitution, and bootlegging rackets in Los Angeles. "He was the most feared and dictatorial power in the city, its behind-the-scenes czar," wrote Beverly Davis, who ran an upscale brothel for Crawford. "You could get away with murder under his wing." This was L.A.'s brand of gangsterism: Crawford used officers of the Los Angeles Police Department to collect the take from the underworld captains. He worked behind the scenes with Kent Kane Parrot, a fixer who'd had George Cryer, the mayor of Los Angeles from 1921-29, pretty much in his pocket. It was a discreet yet effective arrangement that had been in place since Crawford and Parrot contrived to get Cryer elected. As far as the rackets were concerned, L.A. had been a closed town ever since, locked down by Crawford and The System. "It was the most lucrative, the most efficient, and the best-entrenched graft operation in the country," News city editor Matt Weinstock wrote later. Now somebody was monkeying with that operation, trying to destroy it perhaps, or take it over.

"Racketeer bullets declared open warfare in the Los Angeles underworld yesterday," said the L.A. Examiner. "MAN HUNT ON!" An announcement went out over the newly perfected LAPD radio system: "Wanted for murder--an American, about six feet tall, weighing between 150 and 175 pounds, and between 35 and 40 years of age. Hair, brown. A small black moustache. Dressed in neat blue suit and wearing sailor straw hat."

Was this the killer? It seemed so.

"The political structure rocked precariously while everybody tried to imagine who could have fired the fatal shots," wrote Leslie White, a young detective working in the investigative unit of the District Attorney's office. For White, the case had a particular significance, a poignancy almost. He'd met Charlie Crawford several times and had liked him. "Despite the unanimous opinion that the murder of Crawford was a piece of civic betterment, I felt a pang," White wrote. "Would his death improve the city in any way? I doubted it. A new boss might be less efficiently corrupt. The King was dead--but who would seek the throne?"

White worked downtown, in the Hall of Justice, a new building opposite the even newer white tower of City Hall. On that morning after the shootings, White was in his small cubbyhole of an office, talking with colleagues, trying to figure out who could have pulled the trigger when his boss, Blayney Matthews, the burly and genial head of the D.A.'s investigative unit, came in with the news.

"We're looking for Dave Clark," Matthews said.

Leslie White blinked--unable, for a moment, to believe his ears. "Our Dave Clark," he said.

"That's right," Matthews said, and White rocked back in his chair.

Dave Clark--known to the press as "Debonair Dave" or "Handsome Dave"--was a crusading litigator and former assistant district attorney who was now running for judge. He was a war hero with matinee-idol looks. He was, moreover, Leslie White's friend.

"Had the chief suddenly accused me of the crime, I couldn't have been more astounded," White wrote.

Sorry to see Dave Clark's name in any way connected with this sensational crime, White hoped for the best, believing that at any moment Clark would arrive at the Hall of Justice and clear his name. But hours went by and nothing happened, and White himself became involved in the unavailing search for the suspect. Dave Clark had vanished, nowhere to be found.



A great crime saga had been set in motion, with toothsome details that Raymond Chandler--who, at the time, was an executive in L.A.'s oil business--would soon feed directly into one of his very first works of fiction, the short story "Spanish Blood." Chandler, when he turned to writing, wrote what he knew, and he knew Los Angeles--not just its map and climates, but its history of corruption and violence. Like James M. Cain, Horace McCoy, and others who wrote in and about L.A. during the years of the Great Depression, Chandler drew material from the headlines and bullet-prose of the tabloids. True crime tells the story of how L.A. got hardboiled and noir.

Flash back to 1910, when the population of Los Angeles was 310,000 or thereabouts, many of them Spanish-speaking. "There were more cows than people," says the writer and historian D. J. Waldie, and he might not have been joking. Ten years later, in 1920, the population was 576,000. By 1930 the figure would rise to 1,250,000, and L.A. County--which gathers together various unincorporated cities, including Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, Venice, and Culver City, as well as the city of L.A. itself--would be home to almost 2.5 million souls.

Throughout this astonishing period, L.A. was the fastest-growing city in the world. In America only San Francisco had ever grown so fast, during the years of the Gold Rush following 1849. But by the 1920s, San Francisco's boom was long done. New York, Boston, and even Chicago had never known an explosion like the one that was happening in L.A. Every working day throughout the 1920s, builders started more than fifty new homes. Each week a new hotel went up. The year 1923 alone saw the construction of 800 office buildings, 400 industrial buildings, 150 schools, 130 warehouses, 700 apartment buildings, and more than 25,000 single dwellings. Property prices doubled, tripled, quadrupled, eventually rising sixfold through the decade. The city began to spread, amoeba-like, in search of its suburbs, although in those days L.A. still meant downtown, thriving with business and residences. In 1923 a Saturday Evening Post article about the boom ran a photo showing the district, chockablock with office buildings, all about twelve to fifteen stories tall, as high as the earthquake regulations would then allow. "Most of these buildings are less than a year old," said the caption.

L.A. was "a civilization that will not need to hang its head when the Athens of Pericles is mentioned," wrote the New Republic in 1927--when L.A. seemed like a strapping youth, foolish and violent at times, bursting out of its skin with exuberance. Within a few years the New Republic's pronouncement would seem bizarre and deluded. By 1931 the depression gripped California. Capitalism was in crisis and people no longer spoke of L.A. as a utopia with the added luxury of a voluptuous climate. Rather, for a while the whole social fabric was stretched and tattered and in danger of being torn in two. L.A. still had the sunshine, but it could be a lonely and hellish place--rife with crime, riddled by corruption, and drained of civic and moral purpose. Banks failed, thousands of businesses went to the wall, foreclosures hit epidemic proportions, and empty lots awaited the rush of investment that had until recently seemed so certain. People blew their brains out, gassed themselves, hanged themselves, took pills and poison, slit their wrists, or walked into the ocean. Southern California became America's suicide capital, an amazing phenomenon on which Edmund Wilson would report for the New Republic, driven to revise its previous optimism. In 1931 alone there were over 750 suicides in L.A.; so many threw themselves from the handsome Colorado Street Bridge crossing the Arroyo Seco Canyon in Pasadena that the city first appointed a special police detail to guard the bridge and, when that didn't work, erected high fences of barbed wire to stop people from jumping which remain to this day.

In its early days, L.A. attracted lower middle-class and middle-middle-class retirees from the American Midwest, people drawn to the life of relaxed ease promoted in the booster ads of L.A.'s Chamber of Commerce. A further growth spurt came with the development of an industrial base in the 1920s. At the same time the recently arrived movie business began to attract a different sort of young person--attractive, ambitious, driven. One could argue that L.A. needed and invented Hollywood in order to provide itself with a different demographic and to achieve maturity. Then yet another element was thrown into the mix. After 1929 the character of immigration changed again as the roads into California filled with the armies of the indigent and the unemployed, riding in battered jalopies or hitchhiking. At the height of the Depression 1,500 arrived daily, many of them boys, said The Nation, "who beat their way out on freight trains and are in danger of becoming hopeless tramps or criminals."

In this defeated atmosphere, the expressionless blue of the sky and the unchanging rhythm of perfect days that followed each other one after the other added to the melancholy. "Outside the bright gardens had a haunted look, as though wild eyes were watching me from behind the bushes, as though the sunshine itself had a mysterious something in the light," wrote Raymond Chandler.

Cities have characters, pathologies that can make or destroy or infect you, states of mind that run through daily life as surely as a fault line. Chandler's "mysterious something" was a mood of disenchantment, an intense spiritual malaise that identified itself with Los Angeles at a particular time, what we call noir. On the one hand noir is a narrow film genre, born in Hollywood in the late 1930s when a European visual style, the twisted perspectives and stark chiaroscuros of German Expressionism, met an American literary idiom. This fruitful commingling gave birth to movies like Double Indemnity, directed by Vienna-born Billy Wilder and scripted by Raymond Chandler from a James M. Cain novella. The themes--murderous sex and the cool, intricate amorality of money--rose directly from the psychic mulch of Southern California.

But L.A. is a city of big dreams and cruelly inevitable disappointments where noir is more than just a slice of cinema history; it's a counter-tradition, the dark lens through which the booster myths came to be viewed, a disillusion that shadows even the best of times, an alienation that assails the senses like the harsh glitter of mica in the sidewalk on a pitiless Santa Ana day. Noir--in this sense a perspective on history and often a substitute for it--was born when the Roaring Twenties blew themselves out and hard times rushed in; it crystallized real-life events and the writhing collapse of the national economy before finding its interpreters in writers like Raymond Chandler.

In this book I evoke the time when Los Angeles came of age and found a defining tone. Many people--some famous, others not--will feature in an urban mosaic in which everything and everybody seems to be connected, and, in one way or another, is corrupt, is seeking corruption, or is trying to escape it. But, for me, the story belongs most prominently to two very different young men, both long dead and largely forgotten: Leslie T. White and David H. Clark. White, as we've seen, was for a while a D.A.'s investigator. In time he, like Raymond Chandler, would transform himself into a writer. For Clark, the veteran from WWI and high-flying attorney, the future would be very different. White, who was small and slight and peered at the world through horn-rimmed spectacles, proved himself undauntable. The tall and suave Clark, with his movie star looks and his huge promise, went wrong in a most spectacular way. These contrasting trajectories have much to say about Los Angeles, and maybe about America. The two men are symbols of light and dark, linked emblems in a city's scandalous process of becoming.



2
Dam Disaster

In 1928 the boom ran full tilt and the leaks in L.A.'s destiny had yet to appear. Nobody guessed yet that depression and a haunted future were around the corner, waiting to wash bright hope away. Leslie White was living in Ventura, about fifty miles north of the city. He was in his mid-twenties, recently married, and had his own photography business. Murder, and indeed Los Angeles itself, were far from his mind.

Ventura had a population of fewer than 15,000. It had a Main Street, a courthouse, one of the original Spanish missions, and two small newspapers. On an average afternoon, its air was thick with the smell of citrus. But this country town was being transformed by oil fields that had been discovered nearby. Several of these gushers had been brought in by Ralph Lloyd in partnership with Joseph Dabney, the former a friend of Raymond Chandler's and the latter who happened to be his boss in 1928. The existence of these Ventura fields, and a dispute concerning revenues from them, would be of great and surprising significance for Chandler's career as a writer. But that was in the future.

Leslie White came to Ventura in 1922. Born on May 12, 1903, he'd been raised in Canada--in Ottawa, Ontario. His father died when he was seven years old; his mother and aunts, strict Methodists, took the young boy to church three times a week, doing their best to point him in the ways of the Lord. He left school at fifteen, prone to ill health, and with an earnest and highly moral worldview. In Northern Canada he worked in a lumber mill and as a railroad fireman. He claimed, too, that he'd tried his hand as a prizefighter and traveled with a carnival. Certainly he loved adventure, and all his life he would be restless, searching for the next interest. On arrival in Ventura he secured a job as a park ranger, saying he knew how to ride though he'd never been on a horse. Mounting for the first time, he slipped and fell, breaking a collar bone. After he recovered, he went back to work, protecting land that had been bought for rich hunters. He became a deputy sheriff, despite admitting that what he knew of the law was "gleaned from Conan Doyle and motion pictures." His superiors called him "The Kid." He was touchy about his physique and youth, and he had a firecracker temper. Once he arrested a man for having carnal relations with a cow. On the lonely fog-swept promontory of Point Magu, he watched rumrunners armed with machine-guns bringing their crates of bootleg booze ashore. Gung ho, he was about to steam in to make some arrests when his superior warned him off, pointing out that the trucks into which the rumrunners were loading their stuff were driven and guarded by cops from the LAPD. This early brush acquainted White with how things worked in the big bad city where, as he would later write, "brains and money, or, better still, a combination of both, could sabotage the machinery of justice at will."

White shifted jobs frequently. The 1926 Ventura County directory lists him as a driver for Shell Oil and has him living on Poli Street, close to the courthouse. By 1928, however, he was married to Thelma, his first wife, and had opened the Leslie White Studio on Main Street. He loved gadgets and machines and had transformed himself into a photographer. He made portraits, or pictures of weddings and christenings, and did fingerprint and identification work for Ventura's newly inaugurated police force. His business did well. A wall-sized blowup of one of his street scenes is still featured in the main Ventura library. He was also learning to fly and was a fan of Clara Bow, whose film Red Hair finally reached Ventura in March 1928. White was a member of the Chamber of Commerce, the Rotary Club, and the Breakfast Club (at one meeting of which he caused a rumpus by releasing, as a prank, a tame circus lion!).

Leslie White was a success, and if truth be told, more than a little bored; but that was about to change.

Media reviews

Praise for A Bright and Guilty Place

"In the early 1980s, just before Los Angeles put on its second Olympic Games, British journalist Richard Rayner came here and fell reluctantly, madly in love with this city. Los Angeles -- from which I write -- offered him a blithe nuttiness: earthquakes, civil unrest, mindless heat (Rayner once spied a hapless citizen trying to take shelter from the sun in the shade of a telephone pole) and especially, a panoply of truly grotesque and off-the-wall crime.

In A Bright and Guilty Place, Rayner uses crime as a key to the secrets of this seductive metropolis, and the time frame he has chosen seems unnervingly appropriate for today: He begins with the last few euphoric years before the crash of 1929 and continues a few more years, into the depths of the Depression, by which time somber reality had knocked optimistic if corrupt L.A. off its shaky emotional pins.

To love this book you have to love the wonderful novels of Raymond Chandler or James Ellroy, where only the flimsiest veneer of freshness and glamour covers a decaying, even disgusting reality. If you can go along with that point of view, this social history will be a bonanza for you, a boundless source of creepy joy.

I am probably this book's perfect reader. Among the cast of characters in this complex and bristling narrative is Gene Coughlin, a top newspaper reporter of the time, mainly for the Illustrated Daily News; Matt Weinstock, that paper's city editor, shows up on Page 2; crime reporter Casey Shawhan on Page 98. They were all poker-playing buddies of my old Texan dad. My father knew he lived in a magic time, and I remember it -- in glimpses -- from when I was a little girl: our dining room turned into a poker parlor; handsome, raffish men and beautiful women; oh-so-cool banter; rivers of whiskey; clouds of cigarette smoke. These are the men who first reported on these magnificently awful shenanigans. They made history out of glitter and crime and the enchantment of ephemeral worlds. If you love the idea of all that, you'll really love A Bright and Guilty Place."

--Carolyn See, The Washington Post Book World

"A cracking good murder case--a true crime story that's driven by several fascinating characters and that's also engaging and suspenseful....An artful and evocative yarn."

--The New York Times Book Review


"Everything has its counterpart. For every piece of matter there is a like piece of antimatter, for every movie star there is or will be a like TV star. For every Steve McQueen a Lee Majors, for every Marlon Brando an Arthur Fonzarelli. (These facts have been established.)


In his brilliant new book, A Bright and Guilty Place, Richard Rayner has given us, finally and definitively, the nonfiction equivalent of the Raymond Chandler classics that fell like hammer blows in the middle of last century: Farewell, My Lovely, The Long Goodbye, The Big Sleep. Chandler turned fact, the criminal underworld of Depression-era Los Angeles, into fiction, and now Rayner, by a strange Didion-like alchemy, has turned fiction back into fact. Not to say he has dug up the story behind the story, as a reporter might profile the real white whale, but that he has run the world of Chandler through the machine a second time, the result being utterly truthful, fantastic and new.


At the center of the book stand two characters, the good soul and the killer, Abel and Cain, around whom the story spins as cotton candy spins its wispy strands around a paper handle: Leslie White, 'sickly, smart, dedicated, eager to be good,' who moved to Los Angeles in 1928 and took a job as an investigator at the district attorney's office, where his optimism was soon ground down (he would become a writer of pulp fiction); and Los Angeles native Dave Clark, who traced his lineage to explorer William Clark. You could not invent a more dashing character than Clark -- a fighter pilot, champion golfer and double-fisted drinker who became the kind of celebrity prosecutor whose thoughts inevitably turn to politics.


He had a 'pencil moustache and a gorgeous quality about him,' writes Rayner. 'Reporters likened him to John Barrymore, to John Gilbert, and later to Clark Gable.' But by the end of the story, Clark, the golden boy, having fallen in with a bad crowd, finds himself prosecuted by his own office, on trial for double murder, the shooting deaths of local crime boss Charlie Crawford and newspaperman Herbert Spencer.


(Spencer dies like a kid dies in a movie shot on Super 8: 'Mortally wounded, [he] staggered out of the office . . . stopped to steady himself against the signboard advertising a photographer's studio; then he collapsed, spilling his blood, bright red against the sidewalk on Sunset Boulevard.')


The background of this murder is the book's real subject, Los Angeles in its defining moment, the late 1920s and early 1930s, which, according to Rayner, who writes an online column for The Times' books section, is when the city's 'personality was fixed.' Here, characters, crimes, scandals and legends spill from the pages in bewildering and fascinating profusion. Take Clara Bow, silent star, 'It' girl, washed up at 25, blackmailed by an assistant who had taken possession of letters of a very personal nature, chronicling nymphomania -- these came to light in a case tried by Clark. According to one highly fact-challenged press report, Bow 'seduced her chauffeur, her cousin and a pet koala bear.'


Or take the story of E.L. Doheny, known to many as a road in Beverly Hills, but in fact one of the mythical founders of Los Angeles, an old American type who began his adventures in Arizona in the 1880s, then carried the spirit of the Wild West into the new century. He was one of the most powerful oilmen in the world, mixed up in the Teapot Dome Scandal that crippled the presidency of Warren G. Harding. Doheny was a model for the tycoon portrayed in the Upton Sinclair novel Oil! The mansion, Greystone, that Doheny built for his son, on 12 acres in Beverly Hills, still stands and is often used as a location for Hollywood movies, including The Big Lebowski and There Will Be Blood (that was the house's bowling alley), itself based on Sinclair's book. That movie, in other words, is Daniel Day Lewis playing a character based on the guy who built the house: real to fake to real. If you follow that, you understand L.A.


Greystone was the scene of a great unsolved murder -- it appears and reappears in Chandler -- in the course of which Doheny's son either killed or was killed by his valet, who then killed himself, or was killed. The crime scene was investigated by Leslie White, who brought evidence of tampering to his boss at the D.A.'s office, where it was covered up. 'And what were the family and the family doctor doing during the four hours they didn't call the cops,' Philip Marlowe wonders in The High Window. 'Fixing it so there would be only a superficial investigation.'


A Bright and Guilty Place is stuffed with incidents and alibis. As in the novels of Chandler, every two-bit walk-on gets his description and back story, the result being a landscape crowded horizon to horizon, as rushed and overpopulated as a marketplace. It is like one of those paintings by the photo-realists in which every face, even those deep in the background, is drawn in exaggerated detail. Like a baseball game in high def. Nothing is allowed to blur into distance. At times, this brings on a kind of vertigo, the heat of overstimulation, like the not unpleasant aura seen before the migraine.


All of this is held together by Rayner -- his sensibility, which is wised-up tough, and his style, which is lyrical and sharp, drifting, now and then, into the funkier bass-driven groove of Chandler. 'The trial's early days were pretty routine for L.A. at this time,' Rayner writes of another case, 'which is to say that Leontine Johnson looked a knockout on the stand, then wept, then fainted and had to take a day off. . . . '


As you read on, though, you realize he is up to something grander than merely telling a story. He is showing us Chandler's memory bank, what he lived through, the experiences and sensations that made him the Homer of his moment. Born in Chicago, schooled in England, Chandler, who worked for years in the oil business, learned the score in Los Angeles. In other words, the book is about the birth of noir -- it's like a diorama in which you see the underworld and graft that created the hard-bitten attitude as naturally as a cold wind creates fog.


'[N]oir is more than just a slice of cinema history,' writes Rayner. '[I]t's a counter-tradition, the dark lens through which the booster myths came to be viewed, a disillusion that shadows even the best of times, an alienation that assails the senses like the harsh glitter of mica in the sidewalk on a pitiless Santa Ana day.'


In the end, as a kind of grace note, Rayner, who opened tight on the streets of old L.A., then pulled back to show Chandler sketching those streets, pulls back still further, revealing himself, born and raised in England, a kid who fell on the works of Chandler in a gloomy fever, came west looking for the world in those books and wound up creating his own world instead.


In this way, Rayner puts his name alongside the names of Doheny, Bow, Clark, White and Chandler. It's the oldest story in the world. The kid comes to town, then the town changes the kid."

--The Los Angeles Times


“Set in Los Angeles during the Roaring Twenties, A Bright and Guilty Place weaves the stories of two men, an idealistic crime-scene investigator and a charismatic politico, who stood on opposite sides of a scandal that shaped a city's identity and darkened its soul. Richard Rayner makes masterful use of his material—sex, murder, corruption, greed, and the invention of noir—to concoct a seething, sinful tale worthy of Raymond Chandler himself. This is narrative nonfiction at its best: meticulously researched, deftly drawn, and more compelling than anything the imagination might dare to conjure.”

—Karen Abbott, author of Sin in the Second City


“A Bright and Guilty Place is a seductively readable knot of intersecting stories about pre-noir Los Angeles. It has an intriguing shape, a spectrum of emotions, beckoning suspense, satisfying inevitability, and a flavor all its own, at once familiar and strange.”

—Luc Sante, author of Low Life

“Thanks to this detailed and cinematic narrative of desperate people in a desperate city, LA the place, LA the novel, and LA the film are fused into a tour  de  force of LA noir.”
—Kevin Starr, University of Southern California