1947 Project

Oh, the alcoholic. The only thing more predictable than the alcoholic is the child of an alcoholic. Resistance is futile. Maybe it’s your juice-damaged genes. Maybe it’s that, after a childhood of abuse and emotional neglect, you just need to share that special feeling with others. Nature or nurture, the events of your life are as precisely mapped as moves on the GAOTU’s tessellated historyboard.

Diana “Too Much Too Soon” Barrymore was no exception. John Barrymore was a kind and caring father, when he wasn’t drunk, which wasn’t often. After he died in ’42 Diana became an actor and an alkie just like daddy. By ’47, after a series of minor film roles, she was off on an alcoholiday with husband number two of her three failed marriages, brawling and slapping cops and generally putting the fun in functional alcoholic, just baby steps on her path to sanitariums and suicide attempts.

The Happy Couple, under arrest:

Diana pens TMTS and sees it made into a feature in ’58; its most truthful element being Errol Flynn cast as boozehound John Barrymore (the bottle killed Flynn a year later). Despite the picture’s Hollywood ending-she’s on the road to recovery!-Diana finally offs herself in 1960 at age 38. When life hands you a lemon, make lemonade. And put plenty of gin in it. And use it to wash down all the sleeping pills in your medicine cabinet.

“What the hell would I want with a dozen gladioli when I could have four roses?”

(Yes, Diana was the sister of John Jr., the rageful child-beating drunk who whupped Drew “Little Girl Lost” Barrymore as a toddler. Drew became a preteen addict, but has thankfully since fallen under the sway of a famous womanizing, stock-swindling, acid-dropping midcentury occultist mysteriously named “Bill W.”)

10 May was a slow news day for crime. But as I put my feet up and vainly perused the paper for evidence of murder and mayhem, an item about a new house caught my eye. Here in 1947, where building costs are high and the housing shortage acute, veteran Clement Cointe has decided to build a miniature dream house, to live in until such time as he can enlarge.

Enlisting architects Harold Bissner and Harold Zook, they’ve come up with a 700sf one-room house with a magnificently modern wall of glass (please note how unobtrusively it fits into the landscape):

Their one room is all-purpose, with closets that open to reveal built in linen and dish storage, card table, bar, coat closet and radio-phonograph. The Harolds included built in bookshelves and desk. The bedroom area-couches of grey upholstery with Mexican cow pony pillows-can be partitioned off with an accordion wall. The whitewashed fireplace in the wall of rough-sawed redwood stakes is a nice touch.

Oh, hell. Since I’ve brought up the housing shortage, I might as well touch on one of LA’s juicier housing stories: in the late 40s the City Housing Authority, its coffers full of federal lucre, pulls an eminent domain on the people of Chavez Ravine. Out come the bulldozers, which level the barrio community. Don’t worry, says the Authority, we’re building you a 3,300 unit high-rise housing project, and you’ll all get first pick of the brand new units! (And it’s designed by Richard-Freakin’-Neutra no less!)

But uh-oh, here comes the Committee Against Socialist Housing. And here comes HUAC hot on their heels. In 1953 new mayor Poulson kills the whole deal, including the resident’s Right of Return. ‘Round about that time O’Malley couldn’t connive an Ebbets Field replacement out of the borough of Brooklyn, so he went fishing in LA, and found a sweetheart deal if ever there was one. You know the rest. Go Dodger Blue.

Not that I don’t love Captain Emil Praeger’s park-the early 60s stadium is replete with atom-age flourishes-but I hope no-one goes there without recalling this image:

Sheriff’s deputies forcibly evicting Aurora “They’ll Have to Carry Me” Vargas from the Arechiga home; bulldozers razed the structure moments later.

Well, not really. This wasn’t a rigid-framed dirigible airship like Count Ferdinand’s England-bombing namesakes, this was just a gasbag on a journey of freedom, terrible freedom, seeking to join its brethren at Mines Field. Perhaps LA’s curious onlooker recalled the 9,000 incendiary balloons sent to America by the Japanese-though those only managed to kill six picnickers in Oregon, proving again that picnicking is a dangerous activity.

Barrage balloons were part of our air defense system, designed to thwart bombings and low-level air attacks. This one was probably Air Corps surplus, discard of a War Won, finding new use in peacetime America (like the friendly antiaircraft shell, plaything of children; see entry of April 26).

After a long trek across miles of stucco and security bars, I finally came to the Coulter residence. Could I be hallucinating? A nice side-gable with Doric-columned entry porch. Original board wall cladding and double-hung wood sash windows, bracketed eaves-I considered chatting up the elderly rose-tending gentleman out front, but elected not to when I realized it could in fact be Charles Coulter. And you never know when someone is going to practice the ol’ knife-throwing routine. Explains his needing no security bars.

Your average house. Balloon frame. Stucco. Low hipped roof. Patched-up shotgun blast holes. Textbook stuff.

Before the War, Bell Gardens was known as “Billy Goat Acres,” due to the large number of Okies that’d settled there. The goats and Okies have disappeared into the ether, but the area maintains a certain midcentury quality, especially as-in contrast to this “graying of America” business-the median age of the 45,000 souls who inhabit Bell Gardens is twenty-three.

Plus they still have lots of children and lots of shotguns.