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Please do visit our Odds & Sundries shop at https://www.cafepress.com/1947project
Lawrence Lipton couldn’t take it anymore. His wife, best-selling crime novelist Craig Rice, insisted he stay up with her until four or five every morning, while she talked, talked and talked. He couldn’t write his own books on two hours of sleep. “It made me ill,” he complained. She humiliated him in front of friends and servants, disrupting his attempts at conversation with a lordly, “Don’t pay any attention to him.” Despite their household staff, she insisted Lipton clean out the fireplaces. And as for having business conversations around her? Impossible. Lipton’s witness, Raymond J. Healy of Simon & Schuster told Judge Alfred E. Paonessa that Rice routinely told Lipton to “Shut up,” and seemed both personally and professionally jealous of her spouse.
Judge Paonessa granted the divorce decree, noting that under an agreement worked out by the parties, Miss Rice would retain ownership of the 15-room house at 351 23rd Street, Santa Monica, they would own their own copyrights, and maintain joint ownership of collarborative works. The couple were married at Ft. Atkinson, Wisconsin on March 31, 1940, and separated last October 4.
Rice, who outsold Christie and the noir boys (and made the cover of Time in ’46) is largely forgotten today. Like so many words into the ether, the house has since disappeared, replaced by this piece of 1970s architectural fancy.
Clara Anzis, 64, had decided to leave her husband Max, 79. He knew it, and was despondent, angry, lurking in the darkness of their kitchen like a wounded dog. Clara came to the door asking for her clothing. Max made a pretence of pushing it through a tiny opening.
“Don’t come in here, Clara!†But a lady needs a change of clothes when she’s leaving, even if it’s just to an empty apartment in the building they own together at 1225 Boston Street. She came in. Max fell on her with a huge pipe wrench. She got the wrench away from the old man and leaned out the window hollering. Her screams alerted their tenants, who found the pair in the kitchen, Clara bloodied and beaten, Max calmly cutting his throat with the bread knife. Tenant Charles N. Morris told Radio Officers D. K. Jones and F. Batelle that when he divested Anzis of this weapon, his landlord merely picked up the paring knife and continued his excavations.
Mr. Anzis, who is expected to recover, was taken to General Hospital’s prison ward where he was booked for suspicion of assault to commit murder. His wife was treated for three lacerations to her head, and for shock.
Deposed in the office of Attorney Paul Overtorf, newlywed Mrs. Dorothy Evelyn Burks Stoner, 25, denied the claims of cosmetics manufacturer Andrew Norman, 60, that she had relieved him of a $75,000 home and $25,000 in jewels by means of “female arts.†Why, she had been anxious to marry the gentleman, if he would only divorce his wife.
Mrs. Stoner painted a picture of a relationship that commenced in 1943 and continued until September 1946, when the pair went to Las Vegas to attend the wedding of mutual friends. Inflamed by the matrimonial urge, and wearing the seven-karat diamond engagement ring Norman had given her before a June visit to her family in Kansas, Miss Burks spent some evening hours unloading her woes into the friendly ears of C. Earl Stoner, automobile distributor and acquaintance, whom she encountered in a Las Vegas café. On their return to Los Angeles, Burks and Stoner continued the conversation, and two weeks later they were wed.
As for that house at 348 Homewood in Brentwood? A gift from Mr. Norman, made sometime between March and June, as scant compensation for a lass who was wasting her fertility on a stubborn old goat who wouldn’t give her the home and children she craved. Oh, sorry, I meant to say, “I loved him like a father,†as stated by Mrs. Stoner in deposition today.
It’s a solid house, stolid even. The curved entry whispers “moderne.â€
A seventy five-thousand dollar home if ever there was one.
Such are the spoils of love.
Joseph Scarantino, 39, of 8845 Sepulveda Blvd., Van Nuys, suffered facial lacerations and possible broken ribs early today, when his car was dragged 450 feet by a Southern Pacific train at a grade crossing near his home. Scarantino, a painter, is missing one arm as the result of a similar accident some years ago.
For as long as there’s been a highway into the hills, young lovers have gone up into Angeles National Forest on Saturday nights to be alone in the dark. Gerald Snow Welch brought his beloved Dolores Fewkes, 16-year-old Montebello High student, to the deserted Horse Flats picnic grounds. He also brought his .22 rifle.
What Welch swore was a suicide pact went awry when both shells he had brought proved necessary to extinguish the young lady’s existence. In fact, he had to beat her roundly with both stock and barrel of his gun to finish the job. Then he carried her body down the mountain to the cops, stated his “purpose in life had been completed,†and expressed impatience for the State to execute him.
From suicide watch in a padded Pasadena Police Station cell, Welch told officers that it was he who wished to die; Dolores had begged to join him. His depression could immediately be blamed on three miserable months spent in the Navy, which culminated in a medical discharge. In service, suffering “religious disillusionment,†Welch came to doubt the things he’d been told in Sunday school. He went to the library and read Plato, Schopenhauer and Emerson. In Schopenhauer, he found justification for suicide. Bu the roots of Welch’s troubles go back a decade, when the then-eight-year-old saw a neighbor, fleeing police after murdering her husband, blow her brains out in front of him.
Welch said he loved Miss Fewkes and longed to join her in heaven. For now, he appreciated the padded cell, a quiet place where he could be alone with his thoughts. And if the State declined to kill him, he would be happy to finish the job himself.
The Fewkes’ lived in the back house, at 5941 Gage —
and it was here where Dolores lived her life, dreamed her dreams, and let her heart beat for a budding existentialist who had issues with Christianity and women. A potent combo. “In the last five years my mother’s attitude toward me changed,” said Welch. “There wasn’t the same kind of affection as there used to be. And the church didn’t live up to what it was supposed to.” Who wouldn’t adopt what the papers called “the immature philosophy of pessimism?”
Maybe part of his escape to Horse Flats had to do with feeling confined in this newly-dense urban environment. The likes of Huntington Park, Walnut Park, Bell Gardens and South Gate had been, just previous to his birth, endless acres of grazing sheep and cauliflower fields (Amelia Earhart learned to fly in one such South Gate expanse of dirt). In the early 20s cities were incorporated, every inch was parceled out, and frame buildings went up like mad.
Welch lived in this one, at 7501 Whitsett:
And it was here, during his post-Navy freakout, he argued religion, thought his dark thoughts, and formulated a philosophy based on a common youthful misreading of Schopenhauer (seemingly endemic to the postwar geist).
Like get hip. Murder-suicide is no answer in an absurd vacuum, dad.
