2002 (2001) (2003) (1990-2000) (2000-2010) Table of Contents
Marlin L. Heckman (MLH) Santa Monica in Vintage Postcards, Arcadia Publishing: Chicago, Il, 2002, See Text
Edan Milton Hughes, Artists in California, 1786-1940, Crocker Museum, 2002 See Text
James C. Miller, Ph.D. Obituary for Cecil R. Miller*, A.B., B.D., M.A., Ph.D. (1912-2002), 2002, 1965-1957, 1952-1950 On-line Search See Text
Walter Mosley Bad Boy Brawly Brown Phoenix: London 2004 (2002), 311 pp. (1964) See Text
Becky M. Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920-1965, with photographs by Robbert Flick. The University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 2002, 1960, 1960s, 1950, 1940, 1939, 1930, 1930s, 1908 See Text
Santa Monica Planning
Division Santa Monica Landmarks Tour,
2003.
35. Barnum Hall, 1938
36. Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, 1958
43. Merle Norman Building, 1936 See
Text
www.artsiteguide.com/diebenkorn/ -
John Seed How California Painter Richard Diebenkorn Became a Role
Model,
and a Real Person, to a Young Artist , 2002, 1977
See
Text
Greetings from Santa Monica . . . Dear Friends Post Card 2002 KR 2002 See Image and Text
Kevin Starr Embattled Dreams California in War and Peace 1940-1950, Oxford University Press, 2002, 386 pp., 2002, 1947, 1940s, 1912, See Text
Notes:
Janice Dickinson No Lifeguard on Duty, Regan Books: New York, 2002, 308pp.
Documents
Marlin L. Heckman (MLH) Santa Monica in Vintage Postcards, Arcadia Publishing: Chicago, Il, 2002.
Edan Milton Hughes, Artists in California, 1786-1940, Crocker Museum, 2002
James C. Miller, Ph.D. Obituary for Cecil R. Miller*, A.B., B.D., M.A., Ph.D. (1912-2002), 2002, 1965-1957, 1952-1950
"Dr. Cecil R. Miller was born in Waterloo IA in 1912 and graduated from East HS in 1930. He received his A.B. in Philosophy, Education and Psychology from Cornell College (Mt Vernon IA) in 1937 and his B.D. in Religious Education and Counseling from Drew University (Madison NJ) in 1940. From 1940 to 1941, he pursued graduate studies at Drew in Mental Hygiene Counseling and trained at the NJ State Hospital, Greystone Park. From 1937 to 1941 he ministered to Methodist congregations at Summit NJ, Round Top and Acra NY, Madison NJ, and Olin IA. He served from 1941 to 1945 as a Navy chaplain at Great Lakes IL and Pearl Harbor, and then as an Army psychologist at San Francisco, Ephrata WA, and March Field CA.
"In 1946, he worked as a Senior Clinical Psychologist at the California Vocational Institute, Lancaster CA, and then until 1950 as a Senior Vocational Counselor and Assistant Center Director at UCLA's VA Vocational Guidance Center while he pursued graduate studies in Clinical Psychology at UCLA. He interned in 1950-52 at the Psychology Clinics at UCLA and Kabat-Kaiser, Santa Monica CA. From 1953 to 1954 he was a Research Assistant with the Los Angeles Board of Education, from 1954 to 1955 a Vocational Advisor for the United Cerebral Palsy Association in Los Angeles, from 1955 to 1956 a Personnel Consultant with the California Test Bureau in Los Angeles, and from 1956 to 1957 the Director of Staff Development, Nutrilite Products, Buena Park CA.
"From 1957 until 1965, he was a Human Factors Scientist at the Systems Development Division of RAND Corporation and then the Systems Development Corporation, Santa Monica CA. At SDC, he worked in the Field Operations Department under the USAF System Training Program (STP) checking out, installing and training trainers and programmers to use the Weapons Evaluation and Subsystem Training (WEST) in the North American Air Defense (NORAD) and Air Defense Command SAGE computer networks. He helped design Desk Top exercises: computer-simulated attacks on the entire North American air defense system. In conjunction with this work, Dr. Miller invented the Quadractor, a protractor with all 360 degrees represented in one quadrant that was used as a manual aid in the development of simulation problems (SDC Disclosure File Number 58, 1963).
"He completed his M.A. and his doctoral studies (ABD) in Clinical Psychology at UCLA in 1954; he received his doctorate in 1964. His doctoral dissertation was titled, "Psychological Characteristics of Young Adult Cerebral Palsied Industrial Workshop Trainees" (Diss Abstr, v. 25, no. 9, 1965). Dr. Miller was licensed by the State of California (PL 233, M 5258) and was a member of the National Register of Health Service Providers in Psychology. He conducted a clinical practice in San Pedro CA from 1965 until recent years and was on staff at San Pedro Peninsula Hospital and Little Company of Mary Health Services of Torrance CA.
"Dr. Miller held memberships in the American (1949 through 2003; #1250-9054), Western, California and Los Angeles County (former Secretary) Psychological Associations; the National Vocational Guidance Association; the Projective Techniques Society; the Human Factors Society; the Simulation Council in and after 1965; and before 1965 in the American Management Association, the Personnel Directors Association, the Los Angeles Personnel Testing Council (which he re-joined in later years), and the National Management Association.
"Dr. Miller passed away on 28 July 2002 at the age of 89. He leaves his wife of 59 years, Wilhelmina (Billie) of Rancho Palos Verdes CA, where they had resided since 1965; son Dr. James C. (Jay) Miller and daughter-in-law Joye Miller; two granddaughters, Stacey and Ju-Young Miller; and two sisters, Merle Melrose and Veramae DeBonis; he was pre-deceased by three other sisters, Lucille and Kathryn Miller, and Loy Bauman. He participated with his son in Cub Scouts as a den leader and pack master, and subsequently as a Junior/Senior Hi-Y club sponsor and as a director of the West Los Angeles YMCA, and camped with his son with those groups. He and his son shared an appreciation for physiological psychology, enjoying discussions on that subject for many decades. They also shared a love of puns and groaners. Dr. Miller's ashes were scattered by his family in the sea near his adopted town of San Pedro. Donations in his memory may be made to the Bridges Fund of Little Company of Mary Community Health Foundation, 1300 W. 7th Street, San Pedro CA 90732.
Submitted by James C. Miller, Ph.D., CPE (jcmiller@brooks.af.mil, tel. 210-536-3596); 13 Aug 2002
Walter Mosley Bad Boy Brawly Brown Phoenix: London 2004 (2002), 311 pp. (1964)
Chapter 14
"Instead of going directly to my car, I walked the short block down to the beach. Santa Monica still had the feel of a small town in '64. Wooden buildings painted in primary colors, small storefronts that specialized in trinkets made from seashell. . . ." p. 109
Becky M. Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920-1965, with photographs by Robbert Flick. The University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 2002, 1960, 1960s, 1950, 1940, 1939, 1930, 1930s, 1908
". . . In 1908, Los Angeles passed the first major land-use zoning law in the United States, eight years before the more famous New York City measure . . . reserved the west side for 'higher class residential areas.'" p. 50
On page 90, " . . . in 1930 . . . Many of the natural attractions-like the beaches and mountains-were free to all comers. As a result, outdoor recreation came to represent a sort of social leveler in Los Angeles, a place where people of different classes might mix. Although the upper classed tried to change this by establishing elite beach clubs, designed to keep away the "riffraff," most L.A. beaches remained open to a wide cross section of classes. The line, however, was drawn when it came to race. Nearly all Southern California beaches were off-limits to blacks, more by de facto practice than written law. Although no beaches explicitly prohibited blacks, public officials and public pressure encouraged blacks to use certain beaches set aside for them, such as a part of Santa Monica known as 'the Inkwell' and a section of Manhattan Beach."
Page 132, "In late 1930 Santa Monica adopted 'a handbill ordinance' that prohibited out-of-town businesses from advertising in Santa Monica."
on p. 192 "Scattered working-class pockets around Santa Monica and southwestern Los Angeles likewise got red-lined although not always for racial reasons."-1939 HOLC appraisers.
on p. 201, "Table 5-2, gives the Santa Monica Median Family Income in 1939 as $2,667, in 1950, $3677, and 1960, $6845." I'm not sure if these are adjusted dollar amounts.
on page 41, "using the Sixteenth Census of the United States, 1940, gives the percentage of residents with working-class jobs in Santa Monica, whose population was then 53,500, as 53.2%."
on p. 260 reports that in the early sixties, (Ray Markle, with his wife and friends from Southgate) "danced to Spade Cooley's country-and-western band at the Santa Monica Pier."
Santa Monica Planning Division Santa Monica Landmarks Tour, 2003.
35. Barnum Hall, 1938
601 Pico Boulevard
Architects: Marsh, Smith & Powell
Designation: 9 December 2002
"This Streamline Moderne auditorium on the Santa Monica High School campus has long been an architectural and cultural focal point. It was one of the few Works Progress Administration (WPA) relief projects completed in Santa Monica during the 1930s. Internationally recognized local artist Stanton Macdonald-Wright* created the large mosaic in the lobby and the fire curtain mural on the stage as part of the WPA and Federal Arts Project.
"The primary facade contains a large glazed grid and a geometric motif in the concrete bas-relief. The auditorium was recently extensively renovated through the efforts of the "Save Barnum Hall!" parents' organization."
36. Santa Monica Civic Auditorium,
1958
1855 Main Street
Architect: Welton Becket & Associates
Designation: 9 April 2002
"This building was the third of three major 20th century Civic Center structures, beginning with City Hall and the County Courthouse. It remains an excellent example of the mid-20th century International Style. It is the only surviving institutional design of world-famous master architect and Santa Monica resident Welton Becket in the City.
"The Auditorium has state-of-the-art engineering designs: a hydraulic floor, retractable domes and flexible stadium seating. Its acoustics system was designed by UCLA Chancellor Vern O. Knutsen, and is still highly functional, and requires minimal maintenance."
43. Merle Norman Building, 1936
2525 Main Street
Architect: H.G. Thursby
Designation: 11 November 2002
"This Streamline Moderne/Art Deco style building was the former headquarters of Merle Norman Cosmetics. Its ornate and stylish design reflected Norman's prosperity and the building towered above most of Main Street's low-rise commercial structures. {The Library?}
"The Streamline styling of this building is a distinctive interpretation of an architectural movement, which suggests dynamism, progress, and optimism. The unique combination of complex curves, pylons, and a prominent circular cupola distinguish this building. It further symbolizes the success of a Santa Monica business during the peak years of the Great Depression."
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Greetings from Santa Monica
Greetings from Santa Monica! Post Card Santa Monica Coalition to Protect the Living Wage, 525 Colorado, Santa Monica, CA 90401 2002 KR 2002
Franked with the green 2000 New York Public Library Presorted Standard and addressed to Kelyn Roberts/2421 3rd St./Santa Monica CA 90405-3602
Bearing the message: Dear Friends, We work in beautiful hotels. We cook and clean for visitors to Santa Monica.//We are proud of our work but we need to make a little more money just to get by to the end of the month.//Measure JJ will raise the minimum wage at the beach hotels where we work.//Please vote yes on Measure JJ for Justice and Justicia. Mucho Gracias.//Maria Mena; F , , . Andrade//Santa Monica 'S Hotel Housekeepers
Kevin Starr Embattled Dreams California in War and Peace 1940-1950, Oxford University Press, 2002, 386 pp., 2002, 1947, 1940, 1940s, 1930s, 1912,
" . . .
[p. 51] "The most complete version of this invasion scenario came in 1909 from [p. 52] Homer Lea, a Southern Californian, and the English naval strategist Hector Bywater in 1925. Born in Denver in 1875, and moving with his family to Los Angeles in 1892, Homer Lea was one of these eccentrics touched by genius whom one frequently encounters in turn-of-the century Southern California. Despite his diminutive stature (five feet) and a curved spine, which earned him the nickname "Little Scrunch-Neck" among his classmates at Los Angeles High School, Lea dreamed of a military career (as did his contemporary George Smith Patton, Jr. then attending a private academy in Pasadena.) Educated at Occidental and Stanford, Lea became involved with Chinese students committed to the overthrow of the imperial system and the establishment of a republic. In July 1895, just before the outbreak of the Boxer Rebellion, Lea sailed for China in search of further involvement. Concealing his republican sympathies, he seems to have wrangled some sort of military commission in the army of the Emperor. In any event, he appeared at the relief of Peking in ht last days of the Boxer Rebellion wearing the uniform of a lieutenant general (the rank authorized in his imperial commission, presumably) and directing a ragtag army of reform volunteers.
"When it became apparent that there would be no republic in China, not yet at least, Lea returned to Los Angeles in 1901 wearing his general's uniform. He spent the next few years writing and lecturing on military matters. Among other activities, Lea drilled Chinese students in military fundamentals, in the hopes of preparing them to serve as officers in a revolutionary republican army. Lea's assistant and chief drill master was Ansel O'Banion, a leather-lunged former sergeant in the United States Cavalry who had later secured a commission in the Philippine constabulary. Lea returned to China in 1904 on behalf of the republican movement, and was in Nanking in 1911, the only white man in the room, when Dr. Sun Yat-sen, with whom Lea had worked closely in Sun Yat-sen's California exile, was elected President of the newly formed Republic of China. Three years before his death in 1912, Harper & Brothers published Homer Lea's The Valor of Ignorance (1909), the result of long study and extensive reconnaissance of the Pacific Coast he and O'Banion had conducted after his return from China.
"In the first third of The Valor of Ignorance Lea developed the thesis that war between Japan and the United States was inevitable because of economic competition. Lea was no crude Japan-basher. On the contrary, he admired the Japanese for their intelligence, enterprise, and military skill. Lea devoted the middle third of his book to a discussion of Japanese military capabilities on land and at sea. Japan, Lea observed, was capable of fielding an invasion army of 1.25 million men. Its navy was the finest on the planet, and it was capable of transporting in one troop transport ship more soldiers than the British had brought to the United States during the entire War of 1812. A military invasion of the Coast, Lea concluded, was fully in the reach of the Japanese from the point of view of their population and industrial capacity, the skill and training of their general staffs and officer corps, and the technical capacity of their army and navy. As important as any of [p. 53] this, the Japanese possessed bushido, the code of the samuri, an instinctive affinity for the sword (in Franz Boas's later term) running parallel to their love of the chrysanthemum.
In the final third of The Valor of Ignorance, Lea sketched a scenario of Japanese invasion, which later read as an almost eerie prediction of the course of the Second World War in the Pacific. First, Lea argued, the Japanese would seize and occupy the Philippines. From there, they would move to Samoa, Hawaii, the Aleutians, and Alaska, establishing in each a center of overlapping strategic spheres, which would give them control of the entire Pacific. The attack on the Pacific Coast would come on three axes: Washingt State, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Los Angeles and the South Coast. With extensive detail and maps, the result of his and O'Banion's surveys, Lea described how the Japanese could land at Santa Monica Bay, seize Los Angeles, and rapidly seal off most of Southern California. Landing in Monterey Bay, the Japanese would move north and encircle San Francisco, bombarding it from strategic heights around the Bay until it surrendered. Eventually, a Japanese army of more than 1.25 million men would establish a defensive perimeter in the Sierra Nevada. It would take years, perhaps a decade, for an American army to be raised, trained, and successfully employed against the invaders.
"As a prophetic document, The Valor of Ignorance gained credibility, indeed great power, through its detailed plausibility. Lea envisioned the Japanese invasion of California down to the emplacement of specific artillery batteries. He had personally surveyed landing beaches and deployment routes and had reviewed all relevant military maps to back up his assertions. Lea also grasped the essential isolation of California, sealed off as it was by the Sierra Nevada and the Great Basin beyond: an isolation that meant California could be seized and defended by Japanese invaders.
"The general staffs of the United States and Japan each took Lea's scenario seriously enough to incorporate it into their own contingency plans. Dining with a group of Army officers in Manila in October 1941 Clare Booth Luce was treated to a description by Colonel Charles Willoughby of how the Japanese would soon be moving on the Philippines. Luce asked Willoughby his source of information. The colonel laughed. "Just quoting military gospel," he told her, "according to Homer Lea." Willoughby went on to describe how his generation of officers had first encountered Lea in their readings at West Point. Among staff officers in the Philippines, The Valor of Ignorance was considered established doctrine. Luce returned to the United States and wrote an article on Lea for the Saturday Evening Post, which Harper & Brothers used in 1942 as an introduction to a reissue of a book whose prophecies-an attack on Hawaii, the siege of the Philippines, a deployment into Southeast Asia-were now in the process of coming true.
"In 1909 the plausibility of The Valor of Ignorance was especially high among Californians. Homer Lea might be a shadowy and eccenteric figure, but no one [p. 54] less than Lieutenant General Adna Chaffee, the retired chief of staff of the United States Army, wrote the preface to the first edition of Lea's book. Chaffee was not only a retired chief of staff, he was a Los Angeleono as well-someone, that is, fully capable for reasons other than his military career of saying that, yes, the Japanese would one day invade the Coast. This was no fantasy, Chaffee argued, merely an inevitability Home Lea had envisioned and analyzed.
"Brilliant in his depictions of the land war in California, Homer Lea was rather sketchy when it came to details of the Japanese naval strategy in the Pacific. This scenario was left for Hector Bywater . . ."
" . . .
[p. 133] " . . . the [aeronautical] companies of Southern California possessed the mass and the depth necessary for large-scale production. By 1937 Southern California had surpassed New York, meaning Long Island, as the leading center of aircraft manufacture, , and the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena had become the leading center of aeronautical research and teaching in the nation. In early 1938 General H.H. (Hap) Arnold, chief of staff of the Army Air Corps, met with Southern California companies and discussed the probability of a major gearing-up of the industry. Already, a number of companies were expanding to fill British orders. On 23 June 1938, for example, the British purchasing Commission headed by Arthur Purvis placed a $25 million order for planes from Lockheed. Within the next three years, the British had a total of $34 million in orders with Northrop alone. By the summer of 1940, it was forced to inaugarate a three-shift, aroud [p. 134]-the-clock schedule. . . .
[p. 208] . . .
" . . . bohemian writer and all-round rebel Henry Miller might very well [have disagreed with the promise of prosperity in 1940 California]. Life in Panorama City was just another example of the Air-Condidtioned Nightmare. Miller first used the phrase "air-conditioned nightmare" as the title of a book he completeted late in the war while living in Big Sur on the central coast. Based on a year-long auto tour of the United States from October 1940 to October 1941 and published by New Directions in late 1945, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare can be taken as a prophetic, anti-statement to everything that Panorama City stood for: conformity, routine, philistinism, sexual repression; the long, grey death, in short, to Henry Miller's way of thinking, of middle-class life in America.
"Born in Brooklyn in 1891, Henry Valentine Miller-Val to his friends and the intimates who were legion-had spent only a few months in Southern California in 1910, doing odd jobs in Los Angeles and San Diego, before returning to New York. Like Walt Whitman, whom he resembled in so many respects, Henry Miller, both the man and the writer, was hard to classify. Was he the last representative of the 1920s generation, so infatuated with Paris, as Edumund Wilson claimed? Was he a social critic of prophetic importance, warning against the increasing conformity and mechanization of American life? Or was he a cad, a heel, a shameless sponger, whore-mongering pornographer, a poseur and blowhard, the perpetrator of some two million words of stream-of-consciousness prose that seemed to be saying everything, hence nothing, simultaneously?
"The answer was yes to each query. In some vast and nearly impentrable way, Henry Miller was managing by the mid-1930s, when his autobiography Tropic of Cancer (1934) was published in Paris and banned in the United States, to have contained within himself all the contradictions and paradoxes that two of Miller's favorite writers, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman, considered a salient characteristic of the free-thinking, free-spirited American man of letters as social and cultural critic. Whatever Henry Miller might have become by 1940, when he [p. 209] returned to the United States after a tour of Greece resulting in The Colossus of Maroussi (1941) which some believe his best book-hierophant or shameless lech, free spirit or sponging bum, ingrate or reformed visionary in the Americanist tradition-Henry Miller was well on the way, as man, writer, and legend, to becoming one of the most influential writers ever to be based in California, for what Miller wrote, together with what he acted out and stood for, would in time pervade the value system of an entire generation and shift the sensibility of the entire nation.
"All of this was a big order for [Henry Miller]a down-and-out writer nearing fifty in 1940, with only one important book available to the general public: a writer turned down by the Guggenheim Foundation when he applied for funds to tour the United States just as he had recently toured Greece, and wirite a book about his travels and observations. Thanks to an advance from Doubleday Doran, Miller made his trip anyway, after learning to drive in five lessons from aspiring poet Kenneth Patchen and buying for $100 a 1932 Buick sedan, which terrified him as he headed south toward New Hope, Pennsylvania, and from there into America itself.
[Note that Kenneth Patchen's The Journal of Albion Moonlight, Padell Press, 1941, was in its fifth printing when Miller's The Air-Conditioned Nightmare was published. KR]
"In the course of this year-long journey of return and anti-homecoming, Miller drove, worked, crashed, and sponged his way across America: an over-age-in-grade Parisian expatriate returning to America along with a whole generation of emigres, the vast majority of them more solvent and respectable than Miller, which was not a difficult accomplishment. A decade later, another rebel, Jack Kerouac, would make a similar journey in part under Miller's inspiration; for the important thing about Miller's journey was that it brought him, once again to California, where he hung out with like-minded people-John Steinbeck's friend Ed (Doc) Ricketts in Monterey and Lawrence Clark Powell, a literary critic and former French expatriate, then settling into a career as librarian and writer at UCLA.
"Like so many expatriates, Henry Miller liked California-inasmuch as he could find anything to like about the the United States-and decided to settle there. Thanks to the generosity of two friends, Margaret and Gilbert Neiman, he could now do exactly that: settle into the Neiman's home in the Beverly Glen district of Los Angeles as a more or less permanent non-paying guest. Two years later, in May 1944, Miller accepted a further offer of hospitality, moving in with artist Lynda Sargent . . . in Sargent's Log House on the Big Sur coast, later famous as the site of the Nepenthe Restaurant . . . [p. 210] [The text goes on to say that Sargent sold the building to Orson Welles in May 1944, forcing Miller to move to Partington Ridge, further into the Big Sur mountains . . . ]
" . . . From one perspective The Air-Condiditoned Nightmare [which he had begun before Pearl Harbor] can be seen as a bitter, dismissive, contempt-ridden indictment of American life as ordinary men and womn lived it-or were being asked to die for it in wartime . . . He encountered the great American ugliness, the great American chill. "I didn't like the look of the American house . . . there is something cold, austere, something barren and chill, about the architecture of the American home. It was home, with all the ugly, evil, sinister connotations which the word contains for a restless soul. There was a frigid moral aspect to it which chilled me to the bone.""
"" . . . Topographically, the country is magnificent-and terrifying . . . Nowhere else in the world is the divorce between man and nature so complete. Nowhere [he had encountered] such a dull, monotonous fabric of life as here in America. Here boredom reaches its peak. . . . To call this a society of free people is blasphemous . . . What we have to offer the world besides the superabundant loot which we recklessly plunder from the earth under the delusion that this insane activity represents progress and enlightenment."
" . . . [p. 211] Miller's work, "the dirty books of a generation, a call, however muddled, to transcendence and liberation through eros . . .
"Others, however, considered Miller's books purient-and worse, radical-trash, speaking with an especially corrupting power to the young. Already, well before the war had ended-indeed, because of the war-America was finding itself uneasy about its youth: not so much of the young men and women in uniform, but the half-generation just behind them, the pachucos and V-girls, the growing number of young offenders from the inner city. Writing in Look magazine in January 1946, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover predicted an outburst of juvenile delinquency in the post-war era. Already, Hoover pointed out, seventeen-year olds had the highest arrest rate of any age group in the country. Then there was the recently released veteran, only a few years older, to be watched, the sort who had made up the bulk of the motorcycle gang that had taken over Hollister in July 1947 . . . only jeans and a T-shirt and a mumbled way of talking could manage to express a massive rebellion and thus . . . hold a troubled identity together.
"Rebellion then was in the air and would grow steadily thoughout the next decade, and Henry Miller . . . was in some palpable way emerging as the guru and avatar of an emerging alternative vision . . . From Miller, . . . a generation of alienated young people, especially pacifists, but veterans as well, were imbibing "an engaging potpourri of mysticism, egoism, sexualism, surrealism, and anarchism."
"Accentuated and enhanced by Miller's own eclectic and chaotic religiosity, which emphasized astrology and the occult, a certain free-wheeling mysticism dovetailed easily withthe already flourishing tradition of religious cults in California . . .
[p. 212] " . . .
" . . . There was in Miller's worldview a hallucinogenic quality transcending drug-induced visions, although lesser beings would need drugs to get there; a view of the world, that is, as nightmarish and deceptive-and only true and beautiful on the other side, however one got there.'
" . . . as early as 1946, one observer at least was seeing in the gathering Berkeley-Big Sur bohemia the makings of an alternative view of American life that could in time become the makings of a mass movement. Over the next decade and a half, the attitudes described by Brady would emerge as the beat movement and this sensibility, in turn quickened by generational revolt and a hated war in Vietnam would become the hippie movement, the anti-establishment movement, the anti-everything movement: that congeries of resentments and shifting values and attitudes, in short, that would coalesce in the 1960s as a whole new way of looking at American life. . . "
[p. 227] ". . . Al Capone was alleged to have visited Los Angeles in 1927 with an eye to organizing the city. By the mid-1930s, Phil Capone, Al's brother, Bugs Moran, Busgsy Siegel, and others had established themselves in Los Angeles . . . In the late 1930s gangster Willie Bioff penetrated and took over the International Alliance of Theatrical and Stage Employees and shook producers down on a regular basis . . .
[p. 227] "The 1930s also witnessed a fusion of mob and Hollywood interests in the evolution of the gangster movie . . . George Raft . . . an open friendship with Busy Siegel.
" . . .
" . . . There were more than two hundred identifiable gangster or gangster-prison films released in the 1930s, a figure falling by more than half in the 1940s . . . The prison film was even more schematic than the gangster movie, for here there were no distracting themes of social class and urban sociology, as there were in gangster films. In the prison film, society was collapsed back into its basics, prisoners and guards, the powerless and the all-powerful, in a setting that awaited the analysis of French theorist Michel Foucault for its more complete construal . . .
[p. 228] " . . .
"And so too, like the movie they eventually became, were the last days of George Raft's good friend Benjamin (Bugsy) Siegel, then busy with the construction of a gangland institution of another sort, the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas. . . .
" . . . At some point during the war, Siegel had taken up with a rather mysterious woman from Chicago named Virgina Hill . . . Siegel's open association with Hill eventually [led] Esta Siegel [mother of Bugsy's children] to sue for divorcc in Reno in December 1945, and in the fall of 1946 Siegel and Hill were secretly married in Mexico.
"By this time, Siegel had discovered the one great venture that would give him . . . glamour and power, legitimacy, respectability: a resort hotel in the Las Vegas desert . . . Every dream, however tawdry and meretricious, that had pulsated through the collective imagination of Los Angeles-Hollywood Bugsy Siegel brought to Las Vegas. [Along with George Raft's $200,000 investment], told his associates-among them Meyer Lansky . . . and Charles (Lucky) Luciano-that the Flamingo, which they bankrolled,. would cost $1 million. Siegel hired Del Webb to build the hotel. [p. 229] Through his good friend United States Senator Pat McCarran, Webb arranged priorites for construction materials still scarce in the post-war period. Siegel interfered constantly with his architects and with Webb, ordering expensive adjustment, and the cost fo the project pushed towarrd $6 million. Part of the money Siegel raised from loans and the sale of hotel stock (no one ever fully accounted for how many shares Siegel issued); much of it came from Siegel's coll
[p. 229] [On 26 December 1946, a storm kept Hollywood from the grand opening of the hotel.] In January of 1947, the hotel was closed to finish construction. [He was summoned to Havana for a meeting with Luciano, Lansky and others. He opened for a seond time on 1 March 1947. The Flamingo continued to lose money. . . . ]
" . . . The 20th of June 1947 was Siegel's last day on earth. . . . At 12:53 that morning Siegel and an associate, Swifty Morgan, boarded Western Airlines flight 23 for Los Angeles. In Siegel's briefcase was $600,000 in cash . . . Flight 23 landed at Mines Field in Los Angeles at 2:30 a.m. Siegel went directly to Virginia Hill's house on Linden Drive in Beverly Hills and went to bed. That morning and afternoon, Benjamin Siegel . . . embarked upon a prototypical day that seemed almost choreographed in its evocation of Siegel's personal version of the good life, Los Angeles style. He spent the morning with his associated Mickey Cohen, a tough guy out of Chicago, and his longtime friend George Raft. In the afternoon, Siegel went to his favorite barbershop in Berverly Hills, where he ordered a shave, a haircut, a manicure, a neck and shoulder massage, and a shoeshine. In the early evening he phoned the Hollywood office of Daily Variety and thanked columnist Florabel Muir for her favorable review of the floor show at the Flamingo. Later that evening he went with his associate Allen Smiley, Virginia's brother Chick, and Chick's girlfriend Jerri Mason out to Ocean Park for a seafood dinner at Jack's at the Beach.
[p. 230] "As if he had not a care in the world, Siegel ate dinner with his back towards the door, as opposed to the usual gangster style of always eating back to the wall, facing the entrance fo a restaurant. Leaving Jack's shortly after nine, Siegel picked up a complementary copy of the next day's Los Angeles Times. Good Night, the front page was stamped. Sleep Well, With the Compliments of Jack's. On the way home he stopped briefly at the Beverly-Wilshire drugstore . . .
"[Shortly after arriving in the Beverly Hills house] Bugsy was shot nine times throught the window with a rifle. The next day , a photograph of Siegel's body in the Los Angeles County Morgue . . . went out over the wires. Just about the same time, Moe Sedway and Morris Rosen waked into the lobby of the Flamingo in Las Vegas and assumed control of the hotel in the name of its Eastern investors. A few days later, Jewish services were held at Groman Mortuary on West Washington Boulevard. Only five people showed up. Virginia Hell not among them. She and Siegel's other firends were very frightened as to who might be next."