West of Sunset

Somewhere in this latest humiliation there was a lesson in self-reliance. He'd failed so completely that he'd become his own man again.

These still mornings in the kitchen were a kind of penance meant to exorcise that fear. When he was working, it worked. It was when he stopped that the world returned, and his problems with it, which was the reason he worked in the first place. He was a writer -- all he wanted from this world were the makings of another truer to his heart.

The plates of the continental shelf - the world itself - had shifted, and their first concern was putting things back in place. He could have told them it was no use, though his whole life he'd done the same.

As a boy, he'd always had some elaborate project that had nothing to do with school. On Summit Avenue, alone in his aerie, he drew the stately homes across the street and numbered the many windows and doors, compiling a detailed log of his neighbors' activities. In sixth grade, simultaneously, he kept a diary concerning the girls he liked and a ledger chronicling every penny he made and spent. These secret fascinations led nowhere in the end, were left mysteriously incomplete like the detective novel he patterned after Sherlock Holmes, to be replaced by his next obsession. At Princeton, when he was supposed to be cramming for exams, he wrote a musical. In the army it was a novel. Nothing had changed. He was still that boy, happiest pursuing some goose chase of his own making, and lost without one.

He didn't like to fly--the noise and vibration gave him a headache--but, as with anything new, he was excited by the strangeness of it. The disjuncture intrigued him: stepping through a door in one place, sitting still for a few hours, then stepping out a thousand miles away. It seemed to him a very American mode of travel, even more so than the car, not simply going farther faster, but eliminating any temporal experience of the journey, skipping over whole sections of the country, the sole focus on arriving, with the help of expensive and arcane technologies, at one's destination, except of course, when one didn't--a thought brought on by his own instinctive disbelief and the bumpiness of the flight.

Selznick was of the new generation. Unlike Mayer and Goldwyn and Laemmle, he hadn’t sold buttons in Minsk or shirtwaists in Krakow on the narrowest of margins to leave the bosom of his family and endure weeks in steerage dreaming of streets paved with gold only to wash up in the shtetl-like tenements of the Lower East Side where daily he fought his neighbors, those same margins and the Italian rackets, earning a second fortune he used to bankroll a third and, as mere by-product, creating from the dusty foothills of West L.A. a gilded fiefdom called Hollywood.

For all its tropical beauty there was something charmless and hard about it, a vulgarity as decidedly American as the picture industry which thrived on the constant waves of transplants eager for work, offering them nothing more substantial than sunshine. It was a city of strangers, but, unlike New York, the dream L.A. sold, like any Shangri-La, was one not of surpassing achievement but unlimited ease, a state attainable by only the very rich and the dead. Half beach, half desert, the place was never meant to be habitable. The heat was unrelenting. On the streets there was a weariness that seemed even more pronounced at night, visible through the yellow windows of burger joints and drugstores about to close, leaving their few customers nowhere to go. Inconceivably, he was one of that rootless tribe now, doomed to wander the boulevards, and again he marveled at his own fall, and at his capacity for appreciating it.

It’s true what the natives say. Every time someone takes your picture, the camera steals a little bit of your soul.” “That explains Bette Davis.

Like many men in their forties, he tended to dress in the style of his youth as if it were the current fashion.

Why was he drawn to complicated women, or were all women--all people, finally--complicated?

What man wanted a woman without fire, and vice-versa?