Lonelyhearts by Marion Meade

Author:Marion Meade
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

In Nat’s fiction, the Parva-Sed-Apta would reincarnate itself as both the Chateau Mirabella, a scruffy hotel whose halls reeked of disinfectant, and the slightly more attractive San Bernardino Arms. North Ivar Street would be nicknamed Lysol Alley for its large population of hookers and their pimps. In reality, the 1800 block of North Ivar was a quiet street of unremarkable bungalow courts, red-tile-roofed Spanish colonial houses, and gardens hazy with the smell of magnolias. His building, a short walk up the hill from Hollywood Boulevard, was within the downtown business district but not at the heart of it. Only five years earlier, Hollywood had been a small town with few decent restaurants and nothing to do at night, but now Hollywood and Vine was beginning to resemble Times Square West, a clutter of beauty parlors, dime stores, and soda fountains jammed among flashy hotels and cocktail lounges. On nearby Hollywood Boulevard, he poked around Stanley Rose’s bookshop, a writers’ hangout, and next door was the Musso & Frank Grill (Musso Frank’s), a popular chophouse known for beef goulash and chicken potpie.

Adrift without the company of the kids, missing his dog more than ever, Nat would pass the time browsing the Hollywood sex market and its variety of services, gay, straight, and Gillette blades (local slang for bisexuals). Bookstores retailed extensive selections of pornography, with some offering free delivery, toting orders in suitcases with false bottoms. Entrepreneurs like Lee Francis used standard marketing practices, booking appointments in advance and opening charge accounts. She and a panoply of competitors, conveniently located in the best neighborhoods, served caviar sandwiches and Champagne. It was heaven for a hooker consumer like Nat, or would have been if he had money. (The alternatives to clean girls were the street girls or the crib houses, unappetizing joints with scratchy sheets.) Hollywood was equally broad-minded about homosexual activities. “Nances” and “Sapphic ladies” were routine sights along Sunset Boulevard, while the big stars (Greta Garbo, Katharine Hepburn) and directors (George Cukor) lived discreetly gay lives and it was assumed that Cary Grant, a matinee idol, would marry to conceal his relationship with partner Randolph Scott. The city’s homosexual subculture fascinated Nat.

Aside from the lively sex scene, the town was swarming with a vast population of immigrants, lured to Southern California by visions of new-model Pontiacs and modest homes without mortgages, a parallel universe to the cliché Hollywood of swimming pools and private screening rooms. Multitudes of hat-check girls and carhops dreamed of hitting the jackpot as movie stars, but most would seek to become one of the fifteen thousand technical workers—grips, cutters, seamstresses, electricians—to whom the studios provided steady incomes. For others, success meant employment as bit players or nonspeaking extras, who could earn as much as $16 a day, or $50 to $75 a day for babies. As Nat rambled along the streets and studied the people around him, he realized that Hollywood was a factory town. What struck him as unnerving were not the hardworking laborers—the insurance

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.