Ross Macdonald by Tom Nolan

Author:Tom Nolan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

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February 16, 1966

Editor, News-Press: Ever since my service as a naval officer in far Pacific waters in the forties, I have been haunted by the thought of American young men dying in Asia, and others having to garrison that thankless continent’s shores and hinterland. We are beginning now to take on just that bleak and unrewarding task—a task which could eventually bleed us dry, as it bled France and England. For God’s sake and our own, let us somehow avoid that open-ended, bottomless mantrap.

—Kenneth Millar 4420 Via Esperanza

Their new residence in Hope Ranch Park, the lush enclave above Santa Barbara, was a long way from Mrs. Funk’s boardinghouse where Millar slept as a kid, and from the home where Mayor Sturm’s daughter lived within whiff of the tanning factory. The Millars’ Via Esperanza perch, up where the big birds nested, gave them a different social perspective.

Jackie and Henri Coulette visited them there soon after the Millars moved in, Jackie recalled: “Hank had just been invited to have his entry in Who’s Who in America, so he rather diffidently but proudly told them. Maggie said, ‘Oh, ho! No kidding! There are seven of us in this block in Who’s Who!’ How’s that for deflating you? And of course she had her own entry. That was the last time Hank attempted to brag in front of them.”

The Millars’ neighbors in this elevated zone included founders of such major corporations as Northrop and TRW: some of the wealthiest people in the country. (The actor Fess Parker was also a neighbor, allowing Millar to tell people, “I live next door to Davy Crockett.”) Millar felt uneasy about his new location, he later told critic-journalist John Leonard: “I kept wondering what am I doing in a place like this, and what will a place like this do to me?” Hope Ranch residents raised eyebrows at these newcomers, with their old Ford covered with pro-ecology and antiwar bumper stickers; the Millars felt their Republican neighbors perhaps didn’t much like them. More bothersome, after a birding vacation in Texas, the Millars came home to find someone had broken in through a window and taken fifty dollars, a bracelet, and six bottles of beer. “A burglary, even in absentia, leaves a funny feeling in a place,” Millar told Knopf. Almost as bad was the treatment they received from “the stupidest deputy sheriffs in the world,” Millar wrote von Auw. “One deputy’s theory was that we had broken the window in a quarrel and had then gone away and left it hoping that it would appear to be a burglary. No kidding.” In time their affluent neighbors seemed to accept the Millars as benign Bohemians (“Oh, they’re writers”), two of Hope Ranch’s “token Democrats.”

In any case, Hope Ranch didn’t change the Millars. Except for enjoying their swimming pool and a lot more floor space, they lived about as simply up here as they had in the forties down on Bath Street where the Union Pacific rumbled by.

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