Come Immediately to Culver City!

The year is 1925.  Lucille LeSeuer, in Kansas City, has just received a telegram from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. "Come immediately to Culver City!" 

Lucille is 21 years old - a pretty girl, short and plump, with huge eyes, freckles - and with lots of pep and determination. She borrows $400 from her mother, spends it on a new wardrobe, and takes the train west. At the station a publicist meets her and escorts to her hotel. It's the Washington Hotel, at 3927 Van Buren Place.

This hotel was constructed just two years earlier, in 1923. It has three stories and 53 rooms, and is in the Zigzag Moderne style - which means the plain E-shaped building boasts a jagged, angular false front.

"I was happy there" she recalls later. "I didn't really want to go to sleep at night, and I was anxious to wake up early every morning because every new day held promise. It wasn't until months later that I noticed that the Hotel Washington was, as you might say, sort of a dump. It hadn't changed, so I guess I had."

Now, 86 years later, the Washington Hotel is still a dump. The streets around it have been rerouted, and the building was renamed the West End Hotel at some point. The structure has been deemed historic and therefore of value and it thus survived, though hemmed in all sides by Linwood Elementary School. The plainest side of the building is now prominent, and is bordered by the school's parking lot.

I walk by this hotel every morning on my way to work, and I walk past it again on my way home.

In 1927, two years after Lucille arrives at the hotel, Hal Roach film studios team an unlikely pair of actors in a comedy short, filmed on the streets of Culver City. This, the first film Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy make as a team, is called "Putting Pants on Philip."  Or "Uvadzanie Nohavice na Philip" as it was titled when I found it on YouTube.

On my walk to work, I encounter the sites in that film.

At the Culver Hotel . . .

I see the door where Stan Laurel stood . . .

and now . . .

On Main Street, you can see the sign for the Washington (West End) Hotel, on the roof, in the distance, past the Culver Hotel. And faint oil derricks on Baldwin Hills.

Finally, I reach my goal. I see the windows of the Museum of Jurassic Technology. In 1927. . .

. . . and today.

Interestingly, the clip of "Putting Pants on Philip" that I found on YouTube has vanished. A company claiming ownership has requested that it be removed from the internet. This seems to be in line with a possible larger plan for the cultural erasure of Laurel and Hardy in Culver City. For instance, the back of Stellar Hardware, on Main Street, once featured a mural of the two men, comically wielding tools. But with the demise of Stellar Hardware, Laurel and Hardy too began to disappear, a disemboweling reflected with horror in Oliver Hardy's face.

Although some people still do remember who they are.

And what became of Lucille LeSeuer? She soon moved out of the hotel. She says: "There were many young men who had been asking me out, but I thought I should only think about my work, even when I didn't have any. I wasn't very fond of spending so many nights alone in my hotel room, in this hotel that was looking less and less glamorous to me. I started saying yes instead of no."

Her story has a happy ending. Lucille soon found work in the movies - and as it turns out, she was one of the immortals. MGM gave her a make-over, and changed her name to Joan Crawford.

He Returns To Us Now

The long-awaited Napoleon bottle stopper has arrived.

In clear plastic, the Emperor is suspended against a cloudy blue sky - as if he was affixed atop the Vendome column - rather than balanced on a column of cork.

The back of the package is interesting too. The text explains, in English and in French, that Napoleon Bonaparte was a political and military genius . . .  and then goes on to say, with undeniable truthfulness, that "though exiled, he returns to us now as a brilliant bottle stopper."

Then there are instructions:
To use, gently press cork into open bottle. Twist to remove.

Equitation

A weekend in Washington DC, that most symbolic of American cities.
 There we found monstruous cupids . . .

nudely draped women embracing empty cartouches . . .

men, women, and eagles poised, pointing, and posturing . . .

in solitude . . .

and in company.

 

 

As expected, men were engaged in equitation.

Including, in an obscure corner of the National Gallery, General Bonaparte.

Fur and Feathers

The Goncourt Brothers
"Our minds see alike and see with the same eyes."

Here, photographed by Nadar, they appear to be dressed alike. Silently sharing their thoughts, leaning towards eachother, slightly touching. Both of them smoldering in a way that is romantic, and intimate. Jules is looking our way. They are fascinating, and repellent.

"Yes, it is true that there is an element of sickness in our talent, and a considerable element at that. But this, which at the moment causes displeasure and irritation, will one day be regarded as our charm and our strength. Sickness sensitizes man for observation, like a photographic plate."

In this paean to hypersensitive neurasthenia, were they describing themselves?
"Charles was impressionable to a supreme degree. He had an almost painfully sharp sensitivity to everything in life. Wherever he went he was affected by his reactions to the feeling of the place. He could discern a scene, an argument, in a house where smiles were on every face; he could sense what his mistress was thinking when she was absolutely silent, he could feel in the atmosphere the hostilities of his friends, he could sense good or bad news in the walk of the man coming towards him. And all these perceptions, which had something of presentiment about them, were so strong that they were almost unconscious. A look, the sound of a voice, a gesture would speak directly to him and reveal what they managed to hide from everyone else, so much so that he envied from the bottom of his heart those fortunate souls who go through life without seeing any more than they are meant to see and who maintain their illusions to the end.

Objects had a great effect on him, were as eloquent to him as people. They seemed to have a physiognomy, a voice, and that mysterious uniqueness that creates sympathy or antipathy. These invisible atoms awaked an echo in Charles. A piece of furniture would reveal itself as friend of foe. An ugly glass would put him off an excellent wine. The colour of a paper, the material covering a chair, would affect him both for the better and the worse, and his mood would change along with his impressions."

Then comes our sympathy - the death. The loathsomeness of the disease, the disease of a libertine. The details of it obsessively recounted. Once it has occurred, alone with his brother's body, Edmond peers through the door: "At midday, through the crack of the dining-room door, I saw the hats of four men in black." What could be more vivid, and pathetic? History then immediately overtakes the death - and Edmond survives for decades after, diminished.

In the Journals, the two batten on scurrilous gossip. And must say, I instinctively dislike all these coarse, vulgar men. Sitting at dinner with Flaubert, Dumas, and Zola, I too have an expression of melancholy surprise on my face, like Mme Daudet, "who seemed pained, upset, and at the same time disillusioned by the man's gross, intemperate unbuttoning of his nature."

In the journals, the women generally appear to be inhuman - and I align myself with those women, perhaps wistfully. "These women have horrifying heads, half antique cameo, half animal, sculpturally, implacably bestial in appearance."

Am also aligned in sympathy with all the young things in brothels, who they despise:
". . . . so many skinny graces, those spiteful, chlorotic little whores . . . always as melancholy and careworn as alms-collectors, with clouds of eviction on their foreheads, forever worried and, beneath the mask of laughter and caress, preoccupied with the parturition of their due; after all those shopworn chatterboxes, those mercenary parrots with their miserable, unhealthy slang picked up in the popular press, the brothel, and the workshop; after those touchy, peevish little things."

At one point Edmund encounters Judith Gautier. "In her fur and feathers, Theo's daughter looked beautiful, with a strange almost terrifying beauty. Her pale complexion barely tinged with pink, her mouth standing out like the mouth of a Primitive against the ivory of her broad teeth, her clearly defined and as it were drowsy features, her big eyes, whose animal lashes, stiff lashes like little black pins, did not soften their gaze with a veil of shadow, all have the lethargic creature the indefinable, mysterious air of a sphinx, of a flesh, a matter in which there were no modern nerves."