Burroughs.
This craving for peaceful escape from the chaos and danger of city life is part of what created suburbia in the first place. Of course, another way to describe that drive is “white flight.” The Ganado of the Penningtons and the Evanses is an enclave of whiteness. There are Mexicans hiding in the hills, but they are criminals, bootleggers and murderers; the land is not for them. Where there are non-whites in this book, there is corruption, and it would be unduly generous — the text in no way demands it — to chalk this up to coincidence. The only characters of color are the Mexican criminals and a “Japanese ‘schoolboy’ of 35,” sometimes referred to as “the Jap,” who works as a housekeeper at an actor/director/drug dealer’s bungalow. The only one with a name is a Mexican murderer who tries to blackmail, rape, and kill Shannon Burke: “She knew how lightly the criminal Mexican esteems life — especially the life of the hated gringo.”
Burroughs was a product of his time, etc. etc., but The Girl from Hollywood does have plenty of resonance with ours — it is a novel about the sordidness of Hollywood, after all. When Grace makes her move to the big, bad L.A., Shannon Burke is already there, using the stage name Gaza de Lure:
Two years ago she came to Hollywood from a little town in the Middle West […] She was fired by high purpose then. Her child’s heart, burning with lofty ambition, had set its desire upon a noble goal. The broken bodies of a thousand other children dotted the road to the same goal, but she did not see them, or seeing, did not understand.
The girl from Hollywood was originally a girl from the Midwest, brought down low by the corrupting influence of the city and the film industry. Her career stagnated due to her resistance to the advances of powerful men. As one sleazy assistant director put it, “The trouble with you is you ain’t enough of a good fellow. You got to be a good fellow to get on in pictures.” Grace runs into the same obstacles when she starts making her rounds:
If she could only have a chance! In the weeks of tramping from studio to studio she had learned much. For one thing, she had come to know the ruthlessness of a certain type of man that must and will some day be driven from the industry — that is, in fact, even now being driven out, though slowly, by the stress of public opinion and by the example of the men of finer character who are gradually making a higher code of ethics for the studios.
How optimistic, in retrospect, and how heartbreaking. Burroughs wrote those lines 30 years before Harvey Weinstein was even born, and almost a century before he and others like him were held to account for their decades of misconduct.
Burroughs’s outrage is strong and apparent. He recognizes the vulnerability of young naïve women trying to make it in Hollywood, and condemns the industry men who abuse their position and power. Unsurprisingly, though, his attitudes are far from feminist. He wants men to behave honorably and protect women: “It brought the tears to her eyes — tears of happiness, for every woman wants to feel that she belongs to some man — a father, a brother, or a husband — who loves her well enough to order her about for her own good,” and for women to maintain their sexual purity.
Shannon manages to stay chaste, even in the clutches of the wily, villainous Wilson Crumb, the aforementioned actor/director/drug dealer, who tricked her into becoming a drug addict (he tells her the white powder is crushed aspirin; not the brightest, our Shannon). She spends her days with him at his bungalow, helping him sling cocaine, heroin, and morphine. When we meet her — and we do meet her, in a brief, brilliant passage that makes rare good use of second-person narration — she’s in poor shape, as are we:
At sight of you she rises, a bit unsteadily, and, smiling with her lips, extends a slender hand in greeting. The fingers of the hand tremble and are stained with nicotine. Her eyes do not smile — ever […]
Probably you have not noticed that she is wild-eyed and haggard, or that her fingers are stained and trembling, for you, too, are wild-eyed and haggard, and you are trembling worse than she.
It takes her mother’s death to pull her from her wretched Hollywood life by bringing her to Ganado, and under the benevolent influence of the Penningtons. She falls in love with Custer, but his engagement and her shame — more about her close association with Crumb, which most would wrongly assume was sexual, than her two years of being a straight-up drug dealer — pose major problems for their romance.
Burroughs has a lot of sympathy for Shannon, and that sympathy makes her a substantial protagonist, a flawed female character who is easy to root for — a bit of a feat for a pulp writer in the 1920s. He doesn’t judge her too harshly for her criminal activity, and he portrays her fight against addiction with real humanity: “Already she could feel her will weakening. It was the old, old story that she knew so well.” She has more depth and courage than any of the male characters, and she does more to protect Custer than even he, the noble, selfless hero, does to protect her.
The Girl from Hollywood has many of the trappings of a standard morality tale — heroes and villains, virtue and vice, astonishing levels of coincidence — but it has enough shadows and ambiguity to keep things interesting. There are moments in the book that seem to predict the coming age of hardboiled detective fiction. Both Shannon and Guy Evans — on the side of good, decent people — find themselves entangled with criminals and illicit activity. Guy works with the bootleggers in the hills:
Young Evans, while scarcely to be classed as a strong character, was more impulsive than weak, nor was he in any sense of the word vicious. While he knew that he was breaking the law, he would have been terribly shocked at the merest suggestion that his acts placed upon him the brand of criminality. Like many another, he considered the Volstead Act the work of an organized and meddlesome minority, rather than the real will of the people. There was, in his opinion, no immorality in circumventing the 18th Amendment whenever and wherever possible.
He gets in way over his head, of course, but it all starts because the Prohibition placed him and others like him on the other side of the law. “Every one’s breaking the damned old 18th Amendment,” he says, “and it’s got so it don’t seem like committing a crime, or anything like that.” This is classic noir territory, slippery slopes and shades of gray, many of them introduced by the strictures of Prohibition, which created a large, fresh class of booze-running criminals.
Burroughs still comes off as pretty prudish in his values (even as some of his characters engage in treachery and violence and snort copious amounts of cocaine), but The Girl from Hollywood is a departure from the tales of male heroism that formed his reputation. Shannon has sinned and suffered, and is therefore forgiving and flexible: “Her own misfortune had made her generously ready to seek excuses for wrongdoing in others,” which is good because even Custer has a bit of a drinking problem. The Girl from Hollywood is an entertaining book and a fascinating study of Los Angeles in the 1920s: a decade before Chandler tied the city’s identity to the tradition of noir and almost a century before the reckoning of #MeToo. Enjoy the morphine and blackmail and romance, and the rustic paradise of old Tarzana.
Steph Cha
Los Angeles
2019
THE GIRL FROM
HOLLYWOOD
CHAPTER I
THE TWO HORSES picked their way carefully downward over the loose shale of the steep hillside. The big bay stallion in the lead sidled mincingly, tossing his head nervously and flecking the flannel shirt of his rider with foam. Behind the man on the stallion, a girl rode a clean-limbed bay of lighter color whose method of descent, while less showy, was safer, for he came more slowly, and in the very bad places, he braced his four feet forward and slid down, sometimes almost sitting upon the ground.
At the base of the hill, there was a narrow level strip; then, an eight-foot wash with steep banks barred the way to the opposite side of the cañon, which rose gently to the hills beyond. At the foot of the descent, the man reined in and waited until the girl was safely down; then, he wheeled his mount and trotted toward the wash. Twenty feet from it, he gave the animal its head and a word. The horse broke into a gallop, took off at the edge of the wash, and cleared it so effortlessly as almost to give the impression