It's 1937

Downtown Glendale can be an excellent Time Machine if you look in the right places. (The Americana and the Glendale Galleria are NOT the right places.)

The best thing to do first is to look around for a giant spire sticking up out of the middle of nowhere. As soon as you've found it, start heading in that direction. It's the Alex, a beautifully restored movie theatre from long, long ago. Although it only rarely shows a vintage film, the Alex and the areas immediately surrounding it have remained more or less the same for many, many decades. New businesses have moved in and out, but the storefronts are practically unaltered, and a few of the original businesses are still in existence.

Damon's Steakhouse is one of them.















Now, historically speaking, if I were walking down Brand Boulevard in 1937, it's a cinch I probably wouldn't be able to afford a steak dinner, much less something as frivolous as a cocktail. I'd be wearing a dress made from flour sacks and I'd probably be going home from whatever job I (hopefully) had to make dinner for the family. Somehow I think I'd look more like Marjorie Main than Claudette Colbert, but just for this one day the hubby and I must have scraped and saved just enough for a night out. Maybe it was my birthday.

I'd be wearing my best dress with a hat and gloves, because I'll be out in public, and for heaven's sake you can't go out wearing just ANYTHING. You have to look NICE.

We'd just left the wonderful Alex(ander) Theatre, which was showing You Can't Have Everything (I just love Alice Faye and Don Ameche) and London by Night. We walked a few blocks away to to that new place, Damon's, where they say the steaks are absolutely the very best, and as thick as the potatoes they serve with them. I hear the martinis are terribly strong, too, and what better way to end a night of escapism?

Well, whaddaya know, it was all true (and it still is).

After a delicious dinner of juicy steak and potatoes, we sipped our cocktails and chit chatted far into the night. Did you see the paper today? They've started printing photos in color...Stella Dallas was a terrible movie, and I hear Barbara Stanwyck still hasn't gotten a dime from that good for nothing Frank Fay...They're opening up Foothill Boulevard, so we'll be able to get to Pasadena faster now...

Finally, we wobbled our way into the street and boarded the last trolley home, looking behind us at a street practically deserted this time of night. Only the steady light from the streetlamps and the dark sedans parked along the street could be seen, not a person in sight. Tomorrow I'll have to go back to my flour sack dress, my radio shows and my Rinso white laundry, but tonight I can dream.















Damon's still has marvelous steaks and cocktails. Years ago they hooked up with a tropical theme and kept getting more and more kitcshy until they hit critical mass.


Further traveling for my time-jumbled friends:

www.alextheatre.org
www.alexfilmsociety.org

The Alex Theatre has been gorgeously restored and the Spire is still visible from miles away. It's used mostly as a live venue these days, but among the usual must-miss events such as An Evening Celebrating Set Decorators in America and the Young Musicians from Armenia Tour, the Alex will actually show MOVIES. The Alex Film Society will tell you when. (Single lady time travellers take note: A Three Stooges Marathon is coming up; it's bound to be loaded with men!)

www.damonsglendale.com

Damon's has their own website, but do visit in person for the excellent steaks and the framed original menu from the days where a steak dinner outed you a whole fifty cents. Years ago they hooked up with a tropical theme and kept getting more and more kitschy until they hit critical mass. They're also not in the original location anymore, but their "new" location (since 1980) is a storefront even older than the first one. The menu is pretty much the same and you can pick out the modern dishes if you want to, (she said snootily). Beware of their famous salad dressing. It's an original recipe from the 30's but I suspect it's really just Lawry's and Mayonnaise, which only reinforces the idea that maybe it really IS an original, depression-era recipe along the lines of fried dough and ketchup soup. They still have powerful cocktails to wash it all down.

www.lapl.org

The moody shot of Brand Boulevard in 1937 was courtesy the enormous and detailed photo collection that's available online from the Los Angeles Public Library, and they update it every year. Everything from the first photographs ever taken of Los Angeles in the 1860's to "Take my picture, Gary Leonard!" is here. The BEST pictures are by professional photographer William Reagh, who took shots all over Los Angeles when he was young, and then re shot the same areas decades later when he was an old man.

If you're blessed with a Library Card, you can access the ProQuest database for the Historical Los Angeles Times. Every issue of the Times from it's inception in 1881 is available. Look up your name, your address, or your favorite movie star. I found a marriage announcement for the people who lived in my house back in 1941, plus the original classified ad offering a plot of land that eventually became my neighbor's house in 1924 . What will YOU find?

It's 1906

The Tiger Lilies have started to bloom in my yard today. This is a few weeks earlier than they usually bloom for me, but they always open in late June when it starts to get really uncomfortably hot. Not the kind of heat where you turn on your AC and go about your merry way, but the kind of hot where you turn on your AC and it doesn't really seem to help much. You don't want to go anywhere or do anything because effort = sweat, and in this sticky heat it's a sweat that will hydroseal your clothes to your skin, preventing any evaporative cooling. You might as well be wrapped in plastic for all the relief you'll get.

Imagine, if you will, that you're a rich young man around the turn of the century before air conditioning was invented. Not only are you generally sticky-hot today, but you're in New York, legendary land of summer swelter. Is there any reason you would choose to wear a heavy fur coat on a day like this?

Maybe. If you were crazy. Or hiding something.

If you were Harry K. Thaw of Pittsburgh, you were both.

Although the story has been told by better storytellers with more detail, here's the gist of it: Rich, unstable, violent Harry Thaw had pursued and married beautiful showgirl Evelyn Nesbit, in spite of (or perhaps because of) Evelyn's defloration at the hands of rich, famous, and much older architect/professional debaucher of showgirls, Stanford White several years earlier. Harry had an obsession with the details of the seduction, and on the night of June 25th, 1906 all three principal players found themselves attending a performance of Mamzelle Champagne on the rooftop stage of Madison Square Garden. Stanny was at a front table with several friends when Harry approached him, oddly dressed in a fur coat on this sweltering night. He had been wearing it for hours despite efforts to convince him to remove it. A few words were exchanged before Stanny turned his back on Harry, at which point Harry pulled a revolver from the pocket of his fur coat and blasted three holes in the back of Stanny's head in front of several hundred witnesses.

Although the impact has dulled over the years for people who don't know their names, let me put it into some modern perspective. Pretend Tom Cruise shot Sean Connery over deflowering Katie Holmes, in the front row of the Kodak Theatre on Oscar night.

The resulting trial set the press on fire. Had it been a seduction or had it been rape? Was Harry crazy or was he sane? Was he avenging his wronged bride ("He ruined my wife." Harry said calmly when police arrested him), or did he marry Evelyn specifically so he could have an excuse to murder the already-hated Stanford White?

The trial settled nothing. Harry was found guilty but insane and sentenced to a sanitarium. He was later declared sane at another trial and released. The only jail time he had was while he was waiting for his trial, and to say he had preferential treatment would be an understatement. He had all his meals, including champagne and desserts, catered by Delmonicos, and had a personal valet on staff. Evelyn was offered a large settlement by the Thaw family to swing her testimony more towards justified protection and insanity rather than premeditation, but as soon as Thaw got off they reneged. Evelyn was soon penniless, returning to the stage for as long as her notoriety as "The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing" (Stanny had a bit of a fetish) would hold out. After that, several attempts at swallowing copious amounts of Lysol failed to provide the desired release, so she moved to Los Angeles and lived as anonymously as possible, only being bothered years later when she publicly displayed her sculptures at an art show, and again for the premiere of "The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing" in 1955. Evelyn died in 1967, but will forever be known as the central figure in The Trial of the Century. Harry died of a heart attack in 1947, leaving what remained of his vast multi-million dollar fortune - all $10,000 of it - to Evelyn.

In 2006, the one hundredth anniversary of the murder did not pass this Timecat quietly. I was amazed to find that assorted descendants of all three players were planning to get together to meet and discuss the impact of the murder on their respective families, but darnit, I never found out if anything came of it. At the time I thought it was a REALLY bad idea, but now I sure hope they did it. I would have loved to listen in on the discussion! Meanwhile, not having any Thaw, White or Nesbit blood in my veins, I did what I usually do when I get obsessed with a damned good story. I DEVOURED everything about the case I could get my hands on: Books, memoirs, talking heads, biographies, fiction, movies, documentaries, newpaper articles and rumors. While I was doing all this brainwork, the flowers I'd been growing in my old-fashioned garden that year had started to bloom. On June 25th, I got my very first Tiger Lily.

I gave it to Evelyn.