Blood and Oranges by James Goldsborough (latest books to read txt) 📗

moved into his own place somewhere in West Hollywood. He’d apparently found a job, but no one knew anything about it.

“We’ve got to go,” said Lizzie, coming back from the phone with the Times photographer. “Something going on in Watts. They’re calling everyone in. Sammy has a car.”

“What’s up?” said Joe.

“Not sure. Trouble in South Central. Pulling in police from everywhere.”

“Ralph is somewhere down there,” said Nelly. “With my car! Lizzie, for heaven’s sake. At your age. What’s wrong with that newspaper!”

Lizzie ignored her mother. “Sorry Didi. Work calls. Bye everyone.”

“That’s my mother,” said Robby, who was not smiling.

“Ah,” said Nelly, reviving as other guests came in the door. “There’s Jonathan Schwartz. Who’s that with him?”

“I believe that would be Archie Zug,” said Joe.

“Who is . . .?”

“An agent I know from Universal.”

“I don’t believe he’s on the guest list.”

“I think he’s here for me, Granny,” said Didi.

Joe sighed. “I certainly hope not.”

Archie Zug was the Hollywood talent agent par excellence. His agency represented a good many of the top stars, but Archie was also known for developing talent, especially young female talent. Hollywood was a vortex, if not a maelstrom, for young females and had been since the movie industry arrived. Males, too, made their way west if they thought they had something, but the suck on females was greater because they had more to offer and more to gain. A young fellow off a Midwestern farm or from an Eastern blue-collar family could always step into Dad’s shoes when the time came, and if he had a college education, he might set his sights on a career in business. It was different for young women. Despite the gains they’d made during the war, the business world was closed to them unless they could type or work a switchboard. The situation wasn’t as bad as in places like Germany, where the tradition of Kinder, Küche, Kirche reached back to the Middle Ages, but it wasn’t good either. Home economics was still the most popular college major for co-eds, as they were called, and for more adventurous girls there was always nursing and teaching. Hardly a wonder that if a girl was attractive enough and had a little gumption she would set out for Hollywood.

The first thing they did off the train was visit a talent agency. They didn’t need an appointment. Just show up and let the agent have a good ogle from all angles. The girls generally fell into three groups. There were the ones away from home alone for the first time, and the agent’s job was to be surrogate comforter and father confessor. The second group was girls who didn’t need surrogates because they came equipped with mothers, who often saw beauty and talent where no one else did. For agents, mothers were something to be tolerated only if the girl had something truly special, like Judy Garland or Ginger Rogers.

Finally, there were the girls who came to the agent to escape their mothers, who had some sort of psychodynamic grudge against them for being too domineering or too successful. Think of the daughters of Mary Astor or Joan Crawford. Motherly success casts a long shadow over insecure daughters. Or maybe the case was the opposite: Mother just didn’t give a damn. Sometimes mothers just can’t win.

♦ ♦ ♦

Nelly never saw her black Buick again. Lester Jones never played for her again because no one dared go to Watts to fetch him. Lizzie, the Times metro editor, returned home Thursday morning in a taxi, caught a nap and, frazzled, sat down with Joe for coffee. Joe had read the paper while she was sleeping, and nothing surprised him. It wasn’t the Marxist class struggle but the racial struggle that had gone on in America since emancipation. For decades it had been the problem of the East and the South and maybe the Midwest and Los Angeles hadn’t paid much attention. When blacks discovered the West after the war, real estate covenants, known as “redlining,” conveniently hid them away in their own part of town, mostly on Charlie Watts’s former ranch. Los Angeles still didn’t pay much attention. Watts became the city’s Harlem, where you didn’t go except maybe for the music, and everyone was fine with that. As the black population increased over the next two decades, Harlem West kept on growing. By 1965, with the new federal Civil Rights Act just passed, its people were sick of redlining and wanted out.

“How are you doing?” he asked his wife, who didn’t look too rested.

He could tell without asking, but asked anyway.

“Wait till I finish this coffee and I’ll tell you.”

He passed her the paper. “The whole front section is Watts.”

“Those guys did a hell of a job.”

“You mean you guys.”

“Everybody, Joe. I mean we were mobilized. Every reporter, every editor, every photographer worked all night. Two special editions.”

“I heard on KHJ this morning that it’s getting worse. More dead, houses burning. Police chief called it a revolution. Says it’s like fighting the Viet Cong.”

“More like an uprising than a revolution.”

He sipped his coffee. “There’s a difference?”

“Uprisings fail. I’m going down to have a look.”

“You!” he sputtered. “You’re the general. Generals stay back at headquarters. Where it’s safe. That’s the point in being a general.”

“I need to get the feel of it.”

“Read the stories. Look at the pictures. How much of a feel do you need?”

“We don’t have another edition until four. Sammy picks me up at eleven.”

“That gives you five more minutes. KHJ said something about the national guard.”

“Probably a good idea. Chief Parker has no credibility with those people.”

“You know, there’s something fraudulent about this city, something Potemkin, and I don’t just mean Hollywood. How many people have even heard of Watts?”

“They’ve heard of it now.”

They would hear of it again a quarter century later when police beat up a black man named Rodney King and were acquitted of unnecessary violence by a white jury, though a video showed the brutal beating