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

as well use it for once. They parked on Wilshire and walked in unnoticed. They were seated at a booth by the window, ordered chicken salad sandwiches and iced tea. He was slightly surprised that no one came up for an autograph, for Angie was well known, though not yet quite well enough known to have her picture up on the wall with Willie’s and the other Hollywood stars. That would come.

Reflecting on it later, it occurred to him that no one approached because she was unrecognizable. The woman on stage at the temple, the woman in the display cases outside, the woman dressed in white and posing under a halo with her hands behind her head so that the long sleeves billowed down and resembled wings, was neither the girl at Sunset Tower nor the girl next to him at the Brown Derby in tight yellow sweater and swishy skirt.

There were two Angies, and at lunch he decided that the Brown Derby Angie was the real one. The other one, Sister Angie, who preached and saved and healed on the stage at the temple and was adored by millions nearly as much as Willie himself, for him was no more than a plastic personage borrowed from a Hollywood stage set. For two hours they exchanged not one word about God or Jesus or the temple or Willie. It was as if they were on a real date, the kind he used to have at USC when he’d take a pretty sorority girl to a lunch counter on Jefferson. He was fascinated and he was aroused. Angie was deadly. He feared for his father. He feared for himself. He was glad to be leaving town.

♦ ♦ ♦

As war approached, the Los Angeles Times was a newspaper in search of an identity. Newspapers take on the characters of their founders even more than their cities and keep that character long after the founders are gone, especially when it is a family newspaper. It took four generations of Otises and Chandlers for the Times to transform itself from conservative to liberal, and when Elizabeth Mull went to work at First and Spring Streets in the summer of 1938 it had not yet begun the transformation. Harrison Gray Otis, the founder, was an antediluvian scoundrel. Harry Chandler, his son-in-law, a key figure in the San Fernando Land and Water Syndicate flimflammery, was only marginally an improvement. They pretended to run their newspaper in the community interest, but did so only when the community interest happened to coincide with their personal interest. The Times’s focus was always local. It had no national or international aspirations, but insofar as Southern California was concerned, it was the kingfish. Mayors, supervisors, councilmen, district attorneys, judges and police chiefs all came to pay obeisance at First and Spring.

Women weren’t entirely unknown on the third floor. Journalism has been a comparatively good profession for women because it is a literary profession where girls, as any boy who ever sat with them in an English class knows, tend to excel. “Comparatively” is the operative word. For most of the twentieth century and all centuries previous, women were largely restricted to two respectable professions: teaching and nursing. If writers they were, they labored anonymously at home or, for the more daring, under a pseudonym. It was during the first half of the twentieth century that women came to be found here and there in newsrooms, generally working on the “woman’s page,” which in time became the “society pages.”

The Times was the stodgiest of newspapers. Its city editor, a man named Larry McManus who’d come out from Detroit in the twenties and been hired by Harry Chandler himself, saw this as an anomaly in the entertainment capital of the world. With support from Norman Chandler, Harry’s son and heir, he set out to change things, if for no other reason than to keep pace with Hearst’s Examiner, which was not stodgy. Lizzie Mull was good enough to have gone if she’d wanted to New York, where newspapers were more enlightened, but since she had no desire to leave home, she accepted McManus’s offer. She let Nelly think it was her pleading that persuaded her to stay home, especially with Maggie off in Europe, but the truth was Lizzie never intended to leave. Los Angeles was what she knew and loved. It was where she would make her mark.

Because of her name, she almost wasn’t hired. If there was a better-known name than Mull in Los Angeles it would have been Fairbanks or Pickford or the new fellow in town named Howard Hughes, but McManus had wanted to hire her since he’d read her article on the Klan and invited her in. He didn’t like that she came from a prominent local family and knew the males would complain about a female in the newsroom, but he wasn’t about to turn down someone he wanted because of her name or her sex. His solution was to send her provisionally to the society pages, where there were no males to complain.

The society editor was a prickly matron named Miss Adelaide Nevin, and no one in the city, not even the publisher’s wife, had more power in Los Angeles society than Miss Adelaide, as she was known. She could make or break anyone in the Blue Book or Junior League by the simple expedient of not covering—or not covering very well—her charity ball, cotillion or coming-out party. The publisher’s wife had long ago stopped passing on complaints to her husband from her friends in Bel Air, Hancock Park and San Marino about Miss Adelaide’s slights. The publisher refused to lock horns with his society editor for the simple reason that Miss Adelaide knew Los Angeles society better than anyone else, including his wife.

Lizzie was miffed. She’d been slighted and passed over on the Daily Bruin because of her sex, and the society pages seemed more of the same. McManus promised it would not be for