Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [57]
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Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House aircraft industries. Bad news was good news, it seemed, in this upside-down Shangri-la.
The landscape itself was a mirage come true, semidesert transformed into semitropics by sheer human willpower and the massive importation of water from the Owens Valley in Central California, carried over the world’s longest aqueduct, a 233-mile marvel of engineering built between 1906 and 1913 by an itinerant knife sharpener turned municipal water czar named William Mulholland.1 Where there was once sagebrush and mesquite, there was now jasmine and oleander, hibiscus and bougainvillea, and acre upon acre of perfectly manicured and constantly watered lawns surrounding mile upon mile of mock Spanish, Tudor, Italian, and New England mansions, from Pasadena to Palos Verdes, from Hancock Park to Beverly Hills. Even the palms that lined the boulevards to the beaches were imported, and every two-bedroom bungalow in the most modest neighborhoods seemed to come with a flowering orange or lemon tree in its tiny front yard. If New York was the ultimate vertical metropolis, Los Angeles was the ultimate hor-izontal one, sprawling, spacious, languid, preternaturally pretty. The newest city in the world, they called it, the city without a past.
This was the city of upward mobility and self-invention, hedonism and fundamentalism; the mecca of beauty queens and musclemen, swamis, psychics, evangelists, and astrologers, asthmatics and arthritics, rich retirees fleeing the boredom of Peoria and Omaha, poor Okies fleeing the desperation of the Dust Bowl, Jewish intellectuals and artists fleeing Hitler; the land of the white picket fence and the kidney-shaped swimming pool, of the open shop and the gated community, where the myth of the American Dream was invented by the Eastern European moguls who ran Hollywood.
Between 1900 and 1940 the population of Los Angeles grew from barely 100,000 to almost 1.5 million,2 making it the fifth-biggest city in the country, after New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Baltimore.3 A relentless campaign of annexation—the only way for neighboring towns to tap into the city’s water supply was to be annexed—had made it the largest city in area in the country, encompassing 442 square miles from the San Fernando Valley in the north to Venice, San Pedro, and the man-made Port of Los Angeles in the south. This was also the city of the car (one for every 1.6 residents by 1926, a ratio the rest of the country would not match until 1950),4
the single-family home (a remarkable 94 percent of all dwellings in 1930),5
and the feverishly promoted residential subdivision (at the height of the 1920s boom, there were 43,000 real estate agents).6
Warner Bros.: 1937–1941
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Unlike the older, industrialized cities of the East and Midwest, whose growth was fueled by European immigration, Los Angeles was the result of a great internal migration from the heartland of America. As Mike Davis noted in City of Quartz, the railroad magnates, real estate developers, bankers, and boosters who took over the seedy cattle town in the 1880s “set out to sell Los Angeles—as no city had ever been sold—to the restless but affluent babbitry of the Middle West.”7 The newcomers, in John Gregory Dunne’s words, were “already thoroughly Americanized, with roots going back several generations—hardworking, white, English-speaking Midwestern smalltowners seeking a Protestant Eldorado with a temperate climate and no foreigners fresh from the boat.”8 Until well after World War II, Los Angeles was the most homogeneous large city in America—90 percent white and two-thirds Protestant9—and had been kept that way by the Chinese exclusion acts of the 1890s, the periodic repatriation of Mexican nationals, and the widespread deed covenants and block restrictions excluding blacks and Asians that