Sleuthing Chandler’s Los Angeles

Judith Freeman Portrays A City and A Marriage

By STEPHEN MOTIKA Palisadian-Post Contributor Judith Freeman moved to Los Angeles 30 years ago to become a writer. Not for the screen, but the page. She discovered the work of Raymond Chandler soon after arriving in this city, and became, in her words, obsesed. Now, four novels and a collection of short stories later, Freeman’s ‘The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved’ (Pantheon; $25.95) has been published to glowing reviews. The book is a carefully constructed amalgam of forms, as much belles lettres as anything else. Freeman, 61, recently spoke with the Palisadian-Post while on her book tour and explained: ‘I knew it wasn’t going to be a biography or a linear account of a life, but a portrait of a marriage and a city, and of me, although I didn’t realize it at the time.’ The project had became her Los Angeles book, a chronicle and meditative account of her travels photographing and considering the more than 35 locations where Chandler lived in Southern California. Pico Iyer, writing in The New York Review of Books notes that ‘Freeman does not try to explain Chandler so much as to reclaim his world.’ Born in Chicago in 1888, but raised primarily in England, Chandler arrived in Los Angeles in 1912 ‘It was attracting people by the tens of thousands during that time,’ Freeman says. Many of these buildings were built in her own neighborhood, MacArthur Park, during the teens and 1920s and became the very apartment buildings Chandler used in his stories. He fought briefly in World War I, but returned to Los Angeles in 1918, where he soon met Cissy Pascal, a woman 18 years his senior, who was married to a wealthy businessman. They began an affair and married in 1924 after she had divorced Pascal and Chandler’s mother had died. During the early years of their marriage, Chandler worked in the finance department Dabney Oil, drank heavily, and was unfaithful to Cissy. Freeman thinks it was a good marriage so long as it was the two of them. The relationship could not accommodate outside engagements.’ The marriage survived. Indeed, after losing his job at Dabney Oil in 1932, Chandler withdrew from the social scene he had once frequented. He cut back on his drinking and began writing, publishing his first story in the magazine Black Mask in 1933. His first novel, ‘The Big Sleep,’ featuring the detective Philip Marlowe, appeared in 1939. Six more Marlowe books followed, including ‘Farewell, My Lovely,’ ‘The Little Sister’ and ‘The Long Goodbye.’ He also worked, unhappily, in Hollywood, co-writing ‘Double Indemnity’ with Billy Wilder, and writing the original screenplay for ‘The Blue Dahlia.’ For Freeman, understanding Marlowe ‘as a heroic white-knight figure’ is the key to understanding the Chandler’s marriage. She relates the fact that Cissy called Ray ‘Gallibeoth’ in private. She writes: ‘The name invokes the Arthurian figure of Galahad and suggests that from the very beginning he played the role of white knight with her.’ At the same time, Chandler needed to be cared for. During the process of writing her book, Freeman befriended Natasha Spender, the widow of the British poet Stephen Spender, who met Chandler late in his life. She compared him to Auden in his need for a structured domicile. ‘Both men needed a daily round of domestic chores to anchor them,’ Freeman says. Yet, this domesticity never involved settling down in one place. During the early 1940s, the Chandlers lived at 857 Iliff Street in Pacific Palisades. For Freeman, it’s while living on Iliff that Chandler realizes that he and wife are ‘rootless, without a sense of home.’ She writes: ‘They moved to Iliff to escape an apartment on San Vicente (in Santa Monica), where they had lived for less than four months. After settling on Iliff, Chandler wrote to Earl Stanley Gardner: ‘Good God, we have moved again’ Living, if you can call it that, in a big apartment house in Santa Monica, brand new and all that, I longed for your ranch. I longed for some place where I could go out at night and listen and hear the grass growing. But of course it wouldn’t do for us, just the two of us, even if I had the price of a piece of virgin foothill. It’s better over here, quiet and a house and nice garden. But they are just beginning to build a house across the way.’ It was the new house that drove them from Iliff Street. Ironically, it’s not too far from Iliff, at 379 West Channel Road, where Freeman lived contentedly from 1981 to 1985: ‘I wrote my first stories there. It was a place where I really became a writer. I loved the canyon and taught myself to swim in the ocean there.’ She moved to MacArthur Park when she moved in with her husband, the photographer Anthony Hernandez. After Chandler’s final stint in Hollywood, the couple settled in La Jolla, where they finally bought a house. ‘As L.A. became despoiled, in the 1940s, he turned against it. The booterism, ruthless exploitation and corruption began to effect the quality of the city’s life and he left in 1946,’ Freeman says. The very things he hated in the city, however, was the fodder for his novels. Chandler wrote ‘The Long Goodbye’ in La Jolla in the early 1950s while caring for the ailing Cissy. It’s Freeman’s favorite Chandler novel. ‘It’s very powerful; it depicts Marlowe becoming fully human, with an inner life. The three main characters represent Chandler’s fractured psyche: Terry Lennox, the damaged war hero; Roger Wade, the alcoholic writer who realizes his work isn’t literature; and Philip Marlowe, his best self.’ Following Cissy’s death in 1954, Chandler drank heavily, even attempting suicide in 1955. After selling the house in La Jolla, he spent long stretches of time in England. He died in San Diego on March 26, 1959. In the nearly 50 years since his death, Chandler’s novels of Los Angeles remain inedible. Freeman thinks he wrote about this ‘unfathomable place’ like no one else. ‘Chandler got it as well as anyone,’ she says. ‘It gave him his material and he gave it a lasting identity. A marriage like that hasn’t happened since.’ Judith Freeman will read from and discuss ‘The Long Embrace’ on Thursday, January 10 at 7 p.m. at the Los Angeles Public Library downtown. Info: (213) 228-7025.