John Arthur Maynard Venice West: The Beat Generation in Southern California, Rutgers University Press: New Brunswick, NJ, 1991. 242 pp., 1967, 1963, 1961, 1960, 1959, 1953, 1950s, 1948, 1946, 1944, 1938
Lawrence Lipton [1898-1975]
Chapter One
"Time Magazine, 28, January 1946, cover story was on Craig Rice, the first woman to win a Gertrude, for having sold a million copies of a single title in paperback. Lawrence Lipton, 48, was fifty percent of her for at least the last eight years, since 1938, six of which she had been sober and two drinking again, living and working in Santa Monica. He had been doing all the writing since 1944.
". . . a veteran of radical literary and political movements in New York, Detroit, and Chicago, and the co-author with, Kenneth Rexroth of . . . the Escalator Manifesto, Lipton was also a past editor of the Detroit Jewish Chronicle, a former director of national publicity for the Fox Theatre Chain, and the well-paid author of stories, screenplays, and potboiler novels that almost never appeared under his name . . ."
"Each title normally sold between fifteen and twenty thousand copies in hardcover . . .
"The Craig Rice titles were selling too well. Even at the rate of a quarter of a million words per year, he and Rice could not keep up with the demand. The unreasonable pace was at least part of the reason Rice began to drink again in 1944. As the pressure mounted, their marriage, anchored in work, turned destructive.
"They separated early in 1946 . . . In February 1948, the two of them signed an agreement to share the income from all Craig Rice properties . . .
". . . He moved from a beachfront hotel in Santa Monica to a cottage near the boardwalk in Venice . . .
". . . By November 1948, he was far enough ahead to marry his former secretary, Nettie Brooks . . ." p. 35
[By this account a highly publicized but lightly practiced social rebellion includes Ocean Park incidentally as a way station for notables and their families on their way to or from the Venice scene. KR]
". . . if the Beats had merely been eccentric, they might have slid along. The Southern California "nut," with a bottle of goat's milk and sign predicting the end of the world, was already a well-established stock figure, and the Los Angeles basin had a long tradition of congeniality to the odd and unconventional. Vedanta, Theosophy, Rosicrucianism, spiritualism, New Thought, and the Self-Realization Fellowship had all found homes there, right along with Krishnamurti, Paramanhansa Yogananda, Ernest Holmes, and Aimee Semple MacPherson. Nudism, spiritualism, body building, ethical vegetarianism, Theocracy, and homeopathy all coexisted more or less amiably with circus-tent revivalism, militant atheism, the Nation of Islam, and the Church of Wicca. The city's older, pre-Forest Lawn-era cemeteries were studded with crypts bearing the sun disk, wings, and cobras of ancient Egypt, while the vast industrial complex collectively known as "Hollywood" housed three of the most powerful crypto-religions of modern times, the American motion picture, television, and record industries.
"For more than fifty years, Hollywood had been the world's great channeler and shaper of mass fantasy, with its own inscrutable doctrines of beauty, perfection, reward, punishment and deification. Though not particularly systematic about it, the industry tended to emphasize the marks of virtue that showed in pictures - material goods were easy to photograph, inner peace somewhat trickier - and because of its presence, the fabrication of dreams and beliefs was as calmly accepted in Los Angeles as the harvesting of cotton in Fresno County.
"Paradoxically, none of this made Los Angeles a really tolerant city. It was not an easy place to defy convention; it simply tolerated a great many odd conventions. As late as 1959, local authorities were still trying to root communist teachers out of the public schools, and the police department had acquired a national reputation for persecuting homosexuals . . .
"The gates slammed hard on the Venice Beats. It was one thing to harbor strange ideas; it was another, in the language of theater, to "kid the show." In Southern California, the show was economic growth - and the unquestioning belief in its goodness. From 1953 to 1963, the Los Angeles metropolitan area added 300,000 new residents a year, or not quite one thousand per day - and there was a reason why people were coming . . . By 1960, the "Southland" held seven and a half million people, and there was no reason for most people to think it would ever end . . ." pp. 10-12
". . .
". . . a new branch of popular culture dedicated to the rejection of popular culture . . ." p. 13
". . . They lived on subsistence incomes in the shabbiest part of Southern California's tackiest beach town, held jobs no longer than they had to, and considered the sacirifices worth it if it freed them from the false values and phony satisfactions of conventional life . . ." p. 14
". . . [circa 1950] the Ocean Front . . . ran north all the way through Ocean Park, still known in some circles as "O'Sheeny Park," with its battered but still profitable amusement pier, its solid brick apartment houses, and its community of refugees from East Coast winters, the Germans and the Tsar. During the tourist season, the half-mile from Venice Boulevard to the Santa Monica line was a natural place for families to lose sight of the city, for suckers to lose their money, for drug users to score in relative safety. Now that the bingo parlors had finally been shut down, the beachfront arcades featured skee-ball, pinball, miniature bowling, pop-up baseball, electric shooting galleries, dart throws, ring tosses, mechanical contraptions for winning worthless prizes, and, carefully guarded from minors, "art shows" - viewing boxes with still or moving pictures of naked women, posed with a timid lasciviousness that approached real innocence. Above all, the Ocean Front offered outsiders a mildly titillating seediness, a sense of risk without much risk, in the same way that bingo had offered the opportunity to gamble - not for the money, really, but for the feeling of getting away with something." pp. 34 - 35.
"Now thoroughly established in Venice, [the Liptons] lived an essentially middle-class life on Park Avenue, a kind of elongated court lined with homes of a type still found all over Southern California - deep, high-roofed, generous with wood and space . . sandy lawns, wooden baffles, bougainvillea, railroad ties, climbing plants, porch railings fashioned from steel pipe, and everywhere, as might be expected, cats. . ." p. 46
". . . The year-round Venice economy, with its tiny corner markets, warehouses, liquor stores, fleabag hotels, strange little factories, and old-fashioned Jewish bakeries, was essentially a skid row proposition . . . It was still possible, in 1953, to rent a storefront apartment for forty dollars a month . . . Venice was not the only slum in Los Angeles, but it was probably the only one that was not a good investment.
". . . With its benches, chess tables, archways, empty buildings, and broad expanses of lawn and sand, it was a playground for the idle poor. A man who slept in the doorway could literally awaken to his own private beach; as the day wore on, he might find himself sharing it with Charles Eames, the architect, Stan Laurel, the actor, Mickey Cohen, the gangster, and a strolling party of great-grandmothers from Lublin.
"While Lipton's term, "voluntary poverty," might have been an overblown way to describe it, Venice was also home to a distinctive way of doing without. Its practitioners, most of them young, a fair number of them artists had ended up there . . . They lived in cottages, sheds, garages, warehouses, and empty stores . . . Many were "students" on the GI Bill, and some were veterans of Korea or even World War II . . ." p. 47
". . .in the summer of 1961. . .
"It was a mean-spirited time in which the police, the thugs, the career criminals, and the solid citizens of Venice all seemed to have banded together against a ridiculously peaceful common enemy. Two years before, Venice had been on the fringes of the serious drug world. Now it was known throughout the city as the place to go for an easy score, an easy bust, an easy roll, and, for those so inclined, an easy rape. The gaudy hulk of Pacific Ocean Park, which had been built to challenge Disneyland, now stood rotting on long black pilings over the water; instead of saving the economy of the Ocean Front, it had hastened its dissolution. Tourists, sun-worshippers, and body builders (considered members of a bizarre subculture in 1961) still crowded the beach by day, but the night belonged to the muggers, the drunks, and the psychopaths." p. 147
". . .
"[c. 1967] In Venice, meanwhile, one of the Beat ethic's more seasoned practitioner's, Stuart Perkoff, was making yet another subsidized attempt to lead an orderly, productive life. His father had set him up in a house in Ocean Park; there he and Jana Baragan would live quietly, write poetry, draw pictures, make collages, and learn to live without drugs. Or so the plan went, at any rate. Like all the other plans, it demanded more concessions than he was able to make.
"To sustain his heroin habit, Perkoff had put together a modest scam. His role was to be the man who knew the connection; drug trafficking had become so hazardous in Venice that most reputable dealers worked only through third parties. When a customer wanted to buy, he would take the money and score. He earned himself a "taste" that way, but he also assumed the risk for both parties. With a steady stream of customers flowing through his house, it was only a matter of time before the police realized what he was doing. When they did, they decided to set him up for his connection. There was no hurry about it; they waited three months to issue the warrants.
"Perkoff hardly remembered the specific buys they arrested him for, let alone the phony customers. The warrants were Federal, and although he ended up being convicted of "transporting marijuana" rather than selling heroin, he drew the maximum penalty of five years, to be served on Terminal Island, in the man-made Harbor of Los Angeles.
"After his son's trial, Nat Perkoff drove down from Santa Barbara to clear out the house in Ocean Park. He and the landlord worked all day. There was no time to sort through the mountain of clutter. Since it all looked like trash anyway, they told the workman they had hired to throw it all out. At precisely the moment Stuart Perkoff's entire literary estate was being rolled out the door in a barrel, Larry Lipton, the man with the perfect sense of timing, happened to be strolling up the front walk. Once he realized what was happening, he refused to stop shouting until the police arrived and agreed to impound everything until Perkoff was released." pp. 172-173