West of Eden - An American Place

Zusatztext 44997480 Informationen zum Autor Jean Stein was the longtime editor of Grand Street magazine and a former editor at The Paris Review . She was the author of American Journey: The Times of Robert Kennedy! an oral history with interviews by Stein and edited by George Plimpton; Edie: American Girl! which was edited with Plimpton; and West of Eden: An American Place! an oral history of Hollywood and Los Angeles. A winding driveway dropped down between retaining walls to the open iron gates. Beyond the fence the hill sloped for several miles. On this lower level faint and far off I could just barely see some of the old wooden derricks of the oilfield from which the Sternwoods had made their money. . . . A little of it was still producing in groups of wells pumping five or six barrels a day. The Sternwoods, having moved up the hill, could no longer smell the stale sump water or the oil, but they could still look out of their front windows and see what had made them rich. If they wanted to. I didn’t suppose they would want to. —Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep Richard Rayner: The nature of scandals is that once Pandora’s box has been opened, it always ends up murkier, more intestinal, more twisted, and much bigger and longer than anyone could have imagined before they opened the box. And the story of Edward L. Doheny is centered around a Pandora’s box that unleashed an extraordinary sequence of events, enthralling the nation for a decade. It involved the fall and death of a president. It involved millions and millions of dollars paid to some of the most gifted lawyers in the country. It involved two slayings intimately connected to Doheny in circumstances that are still very murky. And it ended in the fall from grace for Doheny—at one point the richest man in America—who died in 1935 broken and disgraced, very much by his own actions and his determination to protect himself Patrick “Ned” Doheny: My great-grandfather was shocked at the way that everything spun out. When you think about a guy that strong being broken, you have to wonder what it must have been like to have had to deal with all those elements, who you had to be in order to survive it. It was a tragedy, but the history books have always done a hatchet job on him. It’s the heartlessness that I find the most bitter about the interpretation of our family. And it upsets me that someone like my great-grandfather, who was such a seminal figure, gets supplanted by a cardboard stick figure. That’s madness. What my great-grandfather did is almost beyond conception in terms of the amount of money that he made, the success that he enjoyed, and the wildness of his adventure. That whole business with There Will Be Blood, however, was completely apocryphal. There’s not a shred of truth in it. The only true part of the film was at the beginning, with him in the mine shaft by himself: he did always say he once fell down a mine shaft and broke his legs. But all the rest of it is utter horseshit. All these people—Upton Sinclair with Oil! and later the movie people—had a vested interest in furthering their own agendas, and it’s ludicrous to confuse those agendas with history. I enjoyed the movie, and I thought Daniel Day-Lewis was outrageously good. But it had nothing to do with my people at all. The actual story itself is so much more interesting than anything they might have come up with. Shuffle the cards, and deal a new round of poker hands: they differ in every way from the previous round, and yet it is the same pack of cards, and the same game, with the same spirit, the players grim-faced and silent, surrounded by a haze of tobacco-smoke. —Upton Sinclair, Oil! Richard Rayner: The Doheny saga is central to L.A. history in all sorts of ways. One thinks of Mulholland as being the twisted godfather who summoned L.A. into existence because he brought the ...

Produktdetails

• Autoren: Jean Stein
• Verlag: Random House USA
• Sprache: Englisch
• Produktform: Fester Einband
• Erscheint: 29.02.2016, verspätet
• EAN: 9780812998405
• ISBN: 978-0-8129-9840-5
• Seiten: 320
• Themen: Geisteswissenschaften, Kunst, Musik > Kunst > Theater, Ballett; Kulturgeschichte, Hollywood (Film), Los Angeles : Berichte, Erinnerungen