Gentle reader,
Writers are generally shy, more comfortable with ideas than with other people. Some even craft a fictional version of themselves, to make public interaction easier.
“Raymond Chandler,” the pipe-chewing, cat-clutching, cynical master of L.A. noir detective fiction, was such a manufactured character. Inside the hard-boiled crust was something more tender and complicated. One was Chandler, the other Ray.
In 2007/08, when we first hosted twin bus tours (Downtown/Hollywood and Bay City) of the places that figure in Chandler’s life and fiction, we still believed the well-worn biographical beats to be true.
They went something like this: Chandler, born in Chicago (1888) and educated in English public schools, had left his youthful literary ambitions behind when he returned to America in 1912, settling in small town Los Angeles and working menial jobs. He enlisted in 1917 to fight in the first World War, falling in love with the married and much older Cissy Pascal on his return. Cissy divorced and, after Chandler’s disapproving mother’s death, they wed. Chandler became a successful oil executive, only turning to writing mystery stories in semi-desperation, after being fired for drunkenness and absenteeism in the early 1930s. He found fame in fiction and screenwriting, a rare example of a writer who turned to the trade in middle age.
It makes a good story. The parts in bold italics are simply not true. And nobody was ever supposed to know it.
Until ten years ago, there was only one person alive who knew the truth—and while we knew a bit about their relationship with Chandler, she kept his confidence.
Then one afternoon in March 2014, something pretty weird happened. Richard was running errands and Kim was home brainstorming character development for a sequel or prequel to The Kept Girl, her fact-based 1920s mystery novel about the young Chandler, his oil company secretary and the L.A. cop who was something of a real-life Philip Marlowe, all on the trail of a cult of angel worshippers.
She had been thinking it would be nice to know more about Julian Pascal, the Barbados born pianist and composer who had graciously handed over his wife Cissy to their mutual friend, Ray.
In The Kept Girl, Kim had mused on the love triangle from Ray’s perspective:
Cissy and her husband Julian were typical of the Lloyds’ artistic friends. He was musical, she elegant and witty. In dusty Los Angeles, so provincial and small, it was natural that a group of intelligent folk would make their own fun in private spaces. It was as an inside joke against themselves that Warren [Lloyd] named their club of moody souls The Optimists—yet strangely, they had felt happier once they took the name.
And it was in this charmed space that Ray had realized he desired Julian’s titian-haired wife, had confided in Alma [Lloyd], had begun the cold process of carving a man’s mate away through a communal assault of logic, passion and intrigue. Now he had her, and he loved her—he supposed. But sometimes he thought back on those days and wondered if he hadn’t been a little insane, and if the whole love affair might not have died out in a season if not for the flame fanned by their whole social circle, so invested in its consummation.
He felt unsettled when he found himself questioning the myth of their great love affair. Wasn’t Cissy still beautiful and bright? Didn’t she treat him more tenderly than not, when her mood was fine? And anyway, if he didn’t want her, who would? She was his responsibility now, and perhaps always.
This was what she imagined Ray was thinking in 1929. What might Julian have to say?
Back then, Google was still a functional search engine, with tendrils reaching deep into archival sources across the globe. And like an angler standing by still water, a dogged researcher could bait her line and pull in useful and extraordinary things.
This particular fishing expedition didn’t feel like others. It seemed unnatural. Frenzied Boolean queries came on their own, as if whispered by a caffeinated inner voice.
And then it was on the screen: evidence of the thing that could not possibly exist.
What was it? Oh, just registration for copyright purposes of a completely unknown, unproduced and unpublished musical comedy collaboration between Chandler and Julian Pascal—then still married to Cissy!—deposited with the Library of Congress two weeks after Chandler enlisted in the Canadian Expeditionary Force at Victoria B.C.
The story of how we obtained a scan of the operetta from the Library of Congress and initially sought to produce it as a live show is told on the Goblin Wine website.
Not fleshed out there, both because it was such a bummer and it seemed prudent to be discrete, is how our efforts to bring this charming, lost work into the light were thwarted by the (genetically unrelated) Raymond Chandler Estate.
But on the occasion of the announcement of the sale at Doyle’s auction house on December 6 of the Jean Vounder-Davis (aka Jean Fracasse) Collection of Chandleriana—including the dog-eared copy of the other known copy of The Princess & the Pedlar manuscript that the author gifted to Jean’s young daughter Sybil, the only person alive who knew about it—let’s pour some tea.
Ray, who we care deeply about and who feels like a friend, deserves it.
When modern documents are donated or sold to special collections libraries, the owner or institution will sometimes impose use restrictions on visitors making copies, reproducing material, or even accessing sensitive items until after everyone involved is dead.
Angelenos and others seeking to better understand Chandler’s life and work can visit UCLA Special Collections and request access to 13 boxes containing correspondence, screenplays, photographs and books. Much of this material was gifted by Chandler in the 1950s, and the restrictions are minimal and library standard.
We found the UCLA collection illuminating while developing our tours, and its very existence reminds us that our most prestigious public university and Chandler himself valued his work product and wanted people to be able to access it, freely, forever.
But UCLA is only the tip of the icepick. Things changed after Chandler died in 1959. Instead of benefiting from posthumous deposits from the author’s files, the UCLA archive was essentially frozen in amber, and a new, highly restricted archive established 5000 miles away.
From then on, anyone seeking to quote Raymond Chandler’s work, or to consult for purposes of publication the archival material accumulated by his last agent Helga Greene and deposited at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, England, has had to seek the permission of the Estate—co-managed, until his 2016 death, by Helga Greene’s son Graham C. Greene.
And it was Graham C. Greene who personally shot down our efforts to produce the rediscovered fairy tale operetta in the city where it was composed on the occasion of its centennial. Richard sought an audience and Greene took the call at his son’s Tuscan villa. Yes, the Estate reluctantly agreed that this operetta, previously unknown to them and provided by us as a courtesy, was a legitimate work by Raymond Chandler. But it wasn’t important and ought not to be staged, and that. was. that.
When the call ended, Richard was uncharacteristically speechless. After a few moments, he mused “I have never fully understood the British class system until speaking with Graham C. Greene. No wonder Chandler left!”
The Raymond Chandler Estate is truly confounding. Since the Robert Altman / Leigh Brackett collaboration The Long Goodbye (1973) which deftly brought the character into modern times and let him marinate in them, the Estate hasn’t seemed to care much about Philip Marlowe except to poorly monetize him, hiring name detective writers from the United Kingdom to faff around writing books that add little to the canon, and green lighting minor league tax dodge movies, habits that persist under new management.
Graham C. Greene said something revealing, as he rushed to get rid of this annoying Californian who wanted something from him. To affirm how we knew the operetta was a real Raymond Chandler composition, Richard noted that a copy of the libretto had been gifted to Jean Fracasse’s daughter by Chandler before he died.
Greene snapped, “I never want to hear the name Jean Fracasse again!”
Well! If you read any of the biographies that relied on access to the files at Oxford, you have seen Chandler’s last secretary Jean Fracasse portrayed as a ditsy gold digger who “lost” a court case for Chandler’s possessions and copyrights to Helga Greene before vanishing into obscurity. Her children are never named and their relationship with the writer is non-existent.
Sybil Davis tells a different story, as does her auction history: In 2011, Sotheby’s sold on Sybil’s behalf a number of items from Chandler’s library, including his Double Indemnity screenplay, presentation copies from his English publisher and the first edition of The Big Sleep that was inscribed to Cissy and later to Sybil’s brother Vincent, which hammered for $254,500.
The truth is that Raymond Chandler’s personal estate did not transfer to Helga Greene: only the copyrights did. Chandler left things of great financial and sentimental value to Jean and her children, objects that they treasured for many years, and some of which are again coming to auction.
To hear Sybil tell it, as she did in our lockdown webinar, Raymond Chandler was her friend. He was silly, sweet and thoughtful, teaching her how to navigate the grown up world and kneeling down to her level to collaborate on a newspaper about her pets.
Sybil’s friend died in 1959 and left a mess behind. He’d managed to finish a final novel with her mother’s help—Playback is dedicated to Jean Fracasse—but his personal life was chaos. He had a mania, probably alcohol induced, for proposing to any woman who paid attention to him, and regularly rewrote his will to benefit the latest flame to the exclusion of all others.
Jean Fracasse, single Australian immigrant mom without resources, kept on an emotional and financial string by the writer, believed she stood to inherit. Helga Greene, literary agent from a wealthy Irish beer and banking family, had a will in her own favor and ambitions to control a valuable set of copyrights.
As is nearly always the case with subtle problems brought to court, the richer person triumphed, and the significant role Jean Fracasse and her children played in Chandler’s later years slipped into shadow, their intimate relationship missing in the correspondence and court transcripts made available to biographers.
And Helga Greene’s harmful actions, which included subjecting the abashed and unwell Chandler to the humiliation of asking her father for permission to marry, which was cruelly denied, have never been fully assessed.
But this master of the detective novel has inspired a particularly dogged subset of biographers who work outside the canon, people who don’t have or want publishing deals or to navigate the tender feelings of Helga Greene’s descendants, but simply seek to truly know Raymond Chandler.
Among them is Loren Latker, who haunted the L.A. County archives and discovered that Ray and Cissy had briefly separated in the 1930s, a bombshell he added to his Shamus Town website timeline (archive links).
Loren also realized that Chandler had never collected Cissy’s cremains, and initiated a successful legal claim to retrieve and bury them in her husband’s grave at Mount Hope Cemetery.
We attended the ceremony, and at the reception afterwards met Sybil Davis, Jean’s daughter and Chandler’s young friend.
And so it was it, a few years later, that we could go to Sybil’s house for dinner and Kim could shock her by asking, “Have you ever heard of something called The Princess and the Pedlar?”
Sybil’s thoughts on the operetta, which she is now offering for sale, are here.
Yes, the Chandler Estate is confounding, and we don’t have high expectations for the projects it approves. And what a shame that they don’t try harder.
Philip Marlowe is a great L.A. character because he’s forged from the anger of an Angeleno watching his city fall to ruin, turning to fiction to gain some control over a world gone mad.
Raymond Chandler didn’t set out to write hard boiled fiction about blackmailers and killers and mobsters and dirty cops. His preferred genre was fantasy stories—as shown by the remarkable cache of unpublished manuscripts offered as a lot in Friday’s auction.
But working in the oil business, surrounded by money and the nasty things that money makes men do, in a city notable for keeping the eastern Mafia away by running the rackets out of City Hall with police protection, he couldn’t help but put the pieces together. And later, when circumstances forced him to use his literary talents in a more commercial fashion, he turned to crime fiction, and triumphed.
For readers and moviegoers in the 1930s and 1940s, Marlowe taught them how to navigate Los Angeles and other corrupt places, to see the darkness while aiming for the light.
In a late, unpublished fragment of a Marlowe story offered in the auction, Chandler writes, “Our country is not ruled politicians or statesmen ... it is ruled by a syndicate of criminals ... am I afraid of them? I suppose so. But I am much more afraid of the sort of world that awaits us if we don't find a way to liquidate their power."
Chandler’s fiction gave Angelenos the tools to understand themselves and their demonic, angelic city. We need Marlowe more than ever today!
Corruption is still everywhere, and if the Estate would only let him, Marlowe could navigate this 21st century city and make it make sense. Soon enough, the character will be in the public domain and no foreign rights holder can stand in the way. But for now, he’s hobbled, and we miss the guy.
And so a gentle question for our readers who still care about Chandler and Marlowe and getting Los Angeles right: have you got a few million bucks burning a hole in your soul?
How about you bid on Chandler’s last typewriter, the fantasy stories he worked doggedly on in the 1920s apparently for an audience of one (his beloved Cissy), his cocktail guide and glass muddlers and that improbable comic operetta?
And while you’re on a spree, why not buy the Dutch Chocolate Shop, too? Like The Princess and the Pedlar, this pretty building just off Broadway is a rare survivor of Los Angeles in the 1910s, the heady period when Ray and Cissy fell in love and began to craft a private world where Ray could find the voice within himself that was great.
Then you can establish within this lovely, landmarked space a small museum of L.A. Noir, a place to celebrate and interrogate and reveal the secrets of the city, and a place to honor the stewardship that has kept these artifacts intact in a city that, as Chandler put it, had “all the personality of a paper cup.”
And yet here we are still talking about that city, and about him, and about the women he loved, and about the crimes that shaped his imagination.
Sometimes, looking over the state of corrupt decline in which Los Angeles finds itself, and comparing it (as in this advertorial piece Kim wrote for the New York Times) to the previous gilded age of civic corruption, the era that gave us Marlowe—we take a deep breath and remind ourselves that L.A. Noir is now, but it’s not forever.
Eventually, things will get too chaotic to continue, the ship will tip over, and Angelenos can enjoy a period of relative peace and prosperity until Los Angeles returns to her apparently natural state as a dirty old town.
But in the dark or in the light, we wouldn’t want to be anywhere else—except maybe in New York on December 3 for the cocktail party and viewing, and December 6 for Sybil’s auction. But our work keeps us home. So we’ll watch the auction over the wires, and probably cry a little bit as The Princess and the Pedlar manuscript becomes a Raymond Chandler collectible, after spending 107 years as an intimate keepsake.
Then a week later, on December 14, we’ll set out on a tour of Chandler’s noir city, over the same sidewalks where a young oil executive rambled, crazy in love with Cissy and just starting to put all the pieces together for the noir tales he’d spin. Join us, do!
We’re off this weekend for the holiday, but return December 7-8 with a packed weekend of exploration. Saturday’s tour is an ascent from the old streetcar line on Sunset Boulevard to get to know a miraculous (and only slightly manufactured) Victorian time capsule, Angelino Heights & Carroll Avenue. Join us for a deep dive into suburban development and visionary preservation, Chinatown locations and daring girl detectives, ancient trees, atomic age anxiety and the only real ghost story you’ll hear on an Esotouric tour—because it happened on one of them!
And on Sunday, it’s Know Your Downtown L.A., featuring a time travel tramp around Bunker Hill with native son Gordon Pattison, speakeasy tunnel relics and what might be our last chance to visit the tiled marvel Dutch Chocolate Shop before the building changes hands. Join us, do!
And a gentle reminder that we got subpoenaed for third party discovery in the lawsuit by the Marilyn Monroe house owners, and are fundraising to cover our legal expenses with a 20% off holiday sale on bulk gift certificates. Or just buy one ticket or some merch—it all helps!
Yours for Los Angeles,
Kim & Richard
Esotouric
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Our work—leading tours and historic preservation and cultural landmark advocacy—is about building a bridge between Los Angeles' past and its future, and not allowing the corrupt, greedy, inept and misguided players who hold present power to destroy the city's soul and body. If you’d like to support our efforts to be the voice of places worth preserving, we have a tip jar and a subscriber edition of our main newsletter, vintage Los Angeles webinars available to stream, in-person tours and a souvenir shop you can browse in. We’ve also got recommended reading bookshelves on Amazon and the Bookshop indie bookstore site. And did you know we offer private versions of our walking tours for groups big or small? Or just share this link with other people who care.
UPCOMING BUS & WALKING TOURS
• Angelino Heights & Carroll Avenue (Sat. 12/7) • Know Your Downtown L.A. (Sun. 11/8) • Raymond Chandler’s Noir Downtown Los Angeles (Sat. 12/14) • Miracle Mile Marvels & Madness (Sun. 12/22) • Human Sacrifice: The Black Dahlia, Elisa Lam, Heidi Planck & Skid Row Slasher (Thurs. 12/26) • Angelino Heights & Carroll Avenue (Sat. 1/18) • Broadway (Sat. 1/25) • Evergreen Cemetery, 1877 (Sat. 2/1) • Film Noir / Real Noir (Sat. 2/8) • The Real Black Dahlia (Sat. 3/1) • Hotel Horrors & Main Street Vice Downtown L.A. (Sat. 3/8) • Bunker Hill, Dead and Alive (Sat. 3/15) • Raymond Chandler’s Noir Downtown Los Angeles (Sat. 3/22) • Franklin Village Old Hollywood (Sun. 3/30) • John Fante’s Downtown L.A. (Sat. 4/5) • Angelino Heights & Carroll Avenue (Sat. 4/12) • Leo Politi Loves Los Angeles (Sat. 4/19) • Downtown Los Angeles is for Book Lovers (Sat. 4/26)
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