This, the second diary from my dissertation research (the first was a Top Comments diary, Art Hoax, 1920s Version Edition), will be about a bookseller, one of whose bookstores I think was a model for the bookstore in Raymond Chandler's novel The Big Sleep. Stanley Rose was a great old Hollywood character, and the story of his experiences as a bookseller will help explain how I wrote over 400 pages about another bookseller who left a lot more records than Rose did.
Stanley Rose, whose bookstores we're discussing today, came from Texas, and he arrived in Los Angeles as the result of a coin-flip (his alternate choice would have been Chicago). According to the attorney and liberal gadfly Carey McWilliams, Rose, who came from a farming community, had been a tail gunner during World War I. After he was wounded in France, he spent eighteen months in a psychiatric facility near Stanford although there was nothing wrong with his mental health. He then came to Los Angeles to peddle books, as McWilliams recalled – “some slightly pornographic, some definitely pornographic” -- to the studios. Rose opened the Satyr bookstore at 1649 Hudson Street, just north of Hollywood Boulevard, in 1925. The following year, he went into partnership with N.M. “Mac” Gordon, who had managed Powner’s Book Shop in downtown Los Angeles for the previous three years, and moved to a larger space adjoining the old bookstore, next to the Brown Derby.
The Satyr issued a catalogue of rare and standard books very shortly after the move, although Rose’s trade was in best sellers and art books. Rose would go to the studios with suitcases of books, in particular art books, which he would sell to the writers, the directors and the producers. One of Rose’s obituaries noted that Rose hired a young man from Fresno, William Saroyan, to sweep out the store for him. Saroyan would push the cart for Rose when Rose would peddle books at studio offices.
The principals of Satyr published and sold a pornographic item that violated copyright laws. Rose, taking responsibility for the bookstore’s actions and expecting only a nominal fine, was sentenced to sixty days in jail for issuing pornography (this sounds like Geiger's Bookstore in The Big Sleep). Upon his release, McWilliams reincorporated Rose into the Stanley Rose bookstore on Hollywood Boulevard next door to the now-fabled restaurant Musso and Frank; according to Publishers’ Weekly, the store opened “on or about” 1 November 1930.
The store was not immediately successful; Rose sold his entire stock during the latter half of 1932 and assigned his account to an adjustment bureau for the benefit of his creditors. Once all this was settled, the shop became a hangout for Hollywood writers, publishers’ representatives, novelists, con men and producers (as one of his obituaries observed), not in the least because Rose had excellent contacts among the bootleggers during Prohibition. Writers who frequented the bookstore are said to have included John O’Hara, Erskine Caldwell, William Faulkner, William Saroyan, Nathanael West, Budd Schulberg, Dorothy Parker, Donald Ogden Stewart and Dashiell Hammett.
In an oral history Carey McWilliams left at The Young Research Library at UCLA, he has this to say wbout Rose:
Stanley is a Hollywood legend, and he deserves to be, deserves to be because he was the center of whatever there was in Hollywood, in extra-studio fashion, outside the studios where there was intellectual discussion and so forth. You never knew who you would meet in his stores any more than you knew who you might meet in Jake [Zeitlin]'s [the main character in my dissertation] stores. They would be different kinds of people, however. But they were always hanging out at Stanley's.
The literary community surrounding Rose’s bookshop offered patronage in a similar way to that surrounding Zeitlin’s bookshop. When Saroyan told Schulberg he was having difficulty finding a publisher for his third book of stories, Schulberg proposed that he and Rose publish it as the first offering of the Stanley Rose Press. Although Schulberg abandoned the plan to publish the book when he found the material uneven, he persuaded his father, the independent producer B.P. Schulberg, to hire Saroyan as a writer. So, as you see, contacts have always played a part in Hollywood.
Following the repeal of Prohibition in December 1933, Rose tended to end up in the back room at Musso and Frank, where the bar was (and still is). The bookseller Louis Epstein later said that Rose tried to run the bookstore from the bar at Musso’s, and the writers who frequented the shop adjourned to the back room of the restaurant with him. Rose’s store had an ambitious art room, ambitious because he delegated responsibility for the shows to managers who happened to be artists or art critics. Lorser Feitelson ran the gallery for Rose between January and September 1935; during the year, he staged a show, “Post Surrealists and other Moderns,” which featured his own work as well as paintings by Marc Chagall, Paul Klee, Fernand Leger and Feitelson’s wife and fellow Post Surrealist Helen Lundeberg. He also showed etchings by, among others, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, consigned by “one Monsieur Goriany, a travelling [sic] salesman from France,” Henri Matisse, Georges Braque, and Arthur Millier, paintings by Joan Miro, Juan Gris and Rufino Tamayo, and drawings by Diego Rivera. The art critic Howard Putzel took over the gallery in October 1935. He too displayed Miro, in October with Max Ernst and the following month in a retrospective. In December, he organized a group show of photographers such as Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange and Edward and Brett Weston.
In subsequent years, Rose displayed paintings by Pablo Picasso (from his Blue period), Maynard Dixon, and Buckley Mac-Gurrin, lithographs by Jean Charlot, Native American art, and, in May 1938, even mounted an exhibit of art by motion picture people. Rose’s gallery was large enough to host the work of the thirty-four artists who took part in the Los Angeles Branch Membership Exhibition of the antifascist American Artists’ Congress during the spring of 1939. Rose left the bookselling business in 1940, having failed due to what some called a lack of business sense, but he apparently returned to Hollywood as a literary agent in 1941. When Saroyan met Rose in late 1941, Rose confided that if he didn’t find $10,000 soon, he would lose his bookshop, and that, since Saroyan had a writing job at MGM, he needed an agent, and that agent might as well be Rose. Saroyan memorialized Rose, after Rose's death in 1954, in a story, “My Lonely Pal,” which described a friend who had been a “disreputable drunk,” how the news had saddened the narrator, made him suspicious of his emotions, and mourned the part of himself that died with his friend.
This demonstrates that Los Angeles in the 1930s was not the cultural backwater that some people like to think it was, and it also demonstrates what you can find out through careful archival research. Some of this information can be found in Kevin Starr, Material Dreams: Southern California through the 1920s, but the bulk is from oral histories and files at UCLA and at The Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
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