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Introduction

Edgar Rice Burroughs is best known for his many adventure novels set in the jungles of Africa and the alien landscapes of Mars, but one could argue — if one were just a little bit of a smartass — that he left a bigger footprint on Los Angeles than any other writer. Chandler got Raymond Chandler Square at the intersection of Hollywood and Cahuenga, marked by a few inconspicuous signs pinned to traffic lights; John Fante got the corner of 5th and Grand downtown. Burroughs got all of Tarzana, an 8.79 square mile neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley, named for his most famous creation, the feral child/British lord Tarzan.

His books may not have aged quite as well as those of his contemporaries, but Burroughs was enormously successful in his time. Born in Chicago to a Mayflower-white family (his great-great-etc.-grandfather was the Puritan settler Edmund Rice), he was a wholesaler of pencil sharpeners before trying his hand at writing. He spent a lot of time reading pulp magazines and decided he “could write stories just as rotten.” He started his Barsroom series in 1912, and published Tarzan of the Apes in October of the same year. His Tarzan books became a big enough sensation that he moved to California in 1919, where he bought 550 acres of land from the estate of General Harrison Gray Otis, president and general manager of the Los Angeles Times, for $125,000. (When was the last time, I wonder, that a novelist bought major real estate from a newspaper publisher? I’ll bet it was closer to 1919 than 2019.) He built a huge ranch house on the property and called it Tarzana Ranch. Over the next several years, he subdivided and sold off the surrounding land for development, and in 1930, the residents of the new community chose to name their home Tarzana.

I didn’t know anything about Burroughs’s business or legacy when I started reading The Girl from Hollywood, serialized in Munsey’s Magazine from June to November, 1922 (it was later published in book form in August 1923, by The Macaulay Company). Burroughs wrote only a handful of contemporary novels — all anyone wanted from him was sci-fi and Tarzan — and this one offers rare insight into his life in California and his relationship with Los Angeles.

Unlike some other big-name novelists who moved to Los Angeles, Burroughs was not a screenwriter, but he had ploenty of interaction with Hollywood: his books were adapted into movies at a furious pace, seven of them between 1917 and 1921 alone. (His daughter Joan married James Pierce, the fourth actor to play Tarzan, in the 1927 silent film Tarzan and the Golden Lion. They were married for over 40 years, until her death in 1972 — pretty sweet for a Hollywood romance, nothing this book would have predicted.) Tarzan took on a cinematic life of his own, and Burroughs wasn’t always pleased with the results.

The Girl from Hollywood paints a rather nasty picture of Hollywood and city life, which stand in opposition to “the country,” where most of the novel takes place. The fictional Ganado is a rural idyll:

It was the first day of early spring. The rains were over. The California hills were green and purple and gold. The new leaves lay softly fresh on the gaunt boughs of yesterday. A blue jay scolded from a clump of sumac across the trail.

The Rancho del Ganado, Ganado’s largest ranch, is owned and occupied by the Pennington family: Colonel and Mrs. Julia Pennington, their adult son Custer, and their teenage daughter Eva. Their neighbors, the Evans family — the widowed Mrs. Mae Evans and her son and daughter, Guy and Grace — live a half-mile away. The two families seem to be the only residents of Ganado, other than various employees and one new neighbor — a widow named Mrs. George Burke, whose daughter Shannon is the titular girl from Hollywood. The Penningtons and the Evanses are close and almost incestuously intertwined. The children grew up together and fell in love: Custer with Grace, Eva with Guy.

They spend their days doing wholesome things like riding horses at the crack of dawn and having dinner parties with their parents that end with chaste dancing. Burroughs doesn’t hide his admiration for their simple, pastoral way of life:

Unlike city dwellers, these people had never learned to conceal the lovelier emotions of their hearts behind a mask of assumed indifference. Perhaps the fact that they were not forever crowded shoulder to shoulder with strangers permitted them an enjoyable naturalness which the dweller in the wholesale districts of humanity can never know.

They aren’t without troubles, of course. There are bootleggers in the hills, for one. For another, the children, now grown, start longing for city life.

Their little world starts falling apart when Grace decides to move to Hollywood to seek stardom before settling down and marrying Custer:

Why, I haven’t lived yet, Custer! I want to live. I want to do something outside of the humdrum life that I have always led and the humdrum life that I shall live as a wife and mother. I want to live a little, Custer, and then I’ll be ready to settle down. You all tell me that I am beautiful, and down, away down in the depth of my soul, I feel that I have talent. If I have, I ought to use the gifts God has given me.

She leaves to follow her dreams, upsetting the quiet happiness of Ganado. At first, her letters are frequent and hopeful, but as the weeks and months go on, she writes less and less, fading into her new life. She doesn’t visit, and the Penningtons and the other Evanses more or less lose track of her — it’s like she lives in a different world entirely.

There’s so much made of this country/city divide, I was shocked and delighted to learn that Ganado is in fact Tarzana. According to John Taliaferro, who wrote the Burroughs biography Tarzan Forever (1999), “Rancho del Ganado is Tarzana to the last detail; the description of roads, trails, topography, and architecture verge on the encyclopedic — and thus have great historical value for anyone trying to picture the original Tarzana before it became suburbia.”

I pictured Ojai or Temecula or at least Malibu, but Tarzana is a relatively close-in suburb, less than half an hour from Hollywood unless traffic is heavy (which, I suppose, it often is). I thought maybe it took longer to get around in Burroughs’s time, but when he was selling his ranch in 1936, he placed an ad in Script magazine describing the property: “I want to sell it to somebody looking for a beautiful estate only 20 minutes drive from Hollywood.”

I’ve made that drive more times than I can reliably estimate. I grew up in Encino, just one neighborhood east of Tarzana, where Burroughs lived in his later years. He died in his home at 5565 Zelzah Avenue. That house no longer exists, but if it did, it would be just a couple blocks away from the Trader Joe’s with the terrible parking lot (I know all Trader Joe’s have bad parking lots, but I think Valley dwellers will agree with me that this is by far the worst one), and only minutes away from my childhood home.

I spent a lot of time in Tarzana. I went to a Saturday school on the Portola Middle School campus, where I learned Korean and took classes in taekwondo and abacus. One of my best friends lived in Tarzana and got rejected from a job at the Coldstone on Reseda and Ventura (he ended up working at a Jamba Juice instead); we hung out there all the time anyway, and he’d exchange awkward greetings with the manager while we ordered our ice cream, which we ate on the concrete patio adjoining the parking lot, shared with a Panda Express. We didn’t do much horseback riding.

We went into central Los Angeles often, particularly after we learned to drive. Mostly Koreatown and the area near the Grove, and sometimes, we bummed around Hollywood — the Amoeba and the ArcLight being great places to waste time when you’re not yet old enough to drink.

Of course for Burroughs, the distance between Tarzana and Hollywood was more conceptual than physical (though you wouldn’t know it from the book). And the idea that neighborhood shapes your character and determines your fate is, as they say, “very L.A.” Downtown and Beverly Hills are only about 11 miles apart, but drive between them on Wilshire or 3rd or Beverly, and you run through dozens of distinct communities, with widely varying characters and demographics. Tarzana may no longer qualify as “country,” but it does offer the relative quiet and seclusion of suburbia, which is what seemed to appeal to Burroughs.

This craving for peaceful escape from the chaos and danger of city life is part of what created suburbia in the first place. Of course, another way to describe that drive is “white flight.” The Ganado of the Penningtons and the Evanses is an enclave of whiteness. There are Mexicans hiding in the hills, but they are criminals, bootleggers and murderers; the land is not for them. Where there are non-whites in this book, there is corruption, and it would be unduly generous — the text in no way demands it — to chalk this up to coincidence. The only characters of color are the Mexican criminals and a “Japanese ‘schoolboy’ of 35,” sometimes referred to as “the Jap,” who works as a housekeeper at an actor/director/drug dealer’s bungalow. The only one with a name is a Mexican murderer who tries to blackmail, rape, and kill Shannon Burke: “She knew how lightly the criminal Mexican esteems life — especially the life of the hated gringo.”

Burroughs was a product of his time, etc. etc., but The Girl from Hollywood does have plenty of resonance with ours — it is a novel about the sordidness of Hollywood, after all. When Grace makes her move to the big, bad L.A., Shannon Burke is already there, using the stage name Gaza de Lure:

Two years ago she came to Hollywood from a little town in the Middle West […] She was fired by high purpose then. Her child’s heart, burning with lofty ambition, had set its desire upon a noble goal. The broken bodies of a thousand other children dotted the road to the same goal, but she did not see them, or seeing, did not understand.

The girl from Hollywood was originally a girl from the Midwest, brought down low by the corrupting influence of the city and the film industry. Her career stagnated due to her resistance to the advances of powerful men. As one sleazy assistant director put it, “The trouble with you is you ain’t enough of a good fellow. You got to be a good fellow to get on in pictures.” Grace runs into the same obstacles when she starts making her rounds:

If she could only have a chance! In the weeks of tramping from studio to studio she had learned much. For one thing, she had come to know the ruthlessness of a certain type of man that must and will some day be driven from the industry — that is, in fact, even now being driven out, though slowly, by the stress of public opinion and by the example of the men of finer character who are gradually making a higher code of ethics for the studios.

How optimistic, in retrospect, and how heartbreaking. Burroughs wrote those lines 30 years before Harvey Weinstein was even born, and almost a century before he and others like him were held to account for their decades of misconduct.

Burroughs’s outrage is strong and apparent. He recognizes the vulnerability of young naïve women trying to make it in Hollywood, and condemns the industry men who abuse their position and power. Unsurprisingly, though, his attitudes are far from feminist. He wants men to behave honorably and protect women: “It brought the tears to her eyes — tears of happiness, for every woman wants to feel that she belongs to some man — a father, a brother, or a husband — who loves her well enough to order her about for her own good,” and for women to maintain their sexual purity.

Shannon manages to stay chaste, even in the clutches of the wily, villainous Wilson Crumb, the aforementioned actor/director/drug dealer, who tricked her into becoming a drug addict (he tells her the white powder is crushed aspirin; not the brightest, our Shannon). She spends her days with him at his bungalow, helping him sling cocaine, heroin, and morphine. When we meet her — and we do meet her, in a brief, brilliant passage that makes rare good use of second-person narration — she’s in poor shape, as are we:

At sight of you she rises, a bit unsteadily, and, smiling with her lips, extends a slender hand in greeting. The fingers of the hand tremble and are stained with nicotine. Her eyes do not smile — ever […]

Probably you have not noticed that she is wild-eyed and haggard, or that her fingers are stained and trembling, for you, too, are wild-eyed and haggard, and you are trembling worse than she.

It takes her mother’s death to pull her from her wretched Hollywood life by bringing her to Ganado, and under the benevolent influence of the Penningtons. She falls in love with Custer, but his engagement and her shame — more about her close association with Crumb, which most would wrongly assume was sexual, than her two years of being a straight-up drug dealer — pose major problems for their romance.

Burroughs has a lot of sympathy for Shannon, and that sympathy makes her a substantial protagonist, a flawed female character who is easy to root for — a bit of a feat for a pulp writer in the 1920s. He doesn’t judge her too harshly for her criminal activity, and he portrays her fight against addiction with real humanity: “Already she could feel her will weakening. It was the old, old story that she knew so well.” She has more depth and courage than any of the male characters, and she does more to protect Custer than even he, the noble, selfless hero, does to protect her.

The Girl from Hollywood has many of the trappings of a standard morality tale — heroes and villains, virtue and vice, astonishing levels of coincidence — but it has enough shadows and ambiguity to keep things interesting. There are moments in the book that seem to predict the coming age of hardboiled detective fiction. Both Shannon and Guy Evans — on the side of good, decent people — find themselves entangled with criminals and illicit activity. Guy works with the bootleggers in the hills:

Young Evans, while scarcely to be classed as a strong character, was more impulsive than weak, nor was he in any sense of the word vicious. While he knew that he was breaking the law, he would have been terribly shocked at the merest suggestion that his acts placed upon him the brand of criminality. Like many another, he considered the Volstead Act the work of an organized and meddlesome minority, rather than the real will of the people. There was, in his opinion, no immorality in circumventing the 18th Amendment whenever and wherever possible.

He gets in way over his head, of course, but it all starts because the Prohibition placed him and others like him on the other side of the law. “Every one’s breaking the damned old 18th Amendment,” he says, “and it’s got so it don’t seem like committing a crime, or anything like that.” This is classic noir territory, slippery slopes and shades of gray, many of them introduced by the strictures of Prohibition, which created a large, fresh class of booze-running criminals.

Burroughs still comes off as pretty prudish in his values (even as some of his characters engage in treachery and violence and snort copious amounts of cocaine), but The Girl from Hollywood is a departure from the tales of male heroism that formed his reputation. Shannon has sinned and suffered, and is therefore forgiving and flexible: “Her own misfortune had made her generously ready to seek excuses for wrongdoing in others,” which is good because even Custer has a bit of a drinking problem. The Girl from Hollywood is an entertaining book and a fascinating study of Los Angeles in the 1920s: a decade before Chandler tied the city’s identity to the tradition of noir and almost a century before the reckoning of #MeToo. Enjoy the morphine and blackmail and romance, and the rustic paradise of old Tarzana.

Steph Cha

Los Angeles

2019