8/19/23
Newsletter #432
The Crack of Dawn
When I moved back to L.A. in 1979, at the age of 21, for my second assault, I couldn’t locate my old buddy, Marvis, and had to track him down. It turned out that Marvis was renting a room in a friend’s apartment in the High Tower apartment and housing complex hidden way back in the Hollywood Hills behind the Hollywood Bowl. I’d never heard of High Tower, and I dare say, most folks in Hollywood never have. It was built to be secretive. When I got there, I had no idea how to find Marvis’ apartment. The fact that the old elevator in the tower was out of order didn’t help. So, I just started up the maze of walkways.
High Tower is an eclectic mish-mash of apartment buildings and houses surrounding a 100-foot elevator tower that is all connected by a spiderweb of creaky old wooden walkways, each of which actually has a blue and white L.A. street sign. As best as I can make out High Tower started off as the kooky idea of some early Hollywood real estate developer in the late teens, who in 1920 had an elevator tower built, with banks of garages at the bottom.
I fell down a rabbit hole writing this. There’s a whole story with an early movie producer and a beautiful star for whom this house was built, but I must read more. As my father would say, be that as it may . . .
High Tower has two of the earliest houses designed and built by Frank Lloyd Wright, between 1920-23. One is the Otto Bollman House (he’s producer), and the other is the Freeman House. For the Freeman House Wright used a weird new building material called textile brick, which was basically concrete and rebar, covered with Mayan-inspired engravings.
By the 1930s there was a whole community built and living around the tower that was considered the truly avant-garde salon of Hollywood. Of the many esteemed early residents – most of whom were oddly well-known architects, philosophers and photographers – there was the dancer, Martha Graham; film director, Jean Negulesco; actor, Claude Rains; and bandleader, Xavier Cugat.
Later residents of this strange place were David Copperfield, Michael Connelly, Tim Burton, Timothy Hutton, Kurt Cobain, and Courtney Love. It’s been used as a location in many movies and TV shows, including, The Long Goodbye, The High Window, and Dead Again.
In any case, I located Marvis in a back bedroom of a funky, slanted-roof, back storage area/apartment, with all of his shit packed in around him. I have a clear image of him with long black hair, no shirt, playing an electric guitar with no amp, a cigarette hanging from his mouth. I can actually remember what song he was playing — Hey, You, by Pink Floyd, which was brand new at the time, and I was impressed he’d already figured out the chords. He looked up at me like he’d seen me yesterday, instead of a year and a half ago, and said, “I think I’ve got it.”
Luckily for me, I showed up right as he was moving out and got to help him. We carried his voluminous amount of shit down these utterly ridiculous walkways. I distinctly recall wrestling with his 200 lbs. Yamaha electric piano that we almost lost a few times. If someone was coming up, they could not pass and had to wait until we could figure out how to get past them. I could only think, as though living in L.A. wasn’t a big enough bitch, High Tower was truly a completely ridiculous place to live. I have no doubt it did wonders for the relationship of Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love.
On the subject of weird places in L.A. Another weird, wonderful place in Los Angeles is Angel’s Flight, with its narrow-gauge funicular railway. Funicular means it has two train cars on the same line running in opposite directions. As it says on a plaque at the location, “Built in 1901 by Colonel J. W. Eddy, lawyer, engineer and friend of President Abraham Lincoln . . .”
Eventually businesses replaced the houses, and it looked like this.
If you’re looking back the other way, it’s downtown Los Angeles. It’s those buildings there on what they call Bunker Hill, above the funicular railway, where they were able to fake the height for Harold Lloyd’s film, Safety Last (1923).
If he lets go, there’s a rooftop right below him. You can see that they stuck the fake clockface on the side of the building where it didn’t really go. It’s a badly painted, cheap movie prop.
Just as a note, Harold Lloyd blew off three of his fingers on his right hand with a bomb in a movie. He had a flesh-colored, rubber glove made that he wore in all of his movies. It was ingenious and the fingers bent when he bent the remainder of his fingers. If you look for it, you can see it.
It’s just a few minutes before the dawn.
I gotcha, uh-huh!