LITMIR.BIZ

      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,”

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