"Incredible Land A Jaunty Baedeker to Hollywood and The Great Southwest" 1933 WOON, Basil (SOLD)

WOON, Basil

[374] pp.

Liveright Publishing

1933

8 3/8" x 5 7/8"

Illustrated by "Wynn"

VG/ VG

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The British-born playwright, journalist, and traveling bon vivant turns his sights on the American dreamscape.

A Wonder-Struck View of the Western Wonderland; Basil Woon's Guide to Hollywood and the Southwest Wallows in Gimcrack Bigness and Splendor INCREDIBLE LAND. A. Jaunty Baedeker to Hollywood and the Great Southwest.

The lapse of time since this book was written has been less than a year, yet so much alcohol has flowed under the bridge during that period that many of Mr. Woon's pages have a distinctly historical flavor. This fact he himself acknowledges in a last-minute chapter of "Addenda and Errata" in which he points out that repeal alters "the entire entertainment map of the United States." But it is hard to write a description of the Southwest, particularly of California, that will be as accurate tomorrow as it is today, and a slight knowledge of history never did any one any harm, anyhow. It would not do even Mr. Woon any harm. It might prevent his repeating such statements as this:

Cabrillo, that busy lad, discovered Monterey in 1542, but it was sixty years later before Sebastian Vizcaino established the first settlement. Señor Vizcaino was accompanied by a number of Carmelite friars, who immediately set the local Indians to work building a mission. In those days a priest couldn't see a picturesque location without building a mission on it. By 1769 the Carmel mission was a flourishing institution.

In this passage Mr. Woon errs from beginning to end on points concerning which he could have corrected himself in fifteen minutes with the aid of any one-volume history of California. Cabrillo sailed along the coast, but there is no record that he identified the Bay of Monterey. Vizcaino landed at the site of Monterey in 1602, but he did not establish either a settlement or a mission. So far as is known Monterey was not again visited by a white man until more than a century and a half later and the Carmel mission was not established until 1770, by a Franciscan named Junipero Serra.

This illustration should be sufficient to demonstrate that research in libraries is not Mr. Woon's favorite pastime. His researches in drinking places, gambling joints, hotels, restaurants and motion-picture studios and along the highways are on a much firmer basis and are carried out in a manner that is usually interesting despite its flippancy, its superficiality and its rather elemental scale of values. One doesn't look for any great depth of feeling in a writer who can jot down such sentences as this: "The bones of many thousand whites and God knows how many niggers rot in the swamps of Panama." Nor after Mr. Woon's almost hysterical admiration of Mr. Hearst's 340,000-acre estate, with its $5,000,000 room and its $50,000 beds does one expect social criticism from him. His "Incredible Land" is primarily for those whose success can be measured in terms of dollars. Its “liberality” is freedom to drink, gamble and obtain easy divorces, not freedom of speech or thought.

Mr. Woon has a weakness for bigness and splendor, or takes it for granted that his readers have. He is glad to have us know that he attended a première at Grauman's Chinese Theatre "as escort for the delightful and lovely Claire Windsor" and had to say a few words into the "mike." He describes with goggle-eyed admiration the "twenty miles of opulence" between Hollywood and the sea, where there are "hundreds of homes" almost any one of which "would be a fit dwelling for a millionaire." He reels off like the megaphone man on a sight-seeing bus the names of the home-owners at Malibu and in Beverly Hills, with no apparent suspicion that a house which has cost a great deal of money can possibly be uninteresting or annoying to the beholder. He sings the praises of the aristocracy of Montecito:

They are the friends of royalty abroad and of gardeners at home. They wear rough tweeds and baggy trousers and velvet smoking jackets. They know little of finance, but are connoisseurs of fine food and wine. Newspapers rarely reach their homes, but they can quote Wordsworth and Stendhal. Their bills are paid by their bankers even unto the third and fourth generation. Of such, my friends and readers, is Montecito, a land of lovely estates and gracious ladies and courtly gentlemen; a little oasis of Old World culture at the far edge of the still-wild West.

One can't help suspecting, though the suspicion may be unfair to Mr. Woon, that if the lovely estates were twice as big as they are and the trousers of the owners not only twice as baggy but twice as expensive Montecito would seem to him twice as cultured. At any rate, he gives no definition here or elsewhere of what he thinks culture is, and no hint that it exists anywhere in the Southwest independent of a large checking account.

The society of Reno (Nev.) cannot resemble that of Montecito in many ways, but being an expensive society it commands almost as much admiration from Mr. Woon:

The point is that for several years now Reno has known an influx of the socially élite, the wealthy leisured class, people who demand the best and pay for it. In meeting the needs of these rich people Reno has transformed itself from a Western frontier village to a smart little town which reflects quite pleasantly the wealth and culture that has been cast into it.

On the other hand, Mr. Woon tells us that the millionaires of Pasadena are "smug" and that "society in Los Angeles, on the whole, is more snobbish, and with less reason, than in any city I have visited." Pasadena ignores Los Angeles and Los Angeles looks down on people who are “in pictures." Mr. Woon, with what might seem fine democratic fervor, stands up for Hollywood. "Does a royal Prince of England, a deposed European King, a great French statesman, a Russian Grand Duke or an Italian Princess come to Los Angeles," he points out, "it irks 'society' to know that he or she is entertained, not by its own nabobs, but by the Fairbankses or Marion Davies or Constance Bennett or Gloria Swanson or William Randolph Hearst." Standing up for the outcasts of Beverly Hills has its compensations-you get to meet Grand Dukes.

It might be thought that when Mr. Woon's notions of history, culture and democracy are segregated little will be left in his book that is valuable. This would be a grave mistake. Even the notions referred to are significant, because they are so truly representative of the trend now making the most noise if a trend can make a noise in the Golden West. Mr. Woon believes, and the persons who are bossing the Golden West at the present moment believe, that the transformation from the old West of "boundless horizons, of poisoned wells and arrows, of unwashed Indians, of flies, rotgut whisky and canned food" to the new West of "railroads, ice factories, rooms with bath, picture theatres, ocean parks, alligator pears, concrete roads, automobiles, schools, cafeterias, cocktails, golf courses, Hollywoods, fly screens, Japanese valets, private swimming pools and public librars" has been all to the good. Certainly it has not been all to the bad.

Mr. Woon's volume is also an excellent guide book, with the aid of which the average visitor can really find out what it will interest him to see and how to see it. Mr. Woon has ventured into the deserts afoot, on horseback and by automobile. He knows how to camp out. He has an honest admiration for Yosemite and the Grand Canyon and for Death Valley, into which no smoothie should venture during the hot season, and he never once suggests that God

Western Wonderland must have spent a large sum of money in producing these places. His fund of information about restaurants and drinking places is already, as he himself says, outdated by repeal, but it remains an interesting picture of a vanished time. His account of what goes on in the Hollywood studios while a picture is being made is written from the inside, and is good and revealing if not especially critical. He has an honest detestation of the motion-picture director who has still to realize that he is something less than a god. He exposes briefly and bitingly the cults and shams of Los Angeles, even though he is taken in by some of those of Hollywood.

One wouldn't recommend Mr. Woon's book to be taken uncritically with a glass of water (or of any other fluid) before going to the Southwest. But the book's very imperfections are part of the Southwestern atmosphere. Its attitudes are attitudes the visitor had better understand if he wants to grasp the civilization of the land of sunshine and platitudes. Incidentally parts of it will be read with chuckles by San Franciscans who will mind less than ever the fact that Los Angeles has outstripped them in the race toward congestion and discomfort.