perfumes in a seventeenth century boudoir is comparable to my mind in the presence of twilight.'
One might have answered 'What of it?' — but one just didn't.
As one of George's 'friends' put it: 'He's young. He'll get over it. What he needs is contact with harsh realities. At present his writing is tenuous, dreamy, monotonous — and he is like his writing.'
A Future Realistic Novelist
I HADN'T seen George for about a year —
And last night, strolling up Spring street in a sort of Morelian reverie myself, I was startled by hearing a familiar voice. The next moment I saw a tall young fellow in a taxi driver's uniform seize a burly, argumentative man by the coat lapels and growl menacingly:
'Come across with that taxi fare or I'll smack you in the nose, right here and now!'
The speaker was GEORGE MOREL.
By the end of 1925, George had switched his schedule to driving on the night shift while he took jobs as a copywriter, first for a local Army & Navy store and then for the Southern California Gas Company. It was through SoCal Gas that he got his first taste of managing publicity, advertising, and marketing, and landed himself another job as a radio announcer, in which he hosted a live show, introducing the public to classical music during the early-evening hours. SoCal Gas sponsored an hour-long program in the early days of radio. Dad, a gas company employee in advertising, possessed the perfect qualities for the job: a musical prodigy with an encyclopedic knowledge of the classics, he also had a beautiful speaking voice. His uniquely meticulous speech patterns, his ability to use just the right words and diction expressed with perfect intonation, rhyme, and meter, would remain his calling card for the rest of his life. George Hodel's voice was as unique and distinct as his fingerprints. However, after shutting off the radio mike for the evening, Dad put on his cab driver's hat and began looking for fares waiting outside the Biltmore.
Though not yet twenty, Father had already accumulated the life experiences of much older men and had led several lives: boy genius, musical prodigy, crime reporter, advertising writer, public relations officer, public radio announcer, editor of a self-published literary magazine, poet, intellectual elitist, and cab driver.
George and Dorero
Summer 1927
My mother's first love, and perhaps her only true love, was John Huston, the son of actor Walter Huston and later one of America's most celebrated film directors. They met in Los Angeles as teenagers, fell in love, married, and then set off on a joint artistic adventure to Greenwich Milage, where John painted and boxed and my mother wrote poetry. They both drank. Then they came back to Hollywood, where both would become contract screenwriters at the studios, socializing with the talented and beautiful people of the 1920s Los Angeles entertainment community. They lived in a bubble of all-night parties, all-night drinking, and all-night arguments.
By the 1930s, they'd become a pair of fighters in a ring with no timekeeper, no referee, and no bell to end the rounds. The alcohol and infidelities took their toll, and after an extended trip to England, Mother decided to quit the fight game for good. Huston would go on to many more fights with many more women, and he would win them all. After Mother's death, I found in her personal effects the following three paragraphs she had typewritten on a single lonely page, about John Huston:
All his life he was fascinated by boxers. He also loved bullfighters even before he read Hemingway. He had a brief enthusiasm for six-day bicycle racers and even looked into dance marathons and flagpole sitters. But boxers were the best specimens he felt that the race of man had produced.
The first time he tried to tell me about all this, he was 19 years old. I was 19, too, and we were at a party where this shocking thing had just happened. I mean, it was shocking to me, but it left John in an exalted and unusually talkative mood. There was blood all over the floor and on some of the furniture, and my face was green and I was trying not to be sick.
'You're missing the whole point,' John said. He pulled me to my feet and steered me to the front porch. With the sweet sick smell blowing away and everything outdoors swinging slowly back in focus again, I said weakly, 'I am?'
My mother had known my father, George Hill Hodel, for a long time. They had met in 1920s Los Angeles, before Mother married John Huston. In fact, my father and John Huston were very good friends in their youth and they frequently double-dated. At the time, John was dating Emilia, an attractive young woman who worked at the then brand-new downtown public library, and George was dating my mother. Then they switched, and George became enamored of Emilia and John of Dorothy. After John and Dorothy married and ran off to New York, George and Emilia continued their romance, and together they opened a rare books shop in downtown Los Angeles.
Father had always had a strong love of photography. During the mid-1920s he spent much of his free time photographing people and places around Los Angeles. He had his own darkroom at home, where he would process his film. In 1925 he was asked to select the best of these photographs, and a Pasadena art gallery gave him a one-man show.
Another close friend of both my father and Huston during this period was a young Italian artist poet, Fred Sexton, who socialized and partied with both of them. Sexton also drove a taxi in those early days and made money by running a floating crap game. Fifteen years later, in 1941, Huston would put his friend Fred Sexton's artistic talents to work by having him create the sculpture prop 'the Black Bird' for his film
By the summer of'27, Emilia was pregnant with my half-brother Duncan, who was born in March of 1928. Duncan visited us only on rare occasions through the decades, and was a relative stranger to me when I saw him again in San Francisco in the days following Father's death.
With their infant son Duncan, George and Emilia moved north to San Francisco, where George enrolled in the pre-med program at the University of California at Berkeley. During his undergraduate years he got a job as a longshoreman and again drove a cab and learned the city streets and its night people and their secret haunts.
In the spring of '32, George returned to writing, when the
