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sex, she entertained the “folks” with slide shows and healing sessions. She promised not fire and brimstone, but the overwhelming bliss of God’s love as she presided over an enormous congregation that was a stew of life, a fantastic human muddle, a “heart-hungry” multitude. In pageants at her Angelus Temple she wore filmy, flimsy dresses and chased the Devil with his own pitchfork.
    L.A. was a beacon to many, a nightmare for others, but already a phenomenon, not so much evoked as endlessly commented upon, by both locals and Easterners who arrived to work or indulge in a couple of weeks of intellectual tourism in this bewildering American city.
    “It is a young city, crude, wildly ambitious, growing; it has halitosis and osmidrosis; and to kill the stench it gargles religious soul-wash and rubs holy toilet-water and scented talc between its toes,” wrote Louis Adamic, a Slovenian immigrant who worked in the harbor pilot’s office at Long Beach. Great ocean liners glided behind him while he composed magazine sketches that established him as the city’s underground prophet and its first Boswell. “Los Angeles is America. A jungle. Los Angeles grew up suddenly, planlessly .”
    The city that now drew the eyes of the world seemed to have emerged out of nowhere, without much of a past. “The first 100 years were a kind of prehistory in which it moved from pueblo to cow town to hick town at a leisurely pace,” said Carey McWilliams, who came to L.A. from Colorado as a young man in the early 1920s and in time became the most influential historian of the city in this period. “Then suddenly, in the 1920s, it achieved great-city status through a process of forced growth based on booster tactics and self-promotion.”
    It’s true that L.A. evolved without an ordered architectural scheme such as Baron Haussmann brought to Paris or Christopher Wren to certain parts of central London, but in another way the growth of the city had been planned only too well —plotted rather , by a small group of men determined to create a metropolis and make money. Harry Chandler, generalissimo of the boom and publisher of the Los Angeles Times , and General Moses Sherman, the owner of the streetcar system, were among those who formed America’s first Chamber of Commerce and established land syndicates so they could sell real estate, drawing people to the city by constantly promoting merits of climate and crimelessness. Chandler and Sherman, for instance, acquired 108,000 acres of land in the San Fernando Valley before sponsoring the building of Mulholland’s aqueduct from the Owens River Valley. The aqueduct took the water from the Owens River Valley farmers and terminated, not in Los Angeles itself, but in the San Fernando Valley, thus irrigating the syndicate’s lands and earning its members in excess of $100 million. This iniquitous plot was kept secret for years but would in time form the basis of Robert Towne’s screenplay for the 1974 movie Chinatown . Towne set his story in 1937 so he could utilize the shapes of the private-eye story, a genre that didn’t exist in 1905–1913, when these events took place. Chinatown has taken on a totemic power; it’s a great movie, but misleading as history, a metaphor on many levels for the ways in which L.A.’s past tends to be hidden, erased, forgotten, rewritten, or present in our minds only through the filter of fiction. Chinatown does more than switch the dates; its replacement of social context by fictional construct creates a shimmer, a stylish and seductive surface beneath which run depths never spoken of. Thus the film’s true subject is not the mystery that hero Jake Gittes tries to unravel, but the way Los Angeles thinks about itself.
    “Los Angeles is a nut town run by rich bastards who hate the Wobblies like poison,” somebody said to Louis Adamic, drawing attention to the oddity that, since the dynamiting of the Times building in 1910, this place of monotonous sunshine