l subsidiaries, a brewery, two airlines, immense real-estate holdings, a major motion-picture studio, and an electronics and missile operation-run by a man whose modus operandi most closely resembles that of a character in The Big Sleep. By the time Slouching Towards Bethlehem appeared, Didion had already won acclaim for her piece by the same title, published in The Saturday Evening Post. That the Hughes “communications center” should lie here in the dull sunlight of Hammett-Chandler country is one of those circumstances that satisfy one’s suspicion that life is indeed a scenario, for the Hughes empire has been in our time the only industrial complex in the world-involving, over the years, machinery manufacture, foreign oil-too. 7000 Romaine looks itself like a faded movie exterior, a pastel building with chipped art moderne detailing, the windows now either boarded or paned with chicken-wire glass and, at the entrance, among the dusty oleander, a rubber mat that reads welcome.Īctually no one is welcome, for 7000 Romaine belongs to Howard Hughes, and the door is locked. They once processed fan photographs, say, or knew Jean Harlow’s manicurist.
We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. Because Paramount and Columbia and Desilu and the Samuel Goldwyn studios are nearby, many of the people who live around here have some tenuous connection with the motion-picture industry. Slouching Towards Bethlehem By Joan Didion Innocence ends when we are stripped of the delusion one likes oneself. “and warehouses and two-family bungalows.
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