Two true loves

"I used to like this town. A long time ago. There were trees along Wilshire Boulevard. Beverly Hills was a country town. Westwood was bare hills and lots offering at eleven hundred dollars and no takers. Hollywood was a bunch of frame houses on the inter-urban line," Raymond Chandler wrote, in the voice of his detective hero, Philip Marlowe, in 1949. "Los Angeles was just a big dry sunny place with ugly homes and no style, but good-hearted and peaceful. It had the climate they yap about now. People used to sleep out on porches. Little groups who thought they were intellectual used to call it the Athens of America."

Chandler first came to Los Angeles in 1912, a time so distant in the city's history as to seem almost unreal. The population had only just climbed above 300,000. L.A. was still shaking from the dynamiting of The Times by the McNamara brothers, and Clarence Darrow was on trial for alleged bribery. William Mulholland's titanic aqueduct was incomplete and no water had as yet come from the Owens River Valley. Speedy, efficient streetcars connected downtown with the recently incorporated city of Hollywood and the distant beach towns. Chandler himself belonged to a little intellectual group, the Optimists, formed by his friend Warren Lloyd and meeting weekly at Lloyd's house on South Bonnie Brae Street. Music was played, poetry declaimed, literature and philosophy discussed.

At one of these soirees, Chandler first met Julian Pascal, a concert pianist and music professor, and Pascal's wife, Cissy. "Sexy and experienced, witty and confident, she was everything a young man could want in an older woman," writes Judith Freeman in "The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved." "He was sexually repressed and shy, inexperienced with women. Little wonder he found her irresistible."

And irresistible she was. "Cissy was a raging beauty, a strawberry blonde with skin I used to love to touch," Chandler would say later. "I don't know how I ever managed to get her." It took awhile: Cissy, twice-married, a former New York model who liked to do housework in the nude, kept him at arm's length at first.