No writer in the 20th century captured the essence of Los Angeles like Raymond Chandler. His books -- notably the novels "The Big Sleep" and "Farewell, My Lovely" featuring Philip Marlowe, the prototype hard-boiled detective -- are recognized not just as seminal works of mystery, but among the best American writing of the period.
And yet Chandler never embraced Los Angeles. He frequently complained of people with "skins like burnt orange and smiles like gashes" and said L.A. had as much personality as a "paper cup."
What mattered most to Chandler was his wife, Cissy Pascal Chandler, 18 years older, who remained a stunning woman well into her 70s. They were constantly on the move, living in at least 35 locations in L.A. and Southern California.
"I think they could set up house almost anywhere as long as they had each other, and their cat," says Judith Freeman, the author of "The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved." 'The cat was hugely important to them. They adored Taki."
The Chandlers' affections for everyone else was, at best, muted. Chandler, who came to California in 1912, met Cissy Pascal through mutual friends. They had an affair, she divorced her husband and the couple married in 1924. Chandler was 35, and he thought Pascal was 43. Years passed before he learned her true age.
The age difference, however, was not a deterrent to their romance. Freeman, whose previous books include the novels "The Chinchilla Far" and "A Desert of Pure Feeling," thinks that Cissy shares equal billing in any examination of the influences on Chandler's work.
"L.A. is important to the writer Chandler became," she says. "Cissy is important to the man that Chandler became, and that man was invested with a kind of aura of being her white knight. And she gave that to Marlowe. I see it as so circular: the city, the writer and the wife who became his entry into this world of fable."
Freeman sought out the addresses where the Chandlers lived, hoping to find something of their essence. Many of the houses and apartment buildings were long gone and those that remained were often run down or unrecognizable. But she was able to capture something of what the Chandlers saw during their lifetimes by way of "big old 1920s apartment buildings" in the MacArthur Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, places where characters like Dolores Gonzales from "The Little Sister" might have lived.
"They still have neon signs on top of them that say The Bryson, The Ansonia, The Asbury or El Royale, and you can see those signs as you come down Wilshire Boulevard from blocks and blocks away," Freeman says. "They sort of hang over the city, these neon markers of these old apartment building. The names are wonderful -- that's pure Chandler. And Wilshire Boulevard threaded like a little necklace through so many of his residences, so many of the places he and Cissy lived. It was like Wilshire Boulevard was the corridor that connected them all, and these apartments are so evocative of Chandler's early stories and his novels."
As Los Angeles became Chandler's landscape, Cissy became a touchstone for much of his writing. Born in Perry, Ohio, in 1870, she moved to New York City at 20 and settled in Harlem. Cissy studied piano, smoked opium and posed for painters and photographers; a nude likeness of her was said to have been displayed for years at either the St. Regis Hotel or the Plaza in New York. Before she met Chandler, she had been married to a salesman with the "fleabitten" name of Leon Brown Porcher. She left Porcher for Julian Pascal, a classical pianist and composer, before meeting Chandler.
Much of Cissy Pascal Chandler's voice has been lost because Chandler burned her letters to him after she died in 1954. (He died in 1959). But Freeman thinks that when he began writing in the early 1930s --- he was then working as an executive with an oil company -- her presence was conveyed in the dialogue he employed and the themes that emerged.
"I see her in 'The Big Sleep' in the theme of nude photographs," Freeman says. "... I think that theme of nudity, her ability to be so comfortable in her skin, to be nude, was a revelation to Chandler. I feel that came into his novels, as did, possibly, her early drug use. ... I see some of the pieces of Cissy's past leaking into his plots."
While the Chandlers were great to and for each other (despite some affairs Chandler had, he was devoted to Cissy most of their time together), they were not a couple that socialized often, or well. While any biographer would give anything to meet their subjects, Freeman readily admits the Chandlers would not have been pleasant long-term company.
"I think they were rather eccentric and far too private and far too fussy and far too difficult," she says. "Chandler was too uneasy in his own skin, too brittle and abrupt. I think he was a difficult person. I think of them more as an aunt and uncle I knew when I was a child. I was very fond of them, I used to like to go to their house, but I wouldn't want to be left alone with them for a week. I don't think it would have been easy or a lot of fun, and I think that's why they, in a way, had a wonderful marriage because it was so insular. I don't think it was easy for them to allow anybody to spend much time with them." Additional Information:
'The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved'
Author: Judith Freeman
Publisher : Pantheon, $25.95, 353 pages
Capsule Review
Judith Freeman's 'The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved' examines an atypical love story between one of the great American writers of the 20th century and his paramour, Cissy Pascal Chandler. Freeman uses her imagination to conjure the Los Angeles the couple inhabited from the 1920s to the 1950s, traveling to the couple's former residences in hopes of finding something they left behind. While that quest turns out to be mostly symbolic, she does find inspiration; what emerges is an illuminating meditation about two people who loved each other, and not much else.
