Life in Los Angeles
About 1929, Mooney established himself in the Los Angeles area. Soon to become a fixture among the new wave of aviation promoters and fliers, he mingled with oilman Erle Halliburton, actor Ramon Novarro, aviator Moye W. Stephens, and aviatrix Florence "Pancho" Barnes. Also befriending him was Harry Hay, later a gay activist, with whom he argued politics and human rights issues.
About 1930, Mooney met travel writer Richard Halliburton, author of the best-selling The Royal Road to Romance (1925), The Glorious Adventure (1927) and New Worlds To Conquer (1929). The last, and most gifted, in a line of secretaries Halliburton had taken on over his career, Mooney most notably assisted him in preparing for publication The Flying Carpet (1932), Seven League Boots (1935) - these among the last great road narratives of the classic travel book era, and the two Books of Marvels, arguably the two most influential young adult travel books ever written (The Occident ; The Orient ). Independently, Mooney assisted ex-Nazi Kurt Ludecke in writing the 833-page I Knew Hitler (1937), an early study of the Fuehrer and "a masterpiece of political self-vindication".
In 1937, when Halliburton decided to settle down in Laguna Beach, California, Mooney suggested to him that he contract William Alexander Levy, a recent graduate of the New York University School of Architecture, to design and build a house for him. Called Hangover House because it stood on a ridge some six hundred feet above the Pacific Ocean and precipitously overlooked Aliso Canyon, Mooney managed its construction. Of concrete and steel, the innovative house included such features as a dumbwaiter, heatilator, and a bastion-like retaining wall. Today architectural historians consider it among the early masterpieces of modern residential housing design in Southern California.
Read more about this topic: Paul Mooney (writer)
Famous quotes containing the words los angeles, life, los and/or angeles:
“If Los Angeles is not the one authentic rectum of civilization, then I am no anatomist. Any time you want to go out again and burn it down, count me in.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“... when you make it a moral necessity for the young to dabble in all the subjects that the books on the top shelf are written about, you kill two very large birds with one stone: you satisfy precious curiosities, and you make them believe that they know as much about life as people who really know something. If college boys are solemnly advised to listen to lectures on prostitution, they will listen; and who is to blame if some time, in a less moral moment, they profit by their information?”
—Katharine Fullerton Gerould (1879–1944)
“If Los Angeles has been called “the capital of crackpots” and “the metropolis of isms,” the native Angeleno can not fairly attribute all of the city’s idiosyncrasies to the newcomer—at least not so long as he consults the crystal ball for guidance in his business dealings and his wife goes shopping downtown in beach pajamas.”
—For the State of California, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, ended at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire through the community, and in a sense this is true. The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled.”
—Joan Didion (b. 1935)