His suite had piles of books borrowed from the library downstairs, and exposure to the distant ocean, and, at its opposite exposure, the chaparral of the local hills. At night, you could see signs of tiny settlements poking up among the orange groves, the distant lights of Hollywood like a diamond bar pin, and the nearer lights, those of all downtown Los Angeles, the thriving center of culture, commerce, and transportation, were an unimpressive haul of jewels, not quite as many as could be purchased by looting the treasury of any prairie town. Los Angeles had not yet found its own identity, though its supporters were sure that day was coming; as of yet, it had the soul of the Midwest. Since it hadn’t cultivated any morals of its own, it borrowed those of the Midwest, too. There were few dinner parties, no frenzies in the street about the local movie stars (Los Angeles was unsure if it wanted to be known for either frenzy or movies); no bookstores sold Harper’s or other upsetting magazines, clergy ate for free at cafés that otherwise discouraged dawdling over coffee and pie, and the beds at the Club were single bunks. Everyone seemed to know and care about one another’s business.

When the winds were blowing properly, the bachelor in Suite E, blessed with exposures on both sides, could put down his violin and his books and lie awake for hours, listening to the songs of coyotes among the smells of sage and orange blossoms. Dawn came accompanied by gulls and the tang of sea spray. But he rarely slept through the night, staying awake instead and thinking that if Los Angeles were a village, then, by definition, he was the village idiot.

Nine blocks away, on a side street whose name no married man could quite recall when asked, was the Engstrom, the ladies’ hotel. Its manager, its owner, and its detectives were recent émigrés with talent not just for hospitality but also for tact and continental decorum. Once, a newly hired night manager had turned from a woman who had just signed the register to the man escorting her, and said, “It’s amazing, Miss Jones, how much your uncle looks like Adolph Zukor,” and he was promptly sacked, driven to the railway station, and never heard from again.

It was a quiet place. Thus it was without precedent that at dawn on Sunday morning, November 12, 1916, a woman ran screaming through the lobby, and, still screaming, to the street. That it was Edna Purviance, an actress with something of a reputation to keep, made it even more surprising.

She ran, one hand to her mouth, the other holding shut her wrapper, which she had thrown on over an explosion of whatever had come to hand first—men’s wool trousers from the Mutual wardrobe department, a pajama top, boots.