Quotes from Richard S. Prather

Well, you know, it ain't nothin' out of the ordinary happened to Olive and me. Happens hundreds of times every day. But we're still livin' in the dark ages, I guess. Cain't just go to a doctor and say you want an abortion. Be ten thousand people that's got nothin' better to do than trying to run everybody else's lives, and they'd put you in jail, or shoot you or somethin'.

If you've been around Los Angeles much, you know that desolate, unlighted strip of highway, Chavez Ravine Road, that stretches from Adobe Street to Elysian Park. It's solitary and lonely enough in the daytime.

I parked my distinctive Cadillac—I say distinctive not because it's beautiful but because it's a '41 convertible painted a God-awful yellow—across the street from the Spartan Apartment Hotel. I smoked a cigarette while I worried, then flipped the butt carelessly in the general direction of the well-kept grounds of the Wilshire Country Club. That's how mean I felt.

you're just as dead whether they were born in a mansion or a slum, use a Magnum or a zip gun.

managed a hamburger and malt at a Spring Street cafe, then found a spot between Third and Fourth on Broadway to park my sick-yellow Cadillac. I squeezed into the slot, stuck a nickel in the parking meter, and walked ten steps to the Hamilton Building wherein resides Sheldon Scott, Investigations, one flight up.

Robbie, at the moment, was very much full of hell. I was trying out a big Zoomar telescopic lens on my new Bell & Howell movie camera, holding on Robbie while she danced and pranced. She posed, flew around, wiggled a little. The word for it was: sensational.

L.A.'s new Central Receiving Hospital is a two-story brick building at 500 Loma Drive. I trotted up

the phone rang once. It was a gal with a thready voice asking that I please hurry to her address because tiny saucer-shaped men were on her roof, screeching down the chimney at her. I told her to call 2680 at City Hall: the police psycho detail; they got calls like that every day.

I'd heard much about the showcase and seen half a dozen dumps like it. It was one of those phonily "artistic" dives, where pale poets quote blank verse to blank people, where bands honk "modern" dissonances as background to sonorous verbiage. Here gathered painters and writers and poets and sculptors and all sorts of people who talked in lower case, like the showcase sign outside. It wasn't much of a place for laughs.

Manuel Guzmán Boulevard

It was a big white hotel on Wilshire, plush and expensive, its dining room one of the most popular spots in town among those who didn't mind paying four dollars for a hamburger. At the desk, I asked for Julie Tangier.

hilltop home on Durand Drive behind Hollywood

was sweating like a fat Eskimo at the equator.

We walked on to Don the Beachcomber's Bora Bora Lounge and went inside, sat at the Dagger Bar. Loana ordered a Cherry Blossom and I ordered, after slight hesitation, a Puka Puka.

For example, the Cha Cha—that's straight out of Haitian and Cuban voodooism, chacha being the name of a rattle used in voodoo ceremonies. Or mambo—the voodoo word for a priestess of the supernatural religion.

The Inferno was the newest and most fabulous of all the fabulous luxury hotels and casinos in what the home folks themselves refer to as Fabulous Las Vegas. The word when applied to the Inferno was no Hollywood superlative; it was an apt description. It was between the Desert Inn and the Flamingo on the desert end of the Strip. The building was huge, surrounded by twenty acres of landscaped grounds and parking space, and fronted with ten thousand square feet of velvety green lawn.

Hollywood, a few blocks south of the Palladium, and nearly as big as that super-sized dance hall. It was a low, white building, modern, with the front

Nichols Canyon Road winds up into the hills north of Hollywood, twisting and turning like a tortured snake, and the occasional houses perch on the tops of

I parked my Cad around the corner on Olive Street, walked down Seventh to the middle of the block, then took a left. I walked between the shoe store on my left and the cafeteria on my right, into the alley about twenty feet, and stopped right in front of the elevator door. The elevator was there on my right; all I had to do was climb inside and be merrily on my way.

His office was in the Sprocket Building on Figueroa.

as I drove away from the Spartan I flashed my chrome happily at a two-year-old Chevy parked around the corner on Clinton. On Sunset Boulevard I turned right and headed for Lyle's, where I often have my meager breakfast when I'm too lazy to cook my own mush.

He had a high, squeaky voice that sounded like a musical saw being played in a swamp full of mosquitoes, and his stiff gestures might have been Frankenstein's monster blowing kisses at King Kong.

downtown L.A., I drove along Broadway past Third Street, parked in a lot between Third and Fourth, and walked back to the Hamilton Building

Bimbos 365 Club, the theatre-restaurant on Columbus Avenue in San Francisco.