COVER STORY : Literary Legends : Over the decades, the Valley has been home to some of Hollywood’s best and brightest scribes. The picturesque, uncrowded setting inspired some noted success stories.

For almost a century, writers have been coming to Southern California for the same reason that Willie Sutton robbed banks: because it’s where the money is.

Hollywood, which includes such major Valley-based institutions as Warner Bros., Universal, Disney and the new DreamWorks SKG, has caused writers to salivate since its beginnings. By 1915, playwright George Bernard Shaw had asked his secretary to create a special file folder for his lucrative dealings with the faraway movie moguls. Indeed when an elderly Shaw was asked if, given a choice, he would have written for the screen instead of the stage, his answer was an unequivocal, “Yes.”

A silent version of “Tarzan of the Apes” had already been made when its creator Edgar Rice Burroughs came West in 1919 and stayed to found the community of Tarzana. And although the Westside has always had more cachet than the Valley in Los Angeles’ potent geographical mythology, writers from F. Scott Fitzgerald to Harlan Ellison have opted to live here. The reasons are clear to anyone who has made the choice. The Valley has mountain views and marvelous canyons, with deer, eucalyptus and swooping hawks. And it’s close to the studios, relatively uncrowded and cheap--cheaper than Santa Monica anyway.

At least one man who regularly writes about the Valley--David M. Pierce--invariably takes its name in vain, using it as a verbal sneer in such novels as “Down in the Valley.” But Pierce, who writes mysteries about a low-rent detective in Studio City, actually lives in Paris and, thus, probably can’t appreciate the subtler glories of Ventura Boulevard.

Many of America’s best novelists wrote in and about the Valley. James M. Cain, for instance, wrote “The Postman Always Rings Twice” in a rented house in Burbank.

Cain was almost 40 when he set out for Los Angeles in 1931, in full flight from the New York literary scene that he felt numbed his talent. As biographer Roy Hoopes points out, Cain hoped to make a killing and find his subject matter in Southern California. By the 1940s, Cain would command $2,500 a week as a screenwriter, largely because of his novels, not his prowess writing films. And he didn’t really buckle down to that first novel until he washed out as a writer at Paramount, trying to rework “The Ten Commandments” and other unlikely projects for $400 a week.

Let go by Paramount, Cain moved his wife, Elina, and two stepchildren from a pricey Hollywood hotel into a white-frame California Craftsman at 616 E. 10th St. (now South Bel Aire Drive) in Burbank. Built in 1920, the house had a wrought-iron fence, a welcoming front porch and rent even a free-lance writer could afford--$45 a month.

Like most first-raters, Cain had an acute sense of place, and “The Postman Always Rings Twice” is suffused with the sights, sounds and sensibility of the rural communities of the Valley during the worst of the Depression. Tarzana-booster Burroughs tended to see the Valley the way the country mouse did--as a safe place whose hardy pleasures were far superior to such Westside vices as cocaine. But Cain had a darker view of the rural Valley. He saw Hicksville, California: He saw hell.

Cain knew the territory. He loved to jump into his 1932 Ford roadster, complete with rumble seat, and take long, slow drives. The road to Ventura was a favorite route. At a gas station near Thousand Oaks, Cain first saw the model for Cora in “Postman,” the restless wife who conspires with vagrant Frank Chambers to kill her husband for his gas station and luncheonette. Cain once described this pump-wielding siren in an interview: “Always this bosomy-looking thing comes out--commonplace, but sexy, the kind you have ideas about. We always talked while she filled up my tank. One day I read in the paper where a woman who runs a filling station knocks off her husband. Can it be this bosomy thing? I go by and sure enough, the place is closed.”

1933 was a lean year for Cain. He made $3,000. But working at top speed, typing with two fingers, he finished the novel he originally called “Bar-B-Que.” Publisher Alfred A. Knopf gave Cain a $500 advance and asked him to retitle it “For Love or Money.” Cain balked. “There is only one rule I know on a title,” he wrote. “It must sound like the author and not like some sure-fire product of the title factory.” Knopf went along with Cain’s proposed substitute, with its allusion to the British postal tradition of ringing twice to announce the mail.

Published in 1934, the book was America’s first modern bestseller. A major critic trumpeted it as “the most engrossing, most unlaydownable book that I have any memory of.” Others put Cain in the same literary pantheon as Shakespeare and Tolstoy. The steamy little volume sold like crazy, and MGM paid $25,000 for the rights.

By 1934, Cain was working on a second book, the story of a murderous Glendale housewife and her insurance man--”Double Indemnity.” And, convinced he needed something larger, grander and closer to the heart of Hollywood than a rented two-bedroom cottage in Burbank, Cain began house hunting. He settled on what he described as a “Tudor castle” in the Hollywood Hills. It cost him $7,500.

In 1993, Ken Green, director of corporate communications at Disney, bought Cain’s former Burbank residence, a fixer-upper he is now renovating. A former newsman and author of two books of nonfiction, Green loves the view of the foothills, the big yard and the thought of living in a house that gave birth to an American classic, a fact duly noted in the sales material by an especially literate real estate agent. “Maybe I’ll catch some of Cain’s creativity by living here,” Green mused.

As Cain and others have proved, the Valley is rich soil for literature, a complex setting that encompasses natural disasters worthy of the Old Testament, including hills that sometimes burst into flame; sleazy sexual transactions on Sepulveda Boulevard; lives of privilege south of the Boulevard; the struggles of immigrant families with more children than money and the very different dramas that mark story conferences at Warner Bros. or NBC.

One of the Valley’s oddest landmarks--Forest Lawn Memorial Park--inspired one of the great little books about the region, Evelyn Waugh’s “The Loved One.” According to Waugh biographer Martin Stannard, the English satirist discovered Forest Lawn during a visit to Hollywood in 1947, occasioned by MGM’s eagerness to obtain the rights to “Brideshead Revisited.” Given the coldness of Waugh’s eye, his disdain for all things American and his preoccupation with theological last things, including death, it is no wonder that Waugh took to Forest Lawn like a sadist to a masochist.

“I am entirely obsessed,” Waugh confessed to his agent. Waugh was so mesmerized by Glendale’s Disneyland of death that he visited it several times a week, becoming chummy with the chief embalmer. Waugh saw close up the macabre magic that the embalmer worked on the “loved ones,” as the deceased were invariably called.

Aldous Huxley had fictionalized Forest Lawn in his 1939 novel “After Many a Summer Dies the Swan.” But Waugh studied the Glendale necropolis with unprecedented zeal. He pored over his personal copy of “Embalming Techniques,” autographed by author Hubert Eaton, manager of Forest Lawn, who may have been lulled by years of working with the dead into forgetting how dangerous a live writer can be. Waugh praised, or damned, Forest Lawn as “the only thing in California that is not a copy of something else.” Featuring embalmer extraordinaire Mr. Joyboy, “The Loved One” was published in 1948. It satirized with Swiftian savagery a Southland--indeed an America--that euphemizes death and treats it as a tourist attraction.

A number of writers are buried in Forest Lawn, including Oz creator L. Frank Baum (who lived in Hollywood) and Theodore Dreiser. The author of “An American Tragedy” lived in Glendale during the early 1920s and again following his return to Southern California in 1939, during the years when he pinned his financial hopes on selling “Sister Carrie” to a major studio and privately blasted the movie business as full of Jews. According to Otto Freidrich’s “City of Nets,” Dreiser’s Communist friends were appalled that he was to be interred in the Glendale cemetery. But his young widow assured them he had recently been to a service there and thought it was one of the loveliest places on earth.

Inevitably, writers in Hollywood tend to write about Hollywood. The first movie novel--”Love Story of a Movie Star”--was published in 1907 and was set in New York, then the home of the movies, according to writer Carolyn See, a Topanga resident who wrote her UCLA doctoral dissertation on the Hollywood novel. “By 1963 there were way over 500, and they’ve been breeding like rabbits ever since,” she says. Two of the best, Nathanael West’s “The Day of the Locust” and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s unfinished “The Last Tycoon,” have strong Valley associations.

West, whose novels include the haunting “Miss Lonelyhearts,” came to Southern California in 1935. As biographer Jay Martin recounts, West moved into a cheap hotel in Hollywood, the Pa-Va-Sed on North Ivar Street. There, West lived among aspiring actresses who turned tricks on the side, stunt men, extras and other Hollywood non-stars, the models for the characters that fill his apocalyptic novel.

West, who had known job hell as a New York hotel manager, was thrilled to finally get a studio position in January, 1936. Not for West the intellectual pretensions of MGM and the other majors. West was hired at $200 a week at Republic Productions in Studio City, off Ventura Boulevard in what is now the CBS Studios Center.

A minor with a vengeance, Republic was known as Repulsive Pictures. But West was happy to be there, as only someone who had been living on the largess of his brother-in-law--writer S.J. Perelman--could be. Other fine writers worked at Republic, including Horace McCoy, author of “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?”, and West didn’t have to worry that his creative energy would be sapped writing such Repulsive pictures as “Jim Hanvey--Detective.”

As Tom Dardis points out in “Some Time in the Sun,” his history of writers in Hollywood, West had all but finished “The Day of the Locust” by the time he moved up to RKO in mid-1938. “The money he had been receiving from Republic had, in effect, underwritten the time necessary to write the novel,” Dardis writes. West was at the low end of the screenwriting scale--his friend Scott Fitzgerald, who never really mastered the art, was getting $1,250 a week at MGM in 1938. But West made far more cranking out B movies than he ever earned as a writer of fiction. Random House advanced him $500 against royalties for “The Day of the Locust,” which came out in 1939. He earned only $300 in royalties on sales of fewer than 1,500 copies.

In 1940, West was making $400 a week at RKO. That was enough to allow him to marry Eileen McKenney, the sibling subject of Ruth McKenney’s “My Sister Eileen.” In December, the newlyweds moved into a fine, almost new house at 12706 Magnolia Blvd. in North Hollywood. According to West’s biographer, the house looked like a grand farmhouse, with brick walls a foot thick and an open-beamed ceiling. Set on two acres among groves of walnut and pear trees, the house remained on the site until it was torn down in the 1980s.

The North Hollywood home had a very special place in the Wests’ affections. It was, after all, a first house in a happy marriage. Ruth McKenney described the pair as “serious, as all young marrieds are, about furniture and china.” They bought a flowered chintz sofa, pricey Spode dinnerware, a dozen highball glasses from Brooks Brothers. The house was ideal for entertaining their friends, including Fitzgerald, who had had them to his place in Encino. Fitzgerald had moved to the Valley in November, 1938. His two-story guest house at 5521 Amestoy Ave. was on the grounds of the Encino estate of actor Edward Everett Horton (the house was torn down when the Ventura Freeway was built). Here, far from the boozy parties at the legendary Garden of Allah hotel, Fitzgerald settled down to writing his novel about Monroe Stahr, based on MGM Wunderkind Irving Thalberg. Always the eager pedagogue, Fitzgerald also began educating gossip columnist Sheila Graham, his lover, in her very own “college of one.”

As Matthew J. Bruccoli writes in his Fitzgerald biography, “Some Sort of Epic Grandeur,” Fitzgerald paid $200 a month for the house. While there, he hired 20-year-old Frances Kroll Ring as his secretary. Ring, who published a charming Fitzgerald-and-me memoir called “Against the Current” in 1985, now lives in Beverly Hills. As she recalls, the troubled writer’s time in Encino was busy and peaceful, if not happy (“happy is such a big word,” she notes). Fitzgerald worked hard on his novel, usually writing in bed. “He was in good spirits and productive,” Ring says. For much of the time, he was also sober, able to slake his thirst for gin with bottle after bottle of Coke.

Some time in 1939, Fitzgerald invited writer John O’Hara to lunch in Encino and asked if he would like to read what Fitzgerald had written so far. After swearing O’Hara to secrecy, Fitzgerald looked on nervously as his friend read the manuscript. Fitzgerald, O’Hara later recalled, “sat there tortured . . . because he did not know that my deadpan was partly due to my being an extremely slow reader of good writing, and partly because this was such good writing. . . . When I had read it I said, ‘Scott, don’t take any more movie jobs until you’ve finished this. You work so slowly and this is so good, you’ve got to finish it. It’s real Fitzgerald.’ ”

Unwilling to swelter through another Valley summer, Fitzgerald moved in May, 1940, to an apartment in Hollywood, around the corner from Graham’s. On Dec. 21, 1940, he died of a heart attack there. He was 44. The following day, Nathanael West, who had been hunting in Mexico with his bride, was driving back to Los Angeles when he failed to stop at a tricky intersection near El Centro. Both West, 37, and his 27-year-old wife died in the crash. Their new home of less than a month was still full of unpacked boxes.

The Hollywood magnet is stronger for writers than it ever was. And today, in an era that worships the popular arts, people who write for the movies and TV are often respected, not simply envied--gravy no writer expected in Cain’s day. The writers of the 1930s and ‘40s routinely refer to themselves in their letters as prostitutes, and some apparently adopted the tricks of the oldest profession to get through their days at the studio. An interviewer asked Faulkner, after he had won the Noble Prize for Literature, how he was able to stand his two-year stint at Warner Bros. Easy, said Faulkner. “I just kept telling myself, ‘They’re gonna pay me Saturday, they’re gonna pay me Saturday.’ ” It could be the screenwriter’s official mantra.

Just as Ayn Rand and Leon Uris did earlier, Harlan Ellison, Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle all live and write in the Valley. So does Robert Crais, 41, whose Elvis Cole mysteries are imbued with this time, this place. When Cole, a tough but puckish private eye, visits a client in “Free Fall,” he observes: “Jennifer Sheridan lived in one of those stucco ant farms just off the freeway in Woodland Hills that caters to attractive young singles, attractive young couples, and the not-so-young-but-almost-as-attractive newly divorced. There would be a lot of grab-ass around the pool. . . .”

Fresh out of Louisiana State University, Crais moved to the Valley in 1976, hoping to parlay early success writing short stories into a television career. To prepare, he dissected scripts bought at a local bookshop and began analyzing TV shows minute-by-minute as they aired--much as Fitzgerald did, hoping to unlock the secrets of movie writing. Crais was more successful. “I sold the second script I ever wrote, to ‘Baretta.’ ”

Crais, who lives in Sherman Oaks, worked happily for TV until the mid-1980s when, he recalls, “the old dreams began to reassert themselves.” Inventing the life of Elvis Cole allows Crais a freedom he didn’t have as a TV writer. But he looks back on his work in that medium as a valuable training ground. “It was a great place to learn and practice character, nuance, structure and plot.”

Hyperion will publish Crais’ fifth Cole novel, “Voodoo River,” this summer.

William F. Nolan is a prolific West Hills-based writer, perhaps best known as co-author of “Logan’s Run.” Nolan writes sci-fi, fantasy, mysteries, essays, biographies, even poems, and he sees the Valley-convenient entertainment industry as a blessing, not a curse--much as West did.

“The problem with people like Faulkner is that they don’t understand collaborative writing,” says Nolan, who often writes in the front corner booth at Cable’s restaurant in Woodland Hills. Perhaps no writer failed to understand movie writing as profoundly as Bertolt Brecht, whose stillborn Hollywood career included a screenplay titled “Boy Meets Girl, So What?”

Writing for TV and the movies is simply different from writing for yourself or the ages, says Nolan. Different and more lucrative. But it’s his own writing, including the novel he is finishing now--a mystery featuring Raymond Chandler called “The Marble Orchard”--that is Nolan’s oxygen.

“I love writing,” he says. “You’re able to create your own world. You can kill off people you hate. You can have people you love turn out to be heroes. You can create beautiful women you’d never meet in real life. You’re God. Being God is fun. “

Hollywood Novels

Writer Carolyn See, who wrote her UCLA doctoral dissertation on the Hollywood novel, says the four best are Ben Hecht’s “I Hate Actors!” (1944), Ludwig Bemelmans’ “Dirty Eddie” (1947), Gavin Lambert’s “Inside Daisy Clover” (1965) and Charlie Hauck’s “Artistic Differences” (1993).