When Dogs Had Their Day in Bulgaria

Talk about the long paws of Disney. Times staff writer Larry Gordon visited friends in Sofia, Bulgaria, where he mentioned Disney’s proposal to decorate the HOLLYWOOD sign with giant black spots to promote the movie “101 Dalmatians.”

Gordon’s friends were puzzled that Disney was turned down. They advised him to check a famous landmark in Sofia that still bore some of the spots that advertised the movie there. The markings dotted the top of what was once the holiest site of Bulgarian communism--the stately mausoleum of the country’s first Marxist leader, Georgi Dimitrov (see photo).

“Dimitrov would have been turning over in his tomb--if he were still inside,” Gordon noted. “However, his embalmed body was removed and cremated in 1990 and the tomb has remained empty ever since.”

“Dalmatians,” by the way, was big box office in Bulgaria. As a symbol of capitalism’s triumph, the cashiers at one Sofia restaurant even donned Dalmatian ears. Of course, it was a McDonald’s.

ANIMALS, SPOTTED AND UNSPOTTED: In a campaign with a Hollywood theme, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals is pointing out that plenty of cats and dogs are waiting to be adopted (see accompanying). The sexually impartial billboards, a free creation by HMH/Critical Mass Group of Culver City, also use the message “Some L.A. Males Aren’t Interested in Directing.”

FASTEST GUN IN L.A.: Next time someone says L.A. has no history, point out that gunfighter Wyatt Earp lived his final years here, dying with his boots off in 1929 in a bungalow on West 17th Street.

I’ve talked about Earp before. But new details of his L.A. period have emerged in a meticulously researched biography by Casey Tefertiller. Some tidbits:

* Earp wrote to the Los Angeles Herald in 1903, denying a story that had him “being bashed by a midget Mountie” during the Klondike gold rush.

* In his 50s, Earp reputedly led a series of secret “missions for the Los Angeles Police Department,” in which he “illegally chased fugitives into Mexico and brought them back to stand trial.”

* Earp, a lifelong gambler, was arrested at the old Auditorium Hotel (across the street from Pershing Square) for his alleged role in running a crooked faro game. The charges were later dropped.

* In 1910, Earp was reportedly asked to disperse a mob during a threatened run on the L.A. bank of Isaias Hellman. Rather than face the riotous depositors, Earp rode in a wagon to a nearby ironworks, “filled the sacks with iron fillers the size of $20 gold pieces” and delivered them to the bank in full view of the angry crowd, announcing he had $1 million. End of crisis.

“I guess I’m growing old when I got to ride shotgun on a lot of bridge washers from an ironworks just to convince a lot of damned fools,” a friend recalled him saying. Earp was then 61.

L.A. INSULT OF THE WEEK: In Paul Erdman’s novel “The Set-Up,” a U.S. banking executive is arrested in Switzerland, where he is told by authorities: “In this country we have a legal system that works because of the integrity of the people who work within it. You are in Switzerland, not Los Angeles, Mr. Black.”

Smile when you say that, podner. (I’m in my Wyatt Earp mode.)

miscelLAny

An Oakland Raiders billboard that decries violence was on display in Chatsworth, an ironic message in as much as the Raiders used to brag about their “lawless” reputation. Anyway, the billboard’s message has been torn. Though it originally said, “Say No to Violence,” it now appears to proclaim, “Say . . . violence.”