Recalling the Glory Days of Pecs on the Beach

Like Angels Flight and the Red Cars, Muscle Beach is an icon of Southern California during its golden age. Between 1934 and 1958, as we are reminded in “Remembering Muscle Beach” by Harold Zinkin with Bonnie Hearn (Angel City Press, $26.95, 128 pages), practitioners of what was then called “physical culture” gathered on a stretch of beach next to the Santa Monica Pier to pump iron, flex muscles and pull off acrobatic stunts to the amazement and delight of the crowds.

Zinkin, one of the original Muscle Beach bodybuilders, offers up a heartfelt but also richly informative memoir and a remarkable selection of evocative historic photographs in “Remembering Muscle Beach.” At first, the author recalls, the beach served as an impromptu gathering place for circus and vaudeville performers who were “looking for a soft place to land while working out.” Soon they were joined by Hollywood stuntmen, college gymnasts, and a whole new breed of athletes, men and women alike, who sculpted their bodies into works of art by honing their muscles.

Muscle Beach soon became a showplace and a hangout for celebrities. Jayne Mansfield and Jane Russell met their well-muscled husbands there, and Cecil B. DeMille selected Steve Reeves for the role of Hercules in 1957 after seeing him execute some of the classic maneuvers of the Muscle Beach repertoire--balancing three people on his shoulders, for example, and executing a double somersault while coming off the high rings. Thanks to the previously unpublished photographs assembled by Zinkin, all of these near-mythic moments of the distant past come fully and vividly alive.

By the time I first visited Muscle Beach as a child in the early ‘50s, the place was more of a honky-tonk than a Hollywood watering spot, but the bodybuilders were still hard at work. By 1958, however, Santa Monica began to regard the scantily clad and well-muscled men and women of Muscle Beach as something of an embarrassment. And so, when five weightlifters were accused of statutory rape after partying a bit too heartily with two underage girls--”Officials Stirred as Sex Orgy Bared,” read one newspaper headline--Santa Monica shut down Muscle Beach and reopened it a few years later as “Beach Park 4.”

“Remembering Muscle Beach” is a glorious exercise in nostalgia, but Zinkin also reminds us that the bodybuilders of the ‘30s and ‘40s helped to spark the passion for physical fitness that is one of Southern California’s gifts to popular culture. “At one time,” he points out, “we were social outlaws because we believed that people had to move.” Today, Zinkin and his fellow musclemen (and women) are remembered in a commemorative plaque at the original site of Muscle Beach.

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For anyone whose experience of the Mojave desert is limited to what can be seen from the freeway on a drive to Las Vegas or Palm Springs, “Desert: The Mojave and Death Valley” (Abrams, $49.50, 143 pages) will come as a surprise or perhaps even as a revelation.

With photographs by Jack Dykinga and text by botanist Janice Emily Bowers, “Desert” captures a series of quiet moments in a rich and strange place--a field of wildflowers that paints the desert in red and purple and yellow, the subtle tracery of a creosote bush against a canyon slope at dusk, one rock balanced impossibly on another under a delicate crescent moon. Even the dying stalks of a yucca, when photographed by Dykinga in extreme close-up, turn into a work of Abstract Expressionism, and the clusters of primrose that inexplicably appear on a barren sand dune seem like an image out of a Salvador Dali painting.

“Our job, mine and Jack Dykinga’s, is not to break your heart,” writes Bowers, who warns that the Mojave is endangered by the 4 million people who live within an hour’s drive. “Our job is to show you why we love the Mojave Desert and why you might love it too.”

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“In the West, and especially in America, Japanese-style gardens exist as a kind of ghost,” writes Kendall H. Brown in “Japanese-Style Gardens of the Pacific West Coast” (Rizzoli, $45, 176 pages). “While their forms are generally as fixed as stones set in the earth, Japanese-style gardens are strangely vaporous in their meaning.”

To capture these elusive meanings, Brown has focused on some 20 gardens up and down the Pacific coast, including the gardens at UCLA, the Huntington Library and the Tillman Water Reclamation Plant in Van Nuys, and she allows us to see them through the lens of photographer Melba Levick. Along the way, she sets each garden in a cultural and historical context--the Japanese Tea Garden at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, for example, is the oldest extant Japanese-style garden outside Japan, but the name was changed to Oriental Tea Garden during World War II, when the Japanese American staff was relocated to internment camps and replaced by Chinese women.

Indeed, by the time we reach the end of Brown’s book, the meaning of the Japanese-style garden is considerably less ghostly. “Because Japanese-style gardens are completely artificial by their very nature,” she explains, “they serve so well as ‘territories of play’ within the Western culture that gave rise to them.”

Or, to put it another way, the self-invention that is the essence of a Japanese-style garden is perfectly suited for Southern California, a place that has literally and famously invented itself.

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West Words looks at books related to California and the West. It runs every other Wednesday.