West of Eden: An American Place by Jean Stein review – snakes in the Hollywood hills

A sweeping history of Tinseltown lays bare its murky, hellish origins

When John Steinbeck relocated the story of our expulsion from paradise to California, he called his novel East of Eden. Jean Stein’s moral compass points the other way, but her oral history of Hollywood – a saga, like Steinbeck’s version of Genesis, about family squabbles and sins passed down, along with money, from one generation to the next – is also set outside the happy, innocent garden. The Pacific sunset on the cover of Stein’s book looks hellish, and the Hollywood sign, seen from behind, might be starting to spell the word “hollow”.

Southern California has its own myth of origins, which is less about tending God’s earth than redesigning or ravaging it to extract wealth. Stein’s assembled witnesses therefore begin by recalling two predatory capitalists, the “twisted godfathers” of Los Angeles. William Mulholland irrigated the desert by stealing water from neighbouring states, and Edward Doheny planted derricks to suck up oil on vacant lots all over the city. Doheny’s fortune placed him above the law – a bribery scandal was hushed up, as were the suspicious deaths of his son and a male friend – although he remained afraid of infernal retribution: a Catholic church built with his donations was nicknamed “Doheny’s fire escape”.

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