The Frustration of Choosing Photos for a Book

This is Isaias W. Hellman sitting in the president's office at the Farmers and Merchants Bank in Los Angeles. I think the photo was taken around 1905. Note the telephone on the top of the desk.

I’ve been pulling together photos for possible use in Towers of Gold and once again I have run up against the bane of biographers: missing information.

The man I am writing about, Isaias W. Hellman, was a pack rat. If you delve into his papers at the California Historical Society, you can find all sorts of minutiae: newspaper receipts from 1890, dressmakers' receipts from the same period, plumbing bills, etc.

Then why are there so few pictures from his life?

I can not find a single picture of his parents or a portrait of him and his wife and three children. I have one picture – only one – of one of his daughters as a young girl, but none of his son and older daughter.

Since Hellman came to Los Angeles in 1859, this may not seem so unusual. It’s hard to find photos from that far back. Yet that logic falls apart when I realize I have a copy of his report card from Germany from 1854. If papers like that are still around, where are his photos of early Los Angeles?

One explanation is that a lot of his early photos burned up during the 1906 earthquake and fire. While Hellman’s house on Franklin Street was spared, the Wells Fargo Bank building on Pine and Montgomery streets was dynamited and then burned. So maybe a bunch of his stuff was reduced to ashes. I read a reference to this in a newspaper article, but I have not found any reference to this in his personal papers.

I don’t think I will ever know the answer. But as I collect photos (my editor asked me to submit about 40, which St. Martins will winnow down to 16) I keep fantasizing that an unclaimed photo album will turn up with photos no one has seen in decades.

I will just have to work around the missing pieces.

Why the Lack of Communication

Sorry for the radio silence. This has been the longest I've gone without posting -- a record 27 days. I have my reasons, believe me. I haven't been lazy, or on vacation, or reading up a storm. No, nothing really fun like that.

I have been finishing my book. I started this project seven years ago and can't quite believe it's coming to an end. I've had my share of ups and downs -- the editor who acquired the book left St. Martins and my new editor had so much backlogged work it took him many months to read my manuscript. Waiting to hear what he thought was excruciating.

The good news is he liked Towers of Gold. He returned his comments to me in late October and I have spent the last three weeks working like crazy. I feel like this is a term paper and I have to pull consecutive all-nighters to finish. I didn't really have many substantive changes to make, but like all writers, I love to tinker. I could play around with words endlessly, changing adjectives here, tightening descriptions there.

I haven't quite let go of the book, but think it will be complete very, very soon. Like in the next few days. I will still have to gather photographs and all that sort of stuff, but the writing and thinking will be finished.

The book is 133,000 words and about 450 pages. I am not sure how many pages that will turn out to be in book form. But Isaias Hellman's life was pretty fascinating and I tried to highlight lots of good parts. Readers will learn about Los Angeles when it was still a dusty pueblo; ferocious rain storms and droughts, the Nevada Silver boom, the Huntington family and Southern Pacific, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the ensuing graft trials. World War I and the influenza epidemic and most importantly, the Jewish contribution to the settlement of California.

(This is MY blog, so I can plug my own book, right?)

Anyway, hello again.

The Interstection of Journalism and History

I am going to be talking at the Judah L. Magnes Museum on Thursday September 20 about the intersection of journalism and history. In writing my biography of Isaias W. Hellman, I have used the archives of the Western Jewish History Center, an incredible repository of photos, letters, diaries, and newspapers detailing the Jewish contribution to the settling of the West.

I am going to talk about combining a variety of sources to write historical narrative. Normally in journalism, a reporter goes out and interviews people about a topic, reads the literature, observes the scene and then writes up a report.

But recreating history is not so neat. Generally there is no one to interview and you can't observe the scene first hand. So you have to hunt for clues in old newspapers, letters, photographs, etc. I will be talking about how to mine primary sources to write narrative. I will also be talking about Hellman and the Jewish experience in California in the 19th and 20th centuries.

The Magnes is located at 2911 Russell Street in Berkeley. I will talk at 6:30.

Reading and Writing Biographies

San Simeon


I have been on a biography kick for the last few months. I suppose I am trying to figure out the best way to write the biography I am working on. Imitation is the highest form of flattery, they say.

It turns out that there are two distinct forms of biographical narrative: one packed with information and details about a life and one that is short on detail, but long on narrative. The latter turns out to be a better read, but one that is soon forgotten. The former can be a chore to complete, but provides a more lasting understanding of a subject.

I just finished reading The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst by David Nasaw. As a native San Franciscan, I grew up with the name Hearst firmly imprinted on my mind. There was the San Francisco Examiner, owned by the Hearst family, the fabulous Hearst amphitheater at UC Berkeley where I got to sit in the first row when I was sixteen and stare lovingly at my idols, Loggins and Messina, and Hearst Avenue.

Then there was Patty, kidnapped out of her Berkeley apartment by the SLA. She turned into Tania, the armed revolutionary, and her father Randolph set up free food distribution centers in San Francisco as part of her ransom. When I was 16, I snagged two tickets to Patty’s trial, and watched her with a thrill throughout an afternoon’s testimony.

So I started to read The Chief thinking I knew a lot about William Randolph Hearst. I had actually learned about his father, George, not from watching Deadwood, where he is a recurring and despicable character, but through research on my book. (My subject, Isaias W. Hellman, ran for the Senate against George Hearst in 1887) George was an uneducated miner who made millions in the silver mines of Nevada, the gold mines of South Dakota, and the copper mines of Colorado.

I soon learned, however, that I knew nothing about the son. Some of the myths about the man are true: he was a boor, an autocrat, he turned into a reactionary in his later years and he did build a magnificent playhouse at San Simeon, which he lorded over with his mistress, the actress Marion Davies, at his side.

Other myths aren’t true: he didn’t start the Spanish-American war; he didn’t invent yellow journalism, although his papers mastered the form; and he didn’t live an isolated and broken life like Charles Foster Kane, the protagonist of Orson Welles’ movie, Citizen Kane, which is supposedly based on Hearst.

Nasaw did a wonderful job showing Hearst’s strength and weaknesses. He took 600+ pages to tell the story of Hearst’s life, so you see it is the kind of biography that provides every detail Nasaw can squeeze in. It took me five weeks to read this book, but I enjoyed it every time I picked it up. My biggest complaint is that Nasaw didn’t provide much historical context for Hearst’s life, which spanned the early days of the West, two world wars, and an anti-Communist crusade. He just assumed the reader would know the background of all these world events. That, or his editor told him to remove the information because the book was already too long.

I have just picked up Jason Roberts’ critically-acclaimed biography of James Holman, A Sense of the World, How a Blind Man Became the World’s Greatest Traveler. Now Roberts has done the exact opposite of what Nasaw did. He does not have a lot of information about the details of Holman’s life. He uses basic details of Holman’s life and extrapolates from there. For example, the distinguishing fact of Holman’s early childhood was that his father owned an apothecary shop. Roberts doesn’t know much about the family homestead, or what they ate or wore. So he goes off in a riff about apothecary shops in England in general.

He does the same for other elements of Holman’s life –there are riffs on serving in the British Navy in the early 19^th century, what doctors usually did to treat blindness, etc., how most blind people learn to navigate. Roberts doesn’t know critical details about Holman’s life, so he circumvents these lapses by distracting the reader and talking about something else.

It works. It may not be classic biography, but it is a compelling read.

So that makes me ask, what is biography for? Is it to faithfully recreate a life, providing details that can bog a reader down? Or is it to entertain a reader and give a delightful, if slight, sense of a life?

I have been approaching my own biography with the sense I had to create a historical record and provide details that would illuminate the settling of California. Now I wonder.