Stanley Rose
Encyclopedia
Stanley Rose was an American bookseller, literary agent and raconteur whose eponymous Hollywood bookshop, located (from 1935 until its closure in 1939) adjacent to the famous Musso & Frank Grill
restaurant, was a gathering place for writers working or living in and around Hollywood. Rose’s most notable literary associates were William Saroyan
, to whom he was variously a friend, a drinking and hunting companion, and a literary representative; and Nathanael West
, whose 1939 novel The Day of the Locust
owed much of its “local color” to its author’s acquaintance with Rose.
. He served in the United States Army during World War I, and was said to have received an injury to his throat that necessitated treatment at a veterans’ hospital in Palo Alto, California, near Stanford University -- from which, according to historian Kevin Starr, Rose “absorbed the atmosphere of books as if by osmosis.” By the mid-1920s he had moved to Los Angeles and entered the book trade, most successfully as an itinerant supplier of books to writers and executives at the Hollywood studios; according to at least one account, he also operated as a bootlegger, smuggling his liquor deliveries into the studios in the false bottoms of the suitcases he used to make his book deliveries. (Many accounts also claim that he sold erotic or pornographic literature as well.) By the late 1920s, he had become a partner in the Satyr Book Shop, which had opened in 1926 on Hudson Street and subsequently moved to a prime location on Vine Street near the Hollywood Brown Derby
restaurant. The Satyr partnership dissolved after Rose took the rap for his partners by pleading guilty to a violation of the Copyright Act related to their publication of a pirated edition of a popular risqué humor book of the day, The Specialist by Charles (Chic) Sale. After serving a short jail sentence, Rose opened his own bookshop, on the opposite side of Vine Street from the Satyr.
, a few doors east of the Musso & Frank Grill
restaurant. Even before this time the shop had begun to attract many screenwriters and novelists, who came seeking not just books but also the congenial company of their fellows and of Rose himself, but the move to the Hollywood Boulevard location helped to solidify its status as a kind of unofficial “clubhouse” for writers. California historian Kevin Starr has written: “The bookshop and the bar [at Musso & Frank] operated together with superb synergy, creating a welcomed sense of community for screenwriters suffering from an understandable sense of displacement.” (Less often mentioned, but also important, was the fact that the Screen Writers Guild was located directly across the boulevard.)
Among the writers known to have been regular patrons of the Rose shop were William Saroyan
, William Faulkner
, Nathanael West
, Jim Tully
, Gene Fowler
, James M. Cain
, Frank Fenton
, Horace McCoy
, Erskine Caldwell
, John Fante
, Louis Adamic
, A.I. Bezzerides, Jo Pagano and Budd Schulberg
. Many others have had their names linked with the shop by various historians and biographers, despite having probably been no more than occasional customers; in this group are Raymond Chandler
, Dashiell Hammett
, John O’Hara, Dorothy Parker
, Aldous Huxley
, Ben Hecht
and F. Scott Fitzgerald
. Rose also cultivated a well-heeled clientele from other segments of the Hollywood community; the actors and other prominent celebrities who frequented the shop included Charlie Chaplin
, John Barrymore
, Edward G. Robinson
, W.C. Fields, Marion Davies
, Jean Harlow
and Marlene Dietrich
.
, Lorser Feitelson
, Helen Lundeberg
, and Knud Merrild; on occasion, the work of significant European and Mexican artists was featured as well.
:
Although a convivial companion, Rose, by the accounts of McWilliams and many others, was not an especially savvy businessman. (Budd Schulberg reported that Rose once told an inquisitive writer that he only ran a bookstore “‘cause I like to keep a joint where my pals c’n hang out.”) He was prone to letting his many friends have books “on account,” and was extremely lax in the collection of monies owed him. Actor William Bakewell
remembered that Rose's “generosity and easygoing approach to merchandising stimulated a kind of mañana attitude on the part of many of his customers resulting in a host of long overdue accounts which finally put him out of business.”
” genre, including What Makes Sammy Run? by Budd Schulberg (1941) and The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West (1939). The protagonist of John O’Hara’s 1938 novel Hope of Heaven has an affair with a bookstore clerk; although the fictionalized shop is located in Beverly Hills, the character of the clerk is a thinly-disguised portrait of Betty Anderson, a Rose employee with whom O’Hara had been briefly infatuated. Some critics of Raymond Chandler's work have identified the Rose shop as the model (or at least the inspiration) for the bookstore "Geiger's" in Chandler's The Big Sleep, published in 1939. William Saroyan, generally regarded as Rose’s best friend among the writers, wrote various short pieces about Rose and the bookshop, and anecdotes about “Stanley the bookseller” pop up in many of his published works. The bookshop and its proprietor also figure in numerous writers’ memoirs, including those by John Bright, Lester Cole, John Sanford, Budd Schulberg, and others.
, he spent the last several years of his life in and out of various veterans’ hospitals, and was virtually penniless at the time of his death in 1954. In a brief tribute written at the time, Thomas observed that “Stanley was never rich in terms of material wealth. But his life was rich in legend and few men had more friends. ... As far as I can judge, he had only one enemy and that was John Barleycorn
.” Saroyan was more direct, telling his cousin that Rose “died of drink, boredom and loneliness.” The same year his bookshop closed, 1939, Stanley had married Maude Nicol, although they were living apart at the time of his death; he was survived by her and their son, Bruce.
Musso & Frank Grill
Musso & Frank Grill is a restaurant located at 6667 Hollywood Boulevard in the Hollywood neighborhood of Los Angeles, California. Opened in 1919, it is steeped in Hollywood history, having been the hideout of a host of famous Hollywood celebrities from days gone by...
restaurant, was a gathering place for writers working or living in and around Hollywood. Rose’s most notable literary associates were William Saroyan
William Saroyan
William Saroyan was an Armenian American dramatist and author. The setting of many of his stories and plays is the center of Armenian-American life in California in his native Fresno.-Early years:...
, to whom he was variously a friend, a drinking and hunting companion, and a literary representative; and Nathanael West
Nathanael West
Nathanael West was a US author, screenwriter and satirist.- Early life :...
, whose 1939 novel The Day of the Locust
The Day of the Locust
The Day of the Locust is a 1939 novel by American author Nathanael West, set in Hollywood, California during the Great Depression, its overarching themes deal with the alienation and desperation of a broad group of odd individuals who exist at the fringes of the Hollywood movie industry.In 1998,...
owed much of its “local color” to its author’s acquaintance with Rose.
Background and early career as a bookseller
Stanley Rose was born in Matador, TexasMatador, Texas
Matador is a town in and the county seat of Motley County, Texas, United States. The population was 740 at the 2000 census. In 1891, it was established by and named for the Matador Ranch...
. He served in the United States Army during World War I, and was said to have received an injury to his throat that necessitated treatment at a veterans’ hospital in Palo Alto, California, near Stanford University -- from which, according to historian Kevin Starr, Rose “absorbed the atmosphere of books as if by osmosis.” By the mid-1920s he had moved to Los Angeles and entered the book trade, most successfully as an itinerant supplier of books to writers and executives at the Hollywood studios; according to at least one account, he also operated as a bootlegger, smuggling his liquor deliveries into the studios in the false bottoms of the suitcases he used to make his book deliveries. (Many accounts also claim that he sold erotic or pornographic literature as well.) By the late 1920s, he had become a partner in the Satyr Book Shop, which had opened in 1926 on Hudson Street and subsequently moved to a prime location on Vine Street near the Hollywood Brown Derby
Brown Derby
The Brown Derby was the name of a chain of restaurants in Los Angeles, California. The first and most famous of these was shaped like a men's derby hat, an iconic image that became synonymous with the Golden Age of Hollywood....
restaurant. The Satyr partnership dissolved after Rose took the rap for his partners by pleading guilty to a violation of the Copyright Act related to their publication of a pirated edition of a popular risqué humor book of the day, The Specialist by Charles (Chic) Sale. After serving a short jail sentence, Rose opened his own bookshop, on the opposite side of Vine Street from the Satyr.
The Stanley Rose Book Shop
Rose operated his bookshop on Vine Street and at one other location (on Selma Avenue) for about four years prior to relocating, in January 1935, to what would become its final and most memorable site, at 6661½ Hollywood BoulevardHollywood Boulevard
-Revitalization:In recent years successful efforts have been made at cleaning up Hollywood Blvd., as the street had gained a reputation for crime and seediness. Central to these efforts was the construction of the Hollywood and Highland shopping center and adjacent Kodak Theatre in 2001...
, a few doors east of the Musso & Frank Grill
Musso & Frank Grill
Musso & Frank Grill is a restaurant located at 6667 Hollywood Boulevard in the Hollywood neighborhood of Los Angeles, California. Opened in 1919, it is steeped in Hollywood history, having been the hideout of a host of famous Hollywood celebrities from days gone by...
restaurant. Even before this time the shop had begun to attract many screenwriters and novelists, who came seeking not just books but also the congenial company of their fellows and of Rose himself, but the move to the Hollywood Boulevard location helped to solidify its status as a kind of unofficial “clubhouse” for writers. California historian Kevin Starr has written: “The bookshop and the bar [at Musso & Frank] operated together with superb synergy, creating a welcomed sense of community for screenwriters suffering from an understandable sense of displacement.” (Less often mentioned, but also important, was the fact that the Screen Writers Guild was located directly across the boulevard.)
Among the writers known to have been regular patrons of the Rose shop were William Saroyan
William Saroyan
William Saroyan was an Armenian American dramatist and author. The setting of many of his stories and plays is the center of Armenian-American life in California in his native Fresno.-Early years:...
, William Faulkner
William Faulkner
William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner worked in a variety of media; he wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays and screenplays during his career...
, Nathanael West
Nathanael West
Nathanael West was a US author, screenwriter and satirist.- Early life :...
, Jim Tully
Jim Tully
Jim Tully was a vagabond, pugilist, and American writer. His critical and commercial success in the 1920s and 30s may qualify him as the greatest long shot in American literature.Born near St...
, Gene Fowler
Gene Fowler
Gene Fowler was an American journalist, author and dramatist.He was born in Denver, Colorado. When his mother remarried, young Gene took his stepfather's name to become Gene Fowler. Fowler's career had a false start in taxidermy, which he later claimed permanently gave him a distaste for red meat...
, James M. Cain
James M. Cain
James Mallahan Cain was an American author and journalist. Although Cain himself vehemently opposed labeling, he is usually associated with the hardboiled school of American crime fiction and seen as one of the creators of the roman noir...
, Frank Fenton
Frank Fenton
Frank Fenton was an American stage, film and television actor.-Biography:Born Francis Fenton Moran, the Georgetown University-graduate started his career on stage in New York, eventually starring in the Broadway versions of Susan and God with Gertrude Lawrence and as George Kittredge in The...
, Horace McCoy
Horace McCoy
Horace McCoy was an American writer whose hardboiled novels took place during the Great Depression. His best-known novel is They Shoot Horses, Don't They? , which was made into a movie of the same name in 1969, fourteen years after McCoy's death.-Early life:McCoy was born in Pegram, Tennessee...
, Erskine Caldwell
Erskine Caldwell
Erskine Preston Caldwell was an American author. His writings about poverty, racism and social problems in his native South like the novels Tobacco Road and God's Little Acre won him critical acclaim, but they also made him controversial among fellow Southerners of the time who felt he was...
, John Fante
John Fante
John Fante was an American novelist, short story writer and screenwriter of Italian descent. He is perhaps best known for his work, Ask the Dust, a semi-autobiograpical novel about life in and around Los Angeles, California, which was the third in a series of four novels, published between 1938...
, Louis Adamic
Louis Adamic
Louis Adamic was a Slovenian American author and translator.- Biography :Adamic was born at Praproče Mansion in Praproče near Grosuplje, in what is now Slovenia...
, A.I. Bezzerides, Jo Pagano and Budd Schulberg
Budd Schulberg
Budd Schulberg was an American screenwriter, television producer, novelist and sports writer. He was known for his 1941 novel, What Makes Sammy Run?, his 1947 novel The Harder They Fall, his 1954 Academy-award-winning screenplay for On the Waterfront, and his 1957 screenplay for A Face in the...
. Many others have had their names linked with the shop by various historians and biographers, despite having probably been no more than occasional customers; in this group are Raymond Chandler
Raymond Chandler
Raymond Thornton Chandler was an American novelist and screenwriter.In 1932, at age forty-five, Raymond Chandler decided to become a detective fiction writer after losing his job as an oil company executive during the Depression. His first short story, "Blackmailers Don't Shoot", was published in...
, Dashiell Hammett
Dashiell Hammett
Samuel Dashiell Hammett was an American author of hard-boiled detective novels and short stories, and political activist. Among the enduring characters he created are Sam Spade , Nick and Nora Charles , and the Continental Op .In addition to the significant influence his novels and stories had on...
, John O’Hara, Dorothy Parker
Dorothy Parker
Dorothy Parker was an American poet, short story writer, critic and satirist, best known for her wit, wisecracks, and eye for 20th century urban foibles....
, Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Leonard Huxley was an English writer and one of the most prominent members of the famous Huxley family. Best known for his novels including Brave New World and a wide-ranging output of essays, Huxley also edited the magazine Oxford Poetry, and published short stories, poetry, travel...
, Ben Hecht
Ben Hecht
Ben Hecht was an American screenwriter, director, producer, playwright, and novelist. Called "the Shakespeare of Hollywood", he received screen credits, alone or in collaboration, for the stories or screenplays of some 70 films and as a prolific storyteller, authored 35 books and created some of...
and F. Scott Fitzgerald
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was an American author of novels and short stories, whose works are the paradigm writings of the Jazz Age, a term he coined himself. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. Fitzgerald is considered a member of the "Lost...
. Rose also cultivated a well-heeled clientele from other segments of the Hollywood community; the actors and other prominent celebrities who frequented the shop included Charlie Chaplin
Charlie Chaplin
Sir Charles Spencer "Charlie" Chaplin, KBE was an English comic actor, film director and composer best known for his work during the silent film era. He became the most famous film star in the world before the end of World War I...
, John Barrymore
John Barrymore
John Sidney Blyth , better known as John Barrymore, was an acclaimed American actor. He first gained fame as a handsome stage actor in light comedy, then high drama and culminating in groundbreaking portrayals in Shakespearean plays Hamlet and Richard III...
, Edward G. Robinson
Edward G. Robinson
Edward G. Robinson was a Romanian-born American actor. A popular star during Hollywood's Golden Age, he is best remembered for his roles as gangsters, such as Rico in his star-making film Little Caesar and as Rocco in Key Largo...
, W.C. Fields, Marion Davies
Marion Davies
Marion Davies was an American film actress. Davies is best remembered for her relationship with newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, as her high-profile social life often obscured her professional career....
, Jean Harlow
Jean Harlow
Jean Harlow was an American film actress and sex symbol of the 1930s. Known as the "Blonde Bombshell" and the "Platinum Blonde" , Harlow was ranked as one of the greatest movie stars of all time by the American Film Institute...
and Marlene Dietrich
Marlene Dietrich
Marlene Dietrich was a German-American actress and singer.Dietrich remained popular throughout her long career by continually re-inventing herself, professionally and characteristically. In the Berlin of the 1920s, she acted on the stage and in silent films...
.
The “back room”
The “back room” of Rose’s shop is a central element of the legend surrounding the shop. This small area served variously as an art gallery, an informal discussion room, and an unlicensed bar (where Rose would serve orange wine to his friends); in Budd Schulberg’s memorable phrase, it was “the nearest thing we had to a salon (and also a saloon).” Because Musso & Frank’s restaurant had its own semi-private rear dining area/bar, which also catered to writers, the two “back rooms” are referred to almost interchangeably in many historical accounts and memoirs of the period. These writer-friendly environments inspired the title of Edmund Wilson’s famous 1940 monograph, The Boys in the Back Room: Notes on California Novelists, in which the work of Cain, O’Hara, Saroyan, West and Schulberg, among others, is discussed. The art gallery, for its part, was regarded as one of the more receptive venues in Los Angeles for avant-garde or modernist works, and presented some of the earliest exhibits by American artists such as Herman Cherry, Philip GustonPhilip Guston
Philip Guston was a notable painter and printmaker in the New York School, which included many of the Abstract expressionists, such as Jackson Pollock and Willem De Kooning...
, Lorser Feitelson
Lorser Feitelson
Lorser Feitelson was born and raised in New York city but rose to prominence on the West Coast as one of the founding fathers of Southern California-based Hard Edge painting...
, Helen Lundeberg
Helen Lundeberg
Helen Lundeberg was an American Post-Surrealist, hard-edge painter.Lundeberg was born in Chicago. She married California artist Lorser Feitelson, her former teacher...
, and Knud Merrild; on occasion, the work of significant European and Mexican artists was featured as well.
Stanley Rose as a Hollywood “character”
There are many published accounts of Stanley Rose’s personality, perhaps the most vivid of which is that provided by his longtime friend and associate, Carey McWilliamsCarey McWilliams (journalist)
Carey McWilliams was an American author, editor, and lawyer. He is best known for his writings about social issues in California, including the condition of migrant farm workers and the internment of Japanese Americans in concentration camps during World War II...
:
Stanley was a superb storyteller and a very funny man whose generosity was proverbial. In the late afternoons, as he began to warm up for the evening with a few drinks, he would hold court in the store, entertaining whoever happened to drop in, and the performance would invariably continue into the early morning hours in the back room at Musso’s. ... Uneducated but of great native charm, he was forever being lured on expensive hunting and fishing trips by wealthy actors, writers and directors on their promises to buy large libraries of books, which of course they never did; they merely wanted him along as court jester. Stanley dressed like a Hollywood swell, spoke like the Texas farm boy he never ceased to be, and carried on as Hollywood’s unrivaled entertainer and easiest touch until his death in 1954.
Although a convivial companion, Rose, by the accounts of McWilliams and many others, was not an especially savvy businessman. (Budd Schulberg reported that Rose once told an inquisitive writer that he only ran a bookstore “‘cause I like to keep a joint where my pals c’n hang out.”) He was prone to letting his many friends have books “on account,” and was extremely lax in the collection of monies owed him. Actor William Bakewell
William Bakewell
William Bakewell , also known as Billy Bakewell, was an American actor, who achieved his greatest fame as one of the premiere juvenile performers of the late 1920s and early 1930s.-Life and career:...
remembered that Rose's “generosity and easygoing approach to merchandising stimulated a kind of mañana attitude on the part of many of his customers resulting in a host of long overdue accounts which finally put him out of business.”
Stanley Rose in the Literature of Hollywood
Rose and his bookshop make cameo appearances in several prominent literary works in the “Hollywood novelHollywood novel
A Hollywood novel is a novel that takes the Southern California motion picture industry as its setting and often its subject. Examples of Hollywood novels include The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West, What Makes Sammy Run by Budd Schulberg, The Last Tycoon by F...
” genre, including What Makes Sammy Run? by Budd Schulberg (1941) and The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West (1939). The protagonist of John O’Hara’s 1938 novel Hope of Heaven has an affair with a bookstore clerk; although the fictionalized shop is located in Beverly Hills, the character of the clerk is a thinly-disguised portrait of Betty Anderson, a Rose employee with whom O’Hara had been briefly infatuated. Some critics of Raymond Chandler's work have identified the Rose shop as the model (or at least the inspiration) for the bookstore "Geiger's" in Chandler's The Big Sleep, published in 1939. William Saroyan, generally regarded as Rose’s best friend among the writers, wrote various short pieces about Rose and the bookshop, and anecdotes about “Stanley the bookseller” pop up in many of his published works. The bookshop and its proprietor also figure in numerous writers’ memoirs, including those by John Bright, Lester Cole, John Sanford, Budd Schulberg, and others.
Later life and death
Rose’s haphazard approach to business led to the closure of the shop in mid-1939 -- ironically, barely a month after the publication of Nathanael West’s acerbic novel about the underbelly of Hollywood life, The Day of the Locust, much of the atmosphere for which had been gathered by West through his acquaintance with Rose. Following the failure of his shop, Rose set up shop as a literary agent, although his only really notable (and successful) client was his friend William Saroyan. Rose claimed to have negotiated a contract between Saroyan and M-G-M for the filming of Saroyan’s The Human Comedy, although Saroyan himself claimed that it had essentially been an act of charity on his part to employ Rose as an agent, and that he played only a minor role in the transaction. In any event, Rose enjoyed only intermittent success as a writers’ representative, and eventually his heavy drinking took a toll on his health. According to Hollywood journalist Bob ThomasBob Thomas
Bob Thomas is a radio personality, actor, and writer. He was one of the top radio announcers in Knoxville, Tennessee for 25 years. During his tenure at radio station WIVK, he had the highest-rated midday radio show in the United States for over 16 years. As an actor, he has appeared in many...
, he spent the last several years of his life in and out of various veterans’ hospitals, and was virtually penniless at the time of his death in 1954. In a brief tribute written at the time, Thomas observed that “Stanley was never rich in terms of material wealth. But his life was rich in legend and few men had more friends. ... As far as I can judge, he had only one enemy and that was John Barleycorn
John Barleycorn
"John Barleycorn" is an English folksong. The character of John Barleycorn in the song is a personification of the important cereal crop barley and of the alcoholic beverages made from it, beer and whisky...
.” Saroyan was more direct, telling his cousin that Rose “died of drink, boredom and loneliness.” The same year his bookshop closed, 1939, Stanley had married Maude Nicol, although they were living apart at the time of his death; he was survived by her and their son, Bruce.
Suggestions for further reading
- Martin, Jay. Nathanael West: The Art of His Life. New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1970.
- Schulberg, Budd. The Four Seasons of Success. Garden City NY: Doubleday & Co., 1972. The chapter on Nathanael West, "Prince Myshkin in a Brooks Brothers Suit," pp. 145-168, contains much information about the bookshop.
- Starr, Kevin. Material Dreams: Southern California Through the 1920s. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980.