LAT
An L.A. native friend of mine once told me she was moved by Joan Didion's
Where I Was From (wonderful book) to look a little closer at all the California mythology she grew up with--what it really was like, for instance, in the days of the Californios, who, apparently, weren't too bright, certainly not well educated, slovenly in the eyes of coming Easterners, patriarchal of course--their power came from owning vast swathes of land, which gave some of them a royalty complex. The image of Sarah Bixby Smith (
Adobe Days) is that of an old librarianesque nostalgician, but, having plenty of money, her own sense of importance, and her complicated love life and involvements with various Reverend Smiths made her a little interesting than that.
Her first husband, Rev Arthur Maxson Smith, father of their five children, never met a gal he didn't want to shag (coeds in his charge, au pairs and boarders in his own house--he liked to joke about becoming a Mormon). Eventually, after setting up a girlfriend (a Miss Giffen, the boarder) in an apartment in New York and sleeping with her in every hotel in L.A., passing himself off when convenient as her husband, all the while married to Sarah, he was busted and divorced ensued. While still married the Arthur--before the final decree came down, at least--it seems that Sarah hit the sheets with her next dog-collared Smith, one Rev Paul Jordan Smith, 14 years younger than Sarah and coming off his own scandalous divorce and who later added the pretentious hyphen to his name to avoid confusion with yet
another Rev Smith (with whom, it seems, Sarah did
not sleep). Anyway, Sarah's exploits and connections to a fast crowd make for semi-interesting reading; the story of Paul Jordan-dash-Smith's presumption to know better than others what made good art and his hoax along those lines is sort of amusing, especially since he seems at some point to have given up the dog collar and gotten used to the superiority, respectability, and lush life Sarah's money allowed him.
The whole mess here:
http://http://so-cal-arch-history.com/archives/3597
GSV
4800 Los Feliz Blvd, where Sarah Bixby Smith Smith lived with Paul Jordan-dash-Smith ca 1927-1932.