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Raymond Chandler: I don't think I ever, in
my own mind, think anybody's a villain.
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You don't find anyone, really, that's all
bad. Phoebe Judge: This is the only surviving recording
of crime writer Raymond Chandler's voice.
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It's from a 1958 interview, a year before
he died. He's a little hard to understand because,
as the story goes, he was extremely drunk.
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He was drunk a lot, especially near the end
of his life. But what he said here is that he doesn't ever
think anybody's a villain.
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You don't find anyone that's all bad. Raymond Chandler: ... It seems to me that
the real mystery is not who killed Sir John
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in his study, but what the situation really
was, what the people were after, what sort
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of people they were. Phoebe Judge: "It seems to me that the real
mystery is not who killed Sir John in the
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study, but what the situation really was,
what the people were after, what sort of people
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they were." [Music.] He wrote seven crime novels, including The
Long Goodbye and The Big Sleep, and introduced
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the world to Philip Marlowe, a clever, hard-drinking
Los Angeles private detective.
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Marlowe doesn't have the genius of Sherlock
Holmes or tuxedos like James Bond. He's just a guy.
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A little bit philosophical and a little bit
flirtatious, but always very, very calm.
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As Marlowe says in the novel Playback, "Guns
never settle anything. They're just a fast curtain to a bad second
act."
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With a writer as big as Chandler, with archives
at Oxford and UCLA, you'd think there wouldn't
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be much left to discover about his life. But as Lauren Spohrer found out, there was
one last mystery.
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And the only people who could solve it were
a couple of 70-year-olds, in love with each
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other and obsessed with Chandler. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. [Music.] Annie Thiel: He said Los Angeles had the personality
of a paper cup.
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Loren Latker: Yeah. And I think at some point, he also said that
somebody had the personality of the inside
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of a shoebox. So... Lauren Spohrer: Loren Latker's been reading
Chandler since he was 17 years old.
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And he's now 72, so a long time. Here he is talking to his wife, Annie Thiel. Annie Thiel: What about the one about the
blonde that caused the bishop to kick the
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stained glass window? Loren Latker: She was a blonde that'd make
a bishop kick in a stained glass window.
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Yeah, that's his. That's Chandler. Annie Thiel: Or the one as noticeable as a
tarantula on an angel food cake.
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Loren Latker: He was a master at simile. Lauren Spohrer: This is my favorite thing
about Chandler.
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He wrote crazy sentences, like, "I belonged
in Idle Valley like a pearl onion on a banana
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split." Or, "I felt like an amputated leg." Loren Latker: He had a way with words, definitely.
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Lauren Spohrer: Loren has always been a Chandler
fan, but Annie says she was more of a casual
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fan before she met Loren. Annie Thiel: He was completely mesmerized
in Chandler and devoted to him.
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And I'm devoted to Loren, so [laughs] it was
a way of really wanting to understand how
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Loren thought. It was like, okay, if I can really understand
and read enough Chandler, I'll know how he
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thinks, too. And then I kind of stepped into Loren's Chandler
world. Lauren Spohrer: Loren's Chandler world doesn't
just involve re-reading the novels and biographies.
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It's hands-on. He's photographed all the spots in Los Angeles
where Chandler lived, and all the places that he wrote about.
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And he's tracked down anyone he can find who
knew Chandler. Annie Thiel: The first person that we met
with was Dorothy, his secretary.
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And she was 82 and had cancer, at the time. Loren Latker: I had Annie call her up because
Annie's got much better people skills than
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I do. [Laughs.] We invited her for a brunch, and that's how
we got to know her. Lauren Spohrer: Loren pored over the biographies
that have been written about Chandler's life.
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And what he realized was that every single
one has basically the same ending, and not
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one of them got it right. [Music.] So here's what you need to know about Raymond
Chandler in order to make sense of what Loren
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found. When Chandler was young, long before he became
a writer, he fought in World War I with a
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friend of his named Gordon Pascal. This friend Gordon is important, because shortly
after the two of them got home from the war,
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Raymond Chandler fell in love — with Gordon's
stepmom. Loren Latker: Stepmother, yes.
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Lauren Spohrer: Pearl Eugenia. But she went by the nickname Cissy. Annie Thiel: And Cissy was 18 years older
than Ray.
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Loren Latker: 17 or 18, something like that,
yeah. Annie Thiel: 17 or 18 years older than Ray.
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Lauren Spohrer: Cissy lied about her age to
almost everyone. She cleaned the house in the nude.
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Loren and Annie describe her as bohemian,
a free spirit. Eventually, she left her husband and became
Cissy Chandler.
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Annie Thiel: She really enjoyed cooking for
him. And they also had this glass menagerie of
animals.
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And they had a lot of fantasy between them. They played with those little glass animals
like they were children, and they would make
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up stories. And they would hop in their car, and they
would go up into San Bernardino or up into
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the
Loren Latker: Into the mountains. Annie Thiel: ... local mountains. And it was quite a romance.
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Lauren Spohrer: What do you think that she
liked about him? Annie Thiel: I think that she liked that he
had the soul of a poet and that he was handsome
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and that she was very Loren Latker: She called him "Raymio." Annie Thiel: Raymio.
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She was very sexually attracted to him. They were crazy about each other. What some people refer to as soulmates, I
think.
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Lauren Spohrer: Chandler didn't start writing
crime novels until after they were married.
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He published his first one, The Big Sleep,
at age 51. They were married for 30 years.
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And when she got sick, he waited on her hand
and foot. He'd check her into the hospital, and she'd
call right away, and say, "Come get me out
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of here." And he would, even if it meant she had to
go right back because she couldn't breathe.
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Loren Latker: Cystic fibrosis. A fibroid or something that was turning the
lungs to stone, essentially.
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Lauren Spohrer: Cissy was 84 years old when
she died, and Chandler fell apart. He wrote, "For 30 years, 10 months, and four
days, she was the light of my life, my whole
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ambition. Anything I did was just the fire for her to
warm her hands at." Annie Thiel: He attempted suicide after she
died.
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He was deeply, deeply depressed. Always was an alcoholic, but he drank even
more.
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Lauren Spohrer: There was a small funeral,
and Cissy was cremated. Chandler was sad and apparently going crazy.
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In the years after Cissy died, some say he
was so lonely and so drunk that he would propose
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marriage to any woman within earshot. He died in 1959, just five years
later. Because no one could find burial instructions,
he was buried at public expense by the City
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of San Diego at Mount Hope Cemetery. [Music ends.] Loren Latker: Well, about 2010, I was doing
some further research and read that Ray had
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wanted his eyes to go to an eye bank, he wanted
to be cremated, he wanted to be with Cissy.
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And I knew that hadn't happened. I didn't know where she was at the time. I knew that she had been placed in Cypress
View and that he was in Mount Hope, the cemetery.
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I had no idea where they were in relationship
to each other or anything at all about that.
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I'm thinking, "Well, gee, he wanted to be
with Cissy. Too late to have his eyes go to an eye bank,
but maybe I can bring the two of them together."
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[Music.] Lauren Spohrer: So, what'd you do first? Loren Latker: Called Cypress View and said,
"Do you have Cissy Chandler there?"
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"Well, no, we can't find her." Lauren Spohrer: Loren kept calling and trying
to get answers.
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And each time he called, he got a little bit
more information. One time the person on the phone said, "Oh,
Cissy is here.
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She's on a shelf." Loren Latker: "On a shelf?" "Yeah, with other remains. It was on the shelf."
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I'd call again, "Oh, the shelf is in the store
room." [Laughs.] I got the idea that it didn't seem kosher.
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Lauren Spohrer: Loren couldn't actually go
and see the urn for himself. He needed a family member.
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Loren Latker: I couldn't find anybody related
to Ray, and I started tracking down Cissy's
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relatives, and I found a great-great-grandniece
and a great-great-great-grandniece.
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And, you know, contacted them. "Oh, that's a great idea. Why don't you go ahead and do that?
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We love it." Lauren Spohrer: But that wasn't good enough. Loren needed someone closer, like a daughter
or son.
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The other option was to go to court, so they
got a lawyer. Her name's Aissa Wayne.
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Coincidentally, the daughter of legendary
actor John Wayne. And lucky for them, the judge turned out to
be a Chandler fan.
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Annie Thiel: And the judge kept getting rid
of all the other cases. They were just ordinary cases, like neighbors
fighting, or this, that, and the other thing.
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And he kept saying, "Okay, dismiss, dismiss,
dismiss." He wanted to get to our case.
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Loren Latker: In fact, said at one point,
"Oh, I'm going to dismiss this for now, because
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I have a very important case coming up." Annie Thiel: [Laughing.] That's right. He was very excited about it.
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And so there we were, and Aissa and Loren
and I down at the table, and there's the judge.
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And the judge starts asking questions
Loren Latker: Well, the first thing out of
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his mouth was, "I'm not inclined to grant
this." Annie Thiel: Right. And he
Loren Latker: "Convince me."
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Annie Thiel: "Convince me." Aissa had earlier gone to the guy at the crematorium
and had asked him to be available to be on
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the phone. So it was like a Perry Mason thing because
Aissa said, "Well, Your Honor, we actually
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have somebody ready to talk to you on the
phone," and out of the phone in the courtroom
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came the voice of the guy at the crematorium. And the judge says, "So where is Cissy?"
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And the guy said, "In the storage room." Lauren Spohrer: We tracked this guy down.
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He doesn't work at the crematorium anymore
and didn't want to be recorded, but he said
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he remembered talking to the judge. He actually said that Loren and Annie took
up a lot of his time.
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He kept telling me that Cissy was cremated
there before he was even born, and so he had
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no idea why she was in storage. Annie Thiel: And then the judge looks back
and he said, "Not just Cissy Chandler, but
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no one should be left in a room like that
where people can't visit them." And he granted the petition.
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[Music.] Lauren Spohrer: With the judge's okay, Loren
and Annie went to Cypress View, the crematorium
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where Cissy was being stored. Loren Latker: You walk inside, it's all marble. There was one room where they had a fireplace
and the niches were like a bookcase.
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Glass fronts, and you'd sit in a big chair
in front of the fireplace. It looked like a library, except that your
loved one would be in a niche behind a little
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glass door. And you could sit and talk to them, or whatever
you wanted to do. And the rest of it, the interior, was absolutely
gorgeous, all marble and
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Lauren Spohrer: So the place was beautiful,
but what about the room where Cissy was?
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Loren Latker: Well, I'm getting to that. Now, you would bring the casket in, you'd
have your service, and then there was this
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ramp at the back of the chapel that goes down
to the crematorium. And you come down facing these two 100-year-old
brick cremation ovens.
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Looked like some kind of Rube Goldberg affair
with pipes and peepholes and knobs and valves
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and things on the front, and two and a half,
three foot high, hinged at the top with a
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hasp and a padlock on it. And that is where Cissy was. And over in an alcove to that room was the
lawnmowers and brooms and the other things.
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Lauren Spohrer: Her ashes had been on that
shelf for 57 years. It's technically called long-term storage,
but to you or me it looks like she got put
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in a closet. There are two reasons why someone would wind
up there instead of being interred, either
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because it was the cheapest option or because
you just forgot to go collect the ashes.
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Annie Thiel: We think that he kind of forgot
to get the cremains and bury them like he
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had intended to do. Lauren Spohrer: Loren also told me that permanent
storage is a nice sounding euphemism for ‘tossed
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in a box and forgotten.’ Loren and Annie arranged another funeral service
to bring Ray and Cissy together.
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And on Valentine's Day 2011, they held the
service at Mountain Hope Cemetery, for about
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a hundred people. And they got some local news coverage. News Clip: Cypress View Mausoleum could've
legally thrown away Cissy's unclaimed ashes
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in 1959, but held onto them... [Fades out.] News Reporter: Actor Powers Boothe played
Detective Philip Marlowe in a popular 1983
00:12:53
TV series. He read his favorite Chandler quotes during
the ceremony. Powers Boothe: "I was as hollow and empty
as the spaces between stars."
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News Reporter: Loren Latker is a Chandler
buff and organized the day's event. [Fades out.]
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Lauren Spohrer: Yeah, Loren, I'm curious,
how do you feel about ... I mean, you've kind
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of written yourself into Raymond Chandler's
biography now. Loren Latker: [Loren and Annie chuckle.]
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Yeah, I guess so. I'm not sure how Ray would feel about that,
but I was doing it to help Ray.
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All of his wishes were ignored, so to me that
was something that was wrong and needed to
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be righted. And so that's why I went out and did that. Lauren Spohrer: Last question, and you can
just say, "That's ridiculous."
00:13:34
But I wonder if you ever imagine their ghosts
sort of saying thank you. Annie Thiel: Absolutely.
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Absolutely. Loren Latker: I don't believe in ghosts. [Laughs.] Annie Thiel: We're very different that way.
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In my mind's eye, I feel very delightfully
that they're dancing around the cemetery.
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Yes. [Chuckles.] That's what I think. Loren Latker: I indulge Annie on that level.
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[Laughing.] Annie Thiel: I'm not finished yet. [Laughing.] Lauren Spohrer: I like the idea that you can
go to Mount Hope Cemetery to visit Cissy and
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Ray, and also see a little bit of Loren and
Annie. They had a line from their favorite Chandler
novel inscribed on the new headstone.
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It reads, "Dead men are heavier than broken
hearts." [Music.] Phoebe Judge: That's Lauren Spohrer.
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Loren Latker has a Chandler website, www.shamustown.com,
where you can see his brand new Raymond Chandler
00:14:34
map. It has 287 QR codes, so you can scan it with
your phone and see spots that were either
00:14:40
important to Chandler or to his detective,
Philip Marlowe. Criminal is produced by Lauren, Eric Mennel,
and me.
00:14:48
Julienne Alexander does our episode art. And we have some news. Criminal will be putting on a live show here
in Durham, North Carolina, on Wednesday, January
00:14:57
21st. If you live nearby, we'd love to see you. You can learn more on our website, thisiscriminal.com.
00:15:03
We're on Facebook and Twitter, @CriminalShow. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.
00:15:10
[Music fades out.]