Letter from Sinclair Lewis to Marcella Powers, July 24, 1943

              /bf.  CHATEAU flDHRmOIlT  8221  SUNSET BOULEVARD  HOLLYWOOD, LOS ANGELES , CALIFORNIA  Saturday noon  I have just been talking to you on thd phone.  For a month  now I have longed for the exaltation-of hearing your voice,  and though the connection was none too good, so that  your voice came through a little duskily, like black velvet,  still it brought md the darling beloved quality that is  you.  I had got to worrying lest the heat had got you and  you were- sick, when the only delivery on Saturday hd come  and gone and the thing I HM live for, a letter from you,, had  not come.  I am much relieved and sing Yoicks....Yoicks?...•  Yoicks.  To the probably annoyance of the neighbors.  Wednesday evening was extremely nice? just Kate Hepburn,  Spencer Tracy,, who Is becoming a very good friend of mini,  G-eorge Cukor, and Eve March -- very nice girl, you met her  here with her husband, Damien O'Flynn — he's now in the  army — I first met 'em playing.at Ogunquit, the summer I  met you — i.e., the-Sacred Summer....Kate has a small low  spreading iahite house way up almost at the top of these  Santa Monica Mountains that make a background for Beverly  Hills: you climb up and up, with one last dizzy dash where  you're certain that you'll fall off and land in the Beverly  Brown Derby.  From a terrace in front, one looks down on  all of Hollywood spread out like a map....Roast lamb for  dinner and nobody drinking even a cocktail Simple living room with a lovely semi-circular couch half of It on  each side of the fireplace.  Talk of what a fake Louis  B. Mayer Is and: Jed Harris is not a nice man -- new topics,  you see, but anyway, dftscussed with much and ribald mirth,  particularly by Cukor, whom I had expected to find a fat  fairy of fifty but found a slim, neat young Jew of somewhat  a Milton Mayer type...I believe that actually he is a fairy,  actually he is way over forty, actually he once was fat,  but none of these can you detect Kate looked plumper, ,  less ghostly, than in Without Love and Keeper of Flame; tanned  like a beetle and wearing, since you insist, raspberry-  colored jacket and slacks, and a white blouse....She was damn  nice and easy, and she remembers you from our at-Francf^'s  party which, considering the number of people there, is -  a small compliment.  Thursday evening, Geo Macy and Helen and I went with Leonard  Sillman's to his brother-in-law's (Esquifce correspondent)  in the San Fernando Valley, and suddenly we were in Greenwich Village: on-the-floor-sitting,   clever negro couple  at piano and singing*,vituperative discussion of communism,  and^all And on Thursday Adella R.St.J. called .me up from  Malibou. where she is staying (so that I probably never shall  see her; and what macht G-otg, she is writing a film for  Mary Pickfordt  That's the kind of pink dirt you find here.