Letter from Sinclair Lewis to Marcella Powers, July 31, 1943

              /id-  crmTEira aiHRmonT  8221 SUNSET BOULEVARD  HOLLYWOOD, LOS ANGELES , CALIFORNIA  Saturday morning, July 31  Talking with Dorothy.Gish and Louis Calhern last evening, I  was very glad that you had left acting for magazine work""—  with a highly probable future of being, in our mansion iir  Maine, a Highly Celebrated.Lady Novelist....They were talking  of The Great Big Doorstep"" — remember we saw them in it,, and  went back?  Here was a charming and well-done play that meant  something; they gave all their iBjUii/^noriabor to it7Ta53—ftskTi j  still it flopped And just beforeAthat, Dorothy had had tHe  same kind of experience with a.play by Paul Osborne And out  here, I feel they are lost and homeless, no matter how much  money they make: just a suite at the Garden of Allah (which  is almost across the street from the Chateau Lewlsmont) and,  like me, dining round at restaurants.  This after years of  training and pretty high reputation. No, not for my Mouse of  Immaculateness.....  Sunday AM, August 1st, and  August is a blessed month because:  it comes just before September, which  is, or will be, the renowned month  during which I shall see you.  I've been thinking about our Anniversary Present, and then  I thought, lookl I tMught, Marcella might love to see my  Spencerian script, and so I wrote oufr the enclosed.  . pfcj  I want you to use a large part of it to get some very handsome new photographs, right away, in time to send me at least  one here before I go.  I left all the photographs of you at  home, this time, deliberately, so that I would not get too used  to them by my thousands of porings upon them, and that was a  mistake: I miss them greatly. But how wonderful to have a new  version of youl  Whatever then remains of the Anniversary Present is t!i©*t to be  applied either to something new and preferably foolish for your  flat, or else to the hole In your savings made by paying for The  couch.  Last evening, gMng to a very dull party at the house of G-eorge  Bruce, an MGM jb green writer -- a party from which I safely escaped at IOOOjJ walked &bout a mile and a half along the Strip,  on Sunset Boulevard, passing the Troaadero — now closed, the  Clover Club — now closed, Ciro's — now burnt-out and closed.  In all this distance, there was perhaps a quarter-mile o  p  ov — ov — ov