It's difficult to explain how good Mickey Rourke was before his scheduled disassembly commenced circa 1987. His Celebrity Big Brother casting was as redundant as the footage of the wreckage of the OceanGate Titan: the proof of how it ended gives no clue to how the pieces ever fitted together.
Over the New Year, Rourke was evicted from his La Jolla home which of course – of course – once belonged to Raymond Chandler. Between that alcoholic and this one, the house has collected black mould and US$60,000 in back rent.
Chandler famously was suspicious of La Jolla's "meaningless chi-chi and a climate" but promised his wife Cissy Pascal they would move to the coastal town above San Diego when he could afford it. That time came in 1945 after an onerous year of screenwriting for MGM which included $1000 a week to adapt his own novel The Lady In The Lake. (He despised the latter commission and quit after three months.)
Chandler is often quoted as saying La Jolla was "no place to live. There is no one to talk to, just old people and their parents" but conceded to The New York Times that it did have "the finest coastline of the Pacific side of the country, no billboards or concessions or beachfront shacks, an air of cool decency and good manners that is almost startling in California. One may like a free and easy neighbourhood where they smash the empty bottles on the sidewalk. But in practice it's very comfortable."
After Cissy died in 1954 Chandler fell into even heavier drinking. Following blackouts and a shooting incident reported as attempted suicide (he fired a gun into the ceiling) he sobered up long enough to instruct an agent to sell the house to the first bidder.
No one cares about these people now. You can read more in Tom Hiney's Raymond Chandler: A Biography (Chatto & Windus, 1997) and Raymond Chandler Speaking, edited by Dorothy Gardiner and Kathrine Sorley Walker (Hamish Hamilton, 1962).
