"During the Gay Nineties, Europe sent us beef and brawn to tamp railroad ties on our section gangs. Since the World War, she has sent us brains and culture – to be filtered into American life through the crude screens of Hollywood studios. There are more than four thousand White Russians hanging around Hollywood – Cossack generals running cafés... chief of staff of a great Russian fleet baiting his hooks from a San Pedro fish boat... art critics who were known the length and breadth of Europe fussing with the decorations on studio sets – the architect who built the German government buildings in the Camaroons, designing gangster dives... barons, grand dukes, counts who have commanded Imperial boy-guards taking orders from assistant directors who were corporals.

Europe has sent us also a ragged fringe – fakers, slickers, imposters. A war correspondent of some celebrity who had invaded royal palaces to sit with kings said that the only potentate who really over-awed him was a Cincinnati tailor masquerading as a Romanoff, bumming free board at hotels. Meanwhile, the Austrian grand duke who was real was sleeping on the sand at Santa Monica with his devoted and unpaid valet – starving until he found a way to get one square meal a day by his promise not to expose the 'Commander of His Imperial Majesty's Household Troops, Sir,' as a servant in an officers' mess."

from Los Angeles: City of Dreams (1935) by Harry Carr