Why not New York? Personal factors may have played a role: in Los Angeles, Cage's parents could provide support. But Los Angeles was also becoming a cultural center. Architects of Austrian origin R. M. Schindler and Richard Neutra were building the modernist residences that Sample wanted to see. Schindler and his wife, the critic and editor Pauline Gibling Schindler, presided over the public stage at their home. famous house on King's Roadin West Hollywood. One of the King's Road residents, gallerist and educator Galka Scheyer, promoted a group of artists she called the Blue Four: Kandinsky, Feininger, Jawlensky and Klee. The atmosphere is ripe for a new generation. Sample and Cage began creating art together and organized an exhibition at Scripps College in late 1931. The following year, Sample had a solo exhibition at the Santa Monica Public Library, receiving approval from Los Angeles. Time critic Arthur Millier (“sensitive small woodcuts heavily influenced by the German modernist Klee”). Tracking the couple was made easier by the fact that Los Angeles newspapers diligently reported on Cage's movements – no doubt because of his mother's connections.
None of Sample's art or poetry appears to have survived except his Harvard poems. But Pauline Schindler, an astute judge of talent, had a high opinion of him. In a letter to a friend, she wrote that Sample's poems reflected the influence of E. E. Cummings, but were “much more internal and completely sincere… alive, strong and heavy in meaning.” Cage and Sample, she continued, were “intellectually on the verge of decline, and yet, by virtue of their inner vitality, they will continue on their way to the emerging man who is now coming.”
In Mallorca, Cage began composing music, and Sample encouraged him to continue. “Don was an excellent critic,” Hay said in an oral history interview. “When John started writing, Don was very careful and moved it…in the directions it needed to go.” Among other things, Sample introduced his young lover to the work of James Joyce, which had a huge influence on Cage's mature work. In a conversation with Stuart Timmons in 1987, Cage recalled Sample as “a real disciplinarian” who forced him to work “three hours in the afternoon and two hours after dinner.”
Harry Hay, the son of a mining engineer who once worked for Cecil Rhodes, had a fine baritone voice, which Cage used in early performances of his music. Hay later recalled singing Cage’s “Greek Ode,” a setting of the choral lament from Aeschylus’s “The Persians,” somewhat reminiscent of Erik Satie, to an audience at a Santa Monica Bay women’s club. When I was looking through Santa Monica Prospects, In the article, which was ignored as a biographical source of Cage, I could not find such an event, but I did note that Hay and Cage appeared together at the Republican Youth Tea Party on November 6, 1932, an event to vote for Herbert Hoover, who lost to Franklin Delano Roosevelt two days later. Cage and Hay also gave a recital along with a lecture by W. F. Way, who discussed the need for a yacht harbor in Santa Monica. During a “charity tea” at the home of logging company executive Ethelbert R. Maule, whose daughter Cornelia was a dancer and pianist, Cage presented his music alongside Sample's work.
By early 1933, Cage and Sample had moved into Palama, a bungalow in Santa Monica. Cage describes the place in his book Silence, omitting any mention of Sample: “In exchange for gardening work, I was given an apartment to live in and a large room at the back of the courtyard above the garages, which I used as a lecture hall.” Stories in Prospects show that Cage played and/or discussed the music of Satie, Honegger, Milhaud, Poulenc, Schulhoff, Toch, Stravinsky, Hindemith and Schoenberg. At the American-themed event, Cage performed Gershwin's “Preludes” – not exactly a simple composition and not the kind of repertoire one would expect from the future composer of “Imaginary Landscape No. 4” for twelve radios. In later years, Cage characterized his patrons as “housewives,” but his audience was cultured and appreciative.
