WE HATE ACTORS
Organizations serving Hollywood hard-noses, like the Knitting Circle, fretted over the new urbanity. The female Monday Card Club changed its name to the Civic Club to keep its hand in community development. The Woman’s Club and the Hollywood Board of Trade adopted a resolution “to abandon the practice of dice throwing” in Hollywood stores. They sent it to Los Angeles for citywide consideration.
The Hollywood Citizen and the Holly Leaves fought alongside their W.C.T.U. readers to maintain Hollywood’s sanctity. This forced actors and movie crews to travel long distances on bad roads to reach saloons downtown (still a one-hour drive), jazz clubs in Santa Monica, and “Boxing Capital of the World” Vernon, a city the Hollywood Citizen referred to as “that village of commercialized hell.”
With a fervor reminiscent of Harvey Wilcox, Hollywood fought against movies, racetracks and Sunday baseball — a debauchery that vile Vernon permitted. They had special contempt for the “gilded cafes” of Los Angeles that were sending “girls to hell as fast as can the German conquerors.” When local actors organized the Photoplayer’s Club, they had to publicize earnestly that they would not apply for a liquor license.
With all the strict oversight, Hollywood Boulevard shut down promptly at 10:30 p.m., including the streetcars. Writer William de Mille, Cecil’s brother, described working late at Lasky Studio and walking home along deserted Hollywood Boulevard. “The sound of my footsteps on the concrete sidewalk made me feel uncomfortably conspicuous.”
The movie studios banned cigarettes, cigars, and liquor from studio lots, although they seldom enforced the bans. Instead, they praised Hollywood in published interviews. Lasky said that the only scenery he had to duplicate on his Hollywood backlot was the squalor of a New York City tenement.
At the Masonic Lodge at Highland and Hollywood, the Presbyterians addressed the issue of Hollywood’s rising entertainment population. They invited the West Coast manager of Universal to speak. He insisted that movie people were humans, “not curiosities.”
A movie actor changed a few minds on a Saturday in August, 1914, when a truck collided with two Pacific Electric cars on Hollywood Boulevard at Wilton Ave. The accident severed the left leg of the truck’s passenger. The victim would have died on the spot if Lon Chaney, riding to work on one of the cars, had not torn the shirt off his back and stopped the blood flow.
The Hollywood Hotel was the first establishment to succumb to the movie business. Movie people were mostly unimpressed with the place. Jesse Lasky’s wife called it “a dismal summer hotel.” Budding moguls like Griffith and Sennett preferred the Alexandria Hotel near downtown’s financial center. However, the Hollywood Hotel provided handy access for nomadic actors who preferred to live close to the studios.
The hotel’s tourist business had dropped with de Longpre’s demise. Additionally, the manager had left in 1912 for a brand-new retreat, the Beverly Hills Hotel, taking many guests with her. However, Mira Hershey, owner of Hollywood Hotel since 1907 and maiden lady of the chocolate fortune, kept the amenities intact. Every afternoon, the lobby offered full tea with damask napkins and gleaming silver. Elderly starched waitresses in the dining room served five-course meals. Sunday evening concerts in the rotunda continued to attract old Hollywood. Sometimes, Miss Hershey would sit at the piano, adjust her pince-nez glasses, and rip into Bach.
The Hollywood Hotel dominated Hollywood Boulevard at Highland Avenue in 1910 (demolished).
The dining room of the Hollywood Hotel.
Hershey had her hands full once she decided to rent to actors. Suddenly, she found herself policing her tenants. Slight infractions included catching them with an extra dish of peas when she counted their courses. Worse ones involved sex. Miss Hershey tapped nightly on the doors of starlets to ensure they were in their own beds and alone. If not, they got evicted. She was powerless, however, when it came to drinking. As actors smuggled booze into her dining room, she watched helplessly as the level of hilarity ballooned around her.
Thursday night dances in the lobby, a left-over from the hotel’s tourist days, proved another headache. The thirsty thespians at these socials stayed well lubricated in no-drinking Hollywood. While a string quartet of lady musicians played refined selections, actors sashayed among the more arthritic hotel guests as Miss Hershey shoved amorous couples apart on the dance floor, ordering them off if they got too lewd. Anita Loos wrote that everyone laughed behind Hershey’s back when she admired two young ladies so much for dancing together — they were lesbians.
From 1912-1925, Mira Hershey’s yellow hotel saw a thriving business. Hershey found companionship in her sunset years with the movie mothers, who liked to knit on the veranda. Many of Hershey’s guests became huge stars, like Nazimova, Valentino and Garbo. Many guests discovered that their film careers spanned only ten years. So many famous people signed the register of the Hollywood Hotel, it is now in the Smithsonian Institute.
Cecil B. DeMille’s first Hollywood home (at left) in the Cahuenga Pass, 1913 (demolished).
HOME TO THE STARS
If local residents chose to ignore movies, the feeling was mutual. Movie people didn’t even mix with workers from other studios. To vagabond performers, Hollywood represented a paradise of sunny streets and airy homes. Used to dark hotel rooms, they marveled at the beautiful high desert a few steps from Hollywood Boulevard. At night, when the coyotes howled under a star-filled sky, the romance of the place was obvious.
Cecil B. DeMille built his permanent home in Laughlin Park, north of Franklin Avenue and east of Western Avenue. Flower and vegetable plots remained on the north side of Los Feliz Boulevard for years.
Cecil B. DeMille became the first “movie” to have a house in Hollywood, renting a shack in the Cahuenga Pass. The road was so bad that DeMille rode a horse to the studio, relishing the pioneer existence. He even claimed someone shot at him in the Pass. By 1914, DeMille had enough money to buy a fine home in Laughlin Park, negotiated by C.E. Toberman. He lived on DeMille Drive for the rest of his life.
Cecil B. DeMille and Jesse Lasky pose with Geraldine Farrar at her Lasky lot dressing room, 1915.
The edict of no movies living in Hollywood crumbled with the creation of the movie star. No one complained when internationally known opera singer, Geraldine Farrar, rented a house on Hollywood Boulevard west of La Brea Avenue. Starring in a silent version of Carmen at Lasky’s studio, her high notes resounded through the neighborhood as she practiced, adding to the cachet of Hollywood as a place of culture and sophistication.
It was eccentric Dr. Schloesser who ultimately betrayed his old-guard neighbors. He sold Glengary Castle to actor S.I. Hayakawa, a native Japanese, in 1915.
In spite of the racial prejudice rampant in the United States, Hayakawa, discovered by Thomas Ince, had become a movie hero under DeMille’s direction. Hayakawa signed a three-year deal with Lasky’s studio. A Tokyo street suddenly appeared on the Argyle Avenue back lot. Hayakawa’s weekly luncheons for five-hundred guests at Glengary Castle often had more than one orchestra.
Schloesser’s sale opened a floodgate of movie people buying homes in Hollywood. Francis X. Bushman, a movieland Adonis with a mansion back East, bought a large house in an orange grove, now the site of the Chinese Theater. Cecil DeMille bought a house on Hollywood Boulevard south of Laughlin Park for his brother William and family. He also bought a house on Argyle Avenue for his mother. Thomas Ince built an estate at southwest Franklin and Bronson Avenues. Samuel Goldwyn moved to 7339 Franklin Avenue. Jesse Lasky went first class on Hillside Avenue near Franklin and La Brea with a white Mediterranean house and Hollywood’s second swimming pool to Bushman’s first. A stable allowed Lasky to ride to his studio on horseback. Two of Lasky’s neighbors were movie stars, William Farnum and Antonio Moreno.
Lon Chaney, making forty-five dollars a week at Universal and newly married, lived on Edgemont Street just south of Hollywood Boulevard. D.W. Griffith’s cameraman, Billy Bitzer, lived in Bronson Canyon.
Director King Vidor worked at Vitagraph and built a large house in Holly Canyon near David Horsley.
As the wealthiest in the community, many stars opted for what the fan magazines called “the bungalow life-style” north and south of Hollywood Boulevard. Buying or renting homes, they began a continuous round of house parties, bringing nightlife to the area. Female impersonator Julian Eltinge, now a star at Lasky’s Studio, regularly held elegant gatherings in his Hollywood Boulevard home.
S.I. Hayakawa, 1915.
Dr. Schloesser’s ad for Glengary Castle in the Hollywood Citizen, 1914.
William deMille’s Hollywood Boulevard home. (demolished)
Actor William Farnum’s home (upper center) and Jesse Lasky’s home (foreground) were above Franklin and La Brea Avenues, 1917.
By 1915, Hollywood’s old-timers found themselves in the midst of a real estate boom. Even the strictest Bible browser had to admit that movies had not harmed property values. New residential subdivisions sold out quickly as movie people spent money like water, demanding bigger and more pretentious homes. Toberman led developers with four subdivisions including Dr. Gardner’s tract at Hollywood Boulevard and Gardner Street. Signed to Lasky’s, the renowned magician Houdini occupied a cozy craftsman in the Gardner Tract while acting in movies.
Reading the Hollywood Citizen and Holly Leaves, one would hardly know that movies were in the area. Their society columns continued to focus on the Bartletts, the Wattles and the Hoovers. When Mrs. William de Mille got a mention in the social section, it seemed like a fluke.
As people arrived in droves to get into the movies, more residents relented and rented rooms to them. Wallace Beery dropped teenage Gloria Swanson and her mother on tree-lined Cahuenga Boulevard in 1915. They immediately found an apartment in a two-story house.
Attempting to join the prosperity, nearby communities changed their names: Colegrove to South Hollywood, Prospect Park to East Hollywood, Lankershim to North Hollywood, and Sherman to West Hollywood.
John’s Cafe, in Wilcox Hall at Hollywood and Cahuenga Boulevards, was Hollywood’s first celebrity restaurant, 1917.
CASH REGISTERS RING
The first real restaurant in Hollywood was John’s at Hollywood and Cahuenga Boulevards. The other two cafés nearby served mostly lunch and promptly closed at eight o’clock in the evening.
In its heyday in Wilcox Hall, next door to Hall’s Grocery, John the Greek’s unpretentious establishment, with oilcloth-covered tables and a long lunch counter, became a key meeting place for the early movies. During and immediately following WWI, John slowly extended his business hours for movie people, who tended to eat late. On Vernon fight nights, a crowd always came. Charlie Chaplin dropped in every evening for hot apple pie. Jackie Coogan’s parents often left their son in John’s care while they saw a movie at the nearby Iris Theater.
The 1915 release of The Birth of A Nation made millionaires of D.W. Griffith and the film’s investors. The deluge of nickels and dimes flooding into the movie business trickled down to Hollywood and Cahuenga Boulevards.
C.C. Hall, the grocer in Wilcox Hall’s former bank office, found that studio workers would pass his establishment to and from work and during lunch. Many residents blanched when the grocer began advertising in local newspapers “Motion Picture Checks Cashed on any of the Companies.”
On Saturdays, the movies’ traditional payday, the banks were closed, so Hall set up a cashier cage in his store. A publicity manager at Lasky took a liking to Hall. Suddenly national papers referred to him as the “Hollywood grocer.” Hall’s collection of movie star photos was probably the first, eventually covering an entire wall.
Spectators watch a movie filming at Universal Studios. The Los Angeles river is in the background. Mt. Lee is at the far right, 1916.
The front gate of Universal Studios on Lankershim Boulevard.
Dr. Palmer’s Hollywood National Bank, across the street, now competed with Hall’s Grocery for bank business. Palmer arranged special late hours. In 1915, Hollywood Boulevard banks had cashed twenty million dollars in checks. Dr. Palmer’s bank had one million dollars in resources.
On March 15, 1915, ever-smiling Carl Laemmle opened Universal City with great fanfare. It was the third, and final, public opening of the studio. Publicity went nationwide for his stucco buildings among the river weeds. Laemmle paved the narrow, winding Cahuenga Pass for the first time. Workers did such a cheap job that the clutch-ruining road dissolved to dirt for another decade. Opening day, Laemmle ran free bus service from Hollywood and Cahuenga Boulevards to the studio. Everyone on payroll acted as guides for the sightseers.
The new Universal studio made Hollywood and Cahuenga even more of a hub.
In the new brick buildings popping up along Hollywood Boulevard, hardware stores predominated. Next came drugstores that provided actors with the cheap brands of makeup they preferred. Beauty shops arrived when actresses, tired of doing their hair before work, stopped in a parlor on their way to the studios. (Producers would not supply make-up and beauticians until the ‘20s.)
One hundred businesses stretched along Hollywood Boulevard when local orchardist Thomas Hudson died in 1915. The community named the street alongside his home after him. Hudson’s property, fronting the boulevard, remained vacant and park-like for many years.
A tradesman who ran the grocery store on Highland Avenue, north of the Hollywood Hotel, bought and moved into the de Longpre mansion.
Businesses from the previous decade found a new prosperity. Hollywood Fuel and Feed at 1522 Cahuenga Boulevard and a lumber company and planing mill on Ivar north of Hollywood Boulevard supplied materials for the new movie studios. Evergreen Nursery on Bronson, just south of Hollywood Boulevard, was one of the finest and largest nurseries in the state. It supplied greenery for every studio in Hollywood for many years.
C. E. Toberman worried that heavy industry on Hollywood Boulevard, including a freight depot at Cosmos Street and Ivar, harmed the area’s new retail and professional businesses.
Toberman opposed Charlie Chaplin when Chaplin built a movie studio on Sunset Boulevard and La Brea Avenue, directly south from Toberman’s Hollymar Home Tract (1915). Hollywood’s old guard and Toberman protested ugly stages next door to lovely homes. Chaplin won the argument by moving his entrance to La Brea Avenue and giving it a quaint English facade.
The future Max Factor Building appeared when C.E. Toberman built out his Highland corner directly south with a moving and storage business. He felt Hollywood Storage would do very well with the constant migration of actors. An investment partner, H. H. Christie, who had sold his Midwest buggy factory to Henry Ford, invested in the expansion, 1915.
Chaplin made his La Brea Avenue studio look like a row of houses to appease his neighbors, 1918.
HOLLYWOOD BLOSSOMS
When the Grass family replaced their Hollywood Boulevard vegetable farm with a commercial development, Oscar Doolittle was the first businessman on the new block between Cherokee and Las Palmas Avenues. Doolittle opened the first electric store, Hollywood Electric. Next door, separated by an interior sliding glass partition, Doolittle opened Hollywood Music, selling pianos, sheet music, records, and both Victor and Edison phonographs.
Oscar Doolittle had arrived in 1902 with his wife on their honeymoon and never returned to New York, even to visit. Oscar loved Hollywood. He started a family in a home at Cole Place, south of Sunset Boulevard. Doolittle’s oldest daughter Irene recalled seeing the Selma Avenue Schoolhouse bell from the family’s front porch.
One day in 1912, Irene and classmates left school early to watch Thomas Edison parade down Hollywood Boulevard in a caravan of electric cars with steering bars and small flower vases. The inventor stopped at Hollywood Electric, visited the Doolittle family, and shook hands with Oscar, who operated the only electric-car battery exchange in the area.
Another of Irene’s earliest recollections was the night the family walked over to Lasky studio, “because it was just a short way
s from the house. We could watch them filming. I remember a big fire scene. Everybody in Hollywood was there. Of course it was quite a sight. It was just a big open lot. They didn’t even have much of a fence around it.” Spectators were welcome to watch the filming of silent movies as long as they stood out of sight.
In 1915, the Doolittle family moved into a redwood house on Beachwood Canyon’s Glen Green. The three children enrolled in the new Cheremoya Elementary on Franklin Avenue.
New public schools like Los Feliz Elementary (first at Los Feliz and Berendo) did not appeal to movie sophisticates. Beulah Marie Dix, one of Hollywood’s first female screenwriters and a contemporary author, felt that formal education broke a child’s spirit. Dix, who lived on Argyle Avenue north of Sans Souci, sent her daughter, Evelyn, to the Hollywood School for Girls (HSG).
Originally opened on Hollywood Boulevard, HSG established itself in a large house a few lots north of the boulevard on La Brea Ave. The large back yard served as the schoolhouse. Everything from chemistry to interpretive dance was taught under the trees and in sheds. William de Mille’s daughter, future choreographer Agnes, attended, along with C.E. Toberman’s and Louis B. Mayer’s daughters. Costume designer Edith Head came to Hollywood as a French teacher for the school.
The Janes sisters ran another experimental private school in the spacious yards on both sides of their home. Sister Mabel had received her teaching credentials in Chicago in an equally advanced system of education as HSG. With her two sisters and mother, Mabel operated the school, charging a five-dollar tuition. The Janes stressed character building as their primary objective. Movie children here for at least part of their elementary education came from the families of Cecil DeMille, Thomas Ince, Carl Laemmle, and Charlie Chaplin, who had briefly moved next door to DeMille in Laughlin Park. Jesse Lasky Jr., one character the Janes could not build, was the only student expelled from their school. His parents enrolled him, to his chagrin, at the Hollywood School for Girls.
The Story of Hollywood Page 9
