The Story of Hollywood

by Gregory Paul Williams

  The Janes sisters ran a progressive school in the yard surrounding their home, 1919.

  An experimental primary school, The School of the Open Gate, operated farther north, on Beachwood Drive near upper Cheremoya. It was part of the newly arrived Theosophical Society.

  A sect of Theosophists had searched the country for a home before choosing Hollywood. They bought the southern slope on Vista del Mar Avenue between Argyle and Gower. A group of spiritual scientists who sought the refinement of thought, action and culture, they built a large temple and a group of Moorish-style buildings (some of which still stand). They named their center Krotona.

  Krotona became an important part of Hollywood’s cultural life. It offered adult classes in philosophy, occultism, astrology, and comparative religion. Farther up Temple Hill, a Theosophist couple built a platform in their backyard, creating an outdoor amphitheater called Krotona Stadium. On summer nights, elaborate live productions of The Light of Asia brought dramatic performances by noted stage actors. Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn choreographed. A local resident, Christine Wetherill Stevenson, heiress to the Pittsburgh Paint Co. fortune, sponsored the productions. This later inspired her to create the Hollywood Bowl and the Pilgrimage Theater.

  The Hollywood School for Girls on La Brea Avenue, 1922.

  The Hollywood Woman’s Club had grown wealthy from its many affluent members. They built a large clubhouse on Hollywood Boulevard near La Brea Ave. For the next few decades, members held art exhibitions, concerts, and lectures, as well as their noted annual flower show. Dr. Schloesser, eager to atone for selling out to the movies, staged “Living Pictures” fund-raisers at Sans Souci for the club’s construction money. Mary Moll donated a triangle of parkland in the middle of Hollywood Boulevard to the club.

  The Theosophists built Krotona above Franklin Avenue on Vista del Mar, 1919.

  Carrie Jacobs Bond and her Hollywood home, 1918.

  Hollywood Women’s Club, 7078 Hollywood Boulevard, 1921 (demolished).

  A new Woman’s Club member in 1917 was a famous composer who built her house on Pinehurst Road north of Hollywood Boulevard. Many a Hollywood Victrola played Carrie Jacobs Bond’s big hit I Love You Truly — even the Methodists liked that one. Bond named her new home The End of the Road. It became a salon for visiting art lovers and inspired her next hit song, The End of A Perfect Day.

  MOVIES BECOME MOTION PICTURES

  Lasky Studios changed its name to Famous Players-Lasky and then to Paramount Pictures. A difficult merger occurred after a fire destroyed Adolph Zukor’s Famous Players Studio in New York. Zukor was president of the new company. Zukor visited frequently, but he never moved to Hollywood.

  Jesse Lasky served as vice president in charge of production. Sam Goldwyn found himself ousted. The new company possessed an international distribution system with studios in Paris, Berlin, London, Hollywood, and New York.

  Paramount presented itself along Vine Street as a long, two-story wooden building painted silver-gray. Half-hidden by Harvey Wilcox’s pepper trees, the studio was home to the most famous players. Wally Reid, who became a star in The Birth of a Nation, developed a huge following at this studio. Mary Pickford and Cecil DeMille teamed up for The Little American, where DeMille sank the Lusitania in miniature. Jesse Lasky’s attempt to make Enrico Caruso a silent movie star flopped.

  The studio was jammed. The lemon trees had completely disappeared, replaced by plasterboard shacks with tarpaper roofs and, suddenly, indoor stages. Hollywood’s first art director, Wilford Buckland, who lived next door to Carrie Jacobs Bond, brought the film business indoors with the use of arc lamps. For DeMille, this opened a new world of creative moviemaking. As D.W. Griffith and others followed, enclosed stages appeared around Hollywood.

  Paramount on Vine Street was shaded by Wilcox’s pepper trees, 1916.

  Metro built an up-to-date studio at Cahuenga Boulevard and Romaine Street, 1919.

  Metropolitan Pictures appeared near Cahuenga Boulevard, south of Santa Monica Boulevard, when a cast-off sales manager from Famous Players-Lasky formed his own company. Pterova was Metro’s first star; Mary Miles Minter was its first discovery. With its profits, Metro moved to larger quarters on Cahuenga and Romaine Street diagonally opposite its original studio. Metro eventually covered five city blocks and, with Paramount, became a major Hollywood studio.

  The Intolerance set viewed from the southeast corner of Sunset Boulevard and Virgil Avenue, 1916.

  The Babylon set was built in layers to give the illusion of depth, 1915.

  Dancing girls parade down the Babylon set, 1915.

  The Babylon set for Intolerance viewed through the camera for moving pictures’ first long-distance tracking shot, 1915.

  Griffith’s movie factory, now called Triangle, was awash with cash. A separate unit with scenarios by teenage

  Anita Loos made Douglas Fairbanks a star. The only area left untouched on the lot was a grove of small fig trees that the owner and resident, Mrs. Thoren, loved. Workers packed every other available space. Triangle offered Thoren a profit percentage of Griffith’s next picture for her remaining land. She hesitated, but sold for cash. Her farmhouse became the director’s dining room.

  Griffith felt a responsibility to follow the blockbuster The Birth of a Nation with something equally important. He spent two years filming pieces of a movie that, according to a huge sign painted along a Sunset Boulevard wall, he called The Mother and The Law. Released as Intolerance, it combined four separate stories from different periods in history.

  The first story was about Jesus. A Jerusalem street appeared on the Hollywood Boulevard backlot. For a distant view of Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives, Griffith used Olive Hill (Barnsdall Park) which, once cameraman Bitzer masked out the studio, looked authentic.

  Griffith insisted his players keep in character. This caused a small scandal when Jesus, still in his robes, began hopping in his car and driving out of the studio. Bitzer wrote, “Imagine Christ riding down Hollywood Boulevard in a Ford!” And girl-watching. The locals howled their indignation over their new phone lines.

  It is likely that Griffith saw a performance at Krotona Stadium, for he had a sudden inspiration to add a Babylon sequence to his film. Ruth St. Denis choreographed Griffith’s dancers.

  Griffith wove Intolerance into an epic of murder, passion, greed, and sex. He pushed workers to their limits with unlimited funds from eager investors. False eyelashes were invented when Griffith wanted actress Seena Owen’s eyes to look supernatural.

  A construction crew built Griffith the palace of Belshazzar with every detail matching the descriptions of fortified cities of the third millennium BC. Griffith ordered Belshazzar’s palace to be bigger than anything ever constructed for movies. In a nearby plaster shop, Italian artisans created giant, ornate carvings. The huge edifice glowed with color and dominated the intersection. His crew had to lash the set to the ground with cables during Santa Ana windstorms.

  Griffith and Bitzer’s tracking shot of Babylon, the first of its kind, covered three city blocks. Filled with 3,500 people, the set nearly collapsed under the weight of opposing armies and horses on its high upper walls. Intolerance reputedly cost $1.9 million, the most expensive movie up to that time.

  At Sunset Boulevard and Western Avenue, the Reverend Thomas Dixon, author of The Birth of a Nation, attempted the first movie sequel, The Fall of a Nation. It flopped. After a handful of films, Dixon sold his lot to William Fox and returned to North Carolina. A former street peddler, Fox moved from the Selig Studio on Allesandro and made Fox Studios’ two corners of Sunset and Western another major film factory.

  Universal Studios kept multiple units working every daylit hour, six days a week. Along Melrose Avenue, east of Gower Street, studios named Clune, Brunton and Robertson-Cole worked to fill the public’s insatiable appetite for motion pictures. One block away from Paramount, the Christie brothers, Al and Charles, operated their comedy studio at the former Blondeau/Universal lot. By 1
917, motion picture-making was Hollywood’s largest industry.

  The real estate market also reached new highs. Few saw an end to it. Many movie people, such as the Christies, opened local real estate companies.

  With hundreds of movies being produced nearby, Hollywood doubled for anywhere in the USA. Banks and drugstores were robbed for movie scenes. Armies, football teams, or hordes of people marched down streets behind a camera car. Elegant Broadway star Ina Claire found herself running endlessly around one dusty Hollywood Boulevard block for her first Hollywood picture.

  Film crews roped off streets, hosing them down to make a car skid and turn over, a trademark Wally Reid stunt. Movie chases were everywhere. Thomas Lempertz witnessed the era as a young boy. He described pedaling his bicycle down Hollywood Boulevard from Vermont Avenue “when a carload of Mack Sennett cops who were clowning between scenes took after me in mock pursuit, swinging their clubs and shouting. We wove along the boulevard until I turned at Western Avenue and lost them.”

  Residents began noting Mary Pickford sitting next to them in the Christian Scientist Church. Pickford helped build its original sanctuary on the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and La Brea Avenue. They saw Charlie Chaplin, on location in his tramp suit, buying a soda in the drugstore at Hollywood Boulevard and Vermont Avenue.

  The prosperity brought private automobiles, a huge variety of assembly cars mostly in basic black. The top movie echelon bought the largest and finest cars and used chauffeurs.

  S.I. Hayakawa motored in the back of a gold-plated Pierce Arrow limousine. Francis X. Bushman rode in a lavender Rolls Royce with gold door handles and his monogram inscribed in gold on the doors. Driven by a chauffeur in lavender uniform, Bushman smoked lavender cigarettes held between fingers loaded with amethyst rings. Baby Peggy’s car, painted baby blue, had lace curtains in the windows specially woven with her initials. Fiats were very popular. D.W. Griffith owned one that resembled a train engine. Douglas Fairbanks had an elegant two-seater, his pride and joy. Mack Sennett liked to race his Fiat down Hollywood Boulevard with Mabel Normand at his side.

  An aerial view of Fox Studios on Western Avenue and Sunset Boulevard. 1918

  With no traffic signals, a policeman occasionally directed cars at busy Hollywood intersections. Drivers made left-hand turns by going around the opposite car, not in front of it. This proved daunting to once-a-month drivers like Miss Hershey, whose electric car only appeared when the Hollywood Hotel owner went downtown to see her lawyers. Once, when Hershey was negotiating a left turn on Hollywood, with the mothers of Anita Loos and the Talmadge sisters at her side, she turned the steering stick so hard, the car slowly and sedately tipped over.

  The original orchardist’s house stood in the middle of the Fox movie lot.

  Automobile businesses opened on both Hollywood and Cahuenga Boulevards. Rudolph Valentino, who arrived in 1916, hung out with Hollywood Boulevard’s Italian mechanics while spending two years struggling as a movie extra. His buddies let him borrow cars to impress his friends. Lon Chaney met his constant companion and chauffeur, Polish immigrant John Jeske, at a Hollywood Boulevard garage when Chaney brought his car for service.

  Horses slowly disappeared from Hollywood streets. The established stables at Sunset and Cahuenga Boulevards still rented horses. Riders mostly rode for recreation through the undeveloped Hollywood hills. Pony carts were safe only on side roads.

  OVER THE RAINBOW

  A rising population of would-be performers made Hollywood Boulevard a perpetual public vaudeville. Gloria Swanson’s first impression of the street was that “the men, women, children and animals all looked absurd. I had never seen such weird costumes — loud suits, ruffled dresses, fur jackets, cowboy boots and crazy hats.” With more cowboys than the rancho days, dudes drove automobiles with saddles slung over the hoods and custom horns that whooped like Indians. Women wore makeup as a conventional thing.

  Established studios like Paramount had benches crowded with people waiting for a director to step out and hire them as extras. Universal’s entrance was an ongoing circus, with men showing off and women gossiping. Director Erich von Stroheim entered movies as an actor waiting outside of D.W. Griffith’s studio.

  Unceasing fan-magazine gush about life in Hollywood drew flocks of young girls beginning in 1914. Brought or sent by their mothers, some offered sex for a break. The Hollywood Citizen wrote, “Citizens of Hollywood, wake up! For the sake of your community, your homes and yourself, pinch yourself and grapple with a nasty reality. Hollywood is honeycombed with prostitutes.”

  In the public library at Hollywood Boulevard and Ivar Avenue, a group of young women met regularly in the basement to read plays. Lonely and from somewhere else, they practiced their acting skills and endured a hiring system Joseph von Sternberg described as “the most degrading of all.”

  The librarian became concerned for their welfare. With help from the Los Angeles YWCA, she rented Toberman Hall as a meeting place for girls. Movie women like Bessie Lasky and Mary Pickford raised funds to create a home for single women, the Studio Club, a few blocks south of Hollywood Boulevard.

  Bessie Love, three years out of high school and a D.W Griffith discovery, found herself in 1917 with a generous contract from Vitagraph Studios. Flush with money, she bought the log cabin on Laurel Canyon’s Lookout Mountain. She traveled to the studio along Hollywood Boulevard in a big chauffeur-driven Winton town car. With a mahogany ukulele at her side and her current beau, the young Irving Thalberg, she made quite a gay display Within the year, Love was broke, without a studio, her phone disconnected, and her cabin up for sale. (Mr. Millirons, who owned a large department store downtown, bought it.)

  Cameraman Karl Brown wrote that life in Hollywood “had become one big dog fight, with double-crossing and character assassination the normal routine.” A fast money crowd had brought unscrupulous competition. According to Adolph Zukor, the studios “did everything but murder” to win the eyeballs of movie-goers.

  L. Frank Baum felt the fickleness and retired to Ozcot. No market had appeared for his Oz films. Neighboring Paramount had turned down distribution rights, labeling Baum’s movies “kid stuff.” Though he had lost no money, his pride suffered. He could not hide his disappointment. In his make-believe world of Oz, aggressiveness, ambition, rudeness, and bad temper were cardinal sins, but in his home of Hollywood, the reverse seemed truer.

  Mrs. C.B. DeMille and local women raised funds for a home for single women who came to Hollywood. The de Longpre house is in the background, 1916.

  HOLLYWOOD VERSUS HUNS

  As World War I escalated in Europe, troops of civilian men began marching across Hollywood Boulevard to drill practice in Beachwood Canyon. The Hollywood Officers Training Camp met over a garage at Hollywood Boulevard near Hudson.

  The Hollywood Loyalty League held frequent meetings in Toberman Hall, offering Carrie Jacobs Bond singing her new song My Son or a speaker from Washington. The Red Cross’s tearoom on McCadden Place had local female volunteers draped in blue veils.

  The W.C.T.U.’s patriotic work included talks at the Methodist church, pointing out that Germans produced beer to ruin this country. The Yellow Dog Club, a group for boys 10 years and older, found suspect pro-German residents to embarrass.

  In an act of bad timing, Adolph Bernheimer, a multi-millionaire silk importer, and his brother built a replica of a Japanese palace and garden on a hill overlooking Hollywood. Not only was the Bernheimers’ Teutonic name very suspicious, but so was their fluency in foreign languages. The new home’s large concrete retaining walls led some locals to suspect an armory or wireless station in the bowels. Under constant observation from a group of patriotic citizens, the brothers pacified neighbors by buying a $5,000 war bond. They spent little time in Hollywood after that.

  Vigilant eyes also fell on Dr. Schloesser, with his suspicious name, sudden trips to Europe, and a fortress-like home against him. Schloesser counteracted the gossip by changing his name. Reborn as Dr. Castle
, he went all out for the war effort. Sans Souci’s baronial hall became a Red Cross station. He played a large role uniting big movie names and Hollywood’s old-guard residents against the common enemy, hosting garden fetes where he appeared in satin breeches.

  Across the street, Mack Sennett filmed movie propaganda about the Beast of Berlin, using Glengary Castle as the Kaiser’s home.

  The Bernheimer brothers’ German name aroused suspicion as the two men built their estate above Franklin and Orange Avenues, 1916.

  Both movies and locals threw themselves into war bond sales. Fairbanks, Griffith, and Pickford lead a Liberty parade down Hollywood Boulevard. DeMille took two pages in Holly Leaves urging citizens to buy bonds. A Hollywood Boulevard shop displayed Douglas Fairbanks’ check for $100,000 in the window so doubters could see that it was no publicity stunt. Hollywood became the first community in the U.S. to oversubscribe its maximum of war bonds. It received an Honor Flag for it.

  D.W. Griffith and Mary Pickford pose for a WW I fundraiser, 1919.

  Lasky’s Home Guard drill on Vine Street at Selma Avenue. The streetcar in the distance turns west onto Hollywood Boulevard, 1919.