The Story of Hollywood
Page 12
Beginning July 1919, the U.S. Government helped Hollywood’s war against liquor. A national prohibition dried the country with a vengeance. Hollywood’s early residents rejoiced over shutting down the Eight-Mile House in the Cahuenga Pass. It fell into decay until it was demolished.
For the local W.C.T.U., any celebration was short-lived. Hollywood residents had given movie people plenty of practice at breaking liquor laws. Several shabby blind pigs, or speakeasies, had long operated discreetly on Sunset Boulevard. Hard liquor continued to flow at private parties in mansions around Hollywood. During prohibition, the film crowd welcomed bootleggers with open arms.
Narcotics arrived. Fatty Arbuckle and Mabel Normand were users. Poverty came too. In 1921, Holly Leaves estimated that three thousand film aspirants starved in Hollywood.
Jack Warner wrote that everyone in New York went Hollywood, “along with the fast-buck characters from everywhere, the con artists, the real estate chiselers, soda jerks, writers who never wrote, call girls with agents, hoodlums, gamblers, and touts.”
The Warner Brothers Hollywood studio, looking west from Sunset Boulevard and Van Ness Avenue.
Gilbert Beesemyer sits at the head of The Guaranty Loan board, 1925.
THE EMPIRE BUILDERS
During this era, economist John Kenneth Galbraith observed, “The American people displayed an inordinate desire to get rich quickly with a minimum of effort.” Manic boosterism and speculation gripped the nation, and certainly Hollywood. With the ballyhoo of capital investment, local boosters decided that Hollywood Boulevard’s days as a residential street were over. It was now a first-class shopping and business district.
At the start of the 1920s, four hundred businessmen including Toberman, the Christie brothers, and Harlan Palmer formed the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce. The membership drive closed with 2,517 members. The Chamber encouraged downtown retailers to open stores on Hollywood Boulevard and urged local retailers to stock more sophisticated merchandise. They waged a successful fight with Pacific Electric to end the ten-cent rate that had led other areas of Los Angeles to advertise, “Invest your money in property where tenants ride for five cents.” The Chamber brought buses along Sunset, Vine, and La Brea.
Residents and business people began protesting the unkempt vacant lots that looked like missing teeth amid the bright new buildings. Others hurriedly constructed shoddy commercial buildings. Some suggested that the former Hudson orchard, stretching along the south side of Hollywood Boulevard between Hudson and Cherokee Avenues, be preserved as a park.
In 1919, Toberman hatched the idea of “decentralized shopping centers” along Hollywood Boulevard, starting with a group of brick shops and garages at Hollywood Boulevard at Bronson, considered an outlying area. A year later, he developed three corners at Hollywood and Normandie with brick stores.
The lemon orchard on the southeast corner of Hollywood and Wilton, planted in 1894, became eight single-story shops.
A sure sign that a boom had begun, the larger downtown banks arrived from 1918 on to secure the accounts of movie studio workers. Hollywood had 25,000 movie workers by the mid-1920s.
Dr. Palmer and George Hoover profited in 1919 when they sold the assets of their banks to Security Trust & Savings of Los Angeles. Security wanted more pretentious headquarters than either the Cahuenga or Highland buildings. They bought from Philo Beveridge the northeast corner of Hollywood and Cahuenga Boulevards (the Hollywood Club’s tennis courts) at a record price. They hired the architectural firm of Parkinson & Parkinson, who later designed Bullock’s Wilshire, to create their building.
Jacob Stern sold the strip of his property fronting Hollywood Boulevard between Vine and Ivar to John Cooper at four times the price he had paid for the entire tract in 1903. Cooper planned a business block. Dr. Palmer bought the southwest corner of Hollywood and Vine from Cooper at a record price.
Palmer Building, southeast corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Cosmo Street, 1922.
Markham Building, southwest corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Cosmo Street, 1922 (demolished).
In 1921, Dr. Palmer financed the Palmer Building at Hollywood and Cosmos. Harlan Palmer’s Hollywood Citizen moved in and began publishing daily, with a printing press in the basement. Dr. Palmer co-financed the four-story building across Cosmos with an old friend, Captain Markham. The captain, who lived at southwest Sunset and Vine, built himself Hollywood’s first rooftop penthouse.
George Hoover leased his strip of land fronting Hollywood Boulevard for ninety-nine years to four partners. They built a commercial block next to Hoover’s home. The daily Hollywood News sprang to immediate life in the new development. Directly across from the Hollywood Citizen, Hoover gave Palmer a successful, rival Hollywood newspaper.
The Hollywood News opened in the left building and then moved into the right building. Directly across Hollywood Boulevard, the Hollywood Citizen News published in the Palmer Building basement.
Paramount-Lasky caused a stir when they tried to close Argyle Avenue where it ran through the middle of their movie lot. The Vine Street partisans vehemently opposed the action. They hoped to grade Argyle to Larchmont Boulevard. Paramount faced the unhappy prospect of a public street through its busy operation.
When Highland Avenue property owners made plans to connect Highland with freshly graded Wilshire Boulevard, Dr. Palmer formed the Vine Street Improvement Association with the Taft brothers, Jacob Stern, C. Bireley, and the Christie brothers. They chose to grade Vine Street south to Wilshire. They bought forty acres of Senator Cole’s vineyard and, during 1921, graded, widened, and paved the street.
Vine Street opened as a major avenue in 1922. Holly Leaves pointed out that Hollywood Boulevard needed many major north-south traffic arteries to become a shopping district.
The Vine Street Association now had Hollywood’s first native-born generation as leaders. A. Z. Taft, Jr., and his two brothers took over their family holdings, as did the Beesemyer sons.
Born in 1885 on the ranch, Gilbert Beesemyer was a tall, slender blond with a quiet manner. Married with one son and a home on Fountain Avenue, he neither drank nor gambled. One of his brothers was a dentist on Hollywood Boulevard, while another acted as Superintendent of Streets for Hollywood.
Beesemyer began his career as a cashier at Dr. Palmer’s bank in 1906 and was soon a director. Resigning in December 1918, he briefly ran a contracting business out of the Creque Building and, with a partner, operated a Dodge dealership on Cahuenga Boulevard. Fondly considered one of Hollywood’s own, he found himself the advisor to many who were unsure about investments.
Security Trust on northeast corner of Hollywood and Cahuenga Boulevards, Hollywood News Building, and Guaranty Building (circa 1922).
At the start of the ‘20s, Beesemyer formed the Guaranty Building and Loan Association, incorporating with a capital stock of $25,000. He was the secretary and manager. His six directors were Hollywood men (A. Z. Taft, Jr., among them), and, according to Dr. Palmer, all “perfectly innocent of any banking experience.” They regarded Gilbert “with unquestioning confidence.” Guaranty moved from the Creque Building to the brand-new Palmer Building at Cosmo Street in 1922. It flourished due to the goodwill of locals, building forty Hollywood homes that year.
Hollywood Boulevard’s “Skyscraper Mile” arrived June 3, 1922, when Security Trust and Savings opened the tallest building in Hollywood, a six-story bank at Hollywood and Cahuenga Boulevards. The event was reminiscent of Tunnel Day celebration. Thousands of people toured the bank and its vaults. An orchestra played in one of the largest lobbies on the Pacific Coast while, in the basement, two Swiss zithers and a harp-guitar entertained. Guests looked at old photos of the original bank in Wilcox Hall and watched a snappy show from Orpheum artists. They danced among the mammoth horseshoe bouquets sent from neighboring banks, movie companies, and Sam Kress. As souvenirs of the occasion, three-thousand booklets were handed out, titled In the Valley of the Cahuengas — Would That Those Old Indians C
ould See It Now. Seventy-five years had passed since the signing of the peace treaty between the United States and Mexico at the Cahuenga Pass.
The Cooper block, southwest Hollywood Boulevard at Vine in 1921. The left and right buildings were demolished in the mid-1930s. The middle building survived two facade remodels as Roos Brothers and Lerner Dress Shop and Newberry’s before demolition in 1996.
Fatty Arbuckle poses with starlets in a publicity photo, 1919.
WELCOME TO BABYLON
The American public’s insatiable appetite for what happened in Hollywood, especially intimate details of stars’ lives, brought tabloid newspapers and news services to local offices. The Markham Building at Cosmo Street became the local office for the New York Morning Telegraph. Stars visited regularly. The Associated Press kept their Hollywood office in the Palmer Building. Eventually, Hollywood’s press corps became the third largest in the country behind New York and Washington.
Movie studios fostered an open and easy obsession with sex. Producers made a silent version of The Barber of Seville, renaming it The Call of the Flesh. The changing sexual mores of the Jazz Age represented a bogeyman for most Americans.
American boys did not fall victim to Hollywood’s siren song as girls did. Females across the United States flocked to Hollywood. To them, it was a mysterious and romantic place. Screenland Magazine exaggerated, “One has to elbow beauties out of the way to make a passage [down Hollywood Boulevard].” These ambitious young women added to the party atmosphere.
The coalescence of movies, jazz, and new money created a period of lunacy in Hollywood. Some residents suspected what Jack Warner confirmed. “There were indoor sports in some of the movie mansions that would have felled whole platoons of PTA mothers.”
The local W.C.T.U. and other Hollywood residents who lived next door to movie people fed reporters rumors of drug and liquor parties and of orgies. Journalists used the gossip to make Hollywood sound more lurid than a Cecil B. DeMille movie.
Everyone across America noticed when movie stars’ lives became seamy. Joe Schenck and Norma Talmadge gave upscale, proper parties in their Hollywood home, so dull that Schenck preferred playing poker upstairs. However, when Talmadge fell in love with costar Gilbert Roland, eyes popped. Trying to push Schenck into a divorce, Talmadge regularly rode down Hollywood Boulevard in an open car with her arms around the actor.
When Mary Pickford headed out of town to avoid reporters, her divorce in Nevada and the rumors about an affair with Fairbanks tarnished the reputations of the two stars who had connected with the local Puritans.
Hollywood’s old guard sensed they were losing a moral battle as well as one for their personal reputations. By 1921, they were a minority to their jazzy neighbors, Many predicted disaster.
Virginia Rappe had come to Hollywood to get into the movies. She lived in the Hollywood Hotel. It is likely she met comedian Fatty Arbuckle at the Thursday night dances that Arbuckle regularly attended.
Gloria Swanson, circa 1920.
Fatty was a popular star. When he and his business partner, Joe Schenck, signed a multi-millio- dollar contract with Paramount, Arbuckle celebrated in a San Francisco hotel. The riotous party was the scene of Rappe’s death and had as much affect on Hollywood as if it had happened at the Hollywood Hotel. Innocent Fatty took the rap on a scandal that gave the world a sense of moral outrage. The visitation for Rappe’s body at the mortuary at the southeast corner of Hollywood and Argyle brought out a huge crowd, mostly women and children. Rappe’s funeral at the Hollywood Cemetery turned into pandemonium.
Virginia Rappe’s body arrives in Los Angeles, 1921.
A love/hate relationship between Hollywood and the national press started. Reporters arrived in Hollywood to write about the sensational story and, not finding Sodom or Gomorrah, trashed the place. One wrote, “By 10:00 p.m., Hollywood Boulevard resembles the main aisle of the catacombs.” The New York World sniped, “If two people walk down Hollywood Boulevard together, the natives mistake them for a parade.” A Life magazine article called Hollywood “the deadest hole.” Christian Science Monitor took a kinder tack writing, “Hollywood’s only failings have been thrust upon her by Broadway.” All agreed that no one had invented any new vices.
The Hollywood Women’s Christian Temperance Union demonstrates the chains of alcohol.
After the Arbuckle scandal broke, preachers along Hollywood Boulevard announced sermons on sin. This included two recent churches, St. Thomas Episcopal at Gardner Street (1919) and the Hollywood Congregational at Sycamore Avenue (1920).
The Methodists at Hollywood and Ivar formed the epicenter of indignation. Dr. Martin gave a similarly themed sermon on successive Sundays. Hollywood, he preached, was “branded as a community of jazzers around the nation.” All movie folks knew how to do, he thundered, “with their money and their time is to spend it in eating and drinking and wearing clothes and more clothes — and less clothes — and more jewels and trying to drive faster and seeking hungrily for fresh sensations and bizarre things … I am not particularly concerned with a statistical count of murderers, bootleggers, home breakers, moral lepers, lounge lizards, mashing parasites, and lip-sticked women. I do not think we have any more than some other places. (But) I am ashamed and humiliated by those we do have. The time has come in Hollywood to exalt plain, simple Americanism. Let us open the door and say to the bizarre, the dancing follies and the jazz, begone to return no more.”
The W.C.T.U. women in the Methodist church vowed to clean up Hollywood. They organized a group to pass on all motion pictures and circulate a weekly list that commented on the morals of specific actors. They had to see more movies as a consequence of upholding community virtue.
For their instruction, Hollywood had added two more medium-sized movie theaters. The Apollo had opened on Hollywood Boulevard near St. Andrews Place and screened Paramount Pictures. The Hunley appeared near Toberman’s new Normandie Avenue business center, boasting the best organ in town with the effects of forty different instruments.
As the Arbuckle case made its torturous way through the court system, requiring three trials, scandals seemed to pile up. Charlie Chaplin got involved with a teenage girl. Mabel Normand’s chauffeur shot a man in Edna Purviance’s home. The murder of director William Desmond Taylor topped them all. Actresses Mary Miles Minter and Mabel Normand were suspects. Though these scandals occurred across the city, all the parties involved, except for Chaplin, worked with Paramount-Lasky at Selma and Vine.
Rudolph Valentino and Agnes Ayres in The Sheik.
Methodist Church, Hollywood Boulevard and Ivar Avenue, the epicenter for Hollywood’s fight to maintain its morality integrity (demolished).
Hunley Theater, 5115 Hollywood Boulevard (demolished).
Apollo Theater, 5552 Hollywood Boulevard in 1945 (demolished).
Elinor Glyn strikes the same pose as Gloria Swanson in Glyn’s Beyond the Rocks.
For Jesse Lasky, this notoriety was fine. It kept the studio’s pictures on everyone’s mind. Lasky’s current hit was a huge one, The Sheik with Rudolph Valentino. (Valentino had left Metro for Lasky’s in 1921.) June Mathis had refused to work on The Sheik, deeming it cheesy pornography. The film’s fetish for the humiliation of women, however, clicked with Jazz Age females who wanted to smoke, drink, and enjoy their sexuality.
As a shield against critics, Lasky imported British author Elinor Glyn to refine Hollywood. Glyn’s novel, Three Weeks, had been a cause célèbre. The author wrote dainty stories featuring sexually driven heroines who sought handsome, rich, and powerful men to enslave. Many labeled the rather conventional, if overly dramatic, middle-aged Glyn a scarlet woman. She had gone through most of her money and had faced diminishing returns in Europe when she accepted Lasky’s offer. Arriving in Hollywood having never seen a movie, she immediately transformed herself into Madame Glyn, a self-confident, haughty aristocrat who, from her first baby steps down Hollywood Boulevard, took charge of bringing Hollywood up culturally.
The Hollywood Hotel must have been something of a shock to Glyn, who had stayed at the Ritz of Paris. Renting two adjoining rooms, she immediately won Miss Hershey over by letting everyone know she was a lady to the bone. She decorated her suite like a Persian tent with scarlet drapes, purple pillows, gongs, Buddhas, crystal balls, tarot cards, and burning incense. She held forth in Persian pajamas, lying on her tiger-skin rug, declaiming poetry or chattering incessantly to a constant stream of visitors.
She started immediately as an advisor on Paramount pictures made from her scenarios, ordering for Swanson, who starred in Glyn’s The Great Moment, an evening dress with a four-foot train of pearls and ermine. The Great Moment was a success. For her next production that year, Beyond the Rocks starring Valentino and Swanson, Glyn taught Valentino how to kiss the open palm of a woman’s hand.
Each day the author, cast, and crew lunched at Armstrong’s Blue Front Cafe to discuss the psychology and action for the afternoon’s filming. When her second film was a huge commercial success, Glyn became the dowager-empress of Hollywood. Anita Loos wrote, “If Hollywood had never existed, Elinor Glyn would have invented it.”