The Story of Hollywood

by Gregory Paul Williams

  Movie star Bebe Daniels advertised her clothing stores in the Hollywood Citizen, 1926.

  Knickerbocker Hotel on Ivar Avenue, 1934.

  The Knickerbocker Hotel on Ivar Avenue came immediately after the Plaza, financed by Strong, Wheat, Riggs, and Barnett, a team who would develop around Hollywood and Vine for the next four years. The architect, John Cooper, had built I. Magnin’s. The Knickerbocker offered fully-appointed apartments for long-term tenants.

  The Christie brothers came in third with their Regent Hotel, eighty-five rooms with baths and a restaurant. They built it on the Hollywood Boulevard orchard near Argyle Avenue where Charles Christie had filmed his first Hollywood comedy short.

  For a period in 1926, one or more new apartment hotels started construction in Hollywood every week. The upscale beauties on Whitley Avenue became temporary homes to stars like Mae West and Marlene Dietrich when they arrived in Hollywood. Other hotels had single rooms with kitchenettes and rented cheaply. Along Ivar, above Hollywood Boulevard, Spanish-style residential buildings, like the Parva-Sed-Apta and the Alto Nido, blossomed.

  Plaza Hotel on Vine Street south of Hollywood Boulevard, 1923.

  The Rector Hotel, northeast Hollywood Boulevard and Western Avenue, served the busy Fox Studios to its south, as did the St. Francis, west of the Rector, 1928 (demolished).

  Hollywood Boulevard’s Hotel Regent between Argyle and El Centro Avenues (demolished). Strothers Mortuary is in foreground (demolished).

  The Wilcox Hotel at Wilcox and Selma Avenues, 1936.

  The Roosevelt Hotel as seen from the forecourt of the Chinese Theater, 1930.

  MGM’s Louis B. Mayer (standing front left) at a 1930’s Hollywood banquet.

  Breakfast at the Mayfair Hotel, 1933.

  Wilcox Avenue, from Sunset to Franklin, filled quickly. The DuPont appeared near the Pass. The Mayfair stands south of Yucca. The Gilbert is south of Selma. The Hotel Wilcox at Selma had an “up-to-the-minute” drugstore with theatrical makeup and a twenty-two-stool counter. Dr. Shaw built the Wilcox on the site where he had lived and practiced since 1910. He was the hotel’s doctor.

  C.E. Toberman topped them all by taking a ninety-nine year lease on Garden Court Apartments, still the most exclusive residential building in Hollywood. He then gathered a syndicate to finance large hotels along Hollywood Boulevard. The Hotel Holding Company’s principle investors were Toberman, Joe Schenck, Jack Warner, Fairbanks, Pickford, L.B. Mayer, and Marcus Loew, and the minor ones included Buster Keaton. They started with The Hollywood Apartment Hotel on Hollywood Boulevard at Harvard Avenue and then built the now-demolished Shelton Apartments on Wilcox Avenue.

  The syndicate’s Roosevelt Hotel, across from the under-construction Chinese Theater, was their most ambitious. Named after Theodore Roosevelt, the hotel rushed to open August 1927. The roof garden had fountains, flowers, awnings and a dance band in the evenings. For a while, its Blossom Room ballroom served as the Wednesday-night spot for the film colony, although it never surpassed the Ambassador’s Coconut Grove in popularity.

  The banquet rooms at these new hotels never had a lack of bookings. By 1926, Hollywood had nine service and luncheon clubs, dozens of civic improvement organizations, plus the conventions from Los Angeles that always scheduled a day in Hollywood. The movie industry, most of it investing in this building frenzy, made Hollywood its banquet capital.

  Movie banquets became standard events that operated on the principle that everyone went to everybody else’s banquets. These usually featured an honored guest, a dull speaker, an orchestra, a big dinner, a few producers, bored stars looking to escape, and a horde of lesser actors, writers, directors, and sycophants. No matter how powerful a person was at the moment, if L.B. Mayer invited them to a charity banquet, they went.

  The Hollywood Hotel suffered from the competition. Myra Hershey had sold out before the hotel-building frenzy. The new owner made plans to transform the place into Italian Renaissance style that never became reality. Its legendary status went up a notch after Valentino, a huge hit in the Joe Schenck-financed The Son of Sheik, died suddenly of peritonitis in New York. Long after his burial in the Hollywood Cemetery, women came to the Hollywood Hotel to sleep in the actor’s room. As time passed, it seemed that Valentino had slept in every room of the old hotel.

  Music Box Chorus, 1927.

  TWO ON THE AISLE

  Hollywood’s first community theater had occupied a shed-like bowling alley at the Glen Holly Hotel on Ivar Avenue. On summer evenings, its wooden doors were left wide open, giving the place an open-air feel. William de Mille wrote plays for the company. Motion picture stars gladly appeared in them. A young Ramon Novarro danced in 1918, searching for a break in the movies. During this period, his lover Valentino brought him to Metro Studios. By the time the fire department closed the wooden theater in 1922, Novarro was a screen idol at MGM, turning heads as he drove his roadster down Hollywood Boulevard.

  Hollywood was a show town by 1926, offering a variety of stage entertainment in private auditoriums. The Hollywood Woman’s Club built a large theater southwest of their clubhouse where Actors Equity put on monthly shows that were so successful, the group tried to lease the stage every night but Sunday. However, the Woman’s Club Auditorium was already booked solid. Besides the club’s own theatrical and musical events (the Woman’s Club Chorus had 80 singers), the theater hosted the Hollywood Community Chorus (2,000 voices) with programs by Carrie Jacobs Bond, the Children’s Community Chorus (250 voices), the Hollywood-Vermont Community Chorus (400 voices), the Apollo Club (40 male singers), the Choral Society (100 voices) and the Hollywood Community Orchestra.

  Show advertisement for the Music Box Theater, 1927.

  The Music Box Theater (Pix/Henry Fonda), 6126 Hollywood Boulevard.

  Edward Everett Horton and unidentified actress on the Vine Street Theater stage, 1928.

  Hollywood High School built a larger auditorium in 1924 to accommodate the glut of local talent. With 2,500 seats, it became a social center for the community. At one performance, the Hollywood Community Chorus and Orchestra appeared with Agnes Woodward’s Whistling Chorus, the only one of its kind in the world. John Phillip Sousa appeared with his band in 1924.

  Investors scrambled to build professional theaters, with false starts by Oliver Morosco Productions and Orpheum Theaters. The horse race started in earnest in 1924. Jacob Stern again led the pack by leasing a portion of his front yard to Strong, Wheat, Riggs and Barnett. The developers built the Vine Street Theater after they finished the Knickerbocker Hotel.

  S.H. Woodruff, developer of Hollywoodland, and Gilbert Beesemyer completed plans for the Hollywood Playhouse on Vine Street north of Hollywood Boulevard in 1925. That year, Dr. Palmer encouraged the Beveridge heirs to initiate the Music Box Theater on Hollywood between Gower and El Centro. Toberman, with the still-uncompleted Chinese on his hands, announced a legitimate theater in a new business building east of the Masonic Hall.

  Toberman stepped over the finish line first with his rococo El Capitan. May 3, 1926, Charlot’s Revue, an imported New York hit with the original stars Jack Buchanan, Gertrude Lawrence, and Beatrice Lillie, had an opening night like a movie premiere. The reviews of the building equaled the show, calling the lavish theater “one of the most palatial structures in America.”

  Soon after, the thousand-seat Music Box Theater debuted with Fancies. According to the artist director Carter de Haven, (father of movie star Gloria DeHaven), the show was an unabashed attempt to bring Times Square to Hollywood. Built expressly for musical revues, the theater had a rooftop nightclub as well. The show’s reviews were good. “The chorus! Their Serpentine dance was something to see, a very effective piece with the stage lit an eerie green while the girls twine and swirl. The singer, Morton Downey, appears in the second act and triumphs with Who Is Who.” The Music Box’s investors read like a Masquers Club roster, with John Barrymore, John Gilbert, Reginald Denny, King Vidor, and Mae Murray contributing. A succession
of similar shows brought out the stars.

  The Hollywood High School Auditorium, 1927. The craftsman bungalow (far right) was once on the Bonnie Brier housing tract, (both structures demolished).

  The Hollywood High School Auditorium facade, 1927.

  Architect’s rendering for the El Capitan Theatre (Paramount/Loew’s), 6838 Hollywood Boulevard.

  The remaining two playhouses rushed to open in 1927. Shaded by Harvey Wilcox’s pepper trees, the Hollywood Playhouse on Vine Street used the Spanish Colonial architecture popular in Hollywoodland. The Playhouse featured comedies. Franklin Pangborn in Weak Sisters was the second show and the first hit. One block south, the Vine Street Theater made its debut with a dramatization of Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, then a New York success, with a local cast. Originally called Wilkes Vine Street Theater for its artistic director, its penchant for drama proved short-lived. The Vine Street Theater faltered until Edward Everett Horton took it over in 1928.

  Hollywood Playhouse in 1927. The theater would change its name over the years to Vine Street El Capitan to Hollywood Palace to The Palace to Avalon.

  The Vine Street Theater in 1927. It also would change its name over the years to Mirror Theater to CBS Radio Playhouse to Huntington Hartford to James Doolittle to Ricardo Montalban.

  Horton and his brother saw the possibilities of Hollywood as a theater center and staged a successful run of plays here. Horton had already started a movie career as a bounding Douglas Fairbanks type. His comedy work on Vine Street, where he ad-libbed his way through shows, established him as a comedian and boosted his career in talkies.

  Booking shows for these theaters became an arduous chore. Toberman had again taken on a responsibility he could not handle. The second show at the El Capitan, an original production called Castles in the Air that boasted all-local talent, flopped. Toberman traveled to San Francisco and hired Henry Duffy, who ran a popular theater company there, to manage the El Capitan. Duffy’s ten-year reign brought unrivaled entertainment to the El Capitan, with over 120 top-flight productions including No, No, Nanette; Abie’s Irish Rose; Ah Wilderness; and Of Mice and Men, with stars like Leo Carillo, Joan Fontaine, Lon Chaney, Jr., Buster Keaton, Clark Gable, Henry Fonda, and Jason Robards. By the end of the decade, Duffy managed the Hollywood Playhouse too.

  Local developers claimed Hollywood Boulevard was the Great White Way of the West. The movie moguls were not as enthusiastic. Live theater competed with movies at the box office. Coincidentally with the appearance of Hollywood’s legitimate theater district, the movie studios moved farther away from central Hollywood.

  MARCH OF THE MOVIES

  Metro Studios on Cahuenga Boulevard began experiencing trouble in 1923. The studio had accumulated a huge debt that new owner Marcus Loew and his general manager Nicholas Schenck (Joe’s brother) solved by merging with a faltering Culver City studio once owned by Sam Goldwyn. L.B. Mayer came on with Irving Thalberg to run the new Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in Culver City. Metro, one of Hollywood’s largest studios, closed in 1924.

  C.B. DeMille left Paramount-Lasky for his next picture, the story of Jesus, King of Kings. He made it at the former Ince Studios in Culver City. Even without DeMille on the lot, Paramount needed more space. Adolph Zukor had created the world’s largest movie factory.

  As an incentive to move, the Selma and Vine property had “become so commercially valuable that it was not good business to occupy it as a studio site” according to the Los Angeles Realtor. Paramount bought Joe Schenck’s United Studios on Marathon Street and Van Ness Avenue. In 1926, Paramount moved everything off the former lemon grove on Vine Street except for three buildings: the film laboratory, a three-story production building that Otto K. Olesen had occupied since 1920, and the original horse barn that they moved later.

  A rival studio to Zukor’s, New York-based First National, found itself evicted from United Studio after the sale to Paramount. First National, with emerging stars like Loretta Young and Basil Rathbone, chose a huge motion picture factory near the newly paved Barham Boulevard. They vowed to make most of their pictures in Burbank. (Later, this site became Warner Bros.)

  Vitagraph sent out rumors about moving to Santa Ana. Actually, the studio was near bankruptcy. The eighteen acres at the end of Hollywood Boulevard had become useless to them. The Los Angeles School Board proposed an urgently needed second high school for Hollywood on the site.

  With much of the motion pictures’ $2-million weekly payroll spent on Hollywood Boulevard, local businesses felt threatened. Surrounding communities like Culver City, Burbank, and North Hollywood gleefully sniped that Hollywood had lost its hold on the movies. Extras now found it arduous to hit each studio early enough to get a job. Many trekked for miles, lugging their changes of clothing on public transportation.

  Pedestrians outside the Paramount-Lasky on Vine Street and Selma Avenue, 1924.

  The new Paramount-Lasky on Marathon Avenue near Melrose Avenue, 1928.

  The district seemed assured that Fox and Warner Bros. would remain. Two large stages and a theater had appeared on Fox’s Sunset and Western lot, squelching rumors that the studio planned to move to its ranch near on Pico Boulevard. As for the Warner brothers, not only had they moved their Yiddish-speaking parents into a bungalow on Bronson Avenue near their studio, in April 1925, they bought the old Vitagraph property from the L.A. School Board (who went over the hill to build Marshall High). With forty productions a year, the two Warner lots cranked out films like assembly lines. Daryl Zanuck preferred to work on the old Vitagraph lot, where he made Rin-Tin-Tin movies. Fox and Warner were also the only major studios pursuing sound films, refurbishing their stages for the new technology.

  Pickford-Fairbanks Studio on Santa Monica Boulevard west of La Brea Avenue.

  Laemmle’s purchase of so much land for Universal ensured that his studio was staying close. Universal used five acres just for parking. The sporadically used Pickford-Fairbanks Studios at Santa Monica Boulevard near La Brea picked up steam when Joe Schenck signed to run the new United Artists there. Schenck also installed Buster Keaton in the small studio at Cahuenga Boulevard and Eleanor Avenue (the first Metro studio), where the comic turned out silent comedy masterpieces.

  Warner Brothers put their name over the old Vitagraph Studios, 1923.

  Paramount was still close enough to be noticed. After Paramount producer Walter Wanger paid Glyn $50,000 for the word “IT” as in sex appeal, the subsequent film turned an unknown Clara Bow, who had languished at the Sunset and Vine studio, into a major name. The number one female box office star by decade’s end, the “It Girl,” now proudly drove down Hollywood Boulevard in an open Kissel with chow dogs dyed to match her red hair and, very often, her red-haired mentor and tutor, Elinor Glyn, at her side.

  Boosters, desperate to prove that Hollywood still meant movies, pointed with pride to the ramshackle jumble at southeast Sunset and Gower. An independent, Columbia Pictures, had bought up the property. The production head of Columbia, Harry Cohn, nailed tin can tops to the baseboards of his office to keep out the rats.

  Walt Disney appeared in 1923 on a corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Rodney Drive, where he filmed exteriors for Alice’s Adventures in Cartoonland. Disney used Hollywood’s Iris and Vista Theaters to preview his early cartoons. (He alternated with the Alex Theater in Glendale.) Disney and his brother, Roy, opened a studio on Hyperion Avenue, renting a building at Vermont and Hollywood for their extra animators.

  Sid Grauman proved the most durable connection between the moviemakers and Hollywood. Grauman put MGM into the upper rank of movie studios with his Egyptian Theater premiere and exhibition of MGM’s Big Parade in 1925. Grauman paraded veterans and army troops down Hollywood Boulevard. He recreated WWI onstage in one of his most ambitious prologues. The next year, Grauman exhibited the first double bill for Pickford and Fairbanks, with each getting a separate prologue. His big coup was bringing film with sound to Hollywood.

  Essentially a silent film with music play
ed in sync via records, Don Juan, starring John Barrymore with Myrna Loy, created a stir. Filmed at Warner’s Vitagraph lot using the Vitaphone system, it had its 1925 world premiere in New York. Jack Warner, however, stayed in Hollywood to prepare the Egyptian for the Hollywood opening. Warner, with characteristic melodrama, said he received mysterious threats by phone and mail from those who wanted to stop the premiere of sound movies. With his studio police chief and a friend from the sheriff’s office, Warner picked up the sound equipment at the train station and convoyed it in an old truck to the Egyptian Theater.

  Though Don Juan was not a hit, with Vitaphone installed in the Egyptian, Grauman dropped his famous prologues for short sound films of vaudeville acts. After complaints from unemployed cast and crew and audiences, the showman reinstated the live performances.

  A horse and buggy share the northeast corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Highland Avenue with auto traffic, 1927.

  GLANCING BACK

  Nostalgia for the past was evident by the most popular shelf at Hollywood’s new public library, the Western adventure novels. When Sid Grauman towed a vintage train engine down Hollywood Boulevard with Arapahoes and Shoshones from Wyoming following behind it, local residents turned out in droves to watch. (This was for the premiere of John Ford’s Iron Horse.) Still, Hollywood’s past quietly disappeared to accommodate the future. By the start of the ‘20s, the Cahuenga Valley had completely abandoned agriculture.