The Story of Hollywood

by Gregory Paul Williams

  Local hotels like the Roosevelt, the Knickerbocker, and the Plaza were cushioned from the crash. They became the first stop for stage actors, playwrights, directors and songwriters arriving on every train from New York. In December 1930, an actress with some stage success checked into the Hollywood Plaza with her mother. She had been offered a role in Universal’s film of Preston Sturges’s stage hit Strictly Dishonorable. The press agent sent to greet her at the station returned saying he didn’t see anyone resembling an actress. Bette Davis and her mother, Ruth, took a cab to Hollywood.

  Various views of Hollywood’s Pantages Theater from 1929 to 1930.

  Most newcomers spread out into Hollywood, Beverly Hills, and Santa Monica, renting houses and apartments. Davis and her mother rented a thatched California bungalow on Alta Loma Terrace in the Hollywood Hills after Ruth borrowed some money from wealthy friends staying at the Roosevelt Hotel. They took some of the borrowed cash to a car dealership on Hollywood Boulevard, where they bought a green Ford phaeton that Ruth thought made Bette look “just right” behind the wheel. Clark Gable rented an apartment in the new Castle Argyle. Helen Kane, the boop-boop-a-doop girl from New York, leased a house in Hollywood because it had a fig tree in the yard. She had thought they grew in the ground.

  Looking north on Vine Street to Hollywood Boulevard, 1938.

  The Brown Derby at 1628 Vine Street was the place to eat in Hollywood (demolished).

  The vaulted interior of the Vine Street Brown Derby main room.

  Eddie Vitch drew cartoons of famous faces for the Derby walls in exchange for meals.

  The tourist trade continued as the budding star system created screen personalities with as much appeal as those deposed. It was the idea that celebrities were on Hollywood Boulevard that brought sightseers in vast numbers. For them, spotting a Hollywood star in person became a defining moment of their lives.

  To first-time visitors, Hollywood was a letdown. Ray Milland, an unknown in 1930, wrote of his first sight of Hollywood Boulevard, “With the exception of Grauman’s Chinese Theater I wasn’t too impressed. I don’t know what I expected, but I felt vaguely disappointed.”

  Visitors generally avoided Hollywood’s tourist trade businesses that opened and closed like prayer plants. The street’s first motion picture museum closed the first year of the Depression. Its biggest day’s business had been $7. More successful entrepreneurs waited in cars parked on street corners to take people to homes of the famous in Hollywood and Beverly Hills.

  Neighborhood restaurants frequented by film folk remained a lure. Star gawkers who could not afford a meal hung at the entrance and asked for autographs or dined and scrounged to pay the bill.

  The Vine Street Brown Derby opened Valentine’s Day 1929, the second restaurant in a chain hatched by Herbert Somborn, the ex-husband of Gloria Swanson. It came three years after the original, hat-shaped eatery opened on Wilshire Boulevard across from the Ambassador Hotel. The hat had become popular with stars for late-night bites after the Cocoanut Grove. Jack Warner, who had invested as a silent partner, suggested a more formal Derby closer to the studios.

  The building appeared first, financed by Cecil B. DeMille. As DeMille’s career had taken a dive, he needed an immediate tenant. In place of $1,000-a-month rent, DeMille settled for 5% of the take (which in peak years brought him close to $4,000 a month) and a seat on the Derby’s Board of Directors.

  The business was Depression-proof. Investors Jack Warner and DeMille were committed that the Derbys would survive any slump. “I told the banks concerned that I would personally guarantee any losses,” wrote Warner. “I didn’t lose a dime.”

  Somborn, with a flair for publicity, handed out half-rate cards to four-hundred members of the Southern California press. His press agent, Maggie Ettinger, happened to be a cousin of Louella Parsons. Louella made the restaurant her base for lunchtime celebrity interviews and staff meetings. Having tested the acoustics, she knew that the barrel-vaulted ceiling made it possible to hear across the room. She paid the maitre d’ to seat celebrities at certain tables where she could eavesdrop on them. Wallace Beery found his table manners criticized in print by a disgusted Parsons, who had watched him eat a plate of corned beef. Regulars included Tom Mix, director Ernst Lubitsch, and Clark Gable.

  In this era before the parking valet, the famous parked their cars and walked to the Brown Derby. This sustained the movie magazines’ insistence that visitors could always spot celebrities at Hollywood and Vine.

  Robert Cobb took over the restaurant in 1934 after Somborn died suddenly. Cobb became head of the chain that now included a third Derby in Beverly Hills. He also invented the Cobb Salad one evening when he wanted something different than what was on the menu.

  The original Brown Derby on Wilshire Boulevard, 1938.

  Eddie Brandstatter opened the Embassy Club next door to the Montmartre to offer his star pals more privacy, 1932.

  The Hollywood Derby pulled celebrities away from the Montmartre. Many of Eddie Brandstatter’s star clients complained that the Montmartre had become a tourist trap. Unruly fans mobbed the front door and jostled stars as they entered or stared at them while they ate.

  Without consulting Toberman, Brandstatter, with the Christie brothers, knocked a passageway from the Montmartre into the recently completed Christie Brothers Realty Building next door. He opened the exclusive Embassy Club in February 1930. The two-story $300,000 club featured a rooftop promenade and a glass-enclosed lounge with a sweeping view of the Hollywood Hills. Membership was restricted to three hundred of Brandstatter’s closest friends, many (such as Charlie Chaplin, Gloria Swanson, Norma Talmadge, John Gilbert, and Sid Grauman) were in career declines.

  The Embassy proved to be a mistake and the downfall of the original Montmartre. Without the stars, the Montmartre lost its tourist appeal. Brandstatter declared bankruptcy, compounding landlord Toberman’s problems. Toberman bought the business and hired Alex Perino (who eventually opened his own restaurant on Wilshire Boulevard) to run it. Brandstatter was a token boss.

  The Montmartre briefly regained its cachet as a hot club. One night, Jackie Taylor and his orchestra presented young pianist-composer Hoagy Carmichael, who played a new song called Stardust. When Brandstatter booked the Rhythm Boys, one of the trio, Bing Crosby, started his career in Hollywood. (Crosby met his first wife, Dixie Lee, at the Montmartre. An actress at the Fox Studios on Western Avenue, she married him at the new Blessed Sacrament a block away on Sunset Boulevard.)

  The Embassy Club next door flickered to life with members like Ronald Colman and William Powell. Host-manager Bruce Cabot, who would soon have a film career of his own, invited his close friends Delores del Rio and David Selznick to visit regularly. Mary Pickford booked the place for Motion Picture Relief Fund dinners. Brand-new movie star Jean Harlow came on the arm of her escort and manager, Howard Hughes.

  One year later, Brandstatter let the public into the Embassy Club, killing it and the Montmartre.

  Sid Grauman and Howard Hughes created a spectacle for the Hell’s Angels premiere, 1930.

  After toying with producing movies, Grauman returned to the Chinese six months after selling it. As manager, he revived the prologues.

  Grauman reopened with a film by young producer Howard Hughes, who was using his inherited fortune to make movies. Hughes had spent two years filming a silent picture about aviation called Hell’s Angels. He had to remake it with sound and without the thick-accented female who had starred in the silent version. He replaced her with Jean Harlow, an eighteen-year-old who was no stranger to Hollywood. As Harlean Carpenter, she had attended the Hollywood School for Girls, living in the neighborhood with her mother. Teenage Harlean made an impression on everyone, sashaying to and from school along Hollywood Boulevard.

  One thousand movie stars were advertised to attend Hell’s Angels’s May 27, 1930 opening. With “the greatest outdoor show ever presented,” a mock airplane fight took place over Hollywood. Grauman roped off ten blocks
of Hollywood Boulevard, had streetcars detoured, and used 250 searchlights to pick out the 30 airplanes overhead. A crowd estimated at 150,000 showed up, but something went wrong. The combination of a premiere-frenzied crowd and the general frustration with the Depression triggered a near riot in front of the Chinese Theater. People were injured.

  Jean Harlow and Ben Lyons in a Hell’s Angels publicity photo.

  Cahuenga Boulevard looking north to Franklin Avenue and the Mulholland Dam, 1930.

  Houses in Holly Canyon below the Mulholland Dam.

  To ease concerns about the dam, city engineers reinforced it, then buried it under a mountain of dirt.

  MAIN STREET STRUGGLES

  The Mulholland Reservoir in Holly Canyon became a dreaded presence when, in 1928, its flawed sister dam, the St. Francis in Santa Clarita Valley, burst apart and killed hundreds. City engineer William Mulholland immediately reduced the water level of the Hollywood reservoir, an act that may have saved many lives as the Hollywood dam had the same basic design as the St. Francis. Residents in Holly Canyon built stairways up the hillsides behind their homes for emergency use. “See you tomorrow, if the dam holds,” became a favorite wisecrack among locals who vociferously complained about the dam to their elected leaders. Three different review boards deemed the dam’s safety unacceptable. The DWP began a massive retrofit in 1932 that took two years. Additionally, the dam’s front was buried under tons of dirt and hidden with pine trees. It became known as the Hollywood Reservoir, as William Mulholland had lost some of his water-bringing glory.

  Many of the district’s movie studios stood in pathetic decay, ghosts of the past. The once-awesome D.W. Griffith’s studio, where Fairbanks had become a star, operated as a shabby rental studio. The formerly imposing Metro on Cahuenga Boulevard was as quiet as a graveyard, its windows boarded up, walls cracked, and ragged awnings flapping forlornly in the breeze. Some said it was haunted, or so it seemed. In the deserted back lot, a Japanese garden and a French village drooped with rot. Across the street, Buster Keaton’s studio stood lifeless without its master. Keaton had left in 1928 for an abysmal career at MGM. The rowdy gagmen and visiting pals that had once swarmed the place left with him.

  The once-mighty Metro on Cahuenga Boulevard was now an abandoned ghost movie studio.

  The former Lasky lot at Selma and Vine, where crowds once gathered to see a movie star, retained little from its past. The two blocks that had once produced more movies per square foot than any other studio had not blossomed into the estimated five million dollars worth of structures predicted in 1926. The Wheeler-Reid Organization, publishers of half-a-dozen motion picture magazines, had planned a thirteen-story skyscraper at Sunset and Vine, making Hollywood the world’s motion-picture-magazine center. It never happened. Paramount Studios, now on Marathon Street at Melrose Avenue, proposed building a million-dollar theater on the same corner. But with the studio near bankruptcy, that plan also went bust. The ten acres remained a place for neighborhood children to play baseball. It also had a small corner drive-in and a used car lot.

  Paramount-Lasky’s only relic was the three-story structure at Selma and Vine, now home to Otto K. Olesen. Olesen had the largest electrical business in California and soon won the commission to light California’s new Golden Gate Bridge.

  Fox Studios had moved much of its company to Pico Boulevard south of Beverly Hills. About fifteen buildings originally from the Sunset lot remain on the Pico lot at this writing. The outer lots of the once-huge Hollywood Fox Studios were sold off. Some of the standing sets became the fronts for apartment buildings. (Hollywood had a long tradition of turning sets into actual structures. A teahouse from Lasky’s silent Madame Butterfly became a home in the Hollywood Hills.)

  William Fox had left his company in 1930, accused of mishandling funds. Sol Wurtzel now presided over the Fox Sunset/Western studio. A large-framed tough guy, he had perfected the art of nepotism. His grandfather got a weekly paycheck mostly for pinching starlets’ behinds. The Fox Hollywood studio became a B-movie factory where faded stars like John Gilbert, whose stardom had spanned four short years, tried to revive their careers.

  A drive-in went up on the empty Lasky lot at the Vine Street and Sunset Boulevard corner, 1933 (demolished).

  Otto K. Olesen at southeast Vine Street and Selma Avenue, 1942 (demolished).

  Above: Carl Laemmle’s northwest corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street.

  The Broadway Hollywood.

  Four years after the crash, Hollywood retail businesses spiraled into decline. It became a race between buildings and businesses as to which would go under first. The confidence of the previous decade had vanished. Investors avoided starting anything new. Property went up for sale.

  The crosscurrents of the Depression brought opportunity on the failure of others. Buyers, many from the east, bought land at bargain rates. Security First National Bank at Cahuenga Boulevard absorbed the failed bank at Highland Avenue for its second branch. In spring of 1931, the Dyas Emporium at Hollywood and Vine went out of business. Broadway Department Store owner Arthur Letts bought the building and spent two million dollars refurbishing it. He opened one of the largest department stores in Los Angeles, the Broadway Hollywood.

  In April 1931, Universal’s Carl Laemmle bought the shabby commercial building that had taken the place of George Hoover’s house on the northwest corner of Hollywood and Vine. Laemmle announced, but never completed, a nine-hundred-seat theater with offices and stores.

  Legitimate drama at the Vine Street Theater laid an egg in the 1930 season. Howard Hughes bought the theater to start his Hughes-Franklin chain. Publicizing an updated mirrored lobby as having not one trace of old-hat Egyptian or Chinese decor, the Mirror Theater opened in March 1931 with a movie bill that changed three times a week.

  Hollywood’s publishers thrived during the Depression. Some catered specifically to the movie industry. The Hollywood Filmograph, a weekly trade paper for extras and bit-players since 1922, published from the Warner’s Hollywood Theater Building near Wilcox Avenue. The Studio Directory published from the Taft Building. Trade papers, mostly from New York, like Zit’s Theatrical Weekly and Exhibitor’s Herald-World, opened Hollywood Boulevard offices. When local haberdasher Billy Wilkerson saw his store and barbershop go broke at Sunset and Highland, he launched the Hollywood Reporter in 1930. This forced New York’s Variety to rent offices in the Taft Building, eventually publishing daily from Hollywood too.

  Delivery boys outside the Hollywood Citizen-News on Wilcox Avenue below Selma Avenue, 1933.

  Fan magazines did equally well. From the 1930s on, newsstands overflowed with a huge variety of pulp magazines offering mostly female readers fashion, beauty tips, and gossip. Dozens of publishers, East Coast magazine bureaus, and press and publicity agents set up along Hollywood and Cahuenga Boulevards and Vine Street. Local publications with names like Screen Secrets and Hollywood Lowdown churned out articles that made Hollywood the most publicized place on earth. The stalwart local weekly Holly Leaves sold out to Fawcett Publications of Kentucky, who renamed the magazine Hollywood and kept its editorial offices on Hollywood Boulevard. The magazine offered yearly contests to win a trip to Hollywood where winners toured Paramount and had cocktails in the homes of Edward Everett Horton and Fay Wray.

  Anticipating a bright future, the Hollywood News built a modern newspaper plant at Selma and Wilcox Avenues in 1930. When the Hollywood News became a Depression casualty, Harlan Palmer’s Hollywood Citizen bought the paper and its new plant. The Hollywood Citizen-News became the fourth-largest daily paper in Los Angeles.

  A Hollywood fan magazine office and a Billboard publicity shot, circa 1933.

  The Vine Street Theater became the Mirror, a movie theater, under the ownership of Howard Hughes, 1932.

  The new Pilgrimage Theater.

  C.E. Toberman continued his downward slide. His real estate holding corporation went into receivership, forcing him to relinquish the Garden Court Apartments. He
lost the Roosevelt Hotel to a bank, beginning a series of bankruptcies for the hotel. Barker Brothers was the only tenant in the El Capitan who could pay the rent. Toberman put his lavish home on Camino Palmero as security on a $90,000 loan.

  Colonel Harry Baine, with only one Hollywood building to his name, was not so hobbled. The man Sid Grauman had called “the greatest showman in the world,” a life member in the 233 Club, had moved into politics when the California governor appointed him a county supervisor. Though Baine resigned from the Hollywood Boulevard Association, the neighborhood benefited from his connection. He regularly rode down Hollywood Boulevard in a limousine.

  Sam Kress updated the facade of his Hollywood café in modern aluminum, but sold it when L.B. Mayer appointed him head executive of MGM’s wardrobe department. He spent the remainder of his working days there.

  L.B. Mayer faced his own local problems. The bowling alley and billiard hall at Hollywood and Western reneged on their payments. Landlord Mayer had to take them to court.

  In 1932, the Depression hit the West Coast full force. In June, the Hollywood Bonus Army of five hundred Depression-weary veterans packed their belongings into cars and marched to Washington D.C., where they joined the main Bonus Army at a rally for their military service back pay. Only a few shoppers and disinterested parties watched them pass down Hollywood Boulevard.

  The padlocked El Capitan Theater told a depressing story. The Chinese Theater opened and closed sporadically into 1934. Economics killed the prologue, but movie palaces still presented small stage shows with the feature. Mae West’s I’m No Angel at the Chinese got an equestrian act with orchestra. During a week in September 1933, Warners Hollywood presented the Gumm sisters, whose youngest member became Judy Garland.