Aline Barnsdall used billboards at Hollywood Boulevard and Vermont Avenue to express her opinions, 1935.
The Ghost of Hollywood conducted her spiritual business on Highland Avenue, 1934.
In so many ways, Hollywood reflected the rest of the nation, only magnified. Hucksters preyed on the disillusioned, who clung to tattered dreams of speculative wealth and success. Photoplay wrote that there were more racketeers in Hollywood than in Chicago. These shady characters filled the second-story offices along Hollywood Boulevard, calling themselves producers or agents. The article labeled them Cahuenga Casanovas, describing them as “moochers, spongers, panhandlers and cigarette borrowers who ply their profession north and south of [Hollywood] Boulevard,” keeping watch for any hapless sucker with cash.
With a corrupt mayor, Los Angeles was controlled by a group of men who made millions on gambling, prostitution, and bootlegging. The public became conditioned to lawlessness. Games of chance were common in drug stores and other ordinary locations. Gaming clubs prospered in Hollywood and the new Sunset Strip. Nightspots like the Clover Club at Sunset and La Cienega and the nearby Colony Club offered gambling and illegal booze outside the city limits, on the way to Beverly Hills. The Hollywood Citizen News ran editorials to expose these operations and condemn official negligence.
By 1933, police began to stage haphazard raids across the city to crack down on the nighttime revelry. After Eddie Brandstatter abandoned the Embassy and Montmartre that year, the Embassy reopened as the Edgemont Club, but closed quickly when the police raided it. It re-opened immediately as Vanities. The relic barn of Drouet’s harness shop at Sunset and Cahuenga Boulevards opened that year with a drag show called Barnyard Frolics Revue. The police raided it as well.
The craze for horses and racetracks became a year-round illegal business. Bookies and gangsters arrived to partake of the lucre that flowed through the entertainment business. Most of the movie moguls were heavy bettors, especially Mayer, Harry Cohn, and Myron Selznick. Cohn averaged five to ten thousand a day on bets in the 1940s. When horse race betting was legalized in 1934, bookmakers worked openly in their second-story Hollywood Boulevard offices.
Hollywood proved the perfect host to gangsters big and small. One of the top bootleggers was Longie Zwillman, who generally stayed at the Garden of Allah.
Stanley Rose, a hard-drinking tough type from Texas, was on the smaller end. Rose ran a book shop on Vine Street, just south of Hollywood Boulevard, even though he didn’t particularly like books. He had not learned to read until injured in WWI. Rose was a bootlegger. In his bookshop, he stashed cases of liquor smuggled from Mexico or offshore ships. The books were used to hide the booze that Rose personally delivered to the studios. Rose eventually developed an impeccable taste in literature.
The southwest corner of Sunset and Cahuenga Boulevards had wooden structures from Hollywood’s rural past. Drouet’s Harness Shop (left) became a drag club before transforming into the Hollywood Canteen during WWII.
When Larry Edmunds walked into Stanley Rose’s looking for work in 1930, the handsome charmer quickly became Rose’s biggest asset. An old friend of writer Thomas Wolfe in Asheville, North Carolina, Edmunds became the main deliveryman for the bookshop, delivering books and booze to the studios along with Rose’s third lucrative business, pornography, that filled the store’s mezzanine. Edmunds’s commitment to sexual liaisons with lonely studio secretaries ensured their loyalty whenever studio bosses needed literature. Edmunds met women at their homes, in the hills, or in his apartment on Highland Avenue near the Hollywood Bowl.
A man named Cansino opened a dance studio with a partner on a second floor at Cahuenga Boulevard and Selma Avenue. He had moved to Los Angeles in 1930 and worked sporadically as a choreographer at Warners Burbank. In his studio, he rehearsed dance routines with his teenage daughter, Marguerite. They were returning to stage work to make it through the Depression. Once Marguerite danced before an audience at the Carthay Circle Theater, the magnetic appeal of the future Rita Hayworth was undeniable.
In June 1933, a few months before the official end of Prohibition, the Hoffbrau Gardens opened at Sunset and Vine with a beer-only policy. The day before the repeal, trucks unloaded liquor into Depression-emptied Hollywood stores getting ready for the next day. On November 7, customers waited for the legal moment when they could enter and buy a drink. An actor who had briefly been the biggest of silent movie stars and was now a nobody, Charles Ray, witnessed Prohibition’s repeal. He wrote: “Have just heard the opening blare of band trumpets. It is a salute from a band down Hollywood Boulevard.” He described an improvised float of a truck draped in colored bunting and loaded with musicians. It gathered a parade of revelers who danced among the trailing streamers. The band played There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight. At Hollywood and Cahuenga, the band took up a dirge as torches were lit and applied to a dummy carried on poles. “Burn the Bluenose” read the unfolded banner. The crowd went wild.
Rita Hayworth’s father ran a dance studio upstairs at the northeast corner of Cahuenga Boulevard and Selma Avenue.
Castle Argyle at Argyle and Franklin Avenues.
Fire destroyed the Baptists’ sanctuary at Las Palmas and Selma Avenues in 1935. It took the $10,000 organ and the pastor’s 2,000 volume library. The 1,000 member congregation rebuilt the church in 1936.
SAG and Writers’ Guild had thier first offices at southwest Hollywood Boulevard and Cherokee Avenue. (1996 photo).
THE DREAM DIES HARD
Harvey Wilcox’s Hollywood was left when bars opened every few doors along Hollywood Boulevard and drugstores filled with liquor displays. With nearly half of Hollywood in the hands of creditors, local business cheered the cocktail lounges that dressed up the fronts of failed stores and banks. Hollywood deeds of sale still forbade liquor, but everyone ignored them.
In 1934, the Gaiety opened across from the Pantages. It was popular with stars who began to barhop. You would never know whose famous face (mostly male) you would see in a Hollywood Boulevard bar. Blackies, in the basement of the Markham Building, was, like its name, a dark place even at high noon. Bradley’s, at the northeast corner of Hollywood and Cherokee, served huge hamburgers and was a popular meeting place.
The Hollywood W.C.T.U. had lost the war. Many members had enough trouble coping with lost savings and homes. Most of the locals had invested in Beesemyer’s Guaranty and were victims of its liquidation.
Nothing symbolized the dashed hopes of Hollywood more than the wreck at Franklin and Argyle. By 1935, Dr. (Schloesser) Castle had died in a small nearby apartment and left Sans Souci an empty ruin. Made of plywood and plaster, the architectural wonder deteriorated after a series of rainy winters. Only a crumbling wall and turret remained. Dr. Castle gave Henry, his gardener of twenty-five years, permission to live in the turret. Crippled by rheumatism, the old man slept on a simple straw mattress and cooked outside over a fire. Behind him loomed Dr. Schloesser’s last landmark, Castle Argyle Arms, “the queen of all apartment hotels.”
Movies, like real estate, had made Hollywood a mecca of false prosperity. A majority found Hollywood a hard road. The disgruntled included studio workers, whose unrest roiled the industry.
From 1883 on, Los Angeles resisted organized labor. This had helped the city to surpass San Francisco, even though the latter possessed a superior harbor, business district, and culture. The movies, now one of America’s top ten industries, had enforced the anti-union tradition. MGM’s L.B. Mayer considered unions a complete threat.
New York’s Actors’ Equity (formed in 1919) never broke the silent picture industry. Talkies, however, were much more demanding to make. Actors worked six days a week, seven days a week when on location. Movie crews had it harder, with work calls starting early in the morning and going into the next morning. Hollywood needed unions, if only to define a reasonable working day.
In 1929, Actors Equity took another stab at penetrating Hollywood with a strike meeting at the Amer
ican Legion Stadium. Four thousand performers showed up, including stars like Eddie Cantor. The movie moguls took a firm stand and the stars backed down, killing the strike. Actors Equity opened offices on Hollywood Boulevard to continue the battle.
A push for unionization came in 1933 after the studio bosses forced 50 percent pay cuts on workers and hoped to make the cuts permanent. In early 1933, ten writers met at the Knickerbocker Hotel and plotted. Though the Writers’ Club on Sunset was purely a social organization, when it transformed into the Screen Writers’ Guild, it immediately had 173 members. That year, six disgruntled actors met and formed Screen Actors Guild (SAG). Producers would not recognize either of these unions, furious that they had broken away from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
SAG and the Writers Guild made their first homes on Hollywood Boulevard in 1933. In a four-story Art Deco structure built three years previously, SAG had a tiny office with one paid secretary who used an orange crate for a desk. Since the studios sent goon squads out, meetings were held in secret. By November, SAG had 1,000 members, including Gary Cooper, George Raft, Boris Karloff, and James Cagney. The AFL recognized SAG in 1935, but the studios refused to deal with them or the Writers Guild.
The technical union, International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE), began when the motion picture stagehands joined the national American Federation of Labor (AFL). IATSE offices for laboratory technicians, photographers, makeup artists and sound technicians were at Cahuenga Boulevard and Selma Avenue.
Outside IATSE offices on Cahuenga Boulevard in 1935.
IATSE had lost a crippling strike in 1933, trying to control sound recording. It regained power in 1935, forcing producers to recognize them, meet their demands, and make Hollywood a closed shop. Unionization of movie crews remained a fractional battle between many splinter groups. IATSE was the largest, with their new West Coast headquarters in the Taft Building.
Hollywood was large and crowded by 1933. In rainy seasons, the district was flooded and mucked-up for days, clogging traffic. The City of Los Angeles designed and constructed a new stormdrain system that year that created many new jobs.
Ivar Avenue heads into the hills. The Parva-Sed-Apta is the smaller building next to the large Alto Nido at the top. Yucca Avenue runs through the photo, 1940.
Writer Nathanael West.
Nathanael West arrived in Hollywood from New York in 1933. He came to work on a screenplay of his novel, Miss Lonelyhearts, for Columbia Pictures and joined the Writers Guild. When another writer took over the project, West worked on other screenplays while living with his friend, S.J. Perelman, in Beverly Hills. His scripts violated so many Hays Office restrictions that they were never produced. The day before Miss Lonelyhearts opened, West returned to New York. The film of his novel was an unsuccessful mess.
All aspects of Hollywood seemed absurd to Nathanael West. To him, the place was the last stop of the American dream, filled with make-believe houses and an odd collection of people who hungered for wealth, fame and excitement. The fantastic, surreal nature of movies, to West, only exposed the dull, degraded, and betrayed lives of the ordinary Hollywoodian.
West eventually returned to Hollywood. He needed money. During the summer and fall of 1935, growing increasingly bewildered and impoverished as the studios passed him by, he lived at the Parva-Sed-Apta apartment hotel on Ivar Avenue, a place he found “Spanish and quite horrid.” His fellow tenants were bit players, seedy comics, midgets, and prostitutes.
He spent his days barhopping along Hollywood Boulevard, meeting more bruised people than anywhere he had traveled: extras who would never work, actors who had only worked once, people whose high hopes had left them hopeless. With his Brooks Brothers suits and his innate sensitivity, West became their confidant. They appealed to his bitter and pessimistic view of life. One time, he led a visiting friend through a string of Hollywood bars where he knew all the patrons and their stories.
Despairing and lonely, West suffered his darkest period when he contracted gonorrhea and endured excruciating pain. Unable to walk and delirious from morphine, he found himself cared for by a midget and a blonde female bit player who was a part-time prostitute.
STYLE CENTER OF THE WORLD
By the mid-’30s, the Depression had eased. The public became movie-mad again. The district of Hollywood made a comeback.
Hollywood Boulevard, with its wide sidewalks and fancy lampposts, looked unfinished. Between the randomly scattered skyscrapers stood stretches of one- and two-story buildings that looked either right out of Kansas or here with the carnival. Visiting sophisticates sneered at Hollywood, the hick town beneath the big-city veneer. Composer Kurt Weill’s impression was, “It’s a miserable village; you can’t take five steps without meeting someone you know. The scenery is magnificent … but what they’ve built it into. It looks exactly like Bridgeport.”
A favorite 1920-style for Hollywood commercial buildings, Churrigueresque, had become the predominant style. Named after a Spanish Baroque architect who slapped lavish ornamentation on plain walls, it had arrived in California by way of Mexico in 1915. It was a quick, inexpensive way to decorate simple buildings. The Gittelson Building on the north side of Hollywood Boulevard west of Wilcox Avenue went up in 1919 made of utilitarian brick. Remodeled in the ‘20s, it became a splendid example, for a time, of Churrigueresque. (The Gittelson brothers ran the very successful Hollywood Ticket Agency here and downtown.) With the remodeling, a glamorous Art Deco cafeteria opened at street level in the building.
Kress Five and Ten, next door to Newberry’s new store, rebuilt their store with cast concrete, 1934.
J.J. Newberry modernized their Hollywood Boulevard store with glazed tiles, making the brick Kress store next door out of date, 1928.
Newberry’s, at Whitley Avenue since 1911, remodeled their store in 1928 into a colorful example of Art Deco. The Kress Five and Ten next door competitively evaluated Newberry’s new store before remodeling their brick building. Kress’s architect, Edward Silbert, designed a radical cast-concrete structure in 1934. Like all Kress stores, it had offices above. The architect avoided the traditional gilt-lettered logo, using a neon sign instead.
The Gittelson brothers remodeled their 6500 Hollywood Boulevard building using the Churrigueresque style, 1929.
Architect S. Charles Lee helped restyle Hollywood Boulevard. With the Studio Theater building and others, S. Charles Lee made 1931 the year of the French chateau on Hollywood Boulevard. Charming commercial chateaux dotted the commercial district section. Their steep, pitched roofs brought sophistication to the street.
An Art Deco cafe opened in the Gittleson Building in the ‘30s.
S. Charles Lee designed the entrance to Leeds Shoes, 1934.
An early commission for Lee was the Hughes-Franklin circuit Studio Theater (on the original site of Hollywood Boulevard’s first movie theater, The Idle Hour). Lee used modern materials like black and gray glass mixed with white baked enameled metal. The box office had disappearing glass sides used only in rainy weather. At one percent the cost of a movie palace, the Studio Theater represented a new era of film exhibition. It had a small seating capacity and minimal personnel. Change was dispensed and the entrance opened automatically once the patron paid. Two vending machines and an automatic drinking fountain served customers in the lobby. Advertised as a machine-age cinema that would revolutionize moviegoing, the next automatic theater was to appear in Dallas, but the Hughes-Franklin chain went under before it happened. In 1936, Lee remodeled the Studio into the Colony. Later, it became the Holly Theater.
A French Chateau-style shop at 6553 Hollywood Boulevard by architect H.L. Gogerty, 1932.
Howard Hughes financed the Studio Theater in a French Chateau-style building at 6523 Hollywood Boulevard. After the Studio failed, it became the Colony Theater, 1938.
6324-32 Hollywood Boulevard, 1934.
The interior of the Vogue Theater.
The Vogue Theater, east of La
Palmas Avenue on Hollywood Boulevard.
A Mayan-styled building on the southwest corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Wilcox Avenue (demolished). Commercial shops fronted Hollywood Boulevard, 1935.
S. Charles Lee then updated Hollywood with Leeds Shoe Store, using glass on the facade. He also designed a sleekly modern new theater called the Vogue and gave the Hollywood Theater an Art Deco redo in 1936, much of which still remains.
The renovation of Hollywood Boulevard’s major intersections chased the Depression blues away. At Wilcox Avenue, owners covered their two-story brick building with elaborate Art Deco blue-gray embossed glazed tiles. Across from them, a Mayan-style commercial store appeared.
Architect Rudolph Schindler remade a brick building near Vine Street into the sophisticated Sardi’s, 1934.
At Hollywood and Vine, a restaurant row burgeoned, with architects Rudolf Schindler and Richard Neutra contributing their styles.
Schindler worked with Eddie Brandstatter of the defunct Montmartre on Sardi’s in 1933. A stone’s throw from Brandstatter’s nemesis, the Vine Street Brown Derby, Sardi’s focused on lunch crowds. Schindler created a table-height lunch counter with its own entrance west of the main door. The sleek dining areas had dumbwaiters so that dirty dishes were not hauled past diners. A tiny, very hot kitchen in the basement prepared the staple dishes that filled the menu.
The Story of Hollywood Page 21
