The Story of Hollywood

by Gregory Paul Williams

  A screen test in New York brought Frances Farmer to Paramount Pictures in 1936. Between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-eight, she made nineteen movies, co-starring with Bing Crosby in Rhythm on the Range. Way too sensitive and rebellious for the Hollywood system, her smash-up came in a public arrest for a minor traffic incident in Santa Monica. Out on parole, she returned to find her agent had sublet her house and disposed of her personal possessions. Installed in the Knickerbocker Hotel, Farmer experienced an emotional breakdown. One evening, police arrived with a warrant and broke into her room. The actress struggled as a matron haphazardly dressed her. Frances Farmer, movie star, was carried kicking and screaming out of the Knickerbocker for not reporting to her parole officer. The press had a field day. She wrote in her memoirs, “I hated everything about Hollywood. The brassy lingo. The lack of sensitivity and individuality … The fakery. I hated everything except the money.”

  Luckier Ava Gardner arrived with her sister at the Hollywood Plaza in 1941. She had a contract at MGM after a studio representative spotted her photograph in New York. The reality of a starlet’s low pay forced the Gardner sisters to move to the cheaper Wilcox Hotel at Selma Avenue while MGM started grooming Ava for stardom.

  When a troubled Ern Westmore was released from the downtown jail in 1937 for drunk driving, he checked into a tenth-floor room at the Hollywood Plaza Hotel and threatened to jump out the window. His younger brother, Frank, on vacation from Hollywood High, spent hours calming him down. That year, Ern Westmore sold his share of the Westmores’ successful beauty business to Max Factor.

  In 1937, Joe Barbera arrived from New York for an animator job at MGM. He checked into the Mark Twain Hotel on Wilcox which, he later wrote was modeled after a “not particularly enlightened penitentiary.” Barbera got so homesick and depressed, his friends walked him by the arms up and down Hollywood Boulevard. He cheered up when he met Bill Hanna at MGM. He also met his second wife at Musso & Frank’s, where she was a cashier.

  Red car casualty on Santa Monica Boulevard. Red car passengers waited in the street to board and cars often hit them. A red car killed theatrical producer Oliver Morosco on Hollywood Boulevard in 1945.

  Technicolor Laboratory on Santa Monica Boulevard between Ivar Avenue and Cahuenga Boulevard, 1943.

  Gilmore Fields at Beverly Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue.

  Hollywood viewed from the top of the storage building at Santa Monica Boulevard and Highland Avenue, 1938.

  The Janes sisters and brother-in-law ran several businesses in their front yard, 1946

  Larry Edmunds, with a partner, Milt Luboviski, opened his own bookstore at Cahuenga Boulevard near Selma Avenue. Edmunds’s customers followed him, including his boozing companions, Leo McCarey, John Barrymore, and W.C. Fields. Luboviski recalled walking into the bookshop’s backroom to find Edmunds in an intimate encounter with a female movie star. At this point, Edmunds’s alcoholism controlled him. (Musso’s and the Vine Street Derby were his two favorite watering holes.) For over a year, he could not work and spent time drying out. When he did not show up at the bookstore one day, Luboviski walked over to Edmunds apartment on Gordon Street and found him dead of suicide with his head in the oven.

  Jennie Dolly, one half of the famous dance team the Dolly Sisters of the early 1900s, hung herself in the window of her Shelton apartment on Wilcox Ave. Once she had dropped a half-million dollars in Monte Carlo, gambling with Jack Warner. An auto accident had disfigured her in 1933. It led to her suicide eight years later.

  A few City of Homes residents remained amid the developed district. Maud Baum, at Cherokee Avenue, cleaned out her attic one spring day. The workers helping her unwittingly tossed cartons of L. Frank Baum’s original, longhand manuscripts into the backyard incinerator. The Taft farmhouse at Hollywood and Taft became a used car lot on the death of matriarch Mary Taft.

  The Janes Sisters stoically held out in the middle of the world’s style center. Their hassles began in 1936, when building inspectors insisted on updated codes that required fireproof structures on Hollywood Boulevard. After getting no response when knocking on the front door, officials got a complaint against the three sisters. However, a U.S. Supreme Court decision in a similar case ruled that a complaint was unconstitutional, sparing the Janes sisters. They replaced the lost income from their school with a single-pump gas station and a flower stand in their front yard. While Mary Grace mostly stayed inside, Mabel worked the flower stall and Carrie, in tennis shoes, ran out and pumped gas. They shared the house with Mary Grace’s husband, Ernest, who sold dilapidated used cars out front.

  Hollywood professional children, from first grade to high school, now attended Lawlor Professional School, a five-story apartment building at Hollywood and Western next to Central casting.

  Baby Peggy Montgomery attended as a teen with Judy Garland, Mickey Rooney, Gower Champion, and Jane Withers. Betty Grable was a standout graduate, performing as a band vocalist at seventeen.

  The Pilgrimage Play struggled after founder Stevenson’s death. Mrs. Chauncy Clark and Harry Chandler, who held title to the property, both wanted out of the financial responsibility. They deeded the property to L.A. County.

  Dr. Palmer published his encyclopedic History of Hollywood and retired. He ended his history on an upbeat note. In spite of the movies’ abandoning Hollywood, glory lingered. A boom in radio, recording, and a budding television industry gave the district a second run as a national center.

  Four acres on the Vine Street hill, owned since 1901 by William Mead as a rural retreat, were donated by his widow to the Vedanta Society in 1938. Part of the Ramakrishna Order of India, Vedanta built a stucco temple with onion-shaped domes. Here, Swami Prabhavananda taught the scared texts of the Hindu religion that aim for liberation from suffering. The most famous convert at the center was English author Christopher Isherwood, who wrote a book, My Guru and His Disciple, about his experiences there.

  Sunset at Hollywood Boulevard and Highland Avenue. J.C. Penney took over Robertson’s Department Store at McCadden Place, 1942.

  Cecil B. DeMille, Marlene Dietrich and Clark Gable at the first Lux Radio Theater broadcast from Hollywood, 1936.

  “This is Cecil B. DeMille saying good night to you from Hollywood.”

  Sign-off at the end of Lux Radio Theater.

  CHAPTER 6 RADIO DAYS

  Eddie Cantor and his radio family, 1938. Guest star Deanna Durbin stands in the center.

  JUST A WEAK SIGNAL

  Hollywood’s first radio signal broadcast in 1919. An ex-Marconi man, Fred Christian, built a five-watt transmitter in his home near Hollywood Boulevard and Normandie Avenue. Borrowing records from music stores, he broadcast every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 7:30 p.m. Anyone in the area who had assembled a radio receiver (radios were not sold in stores until 1923) tuned to Fred Christian, L.A.’s first disc jockey.

  By 1922, radio became popular in the United States. The Department of Commerce divided the country into three air allotments: New York was the principal broadcaster in the East, Chicago in the Midwest, and Los Angeles in the West.

  Radio manufacturer’s cheesecake, 1928.

  Many in the music industry considered playing phonograph records over the air harmful to record and sheet music sales. Consequently, the U.S. government granted the first broadcast licenses only to producers of live shows. Fred Christian dropped playing records and got a license in March 1922. He broadcast from the California Theater in downtown Los Angeles with a sixty-piece orchestra and movie-star guests like Wally Reid and Conrad Nagel. Christian used the call letters KNX. That same year, car dealer Earle C. Anthony founded KFI and Harry Chandler started KHJ.

  The Country Church of Hollywood, 1750 Argyle Avenue, the only church in the world born of a radio program.

  In 1922, the Hollywood Athletic Club commissioned “one of the finest radio receiving sets in Los Angeles.” They installed it in the Hollywood Security Bank at Cahuenga during the day, but moved it every evening to a different
site along Hollywood Boulevard. Listening to a broadcast was considered a social event.

  Fred Christian subsequently sold KNX to the owner of the Los Angeles Evening Express, one of the city’s top newspapers. The station moved to the Studebaker Building at Hollywood and Gower in October 1924. KNX promoted the newspaper, doing anything to get listeners, including the broadcast of a murder trial. The station became notorious for mail fraud and quack medicine advertising, forcing the postal authority to crack down on it. After the newly created Federal Communication Commission established broadcasting guidelines and standards, it cited KNX for forty violations of the Pure Food and Drug Act. In 1927, Cecil B. DeMille made his radio debut on the station to promote King of Kings. By the end of the decade, when the number of radio receivers in homes grew rapidly, KNX had become a five-thousand-watt station.

  At their studio on Sunset Boulevard, Warner Bros. filled a soundstage with radio equipment bought from a bankrupt broadcaster. In March 1925, KFWB went on the air. Jack Warner, using the name Leon Zuardo, served as announcer, featured singer and commercial spieler. Radio served as Warner’s conduit into talking pictures. Shortly after, the studio presented talking movie demonstrations to other movie companies.

  KFWB offered great publicity for Warner Bros., struggling against their competition. Their father, Ben Warner, said the call letters stood for “Keep Fighting, Warner Brothers.” Having a radio station took the studio’s paltry 1927 net income of $30,000 to a profit of $17 million in two years.

  KNX first used the Studebaker Building., southwest Hollywood Boulevard. and Gower Street. (demolished) as their headquarters. Pictured is the 1934 Driverless Auto demonstration.

  The Warner Brothers added two radio towers to their Warners Hollywood roof when they started KFWB. The photo shows Hollywood Boulevard in 1930.

  Radio meant nothing to the rest of the movie business. Established stars stayed away. The few who did appear on local radio shows usually did them for free. Up to 1932, only RKO would allow their movie stars to appear on the air.

  Radio, with its increasing broadcast power, became Hollywood’s principal industry. The district had three of the largest stations in the state: KNX, KFWB, and KMTR that had moved from downtown to Wilcox Avenue in 1924. (A few stations preferred to stay near central Los Angeles.)

  KFWB opened offices in the new Warners Theater building on Hollywood Boulevard. Warners installed two radio towers with their call letters on the theater’s roof. The KFWB Radio Variety offices in Warners Hollywood had considerable traffic from auditioning performers. In 1933, encouraged by his wife to get into radio, Mel Blanc moved from Portland, Oregon, to Los Angeles. Walking off Hollywood Boulevard into KFWB, he got an appearance on the Joe Penner Show as the voice of Penner’s duck. Blanc later became the voice of many popular Warner Bros. cartoon characters.

  Bing Crosby became both a movie star and a radio star in 1932.

  Jack Benny and his wife, Mary Livingston, were comedy favorites to radio listeners across America, 1935.

  RADIO ARRIVES

  After the crash of 1929, the nation’s radio business not only survived but increased its revenue as newspapers folded. Destitute families clung to their radio as their last remaining possession. Personalities like Fred Allen, Ed Wynn as the Texaco Firechief, and Jack Benny became a shared cultural experience across the nation.

  The power of the medium centered in New York where network shows originated. The broadcasts traveled through telephone lines provided by AT&T that only allowed east-to-west transmissions. Line charges for shows originating on the West Coast were much higher, discouraging Hollywood production. Bing Crosby, a movie star after Paramount’s The Big Broadcast of 1932, had to travel to New York for his first network radio show. Eddie Cantor bucked West Coast transmission costs. While making a string of hit pictures with Sam Goldwyn in Hollywood, he brought his Chase and Sanborn Program west in 1932, adding $2,100 to the budget.

  In 1933, network radio arrived in Hollywood. NBC used RKO stages at Melrose Avenue and Gower Street for their local Red and Blue network affiliates, KFI and KECA. (NBC, launched in 1926 before CBS was born, had the top concert and vaudeville stars, plus the biggest sponsors.)

  One of Hollywood’s earliest national radio successes, The Country Church of Hollywood, broadcast from KFAC locally in 1933. It played coast-to-coast on CBS starting in 1934. Reverend William Hogg and his wife, Sarah, built a non-denominational broadcast sanctuary on Argyle north of Hollywood Boulevard among trees remaining from the Bartlett estate. The broadcasts combined folksy, humorous characters, hymns, and inspirational sermons.

  Al Jarvis owned a record shop on Hollywood Boulevard, The Stomp Shop. He figured that playing records on the radio would help his sales. He answered an ad for a radio job at KFWB in 1932. The prime developer of the deejay as a record-playing entertainer, Jarvis and The World’s Largest Make-Believe Ballroom on KFWB became an immediate hit. Imitators copied his format in New York, Detroit and Chicago. By 1934, sponsors lined up to buy commercial time on Make-Believe Ballroom. Jarvis got extended from a one-hour noontime show to three hours, 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. By 1935, KFWB was making money on him. Emulating his style, in 1934 Lucky Strike Hit Parade went prime time on NBC’s Red Network.

  Radio’s profitability spread into the district. Radio stores that sold or rented sets prospered. Major radio dealers like Philco, Radiola, and Victor opened on Sunset between Vine and Highland. Al Jarvis invested in a newsstand at Hollywood and Cahuenga Boulevard. Eddie Cantor opened a gift shop next to the Vine Street Brown Derby.

  Louella Parsons with Hollywood Hotel guest stars George Sanders, Dolores del Rio, and Peter Lorrie, 1934.

  Local boy Glenn Wallichs built in 1930 what is believed to have been the first car radio. Wallichs opened a small radio shop on Ivar Avenue with car radios as his specialty. Al Jarvis teamed with Wallichs in a record studio and music store in Hollywood Boulevard’s El Adobe Building.

  Radio’s true owners, the advertising agencies, operated on the East Coast. They created and produced radio programs. In 1933, the ad agency Young & Rubicam wanted to produce a show about Hollywood from New York. They figured it might sell a lot of soap. They enlisted Photoplay Magazine to fit the program to Hollywood movie studios’ publicity departments. All but MGM succumbed to the idea of radio selling movies. Young & Rubicam came to Hollywood to have access to movie stars. They opened offices in the Equitable Building at Hollywood and Vine and created Screen Guild Theater. The biggest stars appeared in this comedy-drama half-hour based on movie scripts. The agency donated performance fees to the Motion Picture Relief Fund to entice stars to appear.

  Louella Parsons brought CBS west with a similar show. October 1934, Campbell Soup sponsored her Hollywood Hotel. It was a big move for CBS; the broadcasting logistics were complex. Using a now-standard formula of stars performing scenes from their films, Parsons added songs and sappy interviews. Her clout forced guest stars to accept a case of soup as payment. Dick Powell served as master of ceremonies. “This is Louella Parsons broadcasting from the Hollywood Hotel” went the opening. Background voices, supposedly in the hotel’s lobby, dropped famous movie names. The show actually broadcast from the Figueroa Playhouse downtown.

  In 1935, AT&T lowered rates for west-to-east radio transmissions. Two years later, the telephone company had a switcher with reversible channels. Network radio shows could easily come from Hollywood.

  CBS took a lease on the Music Box Theater in 1935. Camel Caravan opened there, and, during its first year’s broadcast, included the Marx Brothers among its guest stars.

  NBC’s Lux Radio Theater for Lux soap broadcast from New York every Sunday afternoon. Alternating between movie and play scripts, it was not a hit. Moving the show to Monday nights on CBS did not help either. Lux Radio Theater arrived at Hollywood’s Music Box on June 1, 1936. The Lux show became a Monday night regular for over two decades. Cecil B. DeMille came on as host and name-only producer. Lever Brothers, the makers of Lux,
paid DeMille top money to lend his name. A flat fee of $5,000 was soon established for talent, although Gable asked for a dollar more so he could be the show’s highest-paid star. The average production featured two big movie stars reading an adapted movie script, DeMille telling behind-the-scenes stories and then making small talk with the stars at curtain call.

  Glen Wallichs opened a phonograph store in Hollywood’s El Adobe with Al Jarvis as partner.

  Cecil B. DeMille, Fred MacMurray, Bette Davis, and Davis’s mother on Lux Radio Theater, 1946.

  DeMille, Ruby Keeler, and Al Jolson for Lux’s version of The Jazz Singer, 1947. Keeler did not perform in the show.

  A restaurant fire in the CBS Music Box Theater, 1937.

  NBC’s first West Coast radio station was on Melrose Avenue near RKO and Paramount, 1937.

  From its first broadcast, Lux Radio Theater brought a full dose of star power to Hollywood. The first production, Legionnaire and the Lady, starred Clark Gable and Marlene Dietrich. Then came Joan Crawford, Gary Cooper, Barbara Stanwyck, Spencer Tracy, Jean Arthur, Fred MacMurray, and so on. Every Monday night was like a premiere at the Music Box, bringing out huge crowds. When Robert Taylor appeared, a horde of women crashed the theater through an open fire escape, taking seats away from ticket holders. Autograph hounds always tried to break into the rehearsals. Lux soap sales boomed. Suddenly, New York ad agencies were ready to join Young & Rubicam in Hollywood.