The Story of Hollywood

by Gregory Paul Williams

  Columbia Pictures at Sunset and Gower experienced its greatest growth during the war. Harry Cohn discovered Rita Hayworth and made her hugely popular. After director Howard Hawkes met eighteen-year-old Betty Perske at the Vine Street Derby. Renamed Lauren Bacall, she became a star.

  Williams Esty Agency put Abbott and Costello on the air at NBC. Their hit film at Universal, Buck Privates, made them popular radio and film stars. Bob Hope spent most of the war years broadcasting from army bases around the country.

  During the war, the Hollywood Canteen brought the most famous names to Hollywood. On October 3, 1942, the former Drouet’s Harness Shop became a nightclub for servicemen run by movie stars. Bette Davis and John Garfield had led other actors in persuading fourteen movie guilds and unions to donate labor and materials to renovate the building. Cary Grant gave a piano. Jack Warner sent the linoleum.

  Servicemen wait to enter the Hollywood Canteen on Cahuenga Boulevard, 1944.

  Fred MacMurray signs his autograph at the Canteen. Ginger Rogers is to his right.

  Twelve hundred GIs in three shifts came nightly from 6:00 p.m. to midnight. Lines went around the block. Charles Boyer, Hedy Lamarr, Betty Grable, Dorothy Lamour, and Marlene Dietrich waited on tables. Over six hundred stars entertained and 125 name bands played within six months. One evening in 1943, Orson Welles performed magic tricks in a large tent at Sunset and Wilcox, sawing his new wife, Rita Hayworth, in half.

  Frank Sinatra’s appearance at the Hollywood Canteen caused the same pandemonium as his Wednesday evening radio show on CBS. With Max Factor as sponsor, The Frank Sinatra Show drew lines of shrieking bobby-soxers to CBS Radio Playhouse.

  Eight months after the Canteen opening, Bette Davis’s second husband, Arthur “Farney” Farnsworth collapsed on Hollywood and Vine, falling backward with a yell, his head hitting the pavement. Bleeding through his nose and ears, he went into convulsions. His briefcase disappeared. Farnsworth died in the hospital two days later and rumors flew. Davis told police that he had fallen the day before. An unsolved mystery, writer James Spada in The Life of Bette Davis finds the strongest evidence that Davis was with Farney at the time. Warner Bros. used its formidable clout to cover the facts, coach witnesses, and ram the inquest through.

  Frank Sinatra entertains at the Hollywood Canteen. Harry James, with trumpet, talks to his band, 1944.

  At the Canteen, the widowed Davis rarely danced, but she did scrub floors, serve meals, and sign autographs. Holding much magnetism for soldiers, she found solace in the arms of GIs. Davis, however, was not alone. A lucky soldier with the right looks could end the night with any of a number of glamorous movie stars.

  Vine Street’s CBS Radio Playhouse broadcast GI radio shows. Soldiers overseas wrote in requests for star appearances on Command Performance. Recorded on disks, the show shipped for airplay to fighting GIs. Also from the CBS Radio Playhouse, the War Department’s Armed Forces Radio supplied GI radio stations overseas with forty-two hours of weekly programming. Created by Young & Rubicam (in Hollywood and Vine’s Equitable Building), their network grew from 306 overseas’ outlets to 800. Hollywood stars loved to appear. Socially, it was “in” to be a part of Armed Forces Radio. A regular sign-off featured poetry read by starlets.

  Dancing at the Hollywood Canteen.

  V-J Day at Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street, August 15, 1945.

  V-J Day at Hollywood Boulevard near Ivar Avenue.

  The Academy Awards returned to Hollywood in March 1944. Increasing attendance made banquets impractical, so the Academy chose the Chinese Theater. Staying at the Chinese for three years, in March 1945, the Academy Awards broadcast over radio for the first time. Fledgling network ABC carried the event. That year, Frank Sinatra, Dick Haymes, Kathryn Grayson, and Dinah Shore performed nominated songs for the first time.

  At 4:00 p.m. on August 14, 1945, the news arrived that Japan had agreed to surrender unconditionally to the Allied Forces. Celebrations throughout Los Angeles brought the city to a standstill. A writhing snake dance stretched down Hollywood Boulevard from Western Avenue to Vine Street. Servicemen stole street signs for souvenirs. Outside the Hollywood Canteen, Carmen Miranda and a sailor performed an impromptu rumba. After entertaining three million service men and women over a three-year life span, the Canteen closed its doors that day.

  Crowds spent V-J night, September 2, 1945, at Hollywood and Vine, disregarding traffic signals and taking over the street. When a mob of bobby-soxers swarmed Frank Sinatra’s maroon convertible, stopped a by a red light at the intersection, the grinning singer gave the thrilled group a ride.

  Stars on parade in a souvenir program.

  Spectators wait for the Santa Claus Lane Parade in front of Warners Hollywood, 1938.

  CHRISTMAS TIME

  Eastern papers loved to ridicule Hollywood Boulevard’s yearly transformation into Santa Claus Lane. December in Los Angeles is usually warm, yet local boosters stubbornly pushed a winter wonderland theme. One year, in the mad-spending ‘20s, Col. Harry Baine dropped cornflakes from airplanes to simulate snowfall.

  At Christmastime, the Pig ‘n’ Whistle added a guest choir to its regular evening organ concerts. Storeowners competed with window displays to bring people to Hollywood to see the decorations. When Otto K. Olesen lit Hollywood Boulevard for a few holiday seasons, it used more lighting than any city street in the world. Olesen asked a female star to throw the switch that lit Santa Claus Lane.

  Though the Depression had hampered budgets, the celebration expanded with its first Santa Claus Lane Parade in 1931. Traditionally the night before Thanksgiving, the parade opened the season. It started as Santa with the American Legion Band behind him and traveled westward from Argyle to Sycamore Avenues. It soon grew to feature expensive cars with celebrities, floats, and school bands. Newsreels and radio broadcasts confirmed the glamour.

  Otto K. Olesen designed a Santa Claus float with battery-powered lights. It was stored during the day below Olesen’s headquarters at Selma Avenue and Vine Street.

  Santa then made a nightly run down Hollywood Boulevard during December, often with a celebrity at his side. A microphone onboard allowed Santa and the star to make comments to bystanders.

  During three years of WWII (1942-1944), when the parade did not happen, a Hollywood Boulevard souvenir shop compensated with an elf grotto that drew lines of spectators.

  The parade returned November 23, 1945, to a record crowd. The following year singing cowboy Gene Autry served as Grand Marshall on his horse, Champion. Calling to children along the street, “Here Comes Santa Claus,” he got an idea for a song that did almost as well as his Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer.

  NBC sponsored the parade during the early television days. Every NBC star had a float. Alan Young shared his with an eighteen-year-old Norma Jean Dougherty, soon to be Marilyn Monroe.

  Mary Pickford turns on the lights of Santa Claus Lane.

  A photo opportunity for students at a Hollywood Boulevard modelling school.

  Gale Sondergaard (center in black), Herbert Biberman, and others stage an anti-Franco protest at the Chinese Theater. The Cinemart Building is in the background.

  UNREST AND DISAPPOINTMENT

  Marilyn Monroe’s first marriage took place at the Florentine Gardens in 1942. In 1945, Monroe had her hair dyed blonde in a Hollywood Boulevard beauty shop. An aspiring actress, she liked to visit the Chinese Theater and stand in the footprints. Her first commercial photography job was by the Roosevelt Hotel’s pool. Monroe often sat in the lobby of the Roosevelt.

  The new owners of the Mar-cal Theater, James H. Nicholson and his wife, were so broke, they lived in the theater. Nicholson founded AIP (American International Pictures) with Sam Arkoff. From offices at Selma Avenue and Gower Street, AIP would produce B movies for the ‘50s drive-in crowd.

  Over on the third floor of Vine Street’s Otto K. Olesen Building, UPA made Mr. Magoo cartoons. Warner Bros. artists worked out of the Warner’s Theater building, designing posters an
d billboards for the studio’s movies.

  Daily Variety settled into offices on Cahuenga Boulevard south of Selma Avenue. The Hollywood Reporter remained at Sunset and Highland.

  Army Archerd and Bob Thomas, fresh from military service in 1945, got jobs at the Associated Press in the Palmer Building. Thomas would become a noted biographer of Hollywood celebrities. Archerd became a longtime Variety columnist. He bought the home of L.B. Mayer’s secretary, Ida Koverman, in Whitley Heights and walked to work.

  SAG president Ronald Reagan at his desk.

  SAG rally at Legion Stadium. Left to right: George Chandler, Glenn Ford, Henry Fonda, Leon Ames, Agnes Moorehead, Jane Wyman, Boris Karloff, Gene Kelly, and Joseph Cotten.

  SAG rally in Hollywood Legion Stadium, October 2, 1946. Marlene Dietrich is in the center. To her left, Billy de Wolfe straightens his tie. To his left is Gloria Grahame.

  Screen Actors Guild had headquarters in the Hollywood Professional Building at Sycamore, a corner known as a place for spotting famous faces. A senior SAG member and B western actor with long golden hair and goatee worked out front, entertaining with lasso and gun tricks. His main job was bouncing autograph seekers and anti-labor racketeers.

  SAG continued to reflect the unrest in the movie unions. The foulness of IATSE’s leadership splintered workers’ unions into factions. Joe Schenck at 20th Century Fox was indicted for bribing IATSE racketeer Bioff. From 1937 on, SAG president Robert Montgomery had resisted Bioff.

  The unions’ dispute culminated in a small riot outside of Warners Burbank in September 1946. Protesters used rocks, chains, and clubs; police wielded tear gas. The next month, the Hollywood Labor Conference was held at the Knickerbocker Hotel. A SAG meeting for members at the Legion Stadium worked to end interunion fights. SAG helped unify film workers.

  Ronald Reagan edged into politics as SAG president from 1947-1952. Keeping a careful distance from the obvious communists, Reagan spent most of his time moderating battles between IATSE and the smaller unions.

  Many SAG members fraternized with left-leaning groups that had surfaced in the ‘30s. Writers, directors and actors gave active anti-Franco protests, raising money to fight the Spanish dictator.

  Movie stars like Melvyn Douglas and Fredric March supported the left-wing faction in SAG. Accusations of a SAG alliance with communism infuriated stars like Clark Gable and Gary Cooper.

  Conservative actors affiliated themselves with George Richards, an anti-Semite, anti-Roosevelt businessman who owned local radio station KMPC and 50,000-watt stations in Detroit and Cleveland. Some stars bought shares in Richards’s company to support his views. KMPC Hollywood took over the former KNX studio at Sunset and Gordon, calling itself “The Station of the Stars.”

  The Frolic Room in the Pantages Theater Building.

  Every month in 1944 and through the next few years, the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals met in the Hollywood Legion Hall on Highland Avenue. This powerful group lobbied the House Un-American Activities Committee to investigate communist influence in Hollywood. Members at these meetings included Robert Taylor, Ginger Rogers, Walt Disney, Barbara Stanwyck, John Ford, Irene Dunne, John Wayne, and George Richards. Howard Hughes often surreptitiously dropped by to lend his support. By 1947, when ten filmmakers, including Herbert Biberman, were subpoenaed to Washington’s House of Un-American Activities, the communist witch hunts in movies and broadcasting began in earnest.

  Meanwhile, the old battle against sin reached a new level in Hollywood. Eleven years after prohibition’s repeal, Hollywood bars could be divided into two categories, “nice” and “sleazy.” In March 1948, City Councilman Kenneth Hahn complained publicly about barrooms and restaurants on Hollywood Boulevard. They were, he said, dark and dangerous hangouts with “serious moral problems.” The Seven Seas had the least lighting found during one inspection. Rodent droppings were discovered in the kitchen of another Hollywood hotspot.

  Nighttime spots catering to alternative lifestyles opened as homosexual men and women came out after the war. The popular Café Gala above Sunset Strip was the most elegant. High-profile celebrities like Cole Porter and Monty Woolly went there. (In the ‘80s, it was Wolfgang Puck’s original Spago.) Preston Sturges’s Players on Sunset Boulevard was another favorite.

  Hollywood Boulevard had more than its share of spots known for men looking for men. Slim Gordon’s, on the ground level of the old Montmartre building, became a gay bar in the war years, as did Blackies in the basement of the Markham Building at Hollywood and Cosmo. The Frolic Room next door to the Pantages, elegant in its heyday, also offered a meeting place. Bradley’s, on the northwest corner of Hollywood and Cherokee, had a long bar with a mirror behind it to reveal who came in and out the front door. The men’s bathroom at Bradley’s acquired a reputation.

  John Kingsley, president of the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce and a local stationery storeowner, began a campaign to close Bradley’s. After visiting the bar forty or so times, he wrote in the Hollywood Citizen News that “something strange” was going on in Bradley’s, something involving queers. The Hollywood Citizen News supported the purge of unwanted nighttime businesses.

  The police stepped up their raids on suspect clubs. The club north of Hollywood Boulevard on Las Palmas, known primarily as Vesuvius, was forcefully raided several times. Beginning in 1944, male members of the vice squad worked Hollywood bars and bathrooms. One lawyer made his career of entrapping men and then defending them. The paranoia forced some to leave the city.

  During the early years of WWII, D.W. Griffith had returned to Hollywood with his second wife. From a suite at the Roosevelt Hotel, he held discussions about a never-to-be-made film biography about himself written by Lillian Gish. The Griffiths were forced to move when the Roosevelt broke their suite into smaller quarters to meet the wartime demand for rooms.

  After the war, the now-divorced Griffith lived alone in a Knickerbocker Hotel suite. At the age of seventy-two, the father of American film could not find work. Producers refused to meet him. People who knew him avoided him. Colleen Moore wrote that Griffith “wandered around like a lost soul.” Tall, with thinning white hair and an aquiline profile, he became a familiar figure on Hollywood Boulevard. Few people recognized him. Comedy director Jules White spotted Griffith “while I was having dinner with a writer in a Chinese restaurant across the street from the old Garden Court Apartments.” He described the director as “sort of staggering” down the street.

  D.W. Griffith (center) attends a premiere at the Pantages with Lillian Gish (right) in 1947. The Tele-View Theater, formerly the Hitching Post, is in the background.

  Griffith secluded himself for days in his suite. Loss of influence and usefulness plus his megalomania drove him to drink. Admirers kept track of him, occasionally leaving food and liquor at his door.

  Reporter Ezra Goodman used an attractive woman as bait to get into Griffith’s Knickerbocker suite. There, the once-great director sat for an interview. He told Goodman that he felt Intolerance introduced the greatest number of technical ideas to film. He called Birth of a Nation a lousy, cheap drama and talked about the film he planned, Christ and Napoleon, a sequel to Intolerance. It had a million-dollar budget, required fifty thousand extras and a screen time of seven hours over two days.

  A few months later, Griffith stumbled downstairs into the lobby and was rushed to the hospital. He died the next day, July 23, 1948, of a cerebral hemorrhage. An acquaintance said he talked about Christ and Napoleon the night before he died. At the funeral parlor, six people came to pay their respects. Mae Marsh, John Ford, and C.B. DeMille were three of them.

  Frank Lloyd Wright’s design for the ill-fated Huntington Hartford Play Resort and Sports Club in Runyon Canyon.

  Donald Crisp, president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, who had acted for Griffith for many years, arranged the funeral. It occurred July 27 at the Masonic Hall on Hollywood Boulevard. More than one thousand gawkers stood outside.
Lillian Gish described “bobby-soxers, autograph seekers, and amateur photographers … treating the sad moment as if it were a premiere.” Reporters and photographers came to see six hundred of Hollywood’s top names, many of whom could have helped Griffith, but had not. Charles Chaplin, C.B. DeMille, Samuel Goldwyn, Will Hays, Jesse Lasky, Erich von Stroheim, Hedda Hopper, David O. Selznick, Preston Sturges, Walter Wanger, William Wyler, and L.B. Mayer attended.

  At the hour of his service, work in every major studio ceased for three minutes. Griffith was quietly buried a few miles from his birthplace in Kentucky.

  Residents on the west side of Hollywood spent this period fighting George Huntington Hartford II. Heir to the dwindling A&P fortune, in 1942, Hartford bought John McCormack’s San Patrizio in Runyon Canyon, the last intact estate in Hollywood. A New Yorker, Hartford planned to make it his permanent home and write novels, renaming it “The Pine.”

  By the late ‘40s, after his writing career failed, he tried to develop the Huntington Hartford Play Resort and Sports Club and Cottage Group Center. He planned a members-only resort for two thousand people. Committing $500,000 to the idea, Hartford commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright, then past seventy, to design it.

  Wright envisioned a cottage-group hotel at the base of the canyon, moving up the steep, rocky slope. The architect proposed a monumental concrete pyramid above the canyon, near Mulholland Drive. Projecting from the pyramid would be three large disks, one a room for dancing, another a casino and the third a cabaret.