The Story of Hollywood

by Gregory Paul Williams

  Local residents, especially those along Mulholland, objected to the plan and any zoning change to accommodate it. In August 1947, nearly six hundred residents held a meeting to let Hartford and Wright know that they considered the development a “monstrosity” and a traffic nuisance. The battle lasted two years until Wright pulled out.

  As a consolation, Hartford got the architect’s son, Lloyd Wright, to design a pool pavilion on the hill above his house. After Errol Flynn was thrown out of his Mulholland home for failure to pay alimony, he lived in the pavilion. Flynn threw wild parties there regularly. One Warner’s ingenue who had recently co-starred with him, Eleanor Parker, found herself invited to one. She innocently asked if she could bring her boyfriend. Flynn looked at her askance but agreed. She went with her beau and, from that time on, Flynn called her “Grandma.”

  THE CENTER OF SHOW BUSINESS

  Many returning GIs came to Hollywood, where opportunity existed for trained technicians. Television was ready to become a huge industry. When broadcasting returned to peacetime licensing in October 1945, Vine Street was a star-studded center of show business.

  President Franklin Roosevelt had laid the groundwork to dismantle movie and broadcasting monopolies in 1938. The break up of network radio occurred in 1943 when the government forced CBS to sell its Artist Bureau to MCA, a talent agency that ended up owning Universal Studios. NBC had to sell its Artist Bureau and its smaller Blue network. A new national radio network, the American Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), bought NBC Blue.

  Network radio schedules had 108 shows that had broadcast for a decade or more. By 1950, twelve series like The Jack Benny Show and Amos ‘n’ Andy had reached twenty years of production, almost as old as network radio. Marie Wilson parlayed her two thousand consecutive performances in Blackouts into a CBS radio show, My Friend Irma, where she continued to refine her dumb blonde. Groucho Marx became a radio regular on NBC, hosting You Bet Your Life.

  Audience participation programs took off after the war. NBC’s People are Funny with Art Linkletter debuted in 1943. Radio manager John Guedel had met Linkletter, newly arrived from San Francisco, at Nickodell’s for lunch. Booking a recording room at NBC for $23, the two made a demo of People Are Funny that got a regular Friday-night time slot. People Are Funny staged stunts at Hollywood and Vine, selling a fur coat or bringing an elephant down the sidewalk. Linkletter worked from the Taft Building for fifteen years.

  Ralph Edwards also hit his stride with NBC’s Truth or Consequences. The show did stunts all along Hollywood Boulevard. The traffic island at Hollywood and La Brea was a favorite spot. Dorothy Lamour did a segment there; a man and his snakes lived on the island for three weeks. Edwards kept offices on Hollywood Boulevard into the next century. At one time, he had seventeen-and-a half hours on the air each week, on all three radio networks.

  Al Pearce, a popular, nationally known radio host with a gang of fictitious characters like Tizzie Lish, had offices at Hollywood and Cherokee.

  After starring in a not-so-good Breakfast in Hollywood film for United Artists, Tom Breneman pulled out of Sardi’s. He bought the Tropics nightclub on Vine and started his own show, Breakfast in Hollywood. Breneman then bought the Hollywood Recreation Center just north of the Tropics and renovated it. The bowling alley became a restaurant radio center. At 5:00 a.m., people lined up for seats.

  Vine Street looking north from Sunset Boulevard, 1950.

  Breneman does his hat schtick for Hedda Hopper and her mother.

  Tom Breneman’s Vine Street location for Breakfast in Hollywood.

  Al Jarvis doing his regular broadcast from KLAC.

  KFWB installed an electric news sign on the Taft Building at Hollywood and Vine, making the intersection a twenty-four-hour hub for information.

  Tom Breneman’s Vine Street location at night.

  Country-western cowboy singer Cliffie Stone broadcast a popular radio show from the old Montmartre. His Coffee Time at Harmony Homestead introduced Tennessee Ernie Ford. Merle Travis sang on the show as did Coleen Summers, who later changed her name to Mary Ford. CBS’s Hollywood Barn Dance, the West Coast’s answer to the Grand Ol’ Opry, broadcast from the Woman’s Club Theater on Hollywood Boulevard.

  Young & Rubicam in the Taft Building cast actors for The Alan Young Show, Duffy’s Tavern, and Baby Snooks. Rudy Vallee had offices in the Equitable along with the ad agency Benton & Bowles, who sponsored the popular Glamour Manor.

  Betty White, then a hopeful, wangled a lunchtime meeting with a producer at ad agency Needham, Louis and Brorby, who produced The Great Gildersleeve. Their offices were on the fifth floor of the Taft Building. The producer pointed out that White did not have a AFRA union card, and White dejectedly headed for the elevators. As the doors began to close, the producer caught them in time to enter. “I know you’re in a spot,” he said. “I’ll take the chance and give you one word to say in the commercial on this week’s Gildersleeve.” White launched her career saying “Parkay.”

  Stan Freberg, out of high school in Pasadena, took a bus to Hollywood to enter radio. He stepped into the Cherokee Building on Hollywood Boulevard. and an agent won him an interview with Warner Bros. Cartoons. After meeting another agent at Coffee Dan’s restaurant on Vine Street, Freberg worked on a KRLA morning radio show broadcast on Hollywood Boulevard. He then went over to CBS at Sunset where he eventually had his own radio show. His big break came when Johnny Mercer helped him into ASCAP and onto the Capitol label where Freberg made hit records.

  After fourteen years, Al Jarvis left KFWB for KLAC (formerly KMTR) on Cahuenga. The New York Post had recently acquired KLAC. Jarvis got approximately $1.7 million for a seven-year contract. Don Fedderson became station manager. Fedderson enticed Peter Potter, with his Oklahoma twang and his Symposium of Swing, to leave KFWB also. KLAC was the first all disc-jockey station with identifiable personalities. Stars like Doris Day and Mickey Rooney appeared for promotional purposes. Jarvis and Potter played hits by newcomers like Peggy Lee, Perry Como, and Nat “King” Cole. KLAC worked with Wallichs’s Capitol Records, doing broadcasts from the Music City store window.

  Late night DJs proliferated. George Jay, Art Laboe, and Johnny Grant spun records and kibitzed with celebrities into the wee hours. Grant had come through Hollywood during the war and had made an appearance on the Breneman show as a real GI in the audience. He moved to Hollywood and did a radio show out of the Hollywood Plaza Bar. He also did a radio show from midnight to 4:00 a.m. in Ham and Eggers restaurant on Vine Street, immediately south of Taft Building. Sitting in a booth with microphone and turntable, Grant played records and chatted with stars who dropped into the restaurant, such as Jimmy Durante, Bing Crosby, Frankie Laine, Alan Young, and Eddie Bracken.

  Tom Breneman had a late-night ham-and-egg restaurant in his building. The Vine Street Derby also stayed open all night. John Barrymore would drop in several times a week at 3:00 a.m. for pancakes and little pork sausages.

  An early television store on Sunset Boulevard, 1949.

  TV LAND

  Television arrived in Hollywood in 1926, the same year it was first demonstrated in England. Inventor Philo T. Farnsworth moved into an apartment on New Hampshire Avenue below Hollywood Boulevard. Farnsworth’s backyard experiments with copper wires and cardboard tubes led neighbors to assume he was making a still, so they called the police. A year later, Farnsworth patented the first electronic television system.

  Don Lee, a successful Cadillac distributor in California, started the country’s first experimental TV station. Lee had entered the radio business in 1926 with KHJ. With the assistance of his son, Thomas S. Lee, he opened the world’s first television studio above his auto dealership at the corner of Seventh and Bixel in downtown Los Angeles. As television signals did not bend around obstructions as radio beams did, the broadcast went only as far as the eye could see. Starting December 1931, Lee’s W6XAO-TV, Channel 1, broadcast silent movies one hour a day, six days a week. This was in addition to Lee’s chain of
California radio stations affiliated with CBS. (In 1936, Lee switched network affiliation to the Mutual Broadcasting System.)

  Meet Me in Hollywood. television’s first man-on-the-street show at Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street. Bill Welsh holds the microphone. Stan Chambers is at far right.

  Don Lee’s TV station on Mt. Lee. The Hollywoodland sign had fallen in disrepair.

  Ralph Edwards’s Truth or Consequences had a man living at Hollywood Boulevard and La Brea Avenue for three weeks.

  Don Lee’s state-of-the-art TV studio at Vine Street and Fountain Avenue.

  KTLA first operated on Marathon Street outside Paramount Studio.

  Though years away from commercial use, Lee’s experimental TV station chalked up some impressive firsts. The first full-length motion picture ran on March 10, 1933. In 1938, Don Lee’s station televised the first live dramatic television series, Vine Street, about a young woman trying to make a career in Hollywood. Other series followed. By 1939, W6XAO-TV broadcast live talent shows for four nights and films for two nights each week. NBC had pushed New York’s Radio City into television in 1936, but it did not regularly broadcast until 1939. Don Lee did it before everyone else.

  In 1939, Don Lee Broadcasting System went as high as it could go over Hollywood, buying twenty acres above the Hollywoodland sign for its transmitter and station. The second-highest peak in Los Angeles had been leveled a decade earlier for Mack Sennett’s mansion that had never appeared. The new studio appeared, with a swimming pool for bathing-beauty segments. Los Angeles renamed the mountain Mount Lee in honor of the entrepreneur.

  With a larger broadcast range, W6XAO-TV reached homes in the Hollywood Hills and in the San Fernando Valley. Creative people trekked up the winding road for shows filmed under the very hot lights required for early television. Miss Tubb, starring Verna Felton, was an early Don Lee television sitcom broadcast from the mountaintop.

  Paramount’s Adolph Zukor was the only movie pioneer besides Hal Roach to realize that movie studios made better visual entertainment than radio broadcasters. Films of transmitted programs (Kinescopes) made in Hollywood could be sent to television stations across the country for future airing. Paramount Pictures installed kinescope recorders in their experimental studio in 1941. Under the direction of Klaus Landsberg, who proved a genius in broadcasting, W6XYZ-TV began regular broadcasts in February 1, 1943.

  Television development slowed during the war. It started again in earnest in October 1945. One of the FCC’s first local actions moved all stations up one frequency. Don Lee moved to Channel 2. Paramount moved to Channel 5 and became, on January 22, 1947, KTLA, the first commercially licensed station in the western United States.

  NBC’s television studio at Sunset Boulevard and Vine Street.

  From its inception, Klaus Landsberg stressed KTLA’s ability to bring the outside world, and much of Hollywood proper, to viewers at home. For the Christmas season, KTLA broadcast High Mass from Blessed Sacrament Church on Sunset Boulevard. Movie premieres provided perfect fodder for live television. The Santa Claus Lane Parade was first televised in 1948.

  KTLA’s Meet Me in Hollywood, a “man-on-the-street” program, became an immediate hit with its weekly hour-long broadcasts from Hollywood and Vine. Hosts Stan Chambers and Bill Welsh interviewed passersby and, occasionally, motion picture celebrities in front of the Broadway Department Store. Welsh recalled that the show started around 9:00 p.m. and finished when Landsberg said, “Wrap it up.” According to Welsh, “People were driving in from all over Southern California so their friends at home could see them on the television. We had a lot of fun. I met Fred Mellinger, the guy that built Frederick’s of Hollywood. He showed up giving away stockings as prizes as a plug for his business.”

  Mutual/Don Lee Broadcasting trailed KTLA in getting a commercial license, but began 1947 auspiciously when it broke ground for a $2,500,000 radio and television studio at Vine and Fountain. The Los Angeles Herald Examiner agreed to telecast its own news and photos on the station four times a day, another first for Lee. With its new call letters, KTSL-TV, it began broadcasting Monday through Friday in 1948. The Mt. Lee station closed.

  Lee’s KTSL-TV introduced one of its highest-rated and longest-running television programs, Queen for a Day. With Jack Bailey hosting, the former radio show broadcast from the Vine Street. El Capitan and later the Hawaii Theater. (It also jumped stations in its long life that lasted into the ‘70s.) Bailey opened the show with “Would you like to be queen for a day?” He followed the same formula for years as he canvassed the audience for women who told sob stories about what they wished for most. A panel of judges from the audience voted. The winner got a crown and an appliance. Immediately after the show, winners were transported to the Max Factor salon in a gold Cadillac to receive beauty makeovers.

  The first KTTV studio, Santa Monica Boulevard and Highland Avenue.

  In September 1948, L.A.’s third station began as KLAC-TV/Channel 13 out of KLAC’s ersatz mission on Cahuenga Blvd. There, Al Jarvis and station owner Don Fedderson pioneered talk shows with Betty White as Jarvis’s on-air partner. White said Hollywood on Television was broadcast 33 hours a week, every day but Sunday. The station built a state-of-the-art TV studio on La Brea Avenue near Willoughby. The call letters changed to KCOP-TV.

  L.A.’s fourth station, KFI-TV, appeared on Vermont Avenue south of Beverly. A local Packard dealer dabbling in television, Earle C. Anthony, bought the station and built its studio across from Virgil Junior High School. Affiliated with NBC, KFI debuted on Channel 9 with a three-and-a-half hour variety show emceed by actor Adolphe Menjou. (This structure was demolished in 2003 by L.A. Unified School District.)

  Syd Cassyd and unidentified person hold the newly designed Emmy Award, 1949.

  KTTV-TV debuted January 1949 as Los Angeles’s fifth television station, a joint venture of CBS and the Los Angeles Times. They rented the top floor in the tall storage building at Highland Avenue and Santa Monica. They debuted with a telecast of the Rose Parade. The Los Angeles Times made sure that all KTTV-TV’s programming was printed in boldface in the paper’s daily television log. By joining with the newspaper, CBS beat NBC in owning its own local Los Angeles station by one week.

  NBC ended its affiliation with KFI and got its own commercial license as the sixth local television station in Los Angeles. KNBH-TV, soon KRCA (later KNBC), used a studio in the Sunset and Vine radio center. Although the television facility was small, NBC installed a half-million-dollar kinescope recording process. It was officially the first network television studio on the West Coast. (Network television, mostly variety shows, broadcast live from New York. Milton Berle had the top-rated program.)

  KNBH-TV raided KTLA for Shirley Dinsdale and her ventriloquist-dummy pal, Judy Splinters. Dinsdale moved to KNBH-TV for $1000 per week, $750 more than what she had been earning at KTLA. It made her one of the highest-paid performers in television. (KTLA replaced Dinsdale with Time for Beany.) NBC took Groucho’s You Bet Your Life to television in this studio. Johnny Grant hosted NBC’s local morning TV show that aired before the Today Show from New York. Grant often opened his studio door and walked onto Sunset Boulevard for interviews.

  Installing kinescope recorders in its Columbia Square Playhouse, CBS Hollywood launched its West Coast network productions. CBS had already lured NBC radio comedians over to CBS with a novel tax shelter that made their income capital gains. Jack Benny moved first, followed by Edgar Bergen, Amos ‘n’ Andy, and Red Skelton.

  At CBS, The Ed Wynn Show was the first major West Coast network television program. Wynn proved a great innovator. George Burns worked out a TV format with CBS chairman William S. Paley over lunch at the Vine Street Brown Derby in 1948. Burns and Allen started live television broadcasts from Sunset and Gower. Johnny Carson did his first TV show, Carson’s Cellar, from CBS Hollywood.

  There were approximately 400 TV sets in Los Angeles in 1946. By 1949, there were 90,000 and at the end of the year, 300,000. In this era,
people had to turn their antennas to receive a station. The FCC slowed licensing through the Korean War, but picked up soon after.

  Fortunately for the district, television broadcasting contributed to the neighborhood. In the television years, Steve Allen often composed songs at a piano in the window of Wallichs Music City, sometimes writing twenty songs in a sitting. When NBC put Martin and Lewis on television in the Colgate Comedy Hour, they became TV’s biggest stars and brought audiences in droves.

  Jerry Lewis celebrated his success with a camera store on Vine Street next door to the Brown Derby, the Jerry Lewis Camera Exchange. He staged an opening night with klieg lights, celebrity guests, and radio mikes. The shop closed a year later when Lewis got bored with it.

  Televised sporting events by all the local stations made the Hollywood Legion Stadium a television center. It was the site of athletes’ strikes when a professional boxer named Chavez sued the Hollywood American Legion in 1947. The suit was designed to establish a performer’s legal television rights. Chavez sought to prohibit Don Lee’s station from telecasting his fights from the stadium. Station officials contended that their contract was with the Hollywood Legion and the Chavez’s dispute lay with the stadium’s management. Television management won the first round, but the truce lasted only three years. A seven-week wrestling strike in February 1950 banned television from the stadium again. An agreement was eventually reached to pay the wrestlers.

  The abandoned Vitagraph/Warner lot on Prospect Avenue in East Hollywood.