Bill Welsh, who covered wrestling for KTTV one night every week, said good crowds came to the arena through the ‘50s. (The Three Stooges’ Shemp Howard died of a heart attack coming home from a Legion Stadium fight.)
The Academy of Television Arts and Sciences appeared in 1946 when seven people met at 5600 Hollywood Boulevard. Syd Cassyd had tried to start a West Coast branch of the American Television Society with Klaus Landsberg, but was turned down. So, they founded the Television Academy. By the fifth meeting, they had two-hundred-and-fifty members. The first president was Edgar Bergen. Their headquarters opened in the Stardust Ballroom on Sunset at Van Ness Avenue (demolished in 1996).
The Academy’s first Emmy Awards took place at Hollywood Athletic Club in 1949, airing locally on KNBH-TV. Honoring only local television, six awards were given, including one for the designer of the statuette. Shirley Dinsdale and Ed Wynn won for Outstanding Performers. The Ed Wynn Show won for best live show.
Vitagraph/Warner’s became ABC’s West Coast station.
Ozzie and Harriet Nelson, 1952.
When the 1951 Emmy Awards (held in 1952) went from local to national presentation, five of the seven Los Angeles television stations withdrew their support and vowed to set up a system for local awards. As a result, the 1952 Emmys (presented in 1953) were revamped to include local awards. This mollified the Los Angeles broadcasters, all of whom were located in Hollywood at the time.
The last of the VHF local stations in Los Angeles to take to the air was KECA-TV, Channel 7. Originally located at the southeast corner of Highland and Sunset, the station was bought by ABC in 1949 from Earle C. Anthony. Looking for a home for the their new West Coast flagship station, ABC president Leonard Goldenson inspected the abandoned Vitagraph/Warner lot on Prospect Ave. He described it: “Vacant for years … it was falling apart. Rats scampered across the rafters, and piles of droppings were everywhere. I felt sick to my stomach.” ABC bought the crumbling studio and invested in improvements and equipment. With twenty acres, the site gave ABC the largest network facility in Hollywood. On September 16, 1949, KECA-TV, later KABC, took to the air at 7 p.m. with a variety show hosted by Art Linkletter.
NBC had brought The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet to radio a year before the war ended. Ozzie Nelson switched to ABC in 1949, the year he let Dave and Ricky portray themselves. Nelson had the option of taking the entire Nelson family to television in its second year on ABC. He did. By 1953, Ozzie and Harriet were ABC’s biggest stars.
With seven local TV stations, Los Angeles equaled New York City. A few changes of partnerships occurred before everyone settled in for a long run. Paramount sold KTLA under a court-ordered reorganization. CBS, unhappy with its minority interest in KTTV (49% to The Los Angeles Times’s 51%), wanted its own local station. The newspaper refused to sell. CBS got out from the partnership and bought KFI, Channel 9, from Earle C. Anthony. CBS swapped KFI in 1950 with General Tire and Rubber for Don Lee’s KTSL-TV, as CBS wanted Channel 2. CBS leased the Don Lee television studio on Vine Street from General Tire, promising to remain there for a long time.
The Highland Avenue storage building was too cramped for KTTV. The Los Angeles Times bought a small movie studio at Sunset and Van Ness from the Nassour brothers, who produced B movies and rented soundstages to independent producers. This production lot was demolished by the Los Angeles Unified School District in 2003.
In 1951, AT&T completed a coast-to-coast TV signal relay link, using microwave and coaxial cable. Now ninety-five percent of the nation’s televisions could tune to the same program at the same time, an important advance. The West Coast became a major television production center, since all three national networks were in Hollywood.
The Hollywood Parkway sliced Whitley Heights in half.
A GOLDEN AUTUMN
California State Highway 101, the quickest way from downtown to Hollywood, traveled Sunset Boulevard to the Cahuenga Pass and then to Ventura Boulevard. It had long ago replaced the Old Pass Road. To alleviate congestion on the highway, the State decided in 1940 to build the Hollywood Parkway, with three lanes in each direction. The first section appeared before the war from Lankershim to the southern end of the Cahuenga Pass.
While war halted work, clearing property by eminent domain continued for the future Hollywood Freeway. The project carved a swath through many of Hollywood’s loveliest neighborhoods, where original owners were either of advanced years or deceased. Whitley Heights was sliced in half, and the former home of Rudolph Valentino came down with other houses. Yucca Street east of Gower disappeared except for a few hundred feet. The Victorian homes of A.Z. Taft and his mother Mary, both deceased, were moved from Hollywood Boulevard. A.Z. Taft’s home went to a new site on Sunset. Declared a Los Angeles Cultural Landmark in 1980, it burned to the ground in June of 1982. Mary Taft’s house still stands, sensitively relocated to a lemon orchard in Granada Hills. It became a L.A. Cultural Landmark in 1996. The original site of Mary Taft’s home is Hollywood Boulevard’s northbound freeway on-ramp.
Freeway construction recommenced in 1947 and had a huge impact, transforming the neighborhood into northern and southern sections with discontinuous streets.
When the freeway was completed in 1954, the San Fernando Valley boomed. The Cahuenga Valley once again became roadside scenery for travelers between Los Angeles and areas to the north. Pacific Electric red cars faded into history.
The audience waiting outside of Breakfast in Hollywood learns that Tom Breneman just died of a heart attack, 1948.
Frank Sennes took over the Earl Carroll Theatre, 1953.
When Holiday Magazine did a 1948 feature on the fabulous haunts of Hollywood, the article focused on Rodeo Drive and the Sunset Strip. Hollywood’s nightlife had changed forever when Bugsy Siegel completed his Flamingo Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas in 1947. Local nightclub gangsters transferred operations to Las Vegas. The Los Angeles city government was happy to see them go.
On June 17, 1948, Earl Carroll died in a plane crash. His nightclub sputtered under different management for five years. Frank Sennes reopened it in 1953 as the Moulin Rouge, a theater and restaurant. Sennes presented huge Vegas-style shows under the direction of Donn Arden, a Las Vegas showman. With casts of eighty and special effects, the Moulin Rouge operated into the early 1960s.
In 1948, the Florentine Gardens went bankrupt. It continued as the Cotton Club, unrelated to New York’s Cotton Club, featuring black entertainers until it closed in 1954.
The face of local radio changed suddenly on April 28, 1948. Tom Breneman, star of the popular Breakfast in Hollywood, died of a heart attack moments before his morning broadcast. After a frantic search for a new host, the producers picked Garry Moore. The show disappeared from the air, and from Vine Street, the following year.
After Breneman’s death, Sammy Davis, Jr. and investors bought the building once known as the Hollywood Recreational Center.
ABC took space for the ABC Radio Center. In this new facility, ABC pioneered the first network radio broadcasts on magnetic tape. Bing Crosby had financed the American version of German high-fidelity audiotape recording that became the Ampex Corporation. Crosby quit NBC and Kraft after they opposed his doing his shows on tape. ABC signed Crosby and installed Ampex decks to record and edit the singer’s new show, Philco Radio Time.
The next year, ABC brought disc jockeys to network radio. Paul Whiteman, who had opposed broadcasting records over the air in the ‘20s, became a DJ here. Eddie Cantor and Frank Sinatra also became ABC DJs. Sinatra had the Lucky Strike Hit Parade. Also in the Vine Street facility, Louella Parsons did a celebrity interview show.
Up the block, Ken Murray, watching his TV set in his dressing room for Blackouts of 1949, realized that he had to get into television. When CBS offered him a TV show with the stipulation that he broadcast from New York, Murray decided to move Blackouts to Broadway. With over three thousand consecutive performances, it was the longest-running musical in American legitimate theater, grossing
nearly one million dollars a year at Hollywood and Vine. Marie Wilson was ready to leave the show. Murray turned down Marilyn Monroe, who wanted to go with him to New York. Los Angeles gave Murray a warm, heavily publicized good-bye.
Blackouts opened in the Ziegfeld Theater on September 6, 1949. Critics hated the show, calling it unfunny, dismal, and dreadful. New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson sniffed, “even a blonde on the stage needs talent.” Blackouts closed October 15. My Fair Lady soon surpassed it in record number of performances. Ken Murray’s TV show did not last much longer. Using backdrops from Blackouts, Murray made the New York-based show appear to come from Hollywood and Vine.
When Murray left the Vine Street El Capitan, Toberman sold it to the Catholic Church, who leased it to NBC. The network installed its call letters on the marquee, replacing the main-floor seats with a concrete floor for cameras. The network used the theater for television spectaculars. The Colgate Comedy Hour and The Chevy Show with Dinah Shore broadcast here, as well as the first coast-to-coast telethon in 1952, with Crosby, Hope, Dorothy Lamour, and Sinatra raising money for the 1952 Olympic team.
Television devastated the long-reigning radio shows at NBC and CBS. Theatrical stock companies and live orchestras were no longer needed for radio. CBS dropped Lux Radio Theater in June 1954. NBC revived the show for one season, but broadcast its final show June 7, 1955.
Louella Parsons, with Walter Winchell, on her ABC interview show.
Parsons and Burt Lancaster.
NBC took over the Vine Street El Capitan for television shows.
Gloria Swanson gets treated to a Ralph Edwards This is Your Life. Jesse Lasky is in the center, 1957.
Ralph Edwards used NBC’s Vine Street El Capitan for This Is Your Life, often surprising his guests while they dined at the Brown Derby. He then escorted them to the theater. Edwards did very well with his nostalgia show, that brought back old stars and walked them through their past. It took much courage for performers to appear, as it was an admission that years had passed since their glory days.
Hollywood maintained its reputation as a show town, with its dance schools and Ralph Faulkner’s fencing studio, where working actors and aspirants honed their skills. Perry’s on Highland north of Hollywood Boulevard was a favorite studio for professional dancers. José Greco used it for years. When burlesque dancers rehearsed at Perry’s, local boys climbed to the second-story windows to watch.
Edgar Bergen, getting ready for television, took brush-up classes in ventriloquism at the Great Lester’s School of Ventriloquism, 5540 Hollywood Boulevard.
Sy DeVore leased aspace in the ABC Radio Center where he ran a top-of-the-line men’s clothing store with a barbershop. Photos in the store of Sy’s celebrity clients included Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, and Elvis Presley. In 1960, the Associated Press reported that Jerry Lewis spent a hundred thousand dollars annually on clothes, mostly from DeVore. According to DeVore, Lewis owned eighty-eight tuxedos. Lewis hired DeVore to oversee men’s wardrobe on the comic’s Paramount films in the ‘60s.
In the Taft Building at Hollywood and Vine, a men’s clothes shop with a tailor on the premises was popular with local newscasters. The Taft’s one-chair barbershop, manned by the same barber since the ‘30s, had plenty of famous regular customers.
Equally prosperous were local brassiere makers, using Hollywood-based factories for glamour appeal. The former Embassy Club near Hollywood and Highland manufactured Her Secret Brassieres, V-Ette, and Maxwell, who had a popular Whirlpool Bra. The business eventually spread into the Montmartre, the site of a bra workers’ strike.
Frederick’s of Fifth Avenue, established in New York in 1946, came to Hollywood in 1947. As Frederick’s of Hollywood, it raised eyebrows with its black lingerie. Owner Frederick Mellinger introduced the first push-up bra in 1948, the “Rising Star.” Other fashion firsts for Frederick’s were front-hook bras, bras with shoulder pads, and padded girdles. The company advertised in both men’s and women’s magazines, another first. When Kress Department Stores left Hollywood, Frederick’s made the Kress building its national headquarters.
Dean Martin tries on a suit from his friend and haberdasher, Sy Devore, 1962.
The court-ordered separation of studios and theaters split Warner Bros. from Warner Hollywood. It became the Stanley Warner, “Home of Cinerama, 1962.
The Chinese went widescreen with Cinemascope, 1953.
Hollywood’s reputation for beauty encouraged small cosmetic companies, beauty schools, and barber colleges to rent in the district. Mennin’s Lotion was first made in a Quonset hut on Hollywood Boulevard near Bronson Avenue.
Max Factor’s son, Francis, changed his name to Max Factor, Jr. and turned his father’s company into an international cosmetic giant. No wheeler-dealer, he spent his time mixing perfumes in a new brick laboratory at McCadden Place, one block south of Hollywood Boulevard.
Sid Grauman died in 1950. He had remained manager of the Chinese, holding late-night, high-stakes poker games with Joe Schenck and others in his office to the end. The previous October, the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce had honored Grauman with a banquet at the Roosevelt Hotel. Jack Warner, Jesse Lasky, and Mack Sennett were in the crowd when Joe Schenck called Sid Grauman “the greatest showman of them all.”
Theater exhibition was changing. To lure audiences into theaters, studios produced widescreen movies. The opera-scale stage at the Chinese was dismantled for widescreen. Producer and showman Mike Todd reformed the Egyptian, hiring contractors to fill the orchestra pit with cement and removing a whole section of the proscenium. Todd also removed Grauman’s name.
Movies in 3-D appeared. House of Wax opened at the Hollywood Paramount in 1953, as did Bwana Devil, another early 3-D venture. Although Bwana Devil received pans from critics, the box-office line the next morning went down the block to Gotham Delicatessen at Sycamore Avenue.
The Hawaii Theater filled its screen with horror movies and its seats with kids and teenagers. Howard Hughes opened his Outlaw with Jane Russell in 1953 at the Hawaii, and it became the biggest run the theater had.
When the ornamental ceiling of the Mar-cal collapsed due to rain damage, James H. Nicholson sold the theater. The new owners commissioned S. Charles Lee to redo the facade, remove the small balcony, and clean up the interior. They renamed it the World. It was one of Lee’s last commissions before he abandoned movie-theater architecture.
The Newsview and Tele-View (Hitching Post) Theaters were the first local movie theaters to close after the war. No one needed newsreels when television brought news into homes.
Michael Wilding and Elizabeth Taylor present Walt Disney with three Oscars, one for best animated short subject and one each for best documentary and live action short subject, 1953.
The Pantages Theater ended up in the hands of Howard Hughes, who bought a controlling interest in RKO studios in 1948. Hughes opened an office in the theater, one of many for him across the city. He owned the theater for one year, until the Supreme Court, after ten years of litigation, split movie studios from their theaters across the country. It ended a system of block-booking movies that had served the industry since 1920. Hughes had to sell his movie theaters, including the Pantages, in 1950.
In his short interim there, Hughes had coaxed the Academy Awards to the Pantages. The ceremony had moved in 1947 from the Chinese to the Shrine Auditorium in order to sell tickets. Having the event return resuscitated Hollywood’s movie glamour. The first ceremony, held on March 23, 1950, brought reporters, photographers, and bleachers filled with fans. Highlights during the ten-year stay at the Pantages included a 1951 honorary award for L.B. Mayer (who was about to be pushed out of MGM), All About Eve’s Best Picture Award, and Humphrey Bogart’s only Academy Award in 1952.
The Academy Awards’ first televised ceremony occurred at the Pantages in 1953 when several major film companies refused to pay for their share of the ceremony. NBC’s bid to telecast the Academy Awards paid for the twenty-fifth anniversary show.
Bob Hope hosted for the seventh time. The show aired commercial-free and won the largest TV audience in television’s five-year commercial history. In 1961, the show moved out of Hollywood.
The Motion Picture Academy presented its Academy Awards at the Pantages throughout the 1950s.
CBS Television City at Beverly Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue.
Art Linkletter interviews with small children were a highlight of House Party.
NBC and CBS needed West Coast production centers to rival ABC at Prospect. The networks required so much land and Hollywood prices were so high that they had to move away. CBS started a $35-million facility at Fairfax and Beverly Boulevard in 1951, replacing Gilmore Fields. The same year, NBC started its $25-million, nineteen-acre television center in Burbank. NBC’s first studio was completed in October 1952. The following month, CBS opened the first unit of its Television City.
CBS hoped that the new Television City would replace New York for all of its network programming and production. Art Linkletter took his popular six-year-running daytime show, House Party from CBS’s Sunset and Gower to Television City. The first producer to move in, he did the show there for a decade. The fourteen-year-old CBS network radio studio at Sunset and Gower became the local CBS outlet. The call letters changed to KNXT-TV to match radio station KNX. (It became KCBS at the end of the century.)
The situation comedies that had replaced live radio shows in audience appeal had already abandoned the network radio studios for local soundstages. Both Burns and Allen and Ozzie and Harriet established themselves at Hollywood Center Studio on Las Palmas and Santa Monica. Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball brought sound stages to life all over the area with their Desilu. I Love Lucy used stages on the old Metropolitan lot on Cahuenga Boulevard.
The Story of Hollywood Page 30
