The exodus of the broadcasting industry was a hard blow to the district’s economy. The network and agency people, the show folk, and the audiences disappeared with it. Local merchants and restaurateurs saw the flow of money ebb. A man named Tupper who had spent years going from show to show as a professional audience member found his lack of a driver’s license put a crimp in his pastime. Tupper was often seen sitting on a Hollywood curb with his thumb out, hoping to hitch a ride to a TV show. For audience convenience, ABC offered daily buses from its Radio Center on Vine Street to its Prospect lot.
Capitol records built the world’s first circular office tower, 1954.
The record industry increasingly represented the entertainment business in the district of Hollywood. Capitol Records became famous for its recording artists and its distinctive, lush sound. Frank Sinatra revitalized his career with his first Capitol albums. To get Judy Garland out of her professional doldrums, Sid Luft signed her to a contract with Capitol. Nelson Riddle joined Sinatra and Garland to arrange their music and supervise the recording.
Celebrating its commercial appeal, in 1954, Capitol built the world’s first circular office building. At street level, three studios rested on a layer of cork with shock-mounted reverberation chambers underneath for added insulation.
New hot spots appeared catering to music business hipsters. Sonny Bono wrote of Martoni’s on Cahuenga Boulevard south of Hollywood, “Everybody in the record business was there … Sammy Davis might be at one table, Sinatra at another.” Another favorite for Sinatra and the Rat Pack was the Villa Capri at 6735 Yucca Street at McCadden. Bogart, Bacall, and James Dean made it their hangout in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. A special event in 1953 celebrated the restaurant’s “new cans,” to which the owner requested guests “R.S.V.Pee.” Hollywood was cool.
BOOSTERS, DREAMERS, AND THE FORGOTTEN
The body of Elizabeth Short lay neatly cut in half in a vacant lot near Crenshaw and Exposition in January 1947. Short had allegedly lived briefly at the Alto Nido on Ivar Avenue and then in an apartment behind the Florentine Gardens. She had spent much of her time in the bars of Hollywood and downtown while harboring show-business aspirations. Dubbed the Black Dahlia, her unsolved demise cemented the image of Los Angeles as a place with darkness beneath the sunshine.
John the Greek still ran his cafe on Hollywood Boulevard near Vine Street. The man who had created Hollywood’s first celebrity restaurant had lost most of his famous clients long ago. His nearby competition, the Taft’s Owl Drug Store, pulled the walk-in traffic. John’s final years in business were very difficult.
An unidentified woman waits at Hollywood and Vine for a bus out of Holllywood.
Another early restaurateur, Eddie Brandstatter, faced problems at Sardi’s similar to the ones he had at the Montmartre. When Breneman pulled Breakfast at Sardi’s, Brandstatter stumbled into bankruptcy. The spot briefly became Zardi’s, a jazz nightclub with George Shearing and his Orchestra. Don Rickles debuted his comedy act here. Then it became Chi-Chi’s, where Howard Hughes took Jane Russell on dates. By the mid-1950s, the Schindler designs disappeared for a men’s clothing chain. By then, Eddie Brandstatter, sitting in his car, had put a bullet in his brain.
In 1949, some famous names from the silent movie era gathered at the northeast corner of Selma and Vine for the opening of a California Bank branch. It was the last commercial opening in Hollywood to provide a small orchestra.
Downstairs in the basement, Cecil B. DeMille and dozens of silent stars commemorated the thirty-fifth anniversary of The Squaw Man, made across the street. DeMille, the unquestioned success, continued turning out hits at Paramount. Winifred Kingston, The Squaw Man’s leading lady, was happily retired in the Hollywood bungalow home she had bought in flush days. Jesse Lasky had spent the years mostly jobless and bankrupt. He tried to interest DeMille in a project, but DeMille turned him down. Lasky would produce The Great Caruso for MGM in 1951. The first movie Tarzan, Elmo Lincoln, circulated among the crowd, asking for work. He later died at sixty-three, feeling the movie industry did not appreciate him.
Ramon Novarro attended. He had retired to a fifty-acre ranch near San Diego until his health later forced him to move to Laurel Canyon to be closer to doctors.
Mack Sennett came. He had recently starred in This Is Your Life and lived in the Garden Court Apartments amid thousands of Mabel Normand clippings. He lived there until his death at the Motion Picture Country House and Hospital in 1960.
Mae Murray, a former Lasky-Paramount star, attended. She spent her last years at the Garden Court as well. She had dissipated her estimated $15 million in earnings and often wandered Hollywood Boulevard, wearing a floppy hat and her signature bee-stung lips. Her last days were tragic, according to the Garden Court owner.
A few blocks away, Carol Burnett earned her first work experience cleaning the Warners Hollywood building with her grandmother. While at UCLA, Burnett worked summers as an usherette at Warner Hollywood where she was fired. Then she sold handbags in a cut-rate Hollywood Boulevard store. The following summer, she worked in the box office of the Iris Theater (as had Linda Darnell a decade earlier). When Burnett left for New York in July 1954, she bought a suitcase and a brown traveling suit at the Hollywood J.C. Penney’s and some underwear at J.J. Newberry’s. When Burnett returned, she had her own television show at CBS Television City.
Cecil B. DeMille, Sam Goldwyn, and Jesse Lasky cut up for the opening of a California Bank branch at northeast Vine Street and Selma Avenue.
After failing with his recreational complex in Runyon Canyon, Huntington Hartford found another crusade bringing legitimate theater to Los Angeles. Although legitimate theaters blossomed across Los Angeles in the 1920s, the only large playhouse left in operation was downtown’s Biltmore.
For his theater, Hartford bought the abandoned CBS Radio Theater on Vine Street and spent months remodeling it into the Huntington Hartford Theater.
Helen Hayes opened in a fifty-year old play, James Barrie’s What Every Woman Knows. KTLA did a live broadcast of the September 1954 opening night. A typical Hollywood premiere, there were searchlights and two thousand spectators in bleachers. Joan Crawford and Edward Everett Horton (who had appeared onstage when it was the Vine Street Theater) walked across a red carpet. Cesar Romero told the press, “It is the beginning of real theater for Hollywood.” The reviews of the play were lukewarm and the show never made it to Broadway as Hartford had hoped.
Through the fifties, the Huntington Hartford Theater had notable productions like Raisin in the Sun. Bette Davis, Tallulah Bankhead, Myrna Loy, Noel Coward and Vivien Leigh appeared on its stage. The theater was often dark because Hartford eventually lost interest and the money to stage original shows. He finally lost the theater in the process of dissipating his $100 million fortune.
At the Las Palmas Theater, Hume Cronyn’s production of Portrait of a Lady starred his wife, Jessica Tandy. Billie Barnes followed with his popular revues. Carol Channing made her West Coast debut in Lend An Ear at the Las Palmas Theater, directed by Gower Champion. It brought Channing to Broadway as a star.
The Ivar Theater opened in 1951 as an offshoot of the adjacent popular Armenian restaurant, Harout Hramar, on Cosmo Street. Tennessee Williams chose the Ivar to debut Garden District. Elsa Lanchester and others staged solo shows.
After the Hollywood Woman’s Club sold their Hollywood Boulevard clubhouse, they bought the recently closed Hollywood School for Girls not far away on N. La Brea Avenue. The Woman’s Club demolished the house that had served as the school and built a new clubhouse. They absorbed some of the smaller school structures into their complex.
The Huntington Hartford Theater on Vine Street.
One of the last photos showing the Hollywood Hotel lobby with guests.
Interior of the Hollywood Hotel dining room prior to demolition. The man is pointing to names of stars painted on the ceiling.
The district’s disinclination to preserve its past while celebratin
g it surfaced in 1953, when local officials proclaimed the golden anniversary of Hollywood’s incorporation as a city, an act of independence that had only lasted seven years. They called the event the “Hollywood Historama.” That same year, on Maud Baum’s death, L. Frank Baum’s Ozcot was demolished for a boxy apartment house.
The biggest spectacle of the future wiping out the past was developer C.E. Toberman’s comeback, a high-rise to replace the Hollywood Hotel.
In 1947, Toberman bought the hotel property, that ran from Highland to Orchid and back to Yucca Avenue. His plans took six years and had the ringing confidence and optimism that embodied the ‘50s. Toberman proposed a modern steel-and-glass tower on the Highland corner for his First Federal Savings and Loan, Toberman’s executive headquarters, and rental office space. An eight-story department store would top an underground parking structure near Orchid. Toberman proposed a new hotel north on Highland, twenty-six stories high with a revolving restaurant on top. His plan included specialty shops and the city’s largest supermarket. For a man entering his seventies, Toberman had big ideas.
The Hollywood Hotel, the 1903 summer resort that had harbored some of the most famous people of the century, was an anachronism. The dining room still had gold-leaf stars on the ceiling painted with the names of the silent film luminaries, all of whom had eaten there. The salons and meeting rooms with their fine old paintings and woodwork looked worn and shabby. The corridors of faded carpet led to out-of-date “luxury” suites.
Shortly before the hotel was torn down, reporter Ezra Goodman talked to residents. Some had lived in the hotel for thirty-five years. Their favorite pastime remained sitting in the rocking chairs on the veranda, watching the street traffic. One old lady told him, “I don’t want to go to heaven. I want to stay here.”
Abel Green, editor of the weekly Variety, wrote of the hotel’s memories. “The poker game in the cupola suite; the night the lads hollered ‘Fire’ outside Elinor’s (Glyn) door to see what she really looked like. Their keen disappointment when she appeared immediately just as they had seen her last — golden wig, eyelashes, and all — in the lobby. The farewell party to (Somerset) Maugham which sent him off to the Orient and sent them to bed suffering from the effect of a punch made of corn liquor, vanilla extract, orange juice, and Lilac Vegetal. The way Mira Hershey, the octogenarian owner, rode herd on the dancers to prevent any unseemly familiarity or hip-wiggling and summarily stopped the orchestra when the clock struck 11. Those were great days.”
The bravado of tearing down such a famous landmark gave Toberman an idea for some lastminute publicity. Days before razing the structure, he quickly planned a TV show reprising the hotel’s history. Poorly executed, the live afternoon broadcast was a disaster. Personalities could not be booked in time. A member of Ed Wood’s stock company, Criswell, a TV psychic, hosted.
The Hollywood Hotel in its last days.
On April 30, 1956, the Old-Timers Club of Hollywood held a final, subdued dinner in the hotel’s dining room. Toberman attended. Most people accepted the demolition because of a shared vision of Hollywood’s prosperous and modern future. Walter Jacobs, the longtime policeman at the corner of Hollywood and Highland, made a gavel for Toberman from the balustrade of the grand staircase. Toberman’s female assistant got the numbers from the door of Valentino’s old room. On May 4, the wreckers began dismantling the past to make way for modern Hollywood.
C. E. Toberman (center) says goodbye to the Hollywood Hotel’s last guest.
C. E. Toberman’s planned replacement for the old hotel.
The demolition of the Hollywood Hotel, 1956.
The Los Angeles Fire Department responds to the burning Hollywood Branch Library, April 14, 1983.
“In the name of all we hold dear, let us not ‘sell our birthright for a mess of pottage.’ It is ALMOST too late, but not quite — IF WE WAKE UP!”
C.E. Toberman, 1970
CHAPTER 7 LOST HOLLYWOOD
Tiny Naylor’s Drive-in Restaurant, northwest Sunset Boulevard and La Brea Avenue (demolished).
DOES HOLLYWOOD NEED IMPROVEMENT?
Hollywood during the 1950s served the families that filled nearby neighborhoods. Sid Hoedemaker transformed Melody Lane into Hody’s. Its Hollywood and Vine restaurant had a rooftop billboard clown with a revolving beach-ball nose. The Vine Street Brown Derby provided a “Beany and Cecil” children’s menu. Dupar’s, part of a California family-restaurant chain, prospered on Vine Street across from the Ontra Cafeteria.
Drive-in restaurants stood on Sunset Boulevard’s major corners. After school, Hollywood High students went to Tiny Naylor’s on La Brea Avenue or Stan’s at Highland. Students at Le Conte Junior High had either Scrivener’s at Cahuenga and Ivar or Carpenter’s on Vine Street. Drugstore counters at Hollywood and Vine and Hollywood and Highland were also popular.
Los Angeles teenagers brought souped-up hot rods to Hollywood Boulevard. They jammed into cars and drove back and forth, ogling each other, during weekend cruising.
Tiny Naylor’s 1980’s replacement.
Bela Lugosi in state at Strothers Mortuary, 1956.
Lee Drugstore, southwest corner Hollywood and Highland, 1961.
Northwest corner of Hollywood and Vine circa 1955.
The former Griffith Studios, southwest Sunset and Virgil, before demolition in the early ‘60s for a supermarket.
Rudolph Grey’s biography of Ed Wood, Nightmare of Ecstasy, details how in the 1950s writer-director Wood lived all over Hollywood, mostly skipping on the rent.
Wood’s compatriot, TV psychic Criswell, filled his Hollywood house with coffins. Criswell broadcast a show from KHJ-TV at Vine and Fountain, where Vampira also hosted a show. Their Friday night get-togethers at the Brown Derby brought nearly one hundred people a week for over a decade.
In 1955, Ed Wood made the movie Bride of the Monster in a studio at southwest Yucca and Argyle. The film starred Bela Lugosi, who was nearing the end of his life. The film had a sparsely attended premiere at the Hollywood Paramount that benefitted Lugosi. A few months later, Frank Sinatra paid for Lugosi’s funeral at Strothers Mortuary, southeast Hollywood Boulevard and Argyle, where Lugosi lay in state in his Dracula costume.
At Hollywood and Highland, Lee Drugs carried on Hollywood’s glamour-in-retail tradition. Phil and Henry Levine opened the drugstore on April 5, 1951. The brothers, who grew up on Curson and whose family owned the building, evicted Rexall for the space. Regular customers included Joan Fontaine, Martin Scorcese, Alan Hale Jr., and Jason Robards (the latter two attended Hollywood High with the Levine brothers). Another regular, Raymond Burr, had Lee Drugs deliver to his remote Pacific island in the ‘70s.
The Levines’ great-uncle, Phil Goldstone, had arrived in Hollywood with fellow Omaha resident Gurdon Wattles and had co-owned the Curson tract with Wattles. Known as “The King of Poverty Row,” Goldstone bought out independent movies when their producers needed completion funds. He also acquired local real estate during the Depression. He owned the Drake (Christie) Hotel at McCadden Place, the southwest corner of Hollywood and Ivar where Thrifty Drugs stayed for a long time, and Castle Argyle, where the Levine family lived during WWII. He owned the former Griffith movie studio at Sunset and Virgil and the two-story Cinemart Building near the Chinese. (Goldstone evicted everyone from the Cinemart during WWII for Temple Israel’s USO.)
Toberman’s First Federal of Hollywood, NW Hollywood Boulevard and Highland Avenue (demolished).
The Walk of Fame was to bring back Hollywood’s glamour. Model stands on Vine Street.
Across the street from Lee’s Drugs, C.E. Toberman’s last Hollywood subdivision rose on the former Hollywood Hotel site. In January 1957, the cornerstone ceremony for the office tower, the thirteen-story First Federal Savings and Loan Building, brought out Jesse Lasky and County Supervisor John Anson Ford.
Toberman finished his skyscraper on February 23, 1959, his 79th birthday. Jesse Lasky died one year after the ceremony. C.B. DeMille had died
the January before the dedication. (DeMille’s funeral at Hollywood’s St. Stephen’s and burial in Hollywood Cemetery emphasized his ties to the district.) Dr. E. O. Palmer’s death in October 1959 affected Toberman the most.
A new generation of local leaders faced a hard reality: Hollywood had little glamour. The North Hollywood Chamber of Commerce considered renaming their district North Universal. Business boosters tried to resuscitate the district with the Walk of Fame, a gray terrazzo sidewalk with celebrity names in pink terrazzo stars.
Phil Levine, then-president of the Hollywood Merchantors Association, recalled that raising money for the Walk of Fame was a difficult task. Their solution placed the project on the tax bill. Every property owner along Hollywood Boulevard paid an assessment.
Living on their valuable property, the Janes sisters grudgingly paid their assessment. The Chamber and others pestered the three sisters to sell their Whitley tract home. The Janes consistently refused. Carrie could not explain the animosity toward them. Thin, gray, in wrinkled clothes and old tennis shoes, she told a reporter, “My sisters and I did more for Hollywood than any of these people.”
In 1958, the first eight entertainment names appeared in front of Toberman’s First Federal Building. Ultimately, the final Walk of Fame went along Hollywood Boulevard from La Brea Avenue to Gower and along three blocks of Vine Street from Yucca to Sunset.
On completion in 1961, the omission of Charlie Chaplin caused controversy. Opponents pointed to his leftist politics, his recent exile from the United States, and that he had never become a citizen. Supporters argued that Chaplin contributed to Hollywood’s fame, had patronized Hollywood Boulevard, and had built his studio in the district. A decade later, a special ceremony gave Chaplin his Walk of Fame star.
The Story of Hollywood Page 31
