Even in the 1930s, there were people complaining about the fakery, the superficiality, the disorienting sense of impermanence, the preening, the juvenile—as the critics saw it—enthusiasm for throwing together disparate architectural styles. The writer James M. Cain, a transplant from the Mid-Atlantic, complained of Los Angeles in 1933: “The thing simply won’t add up. . . . To me, life takes on a dreadful vacuity here, and I am going to have a hard time indicting it. Frankly, don’t know exactly what it is that I miss.” For the literary critic Edmund Wilson, life there was imbued with the “hollow feeling” of a “troll-nest where everything is out in the open instead of being underground.” Lillian Symes titled her Los Angeles dispatch “The Beautiful and the Dumb.”
The Sphinx realty office: L.A.’s commercial architecture was often fanciful.
The Bruce Torrence Hollywood Photograph Collection
My father loved Los Angeles instantly. The sunshine, the bougainvillea, the banana trees, the ersatz castles, the girls in their strapless bathing suits, all of it. He was thirty years old, and he had been on the road since he was seventeen, a love-the-town-you’re-in (what was it called again?), pack-your-trunk-in-ten-minutes, sleep-sitting-up-on-the-train, give-the-folks-what-they-came-for Middle American trouper. But here? Here he could stay.
A premiere at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, 1930.
The Bruce Torrence Hollywood Photograph Collection
If only they’d let him. If only he could snag a job in motion pictures. But it was 1932, three years into the Depression, and a job was no easy thing to get ahold of, in the picture industry or any other. (A reputable agent inviting you out to Hollywood meant you would almost certainly get a screen test, but it was no guarantee that a studio would sign you.) In 1930, four million people had been out of work; by 1931 that number had doubled; in 1933, the worst year of the Depression, it would climb to almost 13 million—or 25 percent of the nation’s workforce. Coming on the heels of the prosperous 1920s, this was a crushing, emotionally dislocating new reality. Nearly everyone, including my father, knew somebody who’d been rendered destitute. Millions of savings accounts had been blotted out, tens of thousands of businesses had gone belly-up. And though people tend to think of the movie industry as the Depression’s singular island of good fortune, in the early 1930s, at least, it hardly looked like that. Radio was the only part of the entertainment industry that flourished throughout the Depression. The price of radios had fallen—from about $90 in 1930 to about half that two years later—and once you had one, it served up basically free entertainment; you didn’t need to fill your car with gas or pay a subway fare or have a decent dress to put on.
In 1929, the movie industry had been enjoying unprecedented success. The novelty of talkies had attracted record numbers of moviegoers: some 80 million per week in 1930. But within a year, ticket sales began to fall. By 1932, they had tumbled to 55 million a week. Virtually all the studios suffered millions of dollars in lost profits. Warner Brothers alone went from posting profits of $14.5 million in 1929 to reporting losses of $8 million in 1931. In a frantic bid to win back customers, the movie theaters, most of which were owned by the studios, began innovating new enticements. They offered double features, cut ticket prices from thirty cents to twenty, gave away china, stockings, turkeys, and cash prizes, eliminated the ushers who had been de rigueur at the movie palaces in the 1920s, and began selling popcorn and candy, a practice they had never before allowed because it was associated with carnivals and burlesque while the movie palaces strove for elegance. (Thanks to the Depression—and the motion picture exhibitors’ response to it—the popcorn harvest in the United States grew from 5 million pounds in 1934 to 100 million in 1940.) In March 1933, when FDR declared a four-day bank holiday, the studios administered a 50 percent pay cut, to last eight weeks, for everyone earning more than $50 a week. Variety asked plaintively whether “the moving picture will ever again know the popularity of those peaks it reached in the silent era and then again with sound.” A Los Angeles Times headline from September 1934 was gloomier still: “Hollywood’s ‘Boom Days’ Gone Forever.”
In fact, by 1935 the industry would right itself. Movies would become the beloved escape from Depression dreariness we’ve often heard they were. The schemes for luring ticket buyers into the theaters paid off, the advent of screwball comedies along with a spate of better, or at least more family-friendly movies—costume dramas, swashbucklers, classy biopics—proved irresistible to audiences. And as Variety pointed out, the repeal of Prohibition in 1933 helped, too: “In many cities there had been no downtown life to speak of for the 13 years of the Great Mistake, whereas repeal had the effect of immediately bringing life to hotels, restaurants and other places in such downtown zones where the larger theaters are located.” The picture industry had taken a beating, but it got back on its feet much quicker than just about any other.
Even without the Depression, the odds of making it in the picture business—especially as a performer—were always long. That warning had been coming out of Hollywood for at least a decade before my father arrived. Books that ostensibly offered practical advice on how to make it in the movies were often laden with cautionary tales. A 1924 example called What Chance Have I in Hollywood? mixed stringent practical advice (Don’t come to Hollywood without $2,000 to live on and be prepared for a hundred turndowns from casting directors before you got your first job) with tidbits about the attractions of Southern California (Strawberries year-round! A system called the cafeteria!) and the dire, titillating stories of girls who lost their way there. Consider the fate of one “Mamie Swamp,” who left “Cottage Grove, Kansas,” seeking stardom in L.A. but ended up as a prostitute in Baja. (It was always worse, in these tales, to suffer such a fate in Mexico.) In the 1920s, mail leaving Hollywood came with a sticker that read: “TELL YOUR FRIENDS. Don’t try to break into the Movies in Hollywood until you have obtained FULL, FRANK, AND DEPENDABLE INFORMATION from the Hollywood CHAMBER OF COMMERCE . . . IT MAY SAVE DISAPPOINTMENTS.”
The Los Angeles papers regularly ran stories about the dashed dreams of aspirants to stardom. It was almost a journalistic genre unto itself: the flip side of the overnight discovery story, and in its way, just as much of a testament to the power of Hollywood. The dashed dream stories made the successes look all the gleamier and dreamier against the murk of their sadness. In the early 1930s, the ultimate such story was that of Peg Entwistle, a New York stage actress who had relocated to California in 1929 in the hope of making it big in the pictures. Now that talkies had arrived, a theatrical career was a more prestigious calling card in Hollywood than it had been in the silent era, and Entwistle, who was blond, blue-eyed, and pretty, as well as stage-trained and British-born, was at first hopeful. In Los Angeles, she acted in a play with Humphrey Bogart and Billie Burke, the future good witch Glinda, for which she received respectful notices. But by 1932, Entwistle had landed only one bit role in a movie, a lurid female ensemble piece called Thirteen Women, about a vengeful murderess on a mission to kill her former sorority sisters. RKO, the studio she had signed with, dropped her contract. She was deeply discouraged about her career—and who knows what else; it’s always the shattered Hollywood dreams we hear about in such cases—so much so that she decided to take her own life.
She chose a singularly dramatic method. One September morning in 1932, Entwistle climbed into the steep, scrub-covered Hollywood Hills, to the base of the sign that then read “HOLLYWOODLAND.” The fifty-foot-high letters, outlined at night in a blaze of lightbulbs, had been erected to advertise a housing development in the hills, but in the eight years they’d stood there, they had already become a widely recognized symbol of moviedom. Entwistle climbed a ladder that had been left behind by workmen, and leapt from the top of the H. A hiker found her body later that day. Entwistle, the Los Angeles Times surmised, could no longer “endure what she apparently had regarded as the ignominy of defeat in her encounter with fickle
filmland.”
A warning for dreamers.
The Bruce Torrence Hollywood Photograph Collection
Usually the cautionary articles were less tragic, but in their matter-of-fact way, no less discouraging. The movies themselves—with their silver-nitrate shimmer, their slithering satin evening gowns, their Art Deco splendor, their ardent lovers, their luminous close-ups—kept fueling the desires that were so often thwarted. The story lines—take, say, the shy girl plucked from the chorus and launched into the stratosphere when the show’s star breaks a leg—did their part, too. A person could get ideas.
Still, the warnings kept coming, and they probably exerted a dual influence: they piqued the fascination of regular filmgoers with no intention of trying their luck in Hollywood—imagine a town so freakishly overrun with beautiful people, a town buzzing with the exotic phenomenon of female ambition!—and at the same time discouraged a few aspirants to film fame. “Beauty-Filled Movie Village Has but Few Chances for Unknowns,” read a 1933 headline in the Los Angeles Herald-Express. “Casting directors are rather frantic about it. They feel that if they don’t send out warnings that Hollywood is tough pickings, that theirs is a sin of omission and the world will presume them to be double-eyed, deceiving pied-pipers and hundreds more stranded girls will miss regular meals.” With fewer jobs available at drugstores and diners for the displaced “belles from back home,” the situation in the early years of the Depression was even more discouraging. “Only one girl out of every 400 has a slight chance of being a motion-picture chorus girl!” declared the lede of a Los Angeles Times article from 1934, which was based on an interview with a Hollywood dance director named Dave Gould. “According to Gould, between 4500 and 5000 girls invade Hollywood annually seeking fame in films. A scant 2 percent of this number become bit or featured players. The remainder usually try the chorus, with small chance for success.” But the pedantic Gould didn’t stop throwing cold water. “In fact,” he stressed, “their chances are even less than the cold figures indicate because already there are approximately 500 beautiful girls in filmland of proven dancing talent and beauty.” Some of the articles must have been the products of studio publicity machines that detected a nice angle in playing up the hunger for stardom—but there was some truth to them, too: it really was a colossal gamble.
Actors had it a little easier. Perhaps there were marginally fewer of them. But there were enough. Talent scouts working for Paramount in New York in the mid-1930s claimed that they took a look at 1,500 performers a week, male and female, of whom ultimately about twenty-five a year were brought to Hollywood. MGM reportedly auditioned 5,000 people a year, of whom 1 percent were given screen tests, and only a few of those were signed. Even the men and women working as extras, who since the mid-1920s had been reporting to Central Casting, where they registered by age and type, had a struggle securing jobs. Only thirty of Central Casting’s 17,000 extras worked more than three days in 1930.
Lyle knew most of this—if not the numbers, then the anecdotes. Even with his something-will-turn-up optimism to buoy him, like a Ping-Pong ball bouncing around on a column of air, his pennilessness at the moment made him nervous. Maybe that’s why on the train from Dallas, he’d lost his voice, and had to greet his agent at the station in tones barely above a whisper. “Here I was on my way to talking pictures on borrowed money from a man I’d never seen,” my father recalled, “and I lost my voice.” Landau, the agent, was a kind man, but this was ridiculous. An actor who couldn’t talk? In the talkies? Please. Still, Landau’s instinctive courtliness—and the sincere hope that he wasn’t wasting his money—kicked in as he dropped Lyle off, and he offered some words of encouragement that the younger man clung to. It was just “a train cold,” or “nerves,” but in either case, Lyle wasn’t to think about it; his voice would come back.
Lyle wandered through the streets near the Ravenswood the next day, subsisting on black coffee and liverwurst sandwiches from the lunch counter down the street. He smiled and pointed when he wanted something so as not to strain the precious vocal cords. He hummed experimentally to himself. The air was clear and dry. Sprinklers tossed their rainbow-beaded garlands of water over the lawns of stucco apartment courts. The grass was springy beneath his feet. Gradually, his voice, that burnished baritone instrument he so relied on, returned to him. He sang the song he’d been humming: “If I never had a cent, / I’d be rich as Rockefeller, / gold dust at my feet / on the sunny side of the street.” The next afternoon, forty-eight hours after he’d arrived in L.A., he found himself on a Warner Brothers soundstage about to make a screen test.
One thing Lyle felt certain of: The material he had chosen for his test was perfect. It was a scene from a play he’d done in Dallas, Louder, Please. His role was that of Herbert White, a brash and charming young publicity man for a movie studio who runs afoul of the studio’s deeply unpleasant head of production. Both men are crazy about the same actress, and she is keen on the publicity man and forever having to fend off the production head. The dialogue was quippy, and the pace was modern and frenetic, with a lot of ringing phones and shouting. And Lyle had the part wired. In Dallas, he’d gotten great reviews for his portrayal, with one of the papers calling his performance “a striking individual triumph for this deft young player who wooed, lied, ranted, raved, cajoled, implored, threatened and almost never left the stage during the evening.” The same review noted that the play’s author, Norman Krasna, who had himself toiled in Hollywood, “must have been fired, for nothing short of a dischargee’s grudge could have inspired the healthy, boisterous, infectious malice of his composition. He writes directly for your anti-cinema bloodlust, tearing limb from limb the entire system of screen publicity and exposing to your sadistic delight the incredibly genuine processes of synthetic fame.” Did it cross Lyle’s mind that somebody in Hollywood might take offense at such an acid portrait of Hollywood? No, it did not. The studio in the play was called Criterion Pictures, after all, and heck, there was no such studio! Lyle didn’t really know much about Hollywood in those days.
When the test was done, the director walked over and said, “Talbot, that scene you did, was that from a play called Louder, Please?” “Yes, yes,” said Lyle, pleased and surprised that the man recognized the scene. The director spoke slowly, as though Lyle himself might be slow: “You don’t know the story of that play?” “No,” said Lyle, beginning to feel a faint tom-tom of alarm in his chest, “I don’t know anything about it at all.” “Well,” said the director, “that play is kind of taboo on the lot here. The man you referred to as ‘King’ in there, the one you’re having a conflict with, is the head of this studio—Darryl Zanuck.”
Louder, Please was indeed a play à clef. Krasna had worked in the publicity department at Warner Brothers before turning to playwriting and then screenwriting. Herbert White was a thinly veiled version of Hubert Voight, a legendary movie PR man. And Kendall King, who is described in the dramatis personae as “No good. Our heavy. A pretty big man. Foppish. Rattish,” was a thinly veiled version of Darryl Zanuck, the head of production at Warner Brothers. Zanuck, as it happened, was a small-town Nebraska boy like Lyle. He had been born in Wahoo, Nebraska, in 1902, which made him the exact same age as my father, and like my father, he’d had scant formal education. He’d started in the movie industry in the 1920s, writing stories for Rin Tin Tin. Now he was on his way to becoming one of the most powerful men in Hollywood. He would leave Warner Brothers the next year to found his own studio, Twentieth Century Films. Though brilliant at what he did, he was also domineering, crude, and womanizing. “I don’t think,” said the director, “uh, this test is something you’d want Mr. Zanuck to see.”
Lyle swallowed. “Can’t we do it over?” But the director was already looking down at his clipboard, scanning the names of the other hopefuls he was to film that day. He had made up his mind: as sorry as he kind of felt for him, he was done with this yokel. “No,” he told Lyle. “I have n
o authority to do it over. We have other tests to make. I can’t do anything for you.”
“My God, I was then in the depths,” my father would tell a journalist years later. He got on the phone to the assistant in his agent’s office, an ambitious young guy named Lew Schreiber. Schreiber was the type who hitches his wagon to a big macher’s star and rides it for all it’s worth. He had been Al Jolson’s gofer, and when Jolson didn’t need him anymore, he’d set his sights on making himself indispensable to Darryl Zanuck. His bid for the big man’s favor was very much a work in progress. For now, Schreiber was working in the office of Arthur Landau, Lyle’s agent, and was Lyle’s handler that day. “How was the test?” Schreiber asked, rat-a-tat-tat, as soon as he heard Lyle’s voice. “Well, gee, Mr. Schreiber. I don’t know. I may have made a big boo-boo here.” That was the way Lyle talked. Schreiber was a young guy, but he was still “Mister.” And other than an occasional “hell” or “damn,” Lyle was not given to profanity or even to coarse language. A couple was “having a love affair,” even if the reference was clearly to a one-time sex act, as in “he opened the door, and there they were having a love affair right there on the floor.” People were “sons-of-guns,” or they “loused things up.” Sometimes, more childishly, they “made a boo-boo.”
On the other end of the line, Schreiber’s voice took on a little metal. He said, “Oh yeah? What happened?” Lyle told him, “Well, the scene I did was from that play, Norman Krasna’s play.”
The Entertainer Page 14
