Darryl Zanuck and Jack Warner played it both ways, but when pressed to the wall, they played the long game. Darryl knew The Grapes of Wrath was not going to be a huge moneymaker, but he didn’t care. It wasn’t very expensive to produce, it would make money over time, and it would accrue prestige to the studio and the industry that made it.
And Darryl was right. The Grapes of Wrath broke even in 1940, and it has never stopped playing in more than seventy years.
I suspect that for the men and women who run studios today, it’s just a business. But for Warner, Zanuck, and the rest of them, it was a passionate pursuit—they had a vision they wanted to put on-screen, and Hollywood grew around that vision.
I guess you might say that You Must Remember This is my farewell to the lives that those of us lucky enough to be in the movie industry lived.
While the book is partly about style and status, I hope that it will also offer an intimate look at people and what they were like away from the studio and publicity machine—stars and filmmakers at home, entertaining, having dinner with friends. Some of the book will be about the stars I knew best, from the homegrown American variety (Gary Cooper, Clark Gable), to the British colony (Cary Grant, David Niven), to Americans who imitated the British colony (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.). Other parts of the book will be about our houses, the architects who built them, the haberdashers who dressed us, the restaurants where we liked to eat and why. It will be about the way Hollywood actually lived, told via a mosaic of memory.
I will trace the changing times and styles that I’ve lived through. For instance: For about twenty years, William Haines, once the only out-of-the-closet actor at MGM, was probably the preeminent decorator to the stars. After he got cashiered by Metro—it didn’t pay to flaunt homosexuality around Louis B. Mayer—Haines decorated a house for his friend Joan Crawford.
Then Billy bought a house on North Stanley Avenue in Hollywood and decorated it in a combination of colonial New Orleans and eighteenth-century English. The story goes that Irving Thalberg came to visit the house and, as Haines showed him around, kept asking, “Who did this?”
“I did,” Billy replied each time. Word got around, and Billy went into the interior decoration business and did extremely well.
The style that Billy evolved—white or bright fabrics, clean surfaces—began to go out of fashion in the 1950s. He still got decorating jobs, many from his friends in the Old Guard—he did a lot of decorating for the Reagans and their circle—but younger people wanted their own decorators, their own look. They always do. New designers came in, and styles changed.
Watching the ebb and flow of fashion in the microcosm of Los Angeles and its related towns, I’ve developed a sense of time as a river, always moving, always shifting the outlines of the banks. I see Los Angeles as a mutable organism—it never quite looks the same way twice. I remember a town of Red Car trolley lines and weekends spent at Catalina playing baseball with John Wayne and John Ford.
Gone, all gone.
This is a book about life outside the studio walls, from the very beginnings of Hollywood, to when I got there in the 1930s, through the 1950s and 1960s—a window into a bygone world of splendid glamour that can, for most, be experienced only vicariously.
My intent is for you to experience the same thrill I did, one night at Clifton Webb’s house. It was a dinner party, thrown with all of Clifton’s impeccable taste. And then it became something more. Roger Edens, the associate producer for the Arthur Freed unit at MGM, began to play the piano and Judy Garland got up to sing for the better part of an hour—Gershwin, Porter, Harry Warren. While she serenaded us with that great golden trumpet of a voice, Clifton’s small poodles wandered around the room as dogs do, looking for food or affection.
I also saw Judy sing at the Palace in New York, but this was like nothing else. Watching her sing to a crowded theater paled in comparison to being in a room with her by the piano and fifteen people gathered around. There was a palpable, intimate quality that was unforgettable, and it was a complete thrill that I’ve never forgotten.
We who were lucky enough to be in the movie industry at that time lived in a cocoon of golden lace. We were protected from the consequences of our behavior by the vast studio apparatus and by a comprehensively different public attitude. We had freedom and, frankly, most of the time we also had license.
If there was an arrest for drunk driving, there would be a nod, a wink, perhaps some modest amount of money changing hands, and that would be the end of it. No police record, let alone a trial. If an actor behaved the way that, say, Tiger Woods did—and believe me, it was not unusual—it was covered up. No one knew, and no one would ever know . . . except fixers at the studio.
No more. Now one of the prime ways to get on the cover of a magazine or to juice up a career is to go into rehab for alcohol or drugs, have a public psychotic episode, or make a porn tape. Even something as commonplace as a woman getting out of a car can be used to whip up a frenzy, if it’s done sans underwear.
Then, stars could move around town more or less at will. We shopped for our own clothes during regular business hours, we often bought our own groceries, and we flew commercial. And when we flew commercial, we dressed up—maybe not in a tie, but at the very least we always wore a jacket. Wherever you were, there was rarely a sense of anything approaching hostility from the public, much less danger.
Now, the twenty-four/seven news cycle, with its hundred different news outlets, restricts behavior and enforces consequences. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie can’t leave the house without a security detail hovering; if they have to go to the store they go after regular hours, and private airplanes are mandatory. The freedom that used to be one of the perks of celebrity is now virtually nonexistent—the size of the media lens is so much larger, and the focus is less forgiving. There are hordes of cameras, and anyone with a cell phone is a potential paparazzo. And stars can be brutalized by a media that has no filter, only stories—a lot of them manifestly untrue.
My sense is that today’s celebrities trade the huge amounts of money they earn for an almost complete loss of freedom. The focus of the media is very close, and the view is totally unforgiving. And you know something? They can have it; I don’t want it.
So this book is a loving farewell letter to the glorified mom-and-pop business I was lucky enough to get into. I’ve been so fortunate—my career has been going strong for more than sixty years, from Darryl Zanuck to The Pink Panther to Hart to Hart, from Austin Powers to Two and a Half Men and NCIS. That experience, that long view, enables me to examine how the values and motivations of moviemaking have changed.
But at the same time, some things never change. Then or now, Hollywood is about basic human drives: ambition, respect, the desire to be noticed, the need to be loved.
The nightclubs, some of the houses, and almost all of the people that I’ll be telling you about are gone, as are the styles and fashions. But the movies and the legends remain, and the documenting of those places, of the way we lived, will trace the road between then and now.
The time I’m writing about was better than ours in some ways, and worse in others. I’ll point up these behavioral and sociological differences as they occur. I hope this book will be like a good movie: a little spectacle, some laughs, a sense of reflection, all of it underlying an emotional authenticity.
Here is Hollywood as I knew it.
Before it became the world center for the production of entertainment and art, Los Angeles was just the end of the line. When you got there, you had gone as far as you could go.
It was an exotic place, and for a very long time it was also a bit unreal. Maybe it still is; I’ve been here so long—more than seventy-five years—that it just seems normal to me. But if you go back to the beginning, it was a place of open spaces and dreams that took a long, long time to come to fruition.
Before the movies, people came to Hollywood for t
he same reason they went to Florida: the weather. And before smog created temperature inversion, the weather was indeed glorious—seldom over 85 degrees in the hottest summer, rarely below 40 degrees in the coldest winter.
Hollywood was founded in the 1880s by Methodists from the Midwest who saw it as a place where temperance could flourish. First they banned liquor. A few years later, they banned movies.
Neither ban succeeded, thank God.
But everybody who came to Southern California then came to Los Angeles, not Hollywood. The population of Los Angeles skyrocketed from eleven thousand people in 1880 to fifty thousand ten years later, making it the fastest-growing city in the country. All that land west of Los Angeles was bound to become desirable, but when?
Developers appeared early. One of them was Horace Wilcox, who arrived from Kansas in 1883. Wilcox was a devout Methodist who had made a fortune in real estate and helped make Kansas safe for Prohibition.
Wilcox built a gabled Queen Anne house on a dirt road that he modestly named Wilcox Avenue, in a town that his wife named “Hollywood” after the name of a friend’s estate in Ohio that she thought would work well for an entire town. Daeida Wilcox wanted Hollywood to be at the leading edge of the Temperance movement, a model of virtue that would set Christian soldiers marching as to war.
Wilcox offered free land to anybody who wanted to build a church. There were no saloons or liquor stores, no red-light district, and, above all, no theater people. The sign that was most frequently displayed read “No Jews, actors or dogs allowed.”
I don’t know about the dogs, but the Jews and actors were not easily discouraged. They bided their time.
As a temperance venture, Hollywood has to be considered a huge failure; as a real estate venture, an equally huge success.
Horace Wilcox died in 1890, and Hollywood was incorporated in 1903. In between those years, not a lot happened, aside, perhaps, from the construction of the Hollywood Hotel in 1903. Built along a Hollywood Boulevard that was then still a dirt road, the hotel was an old frame barn, part Moorish, part Spanish. It cost twenty-five thousand dollars, had thirty-three rooms, a bathroom on every floor, and a garden on the roof.
Sometime during World War II, I walked onto the veranda of the Hollywood Hotel and saw D. W. Griffith sitting in one of its rocking chairs, quietly surveying the town that he had done so much to build. Just a few years later, both Griffith and the hotel were gone.
The development of the modern Hollywood was an incremental process. A few highlights from its early history:
1904: Sunset Boulevard is completed from downtown Los Angeles to Laurel Canyon.
1905: Hollywood Cash Grocery, the very first store, opens on Cahuenga and Sunset.
1905: A trolley car begins running between Los Angeles and Hollywood every fifteen minutes.
A few places still survive from that era, although they’re not in Hollywood proper but in Los Angeles. There’s Olvera Street, which dates from the founding of the town. Then there’s a restaurant with the delightful name Philippe the Original, which opened in 1908 on North Alameda Street and became famous for its French dip sandwiches served in a rustic atmosphere. It’s still offering them, among other dishes. And the Pantry Café, which opened a little later, in 1924, on South Figueroa, is also still in business.
One of the early landmarks from that period was a mansion built by the artist Paul de Longpré in 1902 on three and a half acres on the corner of Hollywood and Cahuenga Boulevards. De Longpré was a mostly unsuccessful artist in France and New York who got that prime plot of real estate by bartering three original oil paintings for it. He proceeded to build a Moorish-style mansion and surround it with a spectacular Monet-style garden: five hundred rose bushes, a thousand tulip bulbs, jonquils, and fifty blooming trees. His skills as an artist paled next to his skills as a promoter; the public was invited to saunter through his home and garden. If they bought a painting or two en route, so much the better.
De Longpré’s house was the first famous Hollywood mansion, and you might say that he also invented the modern American tourist attraction, which also functions as a glorified souvenir stand.
And while de Longpré’s home is not among them, there are a number of hardy early-twentieth-century Hollywood survivors. (I’m partial to hardy survivors.) The Magic Castle, a Franklin Avenue landmark for decades as a place where magicians go to amuse other magicians, was built as a private home for a man named Rollin B. Lane in 1909. Yamashiro, a Japanese restaurant in the Hollywood Hills, was originally built in 1914 as a home by the Bernheimer family, leading New York importers of East Asian goods. They probably figured the house would be on the decorative leading edge, although the style never quite caught on, at least not in LA. After the stock market crash of 1929, the house passed through several hands until it was resurrected as a restaurant in 1949. All told, the buildings and the beautifully landscaped grounds have been Hollywood landmarks for a hundred years.
By 1911 Hollywood had banned anything that might lower the tone of the town: slaughterhouses were forbidden, as were gasworks, textile mills, and cotton fields. Why cotton fields? Because they required people—usually migrants—to pick the cotton; in addition to Jews, actors, and dogs, migrants were also unwelcome.
What flourished in Hollywood was not tolerance, but nature. Franklin Avenue was wreathed in pepper trees; Vine Street was covered in peppers and palms. Snaking through the hills but stopping far short of the ocean, Sunset Boulevard had a bridle path that ran right down its center. This made perfect sense, because a lot more people were getting around via horseback than via automobiles.
Between 1903 and 1910, Hollywood’s population gradually increased—from seven hundred in 1903 to four thousand in 1910—but the character of its people remained the same. They were middle-class families who wanted to get away from cold weather and alcohol. Among the things that the board of trustees banned were the sale of liquor, gambling, and “disorderly houses”—i.e., whorehouses. As for pool halls and bowling alleys, they had to be closed by eleven p.m. on weekdays and all day on Sunday.
Other laws prohibited driving herds of more than two hundred horses, cattle, or mules, or more than two thousand sheep, through the streets. All that was official; still unofficially prohibited were actors, who couldn’t find rooms to rent.
Things finally began to change when Cecil B. DeMille set up shop in December 1913 at a barn on the southeast corner of Selma and Vine in the heart of Hollywood. He was representing a consortium in New York that included Jesse L. Lasky and Samuel Goldwyn.
The Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company was not the first movie company to have offices in Southern California, but it was the first to establish year-round headquarters; the others were seasonal operations sent out by East Coast studios that were trying to maintain production during the impossible New York winters.
DeMille hadn’t intended to end up in Hollywood; his original destination had been Flagstaff, but finding that he hated the light and the flat terrain in Arizona, he went on to the end of the line. Scanning the horizon for a likely place to set up a motion picture studio, he ended up at a barn owned by a man named Jacob Stern. A deal was struck, and DeMille erected a sign over the barn: JESSE L. LASKY FEATURE PLAY COMPANY. DeMille started shooting his first picture, The Squaw Man.
Members of the Famous Players–Lasky Corporation, which eventually became Paramount. From left to right: Jesse L. Lasky, Adolph Zukor, Samuel Goldwyn, Cecil B. DeMille, and Al Kaufman. In the end these men created more than Paramount—they created Hollywood.
Mary Evans Picture Library/Everett Collection
It was a western, and it was a smash hit. DeMille had lucked into something big. As he ramped up production, he found that the area could serve as background for almost every kind of movie, from desert—about eighty miles outside of Los Angeles—to mountains—fifteen minutes from DeMille’s studio door.
Other studios noted the variety of locations. The gold rush was on.
I have a holster that was used in The Squaw Man, given to me by a wonderful man in the Fox still department who had worked on the picture. When I got into the movie industry in 1949, The Squaw Man was only thirty-five years old, or about as old as The Deer Hunter is now—lots of people who had been there with DeMille were still working, as was DeMille himself. The holster is one of those six-degrees-of-separation objects—a perfectly ordinary piece of leather that is also a piece of Hollywood history.
For the first few years of the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company, Lasky himself commuted from New York and basically left production matters in the hands of his partner DeMille. But in 1917 Lasky bought a Spanish mansion at 7209 Hillside, right where La Brea dead-ends into the Hollywood Hills. The Lasky house’s most exotic feature was a screening room—one of the first private screening rooms in Hollywood—along with the already standard tennis court and swimming pool. Lasky wouldn’t have needed more than five minutes to get to the studio.
By 1915, the annual payroll of the studios in Hollywood totaled about twenty million dollars. By 1920 the population had grown to thirty-six thousand, and the new settlers were no longer teetotaling Midwesterners, but young men and women lured by the siren call of the movies.
You Must Remember This: Life and Style in Hollywood's Golden Age Page 2
