You Must Remember This: Life and Style in Hollywood's Golden Age

by Wagner, Robert J

  There were still very few mansions in Hollywood, and hardly anything at all west of the town. Most of the aspiring actors and actresses, not to mention the writers and directors, rented hotel rooms or modest frame houses, if only because everyone was uncertain how long this movie thing was going to last and they didn’t want to overextend themselves only to be brought up short by the sudden death of the fad.

  In those early years, people seemed to want to stay close to the studios, if only to keep the commute short. There were exceptions; around World War I, the most fashionable address in Los Angeles—at least between Western Avenue and South Figueroa Street—wasn’t in Hollywood at all, but on West Adams Boulevard. Theda Bara lived there for a while, just around the corner from the extremely rich oilman Edward Doheny.

  After a time Theda Bara moved out, and Fatty Arbuckle moved in. This was even worse. Bara was at least an actress, but Arbuckle had worked for the lowly Keystone company. He was . . . a comedian! He was making five thousand dollars a week, but he was still—a comedian!

  Arbuckle was living at his West Adams home in 1921 when the scandal erupted that destroyed his career and his life. He had thrown a party in San Francisco’s St. Francis Hotel, after which a girl named Virginia Rappe died. Arbuckle was accused of manslaughter; there were allegations of rape as well, although nobody who knew Arbuckle thought he was capable of committing rape. After a few trials resulted in hung juries, he was acquitted, but he was banned from the screen by newly hired morality czar Will Hays anyway. Arbuckle sold the house to his boss—and later my boss—Joe Schenck.

  Agnes de Mille would describe Hollywood at that point in its history as “very lovely and romantic and attractive. . . . The streets ran right into the foothills and the foothills went straight up into sage brush and you were in the wild, wild hills. Sage brush and rattlesnakes and coyotes and the little wild deer that came down every night. And all of it was just enchanting.”

  Los Angeles didn’t have traditions of its own, so it borrowed the older traditions of California, a place of Spanish haciendas and missions and a sense of leisure. In good times and bad, one thing stayed constant in California: a feeling for light and the ways in which the land could be made a part of the interior of the homes. The houses were Andalusian or Moorish, Italian or Spanish, but almost all of them were in some way romantic—the basis for Los Angeles, as well as for the movies.

  In those early days, Beverly Hills landscaping was in the hands of the Englishman John J. Reeves, who wanted a different kind of tree for each street, all trimmed to uniform heights and widths. Reeves specified pepper trees for Crescent Drive, just south of the future site of the Beverly Hills Hotel. J. Stanley Anderson, whose grandmother managed the Beverly Hills Hotel, told me that some of the developers thought that maybe pepper trees weren’t such a great idea, but Reeves insisted. He planted saplings, and they all blew down in the first storm, whereupon he was told to plant something sturdier.

  “You are going to have peppers,” replied the stubborn Mr. Reeves. So the pepper trees were replanted and stood for decades, until they died off and were replaced with Southern magnolias. By that time, Mr. Reeves was dead and could no longer bulldoze his way through obstacles.

  All this care and planning yielded . . . nothing much.

  But they still kept planning, confident that if they just kept building, sooner or later the world would come. Los Angeles was the fastest-growing city in America, so some of that had to benefit Hollywood and Beverly Hills, which was right next door. In the early part of February 1911, Margaret Anderson and her son Stanley Anderson were invited to own and operate a luxury hotel. Margaret had another grandson named Robert, but years later I became very good friends with J. Stanley Anderson, who told me many stories of early Hollywood.

  Everything exploded outward in the 1920s.

  The first fortunes of Southern California were created by oil, agriculture, railroads, and real estate. In Beverly Hills, real estate and natural resources were closely intertwined. (Real estate is still a driver of the local economy.) About this time, 80-by-165-foot lots were going for $1,100—the rough equivalent of $26,000 today, which just goes to show you that scarcity and location have more to do with the value of a piece of land than inflation.

  The Depression affected Hollywood in a different way and at a different speed than it did the rest of the country. While most other cities were already in terrible shape by 1930, Hollywood didn’t experience the full extent of the Depression until 1932 or so. Paramount went into receivership, RKO teetered, and Warner Bros. lost most of the money it had made in the early days of sound.

  But by 1937, the year my family moved to Bel Air, the tide had turned. The town was once again beginning to hum, not just because of the quality of the movies being made, but because the studios manufactured one of the few means of escape for a world that was still struggling with the effects of the crash. And so Hollywood created an alternate reality—a collective fantasy, if you will—for a world where reality itself was ugly and unmanageable.

  In 1937 MGM made forty-seven pictures, nearly one per week, while Universal came close to that, with forty-four movies—both amazing numbers. Yet Warner Bros. went far past them both, with sixty-six pictures. Hollywood was truly a factory, churning out movies the same way Ford churned out Model A’s. A lot of these movies were low-budget B’s, produced to fill the bottom of the double features that the studios had devised as a means of combating the economic downturn: two pictures for the price of one, with a dish giveaway in between them.

  I first started going to the movies at the Carthay Circle in the Wilshire district almost from the day we started unpacking. I distinctly remember seeing Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs there—the grassy divider in the middle of San Vicente Boulevard, which ran in front of the theater, featured three- and four-foot-high figures of all the dwarfs.

  In those days LA was a movie town to an extent that’s hard to imagine today. There was a big shipping business down by the docks in San Pedro and Long Beach—the second-largest port in the United States—but the driver of the local economy was primarily the movie business. In a few years World War II would change all that by propelling the airplane industry into prominence and broadening the economic base. Very quickly 750,000 people were working in the airplane business.

  In 1937 I was seven years old, a kid from the Midwest—Detroit, to be specific. I was just beginning my love affair with the movies, which I was lucky enough to parlay into a career.

  My father was a brilliant businessman. He made a great deal of money in the 1920s selling the lacquer that was used on the dashboards of Fords, then lost it all in the stock market crash and the Depression, when nobody had any money to buy new cars.

  But by the latter part of the thirties, he had recovered enough capital to make the move to the West Coast, which had been recommended for my mother’s asthma. At the time, most of the movie people still lived in Hollywood or Beverly Hills; Bel Air was thinly settled at that point, but that’s where my father chose to live. I believe he paid twenty thousand or thirty thousand dollars for a lot, and around forty thousand dollars to build a house there. I’m not sure if there was a surcharge to construct the street to access it, but it was in any event as new as our house on 10887 Chalon Road.

  The house is still standing, and, with the help of a great many people, so am I.

  Our home had three bedrooms; next to it was a pool and a guesthouse. It was Spanish in style, and had a hitching post in the backyard for the horses we were expected to have, and did. We didn’t keep them at the house, but at the stables at the Hotel Bel Air when it finally opened in 1946.

  I immediately loved California, the way each block offered something delicious for the eye. Compared to suburban Detroit, it was intoxicating. Not everybody, though, was enthralled with the prevailing mode of architecture and decoration. Nathanael West wrote about the environment in The
Day of the Locust: “Only dynamite would be of any use against the Mexican ranch houses, Samoan huts, Mediterranean villas, Egyptian and Japanese temples, Swiss chalets, Tudor cottages and every possible combination of these styles.”

  West was a good writer, but I didn’t share his feelings—not then, not now. Los Angeles, like the industry it spawned, was first about creating desire, then satisfying it—a profoundly American gift.

  Bel Air had been opened to development by a man named Alphonzo Bell in 1922. And yes, at first there was a strict policy that forbade selling to movie people, which I find ironic. It seems that Bell wanted his development to become the “crowning achievement of suburban development” and he feared that nouveau riche Hollywood types would lower his property values.

  In other respects, Bell was a farsighted developer. He carved roads out of hillsides and installed sewer, power, and water lines underground—expensive, but worth it. He also landscaped the place beautifully. The first tract he developed was two hundred acres, which he divided into parcels of several acres apiece, then encouraged buyers to purchase even larger lots of five and ten acres. He added polo fields, tennis courts, and my beloved Bel Air Country Club. He also built the Bel Air Stables on Stone Canyon Road and sixty-five miles of bridle paths.

  And he installed the splendid gate at the Bel Air Road/Sunset Boulevard entrance. In the early days of the development, uniformed guards would patrol the entrance, making sure that no interlopers got in, and the private police force would escort visitors up the maze of streets to their destination.

  All went swimmingly in the 1920s, but when the Depression hit, it was no time for artificial barriers to prospective buyers. Bel Air lots were going begging, and the area was teetering on insolvency, so Bell quietly let go of his strictures about movie people.

  Colleen Moore, the popular flapper of the 1920s and a brilliant stock investor, bought a house on St. Pierre Road, and Warner Baxter came in about the same time. By World War II, movie people were setting up shop in Bel Air on a weekly basis, as it had become a more prestigious address than Beverly Hills. Judy Garland would build a ten-room Tudor house for herself at 1231 Stone Canyon Road, just up the street from the stables.

  Bel Air had an interesting dynamic in those early years. Although you were only twenty minutes from Hollywood and its core industry, the town had a rural feel. Alphonzo Bell had his offices on Stone Canyon Road, and when he sold that property the office and the stables he had built there were redesigned and reconfigured to become the foundation of the Bel Air Hotel.

  A lot of the rooms at the hotel were once horse stalls, and I’m particularly fond of a large circular fountain on one of the patios where I used to water my horse when I was a boy. Part of Bell’s property was converted into the Bel Air Tea Room, where I bused tables as a kid, with John Derek working alongside me.

  Besides busing the tables, I washed dishes and occasionally waited on tables. It sounds like a typical summer job, but it was a life changer, because I became close friends with another kid named Noel Clarebut. Noel introduced me to his mother, Helena, who ran the dining room and the antiques gallery at the hotel.

  Helena became a tremendous influence on my life. A European, she loved the theater, food, classical music, dogs—all the finer things in life. I didn’t have any of that. My family was Midwestern, with a utilitarian, bricks-and-mortar set of values.

  Horses were very much a part of my life from the time we arrived. Robert Montgomery was responsible for making it easy to ride there, because he promoted the construction of bridle trails that wound their way through Bel Air in more scenic routes than were available in Beverly Hills.

  My first horse was named Topper, after Hopalong Cassidy’s horse. He was a great horse, and I had him until his old age, when my father did exactly as Robert Redford’s character did in The Electric Horseman: he took Topper back to the breeder from whom he’d bought him. The breeder had a thousand acres, so Topper was unloaded into the pasture and slapped on the rear end, then went off to live out his days grazing. For Topper, life was a circle—he was born there, and he died there. At the time a lot of people didn’t fuss over their animals; they were part of the property more than they were part of the family, but I’m proud to say that my father didn’t feel that way, and he passed that same feeling on to me. Animals deserve nothing less.

  A photo of me with my horse Sonny.

  Courtesy of the author

  Sonny was another horse I adored. He was a gentle soul, brown, with big hips and splashes of paint on his shoulders. Technically he was my father’s horse, but Sonny and I bonded in a very special way. His previous owner had taught him a routine that I maintained and amplified at performances at shows and fairs.

  We’d make an entrance with him pushing me out. I would pretend to trip and fall. Sonny would lie down next to me, and when he was flat on the ground I’d grab a strap that was around his stomach. He’d get up and lift me with him, and I would hop on his back. We’d make an exit, then come back with an American flag in Sonny’s mouth. He’d toss his head a few times, which caused the flag to wave, and the crowd would reliably go nuts. Then he would take a bow.

  For a boy who loved horses and was beginning to love applause, it was a surefire act, and a lot of fun to perform.

  Years went by and Sonny got cataracts, so, just as he had with Topper, my dad took him back to the breeder. I got a chance to say good-bye to him, but losing him bothered me for years. It still does.

  It sounds impossible now, almost like something out of science fiction, but the fact is that before and after World War II Los Angeles had one of the best mass transit systems in America. Electric streetcars connected Orange, Ventura, Riverside, and San Bernardino Counties with no exhaust and no smog—the trolley lines ran on overhead electric wires.

  Los Angeles and the suburbs around it were expanding exponentially all during my childhood, but the air remained remarkably clean. I know: I rode those streetcars because that’s how I went to the movies. Occasionally I would take my bike and head to Westwood to see a movie. But if the film I wanted to see was in Hollywood, it was too far for the bike ride, so I’d walk from our house to UCLA, and grab a bus to Beverly Hills, then catch the trolley. (Occasionally, my father would drive my mother, my sister, and me, and sometimes he’d even come in with us.)

  The trolleys began in 1894 with horse-drawn cars. By 1895 there was an electric rail line connecting Los Angeles and Pasadena, and a year after that a line opened that connected Los Angeles with what would become Hollywood and Beverly Hills, all the way to Santa Monica.

  During World War I you could go from downtown Los Angeles to as far away as San Bernardino, San Pedro, or San Fernando on the trolleys. There was a trip called the Old Mission that went from Los Angeles to Busch Gardens, all the way to Pasadena and San Gabriel Mission. The Mount Lowe trolley, which was actually a cable car on narrow-gauge track, went to the top of Echo Mountain. The Balloon Route ran from Los Angeles through Hollywood, Santa Monica, Venice Beach, Redondo, and back to Los Angeles via Culver City. (I shudder to think how long that round trip must have taken.)

  Two trackless trolleys (the first in America) running through Laurel Canyon.

  Mary Evans Picture Library/Everett Collection

  Apparently the trolleys took a hit in the 1920s as the population became more prosperous and people started buying cars, but with World War II, gasoline and tire rationing revived the trolley lines, and ridership hit an all-time high of 109 million in 1944.

  By then, Los Angeles had two separate trolley systems, commonly known as the Red Cars and the Yellow Cars. Pacific Electric owned the Red Car line, and National City Lines owned the Yellow Cars.

  I generally took the Red Cars, which ran from Union Station downtown all the way to the beach—an east-west line. To get there, it wound through the middle of Beverly Hills, through the upper part of Hollywood, then crossed ove
r to Sunset. The Red Cars were great—they were fifty feet long, and ran between forty and fifty miles an hour.

  The transit system was remarkably well engineered, efficient, and, in modern terms, environmentally sound. When I was riding the Red and Yellow lines they were at their height—there were nine hundred Red Cars running on 1,150 miles of track covering four counties. There aren’t that many people who remember them anymore, but they were a crucial factor in how Los Angeles developed the way it did. Because the trolleys made travel simple—not to mention cheap—they encouraged very expansive development. As late as 1930, more than 50 percent of the land in the LA basin was undeveloped. The population spread out over a very large area of land, which is why in my memory, and in my friends’ memories, Los Angeles seemed uncrowded and undeveloped—almost sylvan.

  One of the red cars passing in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard. In an astonishing coincidence, Grauman’s just happens to be showing one of my movies.

  Courtesy of the author

  Of course, it all changed. The sheer expanse of Southern California made it perfect for the automobile, and the basic disposition of the American public toward independence probably made the decline of the trolleys inevitable. Making the changeover faster than it had to be was the dismantling of streetcar systems in favor of buses by a number of companies, including General Motors, Firestone, and Standard Oil, who stood to make a lot more money with buses than with electric power.

  By the early 1950s, when I was a young leading man at 20th Century Fox, cars had displaced the trolleys as the primary means of travel in Southern California. Freeways that sixty years later are now often impassable, not to mention impossible, were being constructed. By 1959 the only trolley line that was still operating was LA to Long Beach, and that was discontinued in 1961. The trolley cars were chopped up and destroyed; some were sunk off the coast. It was a terrible waste of valuable historical artifacts.