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

by Wagner, Robert J

  William Randolph Hearst built the Santa Monica palace for Davies in 1928, the last, flamboyant year of the silent era. Money was clearly no object. The house held down 750 feet of oceanfront real estate—and this at a time when anything more than fifty feet was regarded as a luxury. Hearst assembled the land piecemeal, using various pseudonyms in order to keep the prices down.

  The story goes that the last parcel of the property belonged to Will Rogers, which Hearst wanted for the tennis court. The land was worth about five thousand dollars, but Rogers found out who the buyer really was. By the time they were through negotiating, Rogers got a hundred thousand dollars for his parcel.

  To give you some idea of the scale of Davies’s place, it had five buildings, a hundred ten rooms, fifty-five bathrooms, and thirty-seven antique fireplaces. For one party in 1937, to which I was unaccountably not invited, they installed a merry-go-round on the grounds.

  The Beach House was small only in comparison to Hearst’s San Simeon, which was situated on 240,000 acres. But you couldn’t make movies and commute from San Simeon, so Hearst simply built his mistress an equivalent in Santa Monica. While the exterior was Neocolonial in design, inside it was eclectic. There were vast rooms on the first floor, a ballroom, a theater, dozens of bedrooms on the second floor—a random succession of grand rooms that had no connection to one another.

  As with San Simeon, Hearst’s decorating principle was simple: he bought entire rooms out of various European castles and installed them in Davies’s new house. The dining room, drawing room, and reception hall came from Burton Hall in Ireland. Then there was a ballroom from an eighteenth-century Venetian palazzo. A tavern in the basement had been a pub in the Elizabethan era, and sat fifty. Davies herself lived on the top floor of the main building, with a spectacular view that looked out to sea and up the coast.

  There’s a story that gives you some idea of the scale on which Hearst and Davies lived. It seems that Davies had ordered a twenty-four-by-one-hundred-foot custom rug for the movie theater on the second floor. After misadventures with the shipping, the rug finally arrived, and it was found that there was no possible way it could be brought inside the house.

  The beach-side facade of Marion Davies’s Santa Monica home, known as Oceanhouse.

  Everett Collection

  No problem. Davies simply ordered part of the wall to be removed; then the rug was lifted into the house by crane, and the wall was rebuilt. It sounds like the type of, well, off-the-wall thing that today would be done only by Arab sheikhs residing in Dubai. In that era, Hollywood was Dubai.

  The Beach House was a popular site for theme parties—Pioneer Days, or Tyrolean, or whatever incongruous thing they could dream up. One time Davies threw what she called a “Baby Party,” for which all the guests had to dress up as children. Joan Crawford came as Shirley Temple, while Clark Gable made an appearance as a Boy Scout. (It was an echo of a similar party in the 1920s, when Alla Nazimova appeared in diapers and Wallace Reid came as Buster Brown.) Perhaps the most creative party involved an invitation demanding that couples arrive wearing exactly what they had on when their romance began. Lee Tracy and his wife came in a shower curtain.

  Once, Norma Shearer showed up as Marie Antoinette for a party billed as all-American. Norma’s hoop skirt was so huge that seats had to be removed from her car before she could get in.

  Davies was a good-natured woman, greatly loved by everybody who knew her, but Shearer was a thorn in her side. Like Joan Crawford and most of the other actresses on the MGM lot, she was jealous of Shearer’s ability to land film roles simply because she was married to Irving Thalberg. And now this.

  Davies told Shearer she’d have to take off the dress if she wanted to enter the party. The two women got into it, but Shearer got her way. Hearst may have been running a publishing empire, but Irving Thalberg ran production at MGM, where Marion was making her movies.

  And that wasn’t even Shearer’s most aggressive look-at-me display. Hedda Hopper once told me about a party that Carole Lombard threw. It was supposed to be a white ball—nothing but white gowns on the women. The event was to be held at the restaurant Victor Hugo—the perfect setting for such a lavish display. Norma came late, as was her wont, but that wasn’t what proved so devastating: she was wearing a bright red gown.

  It was all a reenactment of the climactic scene in Bette Davis’s Jezebel, but the people at the party weren’t amused. Shearer had gone far out of her way to show up the hostess, and that was simply bad form. Like Marion Davies, Carole Lombard had a widespread reputation for being a salt of the earth dame, but she was livid and stormed out, followed closely by Clark Gable.

  I went to school with Norma’s son, Irving Thalberg Jr., who brought me over to the house one day to meet her. She was in bed, where Irving had led me to believe she spent a great deal of her time, resting up so she could look radiant at parties. She was sweet, and signed a still for me, which I still have. But stories like the one Hedda Hopper told me indicate that to get between Norma Shearer and something she wanted would have been a very bad idea.

  Marion Davies lived at Beach House until World War II. At that point Hearst became worried about a Japanese invasion. Don’t laugh—there was a great deal of fear in California about just such a possibility. Spielberg’s 1941 wasn’t much of a movie, but it was based on fact. Davies moved back to San Simeon and her house in Beverly Hills. But because she disliked San Simeon—she thought it was gloomy—she spent most of her time in Beverly Hills. Years later, long after Davies had died, that house became famous when it was used as the location for the home of the movie producer played by John Marley in The Godfather. A horse’s head in Marion Davies’s old bedroom!

  Hearst’s empire contracted radically during the Depression and afterward. Part of it was the economy, and part of it was that he was extremely conservative at a time when the dominant philosophy was the New Deal. He couldn’t afford both places, so the Beach House was sold for six hundred thousand dollars—which might have paid for one of the ballrooms—and he held on to San Simeon.

  In 1947 Beach House became a hotel, called Oceanhouse, but the venture failed and the main house was demolished in 1956; three years later the property was sold to the state of California. All that’s left of one of the great mansions of California’s past is one guesthouse, which had been used by Davies’s family. Still later the property was taken over by Wallis Annenberg, who turned it into a public community center. I’ve gone there with my grandson Riley, holding his hand and reflecting on the vast palace that once stood on the spot. Someday, when he’s old enough, I’ll tell him all about it.

  Small beach cottages helped launch the decorating career of Billy Haines. Haines had opened an antiques shop in 1930 while he was still under contract with MGM. He had an innate understanding of his potential market; Hollywood had attracted thousands of people from all over the world, most with very limited educations but with boundless ambitions. They needed to be led, but gently. The antiques shop displayed Haines’s antiques in complete room settings, so that people without the gift of visualization could see what the chairs or couches or vases would look like in context. And of course it also allowed Haines to sell extra pieces, and sometimes entire room ensembles.

  After his acting career ended, Ben Lyon became the head of talent at 20th Century Fox. Ben told me that it was he and his wife Bebe Daniels—not Joan Crawford—who had given Haines his first commission as a decorator.

  Lyon had a cottage with about thirty feet of beach frontage, and he told Haines to make it sufficiently attractive so they could rent it for extra income. Haines enclosed the porch, making it part of the living room, and decorated everything in red, white, and blue. His bill for everything, including the furniture, was twenty-five hundred dollars.

  Because Haines had been a star himself, he had an intimate understanding of a star’s mentality and a star’s needs. Basically, he made them fe
el special. Plus he knew how to gain a star’s trust—perhaps the most valuable quality a designer (or, for that matter, a director) can have.

  Once Haines was done redecorating Carole Lombard’s house, the drawing room featured six shades of blue velvet and Empire furniture. Her bedroom had an oversize bed in plum-covered satin, with mirrored screens at either side. The dining room had satin curtains that trailed on the floor. The result was every bit as sleek as Lombard herself, and totally feminine. That was the way Carole lived until she married Clark Gable, who would have felt out of place in such surroundings.

  Haines did Lombard’s and Joan Crawford’s houses for free, as a favor to friends, figuring that the Hollywood scuttlebutt would bring customers to his door.

  In 1935, he moved his shop to Sunset Boulevard, quite close to all his prospective clients in Beverly Hills. I remember driving by Haines’s imposing double-doored entrance hundreds of times over the years. On either side of the doors were large glass niches with oversize glass vitrines.

  Very posh.

  Haines’s next big commission was George Cukor’s house. “It looks just like a Hollywood director’s home ought to look,” said Cukor when he beheld the results.

  In 1934 Frank Lloyd Wright declared that California’s “eclectic procession to and fro in the rag-tag and cast-off of the ages was never going to stop.” This was his way of declaring defeat; he had been trying to class up the joint by designing several homes in the area: the Hollyhock House and three other concrete-block Mayan-style houses, designed and built between 1919 and 1924. They’re splendid examples of Wright’s midcareer style—and they’re all still standing—but they only added to the stylistic confusion of LA.

  Hollyhock House is located at the corner of Sunset and Vermont—not known as a particularly great neighborhood now, but in 1919, when ground was broken, it was virgin territory. It was commissioned by Aline Barnsdall as a home that would overlook an artist’s colony and theater complex. Wright was always juggling multiple projects, so when construction began he was spending a great deal of time in Tokyo, where he was designing the Imperial Hotel. While Wright was traveling, so was Barnsdall, and the distance bred a lot of disagreements, which only increased when they met face-to-face.

  “How can you put a door there?” she’d yell. “I don’t like it and I won’t have it. Change it!”

  “No!” Wright would yell right back. “That’s the way it’s going to be! I won’t change it.”

  She’d insist, and he would go ahead and do what he wanted to do. It was like a bad marriage. The upshot was that Barnsdall lived in the house only for a year, after which she offered it to the city as a public park and art center.

  While all this was going on, Los Angeles was exploding in all directions. The population had grown from 576,673 in 1920 to 1.2 million in 1930. Four hundred thousand of those people had arrived in the space of just five years. All those newcomers had to live somewhere, and the Southern California real estate boom was quite probably the largest and most loosely managed in history.

  Meanwhile, areas farther west, such as Brentwood and Pacific Palisades, had begun to attract some movie people as Beverly Hills began to be afflicted with tour buses and gawkers. Will Rogers had come to dislike the town because it was getting too congested for him—the population that had been all of 634 in 1920 was 17,428 in 1930. A one-room schoolhouse at Sunset and Alpine had been torn down, and a one-car trolley on Rodeo Drive had also vanished. A great debate raged for a time about whether or not a dime store should be allowed to open on a street south of Santa Monica Boulevard; ultimately the issue was decided in favor of the dime store.

  All this was too much for Rogers. He sold his house on North Beverly Drive and bought a ranch that encompassed several hundred acres at the far reaches of Sunset Boulevard in Pacific Palisades, where he lived for the rest of his life, and where he built one of the finest polo fields in the West.

  Years later, I would buy a place of my own just around the corner from Rogers’s ranch, which by then was the Will Rogers State Park. I lived there with my daughters and Jill for more than twenty years, and that land was a great healing force for me, just as it had been for Will Rogers.

  When Rogers bought his property, he was pretty much alone out in Pacific Palisades, which was just the way he liked it, if only because it was a long drive to the studios, which were in Hollywood (Paramount, RKO, Columbia) or the San Fernando Valley (Warner Bros.).

  Because of proximity to their workplace, a lot of the people at Warner bought places near Burbank and North Hollywood. Bette Davis bought a two-story redbrick Tudor house behind a wall in Glendale, which was only about ten minutes from the studio. This meant she could sleep for an extra hour in the morning—no small thing when you have to be on the set, in wardrobe and makeup, by eight a.m.

  Relatively rural places like Sherman Oaks, Encino, and Tarzana were mostly barley fields and orange groves, with a smattering of chicken ranches, until the 1950s. For those who liked country living, these were choice locations. Clark Gable and Carole Lombard had a thirty-two-acre ranch in Encino, fronted by a white brick and frame colonial. It was all very homey, with early American furniture and a room set aside for Clark’s collection of rifles—he was an excellent skeet and bird shooter.

  By the late 1930s and 1940s, a lot of incredibly opulent houses had begun to be built in Bel Air and, just outside its limits, in Holmby Hills. One of the first stars to move to Holmby Hills was Jean Harlow. Her Georgian mansion was all crème and gilt, and it was also huge—but then, her mother and her mother’s husband also lived with her. William Powell, with whom Harlow had the last serious relationship of her life, thought the house was ridiculous and her relationship with her mother destructive; he urged her to get rid of the place and save some money before her mother drove her into bankruptcy. She followed his advice and rented a much cheaper house, but she died before she was able to put down any roots.

  Without question the most opulent house I have ever been in was Jack Warner’s.

  It was an immense Georgian mansion, more than thirteen thousand square feet, sitting on nine acres of property. It had two guesthouses, terraces and gardens, three—count ’em, three—hothouses, a nursery, and a nine-hole golf course. Harold Lloyd, Jack’s next-door neighbor, also had a short nine-hole golf course on his property, and Jack built a bridge between the two properties so guests could play eighteen if they so desired.

  The interesting thing about Jack’s estate—“house” doesn’t begin to cover it—was that Jack put it together piece by piece over a ten-year period. He originally bought three acres in 1926 and built a fifteen-room Spanish mansion. But three acres felt insufficient, so Jack added another parcel of land, and then another.

  The grounds were completed in 1937, at which point Jack turned his attention to his house. He hired Roland Coate to enlarge and completely redesign the old Spanish mansion into a new Georgian mansion, and Coate went to town on the assignment.

  When he was done, besides the house itself and the guesthouses, there were gas pumps and a garage where repairs could be done on Jack’s fleet of cars. But everybody agreed that the pièce de résistance was the golf course. The holes were on the short side—pitch and putt, really—but that wasn’t the point. The point was that Jack had enough power and money to customize a golf course on some of the most valuable real estate in the world.

  If you didn’t already know that Jack was a rich and powerful man, the entrance to his mansion would have told you. Past the iron gates was a winding driveway lined by sycamores. You ended up at a brick-paved motor court by the portico—all white and classical. Across the way was a fountain, and beyond that were landscaped terraces decorated with statues and urns.

  Needless to say, the interior of the mansion maintained the same impression of grandeur. Jack hired William Haines to do the decoration. Haines liked big houses.

  Billy filled the h
ouse with antiques befitting the setting—authentic George III mahogany armchairs, writing desks, eighteenth-century Chinese wallpaper panels. (At this stage of his career, Haines liked French and English antiques with chinoiserie accents—a weird kind of Regency effect. In later years, he modernized his style to something more aerodynamic and Scandinavian looking.)

  The front door opened into a two-story hall with a parquet floor. Sweeping up the side was a curving cantilevered staircase. On the wall as you ascended the staircase were paintings by Arcimboldo, the eccentric artist—well, I’ve always thought he was eccentric—who made portraits out of fruit and vegetables.

  The library was where Jack spent the most time, because it had been converted into a screening room where he watched movies with his executives. When you twisted the head of a Buddha, paintings would rise and a screen would emerge.

  The library, which also held a collection of scripts from Warner Bros. films, was largely decorated in orange, from the couches to the curtains. Because of the color scheme and the low furniture—so heads wouldn’t get in the way of the projector’s beam—it had a more modern feel than the rest of the house, except for some Louis XV–style panels that broke up the walls and drapes.

  Somewhere in the house over a mantel, I recall a portrait of Ann Warner painted by Salvador Dalí. The bar had a large wooden floor and more orange accents, with Tang dynasty pottery and a couple of huge candlesticks that I seem to recall came from a Mexican cathedral. Behind the bar were statues of the Buddhist deity Guanyin, which Ann had insisted reappear in various places throughout the house.

  I always wanted to ask Jack what he thought about Buddhism. Maybe he figured a little Buddhism on the side amounted to hedging his bets, but the truth is I don’t think Jack Warner ever believed in anything except Jack Warner.

  Overall, the house was more like an architectural museum than a place you’d actually want to live. When you had the privilege of dining at Jack’s house, the silverware wasn’t silver but gold, and a footman stood behind every diner at the table.