by Nancie Clare
There were insinuations that movie-censor-in-chief Will Hays went as far as suggesting to those stars on the rise who might be caught in any sort of scandalous crosshairs that they make their way west to Beverly Hills. Beverly Hills was far enough from the restaurants, clubs, and speakeasies that were springing up across Hollywood and the rest of Los Angeles, as well as the legions of press who made it their business to trawl such locations looking for juicy tidbits, to make it a perfect neighborhood to which the emerging motion picture glitterati could repair. Once in Beverly Hills, the small, discreet combination police and fire department, which had only recently expanded from the lone deputy, Jack Munson, to include Charlie Blair, would know how to best handle any potential for scandal: quietly. In contrast to the honeycombed-with-corruption Los Angeles Police Department, with its full complement of precincts with rank-and-file policemen, their commanding officers, and specialized departments like Homicide staffed with detectives, in the first three years of the 1920s, Beverly Hills had at most three police officers who rode either bicycles or motorcycles. Crime, according to the 1946 conversation among the Beverly Hills old-timers, included Charlie Chaplin refusing to pay his bill from the Beverly Hills Nursery for landscaping done on his new home. His fiancée at the time, actress Pola Negri, ultimately paid. As for the wild parties where underwear and shoes were thrown on the lush lawns, according to Arthur Pillsbury, Blair, who in 1927 became the city’s first police chief, would have a word, asking the hosts to “quiet it down a little bit.” Blair would then have a couple of drinks at the soiree and the volume of the festivities would abate. He never arrested anyone and, in fact, had never even drawn his weapon from the holster he wore. Which is probably a good thing, because according to Pillsbury, Charlie Blair couldn’t hit a target at close range. This may or may not have been attributable to the fact that taking two or three drinks at every stop he made wasn’t just confined to the parties of the movie stars. It should also be noted that most of Beverly Hills’ earliest denizens were armed, not so much to protect themselves from crime, but because the city’s nonhuman population included mountain lions and coyotes, and the occasional deer would get hit by a car and need to be put out of its misery.19
In fact, encouragement to move to Beverly Hills probably didn’t need to come from Hays, or any other authority figure, for that matter. Much like the celebs of today, the boys and girls—for the most part they were still impossibly young—who made up the first generation of film stars moved in packs. There was no blueprint for them to follow, no code of conduct. It’s important to remember that the first moving picture folk who found fame and fortune didn’t go into the flickers with the slightest inkling they’d become wealthy movie stars; their intention was simply to make a living. At the beginning, working in moving pictures had been a leap of faith. Many of those who found early fame, including Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and the Gish sisters, Lillian and Dorothy, spent years traveling in theater troupes barely earning enough money to cover their expenses. Over and over we can see in recollections from those who had been in the vanguard of the motion picture industry, including Frances Marion’s witty Off with Their Heads, that these individuals, most of whom had made it to New York and, not unlike today, wore out the sidewalks between theaters auditioning for parts, took a chance on the new medium. In those early days between 1910 and 1916, none of them ever expected flickers to last, let alone expand and evolve into the widespread entertainment medium that it did. Those who took the leap of faith into flickers became a sister- and brotherhood of characters.
But then as now, they felt most comfortable in each other’s company and so they sought each other out. They worked the long hours together, roomed together, and kicked up their heels together. They were citizens of their own world and knew the unique culture and language that outsiders didn’t and still don’t. This clubbiness is something that would never change for the upper stratum of movie stars. It was an exclusive club and the bona fides necessary for entry were working in the movies. The movie stars knew each other, or were more often than not no more than one degree of separation away from each other, and they knew each other’s weaknesses and strengths. Then too, the coverage celebrities permitted was a carefully calibrated commodity; unwanted coverage of peccadilloes was avoided at almost all costs. The information provided was only what they—and the studios—wanted the general public to know. What went on behind this barricade was closely guarded and the few breeches—the devastating coverage of Olive Thomas’ death, Roscoe Arbuckle’s trial, and the investigation into William Desmond’s murder—stood out as stark examples of why the stonewalling had to be maintained. And few stars then or now were as good at secrecy and obfuscation as Mary Pickford. She and her fellow motion picture stars were spinning the press in the 1920s; the A-listers of today are still spinning. Those on the outside—fandom and the rest of the general public—know only what the celebrities want us to know. In the early 1920s, the celebrities in Beverly Hills knew each other for the people they actually were, not as the viewing public thought they knew them, by the characters they portrayed. To the legions of women who swooned whenever Rudolph Valentino appeared on the screen, the young Italian dance instructor-turned-silent-screen star was the epitome of a sex symbol. To his fellow stars of the silver screen and Beverly Hills neighbors who knew and rode horses with him, Rudy was a former student of horticulture in Italy who loved his garden, knew the Latin names of all the plants it contained, and dreamed of buying land and starting a vineyard, perhaps in Napa or Sonoma counties in Northern California, in the not-too-distant future.20
In Beverly Hills the stars felt free to be themselves. Firmly entrenched in their collective memory was a time in the not-too-distant past when they weren’t wanted in Hollywood. Frances Marion, who came to Los Angeles from her hometown of San Francisco to be a poster illustrator for Los Angeles theater impresario Oliver Morosco, describes her initial impressions of 1914 Los Angeles and Hollywood this way:
“After you left the squat dingy railroad station there was little of interest to be seen beyond the old Spanish Mission on the Plaza and a few adobe houses marked by oleander trees and overshadowed by giraffe-like palms. Obviously the city had sprung up helter-skelter without any pattern, for there was more evidence of haste than taste.…
“Before reporting to Mr. Morosco, I decided to find an apartment which I could convert into a studio of sorts. There were vacancies galore but tacked over many of the rental signs was this ominous edict: ‘No Jews, actors or dogs allowed.’ My blood boiled! I had come from a cosmopolitan city where Jews were revered for their contribution to the arts, science and industry. Where actors were welcome as holidays.…
“I learned from Mr. Morosco that the barring of actors from the apartment houses referred only to performers in the movies. [According to Mr. Morosco] ‘… [t]housands are trekking west and this is resented by large groups of people, mostly churchgoers, who are forming committees to keep these ragtag and bobtails off the streets and out of our parks.’”21
Marion was dumbfounded by this attitude and wondered how “anyone could resent the lively fun [moving picture folk] had brought into this dull environment.”22
When they became successful, many of the same moving picture ragtag and bobtails remembered their reception in Hollywood, including Marion, who in her writings described herself “instinctively” as identifying with the “underdog” (by which she meant the disparaged members of the young motion picture industry). Marion would go on to join the ranks of the said underdogs two years after she arrived in Los Angeles when she signed a contract with Bosworth, one of Hollywood’s first studios and the eventual partner of Marion’s first Southern California boss, Oliver Morosco. Those selfsame ragtag and bobtails knew where they weren’t wanted and they knew who hadn’t wanted them. When they had coin in pocket, Beverly Hills beckoned.
It was never the intention of the men who developed Beverly Hills to create a modest community of small tract homes
tucked onto tidy little lots. The idea was always for a luxury development. But in a few very significant ways, the silent screen stars moving to Beverly Hills were a mixed blessing to the developers. Yes, a few of the neighbors groused about “picture folk,” but it wasn’t what the newcomers did for a living that would become fateful for Beverly Hills’ looming water crisis. They built outsized, luxurious manses designed by the top architects of the time on sprawling acreage that they planted with lush gardens and water-hungry full-grown trees. They installed in-ground swimming pools. And in a region where water was a precious resource, some even built waterfalls. It’s not that the stars chose to build in Beverly Hills, it’s how they built in Beverly Hills that probably accelerated the city’s shortage of water resources.
Frances Marion’s story of how her home grew from a seven-room California Rancho era–inspired hacienda to a more than twenty-acre spread with multiple structures is a window into this domestic escalation. While they were living in rural New York State, Marion’s husband Fred Thomson bought a dapple gray horse with the idea of turning him into an equine movie star. Instead, Joseph P. Kennedy, during his time as a Hollywood producer at FBO pictures, convinced Fred he should star along with the horse. Of course, one horse could not do all the tricks; other dapple grays with individual skill sets (jumping, kneeling, galloping, sidestepping) would have to be procured. Fred hired Wallace Neff, at the time one of the region’s top architects, to design and build both the stable for the horses and a bunkhouse for the ranch hands who would see to the horses, both larger than Marion and Thomson’s prospective home. Full-grown shade trees were to be hauled to the property and planted. In her memoir, Marion writes of going to check on the project’s progress and seeing that a deep, wide ditch was being cut from the top of the hill closest to the riding ring. She asked if it was a firebreak. It wasn’t. The excavation was for a waterfall, the resulting spray of which would keep the horses cool. Soon Marion decided that her small adobe hacienda was going to look like a wart next to the grander buildings devoted to the horses and the men who tended to them. To remedy the situation, Frances Marion herself called Wallace Neff to design a bigger house. By the time all was said and done, Frances Marion and Fred Thomson had “built the largest house on the highest hill in Beverly Hills.”23
Marion and Thomson weren’t alone in their over-the-top efforts. According to Marion’s memoir, many of the silent screen stars who moved to Beverly Hills built “Temples of Mammon” for themselves. These houses represented a mash-up of architectural styles, often within the same structure, and were furnished as if “Europe disgorged its treasure into our laps: paintings from Paris, antique furniture from Italy and Spain, rugs from Arabia … and silver bearing the crests of distinguished English families impoverished by the war.”24 The silent screen nouveaux riches, formerly denizens of homes with stoops and porches, now had lives that revolved around poolside terraces. The arrivistes dug out the native plantings and installed lawns, planted full-grown trees, and added water elements that included fountains, creeks, and artificial waterfalls that brought to mind such water-blessed locations as the English countryside. They had butlers and maids and cooks. In every way possible, they had arrived and Beverly Hills had set the stage.
And so it went. According to Marion, “Houses began to spring up on all the hills like gilded monuments. Every parvenu tried to outdo every other parvenu.”25 All those gilded monuments sucked up water as if there was an unlimited supply of the stuff. There wasn’t. And when it was clear that demand was going to exceed supply, instead of paying to get more water, it was the goal of the utility company that was wholly owned by the Rodeo Land and Water Company, not the city, to hand Beverly Hills to the tender mercies of Los Angeles.
8
“California’s Floating Kidney Transplanted from the Midwest”
Writing in her journal the day before she left San Francisco, Frances Marion described Los Angeles—the city with which Beverly Hills was contemplating annexing itself—as “California’s Floating Kidney Transplanted from the Midwest.”1
But Los Angeles’ image depended heavily on who was viewing it and from where. Bolstered by chamber-of-commerce advertising touting the healthy environment and the boxcars arriving on the East Coast full of golden oranges that acted as globe-like ambassadors of the sweet life, many saw Los Angeles (mostly in their mind’s eye from a perch thousands of miles away) as a temperate paradise with ripe fruit falling from the trees directly into outstretched palms. As you got closer, though, the view changed considerably. To wit: San Francisco’s already tetchy opinion of the city down south, and certain residents of Beverly Hills, the small city that sat to the west of downtown, who contemplated joining Los Angeles’ sprawling mass with horror. Even in the Jazz Age–Roaring Twenties fever dream of bootleg booze and overnight stardom on the silver screen, when it seemed that life would always be as perfect as the weather, doubt about the fulfillment of the promise of the so-called California Dream, like a drop of ink hitting water, was beginning to spread. The scandals of the previous three years that involved celebrity, drugs, sex, and death were harbingers that Los Angeles was well on its way to cultivating a unique, often porous, juxtaposition of high- and low-life that seemed to present itself unabashedly in stark relief in the bright sunshine, but could only really be understood in the corresponding shadows. Los Angeles wasn’t a city on the cusp anymore; sometime during the early 1920s it had slipped over into a manic depression from which many say it still suffers. It was the conflicted, contradictory atmosphere that by the beginning of the next few decades would beguile writers from all over the world and lure them to the noir side of paradise. For reasons that ranged from aversion to the press to maintaining control over city services—which included a small, compliant police force—those Beverly Hills residents who opposed joining Los Angeles wanted to keep their Elysium intact and separate. Maybe it was reluctance to accept change, or perhaps without being consciously aware of it, they were reading the tea leaves that told the future of the large city that surrounded them, which was determined to be a teeming metropolis.
In the first quarter of the twentieth century, Los Angeles was both very different and depressingly the same as the rest of the country’s big cities. It was different in that while other cities with large populations had evolved over centuries, Los Angeles had exploded almost entirely within the decade between 1910 and 1920. New York, the biggest city in the United States, had grown in fits and starts from a seventeenth-century Dutch trading post at the southern tip of the island of Manhattan; as recently as the middle of the nineteenth century, Harlem in the north part of Manhattan had still been farmland. San Francisco had begun as North America’s deepwater port on the Pacific, and had grown in spurts, first after the discovery of gold in 1848 and then after the arrival of Chinese laborers for the transcontinental railroad at the end of the Civil War in 1865; its population would decline after the 1906 earthquake.
Before the transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869, travel to California from points east was a grueling ordeal. The choices were overland by wagon train or stagecoach, or an ocean voyage of months that involved circumnavigating South America; the Panama Canal would not be completed until 1914. Once the railroad to California was complete, to get to Los Angeles travelers needed to take another train south from the railroad’s western terminus of Alameda across the bay from San Francisco. There wasn’t a direct rail line from east of the Mississippi to Los Angeles until the Southern Pacific began service in the early 1880s. When the first train travelers arrived, it was to a much smaller city that gave little hint of the growth to come. At the turn of the twentieth century, Los Angeles struggled to find enough potable water for its 100,000 citizens. By 1910, the population had tripled to 319,000, and it almost doubled again to 576,000 by 1920. The growth wasn’t pretty. Even in its earliest days, there was a temporariness about the city. Things just weren’t built to last in Los Angeles. It could have been because of the climate�
��mild winters didn’t require substantial construction to keep the elements at bay—but perhaps it was because Los Angeles always seemed transitory. Even though hundreds of thousands of people ended up settling in Los Angeles, the city always gave the impression it was more of a way station than a destination. Urban planning, beyond the most rudimentary zoning for business, industry, and residential, was more of an afterthought than an initial approach and often ignored. Like London, Los Angeles was cobbled together from villages connected by a remarkably robust public transport system, only in the case of the City of the Queen of the Angels, there was an appalling lack of charm and aesthetic appeal. Frances Marion’s initial impression was that the city had sprung up helter-skelter “with more haste than taste.”2 Other cities in the region that had enjoyed a more tempered growth—Pasadena, for example—were lovely, replete with tree-lined residential streets of California Craftsman bungalows, interspersed by parks. Los Angeles’ architectural gems, of which there were—and still are—quite a few, became lost in the chaos of a boomtown mentality that saw neighborhoods spring up almost overnight. Because they were often hastily built with shoddy materials and poor craftsmanship, even homes in “better” neighborhoods quickly turned shabby. Just as quickly, however, new housing sprang up. The city’s growing population, especially its wealthier segment, never lacked for bright, shiny new digs.
