by Mark Bailey
More notorious residents would soon follow: William Holden and Glenn Ford checked in. Not that they were paying; Harry Cohn had rented the suite as an insurance policy against the foolish whims of his actors and, after receiving Columbia’s keys to Suite 54, it quickly became their crash pad of choice. David Niven lived there for a time. Bogart and Flynn both hid out there after volatile fights with their wives. Same went for John Barrymore, by then on his fourth marriage and a shell of his former self, sipping drinks on the terrace dressed in nothing but a robe and socks, giving the young actors advice on how to do Shakespeare. Don’t.
Not everyone came to the Chateau to swing from the chandeliers. Greta Garbo and Howard Hughes, famous recluses both, loved its quiet solitude. (Garbo used to say it was the one hotel in America where birds sang to her from her windowsill.) When Montgomery Clift needed a secret place to convalesce from his disfiguring car accident in 1956, there wouldn’t even be a discussion about any place else. And during preproduction of Rebel Without a Cause, Nicholas Ray turned his bungalow into an informal production office, a setup that allowed him to screw Natalie Wood (then sixteen), Jayne Mansfield, and Shelley Winters in some kind of discreet rotation. Advice to any ingénue: Beware directors who work out of hotels.
As the hotel fell into disrepair in the 1960s and stars migrated to the infinitely more private Hotel Bel Air (or to Palm Springs), the Marmont found new life as L.A.’s answer to the Chelsea Hotel: its faint shadow of glamour, untouched by ruinous nostalgia, appealed to a new generation of actors, writers, and musicians. Jim Morrison, for whatever reason, attempted to swing from a drainpipe into his room via the window and fell onto the roof of a nearby shed. Led Zeppelin once rode motorcycles through the lobby. (Not again . . .) John Belushi experimented with speedballs in one of the bungalows, to tragic effect. L.A. Weekly journalist Robert Wilonsky interviewed former Red Hot Chili Pepper John Frusciante as he shot up in his room; the guitarist was on a five-year heroin jag. (Soon after, his former bandmates got him into rehab and, once he was clean, asked him to rejoin the band.)
Purchased by hotelier André Balazs in 1998 and spruced up just enough, the Chateau has been a constant for nearly a century. In 1984 Bright Lights, Big City author Jay McInerney—one of several early eighties writers, young and talented, whose epic partying often threatened to overshadow their work—stayed there while adapting his book for the screen. The studio he was writing for: Columbia Pictures.
HERMAN J. MANKIEWICZ
1897–1953
SCREENWRITER
“It’s all right,” Mankiewicz once said, after puking in the middle of a formal dinner. “The white wine came up with the fish.”
Herman Mankiewicz is generally acknowledged to be the creator and master of the pithy, rapid-fire dialogue that characterized 1930s comedy and 1940s film noir and is best known for cowriting Citizen Kane (1941), for which he won an Academy Award. A noted member of the Algonquin Round Table, Mank began his career as the drama critic for the New York Times and the New Yorker. Brought to Hollywood by Paramount and put in charge of writer recruitment, Mank was responsible for bringing out a number of East Coast literary talents. He had an often unseen hand in an extraordinary number of what are now considered classic films. Mank’s uncredited script contributions include three Marx Brothers comedies, Monkey Business (1931), Horse Feathers (1932), and Duck Soup (1933), as well as The Wizard of Oz (1939). In 1942 he received his second Oscar nomination, for the Lou Gehrig biopic The Pride of the Yankees, but spent the rest of his career fighting to overcome his alcoholism, gambling debts, and obstinate personality.
HERMAN J. MANKIEWICZ WAS less than a mile from his house. What could possibly go wrong? It was the afternoon of March 11, 1943, and he’d stopped by Romanoff’s for a drink or two. Driving the short distance home would be a cakewalk.
But then Mank stayed longer than he intended and drank more than he should have. It was quite dark by the time he found himself driving along North Beverly Drive in Benedict Canyon. Carelessly, he drifted into the oncoming lane and slammed virtually head-on into another car. No one was seriously hurt. The police knew Mank was drunk, and he knew there was a night in jail ahead of him, but all in all, it could have been worse.
Unfortunately, Mank had a knack for worse. He always had. Impossible to intimidate, Mank rankled under all forms of authority. Upon hearing Columbia studio head Harry Cohn’s boast that he could feel how good a movie was by the sensation in his rear, Mank had quipped, “Imagine, the whole world wired to Harry Cohn’s ass.” He was fired. Louis B. Mayer once advanced Mank money to pay back some gambling debts, but Mank just gambled the loan away—and on the MGM lot, no less. He was fired. While working on the Marx Brothers film Monkey Business, Harpo Marx asked Mank for an early look at the script—”I want to find out what my character is.” Mank replied sourly, “You’re a middle-aged Jew who picks up spit because he thinks it’s a quarter.” He was soon fired. Picking fights in bars, passing out in hotels and waking up with obscene writing all over his body (Ben Hecht’s signature prank)—if there was a secret compartment beneath rock bottom, Mank would find it. As a friend once observed, “To know Mank was to like him. Not to know him was to love him.”
* * *
As a friend once observed, “To know Mank was to like him. Not to know him was to love him.”
* * *
The Beverly Drive accident would prove to be another such disaster. It wasn’t just that he’d drunkenly crashed his car. It was that he’d drunkenly crashed it outside Marion Davies’s Beverly Hills house. A house paid for by Davies’s lover, William Randolph Hearst. A house that Hearst was—at that very moment—inside. Once upon a time, Mank and Hearst had been quite friendly. There had been many invitations to San Simeon, Hearst’s castle up the coast. But while Hearst was trying to keep his mistress, Davies, sober, Mank had been trying to do the opposite. And so, eventually, Mank was banned from all of their parties and from ever seeing Davies again.
It was a feud that, even on the scale of Hollywood spats, soon went nuclear. Mank set out for revenge by writing Citizen Kane, a most unflattering biopic based on the newspaper mogul. He used privileged information in stunning ways—like, say, building the entire film around Hearst’s nickname for Davies’s clitoris, Rosebud. Cowriter and director Orson Welles later mixed in elements of his own life, toning down and subtly misdirecting Mank’s poison arrow. But he failed to properly notice the one part that would ensure return fire.
Hearst didn’t much care about being hated or mocked, but the Citizen Kane character Susan Alexander (generally believed to be a brutally unforgiving portrait of Davies) was where the rubber hit the road. When How Green Was My Valley upstaged the considerably better Citizen Kane at the 1942 Oscars, there were more-than-slight suspicions that Hearst had used his considerable influence to turn voters against Welles as an act of revenge.
But to get back at Mank was more difficult. After all, Mank had friends. He was an insider. There were rules, codes, lines not to be crossed. And then there was the dotted yellow line—and the Beverly Drive car crash. Now this was legitimate news—and as such, it deserved a place on the front page of every Hearst newspaper across the country. There were quotes from police officers describing Mank as “insulting, sarcastic, impolite.” There were descriptions of him kicking the bars of his cell until his shoes were finally taken away. There were photomontages. It was Hearst at his muckraking best.
“I was promoted,” Mank said, “from a middle-aged, flat-footed writer into Cary Grant, who, with a tank, had just drunkenly plowed into a baby carriage occupied by the Dionne quintuplets, the Duchess of Kent, Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the favorite niece of the Pope.” He should have just walked home.
LOUELLA PARSONS
1881–1972
GOSSIP COLUMNIST
“The doctor had cautioned me not to drink anything. But doctors are notorious killjoys.”
Along with her younger nemesis, Hedda Hopper, Louella Parsons was
one of the most feared figures in early Hollywood. She single-handedly established the celebrity journalism industry, and could single-handedly make (Marion Davies) or break (Orson Welles) a career if she set her mind to it. The Illinois native wrote scripts for Essanay Studios in Chicago before launching a column for Chicago Record Herald. Picked up by New York Morning Telegraph but signed away by W. R. Hearst in 1923, Parsons relocated to the drier climate of Los Angeles after developing tuberculosis and being told she had six months left to live. (She ended up living nearly another fifty years.) Her flagship column for the Los Angeles Examiner was subsequently syndicated to hundreds of newspapers with a readership approaching 20 million. Fiercely loyal to Hearst, and a close friend of his mistress Marion Davies, Parsons would work for Hearst enterprises throughout the remainder of her career. She launched a weekly radio show in the late twenties—a precursor to modern late-night talk shows, with stars plugging their current projects and airing audio clips. Parsons faced competition when her former source Hopper premiered her own gossip column for the Los Angeles Times in 1938. A heated rivalry between the two persisted until Parsons retired, at the age of eighty-one.
DOCKY WAS DOWN FOR THE COUNT—again. By now, the ridiculous had become commonplace. Dr. Harry Martin—VD specialist to the stars, Hollywood’s leading urologist, and Louella Parsons’s husband—had taken to ending his evenings out on the town by passing out on his hosts’ floors. On this particular evening, the host was Carole Lombard and the occasion was a toga party. Docky had passed out in front of everyone, the fabric of his outfit arranged in such a way that left little mystery. Lombard pointed in shock: “What is that?” “That,” another guest cracked, “is Louella’s column.”
Louella and Docky (“Docky” was her nickname for him) were big on drinking, big on gambling, big on everything. She’d been part of the party circuit since the 1920s. The Cocoanut Grove, the Brown Derby, Montmartre, Pickfair, Marion Davies’s beach house in Santa Monica—Louella frequented them all. As for Docky, he was famous for breaking his neck on a drunken dive into the shallow pool at the Bimini Baths bathhouse, and then holding his spine in place as he walked to the hospital. That’s not nothing.
The couple were regulars at the Santa Anita racetrack and the Agua Caliente casino in Tijuana. They held parties at their home in Beverly Hills almost every week, with sometimes as many as three hundred guests. It wasn’t that they were terrific fun. People came mostly out of fear of what Louella might write about them if they didn’t show up.
The unspoken but obvious undercurrent was that Hollywood despised the gossip columnist and her clownish husband—and not just because she had the power to make and break careers, marriages, and friendships. Part of their contempt stemmed from the couple’s hypocrisy. Docky was an avowed Catholic who’d converted Louella when they married in 1930; yet it was a not-so-carefully guarded secret that he was house doctor at Lee Francis’s Hollywood brothel and the doctor that Fox Studios called whenever an actress needed an abortion. In her column, Louella would shamelessly moralize when a marriage ended in divorce, yet Docky was her third husband. When the story of Clara Bow’s gambling addiction broke, Louella wrote that she was sorry Bow hadn’t grown up; this from the woman who would bet on eight horses at a time and lose thousands in a weekend.
Thus did the couple’s moments of public humiliation become cherished and oft-told tales. Sometimes Louella joined in the mockery of the ever-misbehaving Docky, perhaps because her reputation was more important to her than her husband’s dignity. On the night that Docky lay on Lombard’s floor with his “column” exposed for any passerby to see, two guests decided to help him to his feet. But Louella, having finally noticed the extent to which her husband was embarrassing himself, interceded.
“Let him sleep,” she said. “He needs to operate in the morning.”
THE EMBASSY CLUB
6767 HOLLYWOOD BLVD.
THE MEMBERS-ONLY EMBASSY CLUB was opened in 1929 by restaurateur Eddie Brandstatter in the space next to his hugely successful Montmartre Café, and for about twenty minutes, it was the most exclusive hangout in Los Angeles. Designed by architect Carl Weyl at a cost of $300,000, combining Spanish and Byzantine styles and featuring a glass-enclosed rooftop promenade and lounge, the Embassy Club was limited to three hundred members at any given time. How exactly one became a member was a mystery, but it was generally understood to be by invitation only. On the board of directors sat Marion Davies, Gloria Swanson, Norma Talmadge, King Vidor, Sid Grauman, and Evelyn Brent. Members included Charlie Chaplin (of course); Tod Browning; Paul Bern; Carl Laemmle, Jr.; Harold Lloyd; and Mervyn LeRoy.
Very quickly, however, Brandstatter realized that the Embassy was a very exclusive mistake, with three hundred hand-selected albatrosses to expedite its failure. A crucial component of any see-and-be-seen establishment, it turns out, is the ability to actually be seen.
Sure, it was flattering to be asked to join the Embassy, but once you were in, there was no adoring public like the one that flocked to the Montmartre for a glimpse of your curly locks. Even more damaging, stars who were not invited to join the Embassy stopped going to the Montmartre, too, either in protest or out of embarrassment. Which meant that soon, fans also stopped going to Montmartre—because they wanted to see stars, not to eat. All of this resulted in Brandstatter declaring bankruptcy within three years and being forced to open the Embassy Club to the general public, at which point Brandstatter learned another important lesson: Once anyone could join, no one wanted to.
THE CLOVER CLUB
8433 SUNSET BLVD.
NOT A YEAR AFTER Brandstatter’s debacle, the Clover Club opened on Sunset to attempt the exact same stunt, except it had one attraction the Embassy Club didn’t: gambling. Opened by Eddy Neales, with mobster Milton “Farmer” Page as his silent partner, the Clover was, on the surface, nothing more than a fancy nightclub. But one-way mirrors and secret panels obscured roulette wheels where VIPs could lose $100,000 a sitting and gambling tables could quickly be flipped over and disguised.
As it happens, a few gambling tables are all that is needed to turn a bad idea into a profitable one. That, and Mob protection. Because even after all the greased palms and shakedowns, the Clover still minted money. Heavy hitters like Carl Laemmle, Jr.; Howard Hughes; Irving Berlin; Samuel Goldwyn; Douglas Fairbanks; Harpo Marx; Louis B. Mayer; Harry Cohn; and MGM security fixer Howard Strickling played there. By 1937 Neales was allegedly handling $10 million a year in bets.
On January 14 of that year, a private investigator and former cop named Harry Raymond was nearly killed when a bomb blew up his car. Raymond had been investigating city hall corruption and underworld ties, and was about to testify to a grand jury that had been convened for the same reason. The bombing investigation led to the conviction of powerful L.A.P.D. captain Earl Kynette, a known city-hall insider, and the public had finally had enough.
The ensuing outcry began a chain of events—citizens voting to recall the city’s mayor; a full-scale Mob turf war; the election of a new anticorruption mayor; and finally the arrival of the FBI, which would shutter the Clover for good. By the 1940s, prominent L.A. underworld figures such as Page, Bugsy Siegel, and Mickey Cohen had relocated to Las Vegas, because who needed this crap when you could build the Flamingo? By then, the Clover Club had reopened as Club Seville, and replaced craps with carp, literally—they installed a glass-bottom dance floor atop an aquarium filled with fish.
PRESTON STURGES
1898–1959
DIRECTOR AND SCREENWRITER
“I gave up not drinking and not smoking, and have not been troubled with pneumonia since.”
An all-time great of film comedy, on the family tree of wits, Preston Sturges is routinely named as the branch between Oscar Wilde and Woody Allen. After Sturges’s second play, Strictly Dishonorable, was a tremendous hit on Broadway, he moved to Los Angeles in pursuit of money. The deal for his first original screenplay, The Power and the Glory (1933), included a percentage o
f profits—an unheard of arrangement for screenwriters of the time. But Sturges grew increasingly frustrated with the quality of films made from his scripts. He sold what became The Great McGinty (1940) to Paramount for the sum of ten dollars in exchange for the right to direct and, in doing so, became the first established screenwriter to direct his own material. The film went on to win an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. He followed with a string of critical and commercial hits over the next five years: Christmas in July (1940), The Lady Eve and Sullivan’s Travels (both 1941), The Palm Beach Story (1942), and finally, Hail the Conquering Hero and The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (both nominated for screenwriting Oscars in 1945). Sturges left Paramount after repeatedly tussling with studio heads and entered into a partnership with Howard Hughes that disintegrated after just one picture (The Sin of Harold Diddlebock, 1947). His next two movies for Fox proved to be flops, and Sturges’s career never recovered.
STURGES FOUND CURIOSITY TO be overrated, but maybe that was because it nearly killed him. From his earliest days as Hollywood’s most successful screenwriter through his creative peak as its foremost writer-director, Preston Sturges had maintained the same steady schedule: a late riser, he’d putz around at home throughout the morning, then venture off to his studio office, where he’d sip tea spiked with applejack and maybe take a nap. Afternoon activities varied, but one thing they didn’t include was work. Evenings began at the fights and were capped off with dinner and drinks, typically at the Brown Derby or, when Sturges opened it in 1940, his own place, the Players Club. When the bars finally closed, he returned home, where he’d bang out pages until the sun came up.