Brandstatter had run a club in Santa Monica, the Sunset Inn, that the movie crowd liked. His first foray into Hollywood had been a coffee shop called the Piccadilly that had some success as a place to see stars and their directors at their food. With the Montmartre, Brandstatter hit a bull’s-eye. It became the most publicized cafe in the country, where a bottle of booze was a sure thing, as was gambling in the back room.
Under a canopy of electric blue cloth and crystal chandeliers, serenaded by a hot jazz band, John Barrymore, Bebe Daniels, and even Winston Churchill dined. There was a bachelor’s table frequented by regulars Adolphe Menjou and Tom Mix. Valentino took his date Winifred Shaughnessy, going Hollywood with the name Natacha Rambova, and sat at the table with her dog between them. In the afternoons, actresses broke bread in the age of the tea dansant, when people danced at lunchtime. For star attendance, the Montmartre gave the new Coconut Grove at the Ambassador a run for its money, bringing glamorous café society to Hollywood. Joan Crawford remembered, “At the Montmartre overlooking Hollywood Boulevard, the gayest people lunched, dined and supper-clubbed while tourists were held back by red velvet ropes … I worked all day, danced all night.”
The success of the Montmartre paved the way for more public party rooms. The Hollywood Roof Ballroom opened on Vine Street across from Paramount-Lasky Studios with dining and dancing until one a.m. on a second story level.
Famous faces began to flaunt their drunkenness in public. Both John Gilbert and John Barrymore were celebrity inebriates.
The Montmartre, 6755 Hollywood Boulevard, west of Robertson’s Department Store.
An afternoon tea dance at the Montmartre, 1928.
Hollywood Rooftop Ballroom, southwest corner of Vine Street and Selma Avenue (demolished).
Fight nights at the American Legion Stadium were the place to see movie stars.
The point of no return came when Hollywood, like the-city-from-hell Vernon, became a center for boxing-crazy Los Angeles. Philo Beveridge had originally donated the land on El Centro Avenue, south of Hollywood Boulevard, to the American Legion for a recreation field. To provide a steady income, in 1922 the Legionnaires built an outdoor boxing arena with bleachers that they covered a year later.
The most famous boxing audience in the world came to watch the Friday night fights at the American Legion Stadium. Many attended to see movie stars as much as to watch boxing. By seven p.m., El Centro swarmed with stars.
Inside the stadium, celebrities shouted greetings to each other as they took their places among the coveted two hundred ringside seats. Boris Karloff said he’d “spot (Lon) Chaney at the weekly Friday night fights at the Hollywood Legion Stadium. Lon was quite a fight fan.” Chaney, now a huge star with the 1923 release of Universal’s Hunchback of Notre Dame, had regular seats for himself and his friend, John Jeske.
Over the years, the Marx Brothers clowned in the ring; Mae West, a true boxing fan, gave gifts to the fighters she liked; gangsters and gamblers joined Valentino, Chaplin, Jean Harlow, Gable and Lombard, Errol Flynn, Humphrey Bogart, and the Three Stooges.
The Christie brothers, active Legionnaires, used the stadium during the day to promote themselves and soak up tourist dollars. See How the Movies Are Made featured stars of the Christie Comedy company performing scenes from their movies for the paying public. Among the first advertised attractions were Ben Turpin and Jackie Coogan.
The movie people quickly soothed the hand-wringing locals moaning over boxing and nightclubs by contributing heavily to a long-proposed YMCA. The Reverend Darsie of the Christian church at Hollywood and Gower had said from his pulpit that Hollywood would be better off with a YMCA than a fire department. Built on Thomas Hudson property in 1923, the Hollywood Y, along with the Athletic Club rising across Hudson Avenue, made the area a social center for the athletically inclined.
Cecil DeMille changed his tack to appease locals in 1923. Although he turned to the Bible for film scenarios, his silent version of Ten Commandments somehow pandered to the sensational. An impressive throne room of Ramses II appeared on the Argyle Avenue backlot. Jesse Lasky also became a good neighbor, with a special showing in his home of Paramount’s new The Covered Wagon for one hundred and fifty Hollywood Woodcraft Ranger boys and their leader.
Hollywood YMCA, southwest Hudson (Schraeder) and Selma Avenues.
The American Legion Stadium on El Centro Avenue south of Hollywood Boulevard.
Otto K. Olesen’s klieg lights along Hollywood Boulevard, 1926.
Hollywood had learned of the drawing power of sky lighting in 1918. According to Billy Bitzer, during the shooting of Intolerance, Griffith innovated the use of klieg lights and flares to film at night. Each evening, a lunchroom on Hollywood Boulevard near the studio provided five hundred sandwiches and gallons of coffee for the cast and crew. To the filmmakers’ annoyance, the publicity about the large quantities of food brought gawkers who spotted the lights in the nighttime sky and figured they’d watch some moviemaking and get free food.
Denmark-born Otto K. Olesen made sky lighting a Hollywood trademark after arriving in 1920 to sell incandescent lights to movie studios. He bought his first klieg light from an abandoned San Diego navy shipyard, mounted it on a swivel stand, and proclaimed himself the “King of Illumination.” To advertise his business, he lit the Security Bank at Hollywood and Cahuenga Boulevards for free.
People who followed Olesen’s searchlights in Hollywood usually arrived at a store opening. A Maytag store opened at Hollywood and McCadden with a thrilling Olesen display and the five-piece Maytag Orchestra dressed in Puncinello costumes.
Impresario Sid Grauman had settled into a routine of rising late, dining at the Montmartre, and, after the Egyptian’s last show, sitting in the dimmed auditorium, dreaming up prologues and premieres. His stage presentations got more elaborate, involving many extras who crowded the stage door before each performance. The stage manager hired them depending on the costumes he had to fill. The regular cast members then guided newcomers around the stage during the performance. Unemployed actors thought Grauman was a god.
One disappointed, rejected girl caught the showman’s eye at an audition and, feeling sorry for her, he hired her for the chorus of his prologue for the Ten Commandments. That film set a record run at the Egyptian. The girl, Myrna Williams, got immediately rehired in 1924 as a barefoot belly dancer for Fairbanks’ Thief of Bagdad.
For this epic, Grauman switched the theater’s fragrance to roses, put turbans on his orchestra and, according to a reviewer for the Los Angeles Times, “changed the whole atmosphere of this section of Hollywood into a sort of Arabian Nights fantasy.”
After several months, audiences for The Thief of Bagdad dwindled, so Grauman put photographs of his dancing girls in the courtyard. Valentino saw Myrna Williams’ photos and brought her to the Lasky lot for tests. Although he and partner, Rambova, did not hire her, she left the Egyptian to pursue a film career. Signing her to a ten-year contract at Warner’s, Jack Warner referred to the now-named Myrna Loy as an ex-hootchie dancer.
Henry’s Restaurant 6315 Hollywood Boulevard, 1924.
Loy recalled her Egyptian days and the dinners between shows on Hollywood Boulevard. She loved the tea dances at Montmartre where she spotted many stars. “That’s when (Hollywood) was still quite nice. Hollywood was just a little town. It still is except it’s terribly rundown now. It was brighter then, with an easier quality about it, more like a little Spanish town.” Her favorite restaurants were the Blue Front, Frank’s Café, and Henry’s.
Henry’s, in Hollywood and Vine’s new development on George Hoover property, had the distinction of being the first Hollywood restaurant to stay open after midnight. Financed by Charlie Chaplin, Henry Bergman ran it. He was an actor who played large women in Chaplin comedies. A late-night hangout for Hollywood celebrities, it was Al Jolson’s favorite spot to eat after the Friday night fights at Legion Stadium.
Another popular restaurateur, Al Levy, moved his business from downto
wn to a Louis Blondeau building at Cahuenga Boulevard. At Levy’s new café, Jack Warner loved to “mangle a chop” with his brother Sam and hang out with director Mervyn Le Roy for midnight gabfests. Warner wrote that he met writer Daryl Zanuck at Levy’s and asked him to do a dog movie. The Rin-Tin-Tin series saved the Warners’ studio from bankruptcy.
Myrna Loy, 1927.
Joseph von Sternberg arrived in Hollywood and rented a room off Hollywood Boulevard. After screening his first independent film to jeers, von Sternberg “went back to my room, slept well, and in the morning walked along Hollywood Boulevard to find a restaurant where I planned to have my breakfast in peace. Halfway through my grapefruit, a smiling, slender man asked permission to sit down at my table, introduced himself as Charles Chaplin and told me that he had seen my film at his home last night, and added that he considered me to have only one equal as a director, namely himself.” Chaplin sent von Sternberg’s film over to Fairbanks, Pickford, and Joe Schenck, who hired him to direct Pickford’s next film. “I had started my breakfast as an unknown, but by the time I had a cup of coffee, my name was in the headlines.”
Al Levy’s, Hollywood and Cahuenga Boulevards, 1922.
A Hollywood Boulevard traffic jam at Ivar Avenue, 1933.
HATING HOLLYWOOD
The Hays Office and the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce placed stickers on all mail leaving Hollywood warning, “TELL YOUR FRIENDS. Don’t try to Break into the Movies in Hollywood Until You Have Obtained FULL, FRANK AND DEPENDABLE INFORMATION From the HOLLYWOOD CHAMBER OF COMMERCE (Hollywood’s Great Community Organization) IT MAY SAVE DISAPPOINTMENTS.”
Louella Parsons (left) with Ben Lyon and Bebe Daniels at a premiere, 1926.
Unauthorized people on the movie lots forced studios to raise walls and forbid entrance to anyone without business. Men, women, and children came daily to beg for admission.
Under William Hays’s supervision, the lists of film extras were combed to eliminate prostitutes. Most of the 50,000 girls who came to Hollywood would endure anything to have a chance.
Gloria Swanson renewed at Paramount-Lasky for one million dollars a year plus profits, the biggest deal yet made by a movie star. Swanson wanted to make movies away from Hollywood, preferably at Paramount-Lasky’s studio in Astoria, New York.
Valentino discovered to his outrage that Lasky promoted gossip about his masculinity. Valentino now lived with Rambova in a bungalow near Sunset Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue. After another hit, Blood and Sand, he appeared onstage at the Egyptian for the premiere of The Young Rajah, then left for New York, where he went on the radio and blasted Hollywood. He made his next movie, the Rambova-picked flop Monsieur Beaucaire, at Astoria Studios.
Gossip became a common denominator as juicy tidbits spread across a movie-mad America. When asked if anyone knew he had hired Fatty Arbuckle, after his trials, to direct comedy shorts, producer Jack White replied, “The whole Boulevard knew it.” Telegraph company employees received money from reporters for information. The alley behind Western Union’s Hollywood office in the Palmer Building, where messengers waited for assignments, became a hotbed of information (and a party zone). Postal Telegraph stood one block west. Telephone operators also ran a grapevine of gossip. Stars had to be constantly cautious.
Hearst movie columnist Louella Parsons moved to Hollywood and rented an apartment in the Hearst-financed Villa Carlotta on Franklin Avenue. Lunching regularly at the Montmartre, she would walk among the tables and coyly ask stars, “Any news, dear?” With the Hearst papers behind her, the celebrities had to be cordial.
Another peeve was the transportation system of now-enormous Los Angeles. Hollywood Boulevard’s antiquated Pacific Electric cars were jammed like cattle trucks, and had few direct routes. “Peak traffic” became a new phrase in the lexicon as the latest model cars jammed the district’s streets.
Car dealerships crowded Hollywood Boulevard east of El Centro Avenue and along northern Cahuenga Boulevard. The Barrows Motor Company, specializing in Maxwell-Chryslers, opened their bronze and gold showroom with an orchestra and Olesen illuminations. Included among the many automobile manufacturers were Hupmobiles, Pierce Arrows, Rickenbackers, Overlands and Moons.
Cars publicly proclaimed their owner’s success or failure. Flashy low-priced cars gave the illusion of wealth even if the car wasn’t paid for. From 1918 on, local teenage boys began to steal automobiles.
The Muller brothers removed the horse stable (formerly Knarr’s) at Sunset and Cahuenga for a super-size service station. Their father Jacob Muller had established the area’s first market, Hollywood Cash Grocery, across the street. In 1925, Rin-Tin-Tin posed in Muller Bros. advertisements after his owner bought four new tires for Rinnie’s Cadillac limousine. Everyone in Hollywood had a car.
Villa Carlotta, northwest corner of Franklin and Tamarind Avenues.
A model in a Kissel dealership showroom on Hollywood Boulevard.
The Muller Brothers Service Station and staff, Sunset Boulevard and Ivar Avenue, 1928.
Rin-Tin-Tin poses for Muller Brothers advertising.
The newly widened Cahuenga Pass, 1928.
Traffic on the dirt Cahuenga Pass became intolerable. The Pass needed regrading, widening and substantial paving to take heavy traffic. Toberman insisted that bridges connect the Pilgrimage with the Bowl. For Dr. Palmer, this brought back the old battles over an improved Pass that would only serve the Highland Avenue area. He got a concession that funneled traffic to both Highland and Cahuenga. By 1927, Cahuenga Pass became the third most heavily traveled thoroughfare in the nation, with 75,000 cars a day.
The roads south of Hollywood needed attention too. People in Hollywood who worked in Culver City traveled on a crude fifteen-mile road through bean fields that became large, impassable lakes during the rainy season. The road had ruined several hundred cars.
The shabby suburb of Culver City, the brainchild of real estate developer Harry Culver, had appeared in 1915 when Culver brashly offered free land to anyone who would build a motion-picture studio on it. Thomas Ince constructed the first, followed by Sam Goldwyn and Hal Roach.
Since no public transportation reached this outback of movie production, in 1924, film people petitioned the county to improve the arduous commute between Hollywood and Culver City.
On Hollywood Boulevard, local business complained of high rents. A Holly Leaves editorial expressed shock that “one of the oldest established business houses on Hollywood is giving up its location … and is moving its entire establishment to Beverly Boulevard.”
Louis Blondeau, with his three buildings at Cahuenga and Hollywood, was the most notorious landlord. (Ironically, Blondeau never operated his barbershop in one of his own buildings. After years in the Creque Building, he rented a larger establishment with baths, a cigar stand, crystal chandeliers and an expressive Italian barber at Hollywood Boulevard and Cherokee Avenue.) When Sam Kress had enough of landlord Blondeau’s profiteering, Kress built two Hollywood Boulevard buildings with C.E. Toberman’s help, one for his drugstore and another for the Sam Kress Café.
Methodist Dr. Martin expressed the original settlers’ unhappiness. “We shall never go back to that old Hollywood condition. The orchards are gone, the chance for street planning and community planning is largely gone.” For many of them, the Owens River water had not turned the city into a paradise. It seemed that all hell had broken loose as roads to Hollywood looked like amusement parks with giant barrels, cafés shaped like dogs, and Sphinx real estate offices. Empty lots, strewn with litter, now had advertising billboards.
Those who had become landlords found that their tenants asked for rent reductions, threatening to move to one of the new buildings. Residential builders complained of constructing a home only to find a gas station or a commercial block rising next door in a few short years.
If the public expected stars to live like royalty, stars needed to get away from Hollywood’s commercial district with its encroaching poverty, dirt, and commercial ug
liness. Having endured the disdain of the original residents, movie people felt little loyalty to Hollywood; they called it a hick suburb. After Douglas Fairbanks remodeled his decrepit hunting lodge in wild Beverly Hills into the mock-Tudor Pickfair, he and Mary Pickford set the standard for glamorous movie royalty.
Billboards line an empty Hollywood Boulevard lot, 1923.
Beverly Hills was unblemished by a business district and its attendant traffic and gawkers. Offering lots priced from $400 to $1200, properly planned, Beverly Hills would retain wide gardenlike avenues and large parks, a true city of homes excluding everyone but winners. Actor Conrad Nagel, one of its first residents, headed a movement to build a wall around Beverly Hills, “keeping out much of this fusion some call progress.”
In 1919, G. Allen Hancock started taking down the oil wells on his father’s land south of Hollywood for a subdivision. He leased acreage to the Wilshire Country Club for a golf course and a clubhouse on North Rossmore. By 1925, Hancock Park offered large lots with impressive homes. This led to further erosion of Hollywood as a prestigious address.
Famous names began abandoning mansions along Hollywood Boulevard. Hollywood’s beloved songwriter, Carrie Jacobs Bond, bought a Beverly Hills home in 1924.
The exodus was not instantaneous. Lon Chaney bought a bigger house at 7152 Sunset. Jesse Lasky bought The Outpost (Casa Don Tomás) with plans for a palatial estate for himself.
The Sphinx Realty office on Fairfax Avenue.
The Story of Hollywood Page 14