The Story of Hollywood
Page 18
Mayer Building, southwest corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Western Avenue.
The switchboard operators at Central Casting, 1937.
Casting directors worked in front of a board with the names of a few lucky extras.
The Mayer Building’s architect, S. Charles Lee, later became a prominent designer of movie theaters. Lee playfully put naked friezes on the facade of the Mayer Building expressing “The Spirit of Hollywood” even though the Hays office pursued keeping nudity off movie screens. At the opening on a Saturday night in December 1928, Norma Shearer unlocked the door with a golden key.
Hollywood and Western became the most important corner for the 17,000 men, women and children registered as movie extras. The hallway served as a hangout. Registrants filled out forms that ruthlessly asked for physical characteristics in case a casting director needed a rubber-faced man or a short woman with fat legs. The answer to any question from Central Casting was “Yes.”
The heart of the system was the switchboard that received as many as four thousand calls an hour. This required a special telephone exchange, “Garfield.” All registered extras called daily between four in the afternoon and the seven o’clock closing time. The operator would repeat the names of the callers over a loud speaker to casting directors who had teletypes from each studio listing the extras required for the next day’s work. If a name clicked, the casting director connected with the caller, telling the extra where to report for work and any special costume or makeup requirements. Determined extras kept calling until they got a job or Central Casting closed the switchboard. More often, there were no jobs and the operator said, “Try later,” which became the saddest refrain in Hollywood. If anyone complained, Central Casting had brochures telling registrants that it would be wiser if they found more dependable occupations.
An open casting call on a Hollywood soundstage.
Extras wait in Central Casting’s hallway, circa 1940.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences started at L.B. Mayer’s Santa Monica summer beach house. Organized in May 1927 to represent the motion picture industry, the board of directors included Conrad Nagel, William de Mille, J. Stuart Blackton, Samuel Goldwyn, Sol Wurtzel, and first president Douglas Fairbanks. Mayer felt that the Academy would relieve studio workers from organizing labor unions. The Academy’s first offices were on the Roosevelt Hotel’s mezzanine.
Giving yearly prizes at an annual dinner as a promotional piece for the film industry, the first Academy Awards took place May 1929 (for the 1928-1927 movie season) in the Roosevelt’s Blossom Room. Twelve awards were presented. Janet Gaynor received Best Actress. Paramount’s Wings won Best Picture. A special award went to Warner Bros. for revolutionizing the industry with The Jazz Singer. The award for Best Title Writing was given for the first and last time. Al Jolson sang for the guests. Errol Flynn served bootlegged gin in the barbershop’s back room.
The first Academy Awards banquet, held on the second anniversary of the founding of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, in the Roosevelt Hotel’s Blossom Room, 1929.
Hollywood Boulevard and Las Palmas Avenue, looking west, 1929.
TWILIGHT IN TINSELTOWN
Hollywood Boulevard was the street for strolling. It offered window-shopping, restaurants, theaters, and an occasional movie star. Twenty ice cream and candy stores lined the street. As movie theaters had no concession counters (Sid Grauman refused to consider them), customers bought nickel bags of assorted candy before heading to the movies. One enterprising Hollywood woman, Betty Bolton, changed her business from a tearoom to an ice cream plant on McCadden Place from which she distributed ice cream across Southern California. Chapman’s and Wil Wright’s were equally popular ice cream parlors. Mission Candy and Ice Cream near Ivar Avenue made everything shaped like a Spanish mission.
C.C. Brown arrived in the early ‘20s, opening an ice cream parlor on La Brea before moving to Hollywood Boulevard, west of Orange in 1928. C.C. Brown invented the hot fudge sundae. With horsehair-upholstered booths, metal dishes to keep the ice cream cold, and a secret-formula fudge sauce served in ceramic pitchers, the business brought stars and everyone else. Judy Garland, James Cagney, Elvis Presley, Clark Gable, and Ronald Reagan were regulars. The longest-lived ice cream parlor in Hollywood, Brown’s shut its doors in 1996.
The number one confectionery was Pig ‘n’ Whistle Cafe. With outlets as far north as Seattle and a popular store in downtown L.A., the Hollywood Pig opened in August 1927. The most elaborate in the chain, this Pig had carved oak rafters and booths, red leather upholstery, wrought iron grills and a huge cut glass chandelier. An organ serenaded customers. A private dining room in the back was accessible from McCadden Place. By 1929, there were two other Pig ‘n’ Whistles in Hollywood, a tea and pastry shop near Highland and a restaurant in the Plaza Hotel known as the Plaza Pig. The corporate general manager, Sidney Hoedemaker, remained one of Los Angeles’s top restaurateurs for the next three decades.
A portent to Hollywood future, El Adobe, the world’s first mini-mall, appeared at Hollywood and Kingsley. Built by D.P. Baldwin on land that had been his parents’ home and vegetable farm, the original farmer’s stalls later became a grocery store. Baldwin created the L-shaped building around it as rental spaces for artists who worked in the movies.
Fox Studios dedicated their new headquarters on Pico Boulevard in 1928. The Sunset lot became their center for “B” pictures. An actor named John Wayne made his first movie there that year. With 1928 their most successful year to date, Warner Bros. bought out First National and moved to Burbank. Finding it difficult to fill three large studios, they used the Sunset Boulevard and Vitagraph lots less and less.
Pig ‘n’ Whistle interior, 1929.
El Adobe Market, northwest corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Kingsley Drive. D.P. Baldwin built this early mini-mall on land that had been his parents’ home and vegetable farm. Farmer’s stalls became the grocery store. The L-shaped building rented to artists who worked in the movies.
Mallory Hats next to the Egyptian Theater, 1929.
Betty Bolton Ice Cream factory, near La Brea Avenue and Santa Monica Boulevard, 1933.
1929 Dollar Day shoppers outside Dyas Department Store at Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street.
Charlie Chaplin clowns in a store window for Ambassador Alexander Moore, August 16, 1929.
District defections mounted. The Theosophists no longer found Hollywood appropriate for a pastoral community like Krotona. Taking advantage of real estate prices, they subdivided and sold their center on the hill in 1926. Krotona moved to the more rural Ojai. In 1929, A.J. Bigger, a pioneer merchant on Hollywood Boulevard for fourteen years, moved his store to Beverly Hills. The Armstrong-Carlton closed, reorganized, and opened in Beverly Hills as Armstrong-Schroeder. Jacob Stern, with a theater, a twelve-story hotel, a department store, and a row of shops in his yard at Hollywood and Vine, followed Arthur Letts to Holmby Hills. In a fit of pique for the many times the city refused his offer of a park, he uprooted trees and shrubs to take with him. He left a grove of palms that remain at the rear of the Hollywood Plaza Hotel.
Jesse Lasky sold his Hollywood home and moved to a huge ocean-front house in Santa Monica. Actor Emil Jannings, frustrated with sound movies, returned to Berlin and was not present to receive the first Best Actor Academy Award. Elinor Glyn ran from talkies and returned to Europe.
An exception to the exodus was Irish tenor John McCormack. After his hit talkie from Fox, Song O’ My Heart, he bought the canyon retreat of wealthy coal merchant Carmen Runyon. The largest piece of private property left in Hollywood, he built a mansion that he named San Patrizio.
Louis Blondeau sold out his ornate barbershop to retire comfortably to Laurel Avenue with his mother nearby. Dr. (Schloesser) Castle emerged from his decade-long slump. He finagled financing from a real estate syndicate for a deluxe apartment building in his backyard north of Sans Souci. Celebrating his regained stature, Dr. Castle announced p
lans for a bigger home called Falconhurst for himself north of the building.
“We are told,” wrote the Los Angeles Realtor at the time, “that the transformation from pasture to metropolis is the product of the ages, but not so in Hollywood.” A first-time visitor would have never guessed that twelve years before, Hollywood Boulevard had been a shady, tranquil, small-town street lined with churches and lemon orchards. Early movie people found themselves as nostalgic about old Hollywood as original residents. “It used to be informal and fun, no royalty among the stars,” sighed a Photoplay article about Hollywood Boulevard. “Now the mansions are grander and the manners more formal. The expense is beyond the means of millionaires.”
In less than thirty years, Los Angeles’ urban sprawl had engulfed the once-solitary Cahuenga Valley. The boosterism of Los Angeles as a land of easy living had pushed the city’s population to over one million people. From Western to La Brea Avenues, traffic now flowed around the clock from all parts of the city. A traffic count at Hollywood and Vine in this period clocked 121,200 automobiles in sixteen hours.
Shoppers stroll on Hollywood Boulevard near Vine Street, 1929.
The Knit Shop in the Cherokee Building, 1929.
A 1928 Essex new car showroom at Hollywood and Gower.
At night, Hollywood Boulevard gleamed with colored lights. Otto K. Olesen’s heaven-piercing light beams showed exactly where Hollywood was in the city. Specialty stores stayed open late. WAMPAS Baby Star of 1929 Jean Arthur posed in a Robertson Department Store ad proclaiming “The Stars Own Store” where Bebe Daniels, Billie Dove and Mary Astor shopped. Photoplay gushed “the Rue de la Paix or Hollywood Boulevard — which?” Restaurants and clubs rivaling the best in New York operated into the early hours, serving a steady flow of customers. Rows of dazzlingly lit car showrooms displayed the newest and shiniest autos. The last dealership for the ‘20s was C.E. Toberman’s Art Deco Cadillac Building at Hollywood Boulevard and Orange Avenue.
Sid Grauman stated in 1929, “The future of Hollywood is the future of California.” Whether he meant the district or the movie industry is not clear. The definition of Hollywood had become blurred. The movie business, it seemed, now owned the name and had separated from the district. However, the huge amount of capital invested in Hollywood included movie money. Locals were not the only ones betting on future fortunes to be made from the district’s mystique.
A brand-new 1929 Packard parked in front of the Garden Court Apartments.
1932 Hollywood Bonus Army marches along Hollywood Boulevard, heading for Washington D.C.
“I walk along the street of sorrow
The Boulevard of Broken Dreams
Where Gigolo — and Gigolette
Can take a kiss — without regret
So they forget their broken dreams.”
Harry Warren and Al Dubin
CHAPTER 5 BOULEVARD OF BROKEN DREAMS
A familiar Hollywood Boulevard sight during the Depression, 1931.
HOLLYWOOD SKIDS RUN FAST
The stock market crash on October 21, 1929, wiped out the invested fortunes of movie people and local Hollywood millionaires. Sid Grauman with his penchant for seeking bonanzas in oil wells, show business, and the stock market, lost six million dollars. Sam Kress saw his drugstore lucre evaporate in an instant. Movie and real estate mogul Charles Christie found himself with a heavily mortgaged house in Beverly Hills, a Rolls Royce, and not a dime to his name. By 1932, he was borrowing money for food.
A job seeker at Hollywood and Vine, 1932.
The silent stars who had failed to make the transition to talkies and had invested in the stock market quickly disappeared. Most of these tragedies played out in Beverly Hills, where huge estates changed hands in a matter of months. By 1931, twenty-six new talking stars made their debut, with more to follow. Even those who made the transition had no guarantees. Nancy Carroll in her fancy Garden Court apartment had a quick rise to fame as a talking comedienne and ingenue but found her career in decline after one flop movie in 1930.
Toberman’s unrealized Hollywood Boulevard planetarium.
First National Bank of Los Angeles, in their new Deco skyscraper at Hollywood and Highland, became an early crash casualty. So did the Bank of Hollywood at Hollywood and Vine. Hundreds of Hollywood depositors had their savings wiped out. Other financial institutions tottered over the year.
Those who had rushed to build on Hollywood Boulevard discovered that they had exceeded the demand. Buyers defaulted on property payments; tenants could not pay rent.
Toberman faced three million dollars of debt, with his sources of income gone. The mortgages he held were worthless. He halted the development of Outpost Estates and lost his monumental Hollywood Storage Building on Highland Avenue south of Santa Monica Boulevard. A shopping and museum complex with a planetarium and a covered mall planned for Hollywood Boulevard at McCadden Place died on the drawing board. Propping up his partners, Toberman hastily negotiated the sale of the bankrupt Robertson’s Department Store to Hale Brothers of San Francisco. He dismissed the staff at his Camino Palmero house.
Dr. (Schloesser) Castle was broke too. He lived in the shadow of the nearly completed Castle Argyle, at Franklin Avenue, that now belonged to a bank. The makeup no longer covered the deep furrows on his face, nor the dark circles under his eyes. Rumor had it that one of Dr. Castle’s investors drank weed killer when the crash came. Carrying himself in the grand manner, Castle retired to a wing of Sans Souci and began renting to tenants.
After the crash, Sid Grauman’s more hopeless side got the better of him. Two years after opening the Chinese, Joe Schenck arranged for its sale to the Fox Theater chain. The prologues were abandoned. Hundreds were now unemployed.
Depression-era actors in Hollywood faced even longer spells of unemployment. Only thirty of Central Casting’s seventeen-thousand extras worked more than three days the year of 1930. Still, most clung to the hope that something would turn up. As a young girl, Mary Jane Higby heard a conversation “between my father and Clark Gable when we met him once on Hollywood Boulevard. ‘Get out of here, Bill’, Gable had said. ‘Get back to New York. It’s the only place for an actor.’”
Worried investors wait outside the front door of Guaranty Savings and Loan, 1930.
Lon Chaney had successfully crossed into talkies, but struggled with throat cancer. His new Beverly Hills home by architect Paul Williams was nearly completed when he died in 1930. Movie studios observed two minutes of silence in his memory. Hollywood Legion Stadium held a memorial service for him the first Friday night after his death. The fight announcer called attention to Chaney’s vacant ringside seat and Alan Hale read a poem from the ring.
One of Sid Grauman’s last promotions as owner of the Chinese Theater, a human billboard in the parking lot for MGM’s Hollywood Revue, June 1929.
Beesemyer, in his prison denim, leaves for San Quentin.
The announcement for the unrealized Ritz-Carlton on Argyle Avenue, 1930.
On December 9, 1930, Guaranty Savings and Loan, at Hollywood and Ivar, closed. The head of the bank, Gilbert Beesemyer, insisted the bank was sound. Three days later he confessed to embezzling and gave himself up to authorities. With $7,630,000 in personal overdrafts, his only comment was “I thought I could quickly return it. I wish I could have another week to work this thing out.”
Witnesses stated that on December 8, Beesemyer helped load $25,000 worth of gold bullion to be trucked out of Guaranty. Once a golden boy, he became the most hated man in Hollywood. Dr. E.O. Palmer, who had escaped a financial bloodbath, was Beesemyer’s most vocal critic, calling his former employee a “supreme egotist.” According to Palmer, the failure of Guaranty “staggered Hollywood, rendering many of her best citizens (the frugal and industrious) penniless. The depression progressed conspicuously from that time.”
Convicted of embezzlement, Beesemyer entered San Quentin on January 1, 1931. Paroled on January 7, 1940, he disappeared into Baltimore, Maryland, where he became
a clerk at a chemical company.
The Vine Street Improvement partners never recovered. The Ritz-Carlton withdrew its proposal for a $5 million hotel on the hill at Argyle Avenue that Beesemyer had spent 1930 organizing. Every major Hollywood investor had underwritten the enterprise, including Toberman, Dr. Palmer, Sam Kress, Charles Christie, the Taft family, C.B. DeMille, and Mack Sennett.
PICKING UP THE PIECES
The last theater in the chain of vaudeville magnate Alexander Pantages opened on Hollywood Boulevard June 4, 1930. The first film was Floradora Girl starring Marion Davies. It came with an elaborate prologue called The Rose Garden Idea by Fanchon and Marco. Pantages had searched for years for an appropriate Hollywood site. His theater was the last and largest movie palace in Hollywood and the first Art Deco theater in the United States. Only the Shrine Theater near downtown Los Angeles had a larger stage. The mechanical plant underneath the Pantages, the most advanced of its time, featured switchboard controls, band cars, and elevator lifts. The stock market crash had altered the building’s plans, lopping off the twelve stories that would have risen above it. Fox West Coast Theaters added the Pantages Theater to its chain in 1932.
Hollywood felt the brunt of the Depression later than the rest of the nation. The movie industry’s cash flow did not dip so suddenly. Audiences of unemployed people across the country willingly paid to watch movies all day in the dark.