The Famous Door opened on Vine Street near Willoughby Avenue in 1936. Stars scribbled their autographs on the front door. The spot drew long lines of people waiting to hear Louis Prima.
Spider Kelly’s, Gaslight, and Oasis opened. The Carousel at Hollywood and Sycamore had a working merry-go-round that customers could ride while drinking. The nearby and longer-lived Circus Café had an under-the-big-top atmosphere. The Frolic Room near Hollywood and Vine opened as an elegant watering hole with a celebrity mural by New York caricaturist Al Hirschfeld.
Clubbing was not the only draw in Hollywood. Baseball at Sunset and Gower, on an abandoned movie lot, brought celebrities and fans to cheer the Hollywood Stars. Other ventures that briefly enticed famous gadabouts involved miniature golf, roller-skating, ice-skating, and bowling. After a little star publicity, tourists and locals kept these fad businesses floating.
Sunset Strip’s Trocadero nightclub started as a rural roadhouse (demolished).
Everyone went mad for miniature golf, first called midget golf, in the late 1920s. The Gittelson brothers took profits from their ticket agencies and built five golf courses around the city, including their longest-running course (demolished in the late ‘80s) on Hollywood Boulevard east of Western Avenue.
In 1937, a roller-skating craze hit. Stars like Lana Turner roller-skated at a rink built inside an unused soundstage at Warner’s Sunset and Bronson lot. They ice-skated at the ice rink Polar Palace on N. Van Ness Avenue (demolished after a fire).
Two women in a rocking-horse race at the Trocadero, 1944.
The Hollywood Stars baseball field on the southeast corner of Sunset Boulevard and El Centro Avenue, 1938.
In 1938, Hollywood went bowling mad. The Hollywood Recreation Center went up on Vine Street south of Selma Avenue, a stylish, Streamline Moderne building. It housed a twenty-two-lane bowling alley, a restaurant and a cocktail bar. Cinema Sports Center operated on Hollywood Boulevard near Cherokee Avenue with twelve lanes and cocktails. (It would become a newsreel theater during the height of WWII.) The abandoned Warner Sunset Studios opened the Sunset Bowling Center with fifty-two lanes and cocktails. It was the largest bowling alley in the United States.
Dorothy Lamour outside the Famous Door on Vine Street, 1935.
When Hollywood took up yachting, a South Seas fad docked. Fan magazines wrote of Hollywood yachtsmen like Barrymore, Bogart, John Ford, Errol Flynn, and Cecil B. DeMille cruising the Pacific. The Jade Café opened on Hollywood Boulevard with a Hawaiian orchestra and titillating Polynesian acts. The Tropics, an imitation Tahiti, opened near Sunset and Vine.
The shows at these clubs employed Polynesians who came to Hollywood in large numbers during the ‘30s and ‘40s. They found work in movies, appearing as South Sea residents, Eskimos, Indians, Japanese, and even African natives in crowd scenes. The Polynesian Society had their headquarters at Whistling’s Hawaiian, a club at Sunset and Ivar, behind a drive-in restaurant. Here, they hung out and helped each other find movie work.
Bogart’s favorite Hollywood haunt, Don the Beachcomber, started out serving rum drinks in a small hotel bar on McCadden Avenue north of Hollywood Boulevard. Suddenly, Don the Beachcomber’s was an “in” restaurant that became world-famous. With South Seas decor, exotic vegetation, real leis, and Hawaiian music, the enterprise was so successful, Don changed his name legally to Beachcomber. Rum drink with names like Zombies and Vicious Virgins became the trademarks. Pricey Chinese cuisine was served along with rumaki pu pus. The rooms were so dark you could hardly see and had names like the Black Hole of Calcutta and the Cannibal Room. Regulars included Joan Crawford, Bing Crosby, all the Westmores (Perc, Wally, Ern, Mont, and Frank) and Marlene Dietrich. A special case held their personal ivory chopsticks with their names etched by hand.
The Seven Seas followed, in the Cinemart Building near Hollywood and Highland. The first owner, Ray Haller, was inspired when his customers thought the building’s leaky roof during rainstorms was cute. Haller installed sprinklers to create the effect nightly. (Don the Beachcomber borrowed the idea.) The next Seven Seas owner, Bob Brooks, added a full Hawaiian show headlined by Jennie “Na Pua” (Little Flower) Woodd, the hula comic. Jennie remained here for twenty-five years.
The Hollywood Recreation Center at 1539 Vine Street opened as a bowling alley.
Don the Beachcomber on McCadden Avenue (demolished).
The Hawaii Theater, 5941 Hollywood Boulevard (remodeled), 1940.
Jennie “Na Pua” Woodd.
A Molokai-born champion swimmer, Jennie came first to New York, appearing in the stage hit, Hellzapoppin. Moving to the West Coast, she and her young son lived in a movie-crowd bungalow court at the back gate of Columbia Studios. Jennie choreographed the Seven Seas shows and hired the talent. A friend of Walter Winchell, she got mentions in his columns. All her actor friends came to see her: Red Skelton, Jimmy Durante, Peggy Lee, the Inkspots, the Mills Brothers, Judy Canova, and Carmen Miranda.
Woodd became a major choreographer of Hawaiian dance in movies, employing friends and relatives. She appeared in films like Pagan Love Song and Diamond Head. As a dance teacher, she taught Eleanor Powell to hula on tap and Sonja Heinie to hula on ice. Her favorite rehearsal studio was Perry’s on Highland, north of Hollywood Boulevard. (Dance instructor Ted Howard taught Donald O’Connor to tap dance at Perry’s.)
The Hawaiian craze crested with the May 1940 opening of the Hawaii Theater near Bronson Avenue. With a smokers’ balcony and a nursery for children, the theater also featured murals of Hawaiian beaches. When the lights dimmed, the blacklight effects of a waterfall and swaying trees appeared on the walls. The seats were staggered and could lean back, a new advancement in audience comfort. Ten thousand spectators came to the opening that featured a second-run double bill.
Eventually, stars resented the studios’ forcing them to party publicly. The very dark Don the Beachcomber had no signage out front to keep gawkers away. At La Conga on Vine, celebrities formed a private club called the Peanut Vendors in honor of the man roasting peanuts at the club’s entrance. They met every Sunday for a closed-to-the-public rhumba party. The joke went, “It’s known as the 400 Peanut Vendors, but you don’t belong unless you are in the coconuts.” Stars mingled clannishly among themselves, mostly in their homes, from 1940 on.
Almost every Hollywood nightclub eventually went broke in the fierce competition for stars’ dining and dancing business. The Swing Club on northeast corner of Las Palmas Avenue and Hollywood Boulevard once received mentions in the fan magazines for the famous faces attending. By 1939, renamed Club 17, it had no celebrity cachet. When the city began another serious crackdown around Hollywood, Club 17 had its liquor license revoked for serving after 2:00 a.m. and employing bar girls.
Stanley Rose’s shop was across the street from the writers’ and actors’ unions (in the four-story building on the right), 1937.
THE LITERATI MEET THE UNDERWORLD
As another world war loomed in Europe, Ad Schulberg worked to bring Jewish artists, writers and actors to the United States. Writer Otto Werfel climbed the Pyrenees with his celebrated wife, Alma Mahler, to settle near the Hollywood Bowl. Here, he entertained Thomas Mann, Schoenberg, Stravinsky and other brilliant refugees. The novel he wrote in Hollywood became a best-seller and a hit movie, The Song of Bernadette.
Writers, playwrights, and Pulitzer-prize-winning newspaper people found themselves in Hollywood working for movie studios. Their favorite hangout, Musso & Frank’s, was opposite the Writers Guild offices. Musso was the saloon for Paramount writers, in addition to F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Cain, Lillian Hellman, Dashiell Hammett, William Saroyan, Aldous Huxley, Dorothy Parker, Ben Hecht, Charles MacArthur, Dalton Trumbo, and Ernest Hemingway. Actors who liked the company of writers also came. John Barrymore preferred a corner booth. Myrna Loy wrote that, when she lived at Chateau Marmont, she would come for dinner with her neighbor, Bea Lillie, and “talk the night away.”
Musso and Frank’s expanded into Stanle
y Rose’s book store for this dining room.
Stanley Rose moved his bookstore next door to Musso’s and turned the shop into a writer’s sanctuary. In a back room, writers and readers talked literature as Rose handed around a bottle of orange wine. Rose lent writers money and allowed them to sign his name at Musso & Frank’s. Budd Schulberg recalled the indelible impression made on him by the literary geniuses that Rose gathered in his store. Rose also held the first West Coast exhibitions of contemporary artists such as Calder, Klee, Moore, and Brancusi.
Slot machines in Hollywood Boulevard’s soon-to-be-raided Pup Cafe.
Writers’ paths crossed with the underworld at Stanley Rose’s. A former bootlegger, Rose knew the mobsters. An illegal slot machine in his backroom attracted unsavory types from what Lillian Hellman called “the whorish, drunk, dope-taking world.”
Mobsters had appeared in Hollywood to infiltrate the nascent studio craft unions. They wanted to control the movie industry. Bioff and Browne took over IATSE at Hollywood and Vine. After threatening a strike of movie projectionists, IATSE called it off when Nick Schenck made a payoff for the studios. From then on, extortion money for Bioff and Browne went directly to them at the Garden of Allah.
Backed by the East Coast strongman Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, Bioff and Browne found themselves under the supervision of Benjamin (Bugsy) Siegel, who came to Hollywood in 1937. Three years later Siegel made his mark locally when three men shot down Harry “Big Greenie” Greenbaum, a fugitive hoodlum suspected of informing on Lepke, outside his rooming house a few blocks off Hollywood Boulevard. One of them was Bugsy. No one would testify against him and the indictment was dropped.
SAG, who had avoided the mob, pushed for movie strikes. At a crucial 1937 meeting at the American Legion Stadium, 98 percent of the actors voted to strike. Famous faces encouraging the crowd included Edward Arnold, James Cagney, Harpo Marx, Cary Grant, Charles Boyer, and Dick Powell. According to Ronald Reagan, also a staunch SAG activist, the event “broke the back of the studios.” At midnight, a messenger arrived from Joe Schenck and L.B. Mayer saying they would recognize the Screen Actors Guild as the collective bargaining agent for actors. For several weeks, lines of people stood in front of SAG offices, waiting to join. The guild closed its books to new members for a period.
The Screen Writers Guild, still unrecognized by the studios, faced internal rifts. A rival guild called Screen Playwrights had appeared as the studios’ attempt to divide writers. Republic Studio used the split for its own benefit, meeting with Guild members at the Hollywood Athletic Club and proposing to accept their demands. Republic got great writers at low salaries.
In 1941, producers finally sat down to negotiate with the Screen Writers Guild at the Vine Street Brown Derby. Harry Warner was so outraged at this meeting he had to be escorted out, yelling, “Goddam Communist bastards. They want to take my goddam studio.” The writers and producers hammered out an agreement.
Writers like Dashiell Hammett, observing this tumult, created a literature about Los Angeles that expressed a fascination with its darker side, unmentionable to Chamber of Commerce types. Raymond Chandler saw Hollywood as a perfect haunt for his fictional detective, Philip Marlowe, and the shady crowd who sought him. Chandler gave Marlowe an office at Hollywood and Cahuenga in the fictitious “Cahuenga Building.” He had Marlowe in The Little Sister describe the area as filled with “big money, the sharp shooters, the percentage workers, the fastdollar boys, the hoodlums out of New York and Chicago” and the girls that came with them.
Screen Actors Guild executive board meeting June 6, 1944. Left to right: (standing) Boris Karloff, Alan Hale, Walter Pidgeon, Franchot Tone, (seated) Edward Arnold, James Cagney, Laraine Day, Heather Angel, Walter Abel, Cary Grant, Lucile Gleason.
A parked car on Hollywood Boulevard urges pedestrians to boycott movies, 1937.
Central Casting strike, 1940.
Actors Donald O’Brien and Edward Arnold attend a Labor Day parade.
Raymond Chandler had his fictional detective, Philip Marlowe, work from an office at Hollywood and Cahuenga Boulevards. Hedda Hopper called Hollywood Boulevard the “hardened artery,” 1940.
Nathanael West was equally fascinated with Hollywood’s underworld. He often hung out alone, after dinner at Musso & Frank’s, observing the scene. A close friend of Stanley Rose, West went with Rose and his mobster friends to fights at the Legion Stadium and illegal cockfights in the Hollywood Hills.
West wrote for Republic Studios because, as an avid Screen Writers Guild member, he found no other work. He moved frequently from homes in the lower Hollywood Hills. When his contract at Republic came up in January 1938, he asked to be dropped. He wrote a play to change his fortunes, but it failed. He then turned to a Hollywood novel.
Day of the Locust, written in 1939, solidified in Homer Simpson the image of a transplanted Midwesterner whose gullibility made him the perfect foil for fraud. The novel’s main character, artist Tod Hackett, lived in a hotel based on West’s experience on Ivar Avenue. The novel culminates in a scene of surreal violence, a premiere at the fictional Kahn’s Persian Palace. Inspired by the Hell’s Angels premiere and West’s fascination with film openings, the episode reveals West’s theory that the ordinary person in the bleachers, while worshipping movie stars, really wanted to kill them out of jealousy.
The reviews of the novel were respectful but unenthusiastic. Critics said Nathanael West was the first writer who had made Hollywood’s emptiness seem horrible. In mid-June 1939, Universal’s publicity department persuaded West to appear at the Broadway Hollywood. Nervous and obviously embarrassed, he chain-smoked as he talked about the themes of Day of the Locust to Hollywood shoppers, mostly old ladies. Otherwise, in Hollywood, his book went unmentioned. Sales were poor.
Nathanael West was thirty-five years old when the book came out. One year later, he died in a car crash.
For the scathing estimation that writers heaped on Hollywood, their presence made Hollywood Boulevard a haven for good literature. Bookstores flourished for decades.
A Russian immigrant who named his store Pickwick Books after the Dicken’s character created another sanctuary for writers and intellectuals. Louis Epstein combined two buildings on the northeast corner of Hollywood and McCadden, one from 1917 and the other from 1925, to make plenty of room for books. From 1938 on, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sheila Graham, Robert Benchley, and Humphrey Bogart were only a few of the notables who browsed the three-level store.
Stanley Rose’s enterprise ended when Musso & Frank’s wanted to use the space for an expansion. Edmunds and Rose had begun fighting and drinking too much anyway, so they split in 1938. Rose became a literary agent, with William Saroyan as his most prominent client, an association that ultimately ruined their friendship.
The Cahuenga Pass Tunnel into Hollywood was a death trap for speeding cars, 1941.
THE SKIDS RUN FASTER
In 1936, Max Factor crossed Highland Avenue for a drink at the Hollywood Hotel. A delivery truck struck him, crippling him severely. It contributed to his death two years later.
With one million car drivers in the basin, the Cahuenga Pass reflected the growing congestion and air pollution. Speeding cars smashed regularly into the cement walls of the Pass road, redesigned in the late ‘30s with a curving tunnel to Cahuenga Boulevard. Sirens and tow trucks pulling wrecked cars down Highland became routine.
Hollywood had changed so much, and the region’s movie business was so scattered, that a tourist had to know local history in order to make the connection. The area still had semi-tropical weather as a lure. Some hometown charm remained, although the quirky ‘20s bungalows and apartments looked shabbier.
The district had some movie resurgence. Technicolor Laboratory boomed with its color film process. Columbia Pictures hit its golden years. The public’s appetite for double bills opened many B-movie factories in the smaller ramshackle studios along Sunset Boulevard. Republic financed Majestic, Mascot, Monogram, and Liberty.
B’s and Westerns of varying quality starred Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi and the Bowery Boys.
Briefly in 1939, Walt Disney rented the upstairs of the former Federal Building above the Ontra at Vine. Animators worked on Pinocchio and Bambi until the Burbank studio was ready.
Wilshire’s Miracle Mile became the city’s busiest commercial district. Former Hollywood resident Arthur Letts developed bean fields into Westwood Village, a rival district for shoppers and moviegoers. Beverly Hills was a fashionable shopping area when I. Magnin moved to an elegant new store there, abandoning Hollywood in 1939. Hollywood-based Nancy’s consolidated their stores into the empty I. Magnin building at Ivar Avenue. The William Morris Agency followed to Beverly Hills and left Hollywood forever.
In 1936, Dave Chasen opened Chasen’s restaurant on Beverly Boulevard near Beverly Hills. Baseball’s Hollywood Stars moved from Sunset and Gower to a newer 18,000-seat sports stadium on Gilmore Field at Fairfax and Beverly. Though still technically in Hollywood, it was no easy walk from Hollywood Boulevard.
William Haines set up his interior decorating business in a domed building on the Sunset Strip. SAG moved briefly to the Strip, although they returned in 1939 to the Professional Building at Hollywood Boulevard and Sycamore Avenue where they stayed seventeen years.
Nancy’s took over I. Magnin’s at Ivar Avenue and Hollywood Boulevard with a very smart dress shop.
The just-married Lana Turner and musician Artie Shaw.
SAG had stemmed the rush of people arriving to crash the movies, reducing the 12,000 extras in 1937 to 4,500 by 1943. Many of those who abandoned hope for a film career remained, too proud to go home. William de Mille wrote in 1939 of the high beauty of local waitresses and shopgirls. Fan magazines would restart the cycle every now and then. When Billy Wilkerson discovered Lana Turner at a Highland Avenue café across from Hollywood High, the 1937 event fed more dreams.
The Story of Hollywood Page 24