The Story of Hollywood

by Gregory Paul Williams

  The big hotels had rooms with a singer and a backup band. Great blues singers such as Ivie Anderson and Ida James performed in Hollywood Boulevard bars. According to Short, “One could find without effort (along Hollywood Boulevard) most brands of jazz, but my favorite was in an expanded oubliette called The Streets of Paris.”

  With European ambiance and in the basement of the former Christie Hotel, The Streets of Paris featured some of the era’s great musicians, like Meade Lux Lewis, Art Tatum, and Miles Davis. A budding Nat “King” Cole played there, as did popular cabaret singer Hadda Brooks.

  Bobby Short played the Radio Room and the Hangout, both on Vine Street. The Radio Room had Dietrich-like chanteuses and the madcap antics of Mike Reilly and his band. (Reilly wrote the popular The Music Goes Round and Round. He later had his own club at Cahuenga and Franklin.) In the ‘40s, the Radio Room had “soundies,” a jukebox that played music videos (filmed in Hollywood) for a quarter.

  When Earl Carroll tired of police raids on his risqué New York productions, the showman brought his “most beautiful girls in the world” to Sunset Boulevard. Carroll’s luxurious thousand-seat, multi-tiered dinner theater debuted December 26, 1938. Hundreds of spectators lined the street for the star-studded opening. For $2.50, a patron saw a 9:15 p.m. show with two acts and thirty scenes. The show featured Busby Berkley-style numbers on an elevated, revolving stage. Fifty girls in body makeup backed a star, who was most often Carroll’s wife, Beryl Wallace. The price included a full-course dinner and dancing to the orchestra all evening.

  The “most beautiful women in the world” passed through Earl Carroll’s portal on Sunset Boulevard and Argyle Avenue.

  Two days after Earl Carroll’s opened, the Florentine Gardens became Hollywood’s second showcase dinner theater, catching Carroll’s turn-away crowd. More burlesque than Carroll’s Ziegfeld-like show, the Florentine Gardens offered basic food and seminude girls in a cavernous room done as pseudo-ancient Florence. For $1.50 you got a dinner, an emcee, eight precision dancers, a toe dancer who did straight and novelty dancing, a male dancer, a singer, sometimes a trapeze act, and a twelve-piece orchestra. Customers danced on the largest spring dance floor in the West.

  The Florentine Gardens took off when Nils Thor Granlund became manager and master of ceremonies. Known as N.T.G. to the public and Granny to his girls, Granlund had run a succession of New York nightclubs in the ‘20s, boosting the careers of Barbara Stanwyck and Joan Crawford. After he took over the Florentine, the girls began to reveal more flesh on stage. N.T.G. also added a segment encouraging audience participation. Men came out of the audience, some so drunk they could hardly stand, and danced with the showgirls.

  Customers lined up seven days a week, two shows a night (the last one at midnight) at the Florentine. The King of Jazz, Paul Whiteman and his band opened the place. Sally Rand, Sophie Tucker, Joe E. Lewis, the Mills Brothers, and Ethel Waters entertained over the years. Stars who came from the chorus included Gwen Verdon and Yvonne DeCarlo.

  Earl Carroll with his showgirls, 1939.

  A number from Earl Carroll’s show.

  Opening night at the Palladium., October 31, 1940.

  Ribbon cutting with Tommy Dorsey Orchestra.

  A dance hall appeared near Earl Carroll’s when Norman Chandler of the Los Angeles Times built the Palladium. The Chandlers owned a lot of Hollywood property, including the land under Florentine Gardens.

  For the Palladium groundbreaking, Lana Turner used a silver-plated shovel. Opened on Halloween, 1940, the million-dollar ballroom had a kidney-shaped dance floor, cushioned with cork to prevent dancer fatigue. Ten thousand people jammed the opening. All the big-name bands appeared at the Palladium.

  Record companies arrived from New York. Columbia, Decca, and Dot Records opened West Coast branches on Vine Street. Columbia signed Cab Calloway and Duke Ellington. Decca had Bing Crosby, Guy Lombardo, and the Mills Brothers. Many of the companies kept their recording studios at 7000 Santa Monica Boulevard near La Brea Avenue. (Elvis Presley recorded most of his hits there from 1956 on, starting with Love Me Tender.)

  Stores that sold sheet music and musical instruments prospered. Rings Music on Cherokee Avenue, south of Hollywood Boulevard, had the largest sheet music collection in the world. Phil Harris, Jack Benny’s bandleader, owned a record store on Hollywood Boulevard near Las Palmas.

  In 1940, the Wallichs brothers, Clyde and Glenn, opened Music City at Sunset and Vine. Initially a partnership with Al Jarvis, Music City’s proximity to NBC made it popular for sheet music and instruments. Two years later, the Wallichs started selling phonographs and pioneered self-service records sealed in cellophane and displayed on racks. Weekly customers included Frank Sinatra, Mary Pickford, and Fred Astaire.

  Ciro’s, 8433 W. Sunset Boulevard. The Sunset Strip, closer to Beverly Hills, became the preferred place for celebrities to shop and go clubbing after Ciro’s opened in 1940.

  By 1942, music accounted for seventy-five percent of radio airtime. Record sales increased. On a dare, Glenn Wallichs, with songwriters Johnny Mercer and Buddy deSylva, formed Capitol Records that spring. DeSylva had stepped down as head of production at Paramount Studios in 1938. Near the end of his life, he became Capitol’s chairman.

  Capitol’s first big hit was Pistol Packin’ Mama by The Pied Pipers. Unfortunately, record’s sales halted when the Japanese sunk a ship loaded with shellac. With a record-manufacturing ban during the war, Capitol kept itself afloat with performances and broadcasts of Cow Cow Boogie sung by Ella Mae Morse and Strip Polka sung by Johnny Mercer. When shellac was available after late 1943, Pistol Packin’ Mama sold more than one million records. Capitol signed Paul Whiteman and Dennis Day and operated in offices above Music City.

  Songwriters filled offices along Selma and Argyle Avenues, making the intersection a West Coast Tin Pan Alley. In the Hollywood Recreation Center across from NBC on Vine Street, Irving Berlin and Sammy Cahn maintained Hollywood offices. Oscar Levant and fellow RKO songwriters preferred to work ringside at the Legion Stadium.

  One enterprising composer, L. Wolfe Gilbert in the Cinemart Building, headed ASCAP, charging composer royalties for stations playing music over the air. “Wolfie” had only one song to his credit, The Peanut Vendor, but he led a formidable organization that soon found a rival, BMI, located on Selma Ave.

  Music City, on the northwest corner of Sunset Boulevard and Vine Street. Radio spots for the Wallichses’ store featured a Capitol singing star crooning, “It’s Music City, Sunset and Vine.”

  Lemonade stand at Hollywood and Cahuenga Boulevards, 1939.

  Newly drafted servicemen outside the Hollywood Masonic Hall, 1941.

  THE DAWN OF WAR

  In 1939, Hollywood Boulevard’s Cinema Sports Bowling became a newsreel theater. Named The Newsview Theater, it stood on Grass family property from the City of Homes era, west of Cherokee Avenue.

  Newsreels became popular once Hitler started his westward Blitzkrieg through Europe in April 1940. An hour of current news cost twenty-five cents. During war years, Ernst Lubitsch and other Europeans in Hollywood made regular trips to the Newsview for the latest reports. The Hitching Post near Vine Street also became a newsreel theater renamed the Tele-View. Only downtown Los Angeles, with three, had more newsreel theaters.

  In 1940, the United States set up its first peacetime military draft in history. All male citizens up to age thirty-five had to register. The local draft board opened in the Masonic Hall at Hollywood Boulevard and Orange Avenue.

  Next door, at the El Capitan, benefit performances for China and Great Britain brought in huge crowds to see Greer Garson, Basil Rathbone, and Rosalind Russell on stage.

  Orson Welles opened Citizen Kane on May 9, 1941, in the El Capitan Theater. Having made the film at RKO at Melrose, Welles booked New York’s Radio City Music Hall for its February premiere. The theater, however, abruptly cancelled the showing. Publisher William Randolph Hearst did not want the film opening anywhere. Welles ch
ose the legitimate El Capitan after movie theaters boycotted his film.

  Radio and motion pictures tried their best to ignore the reality of another world war until the United States was forced into war December 7, 1941. The Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor frightened the entire West Coast and left a lingering fear of imminent attack by land, sea, air, or all three at once. The Warner Bros. studio created a bomb shelter overnight on their Burbank lot. Writer James Cain served with Cecil B. DeMille as a helmeted Hollywood Hills air raid warden. When reports came of phantom Japanese bombers over Los Angeles, all streetlights and advertising signs were turned off except(inadvertently) the Christmas trees along Hollywood Boulevard.

  After a few weeks in an apartment on the southeast corner of Wilcox and Yucca, Carol Burnett decided she liked Hollywood better than San Antonio, Texas. Burnett describes in her autobiography, One More Time, her childhood impression of Hollywood Boulevard: “They said Hollywood Boulevard was glamorous, but it sure wasn’t in the daytime.”

  WAR YEARS

  Los Angeles instantly became a major point of departure for combat in the Pacific. Servicemen wanted to see Hollywood before leaving for the battlefront. Overnight, the district filled with transient military personnel. Servicemen packed the audiences of all local radio broadcasts. Yvonne DeCarlo wrote in her autobiography, Yvonne, that Hollywood Boulevard became honky-tonk bars, “storefront photo galleries, pinball parlors, midway-type arcades, rifle ranges. The old restaurants were packed with new business, and the new places opened to profit from the overflow.”

  Hollywood hotels were booked solid. The USO (United Servicemen’s Organization) opened three Hollywood stations in 1941, offering free beds, free tickets to shows, dances, and bingo games. Ivar Avenue had the main branch south of Hollywood Boulevard, with a lounge, showers, music room, library, and basement ballroom. The Cahuenga and Hollywood Boulevard branches handled overflow.

  Servicemen also found free sleeping accommodations at the Hollywood YMCA, the American Legion on Highland, the Congregational Church at Hollywood and Sycamore, the First Methodist at Franklin, and the Beverly Christian Church on Gramercy. Hollywood High converted its gymnasium into a dormitory for service people, offering Sunday breakfast on weekends. Even the Pilgrimage Theater and the Hollyhock House became armed-services bunkhouses.

  Aluminum collection on Hollywood Boulevard, 1942. Hollywood residents patriotically saved metal, rubber, and rags. Collection centers dotted Hollywood Boulevard and the lobbies of movie theaters as they did in towns across the nation.

  Hollywood residents, Pearl and George Skinner (fourth and fifth from the right), with friends in Jade Dragon Lounge, 6619 Hollywood Boulevard, 1942.

  One of three Hollywood USOs, 1531 Cahuenga Boulevard, 1941.

  The new Hollywood Paramount in the former El Capitan, 1942.

  The former Hollywood Playhouse on Vine Street became the new El Capitan Theater.

  Still, soldiers walked Hollywood streets at night without a bed. Annie Lehr at Crescent Heights and Santa Monica Boulevard, turned her large home and yard into a dorm to accommodate twelve-hundred men overnight. Named the Hollywood Guild and Canteen, the movie industry helped with donations. Radio personality Tom Breneman donated the swimming pool.

  For servicemen, Hollywood had the inexpensive nightclubs. Wilshire and the Sunset Strip had the tonier ones. The war saved many Hollywood nightspots from going under. Sputtering Florentine Gardens, once war began, filled its thousand seats nightly. Servicemen and aircraft workers saw Ozzie Nelson take over from Paul Whiteman in 1942. Earl Carroll’s also packed them in. Another club, Hollywood Casino on Sunset, had a deluxe floor show. Actors at the Masquers Club transformed their basement bar into a military canteen.

  Floodlit movie premieres were stopped during the war, although movie theaters drew capacity audiences. Paramount Studios, with 1,650 theaters in their chain finally opened their first theater on Hollywood Boulevard, transforming El Capitan into sleek Moderne and renaming it the Paramount.

  Toberman happily sold El Capitan to Paramount, who walled the wings of the stage to enhance movie acoustics. It opened with a 1942 benefit premiere of Cecil B. DeMille’s Reap the Wild Wind. During war years, the Hollywood Paramount advertised “love seats” in the balcony. A mini-revue with the cast of the Florentine Gardens boosted matinee attendance. (The Florentine girls also appeared regularly at the Hollywood USO.)

  For all the bustle, war made Hollywood bleaker to C.E. Toberman, who saw it slip into decline. His improvement projects came to a standstill. Howard Johnson’s dropped plans for their first West Coast hotel north of the Pilgrimage Theater. Macy’s halted developing the southwest corner of Vine and Yucca Streets for a department store. May Company dropped plans for a department store at Argyle Avenue.

  With his El Capitan cash, C.E. Toberman bought the failed Hollywood Playhouse on Vine Street. He got it from Guaranty Liquidation at a bargain price. The playhouse was running the successful Meet the People. Toberman arranged for Meet the People to re-open at the Music Box Theater. He then transferred stage equipment from his former El Capitan to the Hollywood Playhouse. Sid Grauman bought half the new corporation and had Toberman transfer the name “El Capitan” as well.

  To fill the theater, Toberman and Grauman took a chance on a radio comic whose Texaco Star Theater had left the air. With no radio work, Ken Murray decided to stage a variety show at the new El Capitan. Murray gathered some investors. Toberman and Grauman leased the theater to him on a percentage basis.

  Cover and photos from various Blackout programs, including Ken Murray with Bob Hope. An alternative chorus, the Elderlovelies, featured more mature dancers, some of them great-grandmothers, tap-dancing, jitterbugging, jiving, and doing high kicks.

  Starting in June of 1942, Murray had eleven days to prepare a vaudeville show called Blackouts, a current war term and a stage term for turning out the lights at the end of a skit. Blackouts featured comedy sketches, musical numbers, novelty, and animal acts. Marie Wilson, a struggling film actress, appeared onstage for the first time. Chorus girls, dubbed Glamorlovelies, had Rhonda Fleming among them.

  Abbott and Costello perform at the Masquers Club.

  Murray staged a blackout premiere for Blackouts, using infrared cameras to photograph the arriving celebrities. Grauman invited Mae West, Al Jolson and Rudy Vallee, among others, to the opening. The show’s reviews were lukewarm. Daily Variety, with its office across Vine Street, panned it unmercifully. The first week, the investors lost $700. C.E. Toberman and Sid Grauman backed the production. By the third week, the show broke even and never lost money again. Grauman’s last association with Hollywood, Blackouts returned his entire investment the first year and profits thereafter.

  The show ran for seven years, a miracle for Ken Murray. Popular with servicemen and locals, it constantly changed. Marie Wilson became a star. Blackouts broke records, selling ten million dollars in war bonds, including three two-million-dollar matinees during ‘44 and ‘45.

  Time Magazine wrote about Blackouts’s 1,500th performance, “A ticket buyer might see in the flesh almost any star in Hollywood.” The show always featured unexpected appearances. Walter Huston appeared in the Saturday Night Poker sketch, as did Bing Crosby. When Desi Arnaz appeared, Lucille Ball came on and sang Cuban Pete with him. It began their national stage audition for I Love Lucy. Burt Lancaster stayed with the show for ten days. Donald O’Connor, just out of the army, worked on his impersonations. W.C. Fields climbed out of the audience and did a two-act with Murray. When Murray fell into the orchestra pit and broke his ankle (the audience laughed), Edgar Bergen, visiting backstage, stepped in and finished the show.

  At the Music Box, Meet the People moved to New York, where it bombed. The production that followed, Midnight Revels, was a more risqué show for people out after their midnight shifts in war factories. More sleazy than naughty, it did not have a very long run. The Music Box remained dark for most of the war.

  Breakfast at Sardi’s,
Eddie Brandstatter’s radio promotion of his Hollywood Sardi’s, went on the air locally in spring 1941. Again Brandstatter copied the New York namesake; East Coast radio had Arlene Francis’s Luncheon at Sardi’s.

  With travel restricted to essential business, the rest of America stayed home by their radios. As a break from wartime pressures, Breakfast at Sardi’s went nationwide on NBC’s Blue Network. Originally airing with a hostess, in 1942, radio personality Tom Breneman joined Breakfast at Sardi’s and made it a smash hit. Female audience members attending the show received corsages on entering the restaurant with juice and coffee for everyone, Breakfast at Sardi’s featured Breneman moving among the tables, interviewing soldiers and civilians. He asked silly questions and drew women out with goofy hat contests and “wishing ring ceremonies.” By the mid-’40s, Breneman’s show was among the hottest on the air. Newsweek reported that, in 1942, Folsom Prison convicts voted it their favorite daytime program.

  Greer Garson and fans at the Hollywood Canteen.

  STARS’ WAR

  Walking Hollywood Boulevard no longer guaranteed a glimpse of a famous face, although movie stars still lived in the neighborhood. Betty Grable resided in Whitley Heights with her new husband, Harry James. Linda Darnell lived on La Brea Terrace.

  Yvonne DeCarlo met Jimmy Stewart, in uniform, for a date in the lobby of the Hollywood Plaza. They went with Ray Milland to Lux Theater next door to see him perform with Ginger Rogers in The Major and the Minor. DeCarlo’s career had improved with a contract at Paramount that kept her posing for pin-ups as the “Sweetheart of the U.S. Mechanized Forces.” By 1944, Walter Wanger had spotted her, and she became a star in Universal’s Salome, Where She Danced.