Bringing Up Oscar: The Story of the Men and Women Who Founded the Academy

by Debra Ann Pawlak

  In August 1949, the Stahls hosted their daughter’s wedding reception at their Beverly Hills home when she married Daniel Steen Fletcher, Jr. That night, their son, Ray, announced his engagement to Texas-born actress Martha Hyer. Unfortunately, Stahl did not live long enough to attend their wedding. After suffering a heart attack on New Year’s Day, he died from complications of pneumonia on January 12, 1950.

  John Stahl may not have been the only director who specialized in melodrama, but he certainly perfected the genre, creating his own mark in Hollywood history. Love. Hate. Tragedy. Triumph. Stahl’s stories were interwoven with the human spirit. His characters evoked emotion, from unbridled happiness to bottomless grief. Perhaps his career was best summed up in his own words:

  … everything depends on character. This is not a new thing. In fact, it has always been the prevailing factor in drama. What Shakespeare play, for instance, that does not live in the characters? Only by making your situations and your plot grow out of your people can you really succeed in making your drama real.

  Hollywood was filled with characters, but none more loved than Sidney Patrick Grauman. After opening the Million Dollar Theater, the New Rialto, the Metropolitan and the Egyptian, Grauman envisioned one more—the most memorable of all. In keeping with his knack for publicity, he invited actress Norma Talmadge to dig up the first spade full of dirt with a gold-plated shovel at the April 10, 1926 groundbreaking ceremony on Hollywood Boulevard and Orange Drive.

  More than one year and two million dollars later, Grauman’s Chinese Theater lavishly opened on May 18, 1927 with the flashy premiere of Cecil B. DeMille’s King of Kings (1927). Preceding the movie was one of Grauman’s famous prologues—a live musical called Glories of Scripture, accompanied by a 65-piece orchestra. Two dozen searchlights lit up the area while oriental girls from San Francisco’s Chinatown acted as usherettes. It was by invitation only that the 2,200 Hollywood elite were asked to attend, but the crowd of fans who gathered to cheer for their favorite movie stars was 50,000 strong.

  With its Chinese-style architecture that prominently featured a pagoda and dragon, the opulent theater made history—but not because of the building. It was the theater’s forecourt that garnered the most attention. In an idea dreamed up by Grauman, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks regally placed their hands and feet in a block of wet cement preserving them forever in front of the theater. They started a tradition that has lasted over eighty years and has evolved into one of Hollywood’s highest honors and singular trademarks.

  Grauman envisioned the forecourt filled with famous handprints, footprints and signatures. To accomplish this, he hired Jean W. Klossner, a French mason, who had a secret formula for mixing concrete. Klossner started three days before each ceremony preparing the mysterious “ingredients” that he would combine with the wet cement. This mixture was slow to dry but maintained detail. If something went wrong—no problem. The wet slab could easily be smoothed over for another try. Once it dried, however, Klossner’s concrete was made to last. Not one of the specially made blocks that he personally laid has ever cracked. That’s no small achievement considering the millions of visitors who have stood in those famous footprints. How did he do it? No one knows for sure. Klossner died in 1965 taking his secret recipe with him.

  Some stars left more than prints of their hands and feet. Harold Lloyd left an impression of his famous glasses; William S. Hart, his six-shooters; Betty Grable, her million dollar legs; Jimmy Durante, his celebrated “schnozola.” John Barrymore left his legendary profile. Photographs taken right after the ceremony show him irritably digging wet cement from his left ear. He was also heard to quip: “I feel like the face on the barroom floor!”

  Sid Grauman didn’t actually own the theater that carried his name. He had a one-third interest in it along with several partners that included Mary Pickford and her husband, Douglas Fairbanks. That all changed in 1929 when Grauman took a huge financial hit due to the stock market crash. Paramount chief Adolph Zukor came to the rescue when he purchased Grauman’s share of the Chinese Theater and kept him on to run the place.

  Studio heads, stars and directors actively sought Grauman’s favor. Everyone wanted their movies showcased in one of his fabulous cinemas. Even better, they genuinely liked him. In a town where many have hidden agendas, Grauman never did. He always went out of his way for his many friends, never expecting anything in return. He was also popular with the public, as his prologues proved. Before each movie was shown, Grauman’s theaters would hold an exhilarating live show intended to stir up the audience. Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. once described these prologues as “… essentially half the evening’s entertainment—the film the second half. The prologue took almost as much time as the film. He used them to set the atmosphere for the feature, and they were too lavish to be believed.” Sometimes, Grauman even took the stage himself. A slightly built man with a thick head of curly hair, writer Anita Loos once commented that Grauman reminded her of Alice in Wonderland’s Mad Hatter.

  When Grauman wasn’t entertaining, he was setting up his friends. He once conned Marcus Loew into a speaking engagement for theater owners at the Ambassador Hotel. With the lights dimmed, Loew began his motivational talk and got no reaction from the crowd. He had no idea that he was speaking to a bunch of dummies—literally. Grauman had borrowed them from a local wax museum. During another of his escapades, a distressed Grauman telephoned Charlie Chaplin for help. When Chaplin rushed over to Grauman’s room at the Ambassador Hotel, he saw his friend hovering over a bloodstained body in his bed. Shaken, Chaplin wanted to call the police, but Grauman refused, claiming he couldn’t handle the scandal. When Chaplin finally got a closer look, he discovered a catsup-covered wax figure!

  A confirmed bachelor and a long-time resident of the Ambassador Hotel, he wasn’t a morning person. He much preferred sleeping in and staying up late to gamble. His game of choice? Gin rummy. It’s said that he once lost the Chinese Theater in a card game and then forced the players to keep dealing until he won it back. He didn’t drink, but he puffed his way through four packs of cigarettes every day.

  When he wasn’t playing cards or pulling pranks, Grauman most enjoyed the unique role he played in Hollywood as the resident “theater man.” His ingenious ideas, along with his elaborate prologues, were legendary. He was the first to use souvenir programs and sell advance tickets to moviegoers. It was Grauman who thought to use searchlights for attracting attention. He even dreamed up that majestic red carpet. In recognition of Grauman’s contributions to film, the Academy gave him an honorary Oscar in 1948, more than twenty years after its formation, for being a “master showman who raised the standard of exhibition of motion pictures.”

  A few days after John Wayne left his mark in front of the Chinese Theater, Grauman died of heart failure on March 5, 1950, just shy of his seventy-first birthday. His obituary stated that: “Among his intimate friends, he was known as a great gagger.” Sid Grauman was also a great dreamer who shaped the way movies were shown. Proud of his lifelong association with the film industry and the many filmmakers he counted as friends, Grauman remained a humble man who often credited his success to “The Big Boss Upstairs.”

  While Grauman was busy cementing famous footsteps, actor Jack Holt was building his screen credits much to his fans’ delight. In 1927, he followed up Zane Grey’s The Mysterious Rider with two dramas. He played an Englishman in The Tigress and a spy in The Warning. His next film, The Smart Set (1928), was a comedy in which he fittingly played a polo team captain—a sport he understood first-hand. That same year he also joined the General Society of Colonial Wars in the State of California. Proud of his heritage, Holt was eligible for membership due to his great-greatgrandfather, Revolutionary War Captain and fourth Chief Justice of the Supreme Court John Curtis Marshall.

  The actor who specialized in tough guys had no trouble transitioning to sound. After leaving Paramount for Columbia, he filmed his first talking picture, The Donovan Affair (1929), a dr
ama directed by Frank Capra. He successfully played policemen, soldiers, gangsters, detectives, secret service agents, a deep-sea diver, seal hunter, lawyer, and football coach, clearly making the transition into sound with aplomb. He even took on a supporting role in Shirley Temple’s Civil War classic The Littlest Rebel (1935). In between pictures, he continued playing polo.

  Relations at home, however, were not so copasetic. The Holts were separated. In 1933, Margaret Woods Holt filed for and obtained a divorce through the courts in Chihuahua, Mexico charging that she and her husband were no longer compatible. Holt, required to give his ex-wife both money and property, took a financial hit worth approximately $100,000. All matters were handled through their attorneys with neither party making an actual appearance in court. Fifteen-year-old Charles, Jr. remained with his father in California, while Elizabeth, now twelve, traveled to South America with her mother.

  Later that same year, the Mexican Supreme Court overruled their individual states’ legal decisions declaring that a divorce could not be granted without a hearing where both parties were present. American lawyers countered this claim by asserting that couples did partake in these hearings through their attorneys.

  In 1939, the Holts were back in court—this time in California. Holt claimed that because his wife obtained the divorce in Chihuahua, Mexico, it was not valid. In his mind, if the divorce wasn’t valid neither was the property settlement. Mrs. Holt countered that the Mexican divorce was lawful and that she was entitled to half of his income. She also asserted that she only received about $500 each month, which was hardly enough. The California courts declared the divorce invalid since it was more or less obtained through the mails. Although the Holts never officially divorced, they remained separated for the rest of their lives.

  When World War II began, the fifty-four-year-old actor put his long career on hold to join the U.S. Army at the personal request of General George C. Marshall. Due to his expert horsemanship, he was trained at Fort Warren in Wyoming and assigned to the Army Quartermaster Corps. He held the rank of Captain and acted as a military horse-buyer. By the time he was honorably discharged, Holt had reached the rank of Major.

  After a three-year military absence, he returned to Hollywood, where he continued working as if he had never left. Now employed by MGM, his first feature was a World War II drama, They Were Expendable (1946), starring John Wayne and directed by John Ford. By now, his children, Charles, Jr. and Elizabeth, were known as Tim and Jennifer Holt—both successful actors, mostly in westerns, following in Daddy’s footsteps.

  In 1949, Holt tried something new. Inspired by his grandson, Lance, he teamed up with writer Carolyn Coggins and wrote a children’s book titled Lance and His First Horse with illustrations by Wesley Dennis, which was quite successful. He followed-up with a second book called Lance and Cowboy Billy, but Holt’s writing career was cut short. After suffering several heart attacks, he died on January 18, 1951 in a Los Angeles veterans’ hospital. The 62-year-old actor worked right up until the end despite his illness. His final movie, a western with Clark Gable, Across the Wide Missouri (1951), was released ten months later.

  Following a full military funeral, the L.A. Times reported that two days before he died, Jack Holt amended his will, angry about the “divorce” to the last. “To my wife, Margaret W. Holt who has been amply provided for in the past and for whom full provision was made in a property settlement, I bequeath $1 and no more.”

  Unlike Jack Holt, Joseph Arthur Ball never worked in front of the camera. He concentrated on the color behind it as one of Technicolor’s top team members. For Ball, 1927 was an eventful year. In addition to founding the Academy, he became a new father. His only child, David Jeremy Ball, was born on February 16, 1927. Just three months later, however, tragedy struck the family when Ball’s brother-in-law, Norman Osann, also a respected employee of Technicolor, shot himself on May 4, 1927.

  Osann had recently worked with Cecil B. DeMille as a technical advisor on King of Kings (1927). Authorities believed that the thirty-seven-year-old might have been despondent over some health issues. The previous day, Osann had asked coworker Robert Monroe if he could borrow a gun to use on a trip to the mountains. That evening, after Monroe dropped off the gun, Osann pulled the trigger firing that fatal shot. He left behind a message apologizing for his suicide, as well as a promissory note for $750 made payable to his brother-in-law, Joseph Arthur Ball.

  By the end of 1927, Technicolor Corporation released a short, The Flag: A Story Inspired by the Tradition of Betsy Ross starring Francis X. Bushman as the first president and Enid Bennett as the famous seamstress. The film’s high point came at the end when Bushman boldly unfurled the American Flag in a colorful wave. A hit with the audience, Technicolor continued manufacturing their color shorts to be shown along with black and white feature-length films in theaters across the country. With so much success and audience approval, the company then attempted their first color feature, The Viking (1928), starring English actor Donald Crisp, sporting a full Viking beard.

  That same year, Ball was appointed head of the Academy’s Technical Bureau. The L.A. Times reported:

  … The motion-picture is peculiarly a combination of art and industry, and it has been frequently the rule that the artistic development is proportionate to the industrial. The scientific side of picture making has never perhaps received such well-directed attention and interest as it has since the academy has come into existence and this gives every promise of being one of its largest contributions.…

  In addition, Ball joined two more committees sponsored by the Academy. He was a member of the Producers-Technicians Joint Committee focusing on issues that had an immediate impact on the film industry. During their very first meeting, they took on the challenges presented by sound. As a member of the Committee on College Affairs, he also worked on university curriculum and even lectured. The Academy also spawned the idea of a research laboratory. This facility would be established by the MPPDA with Ball supervising their work.

  With The Great Depression hurting the studios, most of them cut back on color film production. The Technicolor team, however, continued working to enhance their product. By 1931, many improvements to their process were evident. They cleaned up the grainy picture removing what looked like bugs crawling on-screen. They also brought the price of color film down from 8.75 to 7 cents per foot. Ball described his team’s accomplishments: “… improved sharpness, improved brilliance and a generally increased clarity and smoothness.” But it was still a two-color world with Technicolor supplying the film, the cameras and the approved cameramen. They also developed and distributed the prints.

  By 1932, the cost of color film dropped another two cents per foot while Ball and his team of researchers finally made a breakthrough. They discovered a method of capturing that elusive color “blue” with a 3-strip camera. This camera exposed three negatives at the same time through a single lens that sat in front of a prism. It took so long to change the film, however, that it was necessary to have a second camera on deck to avoid a break in the action.

  The first theatrical release using this new method was a Disney cartoon called Flowers and Trees (1932), which was part of the Silly Symphonies series. The singing and dancing fauna with their colorful leaves and petals resonated with spectators and even won an Academy Award. In deference to Ball’s hard work, Uncle Walt himself drew a picture depicting three of his most famous characters and wrote:

  To Arthur Ball in appreciation of the color that has given us new life!

  Sincerely, Walt Disney and the Three Little Pigs.

  As Disney experienced continued success with color cartoons, Mickey Mouse himself, always a pioneer, first with sound in the short Steamboat Willie (1928), soon converted from black and white. Other studios followed suit, filming shorts entirely in color. For features, however, the new technology was limited to specific scenes. The first Technicolor feature filmed entirely in the three-strip process was Becky Sharp (1935) with sout
hern belle Miriam Hopkins in the starring role. All scenes were filmed indoors and it wasn’t until the following year that Technicolor was tried outside the studio in The Trail of the Lonesome Pines (1936). Disney’s classic Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (1937), a full-length, color, animated feature, soon followed.

  In 1939, Ball was given a special award by the Academy “for his outstanding contributions to the advancement of color in Motion Picture Photography.” He also held many patents relating to color photography. In his later years, he acted as a consultant with Springdale Laboratories of Time, Inc. located in Stamford, Connecticut, as well as Walt Disney Productions. He also worked for the E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Co. where he helped develop du Pont’s motion picture color positive film and related products. Ball split his time between Los Angeles and New York where he was a member of the New York Athletic Club. He died on August 27, 1951 of carbon monoxide poisoning by his own hand. Like so many tragic suicides of the time, little is known about the reasons why.

  Like Joseph Arthur Ball, Milton Hoffman also worked out of camera range. By 1927, Hoffman was considered one of Hollywood’s most experienced film executives. Back at Paramount after a brief stint with Metro Pictures, he now reported directly to production head B.P. Schulberg. Instead of overseeing studio business, however, he was now involved in actual filmmaking. This was in addition to his new position as President of the Central Motion Picture District, Inc.

  This organization was patterned after the Chicago Central Manufacturing District and tasked with bringing the motion-picture studios into a single district. Their $20,000,000 project was called Studio City. Their ambitious plans included the construction of new studios, widening existing roads, as well as building new ones, installing sidewalks and private housing. Located at Ventura Boulevard and Pacolma Avenue in North Hollywood, Mack Sennett was tapped to build an $800,000 production facility while MGM leased property for their outdoor sets. Utilities including electricity and telephones would also be made available by extending current lines into the area. A ten-mile-stretch of Ventura Boulevard was one of the first roads to be widened between Hollywood and Sepulveda.