Dark History of Hollywood: A Century of Greed, Corruption and Scandal behind the Movies (Dark Histories)

by Kieron Connolly

  Cinema’s First Stars

  Universal’s Carl Laemmle only managed to abide by the Trust’s terms for three months before he rebelled, putting an advertisement in the trade press: ‘I Have Quit The Patents Company … No More Licenses! No More Heartbreaks!’ To meet the demand of supplying cinemas with non-Trust films, however, Laemmle realized he’d have to start making movies himself. Renting space in New York, he launched his own studio and set about looking for talent to put in front of the camera.

  Many actors and actresses were already tied into long-term contracts with the Trust companies, which deliberately didn’t name them, rightly suspecting that if they did, they’d become the attraction and would begin demanding higher fees. For this reason, Biograph’s Florence Lawrence was known only as ‘the Biograph Girl’, while Mary Pickford was ‘The Girl with the Curls’.

  At one point, Laemmle even moved his company to Cuba, but still found mysterious ‘tourists’ busying themselves photographing the company’s equipment …

  When Laemmle managed to poach Lawrence and Pickford from Biograph in 1909 and they began working under their usual stage names, Pickford’s weekly salary climbed from $175 to $10,000, with a yearly bonus of $300,000. At a time when women in most US states didn’t even have the vote, Pickford was able to choose her co-stars and directors. Movie acting, for a select few, rapidly became the highest paid profession in the world.

  Not that the Trust had given up trying to police the use of cameras. At one point, Laemmle even moved his company to Cuba, but still found mysterious ‘tourists’ busying themselves photographing the company’s equipment rather than Mary Pickford. Attempts were also made to discredit the independents. ‘How can an ex-huckster, ex-bellboy, ex-tailor, ex-advertising man, exbookmaker know anything about picture quality?’ ran an editorial in the trade paper Moving Picture World. ‘Hands that would be more properly employed with a push cart on the lower East Side are responsible for directing stage plays and making pictures of them.’

  At first, Mary Pickford’s studio billed her as ‘The Girl with the Curls’, correctly anticipating that if she was named she’d become a star and would demand more money and special treatment.

  Then, in 1910, when the Trust began an attempt to control distribution and William Fox refused, it bribed an exhibitor to screen some of Fox’s films in a brothel, thus giving the Trust grounds to cancel his licence. Infuriated, Fox encouraged the government to bring a Federal suit against the Trust. It was the beginning of the end for Edison’s control over cinema. And when, in 1912, Laemmle won a legal victory over the Trust, the independents were free to use any camera they chose. At the end of that year, the US government issued an anti-competitive suit against the Trust, but by then Laemmle, Fox and Zukor were already succeeding despite the Trust’s demands. The Trust had been broken: that year half of American films were made by independents. In 1918, it was formally dissolved.

  A 1909 advertisement in trade newspaper Moving Picture World calling for companies to break away from the restrictions of Edison’s Trust and work independently.

  An 1887 estate agent’s map of Hollywood land for development. Hollywood film-makers first encountered an area renowned for its balmy orange and avocado gardens.

  WHY IS IT CALLED ‘HOLLYWOOD’?

  DAEIDA HARTELL WILCOX Beveridge and her husband, Harvey Wilcox, moved to southern California in 1886 and bought 200 acres of apricot and fig groves near Los Angeles at the cost of $150 an acre. While travelling by train to visit family in her hometown in Hicksville, Ohio, Daeida met a woman from the Chicago area, who lived on a country estate that she referred to as ‘Hollywood’. Liking the name, Daeida gave it to her new California ranch. After Wilcox failed at fruit farming, the couple divided the property into lots to sell them off. By 1910, when the film-makers began to arrive, Hollywood still had a population of only 166.

  A BARN IN HOLLYWOOD

  CECIL B. DEMILLE, in 1913, had been preparing to film a Western, The Squaw Man. Until then many Westerns had been made way out west… west New Jersey, but DeMille was going to be shooting in winter and New Jersey wouldn’t do, so they settled on Arizona. DeMille, his crew of three and one actor left by train from New York. After two days, they reached Flagstaff, Arizona, but a snowstorm was raging. They quickly reboarded the train and carried on to Los Angeles, knowing that other crews had made short films there in the winter and that there were laboratories to process the film.

  From LA, they sent back a telegram to New York: ‘FLAGSTAFF NO GOOD FOR OUR PURPOSE, HAVE PROCEEDED TO CALIFORNIA. WANT AUTHORITY TO RENT BARN IN PLACE CALLED HOLLYWOOD.’ The barn cost $75 a month. Sam Goldwyn, their financial backer, authorized the rent, stating, ‘DON’T MAKE ANY LONG COMMITMENT.’ Goldwyn subsequently moved to Los Angeles and made films there for the next 40 years.

  Way out West

  So why did film-makers leave cultured New York, with its Broadway actors at hand, cross the country and re-establish themselves in southern California? There are several reasons. In the early days of cinema, all scenes, whether interiors or exteriors, were filmed outside. With interiors of film sets having no ceilings, sunlight was used to light a scene, and if the weather clouded over, filming stopped. With its very bright light and warm, even climate, California was perfect for film-makers. And Los Angeles in particular, situated between the ocean and the desert, with the Santa Monica Mountains as a backdrop, offered a wide range of exterior locations. Also, land was less expensive there and, as Los Angeles was still the country’s main non-unionized city, labour was cheaper, too.

  Then there was the boom city of Los Angeles itself. In 1850, the whole LA area from coast to desert had a population of only around 2500 people. By 1890 about 150,000 people lived there. What had happened in between? In the 1870s and 1880s, the railroad had opened up the Los Angeles basin. LA could now be reached in five days from New York. And, as an incentive to move west, fares were cheap: $1 for a train ticket from Kansas City to LA. And when in 1892 oil was discovered in Los Angeles, the city became a place of opportunity for new ventures.

  But there was one more reason, too: LA was 3000 miles from the harassment of the Trust. Not that the Trust didn’t follow the film-makers to California. ‘Every now and then I would see him standing on a rise watching us through field glasses,’ wrote producer Fred J. Balshofer of his experiences in 1910 with Trust detective Al McCoy. ‘Whenever I spotted him, I’d send one of the cowboys riding in his direction with instructions just to inquire who he was, but McCoy would always disappear before the rider reached him.’

  Balshofer thought he’d seen the back of McCoy, but becoming aware of a break-in at his office one night, he and a colleague, George Gebhardt, armed with a pistol, approached the building. ‘Gebhardt jammed the gun into the man’s back and barked “Hands up!”’ he recalled. The man dropped a package to the floor and begged them not to shoot. It was their own camera boy, who’d been persuaded by McCoy to take photographs of their Pathé camera. After that Balshofer wrapped the camera in a Navajo blanket and stored it in a bank vault every night. Then, when subpoenaed by the Trust, he removed it before they could place a court order to open up the bank vault. In this way, he managed to complete his film.

  The Trust was fighting a losing battle. But even after it had lost control of the copyright on cameras, it still tried to protect the short films that its companies made.

  The Squaw Man was the first feature-length movie made in Hollywood and its makers were wary of the Trust’s interference. ‘They were making easy money with little effort on short films,’ wrote its producer Jesse L. Lasky of the Trust. ‘They were afraid longer films would ruin the whole business by driving patrons out of the theatres with eyestrain and boredom – or, worse still, the public might get to like long pictures and force the film-makers to worry about heavier financing and genuine creative talent.’

  The first feature film made in Hollywood, The Squaw Man (1914) tells the story of an English aristocrat in the Wild West who sca
ndalously falls in love with a Native American.

  Quite literally, the Trust was missing the bigger picture. Adolph Zukor had recognized that while the Trust was busy with litigation, its audience was becoming bored by its product. Longer films with more complex stories were needed. The first film Zukor distributed was a 52-minute French movie about the love affairs of Queen Elizabeth I of England, while the first film he produced was an adaptation of the novel The Prisoner of Zenda.

  Don’t Come Knocking

  Today, Hollywood may be the home of American cinema, but initially film-makers found themselves unwelcome. Rooming houses, aware of the rumours about debauched show business folk, left signs in their windows reading, ‘No dogs! No actors!’ Agnes DeMille, niece of director Cecil B. DeMille, remembered that before the film-makers arrived, Hollywood was populated ‘by citizens of the Middle West who had come to the Coast to die at ease in the sun’. The existing population of farmers, early oil tycoons and estate agents regarded the ‘movie colony’ as a passing fad. Hollywood’s elite has now come to own some of the most expensive properties around LA, but back then, as Agnes DeMille wrote, ‘The contempt of the real estate operator for the movie was without blemish; it was his one perfect characteristic.’

  Rooming houses, aware of the rumours about debauched show business folk, left signs reading, ‘No dogs! No actors!’

  Opened by Carl Laemmle in 1915, Universal City Studio wasn’t situated in Hollywood itself because no one there would sell to the film-maker. Instead, he built his studio just over the Santa Monica Mountains in the San Fernando Valley.

  BIRTH OF A NATION

  D.W. GRIFFITH’S BIRTH of a Nation (1915) has the mixed honour of being not only a hit film, and the first movie to be regarded as serious entertainment, but also as being responsible for a revival in the Ku Klux Klan. Portraying the period around the American Civil War as an assault on the dignity of the South and the virtue of its women by black-loving Northerners and African-Americans (played by white actors in blackface), it characterizes the Ku Klux Klan as a heroic force that was restoring order. African-Americans for their part are depicted as stupid, vindictive and sexually aggressive. Perhaps not surprisingly, the film provoked protest from the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People) and white liberals, and led to riots in Boston and, it is believed, 22 lynchings in Georgia in the year it was released. There was even a ten-year surge in Klan membership, which reached eight million. The film, though frequently banned, was shown widely and became the highest-grossing film ever until another Civil War epic, Gone with the Wind, was released 24 years later.

  The controversy around the film would have a long-lasting consequence within Hollywood cinema. After Birth of a Nation, rather than upset anyone with positive or negative depictions of African-Americans, Hollywood simply omitted them altogether or relegated them to weak supporting roles as clowns, singers, dancers and servants. With a few exceptions, African-American characters became notable by their absence for three decades of Hollywood cinema.

  Lillian Gish in Birth of a Nation. It was the most expensive movie of its time and, although its triumphant portrayal of the Ku Klux Klan was controversial, it became a major hit.

  Altogether, old Hollywood could be actively hostile to film-makers. Cecil B. DeMille was shot at twice by angry residents while filming The Squaw Man, and, after the first negative of the film was sabotaged, he began sleeping in the film lab to protect his copy of the movie.

  Despite their frosty reception from the Los Angeles population, the first Hollywood studio entrepreneurs were not to be deterred. And when, in 1914, Carl Laemmle found no one would sell him land in Hollywood, he bought a 230-acre ranch on the other side of the Santa Monica Mountains in the San Fernando Valley – and began building a giant studio there: Universal. A year later, 200 Universal employees boarded a special train from New York to take them to their new jobs in southern California. On arriving in Los Angeles after the hot Midwest plains, one traveller described it as ‘like coming out of an inferno into paradise’.

  Fortunes of War

  Once Europe had dominated American cinema, but even World War I was to work in Hollywood’s favour. With the European film industries destabilized between 1914 and 1918, the US companies could take a firmer hold on their own industry and also expand more into Europe and other foreign markets. By the end of the war, American films made up 80 per cent of movies being shown on European and other foreign screens, while film-making had become the United States’ fifth largest industry.

  By 1919, Hollywood was the heart of American film-making and the first movie stars had emerged. ‘It is fatal for a producer to sacrifice the production as a whole just to include them in the cast’, warned one British trade newspaper. In the 1920s, movie stars power would drive up box-office takings, and stars became America’s royalty, with their wealth and sense of entitlement allowing them to enjoy excessive lives of sex and drugs. Overdoses and murder would follow. Hollywood scandal had begun.

  The cast and crew of The Squaw Man at the end of the first day of filming. The film’s director, Cecil B. DeMille, is standing in the centre in the light grey suit.

  ‘All I need to make a comedy is a park, a policeman and a pretty girl,’ said Charlie Chaplin. Unfortunately, it was Chaplin’s taste in pretty girls that was the trouble. Twice he hurried to Mexico to marry pregnant girlfriends who were under age.

  II

  HOLLYWOOD

  THE SILENT TWENTIES

  In the 1920s, star power reached new heights – Charlie Chaplin, Fatty Arbuckle and Gloria Swanson were each earning $1 million a year. Stars married, remarried and enjoyed numerous affairs, built opulent homes and threw wild parties. Some became drug addicts, at times fatally. They lived high, perhaps fearing that the bubble of their enormous success could easily soon burst. For some it certainly did.

  ‘Hollywood’s a place where the circus is permanently in town.’

  In 1914 English comedian Charlie Chaplin was touring America in a vaudeville act when he was spotted and signed up for movies with Mack Sennett’s Keystone Studios. While at Keystone creating his tramp character, the 25-year-old also pursued his interest in girls of barely legal age. Raoul Walsh, then an actor (later a director), remembered arriving at Keystone one morning to find it closed. The gateman explained that six months earlier a pretty 17-year-old girl had played several small parts, but then found herself pregnant. Her mother approached the District Attorney, but Sennett had a friend in the DA’s office, who warned the studio: ‘If anybody had anything to do with the girl, tell them to get out of town for a few days.’

  ‘And would you believe it, the whole studio took off,’ said the gateman.

  ‘Did Chaplin go?’ asked Walsh.

  The gateman responded quickly: ‘Go? He was the first to leave.’

  Chaplin got away that time, but he certainly hadn’t learnt his lesson. Four years later, he met 16-year-old actress Mildred Harris. When she later announced that she was pregnant, they quickly married – at that time 17 being the age of consent in California. The pregnancy turned out to be a false alarm and within two years they’d separated. Harris cited Chaplin’s mental cruelty as grounds for divorce, but there were rumours that she was in a romantic relationship with lesbian actress Alla Nazimova.

  Aviation was one of the early stars’ first indulgences. In 1919, Chaplin’s brother Sydney launched his own airline. Pictured at Chaplin’s aerodrome are, right to left, Charlie Chaplin, his first wife Mildred Harris, and actors Mary Pickford, Marjorie Daw and Douglas Fairbanks.

  Child Brides

  Still, undeterred, in November 1924, when he was 35, Chaplin quickly took 16-year-old Lita Grey (originally Lolita MacMurray) across the border to Mexico to get married. She, too, was already pregnant. He’d first met her when she was seven in Kitty’s Come-on Inn tearoom, where her mother was a waitress, and had later cast her in The Kid (1921) and The Gold Rush (1925). When their son, Charles Spencer Chaplin
Jr, was born the following May, Chaplin sent Grey and the baby into hiding until late June, when he could make a birth announcement to the Press – nine months, rather than seven months, after their wedding.

  Although Chaplin and Grey had a second child, Sydney Earle Chaplin, Grey is barely mentioned in Chaplin’s autobiography. Their unhappy marriage left the perfectionist Chaplin spending as long as possible at the studio finishing The Gold Rush and his subsequent film, The Circus (1928). In late 1926, Grey took their children and left.

  While Mildred Harris had quietly left with $100,000 and some property, Grey’s bill of divorce ran to a lengthy 52 pages, including allegations of infidelity, abuse and descriptions of Chaplin’s ‘abnormal, unnatural, perverted and degenerate sexual desires’. Such content made headline news and pirated copies of the document were quickly circulated. Keen to limit the bad press, Chaplin agreed to a $600,000 settlement, the highest at that time.

  Despite some calls for Chaplin’s work to be banned, and with the stress blamed for turning his hair prematurely white, the scandal didn’t actually seem to hurt Chaplin’s popularity at the box office, and he went on to greater success in the 1930s with City Lights (1931) and Modern Times (1936).

  Chaplin quickly took 16-year-old Lita Grey across the border to Mexico to get married. She, too, was already pregnant.

  Lita Grey with her children by Chaplin. In acting for a divorce settlement from Chaplin, Grey’s lawyers threatened to reveal the names of ‘five prominent motion-picture actresses’ with whom Chaplin had been intimate during their brief marriage.