Go West, Young Women!

by Hilary Hallett

  IV

  A spotlight landed on the movies’ new home after the war, as tactics designed to exploit fans’ curiosity about the unconventional private lives and folkways of this first Hollywood became a staple in the repertoire of writers in fan culture. Put differently, Nazimova may have possessed the most sexually challenging persona in early Hollywood, but reporting on the colony increasingly focused on the unusual romantic lives and personal predilections of residents, describing the movie colony as a place of “infinite freedom” “where almost everything goes.”125 “In these days of suffragets [sic] and long-haired poets, bifurcated skirts and lisping ladies, it’s hard to know who’s who and what’s what. It’s getting to be quite the rage—this exchange of identities,” was how Motion Picture Magazine explained the colony’s penchant for topsy-turvy sex roles. June Mathis cunningly offered a view of such arrangements in two short scenes in Four Horsemen. The first displayed two lesbians nuzzling in a Parisian nightclub, one dapperly dressed in a tuxedo, the other in conventional feminine garb. The second involved a bevy of German officers dressed in women’s clothes whose entwined embrace created a single mass staggering down the staircase of a captured French chateau. “To hundreds of people that meant no more than a masquerade party,” Mathis admitted, but “to those who had lived and read, and who understood life the scene stood out as one of the most terrific things in the picture.” “A personally conducted tour of the Hollywood film colony” that Photoplay writer Adela Rogers St. Johns gave readers highlighted the unconventional gender role reversals this environment could produce. “On the left, the home of Madame Nazimova and her husband. I beg pardon lady? No, I don’t know his name, but I’m sure he’s got one.”126 The daughter of California’s crusading defense attorney Earl Rogers, St. Johns attended Hollywood High before starting work at Hearst’s Los Angeles Herald Examiner. After marrying Ike St. Johns, a fellow copy editor at the newspaper, she decided that work at Photo- play was better suited to raising their two children. James Quirk, the magazine’s editor in New York, hired St. Johns to fulfill the demand for on-the-spot interviews filled with local color. St. Johns perfected a style of celebrity reporting that turned personal “anecdotes” into stories that revealed “the secret of Hollywood’s personalities and the drama and melodrama that sprang from these.” Called “Hollywood’s Mother Confessor,” St. Johns also socialized with many of her subjects, hosting regular “hen parties” whose guests included the industry’s most powerful women with Frances Marion, her fellow writer, Californian, and best friend.127 The journalist recalled how as “the Movies swept the country,” after the war, the “news value” of “Hollywood-ites” skyrocketed. “Fan magazines had sprung up and every day the newspapers devoted columnar miles of space to film subjects,” Adolph Zukor agreed, admitting, “We co-operated by furnishing copy, raising the shades so to speak, for the public to look at us. Therefore, we had no right to complain if some people didn’t like what they saw.”128 Clearly the attention was good for an industry bent on becoming the entertainment and fashion capital of the world. Yet in retrospect it’s easy to see how such advertising spun a bit out of control, as “Hollywood took over where [P.T. Barnum] left off” and suddenly became “The Greatest Show on Earth.”129

  News stories marveled at Los Angeles’s development as the “Film Capital of the World” and the first new American metropolis of the twentieth century.130 A place considered little more than a dusty backwater in 1910 had become the nation’s fifth-largest city a decade later. Quickly becoming the most prominent industry in both the city and the state, motion picture production provided both the jobs and the publicity that fueled the explosive growth of Los Angeles.131 Migration to the city peaked immediately after the war, as 100,000 mostly native-born Anglos moved west each year to begin again in the City of Dreams. The young white women who continually disembarked at the city’s new railroad station downtown became a particularly visible eddy in the massive current. The Atlanta Constitution declared that, “10,000 girls go to Los Angeles every year ‘to become a star in movies.’ ” “There are more women in Los Angeles than any other city in the world and it’s the movies that bring them,” as one shopkeeper bluntly described the relationship in 1918.132 By 1920, Los Angeles became the only western boomtown where women outnumbered men.133 Such changes meant that descriptions of the flickers’ Los Angeles as a place of pastoral, innocent play vanished along with the pepper trees that Frances Marion so loved. Confronted with the opulent lives of the industry’s stars, and the growth of hierarchy and defined roles within studios, some likened this first Hollywood to a European court, its residents to kings and queens. Yet the spirit that animated the movie colony was hardly an aristocratic social arrangement that prized outward restraint, fixed orders, and emotional reserve.134

  Instead, keener observers compared Hollywood’s new environment to that quintessential modern metropolitan neighborhood of romantic self-reinvention, a Bohemia—a Hollywood Bohemia, to be exact. The regular references by the midteens to Los Angeles’s so-called movie colony anticipated the emergence of Hollywood’s identity as a bohemian third space, someplace “on the edge of town,” on the “margins,” where “clannish” and “outlandish” customs set the trends desired and criticized by others in equal measure. This “Chameleon City of the Cinema [was] as changeable as a woman,” “the biggest city of make-believe in the universe,” and a place where “the occident and the Orient” converged.135 The image of a shape-shifting, cosmopolitan city within a city keyed to self-reinvention set the stage for the development of the Hollywood Bohemia social imaginary that appeared. The economic and imaginative materials that supported the expansion of the city and its leading industry aided this process by attracting a native-born, female-heavy migrant stream. Such women were eager not just to become movie stars but to find work in routine pink-collar jobs made more romantic by Hollywood’s reflected glow. Valeria Belletti, a secretary at the Goldwyn Company, explained how the artistic airs and social culture at studios could transform even routine sex-segregated jobs. “I like the hustle and bustle of this life,” Belletti wrote to a friend back east. “Everybody but my boss is so nice and friendly—so different from a regular business office.” “You have no idea how glad I am I left New York,” she continued. “There was no place so full of romances as California, especially Hollywood,” she explained, before conceding that, at times, “it reeks too much of the flesh.”136 These conditions, in turn, supported the western-inflected bohemian style that Hollywood dramatized along the frontier of mass culture.

  Calling the movie colony a Bohemia will sound as strange to many today as it did when the article “Oh, Hollywood! A Ramble in Bohemia” appeared in Photoplay in 1921. This “Greenwich Village in the West,” it admitted, “was not so much exploited or propagandized, but pack[ed] the same wallop in each hand.” The idea that Los Angeles was too controlled by uptight, conservative Anglo Midwesterners to nurture anything but conformity became a cornerstone of the city’s image in 1913, when Willard Huntington Wright published his infamous essay “Los Angles—The Chemically Pure,” in The Smart Set.137 The city’s sprawling, sunny, suburban enclaves of bungalows violated the idea of a proper bohemian space as an urban enclave characterized by dilapidated, art-filled apartments, cafés, and nightclubs. British actor Allen Cambell, in a self-published rejoinder to Wright’s essay, argued that such clichés blinded most to Los Angeles’s Bohemia. Here artists took their inspiration from nature and often staged their revelries “at home,” which for Cambell meant “a little house” shared by four women and four men.138 Photoplay also trumpeted how this Bohemia’s “tropical” setting created “a reckless, buoyant, sun-warmed, ‘joie de vivre’ ” that differed from a “ ‘daughter of the pavements’ like Greenwich Village or the Latin Quarter.” St. Johns hit upon the idea of “exaggeration” to explain how the “peaceful country village” of Hollywood suddenly came to resemble “the Left Bank,” “Bloomsbury of London,” and “Greenwich Villa
ge when it was not a phony tourist trap.” What all these places shared despite their different appearances was their possession of residents who excelled at dramatizing their “artistic temperament.” Those who became stars working without sound on the flat canvas of celluloid relied on a process of exaggeration that distilled and enlarged new desires and fantasies. What the Loveliest Working Girl Made Good, the Glamour Queen, the First Lady of Romance, the Ideal Marriage, the Exotic Aristocrat of the Arts, and the Latin Lover all shared was their promise to offer fans lessons in how to discover a more passionate approach to life. And now Hollywood Bohemia, the ideal romantic environment, arose as a space in which to turn these desires into reality. Consuming Hollywood Bohemia let fans identify with an environment that valued daydreaming, originality, play, and pleasure at the expense of utilitarian rationality.139

  Hollywood secretary Valeria Belletti displayed the personal transformations wrought by embracing a bohemian spirit envisioned as a healthful, beautifying adventure enjoyed equally by women and men. “The bohemian colony in Los Angeles has it all over Greenwich Village because here they are real artists and not fake ones like you find in the Village,” explained Belletti. The daughter of Italian immigrants who attended Catholic schools in New Jersey before going to work at a theatrical agency in New York at sixteen, Belletti traveled west with a friend on a vacation after her mother’s death. Responding to the atmosphere, she moved to Los Angeles, alone, at twenty-five. Belletti’s letters to her best friend in New York lingered on the parties she threw with her roommates, where male guests “always bring some good stuff to drink and we make cocktails and dance” before heading off “to a number of real wild bohemian cafes in Hollywood.” Increasingly, her letters embraced the bohemian commitment to pleasure and self-actualization, confiding a desire “to seek and find happiness if possible.” Having realized she “wasn’t living her own life” back east, “due to some sense of duty,” she explained her new code: “Now I do what I want to do and I’m much happier and I believe I’m really fitting myself to do the thing that I desire most—and that is to write. I don’t know if I’ll ever amount to anything, but what difference does it make. . . . I want to write because that is the thing which will give me the most pleasure.”140

  The movies’ crassly commercialized product also made it easy for many elites to discount the industry’s art and artists and, therefore, its image as a Bohemia. Adela Rogers St. Johns and Anita Loos associated the colony with Bohemia to emphasize the industry’s artistry. In Breaking into the Movies (1921), Loos cautioned newcomers, “The colony’s outlandish ideas” were “the same ones . . . always associated with artists—a bohemian spirit which is the same whether in Hollywood or the Latin Quarter of Paris.” She further warned that, “no matter how pessimistically they may talk, these people . . . consider the photoplay a form of art and themselves as artists. If you think movies are a lowbrow form of making a living . . . you will be quietly frozen out.”141 Yet Hollywood Bohemia was always also a marketing tactic that conveyed the more sexually sophisticated, European-flavored glamour the industry purveyed after the war.142 The promotion aimed to sell the movies as much as to challenge the sex roles, work ethic, and social norms of the respectable middle class.

  But this tension—between the wish to market goods through their association with a life of exotic, liberated fantasy and the desire to carve out spaces on the margins to enact genuine rebellions against middle-class norms—has always lain in Bohemia’s heart. The first notable Bohemia appeared in 1845 when a newspaper editor asked the struggling writer Henri Murger for stories about male students in the Latin Quarter and the “grissettes” (“country girls” who moved to Paris in search of work), they loved and lost.143 Murger used Bohemian Life to propel himself out of bohemian penury, writing a musical and a collected edition that catapulted the author and Bohemia to fame. It also demonstrated how much bohemia sold a way of living as much as art. As Murger avowed, bohemians were those whose “everyday existence is a work of genius.” The most sensitive chronicler of Bohemia’s origins, Jerrold Seigel, argues that it arose as a space to express frustration over modern capitalist democracies’ failure to create a society based on fraternity, equality, and individual freedom for men rather than social atomization, egotism, and class divisions. “People were or were not bohemian,” Seigel asserts, “to the degree that their lives dramatized these tensions and conflicts for themselves, making them visible, demanding they be faced.”144 Bohemia housed the archetypical modern artist—freed or bereft of patrons, depending on one’s view, and forced to the market—whose success represented the triumph of talent over circumstance that bourgeois society valorized. Hollywood Bohemia promoted this image of its residents. But as a social phenomenon, it offered both a place and an imaginary space, where the young (for it was always understood as a stage of life) could challenge the hypocrisies and limitations of middle-class life.

  Hollywood’s bohemian new West built on American modifications that already incorporated women as artists and lovers, as well as muses and mistresses. Greenwich Village’s bohemians first modified its once hypermasculine scene, recasting bourgeois sex roles as women actively pursued creative and erotic parts. The first sociologist to study “Chicago’s Latin Quarter” found a similar adaptation.145 But in both instances, old sex roles often reasserted themselves if marriage and children arrived, since most leading artists remained men and most of its bohemian women, aside from those with independent wealth, failed to find stable means of self-sufficiency. In contrast, the movie colony visibly supported many more women artists. Moreover, the comparatively high wages paid even to extras meant that many others in entry-level jobs earned a living wage in the silent era. “Without realizing it,” Loos recalled, “I was in on the ground floor of a sex revolution . . . the transfer of female emotions from the boudoir to the marts of trade” as “female hearts of America” began “to flutter with joy as they flew from homes into office buildings.”146 Frances Marion remembered how many residents used “their new freedom” to pull “down all the barriers. . . . At first we were rather shocked by the behavior of our young,” she conceded, but the colony’s elders (Marion was in her thirties by this time) eventually “forgave the errant ones or looked the other way.” Put differently, women’s comparative success at achieving professional and social mobility allowed the industry to develop and sell a sexual culture that blended bourgeois Bohemia’s already notorious pleasure-seeking ways with working-class youths’ more fluid approach to understanding the relationship between women’s sexuality, their professional aspirations, and their moral character. The “casting couch was no fiction,” scenarist Lenore Coffee declared, quickly adding that the “sweater girl who gives her ‘all’ ” was the same as the one who “gave the same thing to a foreman to get a better job. I heard one woman say, ‘Well after all we’re just using a gift nature gave us. What is the difference between using this or using a voice the way opera singers do?’ I had no answer for that.”147

  The Los Angeles clubwomen who created the Hollywood Studio Club in 1916 sought to curtail the spread of just such sentiments, by building a “suitable home” for single women who were “constantly coming to Hollywood in the hope or prospect of entering the industry.” What mattered most to clubwomen, and increasingly to motion picture producers who aimed to protect the industry’s reputation as well, was the chance to regulate, contain, and transform these mostly working-class migrants into “a respectable, middle-class emblem of decorous femininity,” according to historian Heidi Kenega. Although the club’s financial support derived mainly from residents’ fees and gifts from motion pictures insiders, like Mrs. Cecil B. DeMille, it was crucial to the club’s public relations mission that the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) took charge of its administration. The YWCA ran the club out of a little house on Carlos Street until Mrs. DeMille led a campaign to raise funds for a three-story institution styled as a Mediterranean piazza, completed in 1926. Female mento
rs assisted club residents in their search for work and offered instruction in dancing and literature while creating opportunities for respectable socializing.

  Yet a 1923 report about the club’s residents during its first seven years contradicted the notion that these women were naïfs who arrived determined only to act and left disillusioned and despoiled. Of sixty past residents, twenty-four had divorced before moving into the club, and more than half were over twenty-three years old. Moreover, excluding the ten women who returned home or married, all but four former residents found gainful employment in a variety of jobs, including journalism, publicity, makeup and hair, real estate, set design, scenario writing, and acting—demonstrating the real opportunities some seized in the new West.148

  The figure of the “extra-girl” best captured the mounting ambivalence provoked by the colony’s single women. Discussions about the character and activities of these workers illustrated how the colony challenged both gender norms for single, young white women and a utilitarian approach to life. Even before Hollywood became iconic, depictions of extra-girls in fan culture assaulted traditional gender roles.149 But by the summer of 1921, a Photoplay article about the movie colony's social scene used “Hollywood” as a term to stand in for the industry and its personalities writ large. The article also claimed that what distinguished Hollywood most was that the sexual equality that characterized its bohemian scene made the girls equal partners in rebellion with the boys. “Oh, Hollywood! A Ramble in Bohemia” called “the ‘extra girl’ type the most notable and effective of the new classes. Indeed, extras composed “the background” of Hollywood's “Bohemianism.” Extra girls shared many characteristics with bohemians of the past, trading steady jobs “for the chance to make a masterpiece on celluloid” and living a “lawless, unpremeditated” “hand-to-mouth existence.” Putting their quest for artistic success and individual fulfillment first, they led lives exhibiting the bohemian commitment to passion, play, and self-actualization. Ultimately, the article depicted Hollywood as a place where young single women dominated a cosmopolitan culture that drew inspiration from their total emancipation: “Women can—and do—what they like,” for “they work, play, love, and draw their pay checks on exactly the same basis as men.” A picture peeked into the abode of one “of the mountain colony extra girls.” There a Nazimova look-alike, an epicene, dark-haired woman in “Orientalized” garb, lounged above a caption that beckoned, “The rough board walls, the phonograph, the Chinese housecoat, are absolutely typical of the mountain colony extra girls. How'd you like to live here?”150