by Nancie Clare
History is full of “what ifs.” A case could be made that if Thomas Edison had not been so zealous about enforcing his patents for the technology that enabled the filming and subsequent exhibiting of moving pictures, if he hadn’t been so committed to building and sustaining the vertical monopoly he cultivated first as an individual, then as The Edison Trust, and finally as the force behind the Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC), if he had been less rigid about licensing his inventions and open to the creative ideas of others, the motion picture industry might have stayed in and around New York City and not have made the wholesale move to Southern California.
But Edison, the man and then the eponymous trust followed by the grandiose-sounding MPPC, spent considerable time, energy, and money sending agents out to patrol the New York City environs, seeking out the scofflaws who were using his equipment and not paying him for the privilege to do so.
By its second decade of existence, invention, reinvention, and innovation was already sweeping through the movie business. While the producers and Edison’s MPPC were doing battle, another revolution was taking place in the world of filmmaking: Stars were being born. Unlike legitimate theater, which featured cast members on the marquee, for the most part actors and actresses in the early days of moving pictures went unbilled. Chief among these new stars/celebrities was Mary Pickford, who had created a demand for herself starting in 1909 by making fifty-one films for the Biograph Company in the course of a year. Pickford would evolve from “The Biograph Girl” and “The Girl with the Golden Curls” to Mary Pickford, “America’s Sweetheart” and, not incidentally, the highest-paid film actor of her time. She would eventually move from Biograph to Zukor and Lasky’s Famous Players-Lasky Corporation.
And then Southern California beckoned.
The conventional wisdom is that the industry picked up stakes and moved across the continent for the light and the weather. That is far from the whole story. While the more clement weather was an attractive benefit, the move west was also a financial and creative reaction to Thomas Edison’s heavy-handed enforcement of the patents he controlled, including those for almost all of the early cameras and projectors. The West Coast was a five-day train ride away from Edison’s purview, and although he periodically sent representatives on cross-country train rides to investigate patent infringements, by the time these men arrived at the Los Angeles train station, the filmmakers, having received advance warning, would have packed up their cameras and headed the 120 miles to Mexico, where Edison’s patents couldn’t be enforced.
It was to Hollywood in early 1910—on the cusp of becoming part of the larger city of Los Angeles after being an independent city for seven years—that D. W. Griffith brought moviemaking technicians and many of his regular retinue of actors, which included Lillian Gish, Lionel Barrymore, and Mary Pickford. He shot a number of films all over the Los Angeles area for Biograph, including the first moving picture shot in Hollywood, In Old California, a melodrama about the Rancho era when Alta California was part of Mexico, and Love Among the Roses, starring Mary Pickford, on the grounds of painter Paul de Longpré’s then world-famous garden.
Although the Los Angeles area offered great weather—not only was there no snow, but the weather was warm enough to shoot out of doors even in February and March, something that was impossible in and around New York—and a wide variety of outdoor locations, including beaches, mountains, woods, and deserts, it didn’t offer much in the way of man-made diversions. Something the troupe of young actors and moviemaking craftsmen must have noticed. Compared with New York, where Biograph shot its movies in a brownstone on East 14th Street, Los Angeles and Hollywood must have been a shock to their system. Even forays outside of New York City for exterior shots must have held more allure than Hollywood in the early days. There were day trips across the Hudson to the New Jersey countryside and longer shoots that involved train travel farther north into upstate New York. On those trips, the Biograph company would work all day in heavy costumes and party into the night with everything from cards and dice games to singing and reciting Shakespeare. That wouldn’t be the case in Hollywood, which in 1910 was still a quiet village. After working all day the cast and crew would repair to Los Angeles, which was, in just about everyone’s opinion, a dump. D. W. Griffith stayed at the Alexandria Hotel; Mary, always frugal to a fault, stayed in far less luxurious lodgings with her younger brother Jack, who was fifteen at the time, and a few other girls in the company.
Breaking free from the constraints of the East Coast, both legal and creative, and heading to Southern California brought its own set of challenges. What the motion picture workforce found when they arrived in the dry and dusty environs of Los Angeles was both a blessing and a curse for the new industry. Everyone from the nascent studio heads like Zukor, Lasky, Laemmle, and William Selig to the young actors, actresses, scene painters, camera operators, lighting technicians, and screenwriters (called scenarists at the time) found a young city with little of the urban infrastructure—such as paved streets, readily available public transportation, universal electrification, and easily accessible telegraphy facilities—they had taken for granted in New York.
Mary Pickford described that first trip to Hollywood in both her 1954 series of articles for McCall’s and her subsequent 1955 autobiography, Sunshine and Shadow, this way:
“Our studio consisted of an acre of ground, fenced in, and a large wooden platform hung with cotton shades that were pulled on wires overhead. On a windy day our clothes and the curtains on the set would flap loudly in the breeze. Studios were all on open lots, roofless and without walls, which explains the origin of the term ‘on the lot.’ Dressing rooms being a nonexistent luxury, we donned our costumes every morning at the hotel. Our rehearsal room was improvised from an office which Griffith rented in a decrepit old building on Main Street. A kitchen table and three chairs were all there was of furniture. Mr. Griffith occupied one of the chairs, the other being reserved for the elderly members of the cast. The rest of us sat on the floor.”2
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Mary left out the less salubrious bits from her recollections of her first trip to Southern California. Hollywood didn’t exactly embrace the motion picture pioneers who had come west. In fact, the movie people received a pretty frigid reception from the city that would soon become the capital of American filmmaking. The city’s citizens complained long and loud about the first filmmakers. In addition to the people, who Hollywood residents had determined were a totally disreputable crowd, the film itself stank up the place. Silver nitrate film smelled bad, especially when the exposed footage of cut scenes and rejected takes was burned to reclaim the silver. Film stock presented a danger as well—it was notoriously flammable and buildings that housed it were always in danger of burning to a crisp. The landlords of Hollywood did their best to discourage what they perceived as a crowd of ne’er-do-wells with pyromaniac tendencies who made up the filmmaking community from renting in the city. “No Movies” accompanied “No Dogs” as prohibitions on “For Rent” signs and in newspaper advertisements.3 And it wasn’t just the making of movies to which Hollywood’s citizens objected; going to the moving pictures was just as unpopular. Most of Hollywood’s residents avoided The Idle Hour, the city’s one movie theater, which opened in 1910. In a God-fearing, teetotaling community like Hollywood, idleness was not something to be encouraged.
To those who had lived in more established cities, the backwardness of the urban amenities of Los Angeles, Hollywood, Long Beach, and Santa Monica came as a shock. What was also a surprise to the moviemakers was the small-minded smugness of the residents, the vast majority of whom had arrived within the previous ten years. The Anglo population that moved into the region had dragged along the same prejudices about religion, class, and ethnic background that were a fact of life on the East Coast. Even though the region had only been part of the United States since 1850, after being part of Spain and then Mexico for more than three centuries, it was as if the Americans who moved
in wanted to purge the region of any influence of its former Mexican identity. The new power structure, which included transportation barons and land and oil speculators, wanted to re-create the white, Christian environments they had left behind in the East and the Midwest, even if those places existed only in their imaginations. The only saving grace for the newcomers who worked in the moving picture business was that in the second decade of the twentieth century there just wasn’t a large enough population of citizens who fancied themselves of such high moral standard that they were in a position to judge “picture folk” and to carry through wholesale discrimination on a consistent basis, which isn’t to say they didn’t try. That, and land speculators would sell to almost anyone if it meant turning a buck. Well, anyone who was white.
The Hollywood of the early twentieth century was a far cry from what it ultimately became just a few decades later. It was founded as a God-fearing community by devout Christians and teetotalers Harvey and Daeida Wilcox. Harvey, originally a cobbler, had made a fortune in real estate in Topeka, Kansas, where he met Daeida. After the couple married around 1883, they headed west on the recently completed rail line that ran directly to Los Angeles. Before long Harvey Wilcox had set up a real estate office and entered the growing field of land speculation just in time for one of the region’s many real estate booms between 1886 and 1889. The couple began buying parcels of land in what was known as the Cahuenga Valley. Harvey made a map of his new subdivision, naming the ruler-straight streets he had drawn that crossed each other in a neat perpendicular grid. Daeida supplied the name Hollywood after a visit to her native Ohio. A woman she fell into conversation with on her trip told Daeida that her estate in Illinois was named “Hollywood.” Daeida liked the name and so did Harvey: Hollywood it was.4
Although the couple made frequent trips to the property they had purchased, much of which had been planted with citrus orchards, they didn’t live there at first. Then, when the region’s boom transformed into one of its frequent busts, the couple was forced to sell their fancy house in Los Angeles and move to more modest accommodations in their subdivision. It might have been the best thing that happened to the development on its way to cityhood. Before he lived on his property Harvey Wilcox was prevented by law from grading roads. Once he actually lived on his land, road building could commence. Wells were dug and windmills were built. Larger landowners dug deeper wells equipped with gasoline-powered pumps. Groves of orange, lemon, olive, and fig trees grew.
In 1891 Harvey died, but his widow persevered in the development she had named. Eventually land values began to rise again and lots began to sell. In 1903, Hollywood, with a population of seven hundred, became an independent city (only men voted). The very first law that was passed banned the sale of alcohol—no surprise considering the teetotaling founders. More laws quickly followed, including some that banned the transport of alcohol through the city, concealed firearms, bicycles on the sidewalks (interesting, since sidewalks in the young city were few and far between), pool halls, bowling alleys, slot machines, and gambling of any sort. Hollywood was a serious, sober, God-fearing city with no bars, hotels forbidden to serve alcohol, and little in the way of entertainment.5 What few businesses existed were closed by 10:30 p.m. every night and all day Sunday.
It may have been dull, but it was pleasant. For the seven years Hollywood was an independent city it was a bit of a rural wonderland for its residents. Wealthy Midwesterners built winter homes on large lots. Even John Toberman, who spent six years as the mayor of Los Angeles, built a home there. (The mayor’s nephew, C. E. Toberman, saw the potential of selling land to the moving picture industry earlier than most. He marketed the vacant land he owned to the nascent studios by advertising “Hollywood is at the threshold of a new era of development.”)6 Surrounding the homes were orchards. It was a city of “rural refinement,” according to Gregory Paul Williams’ The Story of Hollywood: An Illustrated History. Until, that is, it wasn’t anymore.
By 1910 it was clear to Hollywood’s municipal officials that the city could not sustain itself. Hollywood had a problem with drainage and, eventually, sewage disposal. Mud and debris would pour down from the hillsides into Hollywood during the rainy season, flooding streets and disrupting public transportation by burying the rail lines. Property owners who wanted to subdivide didn’t want to accommodate the need for septic tanks. And, of course, the more people who moved into Hollywood, coupled with the number of orchards, the greater the strain on the already limited amount of available groundwater. The idea of joining the city of Los Angeles, which had been anathema to the early denizens of Hollywood, began to seem more appealing. Encouraged by land speculators, including General Harrison Gray Otis and Harry Chandler of the Los Angeles Times, both of whom had skin in the game in William Mulholland’s endeavor to bring water from the Owens Valley to Los Angeles—water which, it had been made clear, would not be shared with other cities—Hollywood succumbed to what seemed like its inevitable fate and voted itself out of existence. Flush with the anticipation of all that free-flowing water, Los Angeles was like the kid who owned the ball: The game would be played by their rules. The sole concession to Hollywood’s teetotalers was a continued ban on the sale of alcohol, a concession that would not last long. Like most of the coastal basin, Hollywood and its neighboring city of Colegrove were absorbed into the evolving megacity of Los Angeles. It may have seemed like a good idea at the time, especially considering the anticipation of water that would be available when Mulholland’s Owens Valley project was completed in three years’ time. But in short order taxes and assessments levied on property by Los Angeles made continuing to maintain citrus orchards impractical. Agriculture and “rural refinement” as a way of life segued into residential subdivisions and movie studios. As part of Los Angeles, in the coming decades Hollywood would be unable to protect itself from the larger city’s urban blight.
In her recollections of the time, Mary Pickford makes no mention of any negative reception she and her fellow Biograph coworkers encountered in that first foray to “The Coast.” While D. W. Griffith and his troupe of actors went about their business, making a number of films throughout the region during the four months they were in the Los Angeles area, the preternaturally observant young Mary Pickford cannot have helped but notice the contempt in which movie folk were held by the locals even though the Biograph team kept to themselves. For example, to pass the time when the Biograph players weren’t actually filming, Griffith would encourage them to come up with stories. Mary came up with two right away and Biograph paid for both: For the first one, which she recalls was the outline of Jules Massenet’s opera Thaïs, she received $10; for the second, May and December, she received $15.7
While the reception from the residents of Hollywood might have been less than welcoming, on the other side of the coin, when Mary Pickford returned to New York, she and her brother Jack presented their mother with a black leather handbag. Inside were twenty-four crisp, new $50 bills. Charlotte Pickford had never seen a $50 bill; she thought at first it was stage money. In 2016 dollars, that $1,200 was the equivalent of more than $30,000. It was these earnings from her first working trip to Hollywood that Mary felt were the beginnings of affluence for the Pickford family. Mary always watched the bottom line. When she added it all up, Hollywood equaled financial security.
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If Mary Pickford had somehow missed the cool-to-hostile reception she and her Biograph cohorts encountered in 1910, when she returned to Los Angeles in 1913 with her mother, the treatment her fellow moving picture folk received cannot have escaped her notice. (Mary had married fellow Biograph actor Owen Moore in 1911 in New York, but by the time of her return to Southern California, she was already living apart from him.) Mary Pickford was already a movie star, though the term hadn’t yet been coined, so she and Charlotte Pickford moved into comfortable digs, a Craftsman-style bungalow on Western Avenue. For others who lacked fame and its companion, fortune, landlords were less generous. Prospecti
ve tenants were greeted with signs informing them: No Jews. No Dogs. No “Movie.”8
The love-hate relationship Hollywood—and Los Angeles, of which the former city was now a part—developed with the industry that would go on to define the region to the world was beginning to solidify when Douglas Fairbanks hit town in July 1915 to film Griffith’s The Lamb. Fresh from Broadway, he had his first wife, son, and entourage in tow. (Fairbanks did not travel light; his excess baggage fees totaled $52.44, about $1,250 in 2016 dollars.) Fairbanks, who had made a point of emphasizing in the press that he was a man of the “legitimate” theater, meaning Broadway, had danced around the emerging world of the flickers for a number of years, talking to producers, having screen tests, and waiting for the right (read: most lucrative) moment. When they arrived, the Fairbanks family stayed at one of Los Angeles’ finest hotels, The Alexandria (where D. W. Griffith had stayed in 1910 on his first foray to film in Hollywood), before leasing a two-story home on North Highland Avenue in Hollywood.9 Although renowned as being insouciant and high-spirited, Fairbanks was acutely sensitive to being half-Jewish. Overt anti-Semitism was the order of the day. The “No Dogs. No Movie” signs placed by landlords on buildings and in newspaper advertisements may have escaped Fairbanks’ notice, but it’s more than reasonable to expect he saw the words “No Jews.”