The Battle for Beverly Hills
Page 17
In contemporaneous press reports and Mr. Firminger’s 1941 article, the exact tallies vary by a few votes. According to the Examiner and the Times, there were 489 votes against and 326 votes in favor of annexation, with 32 votes declared invalid. Firminger’s article put the totals as 507 against and 337 in favor. Regardless, percentage-wise the “no’s” had it by a healthy 33 percent margin. Still, in absolute numbers, only 170 or so votes prevented Beverly Hills from becoming part of Los Angeles. Only 170 votes meant success instead of failure for the “battle of the real estate interests that sponsored the annexation idea, against the motion picture people who have chosen Beverly Hills as their home.…”21
The intense scrutiny of the poll watchers on both sides meant the vote tally took quite a while and it was late before the results were announced, but once the defeat of annexation was proclaimed the town cut loose in ways it had never done before, or since, for that matter. Victory was celebrated with torchlight parades, police and fire sirens, car horns, and a marching brass band playing “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.”22 In Firminger’s account “pandemonium broke loose. All rules were suspended by common consent,”23 meaning that corks were popping and spirits were flowing freely in open defiance of Prohibition. Otherwise staid citizens, including Beverly Hills City Trustee Norman Pabst, “commandeered the fire engine and had it driven up one street and down the other.”24 Steve Glassell, who had been one of the few real estate agents opposed to annexation at a meeting of the realty board in late 1922, passed out signs with “Glassell voted NO!” printed on them.25 In the heat of the moment, some sore winners among the anti-annexationists acted out: “Hose lines were connected to fire hydrants near homes of those who had favored consolidation and, amid the sounding of horns and the ringing of the [fire] bell, water was turned on the lawns. Reactions of the besieged were varied. One who took the whole thing too seriously appeared at his front door with a shotgun.”26 One of the lawns flooded was that of Burton Green, the largest shareholder of the Rodeo Land and Water Company, according to the recollection of Paul E. Schwab.27
The celebrations continued at private homes, and Pierce Benedict indicates in his 1934 history that there was a celebratory party on May 11, 1923, but he unfortunately neglected to provide a guest list. There is no record of Mary Pickford or any member of the Beverly Hills Eight attending any of the celebrations either the night of the election or in the days after. Like Mary and Doug, most members of the Beverly Hills Eight would remain involved in the civic affairs of Beverly Hills for years to come. In the late 1950s, as the only surviving members of the Beverly Hills Eight, Mary Pickford and Harold Lloyd would be members of the Committee for Honoring Motion Picture Stars, the organization responsible for the memorial sculpture dedicated to the Beverly Hills Eight.
Not so much for the larger-than-life Tom Mix. His time in Beverly Hills would not extend much beyond the fight against annexation; Mix would move away from the city not long after he was shot by his wife in 1924 at their home. Even without the unfortunate gunplay, Mix’s restless nature predisposed him to being peripatetic, moving from studio to studio, seeking ever higher paychecks. One of his most famous salary disputes was with Joseph P. Kennedy during Kennedy’s tenure at FBO pictures. Of Kennedy, Mix said, he was a “tight-assed, money-crazy son-of-a-bitch.”28 Eventually his high living, multiple ex-wives, and the Depression would bankrupt Mix, who died in a traffic accident in Arizona in 1940. Mix’s cowboy archetype would be an inspiration, however, to future stars including Marion Morrison, who would become John Wayne, and actor-turned-politician Ronald Reagan.
It’s impossible to know exactly what course Rudolph Valentino’s life would have taken. He was interested in every aspect of filmmaking, including directing. Valentino was also keen to own a vineyard, according to Frances Marion. He moved into Falcon Lair, his Beverly Hills estate, in 1925; in August 1926, Valentino died after complications from surgery for gastric ulcers and appendicitis.
While Mary Pickford would continue to remain active in the civic affairs of Beverly Hills until her death, the fight against annexation was a one-and-done when it came to her direct political involvement. Which was very much in keeping with Mary’s philosophy of looking forward. No doubt, the challenge of saving Beverly Hills from annexation having been accomplished, Mary was on to her next task. She had movies to star in and produce; an eponymous studio and a distribution company, United Artists, to run; charities, including the Motion Picture Relief Fund that she organized after World War One, to support; and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to help found with her husband and Conrad Nagel, among others.
Now that Mary Pickford had helped prevent the annexation of Beverly Hills to Los Angeles, the details of moving forward as an independent city were left to the men who ran it. According to B. J. Firminger’s account in the Beverly Hills Citizen, as well as the notes on his manuscript, Beverly Hills was fortunate to have the trustees they had. Firminger sings the praises of Silsby Spalding, the president of the Board of Trustees of the City of Beverly Hills, who eventually became mayor in 1928. It was Spalding, aided by many others, including Paul Schwab and Norman Pabst, and supported by the findings of the engineering firm of Salisbury, Bradshaw and Taylor, who put forth a $400,000 bond measure later in the same year annexation was voted down. The bond was to take care of securing new water sources, as well as paying the $250,000 to purchase the Beverly Hills Utility Company, the price of which was determined by the California Railroad Commission, the predecessor to the state’s Public Utilities Commission. After all was said and done, the Railroad Commission determined a purchase price for the utility service that had been set up by the Rodeo Land and Water Company. Had that been done immediately, it would have settled the issue without the threat of annexation. Firminger wrote about the kerfuffle, “Perhaps, however, the struggle made a better town. Smooth seas do not make good sailors.”29 It was an expensive sailing lesson.
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As she had done in so many other areas of her chosen career, Mary Pickford had been the first to navigate the unknown territory between celebrity and politics. She may have moved aside after accomplishing her political goal, leaving others to finish the job, but every journey begins with a first step, and it was Mary Pickford who took it. She had realized that having one of the most famous faces and recognizable names in the country could be an effective guiding light and a magic key that instantly opens doors that might otherwise be shut forever. Succeeding generations of stars with political goals took it from there. And judging by their accomplishments in being elected to the highest offices in the United States government, it’s a lesson that has been learned well by those who followed her in fame.
Between the late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, Beverly Hills was Rodeo de las Aguas, one rancho among many.
Maria Valdez lived on Rodeo de las Aguas, which she inherited from her husband in the 1830s. (The Beverly Hills Historical Society)
It was easy for the principals of the Rodeo Land and Water Company, four of whom are pictured above (clockwise from top left, Charles Canfield, Henry E. Huntington, Max Whittier, and Burton Green) to get into the water business to sell land. It was harder to find water beyond what they could gather in the Franklin Canyon Reservoir (top). (The Beverly Hills Historical Society)
In 1918, the concept of “movie star” was barely a thing, and yet Mary Pickford, pictured at right, along with Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin, and Marie Dressler, became the main attraction for Treasury Secretary William McAdoo’s Third Liberty Bond tour during World War One. The opening ceremony in Washington, D.C, raised three million dollars alone. (Cari Beauchamp)
Mary Pickford handily outsold her fellow Liberty Bond fund-raisers. Pickford would exhort the crowds to buy bonds, even going so far as to auction off one of her famous curls for $15,000 in Chicago. (Cari Beauchamp)
Mary Pickford, as “America’s Sweetheart,” may have been marketed as innocence personified, but
she was financially savvy and politically astute. (Getty Images/Hulton Archive)
The lush-lawn domesticity of Doug and Mary with two of their dogs at home at Pickfair belies the isolation and rusticity of the wilds of Beverly Hills. Neighbors, while few and far between, were also well known to the famous couple. Exactly how they liked it. (Doug and Mary at Pickfair, courtesy of Cari Beauchamp; aerial shot of Pickfair and its neighbors, courtesy of the collection of Allison Burnett)
Charlie Blair would eventually become the first police chief of Beverly Hills, but at the time of the 1923 annexation election, he was a fresh-faced patrolman who made his rounds by bicycle. (The Beverly Hills Historical Society)
Beverly Hills’ impending vote on annexation was not without controversy, and a bit of violence. Two months before the election, an “infernal device” was sent to Al Murphy, the pro-annexation editor of The Beverly Hills News. After a few days of torrid press coverage that stretched across the country, the whole incident was reduced to being described as a hoax. (Detail of the front page of the February 27, 1923, Los Angeles Examiner)
With the exception of the purported bomb sent to The Beverly Hills News, the competing campaigns for and against annexation were pretty tame. Mary Pickford and the rest of her anti-annexationists kept their efforts low key with no hijinks. The pro-annexation camp saved their one stunt for the day before the election, when a bottle of sulfurous water was deposited on the doorstep of every Beverly Hills home with a note attached. (A facsimile of the note courtesy of The Beverly Hills Historical Society)
Because it’s located on a traffic island in the middle of the busy intersection of Olympic Boulevard and South Beverly Drive, most of the residents of Beverly Hills don’t realize that this sculpture, entitled “Celluloid,” memorializes the eight stars who campaigned against the city’s annexation to Los Angeles in 1923. (Jonathan Brown)
After she helped save her city from annexation to Los Angeles, Mary Pickford remained engaged in the political life of Beverly Hills. Even though she wasn’t running for anything, her appearance at the polls at the Beverly Hills Hotel to vote on a bond measure for the city’s municipal services is a photo op. (The Beverly Hills Collection/Robert S. Anderson)
Will Rogers became the honorary mayor of Beverly Hills in 1926, and it isn’t too farfetched to imagine that, had he not died in an aviation accident in 1935, the man who made a living with his political commentary would have eventually run for elected office. (The Beverly Hills Collection/Robert S. Anderson)
Afterword
It probably didn’t occur to her at the time, but what Mary Pickford set in motion by enlisting her team of picture folk A-listers to campaign for a political cause, in this case against Beverly Hills’ annexation to Los Angeles, was nothing short of revolutionary. It doesn’t spoil the end of the story to say it worked: Beverly Hills remains an independent city now in its second century.
In 1923 the idea that film stars could interfere in places like politics, where only men of serious mien had gone before, was fresh and new. In all likelihood the more hidebound political operatives who were aware of what had happened in Beverly Hills, California—and there can’t have been many—would have been tempted to dismiss the whole endeavor as a one-off. They could tell themselves that now that the rich, spoiled stars of the silver screen who had wanted a city to themselves had attained their goal, they would flounce off back to the land of make-believe from whence they came. Oh sure, in times of national emergency, like World War One, the government could call on film stars to do their bit raising money and morale, but for all intents and purposes, that would be it. After being of use, the men in power fully expected the famous actors and actresses to respectfully step away from the political stage and return to the soundstage.
Needless to say, the stars didn’t do that. Between the years of 1916 or so, when the first actors and actresses began to get billing on the flickers, and 1923, the year of the annexation battle, the more prescient of that first wave of stars who had achieved fame and fortune realized that it was possible to also have political power. After World War One, the mutual seduction between celebrity and politics was on. Although it flew under the radar, increasingly the exposure celebrities offered began to be noticed by politicians and political parties. During the presidential election of 1920, candidate Warren G. Harding hobnobbed with studio heads and film stars, each circling the other to see how best to further their interests. Calvin Coolidge, who became president upon Harding’s death in 1923, was enamored of radio and film technology. Coolidge became the first president to appear in a film with accompanying sound. Local Southern California politicians crossed paths both socially and commercially with studio executives and stars on an almost daily basis. Other alliances between politics and Hollywood that would bear fruit in the future were also being forged. Joseph P. Kennedy, a producer with FBO Pictures in the 1920s, was carrying on a not-so-secret affair with Gloria Swanson. In those halcyon days of early Hollywood, with then up-and-coming Swanson on his arm, Kennedy met everyone. His sons would not only follow in his footsteps when it came to celebrity associations, they would outrun him. His granddaughter Maria Shriver would marry action-hero actor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who would mastermind a recall of a sitting governor of California before running for and winning the seat for himself.
Had Mary Pickford and her blockbuster cast of anti-annexationists’ foray into political action failed, had the vote in Beverly Hills ended in favor of annexation instead of against it, the entire celebrity-political equation might have evolved quite differently. (Not to mention, a city that looms large in the world’s collective imagination would not exist.) If the biggest stars of the day couldn’t come together in 1923 and sway enough of their neighbors to see a situation their way, would there even have been any subsequent celebrity interventions in politics? Would stars, even those like Ronald Reagan, who was president of the powerful Screen Actors Guild, contemplate calling on their equally illustrious peers to help them make the leap into mainstream local, regional, and eventually national politics?
Mary and the rest of the Beverly Hills Eight’s aim was to make politics work for them, and the methodology they developed was a success. In her approach to the fight against Beverly Hills’ annexation by granting access, limited as it might be, to herself and fellow celebrities, Mary Pickford wrote the first handbook for direct celebrity involvement in nonindustry political maneuvering. The next step was to transition this newfound influence on politicians into assuming the actual roles of politicians. It happened faster than most might think: In 1926, Will Rogers was named honorary mayor of Beverly Hills, and in light of his career as a columnist and lecturer who never shied away from expressing political opinions, it’s completely reasonable to assume he might have pursued elected office had he not died in an aviation accident in 1935. Helen Gahagan Douglas, who starred in one movie and married popular actor Melvyn Douglas, began her political career in the 1930s and was elected to Congress in 1944, serving until 1951. She may have lost her Senate race to Richard Nixon in 1960 (John F. Kennedy contributed to his fellow congressman, Nixon, in his battle against Douglas), but she exacted some small revenge by slapping the man who would eventually have to resign the presidency with the sobriquet “Tricky Dick.” The clever nickname was for naught, though. After painting the Democrat Douglas as sympathetic to the Soviet Union, Nixon won California’s Senate seat in a landslide. Next up from the silver screen in politics was George Murphy in a run for the Senate in 1964. Murphy probably came to the nation’s attention in the wake of Tom Lehrer’s satirical—and staggeringly politically incorrect—song written in 1965, “George Murphy,” whose concluding lyrics were “Yes, now that he’s a Senator, he’s really got the chance / To give the public a song and dance!”
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Lehrer and America may have been amused at thinking Murphy was a lightweight soft-shoeing it across Capitol Hill, but Murphy came to politics in much the same way the future president Ronald Reagan did
: as president of the Screen Actors Guild. That experience, plus Murphy’s instant name recognition, gave him the edge. It would offer Reagan the same advantage in his campaign for governor of California and president of the United States. Everyone already knew who they were; there was no need to slog in the political trenches that usually started with city council or school board seats for either of them.
In the case of the Beverly Hills Eight’s stand against annexation, it was about furthering their own agenda and preserving the independence of their city. Whether it was independence of the schools, a separate police force, or maintaining a garden-like setting, the celebrities who campaigned at Mary’s side sought and found common cause with their neighbors in their opposition to annexation. While many of Beverly Hills’ wealthy residents must have valued the insulation of living in a small city with its own small, compliant police force, that was adjacent to, but not actually part of, Los Angeles, none cherished it as much as the stars. The eight who came together to fight annexation didn’t broadcast that their agenda was primarily to maintain their privacy. Luck, timing, and talent had brought them to Beverly Hills, where they had discovered a refuge from a world that was very much with them all of the time. And while none of the rising stars bemoaned their fame, all felt the scrutiny, and because they were all famous—and flawed—they looked for ways to shield themselves from overzealous coverage. With at least six daily newspapers in Los Angeles alone, what the stars did, where they went, and with whom was covered relentlessly, becoming daily fodder for the broadsheets.