Big Dreams (54 page)

At last, I came to a box with Aunt Daryl’s picture on it, all blond serenity, and Michael nodded in approval and settled in for a soothing viewing of the old Cyrano de Bergerac drama that Hollywood had retold as
Roxanne
.

I
N
1887, Horace Henderson Wilcox, a real estate tyro from Kansas, parceled off a ranch outside Los Angeles, in Cahuenga Valley, to forge a new subdivision that he called Hollywood after a friend’s country estate back home. It was to be a saintly, abstemious place where alcohol was forbidden and emigrants from the rural Midwest would not risk the bite of temptation. Any religious group could build a church in Hollywood, Wilcox said, without having to pay for the land.

Cahuenga Valley lay in a frost-free belt of orange groves and barley fields. Truck farmers grew tomatoes, green peppers, and watermelons and sold them at produce markets in the city. A photo taken in 1905 shows Hollywood as a tranquil agricultural village, where a few farmhouses were set well apart from one another in a grid of dirt roads and citrus orchards.

Wilcox apparently did not have an abiding belief in temperance. He’d made a sneaky deal with a French family, the Blondeaus, by selling them a roadhouse in his subdivision on the condition that they not open the doors until after he had died. As soon as the good gray gentleman was in his grave, they set the bottles on the bar and enjoyed
a profitable run until their neighbors shut them down with a new prohibition ordinance.

The Blondeaus were forced to lease the premises. They found an eager tenant in the Centaur Film Company of Bayonne, New Jersey. Like most small studios in the East, where the fledgling film industry was located, Centaur wished to be as far as possible from the law—in this case, the operatives of the Edison Company, which held the only legal right to manufacture movies. Under the guise of protecting a patent, the Edison cops were trying to put the competition out of business.

In 1911, Nestor, a Centaur satellite, became the first Hollywood-based studio, but movies were already being shot in other parts of California. Since 1908, the Essenay Company had been pounding out Broncho Billy one-reelers in Niles, not far from Oakland, and would eventually complete 375 episodes. The Bison Company had a movie ranch in Santa Monica, while Biograph rented some property in downtown Los Angeles so that its great director, D. W. Griffith, could winter in the sun.

Sunshine was the key ingredient in enticing most movie people to the West Coast. The Chamber of Commerce in L.A. promised them 350 days of it a year. There were so many cloudless mornings and afternoons that most pictures could be filmed outdoors on the cheap. The sagebrush, the canyons, and the desert lent a new authenticity to the oaters that had previously been shot in the wilds of New Jersey. Industry moguls also took advantage of the immigrant labor around and employed Mexican and Chinese workers to construct sets and sew costumes. The moguls were glad to be close to the border, too, ready to disappear across it at the first whiff of an arrest.

A trip to the Coast in those early years was a pastoral vacation for a movie company. The streets in Cahuenga Valley were often unpaved and stopped dead at the foothills. Coyotes howled at night, and deer ranged freely. Signs on the trolleys in town advised against
taking any potshots at rabbits from the rear platform. The only cop in town seldom moved from the intersection of Hollywood and Vine.

As the studios grew, they began to restructure and rearrange the valley to their liking. Their unplanned clutter of office buildings and sound stages went up without regard for either the landscape or their neighbors. They cut down the graceful, old pepper trees on Vine Street because the berries left stains on the hoods of automobiles. Non-native species were imported to replace the trees, eucalyptus from Australia and palms from Hawaii.

The arrogance of the studios knew no bounds. Their pictures kept bursting unapologetically out of the frame, with celluloid cowboys galloping across lawns, jungle beasts wandering by schools, and the debris from car crashes blocking traffic. Movie people themselves were seen as a class apart—theatrical, unsavory, and probably guilty of moral turpitude. On occasion, children from established Hollywood families were warned to stay away from movie children.

The homespun settlers that Wilcox had attracted, farmers and senior citizens devoted to religion, were a literal-minded bunch. They had a basic mistrust of the way a movie blended together illusion and reality. Movies could not be counted on for the facts. Films might be newfangled and entertaining, but they were also powerful, confusing, and intimidating, sometimes making the lives of ordinary folks seem even more unrewarding and lacking in imagination than they truly were.

In his novel
The Day of the Locust
, Nathanael West described the bitterness and hostility of a crowd waiting in line for a movie premiere at a “picture palace” that was modeled on Grauman’s Chinese Theater, which had opened in Hollywood in 1927.

The city fathers in Los Angeles shared the ambivalent attitude toward movies—an attitude that the world would one day adopt toward their entire city. They praised the studios for spreading gorgeously composed advertisements for the land that they hoped to develop, and then raged at them for their wanton disregard of private property. Whenever they tried to exert more control, the studio heads would threaten to move elsewhere.

Some merchants and manufacturers in L.A. came together to study the situation. They cut quickly to the chase and conveyed to the city that the film industry had about 25,000 employees and added about $5 million a year to the local economy. In most quarters, the bad feelings soon abated.

Hollywood and the movies were synonymous by the 1920s. The studios were bigger, better, and smarter, always ready to put a new spin on their product. Carl Laemmle, who owned the Independent Motion Picture Company, a precursor of Universal Studios, was instrumental in changing the course of the industry by widening the focus of his company’s marketing to include the personalities of its
actors under contract. He had learned from audiences and exhibitors that some actors generated more applause than others, and that movie fans yearned to know more about their lives off-screen and who they “really” were.

Biograph Studios had a very popular figurehead, Florence Lawrence, who was billed as the Biograph Girl and paid twenty-five dollars a week. Laemmle hired her away for a thousand a week and circulated a phony story to the Saint Louis papers that she’d died in a trolley accident. He followed that by placing a statement in a trade journal that accused his rivals of starting the rumor and denounced them for such low tactics.

No, no, insisted the wounded Laemmle, Florence Lawrence was not dead! To prove it, he dispatched her to Saint Louis with King Baggott, IMP’s top male lead, and the two actors caused a mob scene and garnered even more publicity for the studio. In that instant, the star system could be said to have taken flight.

Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin were the first big stars in town. They made side bets about who could command the most money. Chaplin’s brilliant films had an obvious appeal, but Pickford’s popularity was harder to explain. At a time when feminism was on the rise, she seemed to comfort audiences by playing girl-women who were no danger to the sexual or political status quo.

Beneath her contrived innocence, though, she was a demon negotiator. Along with Chaplin, Griffith, and her husband, Douglas Fairbanks, she began a new company, United Artists, in order to grant them all more creative control over their movies, as well as to earn a larger share of the box-office gross.

The creation of Hollywood stars demanded an accelerated effort from the publicity departments at studios. They had to crank out reams of factual, quasi-factual, primarily fabricated, and grossly false releases to exalt the actors in their stables. It became expedient for a star to live on a scale befitting his or her astral stature, above all other mortals, whether or not he or she could afford it—in a Pickfair,
say, the faux Tudor hunting lodge that Fairbanks and Pickford built in the Hollywood hills.

The first map to the homes of the stars hit the newsstands in 1924. Fans could now conduct their own tour of the kingdom and judge for themselves how wretched they were by their distance from the fabled aura. Some people were amused by the tour, but others returned to their own homes feeling diminished, or fueled by crazy ambition.

No life could be as fulfilling as a star’s life. That was Hollywood’s message, so it made sense that the public applauded whenever a famous actor took a fall from grace via drink, drugs, or a sexual tangle. The mores of most Angelenos—and most Americans—were still those of the middle-western Bible Belt, and a fall confirmed that there was indeed something sinful afoot in the movies. Even the beloved Mary Pickford dropped out of the firmament when she dared to divorce her husband.

The attitude of most people toward Hollywood was firmly set by then. It amounted to push-pull, or attraction-repulsion, and the movie industry was quick to recognize this and would milk the antipodes forever after.

Hollywood had turned into something very different from the temperance community that Horace Henderson Wilcox had visualized. It had turned into Oz, and it only remained for a pig-tailed child star, Judy Garland, to consecrate the transformation by uttering what amounted to both an in-joke and an undeniable truth after she and her little dog went flying through the sky.

“We’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto,” Judy said.

A
WAY FROM SANTA MONICA
and the ocean, the skies were once again rinsed in iodine. Where Sunset Boulevard began its descent into Hollywood, I stopped to buy a map of the stars’ homes from a twelve-year-old Mexican boy from the
barrio
. Somebody had picked him up
in the morning and stationed him under a palm tree, and somebody would retrieve him again at night and shell out a miserly commission.

The map cost five dollars, and I could see immediately that I’d been had. It listed the present or
former
homes of a couple hundred movie stars, many of them in the graveyard with poor Wilcox. It even cannibalized the Ur-map of ’24 and provided addresses for Chill Wills (17984 Boris Drive, Encino) and John Barry more (6 Beverly Grove, Beverly Hills). There was an advisory note that stated, “Many Movie Stars prefer to live a secluded (secret) life.” You can’t be more secluded or secret, I thought, than in your burial plot at Forest Lawn.

I studied the map over a gin and tonic at Musso & Frank’s on Hollywood Boulevard. The restaurant was so ancient that the menu, still typeset daily, went in for dishes like corned-beef hash and liver and onions—dishes from the Eocene of cookery, meals that could kill you on the spot. Musso & Frank’s had never been a Chasen’s or a Brown Derby, but you could ordinarily spot one or two almost recognizable actors in the house. The waiters were old and crusty and had probably served a few crab-stuffed tomatoes to Chill Wills.

On Hollywood Boulevard, tourists were gawking at the sidewalk stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. At that moment, they understood themselves to be absolutely in California and nowhere else. They jumped from star to star as though they were on a treasure hunt, ignoring the evangelist who was standing on Nina Foch and handing out salvation tracts.

“Clark Gable!” they cried, just as I had done ages ago. “Marilyn Monroe!”

There were no soda fountains at Hollywood and Vine anymore. I didn’t find any agents lurking about or anybody being discovered, not even beauty queens from Tehachapi. As smog was to L.A., so, too, was beauty, omnipresent and virtually inescapable. You needed more than a pretty face to make it in the movies.

It could be hard on the beautiful when their luck or their savings ran out. Sometimes they took to strolling the boulevards and turning tricks, or worked as strippers or in peep shows, or commuted to San
Fernando Valley to perform in the porn videos that were fast becoming another thread in the brocade that defined California for outsiders, elevating mega-boobs and monumental penises into the hallowed ranks of beaches, surfers, and palm trees.

Beauty in Hollywood was just another commodity, really. Anyone could buy it. If the gene pool had cheated you, you could amend things by submitting to the scalpel and the sutures. The cosmetic surgeons around Los Angeles offered a dim sum of alterations big and small.

At a newsstand, I browsed through the ads in a local magazine and saw that hair replacers were as easy to find as auto mechanics. Radial keratotomists were set to adjust your eyesight and rid you of your hideously disfiguring glasses. Dentists of an aesthetic bent had the formula for bonding and whitening your teeth. The Leg Center could heal your varicose veins with sclerotherapy. Did your calves need enlarging or reshaping? Mel Bircoli in Beverly Hills was just a phone call away.

Cellulite removal, breast augmentation or reduction, scar revisions, penile implants, corrective tucks for protruding ears, forehead lifts, skin peels, and collagen injections for suckier lips—the phantasmagoria of options was rich enough to keep the nation’s stand-up comics in business for years, and yet there was something touching about the frailty on display. Again, it amounted to a longing for physical perfection that might well be a modern California corollary to the ancient spiritual desire to be cleansed of sins.