You Must Remember This (4 page)

Members of the Famous Players–Lasky Corporation, which eventually became Paramount. From left to right: Jesse L. Lasky, Adolph Zukor, Samuel Goldwyn, Cecil B. DeMille, and Al Kaufman. In the end these men created more than Paramount—they created Hollywood.

Mary Evans Picture Library/Everett Collection

It was a western, and it was a smash hit. DeMille had lucked into something big. As he ramped up production, he found that the area could serve as background for almost every kind of movie, from desert—about eighty miles outside of Los Angeles—to mountains—fifteen minutes from DeMille’s studio door.

Other studios noted the variety of locations. The gold rush was on.

I have a holster that was used in
The Squaw Man
, given to me by
a wonderful man in the Fox still department who had worked on the picture. When I got into the movie industry in 1949,
The Squaw Man
was only thirty-five years old, or about as old as
The Deer Hunter
is now—lots of people who had been there with DeMille were still working, as was DeMille himself. The holster is one of those six-degrees-of-separation objects—a perfectly ordinary piece of leather that is also a piece of Hollywood history.

For the first few years of the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company, Lasky himself commuted from New York and basically left production matters in the hands of his partner DeMille. But in 1917 Lasky bought a Spanish mansion at 7209 Hillside, right where La Brea dead-ends into the Hollywood Hills. The Lasky house’s most exotic feature was a screening room—one of the first private screening rooms in Hollywood—along with the already standard tennis court and swimming pool. Lasky wouldn’t have needed more than five minutes to get to the studio.

By 1915, the annual payroll of the studios in Hollywood totaled about twenty million dollars. By 1920 the population had grown to thirty-six thousand, and the new settlers were no longer teetotaling Midwesterners, but young men and women lured by the siren call of the movies.

There were still very few mansions in Hollywood, and hardly anything at all west of the town. Most of the aspiring actors and actresses, not to mention the writers and directors, rented hotel rooms or modest frame houses, if only because everyone was uncertain how long this movie thing was going to last and they didn’t want to overextend themselves only to be brought up short by the sudden death of the fad.

In those early years, people seemed to want to stay close to the studios, if only to keep the commute short. There were exceptions;
around World War I, the most fashionable address in Los Angeles—at least between Western Avenue and South Figueroa Street—wasn’t in Hollywood at all, but on West Adams Boulevard. Theda Bara lived there for a while, just around the corner from the extremely rich oilman Edward Doheny.

After a time Theda Bara moved out, and Fatty Arbuckle moved in. This was even worse. Bara was at least an actress, but Arbuckle had worked for the lowly Keystone company. He was . . .
a comedian!
He was making five thousand dollars a week, but he was still—
a comedian!

Arbuckle was living at his West Adams home in 1921 when the scandal erupted that destroyed his career and his life. He had thrown a party in San Francisco’s St. Francis Hotel, after which a girl named Virginia Rappe died. Arbuckle was accused of manslaughter; there were allegations of rape as well, although nobody who knew Arbuckle thought he was capable of committing rape. After a few trials resulted in hung juries, he was acquitted, but he was banned from the screen by newly hired morality czar Will Hays anyway. Arbuckle sold the house to his boss—and later my boss—Joe Schenck.

Agnes de Mille would describe Hollywood at that point in its history as “very lovely and romantic and attractive. . . . The streets ran right into the foothills and the foothills went straight up into sage brush and you were in the wild, wild hills. Sage brush and rattlesnakes and coyotes and the little wild deer that came down every night. And all of it was just enchanting.”

Los Angeles didn’t have traditions of its own, so it borrowed the older traditions of California, a place of Spanish haciendas and
missions and a sense of leisure. In good times and bad, one thing stayed constant in California: a feeling for light and the ways in which the land could be made a part of the interior of the homes. The houses were Andalusian or Moorish, Italian or Spanish, but almost all of them were in some way romantic—the basis for Los Angeles, as well as for the movies.

In those early days, Beverly Hills landscaping was in the hands of the Englishman John J. Reeves, who wanted a different kind of tree for each street, all trimmed to uniform heights and widths. Reeves specified pepper trees for Crescent Drive, just south of the future site of the Beverly Hills Hotel. J. Stanley Anderson, whose grandmother managed the Beverly Hills Hotel, told me that some of the developers thought that maybe pepper trees weren’t such a great idea, but Reeves insisted. He planted saplings, and they all blew down in the first storm, whereupon he was told to plant something sturdier.

“You are going to have peppers,” replied the stubborn Mr. Reeves. So the pepper trees were replanted and stood for decades, until they died off and were replaced with Southern magnolias. By that time, Mr. Reeves was dead and could no longer bulldoze his way through obstacles.

All this care and planning yielded . . . nothing much.

But they still kept planning, confident that if they just kept building, sooner or later the world would come. Los Angeles was the fastest-growing city in America, so some of that had to benefit Hollywood and Beverly Hills, which was right next door. In the early part of February 1911, Margaret Anderson and her son Stanley Anderson were invited to own and operate a luxury hotel. Margaret had another grandson named Robert, but years
later I became very good friends with J. Stanley Anderson, who told me many stories of early Hollywood.

Everything exploded outward in the 1920s.

The first fortunes of Southern California were created by oil, agriculture, railroads, and real estate. In Beverly Hills, real estate and natural resources were closely intertwined. (Real estate is still a driver of the local economy.) About this time, 80-by-165-foot lots were going for $1,100—the rough equivalent of $26,000 today, which just goes to show you that scarcity and location have more to do with the value of a piece of land than inflation.

The Depression affected Hollywood in a different way and at a different speed than it did the rest of the country. While most other cities were already in terrible shape by 1930, Hollywood didn’t experience the full extent of the Depression until 1932 or so. Paramount went into receivership, RKO teetered, and Warner Bros. lost most of the money it had made in the early days of sound.

But by 1937, the year my family moved to Bel Air, the tide had turned. The town was once again beginning to hum, not just because of the quality of the movies being made, but because the studios manufactured one of the few means of escape for a world that was still struggling with the effects of the crash. And so Hollywood created an alternate reality—a collective fantasy, if you will—for a world where reality itself was ugly and unmanageable.

In 1937 MGM made forty-seven pictures, nearly one per week, while Universal came close to that, with forty-four movies—both amazing numbers. Yet Warner Bros. went far past them both, with sixty-six pictures. Hollywood was truly a factory, churning out movies the same way Ford churned out Model A’s. A lot of these movies were low-budget B’s, produced to fill the bottom of the double features that the studios had devised as a means of combating
the economic downturn: two pictures for the price of one, with a dish giveaway in between them.

I first started going to the movies at the Carthay Circle in the Wilshire district almost from the day we started unpacking. I distinctly remember seeing Walt Disney’s
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
there—the grassy divider in the middle of San Vicente Boulevard, which ran in front of the theater, featured three-and four-foot-high figures of all the dwarfs.

In those days LA was a movie town to an extent that’s hard to imagine today. There was a big shipping business down by the docks in San Pedro and Long Beach—the second-largest port in the United States—but the driver of the local economy was primarily the movie business. In a few years World War II would change all that by propelling the airplane industry into prominence and broadening the economic base. Very quickly 750,000 people were working in the airplane business.

In 1937 I was seven years old, a kid from the Midwest—Detroit, to be specific. I was just beginning my love affair with the movies, which I was lucky enough to parlay into a career.

My father was a brilliant businessman. He made a great deal of money in the 1920s selling the lacquer that was used on the dashboards of Fords, then lost it all in the stock market crash and the Depression, when nobody had any money to buy new cars.

But by the latter part of the thirties, he had recovered enough capital to make the move to the West Coast, which had been recommended for my mother’s asthma. At the time, most of the movie people still lived in Hollywood or Beverly Hills; Bel Air was thinly settled at that point, but that’s where my father chose to live. I
believe he paid twenty thousand or thirty thousand dollars for a lot, and around forty thousand dollars to build a house there. I’m not sure if there was a surcharge to construct the street to access it, but it was in any event as new as our house on 10887 Chalon Road.

The house is still standing, and, with the help of a great many people, so am I.

Our home had three bedrooms; next to it was a pool and a guesthouse. It was Spanish in style, and had a hitching post in the backyard for the horses we were expected to have, and did. We didn’t keep them at the house, but at the stables at the Hotel Bel Air when it finally opened in 1946.

I immediately loved California, the way each block offered something delicious for the eye. Compared to suburban Detroit, it was intoxicating. Not everybody, though, was enthralled with the prevailing mode of architecture and decoration. Nathanael West wrote about the environment in
The Day of the Locust
: “Only dynamite would be of any use against the Mexican ranch houses, Samoan huts, Mediterranean villas, Egyptian and Japanese temples, Swiss chalets, Tudor cottages and every possible combination of these styles.”

West was a good writer, but I didn’t share his feelings—not then, not now. Los Angeles, like the industry it spawned, was first about creating desire, then satisfying it—a profoundly American gift.

Bel Air had been opened to development by a man named Alphonzo Bell in 1922. And yes, at first there was a strict policy that forbade selling to movie people, which I find ironic. It seems that Bell wanted his development to become the “crowning achievement of suburban development” and he feared that nouveau riche Hollywood types would lower his property values.

In other respects, Bell was a farsighted developer. He carved roads out of hillsides and installed sewer, power, and water lines
underground—expensive, but worth it. He also landscaped the place beautifully. The first tract he developed was two hundred acres, which he divided into parcels of several acres apiece, then encouraged buyers to purchase even larger lots of five and ten acres. He added polo fields, tennis courts, and my beloved Bel Air Country Club. He also built the Bel Air Stables on Stone Canyon Road and sixty-five miles of bridle paths.

And he installed the splendid gate at the Bel Air Road/Sunset Boulevard entrance. In the early days of the development, uniformed guards would patrol the entrance, making sure that no interlopers got in, and the private police force would escort visitors up the maze of streets to their destination.

All went swimmingly in the 1920s, but when the Depression hit, it was no time for artificial barriers to prospective buyers. Bel Air lots were going begging, and the area was teetering on insolvency, so Bell quietly let go of his strictures about movie people.