You Must Remember This (6 page)

The Arrowhead Springs Hotel was in San Bernardino, in the mountains about two hours away from Los Angeles. When it opened in December 1939, its advertising proclaimed it “the swankiest spot in America,” and it just might have been. The “springs” element was not just an advertising slogan—the hotel was in fact constructed over hot springs that ran to 202 degrees Fahrenheit.

The resort was primarily the vision of Jay Paley, the uncle of CBS’s William Paley. The hotel was U-shaped, had 150 rooms spread over six floors, and three dining rooms. The most distinguishing thing about Arrowhead Springs was its interior, which was designed by Dorothy Draper. She rarely ventured west of the Mississippi, and certainly never soiled her hands with any project that would be patronized by show business types.

Draper was the designer for the millions; she had a column in
Good Housekeeping
and wrote bestselling books. What she ended up doing at Arrowhead Springs was a top-to-bottom design of the sort that was rare for the era. She designed
everything
. The dining rooms were done in black and white; they had oversize black-lacquered Chinese cabinets on the walls, huge plaster light fixtures, pink and white roses on the tables. The doormen wore forest green with red trim and silver buttons; the cocktail lounge was done in bleached walnut and Delft tiles. The swizzle sticks were black and red.

I went there only once or twice, and I can tell you that it felt like money. It also felt predominantly feminine, as if you were trapped in a layout from
Vogue
magazine circa 1940. Had it been 1940, it might have been more tolerable, but I was there somewhere around 1954. The Arrowhead Springs Hotel was in operation until 1962.

Six Hollywood fashion models at the Arrowhead Springs Hotel, circa 1948.

Time + Life Pictures/Getty Images

As it turned out, more people were interested in being by the Pacific Ocean than they were in poaching themselves in hot springs.
They headed down to the ocean, first to Santa Monica, and then, as Santa Monica got crowded, to Malibu.

Malibu began to become more desirable, and gradually became more exclusive since there’s less land there. Oddly, however, it took longer to settle than Santa Monica. In 1891, the Rindge family bought all thirteen thousand acres of what was then called Rancho Malibu for ten dollars an acre. The Rindges held on to the property for more than thirty years, finally letting go in 1927. It was only then that show people began settling in what came to be known as Malibu Colony.

In 1930 or so, you could lease a lot with thirty feet of ocean frontage for thirty dollars a month. Dozens of people took advantage of that bargain, including Barbara Stanwyck, Warner Baxter, John Gilbert, and three great friends: Ronald Colman, William Powell, and Richard Barthelmess.

The colony in those days was protected by a high stone wall, with a gate manned by an armed guard. When I got to California, they were starting to build houses to the south of the colony, and even in the mountains alongside the Pacific Coast Highway.

By then Malibu residents had also begun looking out to the ocean, to see what they could see. What they saw was . . . Catalina. Literally. But that wasn’t unusual; all through the 1940s and into the 1950s you could see Catalina from Malibu. It seems impossible to believe now, but in that era you could even see Catalina from the hills above Hollywood, right up until the era when smog began to develop.

The particular charm of Catalina has always been that it’s basically uninhabited. Twenty-two miles long and eight miles wide, the island is home to only about four thousand people, the vast majority of them living in Avalon, the town’s only incorporated city.

Like Malibu, Catalina was for a long time the province of a single family—the Wrigleys, of chewing gum fame, who bought the island in 1919. William Wrigley Jr. spent the rest of his life preserving and promoting Catalina, and the fact that it remains so pristine is a testament to his foresight.

But Wrigley wasn’t the first to see something special in Catalina. George Shatto, who was, like me, from Michigan (Grand Rapids, to be exact), had bought the island for two hundred thousand dollars in 1887. It was Shatto who founded Avalon, and it was his sister who gave that city its name, inspired by the idyllic island Avalon referenced in Tennyson’s cycle of poems
Idylls of the King
.

But Shatto went bust, and the island existed in an uneasy limbo for a number of years. Los Angeles was only twenty miles away, and everybody knew that Catalina was destined to be some kind of vacation destination, but no one knew when its day would come.

World War I put a crimp in tourism. When it was over, Bill Wrigley, flush with money, was looking for something to be altruistic about, and Catalina turned out to be his project. Wrigley opened a mine there, along with a rock quarry, and he even started a plant that produced stunningly beautiful decorative tiles that he called Catalina Clay Products. All this only increased his passion for the island; he built a house on a hill overlooking the harbor and Avalon.

At that point, there were only two ships daily transporting people back and forth from the island to the mainland. Wrigley doubled the roster of ships, so now a lot more people could visit Catalina. In 1926, there were 622,000 visitors; four years later, the total was 700,000. What they saw was a very lightly managed natural wonderland, both on land and beneath the sea—Wrigley also kept a
fleet of glass-bottom boats so that people could safely admire the marine life.

Most of the tourists were day-trippers, but they left a lot of money behind. I’ve been told that George S. Patton met his wife Beatrice on Catalina when they were children, but I’m not old enough to know if that’s true.

The movies came to Catalina gradually. In 1920 Harry Houdini did some filming there for
Terror Island
. Buster Keaton’s
The Navigator
was filmed off Avalon Bay. And whenever the studios needed a place to stand in for the South Pacific, they usually went to Catalina, as MGM did for the 1935 version of
Mutiny on the Bounty
.

By then Wrigley had built a splendid Art Deco dance hall called the Catalina Casino, which opened in 1929; the lower level houses a theater, the upper level the world’s largest circular ballroom. The influx of population made the island a kind of artist’s colony. Not only that, but the Chicago Cubs, which just happened to be owned by Wrigley, trained on the island from 1921 to 1951, with time out for World War II, when the island was used as a military training facility. From Wrigley’s study, he could watch the Cubs work out their winter kinks during spring training.

In the days before and after the war, Catalina was all about yachting, although there was also a smattering of aviators. The boaters clustered at either the Hotel St. Catherine or the La Conga Club, which had a private dock reserved for members’ boats. There were two yacht clubs: the Catalina Island Yacht Club in Avalon Bay, and the Isthmus Yacht Club in Two Harbors, whose building was built in 1864 as barracks for the Union Army. Then there was Moonstone Cove, a private cove operated by the Newport Harbor Yacht Club, and White’s Landing, just west of Moonstone, with two yacht club camps. I had a mooring at Emerald Bay for years.

Catalina offered superb fishing; the waters were roiling with garibaldi, yellowtail, kelp, white sea bass, giant sea bass, and bonito. And there were great numbers of abalone, although now they’ve been fished out.

Beyond fish that made for great eating, there were also barracuda, bat rays, horn sharks, and the occasional great white shark, the latter of which usually appeared on the west—or ocean—side of the island. I also remember the awe-inspiring sight of large schools of flying fish sailing out of the water.

It was in the 1930s that Catalina became a getaway for Hollywood folks. It now seems that I must have spent half my adolescence and young manhood on Catalina, and the other half at the Bel Air Country Club. How lucky can you get? I began spending a great deal of time at Catalina right after the war. John Ford and his crew of reprobates all docked their yachts at Avalon. Ward Bond was always there, as was Ford’s daughter Barbara and, for a time, her fiancé Robert Walker, who was unsuccessfully trying to get over his broken marriage to Jennifer Jones. Wherever you found John Ford and Ward Bond, you also found John Wayne, not to mention character actors like Paul Fix.

Ford’s group began organizing a series of softball games, and I was an occasional participant. I was Mr. Eager, happy to play anywhere, just to play. Mainly, I was at first base. Duke Wayne and Ward Bond had been football players at USC, and they were both natural athletes who also knew how to play baseball. The surprising thing was how competitive the games were. It was only a pickup game of softball, but as far as Wayne and Bond were concerned, it could have been the World Series—they both played to win. Ford was always there, but he didn’t actually take part much, which was odd, because he had been a champion athlete in high school.

Catalina also played a big part in my becoming an actor. It was while spending time on the island that I met Stanley Anderson. His stepdaughter had been hurt in an accident, and I enjoyed cheering her up by doing impressions of movie stars. I didn’t know then that Stanley was one of the founders of the Beverly Hills Hotel and had great connections in the movie industry. His stepdaughter liked me, and so Stanley would invite me on his boat. And later, he put in a good word for me with various directors and casting directors.

Stanley sent me to Solly Baiano, the casting director at Warner Bros. I did all my impressions for Solly—Cagney, Bogart, etc.—and he responded by saying, “That’s all very well, but we’ve already got Cagney and we’ve already got Bogart. What about doing
you
?”

I was totally stumped. “I can’t do me,” I said. “I don’t know who me is.”

It took a few years, but I eventually figured out who I was. By that time I wasn’t under contract to Warner’s, but to Fox.

Natalie and I spent a lot of time when we were courting on my first boat, a twenty-six-foot twin-screw Chris-Craft I had named
My Lady
. Natalie had never been to Catalina before I took her there, and it became one of her favorite places. After we got married the first time, we bought a thirty-two-foot Chris-Craft that we called
My Other Lady
.

In 1975 Phil Wrigley, the son of Bill Jr., deeded his family’s shares in the island over to the Catalina Island Conservatory, which controls 88 percent of the island. The island’s natural resources include six species of plants that are found only there. Other species unique to Catalina include the island fox, which was nearly wiped out by a strain of distemper; the population, which was down to less than one hundred animals in the 1990s, has now been restored to a level of over a thousand.

Then there are the buffalo. Yes, buffalo. How, you ask, did buffalo end up on this island? As with so much else, blame it on the movies. In 1924 Paramount brought fourteen buffalo to the island for a scene in their epic western
The Vanishing American
. When it was through shooting the scenes, the company decided to just leave the buffalo instead of going to the trouble of shipping them back to the mainland.

If you’ve seen
The Vanishing American
, you’re probably scratching your head—there are no buffalo in the movie. That’s because Paramount cut the scenes shot on Catalina. Ah, the wonders of the movie business!

But those fourteen buffalo flourished. The herd has grown over the years to about 150, and their numbers remain at that self-sustaining level. What the Wrigley family did for Catalina meant that the island remains one of the few unspoiled places in Southern California . . . and indeed the world.

As the movie industry expanded, the population needed more vacation destinations, which inexorably led to Palm Springs. The Springs got going in 1934, when Charlie Farrell and Ralph Bellamy bought up fifty-two acres of desert for thirty-five hundred dollars and started the Racquet Club as a way to defray some of their costs. Much to their surprise, it became a popular gathering spot for Hollywood actors who wanted to get out of town for a long weekend. Before the Racquet Club, there had been only the Desert Inn, which had been there since 1909 and was patronized mostly by victims of tuberculosis, who took bubbling mud baths at twenty-five cents a dip under the supervision of local Indians. A few years after the Racquet Club came the Palm Springs Tennis Club, but for the movie people the Racquet Club was always the main destination. Soon, the Racquet Club and all of Palm Springs had become a very posh resort. At that point, the main activities were tennis and horseback riding.