You Must Remember This (8 page)

Interestingly, almost all of the town’s serious bettors were men;
of the women, only Constance Bennett is said to have been able to hold her own at the poker tables. Clifton Webb told me that whoever was hosting the game would bank the money the next morning—nobody wanted to walk around with hundreds of thousands of dollars—and checks would be handed out later that day.

I was close friends with Connie Bennett’s husband Gilbert Roland, with whom I worked in
Beneath the 12-Mile Reef.
It seems that one night Gil lost fifty thousand dollars at the poker game. The problem was that Gil didn’t have fifty thousand dollars, or anything even close to it, so Connie had to make the debt good. As she handed over the check, she said, “Oh, the fucking I’m getting for the fucking I’m getting.”

Gil was a spectacular-looking man, very passionate, extremely romantic. He would talk about his remarkable history with women, but not in a graphic way. Women meant a great deal to him; life meant a great deal to him.

Gambling has always been one of the main participatory sports in Hollywood, always illegal, often tolerated, usually thriving. In
The Big Sleep
Raymond Chandler wrote about a place called the Cypress Club, a barely disguised version of the Clover Club, which was above the Sunset Strip, just west of the Chateau Marmont.

Opened in 1933, the Clover Club was the creation of Billy Wilkerson, director Raoul Walsh, and Al and Lew Wertheimer. The only way to gain entrance to the Clover Club was through membership—i.e., money—or if they knew you.

The food was excellent at the Clover Club, but the main attraction was gambling. The Clover Club, along with other, less renowned venues, were variations on the speakeasies that had thrived during Prohibition.

It was surprising how well known these places were, even
though they were ostensibly illegal. Radio broadcasts featured them. The newspapers covered them as well, noting that such people as David Selznick and Gregory Ratoff—also a heavy gambler—were patronizing the Clover Club. Some clubs even advertised, usually using the word “exclusive” in the copy. When the Clover closed, Lew Wertheimer went on the payroll at Fox because Joe Schenck was into him for serious money. The Fox stockholders helped him pay it off.

Then there were the gambling ships moored just beyond the three-mile limit. One of them was the
Tango
, which began operating off Venice Beach in 1929 and was still there ten years later. The
Johanna Smith
billed itself as “the world’s most famous gambling ship.” But the one that seemed the most heavily patronized was the
Rex
, which was moored off Santa Monica for years, in full view of shore. To ferry people out to the
Rex
, there were three barges and a fleet of water taxis. The ads in the newspapers announced:

Only 10 minutes from Hollywood, plus a comfortable 10-minute boat ride to the REX.

25 cents round trip from Santa Monica pier at foot of Colorado Street, Santa Monica.

Ship opens at 12:30 p.m. daily.

From the way the ships were presented, you would have thought you were boarding the
Queen Mary
. Actually, the
Rex
was a converted fishing barge that looked . . . like a converted fishing barge, even though an ex-con named Tony Cornero had spent a quarter million dollars to convert it. But its unlovely appearance was much less important than what happened on board.

The ship itself had a 250-foot glass-covered gaming deck offering faro, roulette, and craps. Everybody’s gambling tastes could be accommodated, from high rollers to the penny ante. There were three hundred slot machines, a bingo parlor that seated five hundred people, six roulette tables, eight dice tables, keno. . . . There was even a complicated setup for offtrack betting. On a lower deck there was dancing and entertainment, a café, and several bars.

The notorious gambling ship
The Rex.

The
Rex
could accommodate two thousand customers, and its daily profit could be as much as ten thousand dollars. To keep their profits safe from bandits, the boat was heavily fortified by security with a generous supply of machine guns.

Soon the waters off the California coast were dotted by gambling ships hovering outside the three-mile limit: the
Monte Carlo
, the
City of Panama
, the
Texas
, the
Showboat
, the
Caliente.
One ship, the
Playa
, wasn’t satisfied with the three-mile limit, and sailed twelve miles out, which was not only beyond Los Angeles County jurisdiction but beyond federal jurisdiction. The
Playa
served out-of-season food that was forbidden on land—elaborate stuff, but great stuff. In order to get people onto those boats, they hustled everybody and everything.

Supposedly law enforcement personnel were very frustrated by the presence of the
Rex
and the rest of the ships, but I don’t believe it. None of the many underground enticements of Los Angeles
before and after World War II would have been possible without the apathy of or, more likely, the acquiescence of the police. The amount of payoffs from the gambling houses of Los Angeles and Hollywood that padded the pockets of the cops must have been nearly equivalent to their profits. It was an environment that spawned a lot of James Ellroy novels.

The gambling ships came to an end just before World War II, when California attorney general Earl Warren got serious and went after them, using as a wedge the fact that the water taxis that ferried the customers back and forth weren’t registered as public vehicles.

Only a few years later Las Vegas was born out of an effort to service the gamblers of Los Angeles.

But before Vegas there was Agua Caliente, a resort just across the Mexican border built for the specific purpose of enabling Americans to indulge in the pleasurable activity that was forbidden in their native country: gambling.

Agua Caliente was the brainchild of Baron Long, a man who ran gambling and bootlegging outfits around Los Angeles, usually skirting the law by operating just outside the city limits in unincorporated towns like Vernon or beyond the three-mile limit at sea.

In 1926 Long decided to take advantage of the “anything goes” atmosphere of Mexico and build a spa at Agua Caliente Hot Springs, six miles from Tijuana. There was no shortage of investors; I believe some of the original generation of movie moguls, such as Joe Schenck, came in on the deal. Joe supposedly spent something close to half a million dollars building the resort and casino.

Joe Schenck was such an interesting man. He and his brother Nick controlled three movie studios: Nick ran Loew’s Incorporated, the parent company of MGM, while Joe, after a very successful
career as an independent producer, first ran United Artists, then left to form 20th Century pictures with Darryl Zanuck, which soon took over the moribund Fox organization and became 20th Century Fox—the studio that signed me in 1949.

The resort’s grounds didn’t look like much originally—just scrub with sycamore trees—but by the time it opened in June 1928, after millions of dollars in construction costs, the landscape had been radically altered. Occupying 655 acres, it even had its own airport, with easier access for those long weekends. It was an immediate success, because it was the only game out of town. If you wanted the types of things Agua Caliente offered, you had to go to Agua Caliente.

The centerpiece of the resort was a four-hundred-room luxury hotel. Well, that’s not really true—the centerpiece was the casino, where roulette, baccarat, and faro were played. And after the casino came the racetrack. The racetrack attracted people who wouldn’t be caught dead in a casino—Gary Cooper was there, as were Bing Crosby and Clark Gable, Jean Harlow and Howard Hughes.

Occasionally, a film would shoot there—the location was visually interesting, and there were plenty of ways to pass the time at night. When Jackie Cooper goes hunting for his alcoholic father around a luxury hotel in
The Champ
, he’s searching Agua Caliente. There was even a Warner Bros. movie called
In Caliente
, featuring the great Busby Berkeley number “The Lady in Red.”

While the hotel’s exterior looked like something left over from the mission days, inside it was another story entirely. There was an Art Deco dining room inspired by the 1925 Paris exhibition, plus a Moorish-style spa and a Louis XIV–inspired room.

It was the height of a certain kind of luxury. Even the barbershop, which had only three chairs, flaunted custom-designed
terra-cotta. The power plant had a 150-foot-high smokestack that was tiled and covered with decorative ironwork so that it resembled an Istanbul minaret.

So much of what would make Vegas Vegas was actually devised at Agua Caliente. Food, for instance, was a loss leader—they charged only a dollar for a sumptuous lunch, and the casino was without clocks or windows. Sound familiar?

Agua Caliente did not set out to compete with Palm Springs or Catalina; it was designed to attract the same clientele as the Riviera or Palm Beach. And for a time, it succeeded. Movie people loved it. Aside from Joe Schenck, other shareholders included Al Jolson, Irving Berlin, and Alexander Pantages. In 1933, Schenck purchased control of the resort and positioned himself on the board of directors, along with Douglas Fairbanks Sr. and Jesse Lasky.

And then it all came crashing down. In 1935 the president of Mexico signed an executive order outlawing gambling. Two days later, the resort shut down.

Conveniently, just a few years earlier, Nevada had passed legislation allowing gambling, which meant that it was just a question of time until everything that made Caliente Caliente would be available without having to cross the border. Mexico eventually nationalized the old resort and used it as an education facility, although three fires in the 1960s and a misguided urban renewal program in 1975 wiped out the facility as a whole. But for a few years, Caliente was the site of a gaudy spree that eventually landed close to home.

B
illy Wilder could do a lot of things, and setting a scene was one of them.

“I had landed myself in the driveway of some big mansion that looked run-down and deserted,” says William Holden as Joe Gillis at the opening of
Sunset Boulevard
. “It was a great big white elephant of a place. The kind crazy movie people built in the crazy twenties.”

Billy’s attitude was typical. The rap against the architecture of Los Angeles was that it was nothing but a conglomeration of warring styles. But that’s because Los Angeles had a very small indigenous population; it was settled by people who streamed there before and after World War I. All these new arrivals were from different parts of the world and all of them had different ideas of taste; with the exception of the Mission style that was the legacy of Spanish California, there was no strong architectural tradition to guide a building boom.