You Must Remember This (9 page)

Initially the movie people settled in and around Hollywood Boulevard, and the bungalows that had been part of the initial settlement around 1900 were replaced by the Spanish Mediterranean look that became the first wave of popular style.

There were also apartments that catered to the movie people who were holding on to their money to see whether this movie thing had any permanence. A lot of them were built around courtyards, with fountains and Spanish tile. Of these, the most elaborate was the Garden Court, which stood on Hollywood Boulevard into the 1970s. Sixty years earlier the Garden Court had refused to take people from the movie industry, with very few exceptions, such as the very proper Englishman J. Stuart Blackton, who founded the early motion picture firm Vitagraph.

But if blame is to be apportioned for what Beverly Hills is today, it should probably go to Douglas Fairbanks.

In the beginning, Beverly Hills was all beans, acres of beans, and the only people who lived there were Mexican migrant workers. But after 1900, oil was discovered in what would become West Hollywood and land began changing hands. The land was now too valuable to be relegated to farmland, so it was divided up into residential lots.

To do the landscaping and planning, the landscape architect Wilbur Cook Jr. was hired. Cook had worked on the design of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago alongside Frederick Law Olmsted, who was famed for his design of New York’s Central Park.

Cook laid out a three-tier system. People without a lot of money were relegated to small lots in the area around Wilshire and Santa Monica Boulevards. The area of Beverly Hills that lay “below the tracks” of the Pacific Electric railroad along Santa Monica Boulevard came with restrictive covenants that forbade blacks or Asians from buying, owning, or even residing there except as live-in servants. Cook also made space for a commercial zone that was close to the large houses and estates to the north.

North of Santa Monica and south of Sunset was for the upper middle class, with large houses, wide lots, and streets lined with trees of identical size and species. (These guys left nothing to chance.) The hills above Sunset Boulevard were reserved for mansions.

What Cook wanted to avoid was a grid plan of straight lines and squares, which would inevitably lead to views of empty fields extending toward the ocean. What he designed were largely curving streets, which led to a procession of constantly changing views. He used garden hoses to mark off the curves of the streets, forming the borders of the roads. The curves created a feeling of coziness, of community.

The first lots went on sale for eight hundred to a thousand dollars an acre, with a 10 percent discount if paid in cash and another 10 percent discount if construction started within a year. The original streets were Rodeo, Beverly, Canon, and Crescent Drives. Beverly Park sat between Beverly and Canon, which had a beautiful koi pond and a sign announcing that you were now in Beverly Hills—as if there could be any doubt.

Wilbur Cook’s original plan for Beverly Hills. Notice the winding, curvy roads.

For a long time, Beverly Hills remained quite barren because most of the movie people were still living around Hollywood proper, or in Crescent Heights or Los Feliz. Seeing that lots weren’t moving, a developer named Burton Green figured that a hotel might stimulate a land rush. (For many years, it was believed that Green had named the town after Beverly Farms, his home in Massachusetts, but that’s not true. Green’s own version of the naming of Beverly Hills is as follows: “I happened to read a newspaper article which mentioned that President [William Howard] Taft was vacationing in Beverly, Massachusetts . . . It struck me that Beverly was a pretty name. I suggested the name ‘Beverly Hills’ to my associates; they liked it, and the name was accepted.” Given the natural beauty of the location, they could have called it Hogwarts and it probably would have been successful.)

In early February 1911, Green hired Margaret Anderson and her son to open and operate a luxury hotel.

Margaret had originally come to California in the 1870s. She’d married, had two children, and worked in the orange business. After a nasty divorce, she took over a boardinghouse in Westlake, and in 1902 the Hollywood Hotel. So Margaret and her son Stanley were Hollywood pioneers, the hospitality equivalent of Cecil B. DeMille.

Margaret’s motto was “Our guests are entitled to the best of everything, regardless of cost.” In the early days the Hollywood Hotel had forty rooms. The hotel cost—wait for it!—the munificent sum of twenty-five thousand dollars, and was designed by Oliver Perry Dennis and Lyman Farwell, who also designed the building that would become the Magic Castle in Hollywood. The Magic Castle is still standing; I wish I could say the same for the Hollywood Hotel.

Two people could stay at the hotel for $32.50 a week. For that
money, you also got a private bath and all your meals—a bargain. While his mother ran the hotel, Stanley took on a leadership role in the community at large—first in Hollywood, later in Beverly Hills. Stanley knew everybody, was friends with everybody: industrialists, entrepreneurs, and, of course, celebrities. He also began dabbling in real estate, buying property on Rodeo Drive. Stanley’s son once expounded to me about his father’s wisdom in buying retail corner lots. Unfortunately, I never took the advice to heart.

Construction of the Hollywood Hotel, circa 1905.

When Burton Green had the idea for the Beverly Hills Hotel, the obvious choice to run it was Margaret Anderson and her son.

Photos taken during construction in 1911 show nothing much there other than a huge, flat, open field and a water wagon for the workers.

The hotel itself was built to resemble a Franciscan mission, with a white stucco exterior and terra-cotta Spanish tile roof. The original promotional brochure laid it all out in the soothing tones beloved of advertising travel writers since the beginning of time: “Every time one thinks of California he thinks of sunny romance and gold; of sunny skies and balmy breezes; of whispering palms and sandy beaches and gently booming surf. He thinks of climate the like of which is not equaled in any other part of the world. . . .
Here in Southern California’s most entrancing spot on the main road halfway between Los Angeles and the Sea is the Beverly Hills Hotel.”

On the day it opened in 1912, Green’s investment totaled half a million dollars—a huge sum in 1912. It was generally felt that the hotel was so far off the beaten track that it was sure to fail, but it quickly became quite popular, helped along by a Pacific Electric trolley line that stopped directly in front of the entrance. Thus, travelers could get off the train in Los Angeles and travel to the hotel with a minimum of fuss. But home sales still lagged in the area, and for a good ten years after it was constructed, the Beverly Hills Hotel continued to look out on nothing but empty fields.

The hotel soon became famous for its gardens, which certainly figured to attract Midwesterners from the frigid plains of Iowa and Kansas. Stanley devised a brilliant publicity strategy: the patrons of the hotel were encouraged to pick any of the flowers that grew in the gardens. Arranged in bouquets in the rooms, the flowers added a personal touch that made the guests feel right at home.

The hotel began building bungalows in 1915, which indicates that they were getting patronage from people who wanted to stay for the entire winter and for whom a hotel room would be too confining. The first five bungalows were in the Mission Revival style and had several bedrooms apiece—bring the entire family!—and a porch overlooking the main court of the hotel. By the 1930s, there would be more than twenty bungalows, scattered over the sixteen acres of gardens.

In 1915 among the amenities on offer were horseback rides before breakfast with a stable of Kentucky horses on the grounds. Then there was golf at the adjacent Los Angeles Country Club.
And believe it or not, there were fox hunts in the hills above the hotel, which tells you a lot about the guests who stayed there.

In 1919 Douglas Fairbanks, the first great swashbuckling star of the movies and as charismatic a man as ever walked in front of a camera, bought a glorified hunting lodge on Summit Drive, off Benedict Canyon, about a half mile above the Beverly Hills Hotel. He paid thirty-five thousand dollars for the place, and it wasn’t much—it had six rooms, no electricity, no running water, and looked a little run-down.

And then it got worse. As Stanley Anderson’s son told me the story a quarter century later, the morning after Fairbanks moved in, Stanley’s phone rang. It was Fairbanks, and he was distraught. “I’ve never felt so awful,” he said. “I have to leave Beverly Hills.” It seemed that three of his new neighbors had called him the night before and told him that actors weren’t welcome in the town. Property values, and so forth.

Stanley happened to know the neighbors in question—Stanley knew everybody. First he managed to calm Fairbanks down; then he defused the situation by calming the neighbors down. Fairbanks decided to stay and began remodeling and greatly enlarging the old lodge. Soon afterward he married Mary Pickford. It was a royal wedding, for Pickford was Fairbanks’s opposite number: the King of Hollywood was marrying its queen.

Like almost all the early stars, Pickford was born poor. Her father had died young, and the only way the Toronto family could survive was for Mary—whose real name was Gladys Smith—to go onstage. She was very blond and very beautiful, and she became quite successful as a child actress, eventually going to work for the famous theatrical producer David Belasco. That led to work with
D. W. Griffith at the Biograph studio on the Lower East Side of New York, which in turn led to a twenty-year career of success in the movies.

Pickford and Fairbanks owned their own studios, owned their own films, and, along with Charlie Chaplin and D. W. Griffith, founded United Artists. They were all early examples of the actor as entrepreneur, and they set a pattern that the most ambitious stars replicate even today.

Chaplin and Fairbanks were best friends, and it was because of Fairbanks that Charlie Chaplin also built a house on Summit Drive in Beverly Hills in 1921. It certainly wasn’t because he was in love with the surrounding environment: “The alkali and the sagebrush gave off an odorous, sour tang that made the throat dry and the nostrils smart,” wrote Chaplin in his memoirs. “In those days, Beverly Hills looked like an abandoned real estate development. Sidewalks ran along and disappeared into open fields and lampposts with white globes adorning empty streets; most of the globes were missing, shot off by passing revelers from roadhouses.”

At night, Chaplin could hear the coyotes howling. Here was a poor boy from London who shuddered at the very thought of coyotes, but to Fairbanks it was all impossibly romantic. So Chaplin stayed.

After they married, Fairbanks and Pickford added another wing to the house and a second floor, and they ripped out most of the interior walls. Fairbanks’s plans were as grand as his movies, and he grew restless because the process was taking so long. So he moved in lights from his movie studio and hired enough workers for three eight-hour shifts. Fairbanks also landscaped the property beautifully, with hundreds of trees and shrubs, and added a
swimming pool complete with a miniature sandy beach. Below the house was a stable that held six horses.

Christening their new home Pickfair, the couple moved in, and the world began beating a path to Beverly Hills. The house was decorated in a sedate style—the carpeting in Pickford’s bedroom was a pale green, as were the silk curtains, while the dining room had a beamed ceiling, watered silk wallpaper, and a sideboard that held a good silver tea service.

The hall next to the living room had a beautiful terra-cotta tile floor for dancing, and the pale green of the bedroom was replicated in the living room, which had accents of yellow drapes, a couple of antique vases converted into lamps, and a nice Oriental rug over the hardwood floor.

A lot of the furniture—all dark wood and heavily carved—came from Los Angeles department stores. Eventually, the house was redecorated in a more eighteenth-century French tradition, although Fairbanks’s enthusiasms virtually define the word “eclectic.” He spent a good deal of money on Frederic Remington paintings. Once he paid five thousand dollars—a fortune at the time—for a prize German shepherd, and was probably the first American movie star to develop a passion for English tailoring, about which more later.