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Taylorology Issue 13
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* T A Y L O R O L O G Y *
* A Continuing Exploration of the Life and Death of William Desmond Taylor *
* *
* Issue 13 -- January 1994 Editor: Bruce Long bruce@asu.edu *
* All reprinted material is in the public domain *
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CONTENTS OF THIS ISSUE:
The Truth About Hollywood:
Part 2 [Drugs, Alcohol and Sexual Morality]
Part 3 [What Happens to a New Girl in Hollywood?]
Part 4 [Brief Tour of Some Hollywood Studios]
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What is TAYLOROLOGY?
TAYLOROLOGY is a newsletter focusing on the life and death of William Desmond
Taylor, a top film Paramount film director in early Hollywood who was shot to
death on February 1, 1922. His unsolved murder was one of Hollywood's major
scandals. This newsletter will deal with: (a) The facts of Taylor's life;
(b) The facts and rumors of Taylor's murder; (c) The impact of the Taylor
murder on Hollywood and the nation. Primary emphasis will be given toward
reprinting, referencing and analyzing source material, and sifting it for
accuracy.
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The graphic images mentioned in the previous issue of TAYLOROLOGY are
temporarily available on the gopher server at PI.LA.ASU.EDU port 70 in
the directory
Internet Sampler
Selected Electronic Newsletters
Taylorology
Graphic Image Files for Taylorolgy
The files are in Encapsulated PostScript format (Macintosh).
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March 19-April 2, 1922
Thoreau Cronyn
NEW YORK HERALD
The Truth About Hollywood, Continued
PART 2[Drugs, Alcohol and Sexual Morality]
It ought to be possible to write sanely about the morals of Hollywood. It
will be well to keep in mind the purpose of the slightly bewildered but
resolute statesman who said "I will go to the end of the road, let the chips
fall where they may." Recollection of the well known limerick may also be
useful:
"Said the Reverend Jabez McCotton,
'The waltz of the Devil's begotten.'
Said Jones to Miss Blye,
'Don't you mind the old guy;
To the pure almost everything's rotten.' "
I went to Hollywood, to find out the truth, good and band. I talked with
actors, directors, producers, screen writers, extras, merchants, doctors,
ministers, bankers, detectives, performers, extollers, denouncers, newspaper
men and women, publicity men, housewives, onlookers, lenders, spenders and
others of high and low degree and varying standards of veracity. I sat with
the heads of official agencies investigating the Taylor murder, the traffic in
narcotics and bootleggers. I watched movie people at their work and their
frolics. I went without instructions except to get the facts and without other
attitude except that of reporter.
In the minds of many persons who have read of the "Arbuckle party" in San
Francisco and the Taylor murder in Los Angeles there has been created this
picture:
Hollywood, the motion picture capital; a community of dissolute actors
and actresses and others of the movie industry; the worst of them unspeakably
vile, the best suspicionable; a colony of unregenerates and narcotic addicts;
given to wild night parties commonly known as 'orgies'; heroes of the screen
by day and vicious roisterers by night; a section of civilization gone
rottenly to smash.
For comparison to the profligacy of Hollywood the critics go back to Tyre
and Sidon and Rome; to Alexandria, Herculaneum and Pompeii, to the later
Caesars, to Nero and Caligula; to the Herodian courts of Judea; to Belshazzar
and Alexander. The sorriest historical procession is conjured.
Hollywood, which had never thought of itself in quite that light, laughs
merrily at first, as the accusation is echoed back from the East. Then,
compelled to believe that a considerable part of the public is taking the
indictment seriously, it soberly sets about preparing its defense.
What is the evidence as to "orgies," narcotics, alcohol, vice,
extravagant living? I shall tell in sequence whatever I was able to find out.
But just before the plunge the heartening fact comes to mind that a little
while ago the residents of Beverly Hills assembled to discuss the laying out
of a polo field. Beverly Hills is part of the "Hollywood district," an
"exclusive" part, where Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, Charles Ray, Will
Rogers and many other stars live in sequestered comfort. When it was Rogers'
turn to speak he said:
"Folks, I've sort o' been looking over this corner of the world, and it
does look as if there are some mighty pretty places for a polo outfit. But I
also noticed another thing, and that is there is no church in Beverly Hills.
Now, it probably would do my kids and me a lot of good to dress up and get out
and play polo, but I figure it would be just as well if we attended to this
church business first. I move you, Mr. Chairman, that we go ahead and raise
the money, but spend it on a church instead of a polo field. I can chip in
$500, if that's agreeable to you all." And those motion picture people gave a
whoop at the brilliancy of Will Rogers' suggestion, and as soon as the
architect gets his plans drawn that church will begin to materialize.
There is some truth in the stories of wild "parties" in and about
Hollywood. Those who have attended them contend that they have been no worse
than similar things indulged in by persons of the same moral stripe in other
parts of the country, notably New York. But of such stupidly disgusting
conduct I never have heard. These "parties" virtually ceased after the
Arbuckle affair in San Francisco. Their participants were a relatively small
number of men and women, members of overlapping circles of movie parasites and
occasionally a real star. The leading figure in several of them was a
comedian, not now active, who mentally and morally never has risen above his
low beginnings. His popularity with the public enabled him to earn a great
deal of money. He spent it as such a man might be expected to spend it. He was
generous and acquired a reputation in his set as a prince of hosts. A flock of
flatterers gathered around to help him get rid of his salary. He gave party
after party of the same general type, some of them reaching their climax in
everybody getting drunk, some going indescribably further.
An investigator whose word I have no reason to doubt told me he had
definite evidence of four of the more extreme parties. Three of them were
staged in Los Angeles hotels, the fourth in a private residence in Hollywood.
The first one brought together ten men and ten women. Some of them were drug
addicts. Liquor was provided by the host for everybody, and morphine and
cocaine, with hypodermic syringes, for those who craved them.
The second "party" of this type was held, the investigator told me, in
the Hollywood home of an actor. It lacked one bad feature, but included all
the others, and in addition some of the more intoxicated revelers disrobed ans
they danced. This was a large gathering--more than 100 persons. Nearly all
were disreputable and so regarded by the others of the Hollywood community.
The third and fourth entertainments were not essentially different from the
others.
The same investigator told me there had been bathing parties on the
beaches at which some of the "ladies and gentlemen" who had forgotten to bring
their bathing suits were not prevented from going into the water comfortably.
I have heard of a similar exhibition not twenty miles from New York.
Scandalous stories may be heard in Hollywood and Los Angeles by any one
who cares to listen. On this trip it was my duty to listen, but I do not
present on this page as a fact anything which is merely hearsay. One of the
stories I had read pictured a handsome and popular film actor as puncturing
himself in the stomach with a hypodermic needle at the peak of an exciting
dinner attended by "stars" and crying "This is the life." Most of the persons
I met had never heard of this incident, although some of them believed the
actor in question was a morphine user. [1]
The only person I found who professed to know the truth of this tale was
a newspaper man. He said he had attended the party and had seen the incident.
But a veteran of Hollywood who has watched the stars blaze up and die down and
has kept pretty close watch on them and their habits said to me: "I wish you'd
tell me who this newspaper man is and I'll find him and tell him that he's not
only a liar but a blank-blank one."
It may be mentioned here that I met in Hollywood several friends whom I
had known for years. They are in the best position to know what is going on.
They are the sort of men who, despite their connection with the picture
industry--or art--might be expected to tell me confidentially whatever secrets
of public interest they knew, just as I would tell them if they came to New
York.
But the fact is that these learned and agreeable gossips did not believe
one-thousandth part of the stories in circulation and were ready to fight at
the drop of the bat to demonstrate the falsity of these tales. Their
solicitude lest I should prove gullible was touching. And some of the dark
mysteries of Hollywood that I had occasion to ask them about they had never
heard of at all. They told me so, and I believe them.
Now as to drugs, are they in common use in Hollywood? No. I looked into
this question with special care and learned:
The larger cities of California are cursed with an extraordinary number
of peddlers of opium, heroin, morphine and cocaine. The Chinese brought the
first opium to the West coast, and many Californians acquired the habit from
them before the East heard of it and before alkaloids were used at all. Drugs
are smuggled into San Pedro, the port of Los Angeles, by Japanese, Chinese,
British and other vessels. They also come over the border form Mexico and
down from British Columbia and the northwestern ports of the United States.
Much of it also is manufactured in Philadelphia and St. Louis, exported to
Mexico in ostensibly legitimate traffic and smuggled back to the United
States.
The Government and State anti-narcotic agents are absurdly inadequate in
numbers. The Government did not have any agents in Los Angeles specially
assigned to this work until two months ago, when two were sent from the East.
Their investigations included an order to look into reports that drugs were
being sold at motion picture studios. These agents have been trying to get
evidence of "snow parties" as the gatherings of drug addicts are called, in
Hollywood and Los Angeles, but have not yet succeeded. "Snow" is the modern
underworld name for cocaine. Addicts speak of taking a "sleigh ride." The
only actress to whose door the Federal men have traced forbidden drugs is not
in the pictures but in vaudeville. They thought they had a good clew when
told of a railroad conductor who had been invited to attend a "snow party" at
the home of the director of a low grade movie company in Hollywood. The
conductor went to the party in his ordinary Sunday clothes. He found the
other guests and the host in pajamas. They tore off his collar and coat, but
when he said that was enough they let him alone.
There were plenty of opium and pipes in the house, and a Chinese was
"cooking" for the smokers. None of them was a movie headliner. The conductor
was not interested in things. He went upstairs and won $600 in a poker game.
"There really are a good many drug addicts in the motion picture crowd,"
an agent of the Department of Justice told me, "but most of them are among the
low class, roustabout actors, and the extra people who are not working
steadily but call themselves actors. However, the stories have been wildly
exaggerated. And don't forget, young man, that New York has its dope fiends,
too."
A good many "extras" have been arrested as addicts at the instance of the
California State Board of Pharmacy. A few years ago an officer of the
Department of Internal Revenue having said there were 8,000 addicts in Los
Angeles a narcotic clinic was established and maintained for a year, but the
largest number of patients registered at one time was 300. A peddler arrested
by the State board said he had sold cocaine to one of the fairest and most
prosperous of screen actresses. No one else has accused her.
The Los Angeles police have two detectives on the narcotic detail. One
of them, who appeared to me both honest and intelligent, told me that not one
in fifty of the city's addicts lived or worked in Hollywood. He also told me
of a high salaried, dashing movie star who reported to the police that a
peddler was stealing the stuff that dreams are made of into one of the finest
Hollywood studios. The star and his valet helped the police set a trap for
the peddler and catch him. This recital was hugely interesting to me for on
the preceding day I had been assured that this same star was himself an addict
and his abdomen pitted with needle marks.
Some of the studio managements have paid no attention to rumors that
drugs were being sold on or about their premises. Others are alive to this
danger. One studio gave the police the address and telephone number of a
woman listed as an "extra." She was sent to jail as a peddler of cocaine.
She had been a cabaret entertainer and had done "bits" in pictures from time
to time.
"She claimed to be an important actress, but was a bum," was my
detective's appraisal.
A tip from the wife of a scenario writer enabled the police to round up a
coterie of peddlers in a Los Angeles poolroom. A year and a half ago the
Universal studio caused the arrest of a dispenser of morphine. He had hung
around the studio, caught on as an "extra" and the moment he got past the gate
began looking for customers among his fellows of the small fry. He went to
jail and his wife divorced him.
Cocaine is sold in Los Angeles in "bindles." A "bindle" is done up in
waxed tissue, just like a drug store powder, weighs from two to two and a half
grains and sells for $2 or $2.50. Some of the peddlers work on commission--50
cents a bindle--others buy their stock outright from the wholesaler. In their
unwritten code "eight pieces of iron" or of candy means eight ounces of
cocaine or morphine, and "harmonica" is heroin.
"Stories of 'snow parties' in Hollywood are vague. People call us up but
don't give names or addresses. Personally I think all the 'dope' about 'dope'
is exaggerated. It's the Mexicans and negroes who bother us, not the movie
folk. A while ago we thought we had a good one when we heard of 'snow
parties' in an old country house in Hollywood which had been rented to a count
and sublet to others. The stars were supposed to gather there every night and
have a 'sniff' or two. We spent three or four nights around the house. There
were parties there, but it was only a mess of bootleggers."
In certain published accounts of high jinks in Hollywood marijuana is
mentioned as one of the drugs consumed by the insatiate performers. Marijuana
is Indian hemp, sometimes called Mexican weed. It grows wild over much of the
Southwest as ragweed, which it resembles, does in the East. Its seed is sold
for birdseed. If the Californian has no back yard he can buy a quarter of an
ounce of birdseed and raise enough marijuana in a window box to inspire a
thousand bandits. The Mexicans mix the dried leaves with tobacco and smoke
them in cigarettes. The effect is inflammatory stimulation.
The marijuana excites the nerves, deadens fear, turns a coward into a
swashbuckler, accentuates evil propensities. It does not soothe or produce
pleasant dreams, and is scorned by the whites. Some cowboys have picked up
the habit from the Mexicans, and whatever use is made of marijuana in
Hollywood is restricted to punchers and peons.
Before leaving the subject of drugs it should be pointed out that no
prominent motion picture actor or actress has ever been arrested as an addict
so far as I know. This merely is worth passing mention. The ready, of
course, knows that addicts who are well up in the social or professional scale
are seldom arrested anywhere. Does any one recall such an arrest in New York?
Of much greater significance is the fact that even in the "inside" gossip of
the California movie zone the number of well known players suspected of
addiction is very small. Wherever I went I asked, "Who are these dope fiends
we've been reading about?" Of the names given me by more than two persons the
public would recognize only five. One of these was that of the handsome
matinee idol heretofore mentioned. The others were women. There are in the
Hollywood district when the studios are booming, which is not the case now,
about 3,000 professional actors more or less regularly engaged, in addition to
a swarm of extras. About 100 of these are stars or featured performers whose
names sparkle in electric lights everywhere. Only five of the 100 were
seriously mentioned as addicts even by lovers of scandal, and the only one
concerning whom first hand testimony was offered was that of the screen hero
said to have been seen jabbing himself with a needle.
I admit that I was an outsider in Hollywood but I do not believe that any
"dope cult" exists among the well known players, and am sure that the great
majority of them have the same horror of narcotic drugs as other normal
beings. And, by the way, it seems to be pretty well established that William
Desmond Taylor, the director who was murdered, was not only trying to get a
famous actress to give up morphine but was fighting a group of peddlers who
were smuggling drugs into one of the Hollywood studio inclosures. He had
caused one of the peddlers to be beaten almost to death at this studio. Most
of the drug users are among the low grade extras, certain small comedy
companies and a gunman type of hired hand. There has been until recently no
concerted effort of the producing managements to stamp out the traffic.
I was told by the Los Angeles police that such an effort now is under
way. I might add here that a Hollywood physician who gave me a closeup view
of the community as he saw it said that within the past year he had
encountered only three addicts. Two were girls, both "extras." The other was
a man, a relative of an actor. The Rev. Neal Dodd, an Episcopalian pastor,
who is a sort of movie chaplain and is to have charge of a Little Church
Around the Corner to be built in Hollywood, said he personally knew of only
one "dope case" involving an actor.
So much for narcotic drugs. Next alcohol. This topic can be dismissed
with a few words. California under prohibition is one of the wettest States.
Liquor easily is procurable in every large community, including Hollywood. In
parts of Los Angeles it is sold openly, notably at soft drink counters. It
cannot be bought openly anywhere in Hollywood, which always has been a
saloonless town and is now. An old time said to me, "My daughter, 15 years old
has never seen a drunken person."
The homes of Hollywood are stocked with liquor in about the same
proportion as elsewhere. Every thirsty burgher has his list of bootleggers'
telephone numbers. He swaps telephone lists with his neighbor, just as he used
to trade home brew recipes. He phones his order to the bootlegger and the
stuff is delivered at the back door. The prevailing poison is synthetic gin at
$8 a quart. There also is California wine to be had in any quantity,
prohibition having at least doubled the price of the grape growers' product.
Grapes may be bought in season by the pound or the ton. Unfermented grape
juice is sold by the three gallon jar for $5 the jar, I believe. A friend told
me that three parts of water added to the juice produced, after an interval
and without any attention whatever, the rarest burgundy. How this exciting
mutation is accomplished I don't know, but that is what he said. There is much
drinking in Hollywood. Most of it is in the homes of movie and non-movie
residents. Many homes are abstemious. Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford are
among the abstainers. They serve no liquor in their home except at formal
dinners.
An alcoholic cross section of Hollywood presents no phenomena not to be
found nowadays in other communities East and West, with this exception: My
impression is that movie people, taken collectively, have in the past given
and attended more "booze parties" than most other communities of the same
size, and that reckless indulgence has been more frequent. Hollywood probably
will dispute this. Anyway, we can agree that since the Arbuckle explosion
there has been a slowing up all around.
Another count made against Hollywood is that girls who try to enter the
movies or to advance in their profession are subject to the moods of
unscrupulous directors and even of "magnates." I asked one of the best
informed and frankest of men what truth there was in this.
"I'll tell you," he said, "how the motion pictures got a bad name. They
have come up, you know, rather chaotically, from nothing in a few years. A few
years ago the stock company was dominant. It put on cheap pictures costing
from $5,000 to $25,000, and ground out a picture in two or three weeks. Each
studio had a large number of employees earning from $5 to $150 a week.
Sometimes there were as many as twenty-five directors in one studio. The
profession of director was a new one. Some of these were men of bad character
but with a knack for this game. They got into the habit of telling actresses
that in order to become better actresses they needed emotional experience. The
next suggestion was, of course, that the director could help supply this
experience.
"I know of girls who were tricked by this sort of fraud, and the truth is
that some of them really did become stars. But as the new type of picture
developed the stock company passed. The director no longer is all powerful. In
the next phase the little tin king was the star. He picked his own company. If
he were a rotter, as some stars have been, he selected his women according to
their complaisance, and it is only fair to say that some of them were
exceedingly complaisant and evidently came to Hollywood with the intention of
throwing themselves at the first man they met who could give them rank in the
studios.
"Now that phase is passing or has passed. A new functionary, the casting
director, has appeared. In the selection of the cast he is supreme. He has
nothing to do with the players before the camera. He merely selects them. He
stays in his office. In most of the studios he is a fine type of man. The
director on the lot must use a woman in the role to which the casting director
assigns her. In the course of a year an actress may work under a number of
different directors. No one of them has dictatorial power over her.
"And the caliber of the directors is improving all the time. My judgment
is that at the present time if a girl at the studios is led astray it is
likely to be her own fault. You will hear the opposite view expressed, but do
not ignore the fact that many a girl who went to Hollywood to make her fortune
as a star and has had to go home because she has no talent has, to save her
face in her home town, told the neighbors that she fled that awful Hollywood
rather than submit to a wicked director.
"There is no question that some of the well known stage people who were
brought here a few years ago 'raised the deuce.' They could not get over the
idea that Hollywood either was a one night stand or a pleasure resort with the
sky as the limit. The natives, watching their carrying on, exclaimed: 'So
these are actors! God save the mark!' The 'joy rider,' the profligate fool,
always is under observation, while the silent, decorous majority is ignored.
Well, the irresponsible director and the small minded actor were what gave the
motion pictures a bad name in southern California. But I have watched
Hollywood a long time, and am convinced that it is steadily improving, despite
these occasional wild splurges we read about. Most of the bad ones were bad
when they came here.
"The bad ones flock together as affinities do everywhere. Every
experienced observer knows the source of the trouble that recently has come
upon Hollywood. One of the comedy concerns is rotten and ought to be blotted
off the face of the map. But the estimate that not 200 members of the 'fast
crowd' are actors, actresses, or directors is accurate. No census has been
taken, but I should say there are about 3,000 actors in the studio district. I
mean stars, leads and those who play small parts. The extras are as the sands
of the sea and many of them just as shifty. In boom times they gather around,
in slack times they go back to the foundry or wherever they came from. The
body from which the working extras are drawn numbers from 8,000 to 15,000
persons. About 150 of them are ex-pugilists. When the studios are busy they
work as rubbers and extras; otherwise they are absorbed in the mass. Living is
somehow easy for their kind.
"Among the extras are many decent and thrifty souls as well as many weak
and shiftless. They are just such humanity as you might think would be
attracted to the pictures. For a period of twenty months I carefully checked
all the newspaper stories of 'movie actresses' arrested for misdemeanors.
Often they were headlined as 'movie stars.' The fact was that not one of them
was even a player of small parts. They were comedy girls and extra girls. When
arrested, all said they were actresses."
While in Hollywood I also looked into the matter of divorce and informal
alliances. A long list of conspicuous players who have not been divorced and
who have no intention of being so was recited. A very able man who in the past
had been a police reporter in New York and other cities as well as smaller
towns testified that there was the least open immorality in Hollywood of any
place he had known. Another observer thought there was a greater percentage of
couples living together without being married than he had found to be the case
elsewhere, except, possibly, in New York. But as apparently everybody in the
picture fraternity knows who these couples are, this situation would seem to
be exceptional in Hollywood, as elsewhere.
A certain director who has had a succession of women friends devoted to
him is notorious because of that fact and is avoided by some of his former
friends. In the better circles of moviedom he does not show his face. On the
other hand, an actor and an actress who make no secret of being more than
friends are received socially because they are rated as "on the level." They
are introduced at parties by their individual names, and no questions are
asked. Liberal as may seem the social code of a community which regards the
other fellow's private affairs as strictly his own business, it does not
countenance disloyalty in the common law relations.
A woman succeeded in driving out of Hollywood a man who had cast aside a
friend of hers. A baby came to another pair, who were married after one of
them had secured a necessary divorce. The mother, who had not been a Puritan,
not only gave up drinking and profanity, but began giving humorous curtain
lectures to her friends who came to the house. She told them she was not going
to have her baby associating with "wild women." With the help of the baby, she
bettered the standards of propriety throughout her social circle.
Even those who accuse Hollywood of being a "Roaring Camp" must admit that
it has its little "Lucks" as well as its "Sals," and when the recording angel
gets around to the movie town will he not remember them.
The divorce register of Hollywood is formidably long, but the divorce
center of the United States, as a certain author pointed out, is in the Middle
West, not California. At the risk of offending stage people it must be said
that they seem to be more generally tolerant of divorce than others. That is
the case among the motion picture people. The average view is that divorce is
an evil but not necessarily a stigma.
If two persons can't get along together they are not criticized for the
act of separation. All depends on the circumstances. Divorce rarely is
questioned in Hollywood except when one or the other of the persons involved
is believed to have been badly treated. The most notably example of players
who have been divorced and remarried are Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford.
In Hollywood one hears no breath of scandal concerning them. They had their
reasons for doing what they did; they are deeply in love with each other, they
behave themselves and that ends it. This is the Hollywood view.
One wonders to what extent Hollywood realizes how strange its notions
seem to the "good church people," or to small town people generally, who
constitute most of the audiences in motion picture theaters. I heard of a
small town, old fashioned, old lace and lavender mother who visited a relative
in Hollywood. The relative asked her what she'd like to see. "I do not want to
see Mary Pickford," she said emphatically. "There's been so much in the papers
about her divorce!" And yet many good people of Hollywood look up to Mary not
only as a leader of their profession, but all that a woman should be. In the
face of such conflict of views, you see, it is not the easiest thing in the
world to judge "the motion picture capital."
The whole roster of ten players under salary as Goldwyn stars was shown
me and I was told that not one of them had been divorced. I have no reason to
question this, and believe the news should be spread, broadcast to counteract
an impression that nobody in Hollywood knows today who his wife will be
tomorrow.
I was not much interested in the divorce problem of Hollywood, for there
and everywhere it is too deep for me, but for the information of any readers
who may want to know just who's who, the following list is submitted:
Divorced and not married again: Jean Acker, Mary Allen, Agnes Ayres,
Gladys Brockwell, Carlyle Blackwell, Genevieve Blinn, Sylvia Breamer, Herbert
Brenon, Lawson Butte, Mae Busch, Barbara Castleton, Charlie Chaplin,
Marguerite Clayton, Lew Cody (three times), Jack Conway, Donald Crisp, Kathlyn
Clifford, Dorothy Dalton, Allan Dwan, Elliott Dexter, Marie Doro, June
Elvidge, Bessie Eyton, Adele Farrington, Casson Ferguson, Maude Fealy, Fred
Fishbeck, Marguerita Fisher, Ann Forrest, Louise Glaum, Edna Goodrich,
Winifred Greenwood, Kenneth Harlan, Mildred Harris, Helen Holmes, E. Mason
Hopper, Jacques Jaccard, Dick Jones, Anna Lehr, Elmo Lincoln, Ann Little,
Katherine MacDonald, Marguerite Marsh, Christine Mayo, Harry Hillard, Jack
Mower, Anna Q. Nilsson, Marshall Neilan, Jane Novak, Doris Pawn, Irene Rich,
Ruth Roland, Alma Rubens, William Russell, Ford Sterling, Nell Shipman, Ruth
Stonehouse, Gloria Swanson, Myrtle Stedman, Hugh Thompson, Mary Thurman,
Lawrence Trimble, Rodolph Valentino, Lillian Walker, Pearl White, Marjorie
Wilson, Clara Kimball Young, James Young (three times).
Divorced and married again: May Allison, Leah Baird, Reginald Barker,
Frank Beal, Lawson Butt, George Beban, Noah Beery, Wallace Beery, Richard
Bennett, Francelia Billington, Hobart Bosworth, Bert Bracken, Hazel Daly,
Hampton Del Ruth, Ruby De Remer, Jack Dillon, William Edson Duncan, J. Gordon
Edwards, Robert Ellison, John Emerson (now married to Anita Loos), Douglas
Fairbanks, Franklyn Farnum, Eugene Ford, Allan Forrest (now married to Lottie
Pickford), Pauline Frederick (now married to a schooldays sweetheart), Fred
Granvill, Bert Grasby, Jack Gilbert, Hale Hamilton, James W. Horne, Louise
Huff, Irene Hunt, Paul G. Hurst, Peggy Hyland, Rex Ingram (now married to
Alice Terry), Thomas Jefferson, Emery Johnson, Leatrice Joy, Alice Joyce,
James Kirkwood, George Larkin, Edward Le Saint, Wilfred Lucas, John M.
McGowan, J. Farrell McDonald, Frank Mayo, Harry Millarde, Tom Mix, Owen Moore,
Tom Moore, Mae Murray, Marie Manon, Fred Niblo, Wheeler Oakman, Mary Pickford,
Lottie Pickford, Theodore Roberts, Wesley H. Ruggles, Paul Scandon, Rolin
Sturgeon, Conway Tearle, Mabel Van Buren, Eric von Stroheim, Henry Walthall,
Crane Wilbur, Kathryn Williams (married four times, now wife of Charles
Eyton).
Divorce suits now pending are omitted. No doubt almost as long a list of
undivorced persons could be prepared.
This article has come to the end of its allotted space without having
more than touched on the brighter and more wholesome phases of Hollywood life,
which do exist abundantly.
Making of pictures is called an "industry" in Hollywood, and it is so.
The cost of many feature productions is from $3,000 to $5,000 a camera day. It
takes at least five camera weeks to complete the picture, making the total
cost sometimes more than $100,000. The camera cannot be fooled--very much. If
an actor has been out all night rioting, drinking or gambling, the camera sees
it. He cannot go on. Unless scenes can be "shot" not requiring that actor's
presence, the whole production is held up. Result, loss of between $3,000 and
$5,000. If the picture has progressed so far that to call everything off would
be ruinous, the offending actor is retained, but unless he reforms that is his
last picture for this producer. He acquires a reputation for unreliability,
and nobody wants him.
In a girl of the pictures, youth, vivacity, freshness--they must be real,
not counterfeit--are everything. If they are all she has to give, if she does
not develop dramatically, the length of her screen life is only about five
years. They are precious years. Each day is a thing to be treasured and
guarded. To the camera she must look the same every day of the weeks and even
months that pass before a picture is finished. She cannot appear "on the lot"
with a haggard face, with circles under the eyes, with crow foot wrinkles
scarring the smoothness of her skin. All this is intolerable. The actors and
actresses know it as well as the producers and directors.
It follows then--and is a fact--that the typical actor and actress, even
if predisposed toward giddiness, is, during the long hard days when a picture
is being made, a model of behavior. The letdown, if it comes, is in the
interval between pictures. But, even in those vacations the players have to
remember that when the next engagement begins they must look their best. So,
to a degree, good conduct is self-enforced in Hollywood.
This is especially true of actors of "straight parts." The character
actors, whose faces are often changed by makeup, do not have to be so careful.
PART III [What Happens to a New Girl in Hollywood?]
The city of Los Angeles and all the surrounding towns are full of
beautiful girls toiling at homely occupations. The visitor sees them waiting
at table in restaurants, ladling macaroni in cafeterias, behind the counters
of department stores, selling cigars and newspapers in open air shops and
bobbing through the doors of factories. It is an exhibition of personal
comeliness not wholly to be accounted for by the rich endowment bestowed by
nature on the daughters of California.
The visitor makes inquiry and the answer he gets is this:
"So you've noticed all these picture faces? Why, they're the girls who
came out here to be Mary Pickfords. They were the belles of their own home
towns. Nice girls, most of them, and good looking enough, as you can see. But
they mistook good looks and ambition for talent, and now they're lucky to have
$25 in their pay envelopes on Saturday night. It's quite a story. Look into
it."
So the stranger looks into it and finds--
All over the country are girls eager to be motion picture stars. Such a
girl has perhaps won a prize in a beauty contest. Her friends have assured her
that she looks like Mary Pickford, Corinne Griffith, Enid Bennett, Mary Miles
Minter, Gloria Swanson, Anita Stewart or some other celluloid princess. A new
way of doing her hair, a penciled lift of the eyebrow add to the fancied
resemblance. Like as not the girl makes a hit with the local public as the
frolicsome ingenue of amateur theatricals. It dawns upon her that she is an
actress as well as the fortunate possessor of the type of beauty for which
(vide the screen magazines) the producers are searching the world with pockets
full of gold.
But she is reminded that dramatic ability is not necessary, or at least
can be speedily developed, for she reads of a big town beauty contest
guaranteeing the winner a five weeks' engagement at Hollywood at $600 a week.
To be fair to the press agents and the interviewers, the best of them also
tell the other side--the hard work, the sacrifice, the step by step climb
whereby the finest actresses of the films, like those of the stage, have
reached the height.
But to the typical screen struck girl, the spoiled darling of the small
town, this means little. She has been told of her beauty so often that she
believes it, and probably it is true--in Toonerville. She has yet to learn of
facts like this:
Nine delectable women pose successively before a motion picture camera,
under the pitiless glare of mercury vapor lights. To the untrained eye--yes,
and to the trained eye, too--the nine may look exactly alike. Not a mark, not
a line to distinguish one from the others.
The test films are developed and taken to the projection room. There
chemistry tells its grievous truths. Closeups of the nine women are thrown on
the screen.
Four of the nine appear to be Ethiopians. Four are ordinary looking,
neither attractive nor ugly, the kind that would pass unnoticed. The ninth--
one woman of the nine--is the handsome creature that she seemed to the human
eye.
As explained to me in Hollywood, this surprising variation is due to the
quality of the skin. Some skins reflect too much light, some absorb too much;
occasionally one has just the right actinic value. If it isn't right, there is
nothing a woman can do to change it. She may be another Helen, but the screen
will tell her she's a fright.
The proportion of good motion picture complexions is much smaller than
one out of nine, that figure having been chosen at random for the purpose of
illustration. And, of course, possession of the blooming cheek, the cameo
profile and the sparkling eye does not mean that the fortunate lady can ever
be an actress.
The ambition of our small town belle eventually carries her off to Los
Angeles. Sometimes her mother, dissuasion having failed, accompanies her.
Sometimes she is blessed with a relative in southern California, to whose home
she can go. Often she is a runaway, dreaming of the day when her obdurate
guardians will jump out of their seats at the movie show when they she her
starring in her first big release. Going home they will find a check from her
to lift the mortgage on the old place and perforce will nod their heads and
say, "Well, it looks as if Theodosia done the right thing after all."
Somehow the girl reaches Los Angeles. The chances are that as she looks
around the station she sees no friendly face. Welfare work for the motion
picture girls is scarcely begun. There is no agent of the Travelers Aid
Society to meet the stranger and guide her aright. Two Methodist deaconnesses
attempt the task, but what can they do, with trains arriving at frequent
intervals from the north, east and south, and the steamships sluicing their
passengers up to the city from San Pedro?
If the girl has made a little inquiry in advance she knows she can go to
the Y.W.C.A, the W.C.T.U. or the Salvation Army or one of the women's clubs
and at least be directed to a boarding house. Let us assume she is
sophisticated enough to do that. Let us even assume that she is so lucky as to
get into the Studio Club in Hollywood. This is under the supervision of the
national board of the Y.W.C.A. and the direction of Miss Marian Hunter and is
doing on a small scale a splendid work, which it ought to be doing on a big
scale.
It is a club for girls with serious dramatic ambitions. It gives them a
room, with breakfast and dinner on weekdays and three meals on Sunday, for
$10.50 a week. But it can accommodate only nineteen girls--nineteen of the
chosen among thousands who think themselves called.
Our small town Pickford will find it hard to find shelter elsewhere in
Hollywood. Hollywood is not a furnished room resort, but a fastidious suburb.
More than one-half of its population of 70,000 are not in the movie industry
and a good many of this majority entertain a prejudice against movie people.
In passing I might say that the prejudice struck me as largely without
justification at present. In the pioneer days--away back eight or nine years
ago--the movies were harum-scarum. Companies of actors "on location" used to
smash shrubbery and scatter milk bottles and lunch boxes over fine estates
they borrowed for camera purposes. Nowadays discipline is enforced and the
studio management sends along a special cleanup squad to remove any debris. If
accidently damage is done the producer pays for it promptly. The owner of
perhaps the finest show place in Hollywood now lets the actors in, charging a
small fee, which goes to his gardener.
Similarly the movie people early acquired the reputation of being
undesirable tenants. Landlords complained that they gave noisy parties at
night and massacred the furniture. One of the biggest landlords told me,
however, that the boisterous minority which did this had gradually been weeded
out and that some of his best tenants were actors and directors. He said there
was no longer any excuse for the newspaper advertisement that appeared not
long ago, "No children, no dogs, no movies."
My personal testimony is that for several nights I rode and walked
through the residential as well as the business parts of Hollywood. with ears
attuned to noise of any wave length and heard nothing but the metallic click
of eucalyptus leaves as the trade wind set brother against brother. One one of
these trips a tall and amiable stranger walked up beside me.
"Sure feels lonesome," he said. "I live up the hill a few blocks. Looking
for any one in particular?"
"No," I said. "I was looking for orgies."
He laughed.
"They're all doing that. Couple of nights ago two tourists came up to me
and asked if they could get in one some of these wild parties they'd been
reading about.
" 'Orgies?' says I. 'That's it, orgies,' says one of the tourists.
" 'A cinch,' says I. 'What kind of orgy do you prefer--merely dope or
love cult, or something deeper? I am one of the official orgy guides.'
"The tourists decided I was a nut and beat it. Orgies! There's many a
young blood around here would like to get into one once, just to see what
they're like, you know, but they can't find 'em. I've never located one, and I
been here three years had have had a bit of luck writing for the screen. Where
you from? Ever live in a small town?"
I told him I had spent several years in a New England village whose
population of 749 hardly varied from census to census.
'"That's the idea," my new friend said. "Hollywood at night is just like
your New England village. It's just a dormitory for the cops. I recollect one
night they had to wake up and tell Jack Dempsey some of his crowd were
disturbing the neighbors, but outside of that, nothing. Well, here's where I
live. Good luck on your search. Oh, for a jolly old orgy to take the creak out
of these joints. But don't believe all you hear. Good night."
But we have wandered away, through the scented night of Hollywood, from
the screen struck girl and what befalls her. Having found a room--$20 a month
is about the cheapest in Los Angeles, which embraces Hollywood, but is seven
miles away--she learns right away that there is no use in presenting herself
at a motion picture studio without a photograph of herself.
She finds one of the many photographers who make a specialty of emergency
calls like this one. She is rather stunned when the assistant tells her of the
thousands of pictures they have supplied to other girls. But with the dozen
precious photographs she sets forth. Originally she thought that it might be
enough to apply at just one studio, but her few hours sojourn have given her a
glimmering of the truth.
The first studio she goes to has a row of plain one story buildings
fronting the street behind a line of pepper trees. Automobiles by the hundred
are parked outside. A few shabby old men are standing by the curb.
The girl has been told to ask for the casting director. She asks one of
the old men where he can be found. This man has a face waffled by many a
desert sun. He removes his hat and points to a door in the side of the row of
low buildings.
"Are you--are you an actor?" the girl ventures. The old man is not
without a sense of proportion.
"Well, miss," he says, "it might be nigher the truth to say I'm a miner.
Montana, Death Valley, Mexico and all points between. I had a little hard luck
down to Sonora and came up here to take a whirl at a new game. No, miss, I
can't truthfully say I'm an actor. I'm what they call an extra. When I work I
get $10 a day because they figure I'm what they call a good rough and ready
type. Some gets $5, some $7.50, according to how they look and what they have
to do. I had two days work last week; so far this week none. Figuring on
getting into the movies?"
The girl nods her head. The miner surveys her gravely, seems about to say
something, but ends with, "Well, good luck; some gets away with it," and turns
away.
We can't spend much time following this girl's adventures, for there are
other phases of Hollywood to report upon. She enters through the door into a
narrow passage. At the other end she sees sunlight. But it is the sunlight of
a forbidden country--the "lot," the inside of the studio enclosure. Half way
to the alluring sunlight stands a barrier, a low gate, and beside a gate the
keeper thereof.
Nothing that has been written or said about the perfection with which the
studio gatekeeper plays his part is exaggerated. You get by or you don't. If
you belong in the lot you reach it; if you are not on the list of the elect of
the lord of the lot you stay outside.
Persons who have not been in Hollywood, but have tried to pass the stage
doorkeeper of a New York theater may picture a stage doorkeeper seven times
sterner and more bored looking, and that is the gatekeeper of Hollywood. But
just before she reaches him the girl sees a door at the left of the tunnel-
like passageway. That lets her into a small, square room against whose walls
are hard wooden benches. Half a dozen men and women are sitting there. They
strike the girl as decidedly frowsy--the whole lot of them. For their part,
they look the newcomer up and down in frank appraisal.
Between this room and a smaller one adjoining and open window has been
cut in the partition. A young man is sitting by this window in the smaller
room. The girl asks for the casting director. The man tells her the casting
director never sees strangers unless they come with cards or letters from his
friends, and often not even then. He is too busy. She doesn't know any of his
friends.
The young man explains, courteously, that he is an assistant casting
director. The girl says that she wishes to be an actress. She passes over one
of the photographs. The young man rattles off a list of questions and writes
the answers on a card. He records her age, weight, height, color, wardrobe,
type, experience and other personal details. According to the card, which goes
into a filing cabinet, her type is "school girl," her experience "none" and
her wardrobe "modern," she having told the man that she had brought from home
several frocks, including an evening gown.
"That's all," the man says. "We have your telephone number. If we need
you we'll call you. No use hanging around."
"And what am I to do when called?" she says. "Extra--mob stuff," he
answers.
Then, it being a slow day and assistant directors are not always
curmudgeons as painted, he takes time to ask her if she has also registered at
the Service Bureau. She learns that this is an employment agency, operated by
the Motion Picture Producers' Association in Los Angeles for the purpose of
effecting economy through centralization and also of weeding out superfluous
and undesirable extras. Later she finds out more about the army of extras in
whose ranks (if she is so fortunate as to be called) she must grub toward
stardom.
"At first," a wise man of Hollywood tells her, "they were mostly
hysterical kids rushing out to Hollywood to jump in and make a big splash. Now
they are pretty much shaken down to hard boiled persons looking for work. They
used to flock around the studios to loll, chew gum, read the movie magazines
and talk big. They cluttered the streets and didn't add anything to the
reputation of the town in the eyes of those who wish it well. Now they are all
card indexed and most of them stay at home beside the telephone, so as not to
miss a call. That is why you see so few movie people outside the studios
during the day. They are either on the lot, out on location or in their homes.
"You're registered as a school girl type. Well, if a director who is
shooting on the lot wants twenty-five school kids to floss up something he's
doing he sends word to the casting director; the casting director's assistant
grabs twenty-five 'school girl' cards from his card index and works the phone
until he gets the right number. Or he phones the Service Bureau in Los
Angeles: 'Have twenty-five school girls, swell dressers, here by 11 o'clock.'
Some of the studios work it one way, some the other.
"There are also half a dozen private 'exchanges' or employment bureaus
for extras. Many girls on piece work in factories are on the extra list. When
a lot of people are wanted for some big spectacle they get into the mobs and
make their $5 or $7.50 a day. Ordinary mob stuff pays $5. Then again mere
'atmosphere' may be wanted. That may bring in a crowd without any experience
or movie ambition at all--a lot of farmers right off the ranch, for instance,
to piece out a street scene in rural drama, or a lynching scene, or maybe a
bunch of Chinese from Los Angeles to swell the mob in a Boxer rebellion. This
pays $3 a day. The farmers get a lot of fun out of coming to the studios
occasionally and pretending they're actors.
"The extras--on the legitimate stage they're called supers--have to be on
the lot by half past 8 in the morning the same as the actors, for shooting
starts at 9. If there's no rush to get the production done, they're through at
5 o'clock, but if there's a rush, as there often is, they may have to stick
around late at night, or even all night.
"It's hard work, and irregular work, uncertain as to money return,
usually getting you nowhere except a certain standing as a dependable extra.
I've seen many a one start with a flourish in the morning and quit for good
the first night, especially when the company goes into the country on
location. At such times the discipline of the big studios is so strict that
all the extras have to sit in their rubberneck wagons until called. They may
sit there all day in the cold and rain. There are interminable, wearisome
waits.
"And the worst of it for the screen struck youngsters is that they may
never catch even a glimpse, except at a distance, of the worshiped stars.
Often the stars do not figure in the mob stuff at all; they may be miles away
while the sequence is being shot. And at the studios the extras can't wander
whither they wish; they are herded in one place, and no stars are in that
place.
"Yes, it's a tough life, but don't let me discourage you. A few girls
have come up through it, but remember, only a few. Once in a while I hear of
one who is sensible enough to go back home and marry the proprietor of the
Elite Garage, but a great many of those who are crowded out are too proud to
go, or haven't money enough. Hence the lovely ladies you see gracing the
cafeterias and department stores of Los Angeles.
"A few girls with baby doll faces and nothing else have been starred, but
if you look over the list seriously you will find that the majority possess
not only that rarity, a complexion that photographs well, but a personality,
an almost indefinable ability to register changing moods without conscious
effort, to feel what they're playing and make the spectator feel it. In my
opinion the baby doll phase is passing, and more and more the screen is
demanding real actors and actresses."
Our small town belle has a sudden thought as the wise man of Hollywood
ends his disquisition.
"What," she says, "happened to Travesta Turbine, the girl who won the
prize in that beauty contest and got a starring engagement for five weeks at
$600 a week?"
"They paid her the money all right," the friendly cynic makes reply. "As
for the rest, she had no more brains than a snail. They made a few long shots
of her and then doubled her with a woman who can act. They told Travesta she
could hang around and get a movie education if she wanted to. She did for a
while, but as nobody paid any attention to her she gathered up her $3,000 and
left Hollywood to worry along as best it could. It was just an advertising
stunt for the studio and the paper that ran the contest. Few studios do it."
The small town belle is not discouraged--yet. As the telephone never
rings, she takes to making the rounds of the studios every day. She finds them
cheerful enough. She wonders sometimes if it wouldn't be better for her if
they were harsher.
"Can't use you just now, but come again," the assistant casting director
says. He really means it, after a fashion, for the girl is not hopeless: she
dresses well; her obdurate parents have relented to the extent of sending her
money, realizing that it will take some time to effect a cure and that the
climate of California, though salubrious, is not nutritious.
She is inspired by the few instances she hears of quick success in the
midst of failure or plodding. A friend at the Studio Club tells her of Zasu
Pitts. Mrs. Pitts brought her daughter to the Studio Club from Santa Cruz. She
was a timid country, small town girl, without training or obvious ability. She
registered as an extra. Very soon fortune placed her in Mary Pickford's
company, filming "The Poor Little Rich Girl." She developed personality.
Directors gave her small parts and she acquitted herself well, never ceasing
meanwhile to study the difficult technique. In less than three years she was a
star. That was a very rapid ascent.
Then our small town girl hears the story of Lois Lee, another graduate of
the Studio Club. A magazine beauty contest lifted her from obscurity, but it
happened that Lois Lee, unlike most of the prodigies thus discovered, had
common sense as well as beauty. As the prize winner she played a "lead"
without experience. When the picture was finished she astonished the director
by insisting on tossing away whatever prestige this might have given her and
beginning at the bottom as an extra. She had brains enough to see that she
didn't known anything about actor and humility enough to be willing to do mob
scenes in order to learn. She worked up through and is now playing leads
again.
Another Studio Club girl quit a first class stenographic job at $35 a
week for the lure of the movies. She was pretty, a good dancer, "mad about
acting," a girl from whom the uninitiated would expect rapid progress. She
went to work as an extra and also did small bits. The very first week she was
busy every day and made $60. She chanced to be exactly the type a director had
been looking for a certain sequence of scenes. But her prosperity ended with
the sequence.
During the next three weeks she earned nothing. She kept an exact
account. In three months she received $140. That was just what she had earned
in one month as a stenographer. She discovered that she was not an actress and
that the pictures requiring a girl of her type were few and far between. She
returned to her pothooks and typewriter and lived happily ever after.
Her brief experience had taught her much. She had learned that the open
field for extras is not as open as it appeared to be; that casting directors
are in the habit of choosing again and again persons whom they know and are
used to; that in most of the studios, as is entirely natural, the relatives of
employees have the first call, provided they meet the requirements; that many
studios have their own small salaried "stock" actors, who play most of the
bits; that if an extra woman has not a specially interesting personality she
may go ten weeks without earning a single dollar; that the chance of any one
in a mob scene catching the director's eye is slim; that the average picture
has only eight or ten acting parts at the most and the average extra has no
more chance of ever getting a part in Hollywood than he has of taking Caruso's
place at the Metropolitan.
And how fares amid this disillusionment the day dreaming middle Western
belle who went to Hollywood to improve the movies? I do not know. Hers is
merely a typical case, set forth from what I learned of many cases. The
chances of her name ever appearing in electric lights are at least 99 to 1
against her. She may keep on and settle down as an extra, averaging perhaps
$25 a week. She may swallow her pride and go home. She may join the
innumerable company of picture failures with picture faces crowding one
another for jobs in the stores and shops of California. Or she may disappear
altogether from her accustomed walks. Some of the girls "who look like Mary
Pickford" do that, too.
"One of the most distressing facts," said Miss Hunter, the finely poised
director of the Studio Club, "is that so many of the girls who come here have
parents or brothers and sisters to support. They expect to earn large salaries
quickly and you can imagine the worry when they find that perhaps they can't
earn anything at all. If they fail it is sometimes because they want the home
folks to think they had made good here, sometimes because it helps them to
make good."
Having heard that a good many movie girls had had experiences with evil
directors I asked Miss Hunter what conclusion she had come to on this point.
"Before I came to Hollywood," she said, "I worked among girls in large
cities. I have found less viciousness here than elsewhere. Some of the men in
the motion picture industry do present a problem, but not more so than some of
the men in department stores or factories. I know of men here who have worked
themselves into places of power in studios and who use that power to block the
progress of girls who are not complaisant. I know of girls who have revolted
and have left Hollywood for this reason. But these instances are exceptional.
"I could name many girls of my acquaintance who have reached the top
without ever having heard a disagreeable proposal. It ought to be noted that
William Desmond Taylor, the director who was murdered, had a fine reputation
among the girls. He was quiet, courteous, patient. He did not fool the girls
with careless flattery, as some directors do, but if a girl was able to see
him personally he gave sensible encouragement if he thought it deserved. I
have talked with many girls and never heard one of them say a word against
him."
I put the same question to John H. Pelletier, director of the Morals
Efficiency Association of Southern California, which functions like the
Committee of Fourteen in New York in reporting vice.
"Only a small percentage of girls who go to the studios meet
objectionable treatment," he said. "Personally I know of only once instance.
The morally irresponsible director is a marked man. Also marked is the type of
woman who is willing to oblige a director in any way in order to break into
the movies. The producers are more careful than they used to be in keeping out
directors and women of these types. But you could render a service by
publishing this warning to mothers. This city is no place for a girl to come
to without money or without relatives or friends here any more than is New
York."
Another expert view: "Don't forget that the pictures have attracted here
half baked girls and boys from everywhere. The worst menace is not the
director or the girl or the camera roughneck or any of the others you've heard
about, but the aristocratic, ne'er do well gambling and mashing sons of rich
Eastern men, who have come out here with the idea that this is the devil's
playground."
"What is your advice to girls?" I asked Miss Hunter.
"Stay at home," she said. "If you have come to Hollywood, go home unless
it is proved that you have unusual charm and individuality and enough money to
keep you going for at least a year. As a matter of fact, two years is
necessary for a fair trial. Remember that stars are not made in a day or a
month or two. Remember that there is a great and tediously acquired technique
behind the motion pictures. Remember that there are success and happiness for
few, failure and dismay for many."
This good counsel may discourage a few of the butterflies who might
otherwise join in the foolish chase around the pepper trees of Hollywood. But
until the movies lose their glamour there will undoubtedly continue to be
girls like the one who recently ran away from home to be near the studios.
She had fallen in love with a lofty hero of the screen whose specialty is
rescuing forlorn maidens and carrying them off in a rakish roadster over
winding, perilous mountain trails. Her ambition point not toward art but
toward the hero. [2]
Barred from the studios, she climbed ten foot fences to get at him.
Driving home at night, he found her hiding in his car. When he walked in his
garden, she materialized from vines and shrubbery. As this actor has a wife
and children and is a mild and prosaic citizen when not skyhooting before the
camera, the attentions of the runaway girl from the East embarrassed him not a
little. He sent for her parents and had her taken home, but at last report she
was planning another sortie and the star was about to retreat to Honolulu.
Rupert Hughes, who returned to Hollywood while was there, says most of
the gossip about the movie people and their customs is poppycock.
"I've been on the lot two years," he assured me, "and never have even
seen a woman kissed, except as c
alled for by the script. I have never seen a
drunken man, have never seen any soliciting in the streets. Hollywood is just
as clean as any theological seminary, and any other statement befouls the man
who makes it. I have had jobs to offer, careers to make. No woman has as much
as hinted to me that she was willing to grant favors to get along. These
matters aside, let the public keep in mind the words of Ian MacLaren: 'Be
pitiful, because everybody's having a hard fight.' "
To this may be added the observation of one who has watched Hollywood
from its romper days and sees it now adolescent but growing up:
"Bad has been mixed with the good here and a man is a fool to deny it.
But the big question is, Who is molding the movies, the rotten producer, the
rotten director, the rotten actor? Or is it the decent people with an adequate
set of ideals which they don't bother to say much about? To me it is the
latter. To me the movies are not the Arbuckles, but the Fairbankses, the Mary
Pickfords, the Bill Harts, the Charley Rays, the Conrad Nagels, the Will
Rogerses, the Harold Lloyds--scores of others, the finest in the world,
setting an example of good acting and good citizenship.
PART IV [Brief Tour of Some Hollywood Studios]
We rode from beauteous Hollywood down to the flats toward the ocean,
where derricks against the skyline betrayed the oil wells of Culver City. The
car stopped beside a low cottage. Outside the cottage, with her back to us,
stood a crookback witch peering into a hand mirror propped on a window sill
while she applied dabs of fresh putty to an already terrifying nose and chin.
Our guide said, "This is Mark Jones. Mr. Jones, I'd like you to meet this
man from New York who has come here to write up the movies." The witch,
turning and grinning with every snaggle tooth, extended a hand. "Fine weather
we're having," she said, and Mark Jones, kindliest of men, blackest of motion
picture villains, returned to his mirror and make-up box.
The guide took us around the corner of the cottage and we came to another
one which had a front stoop. By the stoop crouched a Confederate soldier. He
wore a gray uniform with "C.S.A." on the belt, forage cap, sword, square bowed
spectacles and short side whiskers. The witch went over and joined him. The
Confederate groveled in the sand at her feet, then suddenly leaped up, grasped
the sword hilt and marched off very fine and resolute. Then he went back and
did it again. He said something to the witch and she leered and clawed in the
air with wheedling fingers twisting in front of his face. But he waved her
aside and, disregarding her mumbled curses, strode away. He strode maybe eight
feet, then stopped and said to a youth waiting at the camera, "All right, let
'er go." All the action was repeated while the camera man cranked. Then the
soldier came forward smiling to meet our guide.
"Harold," said the guide, "you better shake hands with this man. He's
come from New York to write up the movies."
"Good heavens!" cried Harold Lloyd, for the "Secesh" was none other, "are
we as bad as that?"
He proved to be boyish, unaffected, likable. He led forth his leading
woman, Mildred Davis, a blue eyed, yellow haired, fragile looking girl. She
wished it to be understood that she was indignant over the published stories
about Hollywood and that lots of girls in the movies were just like those she
had known at finishing school in Philadelphia. She dropped a curtsey and said
precisely, "I am very glad to have met you," before going back to the
automobile which was to take them back into the hills for other scenes of the
new Lloyd comedy. Mr. Lloyd paused to explain that the fragment we had just
scene was part of a sequence in which he plays his own grandfather. He had
never word a disguise before.
"How long does it take you to make a comedy?" we asked him.
"Well, we've been five months and a half on this one, but it's nearly
finished."
"Why so long," we said, knowing that many pictures are completed in a few
weeks.
"I don't know, unless it is that you've got to take a lot of pains to
make people laugh." The lad, excusing himself and holding the sword against
his leg to stop its gyrations, ran off to join Miss Davis. Our guide sprinted
us around the second cottage, where we came to a sign "Central Hotel" swinging
from a two story shack. A big man in a blue shirt and overalls was rehearsing
a recumbent burro. The burro was supposed to scramble to its feet when the big
man, standing a few feet in front, snapped his fingers. In its own good time
it did so.
"All right, Sammy, get aboard," called out another man, who by every
token of riding breeches and leather puttees should have been a movie
director, which indeed he was. A little negro boy with half his galluses
missing shot up from nowhere, mounted the burro, dug his bare knees into his
ribs and pounded the beast with his fists. The boy was Sunshine Sammy. If you
saw "Penrod" you remember him. In the new picture it will appear that it was
Sammy's frantic goading that stirred the burro from its siesta in front of the
Central Hotel, but we are here to swear that it was the snapping and clucking
of that trainer out in front beyond the range of the camera.
Sammy then sauntered over to a neighboring log pile and sat down beside a
young negro woman. She is his tutor--a graduate of the University of Texas.
The law compels each studio to provide schooling for its actors not yet 16
years of age. Sunshine Sammy snatches his education in large bites between
camera shots. On this day the textbook was "Work and Play With Language." The
teacher showed him a picture and he had to write a story about it. When we
left Sammy he was bent over his copy book and had written as far as "Once
there were two goats lived on opposite sides of the stream."
Studios of the Hollywood district vary widely in appearance. Some sprawl
like lumber yards and are about as tidy. Others would satisfy the most
exacting architect or housewife. The Hal E. Roach Studios, where Harold Lloyd,
Sunshine Sammy and others make their comedies, are of the informal type. The
Goldwyn Studios, which we next visited, are a great white city of forty-two
buildings, eighteen of which are permanent steel and concrete or stucco. These
with the temporary "sets" are scattered over fifty acres of ground.
The talisman that got us past the gatekeeper was the name of Joe A.
Jackson, publicity chief, whom we had known in New York as a newspaper man.
The master of the gate phoned Mr. Jackson and suddenly became human and
opening the barrier told us where to find him. We passed through the
administration building into the "lot." In the scene opening before us were
well kept lawns and tropical foliage--ten acres of lawn and garden, the
dutiful Joe told us--many little parks set down between and surrounding four
great glass roofed, glass walled stages where interior scenes are made. We
inspected a workshop as big as New York's City Hall, where movie scenery is
made; a huge property room where 15,000 objects ranging from thrones of
emperors to pine needles are neatly classified and tagged; a wardrobe room
from among whose 5,000 costumes can instantly be summoned the appareling of
King Menelik's army, the hordes of Ghengis Khan, a harem, a whaling expedition
or a bull fight; a laboratory with aproned girl alchemists transforming raw
yellow film into the magic ribbon of the projectoscope and with gigantic
wooden drums on which the finished ribbon was being dried, revolving in heated
atmosphere.
But I have no intention of wearying the reader with a detailed
description of the complex organism which is the modern picture making plant.
Joe Jackson and I walked around the property room and a glassed in stage that
would house a Zeppelin and found ourselves standing in front of the Town Hall
and flagpole and looking past Anders feed store, down a village street toward
comfortable looking cottages behind fine shade trees. I liked especially an
old brown house set back from the street with a geranium bordered walk leading
to the porch.
"It's interesting on the inside, too," said Joe. "Let's go in." We
stepped firmly up to the porch, opened the front door and were confronted by--
nothing. That is, there were timbers propping up the walls of the house;
otherwise merely a stubbily open space. The house was a carefully built and
painted shell. The two large trees that give it shade--sycamores, I think--had
been brought from miles away. The geraniums were in buried pots. The lawn was
transplanted sod. The brown house was a set built in a few hours for Rupert
Hughes' play, "The Old Nest." The village of which it was part had been
peopled for a day. Grass was now growing in the streets. The studio spaces of
California are filled with deserted villages. It surprised me that they were
allowed to stand after their mission was accomplished, but I was told that
with a little change here and there most of them can be used again and again
for other pictures.
Beyond this melancholy Main Street we came upon a high arched wall and a
turret with a window and balcony. It was here that Will Rogers doubled for
Romeo. He jumped backward from the balcony to a landing net, then from the
landing net to the ground. With the film reversed and the landing net cut out
he seemed in the picture to spring from the ground to the balcony to greet his
Juliet.
Next we traversed a street in Peking constructed for Gouverneur Morris'
photoplay, "A Tale of Two Worlds." For Boxer rebels several hundred Los
Angeles Chinese were hired at $7.50 a day--the high cost of Chinese being one
of the reasons why it takes so much money to make a movie spectacle. Nearby
was a Mississippi River town, created for "The Sin Flood." A stroll along the
levee brought us to the Five Points of New York as that spot appeared in 1869,
reconstructed with the help of old prints for the Gertrude Atherton picture,
"Don't Neglect Your Wife." Its crazy groggeries, drunken lampposts and rounded
cobbles were all made on the lot.
Thence we passed into a street of New York's East Side, which even the
Hon. Louis Zeltner would O.K. The Yiddish shop signs were authenticated by a
rabbi from Los Angeles. This street was utilized in "Hungry Hearts." There are
twenty or thirty acres of these strangely neighboring communities--all the
world and its fantasies in Goldwyn's back yard. They are much more fascinating
to the stranger than Coney Island, the only trouble being that the stranger
can't get in any more than he can get behind the scenes in a theater.
A glance into the casting office completed our visit to the Goldwyn
establishment. There they let us look into filing cabinets where 10,000 men,
women and children are card indexed, each with a photograph of the subject in
his most alluring pose. These are the persons registered form employment in
the pictures as players of parts, bit people or extras.
The next stop on the grand tour was Charley Chaplin's studio in
Hollywood. On the way we passed several others, including the massive colonial
mansion of Thomas H. Ince and the steep roofed, many colored, many angled,
moated old mill of Irving Willat. This curious structure is said to be the
House that Jack Built. If so Jack as an artist has never had the credit he
deserves.
But what shall we say of Chaplin, who perpetrates his comedies in one of
the beauty spots of Hollywood? You ride along Sunset Boulevard and come to a
box hedge behind which are tall evergreens and palms screening a large white
house of Colonial design. The fattest of oranges on the greenest of trees
shine at you over the hedge. Among them a big cherry tree is in full bloom.
Charley Chaplin does not live in the house, but his brother Syd does. It came
with the estate, a whole block which Chaplin bought for $38,000, house and
all, a few years ago, and is now worth $150,000. Residents of that part of
Hollywood shrieked when they found that Chaplin had got the place and was
going to build a studio. They protested on aesthetic, material and all other
grounds. But within fifteen days after the completion of the studio the value
of abutting property jumped from 100 to 200 per cent, and the wailing died
away. Chaplin had fooled them by erecting for his administration offices--the
part of the studio which the public sees--a row of brick or stucco cottages
which would do credit to an English cathedral town.
Penetrating one of these English cottages we came to the Chaplin "lot"
and saw the steel and glass stage where the great pantomimist concocts his
foolery. Just one company uses it--Chaplin's. There are two one storied rows
of dressing rooms, one for men, the other for women. The dressing room of Edna
Purviance, the Chaplin leading woman, who is to be starred independently, is a
little larger than the others. Between these two buildings is a deep swimming
pool which serves for all sorts of aquatic mishaps. Drained it enabled Chaplin
to do his trench fighting in "Shoulder Arms." We inspected his riding horse,
Florrie, and learned from the contents of his garage that he has only two
cars, a limousine and a touring car, with only one chauffeur. His property
room is a museum of every relic known to the slapstick art, including a wall
motto, "Love Thy Neighbor." His private room is a comfortable study. An alcove
opening from it is his dressing room. On a costumer in the alcove hang the
celebrated Chaplin habiliments, including three bowler hats. Reverently we
examined the hats. Each of them had been bashed in my many a stuffed club and
falling wall and the tears neatly sewed up again with surgical precision so
that now the crowns were criss crossed with honorable scars. The size is 7
1/8. Also in the alcove is a dressing table with three mirrors, and on the
table I hastily noted a button hook, a shoe horn, a pair of scissors, a comb,
grease paints and a box of cornstarch. The furniture in the big outer room
includes a large leather covered davenport and chairs, a flat mahogany desk,
bare of papers as an industrial captain's should be, and a small shelf of
books. On the shelf were copies of "Punch" and "Le Rire," a collection of
poems, "Behold the Man"; "Shakespeare in London," "La Vie des Lettres" and
"Through the Russian Revolution," by Albert Rhys Williams. These samples
attested the truth of what I had heard about the range of Chaplin's reading.
In a cement walk outside the stage those toeing out footsteps have been
preserved for the puzzlement of future zoologists. On the day of the
cornerstone laying Chaplin pranced the length of the walk, which was still
soft, and wrote his name in the soft concrete block, with the date,
January 21, 1918.
Continuing our drive through Hollywood we came next to the studios of the
Famous Players-Lasky Company. It covered two blocks near the center of town,
one of the offices, stages, and other permanent buildings, one for the outdoor
sets. Both are fringed with graceful pepper trees. Here the sealed door opened
with the pressure of a button because a good friend left the password at the
gate. It is so hard to get by this gate that the visitor shoots through in a
hurry for fear some mistake has been made. He finds himself in a hard packed
sanded street flanked on one side by the low office buildings, on the other by
three or four monster stages of the now familiar sort, a blending of warehouse
and conservatory. My friend took me into one of the stages. It was a vast
place. We threaded our way among darkened sets until, rounding one of them, we
came upon a patch of brilliant light. Moving closer we saw that the rays of
the lights, fifteen of them I should say, trained from an upper level as well
as the floor, converged at a spot where stood a stalwart young man in khaki
breeches and cobalt blue, open throated shirt. He was in the act of defying a
fat, epauletted, much medaled Latin American generalissimo. A director whom I
couldn't see called "All ready." Epaulettes turned his head to blow out a
lungful of cigarette smoke and then, while the handsome Gringo regarded him
tensely, the camera began grinding. Around the room in which this episode was
being filmed were scattered other Latins--ragged peons with conical straw hats
and haughty lieutenants of the big chief. I knew nothing more except that they
were doing "The Dictator" and the hero with the blue shirt was Wallace Reid.
The director, James Cruze, was getting whatever effects he wanted by speaking
softly. Where is the lair of the cursing, slave driving director? I saw none
of his kind anywhere in Hollywood.
Through another cavernous stage, labyrinth of sets, past the tank where
sank the Lusitania in Mary Pickford's "Little American," we walked until we
struck another circle of light. This time we looked into the living room of a
South African farmhouse. A young man sat at a table, covered with red damsk,
playing cards with a blond who was fair to behold. You could tell by the way
she pretended to steady the cards while listening for a sound of approaching
hoofbeats that she was using the card game as a ruse to hold the young man
until a rescuer came galloping up. The players were Dorothy Dalton and Milton
Sills. This ended their day's work. Sills chatted a moment with the director,
George Melford, and left the stage with a blue book under his arm. "Looking
for orgies, I suppose," he said, passing us. "My personal hobby is decadent
literature. Look at it." The book was Robinson's "English Flower Gardens."
Another set on the Lasky lot proved to be a boudoir. A beautiful young
woman with loosed blonde hair cascading over a negligee house gown stood with
her back to the wall. This was Agnes Ayres. The faultless face and form of the
young man whom she held captive while registering anguish was that of Conrad
Nagel.
From Lasky's we went over to the United Studios, one of the largest in
Hollywood. Outwardly it might be a gardener's lodge on a fine estate. Inwardly
it has real gardens and four streets bordered with cottages which are used as
settings as well as for office and dressing rooms. One of these, a red roofed
cottage, housed Mary Pickford and her staff while "Little Lord Fauntleroy" was
being made. She and her husband have their own studio now. We entered a stage
which is 300 feet long and 160 feet wide. We passed a gorgeous throne room and
the interior of the British House of Commons and stopped at a bower where Guy
Bates Post was at work on one of the difficult double exposure scenes of "The
Masquerader." Post, in evening dress, was standing at a door of the bower and
gazing anxiously into the night. And out of the night the camera was shooting
him, through the door.
Richard Walton Tully, adapter of Temple Thurston's novel for stage use,
was there in the capacity of supervisor. The director, James Young, was
somewhere about. But the man who really directs the action for double exposure
is the camera man. There is a chalk line on the floor which the actor must not
pass with foot or gesture. The camera man, looking into his finder, is the
only man who can tell when this line is threatened. This camera man, while he
cranked, was saying: "A little closer, Mr. Post--a couple of inches yet--look
out--you've reached the limit--step back a little, Mr. Post--now all right--
show yourself more front behind the door--that's good." And Post was obeying
too.
"How much now?" Tully inquired.
"Fifty feet," said the camera man.
"Enough." The cranking stopped. Only five feet of film were needed for
this little scene. The five feet that show the actor with the expression and
attitude best expressing the emotion of the moment will be cut out and used,
the remaining forty-five discarded.
Our studio tour ended with a visit to Universal City, several miles north
of Hollywood, in San Fernando Valley, reached by way of a deep and fragrant
canyon, Cahuenga Pass. Here is the world's largest motion picture expanse.
There is no city in the ordinary sense, nothing but the Universal plant, but
its completeness makes it a film metropolis. To the original 250 acres have
recently been added 350 more. Among its accessories are a menagerie and a
ranch with a full complement of cowboys and Mexicans and bronchos, not to
mention mesquite and chaparral.
In the course of time a sojourn in the studio country dulls one's
appreciation of marvels, but something came into our vision as we approached
Universal City that proved we were not yet jaded. On the crest of a lofty
hill, across the tops of the while buildings in the valley, we saw a full
rigged, three masted ship. On that hilltop "Robinson Crusoe" is being filmed.
The reason was plain enough when given. It is cheaper to build a ship on a
hill near the studio than it is to go down to San Pedro and buy or rent one.
And on the hill the camera, shooting always at a background of sky, attains
the desired effect as of an illimitable ocean. Opposite the entrance to
Universal City is a perfect reproduction of a section of waterfront and pier
as seen from the street of a seaport, with yellow funnels rising from a dummy
steamship aboard which countless anxious couples have eloped to Buenos Aires
and Singapore. Just inside the main gate stands a trolley car labeled "Monte
Carlo" in front and "Battery Park" behind. Such are the wonders of movieland.
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NEXT ISSUE:
March 1926: Cyclone around Keyes
The Truth About Hollywood:
PART V [How Much Do the Stars Earn?]
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NOTES:
[1]Wallace Reid
[2]Wallace Reid
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For more information about Taylor, see
WILLIAM DESMOND TAYLOR: A DOSSIER (Scarecrow Press, 1991)
Back issues of Taylorology are available via Gopher or FTP at
etext.archive.umich.edu
in the directory pub/Zines/Taylorology
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