HOLLYWOOD

I have heard members of this little group more than once speak slightly about papers concerning travel. This I am impelled to say, in the very beginning, that this little effott to bring Hollywood to you tonight is not a Burton Holmes travelogue, for Hollywood and Los Angeles itself is more a state of mind than a place, and I believe that the state of mind created Los Angeles and that Los Angeles did not create the aura which surrounds it.

The way to receive the full impact of the West Coast is to start, as I did, from LaGuardia Field five-thirty one afternoon in what is knows as a Stratoliner. If you are not at home in the air, it is well to ask the hostess after she hasserved you a meager dinner a few thousand feet above the Alleghenies to get your bed ready and to give you a couple of pink capsules. In my experience, even with the aid of sedative, sleep does not come completely. There is a violent pain in your ears when the plane drops down at Kansas City. Then a few hours of restless slumber, and you are down at Albuquerque. Shortly after this the hostess wakes you up.

"If you get up now," she says, "the men's wash room is open and you can see Boulder Dam from the air."

And sure enough, there is Boulder Dam and Lake Mead, a great puddle of blue water lapping against the inhospitable contours of the Arizona desert. You

Hollywood 2

look at it in the same detached manner that you examine a color plate in
a handsome volume, for you have nothing whatsoever to do with Boulder Dam --
your life is still three thousand miles away in New York. It gives you all
the sensations of a disembodied spirit, and that sensation is not diminished
as you watch the dust swirl in the desert by Palm Springs below you, and cross
the Sierras and come to earth at the northern airport, whose name I don't
remember. The flyinf field is flanked by the North American Aircraft factory
and the edge of the field is lined with camouflaged bonbers ready to be shuttled
up to Canada. On hundreds of acres of aemi-arid land, workmen's bungalows are
springing up like mushrooms.

A publicity man from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer met me at the gate with a
tudio car driven by a broken-nosed chauffeur.

"It's a nice morning," I said.

"Yes," he told me, "it's always a nice morning in Los Angeles."

I thought he said it a little wistfully, but from my experience he was
certainly right. Every morning is Los Angeles is like early summer, dewy and
clear as crystal. Birds are carolling throaily in the date palm outside of
the hotel window; a gentle breeze blows always and the sunlight dances through
rattling palm leaves upon Bouganvillia and Jasmine. There is never a cloud in
the sky and those birds, God knows what they are, are always singing and some-
times you wish to heaven, though you know you wish it vainly, but still you wish

Hollywood 3

to heaven that it might be cold and rainy. As Mr. Samuel Goldwyn said not so long ago:

"What a beautiful day it is to spend Sunday."

As far as I know, every day is a beautiful day to spend Sunday, but no one I ever saw in Hollywood ever spent Sunday. We were never in one place long enough on Sunday. We were motoring cross country or swimming in someone's pool or getting seasick on someone's yacht on the way to Barcelona.

The airport was about ten miles from anywhere, except from blocks after block of bungalows; and even the vacant real estate developments which we passed were covered with more six-room homes when I saw that airport again.

There was a great many boulevards which the M-G-M publicity man pointed out to me, such as Sunset Boulevard where the sun hits the motorists' eyes in the evening and causes them to run into each other, and Hollywood Boulevard, that thoroughfare a little like Atlantic City with open-air markets and popcorn stands and cocktail bars and Seventh Day Adventists' missions. Along Hollywood Boulevard in particular are road-stands with Curb Service, where little girls knows as "car-hops" dressed in uniforms like sailors from "Pinafore" or like bull fighters hand you Orange Crush and hope to get into the movies. I stopped at one of those places once with King Vidor for a little refreshment. The little car-hop, when she saw that she was face to face with his wonder-man of the movies, dropped her giant shake. We also passed the Brown Derby where

Hollywood 4

anyone who amounts to anything in Hollywood appears at regular intervals
and shouts boisterously to friends across the room so that everyone will know
for certain that he is there. We also passed Ciro's, that restaurant where
anyone who amounts to anything in Hollywood must also appear once a week and
where boys and girls with autograph books form a line on the sidewalk which
often reaches nearly a block. These autograph hunters run a pretty business.
Some of them hold letter files which contain pictures of all the stars, which may
be purchased at Kresge's for ten cents apiece. When they see the star enter
Ciro's, they snatch her picture out. Should she autograph it, the complete
work sells for fifty cents. Along Hollywood Boulevard there walks day and night
a rainbow agent of corpulent Hebrews and buxome women whose buttocks are
covered by thin slacks of orange and pink and blue, and beautiful girls with
page bobs who want to get into the movies and who eat their hearts out daily in
the extra lines, and fine young men who look like Ronald Coleman and all the
stunt riders and the drug addicts and the religious maniacs and the Chinese
and the Mexicans and also a gentleman known as the Hermit. The Hermit, usually
appears on Hollywood Boulevard at about four o'clock in the afternoon from a
cave he inhabits in some piece of hillside which as yet has been made into
a real estate development. The Hermit is dressed in two gunny-sack bags and
sandals; his hair falls over his shoulders and he has a long and unsanitary
beard. The Hermit never speaks to anyone, but he does sell postcards. He gives
a tone to Hollywood Boulevard. If you go there, ask one of the car-hops when they

Hollywood 5

expect him because you really ought to see the Hermit.

But I seem to be digressing from that trip of mine from the airport. In a short while Hollywood Boulevard was left behind me and we began passing beautiful homes, the older ones heavily Spanish, and newer ones, God knows why, slightly Georgian, each standing on half an acre of lawn upon which is planted a bewildering variety of flora brought from all the temperate zones of the planet. I have sometimes thought that ones' social status is largely determined by the number of things he has growing on the lawn.

"And God knows everything grows here," the publicity man told me. "It's the climate. All you have to do is stick it in the ground."

Into the welcoming bosom of Los Angeles they have stuck Monkey Puzzle trees from Africa, Euclyptus from Australia, grotesque and sportive shrubs from Japan, Avocado trees, fig trees, Hybiscus, date palms, coconut palm, Alexandra palms, travellers palms, palmetto, rambler roses and a lot of other vines. There's no particular relationship between all this conflicting flora. It reminds you a little of one of those apples at a cocktail party impaled by hundreds of toothpicks, each containing a different sort of indigestible goody. These are the homes where people live who have arrived. It is important that you live in a good one or else you are a nobody, each of these homes has an interesting appointment which I have seen nowhere else. On every lawn, no matter how tiny, there has to be a swimming pool, and the pools are made in

Hollywood 6

quantity production in Los Angeles by a company which scoops a hole with
a steam shovel and fills it with cement before you can say Jack Robinson.
Also, everyone of these homes has a room which is known as a bar. This is
equipped with a brass rail, stools, bottles and usually with a great many
comic signs purchasable at any good California gift shop, such as "Don't
Spit On the Floor", "Ladies With Excorts Only", "Don't Hog the Free Lunch,
This Means You". When you are entertained at one of these homes, your
host immediately gets behind the bar, and if he is a wit, he pretends to
be a bar-keeper. He may even put on a hand covering known as "Cocktail
Mittins." These are made of cloth with other wise-cracks printed on them,
and have bells upon the fingers which make a hissing noise as the bever-
lidge is shaken. Every modern architect always includes a bar in his house
plans. I asked King Vidor why once, I may say that he told me a lot of
things when he found that I was interested in the life and habits of the
natives.

"If you don't have a bar," Mr. Vidor said, "the boys get tight all over the place and burn the upholstery with cigarettes. Every housewife in Hollywood wants a bar."

And yet in the homes I visited, and I may say in all modesty that I was
well received by a number of the great figures, there was almost always a
naive, almost naïve simplicity. The really big shots in Hollywood are

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too busy to get drunk, besides, they are all suffering from nerves, dizzy
spells and ulcers caused by trying to think up pictorial ideas for you and
me. Besides the bar room, anyone with culture has at least two pieces of
antique furniture, although these pieces seldom get back further than the
General Grant period. But you must never make what is known in Hollywood as
a "crack" about them, because it will hurt the feelings of your hostess. King
Vidor's home, which I am most familiar, is set upo the summit of a small
mountain, the top of which has been truncated by engineers to make room for
a house which is half Swedish and half Swiss, for a lawn, a garden, and a
swimming pool. Seated on the terrace there, where your chair is nearly
whipped from under you by the trade winds of the pacific, scores of square
miles of Los Anglese stretch beneath you like a magic carpet and you can see
the fog of the Pacific rolling across the oil fields by Wilmington, where
Mr. Vidor and all the other boys keep their yachts. the Vidor's swimming
pool is heated by electricity and the temperature is always 85 because King
does not want any sort of shock. It is a new home, and there is a little
pathos in its story, which is familiar with other homes in Hollywood.

"You see," King told me, "I just built this place two years ago and
planted all the trees and bushes. You see, my life has always run in a sort
of pattern, and I'm trying to break that pattern. First I fall in love with
some star in some picture out her, then we get married, and I build a house

Hollywood 8

and swimming pool and plant trees. Then somehow or other it never works and we get divorced and I leave her the house. Then I fall in love with another star and we get married and I build another house. This time I'm breaking the pattern. I've married my scrip writer and by God, I'm going to stay here until the trees grow up."

This is a wholesome wish, but not as ambitions as it sounds as trees grows about ten feet a year in that sun-kissed land -- everything starts growing just as soon as thou stick it in the ground.

Charlie Chaplin has his swimming pool and tennis court and game room where he likes to sit and talk about Spengler, which is easy because Charlie has never read Spengler. The plumbing is his house is almost entirely rusted out. The shower in his bedroom doesn't work and he has to douse himself from a tin basin. He doesn't bother to repair it because he says he is against everything mechanical and that once he used to be a poor Cookney from the London slums.

Ginger Rogers has a house on another mountain which looks a little like the monastery of Shangri-La. Besides the customary bar, Miss Rogers has a soda fountain off the main hall. Here a boy in a white boat stands all day and as far as I know all night. The story of this is pretty much like so much in Hollywood.

It seems that Miss Rogers as a little girl in humble circumstances never could have sodas, and now, by God, she can have all the sodas she wants. The only trouble is, she can't because they make her put on weight. There is a moral

Hollywood 9

about this story, if you think of it. You can read all the aspirations
and beauty between the lines.

But again I am getting far afield. I have been trying to lead you by the
hand through this magic city to where I dwelt in the sun-kissed stucco spacious
ness of the Beverly Hills Hotel -- and bungalows. Sometimes, on a dark night,
it is difficult to distinguish the hotel from the bungalows, and often in the
small house they all get mixed together. The manager of the hotel is a social
snob who throws names and nicknames and waars a tweed coat with orange strips
and fawn colored pants. I made a fortunate entry because he knew that King
Vidor was expecting me, and when Mr. Vidor appeared to call on me, and when he
found that I knew Mrs. Vincent Astor, everything was quite all right. It seems
that he had lived there in a bungalow once and was very gracious and very
lovely, and Vincent was quite a card, wasn't he? Yes, he had had a lovely
times with Vincent.

King Vidor, who looks a little like Jack Dempsey but who is a highly
intelligent man, was wearing a plumb colored suit and he took me in hand at
once.

When he saw my wardrobe, he was gentle about it, but kindly.

"You see, you've got to wirk with me in the studio. Of course, you're
here as a literary figure but you'd better come with me and get some clothes
first, or else they won't understand you."

In no time I found myself in an emporium climbing into a plumb colored

Hollywood 10

tropic-air suit, exactly like Mr. Vidor's, and being fitted for a paid of
shoes without any laces, called "casuals". I asked Mr. Vidor if I could
buy one of those blue shirts with the tails out, but he thought I had better
not. He was reticent, but later I understood him.

Down there in the fifty acre M-G-M lot where I was to meet this new
intellectual challenge, there is a world within a world and your rank is
determined immediately by your dress. First there are the executives like
Louie Mayer and Ben Getz who wear spats and are dressed by London tailors, and
who each have a dressing room and a valet and at least three changes of clothes.
The directors like King Vidor wear tripic-airs and casuals, I think because
they are temperamental fellows involved in film art. Writers who get over
a thousand a week should ress like the directors or else the policeman in the
Commissary won't let you set at the writer's table. But all those poor
scribbers who get less and who try to organize the writer's Guild wear
rainbow colored beach pajamas and work in a cubicle in a sort of sweat shop
where a policeman with a gun walks up and down the corridors and takes their
names if they come in late from lunch. If your sallary is sufficient, however,
you have an office, air conditioned with a secretary and a leather couch and
an inner office with a leather couch where you can just be alone because the
secretary keeps everybody out. Personally I had a bungalow which I shared with
Anita Loos, but she wasn't there much because she liked to work at home.

I wish I might describe that strange world to you in some detail, but it

Hollywood 11

scarcely falls in the scope of this rambling reminiscence. I might, however, illustrate the life by a few antecdotes. The bungalow where I worked was close to the music department in back of stage 21. There was music and singing all day long. Outside my room was the rest room for the child stars who expressed themselves with merry shrieks and gambles and what self-conscious cute little numbers they were, each followed by a shrill amused Mama.

"Sammy," you could hear Mama saying all day long, "next time you see that big Jewish gentleman, give him a big smile, Sammy."

Odd things were happening all around that bungalow. Once when I was struggling with an idea a man in overalls knocked on the door. He wanted to see my desk and I let him see it. He dropped upon his hands and knees the better to examine the desk and I told him I was just a stranger from a distant land and I asked him what he was doing. It appears that the doctor's desk which was being used in the Young Dr. Kildaire set had somehow disappeared in the middle of young Kildaire's celluloid adventures. It was lost somewhere in the beehive of the G-M's fifty acres and this man was searching for it everywhere, madly, vainly and all alone. When he left there was another knock. It was the rouged white-haired mother of the child star's rest room. It appeared that little Sammy, of course I knew little Sammy in "Our Gang", was about to have a birthday celebration. The children were to have a peanut hunt and could she put some peanuts in my office. They were cute children who would just tip-toe in and whisper while I was working.

Hollywood 12

There interruptions seemed bazarre to me at first, but soon they were a part of everyday in that world of different values. Soon it did not surprise me in the least when I was summoned to a producer's office to find this gentleman, who drew down a salary of a quarter of a million per annum, lying prone on the carpet in the middle of his Jacobean sanctum with all the blinds down.

"Sit down," he said, "and excuse me if I don't get up. This is the only way I can think, and besides, I have ulcers of the stomach."

This malady, it seems to me, is a real badge of distinction. In the pressure of work, in the clash of great minds, in the screaming, cursing and quarreling of a really good picture conference, every executive stops and gulps down his digestive tablets -- every good executive has ulcers of the stomach.

I say it is a state of mind, but perhaps I deal lightly with a serious subject for the men there are deadly serious. They are skillful and endowed with intuition and they love that world in which they were brought up. They have an *esprit de corp* and loyalty which is sometimes enormous. You see it with the night shift who are building scenes in the great barns of indoor stages. Sometimes in the evening, King Vidor would walk with me through the lighted streets of the lots and we would stop to watch the sets they were making for the morning -- ruined medieval castles, slums, dugouts, English country

Hollywood 18

houses. I remember one interior we saw them building. It was to represent
a room in a house which had not been opened for years. The curtains were dropping
to pieces with age, the floor and furniture were covered with impalpable dust
and an old man was walking about blowing something with a Flit gun while
electricians were setting up cameras and lights and sound machines. I asked
King Vidor what the man was doing with the Flit gun, and as I say, King was
nice about answering my questions -- all the producers and directors were nice
to me, first because I was a visiting novelist without any axe to grind, secondly
because I had been divorced at last once, and thirdly because I was connected
by marriage with the Rockefellers. This meant that we had human experiences
in common and that I had presumedly, which would prevent my getting any of
their jobs.

"That man?" King said. "Why, that's the cobweb man."

And sure enough, the old gentleman was walking about the room squirming
cellulose cobwebs out of the gun, weaving them into intricate spider-like patterns.

"It's all he does," King said," and he's a damn good cobweb man. There is
also the man with the trained rat, the dog man and the lionman. Just call
up the office on the telephone, and they will send you anything.

One night as I walked with King Vidor I heard a strange noise in a small
building off stage 3, and we paused at the open doorway to look. It was a brightly
lighted room, a taxidermist shop. A life size rubber bear was standing on its

Hollywood 14

hind legs, flailing its arms, while a man was poking at him with a broom-stick. I had thought by then that I would not be surprised by anything but the man in the rubber bear-skin was so life-like that I thought for a moment that he was real.

"My God," I said, "what's that?"

Vidor at first looked puzzled, but then his face lighted with perfect comprehension.

"That's Slewfoot," he said, "in 'The Yearling' rehearsing for when the dogs chase him. It has to be a man in a rubber make-up. It can't be a real bear when the dogs get after him -- Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and the Hayes Office."

And that reminds me of a final story, the last I fear, that I have time to tell. It has to do with Slewfoot, the bear and that novel of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, "The Yearling" which, when I was there, was bothering the best brains of Metro-Goodwyn-Mayer. They had bought the picture rights of "The Yearling" and they were going to do something big with it. They knew that story of the lonely little boy who made a pet out of that fawn in that primitive everglade wilderness was a whole lot more than a tear-jerker. It had guts to it, it was real, it was a work of art. The word came down to go all out on it, to make it cost at least three million dollars and not to crap it up. It had to be real and artistic, in technicolor, long shots of sun-

hollywood 15

sets, plain simple southern folk with dialect and overalls. It was good for
the Academy Award, and it was going to cost three million dollars. The main
thing they wanted to do was to make it absolutely real.

The way they went to work shows you how the do things. The picture was
to be taken right by the St. John's River where the story was laid, and soon
they found that Miss Rawlings had written of a real place and real people. Fifty
years ago there had been a real farm called Baxter's Island, an upland in the
marshes of the St. John's River. There had been a little boy named Jody
Baxter who had loved a fawn, and what was more, Jody Baxter's brother, eighty-
five years old, slightly crippled, was still alive in Jacksonville. The
technical crew went down and found him. Baxter's Island, it appears, had been
deserted for half a century, so it had reverted to a snake infested Palmetto
winterness. But Jody Baxter's brother was helped there by the picture crew and
the whole Baxter farm was restored just as Jody Baxter's brother remembered it,
the old slab cabin, the barn, the corn crib and the backhouse. It was faithful,
even to the haid-split rail fence. It was necessary to purchase another whole
farm to get a fence that was suitable because the farmer refused to sell it.
It had taken one hundred men six months to fix the island, then, to make it
homey, a couple was hired to life on it so that paths would be worn. There
were, of course, a great many minor problems, such as the corn in the corn field.
It would be necessary when the picture was taken sometimes to have corn three

Hollywood 16

inches high, sometimes two feet and sometimes full grown, and naturally the boys couldn't sit around waiting for the corn to grow. This was solved by starting successive generations of corn in thousands of flowerpots. Then there was the problem of animals. In one shot there had to be a baby raccoon trained and just three weeks old. They began raising generations of raccoons, always taking care to have one ready at any given moment in case they began shooting the picture. The problem of the fawn was more complicated. They had to be fawns in five successive stages of growth from three months old to a year with the right number of spots and properly trained to romp with the little boy. The animal experts, as I say there is always an expert for everything, began raising generations of deer so that five of them would always be ready. This was a little difficult because I understand that deer have what is called a "rutting season", but scientists were called in. While this was going on, other minds were concentrated on the problem of finding a little boy, a real little boy to play the part of Jody, not a fat spoiled little Hollywood actor, but a real little boy with freckles and buck teeth and a loveable southern accent. M-G-M's talent scout was sent out to various cities south of the Mason, Dixon line where he interviewed -- this figure is accurate -- 25,000 little boys until he found the right one, and when he found the right one, everyone knew he was right -- just a nice unspoiled kid whose accent you could cut with a knife, a natural born little actor who had to be kept natural and unspoiled. They sent him up to Hollywood while

Hollywood 17

the animals were being raised to have his teeth straightened, but when he was
there he couldn't play with the other little kids because he might lose his
southern accent, so they kept him in a suite alone with his mother except when
he went to the Zoo to get used to deer.

Mr. Flemming, who had directed "God with the Wind" was to run the show, and
Spencer Tracy was to be Jody's Pa. Now, we all know Spencer Tracy, a happy
piece of casting, tha big strong kindly man whom you see so often giving his
a drop of water and his life for a pal. By that time it was April on the
St. John's River, and the corn and the deer and the racoons and Jody and
everything was ready. The camera crew came, and th sound trucks and Mr.
Flemming, but Spencer Tracy, who is about as spoiled and temperamental as
any star in the business, would not come until they fixed him an air-conditioned
bungalow. He came, though, when the bungalow was fixed. That was the first
time he had ever set eyes on little Jody. When he did see Jody, Spencer Tracy
said he was God damned if he would act with any little boy with an accent like
that, that it was too hot anyway and the whole thing was corny and would ruin
his reputation. In fact the heat began to get on everyone's nerves until
Mr. Flemming, who I am sure had ulcers at the very beginning, suffered from a
nervous breakdown and Spencer Tracy flew back home. And there was Baxter's
Island, a cool million dollars down the drain, and nothing to show for it. The
camera drew and Jody and everyone took the train to Hollywood. They arrived
when I was there.

Hollywood 18

It was a privilege which I won't forget to be in the middle of that
crisis. I saw a corner of it now and then because I was working with King
Vidor and Louie Mayer himself called King Vidor in to take over and to save the
wreck. I happened to be sitting with Vidor in his office that same afternoon
so that I could observe his disturbed reaction. While he paced the carpet, he
helped himself at intervals from a jar of digestive tablets. He had told Louie
B. Mayer that he was damned if he would get a sunstroke in any swamp, and Louie
B. Mayer had said, "All right, King, we will build all of Baxter's Island for
you on the indoor stages." And sure enough, they were already beginning to
build them. However, that was not the only trouble. Vidor, who is a very
careful director, had already looked at the script which he said seemed to him
pretty lousy.

"You see," he said, "I don't like it. I don't like any of it." And he
swallowed another digestive tablet. "There doesn't seem to me to be any basic
pictorial idea. It's all about a boy falling in love with a fawn, isn't it?
The sounds to me pretty corny for a three hour show."

That expression, "corny" is technical. It means a little more than "wet"
and a little less than "whimsey-whamsey". I told King Vidor that I didn't think
the book was really corny, that it had considerable charm, and Vidor stopped
pacing the carpet.

"You mean," he asked, "you've read it?"

Hollywood 19

I told him that I had read it twice, once to myself, and once aloud to my children, but he hardly waited for me to finish.

"My God," Vidor said, "wait a minute." And he snatched up the telephone.

"Get me Mr. Getz. Get me Mr. Getz quick. Hello, Ben, this is King, speaking.

Ben, there's Mr. Marquand' here who's read "The Yearling". Yes, you know, Marquand, that writer from New York. He read it once to himself and once to his children. He can tell us all about it. Get the rest of them in there.

I'll bring him over right away."

"Wait a minute," I said, "haven't any of you ever read "The Yearling"?"

King Vidor looked at me in a kindly, friendly way.

"You know," he said, "that's very nice of you to ask me that because it shows you must admire me. You see, I've been in the pictures all my life, and I've only a grammar school education. I find it awfully hard to read. I have to whisper all the syllables. You want to get it out of your head that any of us read any of these books."

"But King," I said, "if none of you here read the books, how do you know about them."

"We have two women," King told me. "They read the books and then we all get in a room and they tell us the story. Sometimes it takes three hours. Now you can talk to us about it. Come along."

I could go on much further, but perhaps I have said enough. If you want to

Hollywood 20

go there sometime, you will see it too. All the intellectual struggle which
is not funny, all the disappointments, all the loves and hates. I can still
close my eyes before I go to sleep and think of it and how, in the perspective
of time, it achieves a certain majesty.

A little boy in one of the outdoor progressive schools there was asked
to write a story about a poor Hollywood family, and he wrote it.

"Once upon a time," he wrote, "there was a poor Hollywood family. The
father was very popr and so was the mother, the cook was poor and so was the
maid and so was the butler and so was the chauffeur. It was a poor Hollywood
family."