Lost Hollywood
by David Wallace
St. Martins, 256 pp., $ 23.95
I was a small boy in Santa Monica, California, back when the muckraking novelist Upton Sinclair ran for governor against Republican Frank Merriam (the roadside billboards read: "A Vote for Merriam Is a Vote For God"). Our town was where Will Rogers owned a private polo field and Marion Davies relaxed in a vast beach house down on the Pacific Palisades.
Unless you're a Citizen Kane fan, you can't be counted on to remember Marion Davies or the rest of this crowd. According to David Wallace, author of Lost Hollywood, the Davies character in the movie is a nasty caricature of "one of Hollywood's least mean-spirited personalities. As well as one of its most generous." But you're not expected to remember the culture of yesteryear unless it's exhumed by someone like Ken Burns. Which is where Wallace's nostalgia adventure comes in. It's a treasury of Hollywood memorabilia along the lines of Nathan Silver's recently reissued Lost New York.
Silver's book is a jaw-dropping look at the city's vanished landmarks. The venality prize for destroying irreplaceable architecture has got to be a tie: One winner is the Metropolitan Opera Association, which ordered the demolition of its historic 39th Street Opera House, lest it be used to compete with the association's new plant at Lincoln Center. The other winner is the president of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, who supplied an epitaph to the destruction of Penn Station when he wrote a letter to the New York Times asking, "Does it make sense to preserve a building merely as a 'monument'?"
Like Silver, Wallace uses architecture as a springboard for memory, as when he discusses a celebrated hotel named The Garden of Alla, after its owner, the silent film star Alla Nazimova. (A subsequent proprietor changed the spelling to "Allah," to Nazimova's everlasting annoyance.) Alla's Garden was not in the same architectural league as New York's great lost monuments like the Ritz or the Astor. It consisted of two dozen stucco bungalows surrounding an eight room house at the end of Sunset Boulevard. What was noteworthy was not the layout, but the residents.
When Nazimova opened her hotel, she threw "a gigantic eighteen-hour party." And when it closed, a generation later, she gave a party for 350, at which more than a thousand materialized. Between galas, the Garden of Alla(h) gave food and lodging to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Margaret Sullavan, Carole Lombard, Humphrey Bogart, William Powell, and a celebrity register of thousands. William Faulkner wanted to stay there while doing time as a screenwriter. But he couldn't afford it. The place featured one of the first swimming pools to be lit underwater. From which Tallulah Bankhead is said to have emerged in the buff, to be offered a martini by Robert Benchley, a long-time habitue. Sounds reasonable.
During Prohibition, having an aperitif could be complicated. At Ocean House there was an extra hurdle. When Winston Churchill wanted a drink, Marion Davies took him on a tour of the facilities. Davies' lover and landlord, William Randolph Hearst, objected to her drinking. So she cached her gin in a toilet tank in one of the mansion's fifty-five bathrooms and couldn't remember which one.
It's not Wallace's fault that what was lost in Hollywood is flimsier than what was trashed in Manhattan. What can compare to the destruction of Pennsylvania Station, a heroic masterpiece that required a great deal of excavation? Hollywood structures are skimpier, like the electrical sign atop a hill known as Cahuenga Peak. It was intended to promote a real estate development called Hollywoodland. When the last four letters disintegrated, the sign survived as a civic attention-getter.
So Lost Hollywood focuses less on topography than on celebrity. One culture hero was Aimee Semple McPherson, a wildly popular evangelist, faith healer, and entrepreneur whose Angelus Temple is still one of the largest churches in America. Aimee's organization included a radio station, several choirs, and an orchestra in which Anthony Quinn played the saxophone. But it couldn't survive the scandal that ensued when the evangelist went AWOL for a month. She claimed to have been kidnapped by Mexican bandits. But when it turned out that she had been spending a naughty interlude with a married employee, the ridicule was overwhelming.
At the beginning of its silent film period, Hollywood was still a rural backwater. The vacant lots were abloom with orange poppies. "On Vine Street they grew grapes," recollects the director Mack Sennett. "That's how it got its name." But by the 1920s, the town had developed a cosmopolitan ambience. Sightseeing buses were showing tourists the homes of internationally known film stars like Francis X. Bushman ("America's handsomest man"), Harold Lloyd, Charlie Chaplin, and the megastar Rudolph Valentino. Valentino could often be seen in jodhpurs, walking his dogs (two mastiffs and a Doberman) along the narrow streets of a terraced development known as Whitley Heights.
Valentino may have gotten a bum rap as a shallow gigolo type. ("Women adored him, but most men despised him.") According to Wallace, he had a self-deprecating sense of humor. His mystique was even greater than Elvis's. His funeral drew 100,000 mourners. What's left of Whitley Heights is now listed in the National Register of Historic Places. It featured tiled roofs and wrought iron hardware in a Mediterranean style that became a Hollywood trademark.
A lively chunk of Hollywood's lost places consisted of its restaurants. They ranged from the whimsical -- like a bistro in the shape of a hat (the Brown Derby) -- to nightclubs where the stars went to be seen. Tourists visited the cabarets on the Sunset Strip, expecting to find a glitzy expanse like something out of Fred and Ginger's Flying Down-to Rio. But, with one exception, the clubs were disappointingly intimate. The exception was the Coconut Grove, a vast nightspot in the Ambassador Hotel. It was born when the Grove's host bought a thicket of fake palm trees, left over from the set of Valentino's The Sheik. He installed them in a ballroom as big as an airplane hangar. It was an instant success, so much so that, by 1937, the club's publicists were proud to announce that it had been the scene of 126 celebrity fights.
Hollywood's lost landmarks have generated a vigorous rearguard action. The Los Angeles Cultural Heritage Commission has gone to bat for the Cinerama Dome, a concrete igloo built in 1963. It's the only surviving theater from the short-lived Cinerama mode, which employed a curved screen for a "surround" effect. Then there's the L.A. Conservancy, a private preservationist group dedicated to "preserving the city's architectural heritage." This includes the Hanna-Barbera building, birthplace of the Flintstones and Yogi Bear. Others on the list of endangered landmarks are the Hollywood Bowl and the Lakeside Car Wash.
Painted a revolting green, the Hanna-Barbera studio qualifies as "Googie" architecture, named after Googies, a vanished L.A. coffee shop with an in-your-face facade designed to capture drive-by attention. (Alan Hess, architecture critic of the San Jose Mercury News, anatomized this roadside wrinkle in his 1986 book Googie.)
The Conservancy has blocked the remodeling of the Angelus Temple, which would have obliterated a spectacular 40-foot mural over the proscenium. It has shored up the audience-friendly but acoustically archaic amphitheatre, the Hollywood Bowl. And it saved the Brown Derby from demolition. The brown bowler is now entombed in a shopping center.
As for the Lakeside Car Wash, according to a tourist guide: "It's the best one in Southern California, a study in lava rock and wood."
Wallace's fetching Hollywood eulogy emits vibrations that tell you all is not lost. It's certainly a pity that the landmark police were not mobilized in time to save the likes of Ocean House. But going to bat for a car wash does deliver a message to the demolition community. Namely: that it makes good sense to preserve a structure "merely as a monument." No matter how tacky it may be.
Martin Levin is a writer in New York.