City of Nets Read online

  The black sidewalks of Hollywood Boulevard lead eventually to Grauman’s Chinese Theater, a large pagoda with a scarlet roof supported by prancing dragons. Next to the entrance stand two fierce beasts, about seven feet high, which Grauman’s alleges to be “heaven dogs” of the Ming dynasty. “Half lion and half dog these sacred sentinels stood guard for many centuries at a Ming tomb in China,” the sign says. “These massive monsters surnamed the dogs of Foo or Buddha combined leonine ferocity with dog-like devotion and served to terrify the transgressors and inspire the righteous.” Officially, this strange palace is now Mann’s Chinese Theaters, for an entrepreneur named Teddy Mann bought the establishment in the late 1970’s and opened two adjoining theaters in the wings that flank the central courtyard; but to the flocks of tourists who come to marvel, Grauman’s remains Grauman’s. The tourists gather here to gape at the famous footprints and handprints embedded in the concrete panels of Grauman’s courtyard.

  To Sid Grauman Thanks Rita Hayworth

  To Sid A great guy Henry Fonda July 2 ’42

  To Sid My greatest thrill Jeanne Crain October 7 1949

  To Sid His fan Charles Boyer July 24 ’42

  To Sid Sincere thanks Gene Tierney June 24 ’46

  Thank you Sid Jimmy Stewart Fri. 13 Feb. 1948

  For Mr. Grauman All happiness Judy Garland 10-10-39

  A showman is what the yellowing newspaper clippings call people like Sid Grauman. Born in Indianapolis, he got his start by selling San Francisco newspapers for one dollar each in remote Alaskan mining camps during the Klondike gold rush of 1896, and yet he attributed his theatrical successes to “the big boss upstairs.” “God does my shows,” he said.

  Grauman brought luxury to the showing of movies. He spent a million dollars to build the Metropolitan Theater in Los Angeles, but that was modest compared to his Egyptian Theater, which opened in 1922 with live tableaux dramatizing the coming attractions. It was here that Grauman invented the “Hollywood premiere,” with spotlights sweeping the skies, and eager crowds assembled behind tasseled ropes to watch the stars arriving in their limousines.

  Grauman loved practical jokes, and many of them seemed to involve wax dummies. He once filled his dimly lighted room at the Ambassador Hotel with seventy-five mannequins, then persuaded Marcus Loew, the original Loew of Loew’s, Inc., that these were fellow theater-owners whom he had assembled to hear an authoritative account of M-G-M’s forthcoming features. Loew apparently improvised an impassioned spiel for the seventy-five attentive dummies. On another occasion, Grauman telephoned Charlie Chaplin and said he had found a murdered woman in his hotel room. He begged Chaplin to help him. Chaplin hurried to the Ambassador and found Grauman crouched over a bloodstained figure in his bed. Grauman pleaded for help in avoiding a scandal. Chaplin nervously insisted that the police must be called. Grauman finally brought Chaplin closer, to see the ketchup smeared on the dummy in the bed. Grauman’s obituary in Variety a generation later did not record Chaplin’s reaction, but it did say that “among his intimate friends, he was known as a great gagger.” Grauman died of heart failure in the spring of 1950, died a bachelor, aged seventy-one, and the only people at his deathbed were his doctor, his secretary for the past twenty-one years, and the publicity chief of 20th Century—Fox.

  Long before Grauman or Mary Pickford or the Gish sisters came to live here, there were mostly barley fields and orange groves. An Ohioan named Horace Henderson Wilcox, who had been lamed by typhoid fever in childhood but made a fortune in Kansas real estate, began hopefully mapping out avenues and boulevards through these barley fields in 1887. His homesick wife, Daeida, named the prospective settlement after the country place of some friends back in the east: Hollywood. The Wilcoxes were pious. They forbade any saloons in Hollywood; they offered free land to any church built in their barley fields.

  Oil was discovered in 1892 near Glendale Boulevard, just a few miles to the south, but Hollywood remained an obscure rural tract until it was bought in 1903 by a syndicate headed by General Moses Hazeltine Sherman, who had made millions in railroads, and Harry Chandler, the future publisher of the Los Angeles Times. This syndicate managed to get the vacant fields incorporated as an independent municipality. It built a rickety trolley line to the south and called it the Los Angeles—Pacific Railroad, erected the thirty-three-room, Spanish-style Hollywood Hotel on unpaved Hollywood Boulevard, and started a campaign to sell building lots by posting hundreds of signs that said SOLD. Was this the first Hollywood lie? The original deception? The Hollywood town authorities tried to maintain the Wilcoxes’ moral tone. Various edicts by the board of trustees in the early 1900’s forbade all sales of liquor, all bowling or billiards on Sundays, and the driving of herds of more than two thousand sheep, goats, or hogs through the streets.

  Back east, winter storms over the Great Lakes inspired the Selig Studio of Chicago to abandon its filming of The Count of Monte Cristo, and to send the star, Francis Boggs, off to California in search of a sunnier location. Boggs found it at Laguna Beach, well to the south of Los Angeles, and finished the filming there in 1907. Indeed, he found the climate so pleasant that he returned to Los Angeles the following winter and converted a Chinese laundry at Eighth and Olive streets into California’s first movie studio. The first complete film shot there was called In the Sultan’s Power.

  Other fledgling filmmakers soon followed, not to stodgy Hollywood but to Edendale, a few miles to the east, or to the beach at Santa Monica. It was all rather pristine and primeval. Cops and robbers chased each other through the streets, and directors improvised their stories as they went along (one of them, Charles K. French, shot 185 films for the Bison Company in a little more than eight months). The official histories explain this first flowering as a happy combination of sunshine, open spaces, and diverse settings: the Sahara, the Alps, and the South Seas could all be simulated within Los Angeles’ city limits. And the sun kept shining, all year round.

  Many of these pioneers had another good reason for moving west—to escape the law. The moving-picture process had not invented itself, after all. It originated, more or less, in a whimsical wager by Leland Stanford, the railroad tycoon, who in 1872 bet $25,000 that a galloping horse lifted all four feet off the ground at once. Stanford then hired the photographer Eadweard Muybridge to prove him right. Muybridge did so by installing a series of twelve cameras next to a racetrack and filming a classic sequence of a horse in full gallop. In the course of winning Stanford’s bet, Muybridge almost invented the movies.

  That, however, was left to the restless mind of Thomas Alva Edison, who devised a method of filming movement not with Muybridge’s row of cameras but with one camera that could take a series of pictures on fifty feet of continuously running film. Edison, for reasons of his own, photographed a laboratory assistant named Fred Ott in the process of sneezing, and then showed this sequence of moving pictures inside a cabinet called a Kinetoscope. It was one of the big hits of the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893. Other inventors were working along similar lines. In France, the Lumière brothers demonstrated in 1895 that a series of pictures of a railroad train puffing its way out of a station could be projected onto a large screen at a rate of sixteen frames per second. Interesting, if enough people wanted to see a train puffing its way out of a station. Or, for that matter, Fred Ott sneezing.

  In 1903, an Edison Company cameraman named Edwin S. Porter created a completely different kind of motion picture. Instead of simply filming an event, he created events to be filmed. The Life of an American Fireman recorded the rescue of a woman and her child from a burning building. The Great Train Robbery recorded exactly what its title promised. These dramas could be shown on sheets hung up in empty stores, and thousands of people were willing to pay a nickel to see them. They were especially popular among immigrants who knew little English. Edison tried to preserve his control over this lucrative process by creating the Motion Pictures Patents Company in 1909, and then licensing others to exploit his discoveries.
r />   Little did he know the ingenuity of the founders of Hollywood. The “Trust,” as Edison’s company came to be known, kept filing lawsuits in New York against all would-be pirates, but who could track down and enjoin all the violators of New York court orders in obscure suburbs of Los Angeles? Movies could be shot in a few days, and production companies could be dissolved and recreated almost as quickly. “The whole industry . . . is built on phony accounting,” David O. Selznick once remarked. And if every other evasion failed, the Mexican border was only about a hundred miles away.

  Years before Bertolt Brecht ever came to Hollywood, he had something like this in mind when he wrote the opening of The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. Somewhere in an America of Brecht’s own imagining, a battered truck carrying three fugitives from justice broke down and sputtered to a halt “in a desolate region.” “We can’t go on,” said Fatty, the bookkeeper. “But we’ve got to keep going,” said Trinity Moses. “But ahead of us is only the desert,” said Fatty. “You know, gold is being discovered up the coast,” said Moses. “But that coastline is a long one,” said Fatty. “Very well, if we can’t go farther up, we’ll stay down here . . .” said the Widow Begbick. “Let us found a city here and call it ‘Mahagonny,’ which means ‘city of nets.’ ”

  It should be like a net,

  Stretched out for edible birds.

  Everywhere there is toil and trouble

  But here we’ll have fun. . . .

  Gin and whiskey,

  Girls and boys. . . .

  And the big typhoons don’t come as far as here.

  If Brecht’s vision of an unknown future was prophetic, so was that of the Hollywood Board of Trustees. In 1910, it officially banned all movie theaters, of which it then had none. That same year, however, the town of Hollywood was jurisdictionally swallowed up by Los Angeles, which saw no particular virtue in restricting the newcomers’ enterprises.

  Thornton Wilder, ordinarily a friendly soul with a rather jaunty manner, was going out to dinner with some old friends in Hollywood one evening when he suddenly began to describe a vision of utter devastation. “You know, one day someone is going to approach this area and it will be entirely desert,” the playwright told his friends, Helen Hayes and her husband, Charles MacArthur. “There will be nothing left standing, stone upon stone. . . . God never meant man to live here. Man has come and invaded a desert, and he has tortured this desert into giving up sustenance and growth to him, and he has defeated and perverted the purpose of God. And this is going to be destroyed.”

  The prospect of cataclysm is one of Los Angeles’ oldest traditions. The threat lies in the earth itself, in the sweet-smelling tar that still oozes up out of the La Brea pits, the hungry graveyard for generations of goats and deer, and also the saber-toothed tigers that pursued them to their death. The skeletons of a hundred lions have been unearthed here, and more than fifteen hundred wolves, and one human being, a woman who is believed to have been twenty-five or thirty years old when her skull was mysteriously smashed in about nine thousand years ago.

  The first Spanish explorers, led by Don Gaspar de Portolá, riding westward in the summer of 1769 along what is now Wilshire Boulevard, took awed note of “some large marshes of a certain substance like pitch . . . boiling and bubbling,” and wondered whether that hellish swamp was the cause or the consequence of the half-dozen earthquakes that had shaken the area during the previous two days. Don Gaspar rode on, and another two years passed before Franciscan missionaries returned to found the San Gabriel Mission, and then, a decade later, El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles de Porciuncula, the Town of the Queen of Angels.

  The city that now numbers more than ten million inhabitants is built atop the San Andreas fault, and when one of the eight-lane freeways cracks open, the traffic simply streams on. Earthquakes are commonplace, and so are the landslides that carry $500,000 hillside homes crashing down into Topanga or Mandeville canyon. But if the trembling and splitting of the insubstantial earth seems fundamental to southern California’s half-suppressed sense of fear, there is something even more primal in the sense of desert, aridity, desiccation, burning heat, and hence fire. The very life of the city derives from a thin vein of water, built with vast expense and corruption across the desert from the Rockies. And in the mountains that surround Los Angeles, every autumn brings drought and fire. In 1961, the brushfires blazed out of control and destroyed 460 homes, then worth more than $25 million, in the Bel Air region; in 1976, nearly 168,000 acres throughout the state went up in smoke; in 1978, another 200 homes were destroyed near Malibu. In November of 1980, winds of up to 100 miles an hour drove fires all across the hillsides, fire in Carbon Canyon, fire around Lake Elsinore, fire in Bradbury, near Duarte, fire in Sunland, in the Verdugo Hills. In the streets of downtown Los Angeles, people could smell the odor of charred chaparral and scrub oak and sumac. In the summer of 1983, fire even swept through the Paramount Studios and destroyed the half-century-old “New York Street” set that had provided scenes for Going My Way and Chinatown and, of all things, The Day of the Locust.

  The droning voices on the car radio brought constant reports of fire in the mountains as Maria Wyeth sped aimlessly along the freeways in Joan Didion’s Play It as It Lays. The news was both a sign of larger disaster and a sign of nothing at all. “The day’s slide and flood news was followed by a report of a small earth tremor centered near Joshua Tree . . .” Maria noted as she sat in a rented room, preparing herself for divorce and abortion, “and, of corollary interest, an interview with a Pentecostal minister who had received prophecy that eight million people would perish by earthquake on a Friday afternoon in March.”

  Miss Didion ascribed both the fires and the hysteria partly to the Santa Ana, a hot wind that comes whistling down from the northeast, “blowing up sandstorms out along Route 66, drying the hills and the nerves to the flash point.” The Santa Ana brings dread and violence, she wrote in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, because “the city burning is Los Angeles’ deepest image of itself. . . . At the time of the 1965 Watts riots what struck the imagination most indelibly were the fires. For days one could drive the Harbor Freeway and see the city on fire, just as we had always known it would be in the end. Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse. . . .”

  Nathanael West had seen the same prophecy in fire. Tod Hackett, the central character in The Day of the Locust, kept planning and sketching an epic painting to be entitled “The Burning of Los Angeles.” “He was going to show the city burning at high noon, so that the flames would have to compete with the desert sun and thereby appear less fearful, more like bright flags flying from roofs and windows than a terrible holocaust. He wanted the city to have quite a gala air as it burned, to appear almost gay. And the people who set it on fire would be a holiday crowd.”

  West was thirty-five, scarcely more than a year from his absurd death in an automobile crash, when The Day of the Locust burst forth and then disappeared in the spring of 1939. He had hoped that its success would free him from the drudgery of Hollywood scriptwriting, but despite the praises of Scott Fitzgerald, Edmund Wilson, and Dashiell Hammett, the novel sold exactly 1,464 copies. That brought West’s earnings from four novels over the course of nearly a decade to a total of $1,280, less than a month’s pay at his weekly rate of $350 at RKO, which promptly put him back to work writing a remake of Tom Brown of Culver. “Thank God for the movies,” West wrote to Bennett Cerf, publisher of The Day of the Locust.

  Like most writers of his time, West was familiar with failure and financial ruin. His father, a somewhat diffident building contractor, sank into bankruptcy during the late 1920’s while West was in Paris savoring the pungencies of the surrealists. Back in New York, West could support himself only by working as a night clerk in a hotel partly owned by relatives. That was hardly the role in which he had imagined himself. Born Nathan Weinstein, the young West had repeatedly experimented with new identities, acquired the nicknames “Pep”
and “Trapper.” He forged a high school transcript to enter Tufts, transferred to Brown with the transcript of a different Nathan Weinstein, then began signing himself Nathan von Wallenstein Weinstein. “He loved custom-tailored clothes . . . first editions and expensive restaurants,” his college friend and future brother-in-law S. J. Perelman wrote in The Last Laugh. “He fancied himself a Nimrod and fisherman, largely, I often suspected, because of the colorful gear they entailed. . . . For a brief interval, he even owned a red Stutz Bearcat, until it burst into flames and foundered in a West Virginia gorge.”

  Perelman, who first went to Hollywood to write the scripts for the Marx Brothers’ Monkey Business and Horse Feathers, described the movie capital as “a dreary industrial town controlled by hoodlums of enormous wealth,” but he was capable of making marvelous fun of it. “The violet hush of twilight was descending over Los Angeles as my hostess, Violet Hush, and I . . . headed toward Hollywood,” he wrote in Strictly from Hunger. “In the distance a glow from huge piles of burning motion-picture scripts lit up the sky. The crisp tang of frying writers and directors whetted my appetite. How good it was to be alive. . . .” West’s description was more bleak. “This place is just like Asbury Park, New Jersey,” he wrote to Josephine Herbst. “The same stucco houses, women in pajamas, delicatessen stores, etc. There is nothing to do except tennis, golf or the movies. . . . All the writers sit in cells in a row and the minute a typewriter stops someone pokes his head in the door to see if you are thinking. Otherwise, it’s like the hotel business.”

  West came to Hollywood in 1933 because Darryl Zanuck’s new Twentieth Century Pictures had paid him four thousand dollars for the movie rights to his novel Miss Lonelyhearts. This was the era when producers frightened by the advent of talking pictures offered contracts to almost any playwright or novelist or newspaperman who gave any evidence of knowing how to write sharp dialogue. And they all came—William Faulkner, Robert Sherwood, Aldous Huxley, Dorothy Parker, even Maurice Maeterlinck. . . . Twentieth Century proceeded, of course, to turn West’s brilliant and bitter satire into what it called a “comedy-melodrama” entitled Advice to the Lovelorn. West himself never worked on the project but got himself a job as a junior writer at Columbia. His first assignment, Beauty Parlor, was never produced; neither was his next one, Return to the Soil.