Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood Read Online Free
Author: William J. Mann
grumbling.
Zukor’s man Taylor would have his work cut out for him.
CHAPTER 2
BABYLON
Like a tsunami wave, the rising sun burst over the eastern wall of the San Gabriel Mountains and flooded the verdant plain of the Los Angeles Basin. Golden sunshine spilled across roads and between buildings and through the neat, orderly rows of orange and lemon groves. It rushed in to fill up the natural amphitheater known as the Daisy Dell—soon to become the Hollywood Bowl—and bounced off the shiny aluminum roofs of the movie factories. It warmed up swimming pools, opened the petals of poppies, tanned the faces of highway workers, and chased the prostitutes and drug dealers away from the street corners of downtown. Finally the sun’s rays reached land’s end, dissolving in a milky haze over the Pacific Ocean.
Just twenty years earlier, this bustling little city had been mostly farmland and alfalfa lots, studded here and there with oil wells in constant genuflection to the earth. With the arrival of the first film producers in the winter of 1907, that began to change. Before the invention of high-intensity arc lamps, movies had to be shot in the open air or in studios with retractable roofs. So the moviemakers had come west in search of light during the dreary eastern winter months. Eventually many of them settled down, opening storefront studios in the land of the eternal sun.
The influx of movie people nearly doubled the population of Los Angeles between 1910 and 1920, from 319,198 to 576,673, making the city, practically overnight, the tenth largest in the nation. In 1910the census had counted 399 actors and 216 actresses; now there were 2,289 and 1,311, respectively. Directors, scenarists, cameramen, electricians, carpenters, painters, bookkeepers, publicists, managers, and other movie workers numbered thousands more. Although some pictures were still made in New York, more and more producers were basing their studios in Los Angeles. Practically obscure a decade before, the city now found itself the focal point of the world’s obsession with the movies.
“The sudden and grandiose rise of the motion picture,” journalist R. L. Duffus wrote, had brought about an unprecedented cultural transformation. Thirty-five million Americans—one out of three—went to the movies at least once a week. The “flickers” were “transforming the dress, the manners, the thoughts and the emotions of millions of people,” Duffus observed. Fashions, trends, and ideas now flashed across the globe in the twinkling of an eye. “There has never been anything like this before in the history of the human race,” Duffus noted. “The motion picture is the school, the diversion, perhaps eventhe church of the future.”
And every day young men and women from small towns all across America stepped off trains and buses into the bewilderness of Hollywood, hoping they might become gods.
Folks back home had told them they were good-looking enough to be in the movies, and so, like those first filmmakers, these beautiful young people had headed west. In 1920, beauty was all you needed to make it in Hollywood. It didn’t matter what your voice sounded like, or if you could sing or even act. The camera could take care of that. And so the city was overrun with thousands of beautiful people. They were everywhere: on the trolleys, in the drugstores, outside the studios angling for jobs as extras.
But only a tiny fraction ever fulfilled their dreams. Most of them became hard. Bitter. Their looks faded. Their skin turned to leather under the perpetual sun. Eventually most had to choose between returning home or finding other ways to survive. The newspapers were filled with stories of actors snared in the opium dens of the city’s growing red-light district, and actresses caught selling dope from their dressing rooms. The sweet scent of orange blossoms became, for many, the clammy stink of desperation.
CHAPTER 3
THREE DESPERATE DAMES
On this late summer
Zukor’s man Taylor would have his work cut out for him.
CHAPTER 2
BABYLON
Like a tsunami wave, the rising sun burst over the eastern wall of the San Gabriel Mountains and flooded the verdant plain of the Los Angeles Basin. Golden sunshine spilled across roads and between buildings and through the neat, orderly rows of orange and lemon groves. It rushed in to fill up the natural amphitheater known as the Daisy Dell—soon to become the Hollywood Bowl—and bounced off the shiny aluminum roofs of the movie factories. It warmed up swimming pools, opened the petals of poppies, tanned the faces of highway workers, and chased the prostitutes and drug dealers away from the street corners of downtown. Finally the sun’s rays reached land’s end, dissolving in a milky haze over the Pacific Ocean.
Just twenty years earlier, this bustling little city had been mostly farmland and alfalfa lots, studded here and there with oil wells in constant genuflection to the earth. With the arrival of the first film producers in the winter of 1907, that began to change. Before the invention of high-intensity arc lamps, movies had to be shot in the open air or in studios with retractable roofs. So the moviemakers had come west in search of light during the dreary eastern winter months. Eventually many of them settled down, opening storefront studios in the land of the eternal sun.
The influx of movie people nearly doubled the population of Los Angeles between 1910 and 1920, from 319,198 to 576,673, making the city, practically overnight, the tenth largest in the nation. In 1910the census had counted 399 actors and 216 actresses; now there were 2,289 and 1,311, respectively. Directors, scenarists, cameramen, electricians, carpenters, painters, bookkeepers, publicists, managers, and other movie workers numbered thousands more. Although some pictures were still made in New York, more and more producers were basing their studios in Los Angeles. Practically obscure a decade before, the city now found itself the focal point of the world’s obsession with the movies.
“The sudden and grandiose rise of the motion picture,” journalist R. L. Duffus wrote, had brought about an unprecedented cultural transformation. Thirty-five million Americans—one out of three—went to the movies at least once a week. The “flickers” were “transforming the dress, the manners, the thoughts and the emotions of millions of people,” Duffus observed. Fashions, trends, and ideas now flashed across the globe in the twinkling of an eye. “There has never been anything like this before in the history of the human race,” Duffus noted. “The motion picture is the school, the diversion, perhaps eventhe church of the future.”
And every day young men and women from small towns all across America stepped off trains and buses into the bewilderness of Hollywood, hoping they might become gods.
Folks back home had told them they were good-looking enough to be in the movies, and so, like those first filmmakers, these beautiful young people had headed west. In 1920, beauty was all you needed to make it in Hollywood. It didn’t matter what your voice sounded like, or if you could sing or even act. The camera could take care of that. And so the city was overrun with thousands of beautiful people. They were everywhere: on the trolleys, in the drugstores, outside the studios angling for jobs as extras.
But only a tiny fraction ever fulfilled their dreams. Most of them became hard. Bitter. Their looks faded. Their skin turned to leather under the perpetual sun. Eventually most had to choose between returning home or finding other ways to survive. The newspapers were filled with stories of actors snared in the opium dens of the city’s growing red-light district, and actresses caught selling dope from their dressing rooms. The sweet scent of orange blossoms became, for many, the clammy stink of desperation.
CHAPTER 3
THREE DESPERATE DAMES
On this late summer
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