***************************************************************************** * 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 * ***************************************************************************** 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] ***************************************************************************** What is TAYLOROLOGY? TAYLOROLOGY is a newsletter focusing on the life and death of William Desmond Taylor, a top 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. ***************************************************************************** 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). ***************************************************************************** ***************************************************************************** March 19-April 2, 1922 Thoreau Cronyn NEW YORK HERALD "The Truth About Hollywood", Continued PART II [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 timer 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 called 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 worn 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. ***************************************************************************** NEXT ISSUE: March 1926: Cyclone around Keyes "The Truth About Hollywood": PART V [How Much Do the Stars Earn?] ***************************************************************************** NOTES: [1]Wallace Reid [2]Wallace Reid ***************************************************************************** ***************************************************************************** Back issues of Taylorology are available on the Web at any of the following: http://www.angelfire.com/az/Taylorology/ http://www.etext.org/Zines/ASCII/Taylorology/ http://www.uno.edu/~drif/arbuckle/Taylorology/ Full text searches of back issues can be done at http://www.etext.org/Zines/ For more information about Taylor, see WILLIAM DESMOND TAYLOR: A DOSSIER (Scarecrow Press, 1991) *****************************************************************************