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From Primedia Publications
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All That Glitters
A visit to Hollywood helps separate movie legend
from California reality.
By Tom Huntington
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Both grit and glitter exist within reach of the famous Hollywood sign. |
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From my window seat at Yamashiro's Restaurant, a replica of a 600-year-old Japanese temple perched on the hills above Hollywood, it looked like I had found the movie capital of legend. It was nighttime, and the lights of Los Angeles stretched toward the horizon like the glittering contents of a spilled treasure chest. In the foreground I spotted the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, a popular hangout of the stars. Klieg lights whirled around the El Capitan Theater, where Orson Welles' Citizen Kane had its world premiere. With a little imagination it could have been 1941 and the city below me the half-legendary place of studios and stars, Hollywood and Vine, glitz and glamour.
The next day, when I set out to find what remained from Hollywood's Golden Age, I found that up close under the bright California sun, things looked somewhat grittier. Hollywood Boulevard still offered the same tawdry charms I remembered from my days as a film student in Los Angeles. (The dinosaur sticking through the roof of the Guinness Book of World Records Museum was new, though.) Wig stores, tattoo parlors, and tee-shirt outlets predominated, although I was glad to see that the Larry Edmunds bookstore, which specializes in used volumes about film history, was still open for business. Outside of the books, though, Hollywood glamour was not very much in evidence.
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 | According to legend, Errol Flynn invented a gin cocktail in the hotel's barbershop. | |
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Gritty it may be, but its showbiz underpinnings give Hollywood an undeniable allure. People come from all over the world to see the Hollywood sign, gawk at the Chinese Theater's cement footprints, and follow the stars on Hollywood Boulevard's Walk of Fame. Hollywood and Vine is really a fairly nondescript street corner, but that doesn't much matter. Like Elizabeth Taylor, it's famous for being famous, and there's no lure like celebrity. Hollywood has known that for years, but so far the neighborhood has resisted all attempts to spruce up its image. That should finally change in the next few years, with the opening of a new, 3,300-seat theater on Hollywood Boulevard to host the Academy Awards, surrounded by restaurants and shops. Just down the street a Hollywood museum will open in the old Max Factor makeup building, and the El Capitan and Egyptian movie palaces have recently reopened in restored splendor. Maybe Hollywood is finally on the comeback trail.
There are two Hollywoods. One was incorporated in 1903 and absorbed into the city of Los Angeles seven years later. The other Hollywood doesn't appear on maps, but you can find it in theaters, on video, on your television set, and in the innumerable histories written about the movies, their makers, and their stars. This Hollywood thrived during the short, brief reign of the studio system, when self-contained film factories with their own armies of craftsmen, filmmakers, and stars turned out movies by the score. When the Studio Era ended in the 1950s, its movies had changed history—not suddenly, like a Gettysburg or a Great Depression, but in a more subtle way. Movies, quite simply, had invaded our subconscious. "The influence that the movies have had on every generation since 1910 is amazing," director Peter Bogdanovich once said. "They have told us what to think, how to dress, what to say and do, how to cry, move, fall from a gunshot, act drunk, draw a gun, swoon, kiss."
Both Hollywoods intersect at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel on Hollywood Boulevard, which I decided would make a perfect headquarters for my Hollywood search. The hotel opened in 1927, the year Warner Brothers ushered in the sound era with The Jazz Singer, and was part of the film community from its very beginning. Among those investing in the hotel was Sid Grauman, who opened his Chinese Theater across the street the same year, and luminaries like actors Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, and studio moguls Louis B. Mayer, Joseph Schenck, and Marcus Loew. In 1929 the first Academy Awards dinner took place in the Roosevelt's Blossom Room (winning were the movie Wings, Janet Gaynor for Sunrise, and Emil Jannings for The Way of All Flesh). By then the hotel was a recognized Hollywood hangout. According to legend, Errol Flynn invented a gin cocktail in the hotel's barbershop (prohibition dictated the venue), and Bill "Bojangles" Robinson danced with Shirley Temple on the steps up to the mezzanine.
I enjoyed the Roosevelt, and not just because I had a cabana room by the Olympic-size pool. In the morning I liked to stroll through the hotel lobby, beneath the high, hand-painted wood ceiling and past the bench with the life-size bronze of Charlie Chaplin, and have coffee at a sidewalk table. There I could sit in the golden, smog-filtered morning sun and watch Hollywood Boulevard start its day. Even at that hour tourists with their eyes glued to the sidewalk stars passed by my table, and I could see more people over at the Chinese Theater, studying the famous cement footsteps in the forecourt.
Tom Huntington is the editor and publisher of the print edition of Historic Traveler, as well as the editor of American
History magazine.
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