Fabulous Hollywood

A Celebrated Author Begins a Series of Articles on America's Famous Film Paradise

CARL VAN VECHTEN

HOLLYWOOD is incredible, fantastic, colossal . . . My first important discovery was that Hollywood wasn't Hollywood at all: it was Culver City, Los Angeles, Pasadena, Altadena, Beverly Hills, Montmartre, The Garden of Allah, Santa Monica, the Ambassador Hotel, the Legion Cabaret. After driving twenty miles to dine with a friend I began to believe it was all Southern California,. Whatever it is, there's more of it, I'm certain, than there is of anything else in the world: more money, more sunlight, longer distances, brighter jewels (the more careful residents drive from the lonely heights of Beverly Hills with an armed guard on the box), more oil-wells (on the way to Santa Barbara you may observe them pumping far out in the sea), more fur cloaks (in a climate where they are not required), more work, more poverty and bad luck, more automobiles, more Bowers (a young man unable to come to a tea-party I attended apologized for his absence by sending the hostess five dozen orchids), more police dogs, more heartbreak and courage, more Italian villas and Spanish houses, more beautiful gals . . . and more dissatisfaction than there are anywhere else in the world. The only thing there isn't more ol in Hollywood is weather. There is absolutely no weather at all.

THE beautiful gals and the distances made the deepest first impressions. I learned about the dissatisfaction later. The gals, in numbers and appearance (most of them unmarried—the moving picture mother deserves a whole article to herself), are truly bewildering. Of course, all the world knows the joyous, childlike Lois Moran, whom I prefer to remember as she danced entrancingly on a rug in the glow of the firelight, the effulgent, orchidaceous Joan Crawford, the gay and dangerously attractive Patsy Ruth Miller, the saucy Clara Bow, the blonde Betty Compson, playgirl of the Western World, the barbaric and sullenly splendid Pola Negri, the fragile, nunlike Lillian Gish, the wistful Billie Dove, the dashing, insouciant Constance Talmadge, the amazing Ailcen Pringle, who has been dubbed "the screen favourite of the literati," apparently because H. L. Mencken, Joseph Hergesheimer, Scott Fitzgerald, and Carl Van Vechten enjoy the privilege of her acquaintance, the incomparable charming Pauline Starke, who somehow suggests a purple pansy, the dark and lovely Carmel Myers—these and many others (whose combined weekly salaries would serve to float a bank) I encountered at parties, singly and in clusters.

But the world is unaware of the other gals, the gals who work in shops, the telephone gals, the gals who wait on tables in the restaurants: all are of an indescribable pulchritude. It would appear that the cream of American loveliness had hopefully migrated to Hollywood. At any rate there is more feminine attractiveness of every conceivable variety on tap in the card catalogues of the casting agencies than the absent imagination can conjure up any adequate picture of. When you enter a shop, intent on a purchase, the clerk who waits on you focuses her brilliant eyes on you. There is a chance you may be a director. This may be her "break," for everybody is looking for his or her "break." Some even get it. At any rate, judging by appearances, the only distinguishing mark between the extra ladies on a moving picture stage and the star is the salary of the latter. After basking for three days among these sunlit asphodels and anemones I strode sadly through the streets peering into each upheld countenance in a vain search for an ugly woman. The Hollywood slogan is "Bigger and better movies; smaller and prettier gals." They even talk of breeding them eugenically.

OF course, I stopped at the Ambassador. Nearly everybody visiting Hollywood stops at the Ambassador and even some of the picture stars make their homes there. It is, I should think, one of the very best hotels in the world. The service is superlative, the food divine, the courtesy of management and employees unfailing. Indeed, outside of the Algonquin in New York, I do not know a public hostelry where one is made to feel so much at home. This feeling began with me when Maurice Kinstler, the clerk behind the desk, recognized my name; it was re-enforced when Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, directed from the same source, knocked on my bungalow door before I had even unpacked; it was finally cemented when I picked up the telephone and the girl on the switchboard replied, "Yes, Mr. Van Vechten." It was from this same Mr. Kinstler l demanded information concerning Paul Morand who, I had been informed, was headed in this direction. "If you mean the author of Ouvert la Nuit" he said, "he is not stopping here." This sort of thing is so rare at public inns as to make it unique.

Built far back from the boulevard, the Ambassador is approached by two long walks covered by rose-clad pergolas, separated by an expansive lawn where palm and bamboo flourish. On the far sides of each of these walks stand the bungalows, Huerta (where Joseph Hergesheimer once made a celebrated sojourn) and Siesta on the one side, Reposa and Rincon on the other. I lived in Siesta, my door opening directly on the sunlit garden. Late in the morning I would stroll out, hoping for a glimpse of Carmel Myers on her balcony above, a hope sometimes realized. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald occupied the apartment next to hers and over my head, as I lay in bed, I could hear the heavy footfalls of John Barrymore as he strode the floor, perhaps in ardent consideration of the intricacies of his next picture.

I wanted to see a good deal of Scott and Zelda—a desire I gratified in the end— but he had come to Hollywood to create a story for the use of Constance Talmadge, an assignment he discovered to be somewhat irksome. Scott, the best of companions when at leisure, was finding it necessary to curb his susceptibility to companionship. Shutting himself in his room, he pored over his sheets of white paper, his lunch or his dinner often untouched by his side. Zelda occasionally popped out to take a Black Bottom lesson or to have her fortune told by a Santa Monica seer. They refused, on principle, all invitations, although sometimes they relented at the last moment, but it was possible at any hour to disturb their cherished tranquillity by banging on the door, and I am afraid I banged on the door an unwelcome number of times, often late in the afternoon, often late at night.

Committed to no purpose, I was, it must be admitted, an idler in Hollywood and an idler in Hollywood is so strange a phenomenon, especially an idle writer, as to be almost an object of suspicion. Everybody connected with the films—and this was the group to which I entrusted my social fortunes—works in Hollywood, works hard. Invariably, therefore, each new person I encountered attacked me with the same query: "What did you come out here for?" My casual reply, "Oh, I just came out to be amused," met so many incredulous stares that eventually (my avowed curiosity concerning the manner in which moving pictures were made likewise proving insufficient), in desperation and self-protection, I began to invent reasons which would justify my presence, my favourite perhaps being that I was engaged in collaboration with the talented Jeanie Mac Pherson in arranging a film version of Paradise Lost, but naturally Jeanie herself did not believe this yarn and so I told her—I think she was the first—that I was writing a novel about Hollywood. This statement got into print and everybody believed it instantly. It was swallowed so completely, in fact, that I soon began to believe it myself. I think perhaps that there is a very fair chance that I shall write a novel, the scenes of which will be laid in Hollywood.

BUT I did not write it there. I remained an idler, and an idler, particularly one perversely bent on amusing himself, can create a good deal of havoc in a hive of workers. It was not Scott alone whom I disturbed. It was agreeable to be informed that while King Vidor was talking to me for an hour about the curiously interesting picture on which he is at present engaged or discussing with me the possibility of making an all-Negro film, this conversation was perhaps costing the MctroGoldwyn-Mayer Company one hundred and fifty dollars a minute. It was no less satisfactory to be personally escorted about the Famous Players lot by Jesse Lasky, causing work to be stopped on every stage at which we hesitated, while we chatted or posed for stills. Thus Emil Jannings was dragged out of his moving picture bed to stand before the camera with us in his nightrobe. Thus Lois Moran wasted time and lights and a director's patience while she talked to me about the possibility of persuading Scott Fitzgerald to consent to becoming a leading man, at least in one picture, a reasonable project, considering this novelist's likely appearance, which Lois and I had plotted between us. Thus Wallace Beery, after clinging desperately in a blinding blizzard to a bending fir-tree on the heights of a precipitous cliff, kindly consented to pose while Bertha Case cranked her own moving picture camera. Thus Jim Cruze told me how much his wife, Betty Compson, liked my books and thus presently, and painlessly, I found myself seated on a Klieg-lighted tree-stump with Clara Bow (who certainly has IT, on and off) who, in the costume and make-up of Rough-house Rosie, informed me of her ambition to appear on the screen as Zimbule in The Blind Bow-Boy, an ambition which met with my prompt and fervent approval, and we discussed the possibility of snatching the little snake-charmer out of my novel and weaving a moving picture around her which would depart in some particulars from the curious fable in which she originally figured. God knows how much all these interruptions cost the Famous PlayersLasky Company! Perhaps you can figure the sum out for yourself when I tell you that Jesse Lasky has set the weekly salary budget of this organization at $630,000.

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But, aside from the interruptions caused by visitors, distinguished or otherwise, little time is wasted on these busy lots. There are certainly parties in Hollywood: I managed to find several every night, but the gals who are working attend parties infrequently. I spent hours trying to break down this practical attitude, for the most part unsuccessfully. Aileen Pringle, for instance, began work on a picture the day I arrived and could only be seen on the set. And on the set, in a French maid's costume, or was it a Swiss peasant's?—I never did know what the thing was about— Aileen was particularly exasperating. The first day I called to see her at the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lot I discovered her in the arms of T. Roy Barnes and he was kissing her; the next day she was fondling a basketful of St. Bernard puppies; the next, Lionel Barrymore; after, on the fourth day, I had observed her embracing Conrad Nagel, I had had enough. It was bad enough not to be able to drag Aileen away; it was impossible to watch her occupational zeal with any degree of comfort.

To be exact, I did see Aileen a few times off the set. The very first night I arrived I was invited to dine at her house where Blanche Knopf was a guest. In that first evening I discovered something about the distances. That was the moment I began to believe that Hollywood covered all of Southern California. We were not to dress because it is Aileen's habit when she is working to drive to and from the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studio in her costume and make-up. She would arrive late, Blanche informed me over the telephone, just in time for dinner. I loitered then in my room, or annoyed Scott, until a quarter of eight, when I strolled up the covered walk in the cool night air to the hotel where I asked the affable Irish doorman, who was wont to greet me, after our first encounter, with a "How the divil are ye, Mr. Van Vechten?" or "It's a blessed fortune to California that ye came amongst us!" for a cab. When I mentioned the address in Santa Monica to the chauffeur he looked perplexed, but a glance at his little book of maps apparently reassured him. At any rate we started off and drove very fast for half an hour or so. Then I shot my head forward to inquire if we had much farther to go. "We've covered about a third of the distance," the man replied. As a matter of fact we arrived at Aileen's house in Adelaide Place at a quarter of nine and the fare was $9.45 ! After that I learned to get ready to start out for dinner about five o'clock, and I never dissented when any one suggested sending a car for me.