A Star Is Born: The Making of the 1954 Movie and Its 1983 Restoration (3 page)

As you head east from Fairfax on Santa Monica Boulevard, you pass the
Samuel Goldwyn Studios, which used to be United Artists and, before that,
Pickford-Fairbanks, making Goldwyn one of the oldest studios in the city.
If you start out early enough and park by the main entrance gate, you may
see Marlon Brando or Frank Sinatra or Jean Simmons reporting for work
on the musical Guys and Dolls.

Turning down LaBrea Avenue to Melrose and continuing east to Gower
Street, you find the distinctive radio tower perched atop the concrete globe
of the world that announces the RKO Radio Studios. Under its eccentric
and reclusive owner, multimillionaire oil man and aviator Howard Hughes,
the twenty-five-year-old RKO is almost a ghost town; nothing is in production, and its imminent doom is evidenced by the fact that only two films
are advertised on the numerous billboards that surround the facility: Susan
Slept Here and a B western: Cattle Queen of Montana, starring the eminent Barbara Stanwyck and the not-so-eminent Ronald Reagan.

A block further along Melrose are the wrought-iron gates of Paramount
Pictures, the oldest movie-making company in Hollywood, whose genesis
was an outfit formed in 1914 by Samuel Goldfish (later Goldwyn), Jesse
Lasky, and Cecil B. De Mille. (The original studio had been at Vine and
Selma; Paramount moved to Melrose in 1926.) De Mille, the only member
of the original trio still with the firm, is hard at work on his newest and
biggest film, a remake of his 1923 The Ten Commandments. Alfred Hitchcock is also working at Paramount, making an uncharacteristic little comedy called The Trouble with Harry, with a newcomer named Shirley MacLaine and a minor leading man named John Forsythe.

Your sightseeing tour includes a stop at Hollywood Memorial Cemetery
on Santa Monica Boulevard, to see the elaborate mausoleums of the departed great, including Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., and the modest wall crypt of Rudolph Valentino. If you have an eye for such things, you notice that
Los Angeles, and particularly Hollywood, seems to be obsessed with death:
billboards, trolley cars, radio, and newspapers all extol the virtues of funeral
homes and cemeteries, both human and animal. Forest Lawn in Burbank,
across the river from Warner Bros. Studios, is a likely stop on any tourist's
itinerary, being "world famous," as its ads repeatedly inform you.

If you drive further up Gower Street, you pass Columbia Pictures, which
occupy the oldest movie-making facilities in Hollywood, established in 1911
by the Horsley Brothers on the site of an abandoned bar when Hollywood
was bean fields and a few homes. At Columbia, Janet Leigh, who you know
is married to Tony Curtis, is making My Sister Eileen with newcomer Jack
Lemmon and a young dancer named Robert Fosse. Here, James Stewart
is making another Western, this one called The Man from Laramie, while
the new science-fiction craze is being catered to with The Monster From
Beneath the Sea.

Still further up Gower, you're heading directly for the Hollywood Hills
and the famous HOLLYWOOD sign, which seems, for no reason that you can
figure out, slightly askew, with some letters higher or lower than others. To
examine this landmark at closer range, you wend your way up into the
topmost reaches of Griffith Park, only to find that the trail to the sign is
blocked; but telescopes at the green-domed Griffith Park Observatory show
that the sign was erected rather hastily on the hillside, and the eccentricity
of its layout is due to the rough terrain. It was originally an advertisement
for a real-estate development, "Hollywoodland," in the I920s, and the
remnants of this, the letters L-A-N-D, are lying face down on the hillside:
an apt symbol, for if you turn and face south from the Griffith Park hills,
you can see thousands of acres of land. The whole Los Angeles basin
stretches out before you, a horizontal, decentralized, low-density area, filled
with homes, business districts, and irregular, isolated patches of greenmasses of trees line the street, vying for attention with billboards, neon
signs, and parking lots. Looking south to Baldwin Hills and west to the
Pacific Ocean, you might guess that Los Angeles is the flattest major city
in the United States, possibly even in the world. An ordinance passed in
1911 prohibited any building taller than thirteen stories; legend attributes
this to the fear of earthquakes, which shook the area frequently. But the
truth is less dramatic and more quaint. The City Council and the Planning
Department imposed the 15o-foot height limit to give the city "harmonious lines" and because "people come to Los Angeles to get away from the dark, walled-in streets of Eastern cities." So for forty-three years, the city
stayed predominantly flat, with only the downtown City Hall rising twentyseven stories to dominate the surrounding landscape. One other group of
buildings raised its height above its neighbors: the La Brea Towers, an
apartment complex built by the Metropolitan Insurance Company in the
mid-Wilshire flatlands in the early 1940s. But for those two exceptions,
there is a uniformity of space and texture to the entire area that disorients
and discomfits most visitors from other, older cities. But this same uniformity gives the city a strange and compelling impact, especially when viewed
from the surrounding hills, or from approaching planes. It is impressive by
day and spectacularly beautiful at night: the boulevards and avenues lined
with amber street lamps, while the red and white lights of moving autos
give movement and color to the entire metropolis. It's a city built for the
automobile; its vastness and the rectangular grid that is its main design
element endow it with a contemporary character, a sensibility clean and
modern, befitting a city that owes no allegiance to the past.

Los Angeles has grown out instead of up, and as the settlers moved in
from all over the nation in the early part of the century, the city spread
along the main east-west arteries: Wilshire, Sunset, Hollywood, and Olympic; then filled in the north-south byways: Vermont, Western, Highland,
La Brea, La Cienega, until the entire checkerboard of land was sketched
in, laid out, and gentrified. True, there is no center to the vast sprawl,
except for the older downtown Los Angeles proper, where you can find the
financial center of Southern California. This downtown, which was built
up around the turn of the century, most closely resembles the older, Eastern
cities, with its major department stores, shops, restaurants, legitimate theaters, and motion-picture palaces. The sidewalks and thoroughfares are
jammed with shoppers, workers, and hundreds of other pedestrians. Aside
from this downtown area, the teeming street life that characterizes most
major cities of the world is largely nonexistent in Los Angeles; and to the
tourists and other noninitiates, the constant driving in search of recognizable civilization is frustrating and fruitless, as the expected scenes never
materialize. Instead, you are faced with endless miles of streets, avenues,
and boulevards, lined with storefront windows, interspersed with long
stretches of green grass, trees, and vacant lots. Only a few isolated pockets
of business and social centers in Beverly Hills, the UCLA/Westwood area,
and the Miracle Mile shopping district on Wilshire Boulevard midway
between downtown and Hollywood offer visible signs of thriving city life.

But then, of course, there's the Sunset Strip, that glamorous, neon-lit
adjunct of nightlife, Hollywood style, with its lavish, expensive nightclubs
(Ciro's, the Mocambo, the Trocadero), restaurants, and gambling spots.
The area was named after its location: a winding strip of Sunset Boulevard
that snakes its way through an unincorporated section of Los Angeles
County and hence was not subject to the local laws. On the eastern
boundary of the Strip, at Crescent Heights Boulevard, stand two of the
more famous Hollywood landmarks: the Garden of Allah, the legendary
apartment-hotel complex built in 1921 for actress Alla Nazimova, has long
been a haven for visiting Eastern writers, actors, intellectuals, and other
eccentric persons of note; it's a great spot for celebrity watching-if you
have the patience. A block east is the equally famous Schwab's Drugstore,
which-so everyone thinks-is where a teen-aged Lana Turner was discovered sipping a soda at the counter. Like many Hollywood legends, it isn't
exactly accurate; she was found in a drugstore by a talent scout, but it was
across the street from Hollywood High School, and it wasn't Schwab's. If
you read movie fan magazines, you know that one of the original perpetrators of that legend, and of many other bits of Hollywood lore, has his
unofficial offices at Schwab's: Sidney Skolsky, chronicler of the stars' careers
and love lives, the man who first posed the immortal question "Do you sleep
in the nude?" His byline and his column are widely syndicated, and his
sign-off line, "But don't get me wrong-I love Hollywood," has become a
national catch phrase. Skolsky's second-floor, glass-fronted office at
Schwab's overlooks the extensive magazine rack, where you can scan the
latest publications while perhaps rubbing shoulders with small-time actors
and big-time agents and producers and occasionally glimpsing major stars,
old and new.

Leaving Schwab's and driving east on Sunset Boulevard, you turn left
at La Brea (noticing the row of English Tudor-style cottages a block south
and realizing they are the studios of Charlie Chaplin, now in self-imposed
exile in Switzerland because of McCarthyism and other related hate campaigns), past Tiny Naylor's Drive-In, with its cantilevered, amoebalike
canopy--one of the more distinctive examples of 195os Hollywood architecture. At Hollywood Boulevard, you turn right and look down a broad
avenue filled with autos, trolley cars, and tourist buses, dotted with pepper
trees, and lined with shops, restaurants, department stores, hotels, and
theaters. The first building you notice to your left is, oddly enough, a
church-odd because you never associated Hollywood with religion. A block east is an imposing four-story, white Italian Renaissance structure
that bears the name Garden Court Apartments. Diagonally across the
street from it is the even more impressive Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel,
bustling with activity, its twelve stories boasting some of the most elegant
rooms and housing some of the most prominent people in the city. And
across the street from the Roosevelt is the famous Grauman's Chinese
Theatre. As familiar as it is from photographs seen over the years, its
architecture has a formidable impact: to eyes unused to Southern California
eccentric, the towering pagoda entrance, the curved walls surrounding the
elliptical forecourt, and the coolie-costumed employees may seem the very
essence of colorful Hollywood folderol. But the theater is an icon, a shrine
of sorts, the only place in the world dedicated to preserving tangible
elements of Hollywood's past for the moviegoing public. Built in 1927 by
legendary entrepreneur Sidney Patrick Grauman, it has become known
over the years not just for its architecture (which has been referred to as
"Chinese Chippendale") and its lavish premieres but primarily for its
forecourt, wherein are set down for posterity the footprints and handprints
of some of Hollywood's most famous inhabitants. It's the closest thing
there is to a Hollywood Hall of Fame. The practice started accidentally in
1927, when the theater was under construction and a visiting Norma
Talmadge (so the legend goes) stepped onto some wet cement, leaving the
impression of her shoe. Showman that he was, Grauman immediately saw
the beauty of the idea and began a practice of having stars leave their
imprints and autographs in wet cement on the occasion of their first
premieres at his theater. Over the years, the ritual has become as famous
as the Academy Awards, and by 1954 there are close to one hundred of
filmdom's elite immortalized in the sand and gravel of Grauman's front
yard. (After Grauman's death in 1950, the theater was taken over by the
Fox West Coast chain, the exhibition arm of loth Century-Fox. It was
Fox's corporate mentality that in late 1952 dictated the removal of Charlie
Chaplin's hand-, foot-, and cane prints-set down at the 1928 opening of
The Circus-because of his alleged pro-communist sympathies.)

But it was not just handand footprints that were set down in the
forecourt. At the 1942 premiere of MGM's Mrs. Miniver, a complete print
of the film had been encased in a time capsule in one of the concrete slabs.
One of the latest additions, from September 1953, was a bronze plaque
commemorating the opening of The Robe, the world's first CinemaScope
movie. At that time, zoth Century-Fox, one of the principal owners of the theater, and Fox West Coast, the landlord of record, had defaced the
open-air front of the facade by installing a flashing neon sign fifty feet wide
and twenty feet high advertising both The Robe and CinemaScope-a sign
so spectacular and gaudy that it, of course, was deemed a valuable addition
to the theater's architecture and stayed in place even after The Robe
vacated the premises. (It now heralds Darryl F. Zanuck's production of
The Egyptian, starring newcomers Edmund Purdom and Bella Darvi,
which by all accounts is proving to be the big-budget turkey of the year.)
Day and night, the forecourt of the theater is jammed with tourists, performing the time-honored rituals of putting their feet into the concrete
imprints to see if theirs match any of the famous and having their pictures
taken in front of the stone "celestial dogs" that guard the front entrance.
In the gift shop you can buy coffee mugs, posters, photographs, and other
miscellaneous delights sure to arouse the envy of everyone back home.

Diagonally across the street from Grauman's, sandwiched between the
Masonic Temple and the massive Barker Bros. department store, is the
Hollywood Paramount, the local outlet for-what else?-Paramount Pictures. The theater is playing one of the big hits of the week, Sabrina, Billy
Wilder's adaptation of the Samuel Taylor play Sabrina Fair, starring Humphrey Bogart, William Holden, and Audrey Hepburn. Directly across the
street, at the corner of Hollywood and Highland, stands one of the landmarks of the town, the venerable Hollywood Hotel. Built in 1903, the
four-story clapboard building was for years the social center of Hollywood
life; it achieved nationwide fame during the 193os and 1940s when Louella
Parsons initiated a series of weekly broadcasts with big-name stars and
musical entertainment. In 1938 Warner Bros. released a movie called
Hollywood Hotel, featuring the song "Hooray for Hollywood," which
quickly became the town's unofficial anthem. The reality of the somewhat
dowdy edifice, fronted by palm trees, with wide, shaded verandas, is a far
cry from the image created by the movie and the broadcasts, and the
dichotomy between the real and the imagined is disappointing to most
tourists.