Authors: Emily W. Leider
For Myrna the move to California worked as a tonic. She continued to grieve for her father, but in this new, yet familiar, environment she felt the excitement of starting over in a household far more harmonious than the one she’d known in Helena. She had flourished during her childhood stays in Southern California and was glad to be back near the ocean, palm trees, and lush flowers she loved. She adored her Aunt Lu, who took on most of the cooking in the reconstituted household, much to Della’s delight. Aunt Lu was close to Myrna and a warmer, more homey person than was Della, who always made Myrna’s friends welcome in their home but tended to focus on the outside world of music, women’s clubs, and community work on behalf of the arts. She immediately enrolled Myrna in dance classes and set about purchasing tickets for herself and both children to as many performances of classical music, dance, opera, and theater as she could find: Pavlova, Paderewski, Chaliapin, and Eleanora Duse were among the standout performers Myrna saw live and would never forget (
BB
, 29).
Della got to know the local classical musicians, befriending the impresario Lynden E. Behymer, who was involved with the newly founded Los Angeles Philharmonic, and joining the campaign to establish the Hollywood Bowl as a venue for outdoor summer symphony concerts. The stimulating new surroundings and interesting company that Della supplied helped Myrna to look forward, not back.
Although her father’s death left Myrna with a sometimes suffocating sense of responsibility, and an enduring hunger for the security, support, and love a stable father might have provided, it also freed her, encouraging her to set her own goals and, with Della’s help, to make her own way. In Helena Myrna’s interest in performing had caused strife between her parents. Now, with her mother’s encouragement, it could be indulged, unabated. To be sure, there were protests emanating from the Williams family in Helena. Aunt Nettie Qualls took a dim view of Della’s expenditures for Myrna’s dancing lessons and denounced the support Della continued to give her daughter’s expressive, creative impulses. As Della once explained in an interview, “Her father’s family was furious with me. They wrote, demanding to know why I was permitting Myrna to go ahead like this. I didn’t pay any attention to them, for I sympathized with Myrna.” In general, Della was kicking up her heels, exulting in a sense of independence and freedom. Along with other American women she won the right to vote in 1920, and the fervent Democrat surely exercised her franchise once she established residence in California, opposing Harding’s “Back to Normalcy” campaign.
5
In her autobiography Myrna reports that when the family moved, they resettled in Culver City, not the Palms section of Los Angeles. Her geographic confusion isn’t surprising, since Delmas Terrace, the street on which they now lived, extended into Culver City and is named for a cofounder of that enclave. Della, after the move, quickly became active in the Culver City Women’s Club, where she presided even after Myrna became well known and the family had moved to Beverly Hills. The transplanted Williams family, evidently unaware of just where the borderline between Los Angeles and Culver City fell, considered themselves Culver City-ites.
Their new neighborhood in California had been a farming and ranching area in the days before the Los Angeles Aqueduct opened and, in 1919, when the family arrived, had a small-town, bucolic, Edenic ambience. There were stretches of open bean fields, walnut orchards, orange groves, vineyards, and dirt roads, which in rainy season turned to rivers of mud. Horses with buggies were still in use by some auto-challenged families and local businesses, and Main Street in Culver City—which had been laid out in the middle of a barley field—maintained watering troughs for horses. Initially, according to the 1920 census, there were only twelve single-family houses on their block, with a Presbyterian church on the corner, where Myrna briefly taught Sunday school until she flubbed the answer to some biblical question and the minister, a Reverend O’Connell, who lived down the street, “breathed fire and brimstone all over” her (
BB
, 25). That ended that. Teaching Sunday school was as close as Myrna ever came to fulfilling her girlhood ambition to become a nun, although she held on to her ideal of service to a higher cause. Instead of offering selfless devotion to God or a religion, Myrna became an acolyte in the temple of art.
6
Della worried that the Reverend O’Connell, the judgmental minister down the block, would catch a glimpse of Myrna dancing barefoot in a flowing Grecian tunic between the twin palms in front of their house and breathe more thunder. All bluenoses didn’t live in Helena, after all, and they did not all have Williams as a surname. Plenty of stern finger-pointers could be found right here in California.
From the house at 7137 Delmas Terrace (which would now, since remapping, be number 3729) it was an easy streetcar ride on the Venice Short Line to Venice or Ocean Beach, where Myrna’s special friend Lou Bamberger lived. Lou had become one of Della’s piano students, and through Lou Myrna met another lifelong friend, Betty Berger (later Betty Black), who came from an Orthodox Jewish family. Della invited both girls to stay overnight at the Williams home, and a tight three-way friendship took hold. Betty remembered playing word games and spinning phonograph records in the Williams home. She recalled that Myrna in those days wrote poetry and plays; she’d sew the costumes for the plays herself, putting those deft hands to work. Myrna definitely had a practical side. She read and wrote poetry, true, but if the vacuum cleaner broke, she could take it apart and fix it.
7
Downtown was also within easy reach on the streetcar. There Myrna took her weekly ballet lessons in the Majestic Building, and after class she would stop in at the Los Angeles Public Library, loading up with as many books as her arms could carry. She devoured them on the ride home and during the following week, replacing them with a new set on each return visit.
The streetcar also carried the book-laden Myrna to an elite private girls’ high school, Westlake School for Girls, on Westmoreland. Wealthy acquaintances of Della’s from Montana had sent their daughters there and recommended it to Della, who somehow managed to scrape together the tuition. Although most of the other girls at Westlake came from very affluent families with debutante aspirations, social cachet played no part in the choice of that school for Myrna. Della believed that the education provided at Westlake would be top-notch, and that was what counted. Far from being a snob about social class, she believed that no school could set the mark too high for her bright, responsive, and talented daughter and that Westlake would provide Myrna a solid foundation in culture and the arts. Since Della had taken a part-time job at a dress shop, which offered Myrna a big discount on clothes, Myrna always came to Westlake beautifully turned out (
BB
, 26). Myrna, who studied piano and French at Westlake with particular enjoyment, and danced in the school’s May Festival, did not form enduring friendships there, but the rarefied atmosphere confirmed her already strong belief that she need not feel inferior to anyone. Never arrogant or socially assertive, Myrna nonetheless held her head high, developing impeccable manners, a well modulated voice, and other signs of good breeding. In this respect she differed dramatically from her brassier future friend Joan Crawford, whose rough childhood and chorus girl past shaped her into an insecure young woman unable to shake the need to prove herself worthy.
Myrna’s fond memories of her teen years at the Delmas Terrace house, which beckoned with a trellis bursting with roses and offered a backyard full of orange, peach, and apricot trees, never dimmed. Della kept a goat in the yard, believing its milk to be curative to young David, who had what Myrna called “a touch of TB.” Apparently the goat’s milk—and the benign climate—worked because his tubercular symptoms soon vanished (
BB
, 25).
The rustic, Edenic feeling of their first months in California didn’t last long. The entire Los Angeles area had been burgeoning since the end of the Great War, and mammoth changes were afoot. The movie industry, already the biggest business in town by 1920, helped draw tourists and settlers to the region because it provided jobs and because Hollywood films and their attendant publicity advertised Los Angeles to the wider world. As the film industry flourished, the increasingly popular and available automobile required paved roads, and developers’ subdivision of agricultural land soon ruled the day. Where grain fields had recently stretched, banks, hospitals, churches, stores, schools, hotels, restaurants, and newly built homes sprouted. Real estate was needed for the hordes swarming in to settle in the city and its environs at the rate of more than 350 per day. The population of Los Angeles grew from nine hundred thousand in 1920 to more than two million a decade later.
8
Along with the throngs, Prohibition had arrived, and nightspots began to open where fun seekers, many of them employed by the nearby Culver City motion picture studios—Ince, Goldwyn, Hal Roach—gathered after work to dance, dine, and drink bootleg liquor. Because it had a lax police department and a location close enough to the waterfront to be handy for bootleggers, staid Culver City became, paradoxically, a center for vibrant, often illicit, nightlife. Raucous Washington Boulevard clubs like the Kit Kat Club, the Doo Doo Inn, the Monkey Farm, and the Green Mill kept the neighbors awake after hours. In 1922 Culver City’s local government, in a none-too-successful attempt to keep the lid on, passed a resolution prohibiting dancing in cafes and restaurants after 11:00 P.M.
Della harbored no fear that Myrna would fall under the spell of the hard-drinking, jazz-loving nightclubbers and dance-crazed flappers thronging to Washington Boulevard. She had the opposite concern: that her daughter wasn’t having enough fun. Myrna didn’t often go out on dates with boys but continued her old pattern of getting crushes and worshipping from afar. “I was a wallflower,” Myrna would say of herself years later. “I tried to console myself by being an overwhelmingly arty character. It was the Era of Wonderful Nonsense, [but] I didn’t reap much of the fun I saw around me.” Artistic, bookish, serious-minded, and shy, Myrna steered clear of flapperdom in her early and midteens. She had a few good friends but otherwise preferred to be alone or with her family. She danced, but not the Black Bottom. The dreamy-eyed high school student preferred Chopin to jazz, and when she pranced on the grass in bare feet, she donned wisps of draped chiffon, not sequin-spangled sheaths with fringed hems that swayed to the beat. Ethereal, but at the same time purposeful and grounded, she wore her curly hair loose and flowing, like a model for a Pre-Raphaelite painting, not bobbed in the latest jazz-baby mode.
9
Myrna had fallen under the spell of Ruth St. Denis, who with her husband, the dancer Ted Shawn, had founded Denishawn, an innovative, highly influential Los Angeles–based school of interpretive dance, and a well-known concert dance company that toured around the country, drawing huge audiences at venues like the Greek Theatre in Berkeley and Lewisohn Stadium in New York. Denishawn, which attracted Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey as students and company dancers, also had links to the world of motion pictures. Several current and future Hollywood actresses, including Lillian Gish, Carmel Myers, Ruth Chatterton, Constance and Joan Bennett, and, most famously, Louise Brooks, took classes at Denishawn, Brooks at the company’s New York studio. A number of cinema dancers also studied at the Los Angeles Denishawn School, for example Margaret Loomis, who as an exotic dervish entices a crowd of Arabic men with her swirling scarves and bare midriff in the casino scene of
The Sheik
. When a film director sought a dancer who could deliver seductive harem dances before the camera, or peer kohl-eyed through veils of Babylonian decadence, Denishawn could show the way.
10
Ruth St. Denis, a white Protestant American, became enchanted with the traditions of the East as a young woman, and in particular with a series of exotic goddesses she portrayed. Her “Egypta” choreography came into her head when she saw a poster of the goddess Isis in an ad for Egypta cigarettes. Her “Radha,” danced to the music of Delibes, set in a Hindu temple, and based on the story of Krishna, required the use of brown body paint. Her “Green Nautch” was inspired by Indian temple dancing, and her “O-Mika,” about a courtesan who becomes a goddess, grew out of her exposure to traditional Japanese dancers and her study with former Japanese geishas. St. Denis’s adaptation of Asian ritual dancing became wildly popular in private salons and public theaters in America and Europe, complementing the Orientalism—harem pants, turbans, incense burners, patterned Turkish carpets, and embroidered cushions in dimly lit boudoirs—that had come into vogue in the late nineteenth century and that by the 1920s had become well entrenched.
11
Born Ruth Dennis on a New Jersey farm, “Miss Ruth” moved to Los Angeles in 1915 after marrying the much younger Ted Shawn, a fellow dancer who was equally drawn to all things beautiful, spiritual, and otherworldly. Once a skirt dancer in vaudeville, after touring Europe with David Belasco’s acting company and seeing performances by the famed Japanese dancer Sado Yacco, Ruth Dennis morphed into the spiritual Ruth St. Denis and became a groundbreaking soloist whose work incorporated motifs from ethnic dance. Like San Francisco–born Isadora Duncan, she saw dance as an expression of both nature’s divinity and the unshackled soul. St. Denis, like Isadora, had studied ballet, rejecting its rigid European formality, its artificiality, and its insistence on toe shoes but retaining some of its physical rigor. Miss Ruth taught her students to control and discipline their bodies, but at the same time she encouraged them to be individualistic and, above all, natural and free in their movements.