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Authors: Emily W. Leider
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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
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
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