Read Online You Must Remember This by Robert J. Wagner - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Robert J. Wagner
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attract Midwesterners from the frigid plains of Iowa and Kansas. Stanley devised a brilliant publicity strategy: the patrons of the hotel were encouraged to pick any of the flowers that grew in the gardens. Arranged in bouquets in the rooms, the flowers added a personal touch that made the guests feel right at home.
The hotel began building bungalows in 1915, which indicates that they were getting patronage from people who wanted to stay for the entire winter and for whom a hotel room would be too confining. The first five bungalows were in the Mission Revival style and had several bedrooms apiece—bring the entire family!—and a porch overlooking the main court of the hotel. By the 1930s, there would be more than twenty bungalows, scattered over the sixteen acres of gardens.
In 1915 among the amenities on offer were horseback rides before breakfast with a stable of Kentucky horses on the grounds. Then there was golf at the adjacent Los Angeles Country Club.And believe it or not, there were fox hunts in the hills above the hotel, which tells you a lot about the guests who stayed there.
In 1919 Douglas Fairbanks, the first great swashbuckling star of the movies and as charismatic a man as ever walked in front of a camera, bought a glorified hunting lodge on Summit Drive, off Benedict Canyon, about a half mile above the Beverly Hills Hotel. He paid thirty-five thousand dollars for the place, and it wasn’t much—it had six rooms, no electricity, no running water, and looked a little run-down.
And then it got worse. As Stanley Anderson’s son told me the story a quarter century later, the morning after Fairbanks moved in, Stanley’s phone rang. It was Fairbanks, and he was distraught. “I’ve never felt so awful,” he said. “I have to leave Beverly Hills.” It seemed that three of his new neighbors had called him the night before and told him that actors weren’t welcome in the town. Property values, and so forth.
Stanley happened to know the neighbors in question—Stanley knew everybody. First he managed to calm Fairbanks down; then he defused the situation by calming the neighbors down. Fairbanks decided to stay and began remodeling and greatly enlarging the old lodge. Soon afterward he married Mary Pickford. It was a royal wedding, for Pickford was Fairbanks’s opposite number: the King of Hollywood was marrying its queen.
Like almost all the early stars, Pickford was born poor. Her father had died young, and the only way the Toronto family could survive was for Mary—whose real name was Gladys Smith—to go onstage. She was very blond and very beautiful, and she became quite successful as a child actress, eventually going to work for the famous theatrical producer David Belasco. That led to work withD. W. Griffith at the Biograph studio on the Lower East Side of New York, which in turn led to a twenty-year career of success in the movies.
Pickford and Fairbanks owned their own studios, owned their own films, and, along with Charlie Chaplin and D. W. Griffith, founded United Artists. They were all early examples of the actor as entrepreneur, and they set a pattern that the most ambitious stars replicate even today.
Chaplin and Fairbanks were best friends, and it was because of Fairbanks that Charlie Chaplin also built a house on Summit Drive in Beverly Hills in 1921. It certainly wasn’t because he was in love with the surrounding environment: “The alkali and the sagebrush gave off an odorous, sour tang that made the throat dry and the nostrils smart,” wrote Chaplin in his memoirs. “In those days, Beverly Hills looked like an abandoned real estate development. Sidewalks ran along and disappeared into open fields and lampposts with white globes adorning empty streets; most of the globes were missing, shot off by passing revelers from roadhouses.”
At night, Chaplin could hear the coyotes howling. Here was a poor boy from London who shuddered at the very thought of coyotes, but to Fairbanks it
The hotel began building bungalows in 1915, which indicates that they were getting patronage from people who wanted to stay for the entire winter and for whom a hotel room would be too confining. The first five bungalows were in the Mission Revival style and had several bedrooms apiece—bring the entire family!—and a porch overlooking the main court of the hotel. By the 1930s, there would be more than twenty bungalows, scattered over the sixteen acres of gardens.
In 1915 among the amenities on offer were horseback rides before breakfast with a stable of Kentucky horses on the grounds. Then there was golf at the adjacent Los Angeles Country Club.And believe it or not, there were fox hunts in the hills above the hotel, which tells you a lot about the guests who stayed there.
In 1919 Douglas Fairbanks, the first great swashbuckling star of the movies and as charismatic a man as ever walked in front of a camera, bought a glorified hunting lodge on Summit Drive, off Benedict Canyon, about a half mile above the Beverly Hills Hotel. He paid thirty-five thousand dollars for the place, and it wasn’t much—it had six rooms, no electricity, no running water, and looked a little run-down.
And then it got worse. As Stanley Anderson’s son told me the story a quarter century later, the morning after Fairbanks moved in, Stanley’s phone rang. It was Fairbanks, and he was distraught. “I’ve never felt so awful,” he said. “I have to leave Beverly Hills.” It seemed that three of his new neighbors had called him the night before and told him that actors weren’t welcome in the town. Property values, and so forth.
Stanley happened to know the neighbors in question—Stanley knew everybody. First he managed to calm Fairbanks down; then he defused the situation by calming the neighbors down. Fairbanks decided to stay and began remodeling and greatly enlarging the old lodge. Soon afterward he married Mary Pickford. It was a royal wedding, for Pickford was Fairbanks’s opposite number: the King of Hollywood was marrying its queen.
Like almost all the early stars, Pickford was born poor. Her father had died young, and the only way the Toronto family could survive was for Mary—whose real name was Gladys Smith—to go onstage. She was very blond and very beautiful, and she became quite successful as a child actress, eventually going to work for the famous theatrical producer David Belasco. That led to work withD. W. Griffith at the Biograph studio on the Lower East Side of New York, which in turn led to a twenty-year career of success in the movies.
Pickford and Fairbanks owned their own studios, owned their own films, and, along with Charlie Chaplin and D. W. Griffith, founded United Artists. They were all early examples of the actor as entrepreneur, and they set a pattern that the most ambitious stars replicate even today.
Chaplin and Fairbanks were best friends, and it was because of Fairbanks that Charlie Chaplin also built a house on Summit Drive in Beverly Hills in 1921. It certainly wasn’t because he was in love with the surrounding environment: “The alkali and the sagebrush gave off an odorous, sour tang that made the throat dry and the nostrils smart,” wrote Chaplin in his memoirs. “In those days, Beverly Hills looked like an abandoned real estate development. Sidewalks ran along and disappeared into open fields and lampposts with white globes adorning empty streets; most of the globes were missing, shot off by passing revelers from roadhouses.”
At night, Chaplin could hear the coyotes howling. Here was a poor boy from London who shuddered at the very thought of coyotes, but to Fairbanks it
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