A PEEK INTO HOLLYWOOD PAST--PRE-TV

Hollywood has not been uninteresting for a minute since D.W. Griffith came West to make use of the winter sun in Southern California or, a little later, when Sam Goldwyn and his group hit town and made “The Squaw Man” in a barn.

But time and change have lent special interest to those days before television, when the moguls still reigned, the legends were still being written and the stucco was new and shining.

I’ve often said I got to town at least a quarter-century too late: too late to catch a glimpse of Scott Fitzgerald in the bar at the Garden of Allah or Robert Benchley hailing a cab at the Mocambo.

I’ve wondered what it must have been like to be here in that mythic time, and more particularly what it was like to live within the golden enclave of the celebrity world.

I had some glimpses of it last week from Joan Benny, the adopted daughter of Jack Benny and Mary Livingston, and Maria Cooper Janis, the daughter of Gary Cooper and his wife, Rocky. We shared a panel discussion on “Growing Up in Hollywood,” improbably placed within a weeklong convention in San Diego of the Young Presidents Organization. The platform list ran more frequently to the likes of Gerald Ford, T. Boone Pickens and foreign policy experts.

It was not really until they went off to school, they said--Joan Benny to Stanford, Maria Cooper to Chouinard Art Institute--that they realized fully they were perceived as special because they were the children of celebrities. The whispers (“She’s Jack Benny’s kid”; “She’s Gary Cooper’s daughter”) died off on longer acquaintance, but it was isolating at first.

Before that, other celebrities weren’t celebrities; they were the parents of your friends. The pleasure of going to birthday parties for Jack Warner’s daughter, when their ages were still single digits, was not, Maria Cooper remembered, that it was Warner’s house but that the screen in his projection room rose majestically from the floor on a platform, and it became a game of chicken to see who dared stay on longest before jumping off.

Joan Benny did confess that she understood the Sweet Sixteen party her parents gave her was a bit special. A few of their friends, as well as hers, were invited, and some of the elders performed, including Dinah Shore, Frank Sinatra, Tony Martin, Sammy Cahn and Blossom Seely, who brought the house down with a number she had done at the Palace with husband Benny Fields.

Both sets of parents were strict but loving, and Joan Benny recalls a special pressure to be good, lest she bring scandal on her father. “At a certain moment,” she was saying, “the big thing among some of the kids was swiping comic books. I knew that if I tried it and got caught there would be a front page headline, ‘JACK BENNY’S DAUGHTER GOES TO JAIL.’ ”

There were compensations. The scripts for Benny’s radio show were written at the house on Wednesdays and Thursdays and she was allowed to sit quietly in a corner and listen.

“It was fascinating,” she said. “There would be endless discussion over a single word, whether it was funnier to say the pad of paper, or this pad of paper.”

What you saw was what you got, the women agreed: The public image of their very public fathers was very much the private man as well. Jack Benny the rather put-upon and ineffectual or at least unassertive comic figure was indeed unassertive. “It would never have occurred to him to demand a better table at a restaurant. If there was a line at a theater, it would never occur to him that he didn’t have to stand in it if he didn’t want to.”

The shy, soft-spoken Cooper, who often seemed uncomfortable with the trappings of stardom, was all of that, his daughter said. “When he finished a film, what he wanted to do was get out of town as fast as possible. We traveled a lot, and we were always a family unit.”

Coop had industry friends: James Stewart was his closest pal among the actors, director Henry Hathaway another close friend. But Cooper also had hunting cronies in Idaho and Montana and was most at ease with them. “He could sit in a duck blind in the freezing cold for six hours and be totally happy,” Maria said.

Cooper never brought work or its problems home, didn’t like to talk about acting and rarely did. He also never confused himself with the real men he portrayed. He once said, “It’s nice when people congratulate you because you’ve played a hero. Wouldn’t it be something if they were congratulating you because you were a hero.” He resisted playing Sgt. York because he was in such awe of the man.

The women realized early on that not all of their friends had the same comfortable home lives, that with some celebrity parents, the gulf between public image and private reality made home life hell. But “no ‘Mommie Dearests’ from us,” Joan Benny said.

She had a brief flirtation with acting and as a game-show panelist in New York, but did not like the life and opted for marriage, to producer Robert Blumofe, and four children. Now divorced, she is preparing a lecture series on film comedy.

Maria Cooper, long married to concert pianist Byron Janis, is a successful painter who has two one-woman shows a year. “If I’d had any talent as an actress, I don’t think my parents would have stood in my way. But I never really thought I did, and never wanted to pursue it.” She and her mother have lived in the East since not long after Cooper died in 1961, and if she has a warm affection for that other, earlier Hollywood, she feels no kinship at all with present Hollywood.

It may be that you can’t go home again, wherever home is. But I had the feeling that the home Hollywood was for the two girls growing up has ceased to exist. The byways of Holmby Hills and what is left of the back lots are filled with ghosts for them, as for those of us who arrived later to see where our dreams were made.