Hollywood Dreams Revisited : Popular Landmarks Bring to Life the Memories of a Star-Struck Midwestern Boy

When the Boy from the Midwest was growing up, he shaped his character--and probably his soul--in movie houses. When MGM brought a premiere to the town in which he lived, Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland drove in an open car from their hotel to the local movie palace. He ran along behind the car for blocks; once, he was very sure, Judy Garland looked at him. He canonized that moment.

He waited through four years of World War II to get to Los Angeles. Finally, he was shipped there from the Pacific to be discharged.

In the postwar glow, Paramount Pictures offered a studio tour to servicemen and women. That’s where Bing Crosby and Bob Hope were making the Road pictures, Alan Ladd was making “O.S.S.” and Barbara Stanwyck and Paulette Goddard and Ray Milland and Olivia de Havilland were in the midst of shooting.

He stood in line for several hours near the Paramount gates and had just reached the front of the line when the tours were canceled for the rest of the week. Something about visitors mucking up outdoor shooting. He went back to his hotel and back to the Midwest.

It took him 15 years to get to Southern California again--this time permanently. He practiced his trade and finished raising a family there and in the process made Los Angeles a private preserve of vicarious memories, fantasies and wish fulfillment. Most of them had to do with the movies on which he had been nurtured.

He explored the city with care and love, and found places that gave him peace and warmth and that for a few moments breathed life into the fantasies. They still do--especially under a warm summer sun.

The Hollywood Bowl is almost always empty during the day--even during the height of its summer season. It is a place for meditation and privacy in the midst of the city. Acres of empty seats focus on an empty bandshell, framed by a hillside of green foliage and populated by the ghosts of the artists who have performed there during five decades.

If you’ve had the foresight to pack a sandwich, a bottle of wine, portable radio and a book, you can settle in for an afternoon.

Occupy one of the boxes if you like, but the less-expensive seats are best for an afternoon of reflection. Two-thirds of the way up offers a good perspective for the bandshell and a good location for introspection as well. Spread your blanket and tune your radio to your taste. With food and drink at your side and book in hand, settle in for an afternoon.

You can tune in on the Bowl whenever and however you like. You can fantasize the celebrities who have performed there over the years, playing or singing or dancing exclusively for you on this day. Or you can watch the busloads of tourists that pop in periodically. Their murmured conversation wafts upward, a kind of subdued sotto voce music performed in the daytime Bowl.

Sometimes two lovers--usually young--or exuberant children of tourists will climb the steps to the top. They’ll pay you scant attention as they pass. Like you, they are into their own thing.

Once in a great while, you get a bonus. Musicians appear magically on the stage--real, live musicians clad in slacks and loafers instead of tuxedos--and you can hear a piece of rehearsal, fragmented and interspersed with directions you can only imagine, a reminder that much more of life is made up of imperfectly performed segments than the near-perfection of the evening’s concert.

You can take that kind of profundity or leave it, depending on what took you there this day. The Bowl is wonderfully flexible.

Hollywood Bowl , free parking, gates open daily, 10 a.m.-6 p.m.

You can get to Will Rogers State Park on Sunset Boulevard by doubling back from Pacific Coast Highway (4 1/2 miles) or coming across from the San Diego Freeway (7 miles). Either way, you have to watch carefully for the sign that directs you off Sunset; it’s small and easily missed.

The grounds, the house, the polo field that fronts it and the hiking trails that lead to Inspiration Point and beyond somehow reflect the laconic, compassionate and acerbic breadth of Rogers himself. The visitor can soak it up in two parts: the house itself, and the trails behind, on which you can cut away from the picnickers and polo players to contemplate in solitude the Hollywood that once was.

Even after many visits, the Boy from the Midwest never tires of the Rogers’ home. The congeniality of the house is palpable, and it is easy to imagine Franklin Roosevelt or Wiley Post or Babe Ruth or Darryl F. Zanuck at the long dining table or warming themselves before the massive stone fireplace. The porch swing suspended from the living-room ceiling speaks eloquently of the life style in that home.

So does the inviting library and Rogers’ study upstairs where he did his writing--and thinking. An old-time typewriter rests on his desk, and a visitor wonders if the pungent political and social commentary that came from that typewriter for hundreds of American newspapers could ever have been written on a computer. Somehow, it’s comfortable to think that it couldn’t.

Sometimes a visit to the Rogers’ home will be garnished by a polo match--a sport almost as exotic today as it was in his time. He was a fine horseman, loved the game and would undoubtedly approve of the infrequent matches that take place on the field he built (game dates and times are unpredictable, so the visitor takes his chances). And if his mood is not for crowds, there is always plenty of space and peace to be found in the home and on the trails.

Will Rogers State Park , 14253 Sunset Blvd. , Pacific Palisades . Open daily 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. (house opens at 10 a.m.) .

Nowhere does reality intrude on fantasy with a more shattering impact than in downtown Hollywood. On almost any summer day, Hollywood Boulevard--wearing a ragged tux and a two-day growth of beard--plays host to a mix of imperious street people and tourists from all parts of the world. The street people--often with dyed hair--wear shades and undershirts; the tourists wear shorts and sundresses as they mill around the foyer of what used to be Graumann’s Chinese (the Boy from the Midwest can never think of it by any other name). Or they bend over for nearsighted looks at the stars embedded in the sidewalks. Each group ignores the other, which is the only way they can co-exist, and mostly it works.

The Boy from the Midwest ignores both groups to seek out his own pleasures in the Hollywood Boulevard bookstores--two in particular.

Larry Edmunds Bookshop, directly behind the Marsha Hunt sidewalk star, is a trove of Hollywood memorabilia--heavy on books that explore every period and virtually every major performer made famous by the “movies.”

And across the street and down a block--behind the Tex Ritter star--is Book City, a cluster of three wonderfully cluttered stores. The first offers fine and rare books; the second, a wide assortment of Hollywood artifacts; the third, thousands of used books, carefully catalogued by subject matter. At the store specializing in the movie business you can find all sorts of exotic folklore--old scripts, advertising posters, publicity stills almost from the beginning of the motion-picture industry.

After a morning in these bookstores, it’s possible to return to Hollywood Boulevard without seeing either the street people or the tourists. They’re still there, but your thoughts will be elsewhere.

If you finish your browsing around lunch time, stop by Musso and Frank Grill, just a block away and one of the few remaining artifacts of the old Hollywood.

There, not only can you get splendid food and drink, but you also dine in the imagined presence of such literary giants as Fitzgerald, Agee, Steinbeck and Faulkner who, some say, tipped a few at Musso’s after a tough day at the studio.

And if your head is firmly bent this day toward movie nostalgia, you can drive a half-hour from Hollywood to one of the more remarkable sources of such material anywhere in the world: the library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences. The Boy from the Midwest seldom misses a chance to stop there if he’s anywhere in the neighborhood. All it takes is a picture ID and a healthy curiosity about the way it was--or is ; collections are very up-to-date here--in the movie business.

You have to sign in on the main floor of the Academy building near Wilshire and Doheny in Beverly Hills, then ride an elevator to the fourth floor and step off into what--shamefully--is the only official collection of Hollywood history that the motion-picture industry has put together.

You can read contemporary reviews of 1920s movies or dog-eared issues of the fan magazines that offered Americans one of their few escapes from the Great Depression. Or you can browse the bookshelves and sit and dream about days when movies at least allowed small hopes beyond the bleak realities of the ‘30s and early ‘40s.

Larry Edmunds Bookshop, 6658 Hollywood Blvd.; Book City, 6627 Hollywood Blvd. Musso and Frank Grill, 6667 Hollywood Blvd., closed Sundays and major holidays. Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Science, 8949 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills; open Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, 9 a.m.-4:30 p.m.

The city is full of such places, and each individual needs to seek out his own. And the search is almost as rewarding as the discovery.