Universal Studios Fire, Sale a Sad End to Grand Era of Dream Factories

Two recent, related events saddened me deeply and--even to me--inexplicably. I’m talking about the fire that destroyed much of the back lot at Universal Studios and the subsequent sale of that studio to a Japanese conglomerate. It was, to me, rather like seeing an aging member of your family badly injured and then unfeelingly bartered to a stranger who covets the gold fillings in her teeth.

I make no apologies for these sappy feelings. The sadness grows out of one more stamp of finality--maybe the last one--on the dream factories (I use the cliche fondly) that probably had more influence, both good and bad, on my upbringing than any other single force. A soul that was forged in movie palaces can’t be unmoved when the last rococo chandelier comes tumbling down.

The back lot at Universal was the only survivor of the days when movies were made on papier-mache sets instead of on location--and the audience was required to add some of its own imagination to the mix, which we did happily.

When I moved to California in 1959, all of the studios still had their back lots, and thank God I saw them before they began to turn into real estate developments. I saw Tara and the Roman amphitheater and the Paris Opera and the streets of “High Noon” and Shirley Temple’s plantation and Camelot and the courthouse square in Mason City, Iowa, and the “Psycho” house (which was destroyed in last week’s fire). All of which took some doing.

I don’t think any generation of Americans ever dealt with the movies in quite the same way as those of us who grew up in the Great Depression of the 1930s. We wanted gauze, not reality. We had plenty of reality in the food lines and broken families and desperation involved in simple survival. Two men in my neighborhood in Ft. Wayne, Ind., took out large insurance policies, then killed themselves so their families could eat. My own father had a nervous breakdown after frantically trying to save his business and disappeared for several weeks; my brother found him in a hospital in Chicago. He had gone to the city to seek a loan--unsuccessfully.

The movies gave us our only release from these stresses, and the nickelodeon operators who became the moguls of Hollywood knew this. And so they gave us Fred Astaire done up impeccably in white tie and tails dancing on a piano. And kindly Judge Hardy dispensing warm advice from his white Victorian house on a tree-shaded street in Grassroots, U.S.A.

And Cary Grant being wonderfully flip, and Jean Harlow and Marlene Dietrich sultry, and William Powell suave, and Clark Gable and Errol Flynn dashing. They gave us idyllic families and brave, selfless heroes and heroines and stories in which Ruby Keeler was always plucked from the chorus at the last minute and turned into an overnight star. And we lapped them up.

I have no idea to what extent they permeated my subconscious and established a plateau of unreality that made self-honesty much more difficult for me to come by in later years. If that, indeed, is true, it doesn’t change my affection for these movies one whit. I can still move in my head instantly--and with great joy--to any one of hundreds of summer afternoons I spent in enormous movie palaces where, for a dime, I could be transported for a few hours.

This affection was so powerful that I spent an uncommon amount of my adult life opening doors to Hollywood. I think that determination was fixed a few weeks after I was discharged in San Francisco from the Navy following World War II. I had heard that Paramount Studios was offering tours to returning servicemen, and so my wife and I drove back to the Midwest via Hollywood.

We took a motel a few blocks from Paramount and appeared very early in the morning to get on the first tour. I knew that Hope and Crosby were in the midst of filming one of their “road” pictures, and that James Stewart and Jean Arthur were also filming there at the time, and I had visions as I waited of seeing these people. Then we were told that no spouses would be allowed on the tour, and--although my wife insisted I go alone--I left the studio awash in disappointment and anger and determined to come back on my own terms.

That took about 15 years. When I was a well-established magazine writer in Chicago, we moved to Orange County, and I began seeking Hollywood assignments. Within a few years, I was doing the film reviewing and covering the Hollywood beat for the National Observer (the now-defunct weekly published by the Wall Street Journal) and was writing entertainment profiles for a lot of high-circulation national magazines. Since power in Hollywood is equated strictly on what you can deliver, I had virtually unlimited access to both the studios and the people who worked there.

It was a heady experience for a while and could have destroyed those early feelings about the movies. The people, of course, were inevitably smaller than life--or, at least, smaller than the fantasy life I’d given them.

Fred Astaire, for example, turned out to be an almost total pragmatist, an affable, diffident man who seemed to have no conception of the pleasure he’d given millions of people like me. I found Judy Garland one day in an alcoholic stupor. Julie Andrews cussed with the creativity of a top sergeant. Mary Tyler Moore was tense and withdrawn. And I had to learn the hard way not to confuse an apparently warm interview with the beginning of a friendship. On two separate occasions, I spent a full day with Edward G. Robinson and Charlton Heston, then ran into them at previews that evening and they didn’t know me.

But all of this was somehow put into a compartment of my head totally apart from the one that encased the affectionate companionship of the movies I enjoyed when I was growing up. When I had my fill of writing about Hollywood and turned to other things, I didn’t look over my shoulder very often. Sure, I missed the location trips--many of them abroad--and the screening parties and the ego-life of being on the “A” list.

But the need I had--if that’s what it was--to experience what I fantasized as Hollywood on my own terms was gone. That Hollywood no longer existed, anyway--if it ever had. The studio system had disintegrated, and the industry was being taken over by financial conglomerates--first domestic, then foreign--that didn’t know Judge Hardy from Rambo, and couldn’t care less. And the movies they produced turned appallingly violent--or appallingly cute--and were aimed primarily at adolescent minds of whatever age.

So an era was gone, and I didn’t try to fight these changing rhythms. But that hasn’t prevented an occasional opening of that compartment of my mind in which my own adolescent movies are stored--and the chance to poke about in them fondly. That usually happens at this stage of my life only when something stirs these memories--as the Universal fire did the other day. The cardboard sets burned fiercely, leaving only ashes. But the movies I carry in my head--and the feelings I have for them--are indestructible.