Glory of Hollywood Boulevard Was Before Their Time

In writing about a recent walk down Hollywood Boulevard, I noted that in the past the street had been “truly glamorous.” Today, of course, it can be described as curious, bizarre and tacky--even scary--but not glamorous.

Jack P. Gabriel of Carson doubts that it ever was. “I wonder if you can tell me when those days were,” he asks.

Gabriel says he came out by Greyhound in 1933, to join his parents, and the next day his mother took him to the Brown Derby for lunch.

“(It) was mildly exciting, though no name stars were there. . . . The boulevard itself was the biggest disappointment of my life. It resembled the main street of Topeka or Des Moines, but it certainly had no glamour. . . .

“The Broadway Hollywood was the only good store on the street, and while there were many small shops, none was really quality. Just as today, only now they’re worse. It’s now a place to be avoided, like West 42nd Street, New York.”

Maybe Gabriel just missed the glamour by a few years. The boulevard had its heyday in the 1920s, when the movies were new and most stars lived in the Hollywood Hills, not Beverly Hills or Bel-Air.

I myself missed the glamour years, since I wasn’t old enough to haunt the boulevard until the middle 1930s. But one still heard of the days when Tom Mix rode down the street in his phaeton with a set of Texas steer horns affixed to his radiator, and Clara Bow, the “It Girl,” paraded in her convertible with two chow dogs dyed to match her red hair.

I doubt that any stars are seen on the boulevard anymore, except those embedded in the sidewalk, but I believe they might have been bumped into occasionally in the 1920s, if not frequently.

Those were the days when the hills above the boulevard were covered by the houses of movie people--bungalows of 2x4s and stucco in the shape of French chateaux, Italian villas, Spanish castles, Greek temples, Tudor mansions, Egyptian tombs and Islamic mosques.

As movie historian Maurice Zolotow wrote, they were built by movie people--the most wonderful collection of tradesmen, artists, craftsmen, engineers and lunatics that ever lived and worked together in one place. (By the way, many of those fantasy houses are still there.)

Ferrell Burton Jr. chides me for failing to mention the Musso & Frank Grill, which has been open on the boulevard since 1919. For decades it has been frequented by agents and screenwriters; according to the legend, the likes of Robert Benchley, William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald once took their lunch hours there. But Musso & Frank is more of the old Hollywood Boulevard than the new. It is still frequented by movie and TV people, and has not yet been overrun by tourists. (I usually eat alone at the bar.)

Bill Sweet complains that I overlooked the Egyptian Theater, built in 1922 by Sid Grauman in the Egyptomania that followed the opening of King Tut’s tomb. The Egyptian still has that deep forecourt and looks like the entrance to a tomb, but, alas, like most other old theaters, it has been partitioned into multiple screens.

Wanda Marchessault, a graduate of Hollywood High, Class of ‘41, remembers a truly glamorous boulevard when stars lunched at the Brown Derby and shopped at I. Magnin or the Broadway Hollywood.

“The Broadway Hollywood was a beautiful store then, and I will always remember it at Christmastime with the lovely choir singing from the mezzanine.”

She does not mention the old upstairs Montmartre Cafe, where Rudolph Valentino could be seen dancing with Pola Negri, and where Joan Crawford was a regular winner of the afternoon Charleston contests. Alas, I was never there.

While I’m back in Hollywood I might as well confess to a bunch of errors I made in a column about the Variety Arts library in the Magic Castle. Dr. Cam Paschall of Long Beach and numerous others have pointed out that I misspelled the names of Jack Oakie, Lynn Fontanne and Adolphe Menjou, thus using my allowance for a year and a half.

I did know how to spell Oakie and Fontanne, but I admit I didn’t remember that Menjou’s first name ended in an e . My only excuse is that I had no blinds in my new workroom at that time, and that when sunlight fell on my computer screen I could hardly read the letters. (I hope I got Tom Mix and Clara Bow right.)

Paschall also states that I erred in describing librarian Dick Mentzer as recently “widowed.” He says: “widowed is a state reserved for women.”

Not so. Webster’s New World says “widow--vt. to cause to become a widow or widower; usually in the past participle.”

But one out of four ain’t good.