HOORAY FOR HOLLYWOOD: Marian Gibbons and The Founding of Hollywood Heritage docx

Hollywood was famous everywhere in the world but Hollywood.When I visited Russia and told the people I met that I was from LosAngeles, they often asked, “Is that near Hollywood?” But in

have been blessed throughout my life by many, many

dear friends and extended family, all of whom have

been so very important to me over the years Looking

over the pages I am reminded over and over again didn’t

we have such fun? Haven’t we shared a grand journey!

I

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irector Frank Capra loved to tell the story about a group ofJapanese soldiers on a Pacific island near the end of WorldWar II They had fled to a cave after the American invasionand appeared ready to die rather than surrender Thesituation looked bleak Capra recalled: “Finally, some American GI had abright idea: Promise them a trip to Hollywood It worked The Japanesesoldiers surrendered, and after the war they eventually got their trip.”For much of the past century Hollywood has endured as the filmcapital of the world and a symbol of glamour and hope to millions ofpeople from Baltimore to Bombay But while the idea of Hollywoodcontinued to flourish, the actual city went into sad decline in the sixtiesand seventies

When Gib and I had lived there back in 1949, a car trip to Hollywoodwas a gala event This was a beautiful city then and a wonderful place toshop But when I bought my house on Bryn Mawr Drive in 1978, Hollywoodhad fallen into a sorry state of decline, with an unsavory reputation for

flagrant prostitution, blatant drug dealing, and serious crime In 1981, Time

magazine characterized parts of Hollywood as “weekend war zones.”All the glamour and excitement of former years seemed to have left.Like many a starlet, seduced and abandoned, Hollywood showed thosetelltale signs of aging and destruction An arsonist torched the HollywoodLibrary, with its wondrous collection of books on film The HollywoodHotel and the legendary Garden of Allah were both lost to developers.While the Hollywood movies often were carefully preserved, the city’slandmarks were not Like clips on the cutting-room floor, many of themost important buildings in the city were lost to the wrecker’s ball or

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HOLLYWOOD FALLS ON HARD TIMES

Hollywood Falls on Hard Times

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through neglect

Few people knew or cared about the historic buildings of Hollywood,those relics from the golden age of filmmaking The city had no historicalsociety Hollywood was famous everywhere in the world but Hollywood.When I visited Russia and told the people I met that I was from LosAngeles, they often asked, “Is that near Hollywood?” But in SouthernCalifornia at the time, no one gave a damn about what should have beenone of Los Angeles’s greatest assets

Some halfhearted attempts at preservation had been made, but plaqueswere placed on the wrong buildings, and “remodeling” often resulted ingaudy boutiques and T-shirt shops in total irreverence of the city’s past andhistorical accuracy Over three million tourists a year flocked to Hollywoodexpecting to experience some of its glamorous history But except forGrauman’s Chinese Theater, there was nothing much for them to see inHollywood itself So they all trooped over the hill to the Universal Studiostheme park

This was the state of affairs in 1978 when I happened upon thatdemonstration to raise money to preserve the original barn whereHollywood’s first feature film had been made And I thought it wasdisgraceful So I determined to do something about it At first I tried towork through the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, but it proved to be

an absolutely worthless organization for the purposes of historicalpreservation A few years later I gave an interview to a reporter, who asked

me about the HCC “All our Chamber of Commerce does is raise enoughmoney to pay their salaries,” I told her Then, to my horror, she quoted me

I learned then and there not to speak my mind with reporters!

I learned about a group called the Hollywood Revitalization effort,founded by Councilwoman Peggy Stevenson, the representative for ourdistrict When I went to see her, she explained that both the Los Angelescity government and the council office funded the group She put me intouch with Rusty Flinton, who worked for the committee I visited theiroffice in the Equity Building in Hollywood and volunteered my help Theywere pleased as could be to get me as a volunteer Soon I met anothervolunteer there, Mildred Heredeen, a delightful older woman We hit it offfrom the start! She was writing promotional articles for the revitalization

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of Hollywood and doing a great job She also agreed that it was shamefulthat there was no preservation society and said she would help me startone One day in 1979 the two of us were at the corner of Hollywood andVine having coffee in a small shop and talking about how best to form apreservation society, when Christy Johnson approached our table andintroduced herself She was a paid consultant for the HRC She told us thatshe had heard we were setting up a historical preservation society andwanted to work with us We were delighted!

Neither Christy, Mildred, nor I knew any of the politicians, and I knewfrom previous experience that without their support our hope for ahistorical society was doomed Mildred was a good writer, doing

promotional writing for Hollywood Effort, and Christy was a fine historian,

having written a book on Hollywood architecture as her master’s thesis.But whom to contact for political help?

Then, one of those strokes of fate happened I had a phone call A funnylittle voice asked, “Is this Marian Gibbons on Bryn Mawr? “Yes, it is,” I said

“Well,” she said, “my name is Mary Herbold I live just down from you onPrimrose Our regular postman is on vacation and the man they’ve put on

is bringing me all your magazines Now, I’m not quite finished with them.But when I am I will give you a call and you can come down and have teaand I’ll give you your magazines.”

I thought this was as cute as she turned out to be a tiny little lady whowas brilliant She was in her seventies then and smoked constantly Sheusually had on a chenille robe, which was liberally dotted with cigaretteburns I feared she would burn herself up Thank goodness she didn’t

“What is it you want to do here?” she asked over tea I told her of mythoughts of starting a historical and preservation society “What a goodidea!” she enthused “Do you know John Ford?” I hadn’t the vaguest ideawho she was talking about “Well, John Ford is considered the father ofHollywood!” she said “You’ll have to talk with John Ford!” “I’d like that,” Isaid, “but I don’t know John Ford.” “Well, I do!” she said, and went straight

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my homework before we called on Mr Ford in his beautiful home onNormandy in Hollywood He had been Los Angeles County supervisor forthe Third District for over twenty-five years and had a reputation as anhonest and trustworthy politician I could not have found a moreinfluential mentor When I told him what I wanted to do, he was morethan enthusiastic “Why haven’t we done this before?” he exclaimed “Howcan I help?” I told him that I didn’t know any of the politicians and haddiscovered in Wisconsin that it was a very necessary part of the plan “Well,

I know them all,” he said “Who do you want to see? “ I had to admit that Iknew so little of local politics and hadn’t a clue how to proceed “I knowwhat you need,” he said, and went to the phone “This is John Ford,” hesaid “Put me through to Tom.” He chatted with “Tom” for a bit then said,

“We’ll be in to see you next Monday.”

The following Monday, John Ford, Mary Herbold, and I were usheredstraight into Mayor Tom Bradley’s office It was obvious that Mayor Bradleyhad a close friendship with Mr Ford (I later learned that John Ford hadcrafted Tom Bradley’s successful run for mayor of Los Angeles) Once themayor knew just what Mr Ford and I wanted to do, he called in a deputyand gave orders to respond to our calls and keep him informed on ourprogress He became one of our most enthusiastic supporters And thatdidn’t hurt our cause one bit We were quickly on our way to becoming areal organization

Borrowing from several historical societies, I wrote bylaws for ourgroup and took them up to Sacramento to be checked over by a deputy inthe secretary of state’s office, to be sure that we would qualify as a 501(c)3nonprofit society Our corporation papers were notarized in 1979 asHollywood Heritage, Inc

About this time I found myself one day at the office of the HollywoodRevitalization Committee and met Frances Offenhauser and SusanPeterson, two young women who were both architects The HRC hadhired them to do a study of the overall plan for restoring Hollywood to itsformer glory They immediately said they wanted to join in our efforts.Soon afterwards we decided upon our officers and directors I was thepresident, Christy the vice-president, and Frances our secretary JohnAnson Ford was our chairman of the board, Susan, her husband, and

One of the first things we did was to undertake a survey of Hollywood.

We were surprised to discover that there were over one hundred buildingsfrom the twenties and thirties worthy of being saved This was mostunusual in a city of this size But Hollywood had escaped urban renewal inthe sixties and seventies when other cities were gutting their downtownareas Instead, Hollywood simply stood still for thirty-five years

We handful of ladies set about educating people in both the film andthe business communities about the importance of saving the physicalrelics of Hollywood’s past We quickly gained support from some of the topnames in the film industry Actor Ed Asner joined Hollywood Heritage andwarned: “We are dream merchants and as such should be careful not todissipate our mystery for purely pragmatic reasons The continuingerosion, both physical and spiritual, of the entity known as Hollywood is

an irreparable loss to us all.”

Our first big battle came over the world-famous, hat-shaped BrownDerby Restaurant on Hollywood Boulevard In the thirties it was said that

no day went by without at least one article about the Brown Derby beingpublished somewhere in the world Herbert Somborn (actress GloriaSwanson’s husband) had opened the restaurant for business on Valentine’sDay 1929 Immediately, the stars began coming in crowds for lunch anddinner Somborn died in 1934 A few years later, the Hollywood BrownDerby opened on Vine Street just south of Hollywood Boulevard It didn’ttake long before the Hollywood Derby became the place to see the moviestars The building was owned by Cecil B De Mille, the Derby rented it andhired Robert Cobb to run it He became the stuff of Hollywood legend onenight in 1937

Weary of a steady hotdog and hamburger diet, Cobb prowled hungrily

in his restaurant’s kitchen for a snack Opening the huge refrigerator, hepulled out a head of lettuce, an avocado, romaine, tomatoes, some coldbreast of chicken, a hard-boiled egg, plus cheese and some old-fashionedFrench dressing He started chopping and added some crisp bacon he

Hollywood Falls On Hard Times

a carton Over the coming decades the Brown Derby restaurants servedover four million Cobb salads

(As a footnote: Sid Grauman was a Hollywood legend in his own right

He built the famous Chinese Theater and started the practice of moviestars pressing their hands and feet into wet concrete in front He also builtthe nearby Egyptian Theater and the Million Dollar Theater on Broadway.)Such stars as George Burns, Gracie Allen, George Raft, Cary Grant, andBarbara Stanwyck became Derby regulars Clark Gable proposed to CaroleLombard in Booth 54 In the sixties Kim Novak, Ernest Borgnine, and SteveMcQueen were frequently seen there By this time the hat-shapedrestaurant had a large addition to one side, while the original structurenow served largely as an entrance and a lobby In the late seventies, therestaurant received a facelift

In 1980 the owner of the Wilshire Boulevard Derby abruptly closed therestaurant, laid off all the staff, and prepared to demolish the building But

a waitress phoned in a tip about the impending destruction to Martin Weil,

an architect, at the Los Angeles Conservancy He called me with the news

We at Hollywood Heritage were stunned when we heard it We had alwaysassumed that the Brown Derby had been nominated for historic-landmarkstatus But it hadn’t So it came as a real shock when we learned that wecould lose such a famous building We rushed into action to save it When

we arrived the next day, we were horrified to see a bulldozer sitting behindthe back wall of the restaurant with its blade just inches away A chain-linkfence surrounded the restaurant Soon police, city officials, andpreservationists were all involved I pleaded with a guard to take me to theowner I was convinced we could work this out satisfactorily The ownerswere Jim and Brooke Young, the granddaughter of Gloria Swanson, thefamous actress from the silent era Jim Young was there and quiteperplexed as to how they should handle the situation They told me thatthey had closed the restaurant because it wasn’t making much money

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anymore and the land under it had become too valuable

“Let’s be reasonable,” I said to them “Only the original hat-shapedbuilding is worth saving Let’s move that elsewhere.”

“Lady, you mean all you want is that hat?” he asked

“That’s all I want,” I told him

“Well, you just got yourself a hat!” he told me

And that’s how we saved the Brown Derby The story of our fight tosave the celebrated restaurant generated national and international newscoverage And Hollywood Heritage was launched

Well, we had saved our hat But what were we going to do with it? Andthe rainy season was coming Then I visited Western ExterminationCompany and asked them to help us We needed to have the hat coveredwith a large tarp similar to what they used when they gassed a termite-infested house I promised them some publicity in return And thishappened, as the tarp had the name Western Extermination Companystenciled across it

Our next major project involved the most important historic building

in Hollywood, the Barn, home of the first film-company studio (AtHollywood Heritage we have always thought of it as the Barn with a capital

B, to distinguish it from all the other barns of much less historical interest.)One day soon afterward I was at a Hollywood Chamber of Commercemeeting, sitting next to Jack Forman, the president of Warner BrothersStudio He was in charge of the Hollywood Historic Trust, which ownedthe Barn, the building that had originally gotten me involved in thebusiness of Hollywood preservation He told me the shocking news thatBill Welsh, the president of HRC, wanted to sell the Barn to UniversalStudios for $10,000 for them to place in their theme park

“That Barn can’t leave Hollywood!” I said emphatically

“I agree,” Jack told me “Can your group do anything about it?”

“We can and we will,” I promised him

No other building embodied so much early Hollywood history as thisdilapidated structure It was in this barn at the corner of Selma Avenue andVine Street, in 1913, that Cecil B De Mille, fresh from New York City, set up

shop in a sleepy little suburb of Los Angeles to make The Squaw Man, the

first feature film ever shot in Hollywood

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De Mille was thirty-two years old at the time and in partnership withSamuel Goldwyn and Jesse Lasky in a small production company called theJesse L Lasky Feature Play Company The group had bought a film script

to Edwin Milton Royle’s popular stage melodrama, The Squaw Man, which

they wanted to shoot on site in the country around Flagstaff, Arizona Butthe film crew found the climate there to be unsuitable for their movie and

so stayed on the train until they arrived in Los Angeles

Once the group had arrived in sunny Southern California, De Millerented a barn in Hollywood He used it as his first studio, converting theempty horse stalls into dressing rooms for his actors Much later he

Artist’s imaginative rendering of the original Barn.

We had our work cut out for us in trying to renovate the Barn!

The Capitol Records building, a Hollywood landmark in the background.

Another view of the Barn.

The Barn up on movers’ skids.

The interior was a shambles as well.

Everything was in total disarray.

Vine Street and Selma Avenue, circa 1915.

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described the Barn in his autobiography: “It was a surprisingly large barn.L-shaped, one of its yellowish heat-beaten wings ran along Vine Street, andthe other stretched back, parallel to Selma Avenue, into an orange grove Apartition was set up within the barn to form a small room, a desk wasbrought in for the director-general and a kitchen table for his nonexistentsecretary; and we were ready for business.”

The Barn did have one serious drawback, as De Mille noted in hisautobiography: “The roof leaked However, I had an umbrella and MamieWagner Mamie was our film cutter When the rains came, if I was working,Mamie would leave her cutting and hold the umbrella over me If she wasworking at her job, I would gallantly return the compliment Somehow wemanaged to stay dry enough, by turns anyway, to keep the laboratory workabreast of each day’s shoot.”

Hollywood at this time was a sleepy collection of houses scatteredamong the orange groves The roads were all dirt, and few residents ownedcars De Mille declined to use his car to get from the house he rented to hisstudio; instead he rode a horse to work each day As he noted in hisautobiography:

It was possible to drive a car (if one had a car in 1914) over the bumpy, pitted, dirt road which was then Cahuenga Boulevard, but

a horse was a much more practical means of transportation between

my home and the barn-studio Every morning Mrs De Mille packed the lunch, which I carried slung over my shoulder in a leather pouch, as I rode to work Every evening the same pouch carried home the precious extra negative to be stored in our attic

It was a pleasant ride in the freshness of the morning and the cool ofthe evening on horseback, past the vineyards and between the trees andbrush, which then grew wild in the pass through which thousands of carsnow boil hourly on the Hollywood Freeway It was also a lonely ride.Houses were few and far between He almost never met anyone on theroad

De Mille and his crew started shooting the movie on December 29, 1913,

on a budget of $15,000 Oscar Apfel, an experienced filmmaker from New