LIFE IN HOLLYWOOD.

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 231, 29 September 1928, Page 5 (Supplement)

LIFE IN HOLLYWOOD.

FILMDOM TWELVE YEARS AGO

A RETURN VISIT TO THE

STUDIOS.

ENTERTAINED BY MARY AND DOUG.

(By D. M. MONTGOMERY.)

(Copyright to "Auckland Star.")

Hollywood, the enchanted . . after twelve years. Hollywood, the honeypot dripping with wealth and fame. HollyFood, the city of tears and heartbreak.

Down the broad avenue smiling under the Californian sun, I hummed in the big car. We passed Norma Talmadge's palatial house. "She's out at her beach place," volunteered my companion, the Man - Who-Knows-E very thing. He had been regaling me with*" the latest intimate gossip of Hollywood as we swept along Sunset Boulevard, crowded with swift, brightly-coloured cars.

Mae Murray was "throwing" a party that night. ''She's in the fashion. Her fifth husband is a Russian prince. Nice fellow. Gloria Swanson's in the vogue, too. She has a French marquis for husband. Corinne Griflith has been in Paris. Lucky she's Mrs. Walter Morosco, or she might have brought back a European name.

"We're nothing if not cosmopolitan here these days," added my friend. Everybody Building. * "First National," he went on, "are completing a new lot near Universal City at Burbank. It will cost a million and a-half. It's bigger than Universal, and that's big enough—6oo acres, and a mile across. Land prices are soaring. Getting prohibitive. Good for the Talmadges, Norma and Uonnie, and Norma's husband, Joe Schenck. They've got bushels in real estate. They've just sold the big Talmadge apartment house on Wiltshire Boulevard for nearly two million dollars. They're building, building, building," said the Man-Who-Knows-E very thing, waving an expressive hand to the horizon. "Rod La Rocque's building. Bill Boyd's building, Colleen Moore's building, Harold Lloyd is building, Lew Cody and Mabel Normand are building, they're all building. Bungalows, you know, all the time. Spanish villas. Plenty of terraces and balconies and arbours, fine houses in a sunny land like this. Do you know the spread of Los Angeles now? Fifty square miles. It'll be a hundred inside ten years."

We pulled up at the opulent Ambassalor Hotel. I was guest at a little lunchson rty in the Coconut Grove. I had made my way leisurely across the continent from New York, where I had spent a week round and about the Long Island studios, and motored up from San Diego. In the hotel loVby we ran across Claire Windsor, smart as a French fashion plate, with her husband, Bert Lytell. Colleen Moore was with them, laughing over some remark of Raymond Griffiths'. They were going in to lunch. I bad met f hem all at various times and in various olaces, and we exchanged greetings. We should meet again. I was in Hoiiywood for some time. I had mue'i to learn, much to see. Strange, New Atmosphere. Hollywood as I knew it twelve years ago was very different—a sprawling suburb of Los Angeles, a little town of toiling pioneers making motion picture history. Charlie Chaplin was doing ''slap-stick" then. Mabel Normand was dodging his custard pies. Fatty Arbuckle was a great favourite. Chester Conklin and Ford Sterling fled miles along the streets of the sleepy town, while the cameras, following in cars, ground away, the city workers gaped, and retired farmers shook their heads over " sech foolishness." Adolph Zukor had startled the film world by offering Mary Pickford £100 a week. D. W. Griffith was busy making "The Birth of a Nation." Doug, lairbanks was doing acrobatics on the stage. Thomas Ince was laying the foundations of an enormous fortune —on a capital of five dollars. Gloria Swanson was a twelve-shillings-a-day extra in the Chicago studio by Essenav. Francis X. Bushman was the Valentino of the day. Bronco Billy Anderson the Tnm MijJ. Tom Mix himself was still cowboying at twelve pounds a month. Harold Lloyd had not appeared on the edge of the picture horizon.

No jazz, no radio, no elaborate and enormous studios—they did most of their shooting in the open air, only retiring to the studio when it rained —no swimming pools. You would find Mary and Charlie eating at a popular restaurant called Levy's. Charlie drank beer, and had wine only on pay nights. And now! A magnificent stone city. Spanish palaces set in carved-out estates on Beverley Hills. Tom Mix sleeping in a Louis Quatorze bed and pulling in £4000 a week; Harold Lloyd, the <juiet, young,,

happily married comedian, down in the U.S.A. income tax lists with £500,000 a year income; well-trained English butlers and footmen at Doug and Mary's mansion; De Mille making his own pictures, D. W. Griffith making none. And "extras!" Crowds of extras, most dreaming of getting their hands in that honey-pot in which lies wealth and fame and the pride of screen success— and about one in ten thousand making the dream come true. And the rest, the failures 1 The stories of the rest are the ones that tingle to the very ends of the finger-tips to be told, that come up clamouring to the door of memory. But most of them, where they concern lovely girls—and there are more lovely girls in Hollywood than you will find in any other city on earth —can never be told. I was to find out a lot about the lives of the extras, wearing out shoe leather tramping from studio to studio, during my stay in Hollywood.

One of the most fascinating days 1 spent was that with Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks on the FairbanksPickford studio' lot. Fairbanks had invited me to lunch, but it developed into an all-day affair. Three of us arrived together. As the big car pulled up by the smooth lawn Mary Pickford came out of her beautiful white bungalow. Back of it were the relics of some of Doug's pictures; the vast ship used in "The Thief of Bagdad," the huge walls built for "Robin Hood"; massive sets put up for "The Black Pirate."

Mary welcomed us cordially, and took us across, stopping on the way to introduce us to her scarlet and blue parrot in its shining cage outside her bungalow dressing room. She was obviously very proud of her bungalow, an exquisitely furnished little home with every

up-to-date convenience, from bathroom to electric kitchen. In the dressing room a wonderful array of grease paints, powders and other make-up accessories were neatly laid out on a large glasstopped table. Mary explained that she made a complete home of her bungalow, because in addition to dressing and making-up for the lot here, she entertained her friends and did a lot of offscreen work in it. She is a practical, cautious, thoughtful, charming little woman, with immense capacities for work—an ideal wife for the big, reckless, impractical, enthusiastic, bubbling Douglas.

A secretary, hard at work in the study leading to her dressing room, hinted at the activity of Mary. A Frenchwoman in the pretty boudoir was laying out an afternoon frock of pale pink chiffon with a petal skirt. Mary smiled and spoke to her as to a friend. She has been with Mary for many years. The Athletic Fairbanks.

Just then Doug arrived with Jo Schenck, Norma Talmadge's husband, a stout, shrewd calm man. He started as a pawnbroker's clerk, somewhere about the time Irving Berlin, the millionaire jazz composer, was a waiter in an East Side eating house. Now he is probably the wealthiest and most powerful of the movie barons. He is head of United Artists, the group comprising Fairbanks, Pickford, Chaplin, Coleman, Swanson and some more.

Doug had just finished a new picture, and looked as fit as a fiddle and burned almost black with the strong sun. He insisted on doing a circuit of the running track bordering the lawn before lunch, and finished the mile aad a-half run breathing no harder than he had begun. Jo Schenck, who had gallantly followed, was puffing like a grampus. A shower, a change, and we sat down.

There were many delicacies, evidently in honour of the guests. But liver and bacon yas the dish that Doug attacked with vigour. I thought that I had never seen a more joyous man, a man who got more out of life. And he is not merely full of animal high spirits. He is thoughtful, highly educated, a poised gentleman.

I noticed his-fine simplicity. He carried his cigarettes loose in his pockets— the film star I had dined with the previous nipht had offered me monogram in ed Egyptians from a platinum case studded with jewels. Also he wore a thin wedding ring.

We talked until late in the afternoon, and I never enjoyed conversation more. We touched oil a hundred topics, from love to picture technique, and golf— Doug's favourite game. And they spoke of the Rancho Santa Fe, the 1000 acre estate they had bought between Del Mar and San Diego. They are going to build an early Californian hacienda there, and the guests will have to leave their cars in the garage outside the gates and go on to the house of the Dons either ->n horseback on in an old Spanish caretta.

Doug, however, said that he would permit one touch of modernity. He would have an aeroplane and he would jump into it from the house if any pressing business in Hollywood called him. Rancho Santa Fe is sixty miles from Los Angeles.

They make a fairy tale of their lives, those two wise and charming people. They have known poverty and great unhappiness; they have worked tremendously; and they know how to value and preserve the wonderful luck and happiness that has come to them,