Hollywood History the Orton Way

I know a very nice man of my generation named Richard Orton. He lives not far from me in Santa Monica, and local history is his passion. He’s also a serious movie buff, the kind of guy who can tell you how many times the so-called Auntie Mame staircase has been repurposed for other Hollywood films. Since 2017 Dick has been emailing free newsletters that contain his research into what he calls “Ocean Park, Santa Monica, and Other Magic Places.” Now, as a service to a community he loves, he’s compiled his beautifully illustrated newsletters into a two-volume set that fans can purchase. Since the complete box-set is expensive, he has made copies available at a number of local libraries. This is highly fitting, because the project was partially financed through a 150^th anniversary micro-grant through the  City of Santa Monica Cultural Affairs department.

 In reading through Dick’s volumes, I was struck by how much the history of our region owes to the rise of the motion picture industry. Within Santa Monica’s borders there still stand many structures that have a movie association. A small neighborhood movie house called the Aero Theater was built by aerospace icon Donald Douglas to entertain aircraft workers around the clock during the hectic days of World War II. An Ocean Avenue watering-hole called Chez Jay has been described by one wag as “where the stars go to slum.” It has hosted such celebrities as Marlon Brando, Marilyn Monroe, and Elizabeth Taylor, and most recently was used in a key flashback for George Clooney’s 2025 film, Jay Kelly. Unfortunately, the classroom building at Santa Monica High School that had a cameo in the James Dean classic, Rebel Without a Cause, was recently replaced by a more up-to-date structure.

 According to Dick Orton, the Jewish movie moguls of old (as well as those stars in unconventional living arrangements) were once not considered welcome in Beverly Hills. That’s why many built palatial homes on Santa Monica’s “gold coast,” close to the Pacific Ocean. Most are gone now, but Santa Monica still treasures the elaborate 1929 beach house once used for entertaining by actress Marion Davies and her beau, William Randolph Hearst. Given to the city by philanthropist Wallis Annenberg in 2005, it is now a treasured public playground on the sand.

 Old-timers will remember the Santa Monica Pier as the home of a post-Disneyland amusement park, Pacific Ocean Park. But even before that era, celebrities came to the pier for innocent merriment. One of Dick’s newsletters highlights a once-upon-a-time photo studio where celebs mixed with nobodies to have comic pictures taken. That particular newsletter is enlivened with  some of those photos: of Lucy and Desi, of the so-called Citizen Kane and Gilda (Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth), of Judy Garland and David Rose, of Alice Faye and Phil Harris.

 And then there are entries about the long-ago Santa Monica Canyon ranches where movies were once filmed. Like Hartville, founded in 1912, which boasted its own Indian settlement, and is considered the first modern movie studio. And the Clarence Brown ranch, which eventually ended up housing the standing set from TV’s M*A*S*H.

 Now that his book is done, has Dick Orton exhausted his subject? Not even close. I’m hoping he’ll look into the history of McCabe’s Guitar Shop, a Pico Boulevard performance venue that has launched the career of many a famous musical talent. It’s now owned by the son of screenwriter Robert Riskin and actress Fay Wray, and live albums recorded at McCabe’s are prized by collectors. So, Dick, what are you waiting for?   

 

City of Nets: Hollywood Faces the 1940s

I didn’t know much about Otto Friedrich when a fellow member of the Biographers International Organization suggested I read Friedrich’s classic history of Hollywood. Called City of Nets (with a nod to Bertolt Brecht’s crass, venal City of Mahagonny), it focuses on the 1940s, a turbulent era in moviedom. Devoting each chapter to a year in that decade, Friedrich takes the reader from a society at war to a society not quite sure on how it wants to celebrate and preserve the peace.

 A journalist and historian interested in the evolution of culture, Friedrich tackles Hollywood as a place that fulfills the world’s dreams while also dangling celebrity and fortune in front of the lucky few who’ve figured out how to play the game. He spends many pages on Hollywood at war: the famous actors marching off to do battle (or getting cushy commission to make propaganda films); the glamorous actresses hustling war bonds and serving up doughnuts at the Hollywood Canteen. Regarding the post-war years, Friedrich chronicles in detail the rise of political hysteria leading up to the blacklisting of Hollywood writers with Communist sympathies, as carried out by studio heads fearful of governmental censure. His account looks closely at those on both sides, laying bare the inept strategies used by the so-called Hollywood Ten when called before a Congressional committee. Alas, their ill-considered testimony probably lost them key supporters throughout the industry and the public sphere as well.

 But I was most fascinated by the evolution of Hollywood stars in this era. The book was recommended to me initially after I wrote about early films (like Dead End) in which Humphrey Bogart was typecast as a powerful bad guy, someone who lacked any redeeming qualities whatsoever. The transformation came when fledgling director John Huston was looking for a leading man to play Sam Spade, a tough but principled private eye, in the umpteenth screen adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon. The role had been turned down by virtually every tough guy on the Warner Bros. payroll: George Raft, Paul Muni, Edward G. Robinson, John Garfield. But Bogart leaped at the chance to play his first starring role. It made him an icon, and an actor whose stoic charisma the rest of young Hollywood couldn’t help but admire. Suddenly a new sort of antihero was born.

 Friedrich presents equally interesting tales of two new Hollywood glamour girls. When Betty Perske, a sleek eighteen-year-old model, was spotted by Howard Hawks on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar, he thought she might be just the dame to cast opposite Bogart in To Have and Have Not. She was shy and had a high-pitched voice, but she was nothing if not eager to be educated. Under Hawks’ tutelage, she lowered her voice and became Lauren Bacall. Because Hawks felt women were most exciting when they played hard to get, she unveiled an on-screen arrogance that became her persona from then on. It didn’t hurt her career, of course, that she and Bogart quickly fell deeply in love.

 An even more dramatic metamorphosis turned Margarita Carmen Dolores Cansino into screen goddess Rita Hayworth. A young New Yorker whose father had toured as a Spanish dancer, she turned out to be infinitely malleable. Her dancing was her strong suit; the studio dyed her long bob of hair a flaming red, dubbed in someone else’s singing voice, and cast her as the naughty (or is she?) Gilda. Alas, she said years later, “Every man I’ve known has fallen in love with Gilda—and wakened with me.”

 

 

 

 

Going to Bed with Gilda in London’s Notting Hill

While out of town over the Thanksgiving holiday, I flicked on my motel-room TV set and found myself watching a charming Richard Curtis confection from 1999, Notting Hill. Surely you remember it: Hugh Grant is an adorably floppy-haired British bookshop owner who just happens to find himself the love object of a visiting American screen goddess, played by Julia Roberts. (There’s also Rhys Ifans, stealing scenes as Grant’s mangy and horny flat-mate. But I digress.) At one key emotional moment, Roberts as movie-star Anna Scott tellingly quotes a famous line attributed to a genuine Hollywood love goddess, Rita Hayworth. Ms. Hayworth, who had five husbands as well as multiple lovers, is said to have noted, oh so wistfully, "Men go to bed with Gilda, but wake up with me."

Gilda, of course, was one of Hayworth’s most famous roles, She played this enigmatic femme fatale in 1946, wooing audiences, as well as co-star Glenn Ford, by tossing her auburn curls and cooing, “Put the Blame on Mame” in a famous nightclub scene. One of those forever smitten by Hayworth ‘way back then was an L.A. boy, Budd Burton Moss, who grew up to become the older Hayworth’s late-career agent and loyal friend. Budd has turned his memories of Rita (and such Hollywood names as Jack Valenti, Jacqueline Bisset, and good buddy Sidney Poitier) into a memoir he calls Hollywood: Sometimes the Reality is Better than the Dream. A 2015 follow-up to his And All I Got Was 10%, it chronicles Budd’s many movie-related adventures.

Though Budd seems to have known almost every Hollywood celeb, the heart of his second book is his international travels with Rita, who hoped for a career comeback but was stymied by the erratic behavior (much covered by the international press corps) that turned out to be a sign of encroaching Alzheimer’s disease. It was this cruel affliction that ultimately claimed her life in 1987 at the all-too-early age of 68.

So that future generations will remember Rita Hayworth in her prime, Bremedia Produktion GmbH is currently in process of filming a documentary, currently titled Rita / Gilda: Glamour & Tragedy of a Hollywood Legend. Through film clips and interviews with such stars as Robert Wagner, Edward James Olmos, Diane Baker, Millie Perkins, France Nuyen, and Constance Towers, the filmmakers hope to remind the public of Hayworth’s contribution to world cinema.. Coordinating the Hollywood side of this international production will be none other than Budd Moss, who has vigorously put all his resources behind the project. For him, part of the challenge is to show how capably Hayworth managed to define herself as a woman and an actress, in an era when the management of the Hollywood Dream Factory was an all-male club. By the same token, he’s convinced that a focus on the realities of Alzheimer’s is vital. Hayworth was the first major public personality to fall prey to the disease, so her diagnosis sent shockwaves around the world. Today Princess Yasmin, Rita’s daughter by her third husband, Prince Aly Khan, works tirelessly on behalf of Alzheimer’s victims.  The princess, who holds an annual Rita Hayworth Gala to raise funds for Alzheimer’s research, has become an enthusiastic supporter of the Rita/Gilda documentary.

Today’s younger moviegoers have doubtless barely heard of Rita Hayworth. It’s a sure bet that they haven’t seen her peel off a long black glove in Gilda, haven’t seen her trip the light fantastic with Fred Astaire, who once admitted she was his very best dance partner. Here’s hoping that Gilda/Rita helps remind the world of what it has lost.

Some Separate Thoughts about “Separate Tables”

When I was a kid, I loved watching the Oscar broadcast, even when I was too young to have seen all the big films of the year. That’s why I remember David Niven (whom I’d loved as the veddy British Phileas Fogg in Around the World in Eighty Days) looking very pleased indeed when picking up his Oscar for Separate Tables. That 1958 film would have been far too serious for someone of my tender years—but I’ve long since overcome that hurdle. Watching Separate Tables recently, I was impressed by its theatricality, by its marvelous ensemble acting, and by the grown-up way it looks at human behavior. (No superheroes and supervillains here.) At the same time, I was struck by the ways its view of male/female relationships diverges from the attitudes of the #MeToo era.

Part of why Separate Tables originally intrigued me was its mysterious title: where were these tables, and why were they separate? The title refers to a residence hotel whose long-term occupants take all their meals in a common dining room, but are assigned their own permanent seats at individual tables. The arrangement—so very formal—seems distinctively British to me. Americans, I suspect, would just sit anywhere, changing their seats at whim. But the rigidity of expectations and social manners is, in a way, what Separate Tables is all about. 

It started out as a hit play by British author Terence Rattigan. Opening in London in 1954, it was actually two one-act playlets, both set in the same modest hotel in Bournemouth, on the English coast. “Table by the Window” detailed the awkward encounter of a disgraced British politician with his ex-wife. “Table Number Seven” explored the relationship of a repressed spinster and an older man posing as Major Pollock, a decorated war hero. Artfully, the film version (directed by Delbert Mann) combines the two stories, which both unfold during a few tense days amid the ebb-and-flow of life in the hotel’s public and private rooms. Burt Lancaster’s production company, known for taking artistic chances, assembled a cast of British stage and screen stalwarts, but also made room for two Hollywood stars, Lancaster himself and the still-beautiful Rita Hayworth. They play the divorced couple, now convincingly transformed into Americans abroad, whose tragedy is that, despite a still-flaming passion, they bring out the worst in one another. Niven is marvelous as the well-meaning but deeply flawed little man who pretends to be heroic, and Deborah Kerr proves almost unrecognizable as a drab young woman still under her mother’s thumb. Others in the ensemble include Wendy Hiller (she too won an Oscar) as the brisk hotel manager who is forced to keep her own needs under wraps. [The film’s seven Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, also rightly saluted Charles Lang’s moody black-and-white cinematography and David Raksin’s evocative score.]

Lancaster and Hayworth are convincing in their mutual lust, and in the powerful emotional connection that sometimes tips over into violence. But it’s shocking to see Lancaster strike Hayworth, causing her to tumble down a staircase. After this powerfully-staged scene, a modern viewer would find it unthinkable that these two would end up together. There’s also (spoiler alert) the discovery that David Niven’s character has fled his home town after an arrest prompted by a physical assault on a woman in a darkened movie house. Most of his fellow boarders easily forgive this behavior, which in any case seems totally out of character for him. In an early draft, Major Pollock’s misdeed was a homosexual advance, which seems—to a modern sensibility—vastly more convincing.