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* T A Y L O R O L O G Y *
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* A Continuing Exploration of the Life and Death of William Desmond Taylor *
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* *
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* Issue 49 -- January 1997 Editor: Bruce Long bruce@asu.edu *
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* TAYLOROLOGY may be freely distributed *
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CONTENTS OF THIS ISSUE:
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The Screenwriters Defend Hollywood in the Murder Aftermath:
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Gertrude Atherton, Beulah Marie Dix, Elinor Glyn, Frances Harmer,
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Rupert Hughes, William Parker, Louis Sherwin, Rob Wagner,
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Frank Woods and Thompson Buchanan, Waldemar Young
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What is TAYLOROLOGY?
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TAYLOROLOGY is a newsletter focusing on the life and death of William Desmond
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Taylor, a top Paramount film director in early Hollywood who was shot to
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death on February 1, 1922. His unsolved murder was one of Hollywood's major
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scandals. This newsletter will deal with: (a) The facts of Taylor's life;
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(b) The facts and rumors of Taylor's murder; (c) The impact of the Taylor
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murder on Hollywood and the nation; (d) Taylor's associates and the Hollywood
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silent film industry in which Taylor worked. Primary emphasis will be given
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toward reprinting, referencing and analyzing source material, and sifting it
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for accuracy.
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The "home page" for TAYLOROLOGY has moved and is now located at
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http://www.angelfire.com/az/Taylorology
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The Screenwriters Defend Hollywood in the Murder Aftermath
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In the aftermath of the Taylor murder there was unprecedented public outcry
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against the Hollywood film industry. Hollywood rose to defend itself, and
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among the main defenders were the screenwriters, who gave interviews and
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wrote articles in defense of Hollywood.
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* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
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February 10, 1922
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Ruth Snyder
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NEW YORK EVENING WORLD
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Hollywood gets "Clean Bill" from Gertrude Atherton,
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who Praises Movie Folk There
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"I did not hear any more scandal during the nine months I spent in
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Hollywood than I have heard in other places--not as much, in fact."
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The speaker rose restlessly and crossed the room, her tall, graceful
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figure becomingly enhanced by a diaphanous tea gown of Azores blue, serving
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to conjure a mental picture of the motion picture colony. But Gertrude
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Atherton, far from being a cinema actress in real life, is--as very one knows-
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-an author of note and an artist of distinction in real life.
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We had been sitting tet-a-tete in her cozily furnished sitting room in
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the Madison Square Hotel. We decided to talk (at least I had decided to
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talk) on some marital question, having, from some peculiar source, divined
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the notion that this was one of Mrs. Atherton's favorite topics. But with a
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decided and determined downward movement of her arms Mrs. Atherton "bashed"
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this topic as too banal...
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"Isn't there something else of particular interest we might discuss?"
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I suggested...
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"Mrs. Atherton thought for a few minutes. "How about Hollywood?"
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I nodded approval...
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"Hollywood has been very much maligned," Mrs. Atherton went on to
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explain. "I can speak at first hand, having spent nine months in Hollywood.
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I lived in the head and centre of Hollywood life--the Hollywood Hotel.
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It was full of actresses, actors, screen writers, editors, authors and
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directors. There was a dance there every Thursday night. A lot of old women
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from the East sat on the verandah all day and gossiped. There was a good
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deal to gossip about, but less scandal than one would imagine, judging from
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the virtuous outbursts over that unfortunate colony of late. One heard of
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'wild parties' of course. So one does of other societies where moving
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picture folk are not admitted. But dissipation in Hollywood is confined to
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small groups. The majority of screen actors and actresses are far too busy,
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too hard working, to be able to afford dissipation. Just consider. They
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must be on the lot at 8 o'clock in the morning in order to make up and be on
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the stage at 9 o'clock. They rarely leave before 6 in the evening. By that
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time their one idea is to rest and be ready for another hard day's work next
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morning. Moreover, a sequence is not always finished in one day. The actors
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of that sequence must come back looking exactly as they did the day before.
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If a girl, for instance, indulged in a wild party and arrived with swollen
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eyes and haggard cheeks, she would be handed her contract; or, if the picture
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were too far advanced for that and the director were obliged to hold up
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production for several days--while overhead expenses went on--until rest and
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Turkish baths restored her youthful beauty, she would be retained until the
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picture was finished, but no longer. She knows that and if she has any
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inclination for dissipation she waits until the picture is finished. But as
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a matter of fact the actresses in Hollywood are as decent a lot as can be
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found anywhere. Several of the more famous actresses have thoroughly bad
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reputations--I saw two in a highly illuminated condition myself--but the rank
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and file behave themselves far better than many of the young people in
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fashionable society.
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Mrs. Atherton had mentioned the fact that Elinor Glyn had been at the
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Hollywood Hotel while she was there. I reminded her of the different
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impression of the American girl which Mrs. Glyn had brought back with her and
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which had been incorporated in her article "What is the matter with the
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American girl?"
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"Mrs. Glyn hardly could have got her impressions from Hollywood--in fact
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I don't think she pretended to. She was writing of the American girl in
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general. I think she was far more favorably impressed with Hollywood than
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she expected to be. I remember we were sitting together looking on at the
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Cameraman's ball at the Ambassador Hotel, attended by practically the whole
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colony, a very brilliant and interesting affair, when she remarked to me:
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'Really, I haven't attended a party anywhere since the war where the women
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were as decently dressed and behaved as well as these girls. It is most
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interesting!"
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"There has been some talk of doing away with Hollywood," I ventured.
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"That may be. Colonies are always a mistake. They are too self-
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centered. It would be far better if all pictures were taken in great cities
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where the people connected with them could have other interests and
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diversions. There is but one everlasting topic in Hollywood--moving
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pictures. That is unhealthy and stunting to any mind.
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"But Hollywood possesses many advantages. It costs little to live
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there. Food is cheap. The warm climate makes one fairly independent of
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coal. A car can be kept in a garage at from $12 to $20 a month. Here it
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would cost $75. People complain of rents, but they are far more exorbitant
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elsewhere.
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"When all is said," concluded the author of 'Perch of the Devil,'
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Hollywood is unique and most interesting, not the pesthole ignorant reformers
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are trying to make it out."
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* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
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February 28, 1922
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OAKLAND TRIBUNE
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"Camp Followers" of Hollywood
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by Beulah Marie Dix
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On February 1, 1922, William D. Taylor, a director of specials, who for
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some five years had been employed at the Lasky studio, was mysteriously
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assassinated at his home in the Westlake district of Los Angeles. Almost
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before his body was cold--almost before we who had known him and worked with
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him had realized he was gone--there broke forth through the length and
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breadth of this country such a torrent of innuendo directed against the
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defenseless dear man and all who were in any way associated with him--such a
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flood of malevolent abuse directed against the entire motion picture
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profession of which he was an honored member, as in all the many years in
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which I have followed the newspaper accounts of criminal cases I have never
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seen equaled.
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In order to disabuse my friends of the idea that they well may derive
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from the press that Hollywood is a sink of iniquity, peopled exclusively by
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drug fiends and perverts, I am sending out this circular letter. Please
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forgive me for not making it personal. Time is precious, and I want to reach
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you all as quickly as possible, to tell you something about William Taylor,
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and about Hollywood.
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I did not have the pleasure of knowing Mr. Taylor socially. I knew him,
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as I have known so many people in my five years at the Lasky studio, in the
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way of business. That is, we passed the time of day when we met on the lot,
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and we had served together on one or two committees. He impressed me as a
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courteous, dignified Englishman, with a touch of the actor in him, and a
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touch of the soldier. He was as far as possible from the hard-boiled
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roughneck with a megaphone that is the type of director popularized by second-
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rate fiction. He seemed, indeed, more like a college professor!
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Until he was dead, I never heard a word of scandal breathed against him.
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A studio, let me tell you, is a terrible place for gossip. I've heard
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blistering tales, of varying degrees of credibility, about all sorts of men
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and women. But--
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I never heard that William Taylor was, in the argot of the studio,
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"a chicken-chaser," i.e., a pursuer of women.
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I never heard that William Taylor was a drug addict.
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That he had changed his name from Tanner to Taylor, that he left a wife
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in the east, who had divorced him, that he had by her a daughter (whom he
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supported) were facts, it appears, that were known to the few who were his
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intimates. But surely he was under no compulsion to share these facts with
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the world. His affairs were his own. His secrets were his own. He kept
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them to himself--and in all conscience the world at large, that he barred
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from his confidence, has taken a terrible revenge upon him for that
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reticence. It is hard enough that while the good that men do is "interred
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with their bones," the evil that men do lives after them, but harder measure
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still is dealt to this poor soul. Nor merely the evil that he did, but all
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the evil that can be devised by gross-minded men and women, who itch to
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clamber into a cheap notoriety on the shoulders of the dead, is now his
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monument of obloquy.
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May God be more merciful to him than men have been!
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As you know, my husband, our little daughter, and I have been living
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here in Hollywood since 1916. We have seen the pretty town expand, with its
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amazing erection of business blocks, of dwellings, of churches. We have seen
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it adjust itself to war conditions. We have seen it, in the last months,
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struggling with the laxness and lawlessness that have followed on the war,
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the country over. Under such circumstances I feel more competent to discuss
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Hollywood than some of the writers who, after a fortnight's stay at the
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Hollywood Hotel, have published scathing articles upon the town in general
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and the picture people numbered among its inhabitants in particular.
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Those who have gone in for statistics assure me that the percentage of
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arrests for misdemeanors and felonies is lower in Hollywood than in any town
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of twice its size. They assure me that the number of schools, public and
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private, is exceptionally large and that the average of attendance is notably
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high. They say, with good reason, that a city of public schools means a city
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of homes, and city of homes means a city of law-abiding, decent people.
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I don't claim that Hollywood is peopled entirely by angels. Indeed,
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I know of no community in America so blessed. I doubt, however, if it is so
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completely overrun with devils as the stories current just now in press and
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pulpit would lead one to believe.
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The wickedness of Hollywood, as you know, is supposed to come from the
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motion picture people. Who ARE the motion picture people? You know, in the
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studios of Hollywood and Los Angeles some 30,000 people are employed. Quite
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a little army! Among them are electricians, seamstresses, camera men,
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writers, carpenters, bookkeepers, painters, stenographers, interior
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decorators, a host of laboratory men and women. All these, who derive their
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livelihood from the studios, are surely motion picture people. Are they
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hopelessly damned? Well, no, there is a chance for them, perhaps, it is
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regretfully admitted. The real sinners are either producers, the directors,
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and the people who act in the pictures.
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What makes a motion picture actor or actress? His (or her) say-so?
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Every New Yorker knows that 50 per cent of the men arrested in New York give
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their profession to be "stock-broking."
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Every old residence of a college town knows that every hoodlum arrested
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claims to be "a student." Everyone who has ever smiled at poor human nature
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remembers how, in the old days, every little soiled butterfly on Broadway who
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had once carried a spear in the chorus labeled herself ever after "a chorus
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girl," or, more likely, "an actress."
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We have the same phenomenon here in Hollywood and Los Angeles.
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A certain type of pretty, weak-headed girl will always gravitate toward the
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place where she believes her prettiness can be exchanged for a good time and
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easy money. Many, many such girls drift into "moviedom," and the police
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matrons of Los Angeles and the Girls Studio club of Hollywood are not able to
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head all of them back to home and mother. If such a girl has worked for a
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week--even for a day--as an "extra," she is a "motion picture actress" ever
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after.
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Where such girls come, there come also the men who prey upon them, and
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they, too, given one day's [...] themselves the job of "managing" these
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girls, are henceforth "motion picture men." These are the pitiable and
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sinister figures that follow our industry as inevitably as hordes of
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pilferers and pleasure-seeking women follow an army, and for all their
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lamentable actions, the industry, to which they do not in any sense belong,
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must bear the blame.
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The existence of this border of "camp followers" accounts for many of
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the charges of irregular living brought against motion picture actors and
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actresses, but it does NOT account, I grant you, for all of them. There have
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been incidents in the lives of some of the people who are prominent upon the
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screen as disgraceful as incidents in the lives of citizens in other
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professions. But did you ever stop to reckon what actual per cent of picture
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actors and actresses have been involved in scandal? You know the ones who
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behave themselves don't get into the papers. When Miss ----- leaps out of
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one matrimonial bond and into another with the celerity of a society leader,
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the racy tale is "news."
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When my dear old friend, Edythe C-----, hurries home from the studio
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where she has added another portrait to her notable gallery of grandes dames,
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and cooks dinner for the actor husband whom she still adores after twenty-
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five years of married life--well, that's not a sensation. Who cares if she
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does? When a certain star takes more bootleg whisky than is good for him,
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the story is whispered about with unction and hinted at in the press, but
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when Jack H----, equally a star, walks down Hollywood boulevard, leading his
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baby son by the hand and radiating proud fatherhood in every glance, the
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pleasing sight isn't copy.
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There are some vicious, weak-headed people in the profession with more
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money than brains to use it. There are probably in Los Angeles and
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Hollywood, as in other cities of equal size, a small number of unfortunates
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(some of them "in the profession") who in the sequel of the Volstead act, are
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slaves to the drug habit. There are others who drink far more than is
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needful, and whose sole idea of "a good time" is a drunken revel.
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These people are not, however, in the majority nor even in a large
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minority--and why should a profession be condemned lock, stock and barrel,
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because of the lapses of the feeblest and frailest of its exponents. At that
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rate, to be consistent, people should boycott the banks because of the
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malodorous Stillman case, cease to employ architects because of the ill name
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of the late Stanford White, and abolish politicians because of the deceased
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"Jack" Hamon.
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Of course you are not unfamiliar with that count in the indictment
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against Hollywood and the motion pictures to which Dreiser (I regret to say!)
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has lately given currency. [See TAYLOROLOGY 41.]
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"No girl can succeed in pictures, unless she yields herself to the
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director."
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This charge, now brought against the pictures as if it were something
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quite new in iniquity, has been brought with equal plausibility against the
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opera house, the theater, the department store, the business house, even
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against our public schools. I fancy that as long as women are women and men
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are men, and the power to promote lies in the hands of men, that charge will
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be brought forward in every art and industry. Unfortunately there will
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always be some truth in it. I don't believe a girl who is an absolute lump
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has ever been pushed upstairs by a gratified male. I don't believe a girl
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who is an absolute genius has ever been kept down by a disgruntled one. But
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of two girls of equal average ability, the one that is nice to her employer--
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in some cases, nice to the ultimate--is likely to rise faster than the one
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who is stand-offish; whether the business in which she is employed is making
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pictures or making pins. Of course it shouldn't be like this, but life isn't
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a Pollyanna book, and a great many things are that, in the beautiful words of
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Bret Harte, "hadn't ought to be."
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It should be noticed also that this tale, to which Dreiser gives such
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ready credence: "I couldn't succeed as SHE succeeds, because I wouldn't pay
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the price," is the easiest alibi in the world for laziness and mediocrity.
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One fact I wish to point out before I close this endless letter. We are
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living in a post-war period, in a world that still is suffering from shell-
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shock. Read "Ursula Trent," if you haven't already, to see what the reaction
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from war conditions may do to a girl. Many of our people, especially our
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younger people, have flown to pleasure, not in Hollywood and Los Angeles
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alone, but the country over. A freedom of speech and of manner that seems
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hair-raising to those of us who cut our wisdom teeth before 1914 is now the
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vogue, and to judge by the wails from the East and the cries of "Save the
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flapper!" distresses commentators upon men and manners in other circles than
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in moviedom. Now it must be remembered that many of our people employed in
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the studios besides our actors and actresses are very young people. To make
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a good picture one has got to see with young eyes, as D. W. Griffith has
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already said. We must have youth in this business, and our camera men, our
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property boys, our girl script clerks, even some of our directors and their
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assistants, are barely out of adolescence. They take their pleasures (silly
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pleasure, perhaps) as so many young folk today are taking them, the country
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over. Los Angeles is not the only city where some of the people jazz till
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morning and drink perilous bootleg whisky, if they can't get better.
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There are about 30,000 people in Los Angeles and Hollywood of various
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arts and crafts, including actors and actresses, who are employed in the
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studios--genuine "motion picture people," who face unemployment and its
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attendant disasters, if the studios are closed--and it is a frozen fact that
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a campaign of continuous abuse may end by closing them. Of the 30,000 not
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300 genuine picture people (exclusive of the camp follower class) lead lives
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of such irregularity as to make themselves conspicuous. Less than one
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percent, that is, of the motion picture population. And for the sake of that
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one percent, the many decent, law-abiding folk who like myself are residents
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of Hollywood, leading their quiet lives and bringing up their children, to
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the best of their ability, in the fear of God, are today slandered and
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vilified almost beyond credence by a portion of the press that wants, not the
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humdrum truth, but the kind of racy story that will "sell the paper" to the
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prurient and by a section of the clergy that have found it easier to fill
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their places of worship by hawking salacious sensation rather than by
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preaching Christ and Him crucified.
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Thirty thousand people defamed, execrated, pilloried because of the
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frailties of less than 300. Of old ten righteous men were held enough to
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save Sodom and Gomorrah. Shall Hollywood in justice be today condemned as a
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modern Sodom--because of ten unrighteous?
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* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
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February 20, 1922
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LOS ANGELES EXAMINER
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Justice and Fair Play for Film Folk,
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Fervent Elinor Glyn Plea
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by Elinor Glyn
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America is supposedly a Democracy. It had a magnificent start, its laws
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being framed at a time when the world had emerged into a fair state of
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civilization--and yet, as Mr. Brisbane frequently points out in his masterly
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leading articles, the most appalling cases of injustice, which would disgrace
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a corrupt autocracy, seem to be continually occurring.
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One of the greatest is going on now.
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It is the hysterical, illogical attack upon the moving picture
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community, which has sprung forth as the aftermath of the tragic Taylor
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murder.
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My sense of "cricket" won't let me remain silent about it any longer!
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I feel as I did once when I was a child, and hit a big man in the street
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with my little parasol, because he was beating a horse carrying a heavy load.
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My pen is only a tiny thing, but it is going to run on and write words
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to ask those of you who are good, just fellows and true citizens of a great
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country, to listen to me and then stop and think for yourselves.
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The moving picture industry is, I am told, the fifth largest in America.
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It employs countless carpenters, electricians, painters, plumbers, artists,
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draftsmen, architects, designers, writers and musicians.
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Probably the smallest number of its constituents are the actors and
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actresses--and only a fractional percentage of these are lurid figures who
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delight in scandalous excesses. But the whole community is being held up to
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the English speaking peoples of the earth as a rotten sore on the face of
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America!
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Can anything be more unjust and illogical?
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A mysterious murder is committed, and at once, like a flock of vultures,
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irresponsible reporters from the East swarm out to the Coast to get colorful
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news to telegraph back to their centers! They may individually be the
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kindest-hearted beings who would not hurt a fly--but they do not stop to
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think what harm they are doing to millions of their innocent countrymen and
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women when they spread hideous tales of dope fiends, parties and other
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horrors to ugly to speak of, giving the impression, culled from perhaps one
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isolated and probably hugely exaggerated case, that every actor and actress
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whom the public has grown to love and admire on the screen hides some
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grotesque vice in his or her palatial home, where orgies worse than those of
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Rome's decadence are supposed to occur nightly!
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NOW USE COMMON SENSE and ask yourselves, how could any business be done
|
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at all, how could pictures be made, how could work be accomplished, if even a
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tenth part of what is alleged were true?
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Dope fiends cannot come up to time every morning on the set at 9 o'clock
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and do a hard day's work; drunken women and men, putrid with vice, cannot
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register on the screen for all eyes to testify, as beautiful, fresh young
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boys and girls! Directors cannot, month after month and year after year, put
|
|
over dramatic action and control large companies of people if they ware
|
|
stupid and sodden with whisky.
|
|
Use your intelligence, sharp-witted American public! And do not let
|
|
scandalmongers get by with all this nonsense. You are not softies to be
|
|
gulled by freakish exaggerations. Sift the thing down to probable facts, and
|
|
your own intelligence will get at the truth.
|
|
I am a stranger who has watched this cinema world for a year now. And
|
|
they say that lookers-on see most of the game! It also is my habit to
|
|
analyze and make psychological deductions, and I tell you that while it is
|
|
perfectly true that there does exist a minute minority of vicious people in
|
|
the business, there are hundreds and thousands of good, honest, hard-working
|
|
men and women, girls and boys, children--and even animals; whose livelihood
|
|
is threatened by the stamp which this injudicious attack upon the community
|
|
at large may bring.
|
|
So when next you--who read this--are scanning the papers of your home
|
|
towns for fresh horrible details about the poor movie world, and nodding your
|
|
heads over the imaginary Sodom and Gomorrah of Hollywood--try to remember
|
|
that you are helping to take the bread out of the mouths of your fellow
|
|
citizens, whose work has given you many hours of pleasure and relaxation and
|
|
for which you should be grateful. And above all, you are lowering the
|
|
prestige of your country in the eyes of the civilized world.
|
|
Punish all offenders ruthlessly when offenses are proved against them.
|
|
But do not stab an entire community in the back by spreading insidious
|
|
scandal concerning it as a whole.
|
|
I--Elinor Glyn--a stranger, who has always loved America, and realized
|
|
its greatness, am appealing to you Americans to be just to your own kith and
|
|
kin. Because justice and fair play are what the immortal Stars and Stripes
|
|
stand for!
|
|
|
|
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
|
|
|
|
February 17, 1922
|
|
HOLLYWOOD CITIZEN
|
|
Defends Films and Hollywood
|
|
|
|
Miss Frances Harmer, the sweet-faced, white-haired literary adviser to
|
|
William de Mille, and Hollywood resident, who has lived long enough to have
|
|
known the American stage in comparative infancy, and who numbers among her
|
|
friends scores of people of eminence in the world of letters, has taken it
|
|
upon herself to write a very effective defense of Hollywood and the motion
|
|
picture industry in answer to many inquiries received from literary people
|
|
all over the country. Her defense is in the form of a circular letter, and
|
|
is so good that it has been mimeographed by the publicity committee of the
|
|
Writers' Club for general distribution to members of the club. Extracts from
|
|
the letter follow:
|
|
"Hollywood is not a hotbed of iniquity or a 'Sodom and Gomorrah,' nor at
|
|
all worse than any other city. In fact, its police records show a much
|
|
cleaner bill than many cities twice its size. It suffers from several
|
|
things. The envy of other cities which, desiring the money brought in by the
|
|
motion picture industry, put everything against Hollywood in flaring
|
|
headlines and any defense of Hollywood in small type in some obscure space of
|
|
the paper.
|
|
"There is not any industry in the world which can say 'We number no
|
|
sinners.' And in almost every other industry than the motion picture one,
|
|
the public at large does not connect human frailty with the work or business
|
|
of the culprit. The Stillman case has been a scandal to the full as bad as
|
|
any other, but no one says, 'I will never have a banker in my house again.'
|
|
There are undoubtedly perverted plumbers, corrupt carpenters, degraded
|
|
dentists--no need to go on! But while the public gives just contempt to
|
|
convicted criminals in these or any other classes, the work in which the
|
|
criminals were engaged is left alone. There are, of course, reasons why the
|
|
tremendous publicity which, one must admit, has been sought by the motion
|
|
picture industry, throws into relief every motion picture sinner. But,
|
|
surely, if people would exercise a little common sense they would see the
|
|
injustice of this. They would recall that muck-rakers have exposed appalling
|
|
conditions in big department stores. I take this as only one example.
|
|
Hollywood is suffering, so it is reported, from the determination of several
|
|
other towns to wrest from it the moving picture industry.
|
|
"The case of Mr. Arbuckle I pass over briefly, saying that the press has
|
|
made the most of it; and that a jealous city has done everything to show the
|
|
matter in the worse possible light.
|
|
"But in the case of Mr. Taylor, whom I knew personally, admired, liked
|
|
and respected tremendously, we find the most despicable lies told and
|
|
credited--told by a vicious press; credited by gullible and ignorant readers.
|
|
Mr. Taylor's life, during his stay in this studio, was flawless as far as the
|
|
eye of his associates could see. Dignity, reticence, courtesy and kindness
|
|
marked his dealings with all his fellow-workers. His pictures speak for
|
|
themselves. Whether successful or not, they were clean and artistic. I have
|
|
never heard anybody say otherwise, though I must admit that I have not myself
|
|
seen them all.
|
|
"The majority of the motion picture people as I know them--and I
|
|
challenge anyone to disprove this statement--are home-loving and respectable.
|
|
Hollywood and more and finer schools than any other place of its size; and,
|
|
as I heard a brilliant speaker say the other day: 'A city of schools is a
|
|
city of children; a city of children is a city of homes; and a city of homes
|
|
is the city of a respectable community.'"
|
|
|
|
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
|
|
|
|
February 13, 1922
|
|
LOS ANGELES RECORD
|
|
Movie Morals Pretty Bad
|
|
Church Folk Little Worse
|
|
|
|
by Rupert Hughes
|
|
|
|
Movie morals are very bad. They are, indeed, almost bad enough to be
|
|
described in the words of almost any preacher in almost any pulpit speaking
|
|
for his congregation: "Oh, Lord, Thou knowest that we are miserable sinners,
|
|
doing those things we ought not to have done, leaving undone those things we
|
|
ought to have done."
|
|
Moving picture people are nearly as bad as church members. Many of them
|
|
are church members. And it has been shown that of the people in the
|
|
penitentiaries over 90 per cent have church affiliations, proving that--well,
|
|
we'd better not get in too deep.
|
|
A moving picture man has recently been on trial for manslaughter--at a
|
|
time when only four or five ministers were on trial for murder, not to
|
|
mention the murder trial of a clergyman's son who was also the husband of a
|
|
bishop's daughter.
|
|
I have my suspicions that a good deal of mischief is going on more or
|
|
less surreptitiously in moving pictures, although for two years I have been
|
|
working about a big studio and have never caught anybody kissing anybody
|
|
except as directed in the picture. I can't say as much for any Sunday school
|
|
picnic I ever attended.
|
|
Divorces are very frequent in moving picture colonies. Hollywood is
|
|
getting to be almost as bad as England, Chicago and some other divorce mills,
|
|
though it is not yet nearly up to the standard of Indiana, which
|
|
statisticians have put far ahead of Japan as a dissolver of marriages.
|
|
Some moving picture people have been known to drink recently. This puts
|
|
them down with the great majority.
|
|
Dancing is indulged in by many and few of them favor the old fashioned
|
|
waltz, which is not called that pure, sweet pastime--but which was once
|
|
called the devil's favorite device and passion's perdition.
|
|
Many moving picture people wear a minimum of clothes, but judging from
|
|
the sermons I read about, this is the case with all the women in the world.
|
|
In my two years in a picture studio I have not seen a fight (except a
|
|
rehearsed one). I have heard less profanity than on a college campus.
|
|
I have seen less jealousy than in a convention of college professors or
|
|
scientists.
|
|
I have seen tens of thousands of feet of film taken with never a
|
|
quarrel, never a voice raised in temper, never a dispute that passed the
|
|
bounds of artistic debate.
|
|
Of course unpleasant and evil things happen, just as bad things happen
|
|
everywhere as happen in the moving picture colonies. The human vices
|
|
flourish normally because the movie people are human, but the human virtues
|
|
flourish also for the same reason.
|
|
In all comparisons, one should avoid the comparison of real people and
|
|
real conditions with ideal people and conditions, because the ideal is only
|
|
imaginary. Movie folk should be compared, therefore, with actual classes as
|
|
they are. They will not suffer by any such juxtaposition.
|
|
Moralists howl at the movies, but they howl without logic. Vices of
|
|
every sort ran riot centuries before there were movies. Wicked people enter
|
|
the movies, but they were wicked before they entered, and they would have
|
|
gone on being wicked if they had stayed out of them.
|
|
Pictures intended to appeal to evil emotion have been put on--and will
|
|
be put on again. But this is true of books, plays, paintings, what not. One
|
|
of the leading New York clergymen was accused by his congregation recently of
|
|
trying to draw crowds by preaching salacious sermons. And thousands of
|
|
clergymen have made use of the same sensationalism. It is a neat trick to
|
|
denounce indecency so indecently as to attract a morbid crowd. Pulipteers
|
|
used it for ages before movies were invented. But I feel that the person who
|
|
is attracted to a picture, a sermon or a play, because (s)he has heard that
|
|
it is spicy, was already so eager for spice that little harm is done, and a
|
|
dangerous appetite may be appeased by a little homeopathy.
|
|
All new arts, all old arts, like old and new religions, professions,
|
|
races, are, and have been, and will be, denounced by somebody, world without
|
|
end. If critics could only realize how stale their criticisms are and how
|
|
carelessly they have been handled.
|
|
While I do not believe in idolizing or applauding whole classes of
|
|
people, I am solemnly persuaded that the motion picture people are as good,
|
|
as kind, as earnest, as pure of heart, as beneficial to the welfare and
|
|
virtue of the state, as any other class. A man, a woman, a girl or a boy is
|
|
as safe morally in a motion picture studio as anywhere else. Which is saying
|
|
much or little.
|
|
The ridicule and abuse showered upon the movies differ not in the least
|
|
from the showers that have greeted every other new activity.
|
|
I am proud to belong to this world, and am proud of its people.
|
|
|
|
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
|
|
|
|
February 23-4, 1922
|
|
SAN FRANCISCO BULLETIN
|
|
|
|
Hollywood Truths Fall Far Short of Fancy, Writer Says
|
|
|
|
by William Parker
|
|
(Former San Francisco Newspaper Man and Now a Member of
|
|
The Screen Writers' Guild and of the Authors' League of America)
|
|
|
|
A joke a venerable ancestry but with a slightly new twist has been in
|
|
circulation in Hollywood recently. It goes something like this: A man from
|
|
the Middle West confides to an acquaintance: "I always thought Sodom and
|
|
Gomorrah were husband and wife until just recently when I heard they were
|
|
brother and sister."
|
|
It is hardly likely that this is the man who has been doing all of the
|
|
talking about Hollywood and the motion picture industry, but he has many
|
|
prototypes who, like him, have accepted as gospel what is told them.
|
|
It was only a short while ago that a young man friend of mine
|
|
telegraphed me to meet him at the Arcade station; he was coming from the East
|
|
for his first vacation in Los Angeles.
|
|
"Well," I said, after the preliminary greetings, "of all the
|
|
superlatively advertised charms of California, what do you want to see
|
|
first?"
|
|
Eagerly he replied: "The hop joints, the dens of vice, the love
|
|
bungalows of Hollywood!"
|
|
As I led him through the marbel corridor to the waiting auto, he
|
|
continued, "I went through San Francisco's Barbary Coast in its palmy days;
|
|
I saw Chicago's Custom House Place in days gone by; I was in Tonopah and
|
|
Goldfield at the height of their booms; I've read Rex Beach's description of
|
|
Alaskan concentration camps, where men were drawn like flies to an unclean
|
|
feast; but from what I hear about Hollywood, oh boy, it's got 'em all
|
|
skinned! They tell me it's a combination of Sodom, Gomorrah and Babylon in a
|
|
Byzantine setting, and that if a Gibbon should write a real 'Rise and Fall of
|
|
the Hollywood Empire,' it would be the best seller of the century.
|
|
I understand that in Hollywood every motion picture director is a Caesar,
|
|
with the things that are Caesar's being rendered unto them; that the managers
|
|
are cringing Pilates, who show cowardly compassion for vice and dope, while
|
|
Virtue goes hourly to its crucifixion!"
|
|
"Friend," I answered mildly, "you don't know the half of it. Come, see
|
|
for yourself the truth about Hollywood."
|
|
We climbed into the auto, I spoke to the chauffeur and we headed up
|
|
Central avenue, a short cut to Sunset boulevard, that broad roadway leading
|
|
to the land of dreams--mostly hop dreams, if we are to believe what we hear
|
|
nowadays.
|
|
A gathering frown of disappointment had begun to gather on the forehead
|
|
of my friend as we sped through the wholesale district, over industrial
|
|
tracks, past unprosaic cold storage plants and unattractive buildings given
|
|
over to the wholesaling of farm implements, oil drilling machinery,
|
|
restaurant supplies. Through the historic Los Angeles plaza we sped, a
|
|
historic spot, indeed as pictured in the brochures and guide books
|
|
disseminated broadcase by an ambitious community.
|
|
The corrugations in the brow of my friend deepened when I told him what
|
|
it was. I truly believe he expected to see gaily garbed Rudolph Valentinos
|
|
twanging liquid notes from seductive guitars while entrancing Nazimovas
|
|
gracefully whirled in unison to the strains of "La Paloma." But all he saw
|
|
was a crowd of perennially unemployed Mexicans, several watchful-eyed
|
|
uniformed police to keep them from gambling, a number of uncomfortable
|
|
lounging benches painted a choleric green; and, for a background the whitened
|
|
and weather-beaten walls of a chapel, a relic of the padres. Poor Father
|
|
Junipero Serra, he didn't think enough of Los Angeles' future even to build a
|
|
mission here!
|
|
I did not wonder that my friend was becoming disillusioned. Almost
|
|
every newcomer does. Then he learns to love the purple hills, the soft gray
|
|
tones of the olive groves, the vivid green of the orange trees--(pamphlets
|
|
mailed on request by any real estate dealer).
|
|
And then--Hollywood!
|
|
"You are lucky to get in here," I told my friend as we stopped at one of
|
|
the big studios in Hollywood.
|
|
"Why so?" he asked as he glanced about him at the fragile skeleton of
|
|
composition board, canvas and paint which is to appear on the motion picture
|
|
screen as an impregnable wall of ancient Rome.
|
|
"Because the business of making motion pictures has reduced itself to a
|
|
commercial certainty," I replied to his question. "This has become an
|
|
industry of time clocks, requisition blanks, of uninterrupted labor from 8:30
|
|
o'clock in the morning to 5:30 o'clock in the evening, sometimes far into the
|
|
night. Efficiency experts declare that visitors interfere with the work, so
|
|
in this and in several other studios the curious tourist is barred."
|
|
"Umph," he muttered. "Where are the bathing girls? I thought every
|
|
studio had a flock of them."
|
|
"The bathing girl has been relegated to the limbo of forgotten things.
|
|
She was a seasonable novelty, coming into style like the short skirt and
|
|
giving the public something new to see and talk about."
|
|
I called his attention to placards posted in conspicuous places, signs
|
|
reading: "Any employee found gambling or drinking intoxicating liquor on
|
|
these grounds will be subject to instant dismissal."
|
|
"Who," he asked, "is this ferret-eyed little man we have been seeing
|
|
everywhere since we came in?"
|
|
"That is the man hired by the company to enforce what that placard
|
|
says."
|
|
On Hollywood boulevard we came upon a motion picture company working in
|
|
one of the largest churches.
|
|
"You don't mean to tell me," exclaimed my friend in amazement, "that the
|
|
pastor gave his permission for this scandalous sort of thing!"
|
|
We found the amiable pastor, a man with steel blue eyes into which you
|
|
needed but to glance to know he was a keen student of character--we found him
|
|
chatting with the leading woman of the company. Truly, a disgraceful
|
|
proceeding in its entirety.
|
|
"Well," mused my incredulous friend, "I had no idea there were churches
|
|
in Hollywood."
|
|
To this I remarked, "The pulpit has come to recognize that by means of
|
|
motion picture greater moral lessons can be conveyed than through any other
|
|
medium. Alert and able ministers in Hollywood have inculcated in the minds
|
|
of producers, writers, directors and actors that cheerfulness, cleanliness
|
|
and wholesome entertainment is the religious tonic most needed by the world
|
|
today.
|
|
"There are twenty-one churches in Hollywood. The average attendance at
|
|
these churches is 40,000--with Hollywood's population estimate at 70,000;
|
|
30,000 of its residents being employed in the studios. One church holds
|
|
seven services every Sunday to care for the throngs at its edifice.
|
|
At another big church hundreds of persons are turned away at every service.
|
|
"One of the foremost actors of the silent drama is an usher and active
|
|
member in one of the churches.
|
|
"There are ten graded schools and one high school here; we have a branch
|
|
of the University of California; there are eight private schools; there are
|
|
two daily and a number of weekly newspapers--"
|
|
"For the love of Mike," interrupted my friend, "cut out the statistics."
|
|
The shriek of a siren rose above the rattle and hum of traffic.
|
|
"What's that whistle?" he asked.
|
|
"That's at the Hollywood laundry. It blows at 7 o'clock in the morning,
|
|
at noon and at 5:30 o'clock."
|
|
"Do these kings and queens of the movies go to work, eat and quit work
|
|
by a laundry whistle!"
|
|
I suppose that back home he had cherished the thought that the
|
|
Hollywooders were summoned to the studios and to their banquets by stalwart
|
|
glistening Nubians sounding sweet-toned chimes.
|
|
"Let's go to a cabaret where we can dance and meet some of the film
|
|
Janes," he suggested.
|
|
"I am sorry," I told him, "but when Hollywood voted to annex itself to
|
|
Los Angeles it retained some of its charter provisions, one of which
|
|
prohibits dancing and cabaret entertainment in cafes."
|
|
We drew up, however, in front of what at first glance appeared to be an
|
|
Old World inn. Inside we found many of the film folk had already arrived.
|
|
It has always been to me--and I have known picture people intimately for
|
|
seven years--a novelty to see them as we saw them that day, a busy throng
|
|
with cosmetics high-lighting their faces--just from the camera and ready to
|
|
go back before it. Here they were eating away, wholly unconscious of their
|
|
ball gowns, their tramp make-ups, a tuxedo-ed gentleman seated alongside a
|
|
cannibal made grotesque by the addition of a topcoat to conceal the scarcity
|
|
of clothing beneath.
|
|
It was evident to me that my friend was not enjoying himself as he had
|
|
anticipated.
|
|
"You can't tell me," he argued, "that these people have due regard for
|
|
the conventions. Ordinary people would not come out in public places dressed
|
|
and painted like this."
|
|
"Listen," I said patiently. "It requires anywhere from thirty minutes
|
|
to two hours to put on a make-up and costume. Lunch time--depending on the
|
|
sun and other conditions--ranges from thirty minutes to one hour--never more
|
|
than an hour. Make-up and costumes are a part of their daily life, just as
|
|
overalls are to the laborer."
|
|
"But the women smoke in public."
|
|
Glancing about the cafe I counted five women smoking cigarettes.
|
|
"You will note that two of the women are not in make-up, which puts them
|
|
under suspicion of being non-picture people, possibly tourists. The other
|
|
three obviously are actresses. But what about it? Is it not a common sight
|
|
to see women smoking in almost every first-class cafe? If the wife of a
|
|
business man smokes in public is it a reflection on her moral standards?
|
|
Then why point an accusing finger at a motion-picture actress because she
|
|
does this sort of thing?"
|
|
But my friend was not being disillusioned by statistics and moralizing
|
|
generalities.
|
|
"Look here now, you can't tell me--to be specific--that little Miss
|
|
----- ----- is the sort of a girl she should be."
|
|
"No," I replied frankly, "she is not. Were Miss ----- ----- an ordinary
|
|
girl a good sound spanking would be of vast benefit to her and to the motion
|
|
picture industry as a whole."
|
|
"It is so easy--" there was a sneer in his tone, "--then why isn't it
|
|
done?"
|
|
"I will tell you why. In the days before motion pictures came into
|
|
vogue, Mama ----- -----, a blue-nosed Yankee woman, was a stock actress of
|
|
mediocre ability and with a sniveling brat on her hands. She never knew
|
|
whether her next week's booking would be in vaudeville or the poorhouse. Can
|
|
you imagine Mama ----- -----'s feelings when this same brat jumped into
|
|
public popularity and a large salary because of a winsomeness which appealed
|
|
to motion picture audiences! Mama ----- ----- now has diamonds, limousines,
|
|
a mansion and an English accent. And you would ask her to spank the source
|
|
of this luxury!
|
|
"There is an accepted belief that the motion picture industry has raised
|
|
certain popular actors and actresses to their high positions. The public,
|
|
the movie fan, has reared most of these idols; and I have yet to see an idol
|
|
without clay feet. But do not forget that there are prominent actors and
|
|
actresses who have won their way to fame by dint of hard labor. This type of
|
|
actor and actress is respected and encouraged by the picture industry. The
|
|
other type is the cross we bear, a type wished on us to our seeming
|
|
everlasting damnation by a public woefully deficient in its ability to
|
|
discriminate between talent and trickery.
|
|
"Is it fair, I ask you in all earnestness, to believe that because a few
|
|
have touched pitch we are all defiled?"
|
|
"Gee whiz," ejaculated my friend mournfully as the waiter set down our
|
|
orders, "you have certainly ruined my vacation. I came out here to learn all
|
|
the 'dirt' about Hollywood."
|
|
"I am very sorry to have spoiled your vacation," I said regretfully.
|
|
"But you have learned the truth about Hollywood."
|
|
|
|
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
|
|
|
|
February 20, 1922
|
|
NEW YORK WORLD
|
|
|
|
Hollywood, Almost Free of Crime,
|
|
Defended Against Lurid Charges
|
|
|
|
by Louis Sherwin
|
|
|
|
Can you imagine dear old Flatbush or Upper Montclair waking up one
|
|
morning to find itself infamous all over the land as a harborer of the seven
|
|
deadly sins, with every apartment its own love cult and a hop joint on every
|
|
other side street? That would not be a lot more absurd than what has
|
|
happened to Hollywood and the film industry.
|
|
This Hollywood that the newspapers of America, especially of the Middle
|
|
West, have been describing as a cross between Sodom and Ninevh, is as quiet,
|
|
dull, prosaic--and, I must confess, tiresome--a suburb as you could imagine.
|
|
Therein lies the irony of the situation.
|
|
Hitherto the worst affront the local pride has had to endure was the
|
|
sneering of Easterners who found the place deadly slow. Today the movie
|
|
people, Hollywood--in fact, all Los Angeles--are mad, fighting mad.
|
|
Until recently the gibes at Hollywood life and naughty goings on in the
|
|
movie colony have been passed off as a joke. But the mess of unsavory
|
|
fictions with which the country has been flooded as a result of the Taylor
|
|
murder case has proved too much. For once the victims are preparing to hit
|
|
back.
|
|
They claim the situation affects not only the half million people of Los
|
|
Angeles and a few thousand engaged in the cinema industry, but it affects
|
|
everybody in the United States who does not care to have his reading, theatre-
|
|
going, diet and personal habits, regulated by the hybrid union of Church and
|
|
State.
|
|
Some newspapers have talked about "revelations of depravity among movie
|
|
people arising out of the Taylor case." The truth is that there have been no
|
|
revelations. Not a single fact along these lines has been unearthed by any
|
|
reporter. Lacking facts, certain correspondents have sent broadcast the most
|
|
amazing farrago of fabrications, innuendoes, generalizations and downright
|
|
lies.
|
|
The Taylor murder so far is as complete a mystery as you will encounter
|
|
in American history. In order to keep the story alive there have been hints
|
|
of dope rings, love cults and outright accusations of a conspiracy of silence
|
|
among the movie people.
|
|
The fact is that Taylor was a gentleman, and a certain type of mind
|
|
seems not to know that a gentleman does not bandy his private affairs about
|
|
for the gossips. Consequently very few of his friends--let alone his
|
|
colleagues--knew that his professional name was different from his
|
|
patronymic. If they had known, they would not have thought anything of it,
|
|
as nearly half the people in the show business and a fair percentage of
|
|
writers adopt professional names for the most commonplace business reasons.
|
|
The foregoing will merely illustrate the far-fetched absurdity of the
|
|
accusations and canards that have been published. The truth about Hollywood
|
|
is so far from the hectic idea that people have conceived of the place that
|
|
it is almost laughable. It is not, as generally supposed, a colony of cinema
|
|
people lurking in the foothills for the purpose of riotous living. It is a
|
|
residence district, virtually a suburb, of Los Angeles with a population of
|
|
70,000. Of these only some 20,000 are connected with the movies.
|
|
There is absolutely no night life in the place. Drive down its main
|
|
street at 11 p.m. and you will be depressed by its quiet and sleepiness.
|
|
There is not a single public dance hall, not a single cabaret, nor any
|
|
restaurant with a dance license. Before it became part of Los Angeles,
|
|
Hollywood was a Prohibition town--fifteen years ago. There is only one
|
|
poolroom and one bowling alley. The fact is that night life in Hollywood
|
|
would make a Sunday afternoon in London look feverish.
|
|
I am not trying to suggest that it is a community of plaster saints.
|
|
Wild parties are given--some, but not all, by movie people--ranging from the
|
|
home brew fest in the four-room bungalow to the Scotch and champagne jags in
|
|
a few of the larger homes. Undoubtedly there are people here who use drugs,
|
|
but where are there not?
|
|
Arrests for felonies average less than three a week, and half of these
|
|
arrests are made at the request of outside communities. Of the persons
|
|
arrested for offenses other than traffic violations for many months past, not
|
|
a single one has been actually employed in motion pictures. Practically
|
|
every arrest in Hollywood for felony is a floater.
|
|
New York people will be more inclined to sympathize with the inhabitants
|
|
of this place than the rest of America. America judges New York by Broadway,
|
|
and Broadway, as we all know, is supported for the most part by pious
|
|
hinterlanders on the loose.
|
|
Until the Arbuckle case no person engaged in pictures--I mean actually
|
|
making his or her livelihood in the industry--had been even as much as
|
|
charged with a crime.
|
|
Moreover, while there are now three cases of what the French call
|
|
"crimes passionnels" occupying the Los Angeles papers, in no one of them is
|
|
any movie person involved. Los Angeles has its full share of these cases,
|
|
but in no case have people in the cinema industry been concerned, let alone
|
|
being guilty. The courts are crowded with divorce cases, as elsewhere in
|
|
America, but comparatively few of them concern picture people.
|
|
In short, the latter are no worse and no better than people in the
|
|
banking, plumbing or farming business. Of course, the publicity they have
|
|
put out about themselves is largely to blame for the odium they have
|
|
incurred, and for this they have themselves to thank.
|
|
The public loves to read about big figures, so it has been surfeited
|
|
with tales of swollen salaries, extravagant living, ostentatious automobiles
|
|
and garish homes of the movie folk. But, as a matter of cold fact, all that
|
|
sort of thing belongs away back in the past.
|
|
Salaries have shrunk extensively. Most of the people in the business
|
|
are broke, having been out of jobs anywhere from three to ten months. Only
|
|
the frugal are really ahead of the game.
|
|
The Producers' Association, the Screen Writers' Guild and the Directors'
|
|
Association have girded their loins for a scrap. In self-defense the Los
|
|
Angeles Chamber of Commerce, the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, women's clubs
|
|
and other organizations are backing them up. In future any man bringing wild
|
|
charges against this profession and the community in which it is located will
|
|
be called vigorously to account.
|
|
|
|
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
|
|
|
|
February 25, 1922
|
|
OAKLAND TRIBUNE
|
|
The Shame of Sleepy Hollywood
|
|
|
|
by Rob Wagner
|
|
|
|
We are the only people in the world who estimate beauty in terms of
|
|
cost. Imagine, if you can, a French guidebook referring to Notre Dame as
|
|
"our $10,000,000 cathedral," and the Mona Lisa as "the most heavily insured
|
|
picture extant." Yet scattered all over this land of boost and plenty we
|
|
have our "$5,000,000 state houses," "$2,000,000 theaters," "$100,000
|
|
libraries" and "$50,000 orchestras." Money is our measure of success,
|
|
material or artistic.
|
|
It is easy, therefore, to understand how the bell-ringers of the movies
|
|
should have seized upon these fiscal superlatives to exploit their wares.
|
|
It was the one measure everybody was sure to understand. And so for years
|
|
our peppy Barnums have been regaling the villagers with tales of Marie Hoppe-
|
|
Head's $25,000 Pekinese pups, the $50,000 sable coat of Gloria Gorgeous, and
|
|
Harold Handsome's salary that, if placed end to end, would reach from here to
|
|
Helen-gone.
|
|
Unfortunately, however, these stories have had unlooked-for effects.
|
|
If you had read every day for six years that plumbers were earning $5000 a
|
|
week salaries, you would soon begin to hate plumbers, howsoever beautiful
|
|
they might be. This would be especially true if you thought their plumbing
|
|
was inadequate. Every day I meet charming, but indignant people who say,
|
|
"I have just read that this little blonde pinhead, Edythe Excellent, is paid
|
|
$500 a week. Well, I hope the poor fish chokes, and I hope I get my hope."
|
|
And so because of our extravagant boasting a righteous jealousy was born.
|
|
Then, again, if you had been fed up on stories of how our expensive pets
|
|
dined on goldfish and bees' knees and shampooed their curly locks in
|
|
sparkling Mosella and green Chartruse, it would be easy to believe that they
|
|
would go the limit of sensual indulgence in hooch and hop.
|
|
It has taken an unhappy tragedy to one of our directors to reveal just
|
|
these states of mind; and nobody has been more shocked by the results of our
|
|
silly publicity than the motion picture people themselves. Eastern
|
|
newspapers now drifting back to California are painting pictures of a "movie
|
|
colony" that surpass anything our wildest directors ever put on the screen to
|
|
show decadence and crime.
|
|
This "colony," it seems, lies somewhere in the foothills of Southern
|
|
California, far from the restraining contact with ordinary civilization and
|
|
immune from the social standards of Iowa and Illinois. Here, within its
|
|
sacred enclosure, the film folk live in a gorgeous splendor that would have
|
|
made the Babylonians seem like unimaginative pikers, their isolation
|
|
permitting them to enjoy a code of morals that only a regiment of morons
|
|
could cherish.
|
|
This modern Gomorrah is known the world over as Hollywood, and,
|
|
according to population imagination, its streets are lined with dance-halls,
|
|
cabarets, magnificent gambling joints and opium dens, the denizens of the
|
|
film colony working but one or two temperamental hours a day, devoting the
|
|
other twenty-three to delicious sin. Movie queens, in inlaid limousines,
|
|
roll through the golden avenues to meet wicked directors intent upon their
|
|
happy ruin, bathing parties nightly plunge into tanks of eau-de-cologne,
|
|
while beautiful "snow birds" attend cocaine parties at which the Japanese
|
|
servants administer drugs from silver needles; while every morning the
|
|
police, seizing the blonde curls of your beautiful film favorite, drag her
|
|
from some subterranean hop-joint.
|
|
Thus we see what great wealth and prohibition have done to a colony of
|
|
erstwhile "chambermaids and switchboard girls" from the innocent Middlewest.
|
|
One eastern paper goes so far as to say that "the needle-hounds of
|
|
Hollywood order their drugs over the telephone like groceries."
|
|
It seems too bad to spoil this vivacious picture of dear old Hollywood,
|
|
but, after all, maybe the truth will be quite as interesting. And so, as my
|
|
heroin seems, for the moment, to have lost its efficacy, permit me during
|
|
this lucid interim to paint Hollywood as it really is.
|
|
In the first place, the district of Hollywood is not a detached
|
|
"colony," but an integral part of a great city of half a million souls,
|
|
mostly undrugged. And this city, largely populated by Iowans and Kansans,
|
|
with the austere morality of the prairie, would hardly tolerate a modern
|
|
Sodom right "in its midst!" Hollywood is as much a part of Los Angeles as
|
|
Harlem is of New York, even its residents being quite unaware of its
|
|
artificial boundaries.
|
|
Nor are the motion picture studios entirely confined to this district,
|
|
for three of the largest are miles away in Universal City, Edendale and
|
|
Culver City. The truth is that, though many of the motion picture people
|
|
live in the Hollywood district, they are scattered all the way from Santa
|
|
Monica to Pasadena.
|
|
So much for the geography of Hollywood. And now as to its character.
|
|
Well, first of all, it is what is known in Los Angeles as a "high-grade
|
|
residence district" of homes, with only enough stores to attend its homely
|
|
wants. It hasn't, and never has had, a public dance-hall; there is not a
|
|
restaurant or cafe with music, and dancing is forbidden the guests; there is
|
|
not a cabaret or a roof-garden, a hopjoint or a house of prostitution. There
|
|
is but one poolroom, and that upstairs, and one bowling alley, and that in a
|
|
basement--for our Sodomatic ordinances forbid these evils on the ground
|
|
floor!
|
|
But no doubt you have read of a competing group of Babylonian hotels
|
|
battering off our rich degenerates. The fact is, there is just one large
|
|
hotel--the old, rambling frame "Hollywood," palm-shaded and quiet, in which
|
|
ancient and honorable Eastern ladies do a stupendous amount of knitting and
|
|
numberless drop stitches, and night life in Hollywood is about as exciting as
|
|
Sunday in Zion City.
|
|
Ha, ha! but now about its secret sins? May it not be true that there is
|
|
an underground life among these cinemaleptics of which I wot not? Possibly.
|
|
And so the other day I took a fortifying sniff of snow and set out for police
|
|
headquarters, where to learn from our alert guardians the real truth of
|
|
Hollywood's carnival of crime.
|
|
"Capt. Horn," says I, "I am the special correspondent of the Denver Dirt-
|
|
Disher, and I want the real dope on Hollywood."
|
|
"Why take any more?" he answered wittily. "You can't improve on the
|
|
phantasma you've sent out already. But if you really want the truth we might
|
|
go over the records."
|
|
The last five months was all we had time for, but in those five months
|
|
I learned these police facts: There had not been one arrest for prostitution
|
|
or peddling narcotics, not one complaint from any resident regarding a "wild
|
|
party," and not one call to raid a single house or apartment. Arrests for
|
|
felonies averaged less than three a week and half of these were made at the
|
|
request of outside communities. Of persons arrested for offenses (other than
|
|
violations of the traffic ordinance) not one was employed in the motion
|
|
pictures.
|
|
"And you might add," grinned the happy captain, "that there hasn't been
|
|
a murder in Hollywood in ten years."
|
|
"Well, if all you say is true," I shot back, "why have you a hospital
|
|
for drug addicts here?"
|
|
"Say, child," he replied, "that hospital has been here for eighteen
|
|
years--ten years before there was a motion picture studio, and its patrons
|
|
come from Denver, Chicago and points east."
|
|
Capt. Horn is the worst material for a bright newspaper fella I have met
|
|
yet.
|
|
No, brother--judged by carnival standards--Hollywood is duller by far
|
|
than Flatbush or Ypsilanti. About all you can get after 10 p.m. is a malted
|
|
milk and the services of an undertaker.
|
|
But churches! I can literally exclaim, "Holy smoke!" for one church has
|
|
to hold seven masses every Sunday to attend the spiritual needs of its
|
|
devotees, while another cult has one of the largest congregations in America,
|
|
a roll-call which would read like a "Who's Who in Filmdom."
|
|
Of course we have our share of bad eggs--eve as your town. We have
|
|
cowboy actors who wear precious stones in their dentistry, and a small
|
|
assortment of get-rich-quickers who do not behave prettily at times, but
|
|
these few half-baked walkoffs are not peculiar to the motion picture
|
|
industry. Bankers, and even plumbers, sometimes fall by the wayside.
|
|
In fact, I know of eight or ten near-film favorites, three of whom are
|
|
stars of about the fourth magnitude, whose definition of fun is to get quite
|
|
drunk at dinners and throw things about in childish abandon; but a friend of
|
|
mine who attended one of their parties told me it was utterly witless and
|
|
only mildly obscene.
|
|
However, some day one of these alcoholic baby dolls is going to pull
|
|
something in public or shoot up her cutie at an exclusive revel and then once
|
|
again you will be fed up on news of how the whole of Hollywood is drug soaked
|
|
to the ears. Thus will 30,000 workers in the great eighth art have to pay
|
|
for the lapses of less than a third of one per cent. The embarrassment we
|
|
suffer for our bad eggs is that they have been perched so high that, when
|
|
they fall the disgusting aroma is noted all over the world.
|
|
But how about their salaries? I hear you ask. Well, it is in this
|
|
department that our publicity hounds have exaggerated the most. Charlie
|
|
Chaplin's "million-dollar yearly salary" was the sheerest bunk. He did not
|
|
receive one-quarter that sum, and from this must be deducted the cost of
|
|
production (and if you know anything about such things you'll know it is very
|
|
high) and last, but by no means least, the income tax, which is collected
|
|
with almost diabolic enthusiasm. It is true certainly spectacular stars have
|
|
purchased red-white-and-blue automobiles of sensational design and fabulous
|
|
cost, but you would be amazed at the number of these gasoline chariots that
|
|
have reverted to the original owners after the first small payment. This is
|
|
especially true since the grand shaking down of a year ago. As for the other
|
|
functionaries of the industry, the technical staffs, cameramen, etc., they
|
|
receive about the same wages as in any other industry. It is also true a few-
|
|
-a very few--exceptional artists may earl $50,000 to $100,000 a year, but so
|
|
do they in literature, music, law and engineering.
|
|
Thus we see--if you believe me, which you probably won't if the poison
|
|
has sunk too deep--that Hollywood is in almost ridiculous contrast to its
|
|
popular conception.
|
|
But if your beautiful little town is as dull as I say it is then "what
|
|
do the film folks do o' night?" Well, they flock to the movies, especially
|
|
the pre-views. Many of the stars, like Doug and Mary, for instance, have
|
|
projecting machines in their homes, where every evening they enjoy with small
|
|
groups of friends the latest releases. Then there is one playhouse, the
|
|
Community theater, where the high-brow drama is enacted by former stage stars
|
|
without compensation. One dreadful relaxation I am compelled to admit. The
|
|
Wednesday night fights at the American Legion are attended by a large
|
|
audience of film people of both genders, even the ladies of the research
|
|
department growing quite excited when the bouts are particularly lively, but
|
|
as one of our local ministers says: "The soldier boys must have their fun."
|
|
But to offset these debauches, I must also mention the Pilgrimage Play,
|
|
America's Oberamagau, which is shown in the Hollywood bowl to thousands every
|
|
season, and the theosophical plays of the Krotona Institute that is situated
|
|
right in our midst.
|
|
But now for a confession, for it isn't fair to speak only of our
|
|
virtues. It is perfectly true that certain landlords refuse to rent to the
|
|
movie people. You see Hollywood has 70,000 souls, counting oversouls and
|
|
insoles, and most of them have come here because of its dolce far niente
|
|
quietude, and, alas, I'm afraid we sometimes break in upon their magnolia-
|
|
scented dreams. Of course if they built their darned old bungalow courts
|
|
with at least the privacy of chicken coops it would be all right, but if I
|
|
was an old codger from Keokuk who had come here to rest I wouldn't care to be
|
|
squeezed in between a heavy and custard comedian who might play the saxophone
|
|
or pinochle up to 10 o'clock at night.
|
|
These foolish outsiders, who insist upon horning into our "colony,"
|
|
ought to know that actors, artists and writers act like a lot of children
|
|
when they get together. Furthermore it must be remembered the southern
|
|
branch of the University of California is in Hollywood, and you know how
|
|
quiet 3700 students are likely to be. A flat, a duplex house or a bungalow
|
|
court is no place for a nervous wreck--in Hollywood. Why, I've been to
|
|
parties where in inspirational orchestra developed that played upon
|
|
everything from empty milk bottles to frosted lamp shades; where we played
|
|
charades, squat tag and puss-in-the-corner. They were noisy but they were
|
|
fun.
|
|
On last Halloween we--the Mrs. and I--gave a party which at its height
|
|
included the grand old game of postoffice, and when I blushingly went out to
|
|
get a special delivery letter from one of our prettiest movie queens you
|
|
could have heard the squeaks of merriment a block away.
|
|
No, we are not the quietest neighbors in the world, but the Killjoys,
|
|
who never laugh unless alcoholically propelled, quite misunderstand our
|
|
exuberances. In these dour times the spirit of play ought to be kept alive--
|
|
and we are doing our darndest.
|
|
Besides these little home affairs, where everybody burst into song on
|
|
the slightest provocation, we have beach parties up and down the coast and
|
|
barbecues in the hills, for even movie people regard their time at the
|
|
studios as work and seek relaxation the same as brokers and chiropractors.
|
|
Outside of two or three big balls a year given by the directors,
|
|
cinematographers and the writers, our greatest social brawls are at the
|
|
Hollywood hotel, dubbed by the newspaper comedian as "Passion's Playground."
|
|
Here last winter one might have seen Elinor Glyn one-stepping with Sir
|
|
Gilbert Parker, or Rupert Hughes sitting it out with Gloria Swanson, Lionel
|
|
Belmore prancing about with Marjorie Daw or Milton Sills dancing with his
|
|
wife. In fact, wives seem to be quite au fait in Hollywood, however,
|
|
notwithstanding, but.
|
|
Here is a bright and crushing observation that has just occurred to me.
|
|
During the past three years a perfect army of "imminent" authors has lived in
|
|
Hollywood and only one of them has written unkindly about our town, and he is
|
|
a terrible old grouch who would muck-rake the Epworth League. And, remember
|
|
this, these authors are professional observers, yet they haven't observed any
|
|
of the gorgeous drug debaucheries that a lot of "special correspondents" are
|
|
recording in the news syndicate.
|
|
No, puzzled reader, these tales of "love cults" and "dope rings" are
|
|
just good old newspaper hokum. The only real evidence I can offer in the use
|
|
of narcotics is the hectic nonsense emanating from the drugged sconces of the
|
|
newspaper fellows, who have been looking at Hollywood through dope rings of
|
|
their own blowing.
|
|
|
|
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
|
|
|
|
March 1, 1922
|
|
CHICAGO TRIBUNE
|
|
"Wild Orgies of Hollywood are Only Dreams"
|
|
Film Folks Leading Clean Lives, Writers State
|
|
|
|
by Frank Woods
|
|
President of Screen Writers' Guild of the Authors' League of America
|
|
and
|
|
Thompson Buchanan
|
|
Chairman of the Writers' Club
|
|
|
|
When William Desmond Taylor, motion picture director, was found murdered
|
|
by an unknown assassin, nobody could have realized that the mystery would
|
|
resolve itself into a newspaper trial of the film industry and of Hollywood,
|
|
the chief center of cinema production. Such, however, seems to have been the
|
|
case. This quiet and beautiful section of Los Angeles has been treated to a
|
|
drenching of slander unequaled in American journalism, while film people
|
|
themselves have been pictured largely as drug addicts, drunkards,
|
|
profligates, and degenerates.
|
|
If a half, or a quarter, or even a tenth of this muckraking is founded
|
|
on fact, then the people engaged in making motion pictures, particularly the
|
|
stars, are of the wrong class and ought to be eliminated. If, on the other
|
|
hand, the charges are untrue, a fearful injustice has been done to an
|
|
innocent community and to 30,000 hard working, decent living, normal minded
|
|
men and women engaged in a legitimate occupation.
|
|
The injustice is all the greater because slander travels with such speed
|
|
that truth may never overtake it.
|
|
What is the truth?
|
|
The film industry numbers among its thousands of actors, directors,
|
|
writers, artists, photographers, mechanics, and managers, a small percentage
|
|
of undesirable people, the same as in any other art, profession, class,
|
|
business, or occupation. On the whole the percentage of undesirables in
|
|
pictures is somewhat less, for reasons to be stated, than is found in other
|
|
classified occupations. Certainly the proportion is no greater, and must be
|
|
considered amazingly small when the nature and the rapid and unorganized
|
|
growth of the industry are impartially considered.
|
|
Naturally one might suppose that a new industry, recruited
|
|
indiscriminately, would attract to itself the least stable types of people.
|
|
Add to this the fact that the average pay is high, too high, perhaps, in
|
|
exceptional cases, but not nearly so high in the main, as has been popularly
|
|
supposed, considering that employment is precarious.
|
|
With these two conditions--a restless, temperamental, and unstable class
|
|
of people to deal with, and high, even extravagant rates of pay, we might be
|
|
perfectly justified in believing many, if not all, of the wild tales that
|
|
have been told about the industry.
|
|
On the contrary, the result has been largely the reverse, and for this
|
|
there are three perfectly sound reasons. First, there has never been absent
|
|
during the last eight years earnest, effective welfare work conducted by
|
|
people within the profession, while in the management of the larger companies
|
|
there has been stringent control of studio conditions, growing stronger and
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|
stronger as time goes on.
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Second, work in pictures is exacting and mentally and physically
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exhausting--so much so that a great majority of the active workers have no
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time, strength, nor inclination for the revelries and orgies which have been
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pictured as the rule rather than the exception.
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|
Third, speaking now of the players, the camera is relentless, and no
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actor or actress, especially the younger ones, whose faces are literally
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|
their fortunes, can remain long in the spotlight and at the same time give
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|
way to any sort of self-indulgence. This last point alone is sufficient to
|
|
prove the general falsity of the sweeping charges and impressions that have
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|
been spread broadcast in certain newspapers. Make no mistake about this:
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|
habitual depravity on the part of any player brings its own sure and swift
|
|
punishment.
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|
The results of excesses cannot escape the camera, and this fact alone
|
|
has kept many a pretty girl or handsome boy from performing professional hari-
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|
kari. Those who have been weak enough to fall have fallen and disappeared.
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|
If there are others who are weak, they also will fall and disappear. Such is
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|
the natural law, and the players know it. The vast majority of them act upon
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|
it, although now and then there is an exception.
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|
The proof that film folk are mainly as I have represented them is found
|
|
in the true picture of Hollywood as it really exists. Hollywood, which
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|
houses the greater proportion of people engaged in picture work, is a live,
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|
normal business section of Los Angeles. It is not a "camp" nor a "colony"
|
|
nor a segregated district. It is a hustling community, growing rapidly and
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|
justly celebrated for its civic activities, in which picture people
|
|
participate along with their neighbors. The Hollywood Woman's club, the
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|
Writers' club, Masonic temple, the Chamber of Commerce, the Bowl, a great
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|
outdoor auditorium, numerous banks, churches, schools, a university, business
|
|
blocks, library, etc., all attest to its live but normal and wholesome
|
|
character. The only small things about Hollywood, and these are the most
|
|
significant of all, are the night resorts and the police force.
|
|
Of "night life" in Hollywood there is absolutely none. One bowling
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|
alley in a basement, one billiard hall on a second floor, five motion picture
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|
theaters, and one stadium where boxing bouts are conducted once a week by the
|
|
American Legion are the sole amusements. There are no cabarets, cafe dance
|
|
floors, drinking resorts, houses of ill repute--nothing at all of this
|
|
character.
|
|
As for the police, to which I have referred, let Police Captain George
|
|
K. Home speak for himself.
|
|
"Now, as to Hollywood being 'drug crazed' and full of 'wild night life.'
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|
In this twenty-three miles which my department covers there is a total police
|
|
personnel of less than seventy men! Five of these patrol the San Fernando
|
|
valley district, twelve miles from Hollywood. Ten more are assigned to
|
|
traffic duty on busy corners and before schools. The remaining fifty-odd
|
|
cover the whole district, without even a police or fire alarm system to aid
|
|
them, relying upon the upright character of the residents to keep us informed
|
|
of crimes and fires by telephone.
|
|
"For comparison's sake let us refer to the Wilshire district of Los
|
|
Angeles, a district only twelve miles square, solely a residence district,
|
|
and without a business section. It is patrolled now by 113 men. If
|
|
Hollywood had the same proportion of police to the square mile as has the
|
|
Wilshire district we would have a force of 216 men here instead of an actual
|
|
Hollywood force of fifty-five men.
|
|
"Why has Hollywood such a comparatively small force of police? Because
|
|
Hollywood, being a high class residence district, peopled by a home loving
|
|
and law abiding population, is practically free of all crimes of violence!
|
|
"The best index to the moral character of a community is its police
|
|
records. Here is the complete and final refutation to the wild stories the
|
|
eastern newspapers have published. Our police records, covering this
|
|
district with its 70,000 people, including the people in its twenty-two
|
|
motion picture studios, show that:
|
|
"In the last ten years there has been no murder in Hollywood.
|
|
"In the last five months there has not been an arrest for prostitution
|
|
nor for peddling narcotics.
|
|
"In the last five months the Hollywood police have received no
|
|
complaints from any resident of any wild party being held within the
|
|
precincts of Hollywood, and have not been called upon to raid a single home
|
|
or apartment.
|
|
"Arrests for felonies average less than three a week, and half of these
|
|
arrests are made at the request of outside communities.
|
|
"Holdups and crimes of violence are practically unknown in Hollywood.
|
|
"Of the persons arrested by our officers for offenses other than
|
|
violation of the traffic ordinance, for many months past not a single one has
|
|
been actually employed in the motion picture business.
|
|
"Practically every arrest in Hollywood for felony is a 'floater' who
|
|
happens to drift into the district, attracted by its evident prosperity.
|
|
"In the face of these facts, it seems nothing short of criminal that
|
|
unprincipled newspaper space writers should be allowed to send out their
|
|
lurid and ridiculous stories."
|
|
After reading this clean bill of health, one may well wonder where all
|
|
these slander stories have come from. How can there be men and women writers
|
|
anywhere on earth base enough to invent any or all of the lurid stories that
|
|
have been printed so generally about Hollywood and the film people?
|
|
This is a proper question to ask and one that deserves a frank and
|
|
complete reply.
|
|
Let us go back to the Arbuckle case. The unfortunate affair in which
|
|
Arbuckle became involved took place in San Francisco. Everybody has heard of
|
|
the intense jealousy that exists between the two great cities of the Pacific
|
|
coast--San Francisco and Los Angeles. No doubt this had much to do with the
|
|
virulence of the carefully fostered newspaper prejudices in San Francisco
|
|
against the defendant and perhaps, also, his strange silence under advice of
|
|
counsel led many people to believe in his guilt, but most significant was the
|
|
fact that the district attorney had political aspirations and he saw a chance
|
|
of catering to the reform elements of his city by painting Arbuckle not so
|
|
much a murderer as a debauchee. He used the newspapers to try this side of
|
|
the issue and found the sensational press of the entire country more than
|
|
willing to help.
|
|
Arbuckle's mode of living, which was too often the same as that of
|
|
thousands of young men of other stations in life who, like him, have too much
|
|
money, was nevertheless indefensible, and somehow, some way, the impression
|
|
was conveyed that he was a fair example of the film folks' depravity.
|
|
When the Taylor murder broke, not in Hollywood but in Los Angeles
|
|
proper, the press was ripe for sensational developments. The Los Angeles
|
|
newspaper offices were flooded with urgent queries from newspapers in all the
|
|
large cities. The murder at once took the form of a mystery and it is still
|
|
at this writing, to all appearances, unsolvable.
|
|
With no evidence pointing to any person as the murderer the detectives
|
|
and the press invented theories, some of them remotely plausible and others
|
|
wildly impossible. These theories were often bolstered up with imaginary
|
|
suppositions and implications of guilty knowledge on the part of persons
|
|
really eager to help solve the mystery but unable to furnish any valuable
|
|
facts.
|
|
Taylor, himself, who had been a man of exemplary habits, fine
|
|
deportment, and high ideals, turned out to have had an adventurous past.
|
|
He had taken a stage name, like many others of the theatrical profession, and
|
|
this was made much of. Days passed and still there was no evidence
|
|
discovered bearing on the cause of the murder.
|
|
It was then that the theory was invented that there was a conspiracy of
|
|
silence, although Los Angeles publishers claim that this charge came from
|
|
newspapers in other cities. Its publication here cause intense surprise and
|
|
indignation. The Writers' club of which Taylor was a member, offered $1,000
|
|
reward for evidence leading to the apprehension of the murderer and the Lasky
|
|
company offered $2,500 more. To complicate the entire situation, there were
|
|
two detective forces, that of the city and the sheriff's office, working on
|
|
diametrically opposite lines, each eager to maintain its own hypothesis.
|
|
It came to be a dull day with those who had been at all familiar with
|
|
the dead man when each one was not questioned by at least one or two
|
|
detectives. The press called this "grilling," as if every person examined
|
|
were a potential criminal. Finally the district attorney took charge of the
|
|
investigation, examined everybody again, and announced that not one bit of
|
|
evidence had been discovered implicating anybody as connected with the crime
|
|
or even of having guilty knowledge of it.
|
|
So much for the Taylor murder. The deliberate besmirching of Hollywood
|
|
and of the film people as a class followed as a so-called sidelight on the
|
|
mystery.
|
|
There were two reporters here from Chicago, Edward Doherty and Wallace
|
|
Smith. They were here to report the unsavory Burch and Obenchain trials, and
|
|
when these seemed to be flattening out, the seized on the Taylor mystery as
|
|
an excuse for digging up and rehashing all the dead scandals of the picture
|
|
people that had accumulated in the last ten years. There were only a bare
|
|
half dozen of them, but they were embellished, added to, and enlarged until
|
|
they read like juicy stuff.
|
|
Added to these were alleged interviews with Jap[anese] butlers and the
|
|
like, pure fiction, and other out and out inventions, all of which, sent out
|
|
in a series of special stories and published in widely scattered syndicated
|
|
papers constituted an injurious indictment that might easily impose upon
|
|
editors and the public.
|
|
To refute the slanders, the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce and other
|
|
civic authorities, not connected in any way with the film industry have
|
|
joined in circulating a strong statement denouncing the lies and bearing
|
|
witness to the decency and worthy character of film people as a class.
|
|
|
|
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
|
|
|
|
February 10, 1922
|
|
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
|
|
|
|
Police Hunting for Scandal Instead of for Assassin
|
|
Says Defender of Hollywood
|
|
|
|
by Waldemar Young
|
|
Former Dramatic Editor of The San Francisco Chronicle,
|
|
now prominent continuity writer for motion pictures.
|
|
|
|
Another scavenger's holiday. William Desmond Taylor was in life a man
|
|
respected by his associates. He was an artist of high ideals. He was hard
|
|
working, earnest, capable. He was a gentleman. But he was a motion picture
|
|
director.
|
|
So out come the scavengers to burrow in the garbage can, seeking
|
|
morsels, titbits, little delicacies of ripe dirt to roll their tongues
|
|
around. Out they come, headlong, before the corpse is cold. They wallow in
|
|
a mud of their own making. They drag a man's name through that mud. With
|
|
the vicious glee of the virtuous they make great sticking plasters of the mud
|
|
and hurl them broadside at the motion picture colony.
|
|
Instead of concentrating all their efforts toward finding the assassin
|
|
and trying him for murder, they drag the dead man forth and put him on trial.
|
|
He has committed the crime of being shot down without warning from behind.
|
|
Away goes his name through the mud, swishing, swashing. Why? Because he was
|
|
a motion picture director. It is always open season for anyone connected
|
|
with the motion picture business.
|
|
Having put him on trial instead of his assassin, what have they found?
|
|
The one outstanding fact that he had taken stage name, a very common thing,
|
|
indeed, in the profession of entertainment. They make this the basis for a
|
|
claim that he had led a dual life.
|
|
Puerile, imbecilic, certainly.
|
|
But the scavengers must have their holiday. The found some letters.
|
|
These proved nothing. They were not even very entertaining. So the
|
|
scavengers, for want of better sport, have turned their mud guns on the
|
|
picture colony and there is a great splattering.
|
|
Is this fair?
|
|
There are estimated to be about 30,000 persons engaged in the picture
|
|
industry in Hollywood and its environs. Ninety-nine per cent of these, I
|
|
venture to say, lead lives as clean and as decent as the best of people in
|
|
other professions and other industries; they are "just folks." The other
|
|
one per cent are more noisy, I think, than vicious, they can't be very
|
|
wicked. They are too open about it. They flaunt their peccadilloes with a
|
|
too-apparent wish to have them noticed. They wear noisy clothes, ride in
|
|
noisy cars, live noisy lives.
|
|
By the very nature of their employment, everything they do receives
|
|
publicity. They are definitely in the public eye, under a microscope. Press
|
|
agents record their smallest fads and fancies. Every move they make comes
|
|
out magnified, exaggerated.
|
|
And, of course, the bad comes out with the good, magnified, exaggerated.
|
|
A home brew party in a four-room bungalow becomes "a Neroesque orgy in a
|
|
mansion." The tongues of the righteous wag.
|
|
But the noisy ones are no worse than their own prototypes elsewhere in
|
|
every community.
|
|
It is simply that more attention is attracted to them. It is the price
|
|
of publicity.
|
|
Hollywood, I should say, is about the average American community.
|
|
A campaign of calumny against Berkeley, against San Jose, against any city
|
|
of the size you can name, would have just as much reason for being as the
|
|
present campaign against Hollywood.
|
|
And there are just as many honest, decent men and women in the picture
|
|
business as in any other business, even if they do not go around with pious
|
|
looks mouthing the scavenger's chant, "I am holier than thou."
|
|
People in glass houses shouldn't make home brew.
|
|
|
|
*****************************************************************************
|
|
*****************************************************************************
|
|
Back issues of Taylorology are available from the gopher server at
|
|
gopher.etext.org
|
|
in the directory Zines/Taylorology;
|
|
or on the Web at
|
|
http://www.angelfire.com/az/Taylorology
|
|
***************************************************************************** |