The Battle for Beverly Hills Read online

  2

  The Beverly Hills Hotel and the Birth of Its Namesake City

  There must have been something about Beverly Hills in its earliest days that attracted strong women. Margaret Anderson was a force to be reckoned with almost a decade before Mary Pickford married Douglas Fairbanks and moved to Beverly Hills. There are those who say that Mrs. Anderson as much as anyone—and many who say more than anyone—was instrumental in making Beverly Hills a success.

  Because in building the Beverly Hills Hotel, Mrs. Anderson gave the city a heart before it even had much of a body.

  Although the city may have been imagined with aspirations of luxury and high-minded intent, Beverly Hills was far from an overnight success. In fact, real estate sales were slow to the point of nonexistent. As of 1910—nine years before Doug Fairbanks bought the hunting lodge that would evolve into Pickfair—only six homes had been built north of Santa Monica Boulevard, the area of the city where the planners had created spacious lots. It was not a sustainable pace even for investors interested in the long game.

  One of the challenges facing the young city was its remoteness. In an era when there were few cars in private hands and most people depended on horses and public transportation—trains, trolleys, and buses—Beverly Hills was difficult to get to. The only public transportation was provided by one of Henry Huntington’s Los Angeles Pacific Railway “Dinky” lines—and Morocco Station, as the stop in Beverly Hills was initially called, was the end of the line. The Rodeo Land and Water Company needed something that would shift eyes westward to its new development. It knew that without something special, something showy, the market for lots in Beverly Hills would remain cool and sales would continue to move at a glacial pace. Burton Green and his fellow developers needed something that would make the world—especially potential buyers—take notice. They needed a showpiece that would wow prospective homeowners as well as be a comfortable place for people to spend time while they shopped for lots, and eventually, where they conferred with architects and builders. Taking a page from what the folks in the young city of Hollywood had done to entice potential residents, Burton Green and his Rodeo Land and Water Company partners decided to build a hotel that would be a regional attraction. In fact, they took more than a page from the Hollywood Hotel: To realize their vision they enticed Margaret Anderson, who had been in charge of building and outfitting the Hollywood Hotel and turning it into one of the city’s most popular destinations during the previous decade, to be in charge of the project.

  Born Margaret Boag in 1859 in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Margaret Anderson came to California in 1874 as a teenager with her family. At twenty she married Lewis C. Anderson, a Danish immigrant. In the following years the couple had two children, Ruth and Stanley, and they moved to Alhambra, a community in the San Gabriel Valley, to grow navel oranges. (Navel oranges had become a very big deal for Southern California in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Packed in their brightly decorated wooden crates with fanciful packing labels, the Southern Pacific Railway whisked these juicy and seedless golden globes across the country. The oranges became edible ambassadors for the Southern California good life.)

  Margaret was married for eight years before her divorce from Lewis Anderson. She must have had a very good reason for taking such drastic action because divorce in the late nineteenth century was practically akin to social suicide. After she found herself an independent woman with two small children to provide for, Margaret considered her options. And the options were pretty limited: Just about the only respectable course for a divorced woman to make a living was as a teacher or running a boardinghouse. Margaret attended Hanna Los Angeles College, a women’s college in downtown Los Angeles. After completing her studies, she and a friend, who was also a former student, ran a family boardinghouse south of downtown Los Angeles. Most women in Margaret’s situation would have been content to stick with running a successful boardinghouse, but she took what she had learned to the next level: a hotel. Margaret applied for the position of managing a luxury hotel that the founders of the soon-to-be new city of Hollywood wanted to build to attract residents to the area. (Interestingly, and not without irony, Harvey and Daeida Wilcox, who had purchased the land that would become Hollywood, originally envisioned an enclave for Christian teetotalers.) Margaret helmed the project, working with the architects to realize a forty-room, mission-style building that would become the social center of the new city. The hotel opened on December 18, 1902. In 1903, Hollywood incorporated into an independent city. Not one to rest on her laurels, over the next eight years, Margaret saw to the purchase of land for expansion, hired architects to design the new space, and eventually grew the Hollywood Hotel to 114 bedrooms and the physical plant to include electricity, refrigeration, and a large boiler room.

  In a time when many up-and-comers felt the need to cultivate pretensions, Margaret Anderson did not. She was not a snob. She had a keen eye that saw potential regardless of outward appearances. All were welcomed at the Hollywood Hotel and that included a young man who had taken a break from his architectural practice to work as a solo ranch hand on a spread in the young city of Hollywood. Instead of rattling around in the owner’s empty ranch house in his off hours, Elmer Grey wanted to take his Sunday dinners at Margaret’s establishment. The hotel’s convivial atmosphere and Margaret’s cordial mien prompted Grey to ask her if he could spend his evenings sitting in the lobby. According to Margaret, it most certainly was all right and Grey most certainly did spend a great deal of time at the hotel. He went on to make a circle of friends. When he became a subject of gossip because he was “a hired hand by day and assumed equal at night,”1 a young woman with secure social status who was one of his friends gave a formal ball, invited Grey, and gave him the first two dances on her card.2

  It would turn out to be an advantageous association for both Grey and Anderson. Learning that Grey was an architect, Margaret Anderson would go on to hire him to design the expansion of the Hollywood Hotel and draw up the plans for the Beverly Hills Hotel. Margaret’s methodology of building a network of interesting, talented people based on her instincts instead of their outward appearances might not have worked in many places with aspirations of high society, but it would be just the ticket for running the most important establishment in the early days of the new city of Beverly Hills.

  The Rodeo Land and Water Company knew what it was doing when it directed its agents to approach Mrs. Anderson to see to the creation of a luxury hotel for its new city, and it had the good sense not to stint on the enticements. The deal included prime land atop a hillside in the new development—which provided the needed drainage, a problem that had plagued the Hollywood Hotel—that was located near a steady source of water, a generous budget to build and outfit the new hotel, as well as the guarantee that no other hotel would open in Beverly Hills for the following thirteen years. And the principals of the Rodeo Land and Water Company weren’t disappointed. Margaret, along with her son Stanley Anderson, who had learned the ropes of running a hotel through on-the-job training from his mother, delivered and then some. Once Margaret came on board with the project, it was full steam ahead. Under her direction the region’s best architects, including her old friend Elmer Grey, and builders were hired and set on a pace that saw the hotel completed in just over a year. Upon completion, the new hotel could not have opened in a more dramatic fashion. Before breakfast on the morning of April 30, 1912, guests staying at the Hollywood Hotel, of which Mrs. Anderson had remained manager while the new hotel was being built, were informed the building was closing. The entire staff then decamped for the new Beverly Hills Hotel with many of the guests following, finding on arrival that the new facility was ready for them. It was the sort of grand stunt that would set the promotional tone for the city for decades to come.

  Newspapers across the country picked up the story. Practically before a single guest had spent the night at the new hotel, it was famous. This was no small accomplishment. In spite of its distanc
e from the East Coast’s population centers, the Los Angeles region wasn’t lacking in luxury hotels. Several establishments had opened in the last three decades of the nineteenth century, including the Pico House in downtown Los Angeles and Pasadena’s Hotel Raymond and Hotel Green, as well as the aforementioned Hollywood Hotel, which opened just after the turn of the twentieth century.

  It’s almost impossible to underestimate the significance of the Beverly Hills Hotel in the success of Beverly Hills the city. Under Margaret Anderson’s watch, the hotel would become much more than a respite for prospective residents, some of whom stayed for extended periods of time. It would become the heart and soul of the new city. In its early days, the hotel was the center for both indoor entertainment, like movies and concerts, and outdoor pursuits, including riding and golf at the neighboring Los Angeles Country Club, as well as a school and place of worship, not to mention restaurants that served meals on a daily basis and sumptuous feasts at holidays.

  And the hotel did its job. Sales for property in Beverly Hills picked up. Construction on homes commenced. The population, while not exploding, increased. Families moved in, and in addition to attending classes held at the Beverly Hills Hotel, students began to show up at the area’s one existing school, the old Canyon School, a one-room schoolhouse built in 1887, located at the bottom of Coldwater Canyon.

  It was over what the residents considered needed improvements of the Canyon School that one of the first tensions between the community of Beverly Hills and the City and County of Los Angeles began to brew, becoming the first step toward Beverly Hills’ incorporation as a separate city. In 1913, Beverly Hills requested that the Los Angeles City Council expand the school. Los Angeles turned them down. Beverly Hills’ residents decided to hold an election to vote on a resolution to create a separate school district. After being passed, a board of trustees was formed. Until the city was incorporated the following year, the Rodeo Land and Water Company picked up the tab for the new school, which had been relocated to what is now the corner of Coldwater Canyon and Sunset Boulevard.3

  In early 1914, two years after the Beverly Hills Hotel opened its doors and a year after the community’s first skirmish with the City of Los Angeles over the needed improvements at Canyon School, Beverly Hills incorporated as a general law city of the sixth class4 under California law, giving it the power to levy taxes as well as the responsibility to provide services such as police, fire, schools, and zoning, and enabling it to issue building permits—for which it could collect fees. At the time of incorporation, the city didn’t have quite enough residents within its borders to technically qualify as a general law city of the sixth class, so Rodeo Land and Water Company principal Henry Huntington, who had men to spare on his payroll, sent in ringers by rail to make up the needed numbers. Considering how fast and loose politicians of the era played with what laws there were, it was a mild chicanery.

  From almost the beginning, the relationship between the City of Beverly Hills and the Rodeo Land and Water Company was an uncomfortable fit. The newborn city was well aware that the Rodeo Land and Water Company paid 70 percent of the taxes it levied and knew that what was in the best interest of the company wasn’t necessarily in the best interest of the city.5 Contractually obligated to provide municipal services, Rodeo separated its real estate and water businesses the year the city incorporated, founding the Beverly Hills Utility Company. Water, sewers, and trash collection would become the responsibility of the new Utility Company; Rodeo Land and Water would continue to sell land.

  The men who created Beverly Hills didn’t set out to build a residential haven for the stars of the silver screen who were beginning to call the region home. In fact, if the recollections of the Beverly Hills first city engineer, Arthur Pillsbury, are correct, it was the opposite: So pervasive were the negative feeling toward “picture folk” throughout the region, that originally, agents were not supposed to sell to anyone in the movie business.6 But if the likes of Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and Charlie Chaplin wanted to buy some of the city’s most expensive lots and build on them, and the city reaped the considerable publicity of the stars residing within its borders, it turned out to be perfectly all right with Beverly Hills’ creators. (It is said at least one of the original residents of the area, who predated cityhood, complained about “picture folk” moving in. According to local legend, it was hotelier Stanley Anderson who talked this nervous Nellie down off the ledge.)7 “Picture folk” were part of the future for the young, affluent city. Call it providential timing or just coincidence, but at the same time real estate development in Beverly Hills was gaining traction, the film industry was becoming solidly entrenched in and around Hollywood. And this parallel growth should not have been a surprise to the principals in the Rodeo Land and Water Company. Green especially was more than aware that moviemaking was on track to become a permanent fixture in the region; he had been involved in the sale of a vast tract of land in the San Fernando Valley to Carl Laemmle that would become Universal Studios. Ditto a similar sentiment on the parts of Margaret and Stanley Anderson. The Hollywood Hotel had become a popular way station and watering hole for the vanguard members of the motion picture industry, newly transplanted from New York. It might be farther afield than other Los Angeles–area neighborhoods, but Beverly Hills had the potential to be the perfect place for the newly minted stars of the silver screen to settle down. It wouldn’t be long before that came to pass.

  3

  Setting the Stage

  In the first decade and a half of the twentieth century, as the Rodeo Land and Water Company was busy speculating in land and seeking to extract natural resources from under the ground, the movie stars who would one day live in the brand spanking new development were just getting their start in an industry that was fresh off its Big Bang in New York City.

  The business of moving pictures was an open playing field for whomever had the moxie to take a chance. And the men who initially took those chances—the men who would eventually be the founders of the Hollywood “industry”—were Eastern European Jewish immigrants. At the end of the nineteenth century, it wasn’t such a difficult business to get into. The stakes weren’t very high at the beginning, when moving pictures were a cheap leisure-time activity for immigrants and the working class. It was an accessible business opportunity for the Jewish immigrants because the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant business establishment had scant interest in a diversion associated with what was perceived as the lower orders of society. The Jews who did go into the moving picture business and went on to become the founding fathers of Hollywood’s movie industry, such as Adolph Zukor, had other advantages over WASP businessmen: Working in retail and fashion, as Zukor had done earlier in his career, had given them experience in recognizing trends and identifying what would become popular. And, finally, since the WASPs weren’t interested in the nascent business of moving pictures, there were no social barriers preventing Jews from entering the field. It’s not without reason that when Adolph Zukor visited a penny arcade in 1903, as he told Michael Korda when reminiscing about how he got started, “I looked around and said, ‘A Jew could make a lot of money at this.’”1

  What Zukor saw in the arcade were peep shows—not peep shows in the prurient sense, but machines where an individual could look through a viewfinder while turning a hand crank to flip through a series of photos that constituted a moving picture scene. The medium was still a ways off from audiences seated in auditoriums viewing projected ten-minute single and double reelers, let alone multi-reel features. New York was the center for these arcades, many of which were started by men like Adolph Zukor. Zukor would eventually start Famous Players, the company for which Mary Pickford would work for many years. Famous Players later merged with Jesse Lasky’s company in 1916, becoming the architects of what we know today collectively as Hollywood.

  It took a few years to transition from arcades with individual peep show machines to the concept of a “movie” as something audiences sat
down and engaged with like a play. But the men who had invested in the arcades were in an advantageous position to transition to exhibiting films when the time came. They already had the locations; transforming a penny arcade to a movie theater required a minimal renovation that involved removing the peep show machines, installing seats, and obtaining a projector. The added bonus: They could charge a nickel per showing, hence the moniker “nickelodeon” for the early movie theaters. Some of the Eastern European Jews who began in the moving picture business in New York at the turn of the twentieth century would go on to establish empires that revolved around exhibiting films in grander and grander movie palaces, others would shift into creating the films that were shown, and a few would do it all.

  It isn’t surprising that the developing moving picture industry, and the technology that supported it, got its start in New York City. It was, after all, the most populous city in the United States with the largest potential audiences that included seemingly endless fresh waves of immigrants, the country’s financial center, and, maybe most importantly, the center of theater, which provided some of the raw material for moving pictures—such as actors, directors, set directors, and lighting experts. Not that those early moving pictures were theater, which had taken on an elevated status of Culture with a capital “C,” but rather an entertaining diversion for immigrants and the lower classes. Those early flickers were immensely popular, though. Within ten years of the turn of the century there were studios churning out moving pictures in every borough of New York and across the Hudson River in New Jersey (Fort Lee, New Jersey, was the moving picture capital of the United States at this time).