Tours to the Studio
HOLLYWOOD
By GORDON KAHN
THE happy tourist days that wore, before the motion picture studios were Sealed with seven seals, are here again. Once more the freeways of la Ciudad de Nuestra Senora la Reina de los Angeles, or the Pearl of U.S. Highway 66, are full of the coming and going of license tabs from forty-eight states and three territories.
Burbling along behind a package of cylinders fresh off the assembly line, there’s a Pa at every helm, with a Ma beside him navigating from a souvenir map and a 1938 edition of the Duncan Hines guidebook to the eating places. Seen through tinted sunglasses their California is a chartreuse happyland with woodsprites under beach umbrellas every hundred feet along the Camino Real, offering popcorn and “Tours to the Studios — Visit the Movie Stars Homes - Your Car or Mine!”
Soon enough they learn that the studios are neither resorts nor museums, but plants where people work with calculating machines as well as panchromatic make-up, and that they rear the same frowning gray bulk as the harvester works back home. Also that film stars are no more hospitable to unbidden callers than are bankers.
From that point on they can wallop around on the Little Tour: between the enchilada stalls of Olvera Street and the midget auto races, with side trips to the Catalina bird farm and the world’s largest olive press. And when the lime comes to turn the noses of their Chevvies homeward, flying the fox-tail burgee, very few, perhaps a tenth of the pilgrims, will have absorbed enough movie glamour to twitch the needle of a Geiger counter.
The film companies have no desire to be exclusive, but when a pack of 350 tourists slips the leash, as it did recently at RKO, and overruns every holy place, they have to lower the boom. Seven major companies swore a compact that they would admit only 200 trippers a day between them.
One studio alone accommodates 80 a day without a scratch, in two flights, morning and afternoon by motorbus. Once inside the compound their feet never touch the ground. The charabanc whips through the lot like a Buck Rogers space ship. The muffled halloos from within, which may even be pleas for oxygen, are regarded by the actors with no more concern than a brakeman gives a cattle car shunted through the yards.
Later, when they compare notes, the tourists wonder if the barker wasn’t mistaken a little. Why would Bette Davis be lugging a mop and bucket into the Administration Building? It also occurs 1O them that the animal he pointed out as Lassie seemed to behave with the insouciance of a laddie.
The wanderers’ fantastic appetites, which they naturally prefer to allay where film people eat, had been capitalized upon for years by the concessionaire of the restaurant at Universal, when that studio was trying to stay afloat. He decoyed them with a big electric sign reading: “Meet and Eat With the Stars,” and in two years they ate the studio back on its feet. But its new owners, Universal-International, took the sign down and walled up the street entrance to the studio cafe so that its mummers can break a chop without halting at every bite to endorse greasy menus and antique laundry lists.
Since so many actors cannot live by bread alone unless it is buttered on both sides by aves and cries of Gaudeamus! they wander off the reservation to front tables reserved for them in a number of public restaurants. It is in these places that Pa and Ma take their worst licking — right in the pad of traveler’s checks.
Part of the Drang nach Kalifornien is the prospect of at least one lunch in a studio commissary within sight of, well, Walter Pidgeon, for Ma’s sake, and within sound of his high-altar voice. And for Pa to be in the same dining room with Greer Garson —well, sir, that would be something! That, however, is a privilege authorized only for high-priority tourists. War veterans in uniform stand AAA at Warner Brothers and church dignitaries the same at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer; financiers at RKO; prominent Southerners at Paramount. Politicians, particularly those with a voice in foreign and tax affairs, are seated above the salt everywhere.
It must be noted that in most studios there are three refectory levels; one for the white-collar and overalled crafts; one for the professionals such as directors, actors, and writers; and a third for the members of management and production. At MGM there are five, the three lower echelons being served from the same kitchen. The upper two are an executives’ dining room for luncheon and dinner conferences and a salon with a separate culinary staff, where L. B. Mayer fares alone or vis-à-vis his closest associates.
Foreigners, unless they are British, military, and high in Burke’s Peerage, are not encouraged by the studios. They had more than they bargained for with Vittorio Mussolini, Leni Riefenstahl, brothers of Hirohito, a Burmese premier who was nailed as a Jap spy, and every eel-slick phoney who ever signed the guest book at Pickfair. The bane of one studio is bearded foreigners who speak no English. Here it befell that one of these, an important French industrialist with a fine curly bush, lost his guide. An assistant director shouting, “Hey, you with the muff! Over on Stage Nine!” collared him. Convinced by the man’s shouts of “M’daider!” that here was a “subversive” thumping for May Day, the assistant hazed him into a mob scene where he was forced to shout, “À la lanterne!” For a while there things looked pretty tough.
Men of science are presumed to be above or immune to glamour. Yet with few exceptions those who come to California to provoke the atom or tune up the cyclotron, display a concurrent interest in the White Marys of the chorus line. One celebrated physicist, who could slug it out to a draw with Einstein, kept a lot of fissionable material stewing in the cooker while he posed for photographs with a starlet on each arm.
The hundreds daily who can’t get into the basilicas to see the stars, form patrols, stalking the outside of night clubs like tigers on the scent of valerian. Fetishism sends them to the residential sections to catch, if they can, a glimpse of a star’s husband or wife, his house or his dog. They will snatch the advertising folders off his lawn and dip water from his lily pond.
Having reached ivied maturity, Beverly Hills is no longer the most popular colony, bul professional guides still lead their clients into it, deeding houses left and right with bland disregard for the facts. My own hogan has no doubt been tabbed by the guild of Hollywood dragomen to describe as they will. One week it is the house where William Desmond Taylor, a film director, was killed in the early 1920’s. The shooting actually took place eight miles away in a bungalow court. Another jarvey points it out as having once been a luxurious opium den catering to stars and featured players.
The last time, it was pointed out as the honeymoon cottage of a celebrated pair of lovers. My two boys had to choose that moment during their game of Baby-Face Nelson to lam out of the front gate.
“Hers,” said the guide, “by a former alliance.”
That made something to gum over with dandelion wine and icebox cookies when they got back to Kansas. That or something just as rubbishy.
While that stack of Series E bonds is still intact, it’s better by far to know that Humphrey and Errol and Irene and Betty love you all. And that you would love them less if you had to watch a two-hour rehearsal of a scene that will run for only one minute on the screen at the Bijou.
Well, you say, there are no immigration bars at the California border. That’s right. And what’s more, the sidewalks even in front of the movie studios are just as free.
The Chamber of Commerce and the All-Year Club say come. Why shouldn’t they? They’ve got things to sell. And the tags say, “ Prices slightly higher west of the Rockies,”
If you’ll settle for the Dream Girl’s kissing the tip of her glove once for each hundred of you — or your Idol’s giving you that apostolic “Hi, folks” followed by a snootful of exhaust from his roadster —
Oh, you’re not! You’d better visit the folks in Springfield? That’s the other way — towards Mecca. And you won’t he needing that map — or those sunglasses!