“An Actress . . . What everywoman would like to be”
19 Elinor Glyn with protégé Gloria Swanson
20 Aristocratic Elinor Glyn
21 June Mathis, adaptor of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
22 Rudolph Valentino as the Latin lover
23 The Epicene Girls, Alla Nazimova and Natacha Rambova
24 Virginia Rappe seduces Harold Lockwood poolside in Paradise Garden (1917)
25 Virginia Rappe takes a ride with Rudolph Valentino in Over the Rhine (1918)
26 Rappe warns her sex about the dangers of “too much liberty,” 1921
27 Newspaper coverage of “movie orgies” in 1921
28 “Arbuckle Case Rouses California’s Women Vigilants”
29 Valentino and Swanson in Elinor Glyn’s Beyond the Rocks (1922)
30 Poster from James Cruze’s Hollywood (1923)
PART ONE
Along the Road to Hollywood
PROLOGUE I
Landscapes
I
By 1920, city and country were all mixed up. Between the “War to Liberate Cuba” and the “War to Make the World Safe for Democracy,” migrants made their way from rural homes in record numbers. The process was a familiar one, dating back to before the Civil War. What was different about these migrations was the velocity of the movement, the volume of those on the move, and the destinations to which their ambitions drove them. Generally westward migrants continued as before, but few now went in search of a homestead on some sketchily mapped piece of the country. Hopes for a different life lay, for most, along city sidewalks, great and small. Thus the 1920 census made official what many already knew: for the first time, the majority of the U.S. population lived in cities. Imagining the migrants who headed for cities in the new century conjures images of wayfarers in unfamiliar dress disembarking from steamships at Ellis Island, or from trains with the musical rhythms of the race-riven South. Such snapshots abound, documenting the generation between what we now call the Spanish-Cuban-American War and World War I. In this period the movement of the “new immigrants” from Southern and Eastern Europe peaked and the first Great Migration of black Americans streamed north. Both groups mostly settled in midwestern and northern cities, against whose brick, concrete, and steel they hurled their ambitions. The same 1920 census revealed the altered landscape wrought by their resolve: in no major city east of the Mississippi or north of the Ohio did white, native-born citizens remain in the majority.1
This book concerns the implications of reimagining another rural exodus of the era, one that explains how the bucolic backwater of Hollywood, California, became HOLLYWOOD, an industry and a place that specialized in shaping people’s fantasies and fears about modern times. Although it brings few images to mind today, the dimensions of this crossing were no less immense. Indeed, the movement of native-born, white migrants out of the Midwest—“white” here doubling for the ethnic heritage then commonly called Anglo-Saxon—was enormous enough to leave the proportion of native-born to foreign-born in all American cities unchanged despite the massive waves of Europeans settling in the East. Less absolute need, but as much imagination, sent these erstwhile farmers and shopkeepers across prairies, plains, and mountains in a migration similarly premised on mobility’s promise to provide emancipation from the limitations of the known. Southern California was the favored destination of these migrants who helped to create the era’s so-called rural problem. “The rural problem” was the term Progressive reformers coined to capture their belief that social deficiencies, as much as economic deprivation, explained the mounting flight of white Americans from the land during a period of unprecedented agricultural prosperity. Those who aimed to address these deficiencies—called “Country Lifers” for the Country Life Commission Theodore Roosevelt created in 1908—viewed the rural problem from a distinctively masculine, nativist perspective. Assistant Secretary of Agriculture William Hays focused on addressing the needs of those he called “the best crop on the farm,” native-born, Protestant men from the Midwest and Northeast.2
As scholars have well explained, what drew many of those who fit this description to Southern California was the vision that popular writers and savvy commercial developers concocted to advertise the region’s special charms, including its natural beauty, temperate climate, romantic “Spanish” history, new work ideals, and singular ethnic composition. Best-selling novels like Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona (1884) helped to explain the different heritages said to distinguish rugged, raucous Northern California from the state’s more gently rustic southern half. Here one found the gentleman dons and wine-drenched Spanish missions the novelists used to endow the region with a colorful exoticism. Here the health-giving aspects of the landscape and light promised that, at last, labor might become synonymous with pleasure. Historian Hubert Howe Bancroft’s California Pastoral (1888) was another early exemplar. “And so they lived,” wrote Bancroft, a midwestern transplant, publisher, and bibliophile whose collection of books, maps, and manuscripts formed the basis for the West’s first great library, “opening their eyes in the morning when they saw the sun; they breathed the fresh air, and listened to the song of birds; mounting their steeds they rode forth in the enjoyment of healthful exercise; they tended their flocks, held intercourse with each other, and ran up a fair credit in heaven.”
The developers of modern Los Angeles used this image of California Pastoral to fashion perhaps the most shining example in the nation’s long line of astonishingly successful booster campaigns. Curiosity about such descriptions sent the first waves of tourists to the area, tourists who were the bedrock of the region’s economy by 1910. By 1915, just as moviemakers began to venture there in earnest, Collier’s called Los Angeles “The City Advertising Built,” writing, “Here is one dusty little city . . . in the Western desert” made “great by intelligent, consistent, scientific advertising” whose picture of the good life became one of the most tantalizing promotions of the times.3
In this way, the Los Angeles of story, history, and, above all else, booster campaign offered a picture of life that attracted the remarkable number of migrants-with-means needed to launch its speculative, service-heavy projects aloft. Here, publicized railroad officials, real estate agencies, agricultural associations, and finally the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce to the prosperous of the Midwest, lay the country’s own Mediterranean garden, greened by the latest technological wonders and filled with freestanding bungalows decorated in a freshly minted Spanish past. Los Angeles beckoned not just as the “farm perfected, saved from loneliness and back breaking labor,” but also as a refuge from farming itself and from the new immigrants inundating cities east of the Mississippi. Here, proclaimed booster Charles Lummis, lay a new “Eden for Anglo-Saxon home-seekers” as eager to luxuriate in the sunshine as to escape “the ignorant, hopelessly un-American type of foreigner” who “infests and largely controls Eastern cities.” A piece of the heartland responded and moved to Los Angeles, the city that both “benefited from and helped to cause a major internal mass migration in the United States,” according to historian Kevin Starr. During the decade after 1910, the city grew faster than all others on the Pacific Coast combined, passing the million-soul mark and San Francisco as the West’s largest city just after 1920. Many of these youthful strangers from someplace else shared not only their midwestern Anglo-Saxon Protestant origins but also a willingness to use their economic and imaginative resources to chase new desires in the City of Dreams. In this first great metropolis of the twentieth century, country and city
