Abstract
In Central Hollywood, during the 1930s, population became denser, housing values declined, and rooming houses increasingly defined much of the neighborhood. The lodging population was mostly white and native-born (but with significant Asian minorities), young, transient, and maritally unattached. They constituted a working class that was often precariously employed in the entertainment industry, the service sector, and other unskilled or semi-skilled occupations. The rooming houses and residential hotels provided the possibility of housing for the unemployed, the poorly paid, the temporary resident, and the elderly. Lodgers formed part of a socially diverse population in a neighborhood that offered opportunities for employment, services, and entertainment, usually within walking distance. During a decade when migration to Los Angeles was still considerable, rooming houses provided a flexibility in housing possibilities that would decline after the Second World War.
Cecil Belfrage’s 1938 Hollywood novel Promised Land tells the story of the Laurie family who migrated to California from Nebraska in the late nineteenth century and whose matriarch, “Ma Laurie,” is convinced to buy land in the still largely undeveloped suburb of Hollywood. There she builds a “flimsy” and “ponderous” two-story frame house east of Cahuenga and north of Hollywood Boulevard (then Prospect Avenue). As the lives of other characters intersect with the rise of the film industry and they undergo the vicissitudes of success and failure, complemented by alcoholism, rape, mental breakdown, suicide, land grabs, a dam failure, and poverty, Ma, tight-fisted and a teetotaler, acquires more land, determined, as its value rises, to become a millionaire. In addition to her earnings from a four-unit apartment building, Ma regularly rents out rooms in her own house to one or two lodgers to make ends meet. But by the mid-twenties, “[t]he house was looking very dingy. It had evidently not been painted in many years. On the Boulevard side of the house, a great six-storey [sic] apartment house now stood, but behind and on the other side, there still lay, empty and littered with rubbish, the lots onto which for fourteen years Ma had been tenaciously holding. The rest of the land for blocks in each direction was fully built up.” When her investments went bad after the 1929 crash, almost all Ma ends up with is the house. During the 1930s, she turns it into a full-time rooming house. When a visitor arrives, “. . . the door [is] opened by a platinum-blonde in a food-stained wrapper, evidently a lodger . . . . Oddly- and semi-dressed people came in and out constantly,” notes the visitor, “and the place seemed filled with lodgers, like a regular theatrical boarding-house.” Ma’s remaining piece of vacant land has become a parking lot. In important ways, Ma’s story was the story of Hollywood. 1
During the Great Depression of the 1930s, rooming houses like Ma Laurie’s proliferated in the central part of Hollywood. The neighborhood’s generally older and diverse stock of single-family houses, multiplexes, bungalow courts, apartment buildings of varying sizes, and residential hotels proved able to absorb more lodgers into the mix. Hollywood, in fact, was a prime example of what Todd Gish has shown to be the diversity of residential development in Los Angeles which, he argues, had an urban landscape more in common with that of other cities than its—now much disputed—reputation as an unplanned sprawl of single-family houses. 2 Yet, despite Hollywood’s claim to be the Film Capital of the world and the attention lavished by historians and legions of popular writers on the film industry and its personalities, particularly during its so-called Golden Age from the 1920s to the 1950s, the neighborhood itself has been insufficiently studied. 3
Hollywood’s rooming houses and residential hotels have therefore largely escaped historical notice although the lodging milieu (in addition to often crowded apartments and bungalow courts), as portrayed in novels, fan magazines, memoirs, and even movies, was integral to the shaping of those stories of success and failure that were central to the Hollywood imaginary. In her classic study of the Hollywood novel, Carolyn Penelope See found that “the apartments and boarding houses are ubiquitous . . .,” and that in the zeal for fame and fortune, “[o]ne set of spur-of-the-moment acquaintances gives way to another as the protagonist moves from boarding house to boarding house on the way up [or down] the ladder.” 4 The lives of most of the working-class men and women, who lived on the flats below the more affluent Hollywood Hills and who did depend heavily on the world of entertainment for their livelihoods, were, however, more prosaic. Many of them, especially newcomers to the Southland, did wind up, at least temporarily, in rooming houses and residential hotels. The availability of affordable lodging made it possible for these men and women to survive, if not always to thrive.
The paucity of scholarly work on Hollywood is matched by a dearth of studies of rooming houses and lodgers more generally during the half-century after 1900, even though lodging remained a common feature of cities and towns across the country, including Los Angeles. A notable exception is Paul Erling Groth’s book on residential hotels and rooming houses in San Francisco. It examines the gamut of possibilities ranging from the “palace hotel rank” to those of the “cheap lodging house rank” although its principal focus is on downtown hotels. The depression especially, Groth observes, “was a boon to anyone who had inexpensive housing to rent; especially for inexpensive hotels, hard times meant steady and often overflowing business. In skid rows, older and more desperate casual workers piled up.” 5 Since the depression greatly limited the construction of new housing, especially during the early 1930s, the demand for cheap and temporary shelter must have been considerable, as the Hoovervilles that sprang up across the country attested. 6 Moreover, Los Angeles, unlike other large metropolitan areas during the Depression, continued to attract migrants, mainly from other parts of the country, if not on the scale of the previous decade. Between 1930 and 1940, its metropolitan area grew by more than 25 percent, compared to 7 percent for the country as a whole, and, for example, 3 percent for metropolitan Chicago. 7 Moreover, unemployment, surely in part a result of the influx of migrants looking for work, remained high at 11 percent in March 1940 compared to 9 percent for the urban United States. 8 Hollywood was hardly Skid Row, but it was not exceptional in attracting those looking for inexpensive housing.
Most of the Film Capital’s lodgers lived in what is defined here as Central Hollywood, which will be the geographical locus of this study. It is a roughly rectangular area measuring about two miles east to west (from La Brea Avenue to Western Avenue) and one mile north to south (from Franklin Avenue to Santa Monica Boulevard). 9 Despite its relatively small size, Central Hollywood was a diverse area which included sizeable apartment buildings, mainly along Franklin and in the northeast along such streets as Wilcox, Cahuenga, and Yucca; the large craftsman houses built early in the century in the east, and the modest bungalows and court apartments to the south—all of it bisected by Hollywood Boulevard with its myriad of hotels, shops, restaurants, and theaters. Rooming houses were scattered throughout but were especially concentrated north of Sunset. An integral part of Los Angeles, Hollywood was more like a city within a city with its own industrial base, “downtown,” sub-neighborhoods, chamber of commerce, and daily newspaper, the Hollywood Citizen-News. In the 1930s, it was still heavily dependent upon making movies despite the industry’s early and continuing dispersal around the metropolitan area. Paramount, RKO, and Columbia still maintained their studios in Hollywood, while other operations associated with the entertainment industry, including the radio networks, were also located there. 10 Hollywood was a prime tourist destination. Premieres of major productions drew stars and movie-struck crowds. The neighborhood must have seemed exotic, or even morally dangerous, to the typical middle-American tourist who gawked at the lively scene at Hollywood and Vine, which the columnist Sidney Skolsky described as “more like Broadway and 47th St. than any other place I know . . . .” 11
The published census reports are useful for establishing the general contours of an area’s demography, but they have their limitations, and most importantly for our purposes, they provide very little information on lodging. Fortunately, the manuscript enumerator returns for 1930 and 1940, which contain a wealth of information on every household and individual, identify lodgers as such and thus facilitate analysis of lodging on a more granular level. 12 Groth, although he mines a rich array of sources, may significantly underestimate the number of rooming houses in San Francisco since he relies on city directories, rather than the enumerator returns of the census to identify them. If one is to judge by the Los Angeles directory of 1939, the number of rooming houses in Hollywood is hugely underrepresented when compared to the 1940 returns. 13
While the focus will be on 1940, a full count of lodgers has been made for both that year and 1930. For 1940, aggregate data, such as age distribution and marital status, have been drawn on a block-by-block basis from every household and hotel in the twenty-three enumeration districts of Central Hollywood. As a foundation for understanding how the rooming house system worked and how the lives of particular men and women fit into the social economy of the Film Capital as the Great Depression was drawing fitfully to an end, additional data, including occupation and employment, have been compiled from a special subset of rooming houses, hereafter referred to as “the sample lodging data.” 14 Selective data from the 1930 census will show how two smaller areas and, in particular, one street, Wilton Place, changed their makeup during a decade of growing population density. The Los Angeles Times and the Citizen-News, especially the ads for rooming houses in the classified sections, provide important supplemental information. City directories and various government documents, among other sources, have also proven useful. Since large numbers of lower-echelon employees of the film industry, especially actors, lived in rooming houses and hotels, the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) is an important source for further identifying particular individuals. Memoirs and the genre of “Hollywood novels,” such as Belfrage’s, help paint a more intimate picture of Hollywood and rooming house life.
The Growing Importance of Lodging, 1930-1940
By 1940, 5,113 lodgers living in twenty-nine hotels and 1,506 rooming houses, of whom 4,967 were adults older than seventeen, made up 18 percent of Central Hollywood’s population. Women accounted for 1,956, or 39 percent, of the adults. 15 Rooming houses alone provided shelter for 76 percent of the lodging population. (Since the 1940 census did not distinguish lodgers from boarders, who received meals, no attempt has been made to do so here. For the sake of convenience, “rooming house” is used to describe any household that took in lodgers regardless of the number.) Over the previous decade, lodging had become significantly more important to the economic and social configuration of the Film Capital as a stream of newcomers sought out affordable accommodations. Between 1930 and 1940, Central Hollywood became denser, as its population grew from 24,864 to 29,164, even though it was an older neighborhood and, following the building boom of the 1920s, already largely built up. More housing became available partly owing to new apartment construction which, however, tapered off toward the end of the decade, especially with the onset of the Depression. But while the population grew by 17 percent, the number of persons living in rooming houses increased by a far more substantial 84 percent. The number of hotel residents grew more slowly, but if they are added to the count, the total number of lodgers still experienced a 59 percent jump. In other words, residents in hotels and rooming houses accounted for 42 percent of Central Hollywood’s population increase during the 1930s. 16
Central Hollywood remained overwhelmingly white and largely “native American.” The negligible African American population, numbering thirty-five in 1940, consisted almost entirely of menial employees of hotels and apartment buildings or domestics who lived on the premises. Asians were more numerous, especially the 438 Japanese and 222 Filipinos. In 1940, a substantial proportion of each group, 19 and 47 percent, respectively, lived in rooming houses. Hollywood also had a small Latinx population, largely Mexican born or of Mexican descent, whom the 1940 census classified as “white” and who can be identified with certainty only by birth and family relationship (unlike the 1930 census which used “Mexican” as a racial category). Name and place of birth in the manuscript census give the impression of a small but not insignificant Jewish presence. Unfortunately, questions relating to “ethnic” and “racial” Hollywood are too numerous to be considered in detail here and will be addressed in a later study.
Changes in the incidence of lodging were not uniform across neighborhoods, as two 1940 enumeration districts, when compared with their 1930 equivalents, illustrate. An older and declining residential neighborhood to the northeast (Enumeration District [ED] 60-124) saw its lodging population escalate from 84 to 326 which was in fact far greater than its overall growth, from 1,406 to 1,624. By contrast, the population of a second district to the northwest (ED 60-134) experienced the neighborhood’s greatest population increase, from 645 to 1,085, as more apartment dwellers, some of them quite affluent, moved there. The luxury ten-story Montecito, for example, was completed in 1931. Nevertheless, the number of lodgers in the area also grew significantly, from 76 to 178. 17
A close look at one street, Wilton Place, in the northeastern part of Central Hollywood illustrates how declining property values in a once affluent neighborhood were associated with the growth of lodging. During the early 1900s, Wilton Place and adjacent streets had acquired a substantial stock of mostly large craftsman houses, some of which have managed to survive to this day. 18 By the end of the 1920s, much of the area was still a haven for “respectable” and prosperous families, even though homeowners were becoming older, and renters and lodgers were intruding. In April 1930, the census counted 173 people living on the long 1700-1800 block of Wilton Place (between Hollywood and Franklin), including thirty-three who lived in two apartment buildings constructed in 1924 and 1925. Of the thirty-eight non-apartment dwelling household heads, exactly half owned their own houses, whose median value in 1930 stood at $20,000, or three times the median of $6,628 for Los Angeles as a whole. 19 Only seventeen lodgers lived on the block, and of these, eleven had rooms in three houses while the rest were scattered by ones and twos in four others. The three-story craftsman Watkins house was a proper rooming house, built in 1907 and still standing. It accommodated five lodgers plus several family members. The Watkins household, in fact, provided a foretaste of what was to become of the street by 1940. 20
The most obvious change on Wilton Place during the 1930s was the doubling of the population along the block from 173 to 337, which was partly owing to the construction of a six-story apartment building near the corner of Franklin, which added thirty-four residents. 21 The biggest impetus to population growth, however, was the increase in the number of lodgers by more than five times, from seventeen to eighty-eight, who were distributed in sixteen households. Although homeowners along the block decreased only slightly, their properties declined in nominal value, as was the case throughout the country during the Depression; but, more importantly, their value also declined relative to that of the entire city. By 1940, the median value of owner-occupied houses in Los Angeles had recuperated only 58 percent of their value in 1930, but the median for those along Wilton Place had dropped considerably more, to 38 percent of the 1930 figure. Four of the heads of nineteen owner-occupied households in 1930 still appeared in the census ten years later, and another four were headed by their widows, and in one case, by a daughter. 22
Coming to Hollywood
State and federal officials faced massive problems relating to the relief and settlement of migrants seeking refuge from the ravages of the Depression in the presumed promised land of California, including those fleeing rural displacement and poverty in the Dust Bowl States, especially in the face of the hostility of most political figures and most of the media. 23 State agencies and other observers also fretted about the problem of transient youth flocking to Los Angeles, some of whom were attracted to Hollywood. The California State Relief Administration reported that in the short period between December 16, 1935, and January 26, 1936, public and private relief agencies in Los Angeles received 17,476 applications for aid, mostly from single men. The agency noted that “[m]any transients . . . hope to find employment in Hollywood . . .,” and continued, “It is extremely rare for a newcomer in the community to secure any work in motion pictures . . .. But persons with the ambition to act continue to come to Hollywood and to hang around that part of town. Some of them drift into work as waitresses in the vicinity or into less desirable pursuits.” Many must have found their way into local rooming houses especially since, in some cases, an individual could receive aid to rent a room. 24
Miriam Luise Gaertner, a student of social work, who in 1936 interviewed fifty-eight transient women and girls, aged fifteen to twenty-four, echoed the concerns of the Relief Administration. “[P]ractically all the girls,” she found, “were drawn to Los Angeles because of its much-publicized attributes, climate, opportunity for success, beauty; because it is Los Angeles.” Although Gaertner did not get the sense that even the “attractive” women—she judged over half of them to be “definitely attractive”—necessarily expected to achieve a career in pictures, she concluded that most of them had “an excited interest in Hollywood” and “had derived their conception of Los Angeles from photoplays and movie magazines, confusing the ‘set’ with the city.” Remarkably, thirty of the women hitchhiked to Los Angeles from as far away as the middle west and the east coast, while most of the rest came by bus. Hardship, hunger, disappointment, betrayal, and sexual abuse marked the lives of most of them. “Avril,” who was twenty-one when Gaertner interviewed her, had previously worked as a chorine and a singer in night clubs. Now she was just hanging on in a hotel with her funds exhausted. “Hard knocks every so often are just part of the game,” she averred. She intended to stay in Los Angeles. 25
Migrants who came to the Film Capital and ended up in rooming houses, however temporarily, tended to be more recent arrivals to the Southland and must have been among the single transients who caught the attention of relief agencies. While 66 percent of U.S.-born residents of Central Hollywood had migrated to Los Angeles before 1935, only 43 percent of U.S.-born lodgers in the eighteen- to thirty-nine-year age group from the sample lodging data had arrived in the area before that year; and they remained highly mobile. A mere fifteen of them had lived in the same house in 1935. 26 Of a small sample of seventy-two lodgers between the ages of eighteen and thirty-nine years from the 1940 census, only six lived at the same address a year or so earlier, according to the Los Angeles city directory. Somewhat more, sixteen, lived at the same address a year or so after 1940. 27
The presence of lodgers further amplified the neighborhood’s differences from other urban areas (taken as a whole) and, indeed, from the rest of Los Angeles, especially with respect to marital patterns and living arrangements. Not quite the paradise for homeowners that boosters claimed it to be, almost 62 percent of households in Los Angeles rented in 1940, but the figure for Central Hollywood’s 10,729 households was a whopping 87 percent. 28 This was in addition to those living in rooming houses and hotels who were not entered in the census as separate households. In fact, at about 13 percent, Central Hollywood had a significantly higher concentration of families who took in lodgers in 1940 than all Los Angeles where the figure stood at 10 percent, even according to the aggregate census’s restrictive definition of a rooming house. 29 As Table 1 shows, young adults aged twenty-five to thirty-nine (in which the ratio of women to men was nearly equal) were disproportionately represented in Central Hollywood’s population in comparison to other urban areas. Yet unlike this age group elsewhere in urban America, as Table 2 shows, a substantial majority were never married, divorced, or, if married, living apart from their spouse. Not surprisingly, the proportion of children under five in Central Hollywood was exceptionally low. By 1940, lodgers were even younger and less likely to be in a stable marital relationship than the rest of Central Hollywood’s population. Most of the elderly were women who probably had minimal means of support.
Age Distributions: Urban United States, Los Angeles, Central Hollywood, and Sample Lodging Data Base, 1940.
Source: U.S. Bureau of the Census, Sixteenth Census:1940, Population, Vol 2, Part I (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1943), 23, 629; Hollywood Data Base; Sample Lodging Data Base.
Note: The number of persons less than five in Sample lodging data was very small and was not calculated. Tot Pop = total population, Pct = percentage.
Marital Status of Age Interval 25-39 for U.S. and Central Hollywood Enumeration Districts, 1940.
Source: US Bureau of the Census, Sixteenth Census of the United States: 1940, Population, Vol. IV (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1943), 17, 25; Central Hollywood Database; Sample Lodging Data.
Note: The category “married, no spouse present” is a subset of those currently married. Thus, the result is a percentage of those currently married. Pct = percentage.
The Rooming House Economy
The number of lodgers alone understates the significance of lodging to the larger social economy of Central Hollywood by 1940. When the operators, family members, relatives, and help living in rooming houses and hotels are added to the total, the proportion of those having some relationship to the lodging economy rises from 18 percent to 28 percent of the total population (or from 14 to 24 percent excluding the hotels). About a quarter of the population, then, either rented rooms or let rooms for mostly unattached men and women. Most of the 329 rooming houses in the sample lodging data, 67 percent, were small, took in one or two lodgers, probably in an extra bedroom or two, and provided an additional income mainly for older couples, widows, or the divorced. Twenty-nine percent accommodated between three and nine lodgers, and 5 percent, ten or more. The last two groups, however, sheltered, respectively, 54 percent and 23 percent of the rooming house lodgers. The economic impact of lodging extended beyond the houses themselves. Lodgers who had to look after their own sustenance depended on the many small, cheap eateries and soda fountains in the neighborhood, and they could avail themselves of the services and entertainment venues that abounded in Central Hollywood. Moreover, those who hoped to get a break in entertainment could patronize the Film Capital’s army of acting coaches, dance instructors, and music teachers whose ads filled the newspapers. 30
The classified ads were also a place to look for a room. They had separate sections for rooming houses, boarding houses (providing meals), and houses with housekeeping privileges (use of the kitchen or a hotplate). Each was divided into subsections for different sections of the city, including Hollywood. Those perusing the Citizen-News on a typical day in March 1940, for example, could choose from thirty-three rooms with lodging only, ten rooms with board, and nine housekeeping rooms, all in greater Hollywood. Some houses had specific requirements: one ad, for example, sought “young men” or “young women” while another, “two elderly ladies or a couple.” Rooming houses charged mostly in the range of three to eight dollars a week, with the higher rents including board or possibly a private bath. 31
Rooming houses were an important source of income especially for the women who made up 57 percent of the heads of these households in Central Hollywood and who may have had no other means of support. In the sample data, almost three-quarters were widowed, divorced, or married but not living with their husbands. The rest had never been married except for five whose husbands were present but, unusually, did not head the household. While the average age of these women was fifty-seven years, thirty-seven were sixty-five years of age or older. By contrast, three-quarters of the men who headed a rooming house were married and were, on average, slightly younger than the women rooming house keepers. It was probably their wives who did most of the work of running the house. Indeed, in some cases, the wife of the head of household gave her occupation as “housekeeper” in a “rooming house.”
Unless she owned the property, a rooming house operator could lease the house herself, or she could be employed by someone who held the lease or had bought the building as an investment. The Times placed boxed promos in its classified pages extolling the opportunity that awaited anyone with a bit of cash to invest: “. . . this is a mighty fine time to investigate the splendid Income Lease opportunities available! Listed below are a few of the fine Rooming House, Apartment, Hotel, and other Income Lease offerings awaiting your selection in . . . Times Classified Ads.” One such ad offered a house renting for “only” $40 a month on a two-year lease and promised that the twelve rooms would produce a net profit of $85 per month. Another assured a potential taker of an income of $650 from sixteen rooms net with the lease of $1,500, presumably for two years. And yet another ad, placed in the Hollywood Citizen-News’s “Employment Offered for Women” section, sought a rooming house manager whom it promised free accommodation and ten percent of rentals. 32 Leases were sometimes advertised by agents whose identity remains obscure since the ads typically provided only an address and sometimes a telephone number to which a prospective lessee could apply. One address that appeared frequently was 840 South Union Avenue. In the Times classified section headed “Income Leases for Sale-Rooming Houses,” the Union Avenue Agency advertised a sixteen-room house in Hollywood on behalf of a disillusioned operator: “Man can’t manage. Sacrifice. $750 terms.” Another with a house in the “Best Hllywd. dist.” was willing to “Sac[rifice] my Lease.” Prospective rooming house operators also placed their own ads. One was on the lookout for a lease but insisted that the house not be a “dump.” There was, then, a rooming house “industry” in which agents acted on behalf of property investors or engaged on their own account in the buying and selling of leases. They thus facilitated the transformation of family houses into rooming houses. 33
Running a large rooming house was a full-time, but not necessarily a very remunerative, occupation. Gertrude Cox, a widow aged sixty-four, headed a large house with thirteen lodgers at 1750 North Sycamore Avenue that rented for $100. Cox gave her occupation as “housekeeper” in a “rooming house” and earned a wage of $300 for fifty-two weeks of work during the previous year. Free lodging and perhaps a percentage of the room rentals may have supplemented this meager sum of less than six dollars a week. Cox was not alone in having such an arrangement. A block away at 1764 North Orange Drive, Mary Hudson, who was sixty-five years of age and living apart from her husband, likewise earned $300 for fifty-two weeks running a rooming house, also with thirteen lodgers. Cox, however, may have had one advantage. Her divorced daughter Dorothy was a key-punch operator and had earned a solid income of $1,200 the previous year. 34 As in Cox’s case, it was not uncommon to have other family members living in the house who either enjoyed their own income or could share in the chores. In 1930, at the Watkins house on Wilton Place, Charles and his wife Sally, at seventy-five and sixty-five years of age, were getting on in years; but a single son, a daughter, and son-in-law lived at home and were all gainfully employed. They could have helped both with the chores and the rent. The grandparents probably looked after their daughter’s two young children when they were not in school. 35 In another instance, in her divorced mother’s Hollywood rooming house, where eight lodgers resided, the actor Nanette Fabray (née Fabares) was tasked with ironing the male lodgers’ shirts in the morning. She once demonstrated to Johnny Carson on the Tonight Show that she could finish a shirt in one minute flat! 36 These households, then, like many others, could survive, and perhaps thrive, within a larger family economy of mutual support.
Living a Lodger’s Life
The quality and amenities of rooming houses can sometimes be inferred from the block they were on, the employment of the residents, the property or rental value of the house, and descriptions in the classified ads. Most of the larger houses included both men and women. A boarding house on Harold Way described itself as “a real home” and made a special note of its Sunday dinner. It was run by a couple in their sixties, and in April 1940, five lodgers lived there, including a divorced female secretary with three children between nine and thirteen. Since she worked forty-two hours a week, she could probably count on some childcare outside school hours. One ad sought a “gentleman” whom it promised a garden and private bath for five dollars per week. 37 Private baths, however, were rare. Often “home” meant sharing a room with another lodger and sharing a single bathroom with several more. As one observer of the Hollywood scene noted, “Often the destitute double up on a room with their luckier friends.” 38 Somewhat more common was a house that offered an “Adj. shower” or a sink in the room. Most ads revealed nothing about the plumbing. In a Chicago boarding house, which resembled mid-range Hollywood houses, the one woman among six lodgers had the privilege of first use in the morning of the only bathroom. 39 The Garden Vue Hotel on Hollywood Boulevard, which was home to twenty-four lodgers in 1940, survived as the Hollywood and Highland Hostel with dormitory rooms, bunkbeds, and still no private baths. 40 As for boarding, good, hearty food could be part of the draw. The Loyal Boarding House on Wilton Place, which was in one of Hollywood’s better areas, assured prospective lodgers that they would get “3 big, delicious meals a day, good beds, shwrs, etc.” Another advertised “Lge. rms. Refined. Friendly People, Fine food,” not to mention a “Beaut. Grdn.” 41
Other sources, however, tended to paint a less-flattering picture. The comedian Steve Allen recalled his “crummy one-room place in this crummy rooming house on Cahuenga . . . .”
42
The operator of one rooming house complained to Times columnist Alma Whitaker that she had effectively lost control over men and women mingling in a haze of tobacco smoke amid bottles of whiskey.
43
Another house, even if more constricting, left its one female lodger in a state of anxiety. Gaertner described her situation in a house “just off the central shopping district of Hollywood”: Solange is living in a run-down rooming house. She has a medium size bedroom, fairly clean, light, and airy, for which she is paying three dollars and fifty cents per week. She has no parlor privileges. The landlady is strict and will not allow her to receive men friends. All the other roomers are men and, although Solange has never seen any of them, she is sometimes afraid to be there alone. She is not permitted to use the kitchen, so takes her meals in the many cheap restaurants in the vicinity.
44
The peripatetic writer John Fante changed his residence in Hollywood three times between the summer and fall of 1935 to escape annoying landladies. The first was “a religious fanatic” devoted to Aimée Semple McPherson, while the second was an “ex-actress and schoolteacher,” who pestered Fante with “the story of her life.” 45 As for the quality of the food, Raymond Chandler, who knew the underside of Hollywood well, described one of Marlowe’s clients as having a voice “as cool as boarding-house soup.” 46
Whatever the condition of their houses, most lodgers, like Solange, had to depend on those “cheap restaurants,” which could nonetheless offer hearty, if plain, meals. For instance, Thrifty Drug Store’s mixed grill only set the diner back a quarter. 47 On a writing binge, Erskine Caldwell rarely left his room at the Warwick Hotel except to have a fifteen-cent breakfast or twenty-cent lunch at a drug store and then to go for dinner on the Boulevard where he could dig into a platter of admittedly tough T-bone steak and hashed browned potatoes for twenty cents. Steve Allen, on the other hand, survived for a time on chocolate-covered doughnuts and milk. 48 Eating alone might be lonely, but the Film Capital’s numerous bars and restaurants also provided opportunities for socializing, for seeing and being seen. They could act as a communications network for the neighborhood where gossip and hot tips on the horses at Santa Anita to studio hiring made the rounds. Bradley’s Five and Ten was a real bargain and a popular hangout on the Boulevard where, according to the writer Irving Wallace, “for fifteen cents, you can have a hot dog and a stein of beer big enough to make you see pink elephants where you can sit in oversized soft chairs and observe bit players, second-rate agents and all the fringe of Hollywood’s society move in and out.” 49
Some rooming houses must have offered congenial spaces for gay people since Hollywood had a lively Queer scene. According to the gay activist Harry Hay, Hollywood and Vine, besides being a tourist destination, also served as the city’s “most famous cruising ground of the 1930s . . ..” 50 The sources used here provide only one clear example, in this case, from Gaertner’s interviews: “Josepha” met a “divorcee” with two small children en route across the country. When they arrived in Hollywood, a policeman directed them to a rooming house where “the majority of guests were male homosexuals.” 51
Packed into Hollywood was a full range of hotels from the luxurious to the dingy which offered weekly or monthly rentals in addition to daily rates. They provided an alternative to rooming houses especially if one desired greater privacy and, if one could afford it, greater amenities and comfort, such as a private bathroom. Some older residents might spend several years in a hotel. Dating from the 1920s were such well-known first-class establishments as the Plaza, the Knickerbocker, and the most prestigious among them, the Roosevelt. All of them housed longer-term residents. The Roosevelt, located on the Boulevard (ED 60-137), counted 117 residents in 1940, of whom forty-two were sixty and older. Twelve of them had been living there at least since 1935. Ten, including five actors, none of whom rose above the rank of a featured player, worked in the entertainment industry. The absence of any Hollywood celebrities staying at hotels like the Roosevelt may have been an accident of the timing of the census. By 1940, however, they probably preferred the now more fashionable hotels on the Sunset Strip or in Beverly Hills and Bel-Air. One partial exception was the luxurious Chateau Elysée on Franklin Avenue (ED 60-124). The census classified it as an apartment building, but it was more like a hotel with its own bar, restaurant, and room and maid service. The directors Dorothy Arzner and Robert Z. Leonard, for example, rented suites there in 1940, as did the popular character actor Spring Byington. According to Edward G. Robinson, the Chateau Elysée “was headquarters and command post for a great many of the New York expatriates.” 52
Many lesser lights in the entertainment industry favored hotels in the intermediate range. The Warwick on Wilcox (ED 69-135), for example, counted six actors, a stuntman, an actor and director, a director, and a scenario writer among its residents while the Regent Hotel on Hollywood Boulevard (ED 60-126) housed twenty-two persons of the entertainment industry, including fourteen actors, half of whom had appeared in uncredited parts (bit players, a step above an extra) over the years and sometimes enjoyed modest, if irregular, incomes. The venerable Hollywood Hotel (ED 60-137), which had lost some of its luster since its heyday as a Mecca for wintering easterners, had effectively become a seniors’ residence by 1940. Fifty-one of its sixty-eight residents were sixty or above, most in their seventies and eighties. 53
At the low end of the spectrum was one of Hollywood’s more disreputable hotels, the Mark Twain, located on Wilcox south of the Boulevard (ED 60-135). While working at a poverty row studio, John Fante took a room there in 1935, “then as today,” according to his biographer, “a squalid but centrally located operations base for Hollywood newcomers, outsiders and passers-through.” “I am certainly not going to live here,” Fante wrote to his mother. “I hate it. But it will do temporarily. It has one advantage in that it is in the very heart of Hollywood and as near work as I can possibly get.” 54 Two years later, the animator Joe Barbera described the hotel as a “not particularly enlightened penitentiary.” 55 Raymond Chandler may have had it in mind when he described a seedy Hollywood hotel room as “small, mean and tawdry” whose window curtains “had fly marks on them . . . [where t]here was a wash bowl in the corner with two paper-thin towels hanging beside it . . . [and], of course, no bathroom . . . .” 56 Of the twenty-three men and ten women lodging at the Mark Twain in April 1940, twenty-one were over forty (with three aged sixty-five or older). Twenty-four men and women listed an occupation, but eleven of them were seeking work, including Louis Gasnier, who had directed the infamous Reefer Madness in 1936. On the other hand, according to his friend William Saroyan, the writer Jim Tully, who had “a fine home” in the Hollywood Hills, “rented a room at the Mark Twain and went there every day to put in a little time writing, or maybe to lie on the bed and sleep.” But Tully, who had spent time on the road, was used to living rough. Saroyan preferred the “less-depressing” Hotel Gilbert down the street. 57
Making a Living
The typical income for the men and women living in rooming houses and hotels would, in principle, have been sufficient for rent and sustenance. When Caldwell was paying seven dollars a week at the Warwick, “I was living well within my budget of twelve dollars a week.” He had enough left over to roll his own cigarettes and for postage to submit his stories to magazines. 58 Many could even have managed a studio or one-bedroom apartment, which at the lower end, could be rented for twenty-five to thirty dollars per month, especially since they could then prepare their own meals. But matters might be more complicated for many lodgers. A substantial 26 percent of the 1,424 persons in the sample data who were between the ages of eighteen and sixty-four, including most female spouses, did not report an occupation in 1940. Of the 1,050 who did, 18 percent were self-employed—music teachers, free lance writers, repair persons, and small business or professional persons—whose income in 1939, unlike that of wage earners, was not reported in the census. Since many wage earners were fitfully employed and worked an average of only thirty-seven weeks, their average income over the course of a year was seventeen dollars per week. Of course, there were many lodgers who earned less than the average. Moreover, 17 percent of the men and 7 percent of the women who reported an occupation, even if they had earned an income in 1939, were unemployed at the time of the census and seeking work. 59 In such circumstances, renting a room was a hedge against uncertainty, especially at a time when unemployment was still high, and provided a way for newcomers to get their bearings before finding something more permanent.
The entertainment industry—film, stage, radio, music, and their associated branches—was the largest single employer of Central Hollywood’s lodgers in the sample data (see Table 3). Another large group made their living in restaurants, bars, clubs, and hotels. Altogether about half of those lodgers stating an occupation were part of the world of entertainment and “hospitality,” while most of the rest claimed a variety of white- and blue-collar jobs. Outside the film industry itself, relatively few followed industrial pursuits although some were already working in the aircraft factories which were becoming a major employer in Los Angeles as the Roosevelt administration boosted military spending. 60 A closer look at seven larger rooming houses offers a clearer picture of the eclectic mix of working-class men and women, mostly single, and mostly in their twenties and thirties, who lived there. (All of the following are male unless otherwise noted or are apparent from the occupational designation.) There were seven waitresses, two waiters, three bartenders, one dishwasher, three busboys, three cooks (one female), one laborer in a restaurant, one counter girl, and one floor girl. The motion picture industry accounted for four actors, one writer, one property man, one truck driver, and one nurseryman. There were four musicians: two in a dance orchestra, one symphonic, and one simply a musician. The remaining occupations comprised four salesmen, one saleslady, two hotel workers, three clerks (one in a drugstore and a husband and wife team in the “political” field), two stenographers (female), a theater usher and a doorman, one routeman in linen supply, one laborer in ice cream manufacturing, one laborer (field not given), one gardener, two housekeepers (female), one school custodian, one painter in home construction, one metal punch operator, one garage night man, two pinsetters in a bowling alley, one magazine illustrator, one public school teacher (female), and one “new worker.” Twenty-three of these sixty-seven lodgers were currently unemployed and looking for work. Five of the lodgers gave no occupation details. 61
Occupational Distribution by Gender, Sample Lodging Data, 1940.
Source: Sample Lodging Data.
Note: Actor includes screen, stage, and radio; creative includes writers, artists, designers, and so on, working outside the entertainment industry; professional and managerial includes those not in the second and third categories. Pct. = percentage.
Among the motion picture actors in the sample lodging data, fifty-eight can be identified with a reasonable degree of certainty in the Internet Movie Database, in most cases, playing uncredited roles, while sixty-two, presumably mostly extras, cannot. While these results cannot be precise, they do give a fair picture of how things stood, namely, that most “actors” who lived in rooming houses had a quite precarious relationship to the industry with respect both to wages and availability of work. In 1939, only 32 percent of extras earned $500 or more, which was actually an improvement over 1937 (when the figure was 19 percent) and 1938. On the other hand, the total number of paid extras declined from 15,936 in 1937 to 9,849 in 1939. Women, moreover, were at a disadvantage in getting called as extras. Although more women than men were registered at Central Casting, the percentage of women hired for each year between 1935 and 1940 ranged from 29 percent to 32 percent. While crowd or restaurant scenes, for example, usually included both men and women, there was rarely an all-female equivalent for the battle scenes, pirate ships, and sheriffs’ posses that required only men. 62
Altogether, 1,117 actors lived in Central Hollywood in 1940, of whom 355, almost a third, were lodgers. Most of the motion picture actors in the sample lodging data, 96 out of 119, were male and older. Eighty-six were thirty or above, well past the age for beginning a successful career in pictures. Indeed, forty-nine of these men and women were into their forties and beyond, unlike the generally more youthful rooming house residents. Remarkably, nearly all the actors aged twenty-five years or older (ninety-three) had never been married (forty-two), were divorced (twenty-three), were not living with their spouse (sixteen), or were widowed (four). 63 The reality of being an actor in Hollywood, then, did not mean rubbing elbows with stars or establishing a stable household; it meant sharing much of your daily life, often in a rooming house, with other men and women who also occupied the lower rungs of the occupational ladder and experienced precarious employment prospects. Under such circumstances, the film industry had a huge advantage. When it needed bodies, it could count on a substantial local supply living in rooming houses, hotels, and other cheap accommodations. There was a grain of truth in a Connecticut expatriate’s exaggerated and condescending remark that when four “Indian pictures” were in production in 1940, “[e]very Indian suit in every costume company in Hollywood is now being worn, and all the hotels and boarding houses are full of Indians.” 64
Some exceptions to the generally dismal prospects of those seeking a career in pictures could be found among the ninety women who were lucky enough to get room and board at the Hollywood Studio Club. The fifty-seven who gave details on occupations relating to entertainment, including ten who had clerical jobs at the studios, would also have significantly increased the proportion of women lodgers working in the film industry beyond those found in the sample lodging data. Tales have abounded of the “studio girls” who, after passing through the Club, achieved stardom, and among them were Rita Moreno, Barbara Hale, Kim Novak, Donna Reed, and Marilyn Monroe. In the enumerator returns of 1940, however, the names of future stars living at the Club do not jump off the pages although there were a few who were able to pursue a modest career in pictures. 65
Other women who were not so lucky might have drifted into “the less desirable pursuits,” as the State Relief Administration put it. Such occupations were not recorded in the census, but among the irregularly employed actors, dancers, and waitresses living in rooming houses and hotels, some must have gained even a part-time livelihood in sex work or in the semi-underground pornographic industry, for here Hollywood did offer “opportunities.” Queer People, a once notorious Hollywood roman à clé, featured a rooming house which became “a happy hunting ground for a hardworking group of blondes . . . . All were blonde. All were young. All were predatory.” The house became “a social center” for men “bearing furs, clothes, jewelry, and gin.” 66 Quite apart from lurid prose, there was evidence for the fictional trope. “Eventually,” Gaertner lamented, “some of [the women she interviewed] will accept the attentions of persistent males hovering in the vicinity [of employment agencies].” She confirmed that at “the casting offices of the large motion picture studios . . . there is a ‘stag line’ waiting to entice discouraged and hungry girls.” Eleven of her thirty-nine interviewees who agreed to a medical exam had a venereal disease. 67 Irving Wallace identified the Pacific Ciné Arts Film Company as a place where “unemployed girls become employed by stripping off their clothes and for $3 an hour, performing in the nude for two days at a time to help make suggestive movies for stag parties.” 68
Conclusion
The decline in housing values and proliferation of rooming houses in the Film Capital seemed to confirm the conclusions of inspectors for New Deal housing programs who by 1939 were unimpressed by the state of the neighborhood. On the color-coded maps used by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) and the Federal Housing Administration, all of Central Hollywood was shaded entirely in hues of yellow (a “definitely declining neighborhood”) and red (“hazardous”), except for uncolored areas which were deemed “business” and “industrial.” The industrial zone consisted mainly of film studios. But the business district as defined by the HOLC, bounded south to north by Sunset and Franklin and east to west by Gower and La Brea, was in fact densely populated and home to between 8,000 and 10,000 persons in 1940, living mainly in apartment buildings, hotels, and rooming houses. Hollywood’s red area contained housing whose maintenance was often of “poor quality” and sometimes “jerry built,” perhaps like Ma Laurie’s ‘flimsy’ rooming house. Some blocks had dwellings “said to be operated on a ‘bawdy house’ basis.” Others could have been given a higher rating “[w]ere it not for a scattering of Japanese and Filipino residents.” One yellow-coded area had a “heterogeneous” population, fifteen percent of which consisted of “American-born Jews.” 69 Although Hollywood Boulevard remained a vibrant shopping and entertainment artery during 1930s, the expectation of boosters that it would become Los Angeles’s center for luxury shops and high fashion never materialized. 70
As for Wilton Place, the HOLC assessors had no doubt that it and surrounding streets were becoming less desirable, coloring the area yellow. Even though the repair of the houses was deemed fair to good and no “Negroes” or “subversive nationalities” lived in the area, the assessors emphasized termite infestation, improper drainage, and “antiquated architectural designs.” Perhaps more to the point, they feared that the neighborhood was “beginning to incline toward heterogeneity” and was threatened with the “infiltration of subversive racial elements and encroachment of business.” 71 In 1939, the 1700-1800 block of Wilton Place, according to a Works Progress Administration survey, consisted of twenty-six single-family houses, which would have included the rooming houses, four two- to four-family dwellings, three apartment buildings, and six vacant lots. 72 At least two of those lots would disappear by 1941 after two additional two-story multi-unit buildings were built, a foretaste of the rows of apartment buildings on many Hollywood’s streets today. 73
Nevertheless, by the end of the decade, the block remained a relatively desirable place for people of any age to find lodging. Some elderly persons, mostly women on their own, were fortunate, at least for the moment, to find rooming houses that also offered some care. One house at 1723 North Wilton Place was, according to its own advertisement, a “beautiful” home for the “aged and convalescent,” providing twenty-four-hour care and the “best of food.” It housed thirteen lodgers, including one male, eleven of whom were over sixty-five years of age. None there or at a neighboring house for the elderly was living with a spouse. All but four had been living in the Los Angeles area at least since 1935. Since most of those who can be traced to the 1930 census came from modest backgrounds, the thirty-five dollars or so a month they had to pay for room and board probably did not leave much to spare. The youngest at forty-four, Alice Lake, had been a well-known movie star in the 1920s, but her career careened downward in the sound era on a slope apparently well-lubricated by alcohol. (Already by 1930, she was living at the Mark Twain Hotel.) One lodger who seems to have pursued a successful career was Mary George who was a department manager at a department store in 1930 and already divorced. Perhaps she was a victim of a depression layoff since, at sixty-one in 1940, she was still relatively young. 74
Having to cope with the demands of age, widowhood, loss of career, and decline in income was bad enough, but then having to find another place to live when your rooming house was sold out from under you made life even more complicated, for in the fall of 1941, 1723 was advertised for sale. And then in December, the Loyal Boarding Home, which at its previous location had claimed to house forty-five [sic] Lockheed “boys,” moved in. But it ceased advertising in the Times by the end of the year. Eventually, it and the rooming house next door were torn down. The growing demand for housing for workers at defense plants, such as Lockheed Aircraft, must have made matters worse for the elderly and likely would have marked a real change for lodging in Hollywood more broadly. 75
Hollywood could be, in Carey McWilliams’s words, “lonely, insecure, full of marginal personalities, people just barely able to make ends meet; a place of opportunists and confidence men, petty chiselers and racketeers, bookies and race-track touts; of people desperately on the make.” 76 It was also a real neighborhood with its own configuration of industry, commerce, institutions, demography, living arrangements, and, importantly, mystique. Although the Film Capital did include middle-class areas and even affluent enclaves, it was primarily home during the 1930s to working people who depended heavily on the entertainment industry and the service sector. Rooming houses allowed the young, unattached, and those working with little pay or only occasional employment, as well as the elderly, to find affordable housing. Running a rooming house also offered opportunities for those on diminished incomes, mainly women, to support themselves as they got older. The “decline” of historic Hollywood during the Depression may have led paradoxically to a wider availability of affordable shelter in a neighborhood that had a full array of services and was still livable and lively. Hollywood’s relative desirability was, of course, a privilege enjoyed by its overwhelmingly white and mostly native-born population. Subsequent decades brought further changes; we have already seen a hint—those “Lockheed boys”—of what must have been a growing demand for housing during the war, not to mention for the large postwar migration to the Southland. Moreover, since few apartment dwellers (at least during the 1930s) took in lodgers, the replacement of houses by multi-unit buildings, a process that picked up speed in the postwar years, could have led to a decline in lodging more generally. After the war, Hollywood went on to experience death throes and resurrections, while in more recent years, the problem of housing there and in greater Los Angeles has grown to crisis proportions. 77
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank colleagues in the Department of History at Concordia University, especially Frank Chalk, Norman Ingram, and Alison Rowley, as well as former students John Hamer and Kyla Henriksen, for their comments on an earlier draft and for their continuing encouragement. The author also wishes to thank Kathy Feeley and Becky Nicolaides for the opportunity to present an earlier version before the LA History and Metro Studies Group in October 2021, members of which offered helpful comments and suggestions. Finally, the author benefited from many conversations with an old friend, William Allen, whose aunt, Marie Cote, operated a boarding house in Hollywood during the 1940s and 1950s.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
