10HOLLYWOOD BABYLON

AGAINST A BACKDROP of oil boom, real estate frenzy, and population explosion in Southern California, Hollywood emerged in the mid-1920s to become the nation’s fifth largest industry. The big studios—Paramount, Fox, Universal, United Artists, Metro Pictures, Goldwyn Pictures, Warner Bros., imperially run by movie moguls and linked vertically to national distribution systems and theater chains—grossed $1.5 billion a year and accounted for 90 percent of all the films made in the world.¹ Awash in cash, this new class of men and women, “the movie people,” were living in such an aura of lavishness and glamour that it would give rise to the epithet “Hollywood Babylon.”

To a nation ostensibly founded on the bedrock of Puritanism, the movie people, dedicated to the body and senses, to passions and dreams, were wallowing in a moral cesspool of biblical proportions. Even in its infancy, Hollywood was inundated with scandals of all sorts, Babylonian or otherwise. Infidelity and divorce made constant headlines, destroying or enhancing—depending on public sentiment as fickle as spring weather—the reputations and careers of those involved; tragic suicides revealed the dark side of living in the fast lane; and brutal murders were more shocking in reality than the horror movies they inspired. On September 10, 1920, Olive Thomas, the sister-in-law of Mary Pickford, committed suicide in a Paris hotel, a tragedy induced by drug addiction and despondency over her husband’s philandering. A year later to the day, Virginia Rappe, a twenty-five-year-old actress, died during a three-day orgy hosted by Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle at a hotel in San Francisco. At the time, Arbuckle, an ex-plumber from Kansas, was Paramount’s top-earning actor, whose popularity as a comedian was second only to that of Charlie Chaplin. Arbuckle was arrested and charged with murder on suspicion that he had violently raped Rappe with a champagne or Coca-Cola bottle or a piece of ice. Even though he was acquitted, exoneration by the court of law did not save him in the court of public opinion. Paramount canceled Arbuckle’s $3 million contract and shelved his unreleased films. Even though he attempted a comeback by changing his name to Will B. Good, subsequently refining it to William Goodrich, Arbuckle died broke and broken at the age of forty-six, making him the embodiment of the classic American story of rags-to-riches to ruin.²

And then there was the shocking murder of the actor and director William Desmond Taylor on February 1, 1922—a never-solved killing that brought to light bizarre details that would shake the foundation of Hollywood: Taylor, the ex-president of the Motion Picture Directors Association, was actually William Cunningham Deane-Tanner, an Irish-born homosexual who had mysteriously disappeared from New York a decade earlier. Since so many movie people were fugitives from their own pasts, the truth about Taylor erected a funhouse mirror for almost everyone. It created an existential crisis in Hollywood, lending credence to the Shakespearean line, “All that glitters is not gold.”³

The succession of scandals would prompt a period of soul-searching and the appointment of William Hays as the czar of censorship in 1922, followed by the issuing of the infamous Production Code. It imposed restrictions on such subject matter as sex, violence, religion, and race, and it banned portrayals of miscegenation and interracial romance—Madame Butterfly would be out. As we shall see, these puritanical and overtly racist guidelines became a virtual form of foot-binding for Anna May, shackling her career ambitions for the rest of her life.

The Hollywood party, however, must go on. The Roaring Twenties continued to roar. In this age of jazz, flappers, cars, billboards, radios, washing machines, sewing machines, refrigerators, toasters, vacuum cleaners, as well as the Ku Klux Klan parades and cross burnings, America—at least the America portrayed in fan magazines—was a sprawling party that would seem to go on forever. The Dream Factory in Hollywood used the medium of film to supply America’s need for dreams: social mobility, a better life, romance, a bigger home, travel, leisure, and excitement of all sorts. And as the headquarters of self-actualizing myth, Hollywood certainly led the way in this epic of conspicuous consumption—of what F. Scott Fitzgerald, as the decade’s most recognizable spokesperson and victim, called “the greatest, gaudiest spree in history.”⁴

If Anna May thought what she had seen at the Garden of Alla was impressive and overwhelming, she had not seen anything. In fact, after a decade of living in high style, Nazimova had fallen on hard times by the mid-1920s. Her stylish Spanish mansion was converted to a hotel, and she ended up as a tenant renting a room in her former palace. But many more showplaces of the movie people would rise in Hollywood, as would new parvenus, among them Thomas H. Ince, who built a mansion and inaugurated the Aquarian lifestyle of outdoor sports, big cars, and weekend parties. Others followed suit with bigger and costlier homes in the hills above Hollywood and in Bel Air. John Barrymore’s Beverly Hills estate consisted of sixteen buildings on seven acres, featuring such amenities as a swimming pool, a skeet-shooting range, a zoo, and an aviary of rare birds. Harold Lloyd’s Greenacres, a twenty-two-acre estate, encompassed “a forty-room Italian Renaissance villa worthy of Lorenzo de Medici himself.”⁵

The crown jewel, however, was Pickfair, the hilltop residence of Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, representing the very essence of glamour and respectability in Hollywood style. At their height, “Mary and Doug” were the First Couple of the United States, Pickfair the Buckingham Palace of Hollywood. Both hailing from origins of obscurity and poverty, the couple purposefully lived private lives as public performances, artfully releasing to the press such details as “who came to dinner, who walked the dogs, what Doug gave Mary for her birthday.” Shunning such time-honored symbols as rugs, paintings, and antiques, Mary furnished their home with department-store merchandise—or things that George Babbitt, the title character of Sinclair Lewis’s 1922 novel, might have used to adorn his middle-class house in the Midwest. In this way, the couple established a deeply personal connection with millions of fans all over the world. The golden ringlets of the Queen of Silent Cinema became the talk of the town in every town, and the former dapper light comedian would make suntan an American preoccupation.⁶

Coming of age in this period of glamour and extravagance, Anna May was certainly inspired by these highly publicized personalities. Who wouldn’t want to be “The Most Famous Girl in the World,” as Mary was dubbed? However, according to the journalist who, on his days off from his beat outside Pickfair, visited the dingy Chinese laundry on North Figueroa, “Anna May Wong is the Chinese exception to the American rule.” To quote Timothy Turner again, “The films have not spoiled her. It is well known what screen success does for the maid of beauty and youth. It is apt to wean her from home in a twinkling, and some of the studio directors say it makes her ‘all swelled in the head,’ which is the cinema manner of saying ‘up stage,’ and that is the stage way of saying conceited, opinionated, stubborn, vainglorious and smug.”⁷ But Anna May remained content with her small room behind the laundry along with her large family of siblings, and when she had time, she would help out at the laundry, manning the counter and doing bookkeeping with an abacus. When a phone call came from one of those directors needing her to play a Chinese maid, she would hop on the Big Red Cars the next morning. After getting off the trolley, she would have to walk for a mile or two to the studio. On the long and lonely trek from the bus stop to the studio lot, according to the city’s crime logs, many aspiring young women had encountered unpleasantries of all sorts or simply disappeared, prompting Photoplay to publish a series of stories bearing the overall title “The Port of Missing Girls.” In a somewhat stereotypical manner, Turner ascribed Anna May’s bravery, humility, and diligence to Chinese culture, “For with the Chinese the ties of family and the ideal of work are stronger than any surface things.” There might have been a kernel of truth in it. For Anna May, a home was a home, whether it was a chalet in Hollywood or a laundry on North Figueroa.⁸

By this time, around 1922, Anna May had enrolled in Los Angeles High School on Olympic Boulevard, majoring in art. She excelled in tennis, the very sport that Mary and Doug, via their publicized life at Pickfair, were turning into an upper-middle-class obsession. She won singles and doubles matches in school tournaments.⁹ Later she would recall her two years at Los Angeles High as the happiest period she had known. Soon, though, an opportunity came—an offer, as they say, impossible to decline—and she would need to quit school in order to pursue, like Icarus, the blinding light of fame.