Binnie Barnes — Why Hollywood Got Me (1935) 🇬🇧
I didn't want to go to Hollywood. It's a different matter if you're sold on the idea before you ever get there, as most people are; I wasn't.
To be perfectly frank, I was scared. I'm willing to try anything once, as much as anyone else, but to try it for three years is carrying the joke too far.
My original contract just said "three years," without any mention of remission for good conduct or week-ends home. Can you imagine one hundred and fifty-six weeks stretching out ahead of you, in a place you've never seen that's been described to you as a cross between the Ritz-Carlton and a mental ward?
I did get as far as New York, but I hated it at sight, and I thought to myself, "If Hollywood's even a little like this, I shan't be able to bear it." So I got on a boat and came home.
And then — last May — I tried again; this time my contract said "three years with the option…" of coming home every now and again to see how the window-boxes were coming along and whether the pup had grown; and only two pictures a year, anyway, which does give you a chance to stretch between whiles.
And I only stayed a few minutes in New York — not long enough to get discouraged; and I flew to Hollywood; and am I glad I did? Oh, boy! (I've reached the Hollywood part now, so I'm allowed a little local colour).
To begin with, the studio people were extremely kind. Over here they're generally quite friendly, but they don't go out of their way to make you feel on top of the world; or perhaps they save that up for American stars.
Anyway, Universal City made me feel like a star as soon as I arrived, which, as you may imagine, prejudiced me in Hollywood's favour right from the word "Go."
And then, steadily, Hollywood got me. You know the sensation of being attracted to a person almost against your will?
Well, Hollywood is very nearly a person — with an erotic, erratic, exotic, exacting personality at that.
For a minute or two, or a week or two, you don't know whether to hate it or love it. In my case the scales tipped promptly and heavily in its favour.
There are so many things in the scale. The climate, the architecture, the people, the situation, the shops, the life, the irresponsibility with a sense of responsibility running through it like light in a dawn sky or the lean in streaky bacon.
Why, there you are — you couldn't use those two similes to describe any other place on earth! They wouldn't fit. In Hollywood everything fits.
My apartment was in a tall building called Sunset Towers; not a skyscraper as skyscrapers go — only eighteen storeys — but that's fairly high for California, where there's more room to expand than there is in New York.
I was half-way up — and even at that height the air was so crisp and clear you could almost hear it crackling.
Each floor is divided into four apartments (seventy-two altogether, which is pretty good arithmetic for Binnie Barnes, let me tell you), so each apartment has a corner of the building, and each corner is made of glass. So is that something to wake up to in the morning!
Sunset Towers is quite near the famous Athletic Club on Sunset Boulevard, the great wide road that runs east and west, parallel with Hollywood Boulevard and Santa Monica Boulevard, between these two.
It's quieter than either of them, though, for there are few shops and no street cars, yet you're only a few minutes' walk from the heart of the shopping centre.
You've heard about the shops, of course; they're swell; but I was more attracted by the markets — great open places, roofed over, mostly run by Chinese, where you can buy every imaginable fruit and vegetable for absurdly little money; and some of them you can drive right into and shop without leaving the wheel.
I had a housekeeper, but I insisted on doing my own shopping because it was fascinating.
And the "cash-and-carry" stores, where you roam round picking your groceries from shelves and take them to a counter to pay for them as you go out; and the Viennese bakeries, and the Italian restaurants, and the German bier-und-pretzel-gartens, and the English chop-houses, and the Turkish coffee-houses, and the Swiss clock-shops, and the Indian bazaars, and the Chinese chop-suey joints… each nation doing the thing it knows about, and each one fitting like an old Ford radiator on a junk-pile.
Yes, shopping in Hollywood is an adventure, if only for the people you see. There are no ordinary-looking people; of course, they're not all beauty competition winners, but they've all got something striking about them, for most of them have come from the ends of the earth to make a million in motion pictures — and you have to be a tiny bit different even to get as far as Hollywood.
I had three homes, actually, for besides my apartment in town I had a bungalow at Universal City, consisting of a lounging and make-up room, a kitchen, and a bathroom with hot and cold showers, and I also had a darling little beach-house at Topanga, which is between Santa Monica and Malibu — about eight miles south of the latter; and here I owned a strip of the beach all to myself. You can't do that in England; it belongs to the Crown.
In California the only crown is the one the movie-stars wear.
Now for the sense of responsibility. Everyone puts work first. They're there to make pictures, and they concentrate on that absolutely. There's no stage-work to distract them; and we shouldn't have that difficulty to contend with here, if Elstree were three thousand miles from the West End, as Hollywood is from Broadway.
Those who are in work, work like fury; those who are out of work, work at getting work. Everyone thinks, talks, eats, sleeps, dreams, and lives motion-pictures, and motion-pictures aren't any the worse for that.
But then there is also a complete and delightful sense of responsibility during play-time. You don't have to take a 'bus-man's holiday if you don't want to.
It's fashionable to watch polo matches; but if you don't want to watch polo, no one thinks any the worse of you; in fact, unless it were just for the sake of being "seen around" (which isn't really necessary) you would be considered a sap for doing what you don't want to just because other people are doing it.
I didn't bother to ask whether roller-skating was "the thing to do" or not; I wanted to go to the Rollodrome, and I went — with Cary Grant and Virginia Cherrill; but also I went to the all-in wrestling every Wednesday and the fights every Friday, not because everyone else was going, but because it was fun.
In fact, you don't have to kow-tow to public opinion over anything.
So long as you observe certain wide bounds of decorum, and don't tread too hard on other people's toes, you can do more or less as you please.
You don't even have to go to parties. I went to a few — one of them was a swell fancy-dress affair given by Junior Laemmle, with practically everyone in the film colony present; but parties are a form of amusement that have a way of slopping over into next morning, so are not favoured by people who are actually working.
One of the greatest attractions about Hollywood is its power to surprise you. For instance, how could I have imagined that one of my biggest thrills would be listening to a symphony orchestra conducted by an Englishman! Yet so it was — Sir Henry Wood was at the Hollywood Bowl, with two million gnats trying hard to drown the music, and failing even to distract our attention.
Of course, the regular Hollywood thrill is fun, too — bumping into well-known character actors on street corners, recognising featured players whom you've seen acting dozens of times on the screen.
Some of the lesser-known ones just stand about on the kerb for the sake of being recognised by the occupants of the rubber-wagons — the sight-seeing buses that bring people from Los Angeles City to "see the stars for 50 cents."
They don't see many stars, let me tell you — but they can always be sure of seeing eight or ten girls on Hollywood Boulevard, between Highland and Western, who look more like Garbo than Garbo does; and any one of these will do when you've paid 50 cents for one.
And there are pretty sure to be a few gaudily dressed cowboys in high-heeled boots squatting on the kerb, to give a spot of local colour.
Colour, did I say? There's colour everywhere. In front of the houses there are green lawns, with no fences — and then the white pavement — and then a strip of green in which the palm trees grow — and then the kerb.
But in two days, in early summer, suddenly that strip of green is covered with wild marigolds, so that the streets are literally bordered with gold; why, even the dust-carts are golden — they are so full of orange peel. And imagine all that colour, and a riot of flowers of every description, all drenched with the Californian sunshine… It takes your breath away even to remember it.
And you can get in a car and in an hour you can be in parched tropical desert with cactus and tumbleweed, or among snow-clad mountains. And all the time you're paid for being there…
Of course, Hollywood got me; the surprise would have been if it hadn't.
A delightfully informal snap of Binnie Barnes at home in Hollywood.
Top: The star and Frank Morgan in "There's Always To-morrow," and, right, Edward Sloman directing the former in that picture.
A striking shot of the author of this article in "To-day We Live" in which she and Frank Morgan head a strong cast.
THE MERRY WIDOW
Coming shortly — a sixteen page fully photogravure supplement which deals exhaustively with Ernst Lubitsch's latest and greatest musical. It will be presented free with the January 19 issue of Picturegoer.
Collection: Picturegoer Magazine, January 1935