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{Hollywood} The Roosevelt Hotel
Opened in 1927 and situated diagonally from Grauman’s Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard, the Roosevelt Hotel is a well-known Hollywood landmark. It was named for Theodore Roosevelt and was financed by Louis B. Mayer, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks. Marilyn Monroe lived here for two years and did her first photo shoot in the hotel’s pool area. Other notable residents include Clara Bow, Al Jolson, Frank Sinatra, Errol Flynn, Cary Grant, Harold Lloyd…you name them, they probably stayed at, or least partied at, the Roosevelt. Of course, this includes Clark Gable and Carole Lombard, who frequently rented out the penthouse before they were married. The room rates actually aren’t…
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Gossip Friday: The Truth about Matrimony
From April 1940: What, in a word, is the truth about matrimony on the coast? On a recent whirlwind tour of the colony I became the Marriage Reporter Pro Tem of the coast. I looked at the stars with no eye for their wardrobes, their coiffures or their conversation, if any. I studied them as wives. Not even Clark Gable’s eyelashes were able to deter me from my chosen point of view. Mr. Gable, bless his heart, was interesting to me only as a married man. And having angled some of the famous pairs from a strictly Married Love approach, I can report that things out there are just about…
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{Hollywood} Home to Encino
As I learned after zig-zagging around the (often treacherous) Hollywood hills, most stars of today and yesterday aren’t that different when it comes to where they lay their head. Some locations are desirable only so you can write a certain street and a certain zip code as your address. No doubt this is the reasoning behind people who bought residences such as Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks’ Pickfair and Jimmy Stewart’s beloved Beverly Hills home only to wreck them down and build something ultra-modern and ultra-vulgar. Both having spent several years residing under the shining lights of Hollywood, Clark and Carole chose the quieter suburb of Encino to set up their new…
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{Hollywood} Carole Lombard Lived Here
Tracing the footsteps of the beloved third Mrs. Gable… This house on Iris Circle, built in 1926 in the then-trendy Whitley Heights area of Los Angeles, was owned by Carole and her first husband, William Powell, from about 1931 to 1933. It was quite a treacherous drive up a long, narrow street and there is absolutely no parking at all–heaven forbid you have guests over! (In fact I couldn’t get a shot from across the street because there were cars parked right behind me on the narrow road.) But the view from those windows must be spectacular. Here’s that same window, from the real estate listing when the house was for sale about…
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{Hollywood} The Former Homes of…
Instead of hopping on a tour bus to be driven around, snapping photos and hoping to catch today’s stars in their bathrobes watering their front lawns, we were on a mission to find the homes of the past. Let’s start with two of Clark’s wives… Here is the house on Landale that Clark’s first wife Josephine Dillon lived in from her arrival in Hollywood until her death. Clark owned this property, paid the property taxes and let Josephine live there rent-free. He left her the house in his will. After Clark’s widow Kay Williams sold the Encino ranch to developers in 1970’s, she moved into posh Beverly Hills to this house on…
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Gossip Friday: Too Many Eggs
From August 1940: Clark Gable’s such a successful farmer that his valley neighbors often drop by for advice on their alfalfa crops. Mrs. G. gets their wives into a huddle and begs them for “recipe counsel” . Seems that Clark, proud of his record-laying hens, likes the fruits of their labor used for his own table. “After you’ve fried, boiled, scrambled, baked and even eaten them raw,” Carole moans, “then what’s to do?” And don’t think she doesn’t slip them a dozen or two!
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{Hollywood} Clark Was Here
Let’s follow Clark around Los Angeles… Culver Studios. Formerly Selznick International Studios, this is where Gone with the Wind was filmed. The white house and manicured gardens are well-remembered as the opening shot of GWTW, then with a white sign in front that said, “A Selznick International Picture.” The scene where Mammy, Prissy and Pork stand in front of Scarlett and Rhett’s enormous Atlanta mansion and exclaim over its size (“Lordy, she sure is rich now!”) was filmed right here, in front of this building, with a matte painting standing in for Scarlett and Rhett’s mansion. Carole Lombard made Nothing Sacred and Made for Each Other here. It was later home…
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{Hollywood} Calvary Cemetery
Calvary is a beautiful Roman Catholic cemetery located in East Los Angeles. It dates back to the late 1800’s and that is evident. Unlike most of the cemeteries which were usually all flat headstones with the occaisonal elaborate memorial, this cemetery was filled with gorgeous tall monuments. My main reason for venturing here was to find Clark’s first wife, drama coach Josephine Dillon. When we arrived, we located the name of the lawn she was buried in and the area was huge. We set ourselves for another long search, but it turned out to only take about two minutes; we had no trouble finding it because the headstone is HUGE. I am…
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{Hollywood} The Academy Library Clears Up a Clark and Carole–Gone with the Wind Mystery
People sure did look at me funny when I said that one of the things I was most looking forward to on my Los Angeles trip was a visit to the library. Sounds strange, but this is not just any library, it’s the Margaret Herrick Library, the library for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (the Oscars). If you’ve read a bio on a classic star (a reputable one, anyway) bet your bottom dollar they did their research here. They house thousands of original scripts, screenplays, correspondence, you name it. Many, many people have left their personal papers to the library, including Katharine Hepburn, Steve McQueen, Billy Wilder, Esther Williams, …
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{Hollywood} Warner Brothers Studios
All the major studios offer tours: Sony (formerly MGM), Warner Brothers, Universal, Paramount. We of course knew we wanted to do MGM (blog post forthcoming), since that was home to Clark and so many other of the “brightest stars”. We wanted to do one other one and it was a toss-up between Warner Brothers and Paramount. We ultimately picked Warner Brothers because it was the highest rated studio tour. We weren’t disappointed. It is a tram tour, but our guide was very knowledgable and I felt he mixed the old with the new quite well. We saw the set of Friends’ Central Perk, the outside set of ER, and heard…