Philip Hensher

Tawdry tales of Tinseltown

Jean Stein’s collection of Tinseltown tittle-tattle is moderately interesting, unpleasantly salacious and largely unsourced

This is a very odd book that Jean Stein has compiled — about the evanescent splendour of Los Angeles, which only occasionally touches on the film industry. Its setting’s most memorable landmark appears to be the name of one of its districts, written in enormous white letters on a hillside. That, and various opulent houses, preserved in one movie after another and generally concealed from public view. Stein’s subject is the failure to leave any kind of a mark — despite huge spectacle and expenditure; and witnesses are reduced to repeating over and over again,‘Well, you should have been there at the time.’

She tells five stories. The first concerns the Doheny family, whose wealth derived from Los Angeles’ main commodity before films: oil. The patriarch, Edward L. Doheny, was the principal operator in the Mexican and Californian oil fields until the 1930s. (In the 1920s, Los Angeles wells produced 20 per cent of the world’s oil). His son Ned almost certainly shot and killed his secretary and possibly lover, Hugh Plunkett, before killing himself.

Second, there is Jack Warner of Warner Bros — a notoriously vile person. He made an immense fortune in the early days of film, and lived in grand style, with a golf course in his garden which was never used. The colossal house was designed and dressed by the studio art department. This proved a problem when the business magnate David Geffen bought it years later and took his interior designer to see it:

I said: ‘This wallpaper was from the imperial palace in China.’ She said: ‘This is French wallpaper from 1870 or 1880.’ I pointed to another piece and said: ‘This is a Chippendale.’ She said: ‘The original is a Chippendale and in the Victoria and Albert Museum. This was made at Warner Brothers.’

Jack Warner was a fool, and went along with the McCarthy investigations into communists in Hollywood to the point of naming names off the top of his head.

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