Tales from Los Angeles' Most Infamous Beach of Yesteryear
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Tales from Los Angeles’ most infamous beach of yesteryear. In the 1920s & 30s a small spit of land along Los Angeles’ quaint beachside neighborhood of Santa Monica became ground zero for what the press dubbed “America’s Riviera,” a sandy playground for the rich, famous and idolized to indulge their every decadent whim. WORDS BY | FALENE NURSE Davies-Hearst Beach House Santa Monica Beach 1930 Photographs by: Archive Bison Photographs treatsmagazine.com 87 In Hollywood’s harder partying heydays of the 20s and 30s, the rich and famous had taken up residence along Louis B. Mayer’s pool with the shores of Santa Monica. With the studios forcing their Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland stars to propagate a myth of a sexually innocent America, and prohibition tightening its grip, people grew hungry for MOBSTERS OWNED escapism. And if the realities of the breadline were getting you down, you could always live vicariously through the THE CLUBS AND elite colony emerging along the Californian coastline. Here, sun, sea and sex could be enjoyed with extravagant CASINO BOATS abandonment. It became the self-appointed tropical Shangri-La for OFFSHORE. bored mistresses, closeted sexual preferences and imbibing personalities. Free to mingle with bootleggers, starlets, illegal hooch and brothel keepers at their leisure, it was an anything-goes time. Poolside by day or dance floor by night, the parties seemed to never end, making for both decadent spectacle and alluring gossip column fodder. According to legend, it was an 18th-century priest credited with giving Santa Monica its name because the waters of the nearby springs reminded him of the tears shed by Saint Monica (the patron saint of married women!) over her unruly son. Upon her saintly sands the sprawling estate of one of America’s most infamous mistresses would be housed. And no one liked a good party more than Marion Davies, newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst’s lover and clandestine partner. Even an accidental murder and a rumored love child couldn’t stop the revelry. Welcome to the Gold Coast. “MOVIE PRODUCER SHOT ON WILLIAM RANDOLPH HEARST’S YACHT” Amidst the private lives of the community north of Santa Monica Pier there lay plenty of secrets. Marion had allegedly taken another lover: Charlie Chaplin. Aboard Hearst’s 280- foot yacht, the Oneida, one evening in November of 1924, the three were celebrating silent movie producer Thomas Ince’s birthday. Without warning, Ince was mysteriously taken ill with a bout of “severe and acute indigestion.” Many believed Hearst had accidently shot Ince (with a fabulous diamond encrusted revolver), while hunting for Chaplin in a jealous rage. However, Chaplin survived the near-fatal attacks, free to continue his trysts with Marion when they safely docked. The same alas cannot be said of Ince. Although the coroner reported cause of death as “heart failure” the Los Angeles Times revealed, “MOVIE PRODUCER SHOT ON HEARST’S YACHT!” During the 20s and 30s the nouveau riche industry folk and their newly bohemian friends spent off-days cavorting at Santa Monica’s private beach clubs like Club Casa del Mar, also known as the Del Mar Club. Built in 1926, its opulent Italian Renaissance Revival style was well suited to many of its Gold Coast patrons. It wasn’t long before Mae West, dressed like an inflatable Venus in pearls, moved to town. Having earlier been sentenced for 10 days in the hoosegow for obscenity for her play Sex, within three years she became the second highest paid person in the United States—and a neighbor of Hearst. West, friend to the marginalized— by: Archive Bison Photographs prostitutes, fallen women, homosexuals—would eventually 88 treatsmagazine.com treatsmagazine.com 89 cross paths with the gorgeous pansexual leviathan known belonged to Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford. MGM’s as Scotty Bowers. He would famously sleep his way tyrannical mogul, Louis B. Mayer, was close by at 625, ever through nearly the entire coastline, as well as the adjacent watchful of his Dream Factory’s livestock of talent. He neighboring hills that ran all the way to Hollywood. mercilessly scolded his stars for their indiscretions, but was Marion, a lover of costumed parties, beach soirees, and personally known for committing his own countless acts of copious amounts of alcohol, referred to her own life as one debasement. His 20-room house would become infamous “big, gay party!” These parties hosted by herself, Norma once again when Rat Pack insider and JFK confidante Peter Talmadge or Bebe Daniels became part of Hollywood lore. Lawford and Patricia Kennedy bought it during the height of Soon, West, Fitzgerald, J. Paul Getty and Harold Lloyd Camelot. (Bowers claimed to have bed his wife at the base of the family When the Santa Monica Land and Water Company Christmas Tree) were having their own weekend-long pool had originally offered this prime stretch of beachfront to parties. “What a crowd of Hollywood’s famous collected at the city for under $100,000, in 1922, the city declined. As her house, when Norma Talmadge gave a party!” described it ascended into a glamorous seaside resort, it grew rich the local Santa Monica papers in 1929. “And here’s the whole with cinematic history, too. If you saw an ocean in a black- gang… everyone from Zeppo Marx, Lionel Barrymore, Buster and-white film, chances are it was Santa Monica Beach. Keaton, and Louella Parsons.” The column noted that the When Horace McCoy’s Depression-based novel They Shoot “gentleman in the gay trunks” gathered Horses Don’t They? became a movie, by the pool was “none other than the director Sydney Pollack filmed its legendary showman Sid Grauman” (of grueling dance marathon at La Monica Grauman’s Chinese Theatre.) What it ONE OF ballroom. didn’t discuss was the rumor that he Here, constant weekend “dress had run a highly successful brothel CHAPLIN’S PICK- ups” or birthday parties, were never in Dawson City, Alaska, during the questioned; teen lovers and child Klondike Gold Rush. UP LINES WAS TO brides (Lita Grey, Mildred Harris, Faith Although many powerful Domergue) were routinely paraded on Hollywood families (like the Zanucks TELL A YOUNG full display before being vanquished and Laskys) lived a settled existence, back to their own hidden estates. Lita with the Depression came more STARLET “HE Grey (Chaplin’s second wife) told her corruption and scandal. Mobsters biographer Jeffrey Vance that one owned the clubs and casino boats WAS THINKING of Chaplin’s pick-up lines was to tell offshore. Lovers’ quarrels often a young starlet “he was thinking of caused private, then public, outrage. OF MAKING making a film about Napoleon” and Years later Scotty Bowers, a former she would be “his perfect Josephine.” handsome gas station attendant on A FILM ABOUT (The French general was a costume Hollywood Boulevard turned Man favorite of Chaplin’s at Marion’s About Town, shared all the stars secret NAPOLEON” AND legendary balls.) Grey, like Mildred sex lives in his memoirs Full Service, Harris before her, was a teenager divulging how he single handedly SHE WOULD BE when she first hooked up with a then bed nearly every Hooray Henry (and 35-year-old Chaplin. Facing statutory Henrietta) on the seafront—whether rape charges—and, worse, bad for fun, or a small reasonable fee, or “HIS PERFECT publicity—the couple slipped into both. Mexico for quickie nuptials. Charles, JOSEPHINE.” Jr. was born in May of 1925, but the news was withheld from the press. A whole month later mother and child emerged and little Charlie’s birth date was changed to June. WISH YOU WERE HERE When Grey eventually divorced him, her complaint was put Starting at 415 Palisades Beach Road north to the thousands, on public record as “a warning to young maidens.” Chaplin’s America’s new royalty wanted their very own whimsical sexual proclivities (especially his demands for oral), made retreats. And nothing less than California’s greatest architects headlines for months, and when Grey threatened to make would do for the building of such grandiose creations: Julia his lovers—Merna Kennedy, Georgia Hale, Edna Purviance Morgan, William Flannery, Richard Neutra, Wallace Neff, and Marion—public, he caved. It resulted in one of the John Byers, Paul Williams, and Roe Crawley. They were most expensive divorces of the time; he was ordered to pay commissioned by an equally impressive homeowners list: over $600,000 and $100,000 in trust for each child. Chaplin comedian Harold Lloyd at 443; Mae West at 514; Darryl suffered a nervous breakdown soon after. Some claim it’s Zanuck at 546; Samuel Goldwyn at 602; and Harry Warner at this story that was Nabokov’s inspiration for Lolita. 605/607. MGM’s reigning “King and Queen,” Norma Shearer And then there was the gambling. and husband Irving Thalberg, could be found lounging like The L.A. Times often reported gambling “on a unique John F. Kennedy visiting Peter Lawford’s beach house Gopis at 705-707 in their Byers-designed French Provincial. floating casino in which beautifully gowned women rubbed Nearby, the Wallace Neff-designed Venetian Revival elbows with ordinary fellows.” Local gangster and rum- Photographs by: Archive Bison Photographs 90 treatsmagazine.com treatsmagazine.com 91 runner, Tony Cornero, realized the 21st Amendment was The party continued to roll in a blinkered “spirit of putting quite a dampener on his operations until he got a ecstasy” on Rolls-Royce Row, named so after the Sunday bright idea: “a casino past the three mile mark…. The boys morning chauffeurs seen polishing the “flying ladies” atop in blue can’t touch me!” Pulp noir writer Raymond Chandler, the luxury cars, lined up one after another.