Photograph of Studio Club residents cleaning house, Los Angeles Times, 1927
The Hollywood Studio Club was formed in 1916. It began with a group of young women trying to break into the movies who gathered in the basement of the Hollywood Public Library to read plays.[4] A librarian, Mrs. Eleanor Jones, worried about the young women living in cheap hotels and rooming houses with no place to study or practice their craft. Mrs. Jones solicited help from the local YWCA, and a hall was established as a meeting place.[4] Hollywood studios and businessmen donated money to rent an old house on Carlos Avenue with space for 20 women. Mrs. Cecil B. DeMille and Mary Pickford were active in the club's operations, and Pickford later recalled, "Mrs. DeMille spent every day doing something for the club. And the motion picture industry supported us."[4] A newspaper article in 1919 described the club this way: "The club is more of a sorority, with delightful picture 'atmosphere,' than anything else, and the same happy atmosphere will pervade the new home. A dominant note is the refining touch of home life and sense of protection, with assurance of assistance, not only in material way when need arises, but in one's work, as well. Financially, many desperate cases among young women have been tided over by the Hollywood Studio Club."[5]
The "Studio Girl"
In the early 1920s, Hollywood became embroiled in scandals, including the 1921 case involving Fatty Arbuckle and his role in the death of young actress, Virginia Rappe. The image of the "extra girl", the pretty young girl who had traveled across the country to make it in the movies only to find herself the victim of exploitation, became a public relations problem for Hollywood. One industry observer wondered if extra work would ever be anything other than "an alibi for prostitution."[6] In order to change this negative reputation, the Hollywood studios, led by Will Hays, enacted reforms including the formation of the Central Casting Bureau in 1925 and the construction of a large new home for the Hollywood Studio Club in 1926. By opening a large "chaperoned, elite dormitory" for Hollywood's young women, the studios hoped to replace the image of sad, bedraggled and exploited "extra girl" with the image of the new "studio girl"—a smartly dressed, graceful, and genteel woman tutored in etiquette as well as the performing arts.[6] Hays told The New York Times that he sought to "make the motion picture business ... a model industrial community, complete with recreation facilities, community centres, dormitories [and] matrons."[6]
Architecture and construction
Between 1923 and 1925, a widely publicized fundraising campaign was held to build the new Hollywood Studio Club.[7][8] Contributions were received from Famous Players–Lasky ($10,000), Metro Goldwyn and Carl Laemmle ($5,000 each), Warner Bros. ($3,000), and Christie Comedies ($2,000).[9] In March 1923, aviator and movie star Andree Peyre conducted an aerial acrobatic exhibition and airplane race over Hollywood to help raise funds for the new home.[10] In February 1925, a final $5,000 donation from silent screen star Norma Talmadge allowed the group to begin construction.[11] The organization hired architect Julia Morgan to design the new building, and a ground-breaking ceremony took place in June 1925 with Mary Pickford and Morgan in attendance.[12]
The new Hollywood Studio Club opened in May 1926, having been built at a cost of $250,000. The building was opened at a ceremony attended by 2,500 people, "including many of the celebrities of the motion picture world," with dedication ceremonies in the afternoon and "dancing at midnight."[13]
North wing of the Studio Club
Julia Morgan designed the Studio Club in a Mediterranean style with interiors decorated in "pistache green, rose coral, and tan."[6] The large building has three sections—a central section with connecting wings on each side. The entrance to the center section is marked by a loggia, three archways with decorative quoins.[14] There is also a painted frieze above the main entrance.[14] The building includes several recurring elements from Morgan's Mediterranean style buildings, including full-length arched windows, balconies with iron balustrades, and decorative brackets.[14] A writer in California Graphic said "this beautiful and spacious new building is but one more jewel in the crown of Achieved Results which this progressive and cultural little city is wearing so proudly and shows its ever increasing desire to give unstinted moral and financial support to every progressive endeavor."[6]
"Map of Hollywood" from Jan. 1927 Photoplay article showing directions to studios from Hollywood Studio ClubFront entrance, 2008
The only qualification needed for admittance to the Studio Club was that the applicant had to be seeking a career in the motion picture business, whether as an actress, singer, script girl, cutter, writer, designer, dancer or secretary.[15] Some referred to it as a sorority, and the Studio Club also offered classes in various aspects of the performing arts, as well as hosting dances, teas, dinners and occasional plays, fashion shows and stunt nights. The club also provided residents with two meals a day, sewing machines, hair driers, laundry equipment, typewriters, theater literature, practice rooms, stage and sundeck.[16] Former resident Rosemary Breckler recalled, "At the Studio Club, when we had a date, he waited anxiously and almost reverently downstairs, and then, dressed like princesses, we floated down those gorgeous stairs."[17] A newspaper article in 1946 described the club this way: "The Hollywood Studio Club has been thought by the unknowing to be a house filled with glamour girls constantly receiving boxes of long-stemmed roses. On the other hand it has been classified as a rescue home for wayward girls. It is neither of these. The club is a comfortable sorority house possessing many of the freedoms and comforts of a man's club. It has grown in 24 years from the home for 22 girls and a white mouse into the home of 100 girls with another 100 servicewomen equally at home in the adjoining guest house."[18] Another article in 1959 referred to the club as a "colony" of students and described the atmosphere this way: "You may hear the wail of a clarinet, the vocal exercise of a balladeer ... and seen in a quiet corner, the silent gestures of a rehearsing ingenue with a script. But most of all there are clustered groups recounting their day – of pounding pavements, hearing of jobs, lamenting and blessing their luck and philosophizing."[19] In 2000, Susan Spano wrote in the Los Angeles Times: "The handsome Italianate building, designed in 1926 by architect Julia Morgan (of Hearst Castle fame), still evokes the good old days when a mother could send her daughter to Hollywood to become a star without worrying that her offspring would go astray."[3] However, the Studio Club was not free from scandal. Actress and former Studio Club resident Virginia Sale recalled, "One woman, older than the rest of us, was murdered in front of the club by a boyfriend. He was an ex-serviceman or something like that. And he then killed himself."[4]
Closure
By the mid-1960s, times had changed, and the idea of a chaperoned dormitory had become dated. In 1964, the club expanded its membership to include studio secretaries, dancers, models and others working broadly in the talent field.[20] The club was losing money, and the YWCA Greater Los Angeles considered using it for executive offices or selling it until a petition drive by residents persuaded the YWCA Greater Los Angeles to keep the facility open.[20] By 1971, the club was forced to open its doors as a regular hotel for transient women and stopped serving meals, but it still lost money.[4] Changes in the fire code also took a toll, as modifications needed to bring the structure up to fire code were estimated at $60,000. In 1975, the Studio Club closed its doors. At the time of the closure, the Los Angeles Times wrote:
They are tales of happier times, when the Studio Club was a haven for all those young girls – nearly 10,000 of them – who had come to Hollywood from little towns across the country to seek fame in the motion picture business. Some of them made it. Most of them didn't. While they were here, though, the club tried to be what it said it was, a substitute home for the one each had left. Today, the Studio Club is gone. The building on Lodi Place just a few blocks from Sunset and Vine closed last week, a victim of changing times and new fire codes. 'It's out of vogue to live in a club atmosphere,' said actress Dorothy Malone, a Studio Club alumna from the mid-'40s. 'They never allowed men in the rooms and girls didn't live with their boyfriends then,' she explained.[4]
The city of Los Angeles began using it in 2018 as a 64-bed crisis housing facility for women.[21]
Famous residents
Marilyn Monroe posed nude to earn $50 for rent money at the Studio Club.
Over the years of its operation, the Studio Club was home to many budding starlets and others trying to make it in show business. Those residing at the club included:
ZaSu Pitts – Pitts, the star of Erich von Stroheim's 1924 masterpiece, Greed, was one of the first stars to come out of the Studio Club. Von Stroheim called Pitts "the greatest dramatic actress." Pitts later noted that "without the club I should have been a village dressmaker all my days."[18]
Ayn Rand – When Ayn Rand arrived in Hollywood in 1926 to become a screenwriter, she lived at the Studio Club. Though her heavy accent and plain Russian clothes made her an "odd apparition" to the pretty, fresh actresses of the Studio Club, Rand was welcomed into the sorority. She was hired initially as an extra, at a salary of $7.50 a day, leaving the Studio Club before dawn each day to arrive at the studio at 6 a.m. for makeup and dress. While staying at the Studio Club, she met both Cecil B. DeMille and her future husband, Frank.[22] A club resident later recalled the following story about Rand:
We all had money problems, but the funniest story I ever heard was about Ayn Rand, the author. She apparently had terrible financial problems and owed money to the club. Almost everybody did at one time or another. Anyhow, a woman was going to donate $50 to the neediest girl in the club, and Miss Williams (Marjorie Williams, the revered director of Studio Club from 1922 to 1945) picked out Ayn. Ayn thanked them for the money, went out and bought a set of black lingerie.[4]
Maureen O'Sullivan – Actress Maureen O'Sullivan, who played Jane in the Tarzan movies of the 1930s and early 1940s and starred in The Devil Doll, took up residence at the Studio Club when her mother brought her to Hollywood from Ireland.[15]
Virginia Sale – Sale, who went on to have more than 150 film and television credits, also started at the Studio Club. Years later, Sale recalled her friendship with Ayn Rand at the club in the 1920s. Though Rand largely kept to herself, Rand encouraged Sale in her writing of skits. "She (Rand) did the sound effects for me backstage and that was really where my one-woman show got started, right at the club. Over the years on tour I gave 3,000 performances."[4] (Sale is one of the women in the picture above shown "cleaning house.")
Diana Dill – Diana Dill was an actress living at the Studio Club when she met Kirk Douglas, whom she married in 1943.[4]
Marie Windsor – Windsor, who found a niche in film noir and became known as "Queen of the B's", won two beauty pageants in Utah before driving to Hollywood to become a star. She lived at the Studio Club when she arrived in Hollywood,[23] stayed for three years (the maximum stay period) and later returned for six more months after World War II.[4]
Dorothy Malone – Malone, who later received an Academy Award for her role in Written on the Wind, lived in the Studio Club in the 1940s after moving to Hollywood from Texas. She later recalled that the Studio Club was already famous as a home for aspiring young actresses. She said, "You had to have references and a letter from your parents just to get in. There was a long waiting list from the beginning."[4] She dated Mel Torme while living at the club and recalled being discovered by Alan Ladd while playing a Spanish girl in a showcase at the club; but when she reported to the studio without the black hair, they did not believe she was the same person.[4]
Marilyn Monroe – Monroe lived at the Studio Club from 1948 to 1949. She later recalled that it was to raise $50 to pay rent at the Studio Club that she posed for the famous nude photographs. She said, "Funny how shocked people in Hollywood were when they learned I'd posed in the nude. At one time I'd always said no when photographers asked me. But you'll do it when you get hungry enough. It was at a time when I didn't seem to have much future. I had no job and no money for the rent. I was living in the Hollywood Studio Club for Girls. I told them I'd get the rent somehow. So I phoned up Tom Kelley, and he took these two colour shots—one sitting up, the other lying down. ... I earned the fifty dollars that I needed."[24] Monroe stayed in Room 334.[25]
Kim Novak – Kim Novak was the biggest star to live at the Studio Club in the 1950s. When Harry Cohn, president of Columbia Pictures, signed Novak to a studio contract, he required that she not date anyone during the week and posted a studio guard outside the Hollywood Studio Club, where he required her to live.[26] Novak moved into the Studio Club in 1953 and stayed on at the club even after she became a movie star. Another resident at the time recalled, "She was very neat and clean. Nobody could look more glamorous in a man's white shirt and Levi's. I remember she just couldn't bear to leave. In those years we had raised the limit of time to five years."[4]
Barbara Eden – In the 1950s, before landing her role on I Dream of Jeannie, Eden lived at the Studio Club. Other club residents later recalled that Eden would look at the club's bulletin board and apply for every show business job available, even those that she was advised would "ruin" her career.[27]
Sharon Tate – Tate, who was murdered by the Manson Family in 1969, lived at the Studio Club when she began her career in Hollywood in 1963. When her aggressive roommate at the Club made lesbian advances, Tate requested a new room.[28]
Joanne Worley – Worley, who went on to fame in Laugh In, lived at the Studio Club in the 1960s. She recalled, "I remember it was a wonderful place. ... It was inexpensive, had good food and 24-hour telephone service. And on Sundays the best coffee cake I ever ate."[4]
The Hollywood Studio Club has been recognized as a building of significant historic importance at both the local and national level. In 1977, the Studio Club was designated a Historic-Cultural Monument (No. 175) by the City of Los Angeles.[2] And in 1980, it was listed in the National Register of Historic Places.[1]
In 1994, an episode of Visiting... with Huell Howser featured a tour of the Hollywood Studio Club and reminiscences of several women who lived there.[29]
Gladys Marie Smith, known professionally as Mary Pickford, was a Canadian actress resident in the U.S., and also producer, screenwriter and film studio founder, who was a pioneer in the US film industry with a Hollywood career that spanned five decades.
Clara Gordon Bow was an American actress who rose to stardom during the silent film era of the 1920s and successfully made the transition to "talkies" in 1929. Her appearance as a plucky shopgirl in the film It brought her global fame and the nickname "The It Girl". Bow came to personify the Roaring Twenties and is described as its leading sex symbol.
Betty Compson was an American actress and film producer who got her start during Hollywood's silent era. She is best known for her performances in The Docks of New York and The Barker, the latter of which earned her an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress.
Hollywood and Vine, the intersection of Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street in Hollywood, a district of Los Angeles, became known in the 1920s for its concentration of radio and movie-related businesses. The Hollywood Walk of Fame is centered on the intersection.
Marilyn Pauline "Kim" Novak is an American retired film and television actress and painter. Her contributions to cinema have been honored with two Golden Globe Awards, an Honorary Golden Bear, and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Rita Hayworth was an American actress. She achieved fame in the 1940s as one of the top stars of the Golden Age of Hollywood, and appeared in 61 films in total over 37 years. The press coined the term "The Love Goddess" to describe Hayworth after she had become the most glamorous screen idol of the 1940s. She was the top pin-up girl for GIs during World War II.
Jill St. John is a retired American actress. She is best known for playing Tiffany Case, the first American Bond girl of the James Bond film franchise, in 1971's Diamonds Are Forever. Additional performances in film include Holiday for Lovers, The Lost World, Tender Is the Night, Come Blow Your Horn, for which she received a Golden Globe nomination, Who's Minding the Store?, Honeymoon Hotel, The Liquidator, The Oscar, Tony Rome, Sitting Target and The Concrete Jungle.
Dorothy Malone was an American actress. Her film career began in 1943, and in her early years, she played small roles, mainly in B-movies, with the exception of a supporting role in The Big Sleep (1946). After a decade, she changed her image, particularly after her role in Written on the Wind (1956), for which she won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress.
Harold Brent Wallis was an American film producer. He is best known for producing Casablanca (1942), The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), and True Grit (1969), along with many other major films for Warner Bros. featuring such film stars as Humphrey Bogart, John Wayne, Bette Davis, and Errol Flynn. As a producer, he received 19 nominations for the Academy Award for Best Picture.
Barbara Joan Branden was a Canadian-American writer, editor, and lecturer, known for her relationship and subsequent break with novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand.
Susan Cabot was an American film, stage, and television actress. She rose to prominence for her roles in a variety of Western films, including Tomahawk (1951), The Duel at Silver Creek (1952), and Gunsmoke (1953).
Virginia Davis was an American child actress in films. She is best known for working with Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks on the animated short series Alice Comedies, in which she portrayed the protagonist Alice.
Shirley Ann Richards was an Australian actress and author who achieved notability in a series of 1930s Australian films for Ken G. Hall before moving to the United States, where she continued her career as a film actress, mainly as a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer starlet. Her best known performances were in It Isn't Done (1937), Dad and Dave Come to Town (1938), An American Romance (1944), and Sorry, Wrong Number (1948). In the 1930s, she was the only Australian actor under a long-term contract to a film studio, Cinesound Productions. She subsequently became a lecturer and poet.
The Fountainhead is a 1949 American black-and-white drama film produced by Henry Blanke, directed by King Vidor, and starring Gary Cooper, Patricia Neal, Raymond Massey, Robert Douglas and Kent Smith. The film is based on the bestselling 1943 novel of the same name by Ayn Rand, who also wrote the adaptation. Although Rand's screenplay was used with minimal alterations, she later criticized the editing, production design and acting.
Gail Patrick was an American film actress and television producer. Often cast as the bad girl or the other woman, she appeared in more than 60 feature films between 1932 and 1948, notably My Man Godfrey (1936), Stage Door (1937), and My Favorite Wife (1940).
June Claire Sebastian was an American actress known for her work in B movies in the late 1950s.
Mary Andrews Clark Memorial Home is a four-story, 76,000-square-foot (7,100 m2) "French Revival Chateauesque" brick structure in the Westlake neighborhood of Los Angeles near downtown. It was built in 1913 as a YWCA home for young working women.
The Legend of Lylah Clare is a 1968 American drama film released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and directed by Robert Aldrich. The film stars Peter Finch, Kim Novak, Ernest Borgnine, Michael Murphy, and Valentina Cortese. The film was based on a 1963 DuPont Show of the Week TV drama of the same name co-written by Wild in the Streets creator Robert Thom.
YWCA Greater Los Angeles is a charitable organization with a focus on addressing issues of poverty, homelessness, domestic violence and skills training for the community.
Jessie Coles Grayson was an American singer and actress, known for The Little Foxes (1941), Cass Timberlane (1947) and Homecoming (1948).
↑ "Boon For Girl Film Workers: Will Make Hollywood Studio Club a Real Home; National Y.W.C.A. Takes Care of Local Institution; Valuable Aid Already Given Players in Distress". Los Angeles Times. July 20, 1919.
1 2 3 4 5 Kenaga, Heidi (2006). "Making the 'Studio Girl': The Hollywood Studio Club and industry regulation of female labour". Film History.
↑ "Film Girls Ask New Home: Studio Club of Hollywood to Campaign for Building Fund Middle of Next Month". Los Angeles Times. February 10, 1923.
1 2 "Efforts For Club Funds Ends Today: Hollywood Studio Campaign Enters Last Lap on Way to New Building". Los Angeles Times. March 19, 1923.
↑ "Large Sum Is Pledged for Home: Hollywood Studio Club Drive for Funds Meeting Ready Response". Los Angeles Times. March 14, 1923.
↑ "Flyers to Chat Over City Today: Aviatrix Will Visit With 'Smoke-Writer' to Help Drive for Studio Club". Los Angeles Times. March 9, 1923.
↑ "Building of Studio Club Is Assured: Norma Talmadge Donates $5000 Toward New Home for Film Girls". Los Angeles Times. February 14, 1925.
↑ "Building of Studio Club Begins Soon: Mrs. Cecil B. DeMille and Mary Pickford to Attend Exercises Monday". Los Angeles Times. June 11, 1925.
↑ "Studio Club Dedicates New Home". Los Angeles Times. May 8, 1926.
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