The Entertainer by Margaret Talbot

Author:Margaret Talbot
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group, USA
Published: 2012-10-14T04:00:00+00:00

Lyle and his father and stepmother, Ed and Anna, in Whitley Heights.

Whitley Heights was close to the studios, but it seemed secluded, and the combination made it popular with silent-era actors. Besides Dressler, its residents included Harold Lloyd, Charlie Chaplin, and Wallace Reid. Rudolph Valentino had a house there, and “could often be spotted, clad in riding togs, walking his two mastiffs and his Dobermans along the narrow road,” says the Hollywood historian David Wallace. By the time my father moved to Whitley Heights, to a house on Wedgewood Place, many actors had switched their allegiance to the newly chic Beverly Hills. But there were still those who preferred the supposedly fresher air of Whitley Heights—Bette Davis, Maurice Chevalier, Jean Harlow, and Carole Lombard all lived there at one time, as did William Faulkner. In the mid 1950s, about a third of Whitley Heights was razed and the neighborhood bisected to make way for the Hollywood Freeway. But even today, if you walk around what’s left of it, you feel something of what Southern California must have felt like before the postwar development boom. You can see how somebody had the idea to build a replica of an Italian hill town in the middle of Hollywood.

There is a photograph of my father at his Whitley Heights house that I have always been very fond of. He is sitting, in profile and partly in silhouette, on the iron railing of a wide window. He’s wearing a white dress shirt and a tie, and his gaze is pensive. Behind him, tile roofs, palm and cypress trees, and sepia-colored hills recede into the distance. He might be in Tuscany. Except that you can also, though just barely, make out a sign in the far hills: the white letters, shivery like a heat mirage, that spell out “Hollywoodland.” There’s an Expressionist elegance to his pose, and looking at the landscape behind him, you get an elegiac sense of a lost and smogless L.A.

After a year or so, Lyle decamped for Beverly Hills. There he rented a little house that he loved, a Tudor-style cottage with a rustic wooden gate and shuttered windows, on Rexford Drive. We used to drive past it sometimes on our way to Beverly Hills, to Nate ’n Al’s deli or to my orthodontist, and my dad would always point it out. That house was the one that got away, the bargain investment he could have landed if only he’d been smart like some of the actors. Guys like Bing Crosby, Gene Autry, and Bob Hope, he’d say, had seen not only that the movie industry in Southern California was going to last, but that buying up land and media outlets there was the way to go. Then he’d sigh a little and change the subject. His attitude about money-making was fatalistic and insouciant at once. Sure, there’d been chances to invest, sure, he’d been dumb about them, but money wasn’t what mattered. What mattered was that you kept working; what mattered was that you had fun and shared the fun with people less fun than yourself.

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