Picture-Play Magazine (Sep 1928 - Feb 1929)

44 h e r i e r Acute comment on the foibles of Hollywood by an omniscient pedestrian. By Carroll Graham Illustrations by Lui Trugo ARL VAN VECHTEN'S novel about Hollywood, "Spider Boy," is further and almost irrefutable evidence that a good novel cannot be written about Hollywood. Authors, good and bad, famous and obscure, have had a fling at it. As the boys at the Writers' Club would say, all the attempts have been flops. The celluloid-packing industry is the only subject in the world which could possibly attract the literary efforts of Mr. Van Vechten and Jim Tully. One attacked it from the superhighbrow standpoint, and the other from the super — oh, well, let's not finish that sentence. Mr. Van Vechten spent some weeks in Hollywood, then went away and wrote the strangest collection of stuff anybody ever put on paper. The only new fact I can gather from his book is that there must be a lunatic asylum in Beverly Hills. I didn't know there was one, but it is apparent that the author lodged there during his stay in the West. Joseph Hergesheimer, Adela Rogers St. Johns, Harry Leon Wilson, Frank Condon. Alice M. Williamson, and a whole lot of other writers have tried to get Hollywood between the covers of a book. The subject has been approached from every conceivable standpoint and attitude, thus demonstrating that there is no standpoint or attitude toward the place which resembles sanity. ■ * To mention the extremes again, Mr. Van Vechten tried to be satirical and Mr. Tully tried to be realistic, and one is as impossible as the other. It is impossible to burlesque a burlesque without getting something resembling the stenographic report of a nightmare. And it is no "She's up on the roof — been there for hours," was the reply given by a fellow with a mania for answering any telephone in sight. more possible to be real about such an improbable community, than it is to find an actor who will not read you his press notices. Harry Leon Wilson probably got along better than any one else, because he regarded Hollywood with frank and amazed humor and wrote about it that way. Even so, "Merton of the Movies" is not comparable to his other comedies. Mr. Hergesheimer seemed so taken in by the town that he was almost incoherent. Mrs. St. Johns writes about it in the manner of the "confessions" magazines. There must be some deep-seated reason for all this. Some of these authors have written good books, and some have written great books on other subjects. But they become hysterical, one way or the other, on the movies. Unfortunately, Lewis Carroll did not live to see Hollywood, or he would have found the Wonderland into which he sent Alice with all his characters, the Duchess, the Cheshire Cat, the Walrus and the Carpenter, the March Hare, the White Rabbit, the Gryphon, the Mad Hatter — plenty of Mad Hatters — and all the rest. Now, there is a man who might have written the real novel of Hollywood. Had he soaked himself in Russian tragedies for ten years, then read the Elsie Dinsmore series as an antidote, taken to hashish, become a Christian Scientist, married a "Follies" girl, then come to Hollywood as a film supervisor, and leased an apartment in the Garden of Allah, he might have got his fantastic imagination in a sufficiently weird state to have written the real novel about the movies. Some one will write a good one some day. Now if I only had the time Telephonitis is a dread disease prevalent, I suppose, all over the world, but the citizens of Hollywood seem particularly susceptible to it. In case you've never come down with it, or had your immediate friends under quarantine, I might explain that its symptoms are a foaming at the mouth whenever a telephone is sighted, together with an uncontrollable desire to start calling friends and strangers alike. I was awakened at one thirty in the morning recently by an unfamiliar and somewhat uncertain voice, urging me to "come on over." A little piece of paper under the bell now stops that. One young man in Hollywood has the telephonic disease, I am told, to a spectacular extent, which will one day probably bring unlimited woe and grief into his life. He moves frequently, as most young men do who live in Hollywood apartment houses, and at each move he lists his telephone number under an assumed name.