Star-dust in Hollywood (1930)

Qhapter IV LOS ANGELES— REAL ESTATE /^>vMONG the guests at the groceress's supper-party f / J was a woman who lived by touting for the real estate *-^ business. Her duty was to scour the town for newly arrived * tourists/ the word ' tourist ' in the Los Angeles sense meaning merely a visitor from some other state. The * tourist ' when discovered was then to be tempted, by means of free drives round Los Angeles and Hollywood, free peeps at a movie studio, or at films describing the making of a movie, free lunches, to visit one of the real estate propositions which infested almost every square yard of unbuilt-on land within the four hundred or more square miles of Los Angeles city. For fourteen miles in every direction the flat lands and their enclosing semicircle of hills sported villas of every hue and every variety of architecture. Huge signs announced " This is Hollywood Land," " Come and live on Booster Hills," and at night gigantic announcements in electric lights, either stable or winking at one with a sly monotony, prevented the ' tourist ' from ever forgetting that this Los Angeles was destined to be the greatest city on earth. In a way some of the less developed parts of the hills were not without a charm at first sight, the white, pink, yellow, green, blue, or orange houses, each with their conventional piece of green turf in front, sprouted up here and there along the concrete development roads which divided the dried-up waste into squares and segments of unchanging yellow-brown. But the mind staggered with horror at the vision of the real estate salesman's ideal, when every plot shall have been bought up, and the whole area packed with a monotonous mass of undistin [54]