Jerry Lewis on one occasion begged one big star to join him in New York on an all-night telethon to raise funds in a muscular-dystrophy drive. “You know what you can do with those crippled kids,” was the response he received from this father of a big family, who has a reputation for charming birds off trees.
Some of our inhabitants cherish the quaint idea that the number of charity performances he gives is an accurate yardstick for measuring an entertainer’s heart. More accurate, anyway, than the size of his bank account. It’s easy to sing a song or two, harder to stand up and be funny for half an hour. Yet the comics measure up well; Jack Benny, Red Skelton, Jerry Lewis, George Burns—all knock themselves out in the sweet cause of charity.
Our number-one citizen on that score is Bob Hope, and we’re proud as peacocks of him. There isn’t a place in the world he wouldn’t fly to for charity and work without drawing a nickel. He’s ham enough to love the publicity it brings him, but he does a monumental amount of good. Bob has literally made the millions that everybody believes Bing has stashed away in the vaults.
Money is talked about in our town more than elsewhere, perhaps, because there’s more of it around. Bob, who could safely be called thrifty, has splurged on a private three-hole golf course valued at more than $100,000. Elvis Presley owns fifteen automobiles, including an all-pink Cadillac with a television and hi-fi set. Beverly Hills High School has an oil well on its campus which brings in $18,000 a year.
Beverly Hills is an oasis of thirty thousand inhabitants and thirty thousand trees set in the steppes of Los Angeles. Many of its people earn their living in the entertainment industry or as doctors, lawyers, agents, soothsayers and headshrinkers, living on the backs of the others. Most of the trees that line the sidewalks are palms, though magnolias, eucalyptus, and acacias thrive in the gardens, and the evening scent of pittosporum drifts over the streets as sweet as the song of nightingales.
It’s a separate community with its own schools, police, firemen, and local government. As a contented resident, I’m happy to say that it enjoys the lowest tax rate for miles around. I am not so happy to report that in our town, where there’s at least one Olympic-size pool to the block, and sometimes five, Esther Williams found nobody she asked would give her the regular use of one for classes in teaching blind children to swim. She finally found a pool in Santa Monica, thirty minutes’ drive away, two days a week.
Acting as a kind of buffer between Beverly Hills and Los Angeles proper is Hollywood, with a population of some quarter of a million, which is the workplace of most of the stars who live in Beverly Hills. The rest of our population seems to be Texans, who are flocking in and who can usually leave the movie colony standing with dust on their faces when it comes to worshiping the golden calf.
Up until the early days of this century, Beverly Hills saw more coyotes than dollar bills. It was a Spanish-owned wilderness of remote canyons and tumbleweed. Then in 1906 it was bought for $670,000 by its American founders, who sold off lots at $1000 apiece on the installment plan, $800 if you paid cash; those lots sell now for $50,000. The big spending didn’t start until soon after World War I ended, but long before that Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks had bought a whole hilltop on Summit Drive together with the hunting lodge that stood there. They spent hundreds of thousands on the place that we called “The White House”—Pickfair.
Doug itched to put a wall all the way around Beverly Hills, but he compromised by simply encircling their estate. He and Mary literally made their home a palace. They were America’s royalty and were treated as such in their own country and overseas. Kings and queens entertained them; they rode in Mussolini’s private train. At Pickfair they entertained visiting bluebloods.
The Duke and Duchess of Alba stayed there, but they left a week early because the duke discovered, to his chagrin, that the armfuls of cuddly Hollywood blondes he’d been expecting were not permitted through Pickfair’s portals.