(Greg Joseph has been a member of SAG-AFTRA since 1970. He has served on SAG’s State Board of Directors, Primetime Television Nominating Committee, and National Committee for Performers With Disabilities, and on the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences regional board of governors and the Film and Media Coalition board. Also a writer, former journalist and television columnist, he is a past member of the Television Critics Association. His acting honors include the Best Character Actor Award at the Hollywood Shockfest Film Festival, starring in an Official Selection of the Cannes Film Festival Short Film Corner, and starring in a Best Ensemble winner at the New York First-Run Film Festival. He has been nominated for the Governor’s Arts Award for his contributions to the arts.)
“So goodnight Hollywood Boulevard, goodnight,
“See ya soon
“Goodnight Hollywood Boulevard, goodnight,
“See ya sometime
“See ya sometime
“Yeah, right, yeah right.”
— “Goodnight, Hollywood Blvd.” (Ryan Adams)
By Gregory N. Joseph
The word “Hollywood” conjures a blizzard of contradictory images and feelings that crash against each other like characters in an overwrought melodrama universally panned by critics: loved and hated, a dream and a nightmare, Technicolor and bleak, classic and gauche, beautiful and tawdry, welcoming and remote, leading lady and forgotten grande dame, a place and a state of mind.
Taking root as “The Movie Capital of the World” at the turn of the 20th century because of the area’s year-round sunny climate and abundance of shooting locations, Hollywood is met with ambivalence and sometimes outright derision by those forced to live and work there, even the most successful. One star, who famously made his home in another state so as to keep his family and life away from the place, described the experience of conducting his career there as “parachuting behind enemy lines.”
After I made my feature-film debut in “Adam at 6 A.M.,” I was told by my agents and the casting directors in Kansas City, Missouri, that if I was serious about pursuing an acting career in television and the movies, I needed to go there, to strike while the iron was hot, that Hollywood has the shortest of memories.
At 23, I had never been away from home, but decided to take the plunge. I was both frightened and blindly fearless, as only a young person can be.
On Monday, June 1, 1970, with the white ’62 Chevy Impala convertible Dad had given me stuffed to the gills, and armed with Hollywood contacts from my agent, I left home. It was pouring rain. My parents and grandparents stood in the driveway anyway, waving madly, forcing smiles. I couldn’t stop crying. But I drove away.
I drove 500 miles a day for three days, in a straight line, no stopping except to eat and sleep. I arrived at the center of downtown Hollywood at noon on Wednesday, June 3.
I might as well have landed on the moon.
My new home was a bachelor apartment at 1769 North Orange Drive, directly across from the cinematographers’ headquarters, a few doors from the Magic Castle, the famous magicians’ club, and just a short walk from the iconic Grauman’s Chinese Theater and its equally well-known neighbor, the Hotel Roosevelt.
A stone’s throw away, at the intersection of North Highland Avenue and West Sunset Boulevard, is Hollywood High School — christened “the high school of the stars” — whose mascot is The Sheik — named after the hit 1921 silent Rudolph Valentino film of the same name (if you don’t get the idea, a large painting of a sheik is painted on the side of the school). Graduates and attendees over the years ranged from Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney to the ill-fated Sharon Tate, whose murder at the hands of the Manson gang is one of Hollywood’s most infamous episodes.
I would often walk down there to watch the school’s football team practice, them go a half-block to the IHOP on Sunset, a favorite haunt because it was open 24 hours a day.
I also ate at a diner next to Grauman’s. where I usually would have bacon and eggs followed by cherry pie. So often did I go there that the waitresses all but adopted me, finally insisting that I get the pie for free.
I ran into people I had seen in the movies and on television all the time.
Once, when I came home from work, a brown Mercedes belonging to the Oscar-winning star Burt Lancaster (“Elmer Gantry”) was parked in my spot. A friend of mine who lived in the complex, Mark Hudson, a dancer-actor who was working as a regular on “The Carol Burnett Show,” was appearing with Lancaster in the stage production of “Knickerbocker Holiday” at the Los Angeles Music Center. He apologized profusely, saying he was doing Lancaster a favor, and asked if he could use the space just for an hour or two.
Through Mark’s girlfriend, Janice Whitby, a member of Dean Martin’s Golddiggers, a group of young female dancers and singers, I was given a $500 seat to Frank Sinatra’s retirement concert at the Music Center on June 13, 1971. I sat next to screen legend Clint Eastwood.
Through another friend at the apartment complex, a comedian named Johnny Decker, I was able to submit gags to Johnny Carson for “The Tonight Show” — I met him and he used them!
My first moment in town was unforgettable, even for Hollywood. As I pulled into the driveway, an actor friend — Ed Call, like me a Kansas City native who had also worked on “Adam at 6 A.M.” — stood there waiting, and told me to not even get out of my car. “I’m working in a film (“Wild Women,” a Western television movie that was a pilot for a series) at Warner Bros.,” he explained. “You’re going with me so you can meet some people — you drive. I’ll tell the guard at the gate you’re my driver.”
Incredibly, it worked.
Thus, within my first hour in Hollywood, I stood on a sound station at Warner Bros., where I was introduced to a who’s who of actors and actresses I had grown up watching, including Hugh O’Brian (“Wyatt Earp”), Sherry Jackson (“The Danny Thomas Show”), Ann Francis (“Forbidden Planet” and “Honey West”), and Marilyn Maxwell (“The Lemon Drop Kid” and “Champion”). The director, Don Taylor, had been an actor and starred opposite Elizabeth Taylor in “Father of the Bride” with Spencer Tracy, and opposite Barry Fitzgerald in the film “Naked City” (Fitzgerald had won the best supporting actor Oscar a few years before, playing the old priest to Bing Crosby’s young one in “Going My Way,” with Crosby taking home the award as best actor for his performance).
They couldn’t have been kinder, or more welcoming. They had once been new to Hollywood themselves, and understood the complicated feelings I was experiencing at that moment.
I resided in this little box of an apartment for two unbelievable years, surrounded by a fascinating mix of people: actors, dancers, and all kinds of characters, ranging from a 90-year old former magician’s assistant (when he flicked on the light in his apartment, the switch was the plastic tongue of a devil’s head) to a former newspaper cartoonist who had been all but forgotten by her family in the Midwest.
At one point, I rented a piano (I began taking classical music at the age of 7), and would play every night when I got home to relax. Once, when I stopped playing because I was ill with a heavy cold, there was a gentle tap at the door. My neighbors wanted to know what happened to me, if I was all right — they had been gathering every night on a little patch of grass in front of the apartment complex, sipping wine and snacking on cheese and crackers. My piano playing was their entertainment. No one told me.
Yet another neighbor, a disabled man in his 60’s whom I drove to downtown Los Angeles whenever I could, wanted to repay me, so he took me to dinner and a Dodgers game. It turned out that he was the manager of a garage where famous people parked their cars. He obtained tickets from Ralph Edwards, known around the world as the host of “This Is You Life,” and we wound up sitting next to baseball legend Casey Stengel as we watched home run king Hank Aaron take batting practice.
I enjoyed seeing myself on screen when “Adam” had its Academy Award-qualifying two-week run at the historic Pix Theatre at 6126 Hollywood Boulevard, a short trek from my apartment. What a strange and wonderful feeling to be in Hollywood watching that as the savvy and involved audience reacted. (I sat in the back of the theatre, just in case they didn’t like it — or me.) The Los Angeles Times called our little film “the sleeper of the year.”
One moment early in my arrival in Hollywood stands out in particular, personifying my new life: the 1970 annual Screen Actors Guild meeting at the storied Hollywood Palladium, where SAG president Charlton Heston was about to present the organization’s eighth annual Life Achievement Award to fellow movie star Gregory Peck.
As a young, aspiring actor, a newly minted member of SAG, I was there in the auditorium on that crisp Sunday afternoon in November with what seemed like every recognizable face in American film and television. I had grown up watching all of them.
I was as green as grass, at that point a mere five-month resident of Hollywood, my bachelor apartment a stone’s throw away, but a universe removed from the spotless white, three-bedroom ranch-style house in Kansas City where I had been surrounded only by love, laughter and encouragement,
I was now in the heart of Tinseltown, a tattered damsel who promised none of those, but only a chance and an opportunity I very much had to make for myself.
Here at the Palladium, I tried to manufacture my first big, aggressive career break: I was seated as close to the stage as I could get, in the lefthand section, right on the aisle.
A harbinger of the uncertainty of Hollywood, the spot turned out to be as much curse as blessing (years later, Screen Actor Magazine marked an anniversary of the event with a huge, double-page photo — and there I was, as wide-eyed as Bambi, but twice as gullible. A few chairs away, seated in the same row, was former SAG president and “Laura” film noir star Dana Andrews; I was in very good company).
The Palladium itself was a Hollywood legend. Located at 6215 Sunset Boulevard, it had opened on Halloween night in 1940, thanks to the $1.6 million generosity of Los Angeles Times publisher Norman Chandler.
To say that the list of performers who appeared there over the years is varied and eclectic is an understatement in the extreme.
The Tommy Dorsey Orchestra featuring a boy singer named Frank Sinatra, not quite yet arrived, gave the inaugural performance there (Judy Garland and Bob Hope were in attendance, along with a crowd of 10,000).
Conceived as a venue for Big Bands, Collier’s magazine referred to the Palladium as “the biggest night club on earth,” covering nearly two acres and boasting six bars, where people could eat, drink and dance. Lana Turner enthused that she went there “four or five times a week.”
In the ensuing years, the Palladium was home to everything from the starchy “The Lawrence Welk Show” to the ribald “Richard Pryor: Live on the Sunset Strip,” with films such as “The Blues Brothers” and “Day of the Locust” sprinkled liberally throughout. It hosted political rallies, high school proms, rock ‘n roll acts — and awards shows like the one I was attending.
An aging grande dame a little worn around the edges, it still managed to retain its status as a ranking member of Hollywood culture that was mentioned in the same breath as such landmarks as the Brown Derby, the Earl Carroll Theatre and the Café Montmartre (where, at its zenith, you might see Joan Crawford well before her “Mommie Dearest” days dancing on a tabletop or Rudolph Valentino having a bite to eat as his dinner companion squeezed her pet chihuahua).
On this particular afternoon, the actors Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland, fresh off filming “Klute,” which would bring Fonda her first Academy Award, were at the height of their anti-everything cycle. They were attacking SAG for not being diversified enough. That came as an immense surprise to me, since the organization’s board members, seated onstage, seemed pretty darned diverse to me, featuring everyone from Native American Jay Silverheels, Tonto himself, to actresses like Kathleen Freeman and Kathleen Nolan of “Real McCoys” fame, the latter slated to become the first woman president of the body a few years later.
Ms. Fonda and Sutherland seemed to want to talk, and so they they did, via microphones that had been set up in the aisles so that members could question Heston and the board.
There were plenty of pressing issues.
A whopping 42% of the SAG membership was unemployed, and because of that the guild and IATSE (the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees) had signed a lower-budget contract designed to bring production back to Hollywood (the agreement was called the “Comeback Contract”).
Positioned as I was right on the aisle, Ms. Fonda became my new best friend, at least geographically. No matter what anyone said or how well they said it or what facts they quoted, she had a ready answer and sped back to the microphone. And — almost — to me. (It occurred to me that I’d better have something to say if she sped too hard, missed the mic and landed in my lap; it could be the ultimate career changer.)
Finally, the dignified and reserved character actor John Randolph, just coming off a dynamic performance as the “old” version of Rock Hudson in the film “Seconds,” attempted to bring reason and decorum back to the session. Avuncular and extraordinarily well-spoken, appearing dignified in a cardigan sweater, he removed his glasses repeatedly and leaned in to the mic, moving his arms and hands in way that must have taken years onstage to perfect. (Alas, this was not to be Mr. Randolph’s worst experience at a gathering of actors; at the 1986 Oscar ceremonies telecast, his wife, actress Sarah Cunningham, would die of an asthma attack.)
It went on like that for a very long time. Aside from Mr. Peck receiving his award, something that seemed to please him greatly and drew an awful lot of applause, nothing seemed to get solved. Jane and Donald remained very upset.
As I trudged slowly back to my tiny apartment, head down, my mind swirling with what I had just seen, subconsciously studying the cracks in the sidewalk of that world-famous thoroughfare for hidden meaning as scores of actors before me surely had done in moments of quiet, solitary reflection, I was at once dazed, excited — and frightened.
It was the beginning of a long, winding journey that would span a lifetime, taking me places I never could have imagined.
Hollywood: the ultimate labyrinth.
