The Hollywood Dream (3): H.J. Whitley Paves Paradise
Hollywood’s fever dream peaks during Oscars Week. The global telecast marks the end of four long months of elaborate and exhausting rituals: lunches, screenings, red carpets, press, all geared towards anointing new stars and cementing the place of established ones in history.
Sunday night’s ceremony represents the rare occasion when Hollywood [the institution] converges en masse on Hollywood [the place]. The Dolby Theater will seat 3,300 illustrious guests who, for the rest of the year, steer well clear of the psychotic fake superheroes, snake charmers, pickpockets and tourists thronging the urine-smelling sidewalk. However, when little gold statues are in the mix, they’ll hop in their limos to join the party.
It’s a weird event, rigidly hierarchical, an awkward mix of business and pleasure, a cacophonous display of wealth and status. It’s about reminding the world of what the gilded, loaded term “Hollywood” means, leaning into the dream, and thus ensuring the flow of money, from audiences and movie financiers, for another year.
The center of Hollywood has long been the site of such pageantry. A full decade before D.W. Griffith shot a frame of the first Hollywood movie, “IN OLD CALIFORNIA” in 1911, the so-called Father of Hollywood was busy associating the name with beauty and escapism. Hobart Johnstone Whitley knew that the best way to sell a dream is to host a party.
He understood this principle better than his predecessors, the Wilcoxes. Their vision for the land was geared towards lotus eaters, retirees who wanted to live out their days in indolent sunshine, wandering through exotic gardens in the afternoon and gathering for sober tea parties in the evenings. They designed an enclave for a homogenous group: wealthy, older, righteous white people. No hedonism allowed. It was a flaccid dream, destined for collapse amid the financial uncertainties of the 1890s.
HJ Whitley bet big on the Wilcoxes’ failure. He had been waiting in the wings since 1886, when he brought his wife Gigi to Los Angeles on their honeymoon. They stayed in the Westminster Hotel downtown, but hired horses to explore the citrus groves and nopal-strewn hillsides around the Cahuenga Pass. It was on this trip that they had their fabled encounter with a Chinese worker “holly wood”. 19 year-old Gigi may have admired the idyllic views and the sea breezes that made their picnic so pleasurable, but Whitley was more intrigued by the potential for ownership and exploitation. He made a handshake deal with a local rancher, Hurd, to buy the land when it became available. All he had to do was bide his time.
Nearing forty, HJ Whitley was a developer, instrumental in the colonization and genocide that rippled westwards with the railroads. As an employee of the Rock Island Railroad, his job was to manage settlement sites along the new routes. He imposed order on the speculative chaos surrounding new depots in Kansas, Missouri, the Dakotas and Oklahoma. He oversaw land auctions, built banks, cut roads, and whatever else it took to build–and enforce justice in–more than 100 new townships between 1870 and 1894. His frontier life was profitable, but tough, dangerous, and no place to raise a young family. So in 1893 the Whitleys returned to Los Angeles, ready to build another empire.
They settled temporarily downtown, in a Flower Street mansion, and Whitley set up a fine goods emporium at 111 North Spring Street. He sold luxury items, from diamonds to pottery tiles, many of them sourced on the trips he and Gigi took to Europe. The sought-after merchandise helped to cement relationships with the area’s wealthiest citizens as well as framing the Whitleys as arbiters of taste, thought leaders. And the H.J. Whitley Company was always a good place to throw a party. A Los Angeles Times article, headed “Jeweled Opening” from December 2, 1900, describes an annual week-long promotional event as having “the elegance of a brilliant society function”, with “Rare Decorative Effects” and musical accompaniment from Schoneman and Blanchard’s orchestra.
But Whitley had his eyes turned westward. In April 1899 he finally completed the purchase of what the LA Times called “a well-known and highly improved lemon grove in the Cahuenga Valley” from Hurd’s widow, for $22,500. The Times went on to extol the tract’s virtues:
“The lemons raised on this property have always sold for the top price in the market, the grove being an excellent example of what may be done by careful and painstaking cultivation… The house is neat and cozy, and the surroundings are most attractive… Mr. Whitley is a well-known and wealthy businessman who expects to spend several thousand dollars on the property which he has just purchased.”
(LAT 21 April, 1899)
But Whitley had no interest in “painstaking cultivation” or selling high quality lemons from a cozy farmhouse. He was not a man who worked the land: he wanted the land to work for him. So he moved to subjugate it, to overlay the bucolic scenery with roads, train lines, municipal buildings and utility connections. Whitley’s Hollywood dream involved concrete, arc street lights, general stores, paving paradise to create a money-generating hum. The land, pretty as it was, needed Improvement, his mantra, the word he used over and over again in meetings and advertisements.
By the end of September, 1899, Whitley had persuaded “a committee of local citizens”, including larger landowners like Ida Hancock and Colonel Griffith, to approve the Los Angeles-Pacific Railway Company’s proposal to build an electric train line to Hollywood. This was his playbook from back east: build the railway and the rest will follow. Over the next two years he reshaped the area to his new specifications. And of course, he threw a big party to celebrate, one the LA Times dubbed a “HOLIDAY FOR HOLLYWOOD Large Excursion to the Pretty Place” (June 27, 1902).
Whitley ferried more than 500 guests from DTLA “five special cars furnished by the Los Angeles-Pacific Railway Company”, along with those who traveled in automobiles and horse-drawn wagons (tally-hos). The eager crowd included “stockholders of the development company, city and county officials, bankers and representative citizens”, plus their wives and children. Whitley threw open his house and grounds and served “several kinds of delicious punch” to all comers.
This was partying with a purpose, however. The excursionists were there, not to smell the flowers like the regular tourists, but “to admire the newly built roads” and to support legislation favorable to Whitley’s schemes. The LA Times gushed over “the improvements now in progress”:
“Five miles of fine roadway surfaced with decomposed granite… and over eight thousand feet of granite curb laid. Twelve fine houses are now in course of construction, including the Hollywood Hotel, of fifty rooms…Roads have been built from Hollywood to the tops of the neighboring peaks and the view from these is well worth the climb.”
General H.A. Pierce, an old friend of Whitley’s called upon to give an address, waxed lyrical about the view, suggesting “should an angel stray to the Valley of the Cahuenga from the heavenly realms there would always be a sign on Peter’s gate ‘Angel lost’.” He also applied a sheen of divinity to Whitley, saying that “he seemed to wield the scepter of the God of Midas”. Perhaps there was some magic seeping from the land that afternoon? Or it might have been the punch.
None of the visitors acknowledged that Whitley’s plans inevitably involved bulldozing the golden beauty of the environment, the thing that drew people to the valley in the first place. But such is the developer’s way.
The event was a success. Whitley got his legislation, more investments, and an electric rail line, all patterned after his previous endeavors in the Midwest. But, to keep the money flowing. there would need to be more parties, more elaborate, attracting a variety of wealthy, beautiful, and charismatic guests to do media-worthy, even scandalous, things. Not the type of parties you can host at your cozy farmhouse.
For the next phase of his vision, Whitley needed a hotel.