A friend of mine grew up in a house on Wonder View Dr., that's in the hills over by Lake Hollywood. Like a lot of folks that lived in houses in that area he was told as a child that a prior owner was in the picture business, he vaguely recalled that she was maybe an actress in the silents. So of course I was intrigued, I told him that I would go to the city's online building search and see what I could find. I ran the address, 3333 Wonder View, and came up with a 1938 new construction permit for a woman named Margaret Cummings. Researching her I found no connection to the movie business.
But I decided to do a little more digging. I pulled up the 1940 census. I found that Wonder View was not even listed as a street. So maybe the house Margaret was building was unfinished when the census taker came around. I still did not want to give up so I located the census enumeration district (60-114) and started browsing it, searching for her name.
This turned out to be a thoroughly fascinating exercise. I'm not finished going through all the pages (there are 46 total), but what I'm finding is a remarkable view into the industry circa 1940. This census district basically starts at Barham/Cahuenga, then goes over in the hills to Beachwood. Down to the flats along Franklin, over to Highland Ave by the Bowl, and those hillside streets adjacent. This is Barton Fink territory. So many of these people show as actors, dancers, screenwriters....many showing NYC as previous address, with Jewish surnames. You really get a feel for the draw the film business had become by then. If you had made it at all you got a house in these hills. If you were newly arrived with no contract you took a room in a building down by the blvd.
A couple of pages into the browsing, who turns up but the Godfather of Noir L.A., the man who started it all. Author of "Double Indemnity", "Postman Always Rings Twice", "Mildred Pierce"... Mr. James M. Cain :
Cain is misidentified here as James "N" Cain. He's at 2966 Belden Dr., Beachwood Cyn. His wife, shown here as Eline, was actually Elina. According to Wiki, Cain was devoted to the two step children listed. He also had Elina's mother, Sofia, in the house. Cain divorced Elina and re-married in 1944.
A couple of doors down from the Cain household, at 2986 Belden, was a residence headed by Frank O. White, age 72. In that house was a 23 year old step daughter, Marie Wilson:
On the other half of the page Marie lists her occupation as actress, and the name kind of rang a bell, so I looked her up. It appears Marie bought 2986 Belden for the family (from Wiki):
"Wilson was born in Anaheim, California on August 19, 1916. Her nickname at Anaheim High School was Maybelle.[1] Wilson graduated high school in 1933. At age 16, she soon moved her family of nine – including her mother, sister, grandfather, step-father and his four children to Hollywood after she inherited $11,000."
Marie had started in the business in '34, but really did not break out until '47, when she got a radio series "My Friend Irma". In 1949 they made a film out of the series, it was the first Martin & Lewis picture. She got to reprise her radio character in the movie. "Irma" was then a TV series for a couple of years. Her career faded after that. Here she is in a photo dated the census year, 1940:
I went a couple of pages deeper into the the census, and was jolted back to the literary side of the noir city, with the appearance of Nathanael West:
Nathanael West, author of "Day of The Locust", a defining novel of L.A. Noir. He was at 6614 Cahuenga Terrace, over by the John Anson Ford theater. With him is wife Eileen, misidentified here as "Aileen".
Here's the other half of the census page with the Wests:
Nathanael is shown as "writer, motion picture studio". Eileen is listed just below him as "writer, cartoon studio". She was working as an assistant to Walt Disney.
Eileen West was raised in Ohio, maiden name McKenney. In the early '30's she and her sister Ruth moved to the bohemian world of Greenwich Village. Ruth wrote up the colorful tales of their years in the Village for the New Yorker in the late 30's. These short stories became a 1940 play directed by George S. Kaufman, "My Sister Eileen". Which then begat a 1942 film starring Rosalind Russell. And the 1953 Comden/Green/Leonard Bernstein show "Wonderful Town". And the 1955 Columbia musical, back to the "My Sister Eileen" title, with Jack Lemmon, Bob Fosse, Janet Leigh, Tommy Rall....Janet played Eileen, the "pretty" sister. Nathanael West ended up with the beauty, as Ruth was rather plain. Betty Garrett played Ruth in this version.
(A complete aside, about 15 years ago I went to a screening of the 1955 film at the Egyptian. Betty Garrett and Tommy Rall showed up to take questions. Rall has a "challenge dance" in the film with Fosse, it's on YouTube, really top shelf stuff. At the Egyptian screening Rall said that Fosse conceded Tommy was the better dancer of the two. I think someone here posted recently that Gene Kelly called Rall the best dancer in Hollywood. He's still with us at 86, Betty Garrett died in 2011).
Anyway, back to Nathanael and Eileen West, and the 1940 census. They would not live to see out the rest of that year. On Dec. 22 they were returning from a trip to Mexico, and were in El Centro, where West ran a stop sign. The resulting collision killed them both.
This occurred the day after West's friend, fellow novelist and screenwriter Scott Fitzgerald, unexpectedly died. The suspicion is that West had learned of Fitzgerald's death, and was distraught and rushing back to Hollywood, contributing to the crash.
The great irony in all this is that both men went to their graves thinking themselves failures. Recognition of their work was almost entirely posthumous.
The Cain and West houses are still with us. Old broker listings note their prior ownership, so really no revelation here in that regard.
I won't write it up here but I also found Dorothy Comingore (she was playing Susan Alexander in "Citizen Kane" at the time of the census) and her screenwriter husband Richard Collins at an apt court on Highland. Her story is textbook noir, has it appeared on the board previously?
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Thanks for the photographs and information on the Highland-Camrose bungalows SheriffPaul. You're a lucky man to be able to work in such a serene setting.
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