Bring on the Empty Horses (Excerpt)

by David Niven

Excerpt #1 The Playpen

The “film folk,“ I discovered, unwound at their favourite playgrounds, the beaches, the mountains at Arrowhead and the Big Bear and the desert at Palm Springs - - a tiny colony in the middle of Indian-owned land which boasted a main street and two hotels. Santa Anita Racecourse was also a very popular with them, and there were various country clubs, which dispensed golf, tennis, and an extraordinary degree of segregation. Not one had a black member, and several refused to have Jewish members, prompting the Jewish community to start their own country club and to take in no Gentiles. (They also found oil in satisfactory quantities beneath their fairways, which provided them with a splendid opportunity for nose thumbing.) But the topper was the prestigious Los Angeles Country Club, which adamantly refused to have anything whatever to do with anyone in the motion-picture industry irrespective of race, creed or colour.

Greater Los Angeles, a city which grew more quickly than the city planners had planned, was not remarkable for its beauty, and it was necessary to disregard the largely temporary appearance of the buildings and the unsightly forests of poles and overhead wiring and concentrate on its truly remarkable setting, in the horseshoe of the San Gabriel Mountains, and on the sunsets.

In Hollywood itself, a place of dusty Baroque charm, one important thoroughfare, La Cienega Boulevard, with great subservience separated on either side of an oil derrick pumping slowly like a praying mantis, and in the scrub-covered hills above, underlining its claim to fame, was a forty-foot-high wooden sign: HOLLYWOODLAND.