Beverly Hills, another suburb, had gone against the haphazard planning of Greatest Los Angeles, and when the Rodeo Land and Water Company decided to develop its gently sloping acreage, it had the great good taste and foresight to send for an expert from Kew Gardens, London, who planted a different species of tree for every street, and thereafter a fascinating variety of architecture proliferated beneath maples, magnolias, palms, corals, pines, sycamores, flowering eucalyptus, elms, olives, jacaranda, and oaks. A home in Beverly Hills was the status symbol of success in the prewar motion-picture industry, and the area boasted more private swimming pools and detectives to the square mile than anywhere else in the world.

Excerpt #2 Degrees of Friendliness

Less than two years after the end of the World War II the first microbes of a foul disease that was to spread across the fair face of the United States surfaced in Hollywood. Senator Joseph McCarthy and his two loathsome lieutenants, Cohn and Schine, had not yet succeeded in infecting the land with McCarthyism, but a cry of “There are Reds under Hollywood‘s beds” was raised in Washington, and the House Committee on Un-American Affairs opened an investigation on Communist infiltration of the motion picture industry. Immense publicity was generated by the ensuing circus like proceedings under the chairmanship of a highly biased gentleman named Parnell Thomas. Richard Nixon was a member of the investigation team.

Some full-blooded support for the theory Hollywood was in grave danger of becoming a tool of the Communist Party was given by a long list of “friendly” witnesses, including L. B. Mayer, the head of MGM; Jack Warner of Warner Brothers; Walt Disney: Gary Cooper; Robert Montgomery; Adolphe Menjou; George Murphy, later U.S. Senator from California; Ronald Reagan, who became governor of the same state; and Ginger Rogers’ mother, who remained Ginger Rogers’ mother. Between them these “friendly witnesses” named a few of their fellow workers as Communists and pointed to a larger group as “acting like Communists.” Before long, all these people were paraded before Parnell Thomas and Co.; many became known as the unfriendly witnesses.