Hollywood Studio Club

Hollywood Studio Club
U.S. National Register of Historic Places
Hollywood Studio Club, May 2008
Location	Hollywood, California
Built	1925
Architect	Morgan,Julia
Architectural style	Renaissance, Other
NRHP reference No.	80000806
Added to NRHP	November 25, 1980

Hollywood Studio Club was a supervised residential facility for young women involved in the motion picture business from 1916 to 1975. Located in the heart of Hollywood, California, the Studio Club was run by the YWCA and housed more than 12,000 women during its existence. The building was designed by noted West Coast architect Julia Morgan, who also designed Hearst Castle, and is currently used as a YMCA-run Jobs Corps dormitory. It was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1979.

Formation of the Studio Club

The Hollywood Studio Club was first formed in 1916 in a rented facility on Carlos Avenue in Hollywood. It began with a group of young women trying to break into the movies who got together in the basement of the Hollywood Public Library to read plays. A librarian, Mrs. Eleanor Jones, worried about the young women living in cheap hotels and rooming houses with no place to study or practice their craft. Mrs. Jones solicited help from the local YWCA, and a hall was established as a meeting place. The movement grew as Hollywood studio moguls raised money to rent an old house on Carlos Avenue with space for 20 women. Mrs. Cecil B. DeMille and Mary Pickford were active in the formation of the Studio Club. Pickford later recalled, "Mrs. deMille spent every day doing something for the club. And the motion picture industry supported us. There was a great need."

The "Studio Girl"

In the early 1920s, Hollywood became embroiled in scandals, including the case involving Fatty Arbuckle and Virginia Rappe. The image of the "extra girl", the pretty young girl who had traveled across the country to make it in the movies only to find herself the victime of exploitation, became a public relations problem for Hollywood. One industry observer wondered if extra work would ever be anything other than "an alibi for prostitution." In order to change this negative reputation, the Hollywood studios led by Will Hays led reforms including the formation of the Central Casting Bureau in 1925 and the construction of a large new home for the Hollywood Studio Club. By opening a large "chaperoned, elite dormitory" for Hollywood's young women, the studios hoped to replace the image of sad, bedraggled and exploited "extra girl" with the image of the new "studio girl" -- a smartly dressed, graceful, and genteel women tutored in etiquette as well as the performing arts. Hays told The New York Times that he sought to "make the motion picture business ... a model industrial community, complete with recreation facilities, community centres, dormitories [and] matrons."

Architecture and construction

The new Hollywood Studio Club opened in 1926, having been built at a cost of $250,000. The building was designed by noted architect Julia Morgan. Morgan designed the Studio Club in a Mediterranean style with interiors decorated in "pistache green, rose coral, and tan." The large building has three sections -- a central section with connecting wings on each side. The entrance to the center section is marked by a loggia, three archways with decorative quoins. There is also a painted frieze above the main entrance. The building includes serveral recurring elements from Morgan's Mediterranean style buildings, including full-length arched windows, balconies with iron ballustrades, and decorative brackets. A writer in California Graphic said "this beautiful and spacious new building is but one more jewel in the crown of Achieved Results which this progressive and cultural little city is wearing so proudly and shows its ever increasing desire to give unstinted moral and financial support to every progressive endeavor."

Operation

During its nearly sixty years of operation, the Studio Club was more than a dormitory. Some referred to it as a sorority, and the Studio Club also offered classes in various aspects of the performing arts, as well as hosting dances, teas, dinners and occasional plays, fashion shows and stunt nights. In 2000, Susan Spano wrote in the Los Angeles Times: "The handsome Italianate building, designed in 1926 by architect Julia Morgan (of Hearst Castle fame), still evokes the good old days when a mother could send her daughter to Hollywood to become a star without worrying that her offspring would go astray." However, the Studio Club was not free from scandal. Actress and former Studio Club resident Virginia Sale recalled, "One woman, older than the rest of us, was murdered in front of the club by a boyfriend. He was an ex-serviceman or something like that. And he then killed himself."

Closure

By the late 1960s, times had changed, and the idea of a chaperoned dormitory had become dated. By 1971, the club was forced to open its doors as a regular hotel for transient women and stopped serving meals, but it still lost money. In 1975, the Studio Club closed its doors. At the time of the closure, the Los Angeles Times wrote:

"They are tales of happier times, when the Studio Club was a haven for all those young girls -- nearly 10,000 of them -- who had come to Hollywood from little towns across the country to seek fame in the motion picture business. Some of them made it. Most of them didn't. While they were here, though, the club tried to be what it said it was, a substitute home for the one each had left. Today, the Studio Club is gone. The building on Lodi Place just a few blocks from Sunset and Vine closed last week, a victim of changing times and new fire codes. 'It's out of vogue to live in a club atmosphere,' said actress Dorothy Malone, a Studio Club alumna from the mid-'40s. 'They never allowed men in the rooms and girls didn't live with their boyfriends then,' she explained ... 'But they do now. What a sad commentary on society.'"

Famous residents

Over the years of its operation, the Studio Club was home to many budding starlets and others trying to make it in show business. Those residing at the club include:

• ZaSu Pitts - Pitts, silent screen star, was one of the first stars to come out of the Studio Club.
• Ayn Rand - When Ayn Rand arrived in Hollywood in 1926 to become a screenwriter, she stayed at the Studio Club. Though her heavy accent and plain Russian clothes made her an "odd apparition" to the pretty, fresh actresses of the Studio Club, Rand was welcomed into the sorority. She was hired initially as an extra, at a salary of $7.50 a day, she left the Studio Club before dawn each day to arrive at the studio at 6 a.m. for makeup and dress. It was also while staying at the Studio Club that she met both Cecil B. DeMille and her future husband, Frank." Club resident later recalled the following story about Rand:

  "We all had money problems, but the funniest story I ever heard was about Ayn Rand, the author. She apparently had terrible financial problems and owed money to the club. Almost everybody did at one time or another. Anyhow, a woman was going to donate $50 tot he neediest girl in the club, and Miss Williams (Marjorie Williams, the revered director of Studio Club from 1922 to 1945) picked out Ayn. Ayn thanked them for the money, went out and bought a set of black lingerie.

• Virginia Sale - Sale, who went on to have more than 150 film and television credits, also started at the Studio Club. Years later, Sale recalled her friendship with Ayn Rand at the club in the 1920s. Though Rand largely kept to herself, Rand encouraged Sale in her writing of skits. "She (Rand) did the sound effects for me backstage and that was really where my one-woman show got started, right at the club. OVer the years on tour I gave 3,000 performances."
• Peg Entwistle - Better known as "The Hollywood Sign Girl," Entwistle was an aspiring actress who moved into the Hollywood Studio Club in 1932. Later that year, after a night of drinking and feeling depressed, the 24-year-old Entwistle climbed the workman's ladder to the top of the "H" in the Hollywood sign and dove to her death.
• Dorothy Malone - Actress Dorothy Malone was another resident of the Studio Club. She dated Mel Torme while living at the club. Malone recalled being discovered by Alan Ladd while plyaing a Spanish girl in a showcase at the club; but when she reported to the studio without the black hair, they did not believe she was the same person.
• Diana Dill - Diana Dill was an actress living at the Studio Club when she met Kirk Douglas, who she would marry.
• Marie Windsor - Windsor, who found a nich in film noir and became known as "Queen of the B's", won two beauty pageants in Utah and drove to Hollywood to become a star. She lived at the Studio Club when she arrived in Hollywood. Windsor spent three years at the club (the maximum stay period) and later returned for six more months after World War II.
• Dorothy Malone - Malone moved into the Studio Club in the 1940s when she moved to Hollywood from Texas. She later recalled that the Studio Club was already famous as a home for aspiring young actresses. She recalled, "You had to have references and a letter from your parents just to get in. There was a long waiting list from the beginning."
• Marilyn Monroe - Monroe lived at the Studio Club from 1948 to 1949. She later recalled that it was while living at the Studio Club and needing money to pay the rent that she posed for the famous nude photographs. She said, "Funny How shocked people in Hollywood were when they learned I'd posed in the nude. At one time I'd always said no when photographers asked me. But you'll do it when you get hungry enough. It was at a time when I didn't seem to have much future. I had no job and no money for the rent. I was living in the Hollywood Studio Club for Girls. I told them I'd get the rent somwhow. So I phoned up Tom Kelley, and he took these two colour shots -- one sitting up, the other lying down. ...I earned the fifty dollars that I needed." Monore stayed in Room 334.
• Shelley Winters - Winters, who went on to win Oscars for her roles in The Diary of Anne Frank (1959) and [[A Patch of Blue" (1965), lived at the Studio Club after moving to Hollywood from East St. Louis, Illinois. Winters was roommates with Marilyn Monroe at the Studio Club.
  
• Kim Novak = Kim Novak was the biggest star to live at the Studio Club in the 1950s. She arrived in 1953 and stayed on at the club even after she became a movie star. Another resident at the time recalled, "She was very neat and clean. Nobody could look more glamorous in a man's white shirt and Levi's. I remember she just couldn't bear to leave. In those years we had raised the limit of time to five years."
• Barbara Eden - In the 1950s, before landing her role on I Dream of Jeannie, Eden lived at the Studio Club. Other club residents later recalled that Eden would look at the club's bulletin board and apply for every show business job available, even those that shw was advised would "ruin" her career.
• Sharon Tate - Tate, who was murdered by the Manson Family in 1969, lived at the Studio Club when she began her career in Hollywood in 1963. When her aggressive roommate at the Club made lesbian advances, Tate requested a new room.
• Joanne Worley - Worley, who went on to fame in Laugh In, lived at the Studio Club in the 1960s. She recalled, "I remember it was a wonderful place. ... It was inexpensive, had good food and 24-hour telephone service. ANd on Sundays the best coffee cake I ever ate."

Other residents of the Studio Club include Donna Reed, Nancy Kwan, Barbara Rush, Janet Blair, Elvia Allman, Barbara Britton, Gale Storm, Evelyn Keyes, Ann B. Davis, and Sally Struthers.