Welcome to another episode of The History Islands! Elinor Glyn has now arrived in Hollywood, at the dawn of its golden age. We follow her story.
The Hollywood Hotel
Los Angeles, California
1925
We are present at the creation. In California in the beginning, there must have been an Edenic paradise, of orange groves and eternal sunshine. This was a world of old Spanish missions, of burning heat on adobe walls. Time moved slowly here, unfolding languidly on the sundials, until one day, it started to accelerate into the future.
First men came west for God, then for gold. Now a new breed of technical pioneers has colonised the Promised Land, in search of the aura of pure clear light. Dusty farms have become studios. The merciless Californian sun is the ideal medium for these magicians, as they conjure up ghosts on their magic lanterns. We came here to consult with these wizards of the coast. We checked into an obscure and somewhat ramshackle country roadhouse, the Hollywood Hotel, which has suddenly become deluged with celebrities. The landlady is now a good friend of mine.
Jesse Lasky, the studio supremo, had invited us over. Those early motion pictures were marvellous, but their style was raw and untutored. So, Jesse summoned a brace of established writers, to travel over from old Europe and embrace the uncharted horizons of Hollywood. Most of them failed to grasp the fluid new visual medium of the cinema; and were soon sent packing. Even the great Somerset Maugham lasted only a week here. I took to it like a duck to water.
California is the ultimate reversal. Sunlight is burning away the cloying Jersey fog of my past, scourging and renewing me from within. In England they dismissed me as a mere scribbler, a purveyor of pot-boilers; over here the sheer popularity of my books is validation enough. In Jersey as a child, they pitied and scorned my unconventional looks; remember that threat of the leaden comb, and all those whispered asides? Here, they adore me. Gloria Swanson loves my striking red hair and my theatrical poise; I receive daily compliments about my piercing green eyes.
There is a new world here, and it is in the process of being born. They are busy ploughing boulevards, excavating great highways across empty scrubland and new roads along twisting canyons. They are planting young palm trees outside, in neat rows along the boulevards. Beverly Hills often seems like a dusty building site, with estates of grand houses springing up overnight like mushrooms. The sidewalks vanish into empty fields, but we know those fields will soon be filled. We perch here above a thousand miles of azure ocean, where the brown hills dissolve into pure clear light. This is where the great trek west ended, where the restless American frontier reached its final destination. I am living in this promised land.
My first major cinematic breakthrough was Beyond the Rocks, which starred Gloria Swanson and Rudolph Valentino. Now I glide through the opulent salons of William Randolph Hearst. I waltz at parties with Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, the golden couple of the silent movies. It is as if I am a house guest at a beautiful and shining ball.
Weekends are spent unwinding and playing charades with Charles Chaplin. He is such a riot! Can you believe this is the lost boy whose hair was doused in iodine in the Hanwell workhouse? He was an unknown theatre clown, when he was captured on film for the first time in my beautiful home Island of Jersey. Now, by a dazzling series of miracles, this wonderful human being has ended up as the most famous man in the world.
We’ve had such tremendous fun together, and one fine morning we even eloped down to Mexico! He’d just married young Lita Grey, and after a madcap road trip, we all ended up in a decrepit double-bedded shack in a tiny Mexican village! Charles and Lita shared a bed while I curled up in a makeshift cot in the corner. We were just drifting off to sleep when Charles, with impeccable comic timing, intoned in a sepulchral voice: “My God! Think of Charlie Chaplin and Elinor Glyn in bed together in the wilds of Mexico”. He then ad-libbed some hilarious press reports of the incident!
It is a beautiful life; a fairy tale as poetic as any of the endings to my novels. I wake every morning, and the blazing sun warms my bones. My past in Jersey and England has receded to the form of a distant, troubling dream. The longer I am here, the further away I feel. It is a blissful thought. Yet somehow, far beneath the waterline, I sense that my soul is already beginning to fray.
To be continued….
This story is extracted from Jersey: Secrets of The Sea which is available from Waterstones and WH Smith in Jersey and of course Amazon.
