When America entered World War II, the HSC, like most other Hollywood social centers, joined the war effort. Dances for servicemen were held on Saturday nights. Residents knitted slippers and blankets in the library and volunteered at the Hollywood Canteen.
In 1945, Marjorie Williams, the club’s director for a generation, retired, to be eventually replaced by Florence Williams (no relation). One resident remembers the second “Miss Williams” as being “right out of central casting; she always wore a cardigan and her hair in a bun. She was so very proper.” Miss Williams was often the one at the front desk and, by all accounts, really “knew her girls,” particularly those who needed a little extra attention.
And the ingenues kept arriving. Actresses Barbara Hale, Donna Reed, Dorothy Malone, Ann B. Davis, and Marie Windsor all called the HSC home when they first moved to Hollywood. There was usually a long waiting list, but if a major studio called, you went to the head of the line. That’s what happened to Barbara Rush, who, less than two weeks after coming to town, found herself in the office of Adolph Zukor, chairman of the board at Paramount. “He asked where I was living, and when I told him I hadn’t settled anywhere yet,” Rush remembers, “he told me, ‘You will be at the Studio Club.’ It made sense: It was close to Paramount, and they could keep an eye on me.”
Today, the fellow resident Rush remembers best is Marilyn Monroe: “She wasn’t a bombshell then, and was so sweet with that whispery voice.” Robert Wagner, who, along with Monroe, was under contract at Twentieth Century Fox, recalls dropping off Monroe at the HSC and thinking “the concept of the place was just fantastic,” especially for someone like her, who “everybody loved and felt protective of.”
In late 1949, Monroe secured a part in John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle. While she had had small roles at Fox, Monroe would later say that she so needed $50 in 1949 that she agreed to pose for what would become her infamous nude calendar. Even if the HSC suffered negative backlash as a result, house director Florence Williams fondly remembered Monroe. When asked who was the most stunning woman she ever encountered there, Williams answered, “Marilyn Monroe, because she was even beautiful first thing in the morning.”
Williams was also fond of another breathtaking resident, Kim Novak. When Columbia chief Harry Cohn put Novak under contract, he had insisted that she stay at the HSC. Not that there was any love lost between them, but Cohn wanted to totally control her private life, going so far as to hire private security to keep tabs on her.
Yet Cohn wasn’t very successful, according to Novak’s fellow boarder Betty Kelly, a radio and TV staffer at CBS who, for a time, was the house’s official social chair. Later on, says Kelly today, “Cohn ordered her to stay out of Sammy Davis Jr.’s bed, but Kim did whatever she wanted. She stopped traffic. She was a model for a couple of minutes, and then she was a star.”
While many speak of the solidarity found at the HSC, Kelly remembers it as cliquish: “The other girls were mean to Kim because they were jealous of her success.” Kim also stood out for her platinum hair with a purple hue and because “she had great boobs. She’d just take off her shirt as she was walking down the hall.”
“Kim never wore a bra—I was astonished,” confirms the acting and dance legend Rita Moreno, who had left her mother’s home for her own apartment but couldn’t afford the rent. “I heard there was this place for girls in show business who hadn’t made it yet and you got two meals a day for $15 a week,” so she and her friend Louise Martinson moved in. After some initial professional ups and downs “playing a lot of little Indian maidens,” Moreno signed a contract with Fox. Today, Moreno, 87, marvels at how naive she was, even after being raped by her first agent. She also relates some very close calls with a persistent Buddy Adler, then head of production at Fox, and meeting Cohn at a party, where he told her, “ ‘I’d like to fuck you,’ ” in the same “tone you might use to remark on the weather.”
2019-12-10 14:03:04Z
https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2019/12/the-lost-history-of-las-women-only-hollywood-studio-club
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