Anna May Wong
Anna May Wong is recognized as the first Asian American movie star, hence her justifiably bitter disappointment at how Hollywood treated her, as fairly assessed by the Netflix series. Hollywood mostly reminds you of how incredulous it was that Wong (Michelle Krusiec) lost the role of a Chinese character named O-Lan to the lily white Luise Rainer in MGM’s The Good Earth (1937). However, that was just the biggest personal setback in a career filled with them.
Born to second generation Chinese American parents living in 1905 Los Angeles, Anna (born Wong Liu Tsong) saw the fledgling movie colony spring up around her. Hollywood mutated from being a sleepy annex of Los Angeles to the movie capital while she came of age, and Wong in turn became fascinated by the silent moving picture. She broke into film by becoming an extra in The Red Lantern (1919) without her father’s permission. By 1922, and at the age of 17, she got her first leading role in the first two-color Technicolor film, The Toll of the Sea. She’d become a star at 19 by playing a scheming Mongol slave opposite Douglas Fairbanks in The Thief of Baghdad (1924).
However, she soon learned the limit of such roles, as throughout her life she continued to be cast as “native” and “exotic” roles, from Tiger Lily in a 1924 film of Peter Pan to Princess Ling Moy in early Dr. Fu Manchu talkie, Daughter of the Dragon (1931). Laws against “miscegenation” in the South made it impossible for her to get a lead role where she could have an actual love interest with a male co-star (and the later Hayes Code prohibited interracial relationships). She was constantly cast in “Dragon Lady” parts, even in films like Marline Dietrich classic, The Shanghai Express (1937).
After visiting her family’s ancestral Chinese village in the late ‘30s, she focused on starring in B-movies that depicted Chinese-Americans and immigrants in a positive light, and raising money to help China against Japan during World War II. She largely retired from movies in the ‘40s, but became the first Asian American lead of a television series by starring in 1951’s The Gallery of Madame Liu-Tsong.
Irving Thalberg
Irving Thalberg appears in Hollywood for a single flashback to the “old days” on the set of The Good Earth (1937). Thalberg, the New Yorker son of Jewish immigrants, is also considered one of the greatest movie producers of the Hollywood Golden Age who might’ve become even more legendary if he didn’t work himself into an early grave. Getting his start at Universal where he made his name producing Lon Chaney Sr. horror movies like The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), he quickly moved to Louis B. Mayer’s new MGM where Thalberg helped build the studio’s status as having “more stars than in the heavens.”
During his time at MGM he helped turn Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo, Clark Gable, and Norma Shearer into movie stars, the latter of whom became his wife. He also was an innovator, being dubbed in the 190s as a “boy genius” by Cecil B. DeMille. He helped pioneer the first American horror movies at Universal, pushed MGM to make the first movie with an all-black cast, and created the concept of “story conferences” and “sneak previews.” In 1936, at the age of 37, he died of pneumonia.
Hedda Hopper
The infamous Hollywood columnist makes a brief cameo during the final episode of Hollywood when she interviews Parsons’ Henry Willson. Originally Hedda wanted to be a movie star herself, coming to nascent Hollywood in 1923 after already starring in silent films back in 1910s New York (and a failed attempt to become a Ziegfeld Follie). She was a contract player for Louis B. Mayer Pictures throughout the ‘20s but never became a star.
So she became a Hollywood gossip columnist, and one of the industry’s most famous and PR-shaping personalities. At the height of her popularity in the 1940s, Hopper’s Los Angeles Times columns were syndicated around the country with a readership of more than 35 million Americans. However, she is now largely looked back at with scorn and infamy for being one of the loudest megaphones and champions of the U.S. House Un-American Activities Committee.
A staunch anti-Communist, she named supposed Communists in her columns, worked to ruin careers, and helped lead the Motion Picture Alliance for Preservation of American Ideals, a group that invited HUAC to Hollywood and helped publicly enforce the blacklist. She also outed anyone she thought was perhaps a communist but definitely a homosexual in her columns as being gay. So her being so non-responsive to Rock Hudson coming out as gay on Oscar night in Hollywood, which takes place during the Red Scare, is a bit strange.
George Hurrell
George Hurrell also briefly appears as the glamour photographer who takes extravagant photos of Camille and Jack. He really was the go-to photographer for movie star mythmaking in the 1930s and ’40s, and is responsible for likely many of the most striking black-and-white photos you’ve ever seen of the Golden Age stars. He was hired at the beginning of the ’30s by Irving Thalberg (him again) to help craft the image of MGM stars who included Jean Harlow, Clark Gable, Joan Crawford, Anna Mae Wong, Carole Lombard, Rosalind Russell, and more. He also moved for part of the 1940s to WB where he is responsible for striking images of James Cagney, Bette Davis, Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, and the visual mythology around Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. He also helped build up Rita Hayworth’s visual iconography at Columbia.
During World War II, Hurrell participated in the First Motion Picture Unit for the United States Army Air Forces. He continued to work in Hollywood in the ’40s, including taking that infamous Jane Russell photograph for Howard Hughes on The Outlaw, but after his style fell out of favor in the ’50s with the advent of an earthier reality brought about by post-war cynicism and Method acting, he ended his career working in advertising.
Mickey Cohen
I’m pretty sure the gangster Henry Willson gets to beat up a tabloid journalist is supposed to be Mickey Cohen (he’s just called Mickey in Hollywood). Mickey was a wiseguy who came up with Jewish crime outfits in Prohibition era New York before working for Al Capone in Chicago and then Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel in Cleveland. In 1939 he carved Los Angeles out for himself when Lansky sent him to the west coast to work with Bugsy, who was building the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas.
Mickey’s reign was relatively brief after the U.S. Senate Committee known as the Kefauver Commission took a page out of Chicago’s playbook and pinched Mickey on tax evasion in 1951.
Scotty Bowers
Scotty Bowers does not appear as an actual character in Hollywood but his presence is paramount in the project. It was while discussing his memoir, Full Service, that star Darren Criss (who plays Meg director Raymond) and Ryan Murphy first got the idea to make a TV series set in the underground gay community of 1940s Hollywood. However, Bowers wasn’t technically gay; he was a veritable sexual Olympian as well as an entrepreneur.
With the 2012 publication of Full Service, Bowers (who passed away in 2019) revealed that he operated a prostitution ring that serviced, among others, the stars out of a gas station on the corner of Hollywood Blvd. and Van Ness Avenue. Happily providing sexual relief to men and women for a price, he and his ring of men (and some women) became the toast of parts of town, a feat that appears genuine considering the ring’s been hinted at for decades, and actor Beach Dickerson left Bowers multiple houses in his will (after naming a racehorse after him).
However, the extravagant depth of Bowers’ claims personally strikes me as a little more dubious. He says he waited until he was in his 90s to come forward because all of his famous partners and clients were dead and couldn’t be embarrassed, but they also couldn’t sue. A sampling includes George Cukor, Cole Porter, Bette Davis, Cary Grant and Randolph Scott (together and separately), Ava Gardner and Lana Turner at the same time, Vivien Leigh while some of his male tricks handled Laurence Olivier, Spencer Tracy while female tricks handled Katharine Hepburn, Rock Hudson, setting Rock Hudson as an employee up with Cary Grant, Tennessee Williams, Bob Hope, Errol Flynn, William Holden on the night they shot the end of Sunset Blvd., and no less than J. Edgar Hoover and Edward VIII, the former King of Britain.
Given the veritable who’s who in his kiss and tell, I take a large helping of salt with it. But he was still a former U.S. marine who fought in Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima, the latter of which his older brother also fought and died at. Obviously Hollywood’s Jack Castello (David Corenswet) and Dylan McDermott’s Ernie are both based on Scotty, with Jack as the young hunky World War II vet looking to support his family by jumping in the pool, and Ernie as the actual pimp who ran the show. For the record, Jack also appears to be based on Audie Murphy, the Western actor and future movie star who did fight in the Battle of Anzio like the fictional character. However, he did not turn tricks. In fact, he was a nationwide war hero after receiving the Medal of Honor for holding off a whole German company by himself.
Lena Horne
Another historical figure who doesn’t actually appear in Hollywood but seems to be a major influence on it is Lena Horne. Arguably the first African American movie star, and certainly the first glamorous one who was meant to appeal to all audiences, Horne came to prominence in Tinseltown during the World War II years.
Prior to Hollywood, Horne was a nightclub singer who broke in at Harlem’s famed Cotton Club–a joint where black performers danced and sang for white-only audiences–and while it’s where her career began, Horne did not have fond memories of the working conditions or the cynicism of the fellow showgirls she leapfrogged over because of her looks and probably her lighter skin tone. Actually raised in an upper middle class subsect of the black community in first Brooklyn and then Pittsburgh, Lena found her element more at the Cafe Society in Manhattan. There she commiserated with bandleader Charlie Barnett and liberal intellectuals in the audience like Orson Welles… she actually began a years long affair with the future Citizen Kane filmmaker by the time they were both in Hollywood and while he was making Kane, which might influence the relationship between Camille and Raymond on Hollywood.
MGM eventually signed her in 1942 to be their first African American actress groomed for movie stardom and glamour girl sophistication. MGM, which had made one all-black musical in 1929, came to the realization that African American audiences go to the movies too! As we live and breathe… Horne became the talk of the black community in this time (much to the chagrin of some older actors like Hattie McDaniel) and would star in the studio’s second all-black musical, Cabin in the Sky (1942). Yet her star power was cemented in 20th Century Fox’s Stormy Weather (1943), which had Horne sing the titular scorch anthem and make it her own.
Yet Horne’s time in Hollywood was always bittersweet because she was often viewed as “haughty” by the local black community due to her rubbing shoulders with an almost all-white industry, as well as dating white men with her lighter skin, while still almost never getting lead roles from those white colleagues. Southern states refused to show either Cabin in the Sky or Stormy Weather, and their laws against interracial relationships also affected the Hayes Code, making it impossible for Horne to have a romantic relationship with white co-stars. And as there were no black leading men of her generation, or even black male actors required to do more than musical sequences or play servants, she wound up being wasted by MGM who continued casting her as glorified lounge act supporting characters.
During the war, she demanded to sing almost exclusively for black segregated soldiers on the USO Tour, and after the war she faced her biggest disappointment when MGM remade Show Boat in 1952. She wanted desperately to play Julie LaVerne, a major character who is biracial but can pass for white. Her career is ruined after local Southern communities discover she is half-black. Despite being a natural singer previously cast in “exotic” roles or as Spanish characters in the past, MGM passed her over, rationalizing she was too famous as a black woman for white audiences to believe she was anything but. They instead cast Ava Gardner, who needed to have her singing dubbed.
