The Christmas Chronicles of the 1940s in Hollywood and New York reflect the excesses of parties in which anything went and anything could happen. White Christmas was not only white because of the snow, but also because of the cocaine and the bad milk of the gossip girls.
Christmas is like cars and vacations: there are rich and poor. And then, of course, there are those of the mega-rich, who in the 40s lived them as if they were the last: throwing the house out of the window and the farlopa by the nose while Bing Crosby sang 'White Christmas' and Dean Martin brought him the opposite singing 'Blue Christmas'. Neither of them was quite right, for that Babylonian tribe Christmas was half blonde like champagne, half rosy like lobster. And sometimes dark gray, almost black like caviar and hangover.
In Hollywood, sirens of disturbing beauty but devoid of soul roamed warm clubs like the Brown Derby, the Drag Club Flamingo, or the Cock and Bull arm in arm with label gentlemen, also soulless. They were like moths in search of light in the suburbs of Sodom. In that orgiastic and perfumed Bethlehem, the gossips of Louella Parsons, Elsa Maxwell, and Hedda Hopper -the first gossips of the celluloid industry-, with their feathers dipped in vitriol, made the Hollywood all-star tremble. Those gossip girls swallowed reputations along with dinner at the fashionable places Avdeef's, the Arizona Inn, the Biltmore, and so on.
Elsa Maxwell called Katharine Hepburn "a beautifully coiffed skull" and when Hedda Hopper was asked why she posted so much slander, the gossip was impertinently blunt: "Bitchery, darling."
In the 1940s, Hollywood was Babylon, a great salad of evil flowers. Errol Flynn was saying around that he liked "old whiskey and young women." On Christmas 1943, he was acquitted of a trial for allegedly raping two teenagers. Lack of evidence alleged the jury, but everyone knew that lack of evidence was not proof of innocence.
The clients of Madame Lee Francis
When Santa Claus came to town, the actor - who had triumphed in 'Captain Blood' and 'The Charge of the Light Brigade' - would boast in the soirees of playing the piano with a certain limb that he had between his legs. Not only at Christmas did he frequent the Hacienda Arms Apartments, a residential complex on the Sunset Strip that housed the Casa de Francis, one of the most popular brothels in Hollywood, named after Madame Lee Francis, who more than one New Year's Eve had to order her bouncers to They will get famous for not respecting with their drunkenness the inevitable singing of the Auld Lang Syne with their hands clasped around the heat.
In addition to Errol Flynn, Clark Gable, and Spencer Tracy, other names above the titles were regular customers. Even Joseph Von Stroheim who, to keep up the party, turned the set into an abracadabra brothel with limits of all races, each one of them with their erotic specialty: the depraved Austro-Hungarian was not much for Christmas carols. Not all of Lee Francis's customers were men: Jean Harlow and Barbara Stanwyck were frequent hangouts.
The female gay crowd revolved around the Allegro and Mary's, a nightspot on the Strip. The Balcony, the BBB's Cellar and, above all, the very chic Cafe Gala, next to the residences of Cole Porter and Cecil Beaton on Sunset Boulevard, were the meeting points on New Year's Eve for both status gays and industry VIPs. from Hollywood. With a veneer of respectability, a not-so-queer façade, and an interior overlooking the twinkling lights of the city, the Gala had been Greta Garbo's favorite venue before she made her exit from the forum. She liked the atmosphere and that touch of early homo S- decoration.
Parties in the Cocoanut Grove
Howard Hughes (who in their 40s had not yet developed the obsessive-compulsive disorder that took him out of the spotlight) was not only the Elon Musk of those years but also one of the funkiest guys from coast to coast. When the time for Christmas carols arrived, with his mere presence he encouraged the parties at Cocoanut Grove, the nightclub of the Ambassador Hotel, in which he coincided with Gloria Vanderbilt, Ginger Rogers, Rita Hayworth, or the newcomer Ava Gardner. With all of them, he had love affairs.
Also, Gabor Zsa Zsa, although he admired his talent and the size of his checkbook, preferred the skills of Porfirio Rubirosa, another regular at Cocoanut's Torrid Christmases. The whole world of the American and European jet set called Rubi this Dominican, who was the alpha male among playboys without borders. Famous for his legendary S- prowess, his spouses included two of the world's richest women: Barbara Hutton, heiress to Woolworth's department store, and Doris Duke, heiress to American Tobacco.
Beneath the Cocoanut's fake palm trees, where papier-mâché coconuts and artificial monkeys with electrically illuminated eyes hung, Doris Duke greeted 1941 with a cast of celebrities including Louella Parsons Charlie Chaplin, Carole Lombard, Claudette Colbert, James Cagney, Sinatra, and Bing Crosby.
In search of excess
Those happy few were blinded by champagne or gin-fizz and moved like dragonflies suspended in the air to the rhythm of the big bands of Glenn Miller and Artie Shaw (Lana Turner's ex-husband who would end up marrying Ava Gardner). That New Year's Eve, scantily clad showgirls, singing waiters, jugglers, acrobats, and four orchestras reconciled the guests to their ephemeral status as divine mortals. The endearing Christmas reminded them that everything flows towards disappointment; for this reason -because they experienced a horror of emptiness- they sought excess and writhed, as if amid flames, in soirees from which they emerged with cloudy eyes and the air of having spent some time in hell.
The luxury and lust scandals of those Christmas nights used to go beyond the mere fascination of the public and John Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, did not escape any of the sordid affairs that some of the idols of the world starred in real life. star system.
Away from his wife Millicent, Randolph Hearst lived full-time in California with his mistress Marion Davies. The couple threw Christmas-themed parties at their Beverly Hills mansion, a motley-style castle. Wild and extravagant, Davies' winter receptions were not often missed by Jean Harlow, Gloria Swanson, Charlie Chaplin, Carmen Miranda, or a diamond-laden Tallulah Bankhead from DeBeers.
Tallulah and her lovers
Tallulah Bankhead, though she was primarily a stage actress, became a symbol of Hollywood extravagance. Tallulah simply didn't care what anyone said about her, including her father, the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives. She gave herself to drugs and alcohol and didn't hide it. She was so uninhibited as to confess that she had accepted a role in the movie "Between a Rock and a hard place" just so she could sleep with Gary Cooper. Although she said it with less fuss, she used to use a word that starts with f.
She played in two bands and among her lovers were Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, and Hattie McDaniel, the Mammy from 'Gone with the Wind'. Her father warned her to avoid men and alcohol, but since he never told her about women and cocaine, she took advantage.
The atmosphere in the Big Apple
On the East Coast, the summer weather of Long Island and the Hamptons forgotten, when the tree lights at the newly opened Rockefeller Center came on, the beautiful people of New York plunged into a whirlwind of cocktail parties and romantic rendezvous that Morocco, the Embassy, the Stork Club, the lobbies of the Plaza, St. Regis and the old Ritz-Carlton, where the All Manhattan drank martinis and skinned the absent while, between bouquets of calla lilies, devoured lobster salad, were all packed. bacon-wrapped pineapple mini quiches, and smoked salmon tartare with capers and dill on rye bread.
The World War was leaving the world a bitch, but those born with a golden spoon in their mouths had plenty of buffers for hard times. The puppies of the upper class saw themselves as superheroes immune to the end of the world. Above all, the mega-rich Barbara Hutton.
This poor-rich-girl had a troubled childhood and she discovered that "living well is the best revenge." She treated the luxury jewelers Cartier, Van Cleef, and Arpels as others treated the clerks at the Woolworth Dimes owned by her grandfather. Her biography was escorted by a consortium of sycophantic hangers-on: playboys, European titles, broke Hollywood types, a maharajah or two, a sheik, several English peers, and a few tennis bums. She could have anything, and that's why she dedicated herself to buying husbands. In the end, there were seven. Her friend, the couturier Oleg Cassini, said that Barbara's marriages "were devoid of S- and her S- histories devoid of love."
