A Chat with Brooks Wachtel of Hollywood

Part of the fun of research is getting to talk to interesting people.

An old college friend put me in contact with Mr. Brooks Wachtel of Hollywood, a writer/producer/director who has written or produced many documentaries for the History Channel and over 85 episodes of dramatic television, shows such as Fox’s live-action Young Hercules, the animated PBS hit “Liberty’s Kids,” and lots of Saturday morning action shows: Heavy Gear, Static, Spider-Man, X-Men, Iron Man, Robo-Cop, Silver Surfer, The Avengers, Mortal Kombat, The Mask, Beast Machines: Transformers, Godzilla, Gargoyles, Wing Commander Academy. For younger viewers, he has penned many episodes of the pre-school hit, Clifford the Big Red Dog.

The reason I wanted to talk with him was to take advantage of his vast knowledge of film history. He gave me lots of information, some of which I’ll be incorporating into book #3 of the Roaring Twenties series, Renting Silence. Things like the sort of film used in the Twenties as orthochromatic was being replaced by the better, more expensive panchromatic, which gave a truer gray range. With orthochromatic film, props and things that were actually red would film very dar while blues would go lighter, so much so that blue-eyed people seemed to have white eyes. Not a good feature. This influenced the choice of costumes, props, and even actors, of course. 

And while I already knew that silent movies were very noisy to make, with grinding cameras, shouts from the director, ongoing conversations, music from the studio musicians who were “playing the mood,” and hammering from the adjacent stage, I did not know that some studios set up bleachers and charged admission, and those audiences could be quite noisy too. All in all, an interesting conversation with Mr. Wachtel. 

The Invention of the Bathroom

Hard to believe (for me, anyway), but the Roaring Twenties was the decade that saw the introduction of the bathroom as we know it today. 

Today a typical residential bathroom combines three elements: a sink, a toilet, and bathing facilities. But throughout all history, until the twentieth century, those three had been separate. The toilet or outhouse was outside the dwelling, the washstand was in the bedroom, and bathing was usually accomplished in the bedroom or kitchen. There was a good deal of resistance to combining these–after all, since the earliest civilizations, man had tried hard to keep human waste at a distance from the living quarters. The invention of primitive flush toilets changed everything, but many people could not, at first, fathom putting cleansing functions in the same room as smelly, dirty, dangerous human waste. Initially, the indoor toilet was housed by itself in a separate room called a water closet. In fact, in many countries I’ve visited, it still is. Some have speculated that the reason for combining these elements in one room was for convenience of plumbing–it was cheaper to combine the fixtures that used running water. Tub, sink, and toilet were usually white porcelain, which was considered more sanitary. 

The “modern” bathroom starts to appear in America in wealthy homes in the early years of the twentieth century, but it doesn’t really spread to middle-class houses until the Twenties. Existing houses were renovated over the years. Often an indoor water closet would be installed first, crammed in under the stairs or in a hall closet. Or a bedroom might be turned into a bathroom with all three elements. New houses could include a modern bathroom, usually at one end of the upstairs hall near the bedrooms. Pricier houses included a separate toilet in the basement for the servants to use.

I’ve been careful with my passing mentions of bathrooms in my Roaring Twenties mysteries. In the third one, RENTING SILENCE, set in 1925, I describe a boarding house where a murder takes place, and it has separate facilities for the residents. I picked up some of the details from a novel, Hollywood Girl, written in 1927 by Beatrice Burton. Here is the relevant snippet from my mystery:

“There are four units on each floor,” the landlady continued as we climbed to the third floor, “each with two rooms, a parlor and a bedroom. But first, let me show you the bathing room.” We turned down the hall and walked to the door at the end. “Here is the bathtub that you would share with only three other young ladies. This other tub is for your laundry. And you see there are plenty of hooks for your clothing and towels. A colored girl comes every Friday to clean the public rooms, but residents are expected to wash the bathtub themselves after each use.” A washboard hung on a nail beside the tub, and there were several boxes of laundry soap on the shelf above it. Two shelves on the opposite wall contained a jumble of bottles and boxes of geranium bath salts, rose toilet water, lemon shampoo, and dusting powder with a pale blue puff tucked into the top.

“At the other end of the hall,” she continued, “is the water closet. It has a large window too, like this one, for the fire escape, and so the rooms are always fresh.” A door across the hall opened. A bottle-blond head stuck out, took one look at Mrs. DeWitt and the stranger and ducked back into her room. Ignoring the interruption, Mrs. DeWitt opened the door to Lila Walker’s rooms.

 

Blown-Glass Fisherman’s Floats from Japan

What on earth do these old, blown-glass, Japanese fisherman’s floats have to do with the Roaring Twenties? I’m so glad you asked!

Japanese fishermen used to use these blown-glass spheres to float their nets. (The Japanese weren’t the only ones, but they are the only ones that relate to my mystery, so excuse me if I focus on them.) Today fishermen use Styrofoam or something equally horrid, but in the old days, they used globes made of crudely blown glass. There was always a rough pontil mark on one side. Inevitably some of these floats would escape and float away, sometimes across the ocean to America, where beachcombers would find them washed ashore. They came in different sizes, but the color was almost always green or blue-green.

My Roaring Twenties mystery, The Impersonator, due to be published next year, takes place in part along the coast of Oregon, where the missing heiress used to walk after a storm to look for agates and the rare glass float. The floats play a modest part in the plot.

I own a few myself, since my grandparents were Army people who lived in Japan for several years during the Occupation in the late Forties. They brought several home with them when they returned in 1949. My grandmother put them in with her plants for decoration, so I did that with my characters. I think they’d make a nice cover image, and I’ll suggest that to the publisher when they get around to designing the cover.

Air Conditioning Debut

It’s a little known fact that Willis Carrier invented air conditioning not to cool people but to cool factories, to reduce humidity in factories where it was preventing machines from working properly. Only later did the idea of cooling human beings catch on.

The first public place to install “refrigeration,” as it was known, was the Rivoli Theater in Times Square, a movie theater whose advertisements boasted that the new system allowed “the manufacturing of ideal weather.” Here is an eyewitness account of the summer day in 1925 when the new Rivoli Theatre showed its first movie to an audience cooled by Carrier’s invention.

“. . . Typical of show business, the opening of the Rivoli was widely advertised and its air conditioning system heralded along Broadway. Long before the doors opened, people lined up at the box office – curious about ‘cool comfort’ as offered by the managers. It was like a World Series crowd waiting for bleacher seats. They were not only curious, but skeptical-all of the women and some of the men had fans-a standard accessory of that day. 

Patrons line up to enter the Rivoli Theater

Among the spectators was Adolph Zukor. I recall how quiet and reserved he was when he walked in and took a seat in the balcony. Zukor may have come from California, but he was there to be shown!

Final adjustments delayed us in starting up the machine, so that the doors opened before the air conditioning system was turned on. The people poured in, filled all the seats, and stood seven deep in the back of the theater. We had more than we had bargained for and were plenty worried. From the wings we watched in dismay as two thousand fans fluttered. We felt that Mr. Zukor was watching the people instead of the picture-and saw all those waving fans!

It takes time to pull down the temperature in a quickly filled theater on a hot day, and a still longer time for a packed house. Gradually, almost imperceptibly, the fans dropped into laps as the effects of the air conditioning system became evident. Only a few chronic fanners persisted, but soon they, too, ceased fanning. We had stopped them ‘cold’ and breathed a great sigh of relief.

We then went into the lobby and waited for Mr. Zukor to come downstairs. When he saw us, he did not wait for us to ask his opinion. He said tersely, ‘Yes, the people are going to like it.’”

Adolph Zukor, at about the age he was when he attended the first air-conditioned movie screening in 1925

Adolph Zukor makes an appearance in my second novel, Silver Screen Murders. Now that I know about his attendance at this event, I can work it into the story for my third, which I am currently writing. It takes place in the spring of 1925, and this air conditioning event took place in the summer, so the time frame is a little off. Maybe I’ll have him talking about it, planning to attend to see how the new invention works. 

La Grande Station

La Grande Station in 1897

In my Roaring Twenties mysteries, I stick close to the facts, and so whenever my characters travel, I put them at the right train station if at all possible. Since much of my story is set in Hollywood, I researched one of the main passenger stations in Los Angeles, La Grande, where the Santa Fe line stopped on its way to and from Chicago. 

The train going toward Chicago was called the Chicagoan; the same train coming back west was called the Kansas Cityan. It took about 3 days to make the trip in the Twenties. That’s a long time to sit on a hot train–remember, no air conditioning, so the windows would be open and loads of dust would be blowing in, covering everything and everyone. There were toilet rooms with sinks but no way to take a bath or shower. Still, few complained, since many people alive in the Twenties could remember their parents or grandparents coming West in a wagon train. 

I was thrilled to find this picture of La Grande station. This is how it looked when my characters used it. The place was torn down long ago. 

The Price of Cars

I’m not a car person (their color is about the only thing I notice about cars), so when I need to use a car in my novels, I have to do some work to ascertain which make and model is appropriate and whether or not that particular vehicle would have been available to my character. Was a car like that sold in her region? (A French import might have been available in New York in the Twenties but not in Iowa, for example.) And if it were available, could my character have afforded it? So I’ve looked into the prices of cars. Oddly enough, while the price of almost everything goes up over the decades, the price of cars falls dramatically.

For example, the Ford Model T cost $1200 in 1909. Five years later, it cost $490 (or about $11,000 in today’s money). By 1921, the same car was $310, or roughly $4,000 in today’s money. Why the big drop? The car didn’t change much over those years, but the real savings comes from Ford’s increasing efficiency at his factory. His wanted to produce a car that average Americans could afford, and by the Roaring Twenties, he had.  So I was comfortable having my character buy a Ford in 1924–it didn’t cost her all that much. 

By the way, it wasn’t Ford but General Motors that introduced the concept of buying cars on credit, with General Motors Acceptance Corporation (GMAC) in 1919. Instead of paying cash, you could finance through GMAC, bypassing the banks. Sales boomed for GM, as by 1926, 75% of all car buyers were using credit to purchase their cars. 

Street Signs in the Roaring Twenties

     According to an article in this week’s New York Times, the first center line came in 1911 in Michigan. The first electric traffic signal was in 1915 in Cleveland. The first proper stop sign , also 1915, appeared in Detroit. It wasn’t the 8-sided red sign we’re all used to; it was square with black letters on a white background. 

     In 1923 the Mississippi Valley Association of State Highway Departments thought up some recommendations about street signs, their colors, their shapes. They recommended a Stop sign with 8 sides, but their color of choice was yellow.

     The red sign didn’t come along until 1954. Red had been the preferred color much earlier (after all, stop lights are red), but a good, reflective red paint did not exist until the early Fifties. A non-reflective yellow, on the other hand, could be seen better at night. 

     So I’ve had to be careful in my novel, set in 1925, not to mention red stop signs. In fact, considering how slowly ideas spread back then, I’ve concluded that there were few stop signs at all in the mid-Twenties, expect perhaps in the larger cities. 

What kind of telephones did they have in the Roaring Twenties?

Amazing luck–I happened to see a small notice in the newspaper about the Verizon building in Richmond, Va., opening it’s private telephone museum to the public for a few hours that same afternoon. I jumped in the car and headed downtown to a corporate display of old telephones and related equipment. Several retired telephone workers were there to explain the intricacies of early technology, how telephone operators worked, and what sort of promotional advertisements played along with the decades. Fascinating. Several rooms of stuff dating from the 1800s to the present. This private museum (which I had never heard of, even though I’ve lived in this city for 34 years) is opened by Verizon on request or on rare occasions, like that afternoon. I learned a lot.

I had never been satisfied that I understood state-of-the-art telephone equipment of 1925, when my novel takes place. Now I do. Now I can write about it with confidence. (Yes, it’s a very minor part of my story, but historians are compulsive about getting the details right.)

Here are some pictures I took of three telephones from the Roaring Twenties. And I now know how they worked! My main character’s house has the wall version, below, that you cranked (the handle on the right) to talk to the operator (into the mouthpiece, center) and then asked for the number you wanted. She (operators were all female) plugged it in to make the connection and the other line rang a bell. You put the left hand apparatus to your ear. 

Radio Was the Flip Side of Silent Movies*

The visual came first–silent movies. Audio came next–radio. One was pictures and no sound; the other, sound and no pictures. When they mated in 1927, sparks flew. Talkies were born. The combination spelled disaster for studios, theaters, and actors alike. Few actors survived the transition to talkies. Aside from Greta Garbo, almost none of the stars of the 1930s had been stars of silent film. No theaters did–all had to undergo expensive renovation for sound. Studios did not survive either. Entire sets were destroyed, new filming techniques replaced ones that had been around for decades, many studios went under. 

Garbo made the transition to talkies

It’s understandable that when television was invented, people thought the same thing would happen, that is, that television would destroy movies just as talkies had destroyed silent pictures. It didn’t. Television damaged movies–people went to the movies less often–but it didn’t destroy them. 

*Observation courtesy of Eileen Whitfield in “Pickford” (2007).

Sliced Bread

From Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac, July 7, 2011:

     “Sliced bread was sold for the first time on this date in 1928. Up until that time, consumers baked their own bread, or bought it in solid loaves. Otto Frederick Rohwedder, a jeweler from Davenport, Iowa, had been working for years perfecting an eponymous invention, the Rohwedder Bread Slicer. He tried to sell it to bakeries. They scoffed, and told him that pre-sliced bread would get stale and dry long before it could be eaten. He tried sticking the slices together with hatpins, but it didn’t work. Finally he hit on the idea of wrapping the bread in waxed paper after it was sliced. Still no sale, until he took a trip to Chillicothe, Missouri, and met a baker who was willing to take a chance. Frank Bench agreed to try the five-foot-long, three-foot-high slicing and wrapping machine in his bakery. The proclamation went out to kitchens all over Chillicothe, via ads in the daily newspaper: ‘Announcing: The Greatest Forward Step in the Baking Industry Since Bread was Wrapped — Sliced Kleen Maid Bread.’ Sales went through the roof. Rohwedder not only gave Americans the gift of convenience and perfect peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, but he also provided the English language with the saying that expresses the ultimate in innovation: ‘the greatest thing since sliced bread.’”

This all happened at about the same time that pop-up toasters were introduced, making it easier and quicker to toast bread. That must have boosted the demand for pre-sliced bread.

By the way, one of Rohwedder’s machines is in the Smithsonian.