The Unmerry Story of a Hollywood Christmas

The festive part of the festive season may not have been so, well, festive, in the city where there’s tinsel all year round.

True, stars and their families celebrate Christmas-time with a tree and gifts and parties and the various trappings we’ve come to know. In fact, Hollywood Boulevard was annually transformed into Santa Claus Lane with lights, decorations and a huge parade. Jack Benny was involved in the parade one year, as you shall see.

But something was wrong.

National Enterprise Association columnist Paul Harrison wasn’t in the Christmas spirit when he penned this jaded column that appeared in papers starting December 16, 1939. The Los Angeles climes didn’t make things feel like Christmas. And, in his mind, Hollywood’s holiday season was a whole lot of fakery. He doesn’t point it out in his column, but Benny, Andy Devine and some real horses were wrapping up shooting on a movie called Buck Benny Rides Again around the time his journey down Santa Claus Lane was taking place. Benny’s appearance in the parade was merely a film publicity stunt, a parade designed by merchants to attract customers to stores along the route.

HOLLYWOOD
BY PAUL HARRISON
NEA Service Staff Correspondent
In some ways, this doesn't seem much like the Christmas season. It's more like a fiesta sponsored by the Chamber of Commerce, staged by the major studios and directed by Busby Berkeley. The star in the east is a Neon sign on a hovering blimp. Technicolor cameras guard the manger. Holy music comes to you by courtesy of the Upsy-Daisy Brassiere Co.

One trouble is that the “season” begins, by commercial decree and with a big parade, on the day following Thanksgiving. That made it Nov. 24 this year. It is almost as difficult to sustain a mood of sentimentality for a full month as it is to drive along Hollywood Boulevard when the traffic lights are obscured by lines of large tin Christmas trees.
The premiere pageant invariably includes several floats covered with cuties, along with swing bands, military bands and drum-and-bugle corps. You can't play "Jingle Bells" on a bugle. And you are not reminded of peace-on-earth, unless ruefully, while watching a mounted, uniformed troop flourishing unsheathed sabers. But for an ultimate discordant touch, I nominate the spectacle of Jack Benny astride a stuffed horse followed by Andy Devine with a shovel.
SANTA BETRAYS SLIGHT ACCENT
After the first, big parade, the Santa Claus float moves up and down the boulevard each evening unattended except by a couple of motorcycle cops. This month the whiskered saint betrays an accent as he shouts greetings into a microphone—“Folks, dis is de toiteenth year dat I been ridin' down Sandy Claus Lane . . ." In decoration and illumination, his huge conveyance looks faintly Japanese, but pure Hollywood is the blowing device which erupts every few seconds and showers the float with bleached-cornflake snow.

Of course the local weather, distressingly dry and enervating at this time, conspires against a Christmasy feeling. In previous years the shouts of newsboys could be depended on for a helpful touch. "Big Blizzard Sweeps Through East!" they'd holler. But the war has forced those stories off the front pages.
There are no sleds in the toy departments, and skates are for the refrigerated rinks. Only local ski slide is a slope covered with pine needles. The palms that line the avenues are dusty and brittle, though now and then some citizen will decorate one with colored lights in observance of the season.
In dozens of vacant lots, Christ mas-tree merchants sell dispirited little firs and spruces that have been tracked in from the mountains, many of them across the desert from Arizona. When a tree begins to droop and lose its luster, the merchants take a tip from movie prop men end spray them with bright paint. Besides misery green trees, there are pink, blue and platinum blond ones. In an uppity store here is a tree painted jet black and decorated with pearl ornaments. It'd give you the shudders.
POOR RICH KID CAN'T WATCH TOYS
In any town lucky enough to have seasons, the nip of winter enhances a grateful sense of snugness for people who have clothes and food and homes. Tingling cold is a reminder or others' needs, and a stimulant to human sympathy. But in Hollywood the street crowds seem to feel that the hot sidewalks are enough to keep Salvation Army kettles boiling. And the perspiring bell-clanging Santa Clauses, lifting their whiskers now and then to mop their faces, give little more than comic symbolism to charity.

This morning I watched a couple of raggedy kids with noses flattened against the window of a department store toy display. But then appeared a far more pathetic figure—a third boy, this one in a limousine that drew up at, the curb to let a woman alight. The youngster flattened his nose against the car window and tried to see the animated toys. He couldn't get out. His wealthy father and second stepmother are afraid of kidnapers.
On Christmas morning, he'll have plenty of toys, and a governess and a bodyguard to help him play with them. His dad and the blond dish whom he calls "mother" will he up at Late Arrowhead with their gang.

Now, Tralfaz Sunday Theatre brings you the aforementioned parade-promoted film: Buck Benny Rides Again.