“I love history, I love architecture and I love films,” says David Wallace as to why he wrote his recently released book “Lost Hollywood.”
About two years ago, Wallace was visiting Adolfo Nodal, who recently retired as the cultural affairs commissioner of Los Angeles. In talking to Nodal about how the idea of an anecdotal history of Hollywood would make a good book, “Nodal, in effect, said ‘Stop talking about it and go write the book,’ ” says Wallace. “Luckily for me, St. Martin’s Press agreed.”
Wallace researched endlessly, reading hundreds of books and conducting dozens of interviews with people who remembered the Golden Years of Hollywood.
“The problem is Hollywood, of course, has always dealt with fiction,” explains Wallace. “People, especially the movers and shakers, have always had a tendency to embellish anecdotes and facts, so cutting through to what the real stories were” required perseverance.
“This is an anecdote-driven book, not a dry history book,” Wallace adds. The writer found, by and large, as he conducted his research, that many of the anecdotes started to fall apart. Perhaps the most famous was the “borrowing” of John Barrymore’s body from Pierce Brothers Mortuary as part of a practical joke to be played on actor Errol Flynn. In his research, Wallace found that three or four people claimed to have been responsible for the joke, and several claimed it never happened at all. It apparently did happen. Another wild story Wallace recounts, which he says may or may not be true, was that a telephone was buried in the casket with evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, “So when she came back, as her congregation believed she would, she could pick up the phone to call them to dig her up.”
Wallace said he found a report in the Los Angeles Times that the phone had, in fact been buried with her. “So who knows?” says Wallace.
“It’s fascinating to deal with things like that,” the writer says of the many interesting, and sometimes sad stories he encountered while writing his book.
“If you live in Hollywood, you never know what you’re going to find around the next corner.”
David Wallace is signing copies of his recently released book, “Lost Hollywood” (St. Martin’s/LA Weekly, 224 pp., $23.95), Thursday at 8 p.m. at Borders bookstore, 14651 Ventura Blvd. in Sherman Oaks.