The Vice Queen of Los Angeles

On Hollywood Madams, Female Disposability, and Judy Garland & Britney Spears Having a Lot in Common.

Los Angeles County mugshot of an anonymous madam, 1938.

Hello! First of all, I’d like to send my sincere apologies for the little delay  in getting Sisters Under the Mink to your inboxes. Since last month, I have been juggling a lot of family stuff and heavy work obligations, so I do apologise for that pause. In order to keep up the pace, the best thing I thought I could do was to continue along the themes that I sent my last dispatch on, spreading the topic over May and June in order to give it the space it deserves, and then continuing with our ‘film of the month’ video dispatches after that. 

Also, some exciting news: Sisters Under the Mink has been shortlisted for a Freelance Writing Award in the Newsletter category! The awards are next week, 30 June, so keep your fingers + toes crossed. Strangely enough, I will be on a transatlantic flight while the announcements are being made, so when I land I guess I’ll really have something to check my phone for! 

In my last letter, in an interview with You Must Remember This creator Karina Longworth, we spoke about the doomed starlet Barbara Payton, and her eventual turn to sex work in Los Angeles. Our chat also touched on the rumoured brothels in and around Hollywood, as frequented by moguls and movie stars as often as they were staffed by aspiring ones. Karina spoke about the gendered double standards for ‘bad’ behaviour, in mid-century America as in Hollywood, and how fine the line could be between ‘bombshell’ and ‘damaged goods’ in the public eye.  So today I wanted to go on a little exploratory trip through the underbelly of the Hollywood brothel, and how the distance from studio to saloon was sometimes very short indeed. 

~~~~~~~~~ 

A still from the 1976 film adaptation of The Last Tycoon, starring Robert De Niro as Monroe Stahr

‘I don’t think I have more brains than my writers. I just own theirs.’ 

So goes a line from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon, one of the great novels about Hollywood in its golden age. The words come from the mouth of Monroe Stahr, a 1930s producer which Fitzgerald based on a real one at MGM: Irving Thalberg. This idea - that the movie moguls of the age owned their writers’ brains - is striking in its casual arrogance, and also in its fundamental truth in terms of the top-heavy power of the studio system. The reason I bring it up is that it’s an attitude that rankles. Historically, a mogul with a contracted studio employee might own his writers’ brains, but by that logic, he also owned what was thought most valuable in his starlets: their bodies. 

The examples of this sense of ownership are rife throughout Hollywood history, both sexual and otherwise. In fact, they’re so numerous that my mind reels at the possibility of narrowing them down in this paragraph. We all know about Harvey Weinstein, and how many monsters of his kind have preceded him. 1940s siren Veronica Lake had to throw things at producers when they casually exposed themselves to her; Esther Williams wriggled out of the grasp of her co-star Johnny Weissmuller when he tried to pull off her swimsuits. MGM’s biggest female star, Judy Garland, was so pumped full of barbiturates and sleeping pills by her handlers that she was effectively rendered a zombie. It eventually put her in an early grave. It begs the question: if that was Garland’s level of bodily autonomy, what befell less famous women? (It’s impossible to think of Judy Garland’s long history of drugtaking and studio-enforced abortions and not think about the latest news RE Britney Spears, another star who has had her bodily agency taken from her in the cruellest of manners.)

In documentary Girl 27, directed by journalist David Stenn, the story of Patricia Douglas and her rape case is damning of the entire edifice. In 1937, Douglas was a teenage extra, called in by the makeup department with dozens of other girls under the assumption they had been called in for a job. Instead, the extras were left to fend for themselves at an MGM executives party where no distinction was made between extras and the night’s ‘entertainment’. The nature of Douglas’ title - ‘girl 27’ - tells you everything you need to know about female disposability at MGM. 

This wasn’t the only instance of extras being abused or treated as sex workers; sometimes they were literally coerced or welcomed into the trade. Some hoped to finance an up and coming film career. A piece in the L.A. Times, dated 27 April 1940, says something that many would like to forget about the dream factory of old. ‘Efforts of Band to Lure Jobless Film Extra Girls Indicated, Sheriff’s Aide Reports,’ it says.  ‘A concerted effort was being made to lure Hollywood extra girls, temporarily out of work,’ it goes on. These are far from the only headlines on that topic. In 1949, Life Magazine reported that a woman named Brenda Allen, who would later be exposed as one of the most powerful madams in Hollywood, had appeared in The Players’ Directory, a publication by AMPAS which served as a handy guide for casting directors and Hollywood producers. Her photo was displayed under the heading ‘Leading Women’, but the advertisement was not for her acting services. 

There were even more lurid rumours around the ties between the movie industry and sex work. Perhaps the most infamous was the very existence of the legendary Mae’s. You may know it as the place depicted in L.A. Confidential -- where the sex workers were made up and sometimes even underwent plastic surgery to resemble popular film stars. It’s all too shadowy to prove one way or the other, but there were even stories that MGM helped fund the brothel under a secret name so that they could better keep tabs on their errant movie stars - fourteen suites of pretend bombshells, paid for by MGM fixer Eddie Mannix. The regular visitors were said to include Jean Harlow, Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, and Errol Flynn. 

Even if Mae’s was the invention of gossip-mongers and exaggerators, it hardly seemed beyond the pale given the actual activities going on in the LA underbelly. Madams with larger-than-life nicknames like ‘The Black Widow’ and ‘The Queen of Vice’ did not need fiction to prop up their reputations - they only seemed like something straight out of Hollywood lore. 

~~~~~~~~~

Author’s Own

We’ve all seen it in a movie before: the famous spinning newspaper headline. The effect, often used in montage, was pioneered by film editors at Warner Brothers in the 1930s, when the crime flicks and gangster classics that they churned out were, quite literally, ‘ripped from the headlines’. There was a lot going on at the time to draw from: the end of Prohibition, gang wars in Chicago (a ‘Chicago typewriter’ was slang for a machine gun), the rise of Benjamin ‘Bugsy’ Siegel and his rival Mickey Cohen in the West Coast rackets. Scandals ran thick and fast for Hollywood screenwriters to delve into. But the ones in the Los Angeles papers in 1940 were a bit too close to home to dramatise for the screen. 

The so-called ‘Hollywood Syndicate’, run mostly by Siegel and Cohen, was an island unto itself, separate from the Chicago and New York mobs. They made huge profits from bookmaking, illegal gambling dens, and perhaps most of all, more than a thousand brothels. Genuine law enforcers in the LAPD were far outnumbered by ones on the take, particularly in their notorious vice squad. In 1940, the ‘Black Widow’ Ann Forst went on trial for soliciting and forcing young women into sex slavery, ‘luring’ girls with ‘the promise of fine clothing, luxurious apartments, and automobiles’ (LA Times, 24 Mar 1940) and then ruthlessly forcing them to ‘service’ multiple men per day. When Forst got on the stand, she pointed the finger at a former police officer, Guy McAfee, as the head of their prostitution ring.

In the case of the aforementioned madam Brenda Allen - the one who sold her wares as the ‘Leading Woman’ in the Academy publication - she was not known for cruelty or coercion, but of high-class clientele. What she shared with Forst was a yen for crooked cops; Allen had a sergeant in the LAPD vice squad, Elmer Jackson, who was both on her payroll and in her bed.  She was a woman who liked to brag that she’d been arrested 18 times but had never served a day in jail. Her string of cathouses, from Los Angeles’ infamous Skid Row to the upscale confines of Beverly Hills, were protected by two of the major vice operatives in the city, and as it goes, two men nobody wanted to get on the wrong side of: yep, Siegel and Cohen again. As reports had it, Allen treated her girls well, and they pulled in something like $5k a week. In fact, she was well-liked enough that the police had difficulty finding girls to testify against her.

Brenda Allen in court, 1949

The immaculately-dressed, Southern-twanged madam was paying protection money to half of the Los Angeles police department and being tipped off to future raids.  The entire edifice collapsed when an unlucky thief decided to bust into Allen’s Sunset Boulevard establishment one night, and Sgt. Jackson shot the man dead, leading to an investigation. When the story hit the papers in 1948, news of what the raid turned up was damning: ‘a box of index cards, said to contain names, personal info, and sexual predilections of over 200 notables of the film colony’. Imagine Deuxmoi with that scoop. And yet! We still don’t know who and what was written down on those cards, to this day.  Judge Joseph Call ordered the box sealed in court, explaining: 

‘In the box are names of dignitaries of screen and radio and executives of responsible positions in many great industries. Publication of their names would be ruinous to their careers and cause them great public disgrace.’ 

The  gross hypocrisy of this statement, and the way it protects the powerful men who frequented these establishments - while hanging the sex workers out to dry - is galling. But of course the police, the courts, and the big guys in Hollywood closed ranks. Imagine the names on those index cards. It’s impossible to be too cynical where this stuff is concerned. Brenda Allen eventually served eight months for ‘pandering’, or procuring prostitutes. Her partner-in-crime, Sgt. Elmer Jackson, was merely demoted. He remained in the LAPD until his retirement. 

(Yeah, I know. Have I said ACAB in this newsletter yet?

No? ACAB.)

A member of law enforcement with those pesky index cards.

In the end, plus ça change. The powers-that-be have always been good at covering their own tracks, at letting women like Brenda Allen twist in the wind, to serve prison time and eventually die in obscurity while her corrupt cop boyfriend and her wealthy movie-biz clients continued on relatively unscathed. For years to come, rumours of the contents of Brenda Allen’s client index cards were said to be used by Bugsy Siegel’s lawyers for blackmail. Years after the Sunset Boulevard brothel had shut its doors, someone was still earning money from it, and you can bet it wasn’t one of the women who worked inside. 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Thank you for reading Sisters Under the Mink. If you’d like to subscribe for a small monthly fee to help me parcel out the time and research for this newsletter, you are welcome to do so here: 

A quick note for the curious: If you read James Ellroy’s LA Quartet, you can learn a lot more about Allen’s life and career. I also sourced much of my information for this piece from the exhaustive LAPL piece about Allen here.