Cleaning Up the Act in Hollywood

"Stars in the sidewalk, bars on the doors "

Hooray for Hollywood/ That phony super Coney Hollywood," lyricized Johnny Mercer 40 years ago in a sardonic paean to the legend: instant fame, endless sex and the money to pay for it all. Since then the illusion of celluloid glamour has turned into the tawdry reality of a Los Angeles neighborhood of 250,000 people harassed by crime and vice, mired in the flesh and drug trades and fast fading into the sunset of American cultural history. Now Hollywood is trying to stage a comeback--a drive to revive a decayed area that still attracts 3 million tourists a year eager to see such bits of Americana as Mann's--formerly Grauman's--Chinese Theater and the footprints and signatures of movie stars immortalized in concrete. Says Mike Sims, director of the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce: "We've got stars in the sidewalk, but iron bars on the doors."

The chamber is spurring a campaign to lure legitimate business back to Sunset Strip and close down porn establishments. One of its favorite techniques: to ask the city to inspect buildings for safety and zoning violations. Citizens have picketed notorious crossroads like the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Western Avenue in protest against porn, and some 160,000 people signed a petition complaining against the sex merchants. Lucille Ball and Carol Burnett narrated a slide show titled, appropriately enough, Hooray for Hollywood. The 40-member Revitalize Hollywood Committee, a community cross section of producers, actors and businessmen organized by Councilwoman Peggy Stevenson, puts on the show at local schools and community meetings --and then asks for cleanup suggestions. Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley has belatedly appointed a task force of people from seven city and state agencies to investigate Hollywood's problems.

Reformers claim much of the credit for the departure since 1975 of 60% of more than 150 porn shops, X-rated moviehouses and bars that had sprouted on Hollywood's main streets. This week the Los Angeles city council is expected to vote on a temporary measure banning "adult" entertainment enterprises within 500 ft. of a church--or 1,000 ft. of each other. After four months the council would then vote on whether to adopt the measure on a permanent basis.

Yet Hollywood will never recapture the old glory. "I've seen stabbings, shootings, anything you want to see," says Jack Hines Jr., cashier and host at Miceli's restaurant, where business has fallen more than 50% in the past five years. "Hollywood is the sinkhole of Los Angeles."

The glitter of Hollywood began to show signs of tarnish shortly before World War II, when studios--and their owners and stars--began moving to the flossy, faddish suburbs. The original Hollywood neighborhood had deteriorated to the level of seedy respectability when hippies and a punk element, turned on by drugs, arrived in the mid-1960s. From 1969 through 1975, the robbery, burglary and homicide rates in Hollywood climbed nearly twice as fast as for Los Angeles as a whole; narcotics and liquor violations rose more than five times as fast. Last year there were 2,168 prostitution arrests in Hollywood--ten times the average for the city's 16 other police divisions. The streets teemed with whores, transvestites and the S-M crowd dangling slave bracelets and chains. Alarmed, L.A. Police Chief Edward M. Davis assigned his executive officer, Captain Ken Hickman, 37, to clean up the mess with 180 extra men.

Touring Hollywood in his unmarked blue squad car, Hickman pointed out the sights to TIME Correspondent Joseph Boyce. Driving by one apartment building, Hickman recalled, "Until recently, the whores there had a ten-year-old boy acting as a lookout." Entering an "encounter parlor," he was greeted by a woman in halter and shorts--and told that she holds "rap sessions." Then why the mattress on the floor? "That's to make the customers comfortable," the woman explained. Replied Hickman: "It's easy to see you're trained therapists."

Usually Hickman finds little cause for humor. Along Selma Avenue and Sunset Boulevard, male and female teenagers, many of them runaways, line up under the guise of hitchhiking. Grandfatherly "chicken hawks," men in their 50s and 60s, haggle with "chickens," teen-age boy hustlers, through the windows of Cadillacs. Blonde prostitutes boast of earning $600 a night from Mexicans who have illegally sneaked across the border and pay premium prices for a fair gringa. Brunettes and blacks can at best count on around $300 a night.

It used to be much worse. "Prostitution activity is way down, both male and female," claims Hickman, who is proud of the cops' new "juvenile sweeps." In one of them last month, his men picked up 61 teen-agers on charges ranging from auto theft to narcotics violations. Most of the arrests are made in the new discos and coffee shops, many appealing to homosexuals, that have filled the entertainment vacuum left after the demise of such nightclubs as the Trocadero and the Mocambo. Hickman speaks with contempt of the masochists who keep repeating, as policemen handcuff them, "I love it, I love it." Says he: "Our policemen feel they are taking part in a perverted sex act."

Disco and coffee-shop owners are variously hostile and hospitable to the cops. At Arthur J's, four men began openly selling drugs at a table; another time, a 15-year-old girl ran out of the ladies' room screaming, "Oh my God, I broke the needle off in my arm!" Shirley Norris, the manager, hired her own night guard--and then gathered signatures for a petition demanding extra police protection. Now she's seeing "familiar faces back again" --her old "straight" clientele.

On the other hand, Art Leon, owner of The Tourist Trap, a Hollywood Boulevard bar with a parquet dance floor, pool tables and pinball machines, accuses the police of hassling him. "On Friday and Saturday the cops come in here and take out all the women and jack them up against the wall for prostitution," says Leon, who packs a .25-cal. automatic pistol. He claims police sit out front and "tell customers not to come in here." Alcoholic Beverage Control agents have filed an "accusation" against The Tourist Trap, listing 39 offenses, a first step in getting its liquor license withdrawn.

It is a measure of the reformers' temporary success that the seven major film companies left in the Hollywood area do not seem inclined to move. Besides, they still believe in make-believe. Under one rehabilitation plan, rows of shops would become typical sets from western or gaslight-era films, while minibuses would offer fast, easy rides for customers, But can the good guys really win in the end?

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