The Brief

One drunken night in the late 1930s, Garson Kanin, who wrote or directed romantic classics including My Favorite Wife, Born Yesterday, and Adam’s Rib, found himself in a sexual farce more far-fetched than any he had ever dared dream up.

According to Kanin’s Hollywood: A Memoir, that night the notoriously predatory talent manager Johnny Hyde (who later managed a young Marilyn Monroe) took an unsteady Kanin to a stately Greek Revival mansion high in the Hollywood Hills above Sunset Boulevard. There he was introduced to an elderly woman named “Mae,” who looked and acted exactly like Mae West. The madam of the joint, “Mae” ran a stable of “movie stars,” including “Barbara Stanwyck,” “Carole Lombard,” “Myrna Loy,” “Vivien Leigh,” and “Ginger Rogers."

These look-a-likes were said to take their jobs seriously, reading the trades every morning to accurately talk shop with their Hollywood clients. According to Kanin, it took an army of professionals to turn these sex workers into believable facsimiles of Hollywood’s biggest stars, thus erasing their own personhood in the process. Kanin writes:

So uncanny were the results, according to Kanin, that the husband of one movie star frequented his busy wife’s brothel double so that he was not technically “cheating.” In his book Life Is Too Short, Mickey Rooney also references a brothel introduced to him by Milton Berle, filled with sexy imitations of the stars.

“It was amazing,” Rooney writes. “Every girl looked like a film star. Clara Bow, Jean Harlow, Greta Garbo, Norma Shearer. They were dead ringers.”

According to The Fixers: Eddie Mannix, Howard Strickling and the MGM Publicity Machine by film historian E.J. Fleming, “Mae” was in fact Billie Bennett, an actress at MGM, who allegedly had help from the studio- who used her establishment to entertain clients. There is a case for MGM being involved at least tangentially in prostitution. According to Marc Eliot’s Jimmy Stewart: A Biography, MGM operated a brothel next to their Culver City studio, which catered to male stars’ particular tastes. Suspicious of Stewart’s low-key life, a studio executive told him to prove his “manhood” at the brothel. “Get your ass over there,” he said, “and get those rocks off with at least two of those broads.”

Whatever the case, these alleged studio-sponsored brothels — a symptom of a good-old-boy system which often exploited young, vulnerable women who had come to California to break into the entertainment industry —- have become Hollywood lore.

“The top-dollar establishments operated out of houses on residential streets in the hills above the Sunset Strip,” explains Jon Ponder, historian and co-founder of the West Hollywood History Center. “These were by appointment only. The houses usually had no more than four bedrooms, and, just like today, parking on the narrow, hillside streets was dicey. The madams were careful not to annoy the neighbors.”

Madams make the A-list

According to historian Sherry Monahan, author of California Madams, the madams who rose to the A-list had often been the victims of trafficking and exploitation themselves. A few of them became famous, just like the celebrities they catered to.

One of the most famous Hollywood madams was the whip-smart Lee Francis, who ran a series of brothels throughout LA in the 1920s and ‘30s. In her memoir, Call House Madam (ghostwritten by Serge G. Wolsey), Francis, going by the name of Beverly Davis, brags about the night the wife of a movie star spotted her at a premiere at Grauman’s Chinese Theater.

“Is that Beverly Davis?” the woman yelled. “I’ll trade every autograph in the place for hers!”

It has long been rumored that Francis ran a massive brothel — dubbed the “House of Francis”— out of Piazza del Sol on Sunset Boulevard (now home to Katana), where she lived for a brief time around 1937. “She did entertain there, and there may even have been assignations in the bedrooms, but it would have been very limited,” Ponder says.

According to Ponder, Francis in fact operated her brothels in a series of leased mansions where activities including cards, swimming, billiards, and tennis were available along with sex work. He believes she ran houses at various times on Bedford Drive, Kings Road, Norton Avenue, and the 8200 block of Sunset Boulevard.

Fleming counts Errol Flynn, John Gilbert, and Clark Gable among Francis’ Hollywood johns. Another regular was allegedly Spencer Tracy (who famed Sunset Blvd. gas station pimp Scotty Bowers also pegged as a frequent customer).

“There’s a story that Spencer Tracy, a notoriously problematic imbiber, was a regular at Lee Francis’ on the Strip,” Ponder says. “One night he left there so blottoed that he accidentally drove his car over the curb leaving it perched off the side of the hill. When the police came to help, Tracy became so belligerent that they had to handcuff him and strap his legs down.”

Francis’ rented houses of assignation so fit into the Hollywood landscape that there is a possibly apocryphal tale of the Earl of Warwick knocking on the door of the palatial mansion of movie star Kay Francis one night. Believing it only right to entertain royalty, she did her best to make him at home. According to Francis biographer Scott O’Brien, the confused Earl finally asked pleadingly, “You’re delightful Madam Francis, but would you mind bringing in the girls?”

After quitting the business in the late 1930s, Lee Francis would claim to be the soul of discretion — although she would write more than one autobiography, including Ladies On Call, in which she claimed Jean Harlow was a frequent customer, but that Clark Gable was just a good friend.

However, there was a truly dark side to the often violent, always misogynistic Hollywood sex trade, which many women entered through force as a last resort.

Crumbling facades

David Niven, center, photographed in 1959 presenting an American Cinema Editors award to George Tomasini for MGM's 'North by Northwest' while Richard H. Cahoon, TV winner for a CBS 'Perry Mason' telefilm. A memoir written by Niven memoir, published in 1974, talked about Hollywood brothels.

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Courtesy Los Angeles Public Library

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In his masterful memoir Bring on the Empty Horses, movie star and raconteur David Niven tells the story of his friend “Mary Lou,” a free-spirited struggling actress who becomes a sex worker in a cream-colored mansion in the North Hollywood hills. According to Niven, as a lark he went to visit this high-end brothel, which was overseen by a haughty “baroness,” who went to absurd lengths to display an air of propriety.

“The girls will be seated in those three chairs,” she told him. “If you feel you would like to have a private word with one of them before you go, signal the fact to me by turning the handle of your teacup in her direction and I will see that she stays after the others leave.”

However, the façade was soon broken when Mary Lou began to cry in embarrassment. A short while later, Niven writes, the house was abandoned when it was raided by the gangster Mickey Cohen, a not uncommon occurrence.

The fate of “Mary Lou” and thousands of other Hollywood hopefuls meant that any spot in L.A. could become a makeshift brothel — or so city leaders believed. This particularly worried librarians at the Carnegie Library on Hollywood and Ivar.

“They had a basement and the librarians, they really began to worry because there were all these young women spending their days downstairs reading scripts,” says Hollywood historian Gregory Paul Williams. “And the librarians were like, ‘these women are going to be imperiled for exploitation.’”

The Black Widow(s)

Ann Forst.

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Los Angeles Public Library

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Brenda Allen, another A-list Hollywood madam

One of the most notorious predators of the 1930s was Ann Forrester (or Ann Forst), a ruthless madam known as the “Black Widow.” Stories of her “little black book” titillated Hollywood during her trial in 1940. According to historian Annie Murphy of LAPL Blog, her employees testified and “were quick to turn against Forst, revealing sordid details of their job including being forced to service several men a day, not being allowed to rest when ill, and only getting half their promised pay.”

Brenda Allen Burns was one of the sex workers who bravely testified against Forrester. Shortly after the trial, Brenda began to emulate her former boss and quickly set out to become an even more notorious madam.

“In the years after the trial, she dropped the name ‘Burns’ and transformed herself into a stylish and sophisticated player in the Hollywood sex trade,” Ponder says. “By 1946, she was raking in cash from a lucrative outcall business she operated out of an anonymous apartment building on Fedora Street, two blocks south of the Ambassador Hotel.”

Allen specifically catered to Hollywood bigwigs, embedding herself within the industry. “Brenda was a master of the art of marketing with discretion,” Ponder explains. “For example, she placed ads in the back of the AMPAS Players Directory that featured herself in two glamorous head shots, along with her name and the number of her telephone exchange. It was easy to remember: HO-2555.”

Allen would control numerous private house brothels above the Sunset Strip on both Cory Avenue and Miller Place, and controlled an entire bungalow court on Catalina Street. She was finally arrested in May 1948, when one of the houses she operated on Harold Way above Sunset Boulevard was raided.

During the raid, a black box was discovered, featuring the names of hundreds of clients. “Police recovered a box containing her client files on index cards. In careful, precise handwriting, she had recorded the sexual services each of her rich and famous clients had paid for, dates of assignations and their costs,” Ponder says.

“Names Found in Vice Raid Set Hollywood Agog,” the Los Angeles Times blared. A photo of a policeman sifting through the index cards taunted Allen’s worried patrons. Ponder explains:

“At Brenda’s trial, the judge reviewed the cards one by one … When he finished, he addressed the court. He’d seen ‘names of dignitaries of the screen and radio and executives of responsible positions in many great industries,’ he said. ‘Publication of their names would be ruinous to their careers and cause them great public disgrace.’ The judge ordered the files sealed, permanently. They were likely destroyed.”

The unmasking of Brenda Allen would implicate Sgt. Elmer Jackson, her corrupt partner in the LAPD, and usher in the reign of the controversial reformer Chief William Parker. But Hollywood heavyweights stayed suspiciously safe.

“Releasing the names would have been a public-relations disaster for the movie industry, which in those days was the biggest moneymaker in the state,” Ponder says. “The industry had every reason to do whatever it took to clean up the mess. Whatever they did must have worked. None of the names was ever released.”

The fallout from Allen’s trial seemed to signal the death knell of the exploitative Hollywood supported brothel — but you can’t keep the world’s oldest profession down. In July 1951 (before Allen was even released from jail), another A-list brothel was busted on Schuyler Drive in Beverly Hills. The walls were papered with autographed headshots of celebrities, and a black book discovered was filled with names from the film industry. It conveniently disappeared.

Take accountability and move forward.

Those were the two points Los Angeles Fire Chief Jaime Moore hit repeatedly when speaking with LAist’s Larry Mantle this week.

On taking accountability, Moore said hazardous conditions and decisions made before the Palisades Fire erupted a year ago meant “our firefighters never had a chance” to arrest the fire that killed 12 people and destroyed thousands of structures.

On moving forward, he emphasized that reform is already in the works.

“Things have changed since the Palisades Fire, and we're going to continue making big changes in the Los Angeles Fire Department,” said Moore, who was selected for the LAFD top job by Mayor Karen Bass in November.

Here are three takeaways from the interview, which aired on AirTalk on Tuesday.

1. Staffing decisions hampered fire response

The LAFD uses a so-called pre-deployment matrix to set firefighter staffing levels ahead of high-risk weather.

According to the department’s after-action report, however, staffing levels on the day the Palisades Fire began fell short of the LAFD standard for extreme weather conditions. The National Weather Service had warned of low humidity, high winds and dry vegetation, what it calls a “particularly dangerous situation.” It’s the highest level of alert the agency can give.

Despite the high risk, the LAFD report said the decision not to deploy more firefighters in advance was in part made to save money.

Moore said Monday that the department has updated its policies to increase staffing for especially hazardous conditions, but he said he doesn’t believe additional resources would have stopped a fire of the magnitude that leveled the Palisades.

To suppress that kind of fire, he said, the department would need to pre-deploy resources across the city’s vast geography — to places like Baldwin Hills, Franklin Canyon, the Hollywood Hills, the Palisades, Porter Ranch and Sunland-Tujunga.

Moore said the department has already made new policies to call for more resources when the Weather Service issues a “particularly dangerous situation” alert.

2. LAFD is mostly an urban firefighting department

Moore referenced a key finding of the after-action report regarding a lack of training in wildland firefighting, which contributed to confusion and struggles to effectively utilize resources during the fire.

Wildland fires pose a number of challenges that are different from what firefighters face in urban environments. Those include the need to coordinate a large number of resources over vast areas, all while dealing with fast-moving flames that can rapidly tear through dry plants and structures.

The department found in its report that fewer firefighters were trained in fighting these wildland fires in recent years and that “leaders struggled to comprehend their roles.”

Some leaders in the department had “limited or no experience in managing an incident of such complexity,” the report said. And some reverted to doing the work of lower positions, leaving high-level decision-making positions unfilled.

“What we're doing now is really furthering that training and reinforcing that education with our firefighters so that they could be better prepared,” Moore said on AirTalk.

3. Changes to the after-action report

Early versions of the after-action report differed from the version released to the public in October, a fact that was first reported by the Los Angeles Times. The Times also reported that Battalion Chief Kenneth Cook, who wrote the report, wouldn’t endorse the final version because of the changes.

Moore acknowledged to the L.A. Board of Fire Commissioners at a Jan. 6 meeting that the report had been watered down.

“It is now clear that multiple drafts were edited to soften language and reduce explicit criticism of department leadership in that final report,” Moore told the commissioners. “This editing occurred prior to my appointment as fire chief, and I can assure you that nothing of this sort will ever again happen while I am fire chief."

Some changes were small but telling. A section titled “Failures” later became “Primary Challenges.”

Moore told LAist that changes between versions “ made it easier for the public to understand,” but an LAist review found the edits weren’t all surface-level.

In the first version of the report, the department said the decision not to fully pre-deploy all available resources for the particularly dangerous wind event “did not align” with their guidelines for such extreme weather cases. The final version said that the initial response “lacked the appropriate resources,” removing the reference to department standards.

The department also removed some findings that had to do with communications.

One sentence from the initial version of the report said: “Most companies lacked a basic briefing, leader’s intent, communications plan, or updated fire information for more than 36 hours.” That language was removed from the final report.

LAist has asked the Fire Department for clarification about why these assertions were removed but did not receive a response before time of publication.

Olympic organizers announced Tuesday that registration to buy tickets will run through March 18, with sales beginning in April. LA28 CEO Reynold Hoover said that locals will get the first bite at the apple.

The registration period opens 7 a.m. Wednesday.

" Our host city communities here in Los Angeles and Oklahoma City will have the opportunity to be a part of a local presale," Hoover said outside the Coliseum while surrounded by Olympic athletes from Games past. "With our thanks and as part of our commitment to making sure that those who live and work around the games, where the games will take place, can be in the stands and cheer in 2028."

Olympic organizers also provided more details on ticket prices for the first time. One million tickets will sell for $28 a pop and around a third of tickets will be under $100, according to LA28 Chair Casey Wasserman.

That means the majority of tickets to the Olympic Games will run into triple digits. If the World Cup is any indication, some tickets could get astronomically pricey.

Interested fans can go to LA28.org to register. Those who are selected will get an email with a time slot to purchase tickets.

The L.A. County Board of Supervisors took a step toward banning ICE from unlawfully operating on county-owned property and to post signage designating those spaces as “ICE Free Zones.”

The board unanimously approved the motion at Tuesday’s meeting, directing staff to draft the policy.

The draft could include requirements for county employees to report to their supervisor if they see unauthorized immigration activity on county property.

The city of Los Angeles passed a similar order last July, which strengthened protocols that prohibit ICE from operating on city-owned property. The agenda staff report points to an “ICE Free Zone” ordinance passed by the city of Chicago in October.

Supervisors Lindsey Horvath and Hilda Solis co-authored the motion.

Horvath said the county will not allow its property to be used as “a staging ground for violence caused by the Trump administration."

Solis added that their action as a board could have a ripple effect on other city councils and local governments.

“Even though it's taken us this long to get here …I think it's really important for our communities to understand what we're saying is you don't have the right to come in and harass people without a federal warrant,” Solis said. “And if you use our property to stage, then you need to show us documentation as to why.

First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli said in an X post that the county cannot exclude federal agents from public spaces.

"Anyone who attempts to impede our agents will be arrested and charged, including county employees," Essayli said in the post. "We have already charged more than 100 individuals for similar conduct."

Since June, ICE raids have ramped up across the nation, heavily targeting certain immigrant communities like those in Los Angeles.

The motion directs the draft to include language that prohibits all types of ICE operations on county land, including staging and mobilizing without a warrant.

The motion cites an incident on Oct. 8, when county officials say federal agents raided the Deane Dana Friendship Park and Nature Center in San Pedro, arresting three people and threatening to arrest staff.

The motion also requires that the county post 'Ice Free Zone' signage on all of its properties.

Sergio Perez, executive director of the Center of Human Rights and Constitutional Law, told LAist the policy is enforceable under Fourth Amendment case law.

“You have to make sure that when you post that signage … that means that you routinely, or semi-routinely, assess who's coming in to the property, so that you can control access,” Perez said. “But if ICE shows up with a warrant, with a subpoena, then all bets are off, and they can enter into the property and do what they need to do.”

Perez said the county has moved “incredibly” slow on this issue.

“It's embarrassing that the county is moving six months later, given how we've been facing violent, aggressive, invasive and illegal raids now for so long here in Southern California,” Perez said, adding that local governments have not been fast or creative enough in protecting immigrant and refugee communities.

The Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, one of the region’s largest immigrant advocacy groups, supports the motion.

"We do not want our county resources being used for federal immigration enforcement activities, which disrupt, uproot, and terrorize our communities,” Jeannette Zanipatin, policy director for CHIRLA, said in a statement. “It is important for all public spaces to be really safe for all residents.”

County staff have 30 days to draft a plan to implement the new policy.