The year is 1925. Lucille LeSeuer, in Kansas City, has just received a telegram from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. "Come immediately to Culver City!"
Lucille is 21 years old - a pretty girl, short and plump, with huge eyes, freckles - and with lots of pep and determination. She borrows $400 from her mother, spends it on a new wardrobe, and takes the train west. At the station a publicist meets her and escorts to her hotel. It's the Washington Hotel, at 3927 Van Buren Place.
This hotel was constructed just two years earlier, in 1923. It has three stories and 53 rooms, and is in the Zigzag Moderne style - which means the plain E-shaped building boasts a jagged, angular false front.
"I was happy there" she recalls later. "I didn't really want to go to sleep at night, and I was anxious to wake up early every morning because every new day held promise. It wasn't until months later that I noticed that the Hotel Washington was, as you might say, sort of a dump. It hadn't changed, so I guess I had."
Now, 86 years later, the Washington Hotel is still a dump. The streets around it have been rerouted, and the building was renamed the West End Hotel at some point. The structure has been deemed historic and therefore of value and it thus survived, though hemmed in all sides by Linwood Elementary School. The plainest side of the building is now prominent, and is bordered by the school's parking lot.
I walk by this hotel every morning on my way to work, and I walk past it again on my way home.
On my walk to work, I encounter the sites in that film.
At the Culver Hotel . . .
I see the door where Stan Laurel stood . . .
and now . . .
On Main Street, you can see the sign for the Washington (West End) Hotel, on the roof, in the distance, past the Culver Hotel. And faint oil derricks on Baldwin Hills.
Finally, I reach my goal. I see the windows of the Museum of Jurassic Technology. In 1927. . .
. . . and today.
Interestingly, the clip of "Putting Pants on Philip" that I found on YouTube has vanished. A company claiming ownership has requested that it be removed from the internet. This seems to be in line with a possible larger plan for the cultural erasure of Laurel and Hardy in Culver City. For instance, the back of Stellar Hardware, on Main Street, once featured a mural of the two men, comically wielding tools. But with the demise of Stellar Hardware, Laurel and Hardy too began to disappear, a disemboweling reflected with horror in Oliver Hardy's face.
Although some people still do remember who they are.
And what became of Lucille LeSeuer? She soon moved out of the hotel. She says: "There were many young men who had been asking me out, but I thought I should only think about my work, even when I didn't have any. I wasn't very fond of spending so many nights alone in my hotel room, in this hotel that was looking less and less glamorous to me. I started saying yes instead of no."
Her story has a happy ending. Lucille soon found work in the movies - and as it turns out, she was one of the immortals. MGM gave her a make-over, and changed her name to Joan Crawford.
