Those who know how to get to the Hollywood sign don’t tell—and those who tell don’t know. As the L.A. landmark celebrates its 100th year, author Mark Seal recounts the sign's dramatic history.
Fourteen hundred feet above the city of dreams, you can see the sweep of the metropolis, from the hills to the sea, and within it the cauldron of struggle and strife that is Los Angeles. But the eyes down below are staring at you, for you are atop the town’s most famous monument, the ultimate symbol of fame, fortune, and the fantasy of moviemaking worldwide.Normally, you would be chased away, fined, and possibly even arrested.
“I think of going to the sign as the ultimate VIP experience because it’s closed off. Not even celebrities can come up here.” Today she is going to take you all the way up, onto the ridge where the sign stands on Mount Lee, named for the pioneering LA entrepreneur Don Lee, who sold Cadillacs and owned a radio station whose tower stood on the peak. Once at the summit, she’ll hand you a rope and show you how to access the magical letters on the hill.“I think of going to the sign as the ultimate VIP experience because it’s closed off. Not even celebrities can come up here,” she says.
Originally conceived as a billboard for a tony new real estate development called Hollywoodland, the sign was built out of telephone poles and sheet metal. “There are police stationed up at the top of Mount Lee 24 hours a day to kick people off,” says Wright. “Do you want to see a security cage?” The trespasser turns around and descends obediently, but others are even higher, racing up the hillsides, determined to somehow get to the sign.A siren followed by a loud voice from on high suddenly fills the hillsides. “You are trespassing!” a cop’s amplified voice declares. “There is no hiking on the trail! Walk back down the same road! You’re in a fire district area. Thank you.”
Around the desperate fame-seekers, the city roars, real-life dramas competing with the pyrotechnics onscreen. In 1921, the comic star Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle is accused of killing a young actress at a boozy party during Prohibition. In 1922, the silent-film director William Desmond Taylor is found shot in the back. Hollywood’s reputation for decadent depravity only grows as the years pass.
John Roche goes to work to create the sign: 13 big, bold, no-nonsense white letters, each 45 feet high. No permits, deliberations with planning boards, or environmental reviews are required. “I don’t think the word ‘environmentalist’ was in the dictionary in 1923,” Roche will later say. Almost a hundred Mexican laborers with mules march up the hillside and dig holes in the rocky terrain. Into the holes go telephone poles, upon which are fastened the sheet-metal letters, painted white.
Her name is Millicent Lillian Entwistle, but she goes by Peg. She is 24, with a flapper’s hairdo and a solid stage résumé, having appeared opposite the young Bogart. An 18-year-old Bette Davis is said to have told her mother, “I want to be exactly like Peg Entwistle.
In 1932, Peg Entwistle climbed to the top of the H, then leapt and rolled down the hillside to her death. Maybe she even cursed the sign. By 1939, seven years after her death, the sign is a ragged wreck. Most of Hollywoodland’s lots have sold, and maintenance of the sign has stopped. A torrential rainstorm demolishes the H from which Entwistle leapt.
Such a downfall seems unlikely, though. For the sign is eternal, indestructible, forever in the sky and the minds of those inspired by it. Bobbie Chance is 18 years old the first time she sees the sign. It’s the mid-’60s, and she has just arrived from Miami with a seven-year studio contract that will lead to roles inand other swinging beach flicks. She falls in love with the letters at first sight, and the sign becomes her lucky North Star, spurring her not only to make it in Hollywood but to inspire others.
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