In 1977, Los Angeles Times reporters Mike Goodman and Jerry Cohen called Hollywood “a wicked, violent eyesore in the geographical and sentimental core of Los Angeles.”
In their view, prostitutes advertised their services “bold as blue jays'' on the streets by day and night while “sex shops” dominated the “prevailing architecture of the business community: nouveau honky-tonk.”1 Already in the 1960s, city officials and law enforcement voiced concern over the prevalence of sex work in Hollywood, lamenting the “high class” call girls working out of the Sunset Strip as well as rising numbers of streetwalkers along Hollywood and Sunset Boulevards.2 By the 1970s and 1980s, periodic crackdowns on prostitution meant that prostitution-related arrests in Hollywood accounted for nearly a quarter and then half of all such arrests in the city. 3
Ruscha’s photographs illustrate the transitory and covert nature of prostitution, which depended on its ability to attract customers while evading the attention of nearly everyone else.
The photographic evidence to support a picture of blatant, bold, or rampant prostitution along Sunset Boulevard, however, is elusive. Ruscha’s photographs show the intersections that police targeted for their raids, the hotels sex workers used to service customers, and the restaurants where they ate. Yet the photographs offer no obvious sign of the sex workers themselves. In so doing, they illustrate the transitory and covert nature of an illegal business such as prostitution, which depended on its ability to attract customers while evading the attention of nearly everyone else.
The “Gold and Glamour” of the Sunset Strip
Already in the 1930s and 1940s, the Sunset Strip (a 1.7-mile section of Sunset Boulevard between Sweetzer Avenue and Doheny Drive) had earned a reputation as a hotspot for illicit entertainment.4 Beyond city limits, businesses on the Strip were in unincorporated county territory and exempt from city taxes and law enforcement. Night clubs like Café Trocadero, Ciro’s, and the Clover Club attracted Hollywood stars and local mobsters; and Hollywood madams like Lee Francis made a fortune by catering to “prominent Los Angeles and Hollywood personalities.”5 By the mid-1950s, the Strip had lost some of its appeal since “Las Vegas . . . offered the kind of uninhibited adult entertainment that the Sunset Strip only suggested.”6 Still, Ruscha’s photographs from 1966 capture remnants of the Strip’s earlier allure—notably in the Coronet (an apartment building at 8439 Sunset Boulevard), located next door to Ciro’s.7 By 1940, Lee Francis had moved to the Coronet apartments after a twenty-five-year career in prostitution. That year, police arrested her there on a moral charge in connection with an escort service she was operating to provide “out-of-town visitors with pleasant feminine companionship during their foray into the night life of the town.”8
Despite the Strip’s “anything-goes atmosphere,” secrecy and discretion were critical to the success of such “Hollywood madams” as well as professional call girls. Thus, by the 1950s most worked from locations in the hills just above the Strip, and both increasingly distanced themselves further from the business of prostitution through the use of the telephone. Arrests of “Hollywood madams” remained a periodic feature of Los Angeles newspapers from the 1940s into the 1990s, but those arrests took place at locations adjacent to the Sunset Strip. In its coverage of the arrest of “madam to the stars” Heidi Fleiss in 1993 on pandering charges, for example, the Times noted that Fleiss had been a fixture at a Sunset Strip bar called On the Rox (9009 Sunset Boulevard), but that she had been arrested at her home off Benedict Canyon Road.9
While Ruscha’s photographs of the Sunset Strip show the nightclubs, bars, restaurants, and hotels that attracted the potential clients of Hollywood madams and call girls, the most direct link to the exclusive prostitutes working adjacent to the Strip comes with buildings housing telephone answering service companies. In the 1960s and 1970s, call girls used such companies to screen and arrange for rendezvous with clients. This practice made them “much more difficult to catch,” according to an LAPD officer, as they “had unlisted phone numbers” and an “introduction to them was tough to get.”10 In 1965, however, law enforcement officials targeted allegedly “high class” and “high priced” call girl operations by making arrests at seven telephone answering services acting as “go-betweens for prostitutes and their customers.”11 Although law enforcement officers and newspapers associated the call girls with the Sunset Strip area, none of the telephone service companies had locations on the Strip. Of the seven, four were located in unassuming commercial buildings on Sunset Boulevard east of the Strip. Ruscha’s photographs do not capture these buildings close to the time of the police raid, but his photoshoots from 1973, 1985, and 1995 show all four buildings still in existence.
Taken together, the photographs and city directory listings illustrate how an illicit business such as prostitution could evade detection in part by cloaking itself by association with legitimate businesses. The Hollywood Call Board at 6000 Sunset Boulevard, for example–which led to the arrest of its owners Ted and Phyllis Oros, twenty prostitutes, and five panderers and madams–was one of ten businesses operating out of a building with public signage devoted to its first-floor client, “Western Recorders,” then a major audio recording studio.12 Operating out of an office on the second floor, the Hollywood Call Board was literally out of sight and its adjacency to other, lawful businesses likely shielded it from legal scrutiny. Similarly, the Always Open Telephone Answering Service at 6290 Sunset Boulevard was merely one of many businesses in the skyscraping Sunset Vine Tower. The two other busted services on Sunset, Lauria’s Telephone Answering Service (6087 Sunset Boulevard) and RSVP Telephone Answering Service (7274 Sunset Boulevard), occupied low-rise office buildings that appeared no less benign.13 News coverage of the 1965 raid noted that police officers had emphasized that the seven answering services they had targeted in their raid were “mavericks” and “should in no way cast suspicion on the remaining non-investigated 250-plus answering services located throughout the county.”14 While all four commercial buildings persisted into the 1990s, the answering service companies had vacated these spaces. Furthermore, the likelihood that madams and call girls used such businesses declined after the 1970s. Self-described “Madam 90210,” Elizabeth Adams, arrested in 1988 for running a call-girl operation, maintained that her work was “strictly a telephone business” that Adams operated herself from her house located “in the hills above the Sunset Strip.”15
Outside the Sunset Strip: The “Problem” of Streetwalkers
Hollywood madams and call girls represented an elite stratum within the hierarchy of prostitution, catering to the wealthiest clients and charging high prices for their services. As such, they provided exciting fodder for newspapers. The majority of prostitution-related arrests in Hollywood from the 1960s through the 1990s, however, came in conjunction with concerns about the prevalence of streetwalkers along “Whore’s Stroll,” part of an approximately five-mile section of Sunset Boulevard east of Crescent Heights Boulevard ending approximately at Normandie Avenue.16 Female streetwalkers tended to work Sunset Boulevard as well as Hollywood Boulevard to the north, with a “subdivision by color” on Sunset featuring “blacks at the east end, whites to the west,” the Times reported in 1979.17 By 1990, however, Hollywood vice officers believed that the male prostitutes along Santa Monica Boulevard had become “a far worse blight” and posed greater health dangers due to fears that they would transmit the AIDS virus.18
Despite periodic reports of “open and brazen prostitution” along Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood beginning in 1968, Ruscha’s photographs lack obvious signs of the sex workers supposedly contributing to a “perennial summer war between police and prostitutes” by the late 1970s.19 There are hints, however, about the presence of the so-called “malignant atmosphere” created by the increasing numbers of “sex merchants” who had allegedly contributed to the growth of prostitution. Late 1960s court rulings on obscenity allowed rundown Hollywood theaters to show adult films, leading to the spread of “ancillary operations [such] as strip bars, massage parlors, and prostitution.”20 By 1977, the Times claimed that Hollywood contained fifty “sex businesses”: adult bookstores, X-rated movie houses, “raunchy” bars, massage parlors, and nude modeling studios. Since the vast majority of such businesses had addresses on Hollywood Boulevard or Western Avenue, it is not surprising they are absent from Ruscha’s photographs. Still, Ruscha’s photograph of the intersection of Sunset Boulevard and Western Avenue, looking north, shows the consistent presence of one X-rated movie theater: the Sunset Theatre at 1508 North Western Avenue (nearest 5453 Sunset Boulevard). Dating back to the 1920s, the Sunset Theatre had become one of the fifty Pussycat Theater adult movie houses operating throughout California by the 1970s.21 Ruscha’s 1973 photograph of the intersection shows the Pussycat’s marquee, offering viewers the opportunity to see “The Maids” and “Ride Hard, Ride Wild.” In 1985, the marquee indicated that the theater was offering a double feature, including “Sounds of Sex.”
Just as police had to pinpoint the “maverick” telephone answering services in an otherwise legitimate industry, during the 1970s and 1980s they had to distinguish “public nuisances” like the Sunset Orange Motel from law-abiding motels on the same block.
More difficult to see is the impact that the “malignant atmosphere” of such sex shops had on the relationship between local businesses—such as motels and restaurants—and streetwalkers. One motel owner who claimed it was difficult to retain a “family” clientele alleged that the spread of Hollywood’s “adult entertainment business” in the mid-1960s had a deleterious impact on the neighborhood, encouraging an uptick in prostitution. The influx of prostitutes prompted some motels to rent rooms at short-term rates.22 Traveling east from La Brea Avenue along Sunset Boulevard in 1973, Ruscha’s north-looking camera revealed a string of hotels: Travelodge (7051 Sunset Boulevard), the Hallmark House (7023 Sunset Boulevard), and finally, at the northwest corner of Sunset Boulevard and North Orange Drive, the Sunset Orange Motel. While the first two remained typical lodging, the Sunset Orange Motel (1501 North Orange Drive/7001 Sunset Boulevard) had allegedly become a “haven for prostitutes”—especially problematic as students at Hollywood High School claimed they could “look across the street from their classrooms” to the second-floor window of the motel where they could see a mannequin modeling “gauzy lingerie.” Just as police had to pinpoint the “maverick” telephone answering services in an otherwise legitimate industry, law enforcement agents during the 1970s and 1980s had to distinguish “public nuisances” like the Sunset Orange Motel from law-abiding motels on the same block.23 Across the street from the Sunset Orange Motel, the manager at the International House of Pancakes (7006 Sunset Boulevard) also objected to the block’s transformation, claiming that his twenty-four-hour service restaurant had become the late-night hangout for “pimps with their ladies.”24
The prevalence of streetwalkers on Sunset Boulevard provoked several responses from law enforcement and area residents. In the late 1960s, law enforcement representatives claimed to be making two hundred arrests in West Hollywood every week on charges including prostitution and pornography.25 By the early 1970s, police used undercover female police officers as decoys in an attempt to arrest potential male customers of streetwalkers. These, and other such “crackdowns,” resulted in dozens of arrests each night through the early 1980s.26 In 1984, law enforcement officials touted the impact of a new computer in leading to a decrease in streetwalkers. With its help, police could identify repeat offenders who then received longer prison sentences or harsher fines if convicted. As a result, Hollywood residents reported a dramatic decrease in the number of prostitutes on Sunset Boulevard.27
While groups like the Hollywood Neighborhood Action Group supported law enforcement’s efforts to rid the area of prostitution, others expressed concern about the vulnerability of many of the individuals working the streets. In less than five months between late 1977 and early 1978, two men later dubbed the Hillside Stranglers committed a series of murders involving what the newspaper described as “young women . . . heavily involved in the Hollywood street scene.”28 The men were eventually convicted, and the investigation helped raise the profile of activists like Lois Lee, who had asked police to look into the disappearance of seventeen-year-old Kimberly Martin, a sex worker, who turned out to be one of the victims.29 As a graduate student in sociology who had studied sex work in Los Angeles, Lee had noted that many prostitutes were young runaways, subject to the authority of a pimp, and/or drug dependent. Thus, already in 1977 she had established the forerunner of Children of the Night, an organization that attempted to offer “understanding and alternatives” to sex workers.30
Staying Power
By the mid-1980s, the Times regularly reported on a decrease in prostitution along Sunset Boulevard. Police continued to cite the technology of the computer as instrumental in their fight against the “sex trade” in Hollywood, even while noting that many female prostitutes had simply relocated to the suburbs while male prostitutes still flourished on Santa Monica Boulevard.31 Sex workers cited concerns about increasing danger as another reason to desert the street, with many working instead for massage parlors, modeling agencies, and escort services. Some also pursued clients by way of classified advertisements.32 The AIDS crisis along with the availability of pornography on home video (and, later, the internet) also helped spur “the decline in visibility of sexual behavior in public.”33 Ruscha’s 1995 photographs substantiate a subtle change in the street’s sexual culture. At the intersection of Sunset Boulevard and Orange Avenue, for example, the International House of Pancakes remained but the Sunset Orange Motel had given way to a fast-food restaurant. Even the Sunset Theatre, which was still advertising that it carried “The Ultimate in XXX Movies” was less than a decade away from demolition, an outcome reached by the time Ruscha’s camera captured the intersection in 2007.34
Still, illicit sex on Sunset Boulevard had remarkable staying power. Since at least the early 1970s, police had routinely arrested prostitutes and their customers on the short block of Sunset Boulevard bordered on the west by North Genesee Avenue and on the east by Courtney Avenue (to the north) and North Spaulding Avenue (to the south). In 1973, the intersection of Sunset and Genesee was the location of an undercover operation that helped police target potential “tricks” rather than streetwalkers.35 In 1985, the intersection made news with the arrest of Olympic hurdler Edwin Moses for soliciting a Hollywood vice officer posing as a prostitute. Although a Los Angeles jury declared Moses innocent, that would not be the fate for British actor Hugh Grant in 1995. Grant’s arrest and conviction for a “lewd act” involving a prostitute he had “picked up” at Sunset Boulevard and Courtney Avenue made national and international news.36
Illicit sex on Sunset Boulevard had remarkable staying power.
In Ruscha’s photographs of this stretch, the landscape too has remarkable staying power. Among a bank, hamburger stand, KBIG City Radio, and an office building, perhaps the building most likely to catch the eye is the one at 7750 Sunset Boulevard, which housed the Screen Actors Guild for thirty years, beginning in 1956. As with many of the Sunset Boulevard locations that appeared one way by day to Ruscha’s camera and another by night to the men and women who used the streets for illegal sexual encounters, the prominence of the beautiful mid-century building helps to obfuscate—and belie—the adjacent intersections’ clandestine record. The block’s infamy remains hidden in plain sight.