Quote:
Originally Posted by rick m
Yessiree - When Prohibition ended the LAPD plowed into Cosmo and Selma's Jimmy's Backyard and BBB's busting the (to them) most flagrant clubs in Hollywood due to performers like Rae Bourbon , Billy the Male Harlow and the quasi L&G milieu - Malin, Haines and Tachman n Garbo lost their teensy haunts
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Regarding the club space behind the Ivar Theater, Curbed LA was recently mystified by it use:
"Walking around Hollywood, I see several older commercial and warehouse buildings that have been thoroughly and stylishly renovated but have no indication of who or what is inside. Mostly they look like they'd be architect's offices, but none has any nameplate anywhere. They are: 1603 Cosmo Street, 1608 Cosmo Street (the old back-of-the-Ivar club space),
and 1715 North Gower. Does anyone know what is done inside these handsome but mysterious buildings?"
As late as 2011, 1608 Cosmo St was still a venue called The Brick Box.
But Cosmo Street is no longer the raucously entertaining pocket of seedinesss and vice it once was. The club marquee, which was over its main entrance in the Ivar Theater's facade (photo below), is gone. Cosmo Street has been gentrified. Hollywood's first building to get lofted is also on Cosmo. The tiny, one-block-long street is now kept clean as a whistle.
casenet
Kevin Estrada
D Generation plays the Opium Den 1996
P.S. The aforementioned Rae Bourbon (1892-1971) once starred in a review on the Ivar Theater's main stage, "She Lost It in Juarez(?)", the title of which was a joking reference to Bourbon's widely-regarded-as-a-hoax 1955 sex-change operation in Mexico. Bourbon was arrested multiple times for impersonating a woman and once for impersonating a man.
Jimmy's Back Yard, named for the courtyard (now roofed over) at the back-of-the-Ivar club space, opened in circa 1928. It was joined on Cosmo by Bobby Burns Berman's BBB's Cellar. The 1932 police raid didn't bother them much. The Cosmo clubs were back running in the black by 1933. As well as the patrons mentioned by
rick m above, Marlene Dietrich, James Cagney, Mae West, Ethel Barrymore, Talullah Bankhead, Joan Crawford and Jean Harlow hit the Cosmo clubs, the women as much to see themselves impersonated as anything else. Even Howard Hughes dropped by two nights in a row. (per Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood, 1910-1969 by William J. Mann, Penguin Books, 2001 and Out with the Stars: Hollywood Nightlife in the Golden Era by Jim Heimann, Abbeville Press, 1985)