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No More Skunk Fur. Hollywood's old tribal customs and pecking orders are changing, too. The Brown Derby now buzzes with talk of TV, and Gus, its maítre d'hótel, gives his best tables to the TV stars. Tourists who once paid to ogle the movie stars' homes now want to see the live TV shows and ogle the homes of Jack Webb, Lawrence Welk and Liberace.
Such film gossipists as Hedda Hopper find themselves devoting increasing space to TV personalities. When the famed old Cocoanut Grove reopened a fortnight ago, the society columns listed as guests George Gobel, Hugh (Wyatt Earp) O'Brian, Art Linkletter, even Milton Berle. Hollywood's own Bastille Day, the annual Oscar awards, is geared completely as a sponsored TV show; except for those in the running for an Oscar, few movie people bother to attend.
The cinemoguls once frothed when Lana Turner let slip to an interviewer that she had five TV sets, and Beverly Hills Furrier Al Teitlebaum had a customer who, aspiring to dramatize his contempt, ordered a TV set covered in skunk fur. Now TV sets glitter within Romanoff's and during lunchtime in the executive dining rooms of major studios, where the executives claim they use TV for casting ideas. Jack Benny has seven sets. TV exerts such a spell on movie stars—especially when it happens to be showing their old films—that it has rendered the movie colony housebound. Says Columnist Sidney Skolsky: "The nightclub business is dead, and there is just no place left in town, day or night, where you can count on finding a gathering of well-known movie people." As for fur-bearing TV sets, Teitlebaum has since filled orders to cover them in mink ("Of course, I left the screen showing").
The Old Guard. The rise of the TV era in Hollywood has placed the movie people, themselves long cast as parvenus, in the odd role of the social old guard. Social Arbiter Mike Romanoff, the town's leading restaurateur, sniffs at the "dirty shirt" school that he finds prevalent among TV performers as well as newcomers to films. Says he: "The TV actors can afford to eat here, but they haven't progressed beyond the drugstore counter. They think differently, behave differently, live differently. The dirty shirt is a form of snobbery, you know. We're snobs, but not that kind. We are snobs for good manners. I'm a snob without prejudice."
Television parties outnumber movie parties four to one, but oldtimers find them lacking in the oldtime glamour. Says one veteran: "Too many men in empty grey flannel suits and expressions." Says Gossipist Jimmy Starr: "At parties the TV people are on one side of the room, and the movie people are on the other side. TV and movies haven't jumped the social gap yet."