About Us
Hollywood Grandson is a history club dedicated to sharing the memory of Arthur Camp Sr. and acknowledging his 40-year career at Paramount Pictures, first as an Assistant Director for the The Famous Players-Lasky Corporation, then as a Property Manager or Prop Man, as part of the Art Department. As his grandchildren, we have inherited a collection of photos and artifacts, which provide a unique insight into and a record of the golden age of Hollywood. Our mission is to share this history with the world and preserve the memory of the talented people with whom he collaborated. We believe by learning the past we can better understand the present and shape the future.
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Please read Our Story below for more information.
Our Story
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My family was chocked full of mythology, generally revolving around “stuff” and heritage photos, objects and collectibles.
One such mythology was focused on this one particular big black briefcase containing the worshipped old Hollywood photos. My grandfather, Arthur Camp Sr., arrived in Los Angeles in 1917 and landed a job in the early film industry.
He ended up working for Paramount Pictures (formerly "The Lasky Corporation") for over forty years.
The big, black briefcase was off-limits to us – don’t touch, certainly don’t open it and most of all, don’t even look at it. It was held on a pedestal as a container for the most valuable and precious things in the house and both of our parents promised that someday, it would pay off.
Well, that day has yet to arrive. Both of my parents had varsity letters in procrastination. It sat, gathered dust and I never did open it; until recently.
Part of the hidden joy when both your parents are gone is that you can touch their stuff and there is NOTHING they can do about it. So, after my mother passed, I grabbed that briefcase and staring up into the sky, I yelled, “I’m in your house and I’m touching the briefcase!” There was no response, but the air suddenly did feel a bit colder.
What I found inside blew my mind - endless candid photos from behind the scenes from the golden era of Hollywood, from silent films until the late 1950’s. There was my grandfather with many stars, location shots from Yosemite Valley, stills, head shots, publicity photos, newspaper clippings and artifacts. Bob Hope, Elizabeth Taylor, Marlene Dietrich, Cecil B. De Mille – they’re among the many who are in the briefcase, interacting with my grandfather and forever young.
My grandfather had started as a director and had won an early predecessor award like an Oscar, something called the Honor Roll – I have the engraved sterling silver cigarette case he was given and a photo of the banquet. I’m still researching but it appears it was for his work working on a film with the Keystone Cops (also known as the Famous Players Lasky, who started Paramount.)
Then there were the accidents. Sometime in February 1931, my grandfather was stopped in front of the Orpheum Theater in downtown L.A., late for an award's ceremony, when a power main exploded and he was blown out of his car, landing face down on top of the theater marquee (or so the story goes), shattering his face and publicly displaying the slapstick gene that runs in the family.
Here’s the news story:
“SCORE INJURED IN EXPLOSION IN THEATER – (February 7, 1931 – AP) – Panic In Audience of 2000 At Los Angeles Averted By Actor; Screen Star’s Honor ………Thirty persons were injured, several seriously, and a panic in a theater audience of more than 2,000 was averted when an explosion in a power main in front of the Orpheum theater shook the building late last night. So terrific was the blast that several persons standing in front of the theater were lifted into the air and others were hurled against store windows. A portion of the street was torn up and windows smashed. A brilliant first night audience, augmented by the presence of more than 1,000 motion picture players, packed the theatre for the premiere of ‘Cimarron’. Many film stars were on the stage making personal appearances when the explosion shocked the theater. Robert McWade, veteran stage and screen actor, averted a panic. “Don’t get excited folks,” McWade cried. “That was just part of the celebration in my honor.” The audience laughed and grew calm. The show goers filed out in an orderly manner later, when squads of police and firemen took charge of the situation. The blast was due to an accumulation of gas in the power main, according to H. E. Walker, member of the fire prevention bureau, attending the performance.”
Three weeks after he was released from the hospital, while driving, my grandfather hit the excavated ditches that had been dug for the tracks for the new Los Angeles streetcar system, thereby rolling his car, injuring himself, his son (my father) who was in a coma for two weeks, and unfortunately, his wife and my grandmother, Maybelle, died as a result of the accident. (Click on newspaper clippings for magnification.)
She’s buried near Rudolph Valentino in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery (formerly known as Hollywood Memorial Park until 1998) on Santa Monica Boulevard, founded in 1899.
After these events, he slipped into a depression, but Paramount kept him on board, offering him the position of Property Master for the rest of his life, as he lost his zest to direct. So, this is what the holy briefcase mostly contains – photos and collectibles related to his work as a prop man.
On December 26 of 2019, I attended a holiday party in Anchorage, Alaska, and met a woman who was retiring after being a gallery curator for twenty-two years. She asked about my family history and for some reason, I launched into my discoveries inside the briefcase. She spent the next hour convincing me to create a book, an exhibit, something with what I had found and suggested that I apply for grants from film history and arts organizations.
And this is my new project – I’ve gone through the briefcase, meticulously documenting what is inside. I’m doing this for several reasons – to release the dialogue of the briefcase, to release the genie from the bottle, to settle it once in for all – is it truly worth anything, monetarily or historically? And to hopefully provide something to the world that will entertain others and delight Hollywood history buffs; and for myself, just because I think it’s damn cool.
And best of all, the December 26, 2019 conversation happened before I even knew the date of my grandfather’s birth – December 26, 1899. I’m taking this as a sign.
If you’re looking for some sort of sycophantic ass-kissing version of a Hollywood family, please look away. This is a real story of a Hollywood family - the wins, the losses, the disappointments and the trauma. This is not a story of triumph over tragedy; it’s the story of what happens when tragedy changes the course of a family, and what remains in the end.
There are many family legends about Arthur Camp Sr.. As the final and fourth grandchild, he has always been a bit of a mystery man for me. I’ve heard the one about how after he had his stroke, he couldn’t say certain words – like “caterpillar” – so, he would say “There are a lot of kettlepeppers on the lawn.” I also was told how much he detested my mother, even though she took care of him for the last couple of years of his life. However, the stroke played a trick on old Artie – because he could no longer remember my mother’s name post-stroke; he was forced to refer to her as, “Sweetheart,” which he often said from behind clenched, aggravated teeth.
I also heard a lot about the car accident but, it never really sank in. It was a nebulous cloud of information to me when I was young – about something that happened, long ago, in the olden days of cars with running boards, and flapper dresses. In my mind, I pictured my dead grandmother as some kind of silver screen tragic heroine; I glamorized it, which is a tendency that a Hollywood family must embrace.
The real story of the accident – the part that impacted myself, directly – was the deep psychological trauma that my father, as another victim of the accident, dealt with on a daily basis. Again, as a child, I was not sophisticated enough to make the connection between my father’s somewhat (and thankfully, mostly occasional) bizarre behavior, including purchasing a fancy car at the worst possible financial times.
My mother discussed my father’s psychological problems rather openly with me, which now, as an adult, I judge as highly inappropriate because I really couldn’t understand all of the implications of what she was telling me. These conversations began very early in my childhood, and she would refer to the accident often to explain why my father was doing the things he was doing. This in itself is a shadow but what I found in my family was that the shadows themselves had even darker shadows.
Sometimes during their true brawls, my mother would scream at him about the accident, telling him he needed to get help. Even though this was terrible for children to witness and hear, I understand my mother’s frustration – we were being evicted from homes and his reaction would often be to go out a buy another vintage car.
When my parents went to see a marriage counselor, the doctor suggested that my mother, as an exercise, write down every car my father had purchased at that point. After my father died in 2002, I asked her what the final tally was – she told me it was well over one-hundred cars in his lifetime. She also told me that, when she was unable to sleep, she would count the cars instead of sheep.
In the last few years of my father’s life, he could no longer afford nor talk anyone into selling him a classic car. Back in the 1970’s when I was growing up, cars from the fifties, sixties and even the forties, weren’t terribly old comparatively, and one could still seem them in daily use. By the early 2000’s, they had become true collector’s items and rare. After he died, I discovered a hidden treasure trove of dye-cast Franklin Mint toy collector cars. Where other children might find a hidden stash of porn in the dead father’s closet – I found a hidden stash of cars. My mother had no idea he had been purchasing them. It was the final indication of a deep, trauma-based addiction; when things were bad, he needed that fix of a shiny new car, even if they were toy ones.
Back to the marriage counselor: The doctor also came to the conclusion that what my father was trying to do with all of the car purchases was to put the original broken car back together – that’s exactly why he reacted to our financial problems with the purchases – he could not fix their current crisis because he could never fix the original crisis.
At the time of the accident in 1931, my father was nearly eight years old, not five nor six as the newspaper clippings claim. It would had been a little bit better if he had been younger because he would not be able to remember his mother so well.
Apparently, my father and his mother were very close. What severely compounded his trauma was the fact that while in the hospital, he wrote his mother several notes and letters once he had awakened from his coma after two weeks. The well-meaning but misguided nurses at the hospital answered his letters in his mother’s stead, signing her name to the responses. Put simply, he thought his mother was still alive somewhere in the hospital when she had actually died the first night when he himself was unconscious.
My father rarely spoke about how finding out she’d been dead all that time and not answering his letters felt; he would simply put his hand on his forehead and stare blankly for a bit and say, “It was terrible.” Hearing this as a child, I couldn’t even process nor put myself in his place to feel what this must have been like. Now, I can think about it and picture this seven-year old boy in a hospital room in 1931, unwittingly writing to his dead mother; at the very least, it’s very sad.
The shadows get deeper still: I once asked my father why he had such an affinity for classic cars and he told me that they represented the good times for him. His father was making a good income with Paramount Pictures, and by 1930, the cars were fancier. Big shiny chrome lights and bumpers, huge curved fenders – I can imagine the young Arthur Jr. (everyone, including family friend Bing Crosby called him “Junior”) seeing his father pull up in some new, grand machine. But the grand machine had also betrayed my father – they were all out for a ride when the accident occurred.
What I also came to understand over the years, was the story of being “out for a ride” wasn’t completely true. My father told me they were heading home from a Hollywood party in Los Feliz and that drinking may have been involved.
Arthur Sr. was reportedly so distraught after the accident – which had killed his wife and destroyed his bigger dreams in Hollywood – that he couldn’t adequately care for my father who, up to the point of the accident, had been living a rather privileged and glamorous life as a child of Hollywood. My father was given many toys – trains sets, model cars and airplanes – all of which disappeared while he was in a coma and his extended stay in the hospital – to be distributed to his cousins who all thought he was going to die.
Because of Arthur Sr.’s mental state, my father was passed around the family, staying here and there in different homes through the Los Angeles area. It must have been a lot for the kid to bear – his mother gone, his belongings gone, his father gone – and then living with, as he put it, unsympathetic family members.
Most of the family had followed Arthur Sr. out from Ohio, so there was a midwestern sensibility about them – and going on and on about how your mother died was “shushed” and swept under-the-rug. Junior wasn’t really allowed to talk about the accident, especially when Arthur Sr. was around because he shouldn’t “upset his father.”
I heard one story where he was so afraid of his cousins stealing more of his toys, he began burying them in a relative’s back yard.
As time passed, Junior moved on to the new drama of World War II. When he first attempted to enlist, he was rejected due to his low weight. He binge-ate for two weeks and returned and was accepted, having gained weight; he was 18-years old.
Junior was in the marines and was a Captain by the time he was sent to Guadalcanal and the Solomon Islands. His tales of mayhem are amazing but best saved for a different book. Suffice to say, he was discharged honorably and came back home with a 30% psychological disability, something they used to call “shell shock.”
Junior went on to graduate from the Arts Center School in Los Angeles and thereafter worked with Walt Disney during the construction of Disneyland and to worked in television. Art Sr. (aka "Mo-Mo" to some of the stars) continue his work with Paramount and during that time, collected many photos from the studio as well as other mementos, which are the subject of this site.
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Kind regards,
Julien Camp
A Hollywood Grandson
Curator and Author