Celebrities! They can laugh at themselves! They've got kids! They go to church! They're just like you! That seems to be the message of Inside Beverly Hills, a 1956 "spectacular" combining a testimonial dinner, live comedy sketches, musical numbers, and filmed interviews with celebrities outside their palatial homes. Originally airing in color, it exists now only in a faded black & white kinescope, the better to make the long-gone stars even more ghostly than they already are. (You want old? One of the dinner guests is Burton Green, who, in 1900, bought the land that became Beverly Hills after failing to find oil there.)
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| "Are you asleep yet, folks?" |
Inside Beverly Hills is really a 90-minute effort in self-congratulation masked in phony humility. Human blank slate Art Linkletter is your unctuous host, both commending and joshing the citizens of Beverly Hills with not-bad jokes that would be funnier if delivered by Bob Hope, who made himself scarce for this broadcast.  |
| "I think we're missing somebody." |
The occasional flashes of wit found throughout Inside Beverly Hills can be partly attributed to co-writer John Guedel, the creator and director of Groucho Marx's quiz show You Bet Your Life. Top-billed Groucho himself appears in a few segments, cracking wise about Beverly Hills and the cheap set standing in for it. Chico Marx turns up from time to time (once briefly with Groucho), while Harpo is "interviewed" on his lawn with his wife Susan and three of his kids. In typical Hollywood thinking, the producers had the freakin' Marx Brothers on their show in color and put only two of them on screen simultaneously.  |
Peter Lawford has a premonition of what life
will be like after Sinatra throws him overboard. |
Two sketches come off pretty well. Pre-Rat Packer Peter Lawford does an amusing bit of self-parody, sleeping with sunglasses, letting his wife run off with the gardener (Chico again), telephoning Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper with the same "exclusive" piece of gossip ("I awoke this afternoon at 3:15!"), and shooting a movie scene without getting out of bed. Later on, the great character actor Sheldon Leonard plays his typical shady character reminiscing about an ultimately futile experience trying to become a Beverly Hills resident, before moving to Pasadena, "where I belong." (I bet Pasadenans thought that was hilarious.) |
| The dancers earn their $50 the hard way. |
Singers Tony Martin and Helen O'Connell handle the "special material" in typical 1950s
middle of the road style that was fast becoming a thing of the past. The most interesting musical number is a dance piece filmed on location on Wilshire Boulevard. Edited in such a way that it appears to be one long take, it must have been filmed very early on a Sunday, before the streets were filled with tourists, shoppers, and pickpockets. With only a handful of rubbernecking pedestrians and streets blocked to traffic, it almost seems to be the inspiration for the opening scene of LaLaLand, albeit on a much smaller scale. |
James Stewart counts the days before the kids go
back to school and he can have fun again. |
But people don't just break out in dance in Beverly Hills. They live real lives! And so Inside Beverly Hills takes time out to chat with the locals on their well-manicured lawns. The celebrities would be unknown to anyone born after 1960 -- Jimmy Durante, Sam Goldwyn, Harold Lloyd, dancer-turned-Sunday school teacher Eleanor Powell (spreading the Gospel to a bunch of very bored-looking children). Bob Cummings and James Stewart proudly show off their home-on-vacation military school sons, which allowed the actors to continue their extramarital philandering with fewer kids around. And if you're wondering where the ubiquitous George Jessel is, he's quite appropriately in a commercial for the nausea-treatment Tums. |
| And he still doesn't have a living wage. |
For all its humor, Inside Beverly Hills's self-deprecation has the depth of a typical actor's intellect. The tuxedo-clad garbage man who opens and closes the show probably provided chuckles, yet rubbed into viewers' faces that they will never come close to attaining the wealth and status show business professionals enjoy.
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| If you can afford it. |
When Peter Lawford describes his nightmare ("I dreamt I was an ordinary person, making $20,000 a year, living in an ordinary house with perhaps 8, 10, 15 rooms"), it was at a time when the average annual income was $3,600, and kids had to double or triple up in their bedrooms. I know that's the joke, but for some of the savvier folks at home, the laughter must have featured a bitter aftertaste.
Certainly, few of them enjoyed Inside Beverly Hills in its intended glory; the price of a color TV in 1956 ranged anywhere from $495 to $1,300. With only 150,000 of them in use that year (in a population of roughly 165-million), a good many of them could be found only -- where else? -- in Beverly Hills.
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