Entertainment history

Founded in 1913, Paramount Pictures traces its formation to Adolph Zukor’s Famous Players Film Company. Zukor’s Famous Players merged with the Jesse L. Lasky Company in 1916, creating the Famous Players-Lasky Corporation. The studio made its home near Sunset and Vine.

By the 1920s, Famous Players-Laksy was one of the most prominent studios in Hollywood. In 1926, the company purchased its present lot (formerly home to United Studios) and embarked on an ambitious building program.

The studio’s name changed to Paramount in 1930 and continued to expand its film productions and theatre network. It also invested heavily in radio, music, and, later, television. Notable films from this era include Monkey Business, Shanghai Express, and I’m No Angel.

In 1967, Paramount Pictures purchased the neighboring RKO Studios lot from Desilu Productions.

The Radio-Keith-Orpheum (RKO) Corporation formed in the late 1920s, merging a circuit of vaudeville theatres, film production, and radio networks. In order to promote the union of radio and motion pictures, the company pursued an elaborate advertising campaign centered on the image of a giant radio tower perched on a globe.

Like neighboring Paramount, RKO Studios undertook a large-scale building campaign in the late 1920s and early 1930s in order to accommdate new facilities for talking pictures. During the ’30s and ’40s, the studio produced a number of celebrated films, including Gunga Din, Love Affair, and Citizen Kane, and it enjoyed a legendary partnership with Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire.

In 1948, tycoon Howard Hughes purchased the studio, which he ran until 1957. Desilu’s Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz owned the RKO lot from 1957 until 1967, filming episodes of “The Lucy Show” on Stages 21 and 25.

LGBTQ history

Beyond the realm of Hollywood’s Golden Age, the studio lot is significant for its associations with the city’s lesbian history.

Edythe Eyde first arrived in Los Angeles, against her parents’ wishes, in 1946. She lived alone and in a short time acquired a job at RKO Studios as a secretary to Milton Howe. He was a low-level executive in the publicity department who advised her to “look busy” as there would not be a large work load for her to execute.

Eyde had come out as a lesbian the year before and, given her newfound freedom from home, she wanted to meet other women like her. At work she found the necessary supplies, time, and privacy to launch a publication that spoke to the lesbian community of Los Angeles.

She began writing the “gayest magazine” at her secretarial desk crafting the penname Lisa Ben (an anagram for “lesbian”) as a security measure. The first issue was fifteen pages long, and she created ten carbon copies for distribution.

Eyde confided in her neighbors about her sexuality and gave them copies to read. She urged them to pass the magazine along rather than throwing it out. Her networking skills soon enabled her to reach a wider audience of loyal readers. For a short time, she mailed issues out to various locations, but soon stopped when a friend advised her on the dangers of using the postal system. Homosexual material was considered obscene, and its circulation was a prosecutable offense under the Comstock Act.

Eyde went onto publish twelve issues of Vice Versa from June 1947 to February 1948. Each one focused on different topics and reflected the personality and tastes of its publisher. The publication discussed various aspects of lesbian life and introduced poetry and short fiction. Like other magazines, Eyde also wrote reviews on literature and film.

Vice Versa set in motion a new channel of communication for lesbians in Los Angeles. In a time when circulation of “homosexual” material was a prosecutable offense, Eyde’s underground publication gained a loyal following.

Declaring itself “America’s Gayest Magazine,” Vice Versa set an important precedent for LGBTQ publishing in the mid-twentieth century as the first LGBTQ-interest newsletter in the country.

Eyde lost her job in February 1948 when Howard Hughes purchased RKO studios. Thereafter, Eyde was unable to the find the time and privacy to draft any further issues, ensuring an end to Vice Versa. She continued to work as a secretary at various locations as well as writing freelance articles to then-emerging gay publications.

Several years later, The Ladder, to which Edye was a contributing writer, became the first nationally circulated lesbian magazine in 1956. Its gay counterpart was The Advocate, which began publishing content in 1967.

The magazines brought gay and lesbian interests and concerns to a broader audience. In a broader sense, these literary publications became tools for normalizing homosexuality in an effort to gain acceptance from society at large.

ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives holds a complete set of the magazine.

In 2010 she was recognized for her work in journalism by the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association and inducted into their Hall of Fame. She died on December 22, 2015 at the age of 94.