Much Ado About Something HOLLYWOOD, like the Land of Oz, possesses a quaint and fluty flavor: it is the place where tin Christmas trees suddenly sprout around lamp-posts in December under a ninety-degree sun, where restaurants take the shape of lighthouses and hats, ladies on Saturday nights stroll the boulevards in trousers and mink coats leading baby leopards on a leash, where morning newspapers cost five cents and evening newspapers two, and people wait in queues for unexhausting hours to witness other people pressing their hands into juicy cement. A trivial happening in Hollywood, therefore, is hugely less trivial than if the identical event occurs in Cincinnati or Jersey City, and an important one incalculably more important. So when Ohippi Bubble burst, even people who were not stockholders devoured the Los Angeles dispatches, and overnight “Ohippi” became as familiar a catchword as “quintuplets” and “the nine old men.” This is not to belittle the event itself. In collapsing Ohippi paradoxically stood on its own feet as a major calamity.
