Inside Hollywood’s Secret Masonic History, From Disney to DeMille
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/inside-hollywoods-secret-masonic-history-disney-demille-1006571/
The mysterious all-male society lured entertainment's most powerful, and now the Guess brothers' new art museum in Los Angeles reveals its hidden relics, tucked in among works by Takashi Murakami and Jeff Koons.
In Disney’s 2004 action-adventure film National Treasure, Nicolas Cage plays a historian hunting for fortune hidden by Founding Fathers who were Freemasons, including George Washington and Benjamin Franklin. The baroque plot, with its allusions to far-reaching power across time and geography, plays into the public’s long-running, conspiracy-minded fascination with the male secret society’s lore.
As it happens, Walt Disney himself was a member of a Masonic offshoot youth organization, and many of the founding fathers of the entertainment business — including Louis B. Mayer, Tom Mix and Cecil B. DeMille – were Masons. When California membership peaked at 245,000 in the mid-1960s, L.A.’s nexus for the group, the Scottish Rite Masonic Temple, had just been erected on Wilshire Boulevard in tony Hancock Park. (It later was used as a location in National Treasure.)
Now the Scottish Rite Temple, which the Masons reluctantly sold in 1994 amid declining local membership (today there are roughly 60,000 brothers in the state), will be reborn May 25 as the Maurice and Paul Marciano Art Foundation, a cultural center showcasing the extensive private collection of the mogul brothers who created the Guess empire. The 110,000-square-foot property’s famed Millard Sheets murals have been restored, while white-hot art star Alex Israel, who works out of the Warner Bros. lot — Jack Warner was, natch, another Mason — has added his own mural in the lobby. It was Israel who suggested the property to the Marcianos. They’d been in search of a flexible public showcase for grand displays of their pedigreed 1,500-object collection, which includes pieces by Takashi Murakami, Sterling Ruby and Mike Kelley.
For one of the opening exhibitions at the foundation — first revealed at a 500-person dinner May 20 that drew Ryan Seacrest, Owen Wilson and Sharon Stone, along with such name-brand museum fixtures as Murakami and Jonas Wood — artist Jim Shaw made use of some of the temple’s relics, including backdrops from past theatrical productions. “Their size, their height — it’s unbelievable,” says co-founder Maurice Marciano. “You get a sense of the power and spirit of what went on here.”
With its 3,000-seat auditorium and dining hall serving up to 1,500 men, the temple for decades brought together Masons from chapters across the region. Glenn Ford called what was then Palisades Lodge No. 637 home; Douglas Fairbanks and Clark Gable hung out at Beverly Hills Lodge No. 528; and Ernest Borgnine and Roy Rogers were brothers at Hollywood Lodge No. 355, next to the El Capitan Theatre.
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Inside Hollywood’s Secret Masonic History, From Disney to DeMille
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/inside-hollywoods-secret-masonic-history-disney-demille-1006571/
