In February 1932, Los Angeles was aglow in a new and strange kind of light — half sunlight, half stardust. Into this shining came a man who had changed the way the world saw light, the world saw time, the world itself. Albert Einstein was no film star, yet this was a town that measured celebrities in marquee letters. It treated him as such.
By Allan R. Ellenberger for The Hollywoodland Revue
Nov. 9. (THLR) - He came to the West Coast to lecture and to think, to breathe a little freer than the Berlin winter would allow. But what he found in Los Angeles, and especially in Hollywood, was an astonished reflection of himself. He had come to a town that revered imagination, where the invisible could be made visible.
When Einstein and his wife Elsa arrived in Southern California in early 1932, the city was in a state of rapid change. The Depression had dimmed much of the country, yet Los Angeles glowed defiantly — sustained by oil and orange groves and by movies.
The two settled for a time at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, where Einstein gave a series of lectures on relativity and the nature of the cosmos. His audience was not limited to physicists. Reporters, society matrons, and even film directors descended on campus. To hear him was like a sermon on the mechanics of the universe.
Everywhere he went, he drew the kind of crowds usually reserved for film idols. Students clambered over walls to see his frizzy halo of hair; photographers jostled each other for a chance to photograph the prophet of modern science amid the palms of Southern California.
Universal Studios founder Carl Laemmle with Einstein
Hollywood, of course, could not resist. In February 1931 (his first visit) and again in early 1932, Einstein came north from Pasadena to Hollywood. Movie studios sent chauffeured cars; producers sent invitations. He accepted few but enjoyed the pageantry.
At the premiere of City Lights in 1931, he had met Charlie Chaplin, and the two had maintained a friendship that spilled into 1932. When Einstein returned, Chaplin invited him again, this time to the comedian’s home in Beverly Hills. They walked arm-in-arm past reporters, the physicist in rumpled tweed, the actor in immaculate black tie. “They cheer me because everyone understands me,” Chaplin whispered. “They cheer you because no one understands you.”
The line, apocryphal or not, became the evening’s legend, the story of a meeting at the intersection of intellect and illusion.
Einstein’s official work in California was with Robert Millikan, the Nobel laureate president of Caltech, on problems in theoretical physics. But his lectures on these subjects drew crowds beyond the academy. On February 15, 1932, he spoke at UCLA’s Royce Hall. The topic was “The Geometrical Interpretation of the Gravitational and Electrical Field.”
The newspapers wrote of a “reverent” packed auditorium and afterward, students swarmed his car for autographs. It was an astonishing sight: a scientist treated as a matinee idol. The Los Angeles Times observed that Einstein, pipe in hand and gently humorous, “seemed bemused by his own fame — as though he had stumbled into a play and could not find the script.”
While in Hollywood, Einstein visited Paramount and Universal studios, where technicians showed him new sound-recording equipment. One writer later observed that Einstein laughed when he was shown a synchronized musical sequence and said, “I wish my equations could dance so well.”
He also dined at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, where Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and Clara Bow sent greetings. To them he was a curiosity, the rare intellect who commanded the attention usually directed their way. For Einstein, it was amusement and anthropology: the study of fame as an American force of gravity.
Einstein found what he found most compelling about Los Angeles less the glamour and more the openness, the same quality that had drawn dreamers to Hollywood and inventors to the desert. He visited the Mount Wilson Observatory in the San Gabriel Mountains, where astronomers used the 100-inch telescope to see deep into the heavens.
Standing beneath the great dome, he remarked that it was “the closest thing on earth to seeing God’s handwriting.” It was fitting. The man who had mapped the curvature of space now stood beneath a dome built to read it. And outside that observatory, the city itself glittered like a constellation — stars of a different kind, flickering along Sunset Boulevard.
Einstein left Los Angeles in March 1932, returning to Germany, though within a year he would depart Europe for good, as the Nazi regime took power. When he settled permanently in the United States in 1933, his thoughts returned again and again to California. In letters he called it “a place of warmth and light, where the spirit may still breathe freely.”
Hollywood, ever eager to mythologize, later claimed him as one of its own. Studios circulated photographs of Einstein and Chaplin shaking hands — the scientist and the clown, the symbols of intellect and emotion united. It was, in its way, the perfect Hollywood story: opposites creating harmony, art meeting reason, light meeting gravity.
Albert and his wife Elsa at an honorary dinner at the Ambassador Hotel.
When Einstein left Los Angeles, he left behind no footprints on the Walk of Fame — but his presence lingered. He represented something that Hollywood longed to but could not emulate. Brilliance without artifice. Wonder without illusion.
In the city that turned light into stories, he turned stories back into light.
“Imagination is more important than knowledge,” he once said — and in Hollywood, at least, everyone agreed.
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