For half a century the most famous drugstore in America stood at 8024 Sunset Boulevard. Schwab's Pharmacy, in business there from 1932, was where the movie colony filled its prescriptions, nursed its hangovers and read the trades at the soda fountain, and it is enshrined in legend as the place where Lana Turner was discovered sipping a soda. The legend is wrong in almost every particular except the soda. Turner, then Julia, was a fifteen year old skipping a typing class at Hollywood High when she was noticed in the winter of 1936, but the counter was the Top Hat Cafe more than a mile and a half east on Sunset, and the man who noticed her was Billy Wilkerson of the Hollywood Reporter rather than the director Mervyn LeRoy. The myth spread rather than being invented. The columnist Sidney Skolsky worked out of Schwab's so faithfully that he headlined his column from a stool there, and the story travelled with the better address attached; Turner herself later blamed him for it. Hollywood then recreated the drugstore as a set for Sunset Boulevard in 1950, which fixed it in the public mind for good. Schwab's outlived the studio system, closed in 1983 and was demolished in October 1988. The site is a shopping centre with a cinema in it, so the place where the most famous thing that never happened there did not happen is now a multiplex.
Getting there
34.0979, -118.3647
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