Hollywood Sign

This guide to the Hollywood Sign centers on a September night in 1932, when a young actress named Peg Entwistle climbed a workman's ladder to the letter H above the Hollywood hills, and what a hiker found there the next morning. It traces the sign's own story too, from a real-estate billboard spelling Hollywoodland to the decades of neglect that left it rusting and missing letters by the 1970s. Entwistle had come to Los Angeles from Broadway with real promise, after a brutal summer of rejection wore her down.