Hollywood's Home Game: Golf and the Entertainment Industry

No city ever folded golf into its main industry the way Los Angeles did. In New York, golf was what bankers did on weekends. In Los Angeles, it was practically a studio department. The clubs grew up beside the lots, the stars walked off soundstages and onto first tees, and eventually the entertainers stopped merely playing tournaments and started hosting them — a habit that runs in a straight line from Bing Crosby's 1937 “Clambake” to Tiger Woods's name on the Genesis Invitational at Riviera today.

This is the story of golf as Hollywood's home game: the club by the Warner Bros. lot, the club Hollywood built because it had to, the course that moonlighted as a movie set, and the celebrity-host tradition that changed professional golf.

Lakeside: The Club Beside the Warner Bros. Lot

Start in Toluca Lake, where Lakeside Golf Club opened in the 1920s on a Max Behr design laid out in 1924 — directly beside what became the Warner Bros. lot. The geography is the whole point. A contract player could shoot in the morning, cross the street, and play eighteen in the afternoon. As the talkies boomed, Lakeside's membership rolls turned into a studio call sheet.

Two members defined the place. Bing Crosby joined in 1930 and became the club's most serious golfer — not celebrity-serious, actually serious. He got his handicap down to two, won the Lakeside club championship five times, and competed in both the U.S. Amateur and the British Amateur. During World War II his golf obsession even served the home front: a 1942 news photograph shows him posing with a mountain of golf balls collected for the wartime scrap rubber drive.

Bob Hope arrived in 1937 and remained a member for 65 years. Hope had picked up the game in the 1930s on a vaudeville stop in Winnipeg and worked his way down to a four handicap; the golf club became a literal prop, tucked under his arm through decades of television specials and USO monologues. His best line about the game still holds up: “It's wonderful how you can start out with three strangers in the morning, play 18 holes, and by the time the day is over you have three solid enemies.”

Around Crosby and Hope orbited the rest of the industry. Gene Autry and Ronald Reagan both held Lakeside memberships over the decades. If you wanted to understand mid-century Hollywood's social wiring, the Lakeside grillroom was a better map than any studio org chart.

Hillcrest: The Club Hollywood Built Because It Had To

There's a second Hollywood golf story, and it starts with a locked door. Hillcrest Country Club was founded in 1920 in what is now Cheviot Hills because Jewish Angelenos were excluded from the city's other elite clubs. So they built their own — a Willie Watson-designed course that quickly became one of the best in the city, good enough to host the 1929 PGA Championship (won by Leo Diegel) and the Los Angeles Open in 1932 and 1942. That 1942 LA Open matters to golf history for another reason: Ben Hogan won it — the first of his three LA Open titles, and the only one he won away from Riviera.

Because the studios were run largely by Jewish executives and the era's greatest comedians faced the same exclusions, Hillcrest's roster became arguably the most entertaining in golf. The Marx Brothers, Jack Benny, George Burns, Danny Kaye, Milton Berle, and Al Jolson were all members. The club's famous comedians' Round Table — a regular gathering in a corner of the main dining room — was where the sharpest comics in America ate lunch and tested material on the toughest audience available: each other.

Hillcrest also delivered Hollywood's favorite plot twist. In the 1950s, oil was discovered beneath the property. The club allowed drilling, and “B.O.” — before oil — memberships became so valuable they were willed from father to son. Only in Los Angeles does the country club strike oil.

Across town, Brentwood Country Club served the same overlapping Westside entertainment community, part of a parallel club world that the industry built for itself when the established clubs wouldn't have it.

Riviera: The Golf Course as Movie Set

No LA course blurred the line between golf and show business like Riviera Country Club. Built by the Los Angeles Athletic Club and opened in 1926, designed by George C. Thomas Jr. with William P. Bell — the same pair behind Bel-Air Country Club that same year — Riviera was a stage almost from the start. In 1932 it hosted the dressage and modern pentathlon riding events of the Los Angeles Olympics, a fact worth remembering as the course prepares to host Olympic golf when the Games return in 2028.

Its membership read like a marquee: Humphrey Bogart, Dean Martin, Gregory Peck, and Walt Disney all belonged. The club even has a dark footnote from Hollywood's golden age — the actor Conrad Veidt, Casablanca's Major Strasser, died of a heart attack while playing golf there in 1943.

And when Hollywood needed a golf course on film, it went to Riviera:

Follow the Sun (1951)

The Ben Hogan biopic, starring Glenn Ford as Hogan, arrived just two years after the near-fatal car crash that made Hogan a national hero. Hogan himself served as technical consultant throughout production, and Sam Snead, Jimmy Demaret, and Cary Middlecoff appeared as themselves. Hollywood was filming Hogan's legend at the course that had come to be known as Hogan's Alley after his back-to-back LA Open wins there in 1947 and 1948 and his U.S. Open victory on the same fairways in June 1948 — we tell that full story in our Ben Hogan profile.

Pat and Mike (1952)

George Cukor's comedy put Katharine Hepburn on the fairways opposite Spencer Tracy — and opposite Babe Didrikson Zaharias, playing herself, alongside fellow professionals Betty Hicks and Helen Dettweiler. The golf scenes were shot partly at Riviera and partly at the Ojai Valley Inn. There's a neat symmetry in that casting: fourteen years earlier, at Griffith Park in 1938, Zaharias had become the first woman ever to tee it up in a PGA Tour event at the Los Angeles Open. LA gave her the historic start; Hollywood gave her the screen credit.

The Caddy (1953)

Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis brought slapstick to the club Martin actually belonged to, filming their golf comedy on Riviera's grounds.

When the Entertainers Ran the Tour

Hollywood's deepest mark on golf wasn't on film — it was on the professional tour itself. LA's stars invented the celebrity-hosted tournament and, with it, much of golf's modern showbiz.

It began with Crosby. In 1937 he hosted the first “Crosby Clambake,” a pro-am at Rancho Santa Fe pairing his Hollywood friends with tour professionals. After the war it moved north to Pebble Beach, where it survives today as the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am — a PGA Tour staple born from a crooner's house party. Hope followed in the desert: the tournament founded in 1960 as the Palm Springs Golf Classic took his name in 1965 to become the Bob Hope Desert Classic. In 1995 its opening round produced one of golf's most famous tee times — Hope in a pro-am group with three U.S. presidents, Gerald Ford, George H. W. Bush, and Bill Clinton, plus defending champion Scott Hoch — perhaps the first time three presidents had ever played a round of golf together.

The Los Angeles Open itself — launched in 1926 at the Los Angeles Country Club with a $10,000 purse, then the richest in professional golf — eventually took on a celebrity host of its own: from 1971 through 1983 it was the Glen Campbell Los Angeles Open, a country star's name on the town's flagship championship. And the tradition never died; it just changed hosts. Since Tiger Woods's foundation took over the event now played as the Genesis Invitational, the tournament that celebrated its centennial in 2026 is once again fronted by the most famous entertainer-athlete in the game.

The Other Hollywood Golf Story

The industry's golf world had the same locked doors as its clubs, and two figures in our LA golf cluster crossed between entertainment and the game's civil-rights fight.

Charlie Sifford got crucial early backing from the bandleader and singer Billy Eckstine, working as Eckstine's valet and golf instructor while Eckstine financed his playing career when no sponsor would. That support helped carry Sifford to the 1969 Los Angeles Open at municipal Rancho Park, where he beat Harold Henning with a playoff birdie — a Black champion of LA's own tournament, on a public course, two years after breaking through at Hartford.

Maggie Hathaway came to golf through Hollywood. She arrived in Los Angeles in 1931, worked as a film extra, and served as Lena Horne's body double in Cabin in the Sky and stand-in on Stormy Weather — then walked away from the industry rather than accept a demeaning role in a Woodrow Wilson biopic. She took up golf in 1955 after winning a bet against boxing champion Joe Louis, and turned the game into her civil-rights arena: agitating against courses that restricted Black players and founding the Minority Associated Golfers in 1960. In 1997 Los Angeles County renamed the Jack Thompson Golf Course at 98th and Western in her honor, and in March 2026 the Maggie Hathaway Golf Course reopened after a $21 million renovation designed pro bono by Gil Hanse. A Hollywood stand-in became the only name on an LA County course marquee.

The Home Game Continues

The Hollywood–golf thread runs unbroken into the present, and its junctions keep landing at Riviera. In 1978, Bob Hope shared a putting bit on The Mike Douglas Show with Jimmy Stewart and a two-year-old prodigy named Tiger Woods. Fourteen years later, that toddler — by then a 16-year-old high schooler from Cypress, down in Orange County — made his PGA Tour debut at the 1992 Nissan Los Angeles Open at Riviera. He missed the cut. Today his foundation runs the tournament, on the same course where Olympic golf arrives in 2028 and the U.S. Open follows in 2031.

Golf and the movies grew up together in Los Angeles, on courses built beside the studios and peopled by the stars they made. For the rest of that story — the Windmill Links, Hogan's Alley, the players who broke the game open on LA's public courses — start with our full history of golf in Los Angeles.