FILM: STEPHEN DIXONreviews The Hollywood Sign: Fantasy and Reality of an American IconBy Leo Braudy Yale University Press, 224pp. £16.99

IF YOU VIEW them at the same altitude, the letters that make up the Hollywood sign overlooking the movie capital are more or less even. At ground level they appear crooked because of the dimensions of the hillside into which they are set. If you wish to use this image for commercial purposes you will have to pay royalties to the Hollywood Sign Trust, but what is copyrighted is neither the word nor the letters but this familiar meandering shape. Fittingly, you will be buying an illusion.

And it was for purely commercial reasons that the sign came into being, in 1923, as a gigantic advertisement for a real-estate development by the Los Angeles Timespublisher Harry Chandler. Devised to cash in on the swift expansion of Los Angeles, it then read Hollywoodland, cost $21,000 and was intended to last just 18 months.

In the very early days, 10 years previously, Hollywood had been a sleepy and fairly inaccessible place – Anita Loos described it as a “dilapidated suburb”, and, in his autobiography, Charlie Chaplin called the route to it from LA “virtually impassable” – but movie makers valued the excellent locations and freedom from prying eyes. By the 1920s, as the Hollywood version of life gripped the world, the studios were obliged to relocate back to the city, with gates and guards to protect their dream factories from sightseers and crazed fans.

Leo Braudy’s history of the sign itself, part of the Yale series on American icons, is not without interest, but a sign is a sign. There is only so much that can be said about its construction, the various refurbishments and replacements over the years, and the famous people – Hugh Hefner, Andy Williams, Alice Cooper, Gene Autry – who funded the restorations. So the book is really about the birth of Hollywood and the slumps and triumphs the sign has impassively overseen during the nine decades of its existence. And the problem here is that countless books have examined every aspect of the history of Hollywood already.

Braudy ventures into speculation with the story of the sign’s famous tragedy, the suicide in 1932 of 24-year-old Peg Entwistle, who leaped to her death from the top of the H. As a struggling actor Entwistle is generally thought to be one of the first to understand the sign’s potency as a symbol of how dreams can flip into nightmares, but her brief suicide note flatly stated: “I’m afraid I am a coward. I am sorry for everything. If I had done this a long time ago it would have saved a lot of pain.”

So why did this despairing woman, haunted by something that happened “a long time ago”, bother to make the long trek from her apartment, climbing five or six kilometres up Mount Lee on foot, negotiating ravines, scrabbling at loose shale, eluding the caretaker who occupied a shack at the sign and, finally, finding a ladder for her uncharacteristically grand goodbye to the world?

Braudy uses a number of ambiguities surrounding the death to hint at dark doings: a body taken to the area after a crime committed elsewhere, perhaps. It does seem a bit odd all right, but, 70 years on, Braudy can offer no solution to what may not even be a mystery.

The author is more confident when he reaches the 1960s and the advent of pop art, which drew so heavily on advertising, signage and comic books for inspiration. It was during this period, really, that the Hollywood sign became iconic in the accurate sense of having both a physical and a metaphysical life, a pathway to a different reality.

All the same, I still came away from The Hollywood Signfeeling that inside this overstretched book is a decent magazine article struggling to get out.

Stephen Dixon is an artist and journalist