We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
From under my Hat
Bel Air could easily have gone bankrupt after the 1929 crash. So the gates were opened and such of the acting profession as had the price of a plot of land paid their money and built there.
I bought my first car while I lived at the Hollywood Hotel. Wolfie had never allowed me to drive. Although he couldn't even pull down a window shade without jerking it off its roller, he said I was a congenital idiot where machinery was concerned. So I hired a chauffeur for one month. In Hollywood it was either drive or walk. My nether extremities rebelled at the distance between hotel and studios. I couldn't afford a chauffeur permanently, so he was hired to teach me as quickly as possible how to drive. I would take a lesson for an hour and then shake for three hours.
I'd been practicing for several weeks when I spied Mrs. Jesse Lasky ahead of me in her limousine. She turned around, saw me, and waved. I waved back and— smack! Right into her rear end! Bessie didn't mind, bless her. She could have bought ten limousines.
I kept the chauffeur on for an extra month. At the end of that time I could drive up and down telegraph poles as well as the next one. Still can. Hell-on-the-Highway Hopper, they call me.
After I had made several pictures, Reginald Barker— the same who said he couldn't photograph me— asked to have me in his next. Now it was my turn to refuse.
Irving Thalberg sent for me. "What's all this about?" he asked.
When I told him, he said, "I don't blame you. I would refuse too. Just the same, it'll have to mean your contract." Rules were rules, policies were policies.
Right off the bat I got a picture on my own, at twice the salary the studio had been paying me. That picture developed into three for me.
And, like the Elda Furry whose mother taught her honesty and integrity back in Altoona, Pennsylvania, I sent the extra two hundred and fifty dollars I got back to Louis B. Mayer. Maybe I was a fool, but darned if Louis didn't pocket it!
Making that picture gave me my only trip to Florida. I put up at the Flamingo Hotel at the cost of nineteen dollars a day. It was the
140