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38 IT TOOK NINE TAILORS
"This is the lowest point to which a Menjou has ever sunk. The former manager of the Berghoff sleeping in a charitable institution! If Father ever hears about this it will kill him."
After a few days at the Mills Hotel I knew I was licked. New York had cut me down to size. I was developing something that had never been heard of in the Menjou family— an inferiority complex. So I went back to Cleveland to get some good French cooking and to recover my poise.
Cleveland was much kinder to me. Inside of a week I had a job as traveling salesman for the MacAdams Haberdashery. I took two trunkloads of samples and started a tour of Ohio. It wasn't a very good job and I didn't like it, but it was a job.
Then one day I received a letter from Father. He was going to New York to open the Maison Menjou. Would I go along as his assistant? Would I! The haberdashery business lost a salesman that same day.
A few weeks later the paint had hardly dried on the new sign above the Maison Menjou at Broadway and Ninety-first Street when I became a movie actor. That first job at Vitagraph, playing the role of a ringmaster, happened so easily that I wondered why I hadn't thought of trying the movies months before. But once I had discovered the five-dollar-a-day bonanza, I made the most of it.
That winter I became one of the regular extras at Vitagraph, earning my five dollars almost daily at the studio and working nights at the Maison Menjou. In a short time I began to take on the gloss of a professional. I knew that gestures had to be slow, that action at right angles to the camera was bad, that the directors liked the ham cut thick. And I discovered that it was my mustache that landed jobs for me.
In those days most pictures were one and two-reelers, so the hero and the villain had to be identified quickly for the benefit of the audience. A mustache was the mark of a villain; the audience knew that anybody who twirled a mustache was either a rich city slicker or a foreign nobleman.