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THE PARISIAN TYPE 47
would throw it back at me for the rest of my life. A ham actor, a dead beat, a no-good!
At that moment the elevator door opened and I saw a huge mob of people milling around in the casting office of the Fox Film Company, which was on the third floor. Then the door closed and the elevator started down again. Suddenly I did a delayed reaction. They must be casting a picture at Fox! I stayed right on the elevator and rode up again— better to be an extra once more than go back to Father a failure.
As I elbowed my way into this mob of actors, I noticed that there was an assortment of whiskers and muffs in the crowd, a sure sign that they were casting a picture with a foreign background. I was reassured; this was my specialty. I twisted the ends of my mustache a bit higher and tried my best not to look like a lad from Cleveland, Ohio. I even inquired loudly in French the name of the picture. A fellow with a beard like one of the Smith brothers replied in French that it was called "A Parisian Romance." That sounded right down my alley.
At that moment a door opened and Fred (Bing) Thompson, a Fox director, appeared. He climbed on a chair and began picking his cast by pointing. I was way at the back, so I stood on tiptoes and looked over the shoulder of a big, fat bird with a goatee. Finally Thompson looked my way. "You with the mustache!" he called. "Are you a Frenchman?"
I quickly replied in French, "Fardon, monsieur, est-ce que vous madressez?"
"You'll do," he said; then he ordered those he had picked to report to the Union Hills Studio at nine o'clock in full dress.
I yelled, "Do you mean nine o'clock H.O.C.?"
Thompson stared at me in surprise and then grinned. H.O.C. meant "Hand on Crank"— in other words, in make-up and ready to shoot. He knew that I must be an experienced extra, and that is just what I wanted, because you never could tell when a director would pull an extra out of the mob and give him a part.
And that was exactly what happened the next day. There was