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.
158 IT TOOK NINE TAILORS
Clark Gable got it even worse than that one day. He played a fellow who lacked a handicap but who shot a 72. He practically took Gable's teeth.
Anyway, after you have argued the subject of handicaps with the three other golfers in your foursome and have agreed on the size of your bets, the trouble has only begun. For in Hollywood golf you need eyes in the back of your head, especially if you are playing with a producer or an agent. I used to play with Jesse Lasky and Adolph Zukor every Saturday. There were no ethics in that game at all. They thought golf was like the motion-picture business where anything went but murder and— according to rumors some people even got away with that.
Whenever Zukor got into the bushes, I had to watch very closely and inquire when he returned to the fairway just how many strokes he had taken.
"Just one," he would say. "Those others were practice swings."
We had a foursome that consisted of Lasky, Zukor, and his brother-in-law Al Kaufman. We played for twenty-five dollars Nassau, which means a total of seventy-five dollars. Then we always made a few side bets. I used to pluck those pigeons for plenty, but it was never very profitable because I had to put Zukor 's caddie on a steady salary so that he would keep me informed as to the exact number of strokes Zukor and Lasky took when I wasn't looking. Of course, they weren't cheating; they were just doing what comes naturally in Hollywood golf.
Along the fairway there are various types of golfers you have to watch. There is the fellow who picks up his ball to identify it —so he says— and then replaces it in a much better lie. There is also the chap who steps directly behind his ball with an innocent, faraway look, as though he is sizing up the distance to the green. After this maneuver he has a brassie lie, when before he would have had to hack at his ball with a five iron.
Mr. H. N. Swanson, Hollywood's leading agent for authors, employs the above stratagems with amazing skill and savoir-faire. Mr. Swanson, who swings at a golf ball as though it were a rattle