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100 MEN AND A GIRL 235
my agent, took me to see Koster and Joe Pasternak, producer of the picture. Pasternak began telling me the plot of the picture, with interjections in French and German from Koster. After about five minutes I stopped them.
"That's enough," I said. "I'll be delighted to play the part."
"But Mr. Menjou," Koster protested. "We've only told you the beginning."
"You've told me all I want to know," I assured him. "If I'm Deanna Durbin's father, and I'm broke and out of a job, and she's trving to get work for me, it's the most sympathetic part I've ever had in my life. You can't spoil a part like that for me, and you can't leave me out of the plot. The worst you can do is have me die, and I've always wanted to play one of those five-minute deathbed scenes. Good-by, gentlemen. It's going to be a great picture. Settle the financial details with my agent."
Koster and I had quite a time on the picture. He was trying to improve his English and I was eager for a chance to polish my German, so each of us wanted to speak nothing but the other's language. We compromised and spoke French.
After finishing 100 Men and a Girl I had just about run the gamut of Hollywood parts. Since then I have been entrusted with almost every type of role. In A Star Is Born I played a motion-picture producer, a part that required considerable tact. In Roxie Hart I was a flamboyant trial lawyer. In Bachelor Father I was a floorwalker. I have played dapper fathers, pathetic fathers, delinquent fathers. Not long ago I was even made a top star again in a picture called Mr. District Attorney, of which I am also part owner.
I think I've finally licked the bugaboo of tvpe casting. But as one well-known star said to me, "By the time this town begins to think you know your business, you have to hold yourself together with paste and pins."
In 1943 I played a part that earned me no weekly pav check and no praise for the artistry of my performance, but it was the