Motion Picture (Aug 1938-Jan 1939)

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The Phenomenon Named Fidler [Continued from page 31] 62 "I almost starved to death," says Jimmie, with a grim grin. "With so many people out of work, employers were fussy. I couldn't get work. If it hadn't been for my uncle, I'd have been finished. He took me on as his assistant. I was cured. I never wanted to have to rely on pictures for a living. I never tried to get back in." He had never written anything for possible publication. Now he had to make himself a writer. Every piece of copy lie turned out cost him perspiration tinged with blood. Every time he sat down at a typewriter, his inferiority complex leered at his efforts. He had to build up a defense mechanism. He told himself that the most important thing was not how to say something, but to have something to say. He started operating on that theory. And — it has paid dividends. The first dividend it paid was the job, at twenty-one, of first drama editor of the first daily published in Hollywood, the old Nczvs. The new paper was out to attract attention, build circulation. Jimmie had instructions to make the drama page talked about. Those instructions were all he needed. He wrote a daily editorial, lambasting one Hollywood foible after another. The studios didn't like it a bit. Finally, to silence him, one studio offered him a job, at a nice boost in salary, as a press-agent. He took the job — chuckling. He knew something that the studio didn't know : his successor on the drama desk would continue the fireworks. The publicity chief told him that his first job would be to "handle" Gloria Swanson, then Hollywood's star of stars. Jimmie was inclined to be flattered — until some of the boys tipped him off. The last two fellows who had had the job hadn't resigned. They had been fired — bam! So what did Jimmie do? He went to Gloria, told her that he knew her last two press-agents had been fired. He told her that he was new to publicity work, and would probably make mistakes, but he was eager to work with her, and he only hoped she would help him. He appealed to Gloria's mother-instinct. It was a new way of selling himself. But it worked. He wasn't fired. In fact, he got so much publicity fodder from Gloria, and so much newspaper space for her, that he decided a fortune was waiting for him as a free-lance press-agent. He became one. "I started with one client — Walter Hiers, the comedian. For a long time, he was the only one. He paid me fifty dollars a month. I couldn't open an office on that. So I moved in with a realtor friend of mine. He let me use his desk if I'd answer his phone calls when he was out." When he finally snared another client, he moved into his own quarters, and tried to look prosperous, even if he wasn't. In Hollywood, nothing succeeds like success — unless it's the appearance of success. Soon he had a modest quorum of clients. One of them was Marian Nixon. "She was the only one who had publicity sense, knew publicity values. I fell in love with her. She didn't fall in love with me. But I didn't want her paying for her publicity. When she insisted, I made the bill as low as possible. And every check she paid me, I banked in a separate account. I had some vague idea of buying something for her some day that would show how I worshiped her . . . One day she telephoned me, wanted me to come up right away. She had a story to give out. I raced up to her house, and she introduced me to Joe Accept No Substitutes! Always Insist ox the Advertised Brand! Benjamin, the boxer. She had just married him. That was the story ... I went straight from her house to the bank, drew out that special account, and went over and bought a Hudson car — for myself. Youth's idealism had been shattered to pieces." Jimmie laughs at that memory, but he doesn't laugh at the memory of his finale, in 1929, as a pressagent. It was too tragic at the time. "T LOST all my money, except a little I 1 had in property . . . Also — a publicity man was the last person to get his pay. He could wait. 'Publicity was a waste of money, anyway.' Broke and disgusted, I got out. I was through publicizing other people. From now on, I'd publicize Jimmie Fidler ... I didn't know how I'd do that exactly, but that was the idea. "I had been in Hollywood long enough to know my way around. The editor of MOTION PICTURE encouraged me to write some stories for him. That led to stories for other movie magazines. For a period of six months, in 1930, I averaged seventeen stories a month. I made good money, and 1 spread my name around — but the pace was killing. I had to give it up. I became Western Editor for a couple of magazines, at six hundred a month. "Not long after that, Merlin Aylesworth, then head of NBC, decided Hollywood ought to be on the radio. Hollywood couldn't see it. Radio was 'competition with the movies.' But Aylesworth persisted. He had RKO, with which he was also connected, sponsor a program called 'Hollywood on the Air' — a program of interviews with stars. And I was invited, as Western Editor of these magazines, to do the interviews. "The first one was with Dorothy Jordan, wife of Merian Cooper, then production head of RKO. I got together with Dorothy and we cooked up a lively interview, with considerable banter back and forth. I wrote it ; she okayed it. But when RKO saw it, they took all the life out of it. It wasn't 'dignified.' As it went on the air finally, it was a horrible thing — twelve minutes of ga-ga praise. On top of that, both Dorothy and I were scared to death. The whole tiling was bad. But — it drew four hundred fan letters. "That set me thinking. If a thing that bad could do that well, maybe we had something. I stuck with it — at no salary. All I got was publicity. Then one day I woke to this fact. I wasn't an integral part of those programs. What was to prevent RKO from deciding overnight that somebody else could do the interviews just as well — maybe better? I had to make Fidler an entity, a personality. I started putting in lines like this: 'Old King Cole had his fiddlers three, and Hollywood has only one. But here he is — Jimmie Fidler — interviewing So-and-So' . . . Fidler had to be built up. And" — Jimmie laughs — "he was. By one ruse after another. "I kept saying that some day somebody was going to be doing Hollywood gossip on the air, as Winchell was doing Broadway gossip. But I couldn't sell RKO on the idea — till one night a program ended up short. There was one minute of blank silence on the air. The broadcast people went into a stew over that. We 'couldn't let that happen again.' I said, 'If a program ends up a few seconds short, why not let me fill in with gossip?'