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Not even John Stahl, Hollywood's most dignified director, escaped Charlie's heckling
canvas seat, properly tagged Charlie McCarthy— but he scorned to use it. Instead, when Andrea Leeds or Adolphe Menjou or Helen Jepson or Zorina prepared to plop down on their sacred set stools they always found a grinning, wooden imp lolling thereon who promptly apologized in such ornate terms of mock humility for his grave and unforgivable trespass that the absurd pretension of the whole thing was embarrassingly plain. Pretty soon everybody sat wherever there was an empty seat and thought nothing about it.
In spite of his biting satires and the wreck he still makes out of reputations and respected Hollywood institutions, Charlie has been the darling of the set from his first movie venture. True, the.Ritz Brothers refused flatly to work with him, admitting frankly that would just be asking for it, but Zorina and the ballerinas fell for Charlie like a load of coal — much to the dismay of Hollywood's premier prophet, Producer Sam Goldwyn.
Goldwyn, with ambitions to make the 1938 Follies extra-super-colossal, had imported the
It cost Goldwyn plenty when the dancers of the American Ballet found Charlie irresistible
American Ballet from the Metropolitan Opera. Being pretty nearly tops in this country, it was worth its weight in gold. But, when the big ballet number came before the cameras, something went wrong. The girls couldn't seem to get collected, and when they did, their minds obviously weren't on their work. With dollars dribbling away and nothing being shot, Goldwyn ordered an investigation.
THE trail led to Charlie McCarthy. While Bergen innocently sat in the corner and studied his script, Charlie followed each shapely ander-decollete ballerina with ogling eyes and a come-hither toss of his irresistible head. They came over, cooing, and production paused, paralyzed!
Instead of wearing itself out in his first picture, Charlie McCarthy's obstreperous highhandedness just got worse in his next picture, "Letter of Introduction."
When they unpacked him on the set the first day, he raucously demanded not only a new stand-in, but also a new wardrobe, a set valet and a stooge! What's more, he got them! To see Charlie McCarthy, a wooden doll, making wardrobe changes, being brushed and groomed by a flesh-and-blood gentlemen's gentleman and fed lines by his stooge, Mortimer, was perhaps the most trenchant take-off on the airy luxury of a pampered movie star ever presented. Hollywood circles rocked with laughter. But Charlie just grinned the more wickedly, and set out to "get" John Stahl and the assistant director.
NOW the champion tyrants of the picture studios are that gruff-voiced, hard-boiled tribe known as assistant directors. A leatherneck top sergeant has very little in the way of hardbitten orneriness on these gentlemen. A flash of their imperious eves and extras quail. If you have ever visited a motion-picture set you'll (Continued on page 84)
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