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by MARION RHEA
ILLUSTRATIONS BY JAMES MONTGOMERY FLAGG
WHILE YOU WAIT
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T last," cried the would-be star as she signed her first film contract, "success is mine! I've waited a long time to get into pictures, and fought a hard fight, but it's all over now!"
She was young and attractive and possessed of that certain something — personality, they call it, for want of a better word
which is the real requisite of stardom today. She apparently had the potentialities of a topnotcher. Still, she was wrong when she said: "It's all over now."
On the contrary — and she learned it soon enough — the fight she had made to get her first break in pictures was just a preliminary skirmish compared to the battle that lay ahead. Instead of saying, "It's all over now," she should have said, "// is just lie-ginning."
Because, even though a girl has won a screen contract, she must travel a long, hard road before she can hope to enter that coveted Valhalla wherein dwell Filmdom's truly great. She must exchange her vision of fame for the reality of work — work that often seems pointless and futile. She must suffer almost certain physical pain and more than certain bruises of heart and spirit. Unquestioning, unprotesting, she must deliver herself up to a strange, sometimes fearful order of existence in which she is accepted, not as an individual, scarcely as a human being, but only as clay which, someday, God willing, will be moulded into a .moving picture star.
■A new contract player earns about §50 a week. Robert Taylor made even less than that at first. Frances Farmer and Fred Mac Murray a little more. But $50 is the average. And for that amount, Mary Brown or Susie (dutz or whoever must discard her identity unconditionally; must forget hi ;in individual, must surrender to the studio that signs her up foi at least i\\" lung years of her life.
And what docs she gel in return, other than her small
alai ' lln answer is fairly certain. Stardom, if she can
"stand i In gaff"; disappointment and oblivion, if she cannot.
Tills is the tory of what really happens to a new contract player, i peciall) the 'feminine of the species," during the ■ in' i con titute the .1 . erage apprent ii e hip in pk ares 12
Here tlxe actual truth is told — from change of name to change of hairline, from close-ups to clothes. To the strong of heart comes success — but at a price!
Clay in the hands of studio gods, this potential star. Contract signing is only the beginning, but the reward — stardom if she can stand the gaff