Screenland (Oct 1924–Apr 1925)

of any man in Hollywood. And he was only about thirty years old. He got called every time they wanted beards, but has he got a chance to be a leading man or a star? Not in a million years, with spinach on his jaw, and yet he don't dare shave, for fear he'd starve! Believe me, this is a funny game! Well, me and two other girls that was working pretty regular — say three or four days a week at five to seven-fifty a day, minus commission, decided to cut expenses and enjoy life at the same time. An actor that had moved to New York •owned a shack in Laurel Canyon — where all these naughty love nests we read about are said to be — and we rented it through a real estate man awfully cheap, and fixed it up real pretty with a few yards of cretonne. He had it furnished in rustic stuff, and we girls didn't try to put that feminine touch in it too much. Laurel Canyon is not close to a street car, you know, so we had to bum rides from automobiles going into the canyon, and sometimes we had to finish the ride in a walk, if you know what I mean, but picture folks are pretty decent about their cars — everybody has one out there —and we managed to get home every night, especially as one of the girls had a sweetie who owned a near-car. Everything seemed to be jake with us, for we was living on about ten dollars a week for the three of us, not counting the meals that all girls know how to attract. I was getting three days a Week on an average, mostly through the Service Bureau on Tenth and Hill streets in Los Angeles, and the other girls were doing about the same. We was getting together a bunch o' clothes that would have made the Queen of Sheba jealous, and all of us thought we'd be stars before the year was out. Then I got what looked like a big chance. A star I Was working with on a big ballroom set one day got her dress on fire from a cigarette she had lighted, and I was the little heroine who put it out for her before anybody else'd noticed it. We got to talking then, and she discovered what I'd known all along —that we looked a lot alike. I won't tell her name, because stars never want the public to know they use doubles, but she told me they was going to film a big scene on the water— the star was billed to do an Annette Kellerman to save the life of the hero. And the poor girl couldn't swim a stroke. And there'd have to be some pretty close shots, showing her swimming and struggling with the dazed man. Sure I took it. Like a shot. I can swim like a fish, and I didn't care how dangerous the stunt was. They decided at the last minute to make the picture in New York and when the star asked me if I'd come along and 34 0 Rudolph Valentino made of Beaucaire a gracious host for a number of am. bitious breakers-in. double for her, you can bet I jumped at the chance, even if it did mean leaving Hollywood, where the casting directors would admit on being hard pressed that they had seen me somewhere — even though they couldn't remember just where. We got to New York in April, 1923, and it was still pretty cold weather when we come to the big water scene. And believe me, the Atlantic ain't the Pacific. The Gulf Stream must have wandered off and got lost that week, for I worked in water that would have froze the leaves of an ice plant. I was all made up to look like the star's twin sister, and she sat around on the nice warm sand under a pretty red parasol and watched me do my stuff. All she had to do was to get ber bathing suit wet under a warm shower and climb up on deck and emote over the hero. But I didn't blame her; I wouldn't have risked pneumonia myself if I had been in her place. Well, I got a hundred a week— for one week — and double pneumonia out of that job. The studio was pretty decent. They paid the hospital and doctor bills, but when I come out six weeks later I was a pretty sad looking wreck. Alone and friendless and too thin to work ! And in New York ! Gee, if Lake Charles had ever looked good to me be• fore, it looked like Heaven then. I was just on the point of wiring for a ticket home when I met a girl who has been the best friend I ever had. I was warming a bench in the Chamberlain-Brown Casting Agency on Fortyfifth Street, hoping they'd have a call for ■fea human skeleton with pretty eyes and ||P curly bobbed hair, when one of the |F prettiest girls I've ever seen in my life came and took the chair next to mine. Gee! She looked like a Norse goddess or -one of them Russian countesses, or something like that. Tall, five feet seven in her silk stockings, and with long honey-colored hair looped in shining braids over her ears — just like Natacha Rambova does her hair. She give me one long, sleepy look out of her greygreen-blue eyes, and I was as hard struck as if I'd been a village sheik. We got to talking, as girls do in a casting office. Name was Nelly Savage, and she said she liked to work in pictures in between stage engagements and even while she was appearing at the Hippodrome or in the Follies. • Gosh! I thought I'd pass out at the mere thought of talking easy and natural with a Follies girl. She said she had been a dancer for years with Fokine's Ballet. You know Fokine furnishes numbers for all the big revues. "I guess all the producers just run after the Follies girls with contracts," I said. "I suppose you've had a lot of big parts in pictures." "Being in the Follies doesn't mean much in pictures," she said, and you could have knocked me down with that feather people are always talking about. "A Follies girl, unless she happens to be just lucky like Jacqueline Logan or Billie Dove, has to go through the mill like any other extra girl. I'm here today to get work in a picture — anything." Well, that dashed me pretty low. There I was, nothing but a curly-headed little flapper, no prettier than most of the regular run of pretty girls on Broadway, nc special talent except for swimming, and only fair as a ballroom dancer, though I'd thought I was the Isadora Duncan of my home town. And there was a beautiful Follies girl, who talked with a lovely English accent, and could dance well enough to be in Fokine's Ballet and yet she said she'd been bucking the picture game for two or three years and was still, an extra. It made me pretty sick to get wise to myself like that, and I was just about to stagger on off and die or something, when the casting director called us both