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Our heroine, shorn of her glad rags, was seated on the floor busily pasting mementos of the occasion in her scrap-book when the telephone rang. Someone from the talent department of Paramount was on the wire. It seems that he had just run across her picture in the paper and had almost swooned.
"Really now!" our Cheryl said, trying to sound unimpressed.
The Paramountie was nonplussed — but not for long. "Have you thought of pictures as a possible career ?" he wanted to know.
"Not strenuously," Miss Walker replied.
"If you haven't anything better to do tomorrow, why don't you drop around by the studio and let us have a look at you?" the talent man suggested.
"It so happens that I'm going to be in Hollywood on business in the morning," said our heroine.
She was bound for Hollywood by bus the next morning, her heart pounding in her ears and browsing through the morning paper, when she chanced upon an interesting little paragraph, to the effect that Paramount Pictures had just put under contract one Cheryl Walker, late Queen of the Tournament of Roses. Her heart did a rhumba.
Arrived at Paramount, she had herself announced to the talent department, but no one rushed out to greet her. She waited an hour before the receptionist said: "You may go in now, Miss Walker."
The representative of the talent department sized her up like a Kentucky Colonel sizes up a new foal and mumbled something that sounded like Chinese for "Not bad."
"Acting experience?" (Talent representatives behave as if words cost a dollar apiece.")
"Virtually none."
The talent man muttered something that sounded like Chinese for "Good God! I'll kill those jerks over in the publicity department !" He frowned, looked her in the eye.
"How about a three-month contract at $50 a week?"
Cheryl gulped. "I think that would be positively sensational," she finally said.
Not until a week had passed did she learn the bitter truth : she had been signed because the publicity department had made a premature announcement to that effect, an announcement which had, more or less, tied the hands of the talent department.
A fortnight of waiting for a call from the casting office and she read the handwriting on the wall : the studio had no intention of using her.
Any other girl in the world but Cheryl Walker would have been overwhelmed by the situation of being an employee without employment. Cheryl thought the thing over and elected to slug it out. To start with, she sought out Oliver Hinsdell, then in charge of the studio's dramatic school, and had a heart-to-heart talk. He was impressed enough to make a notation on her card, as follows : "Good dramatic material," and to offer her whatever coaching she felt she needed.
Next, she began a systematic campaign to make friends with everyone in the studio, department by department, before her three months expired. She introduced herself to directors and asked to be remembered in case they ever wanted stand-ins, Wellman, Lei sen, and the rest. She cultivated the studio writers, Preston Sturges, Talbot Jennings, Billy Wilder — just in case. She made herself known to the sound specialeffects men, the sound men, the montage men. She even looked up the men in charge of making trailers. With one and all she left her telephone number and the message : "Very available."
At the end of three months her name was dropped from the contract list, but not from
the studio payroll. As a matter of fact it appeared on the payroll for five years, thanks to her missionary work on the lot which started paying dividends the minute her contract expired in the form of assignments from every department on the lot
The log of Cheryl Walker's five-year trick at Paramount as general utility girl at a salary averaging $125 a month reads like a press agent's fantasy. She acted as standin for everybody from Susan Hayward to Betty Hutton. She was stunt-girl for Veronica Lake in "Sullivan's Travels" and took an awful beating, if you recall the picture and remember how Little Miss OneEye was (apparently) mauled all the way through the picture. She was Paulette Goddard's legs in "Forest Rangers," in that log-rolling scene where, just for a second, you get a glimpse of a pair of gorgeous gams treading a log to beat the band.
For the sound-effects department she was the echo of Dorothy Lamour's legs in "Aloma" and the rest of the enchanted-isle pictures where you see Dottie strolling through groves, crushing semi-tropical foliage under her dainty feet, eight to the bar.
For the special-effects department she was Claudette Colbert's double for those scenes in "No Time For Love" when Claudette is knocked off a cliff in her dreams. The special-effects boys actually used a forty-foot cliff, with a net strung up beyond the camera range. Over the cliff she would go, hit the net, bounce up, be lifted to terra firma, rub her bruised limbs, and hear the melancholy words : "Once more, please." It was gruelling but welcome work. It paid her $25 a day.
She was such a joy to work with that even the advertising department threw work her way, despite the fact that at least twenty cuties, all of them stock girls and drawing down regular salaries, were available for the mere asking.
You are not to get the impression, gentle reader, that Cheryl Walker frittered away these five years, knocking down her piddling $125 a month and waiting for "the break." Actually, she had a very definite plan. True, it didn't exactly work like a charm. But that was no fault of hers.
She could have earned twice her salary — three times, perhaps — by making her talents as general-utility girl available to the rest of the studios, except that by so doing she would have been defeating her plan. Her plan was to keep harassing the studios until one of them gave her a screen test which, in the event she was not signed, she could later exhibit to interested producers at other studios. Since studios are not too keen about recruiting picture material from general-utility girls, she led a double life, working three or four days a week for Paramount and devoting the rest of the week, very futilely, to getting her career started.
At the end of five furious years, she was yet to be tested, yet to appear (visibly) in a film. In a way, it was like being a zombie.
She had gone through a half dozen big agents, all of whom had promised much and delivered nothing, when she decided to cast her lot with a small agent, a former casting director for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer by the name of Paul Wilkins. The new agent made no rash promises. He told her that he thought she had wonderful possibilities, that he could promise her nothing — nothing except that he would do his damndest for her.
The very next day he called her up and told her the news. Sol Lesser, about to go into production with "Stage Door Canteen," was looking for an unknown.
"That's me," she said jubilantly.
He arranged for her to meet Lesser's lieutenants the very next morning. They looked her over and told her they'd let
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