Sodom and Gomorrah : the story of Hollywood (1935)

140 SODOM AND GOMORRAH too, for it would never do if her public should learn that she swears like a trooper. Thus Miss Chapman has to live a life that is distasteful to her in the extreme. Perhaps she must even comment on the comparative values of contemporary and mid-Victorian literature, when she scarcely knows the meaning of the words. But she is forced to rattle off in parrot fashion the words her press agent has taught her. The public's conception of her is flattering to the highest degree. She is the incarnation of virtue, charity, and learning. Imagine the general surprise and disgust, then, when the public learns that their goddess has deserted the screen to spend some time in an institution for the cure of drug addiction. How much better for all concerned — except, perhaps, the producers who made money out of Miss Chapman — if she had been left on the burlesque stage in Chicago, and her niche in Hollywood occupied by a real actress whose talent would have sustained her so well that off-screen acting would have been unnecessary. So universal among the studios has the practice of stereotyping a player become that, much to their disgust, even the best actors are more or less victims of it. Because they make considerable money for a time in certain roles, the picture firms force them to play the same kind of films time after time until the public, always on the lookout for a new sensation, tires of them and turns to