Star-dust in Hollywood (1930)

Star-dust in Hollywood already seen him at a glance fit men with straw hats or with boots. Dressed as a gipsy, guitar under arm, I returned to the maze of buildings. Here was the Stenographic Department of the Metro-Goldwyn. Through the windows poured a clatter as though inside were thousands of monkeys cracking nuts. They were but the typewriters of fifty authors trying to crack out stories. A long row of sheds housed odd sidelines of the movie business, including the make-up man, who had a superior kind of barber's shop and was himself dressed in a long white smock. " You won't need much," he said to me. "With these new panchromatic films, we don't have to do a lot to faces, except for character parts." The walls were decorated with a number of photographs, which I took to be specimens of his art, but they were really specimens of himself. Later, to Jo, he was a little more communicative. " Those are all me," he said to her. " You see, I'm an actor really. But making up folks as a regular job pays a darn' sight better than getting a good job in the films now and then. That don't pay at all." As she left he gave her a large card with pictures of himself in a dozen different characters circled round his name, also a tinted picture of himself as a Guido Reni Christ, with a golden halo. He had been understudy for Warner in The King of Kings, Behind the groups of office and technical buildings were the big stages like aeroplane sheds. At the doors of some, taking the air, lounged extras in picturesque groups : Mexican rancheros, in velvet with mother-of-pearl buttons, or Spanish gentlemen of 1880 in tightly fitted black and pink or yellow photographic linen, Austrian officers and soldiers, early American settlers, Indians — nothing could be [202 ]