Swing (Feb-Dec 1952)

460 The chauffeurs, the waitresses, the stenographers all have their dreams and, while waiting, they drive the cars and wait on table and type. In the meantime, they feel a great need for explanation and apology. The second driver who piloted me barely got the car out of second before he announced belligerently: "This is just an in-between job." He drove a moment and then asked if I knew of the Benbow in San Francisco. No, I said, I didn't. "It's one of the best nightclubs up there. I just finished a two week engagement — emcceing and singing." And so it goes. There is as much drudgery around Hollywood as anywhere else, but the people who perform it have their minds on the higher glories of show business. They are actors or writers or composers — or they like to be. Ticker Freeman, Dinah Shore's arranger, once walked into an office building; the doorman handed him a song he'd just written, the elevator operator handed him his latest song. Two songs in twenty feet. Joseph Gotten once had a cook who was in all respects an excellent cook except that she took off from time to time to play in an all-girl band. They are a very knowing crew, these chauffeurs and cooks and stenos who are not really chauffeurs and cooks and stenos. The third chauffeur to drive me out here — I'm not making this up either — had barely got the car in motion when he asked me if I knew Danny Dare. I said no, I didn't. "He directed me in my first picture. Great guy!" "Are you still acting?" I asked. "I just finished a picture — -'The Sniper' — for Stanley Kramer." He could hardly have just finished it. "The Sniper" has been around for some time. He fell to discussing Johnny Ray with the sort of assurance and authority that a New York cabbie uses in talking about politics or economics. "His voice is going but he's become a vocal actor. That's what he is, a vocal actor. I had all that, the emotion, I just couldn't get it out." He brooded a moment, then added the thought he'd been building up to all along: "I saw him just the other day at the Mocambo and he recognized me. He sat right down at the table with me and said: 'How ya, Ray?" Great guy!" Therein lies the satisfaction. They are not going anywhere especially but they have brushed against greatness, if you can refer to Johnny Ray in those terms, and they have been on the inside just long enough to pick up the Ungo. It isn't much but they seem to derive an awful lot of gratification out of it. If you collect people as I enjoy doing, you haven't really rounded out your library until you encounter a movie starlet. I still don't know what a movie starlet does exactly. In these days of shrinking overhead budgets, there aren't so many of them as there once were and in a few years the flock may shrink to almost nothing like that of the whooping crane. If you're interested in this branch of ornithology you better study it right now, while there's yet time. The particular starlet I had under observation was blonde as paper, saucer-eyed, momentarily (and perhaps permanently) unemployed in pictures and full of talk. Brother, you haven't lived until you've heard a starlet talk. "Hollywood men," she was saying, "are the way they are because of the sun. They're all ovcr-sexed. Because of the sunshine, you know. I'll show you what I mean. Feel my skin." I felt her cheek. "It's cool. Because the sun has gone down. But inside, I'm warm, terribly warm. Because of the sun. I'm just stored up sunshine inside." She moved away from Hollywood men to her one other topic of conversation — Hollywood women. "A girl has a difficult time out here," she observed. "She can go out with an older man. But that's not very satisfactory because he is older. Or she can go out with a married man but that's not very satisfactory. Because he's married. Or she can go out with a young man. And that's not very satisfactory either. Because they haven't any money. They may drive up in a Cadillac but they really haven't got any money. They live by their wits, the young ones. And that's terribly unsatisfactory."