Free How to Be a Movie Star by William J. Mann

upon meeting them. They thought the same things; they used the same words to express them. And in the spring of 1943, even as war raged throughout Europe and the Pacific, one goal and one goal only existed for both of them—and it wasn't world peace.
     
     
    Hustling Elizabeth back across the lot to the studio schoolhouse, Sara remained fired up about National Velvet. She knew the importance of breakout parts and how rarely they came along. She'd had a taste of fame herself once, playing the ingénue in Channing Pollock's play The Fool, which made her a sensation for a brief moment. After the London premiere in September 1924, Pollock remembered Sara being mobbed by fans, "clamoring for bits of her frock and locks of her hair."
    A heady experience for the daughter of a laundryman from Arkansas City, Kansas. Sara was born "Sarah" Warmbrodt in August 1895. Her mother's family were Ohioans; her father's father had emigrated from Switzerland. Growing up in a neighborhood of railroad clerks, blacksmiths, and masons had made Sara quite the aesthete: She recited poetry at church socials with such eloquence that the locals declared her destined for the stage. In that booming industrial town with its busy intersection of rail lines that led to bigger cities like Wichita, Tulsa, and St. Louis, Sara's mother, who played the piano and the violin, encouraged her daughter to dream. After seeing Aline McDermott, the leading lady of a touring stock company, perform at Ark City's opera house, Sara went backstage and confessed her hopes of being an actress. McDermott did her best to dissuade her. "She was afraid ... that I didn't know the world," Sara said. "So I thought the best way to know the world was to go out and be in it."
    From then on, like Dorothy, she kept her eyes peeled for a way out of Kansas. Her own personal tornado came in the form of an itinerant moving-picture cameraman, who came through town looking for a leading lady. The local newspaper hosted a contest. Sara got a call in the middle of the night telling her that she'd won. "I was so excited," she said. "I dragged my poor dad out of bed and made him go downtown with me." In the little amateur thriller, the teenaged Sara played the damsel in distress "without any makeup." Her experience served her well. When a stock company from the Orpheum circuit came to town a short while later, Sara won a part—and not even a sprained ankle could keep her from it. Her brother teased her that she'd sprained it "romping down to the theater so fast to get a job." No matter the pain, she hobbled through her part for the week of the show's run. "I just felt as if my whole future depended on my sticking it out."
    Her passion was so single-minded that she never had time for a serious beau. Channing Pollock thought Sara rather "plain," a "wallflower" even, delicate and petite. To Sara's way of thinking, the theater offered far more than any beau could: illusion, applause, and the opportunity to get out of Kansas on her own terms.
    At an age when most girls were getting married and starting families, Sara, twenty-one, packed her bags for New York. Breaking away from the dusty back roads of Ark City and the steam of her father's laundry was an extraordinary sort of rebellion for 1917, when women didn't even have the right to vote. Few women of Sara's means ever thought of such independence. Certainly no one in her family had blazed a trail for her; as Sara boarded a train for New York, her brother remained safely behind in Kansas to run a small photography shop.
    The first thing Sara did in the big city was change her name. Warmbrodt would never do; Sothern was the elegant substitute she had picked out. After Sara played a few bit parts on Broadway, the actors' strike in 1919 sent her into stock. A run with a Winnipeg company was followed in the fall of 1920 by a contract with the Thomas Wilkes troupe at the Majestic Theatre in Los Angeles. Sara played everything from ingénues to vamps.
    In