Free Hollywood by Garson Kanin Page A

prejudice in the South, based upon the notorious Leo Frank rape case that shook Atlanta in 1933. To make it effective and believable, LeRoy needed a girl to walk down the street and drive everyone crazy. Eventually she is raped and the crime is pinned on the wrong guy because he is from the North.
    It is said that when Wilkerson brought her in, LeRoy looked at her in that tight-fitting sweater, and not only did he think she was good, he thought the sweater was good, too.
    Thus began the era of the sweater girls of 1937 and 1938. It was never chic or elegant but it was sexy and show-business and inexpensive. Any high-school girl could afford a sweater and did. The trick was to go into a shop and buy a sweater at least two sizes too small.
    Could this go back to Louisa May Alcott? She once wrote about girls with poor posture who were admonished by the new gym teacher, “You must do this exercise, girls—otherwise you won’t fill out your jerseys.”
    It is doubtful that Lana got the idea from Louisa.
    In any case, stories such as Lana’s captured the imagination of girls everywhere.
    They would read about Shirley MacLaine, a chorus girl in The Pajama Game , understudying Carol Haney. One afternoon Carol Haney was ill. Shirley MacLaine went on. It happened to be the afternoon that Hal Wallis, a movie producer, was in to see the show. He saw Shirley MacLaine, signed her, and—a movie star!
    What the dreamy girls forget is that Shirley MacLaine is a gifted actress, singer, and dancer.
    But the legend of You Too Can Be A Movie Star is one of the myths of our time. David O. Selznick understood it and so did the writers, Robert Carson, Alan Campbell, Dorothy Parker, and William Wellman, when they did A Star Is Born .
    They took this myth and turned it into a glittering fiction. A little bumpkin, Esther Blodgett, comes to Hollywood from a small town, wants to get into the movies, goes to Central Casting. They refuse even to register her as an extra.
    A kindly man there looks at her and says, “Honey, it’s a tough thing you’re trying to do because a thousand people a day try it and maybe only one out of a thousand can even get in.”
    Esther Blodgett looks up at him and says, “Maybe I’m that one.”
    She becomes a movie star. Vicki Lester.
    The legend is not entirely spurious. Oddly enough, many outstanding American actresses—Ethel Barrymore, Laurette Taylor, Maude Adams, Lynn Fontanne, Katharine Cornell, Judith Anderson, Julie Harris, Kim Stanley—did not become “movie stars.” Apparently, talent is a less important attribute than some special quality—and we all believe we possess that .
    The power of the dream is largely generated by the fact that every now and then it comes true.
    It came true for a slightly chubby, very peppy blonde from Indiana named Jane Peters, later known as Carol Lombard, and later still as Carole Lombard.
    “I think that ‘e’ made the whole fuckin’ difference,” she said to me one day, during the time I was directing her in They Knew What They Wanted . (It should be noted thatthis was Carole’s normal style of speech. She used the full, juicy Anglo-Saxon vocabulary; yet it never shocked, never offended because she was clearly using the language to express herself and not to shock or offend.)
    She was the only star I have ever known who did not want a dressing room on the set. What little makeup she used, she put on herself. She preferred to look after her own hair. All she asked for was a chair and a small table. There she would be, twenty minutes or half an hour before she was due, ready and able. I never knew her to fluff a line. She liked everyone and everyone adored her. She was happy.
    On days when she was not required, she would drive in anyway, all the way from the Valley. The first time she turned up on one of those days, I panicked, certain there had been a mistake.
    “What’re you doing here?” I asked. “You’re not called today.”
    “Piss off!” she said.