it, or tried to do it, or discussed it with anyone. I was ashamed to tell the few people I knew of what I was dreaming. I said I was hoping to make a living as a model. I called on all the model agencies and found a job now and then.
But there was this secret in me—acting. It was like being in jail and looking at a door that said “This Way Out.”
Acting was something golden and beautiful. It was like the bright colors Norma Jean used to see in her daydreams. It wasn’t an art. It was like a game you played that enabled you to step out of the dull world you knew into worlds so bright they made your heart leap just to think of them.
When I was eight I used to look out of the orphan asylum window at night and see a big lighted-up sign that read “R.K.O. Radio Pictures.” I hated the sign. It reminded me of the smell of glue. My mother had once taken me to the studio where she worked. The smell of the wet film she cut and spliced had stuck in my nose.
That was Norma Jean’s nose. Norma Dougherty, the aspiring actress, had no such feelings toward studio signs. To her they were the beacons of a Promised Land—the land of Ingrid Bergman, Claudette Colbert, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Olivia de Haviland, Gene Tierney, Jennifer Jones.
That’s the way it was when I sat alone in my Hollywood room. I went to sleep hungry and woke up hungry. And I thought all actors and actresses were geniuses sitting on the front porch of Paradise—the movies.
9
I’ve never read anything about the Hollywood I knew in those first years. No hint of it is ever in the movie fan magazines. If there are any books on the subject, I must have skipped them, along with the few million other books I haven’t read.
The Hollywood I knew was the Hollywood of failure. Nearly everybody I met suffered from malnutrition or suicide impulses. It was like the line in the poem, “Water, water everywhere but not a drop to drink.” Fame, fame everywhere but not a hello for us.
We ate at drugstore counters. We sat in waiting rooms. We were the prettiest tribe of panhandlers that ever overran a town. And there were so many of us! Beauty contest winners, flashy college girls, home grown sirens from every state in the union. From cities and farms. From factories, vaudeville circuits, dramatic schools, and one from an orphan asylum.
And around us were the wolves. Not the big wolves inside the studio gates, but the little ones—talent agents without offices, press agents without clients, contact men without contacts, and managers. The drugstores and cheap cafes were full of managers ready to put you over if you enrolled under their banner. Their banner was usually a bed sheet.
I met them all. Phoniness and failure were all over them. Some were vicious and crooked. But they were as near to the movies as you could get. So you sat with them, listening to their lies and schemes. And you saw Hollywood with their eyes—an overcrowded brothel, a merry-go-round with beds for horses.
Among the phonies and failures were also a set of has-beens. These were mostly actors and actresses who had been dropped by the movies—nobody knew why, least of all themselves. They had played “big parts.” They had scrapbooks full of “stills” and write-ups. And they were full of anecdotes about the big bosses with the magic names who ran the studios—Goldwyn, Zanuck, Mayer, Selznick, Schenck, Warner, Cohn. They had rubbed shoulders with them and exchanged conversations with them. Sitting in the cheap cafe nursing a glass of beer for an hour, they talked about the great ones, calling them by their first names. “Sam said to me,” and “I told L.B.,” and “I’ll never forget Darryl’s excitement when he saw the rushes.”
When I remember this desperate, lie-telling, dime-hunting Hollywood I knew only a few years ago I get a little homesick. It was a more human place than the paradise I dreamed of and found. The people in it, the phonies and failures, were more colorful than the great men and successful artists I was to know soon.
Even the crooks who threw me curves and set traps for me seem pleasant, mellow characters. There was Harry, the photographer, who kept photographing me when he had enough money to buy plates for his view camera.
“I know a real hot agent,” said Harry, “who’s crazy about you. He saw one of your stills and blew his top. And he’s no alley runner. He used to be a big man in Budapest.”
“What kind of a big man, Harry?”
“A producer. You’ve heard of Reinhardt?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Well, he was next in line to Reinhardt,” said Harry. “You’ll like him. He thinks big.”
The three of us sat in a cheap cafe the next evening. The proprietor knew better than to send the waiter over to see if we wanted anything. Harry and I had been there before. The third at our table, Mr. Lazlo, didn’t look any more promising as a customer. Mr. Lazlo was fat, unshaved, bald-headed, bleary-eyed, and his shirt collar was a little frayed. But he was a fine conversationalist. He spoke with a fascinating accent. It was hard to imagine that so cultured a man could be a bum. But I knew he was, or what would he be doing with Harry and me?
“So you have ambition to be a great actress,” said Mr. Lazlo.
I nodded.
“Wonderful,” said Mr. Lazlo. “How would you like not only to be a big star but also to own your own movie studio and make only the finest movies. No Hollywood junk. But art—real art.”
“I’d like that,” I said.
“Good,” said Mr. Lazlo. “Now I know where you stand.”
“Wait till you hear his ideas,” said Harry. “I told you he thinks big.”
“In Budapest,” said Mr. Lazlo, “if I wanted a few hundred thousand dollars I have only to telephone the bank, and they send over a wagon with the money.” He patted my hand. “You are very beautiful. I would like to buy you the kind of dinner I used to have every night—in Budapest.”
“I’ve already eaten,” I said.
“You are lucky,” Mr. Lazlo sighed. “But first, before I go on—you are definitely interested in the project, may I ask?”
“I haven’t heard it yet.”
“Are you willing to become a wife?” Mr. Lazlo asked.
“Whose?” I asked back.
“The wife of a millionaire,” said Mr. Lazlo. “He has authorized me to ask you this question.”
“Does he know me?”
“He has studied your photographs,” said Mr. Lazlo. “And he has picked you out from fifty other girls.”
“I didn’t know I was in any contest,” I said.
“No cracks,” said Harry. “This is high finance.”
“The gentleman who wishes to marry you,” said Mr. Lazlo, “is seventy-one years of age. He has high blood pressure—and no living relatives. He is alone in the world.”
“He doesn’t sound very enticing,” I said.
“My dear child,” Mr. Lazlo took my hand. His own was trembling with excitement. “You will inherit everything in six months. Maybe less.”
“You mean he’ll die if I marry him?” I asked.
“I guarantee it,” said Mr. Lazlo.
“That’s like murder,” I said to Harry.
“In six months you will be a widow with two million dollars,” said Mr. Lazlo. “You will keep the first million. Harry and I will split equally the second.”
I lay in bed unable to sleep that night. I would never marry or even see Mr. Lazlo’s dying millionaire, but it was exciting to think about it. I went around for a week imagining myself living in a castle on a hill—with a swimming pool and a hundred bathing suits.
