Three times a day, the Golden Age of Hollywood is rerun in the dining room of the Motion Picture and Television Country House.
Other evidence of the movie capital`s glory years is scarce. Housing developments stand on yesteryear studios. Others survive more as tourist attractions than sound stages. Many films are made on location, and today`s stars favor out-of-town home addresses, too.
But table talk at the industry`s retirement home is a first-person history of the American cinema.
”John Gilbert used to send me notes proposing marriage,” said Ruth Clifford. ”But we`d done kissing scenes, and I just didn`t feel anything for poor Johnny.”
The 89-year-old actress was recounting her on-and-off-screen roles while awaiting dinner in the library of the Country House, which sits on a gently rolling campus about 15 miles north of Hollywood. Clifford`s career began in the silent-film era and ran on through the 1950s, when she appeared on early network TV. Not all her contemporaries were so fortunate, she recalled.
”John Gilbert was the leading man in Hollywood until the talkies came in,” Clifford said. ”But his first sound film made it seem like he had a high, squeaky voice, which ruined his career. Poor Johnny, after that he drank himself to death. Once you`ve been in the public eye, it is hard to let go.” Her reminiscence was interrupted by a living tableau of that very proposition. A group of her fellow residents sternly marched upon the table where Clifford was seated and, in no uncertain terms, announced it was reserved for their weekly bridge game.
”There are plenty of other tables!” Clifford replied. ”Can`t you see I`m being interviewed?”
If anything, the others seemed all too aware. The room quickly resounded with the angry recriminations of Clifford and her opponents, among them Mae Clarke, who has her own footnote to movie history. In the 1931 gangster film, ”The Public Enemy,” James Cagney shoved a grapefruit in her face. She must have long waited an opportunity to play the reverse role, judging by the enthusiasm she brought to the card-table dispute.
Another resident took a visiting reporter by the arm and, withlong-practiced stage moves, extracted him from the confrontation. ”Now you see the pettiness and jealousies that keep us alive in here,” she whispered.
”Oh, well, the show must go on.”
Indeed, for almost half a century, screen veterans have taken final curtain calls at the Motion Picture and Television Country House, Hollywood`s way of taking care of its own. Its origins date to a charity established in 1921 by Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks and D.W. Griffith, the movies` first superstars, to help colleagues down on their luck. In the 1940s, the fund`s administrators bought a 42-acre site in the San Fernando Valley and began the complex of individual cottages, a residential lodge and hospital facilities where upwards of 300 former actors, directors and technicians and their spouses live.
Despite a continuing building program, there is a long waiting list for admission to the Country House, which is financed by bequests, fundraising events and payroll deductions from industry employees. To be considered for a place here, an applicant must have been in show business for at least 20 years, which makes the Country House a repository of silver-screen legend and lore.
There was a time, residents recall, when Hollywood was just a small town whose industry happened to be moviemaking. Growing up here, young people found jobs in the studios, much as counterparts elsewhere signed on at a hometown factory, noted Lathrop Worth, who, during the 3-D craze of the 1950s, pioneered camera techniques that paved the way for today`s special-effects spectaculars.
He got into movies because Cecil B. De Mille, the famed director, was a family friend. His father died, the 86-year-old Worth recalled, during his sophomore year at the University of Southern California, putting an end to his college days.
”Constance De Mille, Cecil`s wife, said she knew I`d need to find a job quickly and did I want to be an actor?” Worth recalled. ”I said I preferred the technical end of the business. So she phoned the studio, and that`s how I became a cameraman.”
Instant tears
Ruth Clifford became an actress after she visited relatives in Los Angeles, in 1915, and an aunt with show business connections took her to see Universal Studios. A bit player hadn`t shown up for a melodrama walk-on, and the director, determined to keep to his shooting schedule, was holding on-camera auditions for any prospect close at hand.
To a wide-eyed young girl, Clifford recalled, the distinction between reality and stage fantasy wasn`t entirely clear, thank goodness. Otherwise, her life might have taken a less glamorous path. Showing Clifford how to make an entrance, the director pointed her towards a set where an actress lay on a hospital bed.
”In those silent-film days, a director would coach you right through a scene, and when I got to the bed, he shouted into his megaphone: `She`s dead!` ” Clifford said. ”I was so stunned I fell to my knees and burst into tears.”
In fact, Clifford was still crying long after the camera had stopped rolling. When she regained her composure, the studio signed her to a three-year contract. The ability to emote on cue was worth the then-considerable sum of $75 a week.
To earn those paychecks, Clifford and her contemporaries were held to a factorylike schedule. In today`s Hollywood, she noted, actors and actresses seem to require months of pool-side recuperation from occasional screen appearances. But in a 3-year period, Clifford had parts in 24 movies, among them, ”The Dramatic Life of Abraham Lincoln,” in which she was cast as Ann Rutledge, the Great Emancipator`s first love.
Working at that pace, you learned your craft quickly, she added. It also taught you to recognize the true artists among fellow workers, like director John Ford, in many of whose classic films Clifford appeared.
”We who worked with him were in awe of Mr. Ford`s genius,” Clifford said. ”On a sound set, they ring a bell when a scene is about to be shot, and usually people keep on gabbing until the warning has been repeated three or four times. But on Mr. Ford`s set, that bell rang once, and nobody said another word!”
`No` to the casting couch
Rose Hobart, though, recalled that Hollywood moguls were sometimes less than saints. Sitting in the living room of her cottage, the 83-year-old actress noted that she came to the movies with established theatrical credentials. A TV Guide on a nearby end table was open to a late-evening listing of her 1931 film, ”East of Borneo.”
As a teenager, Hobart was already a seasoned trouper, having been on Broadway and toured with road-show companies. So she was invited for a screen test when sound replaced silent movies in the 1920s. Hollywood suddenly needed stage-trained actors who could speak lines convincingly instead of just pantomiming.
The moment she got to town, she started getting good solid roles. But the old-timers took her aside to suggest that if she wanted to become a really big star, Hobart should recognize that some of Tinseltown`s most important producers insisted on casting their films personally and after working hours. ”I thought of myself as an actress and wasn`t about to go sleeping around for the sake of a career,” Hobart said. ”That meant that I permanently typecast myself as a `featured player.` For many years, I was inevitably the `second woman` in a movie`s plot line.”
For Fayard Nicholas as well, Hollywood`s dream machine couldn`t always live up to advanced billing. Recently the 75-year-old dancer won a Tony Award for choreographing ”Black and Blue,” a Broadway review of vaudeville and musical theater during the decades when a color line ran right through show business. Nicholas had learned about it firsthand.
He and his brother Harold already were stars on the black nightclub circuit when they were scarcely in long pants, recalled Nicholas, who came to the Country House in 1984, after a hip problem finally ended his dancing career. In the early 1930s, the Nicholas Brothers were featured alongside Duke Ellington at the Cotton Club, which was then a mecca for white jazz aficionados out for a night on the town in Harlem. Then they got a Broadway booking in the 1936 edition of the ”Ziegfeld Follies.” Along with the review`s other stars, Bob Hope and Judy Canova, they attracted the attention of Hollywood talent scouts.
In the movies, though, their careers took a different path from the white performers` with whom they came West. As dancers, they were as popular as ever, especially because their acrobatic high-kicking style hadn`t been seen on the screen before.
”My brother and I would do a movie`s featured dance number,” Nicholas recalled, ”and at the end of it, audiences would clap so long that the projectionist sometimes had to rewind the film to show our scene all over again.”
Nicholas and his brother, though, also wanted to be taken seriously as actors. That just was not possible for black performers then, as Tallulah Bankhead, the acerbic-tongue actress, once explained to them.
”Tallulah came up to us at a premiere of one of our pictures and was raving about our talent,” Nicholas recalled. ” `If you were only white,` she said, `you`d get to dance with Ginger Rogers, just like Fred Astaire does.` ” Gossip was an art
Whatever their disappointments, Nicholas and the others still treasure the tinsel-and-glitter excitement that once was Hollywood. Even Rose Hobart clings to those memories, even though her career was cut short by the Red-baiting of the McCarthy Era, when the studios, eager to prove their Americanism, purged anyone suspected of Left-leaning politics. When another actor claimed that during World War II he attended a communist meeting at Hobart`s house, she went before the House Un-American Activities Committee to clear her name.
”I testified that my house was rented out at the time, since I was on a USO tour entertaining our troops overseas,” Hobart said, leafing through scrapbook mementoes. ”They seemed to accept that explanation, but I never worked another day in the film industry. Still, despite my own troubles I like to remember Hollywood as good place for fairy tales, on and off the screen. Now the movies depend too much on pornography and violence.”
As Ruth Clifford walked a guest to his car, she, too, recalled the glamor of decades past. Today`s actors and actresses, she suspects, don`t have so much as a hint of what life once was like in the movie capital.
”We had the time of our lives, dancing cheek to cheek at the Coconut Grove,” she said. ”Not butt to butt, like young people now.”
In an older Hollywood, Clifford recalled, gossip was both an art form and a business. When two big stars signed to do a movie, the town buzzed for months debating whether they would wind up playing love scenes off screen. Even when a movie finished without Cupid`s intervention, studio publicists would beg a star to let them give the gossip columnists an audience-tantalizing rumor that might hype box-office receipts.
”I don`t mind growing old,” she said. ”I just don`t want to become bitter.”
Then she fell silent for a moment. Perhaps she wondered how her reminscences would play when her reporter-companion repeated them for a younger audience. Did he recall, she asked, how a Hollywood colleague once spoke to that same fear in ”Tea and Sympathy”?
”Remember Deborah Kerr`s curtain line,” Clifford said. ” `When you speak of me, and you will. Be . . . a little kind.` ”
