he said, opening the bungalow’s rear door.
“Mind your head,” I heard Kitty say with a chuckle.
Thinking she was a royal pain, I gritted my teeth and did my best to ignore her. Then Stern, Papa, and I stepped into the back lot and my future. We moved along on a raised wooden walkway painted white that snaked past several framed bungalows. In front of one of them I saw a stack of round silver cans.
“Those tins contain our bread and butter,” Stern said. “They each hold a finished movie.”
I was flooded with all of the new sights and sounds. We walked a bit farther to a large building. Coming out of it I saw spear-carrying gladiators, harem girls, and a backdrop of an alpine meadow strewn with edelweiss that two painters expertly carted by us.
“That’s our prop department,” Stern explained. “It’s huge. It has to be. We need a lot of backgrounds and props because we produce all kinds of serials. You name it: Westerns, jungle adventures, mysteries, even animal flickers. Speaking of animal pictures, here at Century we’ve even got our own zoo with our own bull handler.” Then we walked by the largest structure at the studio. “You know, this old barn was part of the original property. It’s so big I run several crews in there at the same time,” he said.
I was impressed by the immensity and scale of all that I saw. I had never been exposed to anything like it before. I wanted to stop the tour and start working as soon as I could. If I knew what was shortly to take place, I would have been more patient.
We moved to an area with two huge, windowless sound stages. On their respective doors, one had a large painted letter A and the other a large painted letter B. Stern opened door A and we entered.
The space was huge. Several movie crews were working at the same time. We stopped and observed one of them. A half-dozen musicians played for a romantic interlude, acted out by two young actors. I noticed Papa was looking away; he seemed embarrassed. I imagined myself playing the part of the dashing leading man, embracing the pretty ingénue. That’s how naive I was in those days. The scene was framed by blinding lights and captured on film by a hand-cranked Lytax camera and crew of ten.
Everyone we passed stopped to stare at me. I liked the fact that an instant later they returned to what they were doing, as if I wasn’t even there.
After we left the sound stage, we continued walking for another five minutes, during which Stern didn’t say a word. I wondered what he was thinking. Maybe he was having second thoughts about his talent scouts’ decision to hire me. We wound our way back to the building that contained the prop department. But this time we entered it and stopped in front of a rack with suits, coats, uniforms, and capes. Though the costumes gave off a very musty smell, just looking at them filled me with anticipation: I wondered which ones I would wear and when they would teach me to act. A short woman with a wrinkled, yellow tape measure draped around her shoulders sat in front of the rack. She looked like a cross between a gypsy queen and somebody’s grandmother. The woman gazed up at me with a look of astonishment that quickly transformed into panic.
“This is Mrs. Romanov, the mistress of the wardrobe. She will get you set with today’s costume. Then you’ll put on your makeup. I want you at Stage B to begin shooting in an hour,” Stern said.
“An hour? What, do you think I’m Moses at the Red Sea? I don’t do miracles. There’s nothing on the rack to fit him,” Mrs. Romanov protested.
“Get goldilocks—you know, that blonde—to help. Whatever it takes but make it happen,” Stern ordered.
“Stage what? Put on my makeup? I need . . . Papa, can’t we? I thought I would . . . ” I objected. I was overwhelmed but too nervous to be terrified.
Mrs. Romanov grabbed a small ladder resting on a wall behind the rack of costumes. Without so much as a by-your-leave, she opened it in front of me, climbed to the fifth rung, and began to measure my arms and shoulders. Before I could utter another word of dissent, Stern had spun around and disappeared into the crowd on the wooden walkway.
I wanted my father to rescue me, but he was as surprised as I was. He looked at me with a helpless grin that said: You’re on your own, Jakey.
I thought for sure that first day all I would do was take a tour of the studio, learn the lay of the land, and maybe get some pointers on how to act in movies. But there had been no real tour and not even a minute of orientation and certainly no pointers. Soon I would be shooting the first scene in my first film. I didn’t have the slightest idea who my character was, what the story was about, how to act on camera, or what in the hell I was doing there. I wasn’t ready. I was totally lost and what’s more, I didn’t even have my costume.
A few seconds passed as a mute Mrs. Romanov scrambled off the ladder and angrily shuffled through the clothing on the rack. I came to the awful realization that it was just my first day on the job and I was already causing big problems.
Then the old woman coughed, spit on the ground, roughly signaled for me to follow her, and guided us to another nearby building. Inside was the cubbyhole—more accurately, the closet—that would serve as my dressing room. It would have been small for an ordinary sized man; for me, it was miniscule.
A few minutes later, Blanche Payson, a six-foot-two, two-hundred-pound Amazon who had worked as a police woman in Los Angeles before her stint as an actress at Century, stood in my dressing room. She extended one arm to shake my hand. In the other hand she held a banged-up beige cosmetics case. I recall she had the strongest grip of any woman I’d ever met. As a matter of fact, it was stronger than those of most men I knew.
Blanche explained that Julius had tasked her with giving me a crash course on the basics of donning movie makeup. For the next fifteen awful minutes I was initiated to the mysteries of being vamped. As Papa looked on, Blanche roughly painted thick, white, lead-based greasepaint all over my face. That awful stuff came in paper-wrapped, six-inch-long solid cylinders. The first time she rubbed it on me, it actually hurt. Then Blanche used a toothpick to apply a dab of lip rouge to the inner corner of each of my eyes. After that, she used her pinky finger to carefully apply purple eye shadow. She finished by patting my entire face with white powder. I coughed after inhaling some of that heavily leaded dreadful dust.
By then, Mrs. Romanov had returned with my costume and hung it on a small rack that ran along the rear wall of the dressing room. My first costume consisted of worn dungaree coveralls and a scratchy canvas shirt done in a Scottish Plaid. I was to use my own shoes until the studio could special order some to fit me.
Blanche and Papa stepped out and I changed into the outfit Mrs. Romanov had just delivered. As I dressed, I gazed out of the single source of light in the cramped room. It was a tiny block of smoky glass in the rear wall. I imagined squeezing myself through it and high-tailing it to the Hollywood Hills.
“Hurry it up, princess!” Blanche yelled.
When I came out of the door I was embarrassed for them to see me in costume. The pants looked two sizes too short and the shirt was so small I could barely button it. Papa politely smiled. Blanche wasn’t so kind. She shook her head and snickered.
“Follow me!” she demanded as she lit out down the wooden path. “It’s time to lose your virginity.” Blanche started out at a brisk pace.
Papa didn’t look pleased. We both jogged to keep up. Soon we stood in front of Sound Stage B. Blanche threw the door open with authority and marched in. Papa followed and I brought up the rear, hoping to not be seen.
The massive space was dimly lit
