not for me. I started out earning forty dollars a week. Soon they raised me to seventy-five dollars a week. That was a good wage for a kid who was barely seventeen. But it didn’t make me rich and they made me earn every penny.
By the time we wrapped that first day and I’d scrubbed the greasepaint off my face and changed back to my own clothes, it was past eight o’clock. Let me tell you, getting that makeup off was a royal pain. In all my time in Hollywood, I never got used to the theatrical cold cream we had to use for that chore. It got so I would dread the sight of the big blue cans of that foul-smelling goo.
That night after work, I was a new kind of tired. I was sore. I mean I was bruised in places I didn’t know I had places. In retrospect, being so drained was a very good thing; a gift. When we got back to the apartment, I was so French-fried that I fell fast asleep before supper and before I could dre a kopf (worry) about my parents’ departure the next morning.
CHAPTER 7
Musso and Frank
Bang, bang, bang.
A jackhammer pounding on the apartment door woke me at five thirty a.m. “Wake up, Jake,” I heard Mrs. Scheiner, the landlady, holler. “It’s time to get ready for arbeiten.”
I struggled to lift my hundred-pound eyelids. When I finally did, I felt like Hap Arnold flying in thick Atlantic fog. But I had no instruments, no plane, not even a damned map to guide me. When I rolled out of bed, it hit me hard: I was alone.
An hour before, without making a sound, Mama and Papa had left for the train station. Lunatic-frantic, I searched the apartment for any traces of my parents: a piece of clothing in the closet, a suitcase under the bed, even a smell. I knew that they were going. We had talked about it since we arrived in town. We had already discussed the rent being paid for the next two months, about me writing to them and my brothers weekly, and how I would take a trip home in December for Myer’s Bar Mitzvah.
But those memories didn’t soothe or even stop my rush to find clues of their departure. It made no sense, but still I searched. It was as if I believed that if I could figure out exactly where, how, and when they disappeared into the darkness, maybe I could will them back. But they were gone. The only evidence I found of them ever having been there was a note in my father’s handwriting and a twenty-dollar bill they left for me on the little table in the kitchenette.
Dear Jakey,
Be a good boy!
We love you,
Mama and Papa
P.S. Remember, a good name is worth more than gold.
I had never felt so alone. Luckily, my parents had raised me with a strong sense of responsibility and commitment. I’m sure you can tell from the little I’ve already shared that responsibility and commitment have always been both my anchor and my sail; they keep me stuck or they get me moving. That morning it was the latter.
Within a few minutes, I was dressed and out the door. A moment later I was back in my room. I had forgotten my sweater; I promised Mama I would take in case it got chilly.
XXXX
By Thursday night, the end of my first week in Hollywood, I was banged, bruised, and bumped, but I had finished my first movie, A Corn-Fed Sleuth, the tale of a hayseed who came to the big city to seek fame and fortune. You might say it was autobiographical.
What I remember most about that memorable week happened late on Friday afternoon. Archie, Century’s PR man, had just finished shooting some publicity pictures of me when I felt a tug on my pants leg. It was Kitty. Over the past week, my initial harsh judgment of her had begun to change.
“Hiya, kid. How was your first week in pictures?” she asked.
“Okay, I guess. I hope Mr. Stern, Fishbach, and the other fellows on the crew liked my work,” I said, searching for a compliment or some morsel of approval.
You see, all week long I did the gags the gagmen wrote and followed the director’s instructions. I even did most of my scenes in one take, but nobody told me I did a good job, much less complimented me. Over that week, and during my first year in Hollywood, seeking the approval of others was a constant.
“Come with me. I wanna show you something,” Kitty said as she stepped out of my dressing room and onto the wooden path.
She waddled at such a brisk pace that I almost had to run to keep up with her. After a few minutes, we stood in front of a bungalow on the other side of the lot that I had not noticed before. Kitty and I entered, walked to the back of the building, and descended a flight of rickety stairs. The dimly lit, Tampa-Jewel-smoke-filled basement served as Century’s projection room. It had two rows of empty chairs, behind which stood a non-descript man next to a card table that supported a small, hand-cranked movie projector. I thought I recognized Fishbach and Goulding with their backs to us sitting in the second row.
“Is that who I think it is?” I whispered. Kitty nodded.
“Roll it, Roland.” Goulding ordered.
The scratchy numbers four, three, two, one appeared on the screen, followed by the title, A Corn-Fed Sleuth. Over the next twenty minutes, for the first time ever, I watched myself on film. From the opening scene where my tiny mother paddled me, to the final shot when I returned the stolen loot, I was riveted. Not so much by the story, but more—much more—by my image.
There was something other-worldly about seeing yourself projected on a small screen in a darkened room. I wondered what it would be like to see that image on a huge, bigger-than-life screen in a real movie house. I couldn’t wait for my friends and family to get a load of this.
I was also captivated by seeing the other players react to me. That was a first. In my seventeen years of life I’d never before thought of others responding to me. I was always reacting to everyone else, trying to wedge myself into their lilliputian world, a place I didn’t fit.
When the scene of me squeezing myself through the hotel door lintels played, Roland, the man operating the projector, laughed out loud. I noticed that Kitty giggled, too. I was too green to understand why, but I liked how that made me feel.
Later, I would come to appreciate what I enjoyed so much about acting in flickers. Even though they were just slapstick comedies, they gave me the power to connect with and impact others.
Something else, something very strange—and another first for me—happened as I watched that footage. Ever since I was seven, when I met someone or encountered a new group, I automatically focused on how different I was than everyone else. Watching me painted onto that silent film screen with the other actors, I recognized, if just for twenty minutes of gags, how much I was like the others, just taller. I got the chills as the screen went black and the movie ended.
Flap, slap, flap, slap, flap, slap. I heard the percussive sound of celluloid popping against a metal movie reel, a noise that would become more and more familiar. Roland stopped winding the projector and switched on the lights. Other studios were using projectors powered by electricity, but because Julius Stern was such a skinflint, we still used an old-fashioned version at Century. By then, Fishbach and Goulding had stood up, turned around, and approached us.
Goulding
