They Started From Scratch

Auckland Star, Volume LXXI, Issue 153, 29 June 1940, Page 6 (Supplement)

They Started From Scratch

Screen Page

SANDWICHED into the mornins mail, cluttered these days with pitifully earnest letters from determined mothers whose offspringy are glowingly described as "ideal*,* candidates for this or that juvenile role in movies now coming up, is a plaintive note from a department store clerk. She's a very pretty girl, judging by an attached snapshot, and she writes: "I am 19 years old and in high school was considered the best dramatic student in my class. But now that I am nothing but a clerk, I sii|*pose my ambition to become a screen actress is point-

By---

Harold Heffernan

less and impossible. Can you tell me if any film players ever worked behind store counters before getting into pictures?" The answer is that no youngster with ability and courage who aspires to a career in Hollywood need be ashamed of. the fact that he or she works in a store—in a factory, mine, barber shop, savmill or at any other even more menial occupation. If any of these jobs were considered a barrier to success in

the movies a flock of fine-feathered big names wouldn't be decorating theatre marquees and plunging into their awn Beverly swimming pools these fine mornings. Take Dorothy Lamour for example. Before film scouts heard her sing and hustled her into a sarong, she operated an elevator in Chicago. Bing Crosby Bob Hope, Madeleine Carroll, Fred Aetaire, Joan Crawford, Ginger Rogers are half a dozen of probably fifty outstanding "name" players who sold ribbons, hats, groceries or otherwise chunked cash into the money tubes. Clark Gable was a telephone pole climber, a farm hand and eventually rode into Portland, Oregon, in a box car to get his first break in stock. Don't forget that Greta Garbo lathered the faces of male customers in a Stockholm barber shop . . . and that Allan Jones toiled in the Pennsylvania coal fields as a miner before his voice began paying dividends in Hollywood. . . Ellen Drew went straight from a candy counter job into Paramount's stock player ranks, and Arleen Whelan found barber shop manicuring the stepping stone to a tremendous build-up at Twentieth Century-Fox. llona Massey's Rise. Before Ilona Massey's voice turned to gold she was a seamtress in Budapest, and still holds a license to sew there, if and when . . . Rita Johnson, once a waitress in a Worcester, Maes., restaurant, now plays blue-blooded society girls on the screen. . . Frank Morgan peddled brushes house-to-house. John Carroll wielded an acetylene torch in a steel plant, and debonair Robert Montgomery worked bis way into California as an oiler aboard a tramp steamer. A few dozen others have ascended their present high thrones via the wealthy family "gold spoon" route, but on the whole Hollywood's player roster executives, too, for that matter—is composed of boys and girls who have come up the hard way. Take away the ex-store clerks and other lowly starters, and you'd clip a large chunk of box office out of this business J