The Property of a Lady - Elizabeth Adler [167]
The only trouble was, they didn’t yet have any boarders and the money had almost run out.
“We must advertise,” Missie said as they glanced worriedly at each other across the dinner table. “We shall get the girls to hand-letter some leaflets and distribute them to the studios.”
They trudged around Hollywood dropping their leaflets in every waiting room at every casting office, and two days later they got their first boarder, a bright fair-haired young man with a pleasant round face and thick glasses. His name was Dick Nevern and he was an aspiring director. He took the smallest single room and paid one month’s cash in advance, peeled, Rosa noted as he handed it to her, from a very small roll of bills.
Because he was their only boarder they decided he might as well eat with the family, and he kept them entertained with stories of his home out on the vast wheat plains of Oklahoma, where life drifted slowly and inevitably from the old red schoolhouse to teenage square dances, to work on the family farm and marriage to the girl next door, to a rocking chair on the porch and dungarees, a wide-brimmed hat, and a straw in the corner of your mouth as you dozed the time away and swatted flies.
“So what makes you think you can be a movie director?” Missie asked.
Dick took off his thick glasses and polished them, peering at her with myopic red-rimmed eyes. “Y’jest learn how to really see things out there on the plains. There’s sumpin’ about all that space, those broad horizons, that stretches the eye, puts everything into perspective, every tree and every object into its rightful place. I’ve rearranged that landscape so many times I reckon it’d be child’s play to do what Mr. Griffith does. It’s characters I’m not too sure about. I haven’t had much truck with strangers….”
“You’ll do just fine,” Missie reassured him. “You’re having no trouble with us.”
“And how long do you give yourself before you become this big director like Mr. Griffith?” Rosa asked, thinking worriedly about her rent.
“Ah’ve given myself exactly three months, that’s ‘bout as long as my money will last.” He finished polishing his glasses, put them back on his blunt nose, and beamed at them. “That’s time enough, don’t y’think?”
Rosa sighed. She could just see the way it was going to be with a rooming house full of young hopefuls with no money. Maybe it hadn’t been such a great idea after all.
Hollywood was swarming with eager young people, and within two weeks Rosemont was able to hang the “No Vacancies” sign on the gate. They had the twins, Lilian and Mary Grant, aged nineteen, blond and beautiful with round blue eyes and long curling hair, accompanied by their mother, Mrs. Winona Grant, all the way from Stamford, Connecticut, who told them her daughters were “just brimming with talent. They’ve learned since the age of six at the local Barrymore School of Mime and Dance.”
Then there was Millie Travers, aged twenty, from Des Moines, with a valise full of old copies of Photoplay and her pretty red head full of dreams; and feisty young Ben Solomon from Newark; New Jersey, who wanted to be a comedian like Harold Lloyd and who had worked his way across the country playing every small club that would have him. There was forty-year-old Marshall Makepiece, who had played Broadway and San Francisco and everywhere in between in his up-and-down acting career and who thought he recognized something familiar about Missie, but he just couldn’t put his finger on it…. And there were Ruth D’Abo, Marie Mulvaine, and Louise Hansen, who were all fully employed as Mack Sennett Bathing Beauties and from whom at least Rosa knew she could be sure of the rent.
The old weatherboard house brimmed with life and youth.