by David Niven
‘Like this?’ I said, looking down.
‘You look fine,’ said Anthony, ‘let’s go—he’s waiting for you.’ By now I was sure I was going to be made to walk the plank.
In the Captain’s dining-room, the Admiral was waiting, a spare, ruddy, typical sailor.
‘Morning, Niven.’
‘Morning sir.’
‘Enjoy yourself last night?’
‘Very much thank you, sir.’
‘Care for a pink gin?’
‘Thank you, sir.’
There I stood in my dinner jacket, wondering, and there half an hour later, I sat having luncheon, still wondering. Small talk, shop talk, Malta talk, Bermuda talk but the subject of my presence never broached. Towards the end of the meal, a signalman knocked and entered. He handed the Admiral a message using the flat white top of his headgear as a tray. ‘H’m,’ said the Admiral, ‘H. M.S. Bounty off the starboard bow…Niven, look out there and see if you can see her, will you?’
I moved to the indicated port-hole wondering if delirium tremens was always so fascinating. I had just finished reading NordhofF and Hall’s brilliant historical novel which Lefty had taken to Bermuda.
Sure enough, I beheld the Bounty with all sails set, moving gently on the Pacific swells. Suddenly, little white puffs of smoke like cotton wool erupted from her side, followed by the champagne cork pops of her cannon. H.M. S. Norfolk slowed to a dead stop. The Bounty came close and I could see her crew wearing pig-tails and striped stockings, then victory cheers floated across the water. I turned towards the Admiral and Anthony and they both burst out laughing. ‘This is where you get off, young man,’ said the Admiral.
As he led me on deck, Anthony explained that the great Metro Goldwyn Mayer producer, Irving Thalberg, was about to make a film of Mutiny on the Bounty. A complete replica of the original eighteenth-century warship had been built and now, as a publicity stunt for the promotion of the picture, a meeting with its modern counterpart had been arranged in the Catalina Channel.
A rope ladder was dropped over the side and, an incongruous figure in my dinner jacket and cheered on by Anthony and a large number of the ship’s company, I clambered nervously down on to the deck of the press tender which had materialised alongside.
Several of today’s Hollywood Press Corps, including Jimmy Starr of the Los Angeles Herald Express and Bill Mooring of Tidings, witnessed my arrival and I got the reputation of being the first man to crash Hollywood in a battleship.
Also on the tender were Frank Lloyd, the director of the picture, and Robert Montgomery, one of the reigning Hollywood stars. Clark Gable and Charles Laughton who were to make the film as Fletcher Christian and Captain Bligh were not present. Bob Montgomery had come along for the ride. The camera crews, the press, Frank Lloyd and Montgomery were most hospitable to, their unexpected charge and as Norfolk gathered speed and resumed her course south, I was carried unprotesting for the second time in about three weeks to the port of San Pedro.
Montgomery had a new sports Bentley—very impressive for me to see this beautiful machine so far from home and very helpful to me when he offered me a lift to M.G.M. studios, which lay some hundred miles north. We arrived at about seven o’clock just as the day’s work was coming to an end. The departing crowds of extras stood, respectfully, aside as Montgomery was saluted through the main gate by the studios’ police. Frank Lloyd offered me a drink in his office and there I met another great director of the day, Edmund Goulding.
Goulding had lately completed the epic Grand Hotel with Garbo, John Barrymore, Joan Crawford, Wallace Beery and a host of other great names as his stars. He was about to start a film with Ruth Chatterton. Goulding was about five feet ten of square stocky build, sandy hair and a broken nose spread halfway across his face. About forty, a man of enduring charm, I owe more to him than to anyone else in the business.
Goulding was wearing the Goulding uniform—sweat shirt, silk handkerchief round his neck, a blue blazer and white slacks turned up at the bottoms displaying highly polished loafers. He laughed with a deep rumble when he heard from Frank Lloyd about my arrival on Norfolk.
‘Ever done any acting?’ he asked.
‘None to speak of.’
‘Good. I’m looking for a new face to play the drunken, dissolute, younger brother of Chatterton. Will you make a test for me tomorrow?’
I thought it better with this wonderful opportunity being dangled before me to leave nothing unsaid that ought to be said so I told him about my abortive trip to Central Casting a few days before. ‘No problem,’ said Goulding, ‘you don’t need any to make a test…if it works out, the studio will arrange it.’
‘What do I have to do?’
‘Just be yourself…Harry Bouquet, the test director, will make it—he’ll give you something easy to do.’ Goulding then invited me to his home for dinner. He was married to the famous dancer, Marjorie Moss. Even then she was dying. Goulding knew, she didn’t.
After dinner when I made a move to go home, Goulding and Marjorie would have none of it.
‘Why?’ they asked.
‘To sleep, shave and change.’
‘You can sleep and shave here,’ said Goulding, ‘but I want that test made exactly as you are now—in that dinner jacket.’
The next morning at 8.30 AM I presented myself to Harry Bouquet on stage 29. I had been painted a strange yellow ochre by Bill Tuttle in the make-up department and my eyes and lips were made up like a Piccadilly tart—I felt ridiculous.
Harry Bouquet, a frustrated man, was in a hurry. ‘Christ,’ he said, ‘I’ve got six of these goddamned things to get through by lunch time; waddaya gonna do?’
‘Mr. Goulding said you’d give me something easy,’ I said.
‘Jesus! nothing’s easy in this business! Okay, stand over by that table while they light you.’
The set was decorated as a New York apartment. Under the bright lights I could vaguely make out the outlines of the camera and about forty people. A man with evil-smelling fingers stuck a light meter immediately beneath my nose.
‘Light ‘em all,’ came a voice from the camera—‘Okay, Harry, let’s go.’
Bouquet loomed out of the shadows.
‘Okay now, start off facing the camera, then turn slowly when I tell you—wait a beat at each profile. Then wind up facing the camera again, got it?’
‘Yes sir.’
‘Turn’em over.’
I stood blinded by the lights and stared in the direction of the camera like a dog watching a snake.
‘Turn slowly,’ said Bouquet, ‘hold the profile, goddammit . Okay, now hold the full face…try to come alive for Chrissake…tell us a funny story.’
Out of my panic and my subconscious came a very old school boy limerick. I recited it.
There once was an old man of Leeds
Who swallowed a packet of seeds,
Great tufts of grass
Shot out of his arse
And his cock was covered in weeds.
‘Cut!!!’
Bouquet loomed up again. ‘Whattayou trying to do for Chrissake! Get me fired? Everyone sees these things…L. M. Mayer…Mannix, the whole bunch.’
He softened and smiled, ‘Okay, kid, now relax, we’ll pick it up from there…think of some little story. When you’re ready tell me and we’ll shoot it…clean it up though willya.’
Finally I recounted a story that had happened to Tommy Phipps when he first went into an automat. Not knowing how it worked, he put five cents in the slot machine for a cup of coffee and collected a jet of hot fluid in the fly buttons. Later somebody ate his sandwich and somebody else dunked their doughnut in the coffee he had finally managed to collect in a cup.
I had laughed when Tommy told it and there was, I thought, quite a gratifying reaction when I had finished this homely little tale. The next day, Goulding called me and told me to meet him at his office. ‘That test was really pretty bad—apart from the natural bit when you told the limerick. Except for that
you were all frozen up. You won’t get the part this time…L.B. wants Louis Hayward anyway…but I think you can make it and I’m going to help you. I’ll be through with my picture in about twelve weeks, till that’s over I can do nothing—call me in three months and we’ll see what can be done.’
A1 Hall was Mae West’s director and she was about to start a picture at Paramount—Going to Town. Goulding told Hall about me. Hall got hold of my test and a week later I got a call from the Paramount Casting Office. Mae West would like to interview me as her possible leading man.
I was welcomed at Paramount almost with eagerness. Anybody Mae West might want, they might want too, so before I was even seen by Miss West, I found myself being asked if I would be interested in a seven-year contract with options. Did I have a work permit?—‘No.’—‘Never mind, we can fix that.’ I was ushered into a huge office and seated behind a Mussolini-type desk was a small round platinum blonde woman flanked on one side by a large American-Irish manager, and on the other by the diminutive AI Hall. She never spoke. The men asked various questions. Then, after a whispered conversation Al Hall said, ‘Would you mind taking off your coat? And your shirt?’
‘Now turn around, please.’
More whispers, then the manager spoke.
‘Who is your agent?’
‘I don’t have one.’
Incredulous looks were passed.
‘We’d like to see you again. Please be sure that Casting knows where you are.’
The men rose and shook hands cordially, Mae West said nothing.
The next day, I had an urgent call from the Paramount Casting Office. I also had a visitor. A pale-faced man in a dark suit was waiting for me in the hotel lobby.
‘I’m from United States Immigration Service, Mr. Niven. Now let me see…’ He had some documents, ‘you arrived in San Pedro four weeks ago. You asked for and were granted a ten days’ visitors’ visa. You are, therefore, now in this country illegally. We also understand you are contemplating signing an employment contract with a U.S. firm, so you are about to break the law on a second count.’
‘What do I do?’ I asked.
He was a kind man but a tired one. He must have been through this a thousand times. His voice was weary.
‘You have twenty-four hours to be off United States territory—you understand that don’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then sign this.’
I glanced at a mimeographed slip, it was a statement admitting that I had been told to leave and that I understood the dire penalties involved if I did not comply.
‘Where the hell do I go?’
‘That’s your problem, son. If you want to work in this country you must get a Resident Alien Visa. So long now.’
A1 Weingand advised me and that afternoon I boarded a train that clanked and bumped for hours through a sandstorm to the border post of Calexico. There I left the United States and walked on foot into Mexico.
Mexicali may be a thriving metropolis by now. I hope it is, for its own sake. In late 1934, it was the most awful dump I had ever seen. A single dirt road ran through the centre of the small township and petered out at each end into dry brown hills. In the centre of the town there was one dilapidated hotel, a few broken-down lodging houses, a grocery store that must have been the official breeding ground for all the flies in Northern Mexico and one small clean-looking house, the American Consulate. The American Consul was a busy man, mostly because he had to cope with the problems and grievances of the sad daily flow of underpaid Mexicans who crossed the border to be driven in stinking buses to work crippling hours picking fruit, cotton and vegetables in the Imperial Valley.
He advised me kindly that he would be able to arrange a visa for the as a Resident Alien in the U.S. but first I must produce my birth certificate and a copy of my police record from Scotland Yard.
I took a room for a dollar a night in a loathsome lodging house and sent my sister Grizel a cable—
SEND BIRTH CERTIFICATE IMMEDIATELY.
She got the cable two weeks later when she returned from a trip to Spain. She did not distinguish herself by her reply—
WHOSE BIRTH CERTIFICATE?
I really had to sweat it out—there was little transatlantic air mail in those days. The mail service in Mexicali via Mexico City must have gone by donkey. My little pile of money was dwindling alarmingly but many Americans came to Mexicali to hunt quail and other game in the surrounding brown hills. I became the ‘gun man’ in the only moderately clean bar in the town and in exchange for chili or tortillas, I cleaned and polished the guns while their owners drank and boasted. Sometimes I was given a tip. I never refused.
It was just after New Year’s Day 1935 when I triumphantly presented myself at the U.S. Border at Calexico, in my hand was my Resident Alien Visa—my permit to work.
I jumped trucks back to Los Angeles. A1 Weingand let me have my old room back and manfully swallowed the difficulties of payment.
I telephoned Goulding, but he had finished his picture and gone to New York. Mae West, I learned, was halfway through her picture with an unknown English actor called Paul Cavanagh playing opposite her.
I visited Central Casting and after an agonising wait of several days, was finally accepted and enrolled as ‘AngloSaxon Type N° 2008’.
Such was the efficiency of Central Casting that the first call I got to work as a professional actor, was as a Mexican.
Los Angeles is one of the largest cities in area in the world. The film studios are mostly strategically placed in far away suburbs miles from its centre. Universal Studios is in the San Fernando Valley. I was told to be there at 5 AM The Auburn broke down the night before so .1 started a zig-zag journey across the city by street car at 3 o’clock.
Once at the studios, I was handed a chit through a small window and instructed to report to wardrobe. There, I waited in line, showed my chit which was stamped, and was issued with a baggy white suit, a large sombrero, some sandals and a blanket.
I changed in a huge barn-like dressing room. Other ‘Mexicans’ were putting on their outfits. ‘Indians’ were also preparing themselves and honest townsfolk were getting into tailcoats, top hats and bowlers. The women ‘extras’ were dressing in an adjacent barn.
I followed my fellow ‘Mexicans’ to the make-up department and once more stood in line. While those, including myself, who had fair skins were sprayed with a brown mixture from a spray gun, on some of us they glued moustaches. The ‘Indians’ lined up opposite were being similarly treated all over their bodies with a reddish colour. Somewhere the Chinese were getting it in yellow.
There was not much happy chatter, I noticed.
At six-thirty, we were all marshalled by an assistant director and loaded into buses for a one hour drive to a remote movie ranch where the permanent Western town had been erected, there we were positioned by other assistants and told when to move slowly, when to scatter in alarm, etc., etc. The cowboy star, whoever he was, appeared and at eight o’clock sharp shooting started. The director’s name was Aubrey Scotto. He did not bother with us, we were pushed around all day by a harassed assistant.
At one o’clock we were given a cardboard box and told we had half an hour to eat. The contents consisted of a piece of chicken fried in batter, some cookies, an orange and a small carton of milk. After lunch we resumed shooting till the sun became too low and its light too feeble to continue. There had been a lot of pushing and pulling by the extras during the filming of the last scene, it being essential to be ‘established’ so that you would automatically be called back the following day.
Back at the studios, I waited my turn to wash the make-up off in a basin. When I handed in my moustache and clothing, my chit was stamped again—then a last long wait at the cashier’s office to present my chit and be paid.
I was lucky enough to get a lift back to Hollywood from a group who had lived there but even so it was ten o’clock before I sat down on a stool in the drugstore for the ‘50 cents Blue Sp
ecial’. My salary for my first day as a professional actor amounted to two dollars and fifty cents. My fellow extras, I discovered during the next few weeks, fell into two distinct categories. There were the professional ‘crowd artistes’ and the actors who were ‘would-be stars’.
The professionals were content to remain extras. They had no acting ambitions. They worked all the angles and were not above slipping a percentage of their daily’ salaries to unscrupulous assistant directors to guarantee being ‘called’ next day. Among these ‘professionals’, could be counted the specialists such as the mounted extras, who worked almost exclusively in Westerns, and the Dress Extras. This last named group were much more highly paid, getting as much as twenty dollars a day because they provided their own modern wardrobe for every occasion, including evening dress for the women, white tie and tails for the men, beach outfits, city outfits, and the correct clothes for race meetings, football games, fox hunting and graduation days.
The acknowledged leaders of the professional Dress Extras were two elderly English people, Mrs Wicks and a whitemoustached ex-Indian Army man known as ‘the Major’.
This couple were in great demand, lending dignity and refinement to the drabbest pictures. They had their own little coterie of friends and, sitting in full evening dress, they all played bridge together from morning to night.
There were a few younger professional Dress Extras also totally devoid of acting ambition and perfectly content to put on their smart clothes and work two or three days a week. Stuart Hall was one of these. Born in Cyprus, he had been brought to California as a child and had drifted into the movies. Stuart was a striking looking man of my age. He was constantly being offered small speaking parts: he always refused them.
I did not have the finances to set myself up as a Dress Extra but Stuart became a good friend and if we were called to the same studio, he always gave me a lift.
