“There are some things that should never end. But, alas, time catches up with all of us and only memories remain of the wonderful days of our youth, those carefree days when we faced the world with a smile and a wonderment at what might lie ahead in our lives. If you can look back at those days with pleasure mixed, at times, with a little sadness, as I do in this, my seventy-fifth year, your life has not been in vain.”
(Mary Pickford, 1968)
This book has been a labour of love. If any good things can come out of a conflict as terrible as World War Two, I count one of them the privilege I was given, while training in Canada to fly with the Royal Air Force, to visit the paradise then known as Hollywood.
I consider myself very favoured to have met the real stars of Hollywood, the ones who made its name synonymous with all that was good in the world of entertainment. To have lived briefly in the city of glamour, when it really was glamourous, is something I wish I could offer to each of you.
To have had the doors of the biggest names in show business opened to me, and have the studios welcome me in as though I was a “Very Important Person,” is something I look back on with awe, even now, fifty-seven years after my adventure of a lifetime happened.
That I am able to write my memories of so long ago in such detail is because of the help I received from one of Hollywood’s most important names in sound, Douglas Shearer. When he heard me asking so many questions, and saw me trying to scribble notes as fast as my pen would write, he presented me, for the duration of my stay, with one of his inventions, the first wire tape recorder I had ever seen.
Although it weighed more than thirty pounds, I carried it everywhere I went, from studio to studio and house to house. Like me, many of the people I talked to had never seen a wire recorder before, and perhaps for the sheer novelty of using it they talked much more than they originally intended. The wire recorder was rather like today’s reel-to-reel tape recorders except the much larger spools held magnetic coated wire. The microphone, which Douglas Shearer loaned me, added another few pounds to the already weighty machine, but I wouldn’t have left for any appointment without it.
I owe a permanent debt of gratitude to a young secretary at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio. MGM’s boss, Louis B. Mayer, loaned Ann Howard to me. Every night at around eleven, she arrived at the Sidney Olcott and Valentine Grant home in Mayer’s own chauffeur-driven car to collect the reels I had filled with conversation. She took them back to the studio, leaving me new wire reels for next day’s taping.
At the studio she had a duplicate of my machine, and using this she worked through the night transcribing the contents into readable copy on her typewriter. Since my recording continued for eighteen days without a break she too worked for eighteen nights without a break.
I should tell you that she came over from England to the United States around the same time as Elizabeth Taylor, and hoped, at one time, for a career in acting. She had a few parts when she was around fifteen or sixteen, including one in the Prince and the Pauper that looked like it might be her stepping stone to stardom. But for some reason fame never came. A wise mother told her to stop dreaming and find another line of work. Fortunately for me, she did, at MGM. She may not have been a star on the movie screen but she always will be in my heart.
When I returned to Hollywood after the war I renewed my friendship with many of my wartime friends and found the warmth of their hospitality had not waned. I tried to locate Ann Howard, but had no luck. Louis B. Mayer said she had married and moved away, but no one knew her married name or where she had gone. Even an item in the Hollywood Reporter failed to locate her.
It is sad now to think that the only way I had thanked her in 1943 was to buy her a hamburger and coke in the commissary at MGM. This was a poor repayment for a magnificent job that made this book possible.
I have not told in this book all the things my Hollywood friends told me, because some of the stories were too personal, too sad, or too frightening to be put on paper all these years later. And I have omitted the ultimate ending to the Florence La Badie story because, when I finally uncovered it by accident a few years ago, I found the truth very hard to believe and impossible to put into words on paper.
Many other Canadians who were in Hollywood in the creative years deserve to be mentioned, but it is impossible to cover the lives and careers of everyone so many wonderful people had to be omitted. You will find a list of a few of them at the end of the book.
I must mention one in particular, although I met him, not in Hollywood, but fifteen years ago in his beautiful home in North Vancouver. Osmond Borradaile, awarded the Order of Canada some years ago (an honor in which I am happy to say I was involved), was one of the world’s great directors of photography who made permanent history with his work on the Alexander Korda films made in England.
The story of how he earned the Oscar that sat in the window of his study is worth a chapter to itself, but I have left it out because this great Canadian asked to keep the story for the autobiography he was at the time writing. Borradaile started in the early silent studios of Hollywood, sweeping the floors, and rose to the top as one of the greatest cinematographers who ever lived. Sadly, he died in 1999 when he was 100 years young. I don’t believe his autobiography was ever completed.
And so my story ends. Hollywood today is nothing like the Hollywood I knew in 1943. Even the stars who lived in beautiful mansions rarely locked their doors in those days. Bars on windows and regular armed security patrols today testify that many things have changed, unhappily, not for the better!
I hope you have enjoyed joining me for this look at Hollywood when it was the Hollywood we once dreamed about, and I trust it will have given you some small indication of the vital role Canadians played in the early days of motion pictures in both New York and Hollywood.
Charles Foster
145 Leonard Street
Riverview, New Brunswick
Canada E1B 1K7
(506) 386-8749
e-mail retsofcharles@webtv.net