Mother and Brat
By GORDON KAHN
THE solemn moment had come for the enthronement of “Little Miss America” and “The All-American Boy.” Crowned with full Druidic rites, and liturgy as ordained by the Screen Children’s Guild, they were to reign, sultan and sultana of juvenile filmdom.
The sun beamed inclemently upon Hollywood Bowl.
The candy-butchers had sold the last of their goodies, tasties, and indigesties, and the 7-Up countermarched in a thousand slaked throats.
Just as the selected cherubim were made manifest, before the coronation, a mighty hosanna went up from the spectators— “Fake!”
Only two matrons of the hundreds present at this saturnalia were smug and aggressively silent. These were, naturally, the queen mothers. But no matter on which two cubs the purple had descended, the identical brouhaha would have detonated on Cahuenga Pass.
For these are movie mamas, a species that roams the studio casting offices, artists’ agencies, broadcasting and television stations. At eight o’clock in the morning they squat on apple boxes in front of theaters where premières are scheduled for 9.00 p.m. They know the private telephone numbers of most of the film directors in Hollywood and of all the assistant directors. And when herds of movie mamas gather at the salt licks in Culver City or Fox Hills they make gentle, lowing sounds like, “Saw Cary — Barbara — moo—Beverly Hills Brown Derby — moo — my hairdresser — same as —moo — Claudette Colbert—moo — Olivia — upswept hairdo — Ronald — moo — Romanoff’s — moo — cute — terrific-mooo.”
The genus movie mama has a thick hide like an alligator’s, the sharp eye of a condor, and is a mammal. It is gregarious, and when calling to others it makes the shrill skirl of a magpie. Its habitat is principally the Northern Continent, and it is believed to have originated in Southern California, where a prehistoric specimen was recovered in the La Brea Pits, well-preserved, holding a scrapbook of clippings in its mandibles.
Dam and young browse together, but the weanlings of different mothers are kept carefully apart for fear they will steal each other’s stuff. The movie mama breeds but once — in rare instances twice and frequently separates from its mate as soon as its young has learned to tap dance and simulate Betty Grable or Fred Astaire. Some years ago it was Greta Garbo, then Mae West. More recently it was Sonja Henie. During that epoch proprietors of ice-skating rinks grew fat and rich, and orthopedic surgeons repaired sprained pasterns and collapsed ankles in the hundreds.
This is the fourth in a series about Hollywood which GORDON KAHN is writing for the Atlantic from an observation post in the midst of the movie capital.
The mama early settles down to regulate the life of its get in every particular, sublimely ignorant of the fact that it will some day turn on her. Lacking its mother’s anthropophagous malignity, the young is satisfied with banishing her to a hotel called the Poinsettia Villa and Bungalows, there to end her days knitting snoods, backbiting the other exiled movie mamas, and keening in her rocker — bitter but well-fed.
Happy is the mama with twins, because they get social security numbers while they’re still in diapers and are forthwith farmed out to work in pictures.
Since there is a state law prohibiting the continuous appearance before the camera of an infant for more than a few minutes, little Cotton Mather goes into the breach while Poindexter cools off, and at the end of the day there is fat check for mama at the pay window.
Until another law was passed, mama could appropriate this check and every other that her tyke earned. Now she is obliged to account for the money at regular intervals until the little provider comes to legal maturity. Independence may demonstrate itself earlier, depending on the size of the adolescent’s allowance of pocket-ivy or its social precocity.
Actual dominance ends when the sprout acquires a hopped-up Ford and has plotted a flight-plan for his first rendezvous. He suddenly stops calling his mother by her first name, and informs her, “Going out tonight, Ma. Not with you, so don’t reach for that fascinator. It’s me and that chick from Del Rey. We’re going down to the Palladium and tear off a hunk of Bokhara. And one thing more: it’s her from now on!”
At this stage there will be a flood of tears and a fugue of majestic wails on the theme of “Ohhhh, my bay-bee!” If the adolescent weakens there, he is doomed. One superannuated boy-actor came within a hairline of ruin. Under the claws of his afreet of a mother he was for a time the only childplayer with Lord Fauntleroy curls and a speaking voice of baritone resonance. The youth was sappy with love, but mama refused consent to her darling boy’s marriage. So tight was her rein that he had forgotten he was already thirty-two years old and needed nobody’s consent except that of his Dulcibella. But at last the veteran boy primed himself with two stiff Cuba Libres, went home, and sent the old gargoyle packing, hag and baggage. He married soon afterward and lived happily with his bride for three long years.
Being a movie mama is not a hobby but a fulltime job. The day begins with the reading of the trade publications to see what productions are being cast and what pictures are contemplated. If her child is a registered performer, the call for its services will come by telephone. Her instrument has a thirty-foot cord and she takes it everywhere with her but shopping. She not only reads the trade publications, but she studies them like a horse-player with a Racing Form. She reads that a studio three months hence will make a musical film drama tracing the history of the ballad “Down Where the Wurzburger Flows,” and there will be a part in it for a child who washes beer seidels in the brewmaster’s home and is beaten because she can’t read the mottoes on the rims. Mama hotfoots out in a fine surge of power to snare that role for Lambie LaTouche — her own Lambie.
When Lambie isn’t working, mama mustn’t forget the weekly visit to the State Unemployment Bureau, where the child is required to affirm solemnly that she earned no money during the past week in order to be eligible for her unemployment insurance check.
Lambie’s meals are usually taken at chain drugstore fountains, pieced out with vitamin tablets. Lambie’s wardrobe is much more important. Mama regards with dismay that last spring’s dress is all out of hem and can’t be lengthened. Lambie is growing. Actually expanding to gawkiness. Mama chokes back a sob. Perhaps, she muses, the next time Lambie is called on an interview she’d better carry a pet of some sort. A kitten maybe — or a marmoset would be better. Something cute. Cuteness is the alpha and omega.
Then there is the tap dancing lesson. It’s time to perfect Lambie in a new routine of steps. Every chowderheaded kid on the set in the last picture knew the very routine which mama thought she was getting exclusively from the teacher for her own Lambie. After that there is the singing lesson since Lambie, after all, is billed as a “personality blues singer” on the souvenir blotters that mama had printed.
One studio is attempting now to introduce a new class of child performer to the films. The announcement of the enterprise states that the troupe of youngsters will be called “Lillipurties" and hastens to explain that the word designates the whelps as l’il and purty.
Movie mama is always fighting with the agent who represents her child. Unless the harried representative can keep the boy or girl in continuous bondage, or secure a long-term contract for it, mama herself goes to bat. If a call is for barefoot boys and girls with checks of tan, mama will take her young down to the beach and have it bombarded with actinic rays so that it will freckle. She will rumple its hair, muddy its clothes, and do everything but kick its front teeth out if the Dead End gamin effect is needed.
Directors and production authorities at studios agree that where groups of movie mamas are on a sound stage, their interminable gin-rummy games are a nuisance; but there is no way of barring them when large groups of children are used in a picture. Their gabble affronts the rhythm of sensitive actors, and they are constantly nagging and heckling their own kids. It is often necessary to appoint one of the assistant directors as mom-herder to keep the frolicsome hags quiet when shooting is in progress.
The current official directory of players most often consulted by casting directors lists more than a hundred child performers. These are the vested ones who have already worked in one or more motion pictures. Each child’s listing bears a picture and a brief account of its accomplishments. The skills possessed, or claimed for them, include everything but moose-calling and electro-chemistry. They are, in addition to the essential tap and ballet dancers, skilled fencers, equestrians, calf-ropers, Aeolian harpists, and holders of Red Cross lifesaving certificates.
Only one, a six-yearold, is listed as merely “ alert and obedient,” and he’s the boy for me.
