Hollywood Unknowns: A History of Extras, Bit Players, and Stand-Ins

Chapter Five: The Port of Missing Girls

82 ш Chapter Five THE PORT OF MISSING GIRLS In the March 1927 issue of Photoplay, Adela Rogers St. Johns published the first of six short stories bearing the overall title“The Port of Missing Girls.”1 Each story features a different girl with a dream of a Hollywood career, to which all are attracted “like flies drawn to a honey pot.”2 The first, Greta, is a farm girl who comes to Hollywood, becomes pregnant by a married man, and loses the child at its birth. The weight she gains during pregnancy makes it difficult to obtain work as an extra, but she is hired as a member of a poverty row company filming in Tulare. There she meets a local farmer, and, inevitably, falls in love with him, realizing that life on the farm is better than life in Hollywood.“And then she turned suddenly to kiss him. It was Greta’s first kiss. Oh, she had been kissed before. She had lain acquiescent before love. But it was the first time she had ever kissed a man.”3 Great literature it is not, but the author assures the reader—perhaps in apology for the melodramatics of the storyline—that “The only thing untrue about this story is the girl’s name.”4 In addition to the Adela Rogers St. Johns series, there were others stories about Hollywood dreams, most notably Margaret E. Sangster’s “The Stars That Never Were,” published in Photoplay from August through December 1928. In Sangster’s tales, the leading characters are both female and male. (In reality, calls for male extras in the 1920s and beyond generally outnumbered calls for women by two or three to one.) In general, fictional works concerning Hollywood extras adhered to a theme enunciated by John Parris Springer:“For the extra, as for the star, the drive to work in films and to pursue a career in Hollywood had to be punished.”5 To a large extent, writings such as these advanced the notion that women should be made to suffer for pursuing independence rather than the respectability and controlled environment that marriage would bring. The naivety of the innocent, foolish, and even narcissistic women coming to Hollywood to pursue a career they hoped would begin with a life as an extra and end in the fabled glamor of T H E P O R T O F M I S S I N G G I R L S / 83 stardom was caught by Norman Rockwell in an illustration that appeared in the July 1930 edition of Ladies Home Journal. Titled “Hollywood Dreams,” the painting shows a young innocent girl seated beside an elderly couple outside a casting office bearing a sign that announces:“Closed.” In the 1929 novel Extra-Girl, Stella G. S. Perry’s heroine, Odile Vaure, is a beauty contest winner from Louisiana who comes to Hollywood in search of a career. Her experience of Hollywood involves one of her friends being raped, while another moves in with a male extra and becomes pregnant, and yet another becomes a drug addict and commits suicide. The reality of the Hollywood extra’s desperation is vividly portrayed by a young mother, who takes her sick child with her rather than miss a casting call. Eventually, the Adela Rogers St. Johns. 84 / T H E P O R T O F M I S S I N G G I R L S heroine, like so many in the fiction of the day, rejects Hollywood and what it represents, instead settling down to a life of domesticity as a happy wife and mother. She will live in “the other Hollywood . . . where the real houses are. And the little real hopes.And the little real people.”As John Parris Springer notes,“The book’s culturally conservative admonition was for young women to stay home, get married, and have children rather than pursue an ideal image of themselves as rich, glamorous, and beautiful—an image that was shaped by fan magazines and movies and by powerful but illusory cultural myths about Hollywood.”6 Reckless Hollywood, published in 1932, is credited to Haynes Lubou, the pseudonym of an unidentified female writer. Its central character, Petty Love, is introduced on the set of a film directed by the dictatorial and abusive R. B. De Lacey, a thinly veiled version of Cecil B. DeMille. Her next...