The Star Maker

You undoubtedly remember Hollywood's sexsational early years and perhaps you've been struck, a time or two, by the contrast between them and the film capital's present-day morality. Maybe you've blamed all the censorship and prudery on Will Hays or the Legion of Decency, or just accepted the talk about the industry having "come of age." This is the little known story of the man actually responsible for both the sinful cinema of that twenties and the holy Hollywood that followed.

We shall call him Jeter ..... You would recognize his real name instantly. He is a tradition in Hollywood -- as fabulous as the fabulous city itself.

Even Jeter's birth was colossal. He was one of a set of bastard quadruplets born during the San Francisco earthquake. Due to a natural deficiency, his mother was able to suckle only two of the four children. She had to hire a she-goat (there was a shortage of wet nurses at the time) to take care of Jeter and her other son. Several goats quit under fire. Both boys were lusty youths and over demanding.

"Ah swear to John," Mammy, their colored servant said. "These is the onliest chillun ah ever saw that was fit to gag a goat."

Jeter early showed a tendency toward precociousness. When he was just under four years old he sauntered back into the kitchen one afternoon, and shortly thereafter the cook fled screaming without bothering to pack. This was the first abrupt resignation by a succession of cooks. Indeed, household help became a real problem for Jeter's family, and service charges at the employment bureau were just under the whisky bills in point of size.

"I declare," said Jeter's mother one afternoon, in desperation, "I just don't hardly see how we can ask anybody to come work for us any more. I can whip the other children, but there is just nothing to do about Jeter. I think that boy's got too many glands. Like his pa."

"His pa never had that many glands," the colored Mammy grumbled. "There just ain't that many glands. Dis de onliest chile ah ever knew got throwed out of kindergarten for goosin' his teacher. What you gonna do with a chile like that?"

"I don't know," his mother said, "but I've simply got to get away from it all. Maybe if we take a trip around the world this thing will straighten itself out while we're gone."

"You is the most careless mother ah ever knowed," Mammy complained as she started to pack. "Where we gonna leave the young'uns?"

"Groton," mother said, already thinking about the Nile under a full moon.

Jeter didn't take to Groton. For one thing, it was full of nothing but boys, and Jeter was uninterested in boys. He was a girl fancier all the way. He was expelled at the age of six for conducting a flagrant affair with the wife of the headmaster. They ran away together and were apprehended by police in a shoddy tourist court.

"I don't care what you say," the headmaster's wife told reporters, "Jeter is only a boy in years, but he's the kind of man all women dream about and never find. If it were all to do over I would do it again."

"Will you return to your husband?" the reporters asked.

"Him?" the headmaster's wife replied. "After Jeter?!"

Jeter refused to talk to reporters. That is, he refused to talk until exposed to what was called, at the time, a sob sister. She was a girl in her middle twenties, blonde, and not unpleasingly constructed. She left Jeter's presence with an exclusive story which she never wrote. Also her eyes were filled with stars.

Jeter continued to be a problem child. He would not join the Boy Scouts. He joined the Girl Scouts. This caused talk in the community. It did not seem fitting that Jeter should attempt to create fire by rubbing two Girl Scouts together. That it pleased the girls, who giggled, was not a case in point. Their parents complained.

Jeter early experienced a series of misadventures that would have grayed the hair of a vastly older man. He came out of a flaming hayrick, minus his hair and eyebrows, when only a youth, because the town's leading banker suspected ill of Jeter's relationship with his (the banker's) wife, and snidely touched a torch to the haystack in which Jeter and the lady in question were studying Jeter's lessons.

"They say a burnt child dreads the fire," Jeter remarked to the press, which now accompanied him even on so simple an expedition as a trip to the zoo. "Why? I was raised with my brother Pete, who has been setting fire to everything he could touch since he was a baby. So I got no eyebrows? I got memories. I also got credit at the bank. Credit at the bank is a thing you cannot oversell. So maybe old man Foreclose suspects I was up to no good with his bride. I know the gal; I know the man. When I need credit, I'll get credit. She'll see to it. A certain amount of scorching comes out of any relationship with a woman. I knew that when I was five. But you can always use early experience to good advantage.

"Mom was a philosopher too," Jeter explained. "She had everything worked out in her head, and what she couldn't handle with her head, she could handle otherwise."

Jeter got into a series of scrapes after the incident of the banker's wife. There was the preacher's-wife episode, which created a horrid contretemps. There was the wife of the head of the local Building and Loan. There was the wife of the boss of the Red Cross, and the wife of the head of the Community Chest, and the wife of the high school principal, and the wife of the mayor. His involvement with the wife of the mayor was brought to a boil when the opposition political party made an issue out of it and got the mayor chucked out of office by pointing out simply that any official who could be cuckolded by a callow youth was unfit for office on the basis of naivete alone, and could not possibly be fattening his party's coffers by making the right deals with the underworld.

This was called, at that time, political logic: any mayor so stupid as to be honest was a bad man for the party, and had to go.

The dismissing of the mayor put Jeter in a fairly bad light. He had only to go to Nedick's for a double malted to arouse a heated controversy in the press. His life was made insupportable by reporters, who hounded him even to the barbershop for his first shave. Any woman so indiscreet as to pass the time of day with Jeter was a marked woman from that time on.

Jeter had a genius, of a sort. He thought clearly and was able to reduce the facts of life to a simple function. His colored mammy, who was interested in spiritualism and such, became fascinated with the new profession of psychiatry. And once she subjected Jeter to a free-association test.

"Set down, boy," Mammy said. "Ah wants to ask you some questions, and Ah wants you to glimmer the answers just like they pops into yo' haid. Don't think, rosebud. Just talk."

"Okay, Mammy," Jeter replied. "Shoot me the jive."

"What kinda talk is dat?" Mammy asked suspiciously, adjusting the false spade beard she wore at all seances.

"I dunno," Jeter said. "Words just keep poppin' into my head. I make 'em up as I go along."

"Well, boy, don't make up no more," Mammy said. "Ah ain't long for this world and ah doesn't crave to learn no new languages. Now you pay attention to what ah say. When ah asks you a question, you tell me what you thinks when the word hits yo' haid. Heah we go:

"Declaration of Independence," Mammy said.

"Dames," said Jeter promptly.

"Games?"

"Dames," Jeter said.

"Algebra?"

"Women."

"President Wilson?"

"Girls."

"How 'bout money?" Mammy asked.

"Ladies," Jeter replied.

"Work?"

"Broads."

"What a broad is?" Mammy asked, again suspiciously.

"It's a word I just made up for females," Jeter said. "You know, Mammy. They're small up top and broad below."

"You hush yo' mouf, boy," Mammy said. "Ah too old to heah that fas' talk from a infant."

"Get on with the free association," Jeter said. "I got a date behind the barn."

"All right," Mammy said. "Education?"

"Dames," Jeter said.

"Abraham Lincoln?"

"Mary Todd," Jeter said.

"How come?"

"She was a dame," Jeter said simply.

"All right. Try George Washington."

"Martha."

"How so, boy?"

"Martha was a man?"

"How 'bout music?"

"Girls."

"Baseball?"

"Ladies' day."

"How y'all feel about books?"

"Decameron."

"Who he, boy?"

"It isn't a he, Mammy. The writer's name was Boccaccio. He wrote about women. And men."

"Ah know what they was doin'," Mammy said darkly. "Son, you got a mind ah wouldn't use for a cesspool. What does you think when ah says, 'Christmas'?"

"Women," Jeter said cheerfully.

"One more chance. Now ah says, 'trouble'."

"Girls," Jeter spoke up bravely, without a moment's hesitation.

Mammy paused.

"Baby boy," she said, "you is in for a mess. Far as ah know you ain't interested in nothing but females."

"That's more than we can say for Brother Pansy," Jeter remarked. "I wouldn't like to call him abnormal, but the word around is that he's trying to join the Boy Scouts."

"Hush, son," Mammy rebuked him. "We ain't come to the point in psychiatry where we can speak of dat side of the science."

Jeter fidgeted.

"Look, Mammy," he said. "I got a (continued on page 16) Star Maker (continued from page 8) date down ..."

"Ah knows wheahat you got a date, son," she said. "You just set here for a short spell whilst ah cast yo' horoscope, and then you is free to go down behind de barn."

"Horoscope?"

"Sho, boy, sho," Mammy said. "In dis racket we uses everything, including the stars. Wait'll ah puts on mah pointed hat and ah'll be with you in a second."

Mammy bustled around her room, in which dark wood, muted lights, a large couch, and a few small oak trees hung with Spanish moss presented the mood for decor. In a second Jeter spoke again.

"Ain't you going to cut no goat's throat, Mammy?" he asked. "Ain't you gonna burn no toads and owl feathers? Ain't you gonna make no puree of rattlesnake?"

"That's old stuff, son," Mammy replied. "We don't need them old props no more in the witchcraft business. We has done replaced newt's tongues with Krafft-Ebing."

"Who's Krafft-Ebing?" Jeter asked.

"A fella like you, boy," Mammy replied, fumbling through a book of sorcery labeled simply World Almanac to fool the detectives.

"Howcome like me?"

"His interests was basic," Mammy mumbled.

Mammy went back into a small alcove in the rear. When she came out she had exchanged the spade beard for a shocked expression.

"Where you been, Mammy?" Jeter asked.

"Ah been 'way back," she replied. "Ah been 'way back, as far as ah could go."

"What did you see, Mammy?" Jeter asked.

"Ah doesn't even like to talk about it, son," she replied. "The future scares me."

"You got to tell me, Mammy," Jeter implored. "I got to know. Tell me. I'm a big boy now. Where does the future point, Mammy? Where do I go? What do I do?"

"Hollywood," Mammy moaned. "Hollywood."

"Hollywood? Hollywood?" Jeter murmured wonderingly. "What's Hollywood?"

"Hollywood is a place," Mammy replied in a hushed voice. "Hollywood out on de Coast where you was birthed. It ain't much yet, but it gonna be. People will be makin' jokes about it, and the whole country gonna think like Hollywood thinks. All ah kin see in mah seance is a jumble'-up mess fulla ponies and yachts and double-crosses and budgets. And banks. Always ah sees banks."

"Banks I can handle," Jeter said." I Knew a banker's wife ..."

"Ah knows that," Mammy snapped. "Which is why yo' eyebrows still ain't growed back good."

"How does Hollywood affect me?" Jeter asked.

"Son, you is a cinch for Hollywood," Mammy said. "Hollywood is in yo' future. With yo' talents you can't avoid it. Son, you was created extra special, super-colossal, epicwise, for Hollywood. You and Hollywood comes together like the moth and the flame."

"How do I get to this ... this Hollywood?" Jeter asked.

"Just keep actin' like you been actin' lately, and nature takes its co'se," Mammy replied. "Some people call it osmosis."

• • •

Jeter progressed to Hollywood in easy stages. There was a lady in Pittsburgh. A lady in Detroit. A lady in Denver. A lady in Salt Lake City. A lady in Natchez, a lady in Mobile. A lady in New Orleans, a lady in Houston. A lady in San Antone. A lady in San Francisco. A lady in Burbank.

That was quite a lady. Jeter was one of the few people ever to have been ridden into Hollywood on a rail.

Hollywood wasn't much when Jeter first encountered it. A few were fumbling in a new medium. The camera was an ogre. What they took pictures of fluttered and blinked and ran too fast on the screen. No selfrespecting writer would take time off to give his talents to a bastard medium. The custard pie was king. The word "queen" had not at that time come to free use.

Playing a character part in the life of the town, the first thing Jeter did was meet the wife of a producer. A producer at that time was computed somewhere between a pimp and a process server. He was a man who had nothing to sell and nothing to sell it with. This particular producer was named Schnook, a term by which all producers later came to be known. He was handy when they dumped Jeter off the rail. This producer picked the feathers slowly from the tar that covered Jeter's body and eventually asked him up for dinner.

It was a dinner such as Jeter had never seen. Everybody sat on the floor. Nobody ate anything at all. There was plenty to eat, such as ham, turkey, creamed chicken, pickles, preserves, Caesar salad, salmon in aspic, and the curried hearts of old mistresses, but nobody ate them.

"Darling," everybody said. "I'm on the most beastly diet."

"Sweetie," everybody said. "The food's divine. Why don't you try some? I'm sure another pound couldn't hurt you."

"Lovie," everybody said. "Have you tried the simply sensational hot biscuits dipped in pigeon's blood? I daren't touch them because of my new contract. You mean you haven't heard?"

"Lolly says," one lady said.

"Damn Lolly," another lady said.

"Upstart," another lady said.

"Who?" another lady asked.

"Goldwyn," another lady said.

"I got news for you, girl," a lady said to a man.

"Who needs it?" the man said to the lady.

"It's only money, baby," a man said.

"Valentino's through," a man said.

"How can he be through? He isn't even started," a woman replied.

"I got a hunch," the man said. "Women won't like him."

"Defeatist," something said.

"What we need out here is talent," somebody else said. "Pass the whisky."

"Are you out of your mind?" somebody else answered. "You want to make become decadent the custard pie? What of the pie workers?"

"Lousy wobbly," somebody said.

"Lolly says," somebody said.

"God damn Lolly," somebody said.

"What about Birth?" somebody said.

"Birth of what?" somebody queried.

"Nation."

"Lil Gish?"

"Hank Walthal?"

"... But Lolly says ..." somebody says.

"They had too much budget I happen to know that."

"Think about it this way. It isn't your money. It's the bank's money."

"I was talking to Doug and Doug said ..."

"Doug who?"

"Don't be a bitch, darling. How many Dougs are there?"

"I'm hungry," Jeter said. "How do you get something to eat around here?"

"You have to go to a restaurant," a fat man said. "Food at these parties is only for the help. The guests talk. I'm hungry myself. What say we whistle up a Stanley steamer and go feed the inner man? What's your name?"

"Jeter," Jeter said. "Jeter -----. What's yours?"

"Arbuckle," the fat man replied. "What brings you to the Coast?"

"I had trouble with women," Jeter said.

"You come to the right spot for it," Mr. Arbuckle replied.

"Ask me. I know. And from now on call me Roscoe. I do not like being called Fatty, because I am a lover (continued on page 18) Star Maker (continued from page 16)at heart."

"Who ain't?" Jeter said. "What does it take out here for a man to get along?"

"Talent," Mr. Arbuckle replied. "Nothing but talent."

"Talent?"

"Yeah," Mr. Arbuckle replied, stepping into the Stanley steamer. "You got to have more than acting ability or the right phone numbers. You got to envision a great big vision for moving pictures, where the moving pictures will be the great cultural influence on the land, and millions of people will base their whole lives on what they see on the silver screen."

"Silver screen?"

"I speak figuratively," Mr. Arbuckle said, absent-mindedly shifting a starlet and grinding his gears. "How do these broads get in here, anyhow?"

"Broads is a word I made up," Jeter said defensively.

"Well, it's a good word," Mr. Arbuckle said, reverting to the gears. "Sell me a half interest in it and I will grab the check."

"Done," Jeter said.

"Done what?" Mr. Arbuckle asked.

"Okay," Jeter said. "Means all right. Means O. K. That's one I coined yesterday, and don't try to muscle into it."

"Okay," Mr. Arbuckle said, coming to a halt. "Let us eat and talk."

"How about the broad?" Jeter asked him. Arbuckle shrugged.

"Where were you raised, lad?" he asked. "When you have been in this town another day you will know that dames always are served with the liqueurs. Just because we are in a new industry does not mean we do not know how to live. What are you gonna eat?"

"Hamburg," Jeter said.

"Make it a dead heat," Mr. Arbuckle said to the waitress in the diner. "And what are you doing later, honey?"

"Not casting for no lousy pitcher, you bet," the waitress said. "I got pride."

"They say a burnt child dreads the fire," Jeter remarked philosophically to his friend after they had finished the salad. "I'm sort of tired, and I wonder if there isn't a picture in the idea. Call it Twice Burnt.

"You got this girl with the big knockers, see," Jeter said, warming to his subject, "and she lives in a little town in England, in the eighteenth century."

"Eighteenth century?" Arbuckle asked.

"Who cares?" Jeter said. "Eighteenth, twenty-eighth, any old tired century, so long as it's got low necklines and no libel. So, like I say, this broad with the big knockers, she gets carried away at a picnic by a visiting city slicker out slumming ..."

"Picnic? City slicker?" Arbuckle was confused, but for Jeter all this was as easy and natural as, well, let's say breathing. There was no denying that some strange Fate had brought Jeter and Hollywood together.

"So it's a church social," Jeter said, "so the slicker is a king incognito. Who cares? Maybe he's Robin Hood. Quit asking questions. You're lousing up my story line."

"Story line?"

"Will you for crissake mash the trap? A story line is the basic action for what has got to be a big industry. The trouble with you, Roscoe, is you worry too much about girls. So this girl with the big knockers, she gives her all to this out-of-town schmoe, and after a decent interval she finds out that she is just a little bit pregnant ..."

"You can't be a little bit pregnant," Mr. Arbuckle said. "I wrote the book on this one."

"Okay, so she's expecting, and she's got no papa for the baby," Jeter continued. "Damn it, you're lousing up my train of thought. So she goes to London to look for this dude and one day she is watching a parade. The king is riding at the head of the parade and she takes a good look at him and, by God, the king himself is the guy done her wrong at the church social."

"It suggests a great title," Arbuckle drawled. "The King Can Do No Wrong."

"Stinks," Jeter replied. "I had in mind something like I Married A Serving Wench by King Louis the Whatever, the original story to be syndicated before we make the movie. Shaddup. Listen: the girl goes to the palace and gets herself a job as a charlady and one day she sneaks in into the king when he's shaving and declares herself as the little maid he made in the country, and throws herself on his mercy."

"Mercy?"

"Mercy, schmercy. Bed, I suppose, but we got to do a long angle shot of a sunset to sell it. So she becomes the king's mistress."

"Why?" Arbuckle asked. "After all, she's only a little strumpet from the suburbs ..."

"Look, stupid. We admit she's a good roll in the hay. This is a democracy. We got to sell the idea to the kids in Kansas City that any girl is basically good enough to knock off a king. Look at it this way: here is just a nice sweet dumb kid from Kansas City. She comes to the big city with a letter to me. What happens? I give her a boff and send her around to you. You get tired of her and ship her off to somebody else. She runs the whole list and when nobody wants her any more she gets a job hustling orders in a drive-in. That's the moral. She should of stood in Kansas City. She's out on her ass in the snow, and that is what we have to sell to the American public. You don't get nowhere with round heels."

"Why have you got to have a moral?" Arbuckle asked. "I mean, I'm only a big fat comedian, and ..."

"Oh, God, amateurs," Jeter sighed. "I am only a fast seventeen years old and already I seem to know all the answers. Look, butterball. The moving picture industry is awful young, but it is not all Mack Sennett and Harold Lloyd and Cecil B. De Mille. There comes a time when Birth of a Nation will not be regarded as chic. Sex is here to stay. Now there is a thing I already learned about sex. Sex is not supposed to be fun. You got to pay the fiddler. You can get away with anything if you hang a moral on it. You can shoot sixteen reels of orgy and clean it up with one reel of retribution. Crime must not pay. No nice girl gets pregnant, except for love and when she wasn't looking. Sin don't pay off."

"So?" Mr. Arbuckle asked, chewing reflectively at his lower lip.

"So, like I say, it's like the broad from Kansas City. She is off on a wrong beat. She goes to the country with the king, and they have an orgy."

"We show the people the orgy?"

"Of course not. We show 'em a shot of the coach or cab arriving at a country shooting box and then we pan up to the transom. Who goes to the country to shoot? Is the king keeping her around for laughs? This is an intellectual-type girl?

"So then she has a baby. You get babies like athlete's foot? You get babies from going to the country with kings. You dolly up to the baby and that takes care of the first orgy. Then you evoke the king's disfavor."

"You do what with the which?"

"Look. You got to have conflict. The king is skinny and has red hair and blue eyes. So does the dame. But she ain't skinny. The child looks exactly like the king's prime minister. Brown eyes, black hair, and the same birthmark. Suggest any conflict?"

"Well, if I was the king," Mr. Arbuckle mused, "I would begin to wonder a little bit if the baby was mine, and I would get pretty sore at the girl. Hey. What's her name?"

"I dunno," Jeter said. "Haven't decided. Want a name that suggests something, like Scarlet, or Ruby, or (continued on page 28) The Star Maker (continued from page 18) Jewel. A name with color in it and depth of feeling. Amber -- that ain't bad. Sultry and with deep undertones of color."

"Amber stinks," Mr. Arbuckle said. "You'd never be able to put it in a title."

"I think you're wrong, but skip it," Jeter answered. "I'm only a boy, but I think that Amber is a very sexy name."

• • •

From the very beginning, Jeter fit Hollywood like a turkey-furter fits a walnut malted. No writer he, he knew what he wanted in scripts and was adept in spotting trends. He never cared for the fancy stuff; Jeter believed in giving the public what the public wanted, or what Jeter believed firmly that the public wanted.

"I got one rule of thumb for making pictures," Jeter told an interviewer for Daily Screen, after he had been elevated from producer to the chieftainship of Mastodon-Lipschutz-Meyer. "That is simple: screw the public. The public ain't got the faintest friggin' idea what it wants. It just wants what we tell it it wants. Also: the hell with actors, male and female. Give me one bum with a hairy chest and a profile and Olivier can drop dead. Give me one cow with the right chest and you can keep Cornell. Likewise arty directors. They just louse up the story line with a lot of fancy camera. All I want is a script with balls, and actors dumb enough to obey orders, and I can open a junk shop with Oscars. Writers? You don't need 'em. There are about three situations and about ten dialogues and I know 'em all by heart. All you got to do is change the clothes on the actors and switch the locales and you're home with a solid bofferoo. I never bought a hit book or a Broadway show in my life. There's plenty of stuff in the public domain."

This came out in the movie magazines in due course.

Interviewed as he lounged by his swimming pool in his sumptuous estate in Bel Air (the writer began), Mr. Jeter ------, new president of Mastodon-Lipschutz-Meyer, attributed all his successes to careful selection of story material, extreme emphasis on direction and camera effects, and finally, fastidious care in the choice of actors.

"An actor must live and breathe his part," Mr. ------ said, stroking his chin with a silver-mounted chin-stroker, given him by the cast of his last success, Murder the Bum, a story of the national pastime. "I prize acting above all the other attributes of movie-making. To me an actor is something almost sacred, not to be tampered with by director, nor even a script, if he is a true thespian."

"Yah," said Jeter, when somebody read him the quote. "I'll raise you another thousand."

Jeter's rise in Hollywood had been meteoric. He had started work, just before the advent of sound, as a messenger on the Mastodon-Lipschutz-Meyer lot. He had access to the mail room, and began his upward stride by steaming open envelopes which appeared to contain manuscripts, scanning them quickly, and transferring their basic plot structure to a little notebook. After a year in the mail room Jeter knew, by heart, every structural skeleton in the scenario closet. These he memorized, for future use, and was never afterward stumped by "script trouble." The tightness of his plotting made him his reputation as, first, a director, and later a producer.

But Jeter's real reputation was not made so much on the lot as in the lady's chamber. He was not heavily particular about which lady's chamber, nor, from time to time, did he even demand a chamber. Hollywood history was made one night in the Casita Bomba, a night club on Sunset Strip, when Jeter, somewhat drunk, became so intrigued with the charms of his companion that a headwaiter, named Andre, was forced to drape the enraptured couple with a tablecloth, while an appreciative audience applauded discreetly.

Jeter's prowess as a lady's man eventually achieved such proportion that he became a synonym for sex in Hollywood, no easy trick when one considers that more specialists in this field flock to the strange city that is hard by Burbank than to any other concentrated locality in the world. Jeter invented the term "casting coach." His name became a euphemism for a strong, active verb. Until a girl had been Jetered, she did not really belong to Hollywood's upper strata. Jeter scorned polo as effete.

"Every time I look at that Zanuck on a horse," Jeter said, "all I see is a waste of energy. The guy is showing off for the horse. Me, I save my muscles for the girls. Who's happier, me or Gene Autry?"

Jeter's home in Bel Air was a monument to his avocation. There were no chairs in his vast sprawling house. Every receptacle suitable for the human posterior was a double divan. There were five huge Moorish beds in the living room alone. Jeter wearied of the same workbench.

His bedrooms were miraculous in themselves. There was no floor space in any of them. As one entered the door he stepped directly into bed. Since each room was forty by twenty-five feet, his bills at the tailor's for special sheetings ran high. "Putting a clean sheet on his sack," one of his grumbling servants once remarked, "is like trying to put pajamas on a battleship."

All Jeter's bedrooms were lined, wall and ceiling, with soft mirrors, to match the sheets and blankets. His favorite was the peach room, which he used mostly when his fancy was blonde, and his next favorite was the green room, whence he conducted redheads. He had a room of black sheets and black mirrors for shy maidens, and his room for brunette company was a rich Pompeian red. The all-white room was employed mainly for foreign maidens -- dark and luscious lassies from Mexico and Brazil and Italy and Morocco. Jeter was a man who enjoyed contrasts.

There were only a few house rules in Jeter's mansion. He would employ only blind servants, for instance, because he always said that what people didn't see didn't hurt them. He would allow no woman to retain the clothes she arrived in. As soon as she passed the front portal she was ushered into a dressing room and offered her choice of sarongs.

"I settled on the sarong very simply," Jeter once explained. "It is the only ideal piece of female clothing. One twist and there she be. None of this business of fighting your way past a lot of armor -- corsets and girdles and boned brassieres. Nuts! You might as well try to rassle a barbed-wire fence. Also, a doll goes barefooted with a sarong. I don't know what it is about bare feet, but show me a dame who'll take her shoes off and the rest is just a matter of timing. It gives 'em confidence, I guess, when they feel free to wiggle their toes."

Only nude swimming was encouraged in Jeter's swimming pool, which he kept filled with Napa Valley champagne. Jeter was always reasonably frugal, and since uncorked champagne soon lost its verve, he could see no real reason for using imported stuff merely for getting wet.

Jeter did not drink much, himself, but he poured a lavish tipple. He was a strict disciple of the get-'em-drunk-early-and-save-conversation school. He had a directness of approach to womanhood that was oddly appealing. "A broad in the hay is worth two on the aisle," was his way of evaluating marriage, an estate that caused him to shudder when the word was mentioned.

Jeter always ate very simply of high-protein foods, such as semi-raw steaks and seafoods, especially oysters. "I don't know whether there's anything to it, that old fable about oysters, I mean," he was fond of saying. "But somehow, two or three dozen Chincoteagues (continued on page 32) The Star Maker (continued from page 28) give me a feeling of confidence. And man, without confidence, a guy gets nowhere with dames. They got to feel it, like a dog knows when you're afraid of him. Just let a woman get that old feeling about inevitability and you're home, Dad."

After he achieved considerable fame, and more money, Jeter's method with a maid was charmingly simple. He always traveled in company with a Mexican named Juan Maya, who was in his employ as confidential secretary and public relations chief. Juanny, as he was called, was a fat, jolly little fellow, with no enemies. He had one answer which saved him much time and trouble. Whatever Juan Maya was asked, he always said, "Si." The rest of the time he remained silent.

In the evenings Jeter and Juan would go to one of the better-known celebrity night clubs, sit at a corner table, and slowly check the swirling crowds, sipping champagne. Juan would always be impecabbly dressed in dinner jacket, boutonniere, and a look of sly expectancy. Jeter dressed more and more sloppily as he grew older. a favorite costume was a Hawaiian aloha shirt, a dirty pair of dungarees, and an old pair of sandals or tennis shoes with holes cut in them. He and Juan would sit, saying nothing, until suddenly Jeter's eyes would light up.

"Juanny," he would say.

"Si?"

"That one. The big blonde with the knockers in the black velvet dancing with that half-ass actor. That one."

"Si."

Jeter would get up, stroll out, and go home. Half an hour later Juan Maya, after paying the check, would arrive at Jeter's mansion--which was called Casacama in Spanish and Broad Acres by the irreverent--to find Jeter listening moodily to low jazz.

"Thees Mees Smeeth," Juan would say. "Good night."

"Charmed," Jeter would say lazily.

"Lie down, babe, and make yourself comfortable."

Sidney Skolsky once wrote a "Tintype" about Jeter. He did not have to ask Jeter whether or not he wore pajamas. Everybody in Hollywood already knew.

Then, quite unexpectedly, Jeter fell in love. He fell in love with Gwen Cavendish, nee Nan Nussbaum.

Little Nan Nussbaum had not been a really bad girl. She was merely headstrong, and she had been cursed from earliest infancy with the affliction of always knowing exactly what she wanted. This did not sit well with her father, Abe Nussbaum, a mild man who had been dominated all his adult years by Nan's mother Sarah. As Nan grew to weedy adolescence, her frustrate tantrums piled atop her mother's shrewishness. She did not like living over the candy store on Rivington Street. She didn't care for her life, at all, as it was. She dreamed extravagant dreams, in which her name was usually Gwen Cavendish. She was to live always on Fifth Avenue, except when she was spending the season in London or buying frocks in Paris or ranging the Mediterranean on her yacht with her handsome husband, Lord Derek Alistair-Harmsworth.

In the absence of Lord Derek Alistair-Harmsworth, Nan Nussbaum got in trouble with a boy named Herschel Suritz when she was fifteen. Nobody had bothered to tell her about babies until the imminence of her ownership of one necessitated a burst of frankness on the part of her wailing mother and her crushed father. Nan lost her baby in the fifth month, and she never fully trusted men again.

Nan ran away from home after she got well and went to work in a restaurant just off Broadway. She was taken from the restaurant by a bookmaker, who disappeared one day when he overextended himself on a hockey game. She passed next under the hand of a minor Broadway agent, who eventually got her a job in the chorus of a night club that folded soon after she opened as the third brunette from the left. At eighteen she was lovely, with a fresh, bruised innocence that immediately attracted men. She left the agent for a dancer. She discarded the dancer for an actor. Nobody was more surprised than she when he sent her train fare to join him in Hollywood. He had made one picture and was set for another.

In the celebration that followed his mild success, he got hold of some bad gin and died. Nan procured a job again as waitress in the commissary of the studio for which her protector had worked. She made a fetching picture behind the dessert counter of the cafeteria, and attracted the attention one day of a minor producer who took her away from all that.

There was drinking one night at the house of the minor producer, and in a fit of alcoholic gaiety Nan was given a screen test. Talking pictures were just coming in, and there was some crushed-grape Slavic warmth in her voice that caused immediate incandescence of her personality when she spoke. Still in drunken jest she was signed for a bit part in a minor production and astounded America by stealing it lock, stock, and producer. This was a bigger producer than the other producer.

After that Nan climbed fast. Using a bedroom as a fulcrum, she was able to move the world, as Hollywood considered itself. She finally achieved the couch of Ben Squanders, chief of Ineffable Films, and with it she also achieved stardom, culture, and the name of Gwen Cavendish. Five husbands and a few quickies later, she met an Englishman, a true lord, named Simon Peebles, and straightway became Lady Peebles.

Sometimes, when Gwen Cavendish looked at her three swimming pools, checked the invoice sheet on her lock-box, ticked off her blue mink, her white mink, her blackmist mink, her brown Labrador mink, her sable, her chinchilla and her assortment of fox wraps, she was prone to muse. She would look critically at her husband, Lord Simon Peebles, as he slept placidly by the pool, and sometimes she would stride out to the garage and count her Cadillacs and Rollses.

"I wonder," she would murmur to herself. "I wonder if, with all this, I am really, but really happy." Then she would answer herself in a loud voice, which sometimes shocked guests.

"You bet your sweet ass I am," said Lady Gwen Peebles, to nobody in particular.

It was this last trenchant bit of philosophy which first intrigued Jeter. True enough, Gwen Cavendish was a beautiful woman, with rather more up top than she needed, and a skin so warm, so rich-toned, that she appeared to be on the verge of bursting out of it. She had slightly slanted eyes with abnormally glistening whites, and a way of speaking slowly, in a deep voice, which seemed a direct invitation to every man she met. She was not more beautiful than four of the five thousand women Jeter had known intimately, but she had something--something. The truth was that Jeter was tired of impermanence, of a new head on the pillow every morning, and he wanted, for the first time, a real home. He figured, anyhow, that he had the office at the lot, which was plenty big enough for a fast reversion to type, or "quickies," when he became bored with matrimony. Gwen Cavendish had everything he wanted from a woman, including a husband, her own swimming pool, and a full outlay of clothes, cars, charm, career, and money.

"I want to talk to you, Miss Caven dish," Jeter said one day as he was having cocktails at somebody's house, and happened to run onto her in the garden, where she was wondering aloud as to the state of her personal happiness. "Could we have lunch together sometime next week?"

"Don't call me," she replied. "I'll call you. I'm afraid my husband is a very jealous man, and your reputation rather reeks, old boy."

"I'll wait for your call," Jeter said absent-mindedly wandering off to follow a redheaded rear that looked vaguely familiar. He was sitting in his office the following week, gazing speculatively at a new secretary, when his phone rang. It was Gwen.

"Hullo, there," she said. "About that lunch. How would it be for Tuesday?"

"Fine, sweetie," Jeter said. "How about Romanoff's? Nobody we know goes there any more."

"Cool, man," Lady Peebles answered. "I'll meet you in the bar, and we can always call it an accident when Lolly and Hedda run it in their columns."

Gwen was looking very fetching when they met the next day, dressed in a little Schiaparelli number with something improbable by Mr. John on her head. Jeter's breath came faster. This wasn't sex, he said to himself. This time it was love. He barely finished his herring in cream before he bluntly broached the matter.

"I think I am in love with you, Gwen," he said. "I know I want to marry you. How about it, babe?"

"I got a husband already, dear boy," she said, chewing daintily on a blackstrap-molasses-and-raw-car-rot salad. "Peebles. The limey with the chin."

"Oh, him. No problem. Give the bum a couple of bucks and let him move to his club. Swap him his title for his old tweeds, or something, and throw him out."

"You might have something," Gwen said, her eyes softening with love. "I think I've had that bucktoothed jerk long enough. But how do we beat the community-property thing? This bum can go back to Merrie Old Whatever Hall with half of everything I've got unless we're pretty careful."

"Oh, that's easy enough. I can frame him easy, and give him the choice of taking a few bob to blow or going to jail for a decent bit. I got connections in this town, and the fix is easy."

"Oh, darling," Gwen said. "You're so wonderful. Hello there, Hedda dear. I love you."

"I love you too," Hedda said, staring venomously at Gwen's hat.

"I meant him, actually," Gwen said, pointing to Jeter.

"You and everybody else," Hedda said, moving off. "But it's a dull day and I can use a stick of romance for the column. Good-by, darlings."

"I can scarcely wait to be married," Jeter said. "Would you mind terribly if we don't go to bed until after the ceremony? I feel sort of tender about you."

"Oh, do you really, dear?" Gwen said. "You're the first man ever asked me to marry him sitting at a table. Usually I had to take the question lying down. You be sure and let me know, now, when you've got poor dear Simon framed. I shall miss the poor darling, you know. He was so good about the dogs and all."

The frame of poor Lord Simon Peebles was rather more easy than not. When the police broke down the door--into which Lord Simon had turned merely because it was marked "Men" and he needed to freshen up--three naked women, all from Central Casting, hurled themselves upon him and began to scream and rend his garments. Someone else pressed a smoldering stick of marijuana into his hand, while another placed a sheaf of bookmaker's receipts in his pockets. A swift search by the police revealed a six-ounce packet of heroin, blue-prints from the atom factory in Alamagorda, a freshly severed lady's leg, Jack Benny's hair piece, and a small child, bound hand and foot, a ransom note attached, gagged with a length of stolen chinchilla from Mary Pickford's house. A card from the Communist Party was also discovered in his pocket and a few telltale packages marked "Brink's" were hidden under the bed: All of the naked women proved to be fifteen years old, well under the age of consent, even for California.

"Well, Errol Flynn," said one of the cops--also from Central Casting--"will you sign this property agreement and get a quickie divorce, or would you rather be charged with statutory rape, contributing to the delinquency of a minor, illegal possession of a freshly severed lady's leg, bookmaking, espionage, conspiracy to possess narcotics, armed robbery, kidnaping, Commie-affiliation, and hair-raising exploits? I have reference to Mr. Benny's toupee, you should pardon the yock, in the last reference I have reference to. Do you sign, or off we go to jail forevermore?"

"It would appear you've got me, chaps," poor Lord Peebles said. "I'll sign." He signed. Terms of the property settlement gave him custody of his clothes, the dogs, and fifty dollars a month until such time as he should remarry. Lord Simon Peebles was a (continued on page 35) Star Maker (continued from page 33) very bitter man.

The wedding was marred only by the fact that at the last minute neither bride nor groom could be located. Jeter was upstairs, absent-mindedly fondling a bridesmaid, and Gwen had retired to the summerhouse with a visiting Italian director. But it turned out to be a happy marriage, as Hollywood marriages go. Jeter and Gwen communicated with each other through a neutral psychiatrist, and spoke pleasantly to each other when they met at Ciro's with somebody else. They refrained from bruising each other's eyes and egos, and conducted their love lives discreetly in out-of-the-way cabins and better motels. Life ran smoothly, with Jeter still living in his house, and Gwen living in hers, until tragedy interrupted what has been called, by the gossipists, "Hollywood's happiest marriage" -- especially after they each adopted a dozen refugee children each. The fact that Gwen adopted all boys and Jeter adopted all girls didn't strike anyone as strange, although a few cats did purr that Jeter's wards seemed a little old for adoption.

Tragedy struck in the form of Lord Simon Peebles, the disenchanted, disinherited spouse of Gwen Cavendish. Lord Simon had brooded deeply after his frame. Work was beneath his dignity, and he took to hanging around Lucey's and cadging drinks from old friends of his wife. One night, maddened by Moscow Mules, Lord Simon went home to his boardinghouse in Olvera Street and took down his last possession, an English sporting rifle with which he had once shot lions in the happy days when Gwen took her vacation and he took his. It was a very fine gun, a Western Richards .470, suitable for elephants and rhino, since it fired a bullet the size of a good cigar. He had decided to pawn it, for more drink, when the idea struck him.

Lord Simon sat up all night perfecting his plans, and bright and early, if a little bleared, he set out for the Mastodon-Lipschutz-Meyer lot. He passed the guard at the gate with a cheery nod.

"Good morning, Your Worship," the guard said. "Working, I see."

"Rather," Lord Simon said, hefting his elephant gun. "That new jungle picture of Bogart's. I'm playing a white hunter. Rather like old times. I used to be pure hell on lions and things."

He passed on to the main office building of M-L-M and sat comfily down on the stoop. He lit his pipe and relaxed, dangling the heavy double rifle across his knees. Several people stopped to say hello, since the spectacle of a British lord smoking a pipe and dangling an elephant gun outside the chief of production's office aroused no curiosity, especially since the lord had once been married to the chief of production's current lady.

Eventually a fuchsia Cadillac upholstered in leopard skin drove up and Jeter stepped out. He was dressed rather sharply for him, since he wore an old Seabee fatigue cap, a turtleneck sweater, British walking shorts, and ancient carpet slippers.

"What do you want?" he asked Lord Simon brusquely. "Money, I suppose. Well, you won't get any."

"Oh, there you are," Lord Simon answered languidly. "No, old boy, money wasn't what I had in mind."

He lifted the elephant gun and aimed it at Jeter's middle. Jeter opened his mouth to scream, and Lord Simon pulled the trigger. The gun boomed, and Jeter tumbled backward. Stoically, Lord Simon put the gun's muzzle in his mouth, pressed the unfired trigger, and blew his head completely off. An elephant gun creates rather a mess at close range.

However, Lord Simon did not meet Jeter in hell, to continue the argument. Too much boozing about had shaken the once firm hand of Lord Simon Peebles. He jerked the trigger and hit Jeter a touch low. He was struck, as the newspapers later printed, in the groin.

"I wish he'd killed me," Jeter said when he regained consciousness. "Everything I've lived for is gone."

"You're so right, sweetie," the nurse murmured. Jeter looked weakly at her cleavage as she bent over to give him a thermometer, and then turned his head to the wall as he remembered that from now on all he could possibly ever, ever do was look.

That is how Jeter -- -- -- -- -- -- became the nation's top producer of "art" and "problem" pictures. His avocation gone, he threw himself into his work at 5 A. M. and never knocked off until 6:30 the next morning. In this way he created for himself an odd distinction -- he was the only living man who could labor twenty-four hours a day and still be an hour-and-a-half late for work.

Embittered by his accident, an antagonism towards sex began developing in Jeter and appearing in his work. Sex became a very dirty word in all his pictures. If any of the characters seemed to be enjoying sex in the first reel of a Jeter production, you could be certain they would be jumping under a train, or out a ten story window, or at least completely broken morally and spiritually by the last (continued on page 46) Star Maker (cont. from page 35)reel.

Jeter introduced twin beds into all of his bedroom scenes and because he generally set the trends that the other producers followed, no film couple, married or otherwise, ever appeared together in one bed again.

Everyone was aware of Hollywood's new found prudery, but no one seemed entirely certain how it had started. Various civic, moral, and upleft groups, noting the trend, decided they'd better get on the band wagon, and began speaking out against or actually censoring those few films produced by the small group of free-thinking producers who didn't immediately follow the Jeter trend. The industry itself countered this move by setting up their own Morals Code and censoring board.

That's how morality came to Hollywood. And as for Jeter, each new film surpassed the last, winning him more honors and Oscars than any other man in the industry. If you were in the service during the war, you probably saw his greatest effort. He made an anti-venereal picture so frightening, in glorious Technicolor, so horrifying in its stark reality, that thousands of enlisted men swore off women for life. In this film he proved conclusively that any man who spoke to a woman outside a USO dance or a Red Cross field office would immediately develop hard-and-soft chancres, bubo, strictures, and tropical granuloma.