The Living History of Hollywood

Like a stack of shirts at a clothing store, many of the stories told in the lunchroom of the Motion Picture & Television Fund’s Country House unfold exactly the same way.

“There I was at CBS Studios, standing in line next to this young guy in jeans,” began Hal Riddle, an 82-year-old retired character actor. “He was a good-looking guy with something special about him--you can tell these things if you’ve been in the business. And while we were auditioning for this game show, he had to carry a balloon with pins. Man, you should have seen this guy’s focus.

“ ‘Jimmy,’ he told me his name was,” said Hal, stretching out the punch line. “Jim-my Dean.”

Arlene Cooper, a 78-year-old retired script girl sitting at the table with Hal, itched to one-up him. “Did I ever tell you guys about the day I literally bumped into the most gorgeous man I have ever seen on a movie set?” Arlene asked.

“God, how he walked! They just don’t make ‘em like that anymore. And he looked me right in the eye--hmmm, I’ll never forget it--and said: ‘Hi’ya doing, ma’am. I’m Rock Hudson.’ ”

As a new century dawns in Hollywood, there couldn’t be a much better vantage point from which to gaze back at the last 100 years of movie-making and the emergence of the West Coast entertainment industry than the retirement home run by the Motion Picture & Television Fund.

Here, on a manicured campus in Woodland Hills, live 350 former actors, extras, cameramen, make up artists, best boys and show business widows and widowers. The home, whose halls are filled with autographed photos of stars and people who worked with them, is a living archive of Hollywood history.

After the plates of chicken and boiled veggies were cleared one recent day, the dining room at the home became a stage as a handful of elderly residents, well-schooled in the art of drama, dusted off their memories and transformed them into performances.

“No. None of us are stars here,” said Hal, his fists clenched against his chest like an agonizing Hamlet. “Years ago we came to Hollywood to get everything Elvis got--the Cadillac, the girls, the money, the home in the Hollywood Hills.

“And you know what? We never got it. None of it. But we’re still here, together and alive. And what happened to the king? The king is dead!”

Scratchy laughter followed. Hal’s face burned a passionate red. The aged show biz comrades sitting next to him applauded, including Lothrop Worth, the godfather of the Country House.

Lothrop--simply called Lo--is a 96-year-old retired cameraman and one of the oldest residents. Born in 1903, his life tracks Hollywood’s. In 1921, he took his first job as a cameraman in the emerging silent picture business.

“It was some costume thing with a lot of sword play,” Lo said.

That was the end of Lo’s clerk days--and of L.A.’s obscurity. As the era of talkies arrived and the motion picture business relocated from New York to Los Angeles, Lo became a full-time cameraman. He trained his lens on some of the most famous faces of his time: Marlene Dietrich, Vincent Price, Gary Cooper.

“Backstage, we always had a joke that Gary had two emotions on screen: constipation and relief,” Lo said, laughing.

Lo made big bucks during the brief 3-D era in Hollywood, at the same time becoming a specialist in technology that was dazzling at the time. When TV production took off in the late 1950s and 1960s, Lo was there, becoming a cameraman on “I Dream of Jeannie” and other shows.

Eleven years ago, when he started needing a little help getting around, he sold his home in Brentwood and moved into the Motion Picture home. Lo also donated a new wing to the home’s hospital.

There’s a perception that the retirement center is full of down-and-out actors waiting for their next 8-cent royalty check. True, retired actor and resident Dick Collier deposited a stack of 10 checks the other day that didn’t add up to a dollar. But many, like Lo, arrived with sizable retirement savings built on decades of Hollywood prosperity.

Charlie Chaplin came up with the idea in 1921 for a charity to help retired actors, and 20 years later, the charity broke ground on the retirement home.

Today, the Motion Picture & Television Fund is a social service organization with an $85-million annual budget, a board of directors that reads like a Hollywood “Who’s Who?” and a 40-acre campus in Woodland Hills that includes a fully staffed hospital, golf-cart ambulances and an intensive-care unit. The residents are divided among the 256-bed hospital, an assisted-living center called the Lodge and a community of 65 cottages referred to as the Country House.

The home is for retired people only and an informal policy discourages residents from auditioning for parts once they move in. Gifts from entertainment titans such as Kirk Douglas, Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg, along with voluntary payroll deductions and government-sponsored benefits, help pay for the home’s programs and upkeep.

Orange trees ring the campus. Bushes trimmed in the shape of rabbits, chickens and sheep pop up from sculpted lawns.

On a recent day, silver-haired ladies with saucer-sized glasses sat on benches outside their cottages reading Variety. Dick Collier, who rides his bike every day, sometimes to a 99 Cents Store five miles away “just to browse,” waved to the ladies as he pedaled past.

Dick, 80, is an old-fashioned song-and-dance man and a self-confessed ham. In World War II, the U.S. Army sent him to entertain troops from Egypt to Iran with a specially issued, army-green piano in the back of his jeep. He called his one-man piano routine “The Dysentery Show” and made up bawdy songs based on well-known show tunes.

After the war, he used the same songs--minus the salty language--and hosted a children’s show on TV in New York called “Mister Giggles.”

“I remember people would come up to me and say, ‘Hey, you’re the guy who had the dirtiest show in the Army and now you’re working with kids?’ ”

Arlene, the script supervisor, loves that story.

“You know, I’ve worked with the Stooges, and you’re as funny as any of them,” she said.

The olden days aren’t the only topic. Residents love picking apart contemporary movies. Some, like Hal, are members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and get to vote on Oscar awards. Many think actors today suffer from a lack of stage training and don’t know how to project their voices, or for that matter, act.

“When we were making movies, actors understood the character,” said Robert Cornthwaite, who has played bit parts for the last 50 years, including a role in the 1954 versions of “Lassie.” “They didn’t have to think about their childhood for emotion.”

This week, residents shifted their attention to the home’s New Year’s feast, complete with bingo, cookies and sparkling apple juice. Arlene, Dick, Hal, Lo and others agreed that, yes, it did sound like an old folks’ party.

But they insisted their home wasn’t like that.

“When I first showed up here, me and the wife were still chasing each other and I thought: What are two senile delinquents going to do in a retirement home?” Dick said. “But I’ll never forget that feeling I had when I walked into the dining room for the first time and looked around. I thought to myself, I know these people. We’ve all been in the movies our whole lives.

“God, do we have some stories to share.”