Vintage Movie Memories and Talent Live at Country House

Many of the stories told in the lunchroom of the Motion Picture and Television Country House unfold along well-creased lines, like a cherished letter.

“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 Riddle, stretching out the punch line. “Jim-my Dean.”

Arlene Cooper, a 78-year-old retired script girl sitting at the table with Riddle, 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?” Cooper asked.

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

As a new century begins in Hollywood, there couldn’t be a much better vantage point to gaze back than the retirement home, run by the Motion Picture and Television Fund.

Here, on a manicured campus in Woodland Hills, live 350 former actors, extras, camera operators, makeup 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 vegetables 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 Riddle, 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. But we’re still here, together and alive. And what happened to the king? The king is dead!”

Scratchy laughter followed. Riddle’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 at the home. Born in 1903, his life tracks Hollywood’s. In 1921, he took his first job as a cameraman in the emerging silent picture business.

That was the end of Lo’s clerk days--and of Los Angeles’ obscurity. Soon Worth was training his lens on some of the most famous faces of his time: Marlene Dietrich, Vincent Price and Gary Cooper.

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

He was paid well during the brief 3-D era in Hollywood, becoming a specialist in technology that was dazzling at the time. He later became a TV cameraman.

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. Worth also donated a new wing to the home’s hospital.

There’s a perception that the retirement center, often called “the old actors’ home,” 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 Worth, arrived with sizable retirement savings.

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

On a recent day, silver-haired women with saucer-size glasses sat on benches outside their cottages reading Variety, the trade newspaper. Collier waved to them as he peddled past.

Collier, 80, is an old-fashioned song and dance man and an admitted ham. In World War II, the U.S. Army sent him to entertain troops with a specially issued olive drab piano in the back of his jeep. He called his one-man piano routine “The Dysentery Show.”

After the war, he used the same songs--minus the salty language--on a children’s TV show 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?’ ”

Cooper, the former script supervisor, loves that story.

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

Some residents, including Riddle, are members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and get to vote on Oscar awards. Many think that actors today suffer from a lack of stage training.

“When we were making movies, actors understood the character,” said Robert Corthwaite, who has played bit parts for the last 50 years, including roles in the original “Lassie” TV series. “They didn’t have to think about their childhood for emotion.”

Last week, residents shifted their attention to the home’s New Year’s feast, complete with bingo, cookies and sparkling apple juice. Yes, Cooper, Collier, Riddle, Worth and others agreed, it did sound like an old people’s party.

But they insisted that isn’t the tenor of their home.

“When I first showed up here, me and the wife were still chasing each other. I thought: What are two senile delinquents going to do in a retirement home?” Collier 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.”