Page:Once a Clown, Always a Clown.djvu/199

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CAME DAWN AT HOLLYWOOD

The worst ordeal of the pictures, I found, was the getting up with the working world and being on the lot in make-up by nine o'clock. Photography is all but independent of sunshine now, but it was not then. It was the high percentage of sunshine in Southern California, of course, that located the industry there to begin with. Actorlike, I had been accustomed all my adult life to going to bed with the arrival of the milkman and getting up about one o'clock in the afternoon. The workaday world returns home at five o'clock and gives the evening to recreation. The actor does not finish work until his audience is ready for bed. He then eats, and enjoys his leisure. He might, you may suggest, be in bed himself by midnight and up by eight, with the forenoon free, but leisure comes after work, not before, as all night workers know.

A lesser nuisance of picture routine is the necessity, when on location away from the studio, of appearing in public in costume and make-up. It is such a commonplace that the native does not bat an eye; would not, in fact, turn a head to see Lady Godiva ride by au naturel on her milk-white palfrey, but it gives the tourist something to write home about. I never ceased to feel like a cage of monkeys. My make-up for

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