Being a Bathing Beauty
On the strength of my accumulated debt I jumped at a call that very week to go to Santa Monica with a comedy company for three days' location. There we had to jump into barrels, into fake fishes' mouths, with our feet and legs sticking out, play leap frog, and last but not least, dive off a cliff—really quite a dangerous trick. I was utterly disgusted with life, myself, the jobs I'd been handed, and the people I'd been working with.
Generally speaking, I love movie people. As a class, they are as fine and real as any other people in the world. But this particular crowd didn't vibrate with me, nor I with them. So instead of going home with them when the work was over, I said I was going to visit a friend.
With my three days' checks in my pocket, to be cashed later, plus my car ticket and seventy-six cents, I started off walking down the board walk beside the ocean, thinking.
About an hour later I passed a fortune telling parlor—"Prisda, the Gypsy Queen." Now I must confess to a weakness for having my fortune told, so I stepped in and asked the "Gypsy Queen" what she could tell me for fifty cents. She led me into her mystic den, and instead of telling my fortune, we began to talk—of life, its battles, its heartaches, its victories, and its joys.
When I told her of my life, she said, "Why don't you stay here with me a few days? You can dress up as a gypsy. You can clear a few dollars. I'll advertise you as 'Vera, the Medium'—just here for a few days on her way to Roumania."
"Tella-a da Fortune, Lady?"
I fell in with the idea, with the same thrill I'd have had as a child at running away with a circus. Think of actually living with a gypsy queen!
But had I visited the Queen of Sheba, she could not have treated me more royally. I told dozens of fortunes. Several of the biggest stars in pictures came into our little booth. And I wonder, now that I am back in Hollywood, if the next time I'm working on a lot with some of them, they will recognize the mystic, seeing eyes of "Vera, the Medium."
Hollywood's Religious Complex
The newspapers and magazines throughout the country accuse Hollywood of all sorts of things. But I feel that Hollywood's greatest complex is a religious one.
There are many churches in this small community. Every other person you meet discusses science, truth, healing, demonstrations, the subconscious, or the particular Karma you are working out, until sometimes at night I find my head reeling with isms and ophies that I had never even heard of before.
And even in my film work, this summer, I've lived in a deeply religious, strictly orthodox, Biblical atmosphere.
I read the other day that ninety per cent of the High School children in New York City knew nothing of the Bible. I suggest sending them to Hollywood to enter the so-called "wicked world" of filmdom. Here at least, they will imbibe a bit of sacred history, just from extra work, or the constant talk about the Pilgrimage Play, or the open discussions on religion.
Here, no one is ashamed to profess his faith openly and ardently. Neither do we have religious martyrs. Tolerance is perhaps Hollywood's greatest crime.
Making Bible Pictures
I began early in June, working with the Sacred Film Company, in the episode of Sarah and Abraham.
We searched days and days, in scorching sand and through barren waste, to find the Promised Land.
It was there, oddly enough, that I met one of the real people of Hollywood. A carpenter who had been building the tiny hillside homes to be used as the setting for the great Pilgrimage Play. I was fascinated in the sketches he was making from colored prints of Bethlehem and Nazareth. We began talking, of course, and one day he took me with him up into the canyon where the work was going on. There, clinging to both sides of the narrow canyon, on the steep sides of the hills, were small, flat-roofed homes, just like the ones we had pored over together in the big library Bible.
Things come about in strange ways, and it was really through this new friend Davies that, about a month later, I got a chance to play the part of Martha in the Pilgrimage Play.
John the Baptist rode to rehearsals on a motor cycle.
The Pilgrimage Play
For three summer months, the life of Christ is portrayed every evening. The performance takes place in the hills in a real natural theatre, and the audience, about fifteen hundred in number, sits at the foot of the hills, on the sloping floor of the canyon.
