Hollywood tales

“So we picked this girl up in this big bus of a car, and she had us drive to a party in Beverly Hills. It was the house of a man named Cliff Henderson, a pilot, a kind of Howard Hughes character. And he has in his library a wall of live fish, a huge aquarium. And outside there are beautiful girls playing tennis and swimming in the pool. And my friend met a princess and I met this beautiful dark-haired girl. And they ask us, ‘Why don’t you come have a drink with us?’ And we go to their house, Tower Road, Filipino servants cooking shrimp. It was April, hot like blazes. And the girls went to swim, and they looked like orchids in the water. And I watched them, my first day, and I thought, ‘My God, this is Hollywood.’ But I never again had a day like that. Never again. In forty years I never saw anything like that again.”

 — screenwriter Curt Siodmak (The Wolf Man, The Invisible Woman, Son of Dracula) talking about his first day in Hollywood