In California: A Place for Curtain Calls

By Gregory Jaynes

Save for the celluloid immortality enjoyed by a few of the residents here, they are all, of course, as defenseless against decline as any other aged flesh and mind: the tolerance is gone for noise, harsh light, the unexpected; a sidewalk curb is no more easily managed than an escarpment. But it is different in here. There isn't, for example, the palpable sadness that is so striking in other institutions where people are growing very old. It isn't happy all the time, exactly, but neither is the air so thick with loneliness, to say nothing of futility.

The name of the place is the Motion Picture and Television Country House and Hospital, and it is where many film and TV people who don't get filthy rich wind up; carpenters, grips, security men, sound technicians and other behind-the-scenes retirees outnumber the luminaries, but the list of recognizable retirees is not as brief as one might expect, given the salaries in the business they have left behind. Mary Astor is here. Donald Crisp died here. Norma Shearer is here. Eddie ("Rochester") Anderson died here. Regis Toomey is here. Ellen Corby, the grandmother on The Waltons, just moved in. Stepin Fetchit is here. Bruce Cabot, Chester Conklin, Larry Fine (one of the Three Stooges), Edmund Lowe, Arthur O'Connell, Herbert Marshall and Mitchell Leisen (a director whose credits included Death Takes a Holiday) died here.

Chill Wills would have died of cancer here, but he said he wanted to go home when the end was very near; he barely beat the clock with the help of a limousine. At his house, he told his wife when they laid him down, "I'm never going to leave this bed again." Johnny Weissmuller was here, but lucidity began to elude him in the darkest hours, and he took to wandering into other rooms, booming that famous Tarzan yell, and they had to take him away. The ape man is now being attended to in a villa in Acapulco, and his bills are seen to by the Motion Picture and Television Fund. The fund also administers the Country House and Hospital, which is not equipped to accommodate any behavioral explosion since one of the principal missions here is to becalm.

The fund has been around under one name or another since 1921, and it is enormously well off, primarily as a result of extraordinary expressions of philanthropy. Its motto is "We take care of our own." Recent bequests from the Samuel Goldwyn estate alone approach $35 million. George Burns just gave the fund a supermarket, and the fund sold it for $600,000. The big gifts and an industrywide payroll deduction plan that now brings in about $2 million a year have accumulated to present assets of $80 million, including the 47 acres in the Los Angeles suburb of Woodland Hills, where the Country House and Hospital stands. The budget is $14 million a year and rising. The director of fund raising is William Campbell, whose name may not ring a bell, but whose face would.

"The money most of these people get from their unions, pensions, Social Security, whatever," Campbell was explaining in his office one day, "you could fit in your nostril." Superstars aside, he said, "think of the actor with 30 years of experience, average it out to $12,000 a year earnings, and you come up with retirement benefits of $400 a month. Who could live on it?"

The phone rang. It was the wardrobe man from the TV series Quincy, which is filming a two-part episode at the institution, with Campbell in the role of a possibly murderous administrator of a convalescent home. As the fund raiser spoke, another TV series, Remington Steele, began filming a scene on the premises, and a handful of the 300 people being cared for here would pick up $174 for being extras, for doing what they would do normally. It is a frequent affair, and the deal seems foursquare, with the residents keeping a hand in the business and the business free to harvest the natural rhythm of the old--the triple beat of a pair of feet and a cane coming down the hall, as some poet said or should have. It is part of the difference of the place.

The differences, however, do not extend very far into the looks of the facilities. The 180-bed hospital has only private rooms, but other than that it is stainless steel, gurneys, casters clacking on tile--a hospital. The cafeteria in the basement has tables galore but very few chairs because here, as elsewhere where people are ill, they come to dinner already seated.

The country house is 54 "cottages," the first 38 of which were opened in 1942. Actually, these are not detached cottages but one-room-with-bath flats, tiny garden apartments. When health fails, the resident of a cottage usually moves into the "lodge," which accommodates 62 people in "suites" that are, again, one room and a bath, giving onto a common corridor. Greater attention is at hand in the lodge. Even greater attention is at hand in the hospital. A resident's physical slide can be tracked by his moves.

Twice a week, anybody who can make it is invited to the plush 250-seat Louis B. Mayer Memorial Theater for the showing of first-run movies, though not all the new movies sit well with the residents. "When they start to get into bed," said Mae Clarke, who is remembered best for having a grapefruit shoved in her face by James Cagney in Public Enemy in 1931, "I walk out."

The thing that distinguishes the fund that runs the place is its devotion not only to care but to something approaching benison. You can be rich or you can be broke, and they will take you in as long as you have spent the past 20 years in the business, from acting to locking the gate, and exceptions are made to that. Viola Dana is here (the classic silent Blue Jeans), and the industry forgot about her when movies began to talk.

There are seven resident physicians, and 135 specialists on call. When a specialist is needed, the resident is sent to the doctor in a limousine. To live here, you pay if you can, don't if you can't. If you have money, it must go into an account from which the institution deducts its charges ($690 a month for a cottage). If you die with money in the bank, it is disbursed in accordance with your will. But if the account runs dry before you die, said Dr. Irwin Salkin, chief of staff, "you're never billed. No one says a word. You just go on living here as if nothing happened."

So what's it like? "Shangri-La," said Belle Ohinger, retired cashier for Warner Bros. "They always want you to sleep well," said retired 20th Century-Fox Grip Jim Noblitt. "Nobody ever wished me a good night's sleep in my whole life." "If you have to be institutionalized," said Mary Astor in 1980, the last time she gave an interview, "this is the best."

Speaking of Mary Astor, Mae Clarke has a story on her. She told it over lunch one day in the dining room. The story: a book with real names and birth dates was making the rounds. Mae Clarke came into the dining room and was greeted by Mary Astor. "Good morning, Miss Klotz," said Mary Astor. "Good morning, Miss Langhanke," Mae Clarke shot back. Viola Dana happened by. "Good morning, Miss Flugrath." As Miss Clarke was finishing the story, laughing at the cattiness of it, Regis Toomey passed her table. In residence a month, he said, "People talk too much about age here. I'm 75. I'm 85. I'm not ashamed of mine, but it's nothing to boast about."

Viola Dana was born in 1897. She acted in motion pictures at the Edison studios. She remembers seeing the dam age in San Francisco after the earth quake. In 1913 she played the lead in Poor Little Rich Girl on Broadway for nine months. One is almost tempted to ask whether she knew a man who knew a man who knew Napoleon. She sits in her cottage, reminiscing, and the effect, to a visitor, is momentarily heartstopping, like seeing a pregnant woman trip and fall. The reason is that just beyond this frail ancient, like a bird perched upon her shoulder, is a photograph of a stunning beauty, with melting eyes and a face to die for. Viola Dana, 1920.

"Mary Pickford put Poor Little Rich Girl on the screen and ruined it, actually ruined it," Miss Dana was saying. "Well, she just bitched it up is all I can say."

Outside, the day was soft and caressing, and the visitor fell in step a few min utes later with Virginia Sale (Topper, Oliver Twist, Moby Dick). She talked movies, as everyone around here does -- either movies or marriages. Long ago triumphs are gnawed over, savored, held to the light. They stare back at you everywhere from frames upon the walls. Entering the library, where the fresh notations on the books-wanted list were for Noel Coward's diaries and autobiographies by Glenn Ford and Lana Turner, Virginia Sale saw Mae Clarke poking about.

"There's Mae Clarke," she said. "She's the woman who Cagney -- oh, well, she must get so tired of that." In truth, she dosen't. --By Gregory Jaynes This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.