Tall Tales from Tinseltown

By Gerald Clarke

Does any real American ever get tired of listening to Hollywood stories? Apparently not: year after year the movie books roll off the presses. The newest -- and one of the best -- is Hollywood Anecdotes by Paul F. Boller Jr. and Ronald L. Davis (Morrow; $18.95).

Boller and Davis seem to have mined every shiny nugget in the Hollywood Hills. Could any screenwriter have written funnier lines, for instance, than those of Lewis J. Selznick, one of the pioneer moguls? A victim of anti- Semitism in his native Russia, Selznick nonetheless had a forgiving nature. When Czar Nicholas II was deposed in 1917, he sent him a cable: "When I was a poor boy in Kiev some of your policemen were not kind to me . . . stop I came to America and prospered stop now hear with regret you are out of a job . . . stop feel no ill will . . . if you will come New York can give you fine position acting in pictures stop salary no object stop reply my expense stop."

Most film buffs are familiar with the loony malapropisms of Producer Samuel Goldwyn, such as "Include me out" and "I read part of it all the way through." But how many remember when Goldwyn and his competitor Jack Warner co-produced the following wonderful gaffe? At a postwar banquet for Britain's war hero Field Marshal Montgomery, Goldwyn rose and proposed a toast to "Marshall Field Montgomery." After a stunned silence, Warner corrected him, "Montgomery Ward, you mean."

In movieland, id and ego are often the same thing, and sexy Mae West is also good for several laughs. Director Ernst Lubitsch complained that West, who was her own screenwriter, was hogging the best lines in one of her films. Every story has two characters, he reminded her. "Look at Romeo and Juliet." To which Mae haughtily replied, "Let Shakespeare do it his way. I'll do it mine. We'll see who comes out better."

One of the biggest egos of all belonged to Orson Welles, who was always seeking perfection, or better. When the 60-day shooting schedule of Welles' The Lady from Shanghai ran to 90 days, the studio sent a watchdog, Jack Fier, to speed him up. Welles erected a sign that read THE ONLY THING WE HAVE TO FIER IS FIER ITSELF. Not to be outdone, Fier put up his own placard: ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELLES.

No one, however, was faster with a comeback than Alfred Hitchcock. "Mr. Hitchcock, what do you think is my best side?" asked an actress during the filming of Lifeboat. "My dear," he replied, not even bothering to look up, "you're sitting on it." A man wrote to say that after seeing poor Janet Leigh butchered in the famous shower scene in Psycho, his wife was afraid to step into the bathtub. What should he do? "Sir," Hitchcock answered, "have you ever considered sending your wife to the dry cleaner?"