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In 1938, fresh out of high school., Stu Jerome, an unsophisticated seventeen year old, achieved his first step toward his goal of someday becoming a screen writer. Through the influence of his songwriter father, M. K. Jerome, he secured a job in the Warner Bros. mailroom. It was the lowest job in the studio, a combination "messenger-guide-gofer," yet to him the most exciting even though he was totally unprepared for the headlong plunge into a dazzlingly improbable world of make-believe. But underneath the glamour Jerome soon learned that not for nothing was his new home known in the industry as "the Burbank branch of San Quentin," headed by Jack Warner as Warden-Executioner. It was a rough, tough place, a factory in every way except that some of his fellow employees went by the names of Bette Davis, Errol Flynn, James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, Henry Fonda, Ronald Reagan, Ann Sheridan, Joan Blondell and Dick Powell, to name but a few. Survival was the name of the game and, unless you stood the gaff, you fell by the wayside. Stu Jerome not only stood the gaff, he added to it with his colleagues, about as freewheeling, double-dealing and stealing a bunch of Katzenjammer kids as ever existed. In a series of anecdotes, Jerome recounts his and his friends adventures and misadventures vis-a-vis the executives, the directors and, most especially, the stars. In these pages you'll discover what dress designer Orry-Kelly thought of his one-time friend, Gary Grant; which strutting little actor was known by a nickname that couldn't be used in mixed company; why one up-and-coming young male star's career was suddenly ended by a chance phone call following; one night's indiscretion. It's a book about Hollywood from a whole new point of view. Written in the iconoclastic style of the kids who lived it, it is irreverent, prejudiced and totally outrageous. As Jerome says, "We had to know everything that went on. After all, we were running the place." Yet, at the same time, the book manages to convey a warmly affectionate remembrance of a time and a place that will never be again. You will laugh at the private antics of the movieland giants and, at the same time, be touched by the warm, simple humanity of many of them. Among the several hundred radio and TV shows to Stuart Jerome?s credit are such well-remembered programs as Suspense, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, I Led Three Lives, and The Fugitive. At present he is a TV and movie script doctor. He is married and lives in Los Angeles. All orders shipped protected in a box.
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