Fleeing the Fates of the Little Rascals

“Lights! Camera! Action!”  That is not what I heard at the time I was given a movie “screen test” in my fifth year of life.  Rather it was the soft, pleading voice of director Frank Capra, asking me to sing, to recite, and to emote. And I would not!

Though I repressed the memory of that traumatic adventure into film making for twenty-five years, I can now recall vividly just where I stood in a circle of light and heat from the stage lamps.  The test took place in a huge sound stage of Columbia Pictures on Gower Street in midtown-Hollywood.  I remember Mr. Capra gently exhorting me to demonstrate what I could do.  I had already sung in public for a Lion’s Club Christmas program a year and more before, when I was only three-and-a-half.  My literary, elocution teacher Grandmother had previously taught me to memorize and recite “The quality of mercy” speech from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice at an age when I could neither read nor write yet.  I was dainty, well-mannered, blue-eyed, with long, brown curls, but I didn’t “want to be in pictures.”

Besides, I had already spent days on movie sets when I had first appeared in scenes from the Our Gang Comedies.  It was no picnic for a three, four or five-year-old!  Only the “star performers,” -- “Alfalfa,” Darla, “Spanky,” “Porky,” and “Buckwheat” – had chairs to sit on between “takes” during a ten-hour day.  Not “extras” like me!  If a scene itself included no place to sit, then the extras were consigned to sit on the floor of the scene, in between takes, while cameras and lighting and sound equipment were rearranged.  Or maybe the director wanted to discuss something with one of the star performers, and the extras had to “hold” their positions.  For my part, all I wanted was to go sit in Mama Lee’s lap and take my usual afternoon nap.

One time a scene featured a gravel surface where I had sat for a “close-up.”  When the director said, “Cut,” Darla and “Alfalfa” went to little canvas chairs to rest for a bit, but I, with two other extras, was told to stay, cross-legged, sitting on that hard gravel. It was not soft sand! At the end of that long shooting session, my little behind and thighs were deeply indented with the imprint of gravel.   If that was what “being in the movies” was all about, I didn’t want any part of it.  To a three, four or five-year-old, there is no glamour in physical pain and hardship!