I Dare Say — Laugh, Clown, Laugh!

(originally published in The Pittsburgh Press, September 14, 1946)

By Florence Fisher Parry

Hollywood — I tell you you have to go out and get your story out here; it’s never in the mail or on the telephone.

I know, I know: millions are spent on Publicity in every studio, and the Important columnists have their “leg-women” to tour the studios for them, interview the stars second-hand, and telephone them the gossip items you read in all the syndicated columns.

But I, being nobody, prefer to find my own – they are under my feet wherever I go, stories I can never use, stories that I’ll hoard for a while until something happens that makes their telling just pat. And some, of course, I’m sending on to you right now.

But they’re never the stories you go out for; they’re never what you think they’ll be. How was I to know what I was going to find when they told me at MGM that Red Skelton was over on Stage 10 working on “Merton of the Movies,” and did I want to see him? Matter of fact, I didn’t. It was hot, I was tired, and I’m not a Red Skelton fan.

Or wasn’t. Count me in now, though.Laugh, Clown, Laugh!