Meet two of the most powerful men in movie history. Bet you've never heard of them.
The Bliss-Hayden. The Belasco. The Mayan and the Biltmore. The El Capitan. The Vine Street Theatre. The Hollywood Palace and The Music Box. - not to mention the trio of venues that made up The Pasadena Playhouse.
Night after night they would be there, in the dark: men like Solly Baiano and Billy Grady - two of the most powerful figures in Hollywood.
What - you've never heard of them?
Neither have most - but without these unsung heroes, there'd be a lot of other names you wouldn't have heard of either: James Stewart, Lana Turner, Ginger Rogers, Debbie Reynolds...to name but a few.
Solly worked for Jack Warner. Sometime in the twenties, he traded his fiddle for a job as Jack's personal talent scout. He spent the next forty-seven years haunting theatres, screening films, judging beauty contests, and grilling agents.
It was Solly, as much as anybody, who made Warners one of the great studios of the thirties and forties - though it was Billy - O'Grady cum Grady - who, at MGM, stocked the Hollywood firmament with "more stars than there are in heaven."
That famous story about Lana Turner being discovered at Schwabb's drugstore? It was actually the Top Hat Cafe - Lana, a high school sophomore, had popped in between classes for a Coke - and the man she was referred to by the photographer whose eye she caught was Solly.
Debbie Reynolds Solly discovered at a beauty contest sponsored by Lockheed. Debbie was all of 16 but her lip synch routine was enough to sway him.
Grady talked for years of attending a show at Princeton, where he made note of a soon-to-graduate architect in a line of female impersonators. "He was the only one who didn't ham it up", said Billy of Jimmy - Stewart, that is.
Donna Mullenger was another college student Billy signed, L.A. City College to be exact, though she had just moved to the city from Iowa. She became Donna Drake for a while, then her name was changed again to Donna Reed.
Stories? They and their eagle-eyed charges could have told you thousands of them, one for each celebrity signed.
But they were quiet figures, content to leave the bluster to the boss; truly The Golden Age's silent partners.
