In California: A Place for Curtain Calls

Save for the celluloid immortality enjoyed by a few of the residents here, they are all, of course, as defenseless against decline as any other aged flesh and mind: the tolerance is gone for noise, harsh light, the unexpected; a sidewalk curb is no more easily managed than an escarpment. But it is different in here. There isn't, for example, the palpable sadness that is so striking in other institutions where people are growing very old. It isn't happy all the time, exactly, but neither is the air so thick with loneliness, to say nothing of futility.

The name of the place is the Motion Picture and Television Country House and Hospital, and it is where many film and TV people who don't get filthy rich wind up; carpenters, grips, security men, sound technicians and other behind-the-scenes retirees outnumber the luminaries, but the list of recognizable retirees is not as brief as one might expect, given the salaries in the business they have left behind. Mary Astor is here. Donald Crisp died here. Norma Shearer is here. Eddie ("Rochester") Anderson died here. Regis Toomey is here. Ellen Corby, the grandmother on The Waltons, just moved in. Stepin Fetchit is here. Bruce Cabot, Chester Conklin, Larry Fine (one of the Three Stooges), Edmund Lowe, Arthur O'Connell, Herbert Marshall and Mitchell Leisen (a director whose credits included Death Takes a Holiday) died here.

Chill Wills would have died of cancer here, but he said he wanted to go home when the end was very near; he barely beat the clock with the help of a limousine. At his house, he told his wife when they laid him down, "I'm never going to leave this bed again." Johnny Weissmuller was here, but lucidity began to elude him in the darkest hours, and he took to wandering into other rooms, booming that famous Tarzan yell, and they had to take him away. The ape man is now being attended to in a villa in Acapulco, and his bills are seen to by the Motion Picture and Television Fund. The fund also administers the Country House and Hospital, which is not equipped to accommodate any behavioral explosion since one of the principal missions here is to becalm.

The fund has been around under one name or another since 1921, and it is enormously well off, primarily as a result of extraordinary expressions of philanthropy. Its motto is "We take care of our own." Recent bequests from the Samuel Goldwyn estate alone approach $35 million. George Burns just gave the fund a supermarket, and the fund sold it for $600,000. The big gifts and an industrywide payroll deduction plan that now brings in about $2 million a year have accumulated to present assets of $80 million, including the 47 acres in the Los Angeles suburb of Woodland Hills, where the Country House and Hospital stands. The budget is $14 million a year and rising. The director of fund raising is William Campbell, whose name may not ring a bell, but whose face would.

"The money most of these people get from their unions, pensions, Social Security, whatever," Campbell was explaining in his office one day, "you could fit in your nostril." Superstars aside, he said, "think of the actor with 30 years of experience, average it out to $12,000 a year earnings, and you come up with retirement benefits of $400 a month. Who could live on it?"