SOUVENIR COLLECTING

Wairarapa Times-Age, 29 November 1939, Page 9

SOUVENIR COLLECTING

HOLLYWOOD SUFFERS. Hollywood's safes and clubs have always suffered a great deal more the souvenir purloining of silver, glassware, and ashtrays than do the same establishments in any other city in the world. Hollywood’s theatres long ago found 'hat it was necessary to establish every fixture and decoration so firmly that it would take a wrecking crew to dislodge them. Such show-houses as Grauman’s Chinese, and the Egyptian, and Carthay Circle all suffered losses of pictures, lamps, and even rugs when they were first, opened. The film city’s famous gay spot, the Trocadero, had to stop emblazoning its name on its napkins in order to minimise the souvenir temptation offered to tourists. Even now powder brushes and make-up materials of all sorts have to be watched carefully at Hollywood's famous Max Factor make-up studios. Visitors do not take any of these articles in the line of simple theft, perpetrated because they need the makeup materials; the whole attraction is that these beauty aids have figured in the glamorising of filmdom’s famous personages. Clark Gable and Myrna Loy regularly have their driving gloves purloined by the souvenir seekers. Both of these stars favour open motor cars, and both seem unable to break themselves of the careless habit of leaving these gloves in the car seat when they leave. The gloves are seldom there when they come back.