Jimmy Starr began his career in Hollywood in the 1920s, writing the intertitles for silent shorts for producers such as Mack Sennett, the Christie Film Company, and Educational Films Corporation, among others. He also toiled as a gossip and film columnist for the Los Angeles Record in the 1920s and from 1930-1962 for the L.A. Herald-Express.

Starr was also a published author. In the 1940s, he penned a trio of mystery novels, the best known of which, The Corpse Came C.O.D., was made into a movie.

In 1926, Starr authored 365 Nights in Hollywood, a collection of short stories about Hollywood. It was published in a limited edition of 1000, each one signed and numbered by the author, by the David Graham Fischer Corporation, which seems to have been a very small (possibly even a vanity) press.

Here’s “The Most Passionate…” from that 1926 collection.

 

 

The blue smoke hung low in the large club room. The radio was tuned in softly. A beautiful melody was being rendered on the violin.

Two men sat in massive over-stuffed chairs. Both were silent. Both were smoking.

They were literary men. They were discussing women. (Men do.)

One man was heavy-set and smiling. He wrote humorous stories for a living. The other was thin and sad-looking. He wrote anything that happened to come into his mind, and the public cried for more.

They were talking of the most passionate women in the cinema colony. She was well worth discussing. Everyone talked of her, and everyone had a different story. She was like that.

“Her present husband and I were very good pals at one time,” said the sad-faced man. “We used to run around together, before he married her.”

“I knew him, too,” murmured the other.

“Well, one night up at their house, we all got drunk. He got me in a corner and told me a story.”

The other man was listening intently.

“The next day, after I had sobered up, I wrote the story as he had told it to me, using, of course, fictitious names. I have often intended to sell it to some magazine, but I can’t make up mind to it.”

“I should like to read it.”

“Okay. Come on over to the house and I’ll get it for you,” he said, rising slowly from his chair.

 

.  .  .

 

Paula Monroe was the most passionate woman in Hollywood!

There was no doubt about that. She admitted it. For once her press agent had told the truth. If Hollywood had not talked about her and the world had not listened, where would she be today?

She wouldn’t be, that’s all.

Only a few months had passed since she had been entirely unknown. Now she was a star,—a real exponent of the flickering drama. She had her cars, her maids, her bank accounts and her lovers!

Ah, her lovers! If it had not been for them!

Even now she was not satisfied. (A woman seldom is.) Paula was a passionate woman—and more than that!

(For she had to get along in the Movies!)