Captain Billy's Whiz Bang, August 1921 · page 23 of 68
Captain Billy's Whiz Bang #23 — page 23: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page satirizes 1920s Hollywood mythology. A speaker mocks the romanticized image of beautiful actresses, claiming they're actually voracious eaters who prefer chauffeurs (working-class drivers) to millionaires because dating rich men requires "knowing which fork to eat with"—mocking upper-class etiquette. The text ridicules one unnamed "beauty" whose weekly food bills average $40 (substantial then), eating continuously between stage performances. The satire culminates in commentary about **Pola Negri**, a famous Polish-born silent film star. Hollywood publicity agents allegedly struggled to find an acceptably "inoffensive" birthplace for her, fabricating her origins repeatedly. The joke targets both actresses' actual appetites and Hollywood's manufactured glamour—the gap between carefully constructed public images and mundane reality.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
Captain Billy's Whiz Bang 21 "To tell you the truth," she says, "Those girls don't care much about millionaires. They infinitely prefer to go around with chauffeurs because they don't have to worry about which fork to eat with. They have to have million- aires around on account of their appetites. No ordinary fortune could keep those girls filled up. In a previous existence most of them must have been boa constrictors. They eat all the time. One girl, famous for her beauty, starts in with a good dinner before the show. All during the intervals when she is not on the stage, she has waiters bring her lunches in her dressing room. Her bill averages forty dollars a week for the little snacks she eats between her dinner before the show and the supper with a millionaire after the show. That girl ought to marry a Service of Supply Depot." The little newcomers says that nearly all the lovely beauties whom we have imagined as dining on lark's tongues and poetry have ap- petites like traffic cops. What they need in New York right now is a new country for the movie stars to be born in. They have a dreadful time trying to get Pola Negri located. Ever since the foreign pictures began to pour in with this Negri lady in the leading part of most of the plays, they have been trying to get her born in some inoffensive place. The press agents have had her in turn