It Took Nine Tailors

It Took Nine Tailors is a story told in Adolphe Menjou's own voice that recounts life from his 1890 birth in Pittsburgh through days spent working in his father's restaurants and early travails breaking into the acting business right into detailed stories of breaking into movies and climbing the ladder to become a leading man.

It was Menjou's mustache and a top hat rented for fifty cents that brought him his first part in the movies. Working with Douglas Fairbanks, Rudolph Valentino, Pola Negri, the immortals of early Hollywood, he made his special spot in that difficult town. The hilarity of silent pictures, the birth of the Hays office and the beginnings of the talkies provide a colorful background for the fantastic progress of the actor Adolphe Menjou.

Woven throughout the book are accounts of his excursions into the realms of tailoring, as well as his own witty version of the peccadillos of Hollywood greatness. In his foreword, Clark Gable says of Menjou: 'In Hollywood, nothing less than sensational or colossal is considered worthy of recording. . . . Adolphe's nonstop career as an actor speaks for itself. He started in the business when any pictures over two reels in length was considered a super-special and he is still a leading film personality.' "

From the book's original description:
It took nine tailors and thirty-five years as Hollywood's beloved man-about-town to make Adolphe Menjou. Famous for his wardrobe and his wit, he has probably been associated with more popular moving pictures than any other actor in Hollywood. But the man and how he made his unique place in the picture world has never before been revealed.

Here is his own story and the phenomenon of Hollywood, written with great humor and gusto in collaboration with M. M. Musselman, author of Wheels in His Head.