The Taxi Dancer
by Jeff Siamon

Mitzi Carpenter is beautiful, talented and ambitious. If this were a true story, it would become part of the legend of Hollywood. Like Lana Turner being discovered sitting at the lunch counter at Schwab’s drugstore in Beverly Hill.
xxxMitzi is a farm girl from Pocatello, Idaho. She came to Hollywood hoping to get into the movies and become a movie star like so many innocent, young women in the 1920s. An accidental encounter with Chucky, the band leader at the Dreamland Dance Hall, finds her becoming a taxi dancer. Taxi dancers were dance hostesses that for a nominal fee (often 10 cents), they would dance with a dance-hall patron. A sort of poor-man’s Arthur Murray instructor.
xxxBut taxi dancing isn’t enough for her ambition. She seduces Chucky to become the girl singer in a fashionable L.A. speakeasy run by Chucky’s brother, Harry, and Tony Gallo, an L.A. crime boss. But Chucky doesn’t take her as far as she wants to go. Harry seems to offer that until a screen test set up by Mr. Gallo gets her a contract at a Hollywood studio.
xxxFame and fortune follow. Only what the legends never reveal is the price a person pays for their fame and fortune. The hurt they leave behind in their grasp of success. The ruthlessness in becoming a star that is matched by the ruthlessness of those who seek to own her.