The Rise of Minna Nordstrom

"The Rise of Minna Nordstrom" is a short story by P. G. Wodehouse, which first appeared in the United States in the March 1933 issue of American Magazine under the title "A Star is Born", and in the United Kingdom in the April 1933 issue of Strand. It was included in the collection Blandings Castle and Elsewhere (1935).

Plot summary

The story is the fourth of five stories set in Hollywood that are narrated by pub raconteur Mr Mulliner, who tells this one while sipping his usual hot Scotch and soda at a bar called the Angler's Rest. The barmaid has just seen a movie starring Minna Nordstrom, and was much impressed. Mr. Mulliner claims to know the story of how Nordstrom became a star—by "sheer enterprise and determination", not personal connections.

He begins by describing Vera Prebble, a parlormaid working at the home of the head of a large movie studio. She (and, according to Mulliner, nearly every other non-acting resident of Hollywood) starts demonstrating her acting prowess whenever she encounters a studio executive, who in this case is Jacob Z. Schnellenhamer. Annoyed, he fires her, and she retaliates by informing the police (accurately) that he has a stash of liquor in his cellar. Because the story takes place during Prohibition, the police raid the house and confiscate the alcohol.

But he and his wife are planning a party that evening for 150 people, and they must have liquor to serve, Prohibition or no Prohibition. So Schnellenhamer contacts several suppliers (bootleggers), but they are all busy filming movies—highly unlikely, in the real world, but par for the course in Mr Mulliner's Hollywood. Then he tries contacting another studio head, who had the misfortune of having recently hired the same Vera Prebble, firing her, and suffering the same fate. The two of them move on to a third studio head, who had fired Prebble even more recently, with the same result of confiscation of his liquor.

As is usual in a Mr Mulliner story, the opening events are interesting and perhaps exaggerated, but eventually become so improbable that readers would have to conclude that they are being ensnared in a tall tale. In these five Hollywood stories, Wodehouse has apparently woven wry observations about his own time as a Hollywood screenwriter into the narrative.

The three studio executives band together and, in one last desperate attempt, visit the home of a fourth studio head, who happens to be away on vacation. Alas, Prebble had just been hired by him, too, and she threatens another police raid if she is not awarded a contract as a movie star. The three studio heads begin to bargain with her, each outbidding the others, until they decide to merge their firms and thus become a sole negotiator to deal with Prebble. This is the crisis that precipitates the creation of the (fictional, and highly satirical) Perfecto-Zizzbaum Corporation—by virtue of the merger of the Colossal-Exquisite, the Perfecto-Fishbein, and the Zizzbaum-Celluloid. The vacationing executive, head of the Medulla-Oblongata studio, is not present to add his company to the mix. The actual medulla oblongata is a part of the brain that controls some of the body's lower levels of functioning; this is presumably not an accidental choice by Wodehouse.

As the negotiations escalate and the executives near an agreement to offer Prebble a 5-year contract, the police arrive. Soon the studio heads try to bribe the police, too, by offering them movie contracts. Recalling previous rejections by the same men, the police decline the offers and head for the cellar. (Most readers will find such high moral standards by law enforcement in motion-picture towns to be a role reversal of a role reversal, thus contributing to the tall-tale atmosphere.) Prebble misleads them and locks them in the coal cellar instead of taking them to the wine cellar.

Terms are agreed to. Prebble selects the stage name of Minna Nordstrom, and cannily requires the executives to sign a letter summarizing the main points of their deal before she hands over the key to the liquor. As in most of Wodehouse's Hollywood fiction (and certainly in the five Mr Mulliner Hollywood stories), studio executives can never be trusted to respect an oral promise.

When Mr Mulliner's story ends, there is no mention of the ultimate reaction of his listeners in the pub. Readers are thus left to wonder whether the pubmates, like the actual readers of the story, become skeptical of the veracity of the events he recounts.