It was in Pasadena that Sherman had a sinus operation and I had a movie offer. We both nearly died of our respective shocks.

I was walking along Colorado Boulevard in Pasadena one day when a puffy little citizen raced up behind me. "Wait! You with the crutches. Just a minute," he yelled. I waited.

"Say, young lady," he panted, "would you like a job with the movies?"

"What have you got to offer?" I asked in a feeble attempt at the grand manner.

"I haven't anything myself, but get hold of today's paper. I saw an ad in there. You fill the bill exactly. I've got to run - catch my bus."

With that, he was gone. Of course, I grabbed every paper on the newsstand. It was there, all right. "WANTED: a girl with an amputated leg for movie work. Would prefer one who uses crutches habitually. Good pay and easy work."

The two latter lures always appeal to me, even when they aren't fed up with the movies. The combination was irresistible.

"How would this do for an opener in my application letter?" I said to Sherman that night. "My friends all say I am fascinating. Why, just today I was walking along when someone called me Ann Sheridan - open-and-shut case of mistaken identity."

"Surprise them," Sherman advised cynically. "Let Mr. Goldwyn say, 'Why, Miss Sheridan, don't tell me you hacked off your leg just for this little old part?'"

"I wonder what studio it is," I day-dreamed like an adolescent. "I bet it's Twentieth Century-Fox. They're casting for the Song of Bernadette. Jennifer Jones is probably even now planning to grow me a new leg for a minor miracle."

I finally wrote a dignified little note swimming over what a charmer I was. I merely admitted to my fulfillment of the amputation requirement. I sent it off to the anonymous box number given in the ad.

The next day I had a telephone call. It was the movie magnate. He told me his name, but it didn't sound familiar. He wasn't Louis B. Mayer, anyway, or Darryl Zanuck. He asked me a few questions. The only one I can remember was, "How old are you?"

I crossed my fingers and said twenty-five. If he questioned that later, I figured I could always tell him I had lived recklessly and was considerably jaded for my years. He made an appointment to call on me.

He arrived the next day with some henchman in tow. "Look, she even wears the white crutches," one of the men said the first thing when they came into the house.

"Yes, very interesting, very interesting indeed -"

This, I gathered, was dandy. I must say I was startled when I discovered why. They were casting the lead, they told me, for a Government-sponsored film for distribution to servicemen and foreign audiences, on the life of the famous one-legged French prostitute who habitually used white crutches. Her part in the underground resistance movement was a courageous and fascinating story and would prove a great morale builder when depicted on the screen.

"She has now disappeared from Paris and no one knows what happened to her, whether she was spirited away by friends or whether her role was discovered by the Nazis. I don't suppose you have heard of her?" the casting one asked.

"Well, rather!" I said. It was difficult to forget my encounter on the Place de l'Opera with the sad-eyed young man who had advised me passionately to throw away my white crutches.

Before they departed, they informed me that they were completely satisfied. The part was mine. I would hear from them shortly when the picture was ready to go into production. I asked the leader of the intrigue for his name and studio connection. He scrawled them out on a piece of paper.

That night I decided it might be just as well to find out a little about my producer before I signed up as a prostitute with him. I called up everyone I knew who hobnobbed with the higher brackets in Hollywood. Nobody had ever heard of my man. I even called everyone I knew who had so much as eaten a square meal at the Brown Derby, but I drew a blank.

Finally I tracked down an acquaintance who was as ignorant as all the rest about the mysterious stranger, but he, as casting director of a large studio, was in a position to make effective inquiry.

He telephoned "my" studio. "My" man was not known. That was deflating. An Army moving-picture unit occupying a corner of the lot didn't know him either. The O.W.I. office in Los Angeles in charge of government wartime films, never heard of him, nor were they scheduling the story described. They were, in fact, closing their offices that very day. The studio legal department got somewhat fretful and excited. But if it was a racket, it certainly was a peculiarly subtle one, with a very specialized species of victims.

I hated to give up my movie man. "Maybe he was somebody terribly important, slumming under a false name," I told Sherman. "You know, out getting close to the common people."

"Yes," said Sherman. "He was probably Pandro S. Berman, out 'Pandroing' incognito."

From that day to this I have heard nothing more from my movie magnates. They came, they looked me over, told me I was a great find, and left. What they were up to is anyone's guess. I for one have contrived some magnificent plots.

If they wanted to locate a certain, particular one-legged girl by putting out the irresistible bait of a movie job, they probably found her. I wouldn't know. But obviously, they weren't looking for me. I'm still my old undiscovered self.

But if I never "made Hollywood" as an actress I did sell a book to the movies. It was titled Party Line and related a few odds and ends of juicy gossip that I picked up during a misspent youth listening in on the telephone. For the-most part, it was written in Prescott Arizona, where the waves of the housing problem finally washed us ashore. Here not only desperation but delight in the place and the people turned us into immovable landmarks. We quit trying to rent a house and bought one, a small cottage formerly owned and occupied by a nice old lady.

Instead of throwing it out, which might have been the wiser course, she threw in her furniture along with the house. Artistically speaking, the most dominant piece we acquired thus was probably the stiff, carved Victorian settee in the living room, or possibly the picture which hung over it of a flimsily draped female sitting by a waterfall bathing her clean, bare feet.

From my own personal point of view, however, nothing pierced my emotions quite so sharply as the black coal stove in the kitchen. The house was only three years old and was well plumbed and equipped with other modern devices. But the old lady apparently had one psychopathic quirk. She would have no truck with newfangled stoves.

It had been my equally firm intention never to have any more truck with the old-fashioned, blacksided, blackhearted ones. However, we knew this was Custer's last stand. Our despair was such that we would have happily accepted a wigwam with central heating - a bonfire in the middle. We'd even have taken six Hopi boarders, if they came with the place.

So, my book was composed on a kitchen table, with my peg again propped up comfortably on a coal scuttle. This may have been a tonic for my artistic temperament, but it was an irritant to my human temper. Civilization had weakened me.

As winter advanced and the snow heaped up around the coal cellar and Sherman collapsed with sinusitus, the rationing board took pity on me. They gave me a certificate for a new gas range. "That poor woman..." "Sad case..." "...one-legged, you..."

How firm a foundation! Praise the Lord!

MY REPUTATION for being not only physically crippled but something of a lame brain probably prompted the question that one local citizen put to my husband when my book was published. "Say, would you mind my inquiring how much it cost you?"

"What do you mean?" Sherman asked.

"Did the printing run high? My wife's written a lot of junk, too - poems and such like - and she'd like to get it published, and I just wondered how much that sort of thing sets you back. You don't figure to cover your expenses on the book sales, do you? Nobody's got that many kinfolks." He chortled merrily. "Of course, with you it's different," he went on seriously. "You'll get rid of a lot of copies to people who'll buy it because your wife's crippled."

I am glad, for the health of my royalties, that the book sold in a few places besides my own home town. But it wasn't my name on a national best-seller list that warmed my heart and made me feel important. It was the string of customers who bought out the local supply of my book in half an hour after it went on the block. With these purchasers, buying the book wasn't an impersonal transaction. In most cases, they didn't know whether the critics said it was tripe or a treasure. They bought the book because I wrote it and they wanted to see me get ahead in the world.

What is an anonymous customer compared to the eager little boy who stood in line, representing his widowed mother who worked and couldn't get time off to come for her copy? He had his two dollars and fifty cents clutched in his fist and he whispered to me as I autographed his book.

"We already got seven books," he said proudly, "but Mama decided to buy your book anyway - you being crippled and she knows you besides. Loraine gets to read it first because she washed dishes all week. Mama's going to read it nights when us kids are in bed. Fred's going to read it second, and Jane's going to read it out loud to me third. Then Mama's going to send it to Grandma to read and then we're going to keep it on the table right between Papa's picture and the goldfish."

Another customer, a sweet old lady, patted me on he shoulder while I inscribed her copy. "We're all proud of you, dear," she said. "As I said to my daughter, something worth while came out of your misfortune. If you hadn't had to sit down and rest so often, I expect you'd never have had the time to write a book, would you? I guess you'd be the first to admit that some good resulted from your being handicapped."

For that latter bit of philosophy anyway, there is no argument. I certainly would be the first to admit that quite a bit of good has come from my being handicapped. For one thing, I can't possibly imagine what in Heaven's name there would have been to put in this, my autobiography, if I'd had two feet.