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).

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.