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By most accounts, young Fay Wray was popular on campus, but she made her reputation as a scholar, not a socialite. Every morning she would walk to school from her home in Hollywood, and every afternoon she would spend her lunch hour on the school's sweeping front lawn, among the wild poinsettias. Even her extracurricular life was as wholesome and proper as her attitude about school: "After school I would go right home, help my mother, and then study, sometimes until twelve o'clock at night, but I enjoyed it."
Though she never landed a lead role in a Hollywood High production, young Fay Wray did have minor parts in two school plays - Booth Tarkington's Seventeen and The Pied Piper of Hamelin, presented in 1923. Arthur Kachel directed both plays, and even today Fay Wray credits "Kaich" with having exerted a profound influence on her. "He was an inspiration," she says. "His energy was compelling and he had great authority. He wasn't stuffy or too academic, but a real liberal personality."
That summer, Kaich chose Fay, along with five other students, to play nonspeaking roles in the Pilgrimage Play, one of the greatest honors the drama teacher could bestow upon one of his young protogés. "I played a kind of vestal virgin who had to carry a candle up a path," Fay recalls. "I didn't have any lines but it was a good experience. It gave me a chance to get the feel of working every night in a production." Most of her studio publicity bios claim that Fay Wray was discovered while performing in the Pilgrimage Play, but this was not the case. By 1923 she had already done a good deal of extra work in movies, and as she later said of the studios, "they didn't discover me, I discovered them." Like so many who would follow her, young Fay left Hollywood High her junior year and, as was mandated by state law, completed her education at a special school on the studio lot. As a result, her picture does not appear in the 1925 Poinsettia.
The school newspaper did, however, give passing mention to her leave-taking. Apparently, young Fay's sudden departure caused a bit of confusion among the members of the Athenaeum Club, who had, only two weeks earlier, elected her vice-president. The newspaper's account of the situation, titled "Important Meetings Held By Athenaeum," is indicative of the student body's matter-of-fact attitude toward the film careers of their fellow students: "Last Thursday, the Athenaeum Club held two meetings. Both were of great importance. One was the tryouts for those wishing to become members and the other was the election of a new vice-president. Fay Wray, former vice-president, is working in motion pictures, so is unable to fill her position."