It begins with an invitation for a young actress to see a guy about a film or TV role. She shows up at the appointed time and place and finds herself alone in a room with a man with the power to advance or break her career.

The man-in-command flirts and puts his hands where they don't belong. A Palm Springs-based former actress even tells of the time a guy exposed himself to her, as independent movie mogul Harvey Weinstein is accused of doing to someone else.

“I was up for a cover on a record album,” said Alexis Hunter, now working as a writer and artist. “I went to the person who was making the decision and he walked behind me and locked the door. I just sat there. Suddenly, he goes to sit in his chair and he unzips his pants and starts to masturbate. I was afraid. If a man locked the door, I didn’t know what else he would do. I got up and he jumped up and, the great thing is, he fell. He tripped over his pants and I left.”

Hunter has written a book on her late partner, Joi Lansing, chronicling Lansing's challenges in Hollywood from the late 1940s until her premature death stemming from leaky silicon implants in 1972. She was dubbed "a blond bombshell" in films with the likes of Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin and as a featured actress on “The Bob Cummings Show.” So she dealt with sexual harassment, said Hunter, "on just about every film and every TV show."

Leslie Todd, owner of Town Center Drugs in Palm Desert, heard many of the horror stories Hunter tells in her memoir, “Joi Lansing: A Body To Die For.”

“She (Joi) was married to my dad for 15 years,” said Todd, whose daughters, Suzanne and Jennifer, are successful film producers with credits including last year's Academy Awards ceremony. “She’d go to meet the people she was going to be in a film with and, if they invited her into their trailer and left the door open, it was a good meeting. But, if they shut the door and locked the door behind her, she might as well get up and leave because they didn’t really want to talk to her. They just wanted sex.”

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Since the dawn of the movie industry, and probably before that in the theater world, such behavior was accepted as part of show biz. In fact, they even had a cute euphemism for it. What was once dubbed the casting couch, now in the Weinstein/Kevin Spacey-era, society is seemingly ready to call it what it really is, sexual harassment or sometimes assault.

“It was well known in Hollywood,” said singer-actress Roberta Linn, who started in Depression-era films at age 4. “They called it the casting couch. In fact, there was a saying, ‘Who do I have to sleep with to get on this movie?’ Then there was a funny joke: ‘Who do I have to sleep with to get off of this movie?’”

Linn was one of the rare child stars to make a successful transition to the entertainment industry as an adult, earning an Emmy while serving as Lawrence Welk’s first “Champagne Lady" from 1950-55, and still singing at Oscar's Bar & Cafe in Palm Springs. But she said “it was scary” entering this world without the protection of the film studios who put her through the Hollywood Professionals School. “You knew you had these predators.”

While still in her early 20s, Linn was offered an opportunity to do a television series with the comedy legends Abbott and Costello. An agent invited her to a meeting in his office above Sunset Boulevard while her mother waited for her in the parking lot.

“He came around the desk and he put his hand on my shoulder,” Linn said. “And he said, ‘You know, I’ve never seen you in person. You’re so pretty.’ I said, ‘Thank you,’ but I got that creepy feeling when he touched me. Then he said a few more suggestive things to me and he literally chased me around his desk. I got up and got away from him. I knew something bad was going to happen. Just when he touched me I knew. I got out of the office and ran downstairs and told my mother, who was in the car. My mother was going to go up and let him have it. But it was frightening.”

Linn eventually married Las Vegas lounge star Freddy Bell and became friends with Sinatra, the Rat Pack and Marilyn Monroe, who she saw at the Cal-Neva Lodge in Lake Tahoe shortly before her death in 1962. But after being chased by that predatory agent, Linn said she was afraid to go to any show biz meetings without her mother for years.

“I was afraid every time I went into somebody’s office,” she said. “Then I realized that all the girls that were under contract to the studios probably all had the same situations. So, I knew it was going on. Everybody knew. But luckily, I was protected. My mother was very protective. She went with me everywhere after that.”

Linn attended the Palm Springs Women in Film and Television Broken Glass Awards luncheon Monday at the Agua Caliente Resort Casino Spa in Rancho Mirage, where event co-chair Mitch Blumberg called the behavior described in allegations against Weinstein, Spacey, producer Brett Ratner and others part of “the dark underside of Hollywood.”

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Sexual harassment was a common topic of conversation at the reception for the fundraising luncheon. In fact, of more than a half-dozen Broken Glass Awards attendees asked about their experiences with sexual predators, only honoree Lucie Arnaz said she had “never experienced any of the sexual harassment most women have, including my own daughter.” It might be worth noting that Arnaz is the daughter of studio owners Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball.

Past PSWIFT President Patti Gribow recalled a man trying to force himself on her in an empty apartment when she was a member of Dean Martin’s Golddiggers song and dance group in her early 20s. Another time, when she had just moved to L.A. from Cincinnati, she went for a meeting with a man in a trailer office behind a studio.

“I was naïve,” she said. “I thought, maybe there’s an audition back there. When I found I was just by myself with him, I got out of there.”

Kim Waltrip, a film producer and former actress and model, said she was touched inappropriately on a modeling assignment in Europe by a man who never spoke with her again after she rebuffed him and demanded he take her back to Paris.

Denise DuBarry, an actress and producer who started in Hollywood in 1977 and recently produced and starred in the locally shot film, “Do It Or Die,” said she’s had at least two first-hand experiences with sexual predators in the film and TV business.

“I went to read for a ‘Starsky and Hutch’ series of episodes because they were taking a cruise ship from L.A. to Hawaii and they were going to shoot several episodes on the cruise ship and then in Hawaii and on the way back, too,” she said. “I remember going into the interview. I had just come off being a lead on ‘Black Ship Squadron’ and I was talking with the producer. I won’t mention his name, but he said, ‘We’ve got roles for about 10 women on this upcoming series. But we only want fun girls.’ I said, ‘Well, I don’t know. I don’t know how much fun I am.’

“There was another (incident with a) very famous actor. He was one of those actors who just came from nowhere and had a big hit. So, he was producing his next film. My agent had submitted my head shots and he had culled through who he wanted to interview. I had never met this person or anybody on his staff and, as I walked in, his staff started leaving. Like, it’s 5 o’clock, we’re leaving. I thought, ‘This is odd.’ So I walked into his office, sat on the couch and he was behind his desk. I had my (portfolio) book, as young actresses do, and he said, ‘Let me see your book.’ He started looking at all the different photos and, as he did, he started inching closer and closer and he put his arm around me. And he started to try to kiss me. I said, ‘What are you doing?’ He was like making these romantic moves on me and I said, ‘Look, you’re married. I have a boyfriend. I’m here for a job, that’s it.’ He was new to fame and power (and) I guess he just thought, ‘This is part of the perks.’ He just thought, ‘I’m famous and people will just fawn all over me.’ Most women probably would take that as a big compliment. I wasn’t offended. I was flattered. But I had to draw a strong line.”

Women aren’t the only victims of sexual predators operating a “casting couch.” Michael Childers, a photographer, stage producer and assistant to his late, long-time personal partner, director John Schlesinger, on such films as “Midnight Cowboy,” “Day of the Locust” and “The Falcon and the Snowman,” said he had “a couple famous agents who promised favors for sexual things."

“There were teases – intimations that if I played ball, if I was a good boy, certain things would be delivered to me,” he said. “There are gay predators. Sometimes young actors scream and yell and sometimes they don’t.”

But Childers draws a distinction between people in positions of power who will give jobs to those who "play ball" on the casting couch and those who force themselves upon vulnerable young men or women.

“The casting couch and predators might be cousins,” he said. “I loathe predators, but how are you going to stop the casting couch? … Trading sexual favors for jobs, that’s been going on forever and it will continue. I hope the sexual abuse stuff will stop. The Harvey Weinstein stuff makes me ill.”

Sid Craig, who served as a talent agent for 35 years starting in 1968 and was the casting director for the 1973 TV film, “The Missiles of October” with William Devane as President John F. Kennedy, said there were once rules in the artist-managers labor agreements designed to protect young actors and actresses from casting couch predators.

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“In the 1940s,” he said, “they actually had a statement in the labor commissioner’s rules saying agents could not have a couch in their office.”

Craig said he tried to help his young female clients navigate the audition circuit safely.

“I set down rules with clients: Lunches any time, dinners never,” he said. “If you say yes to dinner with someone you just met, you’re opening a door to something you may not want to get involved with.”

But, once that door was opened, Craig didn’t necessarily impose his will on his clients.

“I remember on a Saturday night, at 10 o’clock, getting a call by one of my young actresses. She said to me, ‘Sid’ – and she started to whisper – ‘I’m at so-and-so’s house and he wants me to spend the night and he’s doing a picture.’ I remember saying to her, ‘Louise, are you attracted to him?’ And she said, ‘Yes,’ and I said, ‘Honey, if you’d like to spend the night with him, that’s your business. If you want to spend the night with him for a part, be sure there’s a contract and a pen on the nightstand.”

Craig feels his rules for his clients “worked” to protect them from predators. But he said protecting young actresses from casting couches wasn't talked about in Hollywood's "golden" days.

“To me, in my 35 years as an agent, it was over-exaggerated,” he said. “And I wasn’t naïve. I sat on the board of the Association of Talent Agents for 18 years. I was one of the two vice presidents. We would meet once a month in board meetings and, my hand to God, never once did I hear the subject come up about clients that had problems. Stories of the trade? There weren’t any.”

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But actresses from back in the day heard stories. Hunter said Lansing, who was promoted as a successor to Marilyn Monroe and Jane Mansfield as a sex symbol, told stories about Monroe's battles with movie power players. Monroe said in her memoir, "My Story," that filmmakers and studio chiefs viewed Hollywood as "an overcrowded brothel, a merry-go-round with beds for horses.”

Paul Davids, writer-director of the Monroe documentary, “Marilyn Monroe Declassified,” said Monroe turned down a marriage proposal from the William Morris agent who discovered her at the Palm Springs Racquet Club, Johnny Hyde, and actually lost opportunities because she wouldn't accede to the casting couch.

“Her biographers suggest that when studio heads pointed to the ‘casting couch,’ Marilyn was more noted for saying no than yes," said Davids, "and it cost her roles, contracts and security.”

Calls and e-mails to ask the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists what safeguards might be in place to protect young actors and actresses today, or what plans might come out of the new national conversation about sexual coercion spurred by the Weinstein allegations were not immediately returned.

Gribow, who is married to attorney Dale Gribow, said she learned from her experiences, “Don’t be alone in a place that does not seem to be where you should be in the business you’re in.” But she added a woman can’t be held responsible for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

“Hopefully, we are coming to a point in our society where we’re recognizing that this kind of behavior is just not acceptable,” she said. “We have to respect one another for who we are as men and women.”

Waltrip said the whole industry needs more education on how to protect vulnerable young men and women who come to Hollywood desperate to fulfill their dreams.

“Agents need to be communicating with directors,” she said. “Agents need to be careful who they’re sending their clients to, and certainly not in hotel rooms.

“I was sexually abused (when) I was between 6 and 10. It really had a profound effect on me. It took me four years of relentless therapy to understand it wasn’t my fault. That’s why I support these women because it’s not their fault and for men, they’re either stupid or uneducated or their egos are so big they think they can get away with it. And every day we let them get away with it makes them stronger and stronger.”