In its heyday, the period 1917–60 dealt with in The Classical Hollywood Cinema, Hollywood was a gold-rush boom town, a place of pilgrimage, when the young and the beautiful, the cynical and the depraved, the talented, the lucky, and the doomed thronged to seek their fortunes. That was how it was supposed to be, at any rate, and, oddly enough, that was really the way the capital city of illusion was, as if Hollywood itself were its own greatest production.
Easy to forget, nowadays, how unprecedented the movie industry was in its mobilisation of vast amounts of capital, both financial and human, in the production of pleasure. Easy to forget the religious fervour that possessed the audiences, those communities of strangers crowded together in the dark. (How appropriate that, according to Hollywood Anecdotes, one of the abandoned Art Deco picture palaces in New York has been consecrated as a Pentecostal tabernacle.)
Hollywood was, still is, always will be, synonymous with the movies. It was the place where the United States perpetrated itself as a universal dream and put the dream into mass production. ‘We take Hollywood seriously, treating it as a distinct mode of movie practice with its own cinematic style and industrial conditions of existence,’ state the authors of The Classical Hollywood Cinema, and proceed, comprehensively to do so.
But there was an extra dimension of scandal and glamour that was also an essential part of the product. John Ford said that you couldn’t geographically define Hollywood. Almost as soon as the studios went up, the town was recreated via the twentieth-century arts of publicity as the home of an ever-increasing pantheon of deities; major, minor, and all sizes in between. Star worship wasn’t a perversion but a genuine manifestation of the religious instinct. (Some of that sense of the sacred rubbed off the movies on to the US itself, too, which is why we all venerate the Stars and Stripes.)
Janet Leigh thought the MGM lot in the Fifties was like fairyland. Other actresses did not. ‘ “Darling,” drawled Tallulah Bankhead to Irving Thalberg, “how does one get laid in this dreadful place?” ’
But did she really say it, or did somebody put the words in her mouth? ‘Hollywood thrives on apocryphal aphorisms,’ say the authors of Hollywood Anecdotes. At least one of their stories – the one about the cameraman who apologises for not getting as good shots as he did ten years before – has a variable heroine, either Greer Garson or Marlene Deitrich or Norma Shearer. The authors categorically deny that another story, told by Elizabeth Taylor about herself, ever happened at all. A favourite story of Hitchcock’s has no basis in fact, either.
This is genuinely folkloric material. ‘Telling a story is the basic formal concern,’ according to The Classical Hollywood Cinema. That is what the Hollywood cinema is there for. Telling stories about the people engaged in telling stories is a basic informal concern, and no matter if these are twice-told tales – they gain richness and significance with repetition.
Much of the contents of Hollywood Anecdotes will be familiar to buffs, and loved because it is familiar. There is the MGM lion (‘Ars Gratia Artis’) who in old age, had to be fitted with dentures, and also the lions (25 lions at 25 dollars a head) who pissed on the assembled Christian martyrs in Cecil B. de Mille’s The Sign Of The Cross. Though, alas, the toothless lion of whom Victor Mature (Androcles and the Lion) said ‘I don’t want to be gummed to death’, is missing.
Sam Goldwyn’s famous deformations of English are lavishly quoted: ‘You’ve got to take the bull by the teeth,’ etc. Boller and Davis are fond of funny accents; they wouldn’t dream of omitting Michael ‘Bring on the empty horses’ Curtiz.
They cite genuine curiosities, like the brothel, Mae’s, staffed by film-star lookalikes (‘Claudette Colbert’ spoke excellent French). Ben Hecht’s celebrated dictum gets another airing: ‘Starlet is a name for any woman under 30 not actively employed in a brothel.’ Otherwise, Boller and Davis are decently reticent about the abundant sexual folklore of Hollywood, which the prurient are advised to seek in Kenneth Anger’s two volumes of Hollywood Babylon.
All in all, the tone of Hollywood Anecdotes is oddly similar to those little Sunday school compilations of the sayings of saints and worthies. Any incident, no matter how trivial, is worth recounting if it concerns a star or near-star. Christopher Plummer, it is said, hated The Sound of Music so much he nicknamed it The Sound of Mucus. Abbot and Costello once threw a suitcase of condoms at their director in the middle of a scene. Well, well, goodness gracious.
Close-Ups – designed to look like a mock-up of a Thirties movie annual – is the very stuff of legendary history, a collection of star ephemera spanning seventy-odd years complete with iconic representations. Odd little snippety articles go with the photographers, some of them historic documents such as Alvah Bessie’s obituary of Marilyn Monroe and Budd Schulberg’s weird threnody for Judy Garland, other bits of makeweight scribble even if the by-line makes you blink – Sergio Leone on Henry Fonda, for example.
Danny Peary, the editor, describes Close-Ups as a scrap-book. Leafing through it is an unnerving experience; like flicking through the channels late at night on television, catching snatch after snatch of old movies diminished by their transmission through the indifferent air. When we talk about Hollywood nowadays, we talk about nostalgia, but Brecht described his own experience in Golden Age Hollywood: ‘Every morning to earn my bread,/I go to the market where lies are bought/Hopefully/I take up my place among the sellers.’
The hell of it was, they made wonderful movies, then, when nothing in Hollywood was real except hard work, mass production, the conveyor belt, the tyrants, and madmen running the studios.
The Classical Hollywood Cinema quotes François Truffaut: ‘We said that the American cinema pleases us and its film-makers are slaves. What if they were freed? And from the moment that they were freed, they made shitty films.’
(1988)