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)
• 25 •
Edmund White: The Beautiful Room is Empty
This account of an American sentimental education starts off according to the conventions of such things: ‘I met Maria during my next-to-last year in prep school.’ In the US, prep school prepares you for college; the narrator is on the threshold of adulthood but, although an intense friendship with Maria, painter, socialist, Lesbian, nascent feminist, will be central to his life, she is far from being the romantic heroine who will administer his lessons of the heart.
Yet, in a sense, she saves his life, or, at least, his sense of self by introducing him into the hard-working, easy-going Bohemia of the Fifties, where our existentially dishevelled hero can feel, if still not quite at home, at least less abandoned in the world.
Love as such will come much later, almost at the novel’s end. As for passion – well, perhaps the preconditions for passion won’t arise until after the novel is over, because you need high self-esteem to engage in a passionate attachment, you need to believe yourself worthy of one, and the narrator of this lucid book spends the greater part of it coping, with considerable fortitude, with the conviction he is depraved, or mad, or worthless.
After he has finally found, and lost, his first great love, he tries to exorcise the pain by writing about it: ‘Yet how could I like myself, or ask the reader to take seriously a love between two men?’ The novel itself is an answer to that question.
The Beautiful Room is Empty is a sequel to Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story, and takes the anonymous hero of the earlier book from late adolescence, to the further shores of youth, his late twenties. It also takes him from the stern repression of the mid-West to New York City; from the ‘frumpy cuteness’ of Fifties Middle America to the ravishing diversity of the late Sixties; from the solid, merciless, deranged, white middle class to the rootless urban intelligentsia with its mix of race and class and desire.
But, essentially, the narrator’s sentimental education concerns neither men nor women but the nature of his own desires. It begins in a painful contradiction: ‘As half-consciously I inched towards my desires for men, I clung to my official goal of stifling these desires.’ Driven by a curiosity he believes to be as perverse as its promptings are irresistible, his encounters are bleak with irony, characterised by a deliberate absence of pleasure, as if to enjoy them would make them even more wicked. The narrator’s secret life, indeed, most of his sexual life, consists of meeting anonymous flesh in the public toilets he obsessively cruises, the ‘long sentence’ served on his knees from which Edmund White extracts an astonished poetry.
In a coffee shop, on a night out with a reckless gaggle of queens – ‘Grab your tiaras, girls’ – he notes straight couples stare with open disgust. ‘I was no longer a visitor to the zoo, but one of the animals.’ Meanwhile, the narrator’s father grudgingly coughs up for the analysis that is supposed to ‘cure’ his son. But the ministrations of Dr O’Reilly, speed freak and alcoholic, teetering on the verge of his own breakdown, collapse, only
induce more anxiety: ‘If I started from the premise I was sick (and what could be sicker than my compulsive cruising?) then I had to question everything I thought and did. My opinions didn’t count, since my judgement was obviously skewed.’
Damaged ghosts, victims of America, drift past. Annie Schroeder, real-life Warhol superstar avant le jour, yearns to be a top New York model. A bulimic, she blocks up the drains when she regurgitates the whole ham and entire turkey from which she has made a midnight snack during a Christmas visit home with the narrator; her gesture of disgust and rejection is so comprehensive, if involuntary, that it is a wonder the narrator never thought of bulimia himself.
Into this world of guilt, lust, and occasional fierce excitement erupts Lou, the ‘handsome, ugly man,’ scarred, alchoholic, heroin-addicted, irresistible, who loves Ezra Pound, and ‘everything deformed by the will towards beauty’, and who loves, too, the ‘beautiful poetry of gay life’. The narrator clearly hadn’t thought of it like that before.
Lou’s own huge potential for tragedy has been arrested by his equal potential for the dramatic glamour of the life of homosexual crime celebrated by Burroughs and Genet, the lure of, the necessity for transgression. In the terms of the period, you might say that Lou enjoys being a pervert.
It speaks volumes for the narrator’s good sense and emotional stability, in spite of all, that he eschews the ‘demon lover’ aspect of his new friend and cultivates, instead, a loving friendship. His scandalised mother, for whom the enigmatic Lou is the last straw, suggests an implant of female sex hormones will solve her son’s problems: ‘ . . . oestrogens neutralise your sex drive altogether; they neuter you and soon you’re free to lead a normal life.’
And yet she loves her son. She truly believes she has his welfare at heart.
Lou suggests the narrator leave Chicago for New York with him, the archetypal journey for the American writer, the mid-West to the Big Apple. Here, normalcy is a more flexible condition; the Sixties are just beginning; the streets are full of what Lou calls ‘Cha-cha queens, hairburners and glandular cases’, and the narrator begins, for the first time, to see homosexuality not as deviancy but as a way of being.
And the beautiful stranger arrives at last. The blond Sean. Perhaps love is not so inaccessible, after all. Yet Sean soon cracks up, breaks down, because loving another man is too much evidence that he is homosexual – a recurrent theme of the book, the wish to gratify desire whilst evading stigma, whilst avoiding self-identification whilst evading membership of a stigmatised group. That’s putting it in bare, sociological terms. It was a system of repression that killed. Sean goes to live with a cowboy; nobody, he writes, would ever guess this cowboy was gay . . .
The narrator despairs. ‘If as a child I’d known my whole long life was going to be so painful, I’d never have consented to go on leading it.’
But the novel is not over. It is quietly moving towards a remarkable and joyous conclusion that takes place, unfashionably enough, on the barricades, probably the first barricades in the history of street warfare manned by people who saw the funny side of a revolution.
On the day of the death of Judy Garland, the narrator and Lou find themselves in a gay bar, one summer’s night; the police raid. There is a riot. The bar was the Stonewall; at this point, the novel enters real history. ‘Lily Law shouldn’t have messed with us the night Judy died,’ says Lou. Somebody shouts out: ‘Gay is good.’ Gay Liberation is about to be born. The Stonewall riot was, the narrator says, ‘The turning point of our lives’. The rioters were not protesting their right to depravity, neuroses, or psychic derangement, but a simple right to be human.
This exemplary novel is written in prose as shining and transparent as glass; it lets you see life through it. It describes how the survivor of a psychological terror campaign retains his humanity.
If I were a teacher, I would recommend this book to every student who asked me why it was necessary to fight the amendment to the Local Government Bill presumably designed to prevent me doing just that. Nobody who has seen the inside of the closet would wish to condemn anyone to return to it.
(1988)
• 26 •
Paul Theroux: My Secret History
The title of Paul Theroux’s new novel recalls that of the Victorian autobiographical masterpiece of erotomania, Walter: My Secret Life, with which Theroux’s book has something in common. Theroux himself makes a more inscrutable reference to Arthur Waley’s The Secret History of the Mongols, which Theroux’s peripatetic hero, Andre Parent, reads on his way to commit adultery, surely a rather precious choice.
My Secret History is divided into six sections that take Parent from adolescence in 1956 to middle age in 1984 in a series of self-contained leaps. In the first person, it begins briskly and attractively: ‘I was born in rich America . . .’ The voice is fluent, conversational, confiding; the novel would pass the time pleasantly on one of those marathon train rides of which Theroux, in his guise of travel writer, has made such a speciality.
But, under this moderately beguiling surface, there is something stronger and stranger. The real subject of My Secret History is libidinal gratification expressed as a basic, irrepressible hunger. At one point, Parent says to an African acquaintance: ‘America’s a very hungry country.’ Which would be tasteless – Africa is starving to death, after all – were it not a metaphor. Parent’s history suggests that to be ‘born poor in rich America’ is to be born with a metaphysical lust that nothing, not success, wealth, or the love of women, can satisfy. There is an acknowledged madness in Parent. He wants to fuck the world.
Parent speedily outlines for us the nature of his two lives – one, that ‘of the dreamer, or the sneak’, hidden, the other led in public. (Later, he puts it more succinctly: ‘One was sex, the other work.’)
And that is enough of that. Theroux does not allow his hero to indulge in introspection, nor to speculate either upon his own motives or those of other characters. As a result, the novel is so free from psychologising that Parent becomes almost a perfect existential hero who does what he does, and, indeed, who he does, because he does it.
Part One. Young Parent is the horny sprig of a dour Catholic family in a small New England town. He forms an attachment to a drunken yet charismatic Irish priest not a hair’s breadth away from cliché. The priest dies; Andre gets laid. A typical ‘male awakening’ scenario, not insensitively done.
Four years pass. Now Andre is at college. He is determined to become a writer, as if writing were a form of phallic mastery. He is still horny as hell; happily, he is maturing into one of those young men, familiar in fiction, whose very presence impels women to remove their clothing but when a girlfriend suffers a vile abortion he is briefly filled with guilt and determines to leave the US.
Another four years pass. Andre is now in Black Africa, teaching school, and screwing local bar girls omnivariously, taking crabs and VD in his stride, kicking the girls out in the morning before they bore him with their chatter. Four years later, he’s a dead mark for the first girl he meets who screws and talks about T. S. Eliot. Jenny. ‘It was wonderful to be with this woman. We talked about books we liked. We took turns quoting poetry we had memorised.’ Wow. It must be Love. Jenny is not Black African but blonde English; Parent proves conventional enough in his marriage choice.
Again, a lapse of four years. The couple have settled in London where Andre, returning from amassing material for a travel book, discovers Jenny has been unfaithful in his absence. His bizarre revenge is to discharge at her lover a water-pistol filled with urine. Jenny is angry but soon begs forgiveness, an episode which needs more finesse than Theroux gives it to make plausible. This section ends with a touch of pure Hollywood, a phone call from an agent to say the travel book is about to do extremely well.
Skip a decade. Andre is rich and famous, with not only a lavish house, Jenny and their child in London but also a lavish house and mistress on Cape Cod to mark his triumphant return to Massachusetts. The mistress, Ed
en, with her dyed black hair, gourmet cooking, and girlish lisp when randy (‘If I’m bad you’ll have to put me to bed’) is clearly a refugee from an early Feiffer cartoon but Parent likes her style and takes her on a trip to India.
A few weeks later, neurotically anxious to duplicate his life in every way, he takes Jenny on the same trip in what, to the reader, looks a transparent bid to be found out. He is found out; Jenny says Parent must choose and the novel ends as Parent announces he knows ‘exactly what to do’ but teasingly fails to tell us.
I’d suggest a vasectomy. As it stands, Parent’s career usefully demonstrates the interconnectedness of sexism and racism; I hope this was Theroux’s point.
(1989)
• 27 •
Gilbert Hernandez: Duck Feet
Gilbert Hernandez’ comic strips in the series, Heartbreak Soup, of which this collection, Duck Feet, is the second portion available in Britain, are about gossip. Especially, about yesterday’s gossip, about the memories our parents share with us so we almost come to think that they are our memories too. The intimate folklore of family. Gilbert Hernandez’ family, of course, is not my family, or your family, but this kind of folklore has a cross-cultural similarity, most of all in cultures where people often find themselves short of a bob.
Families, particularly extended families – and the families in Heartbreak Soup are often stretched to the limit – flourish best in small towns. This involves Gilbert Hernandez in a celebration of small-town life. In the very small town of Palomar (population 356), the narratives of its inhabitants’ lives weave in and out of each other with the same claustrophobic compulsiveness of the lives in the marvellous novels of Louise Erdrich (Love Medicine, The Beet Queen), set in remote townships in the American mid-West.
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