Glyn also liberally laced her persona with Orientalism, in another move widely imitated in postwar Hollywood. By the 1910s, Orientalism already offered a well-established means for imperial nations of the so-called West to depict peoples from the Middle East and Asia as a mysterious, exotic “Eastern” mass with passionate, often excitingly dangerous, feminized natures. In political terms, Orientalist stereotypes justified Western imperialism as a “civilizing,” paternalistic mission. It also excused the restriction and even outright exclusion of Chinese and Japanese immigrants to the United States as a necessary protection of native American morality and values. But when employed in consumer culture, Orientalism provided Anglo-American audiences with cover to explore “uncivilized” desires. Promising escape from the sexually repressive aspects of Western civilization, Orientalism came to shape the merchandising of a vast array of goods, as well as cultural performances from high to low.64 Glyn’s use of Orientalism helped to explain why her popularity stretched across the class spectrum, uniting “the Colonel’s Lady and Judy O’Grady” precisely as the movie industry hoped.65
Orientalist marketing explained the image presented by the author upon her arrival in Los Angeles. Noting her hair dyed “the color of red ink,” “slanting eyes,” and a “red, red, mouth,” Photoplay described Glyn as a ‘very, very well connected . . . old citizen of the world” who, nonsensically, appeared “like one of her heroines” as “an absolutely fantastic ‘houri.’ ”66 Only Orientalist fantasy could transform a middle-aged Englishwoman with aristocratic associations into an houri, one of the beautiful, young virgins said to await devout Muslim men in paradise. Thus Glyn’s use of Orientalism made her good copy, in studio parlance, and a believable cosmopolitan guide for those looking to find products that promised access to passionate pleasures.
FIGURE 20. Elinor Glyn in a pose emphasizing her aristocratic credentials. Courtesy of Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills.
Madame Glyn’s Orientalized glamour ideally suited the industry’s imperial postwar frame of mind. Jesse Lasky’s decision to import Glyn to script and supervise Swanson’s first official starring vehicle signaled the industry’s determination to stir the desires of audiences around the world and to neutralize the revived threat posed by European filmmakers. Having “cast aside its swaddling clothes,” Hollywood embarked on a “period of conquest” to secure “a world existence” that inaugurated the “Golden Age of Pictures” in America, Photoplay gushed the year Madame Glyn arrived.67 Once ensconced at the Hollywood Hotel, Glyn created a setting that telegraphed this motivation to the press, emptying her suite of its contemporary furniture and decorating it with scarlet drapes, velvet divans, silk purple pillows, tarot cards, and crystal balls so that it appeared like a “Persian tent,” according to Swanson. The privileged cosmopolitan mobility these exotic surroundings communicated were central to Glyn’s star image.68 “Tiger Skins and Temperament,” the article that introduced Glyn to American movie fans, laid her out on a tiger-skin rug she had picked up in India as the perfume of an Egyptian fan wafted through the air. The room also emphasized her aristocratic credentials, featuring portraits of her older sister, “Lucile—Lady Duff Gordon—the most celebrated modiste of two continents,” and an assortment of royal friends. Lady Duff Gordon had survived a divorce and the sinking of the Titanic before opening a successful branch of her couture shop, Lucile, in New York, which featured her signature invention, lingerie. Other stories described her dual residences in “London and Versailles,” ultimately underscoring that her Oriental glamour was no act. “Madame Glyn,” Photoplay declared, “out-Baras Miss Bara. Because Miss Glyn is really Miss Glyn while Theda is Theodosia Goodman, if you get what I mean.”69
After establishing her credentials as an authentic continental bearer of Oriental glamour, Glyn announced that her mission was “to set fashion on its ear” by teaching Americans to demand stars and stories that displayed real sex appeal rather than the ersatz version they knew. This description by Swanson would have appalled her mentor. Glyn never used so obvious a term as “sex appeal,” an expression devoid of the continental aestheticism she sold. Glyn spoke of “it” instead of sex, of “the strange magnetism that attracts both sexes,” the decidedly natural, un-self-conscious quality exuded by “tigers and cats—both animals being fascinating and mysterious, and quite unbiddable.” Glyn delighted in telling the press how American movie stars lacked it. Conveniently, only Swanson, whose “not altogether occidental eyes” revealed her “old soul,” escaped Glyn’s complaint that American actresses were mere girls incapable of projecting adult sexuality and chic. Male stars fared even worse in her estimation. With casting approval over the male lead in The Great Moment, Glyn conducted a highly publicized search to find the right actor to play opposite Swanson.70 Advertised as “the vivid drama of a society girl with a gypsy’s heart, and the romantic adventures into which her untamed nature led her,” the film was “written especially by Elinor Glyn, and personally supervised by her.” The male lead needed enough sexual magnetism to pull off a scene in which he sucks rattlesnake poison out of Swanson’s breast in a manner that convinces the wayward heroine to settle down. Glyn judged male star after male star unfit, declaring American men “could simply not make love,” since they treated their leading ladies like “aunts or sisters.”71
The search was a brilliant publicity device, but it also exposed how the personas of the period’s male stars helped to explain the lack of adult female sensuality on screens. Up through the postwar era, the most successful leading men were “good natured, big brother types” who exuded the kind of boy-next-door, “Arrow Collar” masculine charm epitomized by stars like Douglas Fairbanks and Wallace Reid.72 More sexually expressive male characters were typically villains played by “swarthy” new immigrants, or even “genuine Orientals” like the Japanese star Sessue Hayakawa.73 The Great Moment’s success vindicated Glyn’s opinion that audiences wanted to see more daring contests of passion between men and women on screens. “The public doesn’t seem to be able to get enough of Elinor Glyn’s first story for the screen,” one reviewer declared. “It’s a picture that will cause talk,” the Exhibitors Herald predicted.74 Theater owners noted that the film’s “several daring situations will certainly please the women” and declared that Swanson’s performance as “a temperamental English Girl who breaks the bonds of English conventionality to live her own life, as her Romany ancestors did,” justified her elevation to “stardom.”75
Discussions with Swanson, Glyn, and Hollywood’s other working wives explored how their glamorous work affected their opinion about what constituted a satisfying marriage. Playing the role of the outsider-provocateur, Glyn blamed bourgeois Anglo-American conventions that demanded artists commit to monogamous marriages for the artistic limitations of many Hollywood stars. “In my beloved Paris, which is the center of Art, whether right or wrong from a conventional point of view—artists do not think highly of Matrimony,” she explained in her Photoplay article “In Filmdom’s Boudoir.” Although conceding that America’s looser divorce laws made “frequent change of partners” an alternative, she worried that many “foolish, ordinary” wives and “boring, exacting” husbands stalled their partner’s artistic growth.76 A “roundtable” discussion in Photoplay also featured Glyn taking an outlier’s point of view. “What They Think about Marriage!” found female and male personalities alike contradicting the assertion by “Madame Elinor Glyn, the world famous English authoress and authority on love and marriage,” that “motion picture stars—being artists—should not marry.” All but one of the men breezily dismissed the idea that combining marriage and art presented any problem at all. The women, however, contradicted Glyn’s view more carefully. “Choose your husband well!” ordered Constance Talmadge, expressing the opinion shared by most women that a happy marriage required a husband who supported the work of his wife. Norma Talmadge also thought it “entirely possible to have a happy
home life and a career at the same time” if a woman chose a “sympathetic” husband who tried “sincerely to aid his wife in her profession.” Frances Marion went further, redefining “true marriage” as not just “a ritual” but a relationship governed by “love and understanding” that did “away with the deadening effects” of traditional marital obligations that prevented a wife from giving “all that is best in her to her profession.” According to Marion, a happy marriage Hollywood-style featured partners who “work together and play together, have a happy home and get along splendidly.” Only Swanson sounded a different note, declaring, “If motherhood without marriage were possible,” she would “dispense with marriage. Since it is not, marriage is the only alternative.”77
The comments deepened a debate raging in Photoplay over what lessons Hollywood’s personalities offered about the sex roles that best supported a modern marriage. Of the dozen articles the magazine ran on the subject between 1920 and 1921, a two-part interview with director Cecil B. DeMille presented such contrary, and contested, advice that it provides an interesting entry point into the discussion. In “What Does Marriage Mean?” DeMille challenged the widespread criticism that his sex pictures encouraged fans to treat divorce and infidelity lightly by instead arguing that they aimed to prevent divorce.78 According to the director, the films illustrated the biblical injunction, “She that is married, careth how she please her husband,” by teaching wives the importance of staying attractive and of allowing husbands to retain their freedom. DeMille claimed his own happy marriage illustrated just this principle: “In eighteen years I have never passed a Saturday night at home. I have never said where I was on a Saturday night. . . . And in eighteen years I have never been asked.” The idea that the films that produced Swanson’s star merely cloaked stereotypical Victorian gender roles in modern clothes prompted such an outcry from readers that the director revisited the subject in, “More about Marriage.”79 To the many readers who demanded to know if his wife enjoyed “the same privileges of personal freedom” as DeMille, he replied, “Of course, of course! It never occurred to me that such a question could arise.” Perhaps the director believed his sex films taught female fans the importance of retaining traditional Victorian interiors inside modern exteriors.80 The fact that Lasky pressured him to make the movies and the terms of his own marriage—he described his wife a model of true womanhood, whose “broad, wise, pure, understanding” nature helped him “to overcome the Adamic inheritance of lust and dust that lead to ruin”—suggest he had little interest in experimenting with gender roles at home. But the “overwhelmingly violent denunciations” the magazine reported receiving from readers indicated that this was not the message many fans heard.81
Early Hollywood’s fan culture typically depicted a social environment that supported redefining gender roles in marriage along more, not less, egalitarian lines.82 An interview with actress Florence Vidor, who starred in DeMille’s first “sex picture,” Old Wives for New, reappropriated the film’s title to make this point: “Old Lives for New; Florence Vidor demonstrates that the New Woman may do justice to both a home and a career.” Despite the “old ideals implanted by her southern ancestresses [sic],” who taught that a wife and mother must stay at home, Vidor believed a woman with “a real, deep undeniable craving for a form of self expression” did “more for her family by answering that call.”83 In this way, Vidor modeled a new woman whose reinforcing passions—for home, husband, child, and work—demanded a new life. Like so many interviews with celebrities, the story established a shared terrain of intimacy by describing Vidor as an ordinary woman who confronted the same problems as any wife. But it also underscored that the premium her job placed on “self-expression” offered Hollywood’s working wives unusual means to legitimate their desire for unconventional domestic arrangements. An interview with actress Marjorie Rambeau made the same point. After reminding readers how shared marital complaints made “the Colonel’s Lady and Judy O’Grady sisters under the skin,” Rambeau asserted that actresses’ marriages were “the happiest in the world” because their work required husbands who respected their individuality. While “the rule of the laywoman’s life is to repress—repress—repress. The rule of the actress is to express—express—always express,” she explained. According to Rambeau, the artist’s ethic fostered true understanding in marriage by creating shared commitments that provided “a never ceasing topic” of interest that “fused” the interest of husband and wife. The result could reverse typical gender roles, as when Rambeau’s husband decided to play her muse. “I shall devote my life to you. We will do whatever is best for your talent. I shall think of but one career. That is yours,” he promised, leaving Rambeau with “what every woman wants, a deep, lasting, selfless love.”84
Such fan discourse indicated how early Hollywood sold its audience norms that prefigured those that historians equate with the later rise of “sexual liberalism,” a term signaling sex’s divorce from reproduction and the idea that heterosexual pleasure was a value for both sexes as well as a key ingredient of a happy marriage.85 The term distills many of the reforms that activists during the late 1920s grouped under the new ideal of “companionate marriage.”86 Those like birth control advocate Margaret Sanger argued that the era’s climbing divorce rates, agitation for birth control, and youth revolt indicated the frustration many felt over viewing marriage as a union based on obligation and self-sacrifice. Instead, they recommended redesigning the institution along more democratic lines that emphasized sexual chemistry and shared interests. Touting mutual sexual satisfaction and emotional intimacy as the new hallmarks of a good marriage, the ideal justified practicing birth control and jettisoning the idea that respectable wives should tame their husbands’ dangerous libidos. Instead, the companionate ideal asked sexually adroit husbands to cultivate their wives different, but no less powerful sexuality and accepted erotic exploration, or “petting,” before marriage. But the democratic reforms the companionate ideal promised women took place only within the context of marriage, since most still shared the belief that careers destroyed women’s sex drives and made them unsympathetic to men’s needs. Thus, like so much of the advice given to women in the 1920s, matrimony, however modified, remained the means to satisfy all of their needs. Many postwar films duplicated the position. But industry fan culture instead often depicted early Hollywood’s female personalities as more omnivorous and demanding, both sexually and professionally. As a mountain of sociological studies revealed the growing influence of Hollywood’s stars as role models to youths, these glamorous women and their lovers indeed provided examples that set fashion on its ear, as Elinor Glyn liked to say.87
III
The only person to agree with Glyn’s view that Anglo-American sexual conventions prevented early Hollywood’s artists from exercising the freedom necessary to their art was Antonio Moreno, an actor who represented a new masculine type, the Latin lover. The troubled reception that stars like Moreno met suggested that fans both embraced and feared the industry’s exploration of women’s passions. “Elinor Glyn is expressing the European point of view,” argued the Spanish-born actor, “which I understand but many Americans will not.” But of course personalities like Glyn and Moreno were busy ensuring that Hollywood’s postwar audience understood just such differences. In The Philosophy of Love (1920), Glyn noted the “glorification of romance” required teaching “American girls . . . a desire to be loved like European women are loved.”88 Ironically, as the debate on immigration restriction raged after the war—a debate that put the pollution of the nation’s “Anglo stock” by new immigrant men at the center of the danger they posed—just this ethnic type licensed the new displays of passion on screens. When viewed through the virtual intimacy of a camera, many women considered Latin lovers’ “strictly continental” methods of “making love” superior to those of Anglo-American men.89 Put differently, en masse the Southern and Eastern Europeans largely excluded by postwar immigration restrictions appeared
as dark outsiders whose feminized degeneracy threatened the nation’s health. But early Hollywood’s postwar box office exposed the fact that these same qualities proved irresistible when a talented individual could magnify them on the screen.
No other male type appeared as capable of satisfying the passionate natures of the screen’s glamorous heroines as Latin lovers. The Photoplay article “The Techniques of Lovers” found actress-producer Clara Kimball Young praising “the foreign—Latin—technique” of “screen lovers.” According to Young, American men were “too impatient” and “too egotistical” to understand that “love making” was an art. Temperamentally inclined to act the “carpenter” instead of the “artist,” the average American man “fusses and fumes over the least squeak in his automobile,” yet was “satisfied with the commonest sort of mediocrity in his lovemaking,” she complained. Young called “Latins” superior because they studied women “in all their manifestations.” Sounding a note similar to Glyn’s, Young blamed gender conventions in “Anglo-Saxon countries” that taught women and men to treat each other as asexual “companions.” “American women have demanded equality, and they deserve equality,” Young noted, but she argued that equality should not prevent “men from studying them—as women.” American men assumed women reacted “to the same impulses and emotions as themselves, and make love as they would want a woman to make love to them.” Scenarist Lenore Coffee recalled how Young voiced similar complaints in private, when she despaired of ever finding a man off screen who could satisfy her emotional longings and erotic needs.90
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