Gone Hollywood: The Movie Colony In The Golden Age – Christopher Finch & Linda Rosenkrantz, 1979 ★★★

Everybody Is a Star

Today a second-hand venue for comic-book characters and television comedians, movies once dominated western culture. Gone Hollywood offers a look back to Tinseltown in its Golden Age.

The 1930s and 1940s were a legendary time to work in Hollywood. While the world reeled from war and depression, a few square miles of California offered an imagined oasis of escape. Too good to be true, it was an illusion that endured for a long time, buttressed by easy money and a friendly press.

Rather than produce resentment, their success became a source of admiration, even emulation, from the hoi polloi. “The movie celebrity was presented as an example of what the ordinary guy could attain if he wanted success badly enough,” Christopher Finch and Linda Rosenkrantz explain.

A bit of a relic itself, Gone Hollywood was published in 1979 when many key players – Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, James Stewart – were still alive and working. Written not as a linear narrative but as a series of essays, it takes on various aspects of what made Hollywood so unique from 1920-1949: nicknames, salaries, marriages, cars, clothes, even pets:

Clara Bow drove a flame-red Kissel convertible painted to match her hair, and was usually accompanied by two chows whose coats had been dyed the same shade…

Jean Harlow had a perfect body, but her aversion to underwear caused certain problems with the Hays Office. Beneath one costume, she was persuaded to try various brassieres, but still her nipples showed through, until a special bra was devised, one which had tips of fur-lined tin…

W. C. Fields did not subscribe to conventional ways of summoning his staff. Instead, he carried a Halloween horn, on which he’d sound a blast when he needed something – more often than not a shaker of martinis…

W. C. Fields was not only claustrophobic, Finch and Rosenkrantz note, but had a quirk about personal space so acute he could not tolerate even wearing a ring on his finger. Image from http://streetcarnage.com/blog/w-c-fields-too-cruel-for-school/.

The anecdotal approach taken by authors Finch and Rosenkrantz makes for a breezy read, often inconsequential in tone, but certainly useful to those who may want a light reference book for background when writing a novel or script. Writers, alas, are largely ignored by this book, which focuses on stars and those who catered to their appetites and appearances.

They certainly knew how to live. When Edward G. Robinson threw a birthday party for his young son, Edward Jr., the event was designed around the boy’s enthusiasm for jails: “Instead of receiving invitations, his guests were subpoenaed (on regulation State of California forms), and a Black Maria was borrowed from the studio to convey them to the festivities – the Beverly Hills police provided an escort.”

Ginger Rogers’ dressing quarters at RKO included a kitchen, bedroom, sitting room, and separate rooms for hairdressing, make-up, and wardrobe fittings. Emil Jannings kept a chicken coop on his estate, with hens and roosters named after his fellow stars. John Barrymore owned a 93-foot gaff-rigged schooner, the Mariner, which once set a transpacific record.

John Barrymore was a man of many parts. According to Finch and Rosenkrantz, one of them was his inseparable pet vulture, Maloney, often found perched on Barrymore's shoulder, pecking at his famous brows. Image from https://www.pinterest.com/pin/376824693803022240/. 

It took a while for the glamour to impress itself on its immediate environs. For years, Finch and Rosenkrantz write, California kept its cinematic newcomers at bay:

As late as 1931, when the City of Los Angeles celebrated its first 150 years, movie people were treated as pariahs. The industry raised thousands of dollars for the celebrations and staged a spectacular electrical parade, but the committee which organized the culminating Fiesta Ball decided to exclude all Hollywood personalities but Mary Pickford from its guest list. Under the circumstances, Pickford refused the invitation.

The book covers the end of the silent era as well as the birth of talkies, a critical inflection point in the movie industry not only for the impact of new technology, the authors explain, but the way it upset the star system. Suddenly, instead of having to pay silent star John Gilbert $250,000 a picture, they could hire newcomer Clark Gable for $350 a week, and put him in 14 films in 1931 alone.

In time, Gable’s price rose to Gilbertian heights and beyond. But by then, the studios were well-enough-set to pay it, and others, too.

The book definitely leans on a few of the most famous celebrities, like Gable, his famous lover Carole Lombard (a genuine sweetheart, according to the authors), Joan Crawford, and John Barrymore. MGM boss Louis B. Mayer is referenced so frequently you’d probably think this book was about him.

Carole Lombard and Clark Gable. Lombard, Finch and Rosenkrantz note, was "queen of the pranksters." She once had a plane drop thousands of leaflets over MGM studios mocking her lover Gable's famous film flop Parnell. Image from https://www.scoopnest.com/user/McMurtrieSF/959106646206070784-clark-gable-born-on-this-day-in-1901-with-carole-lombard-his-future-wife-in-no-man-of-her-own-1932-he-plays-a-card-sharp-and-shes-a-librarian-getty-images.

When he attended sneak previews of MGM pictures, Finch and Rosenkrantz note, Mayer’s body language was carefully scrutinized. If he was chatty afterwards, studio executives relaxed. If he paced around the lobby instead, a tirade would likely follow.

Some chapters read a bit puffy and draw on well-known legends, i. e. Greta Garbo’s desire for privacy, Errol Flynn’s for fast women. Others offer penetrating analyses of lesser-celebrated parts of the Hollywood life, such as the fan magazines which proliferated in the 1930s and fed the star-making machine:

A couple of hundred free-lancers filed occasional stories with the “fannies” – as they were called – but it is generally acknowledged that the great majority of features was written by a small group of specialists numbering perhaps thirty or thirty-five. A few top writers – such as Grover Jones, Gilbert Seldes, Kyle Crichton, and Quentin Reynolds – were men …Most of the writers, however, were women – often referred to disparagingly as either “sob sisters” or “chatter-chippies.”

Hollywood mores were unique, rather looser than in the mainstream of the time. But backed by glamour, they would soon trump the culture. When Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks left their spouses to marry each other, the result brought scandal, but also eventual acceptance. “The Pickford-Fairbanks marriage did more to promote the acceptability of divorce in America than any other single event,” Gone Hollywood notes.

When it came to peddling gossip, Hedda Hopper (along with arch-rival Louella Parsons) reigned supreme. When one starlet asked Hopper why she was picking on her, Hopper's reply according to Gone Hollywood was succinct: "Nothing, dear. It's bitchery, sheer bitchery." Image from https://variety.com/2015/voices/columns/blacklist-hedda-hopper-career-destroying-1201584311/.

Ultimately, the book is built less around such pointed observations than it is capsule treatments of this and that. Much of its information is pulled from secondary sources, celebrity bios as well as contemporaneous journalism cited in a large bibliography at the back, though Finch and Rosenkrantz also make good use of some of the many surviving witnesses who were still around and willing to talk.

Paul Fix explains how he coached a young and stiff John Wayne to think like a prizefighter when he was in front of the cameras, staying loose and on his toes. George Folsey, a cameraman at MGM, talks about how necessarily focused he became on the properties of light.

Make-up artist Bob Schiffer notes the high fatality count in his profession:

“A lot of them die in bed, smoking, things like that. I guess it comes from looking at women too early in the morning.”

Rudolph Valentino, one of the greatest silent stars, "claimed to receive spiritual messages and to have a 'familiar' named Black Feather – an American Indian – whom he consulted before making any important decision," Finch and Rosenkrantz note. Image from https://www.upi.com/Top_News/2017/08/23/On-This-Day-Silent-screen-star-Rudolph-Valentino-dies/4011503463609/.

Homosexuality was hidden by the studios, who arranged for gay actors to appear in public with opposite-sex partners they also wished to promote. Politics tended to be rather conservative, then, though there were always exceptions. Later on, the industry began cracking down on communists and fellow travelers, but in essence the studio bosses aimed for conformity in ideology and usually got their way.

George Bassman, a composer for MGM, explains:

“Life was very cerebral. People got together and really talked of marvelous ideas. If you weren’t willing to talk, you were considered a reactionary, and if you did get together and talk, you were called a Communist.”

The overall impression from reading Gone Hollywood is that of an enormously creative, impossibly wealthy community of often narcissistic but nevertheless talented people, often competing, sometimes sleeping with one another as they seek to prolong their careers under the harshest of lights.

Occasionally, they gave great quotes, too. After playing Norma Shearer’s evil foil in The Women, Joan Crawford explained: “I love to play bitches and she helped me in the part.”

Unlike other famed Hollywood dining establishments, the Brown Derby had no floor show, only waitresses in tiny costumes. "Many of the waitresses were pretty, aspiring actresses…they spent much of their time dropping and provocatively retrieving silverware near tables occupied by directors and producers," Finch and Rosenkrantz write. Image from https://www.kcet.org/food/the-brown-derby-hollywoods-24-hour-office-party.

Some of the more enjoyable parts of the book detail less-known aspects of Hollywood life. Finch and Rosenkrantz note how vodka first became popular in cocktails along the Sunset Strip. Superstitions abounded within the community:

One superstition shared by a great many actors was the belief that to die on screen at the start of a film career was a good omen. It seems to have worked for Bogart, Cagney, Gable, [George] Raft, Edward G. Robinson, Alan Ladd, and William Bendix, to name a few.

Gone Hollywood lacks a narrative thread, but like the studio system it celebrates, spins some great yarns in a smoothly-polished manner. The end result is certainly pleasing, worthy of any movie aficionado wishing to recall an age when Hollywood had more stars than the heavens, rather than vice versa.