Life Photos: Holding a Mirror Up to Hollywood

Anyone curious about the essence of Hollywood when it was Hollywood should browse along the walls of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences between now and June 14. On exhibition is a show that throws a double shadow. Not one but two powers were at their peak in these photographs, Hollywood and its most faithful mirror to the world, Life magazine.

Today, when magazines disappear with the speed of S&Ls;, the continuity and influence of Life at its prime is almost incomprehensible. For those who didn’t live through it, these selections from the Hollywood work of Allan Grant, a Life staff photographer for 25 years, are an arresting cross section of the magazine’s eye-view of the movie world from the late ‘40s through the late ‘60s.

* Louella Parsons, in a huge black-and-white blowup, arrives at a circus benefit party in 1947, her open touring car and white egret feather giving her the air of a dowager queen that, make no mistake, she was. Grant’s eye never misses the whole picture, the one that extends a little beyond the subject. Parsons’ regal corpulence is also innately vulgar; at second look our eyes are drawn to a woman at Parsons’ side, in Louella’s shadow literally and figuratively.

* James Wong Howe, his camera far above him on a giant crane, puckishly pulls it along after him like a gawky mythological beast completely at his command.

* Audrey Hepburn and Grace Kelly, rival nominees for best actress in 1955, are poised backstage at the Academy Awards like a pair of thoroughbreds about to break from the starting gate. (Kelly won for “The Country Girl.”)

* Marilyn Monroe, vulnerable, wistful and brooding, is captured during the turmoil surrounding “Something’s Got to Give” her last, unfinished film. She was dead 3 1/2 weeks after Grant shot these photos for readers to see how “Marilyn Lets Her Hair Down About Being Famous.”

Not all the Hollywood story is told in staggering 3x4-foot images. Walk upstairs to the long gallery, where the smaller prints are displayed. Try to ignore the distracting matting (the work of a credited “exhibition designer,” and a bad idea from start to finish) and catch glimpses of the studio era in all its not-inconsiderable power. Check the portrait of suave, superagent Bert Allenberg, roughly that era’s Mike Ovitz, and a visual match for any one of the Borgias’ inner circle.

There’s a photo here of a young star in a projection room with an older executive. Read the actress’s body English; she’s pliant, interested, she’s self-contained yet there’s something indefinable in the picture that suggests accessibility. It is Grace Kelly, and considering that the year was 1956, the pinnacle of her career, Grant’s vision is frighteningly instructive.

The studio era was the framework in which virtually all these talents worked, under an unrivaled system of tyranny, cosseting, interfering, mothering, hectoring and nurturing. Many of those principals are here in Grant’s cool view: studio heads Harry Cohn, Hal Wallis, Sam Goldwyn; the tirelessly inventive press agent Harry Brand; composer Dimitri Tiomkin; screenwriter Daniel Taradash, in an evocative multiple exposure; gadfly restaurateur Mike Romanoff and the era’s stars, including Shirley MacLaine and her little daughter Sachi, mugging in their famous cover pose.

Documenting them were Life photographers, 95% of them men, who radiated their own aura of glamour, no less powerful than their subjects. Unsurprisingly, when Philip Barry wrote “The Philadelphia Story,” he made the Mainline interlopers a cracklingly witty Life reporter and photographer: one only had to say “Life photographer” and the image of worldliness was complete. Theirs was a heyday only equal to the studio system itself, if one could imagine a studio in the hands of hard-working, high-living merry pranksters.

It is not an apocryphal story that Eliot Elisofon once persuaded a couple whose house he was photographing to cut down the tree that stood in front of it, to give him a clearer shot. Alfred Eisenstaedt, who was fond of leading tours of starry-eyed novices through the Life photographers’ backstage, once threw open his huge camera locker, only to discover a smiling, bikini-clad model Grant had thoughtfully stashed away just for that moment.

Browsing these walls is like a visit to the doctor’s office of memory, where the doctor could be as late as he wanted, as long as there was a recent Life in the waiting room. A side panel holds one of those photographic challenges the magazine took such delight in during the ‘50s: Could one camera capture all of television’s cowboy stars in one glorious shootout, all their guns blazing, all their eyes open and all the cameraman’s strobes firing when ready? The answer was yes, if the photographer was Allan Grant.

On another wall is a Speaking of Pictures shot, the page that closed the magazine and was supposed to make you say, “How did they ever do that ?” In one of his more baffling entries, Grant put a painted suburban backdrop flat on the ground, had an obliging studio grip stand in the middle of its tree-lined lane and shot him from above. The effect is magical: He seems to be whirring like a projectile straight at the camera.

Like the studios’ grip on movie-making, this was a golden age and like any heady era, impermanent. For some photographers, like Grant, the crazy fun went out of it, swept away with the excess of too many stories, shot and unused, for a too-familiar format. Grant was gone before Life’s formal demise; that great ship went down in 1972.

The resurrected version would never be the same. Television was the death blow to picture news magazines; readers had gotten used to seeing picture news stories in their living rooms; TV had the magazines’ advertisers; the magazines bent under spiraling costs for paper, postage, production.

But for a while, it’s all here again, lining the walls and a little between the lines, all the invention, the craft and the spark that created so many decisive moments that we very nearly took them for granted.

Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, 8949 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills. Through June 14. Gallery open 9 a.m. to 5 p.m, Monday-Friday. (213) 247-3000. Free admission.