The Frenzy of Renown

This is a bulky book, hard to hold for very long on your lap. This will not be much of a handicap for the ordinary reader as opposed to the conscientious reviewer. You’re not supposed to read it; you’re supposed to skim it appreciatively, taking in its many stylish and well-reproduced photographs of movie stars past, present and (perhaps) future. As a gift book, with a price tag that shows you care enough to send the very best, “Vanity Fair’s Hollywood” is a handsome object and a likely success with the crowd it most cares about, haute Hollywood. As Christmas approaches, one imagines executive assistants all over town, snapping it up, wrapping it up and dispatching it,via messengers stooped under the burden of such weighty largess, to their A-lists.

What they will receive is not so much a book as a glimpse into an alternate universe. Graydon Carter, the magazine editor, says in his foreword, “My favorite periods are the ‘30s, the ‘70s and right now. And also everything in between.” Those two ga-ga faux naive sentences pretty well summarize the book’s point of view. It’s basically a huge fan magazine, as devoid of critical or historical sensibility as a bound volume of Modern Screen.

This universe is one where, as the saying goes, beauty knows no pain. Age, illness, death itself do not diminish it; the passing years and shifting public tastes do not stifle its primal power to enchant. The implication is that once stardom is achieved, it is immutable. In this mega-fiction, the has-beens are mainly glimpsed in group shots that look like class reunion pictures, with everyone looking pleased to have survived and glad the camera is far enough away so that the wrinkles don’t show.

Here, even the messier figures always transcend their tragedies. In one of the chipper, vapid captions the usually cranky Christopher Hitchens has supplied for the book (Carter says they locked him in a hotel room with research material and a supply of Black Label, so what can you expect?), “the pills and the pathos” of Judy Garland’s life are alluded to, but we are enjoined to remember her as “the queen of Hollywood evensong.” Louise Brooks, shed from paradise for her nutsiness, has her revenge by becoming “a movie critic and essayist.” As if a handful of pieces, published obscurely in her dotage--they’re really a talking dog trick, a sappy blend of gossip and self-regard--constitutes a triumphant comeback.

Such upbeat mini-narratives are, of course, perfectly suited to the book’s notion that celebrity is timeless and infrangible: Famous is famous: then, now, forever. So Denzel Washington stares across the page at David Niven, Laurence Olivier grimaces and Sigourney Weaver glares at us from the same spread. On and on these odd pairings proceed: Catherine Deneuve and Rudolph Valentino, Cameron Diaz and Al Jolson, Nicolas Cage and Mae West, Gary Cooper and Brad Pitt.

Detached from their historical moments, the stars are reduced to their purely glamorous essences. This becomes tiresome in a dose this large, especially because the book’s refusal to grapple with the power of stardom more analytically is so resolute.

I suspect that something more than intellectual vacuity dictated the a- (perhaps anti-) historical arrangement of the book. Its jumbled layout has the advantage of disguising a large practical problem. The editors are drawing their material from two quite distinct publications. The original Vanity Fair was founded by the legendary editor, Frank Crowninshield, in 1914 and went out of business in 1936. The title was not revived until 1983. This means there is a gap of almost half a century in the magazine’s run and, inevitably, a gap in sensibility between the two magazines.

It yawns in the prose reprinted here. The articles from the Crowninshield era are largely jazzy doodlings--famous authors like Carl Sandburg, D.H. Lawrence, Dorothy Parker, P.G. Wodehouse bending over to pick up their own celebrity’s small change. With the exception of a shrewd analysis of Garbo by Clare Boothe Luce, which correctly predicts that the star’s solipsism will eventually undo her, time has flattened their fizz.

Curiously, this writing is much less sober and reflective than that early era’s photography. The studious reader will have to do a good deal of back and forth thumbing to see what Edward Steichen, the early Vanity Fair’s dominant photographer, was up to, but it’s worth the effort. His black-and-white portraits tend to be tightly framed, generally unpropped (a notable exception is his shot of Walt Disney, posed with Mickey Mouse heads looming over him). His celebrities are always well-dressed, formally fit, and they smile or brood in manners appropriate to their images. Mainly, though, his work imparts dignity to his subjects.

These are serious people doing serious work, and this way of portraying them was a not insignificant milestone in the history of our relationship to celebrity. It made mere movie people seem citizens as solid as businessmen or politicians. America’s yearning heart may already have understood that--more people went to the movies in 1929, when Steichen and Vanity Fair were at the height of their influence, than ever before or since--but his pictures comforted instinct.

The prose and pictures of the revived Vanity Fair represent quite a different take on fame. The articles are long, carefully reported and tend to recount antique gossip. We learn from these pieces how the once-powerful agent Sue Mengers got her wings clipped but survived; how Lana Turner’s daughter, Cheryl Crane, offed her mother’s abusive mobster-lover, Johnny Stompanato, and got away with it; how Liz and Dick’s love affair during the making of “Cleopatra,” almost brought 20th Century Fox to bankruptcy but enhanced their own stardom. To hear the modern Vanity Fair tell it, celebrity follies are never ruinous, just expensive. Everyone just gets up and goes on--forgivably, even lovably.

This is probably, God help us, true. But a touch of irony would not go amiss in these pieces. Nor would an acknowledgment that these figures, these incidents, duded out in dark glamour in the magazine’s retelling, are finally just tabloid trivia. They tell us little about celebrity power and the way it shapes movie history.

The modern Vanity Fair’s pictures do implicitly say something about that topic. Its dominant photographer is, of course, Annie Leibovitz, and her manner is instructively different from Steichen’s. She frames her shots much more loosely, even if all she is including, besides the subject, are some plain rumpled backdrop cloths. Her subjects often affect a certain affectlessness, causing us to wonder if they are denying their stardom--”Why are you staring at me?”--or asserting it in a peculiarly postmodernist, post-ironic manner--”Go ahead, look, I’ve got nothing to hide.”

This is the artifice of no artifice. Which, naturally, requires a good deal of artifice to bring off. There is a kind of arrogance in many of these pictures. They seem to say, “I’m a movie star. I can do anything I damn please.” Demi Moore, naked and hugely pregnant in Leibovitz’s famous image, exemplifies this mode. You can sentimentalize the picture--Madonna with child--but you cannot deny that it transgresses tradition. We do not expect to see famous people so revealed.

But Leibovitz and her ilk like the democratic implications of dishabille: Harrison Ford in his underwear, in his bathroom, shaving; Jack Nicholson practicing golf shots in his backyard in his bathrobe; Kristin Scott Thomas in boots and riding britches in a formal European living room but unaccountably missing her shirt. Many more such opportunities to appraise the nipples of the rich and famous are offered.

Inevitably, pictures of this sort draw us into the process by which they were made. We wonder how the photographer persuades her subjects to strike such intimate poses. Sometimes, when many stars or would-be stars appear in a group, we think about the sheer logistics of getting so many busy egomaniacs together in the same room. We are a long way from the kind of simple transaction that must have taken place between Steichen (also a famous photographer whose attention flattered his models) and his subjects.

It is disingenuous of Carter and his team to pretend that there is a seamless join between the way they present Hollywood glamour and the way their predecessors did. There was an objectivity in Steichen’s portraits, a sense that these creatures could be rationally apprehended as a part--but only a part--of the social texture. They were pretty; they played their roles in our inner lives, but they did not domineer.

The in-your-face approach of a modern Vanity Fair photographer suggests a more brutal command of our inner lives. Their elaborate photo shoots, often with anonymous models playing bit parts, produce what are, in effect, movie stills, but not the kind that promote a film that’s about to open in a theater near you. They illustrate the bigger, better movie that any star’s life finally becomes, an epic in which his or her actual movies are but incidents, a film that is ever available in the much more convenient theaters of our minds. No wonder the stars are so heedless and uncaring in these pictures: They are the triumphant colonizers of the world’s imagination, free to affront us in any way that occurs to them or the photographer, whether by sullen withdrawal or ruthless self-exposure. The old-fashioned need to charm or seduce is no longer necessary.

It is nonsense for a sophisticate like Carter to pretend otherwise, to insist that he is “not at all embarrassed to admit that I am a simple, unabashed fan” of a purely mythic, purely delightful Hollywood. On the other hand, there’s the annual Hollywood issue to consider and the Oscar night party. He has a need to protect and project his innocence. You can never tell what mad gift some star may place at his feet. *