Hollywood Babylon

“The Bad and the Beautiful” borrows its title from Vincente Minnelli’s darkly romantic, ultimately forgiving 1952 portrait of a manipulative, infuriating Selznick-like producer. As is that film, the book is divinely unconscious of its own deeper implications; it’s merely out for a good time, breathlessly recounting the antique dish that surrounded Hollywood’s panicky economic and popular decline in the 1950s.

The authors dimly suspect that television’s replacement of the movies as America’s mass medium of choice--the latter eventually lost two-thirds of its audience to the former--had something to do with the town’s apparent descent into widely reported dysfunction, but that’s about it for a controlling idea in their work. They can tell us who was sticking it to whom, but they can’t tell us why that should matter to us at this late date.

Sam Kashner and Jennifer MacNair begin with an account of the fast rise and equally fast demise of Confidential magazine, the creation of “bottom-feeding” publisher Robert Harrison, whose previous experience was with skin magazines that included Wink and Titter. Seeing that the hard-pressed studios--no longer keeping stars under long-term contracts, thus lacking long-term interest in their well-being--were losing control over how their privates lives were presented to the public, Harrison used scuzzy informers to dig up what he and his readers deemed to be their juicier secrets.

Rumors of homosexual behavior were especially interesting to him, as were stories of interracial heterosexual liaisons. But, hey, someone’s buried prison record or a hint that this or that personality had appeared nude in public (or had been seen necking in a nightclub) were equally appealing. And Howard Rushmore, his chief “investigative” reporter, a former communist turned crazily anti-communist, was viciously active on the political front.

Oddly, Kashner and MacNair are not as dismayed by this publication as they might be. The magazine, they write, “proved that most mainstream reporting was like a thrown fight, with too many pulled punches .... [P]eople wanted, needed to see the other side of the klieg lights; stars without makeup, without glamour, without studio protection, without the cloak of beauty, wealth, and power.” It’s that italicized “needed” that disturbs. What right to know do we legitimately have when a famous person turns down the lights and draws the shades?

As long as no public trust--and what public trust does a movie star have other than to look pretty and entertain divertingly?--is violated and no crimes (other than those against good taste and common sense) are committed, why are they not entitled to be left alone? The struggle for celebrity privacy is, of course, a long-lost battle. Confidential was stopped when a group of stars, led by the invaluable Robert Mitchum, who never gave a hoot about his image, sued for libel, and the magazine agreed to cease and desist in its scurrilousness. But the damage had been done. The age of the tabloids, as Kashner and MacNair observe, had been prefigured.

What they do not observe is that Confidential, short-lived and contemptible though it was, signified the beginning of the end of the long-standing, basically benign social compact that had governed the relationship between the movies and the vast majority of their endlessly bemused public. Though there had been real and scandalizing crimes involving movie people before, such errant behavior didn’t affect people’s unremitting desire to see movies. The censorious Catholic-dominated movie production code had been a nuisance, a puerility and a mystery to many--including, of course, liberal-minded Catholics. But most Americans in the ’30 and ‘40s went on loving movies in quite a direct and uncomplicated way.

In the culturally bland and contented ‘50s, though, some sense of betrayal entered the picture. You can discern this in the response to the decade’s first great movie, “Sunset Boulevard.” It was scarcely the first film to take up the subject of powerful movie players in self-destructive decline.

But in such previous films as “What Price Hollywood?” and “A Star Is Born,” studio bosses saw to it that when stardom’s torch was passed to the younger generation, a lesson in humility and self-possession was wrapped around it. This agreed-upon fiction about Hollywood was essentially sweet-souled and reassuring, and America took it to heart. It was not prepared for a movie in which the principals ended up dead or as crazy victims of a cruel uncaring system. It seemed--how shall we say?--tasteless. “Sunset Boulevard” was, in 1950, no more than a modest, largely urban success. The stix nixed it.

Or consider the decade’s last great movie, “Sweet Smell of Success.” Until it appeared in 1957, New York was, for Hollywood, a glamorous dream: penthouses, white telephones, women in shimmering gowns exchanging bons mots with debonair, tuxedoed males. All of America bought into that convention. But this film--with Burt Lancaster’s viciously hypocritical gossip columnist and Tony Curtis’ scuttling press agent, conspiring to destroy lives in its realistically portrayed, noirishly lighted streets and bars--laid waste the old dream of luxe and lightness. Naturally, a puzzled America rejected the film; it was a huge flop.

Change was everywhere: The confident idiocy of Henry Aldrich in his flivver, daubed with slang slogans, gave way to the brooding sensitivity of James Dean in his rather more deadly hot rod; the calm righteousness of the western hero was sicklied o’er by doubts about gunslinging as a trade; where once a career woman like Rosalind Russell traded wisecracks on an equal footing with Cary Grant, Doris Day--though still a working girl--schemed to trap him in cozy marriage.

In short, all the movies’ ruling equations changed, very occasionally for the better, more generally for the softer, more sentimental worse. Sometimes the gossip collected by Kashner and MacNair illuminates these changes effectively. I suspect that the heated machismo around the Hecht-Hill-Lancaster offices, which they detail, contributed something useful to the unyielding scabrousness of “Sweet Smell.” Similarly, the fact that Nicholas Ray apparently had affairs, as they report, with all three of his young leads--two male, one female--when he was making “Rebel Without a Cause” added something to its sentimental, not to say simpering, portrayal of adolescent angst.

But mostly “The Bad and the Beautiful” fails to make the connections it ought to make. Its authors, for instance, discuss in some detail the interracial affair of Sammy Davis Jr. and Kim Novak; they notice that Sandra Dee’s hysterical defense of her teen queen virginity must have drawn some of its weird fervor from the fact that she was an abused child; they note that Rock Hudson’s cuddlesomeness curdled because he was obliged to hide his homosexuality. But they do not see the linkage between the silence and sniggering that attended these matters and the vast movements and open conflicts they predicted.

It’s the same way with movies themselves. They were trying, in the ‘50s, to be more self-consciously serious and a little more overtly sexy, yet somehow they appeared to be more bland and banal. Impatient with them, the adult audience wandered away; they couldn’t wait for new narrative conventions to evolve and take hold, couldn’t wait to see if their old enthrallment might be reconstituted on a new basis. By the early ‘70s, the movies were catering almost exclusively to their last reliable habitual audience: people 25 and under, from which stars, incidentally, have even fewer secrets than they had in the ‘50s.

There is a great history to be written about how all this began to happen half a century ago, a compound of nuanced critical analysis and sensitive social history. But these writers are not up to that task. They just want to talk trash. And so an opportunity is lost, as it so often is in writing about the movies. The ‘50s, in the movies, in American life generally, are the most enigmatic of modern eras. What in those days we dismissed or refused soberly to discuss or pretended did not exist is precisely what we need now to get serious about if we are to comprehend the world as it has since evolved.