One of the strange side effects of the journalistic exertions in memory of Hollywood stars is the tendency of the commemorators (myself included) to identify actors with their roles, to imagine that performers’ real-life personalities are reflected in the parts that they play in movies. While there’s an element of truth in this equation—every movie being, to some extent, a documentary about the people seen in it—the hidden aspects of actors’ personalities, the parts of themselves that they keep offscreen and reveal only in selected company, make for an equally significant part of their stories. Maybe what we don’t see is, in fact, more significant—for calling attention to the element of deception and simulation in movie acting.
To put it differently, there are things that I wish I hadn’t heard about actors whom I love to watch, particularly when the source is credible. I’m thinking of a few passages from Edmund Wilson’s “The Thirties,” a posthumously published collection of his notebooks and diaries, about some of the most justly beloved actors ever to pass before a studio lens: the Marx Brothers and Eddie Cantor. Here’s Wilson’s account of an evening in New York City with the writers S. J. Perelman, Philip Wylie, and Dashiell Hammett, “all back from Hollywood,” in early 1933:
As for Groucho, there was another side to his rowdy antics, which suggested a frustrated intellectual whose dignity had been wounded by his place in the circus. Perelman told Wilson that Groucho Marx “wanted to be an English country squire, keep beagles and wear tweeds,” and that he was “always trying to start serious discussions, had been talking to [Maurice] Chevalier and thought Europe was cracking up—what about the Revolution?” With Hitler having just come to power, this makes the mustachioed madcap sound like the only sane man in town. (Passages in Wilson’s diary suggest an odd general obliviousness to Hitler’s “anti-Jewish activities,” which found peculiar sympathy among some of Wilson’s acquaintances and “seemed to encourage latent anti-Semitism, give people courage to be impolite”.)
A little while later, Wilson added to the picture by relating stories he had heard from Perelman and Nathanael West:
Not that stories of social riot were news to Wilson (he had, after all, seen the Fitzgeralds and other twenty-four-hour party people at play throughout the Roaring Twenties), nor were displays of Hollywood vulgarity, which he documents at first hand and in friends’ anecdotes throughout the book. But these tales have an air of “say it isn’t so”: The sane, stolid Zeppo a flasher! Cantor, the saucer-eyed imp whose screen persona linked antic adolescence and grandfatherly sentiment, nearly a predator! Groucho an authentic and high-handed grouch! And mop-haired Harpo revealed as a priapic Pierrot! Not that there’s reason to expect beloved comedians to wear haloes in real life; but the next time Harpo puts his thigh in the palm of a handshaker or opens his trench coat, I’ll have an unwanted image in mind. These comedians’ streak of aggression seems to have been more about power than about sex: they used the shock and revulsion that their exhibitionism sparked to demonstrate their power over those who couldn’t say no.
In another lethal set of anecdotes he got from S. J. Perelman and his wife, Laura (who was West’s sister), Wilson looks squarely at Hollywood’s identity politics:
Laura Perelman called the “Mankowitzes” (likely the Mankiewicz family, which included the screenwriter brothers Herman and Joseph) “swinish” and described their “snobbery” over the proper pronunciation of Yiddish. Another story, which Wilson leaves unattributed, describes Herman Mankiewicz “resigning, going to Schulberg or whoever it was and saying, I hate Jews, you’re a lot of dirty kikes!—Big executive had said, Don’t say that: you’re a Jew yourself!—Not after today! he replied, going out and banging the door.” Irving Thalberg, the film producer who was the model for the protagonist of Fitzgerald’s “The Last Tycoon,” comes up a few times, too—as an object of awe but also as another Jew who proved himself in Hollywood by marrying a Gentile, the actress Norma Shearer. “Hollywood Communists” are also a subject of discussion; John Dos Passos’s wife, Katharine Smith, speaks of two who “in great secrecy played poker and gave half their winnings to the Party.”
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It’s no surprise that artists and writers enjoy a sybaritic existence that differs from their public identity—especially in the era of classic Hollywood, when the boundary between the public and the private was clearer and the accepted (and enforced) social limits drove a wide range of behaviors underground. What’s peculiar is the degree of self-revelation that nonetheless emerges from a carefully crafted persona. Take Harpo Marx’s autobiography, “Harpo Speaks!,” from 1961 (written with Rowland Barber). It’s entertainingly chatty and amazingly detailed, as in the story of the accident by which the brothers got their stage names—a poker game in Rockford, Illinois, with a vaudevillian named Art Fisher, who coined the names in the style of “Knocko the Monk,” a popular comic strip of the time—and the peppy, full-voiced tone is that of a full-steam-ahead raconteur telling war stories.
Yet not all of the tales portray the teller in the most favorable light. There’s the one about the insurance fraud that got young Harpo a high-quality harp. There’s another about a practical joke that he pulled on Fifth Avenue (“I bought a bag full of fake emeralds, rubies and diamonds, at Woolworth’s, then went to Tiffany’s. I asked to look at some diamonds. The clerk pulled out a tray of stones, and while I looked at them I turned over the bag from Woolworth’s, behind my back”). There’s another about his painting lessons, given to him by a “well-stacked brunette” who was posing nude for him.
The chaos stirred up by the Marx Brothers onscreen is one thing, but the real-life story shows them to have interfered in a cavalierly whirlwind way with the lives and livelihoods of others. The vision of artists as wild people who exempt themselves from the constraints that limit the yokels whom they entertain (or disdain) is an old one, and the licentiousness of theatre people is legendary, perhaps in both senses. Yet it’s worth looking directly at what’s hard to avoid noticing—that most of the Hollywood personalities whom Wilson heard about and whose arrogant, aggressive, and uninhibited ways he found noteworthy were Jews.
The story of Cantor and the Marxes, of Thalberg and other studio bosses, isn’t about Jewishness as such but about certain Jews—those who escaped poverty and danger overseas or were born into immigrant families, who grew up in largely straitened circumstances, who were crowded into tenements, who didn’t have the benefit of much education, who needed to make a living quickly, and who discovered that their natural ambition, theatrical intelligence, troubadour inspiration, and practical energy brought them not just a living but a killing, propelling them, despite their outsiderness, their religion, their accents, to fame and fortune.
Fitzgerald’s theory (which he expressed in his notes for “The Last Tycoon”) was that this bad behavior on the part of Hollywood Jews resulted from their inborn sense of looming disaster (“they are having their moment among the fleshpots before returning to the darker and bloodier ghettos that lie ahead”). The Perelmans’ observations of the social fears felt by Jewish potentates in Hollywood raises the question: Fear of what? Perhaps their frosted pettiness has similarly dark roots: the fear of seeming not to belong to a social set to which, in fact, they didn’t belong; the fear of ridicule; the fear that their Jewishness would once again become grounds for exclusion and bring their rickety castles down. In descriptions such as Wilson’s and Fitzgerald’s, Hollywood magnates often resemble the stereotypical savage warlords depicted in their own movies—endowed with ruthless practical wisdom that propels them from yurt or hut to palace, enjoying boundless wealth and power, savoring endless pleasure and indulging endless caprice, but blind to their own limiting crudeness, a blindness that ultimately leads to their downfall.
Yet the studios’ downfall still hasn’t happened. They are drastically different today than they were in the twenties and thirties, but, despite the changes that have shaken the industry (from antitrust cases to television to the Internet), some of them continue to thrive, and the “empire of their own” that the movie moguls created still holds sway.
That’s why the stories that Wilson tells about Marx and that Marx tells about himself seem to me to be, rather, stories about the essence of what movies are.
The awe-inspiring realism and physical impact of Hollywood movies depend on the extreme artifice of studio filmmaking—décor, lighting, costume, makeup, special effects, and, in the era of talking pictures (which began in 1927), the hermetically sealed bubble of the soundstage. A core of unimpeachable reality had to be implanted among these extremes of artifice in order to give them life, and that core was provided by the actors—not the imitation of emotion, but emotion; not the imitation of passion, but passion; not pretending, but being. Under the trowel-smears of pancake makeup and the heat of the lights that melted it, movie actors had to be far closer to the outsize, reckless, dangerous, world-conquering, sentimental, romantic, self-deceiving, villainous, or riotous characters that they were playing than anyone would ever want to admit. And because of the inherent nature of the movie miracle—onscreen performers serving as the reflection of the visions and ideas, the very being, of the moviemakers behind the camera—that same spiritedly profuse passion had to issue from producers, directors, and screenwriters, too.
Hollywood spun the dross of the time—prejudice and injustice with regard to race, gender, religion, and ethnicity; economic catastrophe; war, crime, political discord, and extremism; lust for power and just plain lust, the whole Shakespearean jumble—into a new, synthetic artistic gold. The styles, forms, and gestures of the movies created a new world of image and sound that, even in its abstraction, was a portrait of the times. It took a certain kind of wild character to create and sustain the industry and the art in those hard times, and to do so in a way that would not merely get through those times but dominate and exemplify them. But there are other ways of making movies besides the classic Hollywood ways; plus, times have changed. The personalities of classic Hollywood are now as much an anachronism as the styles of classic Hollywood movies themselves. The modern world of filmmaking admits of other artistic and economic possibilities—which are created by other kinds of people.
