Table of Contents
If you buy just one book for Christmas, don't hesitate to
make it the massive Vanity Fair's Hollywood.
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Chapter One
WITHOUT THE CANE
AND THE DERBY
A Poem by Carl Sandburg
Charlie Chaplin Playing
for His Friends After Dinner:
The woman had done him wrong.
Either that ... or the woman was clean as a white rose in the morning
gauze of dew.
It was either one or the other or it was the two things, right and wrong,
woven together like two braids of a woman's head of hair hanging
down woven together.
The room is dark. The door opens. It is Charlie playing for his friends
after dinner, "the marvelous urchin, the little genius of the screen"
(chatter it like a monkey's running laughter cry).
No ... it is not Charlie ... it is somebody else. It is a man, gray shirt,
bandanna, dark face. A candle in his left hand throws a slant of light
on the dark face. The door closes slow. The right hand leaves the doorknob slow.
He looks at something. What is it? A white sheet on a table. He takes
two long soft steps. He runs the candlelight around a hump in the
sheet. He lifts the sheet slow, sad-like.
A woman's head of hair shows, a woman's white face. He takes the head
between his hands and looks long at it. His fingers trickle under the
sheet, snap loose something, bring out fingers full of a pearl necklace.
He covers the face and the head of hair with the white sheet. He takesa
step toward the door The necklace slips into his pocket off the fingers
of his right hand. His left hand lifts the candle for a good-bye look.
Knock, knock, knock. A knocking the same as the time of the human
heartbeat.
Knock, knock, knock, first louder, then lower. Knock, knock, knock,
the same as the time of the human heartbeat.
He sets the candle on the floor ... leaps to the white sheet ... rips it
back ... has his fingers at the neck, his thumbs at the throat, and
does three slow fierce motions of strangling.
The knocking stops. All is quiet. He covers the face and the head of hair
with the white sheet, steps back, picks up the candle and listens.
Knock, knock, knock, a knocking the same as the time of the human
heartbeat.
Knock, knock, knock, first louder, then lower. Knock, knock, knock,
the same as the time of the human heartbeat.
Again the candle to the floor, the leap, the slow fierce motions of
strangling, the cover-up of the face and the head of hair, the step
back, the listening.
And again the knock, knock, knock ... louder ... lower ... to the time
of the human heartbeat.
Once more the motions of strangling ... then ... nothing at all ...
nothing at all ... no more knocking ... no knocking at all ... no
knocking at all ... in the time of the human heartbeat.
He stands at the door ... peace, peace, peace everywhere only in the
man's face so dark and his eyes so lighted up with many lights, no
peace at all, no peace at all.
So he stands at the door, his right hand on the doorknob, the candle
slants of light fall and flicker from his face to the straight white sheet
changing gray against shadows.
So there is peace everywhere ... no more knocking ... no knocking at
all to the time of the human heartbeat ... so he stands at the door
and his right hand on the doorknob.
And there is peace everywhere ... only the man's face is a red gray
plaster of storm in the center of peace ... so he stands with a candle
at the door ... so he stands with a red gray face.
After he steps out the door closes: the door, the doorknob,
the table, the white sheet; there is nothing at all; the owners
are shadows; the owners are gone; not even a knocking;
not even a knock, knock, knock ... louder, lower, in the time
of the human heartbeat.
The lights are snapped on. Charlie, "the marvelous urchin, the little
genius of the screen" (chatter it with a running monkey's laughter
cry). Charlie is laughing a laugh the whole world knows.
The room is full of cream yellow lights. Charlie is laughing ... louder ...
lower ...
And again the heartbeats laugh ... the human heartbeats laugh ...
FROM THE PAGES OF VANITY FAIR MAY 1922
Chapter Two
THE GREAT GARBO
By Clare Boothe Brokaw Luce
Every age has had its Helen, and every Helen has had the people for her willing historians. The Circes of history—Helen of Troy, Cleopatra, Salome, the Queen of Sheba, Mary Queen of Scots, Madame de Pompadour, Ninon de Lenclos, Nell Gwynn, Mrs. Hamilton, Lola Montez—march (if any such martial word may be used for the thrilling rhythms of their sensuous bodies) in exquisite pageantry through the annals of art and literature. They are not forgotten, their remembered stories still have the power to touch men's hearts, and often the taste of their ghostly lips seems more real than the warm embrace of living flesh.
Alone of all the centuries, the 20th seems so far to have produced no beauty who might deserve the word historical, no charmer whose sweet legend will live in the minds of future generations of men, no feminine form which will gloriously survive in the works of poets and artists.
There is one possible exception. There is Greta Garbo—Greta Garbo, the strange and angular siren of the "movies," the legend of the studios, the sole survivor of the tawdry publicity, the spotlight madness, the vulgar exhibitionism of Hollywood. Better known to the average man than either the Queen of Sheba or Helen of Troy, her cinematic image has encircled the entire globe, and domestic as well as alien audiences, who understood no word of what she was saying, have thrilled, again and again, to the vibrant mystery of her voice and her form.
Surely the worldwide fame of this fair Scandinavian, whose every movement is instinct with beauty, whose name evokes mystery, and whose image evokes desire ... surely she will outlast our generation and will join the deathless throng of lovely ladies—one is almost tempted to say—in ... Hell?
She is a likely candidate. The only one, indeed, that our decade has had to offer. There are more beautiful women in Hollywood, where the most beautiful women in the world are to be found. But perfection of face or figure is often a chilling thing, and defeats the very emotion which it is ordinarily supposed to arouse in the beholder. Garbo fortuitously escapes this cold perfection. Her often sullen and too large mouth is beautiful only because it is mobile as music; her hollow cheeks beneath high, Nordic cheekbones have not the poet's smooth, rounded flow from temple to chin; her coiffure, which has been aped by the fashionable women of two continents, falls in a limp, untidy, dun-colored mop upon her thin shoulders; only her eyes, "like jewels in a shroud," heavy-lidded and slumberous beneath the gloom of her lashes (which quite literally sweep her cheeks), approach perfection, and even they are marred by shaved eyebrows, which have been replaced by inane penciled hieroglyphics, springing upward like the antennae of a butterfly.
She is broad-shouldered, flat-chested, long-legged, rawboned, and she moves with the awkward grace of an adolescent.
That is the physical image of Garbo. It shows forth, but does not explain her magnetism and her allure. These far transcend her beauty, as they also transcend her ability as an actress. (Not that she is a poor actress, but that Garbo herself is so much more real and vivid in her audience's mind than the character which she is playing. Her role is like the dress she wears—a sometimes attractive garment which permits her to expose herself decently to the public gaze.)
Perhaps the inability to define Garbo's magic in the usual physical or artistic terms is partially responsible for the inordinate interest in her "private life." It is precisely here that the average person is more than ever baffled, although he should find in that "private life," and the Garbo legend which has grown out of its very impenetrability (or is it vacuity?), his most valuable clue to her personality, and his answer to the question: Is Garbo a woman of history?
Garbo, of all Hollywood's glittering legion, has a private life. She entertains, she receives, she interviews—no one. Her contacts with the studios are reduced to the minimum required by her actual cinema work; nothing more is tolerated. She forms few, if any, friendships, and does not seem to cherish them for long. Even those in Hollywood who have come to know her well— that is to say, who have shared her physical society—have left her more baffled than when they first met, for the theories which they brought to the encounter have been shattered by the almost vicious quality of her reticence. Her indifference to all the recognized Hollywood values, her long silences, her brutal independence, her famous "I tank I go home," with which she frustrates every wish counter to her own, her sphinxlike air of ageless wisdom, of always being on the verge of saying something of vast import, have never deserted her for a single second. There is no chink in her magnificent armor of aloofness. Yes, there was one ... one small, vulnerable spot—Garbo's Achilles tendon (I had almost said heel): John Gilbert. For him and with him, during a brief while Greta Garbo emerged from the cocoon of personal anonymity which she had been spinning about herself ever since she came to Hollywood. A gay butterfly, she wafted about the Hollywood scene, and, according to numerous eyewitnesses, she was—under the Gilbertian influence—"just like anybody else."
Here, perhaps, is the answer to the question about Garbo's place in history.
Beautiful and gifted women always have been, and always will be, judged and evaluated by their weakness—since the strength of a woman is at best a negative quality of virtue. Are not "the beautiful" and "the damned" synonymous terms? Their weaknesses give them what historical glamour they possess. Therefore it is inevitable that Garbo should be judged in the light of her only, if brief, attachment—John Gilbert. In this light she fails not the picture fans, not her studio, not her generation, but—history. History has never reserved a place for a beautiful woman who did not love, or who was not loved by, at least one interesting, powerful, or brilliant man. Love, magnificently, a little recklessly, and certainly publicly—the loves of the great can no more be hidden than the burning of the topless towers of Ilium. When we speak of Helen, we speak in the next breath of Menelaus, of Paris. Pompadour reminds us of Louis XV, Salome would have mattered little but for John the Baptist, and although it is sacrilege, the Baptist would have mattered little but for Salome. Cleopatra had her Caesar, and Mark Antony had Cleopatra. Is the most magnetic woman of her generation, the greatest beauty of her era, to be remembered because her name was "associated with" (to use a genteel euphemism worthy of Will Hays, but hardly of Garbo) John Gilbert's? The answer is yes, or, rather, the answer is no. Neither name will be remembered.
A woman who becomes "just like anybody else" when she is in love is just like anybody else. A great love maddens with joy, or crushes with sorrow, it debases or exalts, deifies or brutalizes, but it does not standardize. The Garbo-Gilbert romance was a standard product of the Hollywood fleshpots and, as such, must be used as an index to the inner Garbo. (The fact that the attachment was not a success does not excuse its inception, although it is customary to demand forgiveness for bad taste in love affairs on the quaint grounds that they so often turn out badly.)
The only way a woman can gloriously succeed in impressing herself upon her age—the way of love—Garbo has, until now, failed in. If she does not remedy this oversight one day, then those shadowy, gigantic six-foot close-up embraces, the microphoned passions spent in the arms of celluloid Gilberts, Novarros, Montgomerys, and Gables, will be her only epitaph—faintly humorous celluloid strips, of interest only to antiquarians or other-day humorists of, say, 50 years hence, who may conceivably show them to their friends to provide a curious or mirthful evening.
There was left to Garbo another way in which she might have, had she wished, survived the oblivion awaiting her: the way of the intelligence—of art and literature. Here, too, she has failed. With enviable consistency, with admirable independence, but with lamentable stupidity and egotism, she has refused to pose for good artists, to interview, or even to meet socially men and women of acknowledged intelligence and ability. To be sure, the veil of mystery which has piqued the fans has not intrigued the artists, who instinctively feel the paucity of interest that it cloaks. Garbo has never inspired a single piece of fine criticism or writing (not excepting this) nor any artistic appreciation of worth. To know that this can be done by a cinema star one has only to witness the career of Charles Chaplin, who has received the serious consideration of the finest writers of his day, and whose intellectual contacts with great men of the world have been profitable and pleasant to both himself and to them. Chaplin will take his place beside Dan Leno, Grimaldi, Debureau, and Coquelin. Garbo will be forgotten as a woman in 10 years, and her legacy as an actress will be dead when Helen Hayes's, Lynn Fontanne's, and Katharine Cornell's are beginning to grow greenest.
The world must take her at her own valuation: a woman with a chip (although it flew there from some Hollywooden head) on her shoulder, a woman with a grudge against life, a woman who cares nothing for literature, little for love, and for art only what she brings to that ofttimes puerile, hardly endurable, and limited medium, the silver screen.
The only first-rate artist with whom, willingly, she ever permitted herself to come in contact—Edward Steichen, the photographer—instantly discovered the truth about her while he was making those photographs which may, curiously enough, prove to be her only lasting claim to fame. He said, "She is like a lovely wild- wood animal ... or a child."
Child or animal, whichever you please. I prefer to think of her as a deer, in the body of a woman, living resentfully in the Hollywood Zoo, suffering in the bonds of a complex civilization, startled by human contacts, disinterested in human things, graceful and beautiful and mysterious with the untutored grace and native mystery of the wild thing of the forest. This would explain the famous "walks in the rain," the sunbaths, the intense need of physical exercise, the long silences (for, since nothing is ever the result of her thoughts, common sense dictates that she must be thinking about nothing), the nostalgia for her native heath, the intense discomfiture among people, and the inability or the lack of desire to make and hold friends.
You may prefer to think of her as a child who has never grown up. Sulky and spoiled, indifferent to all desires but her own, suspicious of bribes, bewildered by adult psychology, impervious to threats, since being a spoiled and talented child she knows that They will not, They dare not, hurt her. Selfish, shrewd, ignorant, self-absorbed and whimsical, perverse, and innocent—the perfect realization of the child left to itself, unhampered and uncontrolled by mature authority.
"Every man has the love affairs he deserves." This is true collectively as well as individually. Our generation's loveliest woman is but a phantom upon a silver screen—a shadow with the face of an angel of Perdition, as substantial as a mist before the moon, the inarticulate, the bad-tempered, and the "great" Garbo.
FROM THE PAGES OF VANITY FAIR FEBRUARY 1932
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