Most stars are just the front-of-house display for an industry that makes fortunes for many others
I asked my mum over the holidays where her big pile of sketches was, because I wanted my sons to see them. She said she'd thrown them away ages ago. I was stunned. I'd loved looking though them all when I was little. Portrait after portrait of actors, all beautifully copied from the movie magazines of the 1940s and 1950s, some of them oil paintings on greaseproof paper, a nimbus of ochre linseed around their edges, most of them pencil on sugar paper. There were a few of Deborah Kerr, whom my mother, as a young woman, had adored. She was my namesake.
My mother's classmate at school in Essex, Maureen Rippingale, had been particularly fascinated by my mother's ability to capture a likeness, even to ratchet up all that glamour and beauty just a tiny bit more. Maureen had loved the movies, had been silly about them, really, my mother said. Maureen had been so crazy about the movies that she had run away from home at 16, two and fourpence in her pocket, aiming to become a star. The amazing thing, my mother would tell me, her voice full of wonder, was that Maureen had managed it. She had reinvented herself as Carole Lesley, a blonde bombshell, and had been in quite a few films. We saw her on the telly one Sunday afternoon, playing Kitten Strudwick in Doctor in Love. She also starred in Woman in a Dressing Gown, which won a Golden Globe in 1957, for best English-language foreign film. Hollywood had surely beckoned.
In 1974, another sheet of paper joined the pile of pictures of actresses. This last picture was part of a newspaper clipping. It reported that Lesley had killed herself, by taking an overdose of drugs, aged 38. My mother was of the opinion, knowing Maureen as she had, that she would probably have been happier if she'd had no success in showbusiness at all, rather than the tantalising status of Very Nearly Famous. My mother reckoned that it must have been so much more awful for Maureen to have come so close to her heart's desire – Hollywood stardom – and then have it all slide inexorably away from her. Maybe that's so. Who can say?
I thought about Maureen/Carole while watching The Artist, in which George Valentin, silent movie star, is left high and dry by the advent of the talkies. Actually, I had lots of thoughts. Like all the very best comedy, The Artist is "about" a lot of things, its rich content lightly worn. It is mainly, of course, a meditation on change. Young people today tend to believe that humanity has experienced no change more profound than the emergence of the internet. I can't help feeling that some of The Artist's success with young audiences is its gentle reminder that the arrival of recorded sound was a fairly big deal, too.
What's most explicit, though, is the change in the nature of global celebrity, or at least in our perception of it. The private lives of the film stars in The Artist are innocent and conventional, which is exactly the way such lives were projected by the studios and the press in that era, and for a long time to come. Even in the 1940s and 50s, this was the line fed to the fans about the stars they adored. No longer.
People forget – if they ever knew – that when Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon was first published in the US in 1965, full of true tales about Hollywood excess and decadence, it was banned within 10 days, and not republished until 1975. I still remember the shock that was sometimes prompted as my mother avidly watched Barry Norman's television series, Hollywood Greats, which began in 1977 and ran until 1983. That wartime generation, as children and as young people, had believed in the purity of Hollywood's heroes, despite all the evidence to the contrary. I believe that the huge degree of amazingly successful subterfuge with which the lives of the stars were presented to a credulous public back then has helped to inform the contemporary attitude whereby the hacking of a film star's phone is something to which a blind eye can be turned.
The Artist received three Golden Globes this week – far more impressive, of course, than Woman in a Dressing Gown's one, in 1957. The Golden Globes are a Big Deal, because they are bellwethers for the Even Bigger Deal of the Oscars. To me, the massive coverage the Golden Globes receives seems pretty recent. I don't remember, as a child in a film-loving household, ever hearing mention of them. I wonder if Maureen made it to the ceremony in the days of her pomp. Probably not, international travel being what it was in those days. She'd certainly have been keen to snaffle a gown, borrow some jewels and pose on the red carpet. They all seem so terribly keen to do that, no matter how unstarry, or how casual about it all they project themselves as being. They're mugs, really, film stars. Sure, they are ludicrously well-paid for their success, and for accepting, encouraging and nurturing that sinister adulation reserved for human archetypes. But they are also particularly pampered, tethered goats, the front-of-house display for an industry that makes fortunes for many others, others who are much less obliged to present and foster "a public image", and much more able to keep their private lives private. The coverage of the Golden Globes may have been illustrated with photographs of beautiful women and handsome actors. But all of the texts agreed that the real winner this year was a producer, back from the brink of bankruptcy three years ago to sweep the board. Or as Meryl Streep, star of one of his winning films, The Iron Lady, put it: "I'd like to thank my agent. And also God: Harvey Weinstein."
Last weekend I visited a location shoot for a modest, low-budget, half-hour television film. I stood in a room crammed with a bewildering number of people as they blocked out the next scene. When they were ready to shoot, the director said: "OK. Let's get the crew in." I was amazed as what seemed like a never-ending file of yet more people marched into the room.
My late father-in-law used to remark, as the credits rolled after films, on how massive they had become: "In my day," he'd say, "you could make a film with just Will Hay and the Fat Boy." All I know about Will Hay's private life is that he was expert in astronomy, and published a book called Through My Telescope. Heaven knows what he would make of the long lenses that are employed today to gaze at the stars.
And my mother's lovely drawings – discarded, irrecoverable? She didn't say much about why she had binned them. But I can't help feeling that somewhere among her motivations there must have been disillusionment, a little bit of disappointment that the human perfection she and Maureen had taken so literally at face value, and celebrated with such innocent charm, had been so manifestly a trick of the light, flickering on a screen, in the dark.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jan/20/hollywood-film-stars-are-mugs-deborah-orr
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