Photoplay (Jul - Dec 1939)

WHAT AMERICAN WOMEN THINK OF HOLLYWOOD WOMEN One of America's most famous women writers frankly explores Mrs. Average America's "over-the-card-table" opinion of Miss Glamour BY MARGARET CULKIN BANNING THE impression' that most of us have of women of Hollywood is a patchwork, made up partly of the old myths and partly of highly personal and detailed information. Where the myth stops and the information begins to be accurate is not always clear to us and perhaps it isn't to the Hollywood women. I shouldn't think it would be. But from what we hear and from what we read in the magazines and newspapers, from letters which come from Susan Smith who went out to live in Hollywood (nearly every woman now knows a Susan Smith at first or second hand) and from tourists' brief views of the industry and the community, the ordinary American woman has made her composite picture of the women connected with motion pictures, the stars, the lesser lights, and the women who have married into the business and have just gone along to be wives. It is not the picture which we had ten or fifteen years ago. Then, to be a woman in Hollywood, especially an actress, was almost synonymous with being a siren, living in real or in potential sin all the time, and dwelling in a house and social environment as tenuous as the shadow pictures on the screen. As time has gone on and pictures have raised their own standards of intellectual values, as we have heard stars and minor actresses talk, often using 20 better English and more careful inflections than most of us, we realize that there must be more to life out there than we thought. It's not just sex. The Hollywood women, at least a decent proportion of them, have brains as well as beauty. They work hard. (They must work hard — or how could they do it? ) And they have to behave. We have heard all about those disciplinary contracts which demand better behavior of motion-picture actresses than is required of the ordinary society woman. Also the candid camera has shown us the realistic Hollywood woman. It reveals flaws, frowns, squints, casual actions, the girl getting older, and those prove humanity better than the posed photograph with every eyelash brushed, combed and stretched. The radio and news columnists have often been mercilessly frank about displays of temperament, about comment on those who carry success well and those who can't stand it. We realize they have their problems and some of them aren't so much different from our own. But just the same, it's a queer life from the point of view of the average American woman. She isn't jealous of the Hollywood woman as a rule, nor does she covet the Hollywood home, which often seems from the photographs to be a swimming pool surrounded by shoe closets. There are, of course, thwarted women in every town, who feel that they could have done just as well, given one screen test or one more husband. But aside from the few who are bitterly biting their nails because they are not in Hollywood, the ordinary woman feels that she does not compete in the same field as the Hollywood one. She may be critical of Hollywood life and she is usually curious about it, more so than she admits. She may not believe all she hears about it, or she may swallow every piece of gossip that comes her way. But she is not envious because she feels that Hollywood is not down her street. The average woman is more likely to envy the wife of her husband's boss, her college roommate who wrote a book, or Dorothy Thompson. H OLLYWOOD is like Mars, a place where ordinary people don't live, or where ordinary people become extraordinary by the fact of residence. This isn't true of the average woman's point of view about New York or even Paris. She may not get to those places very often, but she can imagine herself there and what she would do if she did. Not so in Hollywood. What does this feeling stem from? First of all, I think, from the fact that Hollywood women seem to lack privacy. This is not only in their professional work but also in emotional life and in marriage. If they have divorces or entanglements, they might as well have them in a goldfish bowl or in the front yard. If they have a happy married life, that's also news. This is not true of other women in public life. If, for example, Pearl Buck or Margaret Mitchell should have a personal complication in her life, her friends might know it. The literary set might be aware of it. But her millions of readers, her fans, would not. Winchell might say something about it casually, but unless it amounts to scandal or a