Star-dust in Hollywood (1930)

Hollywood — The Stars when Mr Baily will find a difficulty in earning even £5000 a year for himself. Making the roughest of guesses at figures, we may say that there are some thirty or forty magnates making perhaps £50,000 a year, with some four hundred principal stars at £20,000 and upward, one hundred supervisors at £20,000, three hundred directors at £10,000, five hundred experts, of varying degrees, at £50,000 and upward, and so on. Hollywood must represent the most concentrated gathering of nouveaux riches that the world has ever seen ; for most of these were people bred with expectations no better than of serving in a shop or in an office. Small wonder, then, that the sudden possession of this easily gathered wealth has caused a thousand joyless extravagances ! And small wonder that mad vanities and follies sweep the inhabitants of this colony ! To them Hollywood must seem the purse of Fortunatus, in which they expect to dip for ever. For instance, one famous cowboy star was dazzled by the glamour of his own initials. They were wrought in iron on his fences and gates ; they were enamelled on the doors, stamped into the cushions of his car, and chased in the solid silver of his bits and stirrups. Malicious rumour whispered that they blossomed brightly in his flower-beds. The egomania that made him plaster his initials everywhere, and consider his work not only of national importance, but under the direct control of the Deity Himself, naturally results from wealthinduced superiority, the delusions excited by mimicry and the flattery of advertisement on characters unfortified by education or habit. He saw himself, not as he really was, but as the implacable two-gun man of his pictured existence. We have spoken of the delusion induced by habitual mimicry. A hallucination of character followed one actor off the stage. A star, engaged in portraying the figure of Christ, as he came from the set was so inflated by his assumed role [157]