The stars (1962)

the report was grossly exaggerated, but that it was, indeed, the work of the monstrous movie trust, just one more example of the lengths to which it would go to crush its struggling competition. Miss Lawrence, cried Laemmle, was in flourishing health and, to prove it, she would visit St. Louis, accompanied by her leading man, King Baggott. All and sundry were invited to come down to the station to see for themselves that she was as alive and lovely as ever. Hundreds turned out for the first personal appearance in movie history and admirers "demonstrated their affection by tearing the buttons off Florence Lawrence's coat, the trimmings from her hat, the hat from her head." Within a year, the stock company Griffith had built at Biograph was partly destroyed by the independents, who were quick to follow Laemmle's lead. In the somehow charming jungle that was the movie business in its early days, vigorous and wildly aggressive companies that existed outside the trust (and outside the written, if not the moral, law) were in desperate need of any competitive edge they could seize. The creation and marketing of stars was such an edge. Indeed, it is not too much to say that the creation of the star system was the chief factor in the transformation of the movie business from a struggling, squabbling collection of small concerns into the monolithic industry which it was at the height of its power. Stars gave to the business the stability of mass production. You could predict very closely the probable profits of a major star's vehicle, and it was like money in the bank to know that you had a number of such items in various stages of production. You merely kept grinding them out, sure in the knowledge that, if you didn't radically change the formula, profits would follow as the night the day. Thus did production line methods come to the movies just as new methods of distribution, through nationwide chains of exchanges, were creating a need for standardized massproduced products. Three years after the historic Florence Lawrence publicity coup, everyone had taken to the star system, the first fan magazine (owned by Vitagraph) had begun publication, and the mills of personal publicity had begun their inexorable grind. The first stars, as noted, had been created by the public. Through the mysterious process known as identification, large numbers of people had come to see something of themselves (or, at least, the fantasy image of themselves) in various screen personalities. And, in the period between 1910 and 1920, the great prototype screen personalities began to appear. These stars were archetypes, all unaware of the common chord they set reverberating in millions of people. They became models for hundreds who were to follow. Of them, the Keystone Kops, William S. Hart, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks were, in a sense, originals. Only one of the great prototypes, Theda Bara, was a totally made-up creature, the "invention" of William Fox. She was a little Ohio girl who, through adroit make-up, careful selection of stories and, most importantly, a spectacular publicity campaign, was transformed into a symbol of exotic sexuality, a figure, indeed, so exaggerated as to be comically grotesque. She was, as they say, just too much, and she was rather quickly laughed off the screen. But as a totally fabricated personality, she represented a radical reversal of what, for the first few years of the star system, had been the usual way of doing business. Until then, the creation of stars had been a fairly natural phenomenon; an actor would be noticed by the public in a small part, his talents would be nurtured and publicized by a shrewd studio and, finally, in the good old American pluck-and-luck way, he would achieve his peculiar destiny — movie stardom. Now, following the lead of William Fox, the moguls realized that the process could be reversed — the public could be made to accept, through the assiduous use of publicity techniques, almost anyone the studios thought they should. At least, this was the opinion of two disparate groups, cynics within the industry and the everpoised moralists and intellectual critics to whose voluminous recordings of every Hollywood mistake, failure and lapse of taste all of us owe so much. In point of fact, it is extremely difficult to make a great star out of ordinary clay. It has been done, but it is not easy. And Hollywood is strewn with the wreckage of careers for which a flourish of expertly beaten drums was sent rolling across the land, but which failed to make it with the public. For proof one need only glance at the career of Marion Davies, whom all the millions of Hearst and M-G-M could not make a truly first-rate star, or at Vera Hruba Ralston, who was married to Herbert Yates, president of Republic Pictures. Mr. Yates did everything he could for his wife, soaring far above and beyond the call of connubial duty. The result was nothing short of disastrous. And when, a few years ago, a group of stockholders sought to oust Mr. Yates from control of his studio, one of the chief charges brought against his management was this expensive bit of nepotism. Yates lost his job. So, it is almost impossible to create demand for an individual star when none exists in the unconscious minds of the audience. But the demeaning ordeals through which the would-be star is put by an industry which is particularly brutal in pursuit of profits has had its effect. Simply put, it has made the task of being a star incredibly difficult in terms 12