The stars (1962)

values. It now became necessary to prove that stars were just like everyone else, only more so. It is doubtful that Marion Davies painted over her 14-carat gold ceiling or that Gloria Swanson actually gave up dunking herself in the solid-gold bathtub that was the focal point of her black-marble bathroom, but the publicity departments turned the attention of the public away from such didoes, and directed it toward the more human side of the stars' lives. Public information on salaries, mansions, wardrobe, and so on, diminished, and a new kind of star came to the screen. The age of the American hero, tough, cynical, wise-cracking, frequently unchivalrous toward women, was upon us. Gone were the Latin lovers; gone, for the most part, were the vamps, the sloe-eyed sensualists who had tempted many a good American boy to his doom on the silent screen. Even the virginal staple underwent a transformation. She did not lose her virtue, but she did tend to be a good deal more knowledgeable about the world and its ways than the Gish sisters or Mary Pickford had been. More than one commentator has noted that when James Cagney pushed the grapefruit into Mae Clark's face in Public Enemy, screen love and, for that matter, screen manners changed forever. Certainly the moment is one of those bench marks in social history that cannot be ignored. The exuberant romanticism of the twenties was, at that moment, destroyed forever. And so, too, was the decent distance between star and audience. Now that they were playing parts which, at least in the details of dress, manner and speech, were intended to resemble the lives of their audience, it was useless to keep up the old pretense that in their off-screen lives they were any different. It took a genuine leap of the. imagination to identify in the twenties with the screen character of Valentino or Barrymore or Garbo or Gilbert, so exotic were the settings in which they appeared, so improbable the situations in which they found themselves, the dialogue the subtitles reported. It required no such leap to identify with Cagney or Gable or Spencer Tracy. Speech, very simply, meant that the movies had to be more realistic. This is in no way intended to imply that Hollywood's vision of reality was ever, by and large, a particularly truthful one. It is simply to say that, along the road to the inevitable happy ending, there came to be a greater emphasis on believability in everything, from the words actors spoke to the settings in which they appeared. More important, sound broke down the wall of silence which had previously separated star and audience. Somehow we came to stand less in awe of them, to feel, heaven help us, that they were our friends. At this point teen-agers began writing stars for advice on everything from body odor to their love lives. What this meant to the star system is summed up simply in a quotation from a wise Frenchman named GustaveLeBon: "The gods and men who have kept their prestige for long have never tolerated discussion. For the crowd to admire, it must be kept at a distance." The sound film appreciably narrowed that distance as did the kind of publicity that came with it. The result was that the role of the stars in our lives would never again be totally analogous with that of the gods. Stars retained some godlike attributes, but the opportunities for a sybaritic existence safe behind the walls of their estates and the walls of the improbable legends which had been created for them were now over. From this point it was but a short distance to a picture in the fan magazines of a star playing chef at a neighborhood cookout. Sound also increased the number of stars. In silents it had been necessary merely to play one of the half dozen or so types around which nearly all movies were built. If you were a woman you were basically either a virgin or a vamp; if you were a male you were either a collar-ad type or a romantic in either the Valentino or Fairbanks tradition. There were, therefore, fairly rigid lines drawn between the film genres. Previously, there had been comedies, romances and adventure films, with an occasional contemporary melodrama thrown in. Now the lines between these categories began to blur and we had comedy-dramas and romantic adventures. In addition, there was a sharp upturn in the number of films that focused on contemporary life. In short, stars were called upon to represent not just types, but people in an infinite variety. They had to speak, of course, where previously they had only to mime rather broadly some rather broad ideas. But there was more to their increased duties than that. They had to retain at least part of their old-time romantic appeal and yet, at the same time, be recognizable and believable (realistic) human beings. In the thirties that odd blend of reality and fantasy which the movies continue to offer us was mixed for the first time. A new kind of cinematic speech was developed, as Stanley Kauffman noted, a "tightpacked wisecrackese which sounds like life, but really is the twentieth-century American theater's equivalent of blank verse. ... It is an American convention, an abstraction." As with the dialogue, so with the films; they looked a good bit like life, but they were not. Similarly the actors: they looked like real people, but of course, they were not; they remained movie stars. So the star stopped being a mere type, a sort of incarnated mythic figure, as he had been, and it became fashionable to say that, instead, the stars played themselves. "Generally speaking, they do not," says Rod Steiger. "They play the 14