The stars (1962)

ladies at that). If anything, his screen career was advanced by public knowledge of this fact. The two images, real and fancied, happily coincided. Charles Chaplin, whose screen career consisted of the masterful playing of a highly stylized image of the common man, was, on the other hand, ruined in the eyes of the public by his numerous divorces, his minority political views and his involvement in a paternity suit. Reality could not be squared with the character the public desperately wanted him to be. Similarly, Ingrjd Bergman, who acted with impressive candor and directness about her affair with director Roberto Rossellini, was the object of violent speeches on the floor of Congress and was ostracized for years by her public because she transgressed the rules established by her public personality, which projected a sort of rustic wholesomeness. At almost the same time, another screen star was publicly touring the continent in the company of an Eastern potentate-playboy. And although interest in their affair ran high, her transgression fitted neatly the sexy nature of her screen personality. There was no strong reaction to her affair. All this leads to a simple conclusion: Movie stars are not basically actors, although many of them demonstrate mimetic gifts of a high order. They are, simply, empty vessels who indicate to us the kind of fantasies with which they and their superiors in the production hierarchy want us to fill them. If we respond to these hints, they will succeed. The superstars, the ones who seem to go on forever, are archetypes, answering the basic human needs for identification. Age cannot wither, custom cannot stale the pleasures they afford. Others are very much the products of special circumstances. They rise and fall in a brief span of time, answering a sudden socio-psychological need, then disappear almost as quickly as they appeared. In short, movie stars are objects of pure pleasure. And it is as such that they should be considered, not as actors or as artists. There are difficulties involved in being such an object in our society. We have never been a nation inclined to take pleasure for pleasure's sake. We tend to look for social usefulness to justify our fun. Hence the insistence of stars that they are, indeed, actor-artists; hence, too, the contempt in which the star is often held by stage actors and by his fellow craftsmen in the industry, and the peculiarly ambivalent attitude of both critics and intelligent public toward the star. The simple folk simply love certain movie stars; and they go, a pleasurable tingle of anticipation buoying them on their journey, to see them as they expect to see them. If a role or an incident in the star's life disappoints them or alters their image of the actor, they merely find a new favorite. But few intellectuals have the honesty to admit, as the admirable Robert Warshow did, "that I go to the movies for the same reason that the 'others' go: because I am attracted to Humphrey Bogart or Shelley Winters or Greta Garbo; because I require the absorbing immediacy of the screen; because in some way I take all that nonsense seriously." The average intelligent moviegoer is always trying to validate his attendance at the movies by some elaborate rationale. He and his fellows, in Paul Rosenberg's fine phrase, "have come not to bathe in the waters, but to register the degree of its pollution." The burden of this book, very simply, is that by merely existing, movie stars fulfill whatever function they have in this world. It takes no moral position on the question of whether their existence — or, for that matter, the existence of movies as an institution — is "good" or "useful" in our society. My purpose is descriptive; my method is one which combines factual reporting about the lives of various film stars along with an analysis of what I think the essences they have projected have meant to us at various times. It is my hope that amateur sociologists, social historians and social psychologists among my readers will find some food for thought about the larger forces in our cultural history in the little descriptive and analytical pieces which follow. At the very least I hope everyone will enjoy the pictures which take up more space than the words in this book. Movie stars are really meant to be looked at, not talked about. If you have the eyes to see, you should be able to perceive what a star is, or was, all about, merely by looking. In this connection I would like to offer a final analogy in the hope that it will get us off on the right foot. A movie star is not an artist, he is an art object. The performance one witnesses on the screen (and, for that matter, in his public life) is created by many hands — the star included. You cannot discuss this objectification of conscious and unconscious impulses as you would the work of a more conventional actor. The star's career is like a piece of sculpture — perhaps one of Alexander Calder's mobiles. If you like the piece of sculpture you will return to the museum on many occasions — on rainy afternoons, when you are feeling depressed or anxious or even elated — to seek a reestablishment, through it, of your connection with the world, your sense of continuity with it. It is the same with film stars. There are those democrats among us who can't see the use of either a piece of sculpture or a star. Neither is important since man could exist without them. Both are, however, realities of the general culture of our time. And both, in their ways, are creations in which we can see much and from which we can learn. 16