The Penguin Book of Hollywood edited by Christopher Silvester Viking 696pp, £25 in UK
This is undoubtedly the best book I've ever read about Hollywood. Culling all manner of sources, primarily by insiders, Silvester has created a rich tapestry to immortalise the mad, bad, wild and extravagant ways of the Babylon of the film industry. Sectioning his book into decades, beginning with the 1910s and ending with the 1990s, he has come up with just about everything everyone has had to say about the place that dreams are made of.
In his introduction he gallops through a quick resume of the text, telling of the origin of the name Hollywood (a ranch in the Cahuenga Valley); quoting the exquisitely named anthropologist, Hortense Powdermaker, who said: "Hollywood is not an exact geographical area, although there is such a postal district. It has commonly been described as a state of mind, and it exists wherever people connected with the movies live and work"; and explaining how the pioneer film companies came west in search of fine weather and favourable lighting conditions, and also to evade the detectives who worked for the Motion Picture Patents Company, a group of eight studios under the leadership of Thomas Edison.
By the 1920s the studios that later came to be known as the "majors" had begun to take shape: Famous Players Lasky (later Paramount), Metro Pictures, Universal Pictures, Columbia, Twentieth Century Pictures and United Artists. The mainstays of these companies, the film moguls, were larger-than-life characters such as Jesse Lasky, Cecil B. DeMille, Sam Goldwyn, D.W. Griffith, William Ince and Mack Sennett. All of them are portrayed here, clothed resplendently in their various eccentricities. There is a marvellous vignette of Mack Sennett, by Billy Wilder, who went to work for him as a gag man. The interview took place inSennett's sparsely furnished office, with the great man naked upon a table being given a rub-down by his factotum, Abdul the Turk. The only other accoutrements in the place were a vast leather chair and a large brass spittoon, into which Sennett regularly and accurately spat great dollops of tobacco juice. It was Sam Goldwyn, of all people, who formed Eminent Authors, Inc., a group of contracted scenarists. In the wake of the sound revolution in 1927 there was a migration of playwrights, novelists and newspapermen from the East Coast who came to write for the movies. These people worked in a pell-mell atmosphere, nicely described by Ben Hecht: "Movies were seldom written. They were yelled into existence in conferences that kept going in saloons, brothels and all-night poker games."
The 1930s were the apogee of the producer system and the star system, and it was the time when Hollywood received its greatest influx of talent in the form of refugees from Europe. It was also the time that the studios assumed distinct identities by specialising their products: Warner Brothers was known for its gangster movies and swashbucklers, MGM released mainly comedies - as did Columbia - Universal had an odd mixture of horror films and syrupy Deanna Durbin features, Paramount went in for epics, Twentieth Century Fox made Westerns and historical dramas, and RKO produced film-noir thrillers and Astaire-Rogers musicals.
The second World War years saw Hollywood enjoy its greatest popularity, as 95 million Americans went to the cinema every week. Then came the communist witch hunts, the break-up of the studio system, the advent of television, the take-overs by foreign corporate business, the rising influence of the super-agent, and the arrival of independent film makers such as George Lucas and Steven Spielberg.
All of these factors are dealt with by Silvester, but it is the personal reminiscence and the anecdotes about individuals that give the book its particular air of joie de vivre. There are so many yarns and stories to quote from. Take Elinor Glyn, for instance. Her grand dame manner made her the butt of many a bawdy rhyme, the most popular being:
Would you care to sin
Like Elinor Glyn
On a tiger skin
Or would you prefer
To err
On some other fur?
In spite of her majestic manner, she could also sail close to the wind herself. When her novel Three Weeks was being filmed, she was much in evidence on the set, and, when giving advice on what the twelve young men who would form the Palace Guard should wear, she said they should appear in silk, skin-hugging tights. "And no jock straps," she cautioned. "I do not believe in interfering with nature." It was said that there was a great shortage of knackwursts in the Gotham restaurant on the days that auditions were being held.
George S. Kaufman and Herman Mankiewicz were paired as bridge partners one evening, with Herman playing disastrously. After the loss of points was scored, Kaufman leaned across and said: "When did you learn this game? Be specific, Herman. Don't just say this morning. What time this morning?" And when Mankiewicz returned to the table after a visit to the restroom, Kaufman said, "For the first time tonight I know what you held in your hand."
There are many other delicious glimpses into the often bizarre lives of such as Rudolph Valentino; Theda Bara - her first name is an anagram for Death; William Randolph Hearst, his mistress Marion Davies, his tasteless monstrosity of a house, San Simeon; Aimee Semple McPher son, the mad evangelist; Cecil B. DeMille, his habit of keeping people waiting during the making of The Ten Commandments, causing two of the principal actors to send in word that Moses and Aaron wished to have words with God; John Barrymore who, even when dead, was still brought to have one last drink with his boozing chums; and hundreds more.
I cannot close without one last story. It seems that Charlie Chaplin liked to boast frequently about the fact that he was an atheist. One day, at the pool-side with Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, he jumped fully clothed into the water, crying: "If there is a God, let him save me now." He was going down for the third time when Fairbanks, also fully clothed, leaped in and pulled him out. But the kernel of the story is that, while all this was going on, Pickford was running around the pool shouting, "Let the heathen drown." Isn't that wonderful? Let the heathen drown. What a line to go out on . . .