Periclean Age of Celluloid

By Stefan Kanfer

Sometimes oral history is an art; sometimes it is merely mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. It depends as much on the interviewee as the interviewer. In this exhaustive grilling of showfolk past, Film Historian John Kobal has chosen his subjects artfully, and he has edited ruthlessly. Conversations with Bette Davis, whose dramatic biography has been overexposed, are omitted. June Duprez (The Thief of Bagdad) is included precisely be cause of her failure to ascend in Holly wood. With the British actress's help, and some probing questions, Kobal traces "what happened to her career after the film premiered in America and she became the outsider at her own party."

People Will Talk is shot through with the author's quirky preferences and prejudices. He finds that Director Joseph Mankiewicz often "knows more than we do and he's not going to tell us, and I don't like being talked down to." Yet he has enormous enthusiasm for Joan Crawford's "great talent." Appropriately enough, it is these quirky standards that make all 43 testimonies alternately entertaining, poignant and, in the end, indispensable.

Gloria Swanson, for example, pays homage to "Mr. Edison . . . and all the people who had any thing to do with an invention. It made it possible to put us all in tin cans, like sardines. We could have been bad actors, it didn't matter. It was the fact of volume . . . you were just shipped everywhere." Louise Brooks, the '20s star who first retired from films in 1931 at the age of 25, recalls everything and glamourizes nothing: "They keep talking now about deterioration and how the films are lost. They always forget that the big way they were lost was because the studios themselves had them burned up and melted down to sell for silver content. They used to make $2 [million] or $3 million a year that way."

Mae West's refusal to marry is symptomatic of narcissism, then and now: "Every time I look at myself, I become absorbed in myself, and I didn't want to get involved with another person like that."

Film buffs may regard the '30s and '40s as the Periclean Age of Celluloid. But those on the other side of the screen tended to view themselves as galley slaves. Joan Blondell reports, "During the Depression I was making more than six pictures a year. I made six pictures while carrying my son and eight with my daughter. They'd get me behind desks and behind barrels and throw tables in front of me to hide my growing tummy." Dancer Eleanor Powell runs into a friend, a film cutter at MGM, and lunches with him at the studio commissary. That afternoon she is lectured by Louis B. Mayer: "My dear child, you are going to be a star . . . I would rather you weren't seen with any of the lower echelon of employees." Harry Cohn, the caliph of Columbia Pictures, learns that Choreographer Jack Cole has pronounced a script for Ann Miller garbage. Cohn agrees, but demands, "What . . . does it matter to her? She's just a dumb broad with large thighs." Introduced to Kim Stanley, who was to be nominated for an Academy Award, Cohn asks her director, "Why are you bringing me this girlie? She's not even pretty."

The shrewdest analysts of the industry are directors without intellectual pretensions. Henry Hathaway (The Lives of a Bengal Lancer; True Grit) watches Darryl Zanuck turn misogynism into money: "In the early days we always had as a leading man . . . elegant, fashionable men who had good speaking voices. And Darryl said . . . 'Women love bums!' He took all the heavies; Bogey was a heavy; when he picked Clark Gable, Gable was playing a heavy . . . Richard Widmark . . . was the worst . . . heavy in the world . . . And it's still true. Look at the Burt Reynolds and the Clint Eastwoods and all of that crap coming up. They're all abusive to women." Howard Hawks (To Have and Have Not; Red River) on typecasting: Martha Vickers played a nymphomaniac in The Big Sleep, and the studio signed her to a long-term contract. "She started playing a nice girl, and they fired her after six months . . . I said . . . 'You were a little bitch. Why didn't you keep doing that?'"

Kobal includes some exuberant memoirs. Producer Arthur Freed reconstructs the difficult casting of Show Boat: "I love Dinah [Shore], and she finally said: 'Why don't you give me the part?' And I said: 'Because you're not a whore . . . Ava is.'" Joel McCrea explains his laconic independence: "I owned 1,000 acres, which I paid very little for, and which I sold for $5 million."

But essentially People Will Talk is a melancholy affair, filled with stories of early success and cumulative sorrows. Hardly a witness to the old days can speak without suppressing a sigh. Judy Garland's ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz have been auctioned off; stars dim as predictably as sunrise; archetype runs downhill to caricature: Clark Gable is copied by Burt Reynolds who fades into Tom Selleck. Louise Brooks, who seems to have spent her retirement reading, offers the sole consolation. "Proust wrote: 'The only paradise is paradise lost.' Isn't that beautiful?" she asks Kobal. Wisely, he keeps as silent as one of her old films. --By Stefan Kanfer