Hollywood Glamour Meets the Domestic
The late ’40s-1950s were marked by a general interrogation of “glamour” — a word formerly best understood in relation to the stars like Dietrich, Garbo, Gloria Swanson, and MGM. But the arrival of television, coupled with looser restrictions on how a star could appear in public, decoupled the word from its previous connotations of class and extravagance. As Mary Desjardins has argued, the postwar era marked a sea change in the way that glamour was interpreted and ascribed, largely incited by the dissolution of the studio system.
According to Desjardins, “glamour discourse” long functioned as the structuring relational force between stars and fans.[i] Suggesting that a star “has a surplus of one or more of the following: sexual allure, beauty, taste in fashion, cultural pretensions, disposable income to be spent on exciting leisure activities or expensive goods,” glamour discourse solidifies the power dynamics between the star, who has glamour, and the fan, who aspires to it. In the 1950s, that tension was troubled, and Photoplay and other publications sought to reestablish, or at the very least, relocate it, in the hopes of re-codifying the fan-star relationship. The more secure that relationship, the easier the gossip and film industry could play to and profit from it.
Early Hollywood employed glamour discourse to distance the movie colony from the “hedonistic and perhaps immoral” images of the 19th century stage, effectively adding glitz to the everyday. As Desjardins concludes, “what emerged during this period was a discourse which glamorized the seemingly wholesome lifestyle and comings and goings of stars, with an emphasis on their leisure and consumption habits.”[iii]
But the studios could not infuse the quotidian activities of the stars with glamour on their own. Thus they relied on the discursive labor of gossip columnists and fan magazines, who, in order to maintain daily or weekly interest, had to provide a steady stream of compelling fodder. Thus the “comings and goings of stars” – where they luncheoned, where they went dancing – became the bread and butter of the gossip industry.
By focusing on what the stars wore, ate, and bought, Photoplay and other fan magazines helped make the stars into idols of consumption. Leo Lowenthal situates the emergence of the idol of consumption around the 1920s – exactly when the star system began to take form. As opposed to the idol of production, who gains renown for labor, philanthropy, inventing, etc., the fame of the idol of consumption is rooted in his ability to demonstrate leisure: he plays sports, makes love, eats food. The star is then individuated by his/her patterns of consumption and turned into a superlative: the most beautiful, the most extravagant, the biggest clotheshorse. In this way, consumption becomes the scaffolding upon which all other star attributes are draped – the very foundation of the star image. While a fan could not reach the “superlative” consumption enacted by the star, she could model such patterns on a reduced level.
During this classic era, glamour was constructed via extravagance, especially in the realm of consumption. Yet as the studios and their image-making machines began to unravel in the late 1940s, discourses of glamour were forced to shift as well. This shift was again part of larger cultural forces: as millions moved from urban spaces to the suburbs, the push for consumption was increasingly wedded to the home. Instead of buying expensive gowns, they spent money on washing machines, dishwashers, and vacuums. Efficiency and durability took precedence over glitz and opulence; cheap, washable fabrics, such as nylon and rayon, were highly desirable.
At the same time, Dior’s “New Look,” introduced in 1947, complicated this shift. Characterized by an extravagant use of fabric and feminine silhouettes, The New Look functioned as a clear refutation of the straight, no-nonsense, masculine lines of war-time design. Postwar women’s fashion, with its particular mix of extravagance and sensibility, expressed the contradictory impulses of the era.
The gossip industry reflected such contradictions, mobilizing glamour in a way that would account for the new cadre of television personalities and the increased appearance of Hollywood stars on the new medium. The fledgling television press helped figured glamour as an innate, refineable quality, by no means exclusive to the stars, and, in some cases, wholly disassociated with consumption. A 1953 TV Guide article, for example, labors to reconciling television and glamour, admitting “television may now lack the glamour, ‘oomph’ or ‘it’ of Hollywood’s super productions, but TV will surely acquire it within the next few years and then go on to out-dazzle theater screens.”[iv]
The article further transfers the meaning of glamour from a general connotation of wealth and class to more general attributes of composure and charm: “glamour is the physical and mental attraction an artist transmits to the audience. It is what the viewer sees and feels. It is a projection of what the audience desires.”[v] Put differently, glamour is authenticated via reception; it cannot be produced. Therefore, glamour is an “an inborn quality” that merely awaits discovery and refinement, impossible to fake using “lighting, wardrobe, makeup, hairdo and direction.”
Aesthetically, the renegotiated conception of glamour was reproduced in “the natural look,” described by Photoplay as “a quiet revolution that’s been going on in Hollywood since the war” that emphasizes “the happy combination of all the best things you are.”[vi] Janet Leigh refused to cover her freckles, and Betsy Drake’s “eyebrows are still there - every last one of them. Her mouth is still shaped the way it is when she came.”[vii] In contrast to the heavily painted and distorted beauty standards of the ‘30s and ‘40s, the natural look required little embellishment; make-up artists only used their tool to “intensify a girls’ natural endowments, not to remake hers.” While the look was espoused by the stars, it was ready-made for emulation by readers. “Always be yourself,” the author advises, “Prettier, if possible, with subtle under-scoring, but yourself, first, last and always….Off with your affections and on with individuality!”[viii] The “natural look,” coupled with general clothing trends, helped transform film and television stars into someone who literally resembled the housewife — and would be much easier to “invite” into the privacy of the living room in the form of a television set.
Photoplay seldom mentioned the appearance of Hollywood stars on the new medium — in part because, at least until 1953, they appeared quite seldom — but also because television personalities were the provenance of its sister publication, TV Radio Mirror, regularly touted in the margins of Photoplay’s pages. This would begin to change in the mid- and late-’50s, especially as television personalities’ romances with film stars, such as that between Eddie Fischer and Debbie Reynolds, demanded coverage. But Photoplay was also attempting to reify its image as the keeper of the film stars, along with their attendant glamour. Letters to the editor point to this desire — in 1952, a reader pleaded for “just a little less of the hum-drum family life of the stars plastered over your magazine?…After all, movies still mean glamour and romance to young and old…”[ix] Another reader begged “Please, let’s have more Lana Turner, Liz Taylor, Ava Gardner and Rita Hayworth. These gals have real glamour and they do something exciting once in a while. Anybody can sit home at night and rock a baby, as you read about some stars doing.”[x]
A new gossip columnist seemed to embody both the glamourous and the domestic, the modern and the moralizing, and in short order, she would overtake even Parsons and Hopper in popularity and national exposure. Sheilah Graham was British; she was beautiful; she had been engaged to a Marquess. Most importantly, she was the former (and final) lover of F. Scott Fitzgerald, an experience should would later detail in her best-selling memoir, Beloved Infidel: The Education of a Woman, in 1958.
Even though Fitzgerald had essentially flunked out of Hollywood, his name — and Graham’s association with it — connoted the glamour and sophistication of the 1920s. A resurgence in interest in Fitzgerald in the late ’40s only heightened interest in Graham, and the fact that Graham had been his lover, as opposed to his wife, added a titillating aura to her image. But Graham was also a doting and diligent mother, and regularly used her column to chide negligent parents and errant stars. Her image thus managed to encapsulate the domestic and the glamourous, the scandalous and the moralizing — contradictions that formed the crux of dominant ‘50s ideologies.
Graham got her start writing for the New York tabloids in the early ‘30s, cultivating what she would refer to as a “salable mediocrity.” In 1935, she moved to Hollywood to pen the syndicated entertainment column for the North American Newspaper Alliance in 1935; in short order, she divorced her husband and became engaged to the Marquess to Donegall. She first met Fitzgerald at her engagement party, and, according to Graham, it was love at first sight; she quickly broke off her engagement to the Marquess and moved in with Fitzgerald. Graham was the model for the heroine in Fitzgerald’s final unfinished book, The Last Tycoon, and his constant companion until December 1940, when he “died in her arms.” Already, a thread of glamour and melodrama seemed to embroider the columnist’s life.
Graham served as a war correspondent during World War II, married for a second time in 1941, and gave birth to two children. When she returned to Hollywood, her readership continued to grow; by the mid-‘50s, Graham’s syndicated column reached 20 million readers. Following the business model of her peers, she broadened her vision beyond her newspaper column. By the peak of her popularity and influence in the mid-‘50s, Graham had a regular column for Photoplay, wrote twice-monthly for TV Guide, and penned chance articles in other fan magazines such as Silver Screen. She also started editing her own one-off “specials” — Sheilah Graham’s Hollywood Yearbook, Sheilah Graham’s Hollywood Romances — for Dell Publishing, using her brand to encourage fan magazine readers to purchase material that had clearly simply been repackaged in “special” form. Starting in 1949, she appeared regularly on television and radio; in 1955, Graham was paid $2000 a week for her television services — as much or more than actual film and television stars during the period.
Graham was both more beautiful and less dowdy than her old school compatriots, but she was still a Hollywood columnist in the traditional style, cultivating relationships with stars and regularly moralizing on the pages of the fan magazine. Despite the longevity of her appeal — her column ran until 1971 — she is less remembered than Hopper or Parsons, in part because she lacked a feuding partner. Nevertheless, Graham’s popularity was an expression of the character of the gossip industry in the mid-‘50s: following what she termed “the bloodless revolution” of television, she recognized that she would need to alter both her content and where she published if she wished to remain truly relevant in the field. In this way, writing for TV Guide and appearing on her own show were not simply a way of exploiting her brand cross-media, but recognizing that the landscape of stardom and gossip had and would continue to change.
In addition to providing Graham with a monthly column, Photoplay endeavored to reconcile the glamourous and the domestic through use of a sort of “domestic expose,” using stars’ home lives to craft narratives inflected with romance, intrigue, domesticity and glamour — all at once! Domestic tell-alls were not a new creation: stars during the classic era had long proffered intimate details of their home lives as a means of complimenting their glamorous appearances on-screen. But the domestic tell-all of the post-war era was another animal altogether, grappling with salient issues of the time, including women’s labor, beauty norms, gender performance, and sexuality. These tell-alls sometimes took the form an interview with an established gossip columnists; particularly compliment (or contracted) stars “wrote” their own confessional articles. Janet Leigh’s byline graced over a dozen tell-alls of her domestic bliss with Tony Curtis; Esther Williams, who birthed three children over the span of as many years, also regularly offered details of her private life.
“THAT’S SEX, GIRLS”
Of course, the domestic idyll was necessarily compromised by the fact that the female stars — and apparent domestic goddesses — were also working mothers. Elsa Maxwell tackles this contradiction in her 1950 editorial, “Babies - Hollywood’s Most Expensive Luxury,” outlining the ways in which babies prove a duel-edged sword, leading female stars to loose their career momentum. When stars turn into mothers, they also turn into bad stars — or bad mothers or wives: Sheilah Graham declared herself “haunted by the haunted eyes of some of our movie stars’ kids,” who have been neglected and abandoned by their movie star parents.[xix] Louella Parsons goes so far as to blame the acting ambitions of Kirk Douglas’ wife, Diana, for the break-up of their marriage, while Maxwell praises Rita Hayworth for her willingness to sacrifice career ambitions in favor of her marriage to Aly Kahn.[xx]
The tension around Hollywood mothers bespoke greater anxiety around expected female performance in the public and private spheres. As has been convincingly argued elsewhere, gossip about public figures provides a means of talking through — and socially policing — our own behavior and the behavior of those who occupy our social circles. Myriad articles dealt with proper female behavior during the early ‘50s, the most explicit offering advice from male stars to hopeful young women as to how to ‘nab a man.’ The contradictory recipe called for women to be at once intelligent yet demure, independent yet in need of companionship, beautiful yet without any signs of labor.
For example, Farley Granger admits “Yes, we men actually crave intelligent women. But we abhor the girls who are prone to flaunt their intelligence. ”[xxi] Glenn Ford prescribes similar behavior for the perfect “man’s woman,” explaining that “most men -in spite of a corny theory to the contrary - admire intelligence in a woman, if they are not made to feel they should bow to her intellect!”[xxii] In “That’s Sex, Girls,” Howard Duff prescribes effacing the signs of feminine labor: “I know that my ideal girls…do go to beauty parlors every few days, but they don’t make me aware of it. It’s like eating a perfect dinner. The enjoyment is spoiled if you’re made conscious of all the work that went into it.” Thus “when you give the guy the impression that you always look naturally perfect, that’s sex, girls.”[xxiii] Duff’s perfect girl is one who, “…when she opens the door at night, will say ‘Darling, you’re home!’ and I’ll know that that’s the moment she’s been waiting for all day. That’s the girl I’ll marry, if she’ll have me.”
The rhetoric that imbued Photoplay during this period echoed familiar cultural themes and anxiety now associated with the 1950s: the lingering threat of women who had tasted independence and income in the 1940s, the reactionary idealization of the domestic, hyper-feminine mother. Such ideology was both ratified and contradicted through stories of the stars’ own domestic experiences. Most profiles neatly substantiated this new ideal: Janet Leigh, for example, advised readers to “Spoil the Brute!” in the same way she spoiled husband Tony Curtis, professing her belief that men should not be encouraged to take part in housework; Curtis, in turn, called for readers to “Be a Doll for a Guy.”[xxiv]
But Photoplay also had to negotiate domestic discord: most commonly divorce, but increasingly affairs, illicit children, men who refused to settle down, and violence. In these cases, the actions of the stars contradicted the image of domestic harmony asserted by the fan magazines. This had happened before — in the late teens and early ‘20s, the actions of the stars, both on and off-screen, could not be bended to accord with the image of a morally upright Hollywood. Under threat of censorship and government regulation, the studios cleaned up their acts and tamped down on the stars — a process Photoplay and the other magazines were only too happy to assist.
In the 1950s, however, the studios lacked the power to regulate the stars the way they had in the 1920s. The Hays Office that “cleaned up” 1920s Hollywood was a joke, its production code was in tatters. Photoplay and its brethren were amongst the few still dedicated to preserving the image of Hollywood stars as models of morality. During this period, a handful of stars emerged who challenged the gossip industry’s traditional modus operandi for producing and mediating images. The way they posed for pictures, the words that came out of their mouths, the clothes they wore, the things they did in their free time, the people they dated — none of it could be readily slotted into templates for profiles, interviews, and family-friendly features.
Writers and editors were thus forced to conjure new ways of explaining behavior — usually accomplished through liberal use of neo-Freudian psychology that had become particularly salient in the 1950s. It wasn’t that classic stars had been free of relationship problems; these new stars and their behavior, however, simply did not fit. How can you talk about the love life of Marilyn Monroe with the same set of words you use to describe that of Greer Garson or Esther Williams? How does one describe Marlon Brando’s courting activities with a vocabulary appropriate for Rock Hudson? But the industry did not conjure up a new language, at least not until the scandal magazines decided that the only way you could talk about such stars was in terms of sex, which is to say in terms of scandal, and rode the resultant sea change as far as it would carry them.
[i] Mary Desjardins, “‘Marion Never Looked Lovelier’: Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood and the Negotiation of Glamour in Post-war Hollywood” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 16.3-4 (1999): 424.
[ii] Mary Desjardins, Recycled Stars, Unpublished Manuscript, Chapter 1, p. 32.
[iii] Ibid.
[iv] Anonymous, “TV May Soon Outdazzle Hollywood,” TV Guide 1.2 (1953), 11.
[v] Ibid.
[vi] (Anita Colby, “Unmask!” PP Sept 1949, p. 59).
[vii] Ibid.
[viii] Ibid.
[ix] (Readers Inc., PP Sept 1952, 4).
[x] (Georgia Clark, Clearwater, FL) (“Readers Inc.” PP July 1952, 4)
[xi] A film version of Beloved Infidel was released in 1959 starring Gregory Peck and Deborah Kerr.
[xii] http://www.nytimes.com/1988/11/19/obituaries/sheilah-graham-is-dead-at-84-wrote-hollywood-gossip-column.html?pagewanted=2
[xiii] ibid.
[xiv] Kashner 295 — The Bad and the Beautiful
[xv] IBID.
[xvi] Kasher 295 — The Bad and the Beautiful
[xvii] (EXAMPLES OF TITLES HERE).
[xviii] ((Elsa Maxwell, “Babies — Hollywood’s Most Expensive Luxury,” PP April 1950, 32)
[xix] (Sheilah Graham, “Do Stars Make Good Parents?” Photoplay May 1953, 36)
[xx] ((Louella O. Parsons, “Divorce is a Private Affair,” PP April 1950, p.36). Elsa Maxwell, “Love Affair,” PP Feb 1948, p. 35).
[xxi] (Farley Granger, “Girls Ruin Romance,” PP June 1952, p. 41).
[xxii] (Glenn Ford, “They Are Men’s Women,” PP April 1952, p. 98)
[xxiii] (Howard Duff, “That’s Sex, Girls,” PP April 1950, p. 50).
[xxiv] (Janet Leigh, “Spoil the Brute!” PP Feb 1954, p. 50; Photoplay, July 1955)
