celebrity gossip, academic style

Note: this is the second in a series of posts dealing with Photoplay Magazine and its changes through the course of the 1950s. You can find the first in the series here).

Think, for a second, about the people that head up our current gossip industry. They might not all be movie star gorgeous, but they are at least somewhat attractive, and if not, they’re young, or gay, or funny. Joel McHale, Ryan Seacrest, Lainey Gossip, even someone like Mary Hart on Entertainment Tonight. You may hate Perez Hilton’s flamboyant persona and style, but it’s certainly young, unique, fully self-aware. People who are most often behind the camera or pen manage to manifest a youthful persona — see, for example, the seldom photographed but firmly developed personas of the Fug Girls Heather and Jessica.

Now I want you to take a look at these pictures of the women who ruled the gossip industry from the 1920s through the end of the 1950s.

That’s Louella Parsons, Hedda Hopper, and Elsa Maxwell — the mavens of Hollywood gossip, still attempting to rule the roost through the ’50s. Sheilah Graham, pictured below, is the youngest of the bunch; like Hedda Hopper, she was a failed actress.

There were also male gossip journalists — Walter Winchell foremost amongst them. But Winchell mostly gossiped about New York cafe society with a bit of Hollywood in for good taste; his work was rarely featured in the actual fan magazines. Mike Connolly was perhaps even more powerful than Winchell — as the gossip columnist for the Hollywood Reporter, his gossip was what others in the industry read and believed. He was ruthless and merciless, and was specialized in lording his knowledge of others’ homosexual preferences in order to protect his own closeted sexual identity. A 1954 Newsweek article on the gossip columnists (and rise of press agents) puts a fine point on his power:

“….as one big-time press agent said: ‘The most important plant in town? Mike Connolly. So many people are out of work today, the first obligation is to get a client work. I want the producer, the casting director to see my people’s names. Maybe only 50 men. Everyone in the industry reads Mike. But not everyone reads Hopper or Parsons. An actor — an idiot type — wants to see a lot of space always, but for me and my smarter clients, the trade sheets are the life blood of the business.”

He regularly wrote toothless pieces for Photoplay — usually about a page in length. Working for several publications was quite commonplace at the time — Parsons, Hopper, Maxwell, and Graham all wrote for multiple magazines in addition to daily or weekly columns syndicated nation-wide (and long-running radio shows, plus a smattering of television specials). I’d always heard that Parsons and Hopper were arch rivals — and they were, but only until the late ’40s. There’s been a lot of work on these early gossip mavens, including Samantha Barbas’ The First Lady of Hollywood and Neal Gabler’s fantastic and expansive Winchell. I’ve recently been able to read sections of Jennifer Frost’s forthcoming book, Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood: Celebrity Gossip and American Conservativism, forthcoming in 2011, which deals with the Hopper’s unexplored role in ushering in the age of American conservatism in the early ’60s. It’s nice to think of this old, proper women as keepers of classic Hollywood.

But just look at these women! They were invited to everything — all the big parties; they strolled around at the Hollywood hot-spots, dined and shopped and had tea with the stars. Through the medium of Photoplay and the newspaper columns, the columnists were the mouthpieces of the stars. But they were odd ducks: they didn’t in; some were failed actresses; jealousy and lack of self-confidence regularly manifested in the form of passive-aggressive quips in print.

But what I really want to point out is the fact that these women ARE ALL OLD BIDDIES. Especially by the time we get to the mid-’50s — these ladies used to be matronly, but now they’re downright elderly. They’re your Great Aunt with the costume jewelry telling your brother to shave his beard. And they were the face of traditional fan magazines — and gossip more generally — as Hollywood attempted to reconfigure itself during the 1950s.

They weren’t just old in appearance — they were straight-up old-fashioned. Sheilah Graham less so — perhaps because she herself had earned her initial fame by being the mistress of F. Scott Fitzgerald when he died, then penning a tell-all memoir. But the other three were moralizing, vindictive, and generally unforgiving. They played favorites — that’s nothing new — but they also used their posts to condemn those, like Ingrid Bergman, who would dare not to concede to their authority. From all that I can gather, when Bergman was pregnant with Rossellini’s baby and estranged from her husband, it wasn’t that she wanted to lie to her public — or the columnists — about her illegitimate child. She just didn’t want to talk at all — an early symptom of the stars ceasing willingness to abide by the rules of the old implicit contract between fans, magazines, and stars.

But Louella Parsons knew that one star refusing to play by the rules would open the floodgates, and she lashed out, attacking Bergman for weeks for her transgression. To my mind, it was a tacit acknowledgment of her forthcoming obsolescence: the peak manifestation of her power foretold her slow descent into irrelevancy.

Now, most of the most vicious rhetoric actually isn’t in the Photoplay pieces, but tucked into the end paragraphs of the daily newspapers columns. The Photoplay columns take a different tact, essentially explaining ‘bad’ or scandalous behavior through speculation and pop psychology. A smattering of examples:

On Judy Garland — who had endured a roller coaster of romance, scandal, weight-gain, exhaustion, drug-overdose, and attempted suicide — Parsons argues that Garland can only recover by ceasing to blame others, instead of overwork and MGM head Louis B. Mayer: ”Judy, herself, likes to believe that it is this early childhood effort and strain that hs caused her complete breakdown. But many disagree. Child actresses on the motion picture lots are sent to school and permitted by the courts to work only a certain amount of hours.” Further “one thing I shall never in the world believe is that Judy was driven into her condition by a hard-hearted stuido forcing her to work beyond her endurance….Always Mr. Mayer has loved Judy and advised her like a father…It was L.B. who sooted her to the point of her decision to go East for treatmet under the care of the doctors…Far from her being forced back to work against her will, she was acutally begging MGM to put her to work. ‘I’ve worked all my life,’ she pleaded with them, “Im restless being idle.’ And, believing her, they put her to work in Summer Stock.” (1950).

Two years later, Elsa Maxwell spends an entire article admonishing readers to “Stop Pitying Judy!” “It is past time we all stopped being sentimental about Judy Garland,” she explains, “we should stop being sentimental about Judy, and making excuses for her, encouraging her, in other words, to go on the way she is going…..Her emotionalism, no doubt about it, is both dramatic and touching. And audiences respond to it. But when it goes on and on and on, when unhappy time after unhappy time her secretary, manager, lawyer and physican excuse her as being overwrought or emotionally exhausted, it becomes evident she is ill and need s medical help.”

Maxwell concludes that “Something should be done about Judy — now! That she is permitted to go on appearing overweight, failing to make performances, tading on her emotionalism by sobbing through curtain speeches is unjust to her and it also is unjust to the tradition of the theatre.”

On the subject of the quick break-up of Nicky Hilton and Elizabeth Taylor, Maxwell explains —

“Elizabeth Taylor and Nicky Hilton came to their breaking point before their marriage really began; just as soon as eitehr of them was required to think first of the other. The failure of this marriage — if six months of life on luxurious ships and trains and hotels can be called a marriage — must be blamed, I think, not upon Liz and Nicky, but upon their parents who first spoiled them; then sanctioned their marraige after a courtship so short and public that they were little more than strangers…”

When Kirk Douglas insists that “Divorce is a Private Affair,” Parsons is completely befuddled —

“Never have I been more puzzled….Had Diana been a non-professional who stayed home and concentrated on him — forgotten her career — they might have been happy. But Kirk would not admit this. ‘Diana has talent. She should act if she wants to. She is one woman in a million; quite capable of bein a good wife and a good actress at the same time!’”

Parsons reassuring readers that even though Joan Fontaine is getting a second divorce, she’s still a ‘man’s woman’:

“A odd as it may sound, this ordinary gay, carefree girl, who is at the height of her career, has two qualities unusual in a career woman: she has a natural inferiority complex. And she has a natural, inborn dependence on the male sex which naturally makers her devastating to men! There is not the slightest doubt in my mind that Joan Fontaine will marry again, in spite of being a two-time loser in the matrimonial sweepstakes. She is fundamentally a man’s woman — and that she won’t even attempt to change”

And Hedda Hopper admonishes the stars for their generalized bad behavior — especially their negligence of their ‘duties’ —

“I am sick of the people who revel in the gifts of stardom but groan at the liabilities. They forget that they were deliberately created in and by the public mind; and therfore, to a great extent, they belong to the public. They want the fame that brings screen success; and at the same time, the anonymity of a John Doe when they choose to step out of line. This is impossible, and, having written about Hollywood for many years, I’ve sweated blood trying to explain it to stars. If all stars would take stock of thesmelves, they would see just how dependent they are on the their associates and the world for their success. They have no right to offend th epublic who decides whether or not they’ll swim or sink professionally. I for one feel the time has come for the people of Hollywood to draw the line. We must say to stars who won’t conform: Behave yourselves, or there will be no place for you in this town” (1953)

In my previous post, I concluded that part of what went ‘wrong’ in the 1950s — and precipitated the decline and eventual collapse of the traditional fan magazine — was a change in the terms of agreement between the fan, the star, and the gossip industry that served as the mediator between the two. Now, part of that change had to do with what the star was willing and/or able to give to the fan as the result of structural changes in the studio system. But this shift was put into greater relief by the presence of aging moralist columnists still present in the traditional forms — I mean, there’s nothing that’ll make you feel like a publication is old-fashioned like an elderly woman saying ‘kids these days…’ - exactly what these women were doing on a monthly basis.

They had a right to be nostalgic and embittered. The Hollywood they had constructed with their pens was crumbling; the rules they had helped to set were crumbling. But they stuck to them, and certainly continued to please a broad swath of readers who were still eager to believe that the spread of television, the moves to the suburbs, the baby-boom, The New Look, The Kinsey Report, the publication of Playboy, The ‘Miracle’ Case, and myriad additional cultural events had and would not change the moral contours of Hollywood.

But the Photoplay editors weren’t clueless. They knew they needed to cater to the burgeoning youth audience — not only by featuring young stars, such as June Allyson and Liz Taylor and other ‘young marrieds’ — but by offering younger, snappier voices. Sheilah Graham provided some of this flavor — indeed, during this period, her newspaper column surpassed Hopper’s and Parson’s in circulation numbers — but Photoplay also used small aesthetic and visual concessions, promising ‘What Everyone in Hollywood is Whispering About” and daring to even put the word “sex” on its cover (granted, it was to ask if Hollywood was too obsessed with sex — but the word appeared nonetheless).

In some ways, it’s like abstinence porn: decrying the morals, but still bringing up the act itself, keeping it on the minds of all involved. That’s the fine line that Photoplay attempted to ride, and by the end of the decade, the old guard of gossip was on its way out. They voiced the beliefs of many in America — those still firmly against low neck lines, integration, extra-marital fornication, even divorce in any case — but those who believed that way were no longer the ones buying movie tickets.

Ultimately, Photoplay had to make a decision: go with the moral (but silent) majority….or go with the transgressive, sexy, young, yet potentially alienating style adopted by the new set of scandal magazines and tabloids. They tried to both in the 1960s — and did neither well. In the 1950s, however, the persistence of the old biddies underlined Photoplay’s resilient ties to classic understandings of stars and star behavior….and how increasingly anachronistic that approach was becoming.