The Gospel According to Hollywood

by GORDON KAHN

1

SINCE war’s end, a drastic shakeout has taken effect in the manufacture of periodical literature. Even the comic books and other pulp harlequins which circulated at the rate of two per capita per day among the armed forces went back between the pages of schoolboys’ geographies. Yet the frothiest of all reading matter — the motion picture fan magazines — not only lived out the great newsstand epizootic of ‘45—’46 but fattened. They boast today a new high of 10 million circulation and 45 million readers.

An interpretation of how and why twenty journals devoted almost entirely to the dress, diet, and metabolism of film actors can engross two thirds of the literate adults of America is an undertaking too massive for this sketch. The fan magazine is a phenomenon worthy of the concern of any matched pair of sociologists. They should be lavishly heeled by a Foundation, and no deadline earlier than five years should be imposed for their findings.

In this paper I am equipped only to analyze — or, more accurately, to parse — the Hollywood Gospel according to Modern Screen, Photoplay, Silver Screen, and their seventeen-odd rivals.

In preparation for this essay I went to the largest newspaper stand in Hollywood, and you may be assured they are chrome and colossal. The owner relayed my order for one copy of every current fan magazine to his clerk, “Fan books - a set.”

Nineteen magazines were shucked out in the following order: Movie Show, Movie Fan, Movie Story, Movie Play, Movieland, Movie Life, Movie Stars Parade, and just plain Movies.

From the second shelf came Modern Screen, Motion Picture, Screen Album, Screen Guide, Screen Stars, Silver Screen, Screenland, Photoplay, Picture Wise, Star Land, and New Stars.

I declined copies of the French Cinémonde and the Spanish Cine Mundial. There were others in Hungarian, German, Portuguese, and Tagalog, and some grave, deckle-edged items which, I am sure, contained something about the art of the cinema, hut as little about Hollywood’s beddings and weddings as you would expect to find in Hound and Horn or the Menorah Journal.

“You don’t seem surprised,” I told the merchant as he handed me, unwrapped, the six and threequarter pounds of printed matter I had acquired at the cost of $3.85. “Do you have other customers who buy the whole smear?”

“Lots of them,” he said. “Every month. You’re the first man, though.”

There, in that remark, lay one clue to the essence of the fan magazine. I asked him again, “When men buy these magazines, which ones do they prefer?” He pointed to several. I asked, “Why? More pictures, eh? Cutouts and pin-ups?”

“Nothing like it,” he said. “It’s because they cost a quarter apiece. Most of the others are fifteen. Men like to buy things they can pay for with one coin.”

It was a shrewd observation. We agreed that buying three-for-fifty cigars was a neater transaction than getting one or two at eighteen cents apiece. We had both detected that women seem not to mind dealing in lesser fractions of the dollar.

All of this had little to do with the anatomy of the fan magazine, but the dealer’s final remark as I moved off brought me back to the subject of their design. He said, “Movie Story Year Book will be out tomorrow. Tell the lady.”

Before I had riffled through a fourth of my hoard I realized that this product was no more designed for men than was the sidesaddle. It was intimately for woman, as whisperingly and cozily intimate as the verbena-scented contents of her special drawer.

It is the basic assumption of the advertisers in the fan publications that all women want to look like adolescent boys. Women are encouraged in this, of course, by the stars’ dress designers, who give them shoulders like a water buffalo and hips like a whippet.

The business card of Supermind, an astrologer, offers, for a moderate charge, to disclose to a girl her destiny. She may thereafter avail herself of a six weeks’ course in stenography. But if she wants to marry the boss, she is advised to take up “Contour Control,” for, as an ad says, “Skirt lengths may go up or down, but legs are always noticed, especially by the male audience.”

There are pills and ointments that will open her pores or close them; healing creams in the handy purse-sizeflacon or the giant economy size, as well as a little machine for the removal of blackheads by vacuum. And a device called a “nose mask” promises her a profile like that of the girl on the dime. Let her but spread a trial-size tube of a certain blubber on her hands after a day at the rolling mill (and rub it in well) and her mere handshake will drive men mad — mad!

Until then, she is advised to purchase a “friendship ring, solid sterling silver, for he or she in fact both of you. The hands actually clasp and unclasp.”

Is she unhappy, or bored with her own fragrance? Then she may at will smell like a bower of nightblooming jasmine, a snow apple, or a Russian tannery. By this time she will be ready to exchange gifts with the lucky man. For this, there are two divine suggestions: a pocket adding machine or a necktie which lights up in a dark room and says, “Some Mama!”

Should a male reader be moved to address himself to the editor, he should do so respectfully. Otherwise he may fare like the gentleman on page 4 of Motion Picture who wrote complaining, “What has Peter Lawford got that I haven’t?” The editor dusted him off with two words: “A contract.” Under dryers in thousands of beauty shops the ladies chuckled over the way this upstart was given his dozens.

To males an actor is either worth watching or he is a ham. To the United States Labor Department he is a Social Security number who “plays an assigned part or role in a production; rehearses systematically learning lines and cues assigned; takes comic or serious parts; impersonates and portrays the character by speech and action.”

But how well or how badly he impersonates or portrays a character by speech and action seems to be none of the business of the fan magazines. In them, discussions of the merits of a film are carried on in exceedingly fine print among the deodorant ads. All pictures are either superduper-excellent, super-excellent, or merely excellent. It doesn’t matter. To adore Clark Gable is to see all his pictures — even Parnell, the very mention of which makes him blanch.

It isn’t how well the film hidalgos know their trade: it’s what they eat and how they eat it; are they married, to whom and why, and if not please stay that way —these are the things which the zealots want to read about. And for them the fan magazine writers come through handsomely. Fabre couldn’t do a better job on the stag beetle, nor Maeterlinck on the bee.

The photographers from front cover to insideback do no less. The cameraman always sees to it that the stars have their bifocals off and their teeth in before taking his “candid” shot.

The mode in cover portraiture is for the girls to be faced nor’ by nor’east; the lips dewy with glycerine and slightly parted or in a velvety pout and the eyes saying “Yes.” The boys are given the knotty pine and tweed pre-Man of Distinction treatment with a brand-new pipe held lightly between the thumb and forefinger. When pictures are taken in night clubs for a layout, the resort may usually be identified by the ash tray well in the foreground. That would indicate either that the Stork Club exclusively enjoys the patronage of screen players or that its crockery gets around.

2

THE movie fan magazine is the only modern publishing venture which does not appear to have been generated by private enterprise. The late Eugene V. Brewster may be credited with being its nominal founder, but the initiative as well as the prospectus for the kind of fan publications we have today came from the rugged nickelodeon enthusiasts of thirty-eight years ago.

Before 1909, Brewster was owner and editor of a five-cent fiction magazine. Reputed to have been a pretty slow man with a dollar in those days, he was continually feuding with the writers who offered him material. He wasn’t happy, either, over the prices artists were demanding for their illustrations.

If there was a way to secure both the stories and the illustrations without paying for them, I am told by those who remember old E.V., he would find it. He found his yarns already spun in the movie houses. He fictionized some of the twoand three-reel “features” he had seen, and had others whipped into narrative at cut rates.

He named his magazine Motion Picture Stories and in due time he discovered that he could illustrate it with still pictures of the various film dramas he had adapted. The photographs were obtainable at the film exchanges for pennies.

But Motion Picture Stories was not yet a fan magazine. It became one overnight, however, when the weight of letters from his readers forced him to print a Question and Answer column. The early queries were curt and the replies responsive and no more: —

Q. — Who is the slender child with the long curls in the story on page 19? A. — Mary Pickford.

Q. — Is her hair really blonde or is that a wig she’s wearing? A. — No, it, is said to be genuine.

Q. — Is Mary Pickford her real name? A. — Her real name is Gladys Mary Smith and she comes from Canada.

Q. — Does she think fried pig’s cheek is bad for the skin? If not, what does she eat? A. — She drinks a lot of milk and orange juice.

Q. — Does she mix them ? A. — No.

Q. — Where can I get white-kid-topped button shoes like hers, and if it ain’t asking too much could she send me a pair collect, size 71/2, triple E?

Letters which were not questions, but warm advice to the “picture people,” began to see print in Motion Picture Stories, thus making Brewster’s readers his first writers. They addressed their favorites on the technique of patting the chin with a butter paddle to keep the wrinkles away, and on the vital sciences of bread baking, cosmetology, warding off the evil eye, and sewing a fine seam.

The faithful told their favorites through Brewster’s Q. and A. column that they were distressed over the prevalence of “klieg eyes,” and suggested anointing the lids with mutton tallow and rose water. Somewhere in that early correspondence must lurk the suggestion for the sunglasses which are making this a nation of troglodytes.

Stray paragraphs that were used as fillers in Motion Picture Stories were the first publications of the actual names of the Biograph Girl, the Imp Girl, the Essanay Girl, and the patient band who, up to that time, were merely copyrights like the Scott’s Emulsion fisherman and the gentleman who slices Armour’s ham. Here too they learned that a Mr. Adolph Zukor had gone to Paris, France, to get a well-known actress named Millie Bernhardt to act in the pictures.

By 1910 the Question and Answer column in the back of the magazine shouldered itself forward. Readers began to complain that they weren’t interested in reading stories that hashed over what they had already seen on the screen. They wanted more about the actresses. Long before the studios realized the value of player publicity, the letter columns of Motion Picture Stories had more vital data on the cast than their own employers. Portraits with short biographies began to appear, and in 1911 Brewster lopped off the last word from the title of his publication and it became simply Motion Picture — the first actual fan magazine in this or any country.

Thereafter, he acquired several other magazines, a bank roll of $8,000,000, and a beautiful titian-haired protégée named Corliss Palmer. Against the advice of the motion picture producers he formed a film company with Miss Palmer as his star. He threw his entire publishing plant into her promotion. His magazines became personal albums of the young woman’s classic beauty and artistic endowments. He built acres of sets and uselessly shot away an appalling number of linear feet of film. The venture collapsed.

Eugene V. Brewster had learned nothing from the people to whom he taught the art of public relations for profit. He died broke.

Two other figures, James R. Quirk and William Fawcett, both now dead, entered fan journalism in Motion Picture’s heyday. Quirk began in Chicago by converting a listless theater program into a chirrupy chronicle of how Hollywood romped and played. He served the industry as an amateur scout of talent, and many players who later became successful had their pictures in Quirk’s Photoplay long before they were ever admitted to a studio. Today, of course, the film companies employ whippers-in, but the fan magazines never, never print a picture or relate an item of intelligence about an aspirant. She must first have a contract with a picture company.

William Fawcett may be better remembered as the originator of a bizarre chapbook called Capt. Billy’s Whizz Bang and its dirty little brother, the Smokehouse Monthly. He returned from the wars in 1918 with a musette bag crammed with copies of La Vie Parisienne. He reproduced the French drawings, added sly little captions, slapped a cover on it, and called it So This Is Paris! At Legion conventions it went like hot cakes. Later he spiced it up by alternating the seductive Madelons with some home-grown leg art and renamed the product So This Is Paris — and Hollywood! After a while the kikis with the hatboxes dropped out entirely and the next title became So This Is Hollywood! In those days Hollywood provided the hot copy as well as the pictures, and the Fawcett magazine was retitled Hollywood Secrets, then Screen Secrets. His heirs now operate three fan magazines, but somewhere along the line they dropped Screen Secrets.

3

THE interview is the most popular writing form used in Hollywood journalism. Different magazines have their own rules about this, and so have the studios and the stars themselves. Some players are interviewed in absentia, with the secretary or maid showing the journalist around and answering the questions.

The stars now find that it is safe to talk, because nothing ever gets into the fan magazines that would hold him or her up to an iota of opprobrium. The Hays (now Johnston) Office sees to that in the first instance. This is the bureau which accredits most of the writers for newspapers and news services to the studios, and the applicants for special cards are carefully screened.

No scandalmongers get by, and not since 1937 has there been cause for complaint against the fan writers. In that year, an actress, famous on two continents, hit the cover of one of the three biggest magazines with a rather down-to-earth demand: “I want a man!” and the interview itself was as frank and earthy as the headline on the cover. The interviewer was a lady and a veteran of these encounters. But this time she had slipped magnificently. Things tightened up, but not soon enough to keep the edition from being sold out. It is still a treasured item of Hollywood curiosa. The relations between the studios and the magazines, which that item froze hard, are just now thawing out.

Before an interview can get into print, rigid channels must be gone through. First the assigned interviewer submits to the head of the studio publicity department an outline of the proposed interview. It must have a title. Suppose it is “Let’s Face It — I’ve Been a Bad Boy.”

There has been a stench about this mummer for some time, so the studio approves and an appointment is made. A publicity man sits down with the interviewer and the interviewee and may stop the line of questioning at any point, even call the whole thing off if he chooses.

The writers may manage to get the actor alone and hear, “So I’m bad. So what? I paid off every time, didn’t I! I made my pile out of this racket and it’s a nice way to spend some of it. But you just go ahead and write what you like. Anyhow, if I’don’t make another picture this year, who cares except the tax collector?”

The interviewer is often tempted to give a lout like this his due, and he may, in secret, for private circulation, write an honest interview. But the carbon copy that goes to the studio before publication will not get the purity seal unless Charm Boy gets a good report.

Since many high-caliber actors are not under contract to studios, the free-lance players are assured the same degree of protection. All topflight people have their publicity counsel who impose conditions on the magazines no easier than those which the studios demand.

Both in text and in typography the articles must be easy on the eye and mind. No solid blocks of type except where an article jumps to divide columns of advertising. Some interviews take the simplest form: Cornel Wilde Answers 24 Intimate Questions about Himself in a recent one. Scores of stars have been similarly catechized and the rest are waiting their turn. They all answer the inevitable “How did you get your start in pictures?” by telling of (1) their early struggles against seemingly insurmountable odds; (2) the kindness of friends made during the lean days; (3) the chin-up confidence that the young and beautiful brides had in them at all times.

And so it drones on, without a single whisper of gossip or backbiting creeping anywhere into the saga. True, some fan magazines have “gossip departments,” but there is nothing in them that the studio publicity departments had not earlier sent out to the columnists on the daily papers.

After years in which the studios grayed down the glamour, the type of interview which gasps and gushes is coming back. It runs on this model:

Entering the mullioned hall which Billy Haines had done for her in vermilion and elephant-sweat (see photo on p. 16), footfalls move unheard in the thick pile of her yak-hair drugget. She was humming a gique (Cimarosa, Opus 11, No. 4) as she worked at her embroidery frame in the soft, crepuscular . . .

Quite often this gets away from the writer.

If the subject is male and single, he’s treated with muscular prose like this; —

“. . . two dogs, a Basenji and a Norwegian elkhound, rose as he did.

“Down, Ch. Osmiridium v. Ganzleber - and you too, Sam, down . . .”

Don’t you just know — and trust — aye, love the man who loves dogs and whom dogs love!

“I’m going away,”he said, turning to his gun cabinet. (See photo on p. 12.) “ I’m going away . . . Mount Kangchenjunga . . . in the Himalayas. . . . Roof of the World, you know . . . safari . . . beaters ... no living man has climbed to the summit. . . . Lions . . . simba . . . forgive me for using Swahili. . .”

The truth is that his option is coming up and the studio is plucking him off the payroll like a ripe mango. He’s going nowhere except around the corner to raise hell with his agent. Swahili! One of the reasons he’s being chopped is that he can’t ask his way to the Melrose Avenue bus without sign language.

4

THE publishers of fan magazines are as fickle in respect to changes in staff and policy as the operators of daily newspaper chains. But they are consistent in the one vital matter: the magazines must continue to be written for women. One magazine, however, cannot hew to a style and a content that will appeal to women of all ages and estates. Hence, there are several publications which snuggle up to the hearthside and will have no traffic in its pages with the more spirited members of the film colony. If these roisterers will settle down long enough to be interviewed with their mothers, they’ll get space.

Married film couples are the particular pets of one journal of this type. It conducts a department called And So They Are Married. The editor explains that this section of his book is “designed to give you an intimate word picture of Mr. and Mrs. Hollywood — how they live, what they do and even what they think about in private.”

It’s all very cozy, except for the constant threat that by the time an And So They Are Married piece about a particular couple hits the stands the pair will be in the lists against each other and giving interviews that start, ”It was all a mistake.”

A magazine not aimed at the Parent-Teacher Association readership at all specializes in photographs of young lovers at work. The majority of these are stills from pictures in which the couples appeared together. One recent issue had eighteen couples kissing, seriatim. The bussings compassed all fashions, ranging from the cheekpeck around the corner of the barn to the kind that sears the lips and sometimes cripples.

In one month, fourteen out of twenty-two fan publications had photographs of Lana Turner and Bob Hutton walking arm in arm, seated hand in hand, dancing cheek to cheek, with the captions stating that for certain these twain would soon be one. That was in October. In December there were pictures of Robert and his bride emplaning on their honeymoon. She was somebody else — not Lana.

There’s something for the chicks as well as the biddies in most of the fan monthlies. Among the “services” offered by one magazine to girls in their teens, and darned tired of it, is this bonanza, for just the postage: A kit containing charts, pamphlets, and brochures on the following: How to Be Popular with Boys, What About Necking? Please Behave! Desserts Frankie Sinatra Loves, How to Join a Fan Club, How to Throw a Party, and How to Be Date Bait.

A special section in another journal launches an album of dream boats. A dream boat, for the unhep, is modified jive for dream man, or the Chaucerian leman.

Whether it is regarded as a wholesome thing or otherwise, the institution of the fan magazine, from whatever angle observed, is the magic mirror of reader identification with the Hollywood aristocracy of talent, beauty, money, and the formal appurtenances of the so-called happy life. Regard these titles from one month’s crop of movie magazines: You Too Can Be Like Joan Crawford, How to Get Your Man with a Movie Personality, If You Had a Date with Robert Stack, Let’s Pretend You’re Mrs. Robert Taylor.

A woman reads about a starlet in August who tells how she outwits too ardent males. In November she writes to Paul Henreid, who is acting for that month as a male duenna in one of the journals. “Dear Mr. Henreid, I am 19 years old and like most girls I have a problem in the love department. Where I work the boys act awful wolfish. . . .”

She may be nearer 39 than 19, but the poor crone did get her pathetic little fable across, and that nice Mr. Henreid looked at her from the page as though he were actually listening. Oh, this is so much nicer than trying to match the stories of the other girls during the fifteen-minute break in the powder room.

The Lady under the hair dryer tries to be strong and weeps silently as she reads that her dream boat has married. He had no right to do this! She had known him first - two years ago at the Roxy. She had loved him at the Strand, the Capitol, and that one divine night at Radio City Music Hall . . . and those picnics at the neighborhood theater.

She can’t forget him. Follows him silently to their first trysting place in the last four rows at the Roxy. Then one day his picture is on the cover with that of his wife. They are looking away from each other. He is pouting. So is she. Good! A title blazes between them: Do They Still Love Each Other? Page 16.

Quickly to page 16. “Deep in his heart — but deep — did he mean it that glorious day in Las Vegas when he said, ‘Till death do us part’?”