Sunrise and sunset on the boulevard
David Hughes
VANITY FAIR'S HOLLYWOOD edited by Graydon Carter and David Friend, with text by Christopher Hitchens Thames & Hudson, £40, pp. 318 The American magazine Vanity Fair has covered, with gaps, a good number of the last century's vanities. Founded in 1914, its coverage concentrated, if not on heaven, at least on a starry-eyed view of hell. At the height of fashion was sweet old Hollywood itself, but dryly edited from New York; bal- ancing both cultures made you (like Diane Keaton) a bicoastalite — a top compliment that applies to this ravishingly addictive book mostly of photographs, also of car- toons, and to a minor extent of text. West is east; the twain meet at last in pages as romantic as they are cynical.
One of the many spreads that hit the spot is a round-up of famous faces from the past snapped in the present. Shelley Win- ters is as bloated as Ginger Rogers is fat. Richard Widmark's thin baldness is the twin of Ernest Borgnine's grinning plump- ness. The glamour of senility for the likes of Robert Young is only just round the cor- ner, but even as you look your mind goes back to the triumphs of youth — the strong plot, the tight jawline, the swirl of a skirt on good legs. More than once in exploring the splendours of this work I spent half an hour (how much more riveting than prose) on the eloquence of a single photograph. One afternoon in the late Forties there's a gin-rummy party at Clifton Webb's with the Bogarts and the Oliviers lolling on the lawn. Youth and ego agonisingly suffuse it, plus as extras some sporty odalisques with dollops of lipstick. Then on another page a trio of elderly gents display with a wry grin what has befallen the small boys who all those years ago in postwar neo-realism hit us with 400 Coups, lifted us with The Red Balloon and rode us into Bicycle Thieves: after such success these lads have matured into a very definition of sad hopefuls and we long to ask them round to supper. Every photo has a measure of Proust writ- ten into it.
Most of the photographic honours are shared between two greats, Edward Steichen in the black-and-white Thirties, Annie Leibovitz in the fully monty of colour. But other genies rub their lenses, Irving Penn and Snowdon (hilarious snap of O'Toole and Harris) among them. As ever, Beaton preys on Garbo. Lots of mod- ern shots are set-ups — directors from Oliver Stone to Billy Wilder herded into a panoramic double-page spread, gangs of shady producers similarly anthologised. But if posed, the pictures are also poised. Vani- ty Fair has ensured that each is a finely rehearsed, acted and directed still of peo- pie nervous of, enraptured by, and cashing in on, their own image.
Christopher Hitchens writes the 100- word captions, his tone transatlantic, a sane English voice sounding madly American, knowing as well as knowledgeable. The blocks of well-arranged pictures are punc- tuated by a selection of 14 long pieces from Vanity Fair over the years in which writers as individual as P. G. Wodehouse, Dorothy Parker and D. H. Lawrence fight, often with success, to maintain their mannerisms against the magazine's house-style (`Sex appeal,' writes Lady Chatterley's creator in 1929, 'is only a dirty name for a bit of life flame.') But three mighty setpieces make for the most sophisticated pleasure in the book, on Hearst's rosebud Marion Davies, on the wittily bitter rivalry of Hedda Hop- per and Louella Parsons, the two queens of Hollywood gossip (tizarre dinosaurs', as Gavin Lambert called them), and finally on Liz and Dick (Mankiewicz described Cleopatra as 'the toughest three movies I ever made'). Words apart, it's the images that persist, some unforgettable. In great age Bob Hope sits in rumpled tails and top- per in his joke cellar where a million gags are laid down, as if sadly contemplating the wondrous time that never was', old Hollywood's tangle of myth, mystery, macho, mistresses, mummery and magnifi- cence, as a caption might put it.
Previous page
