Hollywood’s Worst Bugaboo
Recently, several members of a national organization convening in Los Angeles were visiting the Clark Gable set at MGM. Mindful of the assistant director’s cry of “Quiet, please!” they stood in silence, but their expressions, especially the women’s, revealed their excitement as they watched the acting of one of the most fabulous men in show history. When the scene ended, Clark was excused for a short rest. As he started off for his dressing room every eye was on him. Walking steadily, his face set straight ahead, he came abreast of the group. They felt that surely he would turn his head and smile. But there was no pause in his stride. Without so much as a glance to acknowledge the admiration falling all about him, he kept right on and went by. In the cold hush of disbelief that followed, those who were left behind gazed at each other at a loss for words. They thought they had been deliberately snubbed. But they were wrong.
Clark had simply been ducking the one bugaboo almost all the stars come to dread—facing up in real life to their public. The strain of acting in the spotlight is not half as bad for them as living in it. Gable doesn’t like it; Jennifer Jones and Rita Hayworth have been frightened by it; and performers like Janet Leigh, Peter Lawford and Howard Duff are never unaffected.
Go back to Greta Garbo. It wasn’t her picture roles as a goddess that made her choose to be a recluse; it was having people expect her to act like one in her private life. Essentially the story is the same all the way up to the newest starlet, like Marilyn Monroe, for instance. Marilyn’s beauty can fill the screen but not the painful pauses in her social conversations.
What is the nature of this bugaboo? Why does it affect ‘the stars so strongly? The answer, bluntly, is that there are few stars who can bring to their day-to-day life the poise and personality so cleverly written and devised for them by the men who make their films. They know it, and dread matching their actual selves against the popular impressions of them. You don’t have to be a psychologist, then, to understand how they feel about facing the man in the street. They have an inner fear that they are going to disappoint him, and rather than do that they are inclined not to meet him at all.
Can you blame a greying Clark Gable if he doesn’t relish having to live up to the label of booming masculinity slapped on him years ago? Or a balding Charles Boyer or Humphrey Bogart? But it isn’t just fear of appearance that breeds such reluctance. A general distaste of being on exhibition develops no matter how eager a star may be to get around at the beginning. There is nothing grey about Peter Lawford, but neither does he appear to be as gay as of yore when it comes to meeting his fellow men informally. Wherever Peter used to go you could always find him in the center of things, and identifiable by the loudest, most carefree laugh in the place. Not so now. Take that Hawaiian trip he made late this past summer. He didn’t go into hiding exactly, but in a way he darn near disguised himself, and certainly he kept in the background.
He stopped at the fashionable Royal Hawaiian but dressed like a beachcomber, and rarely shaved. You’d have had to take a long look to recognize him even if you’d known him for years. He liked to, hang around the beach at Waikiki but only around the edges of it. Most of the time he sat far back, against the wall of the Outrigger Club, and in the shadow of it. He seldom was alone with a girl. Most of the time he was with two other fellows, and if there was a girl there would also be another boy along.
What has changed Peter Lawford has also changed Jennifer Jones. Everyone in Hollywood remembers that when Jennifer got started in pictures she was middling shy but could warm quickly to affability. It takes her much longer to break down her shyness now in a casual meeting with anyone. In fact, when people happen to visit her set when she is resting between scenes, she becomes a sky starer. They look at her, and she can only stare at the sky. If she has to talk to someone, say in an interview, she reverses direction and often stares at the ground.
Jennifer also used to be noted as having a pretty good memory for names and faces. She still has a good memory or she would not be able to handle the sort of parts she gets. Yet any number of people who have worked with her find she fails to recognize them when they pass. This is by no means an unusual failing. Behind it is not snobbery, necessarily, just difficulty in reacting in an ordinary manner when your whole life has become extraordinary.
A photographer for a national magazine, who has known Jennifer since her first days as an actress, passed her one afternoon and smiled a greeting. There was no response. She acted as if she had forgotten him completely. Curious about this, he walked up to her later and greeted her again, this time by name. And he added, pointedly, “You remember me, don’t you?”
She gave him a quick look, and then acted greatly relieved.
“Why, Joe!” she cried, “of course I do.”
“Then what was the matter a little while ago?” he asked. “I smiled. You went right on.
Jennifer shook her head helplessly. “I don’t know,” she said. The truth may well be that she didn’t.
Many stars are painfully shy, and many times they acquire this shyness after success. If this seems odd, consider what happens to a girl whose first big role knocks over the box office. The producer, knowing that she has become a valuable asset, orders a complete evaluation of her, from personality to general education. What is her background? Does she impress people as a socialite or a shopgirl in casual contacts? Does she know how to talk, to walk, to dress?
The experts go to work and in essence they practically pick her apart. Despite the fact that she has made good in a picture she may have many deficiencies, and all of them are brought out into broad daylight. If her pride is shattered in the process it shouldn’t surprise anyone. Most people are better off not knowing how far they are from perfect, but the young starlet is told. Thereafter though her name may be in lights, her ego is liable to be in a mess.
Incidentally, producer David O. Selznick, the man Jennifer Jones married after divorcing the late Bob Walker, found it necessary to hire a special coach to teach Jennifer about clothes early in her career. This was Anita Colby’s job at the studio for some time, and Jennifer was never sent out on personal appearance tours unless Anita was along to keep an eye on her wardrobe. To many girls such personal supervision would be insulting, even psychologically harmful. How it affected Jennifer is not known, but it is doubtful that she was very happy about it.
There are other factors which wear away at the girl who is an Overnight success. Having enjoyed no particular social advantages, usually, she is suddenly pitched by stardom into the company of very clever people. If she can’t live up to them intellectually she may react by hating them—by disliking to place herself in a vulnerable position with any new people, for that matter. If, on the other hand, she chooses to play with them, she not only has to develop a taste for the cultural, but she has to work at it.
Rita Hayworth worked. About the time the whole world was wondering whether Hitler was a madman or a military genius, a friend of hers dropped in one day to find her reading a weighty book—Klausewitz on tactics of warfare.
“What are you doing with that thing?” the friend couldn’t help asking.
Rita let the book drop wearily. “What else can I do?” she asked. “The people I go out with now talk. They talk about everything. I want to talk, too, and before I can I have to get a little background.”
On the other hand, Betty Hutton and Jane Russell probably wouldn’t be caught dead with Klausewitz—and are just as happy. But that may not be too happy. Jane, for one, is wary of meeting strangers. She is tired of having them look as if they expected her to slouch about, talk slang, and attack the nearest man. Jane does know a lot of people outside the movie business, but most of them are her old high school friends. “I like the kids I’ve grown up with,” she says. “They know me and I don’t have to explain myself to them.”
Janet Leigh and Jane Powell are similar in many ways—young, exuberant, and given to quick smiles. But Janet has yet to learn how to live with stardom as smoothly as Janie. Part of Janie’s popularity, not only with her fans, but with her associates in and around her studio, is due to the fact that she seems to forget about her professional standing. You feel, in talking to her, that she actually enjoys being a young and beautiful woman more than being a young and beautiful star. As the former she is quickly and easily accepted, and everyone, including Janie, feels more comfortable at the absence of pretense. The other afternoon she was shopping in a cut-rate market which is rarely patronized by the well-to-do, let alone well-to-do stars. Coming around one of the food counters, she ran into a man she sees from time to time at the studio in the course of her work.
“Well!” he said, “this is a surprise. I thought you would do your buying at one of our fancier stores.” Janie had her opportunity to explain that she just happened to drop in and was not a regular patron. Probably nine out of 10 other stars would have done this. But she didn’t. She told the truth. “I know these places better,” she said. “I was raised on them.”
Janet has tried to take a common sense approach to her triumphant rise as an actress. But there is a certain amount of nervousness about her which she cannot hide. She tries to, under a flow of constant chatter, but this, in itself, is a sort of give-away. And at times, words have failed her altogether under the stress of personal appearances. One of the last of these occasions was a hospital benefit performance at a theater. Janet was introduced and stepped to the front of the stage to make a response. But she just couldn’t get started. After an embarrassing pause she uttered an apology and fell back. The audience took it good naturedly, but Janet still cannot understand what made her mind go blank. And she isn’t too happy about recalling such instances. The thought that it might happen again is very unnerving.
Even Gary Cooper, who has been a top movie name for 20 years, is hardly master of himself when he meets his public in person. When the going is particularly tough and he is struggling to express himself, he will reveal his mental agony just about the way he does it on the screen—shifting about, twisting his hat in his hands, and contorting his face until it resembles a crumpled paper cup. So perhaps a younger man like Howard Duff is not to be blamed if he, too, is far from poised on such occasions. Howard. doesn’t writhe physically when he is ill at ease. He is more apt to withdraw into long, awkward silences.
A man whose job it sometimes is to write feature stories about Howard has learned that one of the ways to shake him out of a brooding, monosyllabic mood, is to startle him with an unexpected and very personal question. “Is it true you were once jailed by police?” he will ask, for instance. As it happens, Howard was in the toils of the law once… but it was the result of a youthful escapade no one, not even the police, held against him. The point is that something about Howard’s success gets between him and the outside world and prevents a natural, easy contact. That “something,” as we have seen, is not easily licked.
Tyrone Power hasn’t got it licked. He used to avoid newspaper interviews for one thing. It’s still hard to pin him down for a press or magazine story. Diana Lynn is intellectually and artistically a superior person, yet, strangely enough, falls very quiet in a gathering, meekly so. And there have been parties from which she has run off to burst into tears over a fancied hurt. Is Victor Mature bothered by people? You wouldn’t think so; but everyone knows he used to get uncomfortable when he’d have to stop his car at a boulevard light and the occupants of the car next to him would gaze over and study him. Just to give himself something to do, Victor installed a phone in his car and when stalled in traffic would pick up the receiver and pretend to be engaged in a conversation. It was pretense because the phone was never actually hooked up.
You can keep adding Hollywood names to this list and find only a few who actually enjoy meeting their audience in person. Bob Hope, who is an exception, once expressed the reason for it in his own inimitable way. “Up there on the screen you’re a moving target,” he said. “But when you meet them in person and there is something about you that they don’t like—brother, you’re a sitting goose!”
THE END
—BY SUSAN TRENT
It is a quote. MODERN SCREEN MAGAZINE JANUARY 1952
