Conclusion the Stars

Conclusion The Stars I n 1 9 5 7 the Chicago Sunday Tribune Magazine featured an academic study by Thomas Harris about Marilyn Monroe and Grace Kelly as glamorous blondes who represented contrasting social types constructed by the studio system. Anthologized decades later, the essay examines how film studios formulated biographical data to typecast stars in press releases replicated by the mass media. A gigantic communications system existed for this purpose. Studios systematically exploited fan magazines, periodicals, and newspapers to package and market stars as appealing social types. As the subject of a full-length feature in Collier’s, for example, Marilyn Monroe was portrayed as an orphan who survived an unstable family life and teenage marriage to become America’s sex symbol. Allied with studio publicity departments were, of course, the leading fan magazines like Photoplay and Motion Picture. As Paramount publicist Teet Carle claims, “the fan magazines were the greatest star builders that ever existed for motion pictures.” Scrutinizing this network informs us about the social codes constructing feminine identity and behavior in a standardized consumer culture. Appearances were essential and masked an underlying reality that was repressed and not yet acceptable for public consumption. Esther Williams, for example, was a natural swimming champion who came from a humble home and became the sociable girl next door signifying California leisure. She popularized healthy suburban lifestyles. As she observed, “I’m con- vinced from my travels . that everybody wants a swimming pool.” Who really knew about her alcoholic husband and floundering marriage? She herself later wrote, “The fan magazines portrayed your love relationship as a dream state—what could go wrong between two people if at least one of them was a movie star?”1 A great deal of nostalgia about the 1950s as a television sitcom scenario plays up its innocence, but underlying the froth was a stifling Cold War conformity. Bestsellers like Sloane Wilson’s 130 Stars, Fans, and Consumption in the 1950s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955) and William Whyte’s Organization Man (1956) deplored a widespread lockstep materialistic mentality.2 At the time, maintaining appearances was de rigueur because it served to strengthen the forces of social conformity and convention. As “untold stories” about the stars, therefore, news clips, biographies, and autobiog- raphies expose stardom as an artificial studio construct.3 What emerges from these sources is a measure of the extent to which fan magazines—at least until the Debbie–Eddie–Liz scandal in 1958—fabricated Cinderella stories to cover up troubling personal and social issues. Publicity reports circulated some accurate biographical data, to be sure, but they also concealed the star-making machinery so that readers could daydream about their favorites until scandalmongering became a more compelling form of voyeurism. Untold stories about the stars raise issues of credibility even for biographies based on interviews and documentation and for practiced authors writing about several icons. Donald Spoto, for example, sanitizes a short biography of Grace Kelly, whom he interviewed and still reveres, but reveals Audrey Hepburn’s extramarital affairs and accuses Marilyn Monroe’s psy- chiatrist of plotting her death.4 Another biographer, James Spada, who was not guarding his relations with the Grimaldis in Monte Carlo, interviewed Don Richardson (born Melvin Schwartz), an early lover whom Kelly intro- duced to her parents during a disastrous visit. As Richardson recalls, the aspiring actress projected a ladylike image but was promiscuous. During their trysts, “she would jump out of bed on Sunday morning, wearing nothing but the crucifix, go to church, come back in an hour, and jump into bed.”5 Although biographies are bound to differ in detail, dramatic incidents such as Natalie Wood’s drowning have been subject to wildly divergent interpretations that subvert the genre. Susan Finstad practically accuses Robert Wagner of standing idly by after the star fell overboard, while Gavin Lampert stresses unreliable recall due to excessive drinking. A recent investigation by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department was inconclusive but fueled suspicion about Wagner.6 As a genre, the autobi- ographies and biographies of stars have tenuous claims to the nonfiction shelf and can be depressing to read. But as Sarah Churchwell argues in her study of the vast literature on Monroe, “radical disbelief is surely as foolish as absolute credulity.”7 Such accounts may indeed be useful when compared with more problematic fan magazine publicity as Cinderella stories. Discrepancies between a star’s private and public life in an era of suburban togetherness were concealed as opposed to the exposés headlined today. Stardom, in other words, was an unstable process of constructing a feminine identity for women who paid lip service to domestic ideology in the postwar years but had glamorous careers undermining traditional sex roles. Conclusion 131 Since the close readings of Photoplay stories discussed thus far focus on ten box-office stars, this conclusion about their publicity in relation to par- allel discourse in other sources reads like a collective biography. Stardom was indeed a product of intertexuality. As social types, the stars were constructed by studios that standardized feminine identity for mass consumption in postwar America. Consequently, marquee names signifying class, ethnic, or regional origins were unacceptable, especially at a time when mortgagors and zoning boards ensured that white suburban communities would remain homogeneous. An important part of stardom as identity for- mation thus began with name changes: Edythe Marrenner became Susan Hayward, Doris Kappelhoff changed her surname to Day (and had many nicknames like Clara Bixby), Mary Frances Reynolds embodied adoles- cence as Debbie (but still answered to Frannie), Norma Jeane Mortensen metamorphosed into Marilyn Monroe, and Natasha Gurdin (Zakharenko) was anglicized as Natalie Wood. Kim Novak agreed to change her first name because it was Marilyn but fought to retain her Czech surname. Stars with upper-class backgrounds, namely, Elizabeth Taylor, Grace Kelly, and Audrey Hepburn (van Heemstra Hepburn-Ruston) did not undergo a name change. Although Esther Williams came from a lower–middle-class family, she had already been featured in Life as a swimming champion and was an aquatic star when she signed with MGM. Studio christenings to signify a feminine type dictated changes in physicality as a result of altered hair color and hairline, cosmetics, plastic surgery, dental work, suitable fashion, and weight loss. An exception, Taylor became confident about her body while posing for photographer Philippe Halsman and resisted efforts to lighten her hair and pluck her eyebrows. Hepburn refused to submit to orthodontic work on her crooked front teeth until later in her career. Girls next door like Williams, Reynolds, and Day still appeared natural, but sexy blondes like Monroe and Novak were artificial constructs. Monroe unwittingly assumed the guise of a female impersonator when she became a platinum blonde sewn into tight beaded gowns. She had been glamor- ized since her days as a pretty pinup and starlet but now exemplified the aesthetics of camp.8 Stars who were in their teens and early twenties when they began careers in an industry producing fiction illustrated the postmodern con- cept of multiple selves and had fragmented identities. And their family histories were unsound. Although Monroe was most often characterized as having a fragile persona and an unstable background, hers was only the most publicized case of a troubled childhood. Several stars grew up in dysfunctional and impoverished families with ambitious mothers and inept or absent fathers. Such a family dynamic was not promising for the construc- tion of their feminine identities even before they were transformed by the film industry. Child stars like Taylor and Wood had exploitive stage moms 132 Stars, Fans, and Consumption in the 1950s who did not hesitate to thrust them into the spotlight. Unmentioned in the fan magazines was the fact that Sara Taylor received 10 percent of Liz’s earnings or that Maria Gurdin was included in all of Natalie’s con- tracts. A force behind her daughter’s career, Gurdin was a neurotic and manipulative Russian immigrant whom Robert Wagner describes “as close to certifiable as you can get.” Another stage mom portrayed by fan magazines as a pleasant homemaker, Maxene Reynolds was a talented seam- stress and a strong presence. As Eddie Fisher recalls, “she understood more than . Debbie how advantageous to [her] . career our marriage would be and so she really pushed it.” The singer had a very negative opinion of the “incredibly pushy” woman who became his mother-in-law: “the nicest thing I could say about Debbie was that she wasn’t nearly as awful as her mother.” When Reynolds moved out of the family’s modest home after her wedding, her father, who had always hated the swimming pool that she built as a sign of success, filled it with dirt.9 Stars who were the product of strong mother–daughter relations were formed by a family dynamic that was advantageous for their careers but not their marriages. When teenager Doris Day began to pursue a singing career, her mother, Alma Kappelhoff, who cushioned the family after a divorce, sewed her gowns, hired a voice coach, stayed in Cincinnati to raise a grandson, and followed her to the West Coast. Monroe was an illegiti- mate child whose unstable mother, Gladys Monroe Baker Mortensen (later Eley), was repeatedly hospitalized for long periods. But her guardian, Grace Goddard, remained a sporadic presence who encouraged her to fantasize about becoming a movie star. She is listed as a foster mother on an early Twentieth Century Fox biographic form.10 Although Esther Williams’s family was intact, it was so dysfunctional that she remained silent for two years while she was raped by a young man adopted to replace a deceased teenage son.

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