History in Miniature: Colleen Moore's Dollhouse and Historical Recollection

Colleen Moore works inside the Great Hall, 1935. Photograph courtesy Joseph Yranski History in Miniature: Colleen Moore’s Dollhouse and Historical Recollection Amelie Hastie For a collector—and I mean a real collector, a collector as he ought to be—ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have with objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them. —Walter Benjamin, Illuminations Silent film star Colleen Moore left a number of cinematic and historical legacies: the sixty-plus films in which she appeared, three published written works, thirty-six private scrapbooks, an exten- sive personal accumulation of photographs, her witness accounts in both Kevin Brownlow’s Hollywood documentary series and the San Simeon oral history project, and an impressive collection of priceless miniatures. She installed the latter in a massive dollhouse that was constructed over a period of seven years by expert Hollywood set designers under the direction of Moore and her father. “Colleen Moore’s Fairy Castle,” as it is now called, traveled throughout the United States and Canada in the 1930s to raise Copyright © 2001 by Camera Obscura Camera Obscura 48, Volume 16, Number 3 Published by Duke University Press 113 114 • Camera Obscura money for children’s charities and has long been a popular attrac- tion at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry. It is, to be sure, a lavish and beautiful work. The castle itself is bedecked with jewels, precious minerals, fairy tales, and reminiscences; the objects therein are each exquisite treasures. They include furni- ture constructed from Moore’s personal jewelry and other fine materials; tiny but functional objects; paintings, tapestries, and other representational works; and even a library of one-inch books penned by famous authors. The castle is thus a veritable treasure trove for visual pleasure. But much of the pleasure involved in looking at it, I suggest, is in the interpretation that it invites. In its richness of detail, Moore’s bountiful collection elicits our deci- pherment of the clues it (and, indeed, Moore) has left for film history. It is quite clear that Colleen Moore’s fairy castle is no aver- age text. Even as it appears that this structure is begging to be read, it also forces other questions: how do we read a dollhouse? What, for instance, is the spectator’s relation to the dollhouse? How does our own movement around it correspond to a reading of sorts? And to what sort of reading would our movement correspond? Like most collections, it does not have a clear linear structure or even a coherent narrative. Still, viewing the dollhouse might be likened to the experience of watching a film. Because the dollhouse in its current installation is encased by a glass structure, we maintain a necessary distance from the actual image, and we see a series of images displayed as we move around the house. Yet, because of our own movement, we have less the vantage point of an immobile spectator in her or his theater seat and more the mobility of the camera itself. At the same time, looking at the dollhouse is akin to window shopping—especially in that we can never purchase the actual items on display through the windows but can only imagine ownership and inhabitation. Considering all of these positions, how do we interpret this dollhouse, historically and textually? And why, indeed, would we want to in the first place? For one, we might read the dollhouse for the sheer pleasure of viewing and interpretation—a pleasure ever evident in the production of theory and history. Colleen Moore’s Dollhouse and Historical Recollection • 115 Indeed, we are able to read this work because it narrates a history, especially given our various potential vantage points in relation to the cinema and to consumerism. Susan Stewart notes that, “In writings on collecting, one constantly finds discussion of the collection as a mode of knowledge.”1 While Stewart sees this knowledge as “contained” by the collection, and therefore ahistorical, I would argue that the mode of knowledge apparent in Moore’s collection is indeed historical. In fact, at the turn of a new century (and since its making), the dollhouse stands as a nostalgic rem- nant of a particular time and place: Hollywood of the 1920s. But as the very notion of nostalgia hints, the knowledge and narration of history that Moore’s collection invokes are also fundamentally bound to the construction of fantasy. For everyday visitors and scholars alike, the dollhouse therefore offers an exciting prolifera- tion not just of objects but also of relationships between objects, and therefore of ideas invoked by those relationships. The castle’s location at a Museum of Science and Industry nicely emphasizes its origins: under Moore’s personal direction, it was created in the industrial town of Hollywood via the scientific and technological innovations of the film industry. As such, it offers evidence of a personal and a cultural history. With its companion book by the star, the castle unveils Moore’s own auto- biographical history, while it also implicitly discloses a history of Hollywood in the 1920s (the climax of Moore’s career as a film star). This dual history is in part evident in its ties to fairy tales. While the stories of fairy tales influence the narrative of the dollhouse itself and the objects therein, they also play a prominent role in Moore’s construction of her personal history as recounted in her memoirs, Silent Star, in which the actress invokes the specific narratives and general language of fairy tales—as well as Hollywood films—to tell her own life story. Moreover, as an extravagant, costly, and now almost priceless collection, the fairy castle displays the story of Moore’s personal wealth as a movie star. It also points to the economics of Hollywood in general. The castle recalls the fascination with the “private” lives stars led in their own extravagant homes and the lavishness of production and exhibition practices of the time, such as the great movie sets con- 116 • Camera Obscura structed for silent features in the 1920s and the movie palaces in which spectators saw the films. Thus, Moore’s castle, in its own contexts of production and exhibition, reveals itself as a textual artifact that acts as a kind of visible evidence of the intertwinings of personal memory and cultural history, fact and fiction, collection and recollection. The particular histories Moore’s work recalls are inherently bound by fantasy, both in their narration through the fantastic and fabu- lous dollhouse and through the tellings of an industry defined by the production of fictions. In order to seek out and then recon- struct these sorts of relationships, I will read the dollhouse from a variety of vantage points: through its own history (and the construction of it), through its connection to narrative, through its relation to other paracinematic works and film culture more broadly, and through the relation the scholar forges with it. I thus hope to respond to the seductive invitation the dollhouse offers in order to reawaken and re-present the relations that are pre- served and made possible by this collection and its original author— the star. Architecture of History In a 1922 publicity piece, incorporated into a variety of news- paper articles about her, Moore claimed that, “when she is too old to screen well and too wise to work,” she would write a book entitled “The Unromantic Adventures of a Screen Actress.” She was then quoted as saying: I shall fill it full of plumbers, dressmakers, still photographers, upper berths, tests, makeup, dancing lessons, geography, arithmetic, unprepossessing admirers, autograph hounds, appointments with persons that keep me waiting, rain when I have no umbrella, poets who want to write poetry about me at $10 per ‘pome’—and a few other things that go to make up the sum total of a life.2 Here Moore seems desperate to expose the mundane and unromantic details of an actress’s life. Yet while she did indeed turn to writing decades after her announcement (and after the end of Colleen Moore’s Dollhouse and Historical Recollection • 117 her screen career), this design was not completely to be. In fact, in the late 1960s, she produced not one, but three volumes, all of which document her life in various and meaningful ways: her memoirs Silent Star, an advice manual called How Women Can Make Money in the Stock Market, and her companion to the fairy castle entitled, simply, Colleen Moore’s Doll House. Moreover, each of these works told much more glamorous stories than what she vowed in 1922 to recount. They were the stories of her life not just as a screen actress but also, as the title foretells, as a “star.” Indeed, Silent Star documents her life in Hollywood and the Hol- lywood life around her, rife with the romance and scandals of the day. The book on the dollhouse, with its inherent focus on the romance of fantasy, also sketches Moore’s glamorous—and fanci- ful—past as it relates both the “real” and the imagined story of the castle. Through the dollhouse and its attendant texts, then, Moore’s telling narrates a different story of Hollywood, one in which women have relative control over their own historical des- tinies—even when that history is so directly connected to the fantasy of fairy tales and Hollywood film. Further, while Moore tells and retells the history of its origins and construction in her memoirs and Colleen Moore’s Doll House, her history is retold in another, less overt, form: Terry Ann Neff’s text composed for the 1997 edi- tion of Colleen Moore’s Fairy Castle.

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