SUNSET in LONDON

Thursday was the 115th anniversary of the birth of Howard Dietz. He’s a largely forgotten figure now and you may well wonder why anyone would want to remember a guy whose day job was that of publicist. Ah, but Dietz was no ordinary publicist. He was the most successful in the role that anyone has ever been in Hollywood. Here’s how.

Dietz got his first job in publicity with Samuel Goldfish. Goldfish was one of the many chancers and would-be entrepreneurs who showed up in the newly established film colony in the early years of the 20th century. It didn’t hurt that his wife’s brother, Jesse L Lasky, was in the same business. With Oscar Apfel and Cecil B DeMille, the brothers-in-law founded the Jesse L Lasky Feature Play Company. Their movie, The Squaw Man, under DeMille’s direction, is now officially designated the inaugural Hollywood feature. The barn in which they shot it houses the Hollywood Heritage Museum.

A succession of mergers led to the creation of Paramount Pictures but Goldfish fell out with the new boss, Adolph Zukor, and he left. In 1916, he set up a new company with the Selwyn Brothers, sometime theatre producers, under the combined title of Goldwyn. Because he liked the sound of it – and of course it made it sound as if the whole company was his – Goldfish changed his own identity from the literal translation of his Polish name to Sam Goldwyn.

This is where Dietz comes in. He dreamt up a logo for the company, using a short piece of footage of a lion, whom Dietz dubbed Leo. He also proposed a fancy Latin slogan to go round the lion’s head: Ars gratia artis (Art for art’s sake). It was probably Dietz himself who first glossed the company philosophy as “Money for God’s sake”.

In 1923, the Selwyns forced Goldwyn out of the company and their new partner Lee Shubert (whose Organisation is still a potent force in American theatre) soon sold the whole outfit to the cinema chain Loew’s. In turn, Marcus Loew went into partnership with Metro Pictures and Louis B Mayer’s company and so – to supply Loew’s with product – MGM was born: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Sam Goldwyn himself never had any role in or dealings with MGM.

But Howard Dietz did. He became LB Mayer’s right-hand man for more than thirty years and the logo he had created for Goldwyn was adapted for MGM and was soon the most famous studio image in the business. That in itself ought to bestow immortality upon him.

Goldwyn's version of Leo the lion

MGM hit the ground running because Mayer and Dietz picked up the silent epic Ben-Hur, then in production and financial purgatory, and turned it into a public relations triumph. From then on, Dietz could do no wrong in Mayer’s eyes. He was a meticulous hoarder of paperwork – a man after my own heart – and his archive of MGM’s publicity machine is the largest of any kind in New York’s Public Library for the Performing Arts,

But Dietz was also a wit of legend – he was welcomed onto the Algonquin Round Table, the ultimate accolade for a humorist at that time. Here’s a sample. Hollywood’s most hated man of the age was Harry Cohn, the boss of Columbia Pictures. No would-be actress got her starlet break at the studio unless she first succumbed to Cohn’s voracious and brutal appetite (Rita Hayworth was a brave exception whose working life Cohn made a misery). Minions got fired for daring to look at him and it was widely believed that he spied on them all. Writer Ben Hecht nicknamed him White Fang.

When Cohn died suddenly, his funeral was the biggest in Hollywood since that of Valentino. Dietz swept his arm across the massed studio executives and declared: “See? Give the public what they want and they turn out for it”.

But Howard Dietz had another string to his bow. For thirty years, he wrote lyrics for musicals, most regularly with the composer Arthur Schwartz. Their most famous remains The Band Wagon, originally a stage revue for Fred Astaire and his sister Adele in 1931 but far better known in its movie version made 22 years later, also with Astaire. For the movie, Schwartz and Dietz wrote some new numbers including ‘That’s Entertainment’, a notably witty lyric that in time became a much-loved anthem of showbiz.

The quotable Sam Goldwyn

I am playing the album of another of their shows as I write. The Gay Life was based on stories by Arthur Schnitzler and has a charming score, much of it sweetly sung by a young Barbara Cook. The show has been revived since its opening fifty years ago come November at the Shubert Theatre (yes, that Shubert), but under a new title – The High Life. Language evolves, after all. The original book of Show Boat (the leading man of which is called Gaylord Ravenal) had the line “Gay’s a little queer today”, but – surprise – you never hear it in modern revivals.

My own favourite Howard Dietz writing is for a little ballad called ‘Confession’, too risqué for most singers of its vintage (the only contemporary recordings I know are by Mabel Mercer and Judy Holliday, both of whom could do faux naïf convincingly, but differently). This is the lyric in its entirety, set to a deceptively simple up-and-down Schwartz melody:

“I never kissed a man before.
Isn’t that a shame?
I never kissed a man before –
Before I knew his name.

I never got a taste for wine.
Isn’t that a sin?
I never got a taste for wine –
It can’t compare with gin.

It’s nice as nice can be,
My faith is at last restored,
To know that vice can be
Its own reward.

I always go to bed at ten.
Isn’t that a bore?
I always go to bed at ten –
But I go home at four”.

Young Arthur Schwartz

In the 1970s, I worked successively on the film section of Time Out, as the assistant editor of Plays & Players and then as Time Out’s television editor, so for a few years I frequented screenings, openings, receptions, launches and other kinds of industry bash. One ran into all sorts of interesting people at these beanfeasts. A particular aspect of cultural history contributed to the mix among these circles. The investigations of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee – otherwise known as the McCarthy witch-hunts – had propelled a number of leftish Americans from Hollywood and New York to London in the late 1940s and the 1950s. By the ‘70s, although there were no longer blacklists (formal ones, at least), many of that generation had elected to see out their days here. They liked London.

One face I saw around quite often – and knew to say hello to – was that of Howard Dietz’ old partner Arthur Schwartz. I don’t recall that we ever had an extensive conversation – I should have shown more gumption – but I seem to think that he very readily sat down at the piano, as composers are apt to do. I do remember that he was a little man with big glasses and a fine head of hair, the jet-blackness of which must have been enhanced (he was in his 70s).

Jesse L Lasky Jr pre-beard

Another figure on the scene then also connects to Dietz. Jesse L Lasky Jr was (of course) the son of Samuel Goldfish’s brother-in-law and an accomplished figure in his own right. He had forty-odd screenplays to his credit (eat your heart out, Joe Eszterhas), of which the most famous was also the best-known to be directed by his Dad’s old colleague Cecil B DeMille – The Ten Commandments.

I retain a strong mental image of Lasky, a dynamic little man brimming with good cheer and inquisitiveness. His chin beard and flyaway sweep of hair strongly resembled Charles Dickens, a resemblance I do not doubt that he cultivated.

Anita Loos in her heyday

Another vivid memory is of two fabulous ladies from the dawn of Hollywood who could be seen on the ’70s London scene. Long a London resident, Bessie Love appeared in masses of silents and early talkies (Griffith put her in both Birth of a Nation and Intolerance). She was still occasionally appearing on the London stage, including in Harold Rome’s doomed musical version of Gone with the Wind at Drury Lane. Anita Loos had a long and vibrant career but secured her immortality by writing Gentlemen Prefer Blondes as long ago as 1926. I cherish an image of them yakking together at some event, both got up in the style of their youth – wafty, brightly-coloured silks, cloche-like hair, startling makeup. I don’t think this is fantasy. The faces in the image are those of palpably old but feisty dames. Still fabulous, though.

Young Love (Bessie)

But my fondest memory of Hollywood in 1970s London came about when I wrote of The Philadelphia Story. George Cukor’s elegant high comedy was playing at one of the revival cinemas – the Everyman, perhaps, or the Starlight – and I thought Time Out’s standard listing was weak so I rewrote it, mentioning the Oscar-winning screenplay. On publication day, I got a phone call. An American voice came on the line, quavering and drawling: “This is Donald Ogden Stewart. I wrote the screenplay of The Philadelphia Story and I just wanted to say that that’s the nicest thing anyone ever wrote about the movie”. As you may imagine, I was dumbfounded. However, we got talking, I established that he lived in London and he readily agreed to do an interview. I rounded up my chum Geoff Brown, who knew a lot more about vintage Hollywood than I did, and we went over to the house.

Donald Ogden Stewart with his Oscar

Don and Ella lived in a fine pile hidden behind trees on the road called Frognal near the Finchley Road in north London. The house, we learned, had belonged to Ramsay MacDonald at the time that he became Prime Minister in 1924. The first-ever Labour cabinet meeting was held in the library. We stood in the room and “felt the vibes” – no doubt the phrase we used at the time.

The house was fascinating. Ella was a determined collector of art and objets and you couldn’t stick a postage stamp on any wall or flat surface because the space was all taken. She too was festooned with heavy decorations around her neck. It was no wonder that she was apt to stoop.

Young Ella Winter

She and Don entertained us for hours. In many ways, Don deferred to her for indeed her story was the more compelling. As Ella Winter, she had been quite an adventuress. Born in 1898 of German parentage in Australia (I only just discovered that), she studied at the LSE and then worked in the States. She became a friend and trusted confidante of a well-connected woman, Eleanor Roosevelt (Eleanor was Ella’s own full name). In 1924, she married a famous American. Thirty-two years her senior, Lincoln Steffens was an investigative reporter at a time when his trade was known as “yellow journalism” and “muck-raking”. Steffens had visited Soviet Russia within eighteen months of the October Revolution of 1917 and upon his return he made a remark that became legend: “I have seen the future and it works”. During their marriage, the Steffens visited the USSR but they could not sustain his earlier enthusiasm.

Steffens died in 1936. Don Stewart was among those who attended the memorial. “I knew the widow was going to speak and I expected some old dame but … well … out steps this sex object,” he declared in his Jimmy Stewart-like drawl. “So I thought I better marry her”. He had a good ear for the evolving use of language. I could listen to him for hours. A skinny beanpole and physically frail at nearing 80, he kept a lively mind, much stimulated by Ella’s combative style. He covered an inability to remember anyone’s name by calling everybody Toots (rhyming with Schutz).

Muck-raker Steffens

Geoff dropped out of the picture but I kept up the relationship and was a pretty regular visitor to the house. On one occasion, invited to tea, I arrived horrendously late, having completely neglected to allow for the nightmare of getting across north London by public transport on a Sunday afternoon. I was met with a small gathering seated around the tea and the perfectly evident response of Don and Ella that they hadn’t the faintest idea who I was.

It didn’t matter. There were further visits. At one social event, I enjoyed a long and absorbing conversation with Kenneth Tynan in the famous library. Another gathering revived a tradition, as Don explained, that they’d pursued back in California. The guests would all sit around in the library with tea and cake and there would be an invited speaker who, ensconced in a fine leather armchair, would hold forth on a current topic. On this occasion, the topic was the Ellsberg Papers, an issue of public disclosure in Washington that exercised the chattering classes at the time.

Don at work in the 1940s

After the talk, I went to pick up my glass of mulled wine that Don was doling out in the conservatory. “So, Toots” he demanded. “What did you think of the speaker?” He quickly read my face and, before I could summon an intelligent sentence, went on recklessly loudly: “Yes, I know what you mean. I knew that guy’s father and – can you imagine? – the father was just as boring as he is”.

Don died in August 1980, Ella a few short weeks later. Anita Loos died in 1981, Arthur Schwartz in 1984, Bessie Love in 1986 and Jesse Lasky in 1988. All the other London-based Hollywood ex-pats driven out by the blacklist – Carl Foreman, Joseph Losey, Cy Endfield, Sam Wanamaker, Larry Adler, Betsy Blair, Alexander Knox – have passed too.

But one remains. She was not in flight from HUAC but rather from a meteoric career that abruptly fizzled out. On January 12th next year (if she is spared, but she was interviewed on radio as recently as February so we can hope), London will celebrate the 102nd birthday of Luise Rainer. Her Hollywood period ran for just three years, but after she picked up her second successive best actress Oscar (for The Good Earth in 1937), public expectation was so high that the producers didn’t know what to do with her.

Luise Rainer in 2003

To get a sense of how old Rainer is, contemplate that she was once married to Clifford Odets, a figure who seems preserved in truly ancient history. Nevertheless, she was a lively presence around London well into her 90s. Somehow having Gwyneth Paltrow, Michael Brandon and David Soul in residence doesn’t seem quite as magical.

PS: After I posted this blog entry, I noticed that Sunday’s Observer had included in its Review section an extract from a 1957 interview with Charles Chaplin. By a remarkable coincidence, the piece was written by Ella Winter. Sadly, it does not appear in the on-line edition of the paper.

SHAN’T USE THE CHANTOOSE OBIT

The great Margaret Whiting died on January 10th and I became exasperated waiting for The Guardian to notice this major loss so I submitted an unsolicited obituary last night. This was not quite as presumptuous as it might seem. I have written several obits for the paper in the past, both at their and at my own instigation. I was particularly stung into action yesterday morning when the paper carried a sizeable vale to Gladys Horton, lead singer of the Marvelettes. Whiting, I proposed, deserves at least the equivalent consideration.

The obits editor demurred. “She didn’t have an original hit, and didn’t make much impression in Britain” he wrote. “At a time when we’ve got 50 obits waiting to appear, we can’t, sadly, feature every figure that readers would like us to, and we reckon that more readers are interested in Motown artists”. Rather than smother this response with the contempt that it so richly deserves, I propose instead to immortalise my notice herebelow, where I know it will be appreciated by my discriminating readers.

MARGARET WHITING

Margaret Whiting, who has died at 86, was one of the finest of the singers who led American popular music through most of the four middle decades of the twentieth century, performing songs that overlapped Tin Pan Alley, Broadway and Hollywood and that were apt to be known as “the standard repertoire”. Her style – a light but firm, clear but creamy mezzo, not as sensual as most of the black women vocalists of the period, nor indeed as the likes of Lee Wiley, Peggy Lee or Julie London – rather bracketed her with such variously serviceable performers as Jo Stafford, Dinah Shore, Rosemary Clooney, Keely Smith, Abbe Lane and Barbara Cook, all of whom laboured in the long shadow of their senior, Ella Fitzgerald, whose racially neutral timbre set the benchmark.

Whiting's first LP

Whiting’s understated, deftly wry delivery was especially suited to the dreamy, beguiling sort of number that married a caressing melody to intelligent lyrics: Arthur Schwartz and Dorothy Fields’ ‘Make the Man Love Me’, Jimmy Van Heusen and Johnny Burke’s ‘But Beautiful’, Ted Shapiro, Jimmy Campbell and Reginald Connelly’s ‘If I Had You’, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s ‘It Might As Well Be Spring’, John Blackburn and Karl Suessdorf’s ‘Moonlight in Vermont’, Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer’s ‘Come Rain or Come Shine’ or ‘Guilty’ by Harry Akst, Gus Kahn and her father. Lyricists must have greatly appreciated the Fred Astaire-like respect with which she always treated their work.

She was born in 1924 in Detroit, the elder daughter of a pianist and jobbing songwriter. With the coming of the talkies, new songs were suddenly required in industrial quantities and the Whitings promptly moved west. Richard A. Whiting had a particular gift for jolly, rousing numbers and he was soon well-known for penning ‘Ain’t We Got Fun?’, ‘On the Good Ship Lollipop’ and ‘Hooray for Hollywood’ among many others. Margaret was only 13 when he died but she was already a Hollywood kid and her vocal talent was known. Harold Arlen and Jerome Kern were among those who took her under their wings. At 17, she was signed to Capitol Records by her father’s great pal and frequent collaborator, lyricist and sometime singer-cum-executive Johnny Mercer.

As was usual for young vocalists in the early 1940s, her first sessions were anonymous, fronting big bands. But in 1947, she cut a long-player of her own, a selection from the songbook of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. Though she could not quite be said to have pioneered the ‘songbook’ format (Lee Wiley was doing it in the ‘30s), Whiting was certainly in the van of such collections. Thirteen years later, she made a memorable double-album selection from the Jerome Kern songbook.

Mercer and Whiting record 'Baby, It's Cold Outside'

The Rodgers and Hart repertoire was always grateful to the thoughtful performer and it was subsequently raided for dedicated albums by, among others, Sarah Vaughan, Tony Bennett, Barbara Cook, Bobby Short, Frank Sinatra and, some time later, the Supremes and Dawn Upshaw. Nine years after Whiting’s LP, Ella Fitzgerald began her Songbook series with Cole Porter, closely followed by Rodgers and Hart, a series that is probably the most valued of all Fitzgerald’s work.

Whiting was soon recording regularly under her own name and quickly became a radio favourite. In 1948, she cut a cover version of a British hit for Dorothy Squires, Billy Reid’s ‘A Tree in the Meadow’, and it topped the American charts. Soon after this, she took an unexpected but lucrative detour into country music and the single she made with Jimmy Wakely, ‘Slippin’ Around’, also got to number 1. In 1949, she recorded a duet with her mentor Johnny Mercer of Frank Loesser’s larky ‘Baby, It’s Cold Outside’ which became a Christmas chart fixture for several years.

In the ‘50s, she was a regular guest on the kind of television variety shows that lasted well into the ‘60s. For three mid-‘50s seasons, she and her kid sister Barbara were showcased as college co-eds in Those Whiting Girls, a summer sitcom seat-warmer for the production company Desilu’s banker, I Love Lucy.

Never one to allow changing times to deny her any chance to work, Whiting gladly joined the 1970s touring circuit in the best roles for those mature singing women who could act – Pal Joey, Call Me Madam, Gypsy. In later years, she made her home in New York and often performed in Manhattan supper clubs to lifelong fans and new enthusiasts alike. Her delicious version of Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn’s ‘Time After Time’ enjoyed a new lease of life when used in the 2009 movie Julie & Julia.

Mr & Mrs Wrangler

After a long and significant affair with the movie star John Garfield, Whiting’s first three marriages – to producer Hubbell Robinson, pianist Lou Busch and cinematographer Richard Moore – ended in divorce. In 1976, she met John Stillman in a nightclub. He was 30, she 52. He was enthralled by her glamour, she by his looks. He told her frankly that he was gay and that he worked as a gay porn star under the name Jack Wrangler. Nevertheless, they figured out an accommodation, based on Stillman/Wrangler’s contention that he felt “less competitive” with a woman than with a man. But the relationship was punctuated by public slanging matches, one involving an exchange that became legend: “I’m gay, damn it!” “Only around the edges, dear”.

Bogglingly, they married in 1994 and remained so until Wrangler’s death fifteen years later. There surely must be a BBC4 drama to be carved out of their story.

Whiting in later years

Margaret Whiting’s only appearance on Broadway was in a 1997 tribute to Johnny Mercer, produced by Jack Wrangler. She died in the actors’ home in New Jersey to which she moved last March. Her daughter by Lou Busch, Deborah, survives her.

Margaret Eleanor Whiting, singer; born 22 July 1924; died 10 January 2011

POWER and CORRUPTION II: HOLD IT THERE, KITTYKAT

Apart from Vanessa George and her fellow abusers of toddlers, there have been two other stories touching on paedophilia in the last week. One concerns Roman Polanski, picked up in Zurich after being on the lam in Europe for more than thirty years. The movie director had at the time admitted to having sex in Los Angeles with a 13 year-old girl. He has lived safe from extradition in France but the Swiss authorities had no compunction about seizing him as soon as he arrived there to receive an award. An international warrant for his arrest was opened only as recently as 2005: I have been unable to discover why it took 27 years to issue this. Now Polanski awaits transfer to California and, presumably, a prison sentence that will see him out: he is 76.

An initial outpouring of scorn from the Hollywood establishment and the French community of cinéastes, aimed at the Swiss authorities, has been countered by a resurgence of outrage among American women, inside as well as outside the movie business. Both stances, it seems to me, have merit and mischief in equal measure.

To take the anti-Polanski case first: by all accounts, Polanski’s encounter with the 13 year-old – characterised by one of his few women supporters, Whoopi Goldberg, as “not rape-rape” – was very far from consensual. The girl repeatedly rebuffed the 44 year-old’s advances; he plied her with alcohol and Quaaludes; he sodomised as well as penetrating her in the regular manner and with his tongue. He admitted his guilt to the sex charges as part of a plea bargain to avoid being tried for rape, administering a drug to a minor and other serious offences. Polanski’s lawyers understood that he would receive a probationary sentence but a loose-tongued judge let it be known that both jail and deportation were on the cards. Having been granted a stay, Polanski fled and settled in France.

I don’t doubt that Polanski is and always has been pretty much of a sleazeball. From the outset (Knife in the Water, Repulsion, Cul-de-sac, Dance of the Vampires), his work has been characterised by, to put it kindly, moral ambiguity. Soon after he settled in Europe, Polanski took up with Nastassja, the daughter of the German movie actor Klaus Kinski, whom he cast in the name role in his Hardy-based movie Tess. When their relationship began, Kinski was 15.


Polanski's knifeguy (screen grab)

Polanski launched the Hollywood phase of his career with Rosemary’s Baby and crested the wave with his masterpiece, Chinatown. His capacity to behave inordinately has always led me to suspect that there was a particular reason why the director cast himself as one of the hoods that assault the private eye JJ Gittes, played by Jack Nicholson in that succulently dark movie. I fancy that when Polanski’s hood yanked his blade through the crease where Gittes’ nose meets his face, Polanski did it for real. The act is so convincingly violent that the scene was cut when the movie was screened on ITV, rendering Nicholson’s subsequent heavily bandaged appearance impenetrable. See what you reckon: the sequence is posted on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ON6UWUN9Peo


Wounded Jack (still)

Nicholson is himself no slouch at diving into low-life behaviour and assuming that women are furnished for his pleasure, of course. It was in his house that the assault on the 13 year-old took place. Do you think Jack has two-way mirrors in his guest bedrooms?

Five years ago, Polanski sued Vanity Fair for publishing a claim that he publicly groped a young woman shortly after the funeral of his wife. The court found in his favour and awarded him £50,000. The case was heard in London rather than New York, with Polanski giving his evidence by video link from Paris. I hope no one will accuse me of libel if I describe the case as in every way a very rum affair.


Director and star (publicity shot)

What are the arguments in the director’s favour? I certainly do not hold that wealth or fame ought to render anybody above the law or beyond its reach. I do feel, however, that the passage of time changes the quality of the case. Towards the end of his life, I found myself having very mixed feelings about the dogged quest of Simon Wiesenthal to bring former concentration camp officers to justice. I do not propose that the crime lessens with time. But I would submit that the criminal lessens with time. I felt much queasiness at the spectacle of ancient relics dug out of their bunkers to be expected to defend their dimly recalled actions from forty or fifty years before. Something of the same qualm attaches itself to the dwindling figure of the one-time enfant terrible of cinematic psychodrama.

Of course, I know full well (not least from close acquaintance with personal experience) that the abuse meted out to children takes time – often decades – to be assimilated and processed into a cause upon which action may be based. Polanski’s victim – I think we may regard her as such – took time to bring pressure to bear on her abuser. Her suit against him was settled out of court in 1993 and she may or may not have received half a million dollars. Her position now is that she “forgives” him and would prefer to let the matter rest. If that is genuinely her view (even if succoured or tainted by cash), it is a consideration that ought to be part of the assessment of this case. What will the Californian judicial system do if she declines to testify against him in a new hearing?

What is more, Polanski’s life and career have certainly been hobbled to a degree by his situation as a fugitive from justice. After Tess, he wasn’t able to get a movie made for seven years and that was the lamentable Pirates. In the 31 years since he fled, he has only completed nine features, as many as he made in the previous 14. In itself, this is a form of punishment. The crime deserves much harsher punishment; or it would, had it been committed in the last decade.

The other recent matter concerns another outrage perpetrated more than thirty years ago. At age ten, Brooke Shields was photographed plastered with makeup and standing naked in a bathtub. The image played its part in winning her a role in Pretty Baby, an American movie made by another European film-maker much interested in precocious sexuality, Louis Malle. Some 13 years after it was taken, the photograph was re-photographed by Richard Prince, an artist whose shtik is to revisit the images of others, and included in a book called Spiritual America. This sparked an almighty row, not about the nature of the photograph itself but about the nature of copyright.

This autumn, Tate Modern has mounted a London exhibition of various kinds of pop art, including the Prince image of Shields. Before the show opened, the Metropolitan police, having got wind of what was afoot, visited the gallery to ensure, as a spokesman put it, that the curator didn’t “inadvertently break the law or cause any offence to their visitors”. The second half of this formulation would appear to be beyond the pay grade of even a high-ranking officer in the Public Taste Squad. As a result, the Prince photocopy was removed from display but many other exhibits of a tremendously explicit kind were permitted to remain.

The US courts have ruled that neither the original photograph nor Prince’s treatment of it is pornographic and it has hence been displayed several times publicly in America with impunity. In London, however, it is evidently deemed to be liable to attract and inflame paedophiles. This contrast with the stance in the States must be rather a disappointment to those who, in attacking Polanski, made the tart remark that in Europe “they” don’t bother over much about the rights of 13 year-old girls.

I have not visited the Tate Modern show. Frankly, I wouldn’t piss on a Jeff Koons if it caught fire. I find the Brooke Shields image rather repellent but my readers will judge for themselves. Shields herself tried to buy back the rights to the image but failed.


Brooke no interference

One intriguing element unites these two cases. The original shot of Shields was commissioned by Teri Schmonn. She is none other than Brooke’s mother. Mrs Shields commissioned the work from Garry Gross who has said that “the photo has been infamous from the day I took it and I intended it to be”. He was working for the Playboy group at the time. Polanski used photography as his pretext for getting his 13 year-old alone with him and then getting her to remove clothing. But he would never have got her into Nicholson’s house if he hadn’t first asked her mother, telling her that he wanted to shoot her for French Vogue. Given his history and reputation, you might think the mother would at least insist that the girl be chaperoned.

We can all climb onto very high horses when it comes to the thorny matter of paedophilia. But when it comes down to it, I blame the parents.

GOT IT MADE

I finally caught up with the first of three new programmes on BBC1 under the title The Making of Me. In each, someone in the public eye explores, as far as is feasible, how her or his particular personal make-up came to be formed. These being contemporary documentaries, such material can only be filtered through the medium of what are claimed to be ‘celebrities’. Whatever the viewers may actually want or be open to, broadcasting executives believe that no pill can be administered without a coating of stardust. So, if you happen to abominate the chosen ‘celebrity’ (and such abomination – like its opposite, adoration – is entirely subjective and even wilfully absurd), you will be deterred from taking your pill.

The episode I wanted to see was certainly for its pill – the subject matter – and not its sugar coating. John Barrowman is an actor and singer who specialised in musicals until he gained a wider audience through acting in Doctor Who and its spin-off, Torchwood. He has also regularly appeared as a judge in the series of musical audition shows that BBC1 has favoured for Saturday night prime-time fare. Barrowman was born in Scotland of Scots parents but his family moved to Illinois when he was eight and he now sounds like – and comes on like – an American. His parents, still US residents, remain resolutely Scottish and, in their company, Barrowman’s accent joins theirs, though he reverts when talking in their presence to his American nephew. There’s an interesting question hovering in the air as to which persona is his ‘correct’ one.

The other significant aspect of Barrowman’s make-up is that he is gay. Even in these liberated times, it is relatively rare for actors to be ‘out’, believing as they do – and there is some evidence that they are not wrong – that being tagged as gay will do harm to their job prospects. This fear is especially rife in Hollywood where movie and television actors are quite as closeted as gay sportsmen everywhere. The difference between the worlds of sport and drama is that the latter is, in everyday practice, highly tolerant of omnisexuality and indeed tends to attract people of unbuttoned sensuality. As that charming old thespian Alec McCowen once told me: “all actors are more or less gay …” [exquisitely timed pause] “… with the possible exception of Jack Hawkins”.

So I take my hat off to John Barrowman. He has always been upfront about his sexuality. And indeed the burden of the programme here under consideration was to explore and try to determine the source of that sexuality. Personally, I am not very interested in Barrowman’s sexuality qua the sexuality of this particular person. For my taste, he is too much the cardigan model in looks, too much the always-on performer in behaviour and too much the class show-off in style (“less talking” crisply advised one of the scientists who examined him in the film). His predictably elegant civil partner appeared in the film, their ceremony cheesily preserved in Barrowman’s screen-saver (he in his kilt, Scott in a dapper suit, the two dogs oblivious to the fuss). Way too self-conscious for moi.

And I fear that there is a large and largely unexamined question mark over the wisdom of the quest. Barrowman declared his starting-point boldly enough: he believes that sexuality is a given and that he couldn’t alter it even if he wanted to, which he certainly doesn’t. He hoped his quest would reinforce this conviction. But as Johann Hari notes in a related article in the current issue of Attitude, “there is a dark possibility we will end up wishing we hadn’t asked the question in the first place”. I agree with Hari. I have always feared that a conclusion will be reached in the struggle between nature and nurture for the recognition of responsibility for determining our sexuality. While the matter remains in doubt, the enemy cannot select its weapons. Once science has made a definitive pronouncement, the bigots will begin to prepare their means for eliminating homosexuality once and for all.

If science finds for nature – the elusive ‘gay gene’, the event in the womb, the chemical balance brought about by a succession of male foetuses – geneticists will move in to eliminate the gay gene, biologists to ‘correct’ the flow of testosterone and parents will sign up for the abortion of foetuses that are thought to be potentially gay. If science determines for nurture – learned behavioural patterns, social influences, the enduring nexus of accounts first put forward by Freud – behaviourists and moralising busybodies will launch a re-education programme to ‘save’ parents from unwittingly ‘making’ inverts of their children. Either way, it’s bad news for the gay community.

There is a great deal to be said for science’s interventions in the structure of human cells. The prospect of pre-empting the onset of deadly diseases or inherited disabilities is not lightly to be passed up. As in many other fields of human quest, the dangers arise when vested interests, particularly those driven by supernatural superstition, begin to make demands on the uses to which such research and development is put.

There is of course a fundamentally homophobic basis to the whole field of research and, sadly, to Barrowman’s attempt to answer his personal question. “What makes you gay?” presupposes that being gay is some departure from the norm and is therefore itself questionable. We might just as fairly ask “what makes you straight?” or – a better question still – “what makes you sexual?” Such a question would not, I hope, carry within it the implication that the answer will furnish the means by which it can be stopped.

SOME SHALL HAVE PRIZES

As this year’s Oscar ceremony unfolded, the most striking aspect of the award bestowing was the absence of American actors. Not a single home-grown player took home a statuette. While the long-time hot favourites won both the men’s awards (Daniel Day-Lewis, the expat Brit who took up Irish citizenship, and Spaniard Javier Bardem), the women’s titles were snaffled in late surges by, respectively, Marion Cotillard from France and Tilda Swinton from England. The early favourites whom these women by-passed, Julie Christie and Cate Blanchett, are also non-Americans. Christie, who lives much of the year in California, is English, Blanchett (though she sounds it less and less; cf Nicole Kidman) is Australian.

This clean sweep for Europe is not unprecedented. In 1964, two unmistakeable Anglo-Saxons, Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews, won the top awards and two pan-Europeans, Peter Ustinov and Lila Kedrova, won the supporting equivalents. This was the only other year in which no American won an acting honour. Perhaps even more significantly, none of the ’64 winners was playing New World whereas, of the ’08 winners, only Cotillard is not passing for some kind of American (Bardem’s character is an unidentifiable resident of the melting-pot and even Christie was playing a Canadian).

The traffic is certainly two-way: Johnny Depp was nominated for the latest in his swelling repertoire of brilliantly accurate, British-accented characters and Viggo Mortensen was up too for his superb turn in Eastern Promises, the London-set thriller stuffed with Russian characters, not one of whom is played by a Russian. The Other Boleyn Girl, just released here, has American Boleyn girls to set alongside the Australian Henry VIII, father to Elizabeth I, whom Blanchett seems to have made her own. But American Equity could reasonably argue that, Edith Piaf aside, the other roles to win their players Oscars this year could (should?) have been cast from the local membership. The primary argument against that position would be that no one would wish to deny Day-Lewis, the pre-eminent movie actor of the day, any role he fancies taking. As fellow nominee George Clooney so graciously put it, before the result was known, he raises every actor’s game every time he appears.

Cotillard was the first actress to win not performing in English; the male precedent for this phenomenon was set by Roberto Benigni ten years ago. The Academy Awards have never made much pretence of representing world cinema and, though they have always willingly embraced mainstream British film-making, they have remained overwhelmingly Hollywood-orientated. What has always been true of Hollywood, however, as indeed of America at large, is that it is an ever-open refuge for foreigners and expatriates.

The very first Best Actor award in 1928 went to the great Emil Jannings, a recent recruit from Germany’s rich silent movie tradition and a Swiss by birth. For the first time, two years later, neither acting award went to an American (the supporting awards were not launched until 1936): they were the first Brit to win, George Arliss, who had been acting in the States for donkey’s years, and the first Canadian, Norma Shearer, who enjoyed the inestimable advantage of being married to the studio boss, Irving Thalberg. Charles Laughton was the next Englishman to conquer Hollywood and the first to do so in an entirely British vehicle, playing the aforementioned Henry VIII. But he too was established in the States by then, having broken through on Broadway two years earlier and then made several American movies. The Private Life of Henry VIII was, in fact, one of the rare occasions when he returned to Britain to work and, 17 years later, he took American citizenship.

The first European actress to win the top award was German-born Luise Rainer, also the first star to win two Oscars back-to-back (1936, 1937). The fabulous Rainer, once married to Clifford Odets, retired to London in the late 1940s where she still shines at 98. 1939 is often cited as Hollywood’s annus mirabilis when more great movies were made than in any other year, yet it was also the first time that both top acting awards went to Britons, Robert Donat and Vivien Leigh, the latter of course playing a quintessential American, Scarlett O’Hara. 1947 was the first year that Brits won both the awards for men: Ronald Colman and Edmund Gwenn. 1958 was the first time two Brits won for the same movie: David Niven and Wendy Hiller in Separate Tables.

In 1963, when Margaret Rutherford was best supporting actress for The VIPs, three of her four rivals were also Britons and all in Tom Jones (which won Best Film and Director but no acting honours; Albert Finney and Hugh Griffith were also nominated). Beginning in 1989, a run of three British men won the best actor award: Daniel Day-Lewis, Jeremy Irons and Anthony Hopkins. Day-Lewis thus joins the select few actors to have been Best Actor twice; and he’s the first non-American. Several British women have won two awards.

But is there some kind of crisis in American acting? I doubt it. Despite the perennial British domination of the Tony Awards for New York theatre, only Jennifer Ehle won last time round. In the Emmies, another grateful hunting ground for our side, Dame Helen Mirren and Ricky Gervais are current holders and the much-honoured Australian Judy Davis joins them; the rest are Americans. I suspect anyway that the years of international success for British television production are drawing to a close.

Europe and Australasia (with very occasional forays from elsewhere) will continue to breed Oscar-winning actors, not to mention directors and writers and, even more so, technicians. That the American cinematographer Robert Elswit for There Will Be Blood beat the Englishman Roger Deakins for No Country for Old Men was not wholly a surprise and nowhere near a travesty: Deakins will come again. But that Freddie Francis was among the annual Oscar obituaries (the director Claude Whatham wasn’t) is a reminder of how highly English cinematographers (as he was described) are rated in Los Angeles, even though he was also a noted Hammer horror director. While the Yanks continue to imagine that we embody a nebulous quality that they would so dearly like to possess – “class” – I suspect that the Brits especially and foreigners in general will be welcome on the Hollywood shoots for many years yet.

FILM of DUST

Movies are not as much fun as they used to be. When there was a studio system in Hollywood and movies were turned out as if in a factory, a lot of good stuff got made by default because studio heads were too busy to pay attention. The stars were on contract, typically for seven years, and so were the writers, directors and producers. They may have been obliged to work on projects that they didn’t care for or that reinforced an image or philosophy that they would have repudiated – all of which made for a pretty big downside. Among the pluses, though, was a degree of security in a fickle industry and all the advantages of a collegiate regime of predominantly talented (even brilliant) people working to excel and to make others do the same.

Nowadays, every movie, no matter how modestly conceived or relatively inexpensive to make, is like a life commitment for at least the writer, producer and director, sometimes for some of the actors too. The biggest effort goes not into the shoot itself or the writing or the editing or the casting or the often-protracted process of post-production. The biggest effort – involving the producers, stars, financiers, production companies, directors, marketing people, even writers (and, of course, all their managers, lawyers and consultants) goes into the initial deal. It usually takes longer to set up a production than to execute it, release it and promote it (though promotion too can be a marathon). No studio system hammocks anyone or takes care of below-the-line costs. Every production is like founding an uncharted industry from scratch.

No wonder so much is compromised. If it takes months, even years, to raise the budget and sign the participants and ‘develop’ the script, it is inevitable that so many first choices – technicians, actors, locations, weather conditions, release dates – fall out of the equation. Besides, cinema is an art, not a science. People work by their instincts rather than by things they can prove. They all have an opinion based on almost nothing. As William Goldman famously wrote in his memoir of ’70s Hollywood, Adventures in the Screen Trade, NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING (his caps).

The nature of stars has changed. In the vintage years, there was a quality that seemed essential, particularly for male stars to possess. Think of James Stewart, Cary Grant, Fred Astaire, Humphrey Bogart, Clark Gable, Charlie Chaplin, John Barrymore, Gary Cooper, Henry Fonda, Jean Gabin, James Cagney, David Niven, Spencer Tracy, Jean-Louis Barrault, Fredric March, James Dean, Errol Flynn, Charles Boyer, William Holden, Robert Donat, Leslie Howard, Alastair Sim, William Powell, Vincent Price, Edward Everett Horton, Jacques Tati, Charles Laughton, Trevor Howard, Rudolph Valentino, Burt Lancaster, Orson Welles, Peter Sellers, Edmund Gwenn, Laurence Olivier, Joel McCrea, Melvyn Douglas, Anthony Quinn, Robert Montgomery, James Mason, Claude Rains, Marcello Mastroianni. Robert Mitchum, Franchot Tone, Laurel & Hardy, Anton Walbrook, Ralph Richardson, Bill Robinson, Roland Young, Rex Harrison, Walter Matthau, Charles Coburn, Walter Pidgeon, Peter Ustinov, Don Ameche, Ronald Colman, Yves Montand, Boris Karloff, Paul Henreid, Michael Hordern, Kenneth More, George Sanders, Dean Martin, Ray Milland, Douglas Fairbanks père et fils , SZ Sakall, Rock Hudson, Roger Livesey, Joseph Cotten, Marlon Brando, Nigel Bruce, even in his way John Wayne. All had it in spades: charm.

Women stars, even the greatest, needed it less. They were sexy, decorous, sweet, fearless or fearsome. But many charmed effortlessly: Katharine Hepburn, Marilyn Monroe, Carole Lombard, Judy Garland, Jean Arthur, Marlene Dietrich, Barbara Stanwyck, Claudette Colbert, Judy Holliday, Dolores Gray, Shelley Winters, Vivien Leigh, Elisabeth Bergner, Lillian Gish, Myrna Loy, Celia Johnson, Jessica Tandy, Irene Dunne, Louise Brooks, Ingrid Bergman, Edna May Oliver, Dorothy Lamour, Marjorie Main, Natalie Wood, Hattie McDaniel, Janet Leigh, Marie Dressler, Margaret Rutherford, Billie Burke, Irene Handl, Ida Lupino, Françoise Rosay, Anne Bancroft, Ruth Gordon, Margaret Sullavan, Giulietta Masina, Hermione Gingold, Joan Blondell, Phyllis Calvert, Joyce Grenfell, Kay Kendall, Ann Sothern, Helen Hayes, Ann Sheridan, Vera-Ellen, Beryl Reid, Ethel Barrymore, Joan Greenwood, Eleanor Powell, Esme Cannon, Rita Hayworth, Beatrice Lillie, Coral Browne, Mae West, Audrey Hepburn: note how many had comic gifts.

Among today’s stars, we all can list our charmers, being careful to leave out those whom we merely fancy. If your list is rigorously compiled – and, unintended omissions aside, the absences in mine are conspicuous, even a touch harsh – it will be clear how few living stars (those under 65, anyway) possess true charm. Men typically exude a different central quality but what is it? Maybe it is something like invincibility, a carapace patented by two undoubted charmers way past 65 who, in the long view, changed things: Sean Connery and Clint Eastwood.

The younger women have what was always demanded, plus a sense of exposed sexiness. Nobody advocates a kind of Hays Code, imposed in 1930 and operative for three-and-a-half decades, whereby restrictions governed what could be shown in a movie distributed in the States. Many of these strictures were notoriously silly, such as the stipulation that, where a man and a woman were seen (fully clothed, of course) on a bed, the man must keep a foot on the floor; and it was odd always to see married couples in separate beds. But the useful function served by the Hays Office was to oblige filmmakers to be inventive, artful, witty and blithely subversive in conveying sexuality.

Now that there are no restrictions, there is neither any mystery. Actresses – and increasingly actors too – are routinely expected to divest themselves of clothing and expose their parts to the public’s dispassionate, incurious gaze. This is hardly conducive to nuance ...

Remarkably many actresses allow themselves to be conned into believing that there is some mysterious “artistic” imperative that requires them to get their kit off in front of the camera. So they agree to do it, unmindful that the director is (by the by) relishing his power to demand to look at their tits. It doesn’t take very deep analysis of most movies to see that the necessity to bare the performers’ bodies is no necessity at all.

Some actors need little persuading to let it all hang out. Glenda Jackson did disrobe on a regular basis in her movies. The breasts of Helen Mirren were filmic fixtures through the 1970s. The hoax reporter Dennis Pennis asked Demi Moore (unkindly but not unjustly) if she would consider a role that required her to keep her clothes on. And you could expect the young Simon Callow to bare all on stage or screen as reliably as Katharine Hepburn would take to the water.

But for every gratuitous flash of nipple, testicle or pubic area, there is some telling shot that may have cost the performer something to do but yet enhances the movie. In Transamerica, Felicity Huffman plays a pre-op male-to-female transexual. To cast a woman is the movie’s best idea (the screenplay has no ideas remotely as good) because, having set up a roadside shot at night in which Huffman is seen peeing from a (prosthetic) penis, writer/director Duncan Tucker can then linger briefly on Huffman in the bath, post-op and ‘transformed’. A leading performance of sublime perception and exact judgment transcends the movie’s other shortcomings.

In an exquisitely turned episode of the Channel 4 drama serial Shameless, the 60-ish actor Paul Copley played a temporary suitor to Marjorie Yates’ Carol (the neighbour’s unreliable mother). That he would prove to be rather too sexually adventurous for her was signalled from the first morning of his stay, which he passed in the stance of a naturist. Copley’s willingness to appear in any situation naked fuelled the comic momentum that the story strand needed.
These are not instances of gratuitous nudity. You don’t shift gear from watching a character to ogling an actor. The actor stays in character and the performance is deepened by the moment. This is not what most screen (or stage) nudity is like. The trendy Nederlands Dans Theater once came to London with a ballet performed entirely naked. As one critic delicately remarked, the focus of one’s view alters dramatically when the dancers’ parts are visible. One certainly found oneself distracted from the niceties of the choreography.

An RSC revival of Marlowe’s Dr Faustus addressed the perennial problem of how you carry off the magical, silent appearance of a vision of Helen of Troy by having an actress stroll naked across the Stratford stage. It was striking of course but in no way magical. A production by the Oxford University Dramatic Society trumped it. Having secured OUDS graduate Richard Burton to play Faustus, director Frank Hauser persuaded his then wife Elizabeth Taylor to walk on as Helen. It was heart-stopping, even though my fellow theatre-goer Tony Coult and I had earlier had the potentially myth-destroying experience of following the Burtons up the front steps of the Randolph Hotel, upon which occasion the generous width of Mrs Burton’s seat was proclaimed by the electric yellow of her jeans ...

To read on, see my book, Common Sense: this segment comes from the chapter entitled 'Film of Dust'. You can download the book entirely free of charge, along with its index (itself a pleasant diversion), by clicking on the sidebar link above:

COMMON SENSE: THE BOOK