Those Lovely Liars

Back in the '50s, when people still believed in glamour and permitted mystique, the great stars radiated images so cool and desirable no mere mortal could live up to them.

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I ONCE HAD AN IDEA FOR A NOVELTY HOME ENTERTAINMENT, a cross between a board game and a new kind of Charades. The board was designed as a tour of Beverly Hills--all those beguilingly twisted lanes that worm their way up into the hills with dense, brilliant flowering shrubs at every turn (it could have made a pretty board)--and the player had to gain access to the privileged homes of the famous. Ten stars penetrated and you won the game. As your token--the top hat or the racing car--made its way along Summit Drive and Bellagio Road and you came upon a star's house, all you had to do to gain entry was to "do" the stars who lived therein, to take on their personas and "be" them for a few moments. Not them in the movies, but them in real life. You could be them on the telephone, putting on makeup in the mirror, lighting a cigarette (those were the days!) or just ambling along the street. If the other players had to admit that you "were" the star, then you were in.

What gave me the idea? Well, apart from a lifetime of the distant relating to movie stars that afflicts us all, there was Walker Percy's novel The Moviegoer. The narrator of that novel is a rather sad, lonely fellow who has half slipped into movies. It's not just that he likes movies--he feels most at home in them. He knows that other people treasure key moments from life--but he prefers moments from the movies. And he often sees movie stars out on the streets. The book is done in such a nice, deadpan way that you initially don't get a fix on whether this is madness or real. In one passage the narrator suddenly says to us, "Who should come out of Pirate's Alley half a block ahead of me but William Holden!" I love that exclamation mark. It quivers with nostalgia for the innocent awe that might see a drab depressive like William Holden on the street as an icon. I mean the William Holden who could never give up drinking, the one who died alone in some apartment building in Santa Monica and wasn't found for days. Bill Holden--famous, Oscar-winning, bankable Bill Holden! And it was days before anyone wondered about him. Whole days of decay.

The Moviegoer doesn't see that Holden--we only learned about him later. No, The Moviegoer was published in 1961 and it sees the late '50s superstar: the classically trim, handsome, urbane, controlled fellow. Not the ragged hobo from Picnic, with his shirt torn away by the collective lust of Kim Novak, Susan Strasberg, Rosalind Russell and Betty Reid--that, of course, was acting--but rather the sophisticated, cool presence of Sabrina, The Country Girl or Love Is a Many Splendored Thing, In my game you had to just be Bill Holden for a few minutes in such a way that you erased your own exclamation mark and people hardly even noticed. Think about it and you realize that this game works best with stars of the '50s or earlier. The '50s were the last age of starry elusiveness, the last time when you might rub your eyes and say, "Is that William Holden?" Nowadays, having stood in line waiting to check your groceries out every week next to some expose on Tom or Winona, and having seen them endlessly on "Extra," well, if you see some star you sort of feel like saying, "Oh God, don't look, but it's Tom Cruise waiting to be noticed. Hasn't he anything better to do?" And often, honestly, I decide that he hasn't. I think if I had to do him, I'd just sit back in a chair and look amazed. Really!

In the '50s, you still only saw the stars in their movies. Exposure hadn't caught up to them. And most movie stars took it for granted that they shouldn't go on television because it was vulgar and demeaning, which it was (and still is). There was this amazing gap between the radiance of the star (everyone was still glamorous then) and their awful, awkward reality. If Humphrey Bogart had been half as shrewd and hard-boiled as "Bogey," he would have known better than to put on a toupee and wear makeup when people came to pay their last respects when he was dying of cancer. And he still snarled and generally behaved like Humphrey Bogart!

Of course, no one in the '50s was more horribly trapped in that gap between radiance and reality than Rock Hudson. The name itself, "Rock Hudson," virtually demands to be carved off a cliff-face. And yet, the real Rock Hudson--also known as "Roy Fitzgerald" or "Roy Scherer" (good names for extras)--had to smile and look handsome and attractive for every idiot who said, "I'd like you to meet Rock Hudson!" Did he have spring grips on which he could practice his handshake, to be manly and convincing? He played Taza, Son of Cochise, Captain Lightfoot, Bick Benedict in Giant and even Lieutenant Frederick Henry in A Farewell to Arms, adapted from Ernest Hemingway. In truth, the Rock played a lot of very sensitive men, with Jane Wyman a couple of times in Magnificent Obsession and All That Heaven Allows (of course, heaven in '50s America was a very mean-spirited place), and in sly romantic comedies like Pillow Talk and Man's Favorite Sport? Even in his most iconic days as "Rock," he seemed house-trained, capable of keeping his shirt on, doing clever dialogue and understanding varieties of feeling. It's intriguing how Rock Hudson, in all his travails--being the fake and being found out--never really lost his dignity. It's as if some quarter part of us, maybe, guessed all along that there was, if not magic, masquerade in him.

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