Those Lovely Liars

Grace Kelly is another case study in the glamour gap. If you look at Grace Kelly's film roles, you have this feeling of Hollywood being in awe of her ladylike image from start to finish: a Quaker in High Noon; the ice maiden in Mogambo; the model ready for marriage in Rear Window, the very rich girl already casting an eye at Monte Carlo in To Catch a Thief, a princess in The Swan; and a society girl in High Society. There was only one picture, really, where Kelly wasn't positioned and photographed as the crème de la crème, and that was The Country Girl, where she got the Oscar quite simply for standing up without the major advantages of make-up and wardrobe. It's pretty clear now that Grace Kelly was an honest if wealthy slut, eager to go to bed with as many admiring males as her calendar could accommodate. And why not? What's the point of being a movie star if you're not in line for some of those residual advantages? But the sham image worked. An authentic Prince of Monaco fell for it. And then, far more sadly, I daresay, Kelly herself fell for it. In other words, the cheerful opportunist (why use the word adventuress when comparable behavior in a male is treated as plain lifestyle?) gave up the ghost for state occasions in a toy kingdom, for real Catholic vows and attitudes, and for being the increasingly forlorn trophy wife of a Latin prince who got around. If Grace Kelly had stayed in the business (she would have been 74 this year), she might have been our age's Katharine Hepburn--a great star and one of the famous lays of the land.

Kim Novak is another case in point. It was always, I think, a little unkind of the world to ask her to act when she was already a phenomenal wonder of nature. But Harry Cohn and so many others wanted to make her a lady: to have poise, to be possessed by elocution, deportment, style, panache and lady-like restraint. Whereas the real Kim Novak showed every sign of being a little awkward, very shy and as horny as you'd want. Her private life was a merry riot, but Hollywood kept trying to make her a lady (that was a great '50s concept and it went along with being on the far, dark side of the sexual revolution--ladies did not have or ask for women's rights). That's why the great Novak film is Vertigo, when she gets to be two people: Madeleine, the blonde, dressed in gray, aloof, not noticing the rest of the world, somewhat shocked to find that James Stewart has undressed her; and Judy, the raunchy redhead, a cheerful vulgarian who might be all too ready to strip if Stewart would just get that other-world look out of his eyes and appreciate the flesh he has right here and now.

You can hardly think of Kim Novak without recollecting her predecessor at Columbia, Rita Hayworth. Talk about unhappy lives. Rita Hayworth was in all likelihood sexually interfered with by her father, who was her first partner in her dancing act. She was then tossed around by a lot of very worldly men, including Orson Welles, Aly Khan and crooner Dick Haymes, who never paid much attention to her feelings or her reality. She was cast as classical temptress figures in Salome, The Loves of Carmen, The Lady From Shanghai (that one for Welles), Miss Sadie Thompson, and the most famous of all the gorgeous temptresses, Gilda. She did that act to perfection. You could hardly look at her without suddenly knowing how to spell "voluptuous." She was one of those people who suffered the great misfortune of being loved by the camera so much that everyone assumed she was the goddess of love. It was like being William Holden and being taken for a guy who knew and had done everything, instead of a man so wracked by feelings of failure that he had to drink. In Hayworth's case, the gap took this form: that men, incapable of stopping themselves, went to bed with "Rita Hayworth" and woke up with her, unable to escape quickly enough.

Now you may argue, and plenty of actors and actresses might agree, that the gap between a star's persona and a star's real life has always been and still is inevitable. That the spur to acting is a kind of dismay with life that begs for pretending, for the precious, serene moments where you can just be "Grace Kelly" or "William Holden" and feel the exclamation mark rising after your name like identity's hard-on. The thing about the '50s is that it was the last of an age and the beginning of the end. It is then that we began to see that the screen might not be merely worshiped--it might also be mocked. It could possibly be a dire camp joke. Maybe the whole wretched temple could be pulled down. Which brings to mind another of the great figures of the '50s, Victor Mature, who pulled down the Philistine palace in Cecil B. DeMille's Samson and Delilah. But imagine a Hollywood actor called Mature! The great Victor apparently saw and enjoyed the joke as much as anyone. Part of the undying pleasure of Samson and Delilah, though, is that his costar, Hedy Lamarr (so very close to Heady L'Amour) did not. She believed totally in being "herself," the femme fatale who would cut your hair off so that you never noticed the loss of other parts. In Samson and Delilah, Mature and Lamarr confront each other, two forces, two epochs, two acting styles, and you feel as much poison and trouble as you would later with Tom and Nicole in Eyes Wide Shut. There, truly, is the lesson: if you want to be William Holden, you have to do it so well, so thoroughly, that you can do it with your eyes shut. Otherwise, you look dishonest. Which just won't do. We like to love our liars.

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