The Theatrics of Identity: Reading the Classic Hollywood Memoir
Robert Atwan
Note: The essay below is an adaptation of one I wrote in 1985 as the introduction to a collection of celebrity memoirs called Bedside Hollywood: Great Scenes from Movie Memoirs (cover pictured above). Despite a title designed by the publisher to attract attention, despite the generously illustrated and handsome full-cloth hardcover edition they produced, despite the sumptuous ribbon bookmark, and despite even a shout out on Entertainment Tonight, the book unfortunately flopped at the box office. I no longer recall how the idea for the collection came about or how we persuaded the publisher, but I co-edited it with Bruce Forer, a very good friend who at the time served as film critic for several papers and magazines; regrettably, Bruce died a decade ago. As we divided up the tasks, we decided we would select the memoir nuggets together, that he would write the snappy lead-ins to each selection, and I would contribute the introduction. The book has been long out of print.
With my recent retirement, I decided that since so much of my work from the 1970s was done before computers and then in the 1980s and even into the 1990s on primitive word-processing systems, I would try to revisit some previously published material in order to make digital copies for my own records. I think I bit off more than I can chew. I knew it would be laboriously mind-numbing to re-keyboard the pre-digital work, but I underestimated how tedious it would be. I’m awful at typing, never really having learned how. But one way of breaking the tedium, I found, was to revisit various essays with the intention of revising, editing, updating, reconsidering—which is what I’ve done here.
I wish I could have brought the entire essay up to date, but that would entail reading a sizable sample of the enormous number of Hollywood memoirs published since 1985. Looking back, I can’t imagine that I once read as many as I did, from the age of the silent film on, from Mae West and Harold Llyod to Shelley Winters and Janet Leigh. Perhaps (I hope so) this essay may inspire someone to continue from where I left off.
—Robert Atwan, founding editor, Best American Essays series
The Theatrics of Identity: Reading the Classic Hollywood Memoir
1.
They can be outrageously narcissistic, self-serving, untrustworthy. They are often tirelessly self-promotional, gooey with sentiment. They are masterpieces of selective memory. The sermonizing can be deadly; the espousal of virtuous causes could drive any decent reader into misanthropy. And, through it all, the first-person narrative glides along with a naive assurance that could set a literary critic’s teeth on edge.
Yet, even the most demanding readers can find Hollywood memoirs irresistible. One of W. H. Auden’s favorite books was The Big Love (cover pictured above), Mrs. Florence Aadland’s account of her daughter’s notorious love affair with Errol Flynn.
Her tale begins with a line that William Styron found worthy of Melville: “There’s one thing I want to make clear right off, my baby was a virgin the day she met Errol Flynn.” The Swashbuckler first laid eyes on the fifteen-year old “Woodsy” (short for his “little wood nymph”) in 1957 while she was dancing as an extra on the set of Marjorie Morningstar. This was some fourteen years after his 1943 trial for the statutory rape of two minors. The sensational Los Angeles trial thrust World War II off the front pages and gave “sparking” servicemen a new term for scoring with the ladies—“In like Flynn.” That risqué declaration became the title of the chapter in which Flynn presents his account of the trial in My Wicked, Wicked Ways, his own autobiography published posthumously by G. P. Putnam’s Sons in 1959. Perhaps the publishers felt empowered by their remarkable success with another tale concerning statutory rape a year earlier, Vladimir Nabokov’s controversial novel disguised as the confession of a nymphomaniac, Lolita.1
Movie-star memoirs go back nearly as far as the movies themselves. Sarah Bernhardt published her life story (Ma double vie) in 1907; the following year she made a heroic effort to become the world’s first movie star. While La Tosca (1908) was never released, her Elizabeth, Queen of England (1912) deserves its reputation as the first full-length feature film, though one hesitates to call this four-reel “photoplay” a motion picture. She made eight movies in all (“my last chance at immortality”), several after the amputation of her right leg. She succeeded as a silent film star so perhaps her book—though its chronology never catches up to her film career—could be rightly called the first movie-star memoir. Her story certainly displays all the characteristics of the genre: a fastidious avoidance of serious self-assessment; a fascination with role-playing; and an energetic self-promotion. The last quality bothered Henry James so much that he rudely referred to the Divine Sarah as “an advertising genius.”
Memoirs trickled out of the early movie industry. The “queen of the silent serials,” Pearl White, survived such thrillers as The Perils of Pauline and The Exploits of Elaine to write Just Me in 1919. Not wanting to “include himself out,” Samuel Goldwyn published an autobiography, Behind the Scenes, in 1923. Two cowboy stars, even then, waxed nostalgic about the vanishing west: Tom Mix’s The West of Yesterday appeared in 1923, and in 1928 William S. Hart brought out My Life East and West. The prize for the most prestigious autobiography to come out of the silent era belongs to John Barrymore’s 1926 Confessions of an Actor. The most romantic early memoir is Rudolph Valentino’s posthumous Intimate Journal (1931). But the most intelligent Hollywood story from those early days remains Harold Lloyd’s An American Comedy (1928).
Lloyd’s genius perhaps comes closer to today’s comic sensibility than does that of his box-office rival, Charlie Chaplin’s. The star and director of Safety Last was a consummate craftsman both on celluloid and on paper, where he shows far more interest in the filmic art of comedy than in his own career. John Updike has noted that, in their memoirs, actors seem most themselves—and most exciting—when they talk shop. That’s when they reveal the details of craft, the hidden tricks of the trade, the inside dope. Ingrid Bergman’s account of Casablanca’s other ending, like Janet Leigh’s description of her wardrobe problem during the seventy-one setups required for the “nude” shower scene in Psycho, makes a real contribution to film history.
While shop talk may be the best part of Hollywood memoirs for fans who like their facts, few readers can resist the temptation to eavesdrop on movieland gossip. It’s been said that autobiography is the greatest vehicle for telling the truth—about other people. Consider what catches a movie star’s eye: Jackie Cooper sneaks a glimpse of George Raft’s girdle; James Cagney notices Humphrey Bogart’s “nervous habit of picking his nose wherever he was”; Eddie Fisher recalls Elizabeth Taylor spending twenty minutes each evening fanatically brushing her teeth. “People. Wonderful, remarkable people,” said Cagney, “is what an autobiography should be rich in—the people who make up a person’s real environment.”
But Cagney is an exception. “All autobiographies are necessarily egotistical,” P. T. Barnum observed. America’s first great master of ceremonies invented the show-business memoir in 1855. After the Bible, his Struggles and Triumphs was the most popular page-turner of the nineteenth century. The literary conventions of his time precluded any talk of his sexual life, but Barnum did expound at length on that other great theme of American autobiography—money. From then on, popular autobiographies told only one kind of story: success.
Hollywood autobiographies are tinseled success stories with Frank Sinatra’s “I Did It My Way” supplying the background music. The archetypal movie memoir progresses through five stages: Act I: The Early Years. Here we encounter the celebrity’s real self; learn the real name; meet the family; discover the one or two events that have irrevocably shaped the personality. Act II: The Big Break. In pursuit of the dream, the star struggles until the lucky moment: “So much of a successful career,” says Shelley Winters, “depends on standing on the right corner at the exact right moment”—when the still innocent unknown undertakes that Hollywood rite of passage, the screen test. Act III. Making It. The unexpected glamor; the new friends; the parties; the love affairs; and the contracts. Act IV. The Crisis: The deterioration of the perfect relationship; a tragic accident; breakdown, drink, drugs, divorce; contract problems; a new agent. Act V. Final Triumph. A new self-awareness; a hard-won philosophy of life that accepts the ups and downs; the new person—complete and self-accepting—now comes to realize that Hollywood betrays the real self when it fabricates the movie star.
Though few of the memoirs run entirely true to form, most share a good portion of this composite Hollywood life cycle. Almost all memoirs are written from the perspective of Act V, and thus an authentic person—not a fake movie star—claims to be the author of the book. Now whole, and with the wisdom of retrospect, the star disavows his or her stardom. “I’m not just a movie star,” the Classic Memoir insists, “I’m a loving parent, a supportive spouse, an artist, a conscientious citizen, an activist, a sponsor of worthy charities, a connoisseur of the finer things, a serious Broadway actor, an athlete, a writer, director, producer—a complete individual.” Given this drive to establish a non-Hollywood self, it is not surprising that many famous movie stars seem only partially interested in writing about movies. At times, they even dismiss the very talents that elevated them to stardom. In Steps in Time (1959), Fred Astaire concluded that he had nothing to say about dancing. Did he really think that no one would be interested in that aspect of his illustrious career?
2.
Identity crisis—the movie star in conflict with the “real” self—is at the dramatic heart of the Hollywood memoir. How would readers react to the story of an aspiring actor from a small Midwest town who breaks into the movies and at last discovers her “real” self in her role as star? But the genre hasn’t yet evolved in any postmodern way. In memoir after memoir, the “real” person is the pre-Hollywood innocent. Kids who grew up as Hollywood stars, like Jackie Cooper or Shirley Temple, have an especially rough time trying to establish their true identity, but somehow they succeed. It’s often said that movie stars are childlike; perhaps that’s because their only image of themselves as “real people” derives from childhood.
A confusion of names often plays a key role in the theatrics of identity. Shelley Winters announces this central conflict in both the title and opening line of Shelley: Also Known as Shirley (1980): “Who is Shirley Schrift? What happened to her, and what metamorphosis took place that changed her into Shelley Winters, movie star?” Throughout the lively account of her career, she attempts to reclaim an identity buried in adolescence. Her story ends with a Felliniesque episode in Venice. The actress sees a poor young woman who looks “exactly like the adolescent Shirley Schrift.” “Isn’t this movie-star business enough already?” the woman seems to ask. They commune with each other, and then: “I took her hand and as I did, I experienced, in some deep mysterious way, a merging of that long-buried part of myself with the rest of me.” Now at one with herself, Shelley Winters (or is it Shirley Schrift?) can rush back to the Taverna La Fenice to join her friend Maria Callas.
Occasionally, the star’s identity problem grows extremely convoluted. Breaking into pictures at nineteen, Lauren Bacall (born Bette Joan Perske) felt that she, too, lost some part of herself to Hollywood. And her memoir By Myself (1978) also ends with a reaffirmation of her pre-Hollywood “real self”: “What was not real of Howard Hawks' version of me is not real now. I remain as vulnerable, romantic, and idealistic as I was at fifteen, sitting in a movie theater, watching, being, Bette Davis.” The “real person” is not Lauren Bacall the movie star; it is instead a star-struck teenager whose fragile identity momentarily merges with a prominent actress, her namesake and someone who spent her own teenage years immersed in Greta Garbo movies.
The stars may question their identity—but the questions readers ask are: Is this the truth? And who really wrote the book anyway? Mark Twain (born Samuel Clemens) once gave his brother some advice about writing an autobiography: he encouraged him to “try to tell the straight truth…to refrain from exhibiting himself in creditable attitudes exclusively and to honorably set down all the incidents of his life …including those which were burned into his memory because he was ashamed of them.” He reminded his brother that no writer had ever done this before; and that if he could pull it off, “his autobiography would be a most valuable piece of literature.” His brother did write one, and Mark Twain was very disappointed. Then Twain tried to write one himself and he realized that he had given his brother impossible advice: “I have been dictating this autobiography of mine daily for three months; I have thought of fifteen hundred or two thousand incidents in my life which I am ashamed of but I have not gotten one of them to consent to go on paper yet.”
Autobiographies, in other words, are only human. Yet if we can’t expect the whole truth and nothing but, can we at least believe that movie stars write their own books? In a number of cases, the movie star does—or does to the point of rough draft. People at Alfred A. Knopf can recall how “Betty” Bacall graced the offices for days at a time writing By Myself. Sometimes the star gets “grammaticized” (a euphemism for intensive rewriting); sometimes the work is heavily shaped and edited by the publishing house; in many instances a “ghost” does the dirty work—takes the notes and performs the actual writing. And in other instances, the authorship is shared by a respectful and or a less dignified with, or the ambiguous as told to. The variations are multiple; the problems are knotty; the jockeying for credit can be vitriolic. Nonetheless, once past the title page and acknowledgement credits, it’s the movie star’s book.
There’s a certain justice in this. Movie stars have grown accustomed to a world where the written word is not exactly king. They’ve seen scripts savaged and talented writers reduced to pulp. They spend their workdays in a collaborative environment where it’s almost impossible to allocate proper credit. Why should the autobiography be any different from any other project? If it takes a staff to assemble a book, what’s so special about that? It can take a full staff just to get a star on the set. Is the autobiography a mess? Well, call in a rewrite specialist. After all, it’s only writing.
By the time the book is finished, the movie star—no matter what the nature of the editorial contribution—will think he or she wrote it anyway. In Giving Up the Ghost: A Writer’s Life Among the Stars: , the highly entertaining memoir of a ghostwriter, Sandford Dody recalls how Bette Davis behaved after their “collaboration.” It was the “usual syndrome,” Dody, who has ghosted five celebrity books, reports: “Bette had unburdened herself and now I knew too much. I’m sure that in her confusion she believed—since she had told me everything—that she had now written it as well. All my subjects have felt this way.” Dody then says something that should be inscribed in the sidewalk at Grauman’s Chinese Theater:
“To live a life and to write it are of course two entirely different things.”
My Wicked, Wicked Ways has remained in print; the most recent edition (2002) features an introduction by the famed literary biographer Jeffrey Meyers. A jury consisting of nine women and three men (his attorney hoped for twelve women) found Flynn not guilty on all counts. The verdict made the front page of the Los Angeles Times on Sunday morning February 7, 1943: “Erroll Flynn walked out of court yesterday a free man—acquitted of three statutory attack charges by a jury which scorned the accusing testimony of two teen-age girls.” For a recent assessment of the case and the trial, see: https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-fame-male-privilege-and-a-media-circus-revisiting-errol-flynns-rape-trial-80-years-on-188896