The Big Screen (48 page)

People notice him and are enchanted. They become his helpless extras for a moment, until “Holden has turned down Toulouse shedding light as he goes. An aura of heightened reality moves with him and all who fall within it feel it.”

That is a piercing description of movie magic, the empty gesture of heightened reality, and our romance with it. But inside Holden there may have been less light. When he died, aged sixty-three, he was alone in his apartment in Santa Monica. He was drunk apparently—he had had drinking problems for years. He fell and cut his head on a bedside table. He bled to death. The body was not found for four days. It is the kind of awkward conclusion that is not supposed to happen to movie stars.

From about 1950 onward, the first generation of picture people began to die. By then, many of them were what was called old-fashioned. But they had invented a medium and given their lives to it, and some of them sensed that the medium was changing so fast they were in danger of being forgotten. All of a sudden there were funerals all the time.

In July 1948, D. W. Griffith died at the Knickerbocker Hotel on Hollywood Boulevard. He was seventy-three, broke, boozy, and his last wife had just walked out. As Lillian Gish put it, “He idealized womanhood on the screen, but when he had to live with it he could not make the adjustment.” The body was taken back to Kentucky to be buried. Writing of the grave site, Richard Schickel would say, years later, “We have new ways of seeing and thinking and perhaps even being which literally did not exist until the man who lies buried there began his work.”

In 1950, Al Jolson died, the man who had uttered the good news and the bad news—depending on your point of view. An unmatched celebrity in his time, he may be unknown to young people today. In 1954 three beloved figures, stalwart supports in fine films, died: Sydney Greenstreet, Eugene Pallette, and Lionel Barrymore. In 1955 we buried James Dean and Theda Bara; and in 1956 it was Alexander Korda and Bela Lugosi, a pair of Hungarians who had made it to the big time.

On January 14, 1957, Humphrey Bogart died, so physically reduced he went up and down his house in the dumbwaiter. Greer Garson had heard him coughing at a party and told him to get to a doctor. Was it the smoking that he had done so much to glamorize? One cherished shot from
The Big Sleep
is two cigarettes together on the edge of an ashtray, still smoldering. He was fifty-seven. In Paris, in May, Erich von Stroheim died: an assistant to Griffith, the maker of
Greed,
the commandant of the prison camp in Renoir's
La Grande Illusion
, and Max to Norma Desmond in
Sunset Blvd
. In October, in Los Angeles, Louis B. Mayer died. Since his removal from M-G-M he had labored to make a great movie,
Joseph and His Brethren
, but it never reached preproduction. He had presided over fifty pictures a year, or none.

In 1958 we lost two models of attractive men: Ronald Colman, and Tyrone Power, who actually dropped dead in Spain (sword in hand) while filming
Solomon and Sheba
for King Vidor. The descendant of actors, Power was forty-four. For 1959, the list was merciless: Cecil B. DeMille, Lou Costello, Ethel Barrymore, Preston Sturges, Errol Flynn, and Victor McLaglen. Flynn was fifty, though we were told he had used his time to the full. With Power and Flynn gone, what would become of sword fighting? In 1960, Clark Gable died, along with Margaret Sullavan and Mack Sennett. Gable was fifty-nine and there were cautious suggestions floated in the press that his heart attack had followed the physical exertion of doing
The Misfits
in the Nevada desert for John Huston and having to wait so long for his costar Marilyn Monroe. There was no reason to believe those stories (especially the hint that Monroe might even have been Gable's love child), except that going to the movies had always been a matter of believing in the stories about these people.

In 1961, without much warning, unless you had been watching his face, Gary Cooper died. He was only sixty, but he had been here forever it seemed. He had been silent once; he was a fatalistic fellow in
Wings
, Tom Brown saluting Dietrich in
Morocco
, Mr. Deeds, Wild Bill Hickok, Beau Geste, Sergeant York, John Doe, Lou Gehrig, Howard Roark, Will Kane in
High Noon
. So many of America's heroes had needed him. Though something of a mess in life, he had walked or gazed across the screen and conveyed decency and virtue. Today, for good or ill, you could hardly ask an actor to “do” those things so simply, or with so little irony, and not be laughed at.

All but one of the deaths I've listed were received as the passing of veterans, even if so many of them were young by today's standards. Only James Dean seemed snatched out of youth, and that departure was a key step in the public relations for Youth as a newspaper topic. But on August 5, 1962, there was the loss no one has ever explained away.

Norma Jeane Mortenson (or Baker) was born in Los Angeles in June 1926. Her mother had been a negative cutter at a couple of studios, and that's where the Gable rumors came from. So she never had a father to speak of, and her mother was somewhere between disturbed and crazy. Norma Jeane was raised in foster homes, orphanages, or with friends, and she dropped out of high school at sixteen to marry a man who worked building aircraft.

Men began to take her picture. She was always in her glory in stills, like a kid raised on fan magazines and their suspended moments of desire and splendor. When she moved on film, in real time, she often became more awkward or exaggerated. But she was enough of a pinup girl—and there was a luxuriant but tasteful spread for a nude calendar—that she was signed up by Twentieth Century–Fox. They decided to call her Marilyn Monroe. She was one of the last studio fabrications and she would die still attached to Fox in anger, grief, and litigation.

She would marry Joe DiMaggio, the model of baseball, and then Arthur Miller, the intellectual, leftist playwright. It was a search for happiness, but a kind of nationwide casting, too. There were also affairs with, at least, the agent Johnny Hyde, Joe Schenck (a boss at Fox), Elia Kazan, Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra, Tony Curtis, Nicholas Ray…Norman Mailer never quite got over the frustration that he was not included and he wrote a rhapsody to her that was driven by his never knowing her.

What was she like on-screen? More or less, fifty years after her death, everyone has seen some of Marilyn's films. A lot of them were thankless studio assignments. In many she is being mocked by her own pictures, a dumb blonde who doesn't get the joke. She had a funny cute voice for film, so she clung to it. She knew every way of looking sexy for a camera, yet she was hurt when Laurence Olivier told her, “Just be sexy,” on
The Prince and the Showgirl
(1957). There were dark opinions, too. George Axelrod, who scripted
The Seven Year Itch
(1955) and
Bus Stop
(1956) for her, believed “She was psychotic. Once you got to know her, one couldn't feel sexy about her…You just wanted to comfort her, say, ‘It's going to be all right, child.'”

She wanted to do Chekhov or Dostoyevsky? She had Lee Strasberg on her side? She was a mess, struggling with her own attractiveness, her actual sexual frustration, with weight, drugs, and the raging publicity she could neither control nor do without. Studios no longer had reason or the skills to look after their wayward stars, and no one ever knew how to plot a career line for Monroe, or have her remember it. Perhaps she did have a week of fun, with Colin Clark, the third assistant director on
The Prince and the Showgirl
(1957)—if only she had been as good or as understanding as Michelle Williams in
My Week with Marilyn
(2011).

She is funny and glamorous in 1953's
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
(was that Howard Hawks?); she is eye candy in
The Asphalt Jungle
(1950; call that John Huston's way of noticing a girl); she is heartbreaking in
Bus Stop
(but that relied on Josh Logan's kindness); she is a comic achievement and a figure of fun (not quite the same thing) in Billy Wilder's
The Seven Year Itch
and
Some Like It Hot
(and that was Wilder's lewd cunning); she was out of her depth in
The Misfits
(1961; put that down to Arthur Miller's helpless signing off on their marriage).

Marilyn Monroe was never in charge, and that is why the public felt a helpless responsibility at the news of her suicide. Or, was it that? That's where story crept in and fed the endless industry of autopsy and ghost-raising that goes from Miller's
After the Fall
to Mailer's
Marilyn
, from the Andy Warhol silk-screen series to Joyce Carol Oates's
Blonde
, and to
My Week with Marilyn
. With so much more to come. The year 2012 will be the fiftieth anniversary of her death.

She was the twentieth century's Lola Montès, less the real dancer and notoriety than the figure Max Ophüls established in his 1955 film. Her actual achievement, in stills and movie moments, was slight compared with the work of Katharine Hepburn, Barbara Stanwyck, Bette Davis, or Meryl Streep. But if anyone today is asked to do a painting of the history of the movies (or a book jacket), chances are they do Chaplin tipping his hat to Marilyn, with her standing over that subway grating in New York, where the rush of a passing train turned her white skirt into a parachute. She taught us to see that great images were lost children, and we walk on in dismay. She fashioned a strange experiment that showed reality was slipping. She might as well have slept with the Kennedys, Einstein, Shakespeare…or you and me.

Step back and to the side for a moment, and consider a child in the 1950s, and wonder how far he might be aware of some remote but important part of the world through the movies or other forms of popular culture. For the sake of convenience, take a boy who was ten in 1951 and ask what did he know about…Japan?

He knew next to nothing, except that the Japanese were a cruel and bad people. If he lived in Britain, his indignation (or horror) at the Germans was greater, but there was ample room to despise the Japanese. In the 1945 film
Objective, Burma!
(in which Errol Flynn's Captain Nelson wins that war), there is this speech uttered by a Western journalist describing the Japanese:

The boy didn't know yet that that could have been Hitler speaking, and he had only a vague sense of what Hiroshima and Nagasaki had entailed. (He did not know it, but he was waiting on the sheer educational input of Alain Resnais's 1959 film,
Hiroshima Mon Amour
.) But he had read a bestselling paperback of the age, Russell Braddon's
The Naked Island
(1951), about Changi Gaol, a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in Singapore, and an alarming parade of torture, abuse, and execution. Braddon was Australian, and the comparable film,
A Town Like Alice
(1956), from a Nevil Shute novel, had Virginia McKenna and the Australian Peter Finch in love in a similar camp. It moved the boy a lot that British Empire love could survive savagery.