Greater Depth
Verswijver's "interviews" are really more than that. Eliminating his own prompting questions from a series of conventional interviews (conducted from 1999 through 2002) and arranging his subjects' commentary into memoir-like reflections upon a generally coherent set of concerns integrated with his own accounts of their career highlights, Verswijver manages to create profiles of considerably greater depth and interest than generally possible in conventional (and usually tedious) interview dialogues. Unfortunately, the full value of this virtue is a bit compromised by the volume's arrangement of its subjects in simple alphabetical order. Ordering them thematically or according to an echelon of some sort might have lifted these profiles into something like a broader coherent vision of Hollywood's golden era. As things stand, with Pat Boone at one end and Fred Zinnemann at the other, we are left with just miscellaneous glimpses of it. Nonetheless, these are glimpses worth getting, especially for their cultural value. Take Boone, for example.
There may not be much cinematic value in knowing the pieties that guided Pat Boone's career decisions as a film-idol though the fifties and sixties, but certainly there is some cultural value to knowing them. As a true anti-Elvis, Boone's authentic Christian wholesomeness was (and remains) famous, and it will surely be astonishing to most present and future readers to discover the tolerance the Hollywood studios of Boone's day had for his scruples. Defying the obligations of his contract with 20th Century Fox in adamantly refusing on moral grounds to play the part of a wayward Catholic priest (probably more for the Papist association than the moral questionability), Boone managed through his sheer stubbornness to win a concessionary assignment to Journey to the Center of the Earth—which he also refused until being won over by the award of fifteen percent of the film's revenue and the promise of having Verne's science fiction tale turned into a bit of a musical!
Incredible as it may seem, there was once a time in America when wholesomeness could be big box office, and in fact (at least according to Boone), the wholesome Boone-suffused Journey was so successful that it literally saved Fox from the bankruptcy-threatening production disaster of Richard Burton's and Liz Taylor's steamy Cleopatra. It is no wonder that Boone's view of contemporary film is deeply fixated on what he considers the regrettable moral and marketing error of passing up G-rated entertainment. However skeptical most of us might now be of such a view (as simply quaint or falsely nostalgic), the sheer authenticity and intensity of the extended pontification that constitutes the bulk of Boone's profile makes it impossible to imagine that he and Hollywood could have collaborated as successfully as they did on any but his terms. Apparently, it was once really true, not just imagined, in America that wholesomeness sold. This is a revelation worth documenting and preserving against the glib erasures of our ever-increasing jadedness.
Similarly valuable testimonies come from others. Samuel Goldwyn, Jr., whose privileged vantage as a Hollywood brat and son of one of its most powerful figures might have afforded the basis for some original disclosures or penetrating analysis of [End Page 97] Hollywood workings, offers instead little more than a cascade of enthusiastic clichés about it: "Movies were always magical to me" (the title of the volume); "the star system was wonderful"; the unmanageable Marilyn Monroe had that "extra thing you get from a star"; and Julia Roberts is a "star in the true meaning of the word." And with equally clichéd sentiments, actress Janis Paige positively gushes with admiration and gratitude for the studio age and for the parent-like management it provided for her career and even her personal life: "Believe me, it was the golden age....They treated me so wonderfully." More than a set of professional circumstances, that golden age to Paige represented a real cultural epoch of a broad sort: "We'll never see it again. It has to be treasured and respected just because our morals were different." It was an age when audiences "had to use their imagination" in handling the implied sexuality of such famous scenes as the double cigarette lighting between Paul Henreid and Bette Davis in Now, Voyager. Sure, such sentiments are formulaic, but, echoed so much as they are among the various profiles of this book, they come close to validating themselves as real cultural mythology if not cinematic analysis.
This is not to say that the volume is entirely devoid of real informational or cinematic value. There are, of course, anecdotes of biographical interest. We learn from actress Jane Withers (a less remembered peer of Shirley Temple's), for instance, that James Dean had a penchant for a favorite shirt (pink) strong enough to keep it from the laundry for many consecutive days at a time, and producer/director Stanley Kramer's anecdote about Dean's confession of utter pretense in adopting his famously tough attitude as a bit of public self-promotion while having coffee with Mrs. Kramer in a Hollywood drugstore reveals a much softer private self than it could ever be inferred from his mythological character. There is also a touching account of a nearly fatal disfiguring automobile accident that thwarted the promising comeback prospects of actress Paula Raymond (and how many hapless others), and an episode or two of some casting-couch dynamics (more cultural mythology) for both her and Jane Greer (Greer's with Howard Hughes). Then there is Fred Zinnemann's profile (alas again, at the very end of the volume)—a refreshingly substantive and intelligent assessment of cinematic cultural values (probably the volume's only one) offered with an ingratiating modesty that gives the lie to every stereotype of egotistic directors. (Some anti-mythology, here.) Finally, it is worth recognizing the incredibly comprehensive footnotes provided at every subject's mention of any Hollywood figure of note. They constitute nothing less than an incidental encyclopedia of Hollywood's golden age, and, along with the comprehensive filmographies provided for each interview, they easily establish the utility of Verswijver's volume as a true reference work.
Robert Cirasa
Rcirasa@kean.edu
