Hooray for Hollywood? Volume 3

Back by popular demand (not!), we revisit this tome which is filled with quotes from famous performers and craftsmen who spent time in Tinseltown. Things have reached a frenzied pace here in The Underworld and posts of this sort allow me to put something apropos out there while I attempt to regroup. We'll be back asap with more classic show biz fun and frolic!

"I felt that Hollywood was wonderful, and I couldn't in any way complain because I had a wonderful time, and people seemed to like me, and I hope we made some good pictures. But I just wanted to do something more realistic, and when I saw Open City (1945) I realized somewhere in the world they did a different kind of picture, and I left." - Ingrid Bergman, 1980. (Bergman's fateful decision to make Stromboli, 1950, in Italy with Roberto Rossellini led to their affair, marriage, three children and nearly global ostracism for several years!)

"Hollywood was an experience I wouldn't have missed. In those days, just after the war, "Glamour" was the magic word. Everything had to be geared to what the producers thought the public imagined was the perfect romantic male, or ideal woman of perfection. If one of your eyebrows didn't match the other it had to be made identical. If your mouth was crooked, that had to be made straight. If you had no bust, they gave you one. Rotten teeth-they whipped them out." - Ann Todd, 1980. (Todd wed famed director David Lean not long after Alfred Hitchcock's The Paradine Case, 1947, and appeared in three of his less-famous movies.)

"Hollywood is very much like a streetcar. Once a new star us made and comes aboard, an old one is edged out of the rear exit. There's room for only so many and no more." - Cary Grant, 1983. (Mr. Grant was one of those rare older stars who remained in demand long after he exited the biz in 1966, but he resisted all offers, preferring that filmgoers remembered him the way he was in his prime.)

"What do I dislike most? Hollywood! For years I bummed around trying to get a job. It was the same old story. My voice was too soft; my teeth needed capping; I squinted too much. I was too tall. And I know that if I walked into a casting office right now and no one knew I was Clint Eastwood, I would get the same old treatment. Everything they said was wrong is still here." - Clint Eastwood, 1983. (Eastwood, who emerged as an important director along with his acting career, soared to real fame when he made a trio of Italian westerns which became international smashes.)

"I still find things to get angry about. Sometimes, I think I'm back in 1940s Hollywood and the studio system still prevails. And so as soon as I finish working, I take off. Let them try and find me." - Debra Winger, 1983. (Following a period of hits like Urban Cowboy, 1980, An Officer and a Gentleman, 1982, and Terms of Endearment, 1983, among others, Winger really did take off, meaning she left acting from about 1995 to 2001. And she kept a low profile, too, for much of the time. A documentary was even released in 2002 called Searching for Debra Winger, regarding the pressures actresses face in an esoteric business. Winger was pretty active again on TV from 2017 to 2021.) 

"In Hollywood, actors learn to act from watching television. In New York, people learn to act by walking down the street." - Sidney Lumet, 1980s. (Having been Oscar-nominated for directing 12 Angry Men, 1957, Dog Day Afternoon, 1975, Network, 1976, and The Verdict, 1982, as well as for co-writing Prince of the City, 1981, Lumet received an honorary statuette in 2005 for his body of work.)

"I made many films with Joan Crawford... One day, Clarence Brown, the director, asked me to do a test of Crawford. I did and they liked it, so I began our association by photographing her in Chained (1934) - which costarred Clark Gable, who was a fantastic human being with this great animal quality that exploded off the screen. The key to how to photograph Joan came while they were rehearsing a boat scene with her for Chained. Inadvertently, a light high up in the rafters came down and had lit her face. She looked gorgeous. I said that's how we're going to shoot her. When she saw the film she fell down - she hadn't looked that good in years. We used that philosophy of lighting from then on in all our films together throughout the 1930s." - cinematographer George J. Folsey, 1984 (Mr. Folsey was an amazing artist, nominated 13 times for the Oscar, but never winning.)

"Hollywood is the loneliest place I have ever lived in. Never in my life have I been so lonely nor stayed home so much. When I first came, I did not think I could stand it-I would not have stood it if I had not had my work." - Marlene Dietrich, 1930s. (Los Angeles was likely quite a contrast from the very compact and crowded Berlin, though I suspect she eventually found ways to pass the time - in the company of others!)

"Into the community that lives and thinks film pictures I arrived, prepared to work very hard to succeed. I liked Hollywood. I like breathing space. I like green things growing around me. There isn't the feeling here of millions of people huddled together." - Ronald Coleman, 1935. (In contrast to Ms. Dietrich, Coleman seemed to relish the contrast from a bustling city atmosphere to the more laid back surroundings of California.)

"In Hollywood, everyone's home seems to be a sort of personal wish-fulfillment. The buildings are made in the Spanish manner, the New England or English farmhouse style, the Tudor colonial or in what Charles (Laughton) and I call Late Marzipan. Naturally, there are lovely houses, but on the whole the designs are not in harmony with each other. Only a few people seem to have taken a peep at the blue sky and decided how life should be lived underneath it. One feels it is all rather like a film set, or perhaps made of icing sugar." - Elsa Lanchester, 1938. (Apart from her famous role in The Bride of Frankenstein, 1935, Lanchester is likely familiar for a series of dotty middle-aged ladies, but in her youth she was an unconventional dancer and even a nude figure model.)

"Hollywood has everything that God has to offer. Beautiful surroundings and a beautiful climate. In Hollywood there are are no daily obstacles such as people everywhere else in the world have - the obstacles of bad weather, difficult transportation to work, sharp changes of season. Hollywood also permits you to live too comfortably. With the result that in Hollywood one vegetates." - George Sanders, 1947. (The urbane Sanders seemed to possess a low threshold for boredom. Having mastered the occupation of acting and married four times - two of them Gabor sisters! - he fulfilled a vow he'd made many years prior and committed suicide via pills at age 65.)

"There are too many pastel people - pastel characters - in Hollywood. They don't know how to portray a character because they don't know people. Some of them are just busy little people studying their lines. If they learned more about life, about people, about psychology, about acting and timing, their characterizations would be more believable. Pastel people can ruin a picture." - Robert Mitchum, 1947. (More often, Mitchum preferred to downplay any particular skillfulness or method in his acting, though he was pretty great at it.)

"Hollywood is the only community in the world where the entire population is suffering from rumortism." - Bert Lahr, quoted in a 1969 book by his son. (Mr. Lahr, legendary for his portrayal of the Lion in The Wizard of Oz, 1939, was a popular fixture on Broadway and worked on quite a few movies as well. He died during his last film, The Night They Raided Minsky's, 1968, but with the aid of some editing, a body double and a vocal dub, the greater part of his performance was able to be salvaged.)

"I can't play the games that go on in Hollywood. Who cares if my pearls are only seven millimeters when everyone else is flashing eleven millimeters? Who cares about dating the most men, or getting the best table in the restuarants? I don't fit in at all." - Janet Blair, 1972. (This quote was made to TV Guide while she was filming the short-lived TV series The Smith Family, as Henry Fonda's wife. She'd risen to fame in the 1940s with movies such as My Sister Eileen, 1942, and Tonight and Every Night, 1945. She retired after a 1991 appearance on Murder, She Wrote, passing away in 2007 at age 85 of pneumonia.)

"Hollywood: it only ran on one track, and that track was the motion picture. Any and everyone was obsessed with movies. All you ever heard wherever you went were words such as grosses, below-the-line, above-the-line, percentages, negative costs, reruns, spin-offs and scarcely a word to indicate anything at all was happening in the real world other than the making of movies." - Sophia Loren, 1979. (This was the year her autobiography was published and she made the rounds to promote it. Now 88, she still performs occasionally.)

Hooray for Hollywood? Volume 2

We're back with another selection of remarks from our recently-procured book "Hollywood on Hollywood." Rather than put the book's cover on another post, I've opted to use Miss Deborah Kerr and one of her apt quotes on Tinseltown. And there are some more selections to follow! 

"The name Hollywood is, to this day, a misnomer-one very small section of an enormous area where many people work in the movie business, but hardly any people who work in that business actually live in Hollywood, as such." -- Deborah Kerr, 1977. (And still true today...!)

"I have thought, since my tours, that we in Hollywood run a great danger of becoming too insular. I know I was near it when I left. Hollywood is such a tight unit in the American scene that a Hollywoodite's map of the world is apt to show one large eastern seaboard area labeled 'New York,' and one west coast section labeled 'Hollywood.' There are a few pin dots scattered over the map reading, 'Sun Valley,' 'Palm Springs,' 'Miami Beach,' 'Bermuda.' The space between is arid waste. There are no dots reading 'Cincinnati,' 'Sioux City,' 'Augusta,' 'Spokane.'" -- Jeanette MacDonald, 1947. (Wow... Very perceptive and prescient. And decades later people on the coasts were still referring to the "flyover country" in-between.)

"I brought Ruth Warrick out to play Mrs. [Citizen] Kane because the part called for a lady. I have not been able to find a lady in Hollywood." -- Orson Welles, 1947. (He certainly did his fair share of looking...!)

The aforementioned Ruth Warrick in Citizen Kane (1941)

"Hollywood is not an easy place for two people to work. When you leave your house, you're both sleepy, since it's the crack of dawn. When you come home, you're exhausted. All you want is an Old-Fashioned and some peace and quiet. The two of you, as a result, are so full of your own problems that you can't help each other at the time when you most should." -- Cornel Wilde, the 1940s. (Wilde was, at the time wed to actress and sometimes costar Patricia Knight - from 1937-1951. Just after their divorce, he wed Jean Wallace in a union that lasted 30 years and many joint projects, but that, too, wound up in divorce.)

"People outside Hollywood don't understand how it is here. It's a battle to maintain a basic integrity; a scrap against bull and baloney. You've got to fight all the time." -- Burt Lancaster, 1949. (Lancaster was already forming a production company in order to maintain more control of his projects and it eventually emerged as Hecht-Hill-Lancaster, a success venture that put forth several notable movies.)

"There's more pressure on you in Hollywood than in New York. On Broadway, you do your performance every night and that's it. Here you have to get up at five in the morning - which is tough on me - in order to get ready in time at the studio. Then you have to rehearse, do your scenes, and you get home late where you have a relaxing dinner and start studying till bedtime. There's no let-up. There's also so much fussing about costumes and makeup and hair all day on the set. That's plausible, I guess, since the camera is on you - if you're lucky enough to get a close-up. One the stage your audience is at least twenty-five feet away." -- Vera-Ellen, 1949. (Vera-Ellen, a spectacular dancer, receded from view in the late-'50s when her sort of musicals were on the wane and a variety of ailments began to affect her physicality. The sudden death of her only child - of SIDS - in 1963 cemented her retirement from public view.)

"Young love deserves a better break on the screen. The over-age stars get all the clinches, while the young actors in Hollywood today - if they're lucky - get the meaningless kiss or two." -- John Derek, 1951. (Derek more than made up for any slights when he presented film after film featuring wife after wife in anything from semi-nudity to outright nakedness on screen! Inset features his costar Jody Lawrance.)

"In Hollywood you do nothing for yourself. You don't even apply your own make-up. You are awakened, taken to the studio, made up. You play your roles in snips and driblets, harassed by delays, interruptions and stupidities. Over the proceedings hangs a pall of indecision, the fear of the studio swami that the work may in some fashion upset a coal miner in West Virginia, a lama in Tibet. Timidity was the screen's curse. It still is. - Tallulah Bankhead, 1952. (From one of the least timid souls on earth...! This did change in the 1960s and '70s, but it's since pendulumed back to focus groups, committees, "correctness," et al, with a few exceptions.)

"Hollywood is full of these watching, waiting helpers, who look for pretty girls in distress. Mostly what they want is to help take your clothes off in their apartments. Many of them do have valuable connections, and will use them-but the asking price is rather high." -- Mamie Van Doren - 1964. (This quote was from her auto-bio "My Naughty, Naughty Life" [likely a play on Errol Flynn's "My Wicked, Wicked Ways."] She would later pen an even more frank book, "Playing the Field.")

"When I first arrived in Hollywood, they told me to get a new name, so I thought back to the best times I had as a kid playing on the tidal land [in Wales]. There was a tannery and old mills. It was really mill land. So I called myself Jack Milland but they said, 'In Hollywood, only dogs are called Jack,' so I looked down a list and picked the shortest name I could find - Ray." -- Ray Milland, 1972. (Milland was born Alfred Jones, January 3rd 1907, in Neath, Glamoran, Wales. Regardless of his desire for "Ray" he was nonetheless billed early on as "Raymond!")

"They treat you so great in Hollywood, make you feel important even if you really aren't. The technician there, you could have them in your home. They're bright they're alert, they're intelligent, they're trying to help you." -- Paul Lynde, 1973. (I wonder if ol' Paul ever had a Key Grip or a Best Boy over for tea and cookies? Ha ha!)

"There's a dismal swamp out there in Hollywood where the money goes and it's never accounted for. I had 5% of Patton (1970), which cost $10 million to make and grossed $40 million, and I've never made a dime." -- George C. Scott, 1974. (Movie accountants have long been noted by many people for their "creativity" with the numbers...!)

"There I was on the screen, a pancaked, lacquered Hollywood purse made out of a Cincinnati sow's ear." -- Doris Day, 1975. (I'm drawn to quotes that include Cincinnati, as that's where I reside. Day was raised not far from my area and the aforementioned Vera-Ellen just blocks from my house! By the way, popular as she was, I think she really blossomed most when they allowed her more natural - often comedic - attributes to come more to light than all the "lacquer.")

"In Hollywood they like you until you're standing on a pedestal and they hand you an Oscar. Then they say, 'How did he get up there? Let's knock him down.'" -- Yul Brynner, 1975. (True as this may be, Yul had it better than many others... And it doesn't seem to have applied to people like Tom Hanks or Meryl Streep, to name more recent recipients.)

"Certainly, there are good marriages in Hollywood, but to imagine that people who are beautiful, and glorified by the camera and publicity, wardrobe and make-up departments and who are thrown together in close proximity day after day; to imagine they don't get involved with each other, especially when the emotional requirements of their scenes are that they be in love with each other- I mean it's not human to believe they don't!" -- Shelley Winters, 1980. (Shelley did know of what she spoke...!)

"I've always enjoyed working in Hollywood. They are so efficient. And it's so exhilarating." -- Vivien Leigh, 1964. "I loathe Hollywood, and for no other part [Scarlett O'Hara] would I have dreamed of signing a contract. All their standards are financial ones. The more I see of Hollywood, the less possible it becomes." -- Vivien Leigh, quoted posthumously in the 1969 book "Vivien Leigh: A Bouquet." (So who knows what to believe....?!)

Hooray for Hollywood? - Volume One

During my never-ending excavations of used book stores, flea markets and antique shows, I am always looking for something that catches my eye regarding my affinity for classic movies and stars. I recently parted with $3.00 so that I could bring home the book seen here, "Hollywood on Hollywood," a collection of remarks on Tinseltown made by the stars who worked there. Compiled by Doug(las) McClelland, who penned many a biography of famous performers, it is full of a variety of quotes that I will periodically share with my readers. Naturally, I've also unearthed photos to go with! So here come the first 15.

"I have been in show business for twelve years. They have known me in Hollywood but two. Yet as picture-making goes, two years is a long time. Nevertheless, my advice has never been asked about a part in a picture. I found out I was going into Susan Lenox (1931) in Del Monte. Read it in the paper. When I walked on the set one day, they told me I was going to play Red Dust (1932) in place of John Gilbert. I have never been consulted as to what part I would like to play. I am paid not to think." -- Clark Gable, 1932. (This is the first time I had ever heard that John Gilbert had ever even been considered for Red Dust...! More vintage pics and info on Gable here.)

"Hollywood was capable of hurting me so much. The things about Hollywood that could hurt me (when I first came) can't touch me now. I suddenly decided that they shouldn't hurt me-that was all." -- Joan Crawford, Photoplay, 1930s. (This reminds me of JC's approach to eating, too. She would always leave the food that tasted the best on the plate, presumably things like rich potatoes or desserts, in an effort to keep her figure.)

"To survive in Hollywood, you need the ambition of a Latin American revolutionary, the ego of a grand opera tenor and the physical stamina of a cow pony." -- Billie Burke, 1940s. (Best known as Glinda in The Wizard of Oz (1939) and for playing a variety of dithering society types, it sounds like Miss Burke was made of strong stuff underneath that exterior.)

"Hollywood is a chain gang and we lose the will to escape; the links of our chains are forged not of cruelties, but of luxuries: we are pelted with orchids and roses; we are overpaid and underworked." -- Clive Brook, 1933. (I enjoyed this description of the lure of Tinseltown for those brought to it from afar.)

"Hollywood has come a long way since its infancy, when signs on for-rent apartments warned, 'No Dogs or Actors!' We didn't even have the doubtful distinction of first billing!" -- Gloria Swanson, 1949. (Do check out Glo's fur-lined cloak with matching hat and those platform shoes!)

"Back in the forties everybody went to the movies. There were houses open twenty-four hours a day where the seats never cooled. Soldiers, war workers on the swing shift, housewives, school children, couples on a date, pensioners-they all packed in to see the dreams Hollywood printed on celluloid, preferably in gorgeous Technicolor." -- Keenan Wynn, 1959. (Certain parts of Wynn's life could be made into a fascinating movie, too!)

"(In 1930s) Hollywood there was an exclusive clique, and no matter how big a name you were on Broadway, until you made it in the movies you didn't exist. I was just another Broadway star and didn't rate." -- Ethel Merman, 1978. (Regardless of her ability, I don't think that Merm had quite the right face & figure to make it as a leading lady in 1930s Hollywood. But I did enjoy her in the Eddie Cantor musical comedies she made nonetheless.)

"People tell you that the reason a lot of actors left Hollywood when sound came in was that their voices were wrong for talkies. The truth is that the coming of sound meant the end of all-night parties. With talkies, you couldn't stay out till sunrise anymore. You had to rush back from the studios and start learning your lines, ready for the next day's shooting at 8 am. That was when the studio machine really took over. It controlled you, mind and body, from the moment you were yanked out of bed at dawn until the publicity department put you back to bed at night." -- Louise Brooks, 1979. (This is an interesting alternative theory about the shift in personas during the transition to sound, though I doubt it's completely accurate. I LOVE the earrings she's wearing here!)

"Yes, there was racism in Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s. I dealt with it as I deal with it in my own race; I ignore it and concentrate on non-racism. I have no regrets about my years in Hollywood. I loved the weather there." -- Butterfly McQueen, 1984. (Trivia Tidbit: Miss McQueen was part of the the first incarnation of The Wiz, but her role was cut during out of town tryouts. She remained onboard as understudy to the role of Addaperle, Good With of the North.)

"I'm not a little girl from a little town makin' good in a big town. I'm a big girl from a big town makin' good in a little town." -- Mae West, 1932. (By 1935, only one person in the U.S. was pulling in more dough than Mae West. It was the obscenely-wealthy William Randolph Hearst, which really ought to tell you something about her income...!)

"We can't afford to be timid. We can't stand back and be pushed off the rungs of the ladder we have already climbed. Once you let Hollywood push you around, you might as well give up. You are beaten. Your prestige as an artist is gone, your importance and value as a personality somehow damaged. This business is not famous for its second chances. Once you arrive at the top, you've got to fight every moment to stay there. Which is why I never have and never will allow Hollywood to kick me around." -- Merle Oberon, the 1930s. (Few showbiz existences have been as captivating to learn about as Oberon's. She was a woman of many mysteries and contradictions and did try to remain a top-billed star almost to the end - even if the movies were a far cry from the ones of her hey-day.)

"I laugh every time I think of the first interview I had here in Hollywood. The article about me said I had ben a landscape engineer and a specialist with mixed-drinks. That's Hollywood! My landscape engineering amounted to digging ditches for the WPA [Works Progress Administration.] My specializing in mixed-drinks amounted to swabbing beer-puddled bars and, later, mixing drinks." -- George Montgomery, 1941. (I tended to like Montgomery, who you can read much more about here, but never found out why Maureen O'Hara claimed in her autobiography to have "loathed him.")

"Why be beautiful in Hollywood, for the love of Pete? With every car-hop in town a sensational looker, Hollywood is strictly a bull market when it comes to beauty. So if you're asking Walker, she's telling you that she'll struggle along with what she's got for the next fifty years or so. It's done all right for Walker so far. -- Nancy Walker, 1944. (Walker was eerily accurate in her prediction...! She died in 1992, close to fifty years after this remark, and was still working. More about her life and career here.)

"Hollywood personalities are really partly applesauce. We deceive the public, and get paid for it. I get paid pretty well so I deceive the public good." -- Gary Cooper, 1946. (Cooper was an actor who often got more mileage out of a part by saying as little as possible - hence his reputation for often saying "yep" and "nope" on screen! But he was granted two acting Oscars along with an honorary one, so it worked out all right...!)

"If you and your husband both work (in Hollywood) you hardly have time to say hello. You just wave in passing. Actually, I have driven home after working all night to see Desi (Arnaz) passing in a car going to work. 'That face is familiar,' I say. 'Oh yes, my husband I haven't seen for days' and I wave. In Hollywood, too-young people see too much, do too much, go too much. They see others getting divorces and they think nothing of trying it. In a small town they are restrained by example and opinion." -- Lucille Ball, 1947. (No doubt this situation was part of why she insisted that he play her husband when the radio favorite "My Favorite Husband" - with Richard Denning - moved to TV as I Love Lucy. Unfortunately, even that plan couldn't save the marriage in the end.)

That's all folks, till next time!