Wagner on Hollywood’s golden age
Actor’s latest book describes life in movies before camera phones
Had there been IMDb tracking in Hollywood’s golden days, digits of separation would today be known as Six Degrees of Robert Wagner.
With more than six decades in and around film and television, actor and producer Wagner is the original Kevin Bacon. His family moved to Los Angeles from Detroit in 1937, when he was seven years old. And as a teen, even before breaking into movies he caddied at the star-studded local golf course.
From Titanic to Austin Powers, he’s been there, done (and dated) that and seen it all — from the inside.
Wagner’s new book, You Must Remember This, is not an autobiography, however (he wrote one of those in 2008), it’s more of a memoir of the Hollywood community’s social and cultural era, complete with a famous cast of characters and vanished landmarks. It’s also somewhat melancholy, wistful for the more carefree mood of the 1940s and 1950s.
The “this” of the title include the pecking order (and shenanigans) of the bungalows of the Beverly Hills Hotel, the design of the Bel-Air, the Buddhas at Jack Warner’s grandiose estate and the colour of the furniture at Frank Sinatra’s place (orange).
“I remembered it all because it was so impressive to me at the time and I was very fortunate that I was in that inner circle, that I was invited into those homes,” Wagner recalls on the phone from New York, on the eve of the book launch hosted by gossiper and friend Liz Smith.
The voice on the line is the familiar, charming warm caramel that’s mostly recognized these days as that of Anthony DiNozzo, Sr. on NCIS. Before travelling back in time to his early days under contract to Fox, Wagner sets his opening scene at the last great gathering of Old Hollywood: the 2002 wedding of Liza Minnelli and David Gest.
“I was sitting there and thinking of how amazing it was,” he chuckles. “It’s like a Fellini movie.”
The VIP nuptials, like the index, is a who’s who, many of whom are now gone — like friend Elizabeth Taylor and mentors Fred Astaire and Harold Lloyd (Wagner dated Lloyd’s daughter Gloria). The chapters include details about the 1920s real estate boom, architecture and decor seen by Wagner, who was often inside the homes of studio bosses and directors and at the parties at actors’ getaway ranches.
Then one day, Wagner says, “I looked around and it was gone. I mean, it was g-o-n-e. There’s just very few things left.”
The impetus for Wagner, now 84, to set it all down is the many “young people” who ask him what it was like back then, and to do it “before the colours fade.” It’s both personal and detailed, since it’s written with Hollywood historian Scott Eyman, who has authored acclaimed biographies of Ernst Lubitsch and Louis B. Mayer.
The book covers how publicists and studio fixers like Harry Brandt exercised control, even the photo ops of aspiring actors on “dates” were carefully orchestrated by the studios.
“Everything changes, there’s no question about that, life goes on. But, my goodness, this was the advent of technology. The breakup of the studio system and what happened with the distribution system …”
L.A is about creating desire, then satisfying it, Wagner ruefully writes, and that’s a “uniquely American gift.” But he also thinks its main industry is now about shareholder value rather than passion, with endorsements and the 24-hour celebrity news cycle making the careers of actors enormously lucrative but also less about the acting, more about branding. Round-the-clock TMZ is the price, even though it’s basically the 21st-century version of the uncontrollable tabloids like Confidential that thrived as the studio system was disintegrating in the late 1950s.
Back then, even the biggest stars could do their own shopping during business hours or, as Wagner did, have a four-year affair with a star like Barbara Stanwyck without the press finding out.
“We had our own lives away from the studio. Now, everybody’s got a camera, everybody’s taking a picture. Everything is very aggressive.”
Before camera phones, it was the arrival of the Kodak Instamatic camera in 1963.
“That was the breakup — that’s when it started to dissolve,” Wagner says.
When I tried to look up old candid photographs of Wagner, it was rare to find even a casual unposed snapshot until the early 1970s — let alone the “aha! gotcha!” moments photographers now trade in — because restaurateurs like Dave Chasen forbade photographers, autograph seekers and gossip columnists from their dining rooms.
Wagner thinks technology has also altered values.
“And most damaging is the fact that the level of vitriol is off the charts,” he writes.
We get to chatting about the Oscars, and how vitriol was manifest in the nasty comments about Oscar presenter Kim Novak’s appearance.
(His observations in the book are also an allusion to recent Internet mudslinging questioning Wagner’s role in the accidental death of his wife Natalie Wood.)
Wagner hadn’t yet seen the extent of the social media-generated snark about Novak but was still horrified.
“I think it’s so brutal — they can say anything they want to say, print anything they want to print,” he says. “And in the Harry Cohn (Columbia) days, he would protect her. They had a whole department just for that. They put out pictures that were right, interviews that were right — she sat in the right light. We all did! It was family.”
I suggest that the tight-knit groups on long-running television series — like Wagner’s own It Takes a Thief or later Hart to Hart — might be the ad hoc communities that replaced the original studio system and its cosy backlot.
“I just shot on one—NCIS!” he agrees.
“There is very much a community, very much so, on that show. It’s the best company I ever worked for. They all care for each other and for each other’s work and the show.
“And they’re all together as one unit, and I think it’s one of the reasons it’s been so successful.”