Hollywood's BAD old days!
The movie mogul who needed hypnotism before sex. Cary Grant’s penchant for dressing up like a woman. And why Gore Vidal wanted to murder his own mother
CArY Grant was dressed like a woman the first time he took actress Jacqueline Park on a date. He wore a silk blouse, velvet trousers and gold lame shoes. She had previously dated ronald reagan and later became the mistress of film studio boss Jack Warner, whose fondness for her may have had something to do with her ability to hypnotise him out of his erectile dysfunction.
Whatever, she was with Warner on the night in August 1962 that the Kennedys rang. Whether it was the u.S. President, JFK, or his brother, Bobby, she doesn’t say. But they always announced themselves cryptically, as ‘ Code K’, in case anyone was listening in. On this occasion, the message was terse. ‘ This is Code K, Marilyn is dead.’
not everyone could cover Marilyn Monroe’s death, Jack Warner’s virility and Cary Grant’s effete dress sense in a single stream of recollections, but the fascination of Jean Stein’s absorbing oral history of Hollywood derives from the expert witnesses she has assembled.
A tantalisingly intimate portrait of a handful of families whose very different experiences together sum up Tinseltown to a T, her book stretches from the pioneering years to the modern day, and i s pieced together from dozens of interviews the well-connected Stein has conducted over several decades.
So we get the direct, ungilded words of Arthur Miller, Lauren Bacall, Jane Fonda, Stephen Sondheim and Warren Beatty among other household names, but also of gardeners, manservants, lawyers, even a bishop and, of course, of the bedroom hypnotist Jackie Park.
Stein teases great candour from her subjects. ‘ She was one of the most horrible people I have ever met,’ says the writer Gore Vidal of his own mother. ‘All I wanted to do was murder her and I never got round to it.’
As it happens, the mother Vidal loathed was close friends with the author’s own mother, Doris. And Vidal’s half- sister, nina Auchincloss Straight, recalls Doris Stein sporting ‘the most incredible square-cut diamond ring anybody’d ever seen. It looked like the rockefeller ice rink, open for summer parties’.
Stein’s enormously wealthy father was Jules Stein, who founded the powerful talent agency MCA, and who bought Misty Mountain, his grand house overlooking Beverly Hills, from Katharine Hepburn.
It was later bought — lock, stock and even family photographs — by a very modern media baron, rupert Murdoch.
That seems to be how it works in Hollywood circles: famous people buy the homes of other famous people and bask in their reflected glory.
When the music mogul David Geffen paid $47 million for Jack Warner’s house, he told Warner’s daughter, Barbara: ‘I don’t want to negotiate with you about anything. I want every- thing. Everything. Everything that’s in the house is mine.’
But he laid claim to it even before i t was his. When he showed his friend Steven Spielberg around, Spielberg saw an original leather-bound script of rebel Without A Cause and wondered if he could touch it. ‘David asked if he could give it to Spielberg,’ Barbara recalls. ‘He hadn’t bought the house yet, but he took me so much by surprise that I replied “Of course, go ahead.” They were like children in a candy store.’
Not many people emerge likeably from this book, least of all Barbara’s father who, despite his enormous power, never got over his bitterness at being the youngest of the famous Warner brothers.
Arthur Miller tells Stein: ‘The mixture of vanity and gross vulgarity in that man Jack Warner was something to behold. He really had the world in his hands, you could feel it.’
But his mistress Jackie Park found his soft side. ‘He always wanted to be a singer,’ she recalls, ‘and one time we were sitting in a restaurant and Stanley Holloway, from My Fair Lady, walked in and Jack started singing Get Me To The Church On Time.
‘He was singing louder and louder, and finally Stanley came over and said: “Jack, you will never make it.” Sometimes his soul would come out, but that wasn’t very often.’
Another mogul remembered is David O. Selznick, the producer of Gone With The Wind, although it is his serially unfaithful wife, the actress Jennifer Jones, in whom Stein is more interested.
‘We were all crazy about Jennifer, but we saw the flaws,’ recalls Lauren Bacall. ‘We always thought she was a little nutty.’
The actress Brooke Hayward describes the Selznicks’ extraordinarily lavish dinner parties, at which ‘Jennifer would appear for the first time, two and a half hours after dinner had started, in the most gorgeous evening dress you’ve ever seen.
‘She would walk the length of the room, go to every table, shake hands and kiss everybody, and then disappear. She would come back in a second dress and then disappear again. She never sat down.
‘We’d have coffee in the living room and she would appear in a third dress. She never wore fewer than three dresses in one evening.’
THeRe are many s uch descriptions of classic Hollywood extravagance, including one from Jane Fonda, remembering an epic 4th of July beach party she and her husband Roger Vadim threw in the Sixties. She wasn’t sure what music to provide so on the recommendation of her brother Peter she hired a band he liked called The Byrds...
But more than anything else, this book reveals Hollywood to be full of people who behaved like medieval potentates, doing whatever they liked, from Jack Warner to Jennifer Jones, even to Larry Hagman.
Marin Hopper, the daughter of Brooke Hayward and Dennis Hopper, recalls that Hagman, later to become famous as J.R. ewing in the TV series Dallas, took a weekly vow of silence.
‘I always saw him in a kaftan with a hood, and he’d be marching up and down the beach with a big flag and then other people following him in a procession. I think this was something he would do every Sunday.’
It is an image almost as arresting as that of John Gilbert, the star of silent movies whose career was shattered when talkies came along, because he had a high-pitched voice.
He and Greta Garbo used to live in the house l ater owned by the Selznicks, whose long- serving gardener had been there in Gilbert’s day and recalled him routinely standing naked at the window, overlooking Hollywood, with his arms out like a crucifix, screaming ‘ Hollywood, you have crucified me!’
And in a way, Hollywood did.