The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Staying at home, Hollywood style
Sid Avery’s photos of off-duty film stars are no closer to reality than the fictions they performed on screen, says Lucy Davies
In the age of Zoom, our private spaces have been thrown open to public scrutiny. But if “curating” the backdrop for your next video call feels onerous (so much could be inferred from that tea towel!), spare a thought for the
Hollywood stars of the 1950s and 1960s, who were regularly required to be photographed “at home” or “at play”, to convince the public that they were Just
Like Us. Previously, studio chiefs had favoured publicity shots that preserved a sheen of grace and mystery, but by the mid-1940s a more candid style had come into vogue, one that emphasised their human side.
The pictures seen here (and on this week’s Review cover) were taken by Sid Avery (1918-2002), a photographer who captured the idea of the relatable actor perhaps better than anyone else. Here is Steve McQueen eating breakfast cereal, Marlon Brando taking out the bins, and Bogart and Bacall reading comics with their son.
From 1946 until 1961, when he moved into advertising, Avery shot about 350,000 of these “candid” photographs for popular magazines such as Look, Saturday Evening Post and Silver Screen. Today, some of them belong to American museums (including the Metropolitan in New York and Washington DC’s Smithsonian), but many others, never published at the time, form the basis of a new book in which they feature alongside some of the stories the photographer told his son, Ron.
Avery, who favoured a sharp suit and expensive Italian shoes, had a reputation for getting the pictures no one else could. But the “normality” he propagated was life in its most idealised, romanticised form. The stories he photographed – which we might better call “stunts”, so often were they entirely fabricated – were frequently cooked up by the studio’s “fixer”, whose dubious role it was to disguise colourful private lives and maintain the kinds of family-friendly mythologies that characterised the Eisenhower era.
Sometimes the location for these shoots was indeed the actor’s real house, but, just as often, it was borrowed for the afternoon. Stand-in wives were supplied as required, and a great deal of money changed hands in the process. The wholesome fictions that resulted probably fooled nobody, but they pleased everyone.
The family-friendly stories Avery shot were often cooked up by the studio’s fixer
Sid Avery: The Art of the Hollywood Snapshot (reelartpress.com)
I’m not saying the ongoing corona-crisis has shrunk my frame of reference, but when I was thinking about having a threesome the other day, the only person I could imagine having it with was Dominic Raab. And you need three.
I do actually think Dominic Raab would be a good person to have a threesome with, assuming your primary relationship is a happy one. (Albeit a happy one in which you’ve found room for a threesome.) He’s handsome and bland. You’d want bland. Idiosyncrasy is too dangerous, too memorable. Someone like Michael Portillo, for example, could be a real threat to a marriage.
Raab is a safer bet, more likely to provide a pleasant and forgettable experience, like having pizza delivered. (Margherita pizza. Not the blend of piquant spice and fiery sausage one might associate with, for example, Michael Portillo.)
To be clear, I’m not planning to have a threesome. It would play havoc with the social distancing. I understand the new rule is “follow your instincts”, but there’s no way I could pass off a threesome as emergency childcare. Not after last time.
Besides, it isn’t necessary; for now, it’s erotic enough to imagine a stranger coming close enough to give me a haircut. I can indulge my taste for the illicit by arranging to meet two friends in a park, there’s really no need to hump them when I get there. These are just ideas I’m throwing around. Having married someone who would never agree to such jiggery-pokery, I’m free to speculate without any risk of being put to the test. It’s like googling house prices in Italy.
As you’ve probably guessed by now, I’ve been watching Normal People. Have you seen it? Do you know the series I mean? Monday nights on BBC One, 12 episodes, about Marianne and Connell? If you’re not familiar with the show, it’s best summed up by an unnamed media source who observed to me: “It divides between the episodes where they’re doing it by the end, and the episodes where they start off doing it and then something goes wrong.” (Although I think they don’t do it at all in episode seven. Maybe they had cystitis.)
As I’ve written here before, in relation to the Sky series Catherine The Great, I’m not terribly comfortable with actors in TV dramas having to show their breasts and buttocks, or their “Upstairs Downstairs” as I call them. I’m fine with full-on pornography but embarrassed by the pretence of it on proper television. When I first read about Normal People, in a magazine article salivating over “full nude scenes from Connell, a highly sexed studmuffin”, I thought: “The only muffins I want to see on TV are Mary Berry’s.”
Wait, that sounds wrong. You know what I mean. I feel so embarrassed for mainstream actors when they have to get naked and frot about, it spoils many an otherwise enjoyable series. Even Gogglebox, on Channel 4 last night, was interrupted by several moments of frantic masturbation. What can I tell you? I was bored and it passed the time.
But, to the enormous credit of Paul Mescal and Daisy Edgar-Jones, the leading actors in Normal
People, their performances are so good that they almost make the sex scenes bearable. They’re so touchingly truthful, so delicately clumsy, with so much nuance and hinterland, that they absolutely become the characters they play. In and out of bed, they are so convincing that it’s the closest I’ve ever got to suspending disbelief while someone’s balls were out.
I don’t mean that to damn them with faint praise: these are phenomenal acting performances. They are going to win a lot of awards.
The series isn’t flawless. The ending (broadcast terrestrially in two days’ time, though all episodes are on iPlayer) does not work for me; in fact, like a limoncello after a tasty Italian meal, it rather undermines what went before. And the pace is a bit slow; Our Friends in the North managed to tell a similar love story, spanning 30 more years, in fewer episodes, while also fully depicting several other lives and the entire development of 20th-century British political history.
But that’s not a fair comparison because Our Friends in the North is the greatest TV series ever made. If you’ve never seen it, I envy you: it’s available on DVD and you should buy a DVD player as well, if that’s what it takes.
In many other respects, the massive hype around Normal People is justified – particularly in terms of performance, which is why so many viewers have been plunged into nostalgia about their own salad days. It has sparked many reminiscences, publicly and privately, about teenage love.
Less talked about, because it is literally less sexy, is the series’ fine depiction of friendship. A certain sort of teenage friendship anyway. Marianne has no friends. Connell has many. But both feel completely alone.
That took me back too, because I was a bit of a Jeremy Hunt when I was young. That’s not slang, I mean it literally. Former health secretary Jeremy Hunt explained in a recent interview that he had been “nerdy” as a student, compared to “more trendy” Boris Johnson and “ubercool” David Cameron. I mean, QED: I’m sure David Cameron’s a perfectly nice man but God help you if he’s the coolest person you can think of.
Clearly, as with me and threesomes, there is nobody in Jeremy Hunt’s mind but Government ministers. This lockdown has gone on too long.
I was a bit of a Jeremy Hunt when I was young. That’s not slang, I mean it literally