What the Stars Are Really Like

By Frank Trippett

As soon as the film industry invented movie stars, the public caught a case of chronic curiosity about their off-screen lives. Americans idolized the images of actors but still never stopped asking: What are they really like? For years, Hollywood exploited the public curiosity while making no honest effort to answer that basic question; it was left to fan magazines to contrive tales that supposedly revealed what the top players were in private life. But no more. Lately, the outpouring of tell-all and tell-a-lot books by and about filmdom's ranking personalities has grown into a torrent.

Indeed, Hollywood may be bent on disclosing more than anybody could possibly absorb about the stars--or, for that matter, care to know. Gary Grant, Bette Davis, Laurence Olivier, Richard Burton and (in separate covers) Elizabeth Taylor are merely the foremost subjects of the latest crop of biographies, autobiographies and memoirs. Dozens of these volumes have been gushing off the presses, and sometimes the trend seems to be toward not just revelation but multiple exposure: Joan Crawford and Errol Flynn have been dealt with in a couple of books each, and three biographies of Gary Cooper issued forth almost simultaneously.

For all this deluge, movie-star biography has not yet earned literary respectability. Even with the best of intentions, the subjects doubtlessly yield from time to time to the theatrical temptation of make-believe. Yet the accumulated mountain of star lore certainly tells more than enough about what Hollywood stars are actually like. The Secret Life of Tyrone Power depicts that virile swashbuckler as bisexual. In The Untold Story, Charles Higham tries to make a case that Errol Flynn was also sexually ambivalent--and argues, not quite convincingly, that Flynn was a Nazi agent of some sort. In This Life, Sidney Poitier confesses to catching an adolescent case of gonorrhea, and in Please Don't Shoot My Dog, Jackie Cooper claims to have been the teen-age lover of Joan Crawford. Some of this brings back memories of Hedy Lamarr's 1966 autobiography, Ecstasy and Me: My Life As a Woman, which wound up telling so much that the "author" denounced it as "obscene, shocking, scandalous, naughty, wanton, fleshy, sensual, lecherous, lustful and scarlet."

But nowadays stars are more typically pleased that they can reveal so much about themselves. "Here I am, warts and all," Henry Fonda exults on the jacket of Fonda, Howard Teichmann's new as-told-to book. And Fonda's spirit merely mimics that of other such recent candor-struck memoirists as Shelley Winters, Lauren Bacall, Elizabeth Ashley, Sidney Poitier, Gene Tierney, Joan Fontaine and Ingrid Bergman. There cannot be many Hollywood giants left who have not been treated in one book or another. To peruse even a few thousand pages of these literary star treks, however, is to realize that they do not bring unmitigated pleasure to the ordinary reader.

In excess, movie-star biography can dampen the spirit not because it fails to reveal, but because it succeeds all too well in revealing what film actors are really like. The truth is that the events of an actor's offstage life are usually just as banal and repetitious as the events of ordinary lives. The big difference--even if there is nothing new under the sun--is that what would be garden-variety problems for most people become much harder to handle when they happen to a star. Not only are they painted with the flamboyance of their milieu, but they tend to be leaked--or presented--to the world as though they were public situations instead of private ones. Yet, as their stories make all too clear, the stars pass through the usual torments of childhood into sequences of adult problems--familial, professional, financial, emotional--that would not seem particularly exotic in most neighborhoods. While the stars' typical romantic lives are a matter of overheated legend, the actual events of their marital and extramarital flights are as trite as Everyperson's. Even Mae West managed to sound like an average lovesick adolescent when she attested to the uniqueness of the feeling between her and one of her numerous musclemen: "... a love so complete that it embraced not only our bodies but our minds and spirits--a perfect union of the mental, physical and spiritual."

The private reality of a star is set apart not so much by the events it consists of as by the emotions that it inspires. The specialness, in the end, comes from the same thing that turns the private person into a public actor: an emotional apparatus so overactive that it can surround molehills of circumstance with mountains of drama. An unusual need for affection and applause is only the most conspicuous of the traits that impel a person toward the actor's life. Not quite so visibly, the actor type tends to have a streak of emotional gluttony on or off stage or screen. The result is an inclination to inflate the cliches of existence with more dramatic heat than ordinary people can work up. The tendency to view life as though it were play-acting often surfaces in actors' words. Writes Gene Tierney at the end of Self Portrait: "If my life had been a movie, would a director have cast Gene Tierney to play the part?" Writes Robert Stack at the end of Straight Shooting: "In some ways my life was like a movie, full of twists and turns."

Given their bent, movie stars naturally give the stories of their lives many cinematic touches. Their accounts frequently take on the tone of melodrama or soap opera. Lauren Bacall watches her new lover Humphrey Bogart go home to his wife from the set of To Have and Have Not: "When would I see him? When would he call? How could he stand to be with that woman? How could he stand not to be with me?" Young Henry Fonda looks up at the suddenly dark window of the apartment in which he believes his wife Margaret Sullavan to be consorting with Producer Jed Harris: "More nights than I care to remember I'd stand there and cry, and then wipe away my tears so that I wouldn't look like a wino on the subway riding uptown. I'd go back to that flea-bitten hotel room and I'd sit in the dark."

Just as typically fraught with inflamed sensibility are Ingrid Bergman's narration (My Story) of her long, racking breakup with Roberto Rossellini and Joan Fontaine's accounts (No Bed of Roses) of alienation from her mother and estrangement from her sister Olivia de Havilland. Writes Fontaine of the sad encounter that followed Olivia's winning of the 1946 Academy Award for Best Actress: "After Olivia delivered her acceptance speech and entered the wings, I, standing close by, went over to congratulate her ... She took one look at me, ignored my outstretched hand, clutched her Oscar to her bosom, and wheeled away ..." Heartbreak is hardly peculiar to actors, but they are surely experts in extracting drama from it. They often see things the way a scriptwriter might. Concludes Ricardo Montalban's memoir, Reflections--A Life in Two Worlds: "If we are free and open and giving, our lives will be full and fruitful... Those thoughts and a thousand others flowed through my mind as I motored westward toward the waning sun."

None of this means that movie stars in private do not leave behind their public images. Ladd: The Life, The Legend, The Legacy of Alan Ladd reveals that the actor dwelt in a hell of insecurity that was utterly incompatible with the cool, confident screen image. In Mommie Dearest, Christina Crawford establishes that her poised mother Joan occasionally became a hysterical, sadistic monster at home. Bing Crosby, the easygoing crooner of love ballads, behaved like a callous heel toward his first wife Dixie, if Bing Crosby: The Hollow Man is to be believed.

No number of biographies, of whatever credibility, should be expected to extinguish or even satisfy the popular craving to know what movie stars are really like. Public curiosity about the behind-the-scenes lives of political leaders and general celebrities may be great, but it is not unlimited. The case of film actors .is different. They remain the royalty of American celebrities, and something more. The movie star, it is clear without even a glance at the White House, has long since displaced the authentic hero in popular mythology. That hunger for knowledge of the real lives of such players is only a projection of the popular craving for movies themselves--a hunger not for true reality but only for more vicarious drama. --By Frank Trippett

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