Book Review: John Wayne: The Life and Legend

John Wayne: The Life and Legend (2014) by Scott Eyman

"When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." In the film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, this most famous of Western lines comes as the final death blow to a man's idealism. Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart), the supposed hero, realizes in an instant that his life, career, and love have been handed to him by the man he can never repay, the real man who shot Liberty Valance, Tom Doniphon (John Wayne). He can't even make the gesture of telling the truth; nobody will believe him and nobody wants to. The words are sardonic, a cold summation of the entire Western genre.

John Wayne's not even in the scene; his character is dead by the movie's end. But to anyone who knows a little about John Wayne, it's hard not to take those words as an equally accurate summation of the Duke himself. This is after all, the same man who defined onscreen masculinity for over three decades. This was Hollywood's most famous cowboy, the indomitable hero of the frontier; even as the rest of the world changed around him, Wayne remained the same. However, as Scott Eyman makes clear in his latest biography, John Wayne: The Life and Legend, for Wayne, the words "printing the legend" would not have been an insult. For him, they would have been a badge of honor.

Scott Eyman has tackled many difficult subjects before, including Cecil B. DeMille (Empire of Dreams), Louis B. Mayer (Lion of Hollywood), and John Ford (Print the Legend). In the case of John Wayne however, the challenge is not about struggling to find material or sifting through contradictory interviews. It's about trying to write a nuanced portrait of an actor who, despite his obvious intelligence, talent, and ambition, so often seemed to be deliberately trying to erase any nuance or contradiction from his life. At some point, the man and the myth blended together for all time.

Born Marion Morrison in  1907, Wayne grew up as a bright, well-liked boy in Glendale, California, the son of a cold, ambitious mother and a kind but shiftless father. Despite the anti-intellectual image he would gain later in life, Wayne was a top student, one who liked reading and schoolwork as well as athletics. As he loved to point out to people, he could say "isn't" just as well as "ain't." Although he liked to act as if the movies were something he just fell into on accident, beginning as an extra and a prop man on the Fox lot, Eyman paints the portrait of a serious, dedicated actor who was eager to learn everything he could right from the start. 

Although he got a huge push by starring in The Big Trail in 1930 (a well-publicized but expensive flop), Wayne ended up in the back-breaking, frenetic world of the old Western serials and B-movies for the rest of the decade. He wouldn't really break into the big time until John Ford chose him to star in one of the most influential Westerns of all time, 1939's Stagecoach. His appearance as the soft-spoken, tough, and honorable Ringo Kid set the basic outline for the iconic John Wayne character. Rough around the edges but a gentleman at heart. Honest and direct. Doesn't lose a fight. Never backs down. Never gives up. In his long career, Wayne would stretch this basic characterization in many different directions, giving audiences the flinty, vengeful Tom Dunson in Red River, the drunken Rooster Cogburn in True Grit, the romantic Sean Thornton in The Quiet Man, and, in the biggest gamble of all, the anti-hero Ethan Edwards in The Searchers, an enigmatic, hate-filled man who comes close to redemption and love, but can never, ever find it.

If there's one main flaw to Scott Eyman's otherwise meticulous, well-researched, and generous work on John Wayne here, it's this: he doesn't spend enough time talking about the performances. Of course, I realize that's likely my own personal bias talking here. When I read movie star biographies, it's the movies and the performances that I want to hear about. I'd much rather read about the tragic dimensions of Ethan Edwards and Wayne's approach to the role than I would his thoughts on Nixon. In fairness to Eyman, he makes it clear that he's not trying to analyze the movies themselves, but the life surrounding those movies. And in that regard, he does an excellent job.

Like his previous work on Cecil B. DeMille, Eyman is a master at reclaiming respect for artists whose divisive politics and wholehearted embrace of ideas now considered corny and out-of-date can sometimes lead modern audiences to dismiss them. The John Wayne that comes across in this book is a thoughtful, multi-talented, and hard-working actor, one who liked Noel Coward and J.R.R. Tolkein more than Zane Grey and one who took on all the burdens of idealized image with good grace. Wayne knew that he owed all his success to his audience and he believed it was his responsibility to live up to that image. 

This belief would cost him plenty. Although he played the soldier many times onscreen, Wayne never served in World War II and this failure ate at him, fueling the macho militarism he would express later in life. He was equally controlling of his onscreen behavior, turning down any role that would stray too far from his image. Because he was so adept at keeping his image intact, Wayne would often be accused of being a movie star instead of a serious actor. Someone who just kept "playing himself." Eyman has no patience for that kind of labeling and his account of Wayne is admiring but unapologetic. He doesn't shy away from the many uncomfortable things Wayne said and did in his later years, but he does try to keep them in context.

Just like John Wayne's films, Eyman's biography is at its most compelling when the Duke is desperate and driven rather than when he's comfortable and secure. The stretches detailing his long career in the poverty-row Westerns are a standout; Eyman's descriptions of the unrelenting pace and harsh conditions make them sound roughly on par with a stint in the Marines. Cast and crew worked grueling hours, subsisted on a milk-and-bread concoction called "graveyard stew," and tried to look tough standing in front of ramshackle sets so cheap that the crew would paint them no higher than the leading man's head. In one memorable anecdote, Wayne and Yakima Canutt, the great stuntman, end up being ordered to a 5 A.M. shoot at a rock quarry in the San Fernando Valley, just after coming off a midnight studio shooting the very same night. Wayne was forced to borrow a friend's car, tear home for a few hour's sleep, and then rush to the still-dark quarry. There, he found Canutt waiting in the dark, the first man on set, huddled silently next to a fire. Canutt remarked, "It doesn't take very long to spend all night out here." After that, the two men were friends for life.

For all their faults, the cheap Westerns and serials gave Wayne a great deal to carry with him. An unfailing work ethic. An appreciation for the rough-and-tumble camaraderie that could develop on the movie set. And above all, it instilled in him a deep gratitude for his later stardom and for the man who helped him reach it, John Ford. Wayne never forgot those ten, frustrating years before Stagecoach. Even though he had to bear the brunt of Ford's legendary sadism on set, to an extent that made even other Ford veterans shake their heads in wonder, his loyalty and admiration for "Pappy" never wavered. The man famous for taking no guff from anyone on or off-screen, the man who never backed down from a fight, was strangely docile when it came to Ford. By comparison, the teenage Natalie Wood had no problem telling the venerated director to "go shit in his hat" when he told her off during filming of The Searchers.

The relationship between John Ford and John Wayne is perhaps the deepest mystery to be found in Eyman's biography. By comparison, his three failed marriages (all to fierce, proud Hispanic women--the Duke had a type) are relatively uninteresting by Hollywood standards. Whenever he played romance onscreen, Wayne was the strong man out of his element. He was humbled but never fully domesticated by his own tender feelings. It made him the perfect costar for Maureen O'Hara; she was strong enough to stand her own against him, but tender enough to bring out his softer side. Eyman pays indifferent lip service to Hollywood rumor that Wayne was in love with O'Hara as well as the somewhat more credible one that he was in love with the beautiful and tragic Gail Russell (his costar in Angel and the Badman and Wake of the Red Witch). But thankfully, Eyman is uninterested in gossip and scandal. He's far more concerned with the many enduring friendships John Wayne made and the great movies that came out of them. In fact, Eyman's so thorough in uncovering each and every positive thing ever said by someone who knew John Wayne that I almost started to pine for something negative, if only to add a little spice.

However, John Wayne: The Life and Legend succeeds in its primary goal: to tell the life and legend of John Wayne. Few actors could so easily lay claim to the title "legendary" as John Wayne. And few biographers could tackle so weighty a subject with the even-handed eloquence and tactful appreciation that Eyman gives us here. For any fans of Wayne or even for people looking to find out more about him, this book makes a great start. It's long but leaves you feeling like there's so much more to discover.

"When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." True, but there's still a thousand different ways to tell that legend. I'm glad I got to read this one.

Final Six Words:

Intelligent, balanced account of Wayne's life

Note: This book was given to me as a review copy by Simon & Schuster. It is currently available for purchase at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, Indiebound, and directly from the Simon & Schuster website.

Book Review: Five Came Back

Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War (2014) by Mark Harris

I had incredibly high expectations for Mark Harris' latest book on film history. His previous work, Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood, was one of the most praised books of 2009. I have vivid memories of buying it for my mom for Christmas, thinking to myself, "It's about movies in 1967, Mom was a young woman in 1967, she'll like it." Well, it wasn't two hours after Mom unwrapped it that I ended up being the one sitting cross-legged under the tree and reading away, utterly engrossed. Eventually, I did let her read it, but then I promptly stole it back. It's now got a permanent place of honor on my bookshelf. I've also been reading Harris' Grantland articles for some time; he's one of the few film critics I've found who can dissect Oscar races without sounding like a jaded traveler on the world's longest and most boring tour bus. So when I found out that Harris was going to be tackling a new full-length subject in Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War, I marked my calendar. Expectations like that have crushed books far less modest than this one. So I'm happy to say that Five Came Back is every bit the book I hoped it would be.

Like Pictures at a Revolution, Five Came Back zeroes in on five very different subjects, weaving their histories together and giving full weight to the dreams and ambitions that drove them. But Pictures at a Revolution was the story of a competition; it was the battle between five Best Picture nominees and their radically different attempts to reach out to the audiences of 1967. Here, Harris once again goes back to the number five, giving us the tale of how five Hollywood directors walked away from successful careers and into World War II: John Ford, Frank Capra, William Wyler, John Huston, and George Stevens. But while there was a spirit of friendly competition between these men, it paled next to the camaraderie and artistic respect they all shared. Five Came Back is one of those rare books about Hollywood that can look unflinchingly at the foibles and ambitions of its insiders and lets you walk away feeling more fond of them, not less.

The opening chapters of Five Came Back invite irresistible comparisons to those "assemble a crack team" montages that you would get in a caper film. Even the directors' personalities easily graft onto the old archetypes. You have John Ford, the crotchety mentor figure, dropping paternal and ever-contradictory bits of wisdom. Frank Capra, the energetic and ravenously ambitious promoter. William Wyler, the cerebral perfectionist and, as a European Jew, the only one with a personal connection to the war. John Huston, the hard-drinking, cocksure daredevil, looking to prove himself in battle. George Stevens, the thoughtful and quietly troubled introvert. All of these men voluntarily left Hollywood, putting their own viability and reputation as artists on hold, in order to go overseas and document the war.

World War II was the first time in American history that filmmakers were enlisted in the art of packaging a a war for the American public. It was their images that brought home to viewers the reality of the situation abroad, even as that reality was pressed and molded into a patriotic vision. All of them knew and embraced the fact that they were enlisted in order to make propaganda. Before he started work on his series of wartime documentary films, Frank Capra watched Triumph of the Will and walked away shaken to the core. "I could see where the kids of Germany would go to any place, die for this guy...they knew what they were doing--they understood how to reach the mind...how do I reach the American kid down the street?" The challenge of wartime filmmaking was always to find that perfect combination, balancing the need to educate with the need to entertain. If filmmakers were too brutal with their imagery, the Army protested and refused to let the films be released. If they resorted to reenactments and corny dialogue, the increasingly-jaded audiences back home would jeer at them.

One of the more fascinating and endearing elements of Five Came Back is watching these men forget the demands of the war and succumb to their own artistic instincts. William Wyler, no one's idea of a reckless he-man, ended up risking himself time and time again crouched in a bomber plane, angling for the best shots. It would eventually cost him the hearing in one ear. John Huston was criticized by the War Department because his groundbreaking war film, The Battle of San Pietro, with its emphasis on death and destruction, was "anti-war." Huston snapped back that if he ever made a film that was pro-war, he hoped someone would take him out and shoot him. No matter the physical danger or the army bureaucracy or the interests of the public. Ford, Wyler, Huston, Capra, and Stevens found ways to practice their art.

Despite his full-throttle devotion to the war and the acclaim given to his documentary series Why We Fight, Frank Capra emerges as the only director whose career never recovered from the war. He was the only one of the five who never actually got to film anything on the front lines. Instead, his Army career was spent organizing, wrangling resources, and fighting with government officials. It's hard to feel sorry for anyone as endlessly bombastic and self-aggrandizing as Capra but after reading Harris, I couldn't help but sympathize with the man. Unlike the rest of his colleagues, Capra's post-war career was a straight slope down, fulfilling all his secret insecurities. His bag of tricks no longer charmed audiences. The new interest in realism and soul-searching had no place in Capra's fables. Harris pointedly makes a comparison between the first films Wyler and Capra made after their return. Wyler made a strikingly realistic film about the toll of war on ordinary people. Capra made a fantasy about a man who's lost his youthful dreams and craves the assurance that he's still needed by the world.

George Stevens, despite being somewhat neglected by critics over the past several decades (Stevens is the only director featured here with just one full-length biography to his name) stands out as perhaps the most fascinating character in Five Came Back. Stevens had built up his name as a director of sophisticated comedies, working his way up from Laurel and Hardy shorts to Fred Astaire musicals (including the indelible Swing Time) and polished romances like Vivacious Lady, Woman of the Year, and The More the Merrier. Despite his gift for humor, Stevens in person was contradictory and taciturn. He had a habit of falling into a trance-like state on his movie sets while he pondered what had gone wrong. Carole Lombard memorably summed it up: “I just (realized) what that pacing and thoughtful look of Stevens’ means—not a goddamn thing!"

Unlike Huston and Ford, Stevens went into the war without really craving adventure or a test of manly hardship. He was an asthmatic and a family man (Harris quotes extensively from Stevens' affectionate letters to his son back home and it's hard not to like Stevens after reading them). Yet it was Stevens who ended up taking his cameras into the unforeseen horrors of Dachau. It was Stevens who kept his eye to the lens, compulsively recording everything he saw, allowing nobody else to relieve him. "You can send three or four guys out with some weapons to do something, but I couldn't send anybody into the goddamn boxcar," Stevens remembered later. "I had to do it." Audiences of the time would barely get even a glimpse of Stevens' footage. Instead, the reels would be played for the judges at Nuremberg. As for Stevens, after he returned, he never watched the Dachau films again. And he never made another comedy.

The title of Harris' book is Five Came Back, not Five Went to War, and the distinction is an important one. When Wyler, Ford, Capra, Stevens, and Huston came back home, they were irrevocably changed from the men they'd been before. They'd played many roles throughout the war. Sometimes they'd been the decorated officers and sometimes they'd been the lonely cameramen, scrambling for just one perfect shot. They were the stoic witnesses to suffering and the impassioned artists demanding attention. None of them were saints. None of them were born soldiers. But they went to the front anyway and the images they saw would stay with them for the rest of their lives. And fortunately for us, they used what they learned, came back, and gave us some of the greatest movies ever made.

Final Six Words:

Reasoned and just, entertaining and essential

Note: I received an advance copy of this book from The Penguin Press (Penguin Group). It is available for purchase from Amazon and Barnes & Noble. 

Book Review: Lee Marvin Point Blank

Lee Marvin: Point Blank (2013) by Dwayne Epstein

"I don't care what's written about me as long as it's interesting."

Lee Marvin's wish is granted in Dwayne Epstein's new biography, the first serious attempt to trace the life and career of one of cinema's most iconic tough guys. The tall, silver-haired Marvin was always an instantly recognizable screen presence, with a voice that sounded as if its owner was gargling a mixture of vodka and gravel between takes. The actor straddled two generations of movie bad guys. At the start of his career he belonged to the sneering, scene-stealing hoodlums represented by Dan Duryea, Richard Widmark, and Jack Palance. He harassed Spencer Tracy in Bad Day at Black Rock, tormented James Stewart in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and most memorably of all, threw scalding coffee in Gloria Grahame's face in The Big Heat. But by the late 60s and 70s, Marvin had emerged as the elder statesman of cool, a grumbling drill sergeant that could whip even the most rubber-limbed of recruits into shape. Or, as in the film this book takes its title from, he could be the intrepid and remorseless killer, so stubbornly flat in his motivations that he becomes oddly magnetic. Marvin would live to see his own brand of onscreen violence turn him from monster to hero.

Offscreen, the Lee Marvin that Epstein recreates is a rowdy, charismatic individual, a man who combined the ability to spin a great yarn with a steely capacity for action. In short, he's pretty much the man you would want him to be from watching his films. Despite a rebellious childhood in which Marvin would get kicked out of countless schools, he found a strange kind of fulfillment when he joined the Marines during World War II. His wartime experience would be a constant companion through his acting career. For example, when Marvin tried a stint at the Actor's Studio with Strasberg, he got on the man's bad side by disagreeing with him about a scene. Strasberg claimed that Lee failed to act the great torment of a man suffering from a gangrenous leg. Marvin told him no, that was the whole point. A man in the last stage of gangrene feels no pain. With that, Marvin got himself kicked out of yet another school.

During his film career, Marvin would be drawn to movies that critiqued violence and war; he favored his work in the anti-war The Big Red One and the melancholy Western Monte Walsh far above the crowd-pleasing The Dirty Dozen.  In interviews, he disparaged the old idealized violence of classical Westerns, where "you end up with that little trickle of blood down your cheek and you're both pals and wasn't it a hell of a wonderful fight." When asked about his own style of cinematic cruelty, Marvin explained that "when I do a scene, I make it as rough as I can...make it ugly...I say make it so brutal that a man thinks twice before he does something like that." In one sense, Marvin succeeded in his goal, creating a niche for himself as an exciting screen heavy. But on the other hand, his success also hastened the arrival of newer and even more explicit thrills, for audiences that yearned to live vicariously. For his own part, Marvin had no patience for fans that got disappointed when his movies weren't violent enough. After one friend told him as much, Marvin barked, "Screw 'em, let 'em do their own killing!"

But hand in hand with Lee Marvin's thoughtful approach to his own career was his own potent taste for violence and destruction, a desire that expressed itself through brawling and dangerous pranks. When a friend noticed how often he sported fresh injuries, Marvin told her that he would deliberately go to bars and pick on little guys with lots of big friends, so that he could release his need to fight without getting anybody seriously hurt. Worse than the fighting was Marvin's alcholism. While the man was a loyal friend, generous to his family and courteous to costars, the alcohol exacerbated his worst traits, making him positively self-destructive with the passage of time. 

Epstein records these events with distant sympathy but doesn't let them distract us from the glories of Marvin's career. He spends time on each movie, although sadly not as much as my movie-loving heart would wish. And he follows his own interests on that score, giving more time to Marvin's performance in Monte Walsh (a movie that's definitely going on my must-see list after reading this book) than he does to The Dirty Dozen. For the most part, Epstein manages to balance the career with the character, giving weight to the personal stuff but never forgetting why we're interested in Marvin in the first place.

Epstein does a lot of things with this book that I wish biographers would do more often. He takes the space to think deeply about Lee Marvin's legacy and what his films mean to the current cinema. He muses about what today's action stars and directors owe to Marvin. Epstein also provides a list of all the films that Marvin came close to making during his Hollywood tenure (The Wild Bunch is the most frustrating near-miss), along with movies made after his death that the actor could have been perfect for, like The Untouchables or Unforgiven. Most importantly, he refuses to psychoanalyze Marvin. He doesn't try to explain away the man's alcoholism. He's doesn't blame everything on post-traumatic-stress disorder. He simply lets Marvin be who he is, without censure or excuse. It's an approach that Lee Marvin himself would no doubt have approved of.

Epstein's biography elides certain aspects of Marvin's life, for reasons that weren't always clear to me. The man's relationship with his children is kept to a few short comments on how Marvin, despite his affection, could never settle down to parenthood. Christopher Marvin, his only son, does re-enter the story to give a touching afterword to his father's life, but the daughters are given short shrift. Marvin's whirlwind second marriage to Pamela Feeley is almost as mysterious. At times, because this biography is on the slender side, it gives the impression of a book that was heavily dependent on certain sources, to the point that these sources often end up driving the narrative.

However, if Epstein had to rely heavily on one source, he chose well in giving lots of space to Betty Ebeling Marvin, Marvin's first wife. On the page, Betty comes off as a tart, sympathetic presence, fully capable of zinging her husband with a sharp one-liner. When Marvin asked if he had to pay for his daughter's wedding, Betty responded with, "I think that's your privilege, dear". Her marriage to Lee would slowly deteriorate over many years, worn down by alcoholism and adultery, but Betty gives her husband credit for his good points, commenting that her husband taught her to be strong and assertive. Those qualities would come back to bite him later; when he suggested a reconciliation after the divorce, Betty snapped back, "Why would I want to break back into prison?"

My own favorite Lee Marvin role remains Liberty Valance from the classic John Ford film. Both of my parents were avid fans of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and my dad would always lean forward in his seat before the entrance of Liberty Valance, grinning in anticipation. Marvin would have more nuanced and sympathetic roles later, but for my money, nobody's more enjoyable than Liberty. Not only does he have one of the best names of any cinematic villain, he's got a vivid, crackling personality, relishing his own nastiness with a glee that can't be matched. Just watching him stretch out his long leg to trip James Stewart is a pleasure. It's so outrageously larger-than-life and yet the savagery feels real. His scenes with Edmond O'Brien are hauntingly cruel, so much so that it's always a surprise to me that O'Brien turns up alive afterward, no matter how many times I see the movie. The assault is too harsh to be forgotten.

At his best, Marvin's appearance in a film was the equivalent of a knife cutting through the celluloid, a sudden flash of real brutality or hardened experience that could make other actors seem like so much make-believe. At his worst, he was never boring. And neither is this biography, an important step in crafting a full image of Lee Marvin as a man, an actor, and as a living presence in Hollywood history.

Final Six Words:

Straight-shooting account of dynamic actor

Note: This book was given to me as a review copy by Independent Publishers Group. It is published by Schaffner Press. It is available for purchase from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Powells, and directly from the Independent Publishers Group website .

Book Review: I Do and I Don't

I Do and I Don't:  A History of Marriage in the Movies (2013) by Jeanine Basinger

"Embrace happy marriage in real life but keep away from it onscreen." The words were Frank Capra's but they could just as easily have come from any Hollywood director, past or present. And not just happy marriages but any kind of marriage, be it new or old, funny or serious, a tender refuge or a deadly trap, has always been a tricky topic for movie-makers. Why? As Jeanine Basinger argues in her new book I Do and I Don't: A History of Marriage in the Movies, marriage is too familiar and yet too mysterious for the movies. What makes a marriage work? Why should we care about a couple after they've stopped fighting their feelings? What can the movies tell us about marriage if it's a show we already have a front-row seat for?

Well, according to Basinger's book, the movies can tell us quite a lot about marriage and the fears and desires they represent. She digs into a trove of old movies, finding unexpected and powerful images. An old D.W. Griffith film about adultery in which the bored husband finds himself wrapping dollar bills into the blond curls of his mistress but is outraged that his daughter would seek similar excitement with a cheap Lothario. A scene between Ida Lupino and Robert Preston as an old couple that agree to separate but not before walking upstairs for one more night together. Starkest of all is an anecdote drawn not from fiction but from a documentary on the marriage of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. After the couple separated, their children began showing them The Parent Trap in hopes that it would encourage them to get back together. As Lucille Ball said, "They must have shown us that movie about seven times before we had to sit them down and explain things."

If marriage has been stuck on the sidelines all these years, then marriage movies could have no better champion then Jeanine Basinger, a witty, knowledgeable academic with an unassailable reputation as one of the best film scholars around. Her former students range from Joss Whedon to Michael Bay and she's published many well-regarded books on Hollywood, most recently The Star Machine and Silent Stars. She ruefully comments at the beginning of I Do and I Don't that her friends warned her about tackling this topic, but she didn't listen. She canvassed her fellow cinephiles on the topic of movie marriage only to be met by puzzled shrugs and halfhearted mentions of The Thin Man.

The most endearing and intelligent aspect of Basinger's book is the way she follows her subject down the rabbit hole of obscure, forgotten films, proudly indifferent to things like Netflix availability or name recognition. So she gives Nick and Nora Charles, the most famous married pair in all moviedom the brush-off  ("The Thin Man is about a detective who solves murders...not about marriage"), but thoroughly analyzes the self-sacrificing wife of One Foot In Heaven. She gives some space to Brief Encounter but pays far more attention to David Lean's other adultery movie, The Passionate Friends. Movies like Chicken Every Sunday, The Captain's Paradise, Cass Timberlane, and The Very Thought of You all earn a write-up. Basinger isn't afraid to stick up for what she enjoys either, singing the praises of the Pitt-Jolie vehicle Mr. and Mrs. Smith, in spite of its lackluster critical reputation: "One of the most original commentaries on marriage, the marriage movie, and marriage counseling ever put on film."

 

The main problem with I Do and I Don't is that Basinger lives up to her stated intention of keeping the book between a scholarly text and a more casual coffee-table book rather too well. It feels like it's been stretched too thin, not comprehensive or structured enough for a tome, but too weighted down with serious intentions to be a light read. Basinger often tries to sketch out movie plots like linear graphs ("the movie either told the story of marriage in the popular, moving-forward, active mode...or they told it backwards as a flashback"), an approach that is thwarted by her own writing style. She's far more interesting when she goes off-script:

"The Bride Wore Boots uses several screen minutes to tell us what The Bride of Frankenstein tells us in a matter of seconds. Brought to life by the good doctor, Elsa Lanchester takes one look at her intended and lets out a blood-curdling shriek."

Basinger is no slouch when it comes to original and thoughtful analysis either:

"Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis...are a couple on the brink of divorce...The couple they represent is lopsided: Lewis madly loves Martin, but Martin is cool, indifferent to Lewis's ardor. As the years go by in their work together, it's clear Lewis becomes more and more manic in order to attract love and attention, while Martin gets more and more detached. In the end, Lewis turns to others (the audience) and goes crazy, while Martin suddenly realizes he's being upstaged and looks really angry. Their partnership is the comic visualization of divorce."

I can't help wishing that Basinger had either done this book as a loose series of essays on her chosen theme or as a compendium of "marriage movies," giving each one a proper place in the index. Instead, she opts for a footnote-heavy, digressive style that tries to subdivide into categories ("infidelity," "class differences," "addiction, etc.") but keeps wandering off. I also found myself getting really frustrated by the lack of an index in this book. If you're going to pelt me with observations on Too Many Husbands, by all means, but at least give me an index so I don't risk mixing it up with No Room for the Groom.

 

Despite its sometimes muddled approach, I Do and I Don't is a fascinating journey into a genre that's never really been defined before. For most romantic comedies, marriages is the destination, not the journey. For other films, marriage is a subplot, a glimpse behind the curtain. If somebody had challenged me to name my favorite "marriage movie" before I read Basinger's book, I might have named The Best Years of Our Lives, which looks sensitively at two marriages, one of impulsive romance and one of enduring love. One marriage survives but not without gaining bitter experience along the way ("How many times did I tell you I hated you and believed it in my heart...how many times have we had to fall in love all over again?"). And yet even this movie keeps marriage as part of a larger story, the story of troubled vets returning after World War II. Basinger makes a persuasive case that marriage has been a shadow subject on film all these years, something alluded to and joked about and despised and yearned for but so rarely understood. Let's hope that her book is a step towards shedding some light on the most elusive American dream of them all.

Final Six Words:

Rare, valuable glimpse into movie marriage

Note: I received an advance copy of this book from Alfred A. Knopf (Random House). It will be released on January 29, 2013. It is available for purchase at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Powells, and directly from the Random House website.

Book Review: Beautiful

Beautiful: The Life of Hedy Lamarr (2010) by Stephen Michael Shearer

The lives of famously beautiful woman always seem to be asking the eternal Helen of Troy question: "Was her beauty a curse?" In the case of Hedy Lamarr, while her face didn't exactly burn the topless towers of Ilium, it drew the attention of everyone she met. The moniker "most beautiful woman in the world" hung round her neck from the time she was an aspiring teenage actress in Austria. I can't help wondering if Stephen Micheal Shearer went through several different titles for this biography before finally throwing up his hands and saying, "I might as well go for the obvious."

Going for the obvious or easy is one of the few complaints one can make against Shearer's bio, which is otherwise an entertaining, well-researched, and obviously affectionate look at a woman who clearly had more to give than her face. He begins and ends the book with a rather halfhearted, vague statement that she was "a simple, shy, pretty Viennese schoolgirl" and at bottom, "a very normal human being." Shearer is sympathetic and interested in the events of Lamarr's life but doesn't always probe for answers.

For example, at one point he recounts rumors that she had an affair with film producer Sam Spiegel in Germany, but adds that they were "probably not true, since Spiegel was married," in blithe disregard for the numerous other Hollywood adulteries he mentions in the book. Hedy Lamarr's relationships, in particular hers with her children, feel a little thinly sketched for Shearer's lack of insight or unwillingness to speculate. Then again, I've read many other biographies that insist on psychoanalyzing every last curl on their subject's head (Donald Spoto, I'm glaring in your direction), so maybe discretion is the better part of valor in this case.

 
Hedy Lamarr, born Hedwig Kiesler on November 9, 1914 in Vienna, was the daughter of a Jewish bank manager and his wife, a former concert pianist. Young Hedwig couldn't pronounce her own name and christened herself "Hedy." Her striking Snow White beauty was apparent from the beginning and, in spite of her parents' attempts to protect her from too much flattery, she always had attention. Ambitious and uninterested in too much schooling, she started acting as a teenager.

 
After some roles in stage and film, she took the role that would haunt the rest of her life, the frustrated young wife in Gustav Machatý's Extaze (1932). Nobody ever forgot her naked romp through the forest, one of the most famous nude scenes in early cinema. Shearer slyly points out that Extaze's most daring scene was not Hedy's exhibition but a later scene where she and her young lover have sex for the first time, with "angled close-ups of her ecstatic face." Lamarr would later recount that outside the camera view, her director was repeatedly pricking her with a safety pin to the buttocks to achieve these close-up expressions.

In 1933, she caught the eye of the wealthy and controlling Fritz Mandl, a munitions baron, who "could break a prime minister faster than he could snap a toothpick in half." Mandl kept ties to multiple dictators and did his best to hide his own Jewish background. He showered the nineteen-year-old with flowers and gifts and promises of luxury until she agreed to marry him. This marriage would soon prove to be a mutual misery for both of them, as Mandl wanted a beautiful and compliant trophy wife and Lamarr quickly learned to hate being under his thumb.. Mandl's response to Extaze was a futile attempt to destroy every copy. Later, Lamarr would try to literally run away from her marriage many times and finally succeeded in 1937. Oddly enough, long after their marriage was over, Mandl and Lamarr kept in contact and seemed to semi-reconcile, although Errol Flynn would recall that on one occasion she referred to her ex-husband as "that son of a bitch," literally growling his name.

It was Louis B. Mayer that brought Hedy to Hollywood. They met in London while Mayer was making a tour of Europe and scouting for new talent. She made good use of her contacts and secured a date with Mayer. Shearer quotes Mayer as telling the young actress, "'You're lovely my dear, but I have the family point of view...At MGM we take clean pictures. We want our stars to lead clean lives, I don't like what people would think about a girl who flits bare-assed around the screen.'" Said girl was no pushover and got up to leave. Mayer offered a six-month standard studio contract at $125 a week. She snapped back, in broken English, that she wouldn't be intimidated into a cheap contract. After all, she was already established in Europe. But an hour later, Hedy changed her mind and agreed to the deal that made her Hedy Lamarr, Mayer's latest exotic find.

Studio-system Hollywood had the habit back then of hoarding up anyone that stood out as gorgeous, talented, or popular and, likely as not, leaving them on the shelf to collect dust. MGM was proud of getting "the most beautiful girl in the world" but was more interested in molding Greer Garson into the new queen of the weepies than they were in Lamarr. She spent most of her first few months in Hollywood cooped up inside studying English and fretting that she knew no one to take her out. It was Algiers (1938) that broke the ice and it did so with a vengeance. She went from a Hollywood nobody to cinematic dynamite.

 
And yet, and here's where it gets disheartening, even though Hedy Lamarr became one of the queens of MGM and is still a famous name to casual moviegoers-- her fame way, way outclassed the quality of her roles. True, the same can be said for many other screen sirens, like Lana Turner or Betty Grable. But Turner at least had The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Bad and the Beautiful, and Imitation of Life under her belt, as well as other more debatable classics. And Grable had her million dollar legs and the hearts of servicemen around the country.

Hedy Lamarr? Shearer argues that she never found her niche, other than just being beautiful and exotic. She played vamps and aristocrats and European travelers, but it wasn't enough to give her a definable screen persona, something the audience could recognize. It didn't help that Lamarr was an insecure actress at the best of times, needing the support and coaching of her directors, few of whom were interested in molding her. Her English gave her less trouble as time wore on, but she lacked the warmth of Ingrid Bergman that allowed audiences to ignore it entirely. Even as she was melting into the arms of her leading man, Lamarr too frequently came off like a block of ice on screen. The critics loved her beauty, but shrugged over her acting. Shearer however, makes a passionate case in her defense, arguing that she did indeed have a lot more talent than people gave her credit for.

It was here that I really began to appreciate the Shearer's commitment to his subject and his obvious affection for her. Unlike many Hollywood biographers, who spend more time on the stars' bed-hopping than their body of work, Shearer gives a welcome and detailed writeup of each Hedy Lamarr movie, pointing out the virtues of the good to average ones and waxing ruefully comic over the bad ones. Arguably her best role was also her most miscast one, as down-to-earth Midwestern working girl Marvin Myles in H.M. Pulham, Esq. (1941), an adaptation of John P. Marquand's novel. Unfortunately one of her most famous roles was also one of her worst, the half-caste--except psych! she's not--sarong-wearing, hip-swinging Tondelayo in White Cargo (1942). Shearer flatly gives up any attempt to take this one seriously, but seems to take pleasure in detailing MGM's ridiculous ads: "'90% allure, 10% sarong, adds up to LURONG...She rings the GONG in her LURONG!'"

 
It was that same year that Hedy Lamarr and the composer/inventor/self-declared glandular expert George Antheil patented their invention, called Secret Communication System but now known as "frequency-hopping." It had been an unlikely meeting of minds. She had come up with the idea for "a secured torpedo guidance system," consisting of a transmitter "programmed with a frequency that was fixed, continuously shifting, and random, and of a secured guidance receiver, which would shift its frequency to match that of the transmitter." Antheil contributed the use of his own previously developed piano playing system, using two player-piano rolls with eighty-eight keys so that transmitter and receiver could have "eighty-eight different shifting frequencies."

What makes this invention even more strange and remarkable is that neither Lamarr or Antheil come off as dedicated scientists in Shearer's narrative, just two brilliant and feverishly creative people tossing off ideas (one of Lamarr's other brainwaves was an idea for instant soda cubes, like bouillon cubes for cola). Lamarr would claim that during her marriage to Mandl, she had listened to the conversations of weapons manufacturers and retained the information years later.


A few years prior, Lamarr had met Antheil to discuss his work on glandular development. Her motives were less than scholarly; she wanted his advice on how to develop her breasts. Louis B. Mayer and the rest of his mammary-obsessed studio, were always telling her to have something done about them. For the record, Hedy Lamarr was 33-B. For a while, Antheil led her along, giving advice about glandular injections to inflate her chest, but finally came out and said, "'You can sue me for this, but from where I sit you look about perfect...why do you want to know all this?'"

Somehow the conversation turned to the war effort and a friendship was born. They stayed in touch up until Antheil's death in 1959.

The same quicksilver intelligence that Hedy Lamarr brought to inventing did not show up much in other aspects of her life. After Mandl, she would marry and divorce five more husbands; the average lifespan of each marriage was about three years. Shearer can't bring more than cursory interest to each alliance since they all seem to follow a basic pattern of Hedy is lonely, she meets a charming man, they marry after a quick courtship, and it falls apart. She apparently thought of herself as a hausfrau by nature, but her romantic decisions were often impulsive and confused. Upon marriage to her fourth husband, hotelier Ted Stauffer, she shocked everyone with a hasty move to Acapulco to be with him, auctioning off her priceless collection of paintings, sculpture and jewelry (some of which had been stuffed in a coffee can) at the last minute. She also plopped her two unhappy children into a Mexican school; they spoke no Spanish.

Hedy Lamarr and her children. This is for me the greatest mystery of the book. In 1939, Hedy and her then second husband Gene Markey adopted James Lamarr Markey. When she and Gene separated, the actress began a long, determined custody battle for "little Jamesie." By 1941, James was fully hers and when she married John Loder in 1943, James would take his new father's name. She and John Loder went on to have two children of their own, Denise (b. 1945) and Anthony (b. 1947), both of whom pop up here and there in Shearer's account with loving memories of their mother. But James Lamarr Loder? He was deemed a problem child by the age of nine. By fifth grade, Hedy severed contact.

His own memory of the separation follows: "'I went to Chadwick and I got into trouble...and they told me I couldn't go there anymore. But there was a teacher by the name of Ingrid Gray...She said I could live with her and her husband and go (to school during) the daytime...and since all my friends were there, everybody I knew, I agreed. And my mother was disenchanted with that, and she didn't want anything more to do with me." Essentially, Hedy Lamarr was finished with him. She returned all his letters. Even years later, she "reluctantly would talk about her son James but would always elaborate on Denise, Anthony, and her grandchildren."

Finally, in the late 1980s, they established phone contact and he recalled that "she sounded like she was 38...totally hip and chic." A few years before her death, she surprised her son by sending him an photograph of them together with the inscription "Dear Jim, I thought you would want a photo of us, Much love to you and your family, From Mom." But when she died in 2000, James was not mentioned in her will.

So what happened to make Hedy Lamarr split from her adopted son, the son she had once fought so hard to keep? Did he have some severe behavior problems as a child that Lamarr couldn't cope with? Did she just decide he no longer fitted in her life? Were either of them just not being truthful about what really happened? On the one hand, I really, really hate Mommie Dearest style exploitation stories and Lamarr's other children speak very fondly of their mother, so it's hard to believe she was some kind of maternal monster. On the other hand, it's hard to believe that James was some kind of Rhoda Penmark/Veda Pierce monster at the age of nine. This is where I got frustrated with Shearer's biography since he seems to recount the facts of their relationship without any any attempt to examine them. "Whatever demons haunted Hedy...were probably not even understood by her," he says and moves on.


Hedy Lamarr's legacy has been an odd one. Her idea for frequency-hopping is now used in wireless communication and her image nowadays has shifted from 1940s love goddess to gorgeous lady scientist. Her most famous movie, Samson and Delilah (1949), reportedly doesn't make much of a case for her thespian abilities and she never became the subject of cult adoration and pop art handbags like Marilyn Monroe or Audrey Hepburn. People remember her as charming, cultured, and even more stunning in person, but her true personality remains elusive to me, even after finishing Shearer's biography. Oddly enough, even as he claims that Hedy Lamarr was at heart a simple girl, his book reveals she was quite the reverse: complicated, searching, and not so easily defined.

Suggested Links:

HedyLamarrLegacy on Youtube has some nice clips from some of her movies here
A video of her on What's My Line (very relaxed and charming)
The official website

Final Six Words:

Detailed, affectionate, intriguing if imperfect bio