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Very few things about my unbearably happy childhood I recall in such a glow of mystery and romanticism as I do the first time I ever went to see a movie. It was a decade or so after the end of the Second World War, and we were staying in a small town on the rim of the Black Forest. I was four, maybe five years old at the time. One winter night after an early dinner, my father announced that he was taking me somewhere. He bundled me up and led me by the hand over dimly lit cobblestone streets to a tiny movie house in town to see a masterpiece of early color that was his favorite film, and would later become one of mine as well. The movie was Zoltan Korda's 'The Four Feathers', a tea-and-sand epic of cowardice and redemption (in English, with German subtitles). It was released in 1939, that Olympus of movie years. ( 'Gone with the Wind' and 'Gunga Din' were released that year, as were 'The Hunchback of Notre Dame', 'Mr. Smith Goes to Washington', 'Ninotchka', 'Stagecoach', 'The Wizard of Oz', 'The Women', and 'Wuthering Heights'. So were 'Dark Victory', 'Destry Rides Again', 'Drums Along the Mohawk', 'Goodbye, Mr. Chips', 'The Hound of the Baskervilles', 'Intermezzo', 'Love Affair', and 'Only Angels Have Wings'.) I also remember the first novel I ever read. I still have it, in fact: an illustrated edition of 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'. I also remember the first album I ever bought ( The Doors). I haven't reread Huckleberry Finn in years and I haven't listened to that Doors album in decades. But I do manage a late-night twirl with 'The Four Feathers' every now and again. A novel, after a single reading, sticks to your ribs for a lifetime. The great ones do, anyway. Music's different. Music can take you up or down in a heartbeat. And it marks the mileposts of adolescence: first dance, first kiss, first love, first arrest, and so on. Movies, on the other hand, provide a different sort of emotional and intellectual service. They are, in their way, the perfect jet-age entertainment. You bolt your own world, go to a new one, and return home in two hours. Really, what better weekend is there than to stay in bed for two days with an endless supply of videos? Curling up with a book is wonderful, too. But, I confess, I'd rather have the videos. When I was a kid, in the days before VCRs, being a movie nut was hard work. I'd plan my entire school sick-day schedule around a weekly highlighting session of the TV section of the newspaper, combing the meager listings for matinees of 'His Girl Friday' or 'The Wages of Fear' or 'Stalag 17'. An old Ealing comedy on Wednesday at two p.m.? I'd begin planning my Wednesday-morning cough and fever the night before. As a writer for Time magazine in the 70s, I found any excuse to slip off to Southern California. I'd land, get settled in at the hotel, and when I wasn't doing what I was out there to do, I'd be figuring out how to finagle my way into the studios. You know, just to look around. I'd beg an appointment with some lower-level functionary, and when the meeting was over, I'd take off my suit jacket, roll up my shirtsleeves, and wander the lot for hours, prowling the streets between soundstages like a stray, terrified of being found out for the intruder that I was. In situations like this, never underestimate the power of a purposeful walk and a rolled-up file in one hand. I may have looked like a development hireling on a vital mission, but I was a truant and a hopeless romantic, starved for a taste of what life must have been like when the MGM and Warner Bros. and Paramount back lots were bustling with stars and extras, and writers were quartered away in stucco bungalows with typewriters and bottles of scotch. I would have to say that movies brought me to New York from the gray, Protestant, post-Victorian city in Canada where I grew up. In front of the television and in the back rows of big movie palaces and in open-top cars at the local drive-in, I was transported by movies to this fabulous city, a city so unlike the one I knew. Movies like 'The Awful Truth' and 'Holiday', through 'My Man Godfrey', 'Nothing Sacred', and 'Sweet Smell of Success', to 'The French Connection' and 'Mean Streets'-these were my surrogate New York until I managed to get my hands on the real thing. Jazz also brought me here. So did the photographs of wits and intellectuals and bohemians in Greenwich Village that ran in big-league magazines such as Life, Look, and Esquire. But mostly it was movies that brought me to New York. Unlike a lot of people who love films, I was not really interested in being in the movie business-just in movie theaters. Before I got to New York, I had never met anyone who actually worked in the movies, except for a friend of my father's who had been a stuntman in a couple of Michael Curtiz features before the war. So, unlike a kid growing up in Beverly Hills, I didn't know what movie people were like or how they even became movie people. My first week in Manhattan I saw Cary Grant walking up Sixth Avenue outside the Time & Life Building and Myrna Loy at the '21' Club. This, I thought, was living. I love so many types of movies, but most of all I still love the ones set in New York. Beyond that, my tastes are all over the place. I revere Truffaut, Clouzot, Renoir, and Godard. I love anything by Capra, Sturges, Lubitsch, or Hawks. Same for Wilder, Wyler, Spielberg, LeRoy, and Hitchcock. Same, too, for Ford and Lean, Scorsese, Kubrick, Coppola, and Peckinpah. Give me Sonnenfeld and Soderbergh. Fellini and Fassbinder. Oh, and the Farrelly brothers too. Also anything with Irene Dunne, Jean Arthur, Robert De Niro, John Cusack, or Dennis Farina. My favorite periods are the 30s, the 70s, and right now. And also everything in between. Not that it necessarily shows, but we've been chipping away at this book in fits and starts for five years. In 1995, along with my two deputies, Aimee Bell and Matt Tyrnauer, I began going through old issues of the magazine, beginning with copies from 1914 (the year publisher Conde Nast launched the publication, under the stewardship of its storied editor, Frank Crowninshield) and proceeding through to 1936. John Gillies and Chris Lawrence, a pair of fresh-scrubbed summer interns that year, made photocopies of stories and photographs that we liked. This took three or four months. Then, given my full-time responsibilities putting out Vanity Fair, raising four children, and putting on weight, things just sort of drifted. In late 1998, David Friend, a former colleague of mine from Life magazine who had just joined V.F., pressed me to finish the project. Together, we went back through all 470-odd issues of Vanity Fair. Did it twice, in fact. We pulled all the best photographs, stories, and essays involving Hollywood published during the magazine's two incarnations. (For those older readers who may have thought their subscriptions had lapsed for 47 years, Vanity Fair appeared monthly from 1914 to 1936; the current publication was launched in 1983.) Over a few insanely hot days the following summer, David and I spread out the first edit of 1,805 photographs (tear sheets, color-laser copies, and digital scans of rare images from the Conde Nast Archive) on a long dining-room table in my house in the West Village. We pruned down the lot to come up with a more manageable batch of 513 so-called selects: all of them images previously published in, or shot for, the magazine. For the next several months, with the help of Vanity Fair's design director, David Harris, Mimi Park, the book's designer, and SunHee Grinnell, its photography editor, we pushed around these pictures-on conference-room walls, miniaturized-layout boards, and computer screens. It's not what you put in a book that's important. It's what you leave out. And with that in mind, we winnowed our selects down to the 292 essential Hollywood photographs assembled here-a good many taken, not surprisingly, by Vanity Fair's two signature photographers, Edward Steichen and Annie Leibovitz. A guiding hand through this whole process was Jane Sarkin, Vanity Fair's features editor. Over the past 15 years she has set up every Hollywood cover and portfolio. Christopher Hitchens was conscripted to write captions for the photos; he spent a good stretch of the winter of 1999-2000 holed up in Room 1415 of New York's Mayflower Hotel, with a Sharp PC-3030 laptop, 251 research files, and a supply of Johnnie Walker Black. The 14 essays and articles that are woven throughout the book include some of the most memorable Hollywood stories we've run in recent years as well as offerings from early Vanity Fair contributors such as D. H. Lawrence, Clare Boothe Luce, Dorothy Parker, Walter Winchell, and P. G. Wodehouse. Together, they trace nearly a century of Hollywood power and glory, myth and mystery. In spite of the fact that Vanity Fair is a New York-based magazine, it nevertheless has an outsize presence in the movie business, what with our covers, our annual Hollywood Issue, and the party we throw each year on Oscar night. And how fitting is it that the magazine and the movies came of age around the same time? When the first issue of Vanity Fair appeared on newsstands in January 1914, moving pictures were just evolving from novelty to necessity. Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin were already famous when Volume 1, Number 1 was published. But D. W. Griffith's 'The Birth of a Nation' wouldn't come out for another year. And 'Intolerance' a year after that. Officially, there was no such thing as Beverly Hills (it wouldn't be incorporated until later that month, on January 28, 1914) or Paramount Pictures (which would be formed that May) or Technicolor (it was established at year's end). Talkies wouldn't arrive for another 13 years. And 'Ishtar' for another 60 after that. Throughout the 20s and early 30s, Vanity Fair was a pioneer in what came to be known as celebrity portraiture. In fact, the magazine was virtually alone in treating portraits of stars as serious photography and even as art. By having masters such as Cecil Beaton, Anton Bruehl, Baron de Meyer, and Edward Steichen cover the Hollywood beat, Vanity Fair was elevating screen players and their new craft. Many of the photographs here, such as those of Paul Robeson, Charles Laughton, Greta Garbo, and Louise Brooks, are the iconographic images of their subjects. Yes, there has always been a steady, two-way flow of traffic between the New York offices of Vanity Fair and the bungalows of Los Angeles. Many contributors to the old V.F. went on to become noted screenwriters or filmmakers, or playwrights whose work made it to the big screen. Among their ranks: Robert Benchley ('Foreign Correspondent', 'The Reluctant Dragon', 'Sky Devils'), James M. Cain ('Mildred Pierce', 'The Postman Always Rings Twice'), Jean Cocteau ('Orpheus'), Colette ('Gigi'), John Dos Passos ('The Devil Is a Woman'), Paul Gallico ('The Pride of the Yankees'), Anita Loos ('Gentlemen Prefer Blondes'), George S. Kaufman ('You Can't Take It with You', 'The Man Who Came to Dinner', 'Animal Crackers'), Ring Lardner ('Woman of the Year'), Compton MacKenzie ('Carnival'), Dorothy Parker ('Trade Winds'), and Robert Sherwood ('Rebecca', 'The Best Years of Our Lives', 'The Bishop's Wife'). Actors such as Douglas Fairbanks and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. were frequent essayists, and there were occasional pieces by a variety of early Hollywood bluebloods, including Mary Pickford, Leslie Howard, and Theda Bara. In 1921, while still a 21-year-old actor in Britain, Noel Coward received his first American paycheck-from Vanity Fair-for a wry whisper on secret love affairs in the royal courts of Europe. And for those whose photographs appear in Vanity Fair, well, they just become larger than life. And strangely intimate too. How many of us have had the experience of walking down the street and spotting a familiar face, and smiling in recognition, only to realize once he or she has passed that you don't really know the person at all-that the passerby was a movie star? The good ones will smile politely back, aware of the mistake you have made. Like Dominick Dunne, who wrote the afterword to 'Vanity Fair's Hollywood', I am not at all embarrassed to admit that I am a simple, unabashed fan. Of movies, of the people who make them, and of Hollywood. This book is for them and for it, and for the little people like Dominick and you and me-all of us out there in the dark. |
