American film fan magazine, Picture Play, proudly proclaimed in 1932: âThe ancient Greeks had their Delphian mysteries. Hollywood has Garbo.â 1 The confidence of this declaration resonates with the authority of a Hollywood star system that, since the early 1900s, had been placing its leading performers upon pedestals previously reserved for the deities and heroes of the ancient world. These idols were duly projected upon the silver walls of the new picture pantheon, whose architecture, like that of the picture palace, had grown more assured and luxuriant as its own mythology unfurled in ever more elaborate drapery.
This was the mythic landscape described in a 1929 essay by the outspoken British author and cultural commentator, Rebecca West, for humanist journal, The Realist. 2 Presenting the perspective of a European visiting modern America, Westâs âNew Secular Forms of Old Religious Ideasâ explores her observations on the variability of religious fervour in various strata of American society. The aspect that she found most striking is that outside churches themselves, and even on cemetery stones, Christian symbols such as the cross are strangely absent in industrial cities, whereas âthe forces which disguise themselves in those symbols are notâ. These subconscious forces, she asserts, solely religious in Europe, instead are encountered in other forms, with their religious lineage going âlargely unnoticedâ by those she meets. 3 In this context, West argues, the female film star has risen to become a peculiar, yet constant, subject of conversation. As in the cults of antiquity and the ârelics of Roman Catholic churchesâ, we thus find film fans hungering for âvisible tokens of Hollywoodâ often advertised in movie magazines such as signed photographs, department store handbags that are replicas of one held by Clara Bow, and shrines to stars filled with flowers and photographs and burning lamps. The stars themselves, she suggests, fall into the ancient archetypes personified by the gods, with Douglas Fairbanks the âapotheosisâ of the screen male, with Lois Morant and Mary Philbin becoming the âalways desired and ill-spoken-of Aphroditeâ and Artemis respectively. âCan we doubt that what we are witnessing is a new race starting the business of making a new civilisation at the bottom by making new mythology?â West asks. Alluding to the sometimes salacious and sexually subversive side to mythology, she adds, â[t]hey are very often modern versions of the Greek myths, frequently of the kind which is slurred over as much as possible by teachersâ. This is a time when old worlds map onto new, with an âold ladyâ in Connecticut whispering to her âa story alleging that at a beach-party on the Californian coast a certain male film star had performed one of the lesser-known feats of Herculesâ. 4 These gods are to be worshipped, but are also willed to fail and die, and thus bring redemption as a âsacrificial victimâ. This is usually female, although the early deaths, she suggests, of Wallace Reid and the very public mourning of Rudolph Valentino, had brought a kind of strange collective comfort, a form of secular atonement that in the old world would be âspecifically religiousâ. 5 âIt certainly looks very muchâ, West opines, âas if Hollywood were young Americaâs Olympus, and its stars its godsâ. 6
Westâs psychological analysis of the ancient mythical substructures of screen stardom is striking and insightful. However, I would argue that pseudo-religious feelings towards stars were by no means an exclusively American phenomenon. We will also see through the course of this book, as in my previous work on stardom in the silent era, 7 that while recognition of the worship of stars as a religious undertaking might be largely unspoken to avoid controversy, fan magazines were often explicit about the enthusiastic cultural appropriation from the safely dead religions of ancient Greece and Rome in fashioning the screen star. Photoplay magazineâs âOlympus Moves to Hollywoodâ feature, published in 1928, is a pertinent example. 8 Westâs arguments foreshadow the work of later scholars, including that of Parker Tyler and Edgar Morin in the 1940s and 1950s, discussed in Chap. 4. Indeed, Morinâs conceptualisation that beneath the profane âcult of the starsâ, with fan clubs and magazines rather than temples and offerings, âall the processes of divinization are in action beneath these lay formsâ is very similar. 9 Westâs account is unusual, and perhaps accurate, in reading the potential crisis brought about by Reidâs death from an overdose and Valentinoâs early demise as actually an essential part of the cycle of star worship. Many accounts view the late 1920s as bringing crisis to both film stardom and Hollywood itself. This period had already witnessed something of a crisis in Hollywood stardom of the Delphian kind; with star scandals, of which the trials of Roscoe âFattyâ Arbuckle is the best-known example, and the death of luminaries such as Valentino in 1926, it seemed that the temples of the Hollywood Hills were built on very shaky ground. The common conception in received history is that, with a few exceptions, the votive lights set before the screen gods and goddesses of the silent era flickered out with the coming of synchronised sound and the Wall Street Crash of 1929 that drew a line under the materialistic ostentation that often came as a marker of screen greatness.
The use of the past in the construction of screen stardom is bound up with a wider view of cinemaâs place in history. The fan magazines were self-conscious in situating themselves within an aggrandising historical pageant that made Hollywood (and its counterparts) seem the inevitable product of millennia of artistic development, an industry happy to acknowledge that it stands on the shoulders of ancient giants so long as the laurels are placed clearly on its own head. Picture Playâs William H. McKegg asked of the stars âWill History Remember Them?â in a 1930 feature. McKegg unveils a frightening future for his readers where, in some thirty years hence, no one has heard of Garbo or Novarro, or of Richard Dix and Joan Crawford: âAll vanished. Not even phantoms.â 10 Cinemaâs continual technological change and new performance techniques, he argues, set it apart from the other arts, and renders films of even ten years past mere âcuriosâ with early cinema already seeming like ancient history. With the benefit of nearly ninety years of hindsight, one can forgive the murkiness of McKeggâs prophecies, which foretell that Chaplin and Valentino will endure but also, less accurately, the âeternal childâ personality of Mary Pickford, while Garbo will fade as the epitome of the âsirenâ type because âthe original always carries the laurelsâ, namely Theda Bara. A photograph of a suitably crestfallen Garbo gazes down above. A few years later, McKegg would likely revise his view of Garbo, given her new success in talking pictures, and the second phase of divinisation I will discuss in the next chapter, and although the glories of Bara and Pickford remain known to cinephiles, they certainly do not carry the wide iconic resonance of Garbo. Even if someone has never seen a Garbo film, she still evokes an ideal of stardom in popular culture, her elusiveness securing rather than obscuring her fame. McKegg adds, somewhat bleakly, âwho knows the names of the great actors of ancient Greece?â, which is contrary to conventional fan-magazine discourses, and certainly those of the 1910s, that promised cinema as the means to immortality precisely on the terms of the endurance of antiquity, and its preserved icons of statuary. However, there were also fans keen to place their stars into the Hollywood pantheon, and indeed history itself. Fan Richard E. Passmore later complained to the magazine that McKeggâs criteria for âscreen immortalityâ was on the limiting basis of originating a type, rather than the transcending qualities that cause fans to become âa devout worshipper at the idolâs feetâ. Placing Bara âabove la Garbo is blindness itselfâ, he exclaims, before concluding: âGarbo not among the screen immortals? What sort of immortals are these, indeed!â Passmore questions what is meant by âscreen historyâ, and if it is to be dismissed as ephemeral, only to be forgotten, âwhy approach the problem at all?â 11 The answer perhaps lies in the tensions within stardom itself, but also in the need for the fan-magazine industry to both build up its icons and provoke fears that their pedestals may be laid on shaky foundations.
With such provocations in mind, the hottest topic in letters pages of fan magazines of the late 1920s and early 1930s was the arrival of talking pictures, a factor often attributed to the decline of the screen gods. Opinions raged on either side regarding their merits, and otherwise, with a key underlying concern being that speech would destroy the magical aura of cinema and render it commonplace. As Photoplayâs editor put it in 1930: âThe âtalking pictureâ will be made practical, but it will never supersede the motion picture without sound. It will lack the subtlety and suggestion of visionâthat vision which, deprived of voice to ears of flesh, intones undisturbed the symphonies of the soul.â 12 Columnist Everett Blagdenâs article âAlong Came Youthâ in the May 1931 issue of Picture Play takes the view that the arrival of the talkies set âquite an upheavalâ among the stars, and foretells, appropriating Norse myth, the imminent demise of the screen gods in favour of a ânew orderâ: âA red glow is seen in the sky. The Valhalla of the stars is about to go up in smoke and flames. Whether the stars are awaiting their doom as grandly and majestically as would the gods of the Norse sagas is a matter for thought.â 13 The piece then qualifies its position, arguing that it is not the ârealistic talkiesâ themselves that âtoppled [stars] from their pedestalsâ, but that it has accelerated a change, just as the Great War had âknocked royalty off its throneâ. In other words, it was a shock to the star system. âThe truth isâ, the magazine submits, that this system âhas been on the wane since 1927â.
Fans keenly contested the mythic qualifications of the screen star. âAre Stars Ordinary Beings?â ran the caption above one female fanâs letter in a 1930 issue of Picture Play, who exclaimed âWhy make tin gods of the stars?â when it would be more interesting to hear about their human rather than âsuperhumanâ qualities. 14 She was agreeing with an earlier letter from a male fan, who had objected to interviewers who âtack wings and halos onto the starsâ and put them âon a pedestal above usâ, while then concluding, â[n]ow that my venom is exhaustedâ, with praise for the âoften deliciousâ content he found in the magazine. 15 (The editor here also refers the fan to a letter penned by âAfredightiâ, sighing that âAphrodite would probably leap right out of the foam again if she knew how you spelled her nameâ. 16 ) Fans clearly had complex, self-aware relationships with their stars and the discourse that fashioned them. Regular readers of fan magazines know that such prophesies are made on a regular basis, functioning as provocations to stimulate debate among the readership. Likewise, Blagdenâs assertion that the new and enduring stars are the ones âwho personify youthâ could equally have been said of stars a decade earlier, although it seems to be the case, as weâll see in Chap. 3, that a rank of more breezily accessible stars were entering the Hollywood pantheon.
Blagden evokes his own historical cycles, noting that to medieval people outside the capitals, a king was âa mythical creatureâa demigodâ, before the personal access provided by âmechanical inventionsâ meant that âthe coming of even the bicycle knocked a kingâs divinity west of the royal water towerâ. Thus, came the realisation that kings were âordinary menâ too, and the same realisation has visited upon the stars. The metaphor is rather simplistic, but the ability for technology to produce, or undermine, a charismatic relationship between a noted figure and their audience is a valid one. The article asserts that stardomâs height was between 1920 and 1927, a period when stars âwere not worldly creatures, but phantoms made of dream dustâ. Blagden blames the unseemly grasping for higher salaries, and in particular a string of scandals (as Richard deCordova has discussed), 17 for exposing the âweaknesses of human fleshâ before the public, and raising suspicions that the idols had âfeet of clayâ. However, within a few page turns of the same issue in which Blagden writes, one finds fan poems actively constructing exactly the kind of divinised discourse he brushes away as a thing of the past.
There appears to be a clear policy of agnosticism towards the screen gods in the fan magazines; while some articles will divinise, others will kick, or at least graffiti, the pedestal. The most devout, or atheistic, epistles are provided in the letters columns, a sanctuary superficially sequestered from the âofficialâ sections of these publications, although in fact deeply integrated into it, rea...