Jon Lewis
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780520284319
- eISBN:
- 9780520959910
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520284319.003.0005
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
Transition-era Hollywood began with the dead body of Elizabeth Short and ended with two more discarded young women, Barbara Payton and Marilyn Monroe, two more casualties found at the crossroads ...
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Transition-era Hollywood began with the dead body of Elizabeth Short and ended with two more discarded young women, Barbara Payton and Marilyn Monroe, two more casualties found at the crossroads between a dreamed-of life in the sunny city of angels and the reality lived by so many naïve arrivals after the Second World War. Payton and Monroe were glamorous movie stars who began their careers at the very moment Short ended hers. The Black Dahlia murder maybe did not register much with them. Or maybe it did and they figured a shot at movie celebrity was worth the risk. Payton and Monroe believed they were going to be different. They believed in what men had for years been whispering in their ears: “you’re so pretty you should be in pictures.” They were (pretty that is)… and they did (appear in pictures). But movie-land success was for them a mixed blessing at best, their dreamed-of Hollywood celebrity hopelessly complicated by a new breed of industry middlemen, gangsters, and gossip, their lives cut short before their fortieth birthdays.Less
Transition-era Hollywood began with the dead body of Elizabeth Short and ended with two more discarded young women, Barbara Payton and Marilyn Monroe, two more casualties found at the crossroads between a dreamed-of life in the sunny city of angels and the reality lived by so many naïve arrivals after the Second World War. Payton and Monroe were glamorous movie stars who began their careers at the very moment Short ended hers. The Black Dahlia murder maybe did not register much with them. Or maybe it did and they figured a shot at movie celebrity was worth the risk. Payton and Monroe believed they were going to be different. They believed in what men had for years been whispering in their ears: “you’re so pretty you should be in pictures.” They were (pretty that is)… and they did (appear in pictures). But movie-land success was for them a mixed blessing at best, their dreamed-of Hollywood celebrity hopelessly complicated by a new breed of industry middlemen, gangsters, and gossip, their lives cut short before their fortieth birthdays.
Jon Lewis
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780520284319
- eISBN:
- 9780520959910
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520284319.003.0004
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
The gossip industry underwent a fundamental transition after the war, from the gawking clatter of the classical era fan magazines to the gossip columns of Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons and scandal ...
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The gossip industry underwent a fundamental transition after the war, from the gawking clatter of the classical era fan magazines to the gossip columns of Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons and scandal sheets that so successfully harried the Hollywood community after the war. Movie stars were lucky and pretty, rich and famous. But they were as well political neophytes and their everyday lives were, thanks to the columnists after the war, lumbered with undue consequence. It was one thing for the columnists to bemoan the unearned privileges of celebrity, and then to cut folks so lucky and full of themselves down to size. But it was quite another to cast the private and personal lives of these celebrities as fundamentally anti-social and un-American, to subject the lives and loves of movie stars to a narrow and frankly unrelated notion of patriotism, one that asked movie stars to behave, or at least pretend to behave, like the rest of us.Less
The gossip industry underwent a fundamental transition after the war, from the gawking clatter of the classical era fan magazines to the gossip columns of Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons and scandal sheets that so successfully harried the Hollywood community after the war. Movie stars were lucky and pretty, rich and famous. But they were as well political neophytes and their everyday lives were, thanks to the columnists after the war, lumbered with undue consequence. It was one thing for the columnists to bemoan the unearned privileges of celebrity, and then to cut folks so lucky and full of themselves down to size. But it was quite another to cast the private and personal lives of these celebrities as fundamentally anti-social and un-American, to subject the lives and loves of movie stars to a narrow and frankly unrelated notion of patriotism, one that asked movie stars to behave, or at least pretend to behave, like the rest of us.
