Tomorrow you’re going to be a star

Friday, December 29th, 2017

Variety coined the term “casting couch” back in the 1930s, when Hollywood producer Darryl F. Zanuck had a regular 4 PM meeting for his “trysts” with starlets:

Years later, in 1975, Newsweek would do a story titled “The Casting Couch” in which it quoted the words on a plaque above the couch in the office of a Tinseltown producer in the 1950s: “Don’t forget, darling, tomorrow you’re going to be a star.”

The mag wrote, “Contemporary starlets no longer take sex-on-demand lying down.”

But things didn’t change then, and they haven’t changed now.

[...]

Marilyn Monroe once famously wrote in a memoir about the sexual predators in her industry. “I met them all,” she said. “Phoniness and failure were all over them. Some were vicious and crooked. But they were as near to the movies as you could get. So you sat with them, listening to their lies and schemes. And you saw Hollywood with their eyes — an overcrowded brothel, a merry-go-round with beds for horses.”

Movie moguls have preyed on the ambition of young hopefuls seemingly since the beginning of celluloid.

Actress Joan Crawford, who got her start in the 1920s by dancing naked in arcade peep shows, only advanced her career by sleeping “with every male star at MGM — except Lassie,” quipped fierce rival Bette Davis.

According to ReelRundown.com, “Even at the peak of [Crawford’s] career, rumors continued to surface about how her loathed mother forced Crawford to work as a prostitute, make blue movies and sleep her way to the top.”

[...]

Studio head Louis B. Mayer “terrorized Hollywood’s women long before Harvey Weinstein,” according to a recent headline in the UK’s Telegraph.

Mayer would direct a 16-year-old Judy Garland to sit on his lap, whereupon he’d palm her left breast while telling her, “You sing from the heart” — a creepy anecdote Garland recalled in a memoir.

And an 11-year-old Shirley Temple got her first — and, she thought, hilarious — peek at the male anatomy courtesy of MGM producer Arthur Freed, who once dropped his pants during a meeting. Temple burst into laughter at the sight and was promptly ordered out of the room.

[...]

Actress Joan Collins, warned by Monroe about the “wolves” in Hollywood, also wrote in her memoir that she missed out on the title role in 1963’s “Cleopatra,” which went to Elizabeth Taylor, because she wouldn’t sleep with Buddy Adler, the head of 20th Century Fox.

“I had tested for ‘Cleopatra’ twice and was the front-runner,” she said. “He took me into his office and said, ‘You really want this part?’ And I said, ‘Yes. I really do.’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘then all you have to do is be nice to me.’ It was a wonderful euphemism in the ’60s for you know what.

“But I couldn’t do that. In fact, I was rather wimpish, burst into tears and rushed out of his office.”

Other stories are even darker.

“Rosemary’s Baby” director Roman Polanski initially had sympathy when pregnant wife Sharon Tate was murdered in 1969.

But then details emerged of how he gave a 13-year-old aspiring actress champagne and Quaaludes before having sex with her during a photo shoot in 1977, and the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office stepped in.

[...]

Eighties child stars Corey Feldman and Corey Haim also have said they were given drugs and “passed around” by male higher-ups when younger.

Feldman told The Hollywood Reporter that Haim, who died in 2010 at age 38, “had more direct abuse than I did.

“With me, there were some molestations, and it did come from several hands, so to speak, but with Corey, his was direct rape, whereas mine was not actual rape,” he said. “And his also occurred when he was 11. My son is 11 now, and I can’t even begin to fathom the idea of something like that happening to him.”

Comments

  1. Graham says:

    The sex-for-fame model of old Hollywood seems to have endured without real, public trouble all through the relatively puritanical eras of the Depression, the 50s, through the sexual revolution [less surprising...], through the 70s, 80s, 90s [no movie mogul would have expected trouble over anything as weak as a puerile joke about pubic hair on a coffee cup], and right up to the day before yesterday.

    Although certainly there was not anything like social media to drive things, this side of Hollywood was not exactly a secret either. Numberless memoirs, exposes, lurid headlines, etc. passed ultimately with little impact. Even in eras when, pre-feminism notwithstanding, middle class mores demanded women be regarded like Donna Reed.

    Cruel though it might be [I'm consciously aiming for that here], I have assumed it was mainly because regular people, if they came into contact with such stories at all, just dismissed it as the price being asked for the promise of a shot at fame, glory, and not-really-earned wealth. Or that there was, even in decades in which Hollywood and its stars were worshipped, a residue of the old attitude that entertainers were at least a little outside polite society.

    Whereas in the past few decades celebrity culture and its ideals seem to have invaded real life to a greater degree than was true before. I appreciate that there were decades gone by when “movie stars” were idolized and pop culture featured characters swooning over them, probably accurately, but the entertainment “industry” still seems far more pervasive than it was prior to the 1980s.

    I’ve been seeing many ads for a new talent show [it might just be in Canada] called “The Launch”. Another Idol/X-Factor clone but it’s getting heavy advance press because the guy who discovered Taylor Swift is involved.

    As I watch this and reflect back on the Idol phenomenon of over a decade ago, I am reminded of an episode of Black Mirror in which people’s entire lives are devoted to the desperate quest to get fame before an anonymous public audience, and their down time is spent accumulating points on some video game by riding exercycles to generate electricity, or viewing compulsory ads on screens in tiny domiciles.

    I don’t know which aspect of that society I found more terrifying and dehumanizing. I think of it every time I see an ad for “The Launch”. I am glad to reflect that there are still people for whom getting famous in entertainment isn’t their dream.

  2. Graham says:

    All that to say that I wonder if an unexamined factor today is that regular people are even more personally invested in the entertainment industry, its values, its cultural presence, than was true in the past. Combine that with the reach of social media to form a true picture of what has changed.

    It puts me well outside the mainstream that I still think of entertainers as basically making some sort of deal with the devil for unearned social status, so I don’t care that much what the price is.

  3. Graham says:

    Lastly, I’m sure it’s been done to death in recent weeks, but what happened in Hollywood between a few years ago when everybody [including Meryl Streep and other prominent women in the business] mobilized in defense of Roman Polanski, and today?

    I recall vividly the effort to rehabilitate Polanski in the public eye, and the strength with which his partisans conveyed their sense that he hadn’t really done anything wrong except in the eyes of a corrupt prosecutor and the puritan rubes of middle America.

    The entertainment industry’s values sure seem flexible.

  4. Sam J. says:

    Graham,”…what happened in Hollywood between a few years ago when everybody [including Meryl Streep and other prominent women in the business] mobilized in defense of Roman Polanski, and today?…”

    Yes that’s a very good question.

    An even deeper question is do you think they actually care about the actresses that were harassed? If they don’t, and I don’t think they do, then what is all this about? Could it be they want to make a track record that those that harass Women must resign?

    Like…Trump????

    Yes I know I’m paranoid.

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