“Rock is a man who is happy driving a fabulous car or just riding in a local bus!” (“Rock Hudson’s Romantic New Life,” TV & Movie Screen, Jan 1962). Among the many dualities that fan magazines were required to reconcile, one of the most challenging was the problem of wealth and its trappings. When you became a star, you were expected to acquire the “fabulous car” — but not to make too much of it. As the editors of Modern Screen warned Bobby Darin and Sandra Dee in an open letter (July 1961), fans “love Cinderella stories — but like everyone else, they can only lose interest when their idol turns ‘big shot.’”
Dee and Darin had turned up at the Academy Awards driving another “fabulous” automobile, this one “painted with thirty coats of imported pure essence of pearl oil with added crushed diamond dust to make things sparkle.” At a reported cost of $150,000, the car “was spectacular, all right” (Modern Screen, July 1961). But fans were not dazzled. “The avalanche of red-hot mail from readers, outraged at the vulgar display, all but swamped Paramount Studios. So, very quietly, the car, which never did belong to Bobby, was returned to its owner with the hope the whole thing would blow over” (“Sarah Hamilton’s Inside Stuff,” Photoplay, Aug 1961).
Early iterations of the fan magazines skewed to the more glamorous end of the spectrum. Photoplay, for example, ran an early series about stars’ mansions, such as the January 1919 tour of Broadway and film star Fannie Ward’s new home which, “excepting Julian Eltinge’s Italian palace* is the most sumptuous photoplayer’s domicile in the world” (reprinted in Barbara Gelman, Ed., Photoplay Treasury, 1972). Yet even then the magazines tried to thread the needle. While the gossip section in Motion Picture’s July 1925 issue described the new trend among stars of building luxurious country estates, the feature pages insisted “No! They’re Not Happy, Even with Wealth and Fame!” An early Screen Book feature, “How the Stars Spend Their Fortunes,” took care to emphasize that “no wage-earners in the United States pay so large a proportion of their lifetime incomes to the government as do the screen stars” (reprinted in Martin Levin, Ed., Hollywood and the Great Fan Magazines, 1970).
By the mid-Fifties a pattern had crystallized: Feature articles tended to emphasize the down-to-earth, with a few careful nods to the luxurious. A 1955 feature on Virginia Mayo shows her at home on a supposedly typical morning: “On your feet, lazybones! It’s eight AM… already Virginia Mayo is dressed and ready to start a new day.” Attired casually in slacks, she poses on a modest-looking porch, retrieves the mail and “walks with her beloved bulldog across the beautifully kept grounds of her North Hollywood home.” The only hints of more than ordinary affluence in the two-page spread are a photo of Mayo conferring with her housekeeper and another of her at breakfast “on the terrace,” an ornate silver coffee service visible in the foreground (“Wake Up with Virginia Mayo,” Movie World, Oct 1955).
But if you want to know how the stars of their day spent money— on cars, homes, parties, vacations, gifts — you need look no farther than the magazines’ gossip columns, whose attention to their subjects’ extravagance seemed an obsession if not a duty. Below (and in a subsequent blog post) are some notable examples of star splurges, most of them culled from the gossip pages. We begin with that ever-popular object of fascination, the automobile.
The Rolls Royce was Hollywood’s most ubiquitous status symbol, according to gossip columnists. Fred D. Brown (Movieland and TV Time, Jan 1961) observed that “the Rolls is fast becoming the emblem of Hollywood’s new aristocracy.” Cary Grant, dating Madlyn Rhue at the time, “often takes her to a drive-in movie in his Rolls Royce, complete with a catered full course dinner, which they eat while watching the picture” (Fred D. Brown, July 1959).
According to Brown (Aug 1963), “Red Skelton bought a carrot-colored Rolls Royce to match his hair.” That lavender Rolls cruising down Sunset belonged not to Kim Novak but to Laurence Harvey — just one of the lavish gifts bestowed by Joan Cohn, ultra-wealthy widow of Columbia Studios’ longtime boss (Louella Parsons, Modern Screen, Jan 1962). Comic Ernie Kovacs “got himself the biggest white Rolls Royce ever seen in Beverly Hills, complete with chauffeur” (Hedda Hopper, Motion Picture, Aug 1961). George Hamilton may or may not have owned a Rolls: Armand Archerd (Movie Stars, March 1962) reported that Hamilton had just bought a new Bentley, but “also has an Alpha Romeo, and a Rolls Royce.” Yet in “Christmas Gifts I’d Like to Give the Stars,” published the very same month in Hollywood Screen Parade, feature writer and columnist Joyce Becker picked a Rolls as her fantasy gift for Hamilton: “He doesn’t own one, you know, in spite of all that publicity.”
Elvis, perhaps the ultimate symbol of youthful Hollywood at the time, owned a (chauffer-driven) Rolls along with multiple Cadillacs (Rona Barrett, Motion Picture, Aug 1961). Caddies were popular with his competitors as well. In a single column “Snooper” (Motion Picture, July 1962) reported that 18-year-old crooner Bobby Vee had purchased not one but six Cadillacs, and that Frankie Avalon, when asked what he’d save first in an “atomic attack,” picked his red Cadillac convertible (his barber was second on the save list, his parents third).
Other young stars gravitated to livelier makes. Tab Hunter drove a “borscht-colored Porsche” (“Chatterbox,” Movie Life, May 1956). Before switching to Caddies, Troy Donahue not only drove a Porsche but tinkered under its hood as well (Teen Screen, Aug 1961). In keeping with his restrained, clean-cut Dr. Kildare image, Richard Chamberlain drove a toned-down “gray Fiat 1200 convertible” (Photoplay, June 1963). On the other hand, rugged outdoorsman “Rod (Hong Kong) Taylor spins around Hollywood in a new $4500 custom-built silver-trimmed Jeep” (Fred D. Brown, Movieland and TV Time, Jan 1962). T-birds were popular with young performers like Annette Funicello (Popular TV Movie and Record Stars, Oct 1959) and former child star Eddie Hodges (Movieland and TV Time, April 1963). Natalie Wood began her driving life with a pink T-bird, but soon graduated to a Cadillac convertible whose dashboard was engraved with “the names of the movies and TV shows in which she’s appeared” (Mike Connolly, Screen Stories, Oct 1957). Later she married Robert Wagner and, “having done the matching-sweater bit, now Nat and R.J. have bought themselves matching Jaguars!” (“Hollywood Dateline,” Movie Life, Feb 1960).
Then there were the novelties. Dorothy Provine, who usually drove a black Jaguar (Modern Screen, July 1961), “fell in love in Mexico City. No, it wasn’t a bullfighter or a wealthy man — it was a 1923 Stutz Bearcat” (Cal York, Photoplay, Nov 1961). Topping that: “Jill St. John and husband Lance Reventlow, one of the world’s richest young men, drove up to a Beverly Hills restaurant in a 1949 model H-E-A-R-S-E! Jill told us, ‘Lance bought the hearse to use as a knock-about station wagon for the mountains and the beach. It will be handy to carry skis and surfboards.’” (Fred D. Brown, Movieland and TV Time, Jan 1961)
Other means of transport garnered attention as well, none more than the private plane Frank Sinatra purchased in 1961, described as “one of the most fabulous four engine airplanes any private citizen ever had” (“Hollywood Today by ‘Snooper,’” Motion Picture, Jan 1962). Louella Parsons (Modern Screen, Jan 1962), spared no detail: “Not since the days of private railroad cars has there been such an outlay of money and elegance. Instead of plain old seats, Frankie’s plane is built like a playroom, complete with spinet piano. Plus a circular bar with bar stools, a complete kitchen and Frankie’s own bedroom. Overall this, there’s a ceiling, with built-in twinkling stars and a permanently shining moon.”
Sinatra, it seems, could always out-extravagant his peers. Part 2 of this blog topic — with multiple appearances by Ol’ Blue Eyes — will feature houses and other real estate, exotic locations and gifts the stars gave each other, from furs to jewelry to “the whole month of December” (Mike Connolly, Screen Stories, Jan 1963).
* Eltinge was primarily a stage actor who played both male and female roles, sometimes in the same play. “He was popular enough in the early part of the century to have his own magazine and his own line of cold cream. At the height of his fame, he played at Windsor Castle for King Edward VII, who presented him with a white bulldog” (“A Theater’s Muses, Rescued,” New York Times, March 24, 2000).
Image credits, clockwise from upper left: Movie World Oct 1955; Popular TV Movie and Record Stars Oct 1959; Teen Screen Aug 1961; TV and Movie Screen Jan 1962.
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