‘Tis the Season

“This is the season for gifts for your near and dear. This is the season of cards for those far away. This is the season of sentiment and love. And above, all, this is the season of memory. This is the season to remember all our friends, forgive all of our enemies… We only hope that this Christmas issue of Modern Screen will help in some small way.” As the editors of Modern Screen noted, back in January 1961, it’s the season for giving, whether for one day or six days or eight. Here, then, is my gift: a compendium of minor delights from the midcentury fan magazines. My only criterion in selecting these confections was that the material should offer a little extra zing, something that causes a reader to pause in surprise or pleasure or bemusement, before continuing on with Tinseltown’s usual chronicle of “sex, success, scandal and swag” (Earl Leaf, Hollywood Screen Parade, March 1959).

Sometimes that zing merely entails a quick turn of phrase, such as Leaf’s characterization of Hollywood as the “Principality of Pretense” (see citation, above). Sometimes it’s the abundance of those turns, e.g.: “While the wolves howled their heads off, flower-eating starlets lounged on the green grass in Bikinis and skin-tight Capris. Half-clad dollings splashed in the swimming pool where a ton of Eve’s apples bobbled in the agitated water… Nearby tables groaned under mountains of caviar and champagne flowed like water. Flamboyant Mamie Van Doren bounced around with much bounce to the ounce. Zsa Zsa Gabor wore a gown cut so low she spoke with an echo. Steve Cochran came to the party with his pet goat and left with Mamie Van Doren” (Earl Leaf again, in Hollywood Screen Parade, March 1960).

Sometimes it’s an image or description, e.g., “From the day she was born to the day Richard Burton was seen leaving her Roman villa with a Siamese cat in his arms, the world has never seen anything like Liz Taylor” (Hollywood Life Stories No. 12, 1962). Sometimes it’s the audacity of the descriptions; for example: “We saw Warren at LaScala recently with a top-heavy, elderly blonde, while Natalie sat at his side struggling to keep awake and looking as bored as a Rockefeller in a bank vault” (Snooper, Motion Picture, June 1962). Or: “They dined together in Rome — a striking foursome, incongruous, almost bizarre. Sammy, a small (five feet, five inches), dark man with a battered Bogart face across whose rough features expressions changed with mercurial swiftness; May, golden-haired, white-skinned, statuesque and shy; Richard, five feet ten and one-half inches tall (yet, with his oversized chest, head, shoulders, and hands, appearing smaller, so that — as one writer said — sometimes ‘his imagination takes hold and he sees himself as the world’s most conspicuous dwarf’), with tousled brown hair that set off his cratered face that looked like it had been moulded by other men’s fists; and Liz, raven-haired, violet-eyed, ravishing, beautiful beyond belief because she was so much in love” (Photoplay, Oct 1964).

Sometimes it’s the zing in the zinger, such as this from Hedda Hopper, talking about the Oscars: “Marlon Brando made a fuss when photographers tried to take a picture, but only succeeded in making a fool of himself. [Interior designer and former actor] Billy Haines said, ‘If he doesn’t want to be seen, why doesn’t he bury his head in a tea cozy where it belongs?’” (Motion Picture, July 1959). Or this: “People say that Debbie Reynolds treats new husband Harry Karl like the dirt under the shoes he manufactures. Looks like broken dreams turn into broken arches eventually” (“Jody’s Private Line to the Stars,” Screenplay, Oct 1961). Or one of Florence Epstein’s always-witty reviews in Modern Screen, masterfully puncturing a film’s pretensions without committing the fan mag faux pas of actively discouraging readers from spending their money at the box office, like this April 1953 blurb about The Naked Spur: “Janet Leigh plays a sort of roughneck ingenue and winds up with Jimmy Stewart, which is something — but not much, considering that every other male is freshly dead.”

Sometimes it’s the sheer transparency of the fan mag’s manipulation. The high-minded sentiment of Modern Screen’s “This Is the Season” message, quoted above, was quickly — and for this reader, at least, delightfully — undercut by its follow-up regarding the importance of “the season of memory”: “Who should we remember? Surely those among us whom we, ourselves, have hurt. Strangely enough, Liz Taylor is first on that list.” Popular Screen (March 1960) reported that, for Doris Day, receiving the Sour Apple Award for uncooperativeness with the Hollywood women’s press corps “was still another devastating shock, added to the long list of earlier ones: the car accident, the broken marriage of her parents, her own two romantic fiascos. It shook Doris more than any of the others had.”

Sometimes it’s the story itself, such as this one from “Snooper” (Modern Screen, Jan 1964): “This English cat, Cecil Beaton, went kind of wild when he knocked out the costumes for the Gavotte sequence in My Fair Lady. The hats are so big that it actually takes about 30 minutes to get one on a dancer’s head and then she is supposed to stand kind of stiff and not shake it too much or it will fall off. Well, all these problems were solved and about forty of the Gavotters ran through the rehearsal without a hitch. Then, just before the take, one of the girls decided she’d like to be excused — and in a few minutes one of those mass hysteria things got going and everybody had to go to the bathroom. Well, the door to the john was about a foot narrower than the hats. The crew managed to get the first couple of kids in by tilting them. But the others were getting impatient. A quick consultation was held and costs figured and guys with saws and things just cut a big hole for hats at the top of the door and Warner Bros. was saved from near disaster.”

Sometimes it’s having the inside knowledge to appreciate the coded subtext in a story. Movie Life (Nov 1962) ran a feature on two hot young stars titled, “The Night Dick Chamberlain and George Maharis Confessed All and Shocked a City.” The subtitle went even further: “Attempts to keep TV’s biggest stars apart were bound to fail. Here George tells the truth about the night they met and they both confess everything — well, almost everything you want to know.” Alas, for the relatively few readers who might have grasped what now seems like seriously unsubtle innuendo, the fun ended there. Another example: Columnist Dorothy O’Leary had this report in Silver Screen (Dec 1961): “If Juliet Prowse and Frank Sinatra are still dating they’re being very secret about it. But Juliet has a new female puppy on which she bestowed the unlikely name of Clyde. That just happens to be Frank’s favorite name of affection. But Clyde for a girl dog! Only comparable one we know is Gardner McKay’s name for his male dog — Pussycat.” Just a bland, throwaway bit of gossip — unless you happen to know, as I do from Natalie Wood’s biography, that Wood had “told Sinatra about ‘Clyde,’ the code name for penis” that her friend and fellow child star Bobby Hyatt “had coined to fool Natalie’s mother. Sinatra was so amused, he and his friends incorporated ‘Clyde’ into their hipster slang” (Suzanne Finstad, 2001, 2020).

And finally — the rarest of treats — you occasionally encounter something utterly incongruous, like a few lines of T.S. Eliot’s poetry in an otherwise mundane story; or, in the midst of the usual gossip about Joan Collins, George Hamilton or Liz and Dick, this from columnist (and Scott Fitzgerald paramour) Sheilah Graham: “Grace Kelly, who spends her summers in the hills above Monaco, is always dreaming that her children are falling off a cliff. My recurring dream is missing the plane that takes me back to Hollywood. F. Scott Fitzgerald used to dream repeatedly that he was tied to a kite and floating through the blue skies. What is your persistent dream?” (Motion Picture, Jan 1964).

Sweet dreams, and happy holidays, y’all!

Image credits, clockwise from upper left: (1) holiday banner, cover of Motion Picture Jan 1962; (2) Suzanne Pleshette, holiday promotional photo, unknown Japanese fan magazine, n.d.; (3) Movie Life Nov 1962; (4) Natalie Wood with dog, cover of Screen Life Jan 1958.