by ANDREW O’HAGAN
IMAGE/Amazon
West of Eden: An American Place by Jean Stein
Cape, 334 pp, £20.00, February, ISBN 978 0 224 10246 9
Modern Hollywood isn’t really Hollywood – it’s Calabasas. With everyone now the David O. Selznick of his own social picture, gossip replaced with tweets, and fan magazines with selfies, the grandeur of old Hollywood can seem mythical. Like proper myths, its stories are almost exclusively about metamorphosis, self-destruction and things going wrong, but they are at least stories as opposed to advertisements. Jean Stein’s book deploys a wonderful grace in uncovering a monstrous reality – it tells brilliant stories, sometimes very personal ones, and lets their accretion work its own magic.
The Steins lived at 1330 Angelo Drive in Beverly Hills, in a big house called Misty Mountain, now owned by Rupert Murdoch. Stein’s father, Jules, founded the Music Corporation of America, which looked pretty classy: no one would easily have guessed at the company’s deep connections with the Mob. But Raymond Chandler is there in Stein’s evocation of twisted men and violet evenings; and there’s a touch of Sheila Graham in the Garden of Allah, with Fitzgerald drunk on the floor. Kenneth Anger is deep in conversation with Nathanael West at the counter of Schwab’s drugstore, Joan Didion’s desert air is wafting in under the door, and Ben Hecht is taking notes. Stein has an ear for Americana at its most bewildering, most politically servile, and she listens carefully, knowing that characters can fill out a culture. West of Eden is an oral biography of a few addresses, and the history Stein captures was spoken about and overheard, but not written down, until now. It is a book about Hollywood that has the authority of the smartest girl at the party. Stein speaks to the butlers and the chauffeurs, the studio wives, the bit-part players, to the Arthur Miller, Dennis Hopper and Gore Vidal part of the universe, and none of them lets her down, or lets her off. It is a wild compendium of stories about what it is to be a child in a world of childish adults, and her book feels political, a meditation on the moral consequences of being looked after by powerful monsters with sick egos.
The corruption in companies like MCA was never supposed to touch the children. ‘Great’ politicians benefited from the connections with the Mob: Ronald Reagan was helped on his way by MCA agents who arranged for his deferment from military service before greasing his way through what Connie Bruck in the New Yorker has called ‘the political thickets of Hollywood’. ‘Much attention has been paid to Reagan’s appearance as a friendly witness before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947,’ Stein writes, ‘but Reagan made his political debut before that, taking the side of the studios – and the Mob – in a critical episode in Hollywood’s long-running violent labour wars. His 1946 presentation in front of the Screen Actors Guild during that battle probably paved the way for his election as SAG president the following year.’ And there’s more: ‘As SAG president, Reagan granted MCA a blanket waiver that permitted the company to operate as a talent agency, MCA Artists, and also a new television production company, Revue Productions. This was otherwise prohibited because of the inherent conflict of interest in simultaneously being agent and employer.’
When the actress Jennifer Jones’s alcoholic first husband died after an injection given by a dodgy psychiatrist, Selznick, who was in love with her and would marry her after a decent interval, was desperate to manage the publicity. He got his way by creating a cover story saying that it was all about protecting Jones’s two boys. ‘I have no question about it,’ Daniel Selznick – David’s son from his first marriage – said to Stein. ‘I’m not looking forward to seeing this in print, but it’s the truth. Let’s be honest with each other, it’s horribly damning. He was so selfish, so needful to protect his own reputation.’ Jones’s older son, Bob Walker, remembers Charlie Chaplin coming over to him at a party in Malibu. ‘“You know, kid, whenever I need an adjustment, I just bend over like this.” And he turned his back to the ocean, bent over, and looked out between his knees … A beautiful gift.’ In Stein’s book, the adults who fail to find a suitable adjustment simply torture their children.
In later life Jones went to bed in full make-up and hair – it took four hours every day – just in case she was taken ill in the night and had to go to hospital. Stephen Sondheim remembers seeing her in Ravello during the shooting of John Huston’s madcap movie Beat the Devil. ‘I recall her sitting at an umbrella table in the square,’ Sondheim says, ‘rehearsing a scene with Edward Underdown, who played her husband. Above the surface of the table she was bantering blithely with him, but below it she was tearing her napkin into shreds. This was not in the script.’ At home, she never appeared before 6 p.m. This was the only time of day she ever saw her daughter, the child of her marriage to Selznick. This was a world in which parents who spent their afternoons in psychoanalysis spent their evenings berating their children. Selznick was addicted to Benzedrine; Jones tried to drown herself; one of her sons shot himself; and her daughter, Mary Jennifer, jumped off a building at the age of 22. ‘She was a very pretty girl but not movie star pretty,’ her brother says. ‘I think there was some disappointment with it. She magnified it to the point where she got very self-destructive. She couldn’t handle being young and almost beautiful.’
There’s a moment in Rebel without a Cause, when Jim Stark (played by James Dean), Judy (Natalie Wood) and Plato (Sal Mineo) climb up to an old Hollywood mansion that’s now lying empty. They pretend they’re going to live there together, with Jim and Judy as the ‘parents’ in this haunted house. Plato mimics an estate agent, showing them round the house. ‘Oh, we’re safe here,’ Plato says. ‘I hope.’
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