It has oft been an observation of film critics and sociologists alike that if you consult the history of Hollywood stardom, you will find a fundamental shift in ideas of that which constitutes being a 'star.' In the silent age and continuing on well into the 1930's and 1940's, stars were thought to be omnipotent creatures, gods and goddesses - they were not just talented, popular, hard-working actors and actresses, they were people of a different kind from the ordinary run. Even Mary Pickford and Mr. Chaplin, and indeed Greta Garbo or Rudolph Valentino, however much esteem you hold them in, were not the sort of folk you would expect to meet in your own life, Yet gradually through the Thirties and Forties, and more so since the Fifties, the stars have come down to earth.
There are exceptions; but the gods-to-human direction has essentially been that taken by the stars' images. The first stage in this secularization of the stars would reach its apogee in the Fifties, the great period of the star-as-ordinary-person. They were no longer the special beings of the past but straightforward, uncomplicated, average humans. In retrospect, it may be hard to fathom this, Doris Day's hard-edged, peppy virginity, Rock Hudson as the towering soft hunk, June Allyson's almost-swallowed burr of a voice and wig-like coiffure. Gregory Peck's elegant eyebrows and somnolent performance style - to those who were not around at the time, seeing the films as they were released, these attributes must seem as baroque as those of Ramon Novarro and Mae West. Yet at the time, many stars advocated the idea of normality; and 'normality' was the predominant reigning idea of the time. And what this meant was now all the ideals of human behavior that societies of the past had striven for, however unsuccessfully or hypocritically, had at last been abandoned. For now it was not the best that society encouraged its members to strive for, but the average - to work at being typical, ordinary and acceptable. If stars like Greta Garbo, Fred Astaire, Lillian Gish and Douglas Fairbanks Sr. had shown that there were other, more marvelous ways of being alive than the merely everyday, stars like Doris Day, Rock Hudson, June Allyson and Gregory Peck insisted that the everyday was best. They were stars who represented the result of the chilling pressure to conformism of the Fifties.
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| Rock Hudson, having a Doris Day in Lover Come Back. |
This is in no way a means to undermine their adroitness, their charm or the complexities of their images. The contemporaneous Doris Day with her devil-may-care disposition and kittenish appeal as opposed to the typically passive images of women in the magazines of the 1950's raised the bar considerably, while strapping and macho Rock Hudson was at times even effeminate in his gentile and sensitive bearing and expressions. Some friends were built up on these aspects of the stars' images. Doris Day is a splendidly stroppy shop-steward in Stanley Donen's vibrant 1957 adaption of the Ross and Adler musical The Pajama Game, while a fluffy film called Pillow Talk painfully exposes the pressures on businesswomen of the period. Rock Hudson delivers a virile yet strangely ineffectual presence in Douglas Sirk's melancholy meditations on the emptiness of contemporary American values: Magnificent Obsession, All That Heaven Allows (1955) and 1957's The Tarnished Angels. Yet for all considered, Day and the others - to say nothing of Mitzi Gaynor, Donald O'Connor, Dorothy McGuire or Dana Andrews - represented Mr. and Mrs. Nice Guy, Norman and Norma Normal. Their off-screen image was frequently confused with their film role personas.
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| Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the most narcissistic of them all? |
Significantly, only a handful of the garden variety stars were really big - the other gargantuan names were considerably less comfortable figures, expressing a disparate truth about the way people were feeling in the period. Beneath the plastic and antiseptic streamlined conformity of the 1950's, there was a unexpressed but widespread sense of dissatisfaction, a realization though still as yet remaining unformulated, that the status quo was not the best way things could or should be. This undertow of discontent would gain momentum come the 1960's in the wave of cultural protests that were the proverbial calling card of the decade, but in the Fifties, we have to detect it in disguised and covert forms, unknown even to itself. The chief signs of this buried unease as far as the image of stars goes was the role of the scandal.