Word: hollywoodizing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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William Haines was not a very good actor, but he was a very popular one, and in Hollywood of the 1920s the priorities were the same as those of Hollywood today--it's the box office that counts. Haines is one of the now-forgotten stars of the silent screen: handsome, witty and good-natured, between 1926 and 1931 he was one of the biggest box-office draws in Hollywood, top on MGM's roster of stars and adored by women film fans everywhere. Specializing in playing the role of the "wisecracker," a joking, likable trickster hero who starts...
Haines was also gay, and he set a trend in Hollywood by living openly with his lover, Jimmie Shields. When the political waters changed around the early 1930s, Haines refused to play the studio "game"--to repudiate Jimmie, to enter into a sham marriage as so many other actors did, to pretend to be what he wasn't. And it is this that precipitated his early exit from the movies, around 1934. Now the biographer and journalist William J. Mann, fascinated by Haines's colorful rise and fall in the film world and his unique refusal to cave...
Mann, taking an affectionate but carefully critical view of the hero of his book, traces Haines's life through its multiple metamorphoses. One of the book's central revelations is that Hollywood in the 1920s was a place where it was possible to be openly gay. Homosexuality was simply accepted; gay and straight people mingled socially as well as professionally, and there was a line dividing the on-screen persona of an actor from his private life. But with the advent of sound and the conservative reactionism of the 1930s which accompanied the start of the Great Depression, a crackdown...
...both the long-term effect of these forces upon the movies--the infamous Hays morality code, which constrained the movies to representing a rigidly defined value system whose iron grip did not begin to loosen until the 1960s and '70s--and the very personal impact upon the actors in Hollywood. The studios declared that being gay was no longer okay in Hollywood, thereby avoiding the harsh criticism of the Roman Catholic Church and other religious groups, and providing spin control on the gossip newspapers that were rapidly taking on an alarming independence. Actors who were rumored to be homosexual were...
Haines's life both in the movies and afterward, as "decorator to the stars," provides a keyhole through which we can get a very intimate glimpse of Hollywood life, gay and straight, as it once existed behind the veil of secrecy. Haines knew everyone (and seems to have had affairs with many of them). Through his eyes, as reconstructed by Mann, we see the increasingly hidden world of early gay Hollywood: the actors--Cary Grant and Randolph Scott, Claudette Colbert and Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo and Ramon Novarro--and the people behind the scenes, such as director George Cukor...