James Brough

“ Whenever I stand up to make a speech about Hollywood, there is one question that’s ninety-nine per cent certain to pop up from the audience before we’re through: “Is anybody in the movies happily married?” The only answer I can give, of course, is another question: “Who can possibly say, except the husbands and wives?” I’ve been lied to many times when a marriage was crashing on the rocks and nobody would admit it. Can’t say I blame them. A man and his mate have the privilege of pretending that all is well up to the bitter end, the way people do everywhere. ”

“ The tycoons thought they made television, not the writers, directors, and producers. They wouldn’t dream of setting up a studio system, a great pool of brains that could have made NBC or CBS or ABC the biggest creator there ever was of entertainment and the lively arts. They put no funds aside for research, as General Motors, Westinghouse, Du Pont and the others do.
Now TV by and large has become a dime-store business so far as creativity and talent are concerned. The half-hour and sixty-minute series rattle off the production lines like cans of beans, with an occasional dab of ham inside. ”

“ On many a Saturday night Walt and his wife will sit up there, tweaking back the lace curtains that cover the windows, gazing at the crowds below like children watching a Memorial Day parade. It’s a real bit of Americana up to date.
He doesn’t acknowledge that anything but clean, good-humored pictures exist. He has never, to the best of my knowledge, sat through a single reel of the off-color, highly seasoned imports from France, Japan, and Italy that flood our screens today. By sticking to purity and fun he makes more money than ever before—and spends it as fast as it pours in. ”

“ She is mobbed by crowds, wooed by the world, and flattered without shame or mercy from the time she puts her dainty feet in the front gates of the studio in the morning to the time she leaves at night. She’s surrounded by her own special set of courtiers, all busy lubricating her ego—hairdresser, make-up man, script girl, wardrobe girl, still photographer, press agent, drama coach, and interviewers. ”

“ Bill tapped Bob Mitchum for stardom on the spot. Bob, after more than his share of headlines, ranks now as one of our more solid citizens.
Like a ride on a roller coaster, Hollywood reached peak prosperity just before the final dive began. World War II brought in profits that overflowed the tills and burst the bank vaults. It also brought on the first of the catastrophic decisions that wrecked the industry.
A soldier with a precious pass or an off-duty hour to spare, a war worker on the swing shift—the whole world flocked to the movies to escape reality for a few moments. ”

“ Gene’s studio had given the story of the forthcoming baby exclusively to Louella the previous afternoon. When she heard Gene had told me, she had flounced over to the poor girl and delivered a tongue lashing so violent that Gene had collapsed into tears. Gary Cooper had been in another room and didn’t hear it, but of the whole mob of Hollywood heroes who listened to Louella, not one lifted a voice or a finger to help Gene. Fear of their own precious skins kept them as dumb as mutes at a funeral. ”

“ Every year the bosses prepared lavish promotion programs to light a gleam in the exhibitors’ eyes, listing the four colossal musicals, the half dozen scintillating comedies, the seven searing dramas, and so forth which the particular studio would deliver in the months ahead. Many times these promises were pure blue sky. They’d invent a title, pencil in the stars, then a team of contract writers would knock out a story. Today no production head can promise what next year will bring because the system’s out of his control and he just doesn’t know about tomorrow. ”

“ David, who is unfortunately seldom at a loss for words, had his answer ready: “If I’m not the biggest admirer of Tony Curtis’ talent, I’ve never questioned his virility or strength. He is, in my book, a passionate amoeba.”
Playing in television, which used to be more fun than a picnic, is more like a salt mine now. The latest generation of TV actors, if they click in a hit program, slave six and seven days a week to keep the series going. The new faces soon show signs of bags under the eyes and crows’ feet. ”

“ Inside the blonde head of tragedy’s child, Marilyn Monroe, fame and misery were mixed up like tangled skeins of knitting wool. She was an unsophisticated, overly trusting creature whose career was always professionally and emotionally complicated beyond her power to control it. She was used by so many people.
She let herself be surrounded by such a clutch of nudgers, prodders, counselors, and advisers that the poor child developed an inferiority complex so ruinous that she was terrified to walk onto any movie set for stark fear she’d fluff a line or miss a cue. ”

“ But Judy survived the flop that A Star Is Born proved to be, as she has survived all the incredible excesses of her life. In every performance—at concerts, on television, in her new pictures—she has the power to stir an audience to the depths of their hearts, like an old-fashioned revival meeting. ”

“ Hollywood has all the excuses you find anywhere for divorce—boredom, egotism, emotional immaturity, and the rest. It also has some special reasons of its own—press agents who can get bigger headlines with a scandal than with a happy home life; producers who resent a husband or wife “interfering” in a star’s business; managers who stop at nothing to hold onto their percentages. Elsewhere in the world, children are usually a bond that holds parents through many a squabble. But that’s not always the case in the Empire of Guff, which was one of Gene Fowler’s labels for us. ”

“ Even her mother, Judy said, tapped her telephone calls. “She is doing everything in her power to destroy me.”
I said: “You know that isn’t true. Nobody in the world loves you as your mother does—and has all your life through all your troubles.”
But she cried out against her mother; against Ida Koverman; against all those who had helped her out of so much potential trouble. She was carried out of the dressing room, put in a limousine, still wearing make-up and costume, and put to bed. ”

“ Cecil B. De Mille, looking for some place to produce The Squaw Man, had rented a livery stable at Selma and Vine, founding the motion-picture capital, the wonderland that clothed dreams in flesh for millions of the world’s inhabitants. Bill Farnum reigned in splendor in a suite at the Hollywood Hotel; I made my movie debut with him, played his leading lady for $100 a week, which was a fortune to me then.
Life was simple, exciting, and, most of all, fun. We worked hard and loved it. ”

“ She didn’t cotton to Hollywood.
Glamour and Mary were strangers in those days. The studio put her in curls and ruffles. She arrived at one dress-up affair in a sports suit. And make-up men hadn’t yet acquired their present techniques, which can transform literally any girl into a beauty queen.
Mary didn’t start to glow until Mainbocher took her over and made her one of America’s best-dressed women. Any woman wearing a beautiful gown can peek at herself in a mirror and think: “My, how pretty you look in that!” ”

“ Rome and Madrid today are the temporary movie capitals of the world. Tokyo, London, Paris—all compete for the title. Soaring costs at home push more and more production overseas. The peccadilloes of foot-loose stars and producers who hanker for far-off places favor foreign production. Some countries freeze profits from the screening of American movies, so the money must be used to stake new pictures inside those countries’ frontiers. Then, too, the big screen demands the real locations; you can no longer paint a mountain on a piece of glass and make it look like the Rockies. ”

“ Bless them for shedding the gleams of their gifts into our darkening times. Save them—tonight—from Bourbon Street. Inspire the mighty industry that sponsors them. And, in fine, smile beneficently on the box offices of the land, breathe into them a second spring and let there be the financial flow that is so vital to the maintenance of an enterprise without which our daily lives would be so definitely drabber. Amen.
The one man who could hold a candle as a letter writer to Father Murphy was Gene Fowler, another friend of many years. ”

“ You couldn’t pick up a magazine without coming across publicity shots of Betty Grable out marketing, Bette Davis washing dishes, or Alice Faye changing diapers. Nobody had ever seen a picture of Dietrich hanging out wet wash or Jack Barrymore in a life-with-father layout. We were busy bringing stars down out of the sky, lousing up the act, cutting our own throats.
Realism strangled the dream stuff, and it’s slowly slaughtering Hollywood. I see very little hope unless glamour is given its rightful place again. ”

“ Hollywood was always heartbreak town, though most of the world fancied it to be Shangri-La, King Solomon’s mines, and Fort Knox rolled into one big ball of 24-karat gold. We used to see the hopefuls stream in from every state of the Union, tens of thousands of them, expecting that a cute smile or a head of curls was all it took to pick up a million dollars. Many were old enough to know better, but not the children. ”

“ Though he’s proud to be a Democrat, he’s uneasy about being called a “Clansman.” The Clan consists of the men with which this mixed-up, lonely talent has surrounded himself—Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, Jr., Joey Bishop, Peter Pentagon Lawford.
“I hate the name of Clan,” Frank once said.
“Did you ever look the word up in a dictionary?” I said. “It means a family group that sticks together, like the Kennedys you’re so fond of. They’re the most clannish family in America. I don’t like Rat Pack, but there’s nothing wrong with the name of Clan.” ”

“ It’s easy to sing a song or two, harder to stand up and be funny for half an hour. Yet the comics measure up well; Jack Benny, Red Skelton, Jerry Lewis, George Burns—all knock themselves out in the sweet cause of charity.
Our number-one citizen on that score is Bob Hope, and we’re proud as peacocks of him. There isn’t a place in the world he wouldn’t fly to for charity and work without drawing a nickel. He’s ham enough to love the publicity it brings him, but he does a monumental amount of good. Bob has literally made the millions that everybody believes Bing has stashed away in the vaults. ”

“ Coop, Gable, Jimmy Stewart, John Wayne—they all were pitched into these June-and-December screen romances, and the public finally rebelled. But Duke Wayne was the first with sense enough to cry halt and insist on acting his age.
Too often the wives of both stars and producers haven’t enough to do to keep them content and out of mischief. Their husbands go to the studio and spend their day working with beautiful girls. The girls, wanting better parts in pictures, will do virtually anything they can to please them. Reality and normal values got lost. The men live with both feet off the ground. ”

“ It takes avaricious agents with calculating machines for108 hearts to encourage stars like Brando to behave as they do. Now that no studio any longer has its own roster of stars tied by contracts, the agents and actors run Hollywood, as they always threatened to. The studio has to go cap in hand to the agent to sign up the big star for a single picture. No more than a half dozen actors and actresses alive today can attract an audience big enough to give a picture a hope of success at the box office. ”

“ Ten years ago, the movies treated television the way a maiden aunt treats sex—if she doesn’t think about it, maybe it will disappear. But TV grew into a giant, and now it’s the odds-on favorite in entertainment. ”

“ Jack and Harry Warner, with stars like Bogart and Cagney on the payroll, broke in with action pictures, with gang bullets flying and fists swinging in every reel. ABC copied a leaf from that book. Never had such a volley of blank bullets resounded over the land before. Critics threw up their hands in horror, but ABC arrived with a bang and stayed there.
It’s a tragedy of the entertainment industry that the networks were as blind to the future needs of their business as the movie makers had been to theirs. Like Pharaoh, the television tycoons let the people go ”

“ My answer has always been ‘yes.’ If the head of a big corporation can try to use his influence with his employees, if a union head can try to use his influence with his members, if a newspaper editor can try to use his influence with his readers, if a columnist can try to use his influence, then an actor has a perfect right to try to use his influence.
“My own feeling is that those actors who do not agree with my point of view are those who are afraid to stand up and be counted. They want everybody to love them and want everybody to agree with them on everything. ”