Vanity Fair’s Tales of Hollywood: Rebels, Reds, and Graduates, and the Wild Stories Behind the Making of 13 Iconic Films

Edited by Graydon Carter

I have to admit that I’ve always been somewhat intimidated yet still righteously dismissive of the legendary magazine, Vanity Fair.  The former is inspired by the magazine’s history of intellectual acuity, well-deserved early on through the contributions of writers such as Peter Benchley and Dorothy Parker.  The latter comes from VF’s carefully crafted images of wealth, luxury, and celebrity that both tempts and rejects.  It’s aspirational — with a velvet rope around it.  Like the pretty girl who wants you to notice how attractive she is so that she can pretend to ignore the attention, Vanity Fair has always seemed to me to be made only for those people who wouldn’t think twice about plunking down $75 for a t-shirt, yet anyone who can look at it on the newsstand.

Nothing that appears in Vanity Fair escapes the sheen of its glamour, not even ostensibly unglamorous subjects, such as the political and legal scandal involving the “outing” of CIA agent, Valerie Plame, or the criminal beat covered by Dominic Dunne.  Everything, everything is clean, beautiful, desirable.  Even murder.  It is just this transformation that I find disconcerting enough to reject.  It’s as if any life that’s less than opulent isn’t a life worth living.

I grew up surrounded by very rich people — so rich that I believed for the longest time my family was poor.  My poor family, who lived in Malibu.  My poor family, who made it possible for me to be a successful rider on the west and east coast junior hunter/jumper circuits.  That’s how much money these other people had.  By the time I was eighteen, I couldn’t stand it anymore — it wasn’t the wonderful horses I couldn’t take, but the mostly vacuous people and the insulated world in which most conversations revolved around the best clubs to go to while in Palm Beach.  Horses were, at most, an afterthought, just another accessory.  These were the sorts of people who lived like the photos I saw in Vanity Fair.  For them, it was as automatic as breathing.  Sheltered as I was myself, I didn’t know exactly what was wrong with all this, but I was convinced that there were other lives I should be living, lives I created on my own, and more important ideas I should be thinking about.

When Vanity Fair’s Tales of Hollywood, a book devoted to the behind the scenes stories of some of the most important U.S. films ever made, recently arrived at my door, I was suspicious.  ‘Great,’ I thought.  ‘A bunch of salaciously ingratiating articles designed to further mythologize Hollywood, thereby cementing Vanity Fair’s own celebrity.  Boring and self-serving,’ I concluded, without even cracking the cover.  I was already convinced that, rather than focusing on analyses of the important ideas and social criticism that films explore and expose, the articles collected from old VF issues would be mere exercises in gossip and adoration of rich people doing and saying inane things as if they were profoundly consequential.  Then I opened the book.

The pieces in Vanity Fair’s Tales of Hollywood reflect the understanding that movies are part of the fabric of our culture.  They both reflect and create meaning, and the people involved making films are artists and technicians.  In short, films are important to our lives.  So, as it turns out, the collection of articles — well, partly articles, partly essays — is a valuable asset to anyone interested in film studies in particular and culture in general.  Whether or not you’re from the generations covered by, say, “Magnificent Obsession”, about the making of the 1942 film, The Magnificent Ambersons, or “Thunder on the Left”, about the making of the 1981 film, Saturday Night Fever, you’ll find something of interest.  The stories behind the stories allow fans to enlarge their interpretations, which means they’re thinking about aspects of these films in new and possibly unique ways.  Take, for example, casting choices.  If Anne Bancroft hadn’t played Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate, clearly the characterization would have been different, however subtly, and so also the film.  When readers begin to contemplate what the director, Mike Nichols, had in mind when he made his choices, what those choices meant then and now, they embark upon an examination that is just as much about themselves as it is about the film.

Vanity Fair’s Tales of Hollywood is not just an archival anthology about the making of movies.  It is also indirectly about the art of storytelling in journalism.  There isn’t a badly written piece in the bunch, and each achieves a level of intimacy that makes it easy for readers with even only a passing familiarity with some of the figures in the assembly to get caught up in the action.  Here’s Sam Stagg simply but vividly describing an entire world in “Everything About Eve”:

A bicycle messenger arrived at RKO in the late afternoon carrying a large envelope with [Betty] Davis’ name on it.  She started reading the script as her chauffeur drove off the lot.  Her enthusiasm grew with each page she turned, and by the time the driver pulled up to her house at 1991 Ocean Way in Laguna Beach, Davis knew this was the best script she had read in years.  She locked herself in her room and, provisioned with plenty of scotch and cigarettes, didn’t come out again until she had studied every word of All About Eve.

Then there’s James Wolcott’s “Tommy Dearest”.  Wolcott’s piece didn’t cure me of my deep mistrust and current resentment of the anti-establishment-drop-some-acid-love-in crowd of the late 1960’s.  (Have you seen Dennis Hopper’s commercials peddling retirement advice on behalf of Ameriprise?  Really?  Really?  By all means, let’s please ‘turn retirement upside down’ so that those grand iconoclasts can hoard the bundles they made and then ride off easily into the sunset on their choppers or whatever while, arguably because of those edgy, aging baby boomers, the rest of us will likely never pay off our student loan debts or own our own home.)  Anyhoo, I may be bitter, but I can still appreciate how Wolcott succinctly threads together myriad elements of social and art criticism by way of his meditation on the Who’s rock opera, Tommy.  That’s what good writing does.  It forces readers to reassess their beliefs, if not amend them.  I don’t agree entirely with Wolcott’s conclusion, whereby he contrasts the “rock art form” possibilities that were never realized after the success of Tommy with today’s iPod-I-have-my-own-theme-music reality:

We don’t want to be subsumed into something bigger.  We want something smaller to become part of us, incorporated into the repertoire.  When Tommy’s autistic condition was cracked open, his mind awakened to what it was like Out There and his arms embraced the sky.  We prefer it In Here, with the hood down.

But it seems to me that that’s just the point.  The articles in Vanity Fair’s Tales of Hollywood offer us individual perspectives on the shared cultural experience of film, and these viewpoints suggest ways of looking at how things could have been.  It is then up to the reader to determine whether or not we should feel relief or regret; whether or not we must, as Rilke admonishes, ‘change our lives.’