Hollywood on the fake

A fascinating new book reveals the stunts and fixes behind the images the studios wanted to present of their top stars in cinema's golden ages.

Maryln Monroe in the Seven Year Itch Maryln Monroe in the Seven Year Itch

The people of Los Angeles had woken to the acrid smell of burning and were alarmed to see a thick cloud of smoke blotting out the sun.

The police and fire departments were inundated with calls from residents who believed the entire city might soon be burnt to the ground.

By the time the emergency services, followed by an army of journalists, reached the source of the flames at the MGM Studios, an area covering more than 25 acres was ablaze.

But the fire that winter in 1938 had been started deliberately. Studio sets dating back to the earliest days of silent films were being set alight to create a scene of Atlanta burning for David O Selznick’s epic film  Gone With The Wind.

Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh in Gone With The Wind Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh in Gone With The Wind

Selznick’s movie was already one of the most talked-about films in Hollywood. The two-year search for an actress to play the lead role of Scarlett O’Hara had seen hundreds of girls audition unsuccessfully. Selznick had to begin filming without an actress assigned to the part.

Then, days after the fire, the studio revealed a Scarlett had at last been discovered.

 Laurence Olivier had happened to arrive on the set on the day of the fire with his girlfriend Vivien Leigh, then little known in America. As the flames leapt up around her, Selznick had apparently become entranced by Leigh’s intense green-eyed beauty.

News of the enormous fire and the discovery of Leigh, literally among the flames, ensured the press and public were driven into a state of almost hysterical anti-cipation months before the film’s release. Not surprising then that the film broke all box office records and, accounting for inflation, continues to be the biggest grossing picture of all time.

In fact, none of this was coincidence. Gone With The Wind had been the benefic­iary of one of the biggest and most elaborate publicity stunts in Hollywood history.

The massive fire, the long and apparently fruitless search for Scarlett and her sudden appearance among the flames had all been planned by Russell Bird­well, Selznick’s head of publicity.

Birdwell had made sure that no one told the press, the police or the fire brigade about the fire beforehand so they would turn up on the scene believing they were witnessing a genuine catastrophe. But he had also made sure that about 40 telephones were provided nearby so the press could phone in the breaking news story in time for the next day’s papers.

Vivien Leigh had actually been screen-tested and lined up for the role months before Selznick, apparently randomly, saw her visiting the set.

But according to Mark Borkowski, a celebrity public relations agent whose new book reveals the scams and stunts Hollywood publicists used to get their films and the stars on the front pages, Gone With The Wind was by no means the only film to benefit from a publicist’s sleight of hand.

He claims the real stars of Hollywood were the names we have never heard of: the publicity men, fakers and fixers who set up elaborate stories to make their celebrity clients seem more exciting and went to extraordinary lengths to cover up indiscretions.

“A lot of people think that public relations and spin is a very modern idea,” says Borkowski. “And of course today’s publicists like to think they are always breaking new ground. The truth is, nothing we do today is new.”

It was publicist Harry Brand who decided that insuring Betty Grable’s legs for a million dollars each was worth every cent in publicity.

Brand was also instrumental in transforming Marilyn Monroe from an ordinary pin-up to the ultimate sultry sex icon.

Knowing that revealing she had posed nude would upset the morality of the time, Brand’s team decided to make the most of it. “They knowingly acknowledged her overt sexuality,” says Borkowski.

“They put it about that Monroe would ‘look good even in a potato sack’ and to push the point further they bought a clean potato sack and dressed her in it, draping the mater­ial suggestively, though not revealing too much.”

It was Brand and his team who primed Monroe, when asked what she wore in bed, to reply: “Chanel No 5” and Brand’s people who created a furore in New York by filming Monroe on top of a subway grill, while the

public and photographers fought to catch a view of her skirt revealingly blowing in the updraft.

In fact, the actual scene used in The Seven Year Itch was shot in the studio and censors made sure it featured nothing like as much of Marilyn as the people saw on the street.

 It didn’t matter. The fuss made over Marilyn gyrating in public ensured the film was a huge hit.

Other publicists found ways of getting around the strict censors. When Howard Hughes cast Jane Russell in The Outlaw, he employed Bird­well to ensure his starlet’s ample bosom received as much publicity as possible.

Birdwell spread a rumour that Hughes had used his aviation talents to design a new bra for Russell that showed off her assets to greater effect. Jane Russell later admitted that while a bra had been designed, she never wore it. But all the attention made the censors ban The Outlaw for exposing too much of Russell’s breasts.

Birdwell saw the opportunity to capitalise on the controversy and launched an exhibition displaying photographs of the bosom of every female star in Hollywood and used a top mathematician to “prove” that less of Jane Russell, in proportion to her size, was on display than any other star of the Forties. “It was the greatest display of mammary glands in the history of the universe,” Birdwell admitted.

It also meant that when The Outlaw finally got passed by the censors, it was sold out as a lustful public rushed to see a film with the tagline: “The picture that couldn’t be stopped.”

But while Hollywood studios liked their stars to be sexually suggestive, they wanted their private lives to seem as innocent as possible – a task that was less than simple when it came to many of the biggest names of the time.

Clark Gable was one such star.

The moment he arrived in Holly­wood he began a string of affairs that continued despite his marriage to actress Josephine Dillon, the first of five wives. Several pregnancies, including that of Joan Craw­ford, had to be covered up by MGM fixer Howard Strickling.

Strickling forced Gable to divorce his first wife and marry the socialite Ria Langham to deflect attention from his affair with Craw­ford. But Strickling’s main weapon for getting stars out of trouble was the good old-fashioned bribe.

“Between them, Howard Strick­ling and Whitey Henry, the studio’s police chief, could fix anything,” says Hollywood biographer Gerald Clarke. “No less a figure than Los Angeles top prosecutor, District Attorney Buron Fitts himself, was on the take.”

“The stars were told, ‘If you get into trouble, don’t call the police. Don’t call the hospital. Don’t call your lawyer. Call Howard,’” says Borkowski.

Publicists also had their hands full trying to prevent the gay, lesbian and bisexual tendencies of many stars from coming to light. One tactic was to prevent affairs before they could begin.

“In 1930, when Marlene Deitrich arrived in Holly­wood, the MGM machine worked very hard to keep her away from Greta Garbo, knowing of both stars’ lesbian tendencies,” says Borkowski. When Garbo began seeing actress Fifi D’Orsay instead, the MGM fixers killed off the affair by telling publicity-shy Garbo that Fifi had blabbed to the press.

 Garbo never spoke to Fifi again.

But the power of Hollywood fixers had a darker side. When Jean Harlow’s husband Paul Bern was found shot dead in her house in 1932, Strickling quickly determined that he had probably been killed by his jealous common-law wife  Dorothy Millette. “Had her existence become public, the outcry would have obliterated not only Harlow’s career but MGM’s reputation,” says Borkowski.

Strickling ensured Bern’s death was made to look like suicide. Guns and suicide notes were placed in his house and family members who protested he had no suicidal tendencies were quietly bought off. When the studio system coll­apsed in the early Fifties so did the power of men such as Strickling but the publicity mach­ine didn’t stop running and modern publicists still control much of what is and isn’t seen in the lives of stars.

Descendants of men like Bird­well, Brand and Strickling are still at work because, like the elaborate sets behind them, the lives of the top Hollywood names are not always what they seem.

To order The Fame Formula, How Hollywood’s Fixers, Fakers And Star Makers Shaped The Publicity Industry by Mark Borkowski (Sidgwick & Jackson, £16.99), send a cheque or PO made payable to Express Bookshop to: Fame Formula Offer, PO Box 200, Falmouth TR11 4WJ, call the Express Bookshop on 0871 521 1301 or order online at www.expressbookshop.com

UK delivery is free. Calls cost 10p per min from BT landlines.

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