The Fashion Businessmovies. Hollywood, she argued, stressed the ‘look at me’, ‘look at my body’
type. Close-ups emphasized the intimate details of the physical being of actors.
They were also known by parts of their bodies, that which was deemed most
worthy of attention. Thus a husky voice, beautiful breasts, or a dimple in
the chin came to sum up the entire persona of a star. The reduction to parts
affected women more than men, although Powdermaker did reveal that one
(unnamed) male star was known as ‘the penis’. Newcomers to Hollywood
were obliged to perform a long apprenticeship, part of which involved them
in revealing as much flesh as possible for ‘cheesecake’ and ‘beefcake’ shots.
As Edgar Morin remarked, ‘stars reveal their spirits, starlets exhibit their
bodies’.^16
Prior to the Hays Code, many films featured a more obvious sexuality
and laid considerable stress on experience. In the 1920s and early 1930s,
stars like Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich played world-weary women
who had seen everything and were shocked by nothing. Frequently, as in
Garbo’sSusan Lennox and Dietrich’sShanghai Express, they played women
who had been abandoned by lovers and had turned to prostitution. As Lea
Jacobs has shown, ‘fallen women’ movies exercised a great appeal during
the Depression years because they legitimated the use of sexuality as a means
by which women could escape poverty and hardship.^17 These images also
drew on the theatrical tradition of the femme fatale that had been established
in the nineteenth century by writers like Théophile Gautier and actresses
such as Sarah Bernhardt. Garbo and Dietrich were both enigmatic, even
exotic, European women whose allure was enhanced by costumiers like
Adrian at MGM and Travis Banton at Paramount, as well as the art of the
best cinematographers in Hollywood.
The movie capital sometimes liked to give the impression that the seductive-
ness and beauty of its stars was a natural phenomenon. All the industry had
to do was discover the star quality and present it unalloyed to the public.
One example of this can be seen in The Barefoot Contessa. In an evening
scene, Humphrey Bogart tells Ava Gardner (playing a simple Spanish singer,
Maria Vargas) that the moon illuminates her face just like a key light,
revealing her potential for movie stardom. Of course, Gardner was already
a star and the ‘moon’ was in fact a key light. The fiction of naturalness
served to disguise the fact that the beauty and photogenic qualities of the
stars were in reality highly constructed. To turn Margherita Cansino, a simple
girl of Spanish-Mexican origin, into the all-American glamour girl Rita
- Morin, Edgar, Les Stars, Paris: Seuil, 1972, p. 53.
- Jacobs, Lea, The Wages of Sin: Censorship and the Fallen Woman Film 1928–1942,
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991.