11 SEPTEMBER 1976, Page 25

A study in scarlet

Benny Green

Growing Up in Hollywood Robert Parrish (Bodley Head £4.95) Now that the Hollywood studio system is dead forever, the compiling of its obituary Proceeds, and already threatens to be the longest of the century. At the present rate of Production, most public libraries will have to build Cinema annexes, Hollywood outhouses, in order to cope with and to catalogue the vast quantities of reminiscent verbiage pouring from the production lines. Everybody who can claim a passing acquaintance with a featured player, or who once sat with his back to Frank McHugh, Or Frank Jenks, or Frank Albertson in the studio commissary, appears to he able to get a publisher's advance. Directors and stars, cutters and editors, cameramen and extras are all contributing to the boom, and it is instructive that the only two groups of Hollywood workers who have so far stood back from the publishing game are the producers and the writers, for the same reason -that neither group ever included anyone Who could read or write.

There is no doubt in my mind that the reason for the public's indulgence toward this type of book is identical to the reason for the public's indulgence toward old movies. Those of us who were once conditioned to believe that Cagney, Colman and company were demi-gods never tire, despite ourselves, of the search for relevant information. Even today, thirty years later, When I know from conversations with those Involved that Jolson was one of the most detestable men Cecil B. De Mille ever put breath into, that little Alan Ladd had to stand on a box, that Dick Powell loathed the very idea of singing, that Jack L. Warner had trouble distinguishing between the melodies of Swanee and The Man That Got 'ay, that Sonia Henie's grasp of English was so minimal that in her scenes with Don Ameche he had to give her a nudge to signal to her that she should !why start reciting the Phonetic noises she had learned, in spite of all this, the movie generations, which include mine, still riffle through texts like the °Ile provided by Robert Parrish in search of revelation, hardly admitting, even to themselves, that their hearts leap up when they behold a Garbo in the text.

Reading Parrish's amusing reminiscence ra life devoted to the Hollywood machine, r, a ni struck for the umpteenth time by the act that nobody who ever worked in the s‘.ludios emerged with his reason quite intact. St other explanation is there for the s,shooking self-exposure that all books of prrish's kind represent ? Indeed, there is usinning to be something pathetic about

the degree to which the remmiscers damn themselves even as they are looking for our amused approval. I recall reading a dreadful book on, by, or about Bette Davis, I was never clear which, where we are told of Miss Davis's heroic battle against the iniquities of the Warner Brothers contract department; the little woman struggling valiantly against the engines of indifferent capitalism. Miss Davis won some kind of a moral victory but was then dismayed to find that she was still being offered the same old junk parts. This puzzled her. And her puzzlement puzzled me, for she had actually contrived to spend a life at the studios without realising that her masters gave her bad scripts as well as good ones because there was nobody around who could tell the difference.

Parrish is only one of many writers of movie confessionals who never quite grasps the absurdity of his own occupation. He seems to take John Ford seriously as a Great Thinker, and John Wayne as a Great Actor. He even appears to respect the Academy Award system. And yet to judge from his text he seems an intelligent man, able to compose a rounded paragraph and tell a few mild jokes with some skill. He is especially good on his early days, those oddly vivid times when Cal Coolidge and Aimee Semple Macpherson were Mr and Mrs America, one who said nothing and the other who took all day to say nothing. There is a highly readable description of a session at Aimee's annexe of Heaven, a priceless account of a publicity stunt involving Jack Dempsey and the West Coast Newsboys, as well as the usual depiction of Harry Cohn as a foul-mouthed but somehow admirable philistine. The iext rambles on, the anecdotes flow, the feature films slip past.

Parrish is urbane and disarming ; his prose is pleasant and his manner of button-holing the reader inoffensive. And yet at the end, when he gets down to the contemptible charade of the Joe McCarthy witch hunts, he turns it into a happy-ending out of Frank Capra, with the big bold hero, John Ford, seeing off the bullying surrogate-jehovah De Mille with a flourish of democratic rhetoric. Parrish, like a great many of his generation, appears t'o have no idea that the industry in which he was involved, by behaving disgracefully over the McCarthy affair, lost the respect of many people, and never subsequently did anything to earn it back. It is almost as though those who made the movies, and wrote them, and edited them, and distributed them, became so besotted by their own brand of escapism that they were eventually conditioned by it themselves. At one point, Parrish tells us, there was a move by some workers on a Heine picture to take industrial action: Chandler stood on the hood of a parked car and yelled, 'All for one and one for all'. He had worked as an extra on The Three Musketeers and remembered the electrifying effect this phrase had when D'Artagnan yelled it in the picture. Jay yelled it again. I said, `What in hell does that mean, Jay ?'