(Published by Jonathan Cape, £20)
Hollywood haunts our dreams. We put the stars on pedestals – and how we love to see them knocked off! Fame, and its corollary, notoriety, are part of the Hollywood myth. From Fatty Arbuckle to Charles Manson, from Rock Hudson’s “lavender marriage” to Rhianna’s black eyes. Gossip is the grease that makes this horrible Hollywood machine go around. Hedda Hopper, Kenneth Anger, Karina Longworth have made careers of it. And writers have searched to uncover LA’s shadowland, writers as earnest as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Nathanael West right up to James Ellroy and the late Jackie Collins.
Undoubtedly there is a Bad Moon Hollywood and with all that is at stake – fame, ambition, avarice, talent, hubris, vanity, fandom, potential – who can blame people being corrupted. As the songwriter said “all the stars who never were are parking cars and pumping gas”. The other Hollywood is clearly a rich seam to mine and Jean Stein, author of West of Eden, is in a good position to so do. Her father Jules Stein was born in 1924 in Chicago. He started as a booker of bands touring the Midwest, and ended as the founder of MCA, the giant Hollywood talent agency and production house (in 1958 he bought Universal Studios).
Jules Stein at first became an ophthalmologist, but his heart wasn’t in it. In his unpublished biography (quoted liberally by his daughter) he asked his boss for a sabbatical to pursue his dream to give up medicine for showbiz. He wrote, ‘I think that deep down when I asked Dr Gradle for a leave of absence, I knew I would never come back.’ Jean Stein grew up as Hollywood royalty. She used to have the young Elizabeth Taylor as playmate.
The book is an oral history with the author taking a backseat and making no comment. History is told in the voices of those interviewed; her job is to edit and give focus. The book is a heartbreaker, full of dysfunctional families and despair and, dare I say it, broken dreams.
Take the case of Jennifer Jones, who was married to fellow actor Robert Walker (he played Bruno in Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train). When legendary film producer David O. Selznick gave Jones the lead in the film The Song of Bernadette, she won the 1944 Oscar and a star was born.
Jones ended up marrying Selznick and moved into Greta Garbo’s old mansion. And while Robert Walker’s career stalled, he became an alcoholic and was dead by the age of 32. Meantime, Selznick went broke and Jones went into therapy, seeing an analyst every day for 30 years. The sessions didn’t stop her thoughts of suicide – which also haunted her daughter.
The book has been in gestation for umpteen years during which Stein talked to luminaries like the late Lauren Bacall and Arthur Miller, as well as assorted butlers and secretaries. Many of the subjects quoted in the book are the child casualties of those Grand Guignol stories who are now grown up and their parents long dead.
And talking of Grand Guignol, there’s the case of Jane Garland (no relation to Judy), a schizophrenic teenager whose mother virtually abandoned her in the family’s Malibu beach house and hired young men to act as escort/nurses for the troubled, precocious child that she no longer had time for. The implications are quite horrible.
If power corrupts, then money, fame, thwarted ambition and wasted talent corrupt equally. The stories in West of Eden are not salacious just sad. But eminently readable.