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73 CHAPTER 4 THE STUDIO MOUTHPIECE “I would read things I didn’t remember anything about,” insisted Paramount leading lady of the 1930s Mary Carlisle. “I never remember sitting down and giving an interview to a fan magazine. Stories were made up for publicity purposes .” Carlisle’s response typifies the memory of most players relative to their fan magazine coverage. And yet, it is difficult to believe, for example, that she did not recall posing for a two-page photo spread on “A Day in the Life of an Extra Girl” for the November 1932 issue of The New Movie Magazine. In reality, by the late 1920s and the 1930s contract players, both stars and featured performers, were interviewed by fan magazines under the supervision of studio publicists and were subject to rigorous rules and boundaries. The fan magazines and their writers published and wrote what the studios determined they should publish and write. The fan magazines and the studios fed off each other, and both had a healthy appetite. Most stars accepted working with fan magazines as part of their contract. When Marsha Hunt was signed as a leading lady at Paramount in 1935, it marked her screen debut: I had an unusual amount of fan magazine promotion, simply because I was brand new and Paramount put me so quickly to work. I had to appear in court for approval of my contract because I was still a minor, and within two weeks of that I was cast in my first movie. I remember I never had a day off but what there was an interview or a sitting in the still department, taking promotional pictures. Fan magazines were a major tool for the film industry of connecting the public with their product and personalizing the casts of the movies, getting the actors known as people, as celebrities, as glamorous, larger-than-life figures. I thought it was just part of being an actor in films, and I saw the purpose it served. They THE STUDIO MOUTHPIECE 74 were kind of “honeyed.” It was all exaggerated, and we were all made to be infinitely more attractive, more romantic, prettier, handsomer, and brighter and more gifted than we were. But that was what sold tickets. They didn’t have any truck with scandal. It was a very wholesome world they drew for us. I showed Barbara Hale an article on her and her new husband, Bill Williams , titled “Pretty as a Bride” and published in the October 1946 issue of Screen Romances. The actress immediately acknowledged that the piece, in which she visits the office of editor Evelyn Van Horne and discusses beauty tips, was all true. Hale was keen to point out that the fan magazines generally published the truth—albeit innocuous truth about her children and her home life. “Sometimes, they put the comma in the wrong place. You said the same thing but when they printed it, there was a different meaning.”1 In earlier years, there was certainly less control by producers, and many writers had a free hand. Diana Cary, who was child star of the 1920s “Baby Peggy,” provided a fascinating firsthand account of the relationship between a player and the scribes recording her work, The writers came after me, not the other way ’round. Adela Rogers St. Johns . . . wrote two articles on me—both of them sheer fiction, all the birth dates and birth places wrong, my discovery story her own version, my great love for dolls, including dolls of me (which I sold but never played with!), and the rest pure make-believe. When I was three, Willis Goldbeck interviewed me for Motion Picture Classic (1922), “Seen But Not Heard.” He may have consulted Century [her producer] as to phone number and where to find me, but I doubt if it was set up by the studio. When I was taken over by [producer] Sol Lesser, he organized a publicity blitz. The ubiquitous Gladys Hall, apparently in New York in October of 1923, interviewed me and my family there for an “in depth” story. I have also seen two or three others in the major magazines by writers who were not limited to fan magazines, but who free-lanced in other more high-brow magazines. With Lesser I suspect he contacted all of these writers himself as he was a very aggressive publicist. However, when I returned to Hollywood at thirteen in 1932, not only was I being marketed as an “ing...

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