Hollywood Ambitions: Celebrity in the Modern Age (review)

When the journal first asked me to review this book, I was intrigued by the jacket's claims for a "varied and untraditional" approach to Hollywood celebrity and stardom during the studio era. Its promise of "extensive and unprecedented primary research" was an equal draw for someone like me who enjoys working in studio archives. While the author writes engagingly and with great enthusiasm for her five subjects, western hero Wyatt Earp, writers Jack London and Gertrude Stein, actress Clara Bow, and actress/director Ida Lupino, I found the book disappointing.

Orgeron is certainly ambitious. Her formulation of celebrity focuses on public figures and writers who longed to achieve status as Hollywood insiders, but also probes the careers of two very different female stars and the dynamics of their "outsider" status. So this book isn't about director "auteurs" or the process of starmaking and unmaking. It is revisionist as far as studies of Hollywood stardom and celebrity go, but the trouble is Orgeron doesn't situate Hollywood Ambitions within the work of other film historians who have explored Hollywood's complex connections to American culture and society, revised highbrow/lowbrow distinctions, and assessed the nuances of female stardom.

Her approach has interdisciplinary aims, and Orgeron makes some effort to connect Wyatt Earp's dreams of becoming the subject of a major Hollywood western biopic in the 1920s to Hollywood's larger commitment to the West. Yet in each of the chapters, I had the feeling of tunnel vision. They work very well as set pieces—each chapter reveals a different facet of celebrity desires and experience—yet I kept asking myself: What is the rationale for making this a book? Is the "varied and untraditional cast of characters" too disparate and unrelated to function collectively under one argument? As individual essays on the lure of Hollywood, they are interesting. But as a book, the "chapters" are fragmentary and the research questions, advertised in the introduction, are not powerful enough to unite them.

Earp's own failed attempts to become a star of a major biopic are not ever attributed to wider efforts within Hollywood to "elevate" the western's cultural status by linking it to the masculine biopic mode. Further, during the 1920s and 1930s, the western was arguably being redefined by female audiences and stars—even Clara Bow played in a modern western as a wild "mixed blood" (Call Her Savage, 1932)—yet Orgeron ignores this and similar chances to connect her "cast" with broader issues in Hollywood production. Adding Jack London and Gertrude's Stein's experiences with Hollywood adds some offbeat appeal, but Orgeron doesn't compare their experiences with other mainstream and artsy American writers who tried to negotiate Hollywood stardom. Why include Bow and Lupino, I wondered? A few years back, TCM did interesting documentaries on their work and the network's films, and biographer David Stenn did much to revamp Clara Bow as a major Hollywood icon. While her final chapter on Lupino has some smart visual analysis of The Bigamist (1953), it operates in a narrow historical frame. I had similar issues with the other chapters' historical contexts, which occasionally sounded like potted histories.