Glamour in a Golden Age: Movie Stars of the 1930s

Introduction: Stardom in the 1930s

I N T R O D U C T I O N Stardom in the 1930s ADRIENNE L. McLEAN Glamour might be defined as, first and most important, sex appeal (though that phrase is banned by the Hays office, you have to say “it” or “oomph”), plus luxury, plus elegance, plus romance. Glamour is at present an accepted stock, and a very important stock in trade in the movie business. But is it on the wane? Is the era of glamour over? Does glamour no longer pay? —Margaret Farrand Thorp, America at the Movies, 1939 I am hardly the first to call the 1930s a golden age for Hollywood (see Schatz, Genius of the System part 3), nor am I alone in wanting to characterize the decade, despite its glow, as one marked conspicuously by opposition and change. Robert Sklar, for example, divides the era into a “golden Age of Turbulence” (1930–1934) and a “golden age of order” (1935–1941) (Movie-Made America); others name the parts differently, although the dates stay roughly the same: a “grim thirties” and a “New Deal” (Griffith and Mayer), or simply “part one” and “part two” (Bergman). Some acknowledge the period’s bifurcation more broadly: “In perhaps no other decade did the Hollywood film industry and its product look so different at its conclusion as compared to its beginning” (Hark, American Cinema of the 1930s 1). As for the first term in this volume’s title, Margaret Thorp’s remarks suggest that even in 1939 it was clear that glamour, and the movie stars who embodied and literalized it, also looked different than it, and they, had but a few years before. Financially speaking, for Hollywood the 1930s were actually given much more to grimness and turbulence than order and prosperity. Bracketed on one end by the stock market crash of 1929 and on the other by the beginnings of World War II in Europe, the ups and downs that Hollywood experienced during the decade mirrored the “reality of film audiences,” who were living lives “characterized particularly by sudden and unexpected shifts of fortune” (Hark, American Cinema of the 1930s 1–2). The completion of the transition to sound in 1930, and the profits that accrued as audiences flocked to the new talking films and the genres that sound either enabled ★★★★★★★★★★ ✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩ 1 ★★★★★★★★★★ ✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩ (the musical) or made newly popular (westerns, gangster films, horror movies, comedies with witty dialogue), or to see and hear the stars the talkies contained (some already silent-era favorites, others imported from radio, Broadway, and vaudeville), seemed initially, in Andrew Bergman’s words, to indicate that the “dream factory” would not be “stricken along with the steel factory” (xxi). But the confidence was short-lived. The musical died first, at the end of 1931; it turned out that audiences were not interested in every studio “offering its entire roster of stars in ‘novelty’ numbers” or “dated operettas featuring unknowns from the stage whose vocal qualifications failed to make up for their visual inadequacies” (Griffith and Mayer 252–53). (The musical wouldn’t be dead for long; it returned in 1933 to remain a popular genre through the end of the studio era.) And although the audience, or a large part of it, was interested in Hollywood’s ever more realistic displays of violence and sexuality, these soon got the industry into trouble. The case that movies and, in particular, the highly imitatable actions of certain stars—James Cagney shoving a grapefruit into Mae Clarke’s face in Public Enemy (1930), or Mae West telling a man to “come up sometime and see me” in She Done Him Wrong (1933)—were corrupting the nation’s young was more easily made after the publication in 1933 of Henry James Forman’s sensational condensation of the Payne Fund studies, Our Movie Made Children (see Griffith and Mayer 292–93; Sklar 135–40; Thorp 121–22). Mothers everywhere now understood that if they were “puzzled by the behavior of a youthful son or daughter [they] would do well to study the star whose pictures they are most eager to see” (Thorp 124). Certain parent and religious groups and other watchdogs of public morality fought back against the corrupting influence of the movies with threatened boycotts and calls for state and federal censorship.1 At the beginning of 1933, with box office receipts 40 percent of what they had been in 1931 and RKO and...