Recycled Stars: Female Film Stardom in the Age of Television and Video
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Recycled Stars: Female Film Stardom in the Age of Television and Video
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822376033 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/26/2015 |
| Series: | Console-ing Passions |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 320 |
| File size: | 10 MB |
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Read an Excerpt
Recycled Stars
Female Film Stardom in the Age of Television and Video
By Mary R. Desjardins
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2015 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7603-3
CHAPTER 1
"THE ELEGANCE ... IS ALMOST OVERWHELMING"
Glamour and Discursive Struggles over Female Stardom in Early Television
The manner in which Gloria Swanson made food, fashion, and current events grist to her glamorous mill on her 1948 talk show on New York's independent television station WPIX inspired the New York Times television critic Jack Gould to remark that the program's almost "overwhelming" elegance might erect roadblocks to the show's longevity. Such elegance, he points out, contrasts sharply with the down-to-earth editorial stance of the station's owner, the New York Daily News, one of the very successful press competitors of the New York Times. Gould's observations point to an opposition—glamorous versus ordinary—that appears frequently in the discourses of the industry and popular press, and even in film narratives, about television stardom and the behavior of on-camera television "personalities" in the late 1940s to mid-1950s.
The star text of Gloria Swanson, who was one of the first important film stars to have her own television show, provides one of the most complex and telling examples of how film stars negotiated both the transformed terrain of the film industry and the newest broadcast medium in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Her star text and the television genres in which she performed provoked critical discourses that reveal how the television industry and the press were exploring the contours of what television stardom might look and sound like. The television industry and press speculated about female television stardom in relation to an (often unspoken) understanding about the female body and electronic technology and a (usually spoken) understanding of the female viewer as a potential consumer of sponsors' products. They speculated about the entrance of the female film star into television in terms of her relation to the hegemony of a prior medium and its powerful star system, now in a transitional mode. Even as the motion picture, with its spectacle and glamour, still dominated television, its transmissibility on television was through films and stars from the past. Would the cultural capital of the past, particularly as embodied by film stars, be passé on television? Or would it accrue greater value as new modes of distribution, such as television, widened the path of its circulation?
In this chapter I look at Swanson's case as she moves from her television talk show in 1948 to her comeback (or, as her character Norma Desmond might say, her "return") in film in 1950's Sunset Boulevard. I also examine more broadly the categories of glamour, fashion, personality, age, and comebacks—which Swanson's star text seemed to epitomize or speak to at that time—because they were mobilized by both trade and popular press to discuss more generally the role of stardom and of popular female personalities in television, especially those appearing in nondramatic television genres, in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The primary examples concern the television industry's vested interest in recycling formerly popular stars who had been initially groomed by the film industry, and the female film stars, such as Swanson, whose entrance into television involved a renegotiation of their glamorous personas. I also examine a group of African American female musical entertainers in early television known for their glamorous on-camera personas. Unlike Swanson and other white female film stars who appeared in television at this time and brought a sense of the "extraordinary" they had developed with the studios, these African American performers constructed their glamour out of reaction to the vehicles for stardom that Hollywood film studios had designated for them and other African American performers. These performers rejected or modified racially inflected studio casting practices, exemplified by the roles of household maid and exotic musical performer typically offered to nonwhite performers. They did so in their television programs by cultivating personas that projected authority, performing versatility, and glamour—all attributes typically denied them in their work for film studios. While I do not take on the larger task of accounting for all African American performers in early television, many of whom initially performed in films, these case studies of glamorous African American female television stars broaden the ways media historians and theorists have looked at the phenomenon of stardom in television and the public visibility of female stars in transitional moments in media history. That their time on television afforded these stars unprecedented visibility and yet was also very brief underscores that the questions of who gets recycled and how are also questions relevant to all the case studies in this book: Who profits from emerging media forms and transitions across media, and how?
Film Stars' Move into Television
Changes in postwar Hollywood media industries represented both crisis and new opportunities for established film stars. The "Paramount decree," the Supreme Court ruling in 1948 ordering theater divestment, resulted in the studios' loss of real estate revenues and guaranteed exhibition of their films. While this decree was a significant blow to some aspects of the industry's corporate health, its direct effect on film stars is difficult to assess; for instance, more than a few major stars had been freelancing since the 1930s or 1940s, and the decree itself probably had little direct effect on their employment. (Barbara Stanwyck, Cary Grant, and Loretta Young were freelance performers for a decade, give or take a few years, before studio divestment.) However, studios, no longer guaranteed exhibition of their films after divestment and faced with rising production costs, produced fewer films starting in the late 1940s. Even when the number of films rose in the mid-1950s, this was possible only because the studios had slashed overhead costs by not renewing star and unit-producer contracts and firing other employees. Established stars still under long-term contract typically parted ways with the studios when their contracts expired in the late 1940s or early 1950s. Since many stars had chafed under the contract system, this loosened relationship could seem more like liberation than desertion. For instance, in 1949 Bette Davis refused to do postproduction dubbing on a film unless Warner Bros. agreed to terminate her contract. Some stars, more commonly males, started independent production companies to take advantage of modified capital gains taxes and to have more autonomy in their careers. In this legal and economic arrangement of incorporation, stars often joined production partnerships with other established film talent, such as directors, writers, and producers who also wanted or had to separate from studio employment. They typically carried the patriarchal "boys club" attitudes and ties from the studio system with them, and very few female stars were able to benefit from these new arrangements. (The exceptions were those married to producers, such as Joan Bennett and Ida Lupino.)
The images created for stars by the studio system's industrial machinery were now the stars' own "personal monopolies." Press agents working for individual stars, once banned or discouraged by the studios, created and disseminated much of the promotional materials about their clients to keep them in the public view in between pictures and beyond the specific promotional activities the stars were still contracted to perform for studio-produced or -distributed films. Yet however much the studios' crisis meant freedom and autonomy for some stars, the wielding of these monopolies proved difficult for them, as the postwar climate in Hollywood was characterized by a variety of fluxes. The decline in studio production, population shifts to newly constructed suburban tracts away from city theaters, and competition with other leisure industries, such as television, had an impact on the trajectory of some film star personas and careers. Older stars, particularly older female stars subject to gender-inflected age discrimination, were especially challenged by Hollywood's response to the shift of mass audiences from filmgoing to television viewing or other activities—namely, its turn toward a youth market and more action-spectacle genres. Few female stars disappeared completely during this period, but many moved to supporting roles (often playing mothers of teenage or grown children), to self-parody, or to new careers in television.
Although television appearances provided stars with new opportunities to act and promote their films, the complexities of stars' negotiations of their personal image monopolies for this new medium are symptomatic of the ways a diverse media environment challenged the ability of the stars and their employers to sustain the coherency and profitability of star personas. Publicity materials about stars were now originating from diverse sources: studios, press agents, and the actors themselves. Although all these sources could be said to work in and for the media industries, they had individual agendas that could compete as well as overlap with others. Loyalty between studio and star was no longer a given.
In addition television and its explicit commercial ties resulted in new kinds of legal agreements between stars and both past and present employers. A 1952 case concerning the cowboy star Roy Rogers and Republic Studios is relevant here. The star and studio battled in court over the television broadcasting of movies Rogers made for Republic. Rogers, who now had his own company to promote his name as a commodity, did not want to be associated with products that might be pitched by sponsors of the television broadcast of his movies, which were owned by Republic. Jane Gaines argues that this case exemplifies struggles over how to ensure the coherency and profitability of star personas at a time when television and its explicit commercial ties, as well as newly independent stars, threatened the film industry's discursive and economic control over stardom.
Stars and the film and television industries entered into new kinds of relations. For example, Faye Emerson negotiated an early end to her Warner Bros. contract in 1946, which was compatible with the studio's postwar cutbacks in B film production and her desire to enter broadcasting. Ida Lupino was able to start her own production company with her producer-husband, Collier Young; her producing and directing experience, as well as previous acting experience, gave her an eventual edge in television directing and acting. In some ways Swanson was not the typical film star moving into television. When she first came to television in 1948, she had not been under contract to any film studio for many years and had last made a film in 1941. She did not have to renegotiate legal and economic relations with a studio, nor had she been displaced from a contract because of a studio's catering to a youth market. As we shall see, her appearance on television inspired reflection on the past (in particular the silent film era), and after her starring role in Sunset Boulevard in 1950 her star text was closely identified with the concept of the aging star. In 1948, however, her recycling from film to television was most frequently conceptualized in terms of the role of glamour in television. Yet despite her somewhat unique legacy of glamour from her association with the silent film era, her move to television put her in the company of many female entertainers—young and old, famous and unknown. All these women were positioned in emerging critical discourses within a tension that pitted glamour against ordinariness.
The Ordinary Personality versus the Glamorous Star
A few decades after Gould's critique of Swanson's show some television histories and theories posited the ordinary personality, as opposed to a glamorous or mysterious star, as the model of television stardom. Cited as evidence for the inevitability of such a model were conceptualizations of the medium's technological characteristics, such as its live transmission; its aesthetic or rhetorical characteristics, such as direct address and continuing narratives; its economic or institutional characteristics, such as dependence on commercial transaction and scheduling practices according to marketable demographics; and its reception characteristics, such as its reception in private, domestic space.
For example, John Ellis argues that what he calls the television "personality" is "qualitatively different" from the star phenomenon found in the cinema. The cinematic star "awakens" the spectator's psychic mechanisms because its construction and appearance in and outside of the cinematic text is based on a presence-absence dialectic. The cinematic star is always "elsewhere": once before the camera but no longer there at the time of viewing. In a sense this dialectic of presence-absence is "repeated" in what Ellis says is the cinematic star's paradoxically ordinary-extraordinary persona, at once like us or close to us but also apart from us, "removed from the life of mere mortals." Ellis points out that "television has used the word 'star' to apply to anybody who appeared on the screen," even weathercasters. But because it does not produce a play between ordinary and extraordinary, does not produce the presence-absence dialectic (television is always there), and always has the promise of liveness, television cannot present the lives of its performers as "anything particularly glamorous." Here glamour is a correlate of film stardom, not descriptive of content (of certain social values and signs, for example) but a position of enunciation inimical to regularized, ongoing presence. Other theorists, such as P. David Marshall, have built on Ellis's points, arguing that the television performer is an ordinary personality, ubiquitous and perhaps powerful, but not a star.
While contemporary television histories rarely pivot on questions of television stardom, it would be inaccurate to say they deny the existence of stardom as a televisual phenomenon. Most historical scholarship of broadcast media implies, even if it does not explicitly adopt, an understanding of stardom as a discursive production that operates by leading the spectator, via questions or enigmas, outside the confines of the enclosed text to speculate on the truth of the identity of the figure on the screen. The truth is defined in the social terms of sexuality, marriage, family, leisure, and consumption. Glamour is a value or sign that can be an effect of certain performances of sexuality, leisure, and consumption. Specifically it is a sign that circulates in the various manifestations of star performativity (in fictional film and television texts, fan magazines, portrait photography, etc.), and it suggests that the star has a surplus of one or more of the following: sexual allure, beauty, taste in fashion, cultural pretensions, disposable income spent on exciting leisure activities or expensive goods. Promotional discourses about female film stars since the 1910s used glamour as a way to distinguish the star's special qualities and consumption capacities. Although the presence of glamour can put distance between star and fan, it is also often employed to help fans fantasize about overcoming that distance.
My delineation of stardom and glamour may seem similar to Ellis's; what I've described suggests that glamorous film stars do seem to have a life above that of mere mortals. However, I want to reorient Ellis's definitions of stars and glamour so that they are seen as sign systems indicative of social values, which means that their presence and absence are not necessarily dependent on differences between the apparatuses of film and television. Yet even television histories that might not disagree with my schema often imply an allegiance with the theories of Ellis and Marshall because they tend to focus on the transition of network radio stars to network television or on comedy stars from radio or vaudeville, whose spontaneity, intimacy, and ordinariness supposedly best suited them to television. Their network ties and performance practices made inevitable their elevation as television stars over already established stars from film, legitimate theater, or nightclubs. Stars like Milton Berle and Jack Benny are taken as the models of television stardom over Gloria Swanson, Faye Emerson, and Carmel Myers, three former film actresses who had talk shows between 1948 and 1952 that received considerable press and audience interest. Musical performers from the nightclub circuit and fringes of the studio system who moved into television in the postwar era are rarely mentioned as contenders for stardom, much less examination. Many of these were nonwhite performers who had music programs on television before narrative radio programs with nonwhite characters, such as Beulah and Amos'n' Andy, had made their transition to television.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Recycled Stars by Mary R. Desjardins. Copyright © 2015 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ixIntroduction 1
1. "The Elegance . . . Is Almost Overwhelming": Glamour and Discursive Struggles over Female Stardom in Early Television 13
2. Norma Desmond, Your Spell Is Everywhere: The Time and Place of the Female Film Star in 1950s Television and Film 57
3. Maureen O'Hara's "Confidential" Life: Recycling Hollywood Film Stars in the 1950s through Scandalous Gossip and Moral Biography 99
4. After the Laughter: Recycling Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz as a Star Couple 143
5. Star Bodies, Star Bios: Stardom, Gender, and Identity Politics 191
Conclusion 243
Notes 253
Select Bibliography 295
Index 305
What People are Saying About This
"Deftly synthesizing material ranging from fan magazines to cultural theory, Mary Desjardins's Recycled Stars offers a valuable contribution to star studies, gender studies, and media history alike with its dynamic exploration of female film star images regenerated for the small and its argument about the female star as a privileged commodity within media industries and the social imaginary."
"Recycled Stars is one of the fullest examinations of stardom that we have, and it makes a significant contribution to star studies and to broader considerations of film history and the use of primary sources in writing that history. Mary R. Desjardins makes innovative connections between media practices, from the film industry to television, tabloid journalism, and the legal system."