Girl Reel
Excerpt

Introduction—When We Were Hollywood Brats

1

In Southern California it is known as The Industry. The movie studios will eat you alive—or make you rich; lie to you—or grant you the fame and celebrity you have sought all your days. No one growing up in West L.A., not my father and his sister, nor my mother, nor myself, remained untouched by the lure and influence of Hollywood, which oozed gelatinously from the executive honeycombs of offices, studios, premieres, and deals. Yet all four of us, at different times, said NO to Hollywood, to being packaged as images for sale.

My father and his sister were movie extras, studio children in the Great Depression and the forties, with salaries earned from their extraordinary good looks and the hovering possibility of futures "under contract." They were groomed for fame by my grandmother, Evelyn Morris, a woman with a war-absent husband and great ambitions for her handsome children.

Tap dance and acting classes, modeling sessions, and glossy 8 x 10 portfolios haunted my father’s childhood. He began his career as the infant model for the Adohr Milk campaign: little Roger Morris, the "Adohr-able" baby in the Los Angeles papers. At three he tap-danced and played the ukelele in an act called "Roger Morris and his Swing Band"; he went on to take prizes as the Most Hollywood Type Boy in studio modeling competitions and worked on movie sets with the Little Rascals, Ginger Rogers, and Mickey Rooney, among others. He remembers the great Disney premieres of the late thirties and early forties, when the Seven Dwarves paraded down his street, and studio executives led a deer representing Bambi past his house on Del Valle Drive.

Roger’s little sister Patty, who appeared on the cover of <Good Housekeeping> as a toddler model, was sent to school each day so carefully outfitted and coiffed that teachers wrote despairing letters to my grandmother requesting that Patricia come to school dressed like an ordinary child. Together, Roger and Pat appeared in any number of forgettable motion pictures as children, but in their last mutual gig they won roles in the best science fiction picture of their youth, <The Day the Earth Stood Still.> Even now, in 1999, I can walk into a repertory movie theater, or an art cinema/coffeehouse like the Beehive in Pittsburgh, and see a cult revival screening of <The Day the Earth Stood Still.> There on the big screen is my aunt’s famous close-up as the terrified little girl at the start of the story, and there is my father in his high school club jacket, pointing up at and running away from the spaceship.

They both quit the business. They quit when they reached adolescence, rather than joining the Screen Extras Guild and paying union dues; their father, the Major, had come home from World War II denouncing unions and ridiculing union organizer John L. Lewis. More personally, they quit the industry for other adolescent reasons. Groped by a very popular and "wholesome" actor behind one studio when she was still a kid, my aunt had her reasons. Taunted as a pretty actor-boy when neighborhood standards of masculinity called for all cool and hip teenage dudes to join a club or a gang, my father had his reasons. It was a bitter disappointment for their ambitious mother when they quit, right around the beginning of a new era in Hollywood, called television.

Neither Pat nor Roger, today, enjoy having their photographs taken. Neither of them enjoy talking about their Hollywood childhoods. At best they will respond with expletives when I ask for adjectives. Prying a movie set story from my father and aunt, when I am lucky enough to corner them together, is akin to opening a can of tuna with a pair of tweezers. Eventually, you will get in, but only a tiny portion will be rendered unto you.

The one story my father tells from time to time sums up the panic he felt when his Hollywood brat life destroyed a hallmark of regular boyhood: his paper route. He was on his way to an important modeling session, a professional photography shoot in a canyon with Lassie or some other movie dog, and suddenly he realized his appointment would make him late delivering the evening papers. When he expressed a ten-year-old’s anxiety about the time, describing his paper route obligations to the studio agent sitting behind him in the chauffered car, the agent looked at him and said, "You’re not going to make it."

At this point my father describes the sinking feeling he experienced as he realized he could not get out of the car and go back, that the limousine to fame was literally speeding him faster and faster away from neighborhood life and cares. When he tells this story I can picture his striped shirt against the luxurious car upholstery, and, later, his fear of the huge, unfamiliar dog he was made to pose with for hours while the Hearst papers went undelivered. My father tells me this one story because he does not want me to think fame and glamour are of higher rank than small, serious joys. I keep the professional glossy of my father and the dog over my writing desk, to remind me.

I knew nothing of my family’s Hollywood past until I was fairly big, and the stories I’ve been able to extract from the tuna can would only feed a sparrow.

My mother’s contact with The Industry was different. Also a beauty, she nonetheless grew up with a marginal self-image, painfully aware of being the daughter of Jewish immigrants in a blond, debutante beach culture. Her greatest desire was not fame but anonymity, the ability to pass as Gentile; born in Brooklyn and moving to Hollywood at three, she reenacted the journey of so many first-generation American Jews in the film industry, Santa Monica beachcombers with New York accents. In my mother’s home lived her old grandmother from Warsaw, who spoke Yiddish rather than English and screamed "shit" as a cooking instruction. My mother went to school with my father’s sister Pat and lived in awe of Pat’s Gentile good looks, movie outfits, blue eyes. In those pre-Streisand years no one promoted Jewish good looks in Hollywood culture, and actual Jews in The Industry had their ethnicity masked by Gentile pseudonyms.

After high school my mother went to work for a Hollywood legend, the Academy Award-winning actress Greer Garson, who lived in seclusion in Bel Air. As personal secretary to Miss Garson my mother handled correspondence and ran errands, and had tea with the orange-haired older woman every day on the veranda. "Why aren’t you in the pictures?" Miss Garson demanded of my mother. "You’re young and beautiful." She was regally unaware of my mother’s Jewish self-consciousness, though by then my mother had taken to calling herself Jean rather than Myra, and had put a blonde streak in her black hair.

In fact, my rebellious glamorous mother had terrible stage fright and not the remotest interest in acting. She laughed politely when Tom Laughlin, who later made the controversial film <Billy Jack,> came up to her on the UCLA campus and offered to cast her in the pivotal role of the schoolteacher. She blushed modestly when Greer Garson insisted that beauty would send her far. My mother was, by then, in love with my father, and didn’t desire to be sent anywhere. When she gave notice at Miss Garson’s, announcing she was leaving her position to get married, the aging actress sent my parents a silver shot glass as a wedding gift. To this day, my father measures his vodka in this glass.

My father, my aunt, and my mother each said NO to The Industry before they were twenty, but many of their friends and classmates said YES. To read their old yearbooks is to see today’s celebrities as pimply adolescents. There is Dustin Hoffman at sixteen, on the tennis squad at L.A. High, where he was known as "Dusty"; there is George Takei—<Star Trek’s> "Mr. Sulu"—in student government with my mom. And there were others. If I marvel at seeing my father on-screen, he and my mother marvel at seeing expressionless nerds from their high school hallways transformed into movie poster gods, emblazoned on lunch boxes and toys.

So it was in the air, this thing. All of us were Hollywood material in someone’s eyes, Hollywood brats even when we declined The Industry’s tentacles. Good looks meant that strangers on the street assumed you were working. Good looks were family status, currency in a town which turned on faces. Each successive generation had to be even more Hollywood-beautiful, in exponential narcissism.

People talked because my father married a Jewish girl, because he went against the code of marrying blonder, of cultivating Hollywood eugenics. But when I was born to this mixed couple I emerged with formula good looks, as Hollywood-Gentile in appearance as any agent’s dreams. Strangers stopped my mother in Westwood to say "You ought to put that pretty baby in the movies." Soon I was taken to sit for 8 x 10 glossy photographs at Reed’s of Hollywood, where the photographer informed my mother that my dislike of bright flash bulbs indicated pathological insecurity. I was not even two years old.

I found my core of security, my loud feminist voice, the minute I arrived at that first Hollywood audition and decided I could say NO instead of YES to strange men. Thus my own wee career with The Industry went no further than the casting director telling me I had to wear makeup just like mommy, and my outright refusal. While I was inside, giving a two-year-old’s equivalent of a raised middle finger to the director and makeup man, my mother overheard another parent interrogate her auditioning baby: "Did you give them your big personality smile?" "Oy," my mother declared, and took me home. I only discovered the large, unused portfolio of expensive toddler 8 x 10 glossies of myself when I was in junior high, earning movie money by cleaning out our basement.

And so I grew up ordinary. Ah; but not normal. I was too smart to be normal, and, eventually, I also found out that I was queer.

2

After my 8 x 10 glossies went into a drawer and I took up ordinary childhood, I began going to the movies with my parents. The first picture I saw in a theater was <Born Free,> which impressed me deeply at age five, because it seemed permissable for men to cry at this movie. I heard my father, a man with a tight rein on his emotions, stand in our driveway afterward and tell a neighbor that we had all cried at this movie. It was then that I realized that a movie was not something you saw, but a mere part of what happened to you at the movies, which could mean anything. Hmm, I thought.

To be sure, the sixties were prime movie time if you were a schoolkid, because Disney churned out film after film, not just for movie theaters but for <The Wonderful World of Disney> on NBC every Sunday night. I saw <Mary Poppins> four times, <The Love Bug> four times, and the various animated classics—<Snow White,> <Dumbo,> <Peter Pan,> ad infinitum, all over L.L. I saw many of my childhood movies at Grauman’s Chinese Theater (now Mann’s), with the handprints in cement outside; and at least once a year went to Disneyland itself, where movie characters each had their own ride. I went to drive-in movies with my parents, falling asleep in the backseat on a pincushion of popcorn while my baby brother drooled on the gearshift knob up front; I had a collection of children’s records based entirely on movie scores: <The Sound of Music,> <The Jungle Book,> <The Wizard of Oz.> On a regular basis, we saw movie stars in restaurants or on the beach; if you went trick-or-treating at Bob Hope’s house, whispered a girl I met at summer camp, he gave out silver dollars.

We drove past the enormous and secretive studios on an almost daily basis, as Nebraskans drive past corn.

Every child knew that the best movie of all, even if you really LOVED <Mary Poppins> or <The Jungle Book,> was of course <The Wizard of Oz;> but the strange thing about this was that it never came to a real movie theater anymore. Instead it was on TV one night a year, and that night was third to Christmas Eve and Halloween in schoolkid anticipation. Merely mentioning it to my contemporaries, even now, brings a gush of nostalgia. "Oh, my God, yeah," burble my friends Tracy and Reed. "On the night of <The Wizard of Oz> you had your bath first and then you put on your P.J.s and then you got to eat dinner in front of the television with a blanket." This assumes one had a color TV at home: we did not, so I rotated through the homes of various friends and relatives who did, on that special night each year.

Because L.A. was in no way a small or safe town in the late sixties, I was nearly ten before I walked to a movie theater alone with a friend. I went with Brenda Moskwitz, the toughest girl on the playground at Clover Avenue Elementary, and we saw—ah!—<The Wizard of Oz.> We wanted to see how it measured up on the big screen, when at last it came to a real theater we could walk to, unescorted. But by then we found we had become hardened to Hollywood mush; when Judy Garland began saying her tearful farewell to the Scarecrow, Brenda stomped out and I followed her back to the schoolyard. It was important to Brenda to always look tough and never willingly suffer mush; she declared to me that she hated Hollywood and that The Industry wasn’t so great. She was the first friend I went to the movies with alone; later, she became beautiful, got a Hollywood agent, modeled for The Industry; and died at thirty-two, the first friend I lost to breast cancer.

A lot changed when I was nine; for one thing, I became moody and frustrated, because I had outgrown Disney and dolls and was reading at a level about ten years ahead of my peers. What I wanted now was to watch "To Kill a Mockingbird," over and over, until I felt I understood it; my parents threw other literary classics at me to stall my obsession with the story of a rape trial, but there was no turning back. I read the book and saw the movie and thought I understood. I was, I thought, finished with childhood.

The second change was that we left L.A. for good. My father had gone back to school, received his graduate degree, and accepted a job in Durham, North Carolina, three time zones and infinite worlds away from Hollywood movie studios and the Pacific Ocean.

So having lived my first decade as a Hollywood brat, I came of age on the East Coast: five years as a Southerner in Durham, and the rest in Washington, DC, the three cities of my personal identity an impossibly convoluted triangle, and the peculiar Americanism of each place continually at odds with my emerging lesbian sensibilities in adolescence.

In every place that is not quite home one may find sanctuary in a movie theater, as I often did growing up; but no film ever pays homage to real girlhood, which remains a secret to America. We are our own biographers, for The Industry has concluded there is no money to be made in girlhood. I am still talking back to the director I denounced at two, the one who believed even an Aryan-looking baby girl needed makeup; I am speaking now as a witness from my seat in the front of the theater. You have to know who we are by now, us queer girls. We grew up in front of you, our lives a private girl reel. Some of us spent that girlhood at the movies.

3

This is a collection of movie stories: by which I mean recollections of events, images, turning points generated by specific moviegoing experiences, and, of course, specific movies. Some of my stories begin in a movie theater and others take their time getting there, but all have in common the catalyst of a movie outing as a chunk of formative girl identity.

Do you, too, remember your favorite movie house in the old neighborhood? The double feature you saw over and over again with your first gang? The flasher you encountered behind the theater that day; the nightmares from scary film classics; the fantasies about screen heroines? Do you remember seeing your first "lesbian movie," and wondering why it was so dreadful? Did you, too, come out at the movies?

In America, we are all shaped and shifted by moviegoing, and at an early age find ourselves in conversation with that big screen, anxiously patching ourselves against the silhouettes of movie stereotypes to see if we’ll ever fit Hollywood’s notion of glamorous. We all know that "the gaze" of the camera is male, and that there are far more roles reserved for men both in front of and behind the Hollywood camera; and that movies about childhood escapades or pranks will be about boyhood pranks—as though no girl ever skipped off to look for hidden treasure.

But girls as well as boys and grown-ups go to the movies and grow up there, and I was no exception. Although moviegoing greatly influenced my life, I should state here at the beginning that I did not become a film critic. Instead, my Ph.D. is in women’s history, the end result of a lifelong interest in memory and its symbols. As an academic woman I’m an oddity in money-conscious America, for we are no longer a nation of readers or writers. We have long been a media nation in the making, and since the era of talking pictures a substantial percentage of our population has used moviegoing for emotional expression, rather than keeping a journal or—heaven forbid—crying and talking with a loved one in the privacy of bed.

Desperate for emotional outlets, we go to the movies as an excuse to hold hands, to weep copiously, to feel a vicarious and "safe" ethnic experience, to be sexually aroused, to grieve. We go to get out of the house when family members are fighting, or we go because we like to eat popcorn and Jordan Almonds in the dark. We go to have a broad spectrum of feelings flashing in front of us in a vertical therapy session, while we, knees up and bodies open as though to receive lovemaking, are the passive horizontal. Popcorn box between our knees, we dip our hands repeatedly between our own legs, the act of recreational feeding a mimicry of self-loving, self-stimulation. Sur-rounded by complete strangers, we can snicker, gasp, and sob, knowing that our personal reactions to carefully budgeted stimuli will never be a matter of public record because no one is watching us. In this group experience, this audience experience, there is safety for emotional display. The actual film is almost irrelevant.

And perhaps most comforting of all is the universal factor in moviegoing: everyone goes, old, young, parent, child, male, female. Leaving aside, for the moment, our American past of racially segregated movie theaters, and our complex present of X-rated films, we acknowledge that most moviegoing experiences are open to a diverse public society. At "Apollo 13" I saw two ten-year-old boys seated next to a middle-aged Congress-woman next to punk high school lovers next to a group of gay men next to a homeless woman. Everyone is here, but no one is talking to or looking at one another. That is the irony of The Industry’s success: the most American thing you can do is go to the movies, which in turn are the most American and influential product we export; and the nature of the moviegoing experience is being completely alone in a democratically demographic crowd: our bittersweet American characteristic, our individualism. You have to find it for yourself, this conversation; as Lily Tomlin said it, "We’re all in this alone."