Fallen Idols.(movies; movie stars)

Clark Gable, the most famous male movie star of the nineteen-thirties, drank heavily, hit the road and slept with prostitutes when he felt like it, had false teeth and bad breath, fathered an illegitimate child with Loretta Young, carried on an affair with Joan Crawford when they were both married, and, on at least two occasions, wrapped his car around a tree. He settled down somewhat when he fell in love with Carole Lombard, whom he married in 1939, and he apparently did not, as rumor has long insisted, run over a female pedestrian when drunk. Over the years, however, he got into plenty of trouble, and almost all of it was kept out of the press or appeared in the papers in garbled and anodyne form. Louella O. Parsons and Hedda Hopper, in their syndicated newspaper columns, wrote benevolently of the stars except on those occasions when a star crossed one of them or the studios wanted an insubordinate actor publicly punished. There were famous Hollywood romances, of course, like Greta Garbo's with John Gilbert, and scandals, like the Fatty Arbuckle case, in 1921, and also an underground of terrific gossip, but, in general, newspapers and fan magazines published gently whimsical prose about romance and home life in the movie colony. The stars, it seemed, were good. They were helpful, kind, grateful for their enormous luck. Paired up and dressed in evening clothes, they went to clubs like Ciro's or the Mocambo, acting out studio-created liaisons, while their private lives, sometimes thrillingly wicked, sometimes sedate and ordinary, remained mostly out of sight.

Gable had a long-term contract with M-G-M, and if you were on M-G-M's payroll, and you messed up, you did not call your lawyer. You called Howard Strickling, the talented head of publicity and all-around fixer at the studio, or his colleague Eddie Mannix. Strickling's skills included bribing the police, arranging abortions, and shipping off to Europe directors who threw too many orgiastic parties. In 1932, when Jean Harlow's husband, the M-G-M staff producer and bigamist Paul Bern, was found shot dead in their Benedict Canyon house, Strickling arrived at the scene with Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg, and worked hard, and successfully, to keep Harlow from making a court appearance. In those pre-Code days, M-G-M thought it fine to treat Harlow onscreen as a kind of snarling dirty girl, but it was another thing to have her tinged with crime in real life. (Bern may have been shot by his first wife, but the death was ruled a suicide.) The invaluable Strickling performed his role so well that he went to his grave, in 1982, with all his secrets intact--an outrageous affront to star biographers as well as to the merely curious.

But consider our daily bread in the new century. Think of Angelina and Jen seesawing on the fulcrum of Brad, who, over the years, has appeared with one or the other, clubbing, attending award ceremonies, shopping, vacationing--usually grinning slightly or looking a little lost. They date, marry, quarrel, break up, forgive; they deliver, adopt, and lug babies around, sometimes in dusty climes; they gain too much weight, lose too much weight, and so on, forever and ever. Some of what you hear about them may even be true, but all of it will be written or spoken in an abusively familiar style--chummy, coarse, knowing. The tone of the celebrity media is always junior high: "She's my best friend. I hate her."

Us Weekly, one of half a dozen identical celebrity magazines, includes, as a regular feature, a shop-and-schlep page called "Stars--They're Just Like US!," in which young actors are caught on the street hauling the baby in a Snugli or picking up the dry cleaning. Some of the other "stars" are mock celebrities, whose only work is to stone themselves silly and fall apart in public. The feature is lame, but the premise behind it is essential snark: every part of a star's existence, including the surgical scars and the cellulite deposits, belongs to the media--and to the public. The professional paparazzi have been joined by avid amateurs armed with digital cameras and Web uploads, waiting for a young actor to strip off his clothes on some secluded beach. Many of the young actors, male and female, can be seen naked on the Internet. In the past, a star like Rita Hayworth or Marilyn Monroe wore gravity-defying gowns--a negligee negligently hung, and so easy to remove--that offered the promise of nakedness. But the actuality of nakedness forces us to choose between prurience and priggishness. You can avoid this, I suppose, but only if you never watch television, turn on a computer, pass a newsstand, or talk to a teen-ager.

For the record, I don't think that moviegoers seventy years ago particularly needed "the truth" about Gable. Mary Gordon, in her recent biography, "Circling My Mother," recounts that Anna Gagliano Gordon, born in 1908, a hardworking woman who supported her family, "sat triumphant as a bride" when she heard that Gary Cooper had converted to Catholicism. Anna Gordon made the behavior of the stars a feature of her own moral life. Other fans, however, loved ...