Camille Paglia penned a guest essay for The Hollywood Reporter titled Grandeur of Old Hollywood is Gone. Here is an excerpt:
"As a child, I had two pagan high holy days every year. The first was Halloween, where I advertised my transgender soul by masquerading as a matador, a Roman soldier, Napoleon or Hamlet. The second was Oscar night, when Hollywood put its dazzling glamour on heady display for the whole world.
As I was growing up in the drearily conformist 1950s and early '60s, it was hard to find information about popular culture, which wasn't taken seriously. Deep-think European art films were drawing tiny coteries of intellectuals to small, seedy theaters, but flamboyant mainstream Hollywood was still dismissed as crass, commercial trash.
Confidential magazine, a splashy rag specializing in steamy innuendo, was my main news source about all things Hollywood. I avidly followed the lurid adventures of my favorite movie star, Elizabeth Taylor, as she breezily acquired and shed husbands at the drop of a hat. Eventually, my collection of Taylor clippings and photos reached 599.
...Watching the Oscars on TV in upstate New York, I was in near-delirium at Taylor's unexpected win. My breathless state of ecstasy lasted for the entire next school day, where I felt like I was floating on a cloud. In retrospect, I realize that Taylor's triumph was indeed a huge cultural watershed, a prefiguration of the coming sexual revolution.
But a surprise waited. The 1961 Oscars were still being broadcast in black and white. A week later, a gorgeous full-color photo of Taylor regally seated at the Oscars party appeared on the cover of Life magazine. Her white cigarette holder was elegantly raised above a full champagne glass near a bottle of Dom Perignon resting on ice. The billowing white skirt of her floral-embellished Christian Dior dress was barely glimpsed. We saw only her starkly simple, pale yellow bodice that seemed to be channeling the golden glow of the Oscar statuette, which was offering her its adoration from amid a burst of red tulips, matching her full, crimson lips.
That night, with her magnetic composure and luminous charisma, Taylor exuded all the pomp and power of old Hollywood, from which she had emerged as a child star just before the decline of the studio system. Even her glossy raven bouffant was a work of art, because surely those intricate petals had been sculpted by her close friend, hairstylist Sydney Guilaroff, one of the creative geniuses of MGM production at its height.
...Taylor enthroned with her Butterfield 8 trophy is probably the greatest post-Oscars photo ever taken. Next would be a picture of Faye Dunaway breakfasting at The Beverly Hills Hotel the morning after she won the best actress for Network (1976). Lounging at poolside in her creamy silk dressing gown, newspapers scattered at her feet, Dunaway contemplates her Oscar with a tinge of ironic detachment and fatigue.
This bleak, brilliant photo marks the arrival of a new generation in Hollywood, hip, smart, and cynical. The mythic grandeur of old Hollywood and its pantheon of celestial stars is already gone."
Read the full essay at The Hollywood Reporter.
No comments:
Post a Comment