Girls (Have Always) Gone Wild
by Stephen Rebello
As cutting-edge out-of-control as they may seem, Hollywood’s current hell-raising starlets are just the newest in a line of scandalous young beauties that extends back to the earliest days of moviemaking.
As a rising star in the early 1950s, Marilyn Monroe admitted that she had posed for nude calendar photographs early in her career. This shot became the centerfold of the inaugural issue of Playboy in 1953.
Somehow we all know without saying that boys will be boys, and that in Hollywood, a good number of boys are now and always have been practicing boozers, junkies, satyrs, gigolos and gay caballeros. We expect guys to act out and live it up to excess. Young girls who go blazingly, publicly wrong, though, seem a much more recent, what’s-the-world-coming-to? phenomenon. Well, next time you hear someone getting all gooey and nostalgic about Young Hollywood way back during Tinseltown’s “more innocent” times–those purportedly “simpler,” more dignified eras that predate the public screw-ups and scandalous behavior of Britney, Lindsay, Paris, Nicole, Mischa et al.–you have every right to cop a sardonic, derisive attitude. Anyone hip to Hollywood history knows that since the dawn of the movie business, Young Hollywood has been a hormonally charged, out-of-control Babylon equally blessed and cursed with a star roster of gorgeous young suicide blondes, pill-poppers, boozers, home-wreckers and nymphos. Over the decades, the names and faces change, but the habits and hungers don’t.
What has inarguably changed since the late ’60s is that movie stars are no longer under personal contract to powerful studio moguls who manufacture their public images and try to compel them to maintain some modicum of behavioral civility. In the ’40s, popular singer-comedienne Carmen Miranda reportedly got bounced from her studio contract not long after 20th Century Fox boss Darryl F. Zanuck viewed stills from a studio publicity photo session that showed the star buoyantly leaping into the air and revealing that she wore no underwear. There weren’t fewer young ladies with irrepressible natures and terrible judgment back then, but the original bad girls weren’t always quite as open about their badness, and when they were, moguls who micromanaged their publicity persuaded the press to collude in cover-ups. That is why, for instance, devout Catholic Loretta Young never disclosed in her lifetime that in 1935 she’d had a “love child” with the married box-office king Clark Gable.
“Throughout the ’40s, gossip columnists reported so regularly on Judy Garland’s chronic lateness to the set, emotional fragility, weight fluctuations and personal demons that when MGM dropped her contract in 1950 when she was only 28, few could be surprised.”
Today, ubiquitous technologies like camera cell phones, instant messaging and mobile email have turned the public faux pas of young starlets into an all-access media smorgasbord. Who can withstand this much scrutiny? Certainly not Lindsay Lohan, who has not just zipped in and out of rehab stints at Wonderland Center, but provoked openly negative comments from costars by purportedly showing up late for film work and wreaking havoc with film production schedules, all while finding time to go trolling Hollywood hot spots. And certainly not Britney Spears, who has become notorious for driving with her baby son on her lap, checking in and out of rehab centers as if they were luxury hotels, flashing her panty-less crotch while climbing out of a car, and barreling unannounced into a hair salon and shaving off her own locks.
Although today she’s a wife, mother and Oscar winner, Julia Roberts (seen here in 1989) had a string of short-lived, high-profile romances in the ’80s and ’90s and created a tabloid frenzy when she jetted off with Jason Patric only days before her scheduled wedding to Kiefer Sutherland in 1991.
Mistaking today’s Young Hollywood scandals for something altogether newer and edgier than those of even the recent past is not just plain silly and ignorant, it requires amnesia. The recent past set today’s pace. Winona Ryder leaps to mind, though her real downfall, the shoplifting/Dr. Feelgood scandal, occurred when she’d turned 30. A better example would be Julia Roberts. Roberts, last reported as a $25-million-a-movie attraction, is these days a married-with-children Oscar-winner who doesn’t make all that much news beyond appearing in movies and doing live theater. But a dozen plus years ago, Roberts made herself a sensation by flying off to Ireland with Jason Patric days before her much ballyhooed wedding to Kiefer Sutherland was scheduled to take place. And Sutherland, it might be remembered, had left his wife and children to live with Roberts; Patric was his close friend. Before and after Sutherland and Patric, Roberts marched through a troop of paramours from Liam Neeson to Daniel Day-Lewis, Matthew Perry and Benjamin Bratt, and she married Lyle Lovett scandalously suddenly and briefly in 1993. In short, she was a paparazzo’s wet dream right up to the advent of Treo video-streaming, whereupon she became a dutiful mommy. Had the average citizen been armed with cell-phone cameras, who knows what embellishments might have adorned Roberts’s romantic dossier?
So, no matter how big a train wreck the latest escapades of the Britneys and Lindsays of the world may seem, when it comes to growing up in the glaring light of public scrutiny, these girls have nothing on Hollywood women of the past. Because, even minus an omnipresent press and public armed with ever-ready cameras, Young Hollywood beauties of the past managed to get themselves into plenty of hot water.
The 1924 shooting death of film producer-director Thomas Ince aboard the 280-foot yacht of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst was believed to be motivated by Hearst’s jealousy over a secret love affair between his 27-year-old mistress Marion Davies, the silent film comedienne, and the legendary movie-maker and loverboy Charlie Chaplin, 38. An enraged Hearst, it’s said, accidentally plugged Ince when he mistook him for Chaplin. During the same era, “It Girl’” Clara Bow, the screen’s first megastar sex symbol, became notorious for the story of how she took on the entire USC football team. Although that urban legend has been roundly skewered by biographers, that doesn’t mean that Bow didn’t give rumormongers grist for the mill. She scandalized image-conscious Hollywood peers by being successfully sued for alienation of affections by the wife of a doctor. In 1930, Bow herself sued a former secretary for embezzlement and, in retaliation, the secretary shocked the press with stories of Bow’s USC gangbangs and, the same year, a newspaper ran a series of articles reporting how Bow frequently had sex in public, engaged in threesomes with prostitutes, dallied with women in the absence of available men, and had sex with animals. She suffered her first nervous breakdown at age 26, and Paramount, the studio that had made a fortune on Bow, dropped the star in 1931.
The five-decade movie career of Joan Crawford was continually plagued by whispered rumors that as a young, unknown, financially strapped beauty in the 1920s, she danced naked in a short film or two made for arcade peep shows. It’s not at all certain that such a film ever existed, but Crawford did dance herself into scandal of a less ruinous nature. When she had achieved initial fame and was still in her twenties, she made gossip column headlines by partying till all hours at the legendary Cocoanut Grove at the Ambassador Hotel, where the vodka flowed plentifully her way and helped her win over 100 dance contests. Her scandalous behavior later suggested that only relative obscurity allowed her to survive her starlet years. During her 18-year reign as the box-office “Queen of MGM” she had a voracious sexual appetite that probably involved women. (According to recent reports by a former Los Angeles head of the District Attorney’s medical-legal section during the ’60s, Crawford had a one-time sexual encounter with Marilyn Monroe.)
Crawford was by no means the standout in the fast lane of Golden Age Hollywood. Jean Harlow, dubbed “The Platinum Blonde” for being Hollywood’s raucous sex goddess incarnate in such ’30s classics as Dinner at Eight, was scorched by public scandal that she brought on herself by hobnobbing with gangster Bugsy Siegel and dating mobster Abner Zwillman. In 1932, ensconced at posh MGM as a major star under contract, she married executive Paul Bern in what may have been a joint effort by both star and studio to clean up her act. But a mere matter of months into what was evidently a sexual disaster of a pairing–Bern may have been impotent–Harlow threw herself into a torrid affair with her frequent costar Clark Gable. Just two months after the wedding, Bern was found naked and dead of a gunshot wound in their Beverly Hills home. MGM did its best to downplay the scandal, but Hollywood was consumed with it. The press openly speculated that Bern’s mysterious death, officially ruled a suicide, would sink Harlow’s career, but the gifted star survived it, agreed to the studio’s plan for an arranged marriage to cinematographer Harold Rosson and her fame soared. She even found love with debonair leading man William Powell. But Powell, freshly divorced from another firecracker blonde, Carole Lombard, refused to marry her. Five years after Bern’s death, Harlow, who had recently been named as a co-defendant in divorce proceedings launched by the wife of boxing champion Max Baer, died suddenly and shockingly of renal failure in 1937. She was only 26.
At Harlow’s alma mater, MGM, in the late ’30s, the almost supernaturally talented Judy Garland got launched as a teenager on the road to lifetime drug addiction and mental anguish when studio doctors prescribed amphetamines and barbiturates to keep her cranking out one movie after another. The public didn’t hear a word about it, but everybody in Hollywood could see the toll being taken on the popular young star. Soon enough, even in the clamped-down press of her era, stories of Garland’s turmoil began to appear. Ruthless studio boss Louis B. Mayer used his unique powers of persuasion to split up a number of her relationships with older men, but even he couldn’t block 19-year-old Garland from marrying 31-year-old musician-composer David Rose. During the three-year marriage, Rose forced his young wife to undergo an abortion. In 1945, a year after escaping Rose, Garland raised eyebrows all over again by marrying the flamboyant 42-year-old movie director Vincente Minnelli, who masterfully starred her in his movies Meet Me in St. Louis and The Pirate but at home was in over his head dealing with her insecurities and addictions. Throughout the ’40s, gossip columnists reported so regularly on Garland’s chronic lateness to the set, emotional fragility, weight fluctuations and personal demons that when MGM dropped her contract in 1950 when she was only 28, few could be surprised.
Actress Frances Farmer, a blazing meteor in the ’30s, ranks as the godmother of all reckless Young Hollywood outlaws. (It was not for nothing that Courtney Love wore a vintage dress of Farmer’s when she wed Kurt Cobain and proceeded to name their baby Frances.) At 22 in 1935, the strong-featured blonde signed a seven-year contract with Paramount and became an instant star when she was directed by the prestigious William Wyler in Come and Get It. Around Hollywood, though, Farmer was in trouble from the get-go with her outspoken assertiveness, her refusal to play the studio publicity game and overall reputation as a hellion. Paramount kept Farmer’s spiraling alcoholism under wraps, but swiftly dropped her contract in 1942 when she was 29. Without the protection of studio publicity bulldogs, Farmer’s freefall became highly public. She was arrested for driving intoxicated and without a license and, during a court hearing on another transgression, attacked two policemen and mauled a matron. Her mother had her declared “legally insane” and institutionalized in a psychiatric facility, where she was confined in a straitjacket and given electroshock therapy. When the press had fed on her notoriety for all it was worth, she faded into obscurity and died at age 57.
The hauntingly beautiful Natalie Wood, whose stardom bridged the ’40s through the ’70s, was pushed into the movies at age 4 by a grasping stage mother who demanded that she “make people love” her. Wood did just that in the iconic Rebel Without a Cause, which earned her a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination at age 17, but by then she had already been raped by a brawny, legendary movie star (still alive in 2007), as reported in a recent biography of Wood. The public was not privy to the rape, nor to her affair with the much older, bisexual Rebel director, Nicolas Ray. Her dates with Tab Hunter, Nick Adams and Scott Marlowe were little more than studio-arranged publicity photo opportunities but her young marriage to handsome fellow contract star Robert Wagner made headlines. What made Wood thoroughly scandalous, though, was when, at 22, she seemed intent upon destroying her “storybook” marriage to Wagner by having an emotionally turbulent affair with Warren Beatty, her costar in the 1961 film Splendor in the Grass. She would famously remarry Wagner 19 years later but finished out her twenties with public romances with Dennis Hopper, James Dean, Elvis Presley and Raymond Burr, all fodder for the gossip columns.
Marilyn Monroe, Hollywood’s reigning sex goddess of the ’50s, is such an icon now that it’s hard to imagine that in her heyday she was constantly treading a fine line between attention-getting and outright scandal. Her forays into the danger zone would have done in someone with less talent, beauty and va-voom. As a major movie star at 25 in 1952, she preempted public brouhaha by announcing that she had earlier posed for nude calendar photographs, and the following year Hugh Hefner bought one of the photos to use as the centerfold in the inaugural issue of Playboy. When a reporter asked what she had on during the shoot, Monroe quipped, “the radio.” As her popularity skyrocketed throughout the ’50s, Monroe’s private psychological kinks, drinking and pill-popping helped earn her a hellacious reputation for unreliability among moviemakers, but the brass at her home studio, 20th Century Fox, more than tolerated her.
Her sex appeal and box-office popularity in movies like Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and How to Marry a Millionaire provided some immunity for a while. But her private life became increasingly public due to a parade of mysterious illnesses, mental maladies and failed marriages to baseball great Joe DiMaggio and playwright Arthur Miller. While Monroe’s partly deliberate, partly uncontrolled “scandalous” behavior of flaunting her riotously sensual body on screen and in public appearances made her scandalous–and hotly desired–for her entire career, her emotional disintegration ultimately became so crippling that she ended up getting fired from her last, unfinished movie and dying in 1962 at age 36, of what was officially declared a drug overdose.
If the compromising details of Monroe’s private life were occasionally protected by her studio, Tuesday Weld, another spectacularly beautiful and talented blonde of the ’50s, ran wild in a way that was calculated to frustrate studio control. Weld, who won grudging acclaim for performances in ’60s-era movies like The Cincinnati Kid and Pretty Poison, had begun by providing her family’s primary meal-ticket by modeling at age 4. By age 9 she had suffered a nervous collapse, she was drinking and smoking by 10 and at 11, she was carrying on affairs with men way, way older than she. In 1956, the same year she made her movie debut at age 13, she attempted suicide. Once the public spotlight was trained on her ripe teenage beauty and uncommonly naturalistic acting style, Weld drew consistently terrible Hollywood press. She got mocked for her unusual name and pilloried for what was an authentically iconoclastic, offbeat style (she roamed everywhere around Hollywood barefoot, for example).
When she was 18 in 1961, she hooked up with Elvis Presley, her Wild in the Country costar, in what was just one of many Lolita-style indiscretions. Newspaper gossip hatchet woman Louella Parsons observed, “Miss Weld is not a very good representative for the motion picture industry,” which, back then, was tantamount to bringing her up on morals charges.
Melanie Griffith, seen here at age 17 with Don Johnson in 1975, moved in with the bad-boy actor when he was 22 and she was just 14.
Another beautiful girl gone wild, Melanie Griffith, moved in with 22-year-old bad-boy actor Don Johnson when she was just 14. Four years later in 1976, she’d married and was divorcing him. Griffith got more press than the average nymphet because she was the daughter of Hitchcock star Tippi Hedren, but she began to take on her own fame when she made a splash playing an apparent version of herself (Hollywood brat/Lolita) in the critically touted noir thriller Night Moves the year she got divorced at 18. At age 23, she made particularly big headlines for getting struck and thrown dozens of feet by a car on Sunset Boulevard; doctors said she would have been killed if she hadn’t been so drunk. When she was 24, a lioness clawed her face on the set of a movie, and from 1984 on she alternated between lauded performances, drug rehab and turbulent romance, sometimes managing all three.
Today’s instructive parallel to Tuesday Weld and Melanie Griffith is another precocious little blonde, Drew Barrymore. If Weld was emblematic of stars behaving badly during the ’60s and ’70s, it was child star-turned-underage wild girl Drew who exemplified scandalous Very Young Hollywood in the excessive ’80s. After making moviegoers fall in love with her as a post-toddler in E.T. the Extraterrestrial, Barrymore’s tabloid plummet was painful to watch. The press reported her puffing cigarettes and boozing by age 9, smoking marijuana at 10 and becoming a club-crawler and a cocaine user at 12. Barrymore had already been a star, flamed out, almost disappeared and set her sights on a comeback by the time Julia Roberts, seven years her senior, broke onto the scene. The differences between Barrymore, now a hugely successful star and producer, and Weld, who ended up giving many admired performances but never sustained her career, much less stardom, and Griffith, who falls somewhere between Barrymore and Weld, are primarily matters of temperament and desire. They engaged in many of the same excesses, endured many of the same scandals and provided many of the same tabloid headlines.
If Lohan, also a truly talented child star who hit the skids in the process of growing up in public, were to get herself under control, decide that she really does want to be a successful actress and then reorient her priorities accordingly, she would become just the latest version of the same true-life story arc that Barrymore has traced spectacularly. Lohan could just as easily pull a Melanie Griffith or a Tuesday Weld. She could also do a hell of a lot worse. However she and her peers–Spears, Richie and the rest–play things out, they will be acting out a drama that’s a Hollywood chestnut at this point, whether it’s shot with a flashbulb camera or a Blackberry.
