The History of Sex in Cinema

Early in the twenties, the entire nation was rocked by a series of ugly, well-publicized Hollywood scandals, Sex orgies and suicides, dope addiction and murder—these seemed the very warp and woof of the movie colony's new looom of life. The newspapers, ever mindful of the salubrious effects of scandal on circulation, headlined the lurid details; nor were they averse to promoting extras and bit players to full stardom if it made a better story. The fan magazines, which by the Twenties had become a major link between the studios and their audiences, frequently ran editorials and open letters purporting to warn either the industry at large or certain of its stars against "the evil of their ways." Through innuendo and veiled reference, these pious admonitions helped fan the flames of public indignation to a white heat. By the time the sordid Fatty Arbuckle scandal broke in the fall of 1921, the popular image of Hollywood was a Gomorrah with modern plumbing. All over the country, voices were calling out for the movies to repent and reform.

Actually, the moviemakers had been caught up in a two-way bind not entirely of their own devising. Like Shaw's Alfred P. Doolittle, they were "a victim of middle-class morality," which had shifted with unprecedented swiftness at the close of World War One. On the one hand were the forces of puritanism, strong and well organized enough to bring about Prohibition. On the other was the dawn of the Jazz Age, an era of emancipation symbolized by the flapper and the flask. Once the movies began to reflect—and in some instances anticipate—this new design for living, they immediately ran up against the defenders of the past. It was a curious time—a time in which Cecil B. De Mille's voluptuous Forbidden Fruit and D.W. Griffith's sanctimonious Way Down East could both command huge audiences. These audiences, however, refused to remain separate but equal. The conservatives, primarily rural and Midwestern, were genuinely shocked at the changes being wrought in the world about them. How Ya Gonna Keep 'Em Down on the Farm was more than a popular song; it was an acute problem. And the conservatives were determined to meet its challenge.

Hollywood was a made-to-order whipping boy. Not only did its films illustrate in eye-filling detail the very excesses that the defenders of pre-War ways were railing against, but Hollywood's own way of life, as reported by the press, seemed to epitomize all the capital sins. Nor was Hollywood utterly blameless in this respect. In a mere handful of years, the movie industry had transformed itself from a shabby, side-street operation into a vast complex of studios, exchanges and theaters which, in capital investment alone, ranked it among the largest in the nation. And men who only a few years before had been dealing in nickels and dimes suddenly found that they owned or controlled millions. The sleepy suburb of Los Angeles, to which most film makers had repaired during the War years to escape the coal and power shortages of the East—and to take year-round advantage of the sunny Southern California sun for outdoor filming—had become the new Klondike. And like the original Klondike, it attracted all sorts. The lure of easy money always does.

One sort that arrived in great profusion was the eager young actress. Winner of a local beauty contest, or voted "most likely to succeed" by her classmates, she came by train or bus, resolved to be the next Mary Pickford or Mabel Normand. Many had been lured west by "scouts" for shady talent schools that promised, for a few hundred dollars, not merely to teach them the essentials of acting, but also to secure for them important supporting roles once they had finished their brief "course." Typical of the come-on literature of the period was a brochure that began by listing stars' salaries—Mabel Normand's $7800 a week, Anita Stewart's $4500 a week "on a long-term contract," Gloria Swanson's $2500, Wallace Reid's $2000—then added coyly, "In no other profession can an inexperienced person so soon reach a position where he can earn so much money.... Salaries of $300 a week are not at all unusual in the motion-picture world, nor does one have to have had long experience or play big parts to get them ..."

When casting couches and wild parties "to meet producers" led only to disillusion, some—the sensible ones—packed their bags and went home. But others drifted into prostitution in order to remain on the fringe of an industry they still hoped to conquer. The newspapers were soon filled with such headlines as "Beautiful film star arrested in Bawdy House," or "Beautiful film star causes shooting affair at wild party." To maintain the flow of this kind of copy, editors dispatched to the Coast their most sensation-minded reporters, and these were joined by a host of hungry freelancers who knew all too well the profits in yellow journalism.

Many invented what they couldn't find, or inflated whatever they managed to uncover. But Hollywood, at the turn of the Twenties, afforded a wealth of solid factual dirt to writers who were eager to relate the seamier, steamier aspects of film making. Never before had so many done so little to earn so much. The young men and women on whom fortune had smiled found themselves rolling in riches far beyond their fondest and greediest dreams, with no hint that the fabulous flow would ever cease. And most of them were utterly unprepared for it. After they had bought their Spanish-type mansions high in the hills of Hollywood or Beverly, after they had installed the swimming pool and acquired their custom-built Isotta-Fraschinis, what else was there to do? The answer was obvious. Bootlegged liquor was available, for a price. Women were available, for a price. Drugs were available, for a price. And they had the price.

The first breath of Hollywood scandal centered upon, of all unlikely people, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks. The reigning movie stars of the time, their names had been frequently linked despite separate spouses. During their World War One Liberty Bond tours together, Fairbanks sought to quiet malicious tongues by implying that such gossip was inspired by German agents seeking to sabotage their fund-raising drive. The estranged Mrs. Fairbanks did not agree. In a statement to the press she said, "I cannot defend any longer this woman with whom my husband's name has been linked. The gossip has foundation in fact." Whereupon she sued for divorce, naming an "unknown" woman as corespondent. Soon after the Fairbanks divorce, one Gladys Mary Smith Moore took up residence in a ranch house conveniently near the court city of Minden, Nevada. One month later, the Minden court granted a divorce to the same Mrs. Moore, better known to the world as Mary Pickford. Twenty-six days after that, Mary and Dough were married.

Probably if it had been anyone else—any of the thousands whose cases are processed annually by the Nevada divorce mills—they would have been permitted to live happily ever after. Instead, the ambitious, publicity-seeking attorney general of Nevada attempted to set aside the decree, claiming that Miss Pickford had come to his fair state specifically with the intent of obtaining a divorce, rather than to take up residence there. The Nevada Supreme Court eventually upheld the divorce, but not before the newspapers had had ample opportunity to editorialize about Hollywood's contempt for the institution of marriage and about the promiscuity of its stars. Up to then, the stars who had made headlines were of the manufactured variety; but because Pickford and Fairbanks were the real thing, they lent authenticity to all that had gone before and was to follow.

What followed, as it happened, was another Pickford. Jack Pickford, Mary's younger brother, was also a film star, albeit nowhere near his sister's magnitude. But he had married a great favorite of the day, pert Olive Thomas, who had traveled the route from salesgirl to Ziegfeld Follies beauty to movie star in three short years. Then, with tragic swiftness, her career ended when she swallowed poison in a Paris hotel in September 1920. Every light on Broadway was dimmed for the night at the news. But the Paris police, intent on learning why she had committed suicide, followed up clues that led to an American officer who had stayed on in Paris after the War: She was on the clients' list of a Captain Spalding, a known dealer in narcotics. The French threw Spalding into jail for pushing cocaine; but for the millions of Americans who had idealized Olive Thomas, the revelation that she had been an addict was more than merely shocking. It was another indication that Hollywood was "a sink of corruption and depravity," as one newspaper editorialized.

But if Olive Thomas was the ideal American girl, handsome Wallace Reid was even more the ail-American boy. A D. W. Griffith discovery, he had played a sturdy blacksmith in The Birth of a Nation, starred opposite Geraldine Farrar in De Mille's 1915 production of Carmen, and went on to make over 50 films in the next 6 years, all of them highly successful. Then one day he keeled over on the set. His wife, actress Dorothy Davenport, later charged that, in order to maintain the grueling work pace, his studio gave him drugs. He died in 1923, at the age of 30. By a supreme exercise of the will, he had kicked the habit, but complications set in and his weakened system succumbed. The newspapers, however, were decidedly less than charitable. Even before his death, the public learned that their clean-cut Wally was on drugs. Shortly thereafter, the California State Board of Pharmacy issued the statement that it had over 500 prominent film personalities down on its rolls as addicts. Undoubtedly among them were lovely Juanita Hansen, mischievous Mabel Normand, and sultry Barbara La Marr, all of whom had their promising careers cut short by the habit.

But the scandal that blew the lid off Hollywood was the notorious Arbuckle case. Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, who began his film career as a three-dollar-a-day Keystone cop for Mack Sennett, by 1921 was heading his own unit for Famous Players-Lasky at $7000 a week. A grossly fat man weighing well over 300 pounds, Arbuckle was fantastically coordinated and light on his feet, an unlikely combination that served as the basis for much of his comedy. Audiences adored him; he had teamed in shorts with Chaplin, with Mabel Normand and with Buster Keaton to great success, and at Famous Players was beginning to direct and star in feature pictures. Then the storm broke. It began innocently enough with a drive to San Francisco for the long Labor Day weekend. Checking into the St. Francis, he promptly threw a party for some friends—among them a 25-year-old bit player named Virginia Rappe, whom Keaton was later to describe as being "about as virtuous as most of the other untalented young women who had been knocking around Hollywood for years, picking up small parts any way they could."

Details of what followed varied from story to story, according to whether they were told by friend, foe or muck-minded reporter. Certainly everyone at the party had had more than enough to drink; Arbuckle was known to be a generous provider. And there is general agreement that, after a few orange blossoms, Miss Rappe felt ill and began tearing off her clothes—a habit of hers when she had too many cocktails. But from here on, reports began to differ. According to his friends, Arbuckle sent the girl into an adjacent bedroom attended by some of the other women present who completed the undressing. Others say that Arbuckle, clad in pajamas and a robe, accompanied her to the bedroom himself, locking the door. Friendly testimony alleged that Arbuckle, in the presence of the other women, viewed the prostrate Virginia on his bed, tested to see if she was faking by holding a piece of ice against her thigh, then helped carry the nude body to a bathtub to try to revive her and called the house physician. Less friendly testimony tells of screams from behind the locked door, of Fatty emerging, his pajamas dripping under the dry robe, and the girl on the bed moaning, "I'm dying. He broke me inside. I'm dying." Four days later, she was dead.

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Probably the exact truth will never be known. Zealous friends of both parties did their utmost to conceal the facts. For example, Al Semenacher, Virginia's agent, gathered up her torn and possibly telltale garments before leaving the suite and destroyed them before the trial. Rumors flew that Arbuckle had used the piece of ice to assault the girl sexually, that he had used a Coke bottle, or a wine bottle. Friends asserted that "any such obscene act would have been beyond him." Actually, when the case finally went to court, Arbuckle was tried not for murder but for involuntary manslaughter. And despite an inflamed public opinion, his first two trials ended with hung juries, while the third not only acquitted him but criticized the state for having put him on trial in the first place. But, innocent or guilty, the damage had been done. Arbuckle's pictures were banned from the screen and the man was forced to change his name even to find employment behind the camera. As the distinguished criminal lawyer Earl Rogers prophetically observed in turning down the case, "They'll never convict him. But this will ruin him, and maybe motion pictures also for some time. I cannot take the case, but prepare Hollywood for tornadoes."

Hollywood had already begun to batten down the hatches: Will Hays, Postmaster General of the Harding Administration and a power in both politics and religion, had already been approached by the worried heads of studios; then still another scandal broke. In the midst of the third Arbuckle trial, on the night of February 1, 1922, someone shot and killed the handsome and respected director William Desmond Taylor. Murder is always newsworthy; but what kept this case in the headlines during the ensuing weeks and months was a dramatis personae that included two of the most engaging and popular young stars of the day: Mary Miles Minter and Mabel Normand. No one ever suggested that either might have been the murderer. Indeed, it was established that Mabel was having dinner at home at the time the shooting probably occurred. But subsequent questioning revealed that not only was she the last person, apart from the murderer, known to have seen him alive, but that she was being bled for money by dope peddlers and had turned to Taylor for help. There was something the papers could use—and did. Some girlishly passionate love letters from Miss Minter then turned up among Taylor's effects, and again the papers had a field day. As a direct result of the notoriety, Mary Miles Minter, at the time Mary Pickford's only serious rival for little-girl roles, retired permanently from the screen, while Mabel Normand's career went into swift decline. But the Taylor murder was never solved. As Gloria Swanson observed, the police seemed more concerned with digging into the man's past than with finding his murderer.

The part that the press played in whipping up hysteria against the moviemakers cannot be underestimated. Hearst, Buster Keaton has stated, never really believed that Arbuckle was guilty of the crime for which his own papers had pilloried him; in fact, only a few years later, Arbuckle was hired by Hearst to direct Marion Davies in The Red Mill (although he did so using the adopted name of William Goodrich). At the height of the Taylor case, which is reputed to have sold more papers than the outbreak of World War One, two men had a fight on the sidewalk outside of Mary Miles Minter's home. The fight had nothing to do with Miss Minter herself—nevertheless, it made headlines. Charlie Chaplin provided reams of good copy with the sensational charges surrounding his divorce in 1920 from teenaged Mildred Harris, after two years of marriage. The "secret" marriage of Francis X. Bushman and Beverly Bayne became public property when the papers devoted their front pages to her accusations of flagrant and frequent infidelity. There were more headlines when, in 1921, Rudolph Valentino impetuously married actress Natacha Rambova in Mexico without waiting the full year required by California law for his interlocutory divorce from dancer Jean Acker to take effect; he was jailed for bigamy by a politically ambitious district attorney who saw to it that the reporters had the story long before the actor's friends or lawyers could come to his rescue. Movie stars made news, and somehow all the news they made added up to one enormous black eye for Hollywood.

The American public, apprised on the one hand of the incredible salaries paid to movie people, and on the other of their profligate squandering on riotous living, swiftly responded with a resentment that bordered on vindictiveness. Churchmen, clubwomen, schoolteachers, editorial writers all inveighed against the new Gomorrah in their midst; and politicians played upon their reaction to prepare and push through more and stricter censorship legislation. "Sex appeal," a phrase that the producers had only just discovered at the dawn of the Twenties, promptly became a bludgeon that the reformers used to beat them about the ears. They demanded regulations governing the treatment of sex on the screen, the depiction of crime, the use of weapons, drugs, narcotics and liquor. They organized successful boycotts against pictures starring offending players, and threatened reprisals against the entire industry unless it mended its ways. By early 1922, the reformist elements were aggressively on the offensive, and the producers were reeling against the ropes.

Only in that condition could they possibly have come together to create the formidably titled Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America—better known for three decades as the Hays Office. Thoroughly frightened by the aftermath of the Arbuckle case, industry leaders felt the need for a "czar"—a respected public figure who, by his very presence, could assure outraged civic groups of the studios' high resolve to do the right thing. Their choice settled on Will Hays, a Presbyterian elder and Hoosier politician who had risen high in the ranks of the Republican Party. He accepted the job—at $100,000 a year.

Hays and his hastily formed organization had two fronts that demanded immediate attention. The producers, in an effort to counter the flood of bad publicity in the press, had actually taken scriptwriters off assignments and set them to grinding out newspaper and magazine testimonials to the lofty moral standards of the movies and their makers. Hays realized the futility of this gambit. Instead, he and his staff sought speaking engagements before powerful civic and religious groups to outline the reforms that the industry had voluntarily authorized him to make. Even more pressing was the need to stem the procensorship forces. By the time Hays took office, censorship bills were pending in 32 state legislatures, with Massachusetts the most immediate and threatening. He centered his forces there, rallying citizens' committees in the name of freedom of speech. By September, when Hays himself appeared on the scene, a crusade against political censorship was already well under way. It remained only for him to use his considerable talents as a behind-the-scenes manipulator to persuade politicians of both parties that the move was ill advised. When the bill went to the voters in November, it was defeated by better than two to one. With only two exceptions, Louisiana and Connecticut, the Hays Office was equally successful in blocking state action elsewhere, although scores of communities through out the country continued—and still continue—to harass the film makers with their own self-appointed censor boards.

But more significant than either of these actions in the long run was the evolution of a code—the Code—that profoundly affected all subsequent film production in America. Originally and essentially, it was just that: a codification of existing state and municipal censorship regulations that was designed to permit the producers to get their films shown anywhere with a minimum of costly cuts and changes. Inevitably, the censor temperament being what it is, this proved less than useless. It presupposed a consistency of judgment and standards that most censors could not provide. What it did, however, was to instill in the minds of producers the principle of self-censorship of their pictures in order to make them as widely acceptable as possible—always under the benign eye of the Hays Office, of course.

Despite a basic understanding reached shortly after the formation of the M. P. P. D. A. that the producers would voluntarily proceed to clean up their own pictures, Hays was shrewd enough to perceive that, left to their own devices, they could be expected to return to the primrose path the moment popular indignation had subsided. In fact, it had begun to subside by the end of 1922, and already the righteous sponsors of Mr. Hays were straining at the leash. Lacking enforcement machinery, Hays hit upon a singular method of insinuating his views. Early in 1923, Paramount was considering the acquisition of Homer Croy's West of the Water Tower, a popular novel that owed much of its success to such story ingredients as illegitimacy, a dissolute clergyman, and a wide assortment of exceedingly unpleasant small-town types. Because of its sensational nature, the studio asked Hays to sound out some of the groups with which he was working. Although the reaction was uniformly negative, Paramount made the film anyway. But the experience gave Hays the handle he needed. Member companies were forth-with instructed to submit to his office their synopsis of any play, book or story considered for purchase, along with their proposed handling of any questionable or objectionable material it might contain. By resolution, the producers were enjoined "to prevent the prevalent type of book and play from becoming the prevalent type of picture; to exercise every possible care that only books or plays which are of the right type are used for screen presentation; to avoid the picturization of books or plays which can be produced after such changes as to leave the producer subject to a charge of deception; to avoid using titles which are indicative of a kind of picture which should not be produced, or by their suggestiveness seek to obtain attendance by deception, a thing equally reprehensible ..."

Subsequently, wielding the power to review completed films, Hays was able to extend his control over material that came from other literary sources as well; while in 1927 appeared the first formulation of what was to become the industry's Production Code, a detailed listing of "Don'ts" and "Be Carefuls." Among the 11 "Don'ts" that member companies pledged themselves never to show on the screen were: "any licentious or suggestive nudity—in fact or in silhouette; any lecherous or licentious notice thereof by other characters in the picture; any inference of sex perversion; white slavery; sex hygiene and venereal diseases; and children's sex organs." Among the 26 carefully spelled out "Be Carefuls"—"to the end that vulgarity and suggestiveness may be eliminated and that good taste may be emphasized"—the studios were advised to be particularly wary in depicting: "the sale of women, or of a woman selling her virtue; rape or attempted rape; first-night scenes; man and woman in bed together; deliberate seduction of girls; and excessive or lustful kissing, particularly when one character or the other is a 'heavy.'" Needless to say, this primitive code was more often honored in the breach than in the observance. Revised and extended in 1930, it did not exert the restraining influence that Hays had wished for until 1934, when the newly organized Legion of Decency provided the teeth for enforcement.

On the other hand, what the Hays Office "formula" (as Hays liked to call it) did do was to provide the moviemakers with a simple rule of thumb that would permit them to incorporate a maximum of "sex appeal" into their films and at the same time relieve them of the onus of immorality. Termed the "law of compensating values," it stipulated that sin could be shown, but never condoned. Conventions could be flouted, but only if the flouter ultimately paid the full price for his wayward ways—preferably with interest. Evil must be punished, virtue rewarded. Once the producers had grasped the basic principle, they found the formula worked like a charm. For the first six reels, their pictures could be filled with all sorts of delightful, forbidden sin, just as long as they made it clear that they were against it in the seventh. It was a form of hypocrisy admirably suited to the multileveled morality of the Twenties.

Quite apart from his effect upon production, Hays also played a formidable role in scrubbing up Hollywood's besmirched face. Through his insistence, morality clauses were written into the contracts for all studio talent. The language left no doubt that anyone involved in a scandal—particularly if it reached the attention of the press—would find his or her lucrative career abruptly halted. In addition, those whose predilections toward wild parties, perversion or drugs were too notorious for camouflage or concealment were quietly eased out of the industry. To stem the influx of eager youngsters who arrived daily in Hollywood—their cardboard suitcases filled with dreams of glory—Hays undertook a vigorous propaganda campaign to scotch the notion that this was the new El Dorado. Articles underlined the difficulties of finding employment and the odds against attaining stardom—or even an adequate living wage. He even encouraged the production of a movie, Hollywood, to dramatize the indisputable fact that the film capital was no open-sesame to fame, wealth or happiness. Unlike the more famous Merton in Merton of the Movies, the heroine of Hollywood learned by the end of the film that none of the studio doors would ever swing open for her. To further insure the virtue of the movie colony, the Hays Office created and helped staff Central Casting, a clearinghouse for extra and bit players. The studios agreed to cast such roles only through Central Casting, while the organization itself enrolled new applicants only after a careful scrutiny of their moral probity and psychological make-up. Literally thousands were turned away.

Perhaps the one film that best illustrates the efficacy of the "law of compensating values" came, appropriately enough, from the one director most responsible for bringing it about in the first place. As early as 1919, Cecil B. De Mille had introduced into movies the concept of fashionable sinning; in 1923, while still regaling his audiences with such highly colored accounts of the peccadilloes of the flapper set as Adam's Rib and Manslaughter, he launched into the production of The Ten Commandments, which demonstrated for all time how to make sinning not only fashionable but moral as well. Actually, the original Ten Commandments was in two parts—a long Biblical prolog that followed Moses and the Israelites in their flight from Egypt to the moment the Commandments were given to Moses on Mount Sinai; then a modern story starring Richard Dix, Rod La Rocque and Nita Naldi, in which the consequences of breaking the Commandments were graphically explored. In it, La Rocque, a building contractor, deserts his wife for the voluptuous charms of Miss Naldi, skimping on the quality of his concrete in order to keep his new mistress in jewels and revealing negligees. But soon the cathedral he built collapses, killing his mother. Then he learns that he has contracted leprosy from Miss Naldi, and kills her—and is himself killed while making a mad dash for the Mexican border. As Will Rogers said at the time, "It's easy to see where God left off and Cecil De Mille began."

If any single scene could epitomize both the Hays and the De Mille approach to morality, it would be the climactic sequence in the movie's prolog. While Moses is up on the mountain awaiting the Word of God, down below Estelle Taylor exhorts his followers to worship the golden calf. To get the crowd into the mood, she drapes most of her outer garments about the idol, then leads them in one of the most elaborate and explicit mass orgies ever put on film. Within moments, everyone is gloriously drunk, tearing at one another's clothing, kissing everyone—and everything—in sight. There was a good deal of multiple kissing, too, with one character embracing a girl's face and bosom while another tends to her feet and legs. The scene grows wilder and wilder as the golden calf is laden with more and more jewels and castoff clothing. Then, just at the height of the debauch, Moses returns with the Commandments to tell them how wicked they've been, and dashes the tablets to earth in his fury. The errant Israelites were rewarded with 40 years of penance in the wilderness: the law of compensating values in excelsis—you sin; you pay the price. But in the meantime, as wily De Mille knew, the public would have a grand time vicariously (but virtuously) participating in the goings on. Whenever anyone protested about the inordinate amount of sin that invariably turned up in De Mille's early pictures, he had a pious answer ready. "How can you show the defeat of evil if you do not show evil itself?" he would ask sententiously.

Other producers promptly got the message. The following year, for example, Fox released an elaborate version of Dante's Inferno complete with sets based on the illustrations of Gustave Doré. In it, a millionaire who has amassed his fortune by breaking every rule in the book drops off to sleep over a copy of Dante. As he dreams, he visualizes all the gaudier aspects of hell—naked sinners, male and female (the men wearing flesh-colored fig leaves, the women clad, if at all, in their own flowing locks), being tormented by the brawny, oiled minions of Satan. Although the cameras lingered on ladies being shoved into bubbling caldrons or writhing on flaming stakes, the millionaire, when he wakes up, immediately reforms, and spends the rest of the picture undoing his many injustices.

In some instances, the moralizing was even less subtle. Dorothy Davenport, the widow of Wallace Reid, launched a film, Human Wreckage, soon after his death, in which, as the wife of an addict, she pretends to succumb to the habit in an effort to inspire her husband to struggle against it. Reputedly, the film had more than tacit support from the Hays Office, even though it showed quite graphically not only the effects of drugs, but techniques with the needle. However, Miss Davenport made it abundantly clear that she was opposed to the traffic in drugs, and apparently in those halcyon days Hays demanded nothing more. (Later, of course, as the Code was solidified, any suggestion of the use of drugs whatsoever became completely taboo—a stricture that remained in force until the Code was revised in 1956.) As for Miss Davenport, she continued her personal crusade against vice in Broken Laws, condemning the excesses of modern youth, and in The Red Kimono, a lurid exposé of the evils of prostitution.

Understandably, Mrs. Reid's pictures were devoted to the dim view. Most producers, however, looked upon the social scene with considerably more élan. The flapper had come into her own; the public knew all about petting parties, bathtub gin and cars that stalled conveniently on old dark roads. There were dancing mothers and emancipated fathers who stepped out with their secretaries. There were girls who rolled their silk stockings, and boys who carried hip flasks under their raccoon coats. Despite the increasing strictness of the Hays Office and state censor boards, the film makers could not afford to ignore this sure-fire material. Particularly since the "formula" provided them with a socially acceptable method of exploiting it. They showed it, then deplored it.

In the years that followed, Clara Bow led a whole contingent of dark-haired, vivacious, devil-may-care cuties in a seemingly endless series of flapper pictures; they dominated the American screen throughout the mid-Twenties. Suddenly, the sultry vamp, with her lacquered nails and footlong cigarette holder, was passé. The girl next door was no less sexy, no less eager for a good time, and was a lot more fun. Her eagerness might lead her to consort with some questionable characters—roadhouse operators or well-heeled older men whose mustaches immediately identified them as far too worldly to be trusted; but the likes of these could readily be dispatched by the clean-cut youth with the Stacombed hair who really loved the girl. Actually, the flapper films never failed to underline the fact that their heroine, although wild in her ways—she smoked, drank, danced the Charleston, and was the life of the petting party—was fundamentally a nice girl and altogether worthy of the hero's love. The parental admonition that generally preceded the happy fade-out was more for the benefit of the audience than for the girl herself.

Throughout the Twenties, the characteristics of flapperdom varied somewhat, depending in part on the story, and in part on who was playing the lead. Sometimes she was a spoiled darling, or a girl who could distinguish right from wrong better than her frivolous parents. But there was an elusive quality that made them all sisters under their boyish bobs—a quality that was eternally, triumphantly and pithily identified in 1926 by Elinor Glyn as "It." Mme. Glyn had been brought to Hollywood early in the Twenties to supervise the adaptation of her best-selling novel, Three Weeks, in which the queen of a Ruritanian kingdom takes a holiday from her regal duties to loll on beds of rose petals and tigerskins with a British aristocrat before resuming the burdens of state, considerably refreshed. There was little more to it than that, but Mme. Glyn's professed knowledge of high life in high places quickly made her, in addition to a wealthy novelist and scriptwriter, Hollywood's social arbiter supreme, and its unofficial advisor on the more rarefied aspects of sexual behavior. Her position was solidified with the publication of It, which contained her classic definition of what had been called, more crudely up until that time, "sex appeal."

"To have 'It,' " she wrote, "the fortunate possessor must have that strange magnetism which attracts both sexes. He or she must be entirely unself-conscious and full of self-confidence, indifferent to the effect he or she is producing, and uninfluenced by others. There must be physical attraction, but beauty is unnecessary. Conceit or self-consciousness destroys 'It' immediately. In the animal world 'It' is embodied by tigers and cats—both animals being fascinating and mysterious, and quite unbiddable." Among her contemporaries possessed of "It" she listed the Prince of Wales, Gary Cooper and Lord Beaverbrook. Subsequently, when Paramount bought the title and set her to work concocting a new story around "It," she added the name of her picture's star, Clara Bow, who promptly became the "It" Girl.

In the movie, which, despite the contributions of the prestigious Mme. Glyn, was quite typical of dozens that Clara Bow appeared in between 1924 and 1931, she plays a pert salesgirl in a department store who has caught the eye of her boss, wealthy Antonio Moreno. Moreno calls on her one night, discovers her minding a friend's baby, promptly decides that she is an unwed mother—and therefore available. This misunderstanding reaches a happy conclusion, however, aboard Moreno's yacht. Edward Wagenknecht, author of The Movies in the Age of Innocence, recalls the final scene when, after successfully preserving her virtue, she is thrown into the water; she emerges "with her wet skirts clinging high about her naked things, she carefully pulls them down just far enough to make a modest gesture but not far enough to cover up anything that the audience might wish to see!" Such delicate concern for the proprieties won her a vast and loyal audience—an audience as avid and enthusiastic over each new appearance as was Brigitte Bardot's in the Fifties.

If, on the distaff side, favor had switched from exotic vamps to homegrown flappers, the most popular male lead during the Twenties was, by all odds, the Latin lover. Introduced to the screen early in 1921 by Rudolph Valentino in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the type was given definitive shape—and a name—in his very next picture, The Sheik. Here was a man who both used women and abused them, danced with them and flung them aside, loved them and laughed in their faces. Oddly enough, the women adored it; flappers from 16 to 60 flocked to his movies. (Some Psychiatrists hold that all women secretly want to be raped.) Even odder, while men tended to deprecate Valentino—calling him, in the language of the day, a "jelly bean" or "pink powder puff"—they went to his pictures, too. As the late Robert E. Sherwood noted in 1923, "Ninety percent of the young men who have been most withering in their denunciation of the suave signor have also made sheepish attempts to imitate him in every possible way: Witness the number of sideburns that have been cultivated in the past two years." Even more than Clara Bow, the Italian-born Valentino inspired a host of imitators: Spanish-born Antonio Moreno, Austrianborn Ricardo Cortez, Hungarian-born Rod La Rocque, Mexican-born Ramon Novarro, not to mention the impeccable British-born Ronald Colman. After Valentino's untimely death in 1926, every studio brought forth candidates, faces bronzed and hair slicked back, to fill the idol's boots. None ever quite succeeded.

Valentino's hold on his audience was something quite extraordinary, as evidenced by the enormous success of a series of revivals of his pictures during the late Thirties and early Forties. In New Yourk during the Thirties, a Helen Hokinson-type matron in search of her youth attended such a reavival and became intensely absorbed in a sequence from Son of the Sheik, Valentino's last film. Bent on vengeance, Valentino carries a struggling Vilma Banky into his luxurious tent. At the entry, he kisses her fiercely, then laughs and tosses her on a pile of silken cushions. As he advances upon her, the camera begins to follow, but the folds of the tent fall together and the scene blacks out. "My God," gasped the matron in an agony of anticipation, "don't stop now!" After a screening of The Four Horsemen at the Museum of Modern Art, another Well-dressed middle-aged woman confided to her companion, "I came to this expecting to laugh. But you know, that boy really had something!" Whatever it was that he had had altered the style of hair, dress and lovemaking of an entire generation.

As the Twenties rolled on, competition for Hollywood's increasingly provocative output began to arrive from overseas. In 1925, a German film, Variety, was so successful in the American market that it ushered in a whole new cinematic era. During the final years of the silents, American film makers tried desperately to make their pictures look as German as possible. To help them, German stars and technicians were imported by the boatload. Raven-locked Pola Negri had already arrived, rivaling Gloria Swanson in impersonating some what cynical ladies who had been around. So had director Ernst Lubitsch, Who introduced to the American screen a light and fiavorsome touch of Continental sophistication. Moonfaced Emil Jannings, the star of Variety, was no one's idea of a sexpot; but in a series of lugubrious films for Paramount—The Way of All Flesh and The Last Command (which won for him the first Academy Award to an actor) and The Sins of the Fathers—Jannings delineated a character irresistibly drawn from the paths of rectitude by the desires of the flesh. This frank acknowledgment of sex as a motivating factor in men's lives, even though somewhat diluted from the European handling of the same subject, nevertheless kindled a spark of recognition in the breast of many a moviegoer. Besides, Jannings was a European; therefore his films had to be Art.

But it was never a question of Art, art or pure sex appeal with Greta Garbo. Deposited on MGM's doorstep as part of a package deal with the eminent Swedish director Mauritz Stiller, Garbo panned out as pure gold in her very first American picture. The Torrent (1926). Wrote Variety, "Greta Garbo, making her American debut as a screen star, might just as well be hailed right here as the find of the year ... She makes Torrent worth while ..." In it, she played a Spanish prima donna in love with Ricardo Cortez—another of his essays at being the Latin Lover. Although the film had little else to commend it, one still recalls the finale, the "torrent" of the title, in which Garbo sits frozen-faced in a small boat while the aristocratic Cortez pleads vainly with her to come away with him, promising to abandon wife and family in return.

What Garbo brought to the screen, unlike the foreign-born vamps and seductresses who preceded her, was a hint of sexual mystery, the suggestion of a depth of sexuality to which she alone held the key. Alistair Coke once aptly described her as "every man's fantasy mistress." Her somber, brooding eyes were inscrutable pools of love; her slim, languid body drooped under the burden of her knowledge of the world. Because nothing was ever obvious about Garbo, she could play courtesans, mistresses, Other Women, even common prostitutes and, wrapped in her own private mystery, still appear pure, untrammeled and desirable, ever awaiting the embrace of one true love to stir the fires that burned within her. Often as not, those fires consumed both her and her lover—but what man would not gladly pay such a price to plumb the depths of ecstasy that she alone seemed to offer? Her special awareness of the pleasures and vices of love were hinted in hundreds of ways in every film she made, although perhaps never quite so boldly as in the church sequence from Flesh and the Devil. Kneeling for the Mass beside John Gilbert, she accepts the chalice from which he has drunk the sacred wine. Gilbert carefully turns the cup as he passes it to her. Garbo, her eyes on Gilbert, just as carefully turns it back and drinks from where his lips have sipped.

Sophistication of this kind one might expect to find in the films of Erich von Stroheim, that master of sensuality, but hardly in the work of home-grown Clarence Brown. Nevertheless, it was symptomatic of what was happening to American pictures as the silent era drew to a close. The Continental influence affected all Hollywood films—with the possible exception of the Westerns. Continental themes, Continental manners and—to the extent that the censors would allow—the implied wickedness of Continental morality pervaded the American screen. Ernst Lubitsch did it by sly suggestion: The droop of a fan, the straightening of a the, an insinuating glance conveyed hints of all sorts of delicious transgression. As a result, his films got past the censors without much difficulty. On the other hand, Von Stroheim never hinted. The old millionaire in The Merry Widow was a foot fetishist; Von Stroheim not only showed a closet filled with the shoes of his former conquests, but included a shot of the man slobbering over Mae Murray's dainty toes. Miss Murray recounts in her autobiography that Von Stroheim kept on shooting the scene until she ran screaming from the set. For the same film, he shot an orgy so lewd—complete with voyeurs, Nubian servants wearing padlocked chastity belts and a female orchestra wearing nothing but masks—that the entire sequence was excised from the picture. What remained, however, was enough to make it his greatest commercial success.

Riding the crest of this popularity, Von Stroheim next launched into another protracted study of the Vienna he both loved and hated: The Wedding March. In it, he not only wrote, directed and designed the sets, but also portrayed Prince Nikki, an impoverished aristocrat who, after an affair with a commoner (Fay Wray), is forced by his father to marry the deformed daughter (Zasu Pitts) of a cornplaster manufacturer in order to recoup the family fortune. Again, Von Stroheim's passion for a bizarre realism led to scenes without precedence on the screen—a brothel, with more padlocked Nubians, in which Nikki's marriage is arranged by his drunken father and the groveling magnate, who sit swigging and haggling while Nikki makes love to Miss Wray (off screen) in a nearby garden. There was also a rape staged in a slaughterhouse, the blood dripping from a carcass of beef upon the figures squirming in the sawdust on the floor. The picture was desiged to demonstrate the degeneracy of Austria on the brink of World War. One, and there is no question that it succeeded; but by the time the film was completed to Von Stroheim's satisfaction, there was enough footage for two movies. Paramount forthwith took the film away from him and eventually cut it into two pictures, only one of which was ever released in the United States.

Von Stroheim's final directorial effort, begun just as sound pictures were coming in, was Queen Kelly, starring and produced by Gloria Swanson. It was a fantastic affair in which Miss Swanson, playing a convent girl, is coveted by a lecherous prince who burns down the convent in order to carry her off to his palace. But the prince is engaged to the perverted queen of the realm, who roams the palace clad only in an angora cat (live). When she discovers the liaison, she literally froths at the mouth and bullwhips Gloria out into the night. The story was to continue with the girl inheriting a chain of brothels in German East Africa and ending up as their madam; but Von Stroheim, who was writing the script as he shot, revealed this to Miss Swanson only gradually. When she realized that after almost six months of shooting only about a third of the picture had been made, and that the arrival of sound would soon make it obsolete, and that the story Von Stroheim proposed to tell could never be shown on any screen in the first place, she called a halt. "A madman is in charge," she cried—and thriftily took over the directorial reins to tie off the footage that existed. But by that time, it was already too late; the public was clamoring for talkies. The Swanson version of Queen Kelly was seen commercially onlyabroad.

The coming of sound changed everything. Just as the public had once responded wholeheartedly to the novelty of seeing shadows move, now it responded just as heartily to the novelty of hearing shadows speak. At first, it mattered little what they said. Consequently, the first talkies were often naive in the extreme. But because the Broadway stage was being combed for filmable properties, the talk was often more sophisticated than anything the screen had known up to that time. Groucho Marx, for example, eying worldly Margaret Dumont, could say, "I've come here to defend this woman's honor; I'll bet that's more than she'd do for herself!" As the Twenties drew to a close, however, the Depression was just in the offing—and with it, panic time for the motion-picture industry. For most producers, there was only one panic button to push. And it was marked sex.

epitomizing the capital sins it depicted and denounced on screen, jazz-age hollywood became a gilded mecca for the star-struck—and a scandal-ridden sodom for the censors

This is the third in a series of articles on "The History of Sex in Cinema." In the next installment, authors Knight and Alpert explore the sinful Twenties, European style—from the blatant eroticism of the burgeoning German cinema to the far-out, phantasmagorical creations of those experimental film makers from the Continent who clasped Freud to their artistic bosoms.