The History of Sex in Cinema

with its new international identity, the decade's screen royalty projected more explicit sexual images--on screen and off--to an increasingly permissive public

Considering the growing sophistication of the films of the Fifties, with their far more liberal attitudes and--at least on foreign screens--far greater latitude for nudity, it is no coincidence that the new stars who rose in this era had a public (and often private) image that was far more explicitly sexual than ever before. The paramount example of this wholesome trend was, of course, Marilyn Monroe, who speedily eclipsed the reigning queen of the Forties, Betty Grable, and whose appeal was in every way more overtly erotic. Though many of the wraps came off and allowed franker exposition of story material in American movies, however, this new permissiveness did not extend to the total shedding of clothing by the personable creatures who inhabited the newly adult films. Perhaps it was this unbecoming modesty of the American screen that opened the way for invasion of the star regions by a host of European beauties who, unhampered by any forced loyalty to a prudish Production Code, could show a great deal more of their epidermis and flaunt it with fewer inhibitions during their moments of screen passion.

European stars had achieved international (text continued on page 106) stature in previous decades, as Greta Garbo and Pola Negri abundantly attest, but almost invariably, Hollywood support was required. This was not true of the Fifties; nor did Hollywood make stars of Bardot, Loren, Melina Mercouri and Simone Signoret. Rather, Hollywood borrowed their services after their fame was already established. Hollywood did create its own stars during the Fifties, but with far less regularity than in former years. The decline of studio power following the rise of television led inevitably to a decline in prefabricated film fame. Since stars were no longer tied to a studio by contract, the phony public images that the studio publicity machinery had previously fed the public began to disappear. The machinery still went pocketa-pocketa throughout the decade, but no one believed it anymore. For one thing, magazines such as Confidential pretty thoroughly tarnished the halos that studio publicists had been polishing for better than three decades--and the public of the Fifties bought this new image with all the avidity that formerly had been reserved for fan magazines.

The stardom of Marilyn Monroe was all the more remarkable in that she prevailed against a system that no longer worked--and at a time when the market for new stars was bearish in the extreme. Though she was screen-tested as early as 1946, and though the test gave evidence of her magnetic sexuality, the studios first saw her as just another blonde aspirant for stardom. She, on the other hand, had recognized very early in life the qualities that could make a girl very, very popular. At age 12, when the then Norma Jean Baker had needed a sweater for school wear, she borrowed one a size too small for her budding measurements. When she made her first entrance into class, she recalled years later, "the boys began screaming and groaning. Even the girls paid a little attention to me." Attention--and love--was what she needed and wanted most, and with good reason. Few American childhoods can have been more desolate. She was born out of wedlock, on June 1, 1926, to Gladys Baker, a film cutter with an unfortunate history of recurrent mental illness. Because of this chronic affliction, Mrs. Baker was institutionalized through much of Norma Jean's childhood, and the girl's legal guardian became Mrs. Grace McKee Goddard, a friend of her mother's. A series of foster homes followed, in one of which she was raped at the age of eight by an elderly gentleman boarder. At nine, Norma Jean was placed in the Los Angeles Orphans Home, where she remained until she was twelve. An elderly spinster, related to Mrs. Goddard, then took her in.

Those two ladies also noticed Norma Jean's early and exuberant sexuality, and by the time she reached 16, they thought it best for her to marry. Between them, they conspired to have her betrothed to 21-year-old James Dougherty. The girl attempted suicide soon after--the first evidence of the deep-seated emotional disturbances that were later to dominate and ultimately destroy her life. Mr. and Mrs. Dougherty separated in 1944, while the husband was away in the merchant marine. Norma Jean went to work as a paint sprayer in a Los Angeles defense plant, and there ran into her first photographer, David Conover, who had been sent by the Army to do a picture story on the plant and its female work force. So struck was he by her photogenic qualities that he advised her to try modeling. This she did soon after, and was taken on by the Blue Books Model Agency, an outfit that serviced such men's magazines as Click, See and Pic with pinups.

It is rumored that Howard Hughes, the aviation tycoon, movie producer and connoisseur of pretty girls, saw one of these pictures and expressed an interest in MM. It is also possible that the rumor was started by MM's own agent, who, soon after the item appeared in Hedda Hopper's column, took his curvaceous client not to Hughes but to 20th Century-Fox, where a screen test was made. Leon Shamroy, who photographed the test, reminisced afterward that "every frame of the test radiated sex." Without further ado, she was offered one of those minuscule starlet contracts the studios were in the habit of handing out in those days. She remained on the Fox roster for one year, during which she was briefly glimpsed in a corny comedy (Scudda Hoo! Scudda Hay!), and was then peremptorily dropped.

The next three years found Marilyn feverishly attempting to further her movie career, of which she had dreamed since childhood. For the most part, the pickings were lean, and modeling supplied the major portion of her earnings, such as they were. A good many starlets in similar circumstances got along by accepting free meals and rent money in return for favors of another kind, but not Marilyn. "I was never kept, to be blunt about it," she once said. "I have always had a pride in the fact that I was on my own." Yet according to Clare Boothe Luce, in a Life article. Marilyn "sought 'love' with what must have been a fever-pitch promiscuity." There is, of course, a difference between keeping company and being kept.

It was during this period--in 1949, to be exact--that she posed for her celebrated nude pinups. One of them, taken by photographer Tom Kelley (who paid her $50 for the chore), was sold for $500 to a calendar entrepreneur, John Baumgarth, and another to the Western Lithograph Company. When Playboy premiered in 1953, it published one of the poses as its first centerfold--by which time the anonymous nude was anything but anonymous. During the same period, her services were optioned for the usual six-month period by Columbia, and she drew the second lead in a quickie musical called Ladies of the Chorus. The film was a bomb, and Marilyn's option was again dropped, but her tenure at Columbia resulted in a meeting with Natasha Lytess, the studio dramatic coach, who for many years thereafter took both a professional and a personal interest in the girl. A romance with Fred Karger, the studio's musical arranger, also blossomed at Columbia; another of Marilyn's suicide attempts was said to have been precipitated by this broken affair. As before, she called for help in time and was rescued.

Through the efforts of her elderly agent-boyfriend, Johnny Hyde, Marilyn was sent to see John Huston, who was casting for a crime melodrama, The Asphalt Jungle. Among his requirements was a blonde girl of innocent face and sensual figure for the small role of Louis Calhern's "niece." When the picture was previewed, Marilyn's name had been left out of the credits--but audience response to her electrifying presence gave her all the credit that was necessary. When Joseph L. Mankiewicz asked for Marilyn to play the somewhat similar part of a mistress--this time to a drama critic--in All About Eve, he got what he wanted. Oddly, in spite of equally ecstatic audience reaction, MGM saw no reason to keep Marilyn under contract. Probably because she represented a threat to Lana Turner's sway at MGM, Marilyn was released to Fox.

It was not long before thousands of requests a month were flooding in for Marilyn's photograph; although the pinup vogue was waning, Marilyn was soon number one. But still Fox dawdled. She was employed in several of the studio's films, but as featured player, not as star. When columnist Sidney Skolsky recommended her to RKO's Jerry Wald for a starring role in Clash by Night, Wald was able to borrow Marilyn, contrary to custom, at no increase in price. Once the picture was previewed, in December 1951, it was apparent from the response that Marilyn had stolen it away from the veteran Barbara Stanwyck. She went back to Fox an acknowledged star and was given the lead in Don't Bother to Knock.

During the filming of that picture, the nude-calendar scandal rocked the nation. The executives at Fox went into shock at the revelation, but when no demands for her immediate banishment from the film capital came from the public, it was decided to capitalize on the publicity break instead. Marilyn was coached in candor. She told reporters that she had done the nudes for money, and when asked by one lady journalist, "But didn't you have anything on?" replied airily, "Oh yes, I had the radio on."

Her studio, aroused at last to the full realization that the initials M.M. now stood for Hollywood's most sensational sex symbol, banged its publicity drums ever more loudly on her behalf. Not that this cacophony was necessary. Whether merely lying down, her luscious lips parted wetly, or ambling pneumatically down a street, she appeared to fill whatever she had on to the bursting point.

She was both conscious of her body and unashamed of it, and this was a combination much in tune with the changing American female psyche. Puritanical restraints were being cast off at a faster rate than ever before, and psychoanalysis was available for females still fettered by Victorian inhibitions. Not that Marilyn in her personal life was totally free of conventional morality--she was still guilt-ridden by the piously hypocritical morality of her foster parents--but her screen image exuded a healthy sexuality and an ingenuous availability for erotic experience that can be said to have represented an ideal of sorts during this decade of crumbling codes.

But there was more to Marilyn's appeal than that. She had a waiflike quality of helplessness that brought out protective-ness in men. This beauty also had brains--but at first, her studio was interested in her as little more than a simple-minded sexpot. In Niagara, for example, director Henry Hathaway trained a color camera on a Cinemascopic rear view of Marilyn, wearing the tightest of red-satin dresses, for one of the longest--and most memorable--walks in film history. She was next hastened into a musical, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, in which she costarred with Jane Russell; she then shared star billing with Betty Grable and Lauren Bacall in How to Marry a Millionaire. Perhaps it was only coincidence that her escorts in these pictures were Tommy Noonan and David Wayne, respectively, but Fox could hardly have been more calculating in suggesting, through the use of such mousy male types, that Monroe had become the fantasy female of the frustrated American male. Yet Otto Preminger, who encountered a shy, nervous, mixed-up Marilyn during the filming of his River of No Return, confided to an acquaintance that the Monroe boom was beyond his understanding. "She is a vacuum with nipples," he opined--hardly a definitive verdict, as it turned out.

Billy Wilder was more sympathetic--and understanding--when it came to assessing Marilyn's symptomatic behavior as she grew more famous: her tardiness in arriving on the set and in keeping appointments, her insistence on multiple retakes, her propensity for blowing the (continued on page 130)Sex In Cinema(continued from page 108) simplest of lines. "What's happened to her," he said of the star he steered to two of her best comic portrayals in The Seven Year Itch and Some Like It Hot, "is enough to drive almost anybody daffy, even someone whose background has armored her with poise and calmness. But you take a girl like Marilyn, who's never really had a chance to learn, and you suddenly confront her with a Frankenstein's monster of herself built of fame and publicity and notoriety, and naturally she's a little mixed up and made giddy by it all."

Her search for the security of a stable love relationship ended for a time with her marriage to Joe DiMaggio; the union took place on January 14, 1954. But the pressures of publicity and personal and professional incompatibility soon proved too heavy for the match. It would appear that Marilyn's mentality--despite the "dumb-blonde" image conveyed by her films--craved a stimulation that the great ballplayer was unable to provide. She found such stimulation in the person of Arthur Miller. Maurice Zolotow, one of her many biographers, claims that she fell for the tall, Lincolnesque playwright as early as 1950, before she met DiMaggio. If so, she fell for him again very soon after her marriage to DiMaggio ended. Married when they first met, Miller took steps to correct the situation when they met again, divorcing his wife and mother of his children.

Meanwhile, Marilyn was taking drastic steps of her own to reorient her career. She claimed that Fox was dredging up vacuous and tasteless story material for her starring roles. In effect, she went on strike, decamped to New York City, where, with a young photographer named Milton Greene as vice-president, she became president of Marilyn Monroe Productions, Inc. Henceforth, she announced, she would choose her own material and produce her own films. She also told a press conference: "I don't want to play sex roles anymore." She was going to find herself as a person, she said, and "prove to myself that I'm an actress." The Eastern influences were beginning to dominate her life, and for the remainder of the decade, Marilyn's acting career was shepherded by Lee Strasberg, the head of Actors Studio, under whose wing she came in 1955.

It was as Marilyn Monroe, the actress--not the sex symbol--that she returned to Hollywood 15 months later to star in Fox's Bus Stop, directed by Joshua Logan. Yet there are those who still aver that Marilyn was ruined when she went East and encountered the anti-Hollywood snobbism that was prevalent there. The facts of the matter add some substance to this charge. Of her last five movies, two were outright failures at the box office, and only one was a smash. By deserting her sexual image and the Hollywood that--albeit reluctantly--had nurtured her career, Marilyn, while attempting to find herself as an actress, actually lost herself as a star. And by announcing that she was a "real person," she unwittingly diminished her mythic, larger-than-life dimensions. "The more Marilyn's inner torments became public knowledge," wrote film critic Andrew Sarris, "the more she became a recognizable and all too human being, and the result was the loss of her goddess stature."

Yet in her films, she became even more beautiful. At 30, in The Prince and the Showgirl, with the illustrious Laurence Olivier as her director and co-star, Marilyn was as captivating as ever. The film failed to captivate the public, however. Marilyn bounced back briefly in Some Like It Hot, in which Billy Wilder rejuvenated her sexpot image as Sugar, a member of an all-girl band that included Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon on the lam in drag. On that high note, Marilyn ended the film decade she had dominated.

The rest was epilog. In 1960, during the filming of Fox's Let's Make Love, a spate of rumors coupled her with co-star Yves Montand (husband of Simone Signoret) in an off-screen version of their film. The rumors gained more credence when it became apparent during the making of The Misfits, later that year, that the Millers were no longer happy together. Though the film was a trial for everyone concerned, Marilyn's performance was poignant and accomplished. The windy platitudes of Miller's plot-line, however, failed to intrigue the public, and The Misfits was a financial failure.

The next two years were grim ones for Marilyn. In February 1961, she applied for her own admission to the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic of New York Hospital; soon after, she became hysterical and was released as "unmanageable." The Neurological Institute of Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center took her in next and discharged her soon after. But Marilyn's mental state was far from satisfactory, as became apparent when she returned to Fox for Something's Got to Give. She arrived on the set for only 12 of the first 32 days of filming, completing only seven and a half minutes of usable film--after which the exasperated studio fired her, abandoned the picture and slapped the distraught sex queen with a $500,000 damage suit.

She joined Frank Sinatra's Rat Pack circle during the last year of her life, a crowd of funlovers considerably different from those she had known while married to Miller. It also became known that she was drinking heavily and, plagued by insomnia, had become dependent on sleeping pills, supplied to her by both her M. D. and her psychiatrist. And there were never-confirmed whispers that she had become emotionally involved with one of Washington's most prominent political figures. Then, on August 5, 1962, the 36-year-old actress was found dead in her Brentwood home. Los Angeles toxologists attributed her death to an overdose of barbiturates, evidently taken in combination with a large dose of chloral hydrate, more commonly known as "knockout drops." Verdict: probable suicide. But had she truly intended to take her life? The haunting question remains unanswered.

Suicide or accident, much was made by the world's press of the symbolic nature of her demise. As far away as Moscow, Izvestia editorialized that "Hollywood gave birth to her and it killed her." The Vatican charged that Marilyn was the victim of a godless way of life of which Hollywood forced her to be the embodiment. In the end, it was Marilyn herself who afforded the most telling insight into her ambivalent erotic image. "I think that sexuality is only attractive when it's natural," she told a Life reporter in an interview conducted a few weeks before she died. "We are all born sexual creatures, thank God, but it's a pity so many people despise and crush this natural gift. Art, real art, comes from it--everything. I never quite understood it--this sex symbol--I always thought symbols were those things you clash together! That's the trouble, a sex symbol becomes a thing. I just hate to be a thing. But if I'm going to be a symbol of something, I'd rather have it sex than some other things they've got symbols of."

• • •

This healthily hedonistic philosophy was espoused with equal, if not greater, fervor by Marilyn's chief rival as the queen of cinematic sex symbols in the Fifties: France's succulent Brigitte Bardot. It was hardly coincidence that Bardot's ascent came at a time when Monroe's popularity had begun to wane. Significantly, BB was allowed far more latitude than MM in disrobing, and this inhibition, which is still prevalent in Hollywood, did much to further Bardot's illustrious career. Brigitte was younger than Marilyn, too, by a good eight years, and managed to combine the naïveté of a blossoming teenager with the sensuous appeal of a young sophisticate to whom making love was as natural, and as casual, as eating.

Roger Vadim said about the film star he helped create: "Brigitte does not act--she exists." And, indeed, there was often a surprising correlation between the parts she played and her behavior in real life. Her eroticism on the screen was honest and earthy: she forced her viewers, and we quote Simone de Beauvoir the French writer, "to be honest with themselves. They are obliged to recognize (continued on page 222) Sex In Cinema(continued from page 130) the crudity of their desire, the object of which is very precise: that body, those thighs, that bottom, those breasts." Brigitte was equally unhypocritical in her personal life, never attempting to hide the current object of her desire nor the pleasure she took from cohabitation with the lucky fellow. For this attitude she was often censured, even in sexually liberal France; but just as often she was praised, notably by the youthful new French generation of which she was both a part and a symbol.

Unlike MM's, Brigitte's twin-initialed name was hers by birth, and her childhood was as sheltered and secure as Marilyn's had been deprived and insecure. Born in September 1934, in the fashionable Passy district of Paris, Brigitte was the daughter of a prosperous engineer and factory owner; her mother managed a chic dress shop. A member of the haute bourgeoisie, she studied at a select private school for girls, received ballet training from the age of seven and spent long vacations at her parents' villa at fashionable St.-Tropez. Then, in 1950, a friend of the family asked Brigitte to pose for the cover of France's leading women's magazine, Elle. As with Marilyn, the magazine photo paved the way to stardom. Marc Allégret, a film director, was struck by the face of the adolescent girl, with its child-womanly mixture of innocence and availability. He wanted such a girl for a film he hoped to make, and to this end sent his young assistant, then going by the name of Roger Vadim Plemiannikov, to get in touch with her. There were strenuous family objections to Brigitte's embarking on a film career, but Vadim was persuasive, and the 16-year-old girl quit her studies, made a screen test--and two years later became Vadim's wife.

Between 1952 and 1955, she played brief roles in no less than nine films. Then Marc Allégret gave her more prominent notice in his Futures Vedettes, and that same year she was given a leading role in an English film, Doctor at Sea. Another Allégret effort, Mam'zelle Striptease, in which Brigitte showed winning gifts as an amateur ecdysiast, caught the fancy of the French public and thus paved the way for her insistence on Vadim as director of the script he had written for a film called And God . . . Created Woman. Vadim seized the opportunity to expose his wife more completely than was hitherto the custom in the French film industry. He set her against the colorful St.-Tropez seaside scenery, had her make abandoned love with Jean-Louis Trintignant and Christian Marquand, and in general concocted an erotic display that also constituted an eloquent and eye-filling comment on the new French amorality. Successful in France, the film racked up even bigger grosses in the United States, smashing all previous earnings for a foreign film. Not all of it--or her--was seen by Americans, however. The New York State censors carved out certain scenes that emphasized the mobility of Brigitte's naked contours, and it became customary after that to excise certain portions of Bardot films. The public flocked to see them anyway. U.S. distributors imported a spate of early BB films to stoke the public's burgeoning interest in Bardot.

Michael Mayer noted in his Foreign Films on American Screens that "the high point of any Bardot picture is generally her relationship to the towel. BB may be emerging from a tub or a sunbath or a couch, but generally the towel will be loosely draped over her. There will of course be occasion for motion. The towel bends, slips, drops, droops, upends and slithers away. It's all very enticing and intellectually stimulating." That last reference of Mayer's was a sly dig at the fact that Bardot's films played in the artier cinemas and at her adoption as a pet of the French intellectuals, who saw in her frank carnality a rebellion against bourgeois moral values. Vacillating between a desire to become an actress and merely being her unfettered self, Bardot made various proclamations about her artistic intentions, but they were seldom taken seriously.

She was taken very seriously, however, as the world's leading symbol of female nonconformity. She soon developed into what became known as a "kiss-and-tell wife," which is to say that she disdained to hide her quicksilver changing of lovers from either her husband or the public. While being directed by Vadim, she fell furiously in love with one of her co-stars, Jean-Louis Trintignant, and when he departed for army service, her loneliness was soon assuaged by Sascha Distel, a guitar-strumming young singer. Stories of this kind naturally whetted the public's interest in her, and before long her private life was a shambles. Reporters, photographers and fans created mob scenes wherever she went, and Bardot soon fell into severe depressions. Her second marriage, to film star Jacques Charrier, was a succession of mutual suicide attempts. And when she made The Truth for director Henri-Georges Clouzot, the off-screen goings on were a series of tragicomic affairs. Goaded by Clouzot into giving her best performance, she still had enough energy left over for a romance with him--and with her co-star, Sami Frey.

Early in the Sixties, the BB craze showed signs of diminishing, and by mid-decade, it had all but disappeared in the United States. Although she remained popular in France, Raoul Levy, who produced many of her films, complained that "the demystification of the stars, due to too much publicity about their private lives, is ruining them at the box office. There is no longer any mystery about Bardot. The public knows too many intimate things about her life. Bardot sells newspapers and magazines, but she does not sell tickets."

• • •

At the height of her career, BB had been idolized by intellectuals and lowbrows alike, a truly universal appeal. Late in the Fifties, however, while Bardot was still the undisputed sex queen, sophisticates began to note with approval the increasingly frequent appearance in French films of a mature, hauntingly complex and subtly gifted actress: Jeanne Moreau. Since she was just becoming prominent late in the decade, she will be given her proper due in a later installment on the sex stars of the Sixties. No youngster, either, was another French favorite: blonde, bosomy Martine Carol, who preceded Bardot as a Gallic Godiva. A graduate of Paris' Ecole des Beaux Arts and the provincial theater circuit, she broke into films in 1946, but it was not until Caroline Chérie (1950), after a succession of unrewarding minor roles and even more unrewarding love affairs, that she became France's acknowledged queen of the sexpots--a status attained with an unwitting assist from various church groups. Pierre Cardinal Gerlier, archbishop of Lyon, wrote in a religious weekly about that film: "It is a scandalous display of vice, a lowly and licentious film." Naturally, Caroline Chérie was a smash hit. So often did Martine take baths in her films--always making sure that the camera was angled for full uncoverage of her ample bosom--that she became known as "the cleanest actress in the world." Time eventually took its toll of her magnificent body, but not before Martine had zestily bared it in a series of courtesan roles: Lucrezia Borgia, Madame DuBarry, Nana and Lola Montez.

Of a more intellectual cast, but in her own way equally feminine, was Simone Signoret, whose father was chief interpreter to the League of Nations and later to the U. N. Although by birth and her own intellectual attainments she had entree into the most eminent Parisian literary circles, Simone's film forte was the portrayal of robustly realistic roles, such as the prostitute in Max Ophüls' La Ronde, and the seedy apache girl of the prize-winning Casque d'Or. In striking contrast to these parts, she played the austere Puritan wife in the French version of Arthur Miller's The Crucible (co-starring with her husband, Yves Montand). Her fame did not become truly international, however, until her first English-language film, Room at the Top, in which her sympathetic delineation of an adulteress in the English industrial midlands won her a host of acting awards. In all her roles, there was nothing of the conventional sexpot image about Signoret; rather, she portrayed a woman to whom the sex act was a natural consequence of a woman's yielding to her deepest emotions. With her compatriot Jeanne Moreau, and a Greek star, Melina Mercouri, she was one of a triumvirate that became increasingly accepted during the late Fifties: attractively mature actresses of exceptional ability, bold and frank about their desires.

• • •

Mature sexuality was a quality possessed in no less abundance by the gifted Anna Magnani; but when it came to the throng of imposing beauties who followed in her neorealistic footsteps, physical measurements became the prime criterion for producers eager to take advantage of the quickening international interest in Italian films. One of the first to fascinate world-wide audiences--in 1949--was Silvana Mangano, whose felicitously distributed 128 pounds vaulted her to fame in the yeasty role of a sultry rice picker in Bitter Rice.

But post-War Rome fairly teemed with spectacular female star material, judging by the frequency with which one busty beauty after another was "discovered." Miss Rome of 1947--only a year after Silvana held the title--was none other than 19-year-old Gina Lollobrigida, a sometime singer, sidewalk caricaturist, fortuneteller's assistant and model for the fumetti, a kind of photographic comic strip popular in Italy. Assuming from her shapeliness that she was talented as well, director Mario Costa accosted her on the street and offered her a job in movies. She accepted on the spot. Appropriately enough, Gina's first role of importance--after a series of anonymous appearances as an extra--was as a beauty contestant in Miss Italy, made in 1949. By then, revealing stills of her were being circulated to the world's press. Upon seeing one of these, Howard Hughes imported her to Hollywood for a screen test at RKO. The six weeks she spent there were among the most irksome in her life, by Gina's own account. Her trials and torments included forced English lessons, rehearsals for screen tests and attendance at "orrible RKO peectures." One apocryphal story has it that Hughes hired a ballroom so that he could dance with the Italian antipasto in solitary and sybaritic circumstances. She managed to escape Hughes only after signing a contract that gave him the Hollywood option on her services for several years. Since she intended never to set foot in Hollywood again, this formality had little meaning for her at the time. When, a few years later, she found herself one of filmdom's biggest superstars, the contract became vastly more meaningful: She was unable to work in a Hollywood studio until 1959.

The two pictures that put her on the path to international acclaim were the Franco-Italian co-production Fanfan the Tulip and the Italian Bread, Love and Dreams, in both of which her bosom all but burst the confines of her costume. In fact, brassiere advertisements in France were soon referring to oversized bosoms as "les lollos." Although thwarted by Howard Hughes' ban on her employment in Hollywood, American producers soon remedied the situation by starring her in European-based productions. The first of these was John Huston's oddball romp Beat the Devil (1954), which failed to make much of a dent on the box office; but her next, Trapeze, established her as one of the world's most glamorous sex stars. When Harold Hecht, her producer for Trapeze, asked her what she would like to make next, she promptly replied, "A million dollars American." It is to the canny Gina's credit that she did not allow her sex image to obscure her basic goal: financial security.

• • •

An even more celebrated Italian star was (and is) Sophia Loren, whose instincts for survival--and wealth--were fully as developed as Gina's; while her bosom, one of the mammary marvels of the decade, was even more so. Illegitimately born in 1934, she spent a wretched childhood in Naples. At 12 she was enrolled in the local Teacher's Institute, but by the time she reached 15, it was apparent that she was becoming equipped for a career less sedate than running a classroom. Sophia's mother, an "aggressive, single-minded, red-headed tigress," in the words of writer Louis Berg, "saw in her daughter's beauty their sole hope of escaping from the sordid life of the slums." In 1949, equipped with a dress made by her mother from pink window curtains, Sophia entered a Naples beauty contest and won second prize--which was immediately cashed in for two train tickets to Rome--and the fabled Cinecittà.

For the next two and a half years, movie pickings were lean. Both mother and daughter found brief employment as extras in Quo Vadis? at a combined salary of $33.60 per week. In subsequent films, Sophia progressed to speaking parts, but she won considerably more fame in Italy by modeling in dishabille for the fumetti, and it was in these publications that her pictures flooded the country.

She was also asked to bare her breasts in one of her early films--a period potboiler called Era Lui, Si, Si--for the version to be released in France. "I did not want to, but I was hungry," she claimed. Hunger became a thing of the past in Sophia's life in 1952, when she met one of Italy's most peripatetic producers, Carlo Ponti. He saw her sitting in a Rome night club watching a beauty contest elimination--of which he was a judge--and insisted she take part. She lost, but Ponti took her personally in hand thereafter. While she continued to register all emotion "with her bosom," as one Italian critic put it, Ponti helped her lose her uncultured Neapolitan accent and gave her acting lessons. Having already adopted the name Lezzaro, she dropped that in favor of Loren. About the same time, also in favor of Loren, Ponti dropped his wife, Giuliana, from whom he had long--and unsuccessfully--sought a divorce acceptable to Italy and the Vatican. Although it was common knowledge that Ponti had been the guiding spirit of Sophia's career for a number of years, in 1957 he moved into the foreground by marrying his promising protégée after obtaining a Mexican divorce from his wife; but this was annulled after a warning from the Vatican. (They lived eight years "in sin," then remarried last year in France.)

Next came a couple of dozen Italian quickies--for which she sometimes flitted from set to set, making three at once--and then Sophia won a prize part in Vittorio DeSica's Gold of Naples; this role, plus her flimsy costumes in the earlier Aida and a cameo part in Neapolitan Carousel, promptly raised her to stardom. By 1955 she had become important enough to be sought by Stanley Kramer for a starring role in his Spanish epic The Pride and the Passion, filmed in 1956.

Richard Schickel, co-author of The Stars, gave a plausible explanation for her widening appeal: "She is the very opposite of what the European woman used to represent in the movies," he wrote. "There is nothing vampish about her. . . . Miss Loren does not tease. One knows that she will keep her promise of delight." Yet it must also be noted that Hollywood's tendency was to keep her majestic proportions somewhat under wraps. In a series of films she made for Paramount in the late Fifties--Desire Under the Elms, Houseboat, That Kind of Woman and The Black Orchid--neither her impressive figure nor her impressive capabilities as an actress were displayed to best advantage, and it was perhaps for this reason that the films failed to ring bells at the box office. Sophia was soon to conquer even the artificialities of Hollywood, however, and add to her stature as the most lustrous international female star of the coming decade--but that story belongs to the Sixties.

• • •

Another mammoth mammarian of the Fifties was Anita Ekberg, a Swedish beauty contest winner (1951) who managed to crash Hollywood and quickly became a sex symbol there, but was never able to translate her symbolism into a first-rate career. Glimpsed in Blood Alley, Mississippi Gambler and Back from Eternity, she failed to make good her boast that she would "show that I can act instead of just showing off my figure." Her cold-shouldering of the Hollywood wolves earned her the nickname of "the Iceberg." Her international wanderings in search of film parts, and her mania for publicity, inspired Federico Fellini to star--and satirize--her in his La Dolce Vita; it was her finest hour. Thereafter, however, when she began to show an unfortunate propensity for gaining weight, roles grew fewer. Presumably, the boundary lines for movie hips and bosoms did not extend much beyond the 40-inch mark.

• • •

One young lady who stretched those boundaries to the limit was Jayne Mansfield; though easily outsizing Marilyn Monroe in the bosom department, she was never more than an ersatz version of the star she unabashedly emulated. In fact, it is highly unlikely that the relatively ungifted girl from Texas would ever have achieved prominence had it not been for the Monroe craze. Because of it, the studios were on the watch for other likely blonde-bombshell candidates, and when Marilyn's appearances in films grew infrequent after the mid-Fifties, opportunity beckoned for Jayne, as well as for such other blonde and bosomy dishes as Mamie Van Doren, Sheree North and Diana Dors. But none of them proved notable in their film roles; they got as far as they did, in fact, largely on the strength of shrewdly calculated self-promotion.

• • •

But not so for Kim Novak. Groomed by Columbia as yet another Monroe rival--and also as a replacement for the studio's wandering star, Rita Hayworth--she surmounted what might have been a kiss of death and became a golden attraction at the box office. Perhaps her quick rise to the top in the short space of two years was due to her vaguely somnolent manner, which made her seem an opportune candidate for bedroom doings; perhaps it was her throaty, come-hither voice; and perhaps it was at least partly, as has been claimed, that she was studio-created, with all the premeditated publicity this entailed. Whatever the secret of her success, she did manage to waft a slightly mysterious sexual appeal entirely her own. She had a look of commonness, even cheapness, yet with it a certain otherworldly aloofness that came from some hidden complexity in her nature.

The daughter of a Polish railway worker, Kim attended Wright Junior College in Chicago and did part-time modeling. Hired as one of a team of four models to tout a touring home-appliance exhibit, she got as far as San Francisco, then detoured to Los Angeles, where she enrolled in a model agency. This was in 1953. It took only two weeks before the green-eyed girl was chosen as one of a group of models to appear in The French Line, an RKO film then being filmed. A sharp-eyed dance director pointed her out to agent Louis Shurr, who arranged a screen test for her and changed her name from Marilyn to Kim. (Two Marilyns would have been a drug on the market at the time.) Her grooming by Columbia proceeded apace: She was pushed into Pushover after a bit part in Son of Sinbad, then hoisted to star status for Picnic, The Man with the Golden Arm and The Eddy Duchin Story. By the end of 1956, an exhibitors' poll listed her among the ten most popular film stars in the country. Though the possessor of one of the most beautifully rounded bodies in Hollywood, Kim was at first reluctant to unveil her more-than-adequate assets. But after stringent dieting had helped slim her thighs and legs, she became considerably less inhibited, as readers of Playboy (December 1963 and February 1965) will recall.

This conquest of maidenly modesty did nothing to discourage a large entourage of escorts, among whom were an Italian count by the name of Mario Bandini and an American movie-theater owner, Mac Krim. Gossip had it--later confirmed in his best-selling autobiography--that she also became briefly enamored of Sammy Davis Jr., and vice versa. Very little of this reached the newspapers. Though her studio feared adverse audience reaction to the affair, such intimations as did reach the public harmed her box-office appeal not a whit.

• • •

Clearly a reaction to the plethora of busty blondes in Hollywood films of the Fifties was the marked popularity of such less-obviously sex-conscious and seemingly well-bred young ladies as Audrey Hepburn and Grace Kelly, two of the brightest stars of the decade. The Hollywood establishment, ever conscious of, and ever searching for, that indefinable something called "class," rewarded both with its Academy Award. Both did have pedigrees of a sort. Audrey's came from a Dutch baroness mother, Ella van Heemstra, and an English businessman father, J. A. Hepburn-Ruston, whose ancestry stretched far back into English and Irish history. "After so many drive-in waitresses in movies," said Billy Wilder after directing her in Sabrina, "here is somebody who went to school, can spell, and possibly play the piano. This girl singlehanded may make bazooms a thing of the past." His forecast was unfulfilled, as matters turned out, but there was no gainsaying that Audrey was distinctly inferior anatomically to her major competitors of the decade, measuring a mere 32 1/2 inches where the inches count most. Nevertheless, critic Bosley Crowther called her "the middle-aged romantic's dream." Was it by accident or by design that the film makers so often paired her with Hollywood's older stars?

In sex appeal and snob appeal, Grace Kelly was cut from the same fine cloth. Born in 1929, Grace had all the advantages that an Irish-American Catholic millionaire father could provide: She attended the Raven Hall Academy and the Stevens School in Philadelphia. Touted as one of Hollywood's few and true patricians, she kept herself relatively aloof from the press--but not, according to Hollywood reports, from her aging leading men. Ray Milland, for one, was so infatuated with her that he gave up everything for Grace, and then, only through his wife's indulgence, was permitted to return to hearth and home. Bing Crosby, her costar in Country Girl, also wined and dined her for a time.

The canny Alfred Hitchcock sensed the erotic fires beneath the blonde beauty's cool veneer and shrewdly fanned them into flame opposite James Stewart in Rear Window and Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief. In the latter film, he unfroze the seemingly arctic star for an abandoned embrace with Grant; moments later, a sky symbolically alight with exploding fireworks accompanied her willing seduction. There were fireworks in that selfsame sky soon after, when she met and married Prince Rainier of Monaco amid much pomp and circumstance. Anyone from Hollywood not invited to the wedding was considered devoid of real class. Grace gracefully retired from the screen and not long after saved Monaco for the Monacans by providing Rainier with a son and heir.

• • •

Less classy by any standards, but ever-popular, was Doris Day, whose onscreen behavior, with few exceptions, was such a model of propriety that her presence in a racy comedy automatically guaranteed it a seal of virginal purity. She began her career in Hollywood in the late Forties, after achieving a reputation as a popular pop vocalist, and toiled her way toward film fame through a succession of banal musicals in which she was invariably as fresh, freckle-faced and feisty as a high school cheerleader. Toward the end of the Fifties she switched to comedy and was paired perennially with Rock Hudson, or some equally antiseptic screen hero. Despite situations in which any red-blooded woman would have certainly found herself in somebody else's bed, Doris always managed to keep her virtue infuriatingly intact. Either the script or her own innate bourgeois morality would always rescue her in time. This kind of sophomoric sex comedy so proliferated during the early Sixties that she didn't even have to be in one for it to be known as a Doris Day picture.

• • •

Destined for far greater stardom in that same decade was Elizabeth Taylor, although she was almost as far as Doris from being a sex symbol when she began her cinematic odyssey in 1943. She was then 11 years old, and the occasion of her debut was that fondly remembered dog opera, Lassie Come Home. A year later the violet-eyed, brown-haired beauty rode to national fame and affection on the back of a horse called National Velvet, which also happened to be the name of the picture. In almost no time the little darling had grown into a bewitching teenager who wiggled her hips provocatively at almost every male in the MGM commissary, and at 18 she married Nicky Hilton, the youthful hotel-chain heir.

Born in London in February 1932, Elizabeth was the daughter of a British buyer for an art business, and a mother who had once appeared on the stage under the name of Sara Sothern. Before the outbreak of World War Two, Taylor sent his wife and daughter to live with Mrs. Taylor's parents in Pasadena, where an obliging friend helped the then-eight-year-old girl get her start in pictures. From that time on, Hollywood and the movies became her natural habitat.

Until she appeared in George Stevens' A Place in the Sun in 1951, Elizabeth was regarded principally as a beauty whose promise as an actress was far from certain, and while her dramatic talents were thereafter recognized as impressive, for a good many years she generated more excitement with her partner-changing proclivities than with any of her performances on screen. In January 1951, nine months after her marriage, a weeping Elizabeth had told a divorce judge the extraordinary story of her marriage to young Hilton. He was "indifferent" to her, she sobbed, he "ignored" her, and cruelest of all, he actually said to her, "You bore me." The lonely Liz was very soon being seen with a young director, Stanley Donen, who happened to be married at the time, though separated from his wife. Elizabeth's mother and father objected to the relationship, whereupon the prodigal daughter moved out of the family adobe to establish her own. Within months, while filming Ivanhoe in England, she struck up an old acquaintance with Michael Wilding, an actor 20 years her senior, and eight months later, announced their imminent marriage to the press. The actor was somewhat staggered by the news--as was, presumably, Donen--but he recovered and obligingly showed up for the wedding a few weeks later. The marriage lasted four years, and two children were born of the union.

Before the divorce, though, Elizabeth had run into another Michael--the son of a rabbi, a braggart who made his boasts come true, a flamboyant, cigar-chomping showman whose last name was Todd. No sooner was the split-up announced than Todd telephoned Elizabeth and asked her to meet him at his office. Conducting his proposal of marriage with the same staccato certainty with which he clinched his business deals, Todd got an OK from Elizabeth--a coup of sorts, considering the fact that he already had a son the same age as she. The two were married early in 1957, and the blissful couple proceeded to quarrel from coast to coast. Thirteen months after the marriage, Todd's private plane, eerily called The Lucky Liz, crashed in a storm, killing him and the others aboard. The disconsolate widow kept her commitment to star in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and was given an Academy nomination for her performance and her valor.

Then she fell from grace. Todd's young friend and admirer, Eddie Fisher, attempted to comfort Elizabeth in her bereavement and succeeded mightily. Oceans of crocodile tears were shed for dear deserted Debbie Reynolds, and the tide of public sentiment turned righteously against Elizabeth. Debbie, meanwhile, had discovered that there was publicity mileage to be gained from her predicament, and was in no great hurry to get a divorce. The divorce finally came, however, and Elizabeth and Eddie were married in May 1959.

It was prophesied by insiders that Fisher's career would be hurt by his wayward wooing of Elizabeth, and sure enough, it was. Liz, on the other hand, grew ever stronger. Former fans who had reviled her turned out in droves to see her movies, fascinated by a woman who dared to indulge her romantic impulses regardless of the mores of society. Her hold on the public was consolidated further when, taken ill in London, she was rushed to a hospital, all but given up for dead, and survived after an emergency tracheotomy. Now she was not only the bold and scarlet Liz but the brave, indomitable Elizabeth. Hollywood fervently voted her its Academy Award for her performance in Butterfield 8--although many a cynic declared that she received it for her deathbed scenes in London rather than for her tepid interpretation of John O'Hara's ill-fated call-girl on the Metro lot. In any case, Liz was a perfect barometer for the changing moral climate in America. As will be detailed subsequently, the barometric pressure dropped again when Mrs. Fisher was introduced to the also-married Richard Burton on the set of Cleopatra early in the Sixties.

• • •

With teenagers increasingly dominating movie queues, inevitably many of the new sex stars--and particularly on the male side--reflected not only their predilections but their image of themselves. And perhaps the most original and offbeat of these was Marlon Brando, who managed to combine a unique and sharply contemporary personality type with acting ability of a high order. His behavior, both off screen and on, projected an arrogant independence that appealed specifically to the new, nonconformist generation.

Nonconformity was a Brando specialty even as a child. Born in Omaha in 1924, he banged his drums in the house when company came, was dismissed from a military academy for his practical jokes, and in general evinced a nature that was alternately sulky and exhibitionistic. Heading for New York for a thespic career, Brando studied by day with Stella Adler and the Actors Studio and ran an elevator by night. After a few Broadway roles, he hitchhiked all the way to Cape Cod to beard Tennessee Williams in his summer den and beg for the Stanley Kowalski role in A Streetcar Named Desire. He got it, and under Elia Kazan's direction he blazed his way to fame. From there he went on to Hollywood cloaked in an aura of theatrical prestige.

From the first, he was regarded as a "sincere" artist, and his early performances in such films as The Men, A Streetcar Named Desire, The Wild One and especially On the Waterfront fully sustained that image. In his personal life he shunned Hollywood's folk patterns, refused to date stars and instead sought out "nice" unknown girls. He zipped around town on a motorcycle, avoided night clubs and lunched at the MGM commissary with a bohemian bunch of little-known New York actors. He even scorned the very productions in which he was contracted to star. But nothing halted his upward progress--for a time. His T-shirted image had caught on; he helped spread the vogue for studded leather jackets and motorcycles; his brutal Kowalski style brought shivers of excitement to his female fans, and imitative males adopted his slobbish methods of on-screen courtship.

Off screen, meanwhile, he attempted to keep his various courtships, marriages and engagements away from the prying eyes of newspaper reporters and gossip columnists, although with indifferent success. Somehow, fans learned of his long-standing romance with a Mexican actress named Movita (years later he married her, after she bore him a child), with the flashing-eyed Puerto Rican actress Rita Moreno and with an olive-skinned Anglo-Indian girl from Wales who went by the name of Anna Kashfi in Hollywood--a girl whom he married and left soon after.

By the end of the Fifties, he had given up the stage for good and become a full-fledged (although still nonconformist) Hollywood fixture: He had learned to tolerate the place, and to accept the wealth it showered upon him; and, in turn, Hollywood had accepted him, albeit with some misgivings.

• • •

Naturally, he was imitated; and if Brando gave birth, in a sense, to James Dean, it was Dean himself who, by dying young, perpetuated the Brando legend of the essentially pure at heart but maltreated and misunderstood rebel without a cause. Dean's brief career encompassed only three films, but these were enough to earn him a posthumous "career" as legendary as that of Valentino. Born in 1931 in Marion, Indiana, James Byron Dean was, like Brando, a product of the Actors Studio, and, again like Brando, he made his first impression on the Broadway stage. The first film in which he appeared--East of Eden--set the mold for which he was revered by the young. In an undeniably compelling performance, he played a boy convinced that he can do nothing right, yet hopelessly trying to win his father's affection. Rebel Without a Cause found him once again attempting to communicate with an unfeeling father. In both films he appeared to be acting out his own inner conflicts--conflicts that, if anything, were even more vividly exemplified by his own off-screen behavior. In restaurants, if service was not instantly forthcoming, he would beat a tom-tom solo on the tabletop, pour a bowl of sugar into his pocket or set fire to a paper napkin. He collected a small group of sycophants who vied with their leader in dreaming up ridiculous pranks. Dean's last film, Giant, was not yet in release when he smashed himself up while speeding in his Porsche on a California road. His fans reacted to his death with the most remarkable mass emotional display of the decade. For more than a year afterward, Warner's received thousands of requests a month for photographs of the dead star. They provided the fuel for a James Dean cult. A New York psychologist, attempting to assess this hysterical worship of the unlucky star, ascribed it to "a curious case of juvenile frustration, sex substitution and hero worship running like electrical lines into a centrally convenient fuse box."

• • •

That these same ingredients could be channeled into vastly profitable box-office results was quickly recognized by Hollywood; and for a centrally convenient fuse box, another sex star was soon available: Elvis Presley. The sullenly handsome Mississippian, whose galvanic gyrations as he sang, stomped his foot and whacked his guitar soon earned him the nickname "Elvis the Pelvis," first conquered the recording industry before going to Hollywood. Predictably, the Roman Catholic publication America described Elvis' erotic hip-swiveling as "not only suggestive but downright obscene." Elvis defended himself when this and other statements of a similar nature were brought to his attention. "I never made no dirty body movements," he averred. Even so, Hollywood found it necessary to tone down whatever it was that came naturally when, in 1956, at the age of 21, he made his first film, Love Me Tender. He made three more--all enormously successful, if less than memorable--before the Army called him up and turned him into Private Presley in 1958. His phenomenal film career was resumed in the early Sixties with little abatement in popularity. Despite the continued loyalty of his fans, however, teenagers of the Sixties were to find headier--and hairier--delight in such swinging new heroes as the Beatles.

• • •

Where Presley and Dean were meaningful almost exclusively to the teenagers, slender, hawk-faced Montgomery Clift had a unique ability to bridge the generations. Teenagers recognized in him an older brother who shared their problems; and through his artistry, his ability to project his inner anguish, adults gained some insight into the uncertainties and aspirations of their nonconformist offspring. Unfortunately, Clift's problem was that he was inwardly troubled not only on screen but off screen as well. When he appeared in his first two films in 1948, Red River and The Search, he was instantly recognized as possessing an abundance of the stuff that stars are made of, and seemed headed toward an auspicious career. Once established, however, Clift made relatively infrequent screen appearances--he always insisted on being an actor instead of a star--and his career was almost ended in 1956 when he smashed himself up in a car during the making of Raintree County. Rumors were that he subsequently took to drinking immoderately; others declared that he was mentally unstable at times. In any event, suddenly Clift became a bad risk to bet several million dollars on. Thus, during the making of Suddenly, Last Summer, it was hardly a secret that producer Sam Spiegel had a couple of replacements standing by in the event that Monty didn't finish the job. His last film was The Defector, in 1966, and soon after its completion Clift died in his New York City home of a heart attack. Unlike Brando, he had never fully accepted the artificial world of Hollywood; and this constant inner questioning of values--a mistrust rather than cynicism--lent considerable poignance to his roles. Had he been better equipped mentally to withstand the rigors of stardom, he might well have become one of the greatest of them all.

• • •

Many of the same qualities that had made Clift a star no doubt accounted for the rejuvenated appeal of Frank Sinatra in the Fifties. Like Clift, he was small and spindly, as if suffering from chronic malnutrition; and at the start of the Fifties, he had all the earmarks of a born loser--in short, everything necessary to arouse the motherly instincts of impressionable girls. After a series of insipid musicals in the late Forties, by 1951 he was already being written off as a has-been by the Hollywood raters. Then 35, he had also separated from his wife Nancy, and was involved in a nerve-racking affair with the volatile Ava Gardner. After an exhausting divorce battle with his wife, he finally made it to the church with Ava in November of 1951. If his screen career seemed ended by then, Frank's headline-making capacity was not--thanks to a succession of noisy split-ups and reconciliations.

By the time he snagged the part of Maggio in From Here to Eternity, his $150,000 fee per picture had plummeted to a measly $8000, and he had to wage a desperate campaign for the part, at that. The role, of course, won him an Oscar, which promptly became the point of departure for one of the most miraculous comebacks in the history of show business. Almost overnight he switched from amiable sidekick and harassed underdog to a swaggering, assured, aggressive, even cynical leading man. In the prosperous Fifties, this new Sinatra personality shed an aura of glamor on screen and off. In Hollywood, he created a new social pecking order, the highest ranks of which went to the denizens of his "rat pack" circle of intimates. By 1960, he was the acknowledged "king" of Hollywood, supplanting the old "King," Clark Gable, who died that same year; and his kingdom included not only his own movie company but a record corporation, part interest in a gambling casino and other multimillion-dollar enterprises.

• • •

While certainly the most notably successful, Frank Sinatra was not the first of the stars of the Fifties to "go corporate." High income taxes, as opposed to the more moderate tax levied against corporate gains, had already encouraged such enlightened Thespians as James Stewart, Cary Grant, Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster to incorporate their talents and take home a larger share of the fruit of their efforts. Ruggedly handsome, tall, well muscled and athletic, Lancaster was the prototype for a new generation of post-World War Two males who neither whined about social maladjustment nor made bids for motherly sympathy. One look at his broad-grinning, angular face indicated that here was man enough to take care of himself. Neither brooding nor seemingly sensitive, he appeared cut out solely for overtly physical roles; and yet, through intelligence, ambition and shrewd career building, he extended his range to include a memorable series of characterizations, from the tough, philandering sergeant in From Here to Eternity to the alcoholic husband in Come Back, Little Sheba, finishing the decade with his flamboyant, fulminating evangelist in Elmer Gantry.

• • •

Strikingly similar to Lancaster, not only in type but in the roles he chose and in the management of his career, was another leader of the Fifties' beefcake brigade, Kirk Douglas. Douglas first bared his manly chest for the cameras in the prize-fight epic Champion (1949), and has managed to do so again at least once in virtually every picture he has made since--taking the precaution, of course, to shave it bare beforehand, since chest hair is still considered unsightly in some squeamish cinema circles. More so than Lancaster, Douglas owed his rapid rise in Hollywood to the emerging popularity during the Fifties of the heel-hero, the kind of role he prefers to play. "I believe women are attracted by cruelty," he said in 1952. "They don't want gentleness and tenderness." Nor were these qualities conspicuously displayed by him in such films as Detective Story, The Big Circus and The Bad and the Beautiful, three of his better vehicles. But he was not afraid to take on such challenging, offbeat roles as that of Van Gogh in Lust for Life, and he got Stanley Kubrick's antiwar epic Paths of Glory off the production pad by agreeing to appear in it--for a price, of course. His power in Hollywood reached its peak in 1960, when he spent $12,000,000 of Universal's money to make Spartacus, a spectacle that often seemed to have as its primary raison d'être the display of Douglas' manly torso.

• • •

The true king of supercolossal spectacles, however, was Charlton Heston, a rangy, chesty, lean-jawed, Roman-nosed product of Northwestern University's School of Speech, which happened to be situated in his hometown, Evanston, Illinois. After a routine career in stock, radio, television and on Broadway, he was spotted by Hal Wallis and brought to Hollywood in 1950. Two years later, De Mille cast him as a rough, tough circus boss in The Greatest Show on Earth, a big money-maker. Since a picture's earnings invariably cast a golden glow on its star, he was tapped again by De Mille for The Ten Commandments, which Time castigated as "perhaps the most vulgar movie ever made." Nevertheless, although Heston's "gentile" Moses was hardly typecasting, the film turned out to be one of the most profitable ever made. Heston, therefore, became the obvious choice for another prize Semitic role, that of Ben Hur, in which he vanquished the equally manly British star, Stephen Boyd, in a dazzling chariot race. A humorless but competent actor, Heston took his screen glorifications seriously, allowed nary a whisper of scandal to dent his sterling reputation and has kept himself in top physical condition for his arduous film roles.

• • •

Another rugged, good-looking actor who moved up fast during the Fifties was William Franklin Beedle, Jr.--also from Illinois--known more familiarly as William Holden. Born in 1918, schooled at Pasadena Junior College, he gained stardom as early as 1939, when he played the sensitive boxer in Golden Boy. In spite of his early success, however, Holden was not regarded as too promising a prospect for the long haul; executives felt he resembled all too blandly "the nice-looking young man next door." Holden resolved to toughen his image, but nothing much happened until after Billy Wilder cast him as Gloria Swanson's kept man in Sunset Boulevard (1950). In The Proud and the Profane, he played a ruthless, cold Marine officer who calculatingly seduces the sensitive, war-widowed Deborah Kerr; he was the mean pack rat of a German prisoner-of-war camp in Stalag 17, winning an Oscar for this hard-bitten portrayal; he was a powerful businessman in Executive Suite; and he made his early detractors swallow their cigar butts with his performance as the male sex bomb of a Midwestern town in Picnic. A sober citizen who attended P. T. A. meetings, Holden had another side that included temperamental outbursts and hard drinking, and rumors abounded in the Sixties that his career had temporarily ground to a halt until he was able to get himself back on the wagon.

• • •

Like Holden, fresh-faced Tony Curtis experienced considerable difficulty in breaking away from the juvenile mold in which his studio, Universal, persisted in casting him. Not that the studio had much faith in their discovery, a slumbred ex-gang member from the tough Yorkville section of Manhattan. Brought to Hollywood in 1948 after being spotted in an off-Broadway show, he was given a munificent $75 a week and cast in B-movie bit parts as a curly-headed pretty-boy. He tried persistently to escape this vapid image, however, and ultimately succeeded in establishing himself as a serious actor when he co-starred with Burt Lancaster in Trapeze (1956).

Neither his subsequent serious roles nor his marriage to Janet Leigh in 1951 caused the slightest diminution of his appeal to the bobby-sox following he'd acquired, who read with palpitating interest the fan mags' gurgling descriptions of each new addition to the Curtis ménage--and presumably with no less avidity a Confidential article intimating that Tony used his studio dressing room for undressing would-be starlets. Nevertheless, throughout much of the Fifties, the Curtises, along with the Fishers (Eddie and Debbie), remained the favorite young marrieds of the fan-magazine set--until both marriages went phfft in their own well-publicized ways.

What Tony reflected--and continues to project--is a youthful, buoyant, optimistic outlook on life in general and on sex in particular. Knowing him might be dangerous for a girl, but it could also be fun. For those who preferred a safer, saner, more antiseptic approach to sex, however, the Fifties proffered a goodly supply of that as well. Curiously, or perhaps predictably, most of this bland new breed were manufactured by a reclusive talent scout and agent named Henry Willson, whose stable included such wholesome heartthrobs as Tab Hunter, Troy Donahue and, most successful of them all, Rock Hudson.

• • •

Born Roy Fitzgerald in Winnetka, Illinois, Hudson worked as a postman, a piano mover and a truck driver before his discovery by Willson. A screen test was arranged for him at Fox, but he was so utterly inept that it was later shown to beginners as a classic example of how bad acting can be. He had appeared to unimpressive advantage in 28 films before the formula was discovered that shot him to fame. The formula was simple, and largely the invention of Ross Hunter, an actor turned producer: It merely wedded lush Technicolor to lachrymal soap opera. In Magnificent Obsession (1954), Rock played a wealthy playboy turned good-Samaritan brain surgeon who saves Jane Wyman's eyesight and wins her eternal love. He was a dedicated tree surgeon in All That Heaven Allows, and by then was thought worthy enough by George Stevens to star with Elizabeth Taylor and James Dean in Giant, for which the movie colony--noting his high position on the box-office charts--voted him an Academy Award nomination.

One Hollywood observer, hard put to account for Hudson's popularity, said: "The public got tired of decay. So now here's Rock Hudson. He's wholesome. He doesn't perspire. He has no pimples. He smells of milk. His whole appeal is cleanliness and respectability. This boy is pure." Although magazines of the Confidential ilk repeatedly implied that this purity was bred of a basic distaste for girls, Rock's hold on his public was secure. Dissatisfied with his inane image, however, Hudson fought for his contractual freedom, widened his range to include comedy and by the end of the decade had doggedly fashioned a slick acting style for himself. If his image remained bland, he nevertheless developed himself into one of the more reliable of Hollywood's professionals.

• • •

The great sex stars of the Thirties and Forties--men like Gable, Cooper, Stewart, Bogart and Grant--were well beyond the first romantic flush of their youth; and although all of them continued to function throughout the Fifties, producers were searching frantically for replacements among a newer generation of stars. Unfortunately, they were not that easy to come by. When a youthful, vigorous newcomer did, by some miracle, thread his way through Hollywood's obstacle course into the big time, he was immediately besieged with offers and rich rewards. Such was the case with Paul Newman, who, after an unfortunate start in an eminently forgettable epic, The Silver Chalice (1955), moved on swiftly to such meaty roles as that of Rocky Graziano in Somebody Up There Likes Me and the ambitious, unscrupulous hero of The Long, Hot Summer, in which, according to Time, he was "as mean and keen as a cackle-edge scythe." With realism rampant in Hollywood, Newman's laconic, devil-may-care acting style--not to mention his ice-blue eyes and the masculine jut of his deep-cleft chin--made him a top star in little more than a year. Born in Cleveland in 1925, educated at Kenyon College and at Yale University's Drama Department, he appeared on television while studying at the Actors Studio, and then in the Broadway version of Picnic--where he met his second wife, Joanne Woodward, who was an understudy for the play. No doubt it was the Brandoesque quality of his performance in Picnic that first recommended him to the studios, but he quickly demonstrated that he had at least as great a range as Brando and a self-possessed, self-assured quality uniquely his own. Given the fat lead roles in two distinguished Tennessee Williams transplants from the stage, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Sweet Bird of Youth, Newman gained both in box office and in prestige, and was thus supremely well fitted to become one of the most important--and most highly paid--of all male stars during the following decade.

• • •

Surprisingly, foreign actors shone with decidedly less luster on the Hollywood scene during the Fifties than at any time before--particularly when contrasted with the zooming enthusiasm for foreign-born actresses in American films. Through much of the decade, toothy Rossano Brazzi was called upon whenever the script demanded a suave, Continental charmer; or thin-lipped Louis Jourdan if, as in Gigi, the romantic youth were specifically French. Dark, brooding Richard Burton was imported to Hollywood in 1952 for the lead in a romantic thriller, My Cousin Rachel, and the first Cinemascope spectacular, The Robe; but he remained very much on the fringe of things until the early Sixties, when his well-publicized liaison with Elizabeth Taylor--plus, of course, his own innate abilities--suddenly catapulted him to the top ranks of international stardom.

What was remarkable about the Fifties was that for the first time--with notably few exceptions--a foreign actor could become an international star without once setting foot inside a Hollywood studio. The spread of art theaters in the United States, and the stepped-up process of dubbing, which carried outstanding foreign films for the first time into neighborhood houses and drive-ins, had by the end of the decade made such names as Gérard Philipe, Marcello Mastroianni and even Japan's Toshiro Mifune almost as familiar to movie fans as Rock Hudson and Cary Grant. Mastroianni, who began to hit his stride in La Dolce Vita (1959), belongs more properly to the Sixties; but the gifted, Byronesque Philipe, who died at the age of 36 in 1959, had become an idol abroad with Devil in the Flesh (1946) and a favorite of the art-house crowd in the United States after that film was imported here. Remarkably versatile, Philipe was able to switch effortlessly from the lighthearted buffooneries of Fanfan the Tulip to the proudly sensitive Stendhalian hero of The Red and the Black, and so convincingly did he enact his many romantic roles that several of his pictures ran into censorship difficulties here, among them La Ronde and Les Liaisons Dangereuses. By the time Liaisons had opened in the United States, he was already dead of a heart attack; but he might well have been amused at the last erotically impudent impression he left behind him: the well-known scene in which he rests a telephone on Jeanne Valérie's nude rump after successfully seducing the girl.

By the Sixties, Hollywood had institutionalized its practice of skimming the cream of foreign-born talents, mainly because by that time the overseas market had become so supremely important that international casts were resorted to increasingly as a means of selling films successfully around the world, and Hollywood was once again the happy hunting ground of the international male stars.

• • •

Hollywood's stars of the Fifties by and large lived prosaic, relatively dignified private lives--by previous standards, at least--well aware that their lucrative contracts contained what were known as "morals clauses," which could be exercised to terminate an actor's employment whenever a studio so desired. Now and then a gleam of scandal did steal through to interrupt the monotonous round of celebrity teas and fund-raising cocktail parties, but it took a genuine leap from the straight and narrow--rather than a mere studio handout--for a star to break into the news. Not that the public was by any means more censorious and disapproving than in previous decades. If anything, it showed more genuine tolerance than at any previous time in cinema history.

But along with this tolerance went a very real demand for something more honest, more revealing than the pap that studio press departments were accustomed to handing out each month to the fan magazines. It is likely that the phenomenal growth of Confidential and a host of other scandalmongering magazines during this period was due less to the public's craving for mere sensationalism than to its desire for a more realistic, down-to-earth view of their idols than the studios were ever willing to allow. At any rate, Confidential and its sister publications descended on Hollywood like a plague of locusts soon after the decade began. It is principally because of these magazines that the Fifties became the most gossipy of all cinematic decades, with a lurid sexual subculture that was the very antithesis of the image of hardworking respectability the industry attempted to convey for its stars.

The unsavory "genius" of the field was Robert Harrison, the fly-by-night publisher of such publications as Beauty Parade, Flirt, Eyeful, Wink and other publications of similar cultural pretensions. Noticing in 1951 that Senator Estes Kefauver's televised inquiries into organized crime had attracted vast audiences, he came to the conclusion that Americans were interested in "inside stuff," and the first issue of Confidential followed.

Terror soon stalked the boudoirs of Hollywood. There were unconfirmed reports of fat studio pay-offs--"to defray editorial costs"--that resulted in the killing of star stories that might conceivably prove injurious to their box-office draw. On the other hand, young people on the make in the film world saw exposure in Confidential and its facsimiles as a handy, dandy method of gaining wide public attention. By reason of circulation alone, exposure in these magazines meant a kind of instant fame. Confidential alone soared at one point in its checkered career to a print order of more than 5,000,000 copies.

As might have been expected, the lure of these magazines was, with relatively few exceptions, sex--although in its absence something very close to character assassination might well be substituted. Circulation boomed highest when the subjects were such perennial favorites as Frank Sinatra, Ava Gardner, Elizabeth Taylor, Rita Hayworth, Anita Ekberg, Kim Novak and Lana Turner.

In a 1956 Confidential piece, Sinatra was reputed to have kept a girl so busy in bed for two days and nights that she was unable to get a wink of sleep. In Whisper, he was said to have given a "hot party that helped him forget Ava." It turned out to be "a real sizzler," said this sister publication of Confidential, "with overdone stews and plump, peeled tomatoes." Further reported was a purported episode in which Sinatra was said to have gone upstairs with a girl on each arm to a bedroom in which another girl was already waiting.

Lawsuits sometimes followed exposés like these, but not as many as might have been expected. Harrison no doubt counted--correctly--upon the star's understandable reluctance to subject themselves to further unwelcomed publicity. Nevertheless, during the first five years of Confidential's existence, it accumulated some $12,000,000 worth of suits--perhaps a relatively piddling amount considering the fame of the defamed and the number of articles that were run. One such was Dorothy Dandridge, who slapped Harrison with a $2,000,000 damage suit because his magazine had run a story claiming that she had made love "in the open air" with a well-known bandleader. The suit was ultimately settled with a $10,000 payment to Miss Dandridge.

By 1957, the suits against Confidential and Whisper had piled to such a number that decisive court cases were unavoidable. Maureen O'Hara, the red-haired Irish beauty, among many others, sued for defamation of character and criminal libel. By the time the California court got down to cases, the so-called "trial of a hundred stars" had been whittled down to only one--Miss O'Hara, who was asking no less than $5,000,000 in damages. She never got a penny of it, though, for the trial ended with a hung jury. There was a corollary accusation, however, having to do with the publication of obscene material, and of this Harrison was declared guilty and forced to pay a $10,000 fine. Harrison wisely decided it was time to retire and nurse the millions he had made, and the Confidential affair soon subsided into snickers and history. Although many of the scandal magazines continued to publish, their contents were toned down.

On the night of April 7, 1958, not long after the Confidential trial had ended, Cheryl Crane, the 14-year-old daughter of Lana Turner, clutched a butcher knife and drove it deep into the stomach of her mother's hoodlum lover, Johnny Stompanato. Newspaper headlines blazoned his death and reporters dredged up every detail of the liaison, the murderous event, and the inquest that resulted in Cheryl's being made a ward of the court.

After such a sordid scandal, at first it seemed just too unlikely that the star could even hope to continue her career: There were editorial fulminations and women's-club resolutions against Lana. But her current picture then in release, Peyton Place, surged to record grosses. It is not too much to say that the scandal and its resultant furor actually rescued a star whose sexual allure had been undeniably fading, and a career that had begun in the Thirties moved serenely on into the Sixties.

In a sense, the public's reaction to Lana's vicissitudes encapsulated the attitudes of the Fifties. A generation earlier, the scandal might well have banished her from the screen. But in an era of scandal sheets, imported bosoms and unprecedented on-screen honesty about sexual relationships, la Turner's indiscretions--like Liz Taylor's feckless pursuit of husbands and Marilyn Monroe's unappeasable appetite for love--were interpreted simply as somewhat flagrant examples of life imitating art. And it was life, not its imitation, that audiences were finding with increasing frequency on the screens of their favorite movie theaters in the Fifties.

This trend, begun in the Fifties, was to reach a climax in the mid-Sixties with the relaxation of the Production Code and the introduction of nudity into American movies. Before moving on to this period, however, authors Knight and Alpert will turn their attention to a trio of related film phenomena: the "nudies," the stag films and, in their next installment, the far-out experimental cinema.