Movie stars in the silent Twenties were America’s royalty, and the public kept them securely and lovingly on their thrones. Nothing so prosaic as babies and exchanged recipes for upside-down cakes ever appeared in print. Bushman was dethroned by the very public that elected him “King of the Movies” when knowledge of a wife and children came to light. Unforgettable love scenes were the boon which Greta Garbo and John Gilbert gave to a palpitating public. The public, of course, knew nothing of Valentino’s ulcers or Clara Bow’s emotional problems and would have shied away from dry subjects that robbed their idols of glamour-subjects so freely discussed among present-day stars. Pictures were still new, unique and awesome and the people in them far beyond the mundane workaday world outside. Hollywood was a world apart in those days, peopled with creatures born to adoration by a movie-struck public. Gone, too, are the liveried chauffeurs, the white, fur-robed Cadillac of Norma Talmadge, Billie Dove’s baby-blue block-long Pierce-Arrow, lined with the softest of blue velvet with chauffeur’s uniform to match. And of course one no longer hears the horn of Wally Reid blasting out “Yankee Doodle Dandy” at corner intersections.Ī few beads and a lot of lion made this scene from early Gloria Swanson movie rich in glamour and thrills. One no longer glimpses the white-toothed smile of dark-complexioned Valentino or the jolly bulk of Fatty Arbuckle behind the wheels of their flashy roadsters. The Daimlers, the Stutz Bearcats, the Pierce-Arrows, resplendent in zebra linings and silver hubcaps, no longer glide along Hollywood Boulevard. Only a remodeled Cocoanut Grove, where Joan Crawford kicked up a wild Charleston, remains a monument to an era gone forever, along with its gayety. The bright spots that found the old-time stars at play are no more. Most of them are remodeled beyond recognition, some have become pitifully passe. The mansions that rang with their festive parties stand quiet and serene in the smoggy sunshine of Sunset Boulevard. Great lover Rudolph Valentino, unmatched from his time to this as movies’ embodiment of male-type glamour, made millions swoon Locked behind the wall of silence that encompassed pictures in the Twenties lies this whole fantastic world of silent movies and its people-Valentino, Norma Talmadge, the Gish sisters, Wally Reid, Garbo and Gilbert, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks and Charlie Chaplin. It was the golden era of movie queens and movie kings, of sudden wealth, spectacular glamour, of tragedy and scandal, of pomp and show and circumstance. Those early years of Hollywood-they were the brightest, maddest, gayest and wildest in the history of motion pictures. Jean Harlow brought excitement to the ThirtiesĪnd so it was. After all, this town was built around glamour, not babies!” The next morning, answering her critics in a bikini fashioned from what, one photographer cracked, “must have been the smallest leopard in the world,” Jayne flared: “Hollywood’s getting to be a community of staid married couples. “I sure hope she does,” was the fervent reply of a nearby male. One of the female guests snapped cattishly, “What’s she trying to do-set the clock back thirty years?” Casually trailing $20,000 worth of champagne mink, junoesque Jayne matched stare for stare. When Jayne Mansfield showed up at a lavish party recently she made a grand entrance, wearing a sheath of shimmering gold that hugged her body as closely as nature would allow.
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