Hollywood: The Oral Story, Sweet Bird of Youth

RIDGEWAY CALLOW: This is the true story of Hollywood. The most ruthless town in the world. RICHARD SCHICKEL: Or at least that’s the way people like to picture it. GEORGE CUKOR: . . . there are all sorts of stories . . . usually untrue . . . STANLEY DONEN: . . . because it was simply a group of people who kept working there in those pictures, going from one job to another . . . HOWARD STRICKLING: Everything was done carefully, thoughtfully, and in real detail. Everybody working together. We got on the same page, film by film. It was a business made up of creative, intelligent, hardworking people. RAOUL WALSH: Work. That’s the true story of Hollywood. But who wants to hear it? They’re looking for something else. Who took off whose panties behind the piano while the director shot the producer in the head? People want to know stuff like that, even if it isn’t true. BRONISLAU KAPER: Hollywood drew envy. All that money and power. People liked to ridicule Hollywood. “Oh, that’s Hollywood.” Everything is “typical Hollywood.” “Oh, he’s going Hollywood.” Nobody says “He’s going San Francisco.” No. “He’s going Hollywood,” where everyone really secretly wanted to go. GEORGE CUKOR: Hollywood throughout the years was always a real stop on the bus. People were very interested in everything that went on in Hollywood. It was exciting. It had all the glamorous people. Everybody wanted to come to Hollywood. 

FRANK CAPRA: Hollywood! What the hell good could come out of a Hollywood? Three thousand miles west of the Hudson River, where nothing west of the Hudson was any good anyhow? A little town way out in the west, a little bit of a dusty burg called Hollywood? Ah, but here film was being made, being sold, being canned, being shipped. We invented it. We created it . . . this enormous thing that has the tremendous power to move and influence. An art form and a business. Hollywood! VINCENT SHERMAN: What started out as a nickel-and-dime, honky-tonk business grew to be a great industry. It gave employment to many people doing all kinds of jobs, all of which had to be coordinated and put together. Some great films were turned out during this period. A town was created as a result of the picture business: Hollywood. I would say that the films that Hollywood made stood at the forefront of the entire world. Hollywood became a legend. ALLAN DWAN: In the beginning, of course, it wasn’t Hollywood. Films were being made all over the country: New York City, New Jersey, Florida, Chicago, St. Louis, Arizona and New Mexico, Oregon, San Francisco, and San Diego. Everywhere. And nobody knew they were going to work in the movies because there was no such thing, really, when they were born. TAY GARNETT: As a matter of fact, I don’t think it ever occurred to anybody that the movies would ever be a business. 

LEO MCCAREY: I planned to be a lawyer. I even practiced. I started out very young, and they mistook me for the office boy. I was a very poor lawyer. A discouraging factor in my legal career is that I lost every case. JEANINE BASINGER: A movie maker had to be ready to pull up stakes and run! The patent wars are a complicated story—but very colorful. In 1908, after months of negotiations, the two biggest companies, Edison and Biograph, former enemies, got together and became The Motion Picture Patents Company. These big guys licensed successful smaller companies to “legally make films”: Vitagraph, Essanay, Lubin, Selig, Kalem, Kleine, and Méliès and Pathé. It was an attempt for MPPC to own it all. By 1912, this controlling and threatening company was weakening, and in 1917, it was dissolved by court order. The motion picture game was afoot! And it was anybody’s game. ALLAN DWAN: I started directing early. I know I directed in 1909. I know that for sure. When I say 1909, it could have been down to almost Christmastime. In California, you don’t remember—there’s no snow, so we don’t remember there’s a winter. 

PAUL NEWMAN: My time in California didn’t have an auspicious start. I drove there from New York, alone, and literally didn’t know where I was going. I was booked for a room in Hollywood, at the Roosevelt Hotel, but I got off at the wrong exit on one of the freeways—I’m not even sure whether it was the Ventura or the Pasadena; I must have cut all the way through Kansas. Anyway, I don’t really remember ever coming into Los Angeles itself, but I ended up exiting at Santa Monica Boulevard. I later, of course, found out there was a much easier way to get where I was headed, but I had to drive a long way on local roads along Sunset. It took forever until I found the Roosevelt. [...] My vacillations about divorcing Jackie went on for years, despite I knew I had fallen in love with Joanne. —Hollywood: The Oral History (2022) by Jeanine Basinger and Sam Wasson 

In The Hustler (1961), Paul Newman delivers what easily might be his best performance (and it's probably the best film he ever made), a literate and psychologically probing drama set in the grubby world of pool halls. Robert Rossen directed with a conspicuous anti-Hollywood grit and maturity (and he couldn’t resist a heartbreaking ending). As “Fast Eddie” Felson, a born loser with the pool-shooting talent to become a winner, Newman excellently delivers the cocky bravado, the sexy charm, and the self-destructive tendencies, a believable combination of drive and defeatism, finally fulfilling his mission of the Method with ostensibly “personal” acting. Newman often appears semi-paralyzed in his early films, not yet free enough to be great, unable to give of himself fully. In The Hustler, he is somewhat shown up by the superb work around him, from George C. Scott’s electrifying portrait of cool malevolence, and Piper Laurie’s aching, unadorned work as Newman’s sad girlfriend. Laurie and Newman had previously shared one brief scene together in Until They Sail (1957). The Hustler is about mind games, in and out of the poolroom, and it's self-consciously reaching for profundity while also providing a satisfying conclusion. Newman deserved his Oscar nomination and was favored to win the gold-plated prize, but Maximilian Schell (Judgment at Nuremburg) was the victor for a far less intricate, though showy, role. 

Despite the steady stream of film work, Newman had opted to spend the bulk of 1959 starring on Broadway in Tennessee Williams’ new play Sweet Bird of Youth, which opened just after Newman received his Oscar nomination for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, making him very much the Williams actor of the moment. It was only a matter of time before Sweet Bird of Youth made it to the screen, and there was no need to look for a bigger movie star than Newman to play Chance Wayne. With four major cast members from the Broadway production (Newman, Geraldine Page, Rip Torn, and Madeleine Sherwood), Sweet Bird of Youth has more heavyweight original-cast members on hand than any Williams film since A Streetcar Named Desire. 

Chance Wayne would appear to be an ideal Newman role, a virile and ambitious operator out to climb the Hollywood ladder. About a decade ago, he was a good-looking star athlete (a swimming diver) who fell for Heavenly Finley (Shirley Knight). Her father, Tom “Boss” Finley (Ed Begley), a former governor on the Gulf Coast, wanted Chance out of the way, and so he disingenuously encouraged Chance to leave St. Cloud and seek his fortune in New York. Chance found minor success in show business, including a cover of Life magazine as one of three chorus boys in a Broadway show (identified as Oklahoma! in the play, but nameless in the movie). Though he continued to believe in his potential for film stardom, Chance scored bigger as a sexual companion to wealthy ladies. As a beach boy in Palm Beach, he had latched on to Alexandra Del Lago (Geraldine Page), an apparently washed-up movie queen who is afraid to face the press and the public.

Like The Fugitive Kind, Sweet Bird of Youth is concentrated on a male character but utterly dominated by female forces. Geraldine Page’s Alexandra has about half the screen time allotted to Newman’s Chance, but the person you remember is Page's Alexandra, just as in The Fugitive Kind it’s Anna Magnani and Joanne Woodward's characters who overshadow Marlon Brando's. Chance is a fairly naïve young man, never quite sharp enough to be the equal of the monsters he will encounter throughout this Easter weekend. (The play takes place entirely on Easter Sunday.) Chance, in the movie more than the play, seems surprisingly innocent despite his past, and his and Heavenly’s unwavering love is treated as something eternally pure, no matter what, all of which seems intended to provide balance with the film’s more sordid elements. Chance is presented as a love-struck man trying hard to be a shameless conniver, though conniving doesn’t come as naturally to him as it does to most of the characters around him. 

The Hollywoodized version by Richard Brooks is quite faithful to Tennessee Williams' play, where Chance, however sleazy his actions have been in the past, will be redeemed by his lost love. The only problem presented to the viewer is that Newman is simply too good-looking to be totally convincing as loser Chance Wayne. We suspect any Hollywood studio would sign this guy about five seconds after looking at him. Years ago, Chance, content to remain in St. Cloud and marry Heavenly, was swayed by Boss Finley into following the go-getting hordes destined for New York's show-business, staked with a train ticket and a hundred dollars. Newman is convincingly guileless as a starry-eyed hopeful, but this scene stresses the point that Chance’s dreams were not his own. In the play, in the Act Two, Chance's tactics to show the town of St Cloud that he is now somebody are obvious. After popping pills and drinking vodka, he brags to Scotty and Bud that Alexandra Del Lago has signed a contract, giving him the lead role in a film called ‘Youth’. Immediately, Scotty and Bud point out the ridiculousness of the title, seeing through Chance’s transparent lies. 

However, Chance’s fantastical schemes reveal that he still buys into the Hollywood dream of glamour and youth. He even keeps in his wallet the snapshots that Chance took of Heavenly on the beach, capturing and immortalising her young body when they were dating. Williams, in essence, reveals that there is no way to turn back the clock, no way to wipe the slate clean, and thus there is an uphill battle to achieve real redemption. The passing of time, as Williams writes in his 1947 essay ‘The Catastrophe of Success,’ is "Loss, loss, unless you devote your heart to its opposite. It goes tick-tick, it’s quieter than your heartbeat, but it’s slow dynamite, a gradual explosion, blasting the world we live in to burnt-out pieces. Time... who could beat it, who could defeat it ever? Maybe some saints and heroes." Chance is ultimately a hero.

The lighthouse sequence is among those scenes that make us feel for two crazy kids in love simply trying to beat the outside forces against them. This particular myth, rooted in the American consciousness, commonly referred to as ‘the American Dream’, recalls a tradition depicted in American Realist novels such as Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy (1925). Like Clyde, the protagonist of Dreiser’s novel, Chance strives to rise above his poverty and in doing so, he compromises his ethical and moral codes. Del Lago’s character is not merely a diva, she's struggling to survive in the movie industry that turned her into a monster, her alias leads back to Williams’s discussion of the ‘Cinderella story’ as well as suggesting that before being consumed by this Hollywood dream, she was capable of kindness, generosity and grace – traits that in fairytales lead the princess to winning her prince. Like Chance (and Cinderella, who cleaned and toiled for her step-sisters), Del Lago was not always rich and famous. She began, like all them, with only beauty to boast of. 

The power struggle between Chance Wayne and Alexandra Del Lago is, in part, fuelled by their recognition of their similarities. The demanding and self-absorbed actress constrasts starkly with Heavenly: "a nude image of a fifteen-year-old girl with the tide beginning to lap over her body like the sea desired her as Chance would always desire her’; Heavenly's nude photograph that Chance took signifies youth and Chance’s desire to possess that youth forever. Del Lago, like others of Williams’s heroines, 'she is an agent of truth forcing lost men to face their reality.’ Miss Lucy, wen she makes her entrance in Act Two, Scene Two in the play, she is described as ‘dressed in a ball gown elaborately ruffled and very bouffant like an antebellum Southern belle’s. A single blonde curl is arranged to switch girlishly at one side of her sharp little terrier face’. Like Scarlett O’Hara, to whom Chance compares her, she holds on to her dignity and pride even under attack and scorned by her former lover Boss Finley. But her gentility and girlish behaviour is, Williams suggests, a façade. Like a terrier, she is quick and wily, and Miss Lucy wastes no time in retaliating. She immediately approaches a heckler and tells him ‘come to hear Boss Finley talk.’ 

Chance and Heavenly are just as much in love in the play but appear much more bruised by their traumatic experiences. In the play, Chance accuses Boss Finley's son: "Hear that, Tom Junior? Give your father that message. This is my town. I was born in St Cloud, not him. He was just called here down from the hills to preach hate. I was born here to make love to Heavenly. Whatever happens to me, it’s already happened." In the previous act, Alexandra asks Chance: "What are you trying to prove?" Chance: "Something’s got to mean something, doesn’t it, Princess? Well, something’s still got to mean something." Like Joanne Woodward's climactic car-ride offer of Carol to Marlon Brando's Valentine in The Fugitive Kind, sparked by another premonition of doom, the gesture of help by Alexandra is rejected by Chance, but Sweet Bird of Youth turns imminent horror into romantic redemption. The message of the film disparages the hunt for big success and promotes true love above all else. Chance is thereby decontaminated of his erotic opportunism, leaving Alexandra and Boss Finley to continue fighting their nasty battles to stay on top.

Chance runs to the front of the Finley mansion, screaming Heavenly’s name when two cars pull up and four men emerge, including Heavenly’s violent brother, Tom Junior (Rip Torn). As he is beaten, Chance continues to call her name before being dragged by his legs to one of the cars. Tom Junior, holding his daddy’s cane, tells Chance he’s about to “take away loverboy’s meal ticket.” Bloodied and swollen, Chance is reunited with Heavenly in a bittersweet happy ending—with the added bonus of political trouble for Boss Finley, ignited at a rally when heckling about Heavenly’s abortion raised questions about his family values. Behind the production, Newman had pushed his wife Joanne Woodward for the role of Heavenly, which probably would have been expanded and resonated more. Although The Long, Hot Summer (1958) and From the Terrace (1960) were blazing box-office hits, Newman's next film with Joanne Woodward Paris Blues (1961) was a sound failure, thus halting them as a popular screen team for a while.

It was under Sidney Lumet that Newman hit a new peak, playing the alcoholic, ambulance-chasing lawyer in The Verdict (1982), a very fine courtroom drama, satisfying and well-paced and handsomely crafted by David Mamet. The Verdict is basically good pulp, featuring a femme fatale, corporate evil, a surprise star witness, and Newman’s do-gooding crusader, an underdog desperately seeking redemption through a medical malpractice suit. Its archetypal components were freshly spruced, creating a compelling character study. Newman was finally a skillful enough actor to encompass a multi-faceted role, which brings real value to the melodrama of the court case. Newman rarely was better, charting his character’s reckless struggle to regain his idealism and fight his insecurities. Without Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’s Brick making him the hottest new leading man of late-fifties Hollywood, and without Sweet Bird of Youth’s Chance confirming his legitimacy as a theatre star, perhaps he wouldn’t have gotten all the way to The Hustler, meaning that his career might not have lasted long enough for him to do The Verdict, The Color of Money, or Blaze. 

Audrey Wollen’s “Sad Girl Theory” bears resemblance to the anti-optimism of Lauren Berlant, Jack Halberstam, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Sara Ahmed, all of whom point to the ways that everyday culture asks us to buy into an aspirational fantasy of “the good life,” while keeping that life ever more inaccessible. In this context, sadness, failure, and shame might constitute a kind of resistance, or, as Halberstam puts it, “not succeeding at manhood or womanhood can offer unexpected pleasures.” —Sources: "Tennessee Williams and Company: Paul Newman" (2011) by John DiLeo and "The sacrificial stud and the fugitive female in Sweet Bird of Youth" by Cambridge University Press (1998) edited by Matthew C. Roudané