Why are we so interested in biographies of the old film stars? I don’t think our children will be. I can’t see them reading 550 pages, the length of this book, about the lives of far better actors like George Clooney or Gwyneth Paltrow. But then we don’t see the stars as actors. For that period straddling the middle of the last century we really came to believe the old gods were back.
This illusion was the achievement of the Hollywood studios, in particular of the Eastern European Jews who ran them, and were some of the most appalling human beings who have ever walked the earth. According to Lee Server, L. B. Mayer of MGM ‘routinely’ groped the breasts of the adolescent Judy Garland, and Arthur Freed, the producer of The Wizard of Oz, exposed himself to the 12-year-old Shirley Temple. But we knew none of this; all we knew was that after an absence of 1,000 years the gods were amongst us again.
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