She was only a farmer’s daughter . . .

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.

Like the gods they lived apart, appearing to us, like them, as visions of heroism and loveliness, in their case in films. The irony is that off-stage they also behaved like the gods: they drank, they quarrelled, and they humped (the teenage midget Mickey Rooney, who seems to have had a gift for alliteration, revealing of his affair with Norma Shearer, Thalberg’s middle-aged widow, that ‘she was hotter than a half-fucked fox in a forest fire’). But the studio’s publicists managed to keep all this from us, which is why these biographies are so fascinating. Asgard was a mad place. Still the men behind the gods had done their work well: the creatures they chose and moulded were fascinating in themselves.

I remember that great 20th-century thinker Burt Lancaster telling me, ‘When a man’s face is nine feet across in close-up he has to have … something.’