Hollywood is haunted by the ghost of playwright and novelist Oscar Wilde. But how did Wilde, who died over a decade before the first feature film, help to make the movies?
Join Kate Hext, associate professor of English literature at the University of Exeter and author of the new book "Wilde in the Dream Factory: Decadence and the American Movies", for a lively discussion about Oscar Wilde’s hitherto unknown influence on US cinema. This conversation is hosted by Andrew Rimby, host and director of The Ivory Tower Boiler Room.
In the decades after his imprisonment for his sexuality, the playwright and raconteur Oscar Wilde helped to make Hollywood movies racy and queer. His quips and style inspired the new screenwriters and directors, offering a way to put sex in the air in an era of increasing restrictions on what could be shown onscreen. Set within the rich, evolving history of the American screen, this salon reveals Wilde’s influence on Hollywood from the silent movies to screwball comedies – and changes forever how we understand both Wilde’s afterlife and cinema’s beginnings.
Wilde in Hollywood, or How the Golden Age Got Naughty with Kate Hext and Andrew Rimby
Interintellect , May 8, 2024
Dark Room - Kate Hext -- Wilde in the Dream Factory
Kate Hext of the University of Exeter joins us to talk about the tremendous influence of Oscar Wilde in the first days of Hollywood cinema.
Art of Darkness, March 23, 2024
It begins with his 1882 American tour, and traces the ongoing popularity of his plays and novel in the early twentieth century, after his ignominious death. Following the early filmmakers, writers and actors as they headed West in the Hollywood boom, it uncovers how and why they took Wilde's spirit with them. There, in Hollywood, in the early days of silent cinema, Wilde's works were adapted. They were also beginning to define a new kind of style -- a 'Wilde-ish spirit', as Ernst Lubitsch called it -- filtering into the imaginations of Lubitsch himself, as well as Alla Nazimova, Ben Hecht, Samuel Hoffenstein and many others. These were the people who translated Wilde's queer playfulness into the creation of screwball comedies, gangster movies, B-movie horrors, and films noir. There, Wilde and his style embodied a spirit of rebellion and naughtiness, providing a blue-print for the charismatic cinematic criminal and screwball talk onscreen.
Discussing films including Bringing Up Baby, Underworld, and Laura, alongside definitive adaptations of Wilde's works, including, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Lady Windermere's Fan, and Salome, Wilde in the Dream Factory revises how we understand both Wilde's afterlife and cinema's beginnings.
After Wilde’s visit to the US in 1882, his philosophy of life became an inspiration to early filmmakers in their revolt against corporate America, Wall Street and provincial pettiness
The Importance of Being Earnest was NBC’s first coast-to-coast broadcast of a play in 1929. It was ideal for radio, partly because Oscar Wilde’s crisp dialogue obviated any need of facial expressions or gestures. Epigrammatic speech, as Noël Coward found, was a signifier of modernity in the 1920s. Beyond that, as Kate Hext shows, the America of Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover had a sinewy and hardy sympathy for the Anglo-French fin-de-siècle literary mode of the 1890s known as Decadence.
For too long, Hext argues, historians have focused on the American Dream as a mercenary business, concerned with the optimisation of personal wealth, sociopathic ambition, competitive ruthlessness, grinding long hours of work, mass production, cultural uniformity, winners and losers and he-men and patsies. Yet, she continues, Wilde, shorn of his sexual deviance and disassociated from pretty boys, offered a philosophy of life that was an antidote to corporate America, Wall Street, provincial pettiness and meddlesome neighbours. His state of mind gave a sort of subversive hope to men and women – especially those in the Midwest and West – who hankered to live more for pleasure than profit. Putting the sexual history aside, Wilde’s writings were a gallant and inspiriting counter to killjoys and the insatiable demands of wage slavery. Wilde satisfied a yearning for non-monetary fulfilment and recreational rapture.
The Picture of Dorian Gray, says Hext, is the story of a habitual criminal. In pursuit of his ideal of perfect beauty and voluptuous living, Gray steals, blackmails, uses opium, visits dens of iniquity, performs illegal sexual acts, learns the tricks of coiners and commits murder. He becomes, in Wilde’s depiction, a dandy criminal performing acts of fabulous duplicity. As such, Gray is a harbinger of that dominant 20th-century phenomenon, the cinematic crime thriller.
Some gay American men were drawn to Wilde by his sexual history and public tragedy. Vincente Minnelli, a descendant of Sicilian revolutionaries who grew up in Delaware, Ohio, was enthralled by Wilde while working as a teenage window-dresser in Chicago. He became a set designer, then a theatre director, always touched by the visual inflexions of the Decadents. After 1940, as ‘the Oscar Wilde of the camera’, he directed the greatest Hollywood musicals at the apogee of their fashion.
Wilde’s subversive strains also appealed to men of conventional sexual habits. Although H. L. Mencken disliked the idea of buggery, he admired Wilde’s baiting of puritans and emulated his aphoristic put-downs of women. Wilde’s work was readily adaptable to the tastes of vaudeville audiences who whooped and whistled at drag artists. There were similar frissons, no doubt, in the Nickelodeon film Salome, or the Dance of the Seven Veils (1908) and spin-offs such as If You Had a Wife Like This (1909).
Hext gives a rich and fulfilling account of the Hollywood screenwriter and crypto-Wilde, Ben Hecht. Born into a Yiddish-speaking family which ran a small store in Racine, Wisconsin, he was heterosexual. But his sympathy always lay with miscreants, anti-bourgeois dandies, dissidents, unsuccessful smart alecs and no-hopers. While a reporter on the Chicago Daily News in 1914-23, he modelled himself on Baudelaire, and read Verlaine and Mallarmé. The decadence of Dorian Gray and of Huysmans’s À rebours delighted him.
The Front Page (1928), the boisterous comedy about a Chicago newsroom which Hecht co-wrote, depicts hard-bitten hacks reading Huysmans, Gautier, Arthur Symons, Walter Pater and other Decadent writers. Hecht’s snappy film-scripts lift lines and sentiments from A Woman of No Importance and Lady Windermere’s Fan. In Crime Without Passion (1934), the male lead recites verses from Swinburne’s sadomasochistic poem ‘Dolores’ (1866). In Mad Love (1935), Peter Lorre, playing the murderous Dr Gogol, declaims ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’ at the film’s homicidal climax.
Hecht’s gangster aesthetes dominate his scripts for such classic films as Underworld (1927), Little Caesar (1931) and Scarface (1932). The he-men in these films are rash, hypersensitive and perfectionist in their wishes and nihilistic in practice. They have a self-harming need of excitement, regardless of the price. One of Hecht’s narrators says that they ‘lie, quibble, cheat, steal, four-flush and kill, each and all inspired by the solacing mono-mania that every one of their words and gestures is a credible variant of perfection’. Their exacting taste drives them to the merciless, inhuman pursuit of precious objects. In the expectation of an early death, they want immediate gratification, not deferred pleasures. They prefer sudden exhilaration to stability. A cinematic culmination of Wilde’s gangster aesthetes is Edward G. Robinson taking the lead role in a Hollywood adaptation of one of Wilde’s stories, ‘Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime’.
The thesis of Wilde in the Dream Factory invites scoffing before one reads it. But Hext is a subtle, observant, lively and persuasive writer. She knows her stuff and never takes it too solemnly. Her book is a winner.
The curious influence of Oscar Wilde on Hollywood. By Richard Davenport-Hines. The Spectator, March 23, 2024.
On New Year’s Eve, 1922, a most unusual film premiered at the Criterion Theatre, one of the new “picture palaces” on Broadway. Though there was no red carpet, perhaps a sense of expectation filled the chilly December air. Inside the 600-seat movie theatre was at capacity. As the screen titles appeared the Wurlitzer organ stopped playing. This was a silent picture to be played in a completely silent auditorium.
The film was Salome, and Alla Nazimova – so famous she used only her surname – was its star, scenario writer and producer. She had overseen every aspect of this picture, the final act in modernism’s annus mirabilis, a late entry on the roster of artworks that sought to “make it new” in a year that redefined literature and the arts. But Salome turned out to be a failure, and Nazimova’s disappointed ambition put paid to her career, if not her legend.
She was born in Yalta in 1875 and first made her name as a leading actress in the Moscow Art Theatre. When she arrived in Hollywood, via New York, as “The Great Nazimova”, she played opposite Rudolph Valentino in Camille (1921). Hollywood’s studios were expanding, the moving pictures were becoming the movies and the culture seemed to welcome female-led production companies. Nazimova Pictures was one of these “Her-Own Companies”, and Salome mattered to its boss. She fought to realize her vision of it at every turn: from filming at night to get just the right lighting effects, and dealing with the threat of censorship, to negotiating on endless delays in nationwide distribution and organising the publicity.
It was based on the 1891 play by Oscar Wilde, originally published with illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley. After a false start in America – Richard Strauss’s 1907 opera Salome closed after one performance at the Metropolitan Opera – Wilde’s heroine became an underground sensation. Maud Allan started it all with her touring Salome show. The papers called it “Salomania”. Filtered through vaudeville, the story of a young woman who performs the Dance of the Seven Veils for King Herod in return for the head of Jokanaan (which she longs to kiss) was irresistible. America’s Salome became orientalised, voluptuous, up for it. Imitators proliferated. Theda “The Vamp” Bara played her in the first feature-length film adaptation; Irving Berlin wrote a song about her; Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle did a cross-dressed Salome skit in which he kissed a head of lettuce.
When Nazimova’s Salome appeared on screen, though, the audience gasped at an adaptation that looked very different: avant-garde and queer as America’s Salome had rarely been. The distinction between avant-garde cinema and the movies may have been blurred in the early 1920s. Even so, this was outlandish. The court of King Herod was multiracial, some actors cross-dressed and reportedly all were gay. Narraboth and the Page, two of Salome’s admirers, appeared in peacock-feathered leggings and canonical pom-pom wigs, teamed with over-sized pearl necklaces on their bare chests.
The mise en scène took up the extravagant curved lines of Beardsley’s boldest two-tone patterns for a design that quivered into camp. However, the designer, Natacha Rambova, replaced the original illustrator’s phallic symbolism – candelabra, swords, erect plant stems – with yonic symbols of circles, archways and veiled entrances. The entry to Jokanaan’s cistern was reimagined as a gilded cage, over which Salome draped herself. A contemporary review reassured its readers that “only the highest of the highbrows will perceive … unwholesome aspects”. For those highbrows, features such as the arched and gilded cage were an artistic coup – a mons veneris at the centre of the set.
This was a promising, if singular, start. Sex was in vogue in 1922, the year in which Hollywood’s decadence reached a climax: Arbuckle went on trial twice for the manslaughter of the starlet Virginia Rappe at an orgy; Cecil B. DeMille filmed the first lesbian kiss in Manslaughter; and Universal released Erich Von Stroheim’s Foolish Wives, the first film to cost more than a million dollars (and almost bankrupt a studio), much of it spent on shooting 60 hours of erotic encounters with a cast of thousands. In the same year the anonymously published polemic Sins of Hollywood: An exposé of movie vice! salivated over the way the movie world made “the scarlet sins of Sodom and Babylon, of Rome and Pompeii fade into a pale yellow”.
In this sensational kind of view Nazimova was a key figure in Hollywood’s immorality. She was an original member of Los Angeles’s “Sewing Circle”, the society of lesbian and bisexual women that later included Greta Garbo. The Sewers met under the palm trees at Nazimova’s palatial home, 8080 Sunset Boulevard, surrounded by an orange grove, an aviary, a rose garden and tropical flowers. The pool was in the shape of the Black Sea, with underwater lighting. On the terraces she chatted with a changing cast of starlets, including Norma Talmadge, Jean Acker and Pola Negri. The Sunday-afternoon parties were all-female affairs, with masquerade games creating an environment ripe for sexual conquest. On other occasions Nazimova gathered together her Russian émigré friends: Sergei Prokofiev recalled how, in 1921, they still sang “God Save the Tsar” to welcome in the Russian New Year.
The “scarlet sins” of Hollywood were good box office. Had Nazimova stuck to those, she might have had a long career at the top. Anyone can forgive a good-time girl. Or, in another possible universe, the Beardsleyesque design of her film could have been rolled into the carnivalesque momentum of a surreal comedy. In the event, however, Nazimova’s Salome showed little interest in the uninhibited pleasures associated with the Sewing Circle or contemporary Hollywood. It was – to borrow T. S. Eliot’s words to Virginia Woolf – “trying something harder”, and that was the problem. Wilde had been the first writer or artist to endow Salome with an inner life, and now Nazimova sought to express this on the silent screen.
We first see Salome on screen turning from Herod’s advances and flouncing off in a sparkling minidress. Then, slowly, she comes to life as a three-dimensional figure: not a Jazz Age femme fatale, but a determined, vulnerable woman. The camera lingers on her as she gazes through kohl-rimmed eyes, and the audience sees that she has lost herself in desirous longing; looking at Jokanaan, but beyond him, too, to something intangible. Narraboth watches her and the Page watches him, each desiring another in vain, their androgynous bodies playing with the possibility of same-sex desire.
Salome’s inner life had never before been explored so tenderly. It had rarely been noticed at all among the more obvious visual delights of Salomania. The photographer Charles Van Enger experiments with new close-up and continuity editing techniques to create a visual grammar of desire that burns with eros and pain. Wilde’s words and a score would only have distracted. For Nazimova understood that it is the feelings we cannot articulate that haunt us. Seen through a lens that attends to such feelings more than to Salome’s body, we see that she is too fragile to withstand Herod’s desires, never mind her own.
This all makes for an unusual Dance of the Seven Veils, because it’s missing an essential ingredient: eroticism. In the filmed performance, flapperesque in a tight white miniskirt (a screen first) Salome begins, motionless, holding her translucent veils to her face. She is gamine, not curvaceous; and 43 years old, no teenager. Eschewing the orientalized moves of earlier Salome dances, Nazimova turns to ballet, the dance form of her Russian roots. In slippers with toes turned out, she half-chassés self-consciously, hiding behind her veils. Salome should be audacious, but she is anxious, a reluctant sex object. As she gathers momentum her movement turns to desperation and she whirls about – eyes wide and wild – before falling to the ground.
Kenneth Anger, arch mythologizer of silent Hollywood and its sexual mores, was unimpressed. “In Nazimova’s version of Salome’s Dance”, he later wrote, “old Herod didn’t get his money’s worth!” Perhaps not, but that was hardly Nazimova’s aim. As the camera cuts from Salome to Herod, laughing, panting with satisfaction, the king is shown to be ridiculous: a parody of desire measured against Salome’s vicissitudes of longing. The kiss, when it comes, is an anticlimax, taken unseen beneath Salome’s cloak. For Nazimova knows the truth of Wilde’s quip in Lady Windermere’s Fan, the play he finished alongside Salome: “There are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.”
Salome put female subjectivity at its centre to make desire new, or to try. It wasn’t really a failure at all. It was an artistic triumph. Still, with the hindsight of a century, it’s clear that it was an outlier in the entertainment industry. Film moguls may have taken refuge in literary adaptations and half longed for the artistic cachet of Europe, but they were also businessmen. Unfulfilled desires and indecorously emotional women were far from ideal. Salome’s distributors were also concerned that the film would fall foul of morality regulations set down in 1922 by the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America. They needn’t have worried. Salome’s transgressions were too obscure for the censors; those of her auteur-creator were not. Still, despite enthusiastic reviews after the Criterion premiere, a larger release was delayed well into 1923, and when it came it was limited. Hollywood wanted sex, but nothing too highbrow or queer. The only thing less tolerable than an emotional woman was a pretentious one. When studio heads drew up a list of 117 film stars whose private lives made them morally “unsafe”, the list included Nazimova – and her career as a screen star was effectively over.
Within a few years Nazimova was forced by financial difficulties to rent a villa in the grounds of the hotel that had once been her home, now renamed The Garden of Allah. She’d spent her fortune on Salome. The poolside bar became popular with writers and stars, including Charlie Chaplin, Errol Flynn, Ernest Hemingway and Dorothy Parker. Nazimova revived her Broadway career, most famously starring as Mrs Alving in Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts. There were bit parts in Hollywood too. The party, though, was over. In 1959 the Garden of Allah was demolished, its loss allegedly one of the inspirations for Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi”.
Salome was not quite the end of Nazimova’s life on screen. Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950) begins with a struggling screenwriter, Joe Gillis (William Holden), stumbling upon a decaying mansion. Inside 10086 Sunset Boulevard, Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), once the greatest star of silent cinema, is planning a triumphant comeback. She has written a screenplay and intends to star in it. “It’s the story of Salome,” she declares. “I think I’ll have DeMille direct it.” Franz Waxman’s score quotes Strauss, while Norma’s white peacock feathers are borrowed from Rambova’s costuming. Sunset Boulevard pivots around Norma’s vision of her Salome movie, as she emotionally blackmails Joe to help with the screenplay. The role is far too young for her, as it was for Nazimova; her ambition will destroy them both.
Nazimova did not live to see Sunset Boulevard. She died at the Garden of Allah in 1945. Wilder’s movie is an ambivalent tribute, neither a version of her story nor a fair mythical substitute. Was she, like Norma, destructive and delusional? No, that narrative has been corrected by scholars of early cinema. Does she deserve a place in accounts of how art was made new in 1922? Yes, but that omission has not been made good. Perhaps she is just too close to pop culture for avant-garde-focused modernism, just as she was too avant-garde for Hollywood. In spring 1923, as she battled to get her film into cinemas, she was philosophical about its legacy. “If we have made something fine, something lasting, it is enough”, she told an interviewer, her characteristic verve giving way to a sense of weary resignation with which – 100 years after Salome’s premiere – many women will still identify.
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