164   ANDREW HIGSON
PART FOUR
CHARACTER AND TYPE
Introduction
Film actors have decried typecasting almost since the beginning of filmmaking. For instance, silent-film actress Louise Brooks viewed typecasting as a measure of Hollywood success but also as a limitation of the system: "I just didn't fit into the Hollywood scheme at all. I was never, neither a fluffy heroine, nor a wicked vamp, nor a woman of the world. I just didn't fit into any category .. . You see, I didn't interest them because I couldn't be typed" (Kobal 1986,46). Where Brooks described type in terms of roles, classical British actor Eric Portman linked typing to stardom and the actor's personality. He wrote, "So, personality can make you a film star. Whether you are a film actor or not, will depend on your histrionic talent. . . Still, if you have only a little Ulent, and a lot of personality, you may succeed—as a type. This means you will always be cast lor the same parts. Your film life will, then, not be a long one" (Cardullo etal. 1998, 97). Bringing home Portman's threat, silent-film star Mary Pickford, explaining why she left the screen, »iiRgested the dangers of being successfully typecast:
"I didn't want what happened to Chaplin to happen to me. When he discarded the little tramp, the little tramp turned around and killed him. The little girl made me. I wasn't waiting for the little girl to kill me. I'd already been pigeon-holed ... I could have done more dramatic performances . . . but I was already typed."
(Brownlow 1989,135)
1 11 iliese actors—and I could cite many more—typecasting represents commercial, mass-r' ■ liiction instincts that are opposed to artistry and disenfranchise the actor who wishes to 1 1 liirm more complex roles.
11'iwevcr, while the assumption seems to be that typecasting is a sign of an actor's limitation, Htoncession to commerclallim, and the antithesis of art and originality, we also expect actors |i ■■ 1 11 im-, rid His in pl.iy against type. As with typecasting, critics
.....in in i". will tin pirniiv v........1 ■ 1' \ efforts to play against type as evidence of the actor's
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166   CHARACTER AND TYPE
All-time Worst Casting Blunders, author Damien Bona chastises Hollywood studios for casting actors against type and seems to view actors' desire to play against type as the worst kind of hubris. Bona's categories of miscasting include "ethnic impersonators," such as Marlon Brando in The Teahouse of the August Moon (1956), because they show a disregard for verisimilitude in favor of star power; "generation gap," including actors who refuse to age gracefully on screen or, alternately, are in too much of a hurry to grow old (think of an aged Mae West in Sextette (1978) or a youthful Barbra Streisand in Hello, Dolly! [1969]); "performers whose personas and modern sensibilities were completely out of place when they traveled to the past" (famous examples include John Wayne as Genghis Khan in The Conqueror [1956] and Tony Curtis in Spartacus [i960]); and, finally, a category called "out of their league," for "movie stars whose attempts at roles different from those they usually played were stymied" by a "too strongly established screen persona" (Bona 1996).
As these tangled and somewhat contradictory responses to typecasting suggest, typecasting in film is, to a large degree, inescapable. Insofar as film acting is part of the business of film, typecasting will be crucial to the institution, enabling brand-naming and marketing of star commodities. But it is not the case that typecasting is simply imposed on actors from above by studio publicity departments; rather, typecasting occurs at the level of performance, through casting, and through audience demand. Typecasting contributes to narrative economy, allowing audiences to quickly and easily recognize a character by associating him or her with an actor's previous roles. Further, types and typing play into our everyday notions about people and identities, and our tendency to read people in terms of their age, sex, race, gender, region, nationality, class, or other categories, whether insidiously in racial profiling or in less sinister but no less stereotypical ways of assessing persons. Types in film do not, however, simply duplicate social stereotypes, but may create new types, or even the seeming contradiction of a unique type; they may mirror stock types from literature or advance new stereotypes. Rather than something static, types change according to changing notions of identity, changing politics, changing conceptions of realism, and changing aesthetics.
Given all these complications, the essays in this section consider types, typecasting, and stereotypes from a variety of perspectives, considering typecasting as institutional practice, in relation to stereotyping and identity politics, and at the level of stardom as well as amony, character actors. They share in common a concern with the ideologies of identity embodied in notions of type and character and each, in different ways, proposes that the hierarchical institution of cinema should be modified to more realistically represent the lived experience of humanity.
In "Typecasting," Pamela Robertson Wojcik explores competing notions of type, especially as they relate to discourses of realism, and discusses typecasting in its most literal sense as .1 labor issue and as institutional practice in Hollywood: that is, in terms of historical casting practices. Wojcik argues that the discourse of realism in most twentieth-century theotic. 1 acting deals with performance style, whereas typecasting reflects a complex web of institutional practices. She claims that, in Hollywood, acting style and institutional practice, and in partit 11l.11 casting practices, represent a case of uneven development, with acting style shifting increasingly to the dominant naturalist model while casting maintains a residual outmoded theatrical modtl that predates Stanislavskian realism. In particular, she links casting practices in Hollywood In
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role across his career. Ironically, Wojcik suggests that despite today's discourse of diversity,
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INTRODUCTION 167
theatrical traditions, as casting directors, operating under shifting conceptions of realism, increasingly delimit the actor's roles by tying them to her physical appearance, race, age, gender, and sex.
Donald Bogle's contribution examines three major African-American stars of the 1950s and asserts that these stars represented a shift in black representation from "mythic types" and stereotypes of earlier decades to "the emergence of distinct black personalities who, through theii own idiosyncrasies" came to be true stars. Bogle focuses on Ethel Waters, Dorothy Dandridge and Sidney Poitier, characterizing each star in relation to his or her roles and public reception in the 1950s. In each case, Bogle finds traces of a more "mythic" type, but is interested in the way each star personalized that type within a contemporary context. For Bogle, Waters represents an Earth Mother figure, but one who no longer fits into an alienated society. He describes her as signifying "some noble part of our heritage that was quickly becoming extinct ... the individualist foolish enough to assert herself yet strong enough to pay for the consequences." Dandridge portrays the classic tragic mulatto, though she was marketed as a more contemporary and daring figure. A socially significant figure—the first black actress ever to appear in the arms of a white actor on screen—Dandridge was also a tragic figure who seemed doomed to live out the sad plotline of her films. If Waters and Dandridge represented the revivification of classic black stereotypes, and ultimately suffered for it, Poitier seems to have created an original hero, perfectly in tune with his times. Bogle calls him a "hero for an integrationist age" and argues that he appealed to white liberals and middle-class African-Americans because he embodied middle-class ideals of education and refinement, and was the antithesis of the black buffoons of earlier decades. Despite his claim that Poitier was a throwback to the Uncle Toms and servants of the 1930s, Bogle still suggests that Poitier's integrationist message was a "beautiful dream," which is "what great movies and careers are all about."
Rather than stars, the remaining essays in this section examine the often overlooked role of character actors. Rudolf Arnheim and David Thomson each offer an ontological view of the character actor. For Arnheim, writing in 1931, the character actor can be differentiated from the lead actor because he represents a specific type, close to reality, whereas the lead actor represents .i more general, idealized type. Arnheim recognizes a difference in modes of performance for 1 haracter actors and leads and suggests that the character actor's ability to individualize a role, »nd especially to bring out its grittier qualities, needs to penetrate into the hero's territory. I homson similarly suggests that character actors represent us, the unnamed throng, as opposed to idealized heroes. He queries whether character acting should only be viewed as "support," and argues that the "panorama of small lives" in ensemble acting may be closer to the experience of reality in which we all consider ourselves stars and not support.
Taking a different view of the character actor's role as "support," Patricia White asks "What 1« it that supporting characters are meant to 'support' if not the imbricated ideologies of heterosexual romance and white American hegemony permeating Hollywood cinema?" txamining the career of Agnes Moorehead, White suggests that it is no accident that character ICtors like Moorehead—or, we might add, Edward Everett Horton or Eric Blore—embody Stereotypes of sexual difference, such as the lesbian, spinster, old maid (or, in the case of Horton or Blore, the pansy). Rather, she argues that Hollywood needs them, to define and uphold the
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Typecasting 12
PAMELA ROBERTSON WOJCIK
In lanuary 2000, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACPI I'M 'ii'sted the lack of representation of people of color in American TV shows and demanded
.....re diversity in casting, to provide more opportunities for actors of color and to more
• ni.itely reflect the multi-racial diversity of America. Shortly thereafter, the NAACP signed ll rsity agreements with all the major networks—NBC, CBS, ABC, and Fox The networks •Hired to increase opportunities for people of color, both behind the scenes and on-screen, bill with most public attention and scrutiny focused on the promise for better casting pfrtctices and image portrayal.
I his recent protest strongly echoes a World War II protest in which—frustrated with ii"Mvwood's perpetuation of stereotypes that Donald Bogle famously encapsulates as i in',. Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks" (Bogle 1973)—the NAACPdemanded better i nesentation of African Americans in Hollywood films, claiming it would be hypocritical to
nice Nazism without addressing racial issues at home. The issues of concern to the NAACP in both protests have also been of concern to the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) (est.
i which began issuing Casting Reports in 1977 to keep data on film and TV roles, i.....lically cataloguing them by gender, age, race, and ethnicity; and which resolved in 1990,
ving the debacle of Miss Saigon casting, that performers of color should receive
rontial consideration for ethnic roles. A related movement is Non-Traditional Casting, Willi li works to advance the open casting of actors of color, female actors, and actors Mil 11' liabilities.1 These movements, like the NAACP protest, endeavor to ensure that casting
i li cs are representative and fair. They seek diversity both in the kinds of roles performed inri among the actors who perform them.
I ■ lining diversity another way, SAG staged a somewhat different protest over casting |h n hi <••■ in M.ik li l'»'.o I he I ,»•. Angeles Turn's reported that SAG was waging a campaign to
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I /()   PAMELA ROBERTSON WOJCIK
also to escape being typecast in bit parts, thus failing to climb the Hollywood ladder to leading idles .ind st.irdom
Interestingly, almost a hundred years earlier, theater actors had protested against versatility requirements and demanded a form of typecasting. In 1864, the American Theatrical Protective Association formed. In its first set of resolves the union asked for I) "a fixed minimum salary for each distinct line of business, from leading to utility" and 2) "a return to the old system of engaging members of the profession for definite lines of characters, thus obviating all professional misunderstanding and preventing any artists from undertaking any more than his or her legitimate business, and by such means keeping another professional out of an engagement" (McConachie 1992. 248). This protest differs markedly from the 1950 SAG protest in that it aims to protect an actor's right to perform a single type of role, or "line," consistently across his or her career rather than be forced to play multiple and diverse roles. Here, the stakes are job security and the right to maintain one's earned place in the "lines-of-business" hierarchy of roles (which I will discuss in detail shortly).
Each of these protests, spanning three separate entertainment forms, and crossing three centuries, protest unfair casting practices. None of them succeeded in their goals. I begin with them because they seem to me to provide useful touch-points for thinking about the relationship between acting and identity, and particularly changing notions of type. Each ol them makes clear that typecasting is political practice, not only as a labor issue but also as a touchstone for ideologies of identity. The shift between the 1860s Theatrical Protective Association resolution and the 1950 SAG campaign, especially, reflect a sea change in the discourse around acting, and especially shifting notions of what constitutes realism in acting The 1990s NAACP protest represents the culmination of that changing discourse, which leads to an increasing demand for a homology between actor and role, and which, ironically enforces typecasting in the service of diversity.
Typecasting may be, as one critic put it, "one of the theatre's deadly sins" and the "sublimation of the unprofessional in acting" (Isaacs 1933, 132) but, as these somewh.it contradictory responses to typecasting suggest, typecasting in film is, to a large degree inescapable. Insofar as the business of film acting, and especially the star system, relies on recognizability, marketability, and the necessity for known commodities, typecasting will he part and parcel of the institution. Further, insofar as the actor represents human character, film acting relates to changing conceptions of identity and identity politics, and thus tin actor will inevitably negotiate stereotypes and represent identities inflected by race, gendei ethnicity, class, and national differences. Rather than something imposed on actors and audiences from without, or simply an effect of casting or performance style, typecasting occurs at many varied levels, and is equally something spectators and fans enact or impose-on actors. As Patricia White succinctly explains: "Casting and performance are already .i
reading of type; the audience performs a reading on another level, informed by cultural.....I
subcultural codes, spectatorial experience of the star in other roles, and subsidi.uv discourses" (White 1999, 149).
Rather than critique or defend typecasting, this essay explores competing notions of tyi 4 espei i, illy,us they relate to discourses ol realism, and disc usses lypei .istinj', in its most hi. i .1 sense .is < i l.iboi issue.ind .is uistitiition.il practice in Hollywood lh.it is in terms of histoin it catting practices.
Types and realist discourse
IYPECASTING 171
Horrowing Ironi K'li li.ml I >yn I .mi defining type as "any simple, vivid, memorable, easily-I'i.isped .iii.l wiilei\ i. . . igni/ec I , h.ii.u terization in which a tew traits are foregrounded and i lunge oi dev. I. -i >im. ni is kept to a minimum") Dyer 1980, 28). Type can be opposed to the in ivellstic character, "defined by a multiplicity of traits that are only gradually revealed to us through the course of the narrative, a narrative which is hinged on the growth or development ol the character and is thus centered upon the latter in his or her unique individuality, rather than pointing outwards to a world" (Dyer 1993, 13). Put simply, type is relatively simple, shallow, and unchanging, whereas character is complex, deep, and developing.
In terms of acting, type refers most broadly to an actor's ability to embody something typical or representative of the human condition. Bruce Wilshire captures this broad sense i 'I type in his characterization oftheateras "the theory of actingand identity—orwhat wemust suppose about persons if we would understand how it is possible for them to be convincingly I in 'lected and enacted on the stage" (Wilshire 1991, 91). According to his formulation.
The actor cannot stand on stage without standing in for a type of humanity. This characterization will occur even though there is no script and his character is given no name and he says nothing. We recognize him as a type in the family of man, and the fact that we abide in his presence and recognize him as such authorizes him as such; and since we stand in with the character only through his standing in, he authorizes us (Wilshire 1991,6).
In its exemplary form, this general human type will exemplify moral or metaphysical principles, as an archetype or allegorical type. In its most insidious form, typing is exclusionary, as in the stereotype. A narrower definition of type relates to the actor herself, who Iiiik tions as a unique type, characterized by her appearance, distinct performance style ind type of role (often tied to certain genres) across a body of work. In between, we can locate |i k úl types such as the doctor, the politician, or the teacher; stock characters such as the heavy, the ingenue, and the clown; genre-specific types such as the zanni (zany) of commedia ■ t.ll arte-,2 and national or regional types, such as Australia's larrikin,3 or the Yankee of American theater and film. In any given situation, these different and often overlapping functions of type • ire likely to be at play.
As I've said, in most modern discourses on acting, the notion of the actor as type is viewed as a sign of an actor's lack of talent, a limitation imposed on the actor by a brutal and un-iiii.i;-.inative studio system, a sop to audiences' inartistic tastes, or a combination of all three Stanislavski's opinion has been particularly influential in this regard. Stanislavski's 'i ■ ■ on type reflect his larger project in developing a new naturalistic approach to acting, ni. I .ire typical of realists such as Ibsen who seek to replace stock types from earlier theatrical traditions with individuated, complex characters. Stanislavski says, 'To my way of thinking I lien- i .in be onl\ one type ol actoi the character actor" (Stanislavski 1968. 18) lint he ím knowledges thai theater, .ne tilled with types, not characters. Stanislavksi claims that
I vi ii < .isting stems Ir din I lie i.....litu nr. ol work in 19th-century repertory theaters. In particular,
lie links typei .isling to the lines ol business" li.idil ion which dominated IKtli and 1 * »t 11 .. ni my i he.itei ,ii ii I w.iIndliirnotfl tttlliP Moc k system, appearing in virtually all professional thrillers i >l I mope In nn die p. i........ I. nw.ud
172   PAMELA ROBERTSON WOJCIK
As lames C. Burge explains, "lines-of-business" refers to the notion that, within a stock company, there is a "tacit and implicit agreement between actors and managers concerning the casting of that actor through a season or series of seasons" to allow an actor to maintain a particular line, or type of role (Burge 1986, 5, 277; see also McArthur 1984). The lines are hierarchical and based on the idea that an actor can ascend through the ranks (see Figure 1). Thus, an actor may begin as a supernumerary or extra, then gain general utility roles, until he ascends to roles in a line such as the heavy or juvenile, and possibly lead comedian or tragedian.
Men
Supernumeraries (extras) Dancers, singers, musicians General Utility (minor parts—filled by lower members of company and those whose lines aren't represented) Respectable Utility (slightly bigger or more complex minor parts) 1st and 2nd Walking Gentleman (variety of small parts) ist and 2nd Old Man ist and 2nd Heavy Business ("heavies") ist and 2nd Low Comedy Juvenile Business
Light Comedy and Eccentric Business (later developed into distinct lines: Irishman, Scotsman, Jew, Yankee, Mose the Fireboy) Leading Business (Tragedian or Comedian)
Women Walking Gentlewoman ist and 2nd Old Women (one usually low comedy) Chambermaid (sometimes "singing," soubrette) Juvenile Lady Leading Lady
Figure 1 Lines of business
Rather than view each character as a psychologically defined individual—as realist modi-, of performance and dramaturgy would do—the lines-of-business tradition sorts character, into recognizable and repeatable roles. Therefore, the lines-of-business tradition emphasi/v. the similarity between plays and assumes that in each play there will be roles suited to mosi of the various lines. In virtually any given play performed by the company, there would be need for one or more musicians or dancers, some supernumeraries or extras, various non-speaknm parts for those actors assigned to general utility roles, one or two small speaking parts Im I hose,k tor, slot led to play the walking t'.elitleineri or old m.in, .i role lli.it could he c ateg< iri/ei I ,is.k lumber m.iid role, .mother lot,in old worn, in, some qui iky ori oiiiedu < li.ir.ic let refill 111« ,1 lilt ol t'i i rill Hi I »1 l-.l i it 1.1 i .id h .ill li il el In i|. imper.. Hi.ilH Hi .Hid hr.ivlly .ii i elileil |. ,|. —ii.■» mm ■■■ullal ln.il>   up ami , .    Mini ug |. | lei li.i| ». Millie vlll.lllii .11«. lole ,i| i| Hi .| H i.it. Ii .1 1
TYPECASTING   1 73
heavy, young and romantic roles for juveniles and ingenues, and two leading roles, whether tragic or comic.
Despite the promise of mobility and versatility, in the lines-of-business tradition, an actor's movement is limited and determined by the actor's seniority, rules of succession, precedence in performance, and "possession of parts." "Possession" refers to "the assumption by an actor of the privilege to play every part in which he appeared with success before the public in any and all subsequent revivals of the play until he resigned the part, retired, or died" (Burge 1986, 3). In the lines-of-business tradition, "possession" is literal. Since actors are not given whole scripts, but only the "sides," or sheets with just their lines, if an actor owns the sides, he owns the part. Thus, the actor may, through possession, stay in a line that another actor could perform better and for which he or she is no longer well suited—and there-seem to be numerous cases of juveniles being played by actors with seniority who are well past their prime.
Most often, an actor in the lines-of-business tradition will settle into a line and perform all roles in the repertoire that apply to that line, occasionally picking up general utility role-, when a play does not contain his or her line. As is the case with Hollywood's division between character actors and stars, actors in the lines-of-business tradition are unlikely to shili between leading roles, such as Hamlet or Tartuffe, to mid-level character roles, such .is heavies or eccentric business. Rather, an actor will develop a specialty within a line, perhaps serving only as a lead tragedian, never doing comedy, or narrowing his eccentric business to specialize in Irish or lewish roles. Furthermore, the interpretation of the role in the lines of-business tradition is, to a large degree, fixed. Historically, the interpretation ol .1 role was taught to an actor by the playwright, and then handed down from one actor to another, ,ilong with sides and costumes—and the interpretative mode tended toward frontal displays, declamation, and codified poses.
As the 1860s American Theatrical Protective Association protest suggests, lines-of-business and possession of parts were the actors' preferred mode of operation In I lie si01 I lystem, actors worked in a number of different plays, in high rotation, with virtu.illy no rehearsal, and they supplied their own costumes. Thus, it was in their interests to be Identified with a particular line or set of roles and typecasting was a very practical response to the material circumstances of theater production.
From Stanislavski's perspective, the stock system necessarily produces bad mass-produced acting and leads actors to create types rather than characters. Citing the large (lumber of plays performed and the general lack of rehearsal for them, he asks, "Is it astounding then that these unfortunate and hard-pressed actors have recourse first to i t.ilt ,ind then to mass production methods in their parts? What happens is a division of labor wiilie. 11 h actor having his own specialized field of endeavor"! Stain si. ivski l%K, lf>| I le claims 1I1 ill he division ol labor, in turn, attracts people who cannot act but who can be a type: "The
......1 ardent partisans of the custom of type-casting are the poorly endowed actors, whose
i fVnge Is not broad but rather one-sided. Such gifts as they have are somehow made to do for narrowly circumscribed types, but they are unlikely to be sufficient to meet any wider ilem.mils" (Sl.mr.l.ivsh I'ViM IM
In .111 interesting Iwlsl on the St.misl.ivski.iii t ntique ol typecasting, avant-g.irdists sue Ii
«k lllei lit h.ive Viewed the .Hill le.illsl ,i\|>ei I ol typei .istlll(; ,is olleimi; ,i c lll( l.il alternative In 111.Hie.I le,mi 1 iiiniiiei, 1.1I |ii.n 11. r ami have enilil.n ed the use 1 it types linked to iummi'i/lil Mat If and ulliel .Hill le.illsl 11.h III lolls like vaudeville as a lliralis i .1 .11 lilrvlllg alien. It loll
1 74   PAMELA ROBERTSON WOJCIK
effects that de-naturalize the assumed fit between actor and role. By contrast, some avant-garde theorists and practitioners have regarded typecasting as a means of ensuring greater realism. In Soviet cinema, for instance, a form of typecasting, called "typage." calls for the use of non-actors, selected solely on the basis of appearance, to create a realist effect.
The principles of typage were articulated by Lev Kuleshov in his 1929 Art of the Cinema Arguing that "real things in real surroundings constitute cinematographic material," Kuleshov states that "imitating, pretending, playing are unprofitable, since this comes out poorly on screen" (Kuleshov 1974, 56,63). For example, he relates, "If you need a tall, stout man, but your actor is thin, and you pad your thin actor with cushions, and the like . .. the results on screen will be obviously false, theatrical, a prop, a game." Therefore, he claims:
Because film needs real material and not a pretense of reality—owing to this, it is not theater actors but "types" who should act in film—that is people who, in themselves, as they were born, constitute some kind of interest for cinematic treatment. That is, a person with an exterior of character, with a definite, brightly expressive appearance could be such a cinematic "type" (Kuleshov 1974, 63-64).
For Kuleshov and his followers, including Eisenstein, and, later, Italian neo-realists like Dp Sica, the use on non-actors lends films a documentary touch. The non-actor not only fulfills realist criteria for physical appearance, but also is taken to reflect and be typical of the reality represented. As Siegfried Kracauer puts it, "It is precisely the task of portraying wide areas of actual reality, social or otherwise, which calls for 'typage'—the recourse to people who are part and parcel of that reality and can be considered typical of it" (Kracauer 1960, 99).
In its emphasis on the exterior appearance of the non-actor, and its recognition of real persons as types, typage differs from those versions of typecasting that refer to stock character types, such as the juvenile, or the heavy. Ironically, however, as Kracauer points out, the non actor in typage clearly resembles a different concept of type in Hollywood—the star:
The typical Hollywood star resembles the non-actor in that he acts out a standing character identical with his own or at least developed from it, frequently with the aid of make-up and publicity experts. As with any real-life figure on the screen, his presence in a film points beyond the film. He affects the audience not just because of his fit ness for this or that role but for being, or seeming to be, a particular kind of person . . . The Hollywood star imposes the screen image of his physique, the real or stylized one, and all that this physique implies and connotes on every role he creates (Kracauer 1960, 99).
Both the non-actor in typage and the Hollywood star create a role homologous with themselves, a "character identical with his own or at least developed from it" that is, as Kuleshov says, defined in large part by "exterior of character" and "expressive appearance."
One term used to describe Hollywood casting that would also apply to Soviet typage is "face casting," or casting based on external appearance (Yoakem 1958) This mode of casting— in which a pretty girl and not an aged male, plays the ingenue, and tin- in. in wilh I lie broken nose and cauliflower ears will be cast as, i boxer, not ,i b.inkei I fin Is lo In - t.ikrn lor gr.mtri I However, it is worth notint: Ili.it ot11■ • r modi-, ol |><■ rI< >rr11.111■ • .mil ■ .iMlng do not pl.u i In - •., inn ■ imi11>li.isis upon l In ■ .i< toi's individual .ippr.it.ini <■ I < n Inoln......'M.im kinds < I
TYPECASIING 176
in hi umIi'.i i I ir.it ii   ,,iiiuii,,(m ,/, II     .m,l k.ilmki .iin(Hi« them—rely on masks and ritualized model of performance In wliii h the actor's face and external appearance are irrelevant. In a (llllcicnt vein. I in . 111 ■.< ■ ol ii'. i-inpli.i'.i'. upon song. I lindi cinema has long relied upon the use ol pl.ivb.ick sinc.i'i'. lo dub .k lois voices, and in the 1940s attempted "voice casting, or the ir.r ill .i singing vihi r lli.il in,iU lied both the speaking voice and personality of the actor"' |Ma|umdar 2001, 167). Later, and continuing to the present day, Hindi cinema dropped the i i ii lice of voice casting and created a new model of stardom in which both the on-screen n Ioi and the playback singer achieve stardom with a split between visual and aural stardom. While the on-screen star may be cast according to principles like those of Soviet or Hollywood iiMina, the playback singer, cast as only a voice, and equal to or greater in stardom than 1 ii i mscreen actor, challenges the primacy of the face. Rather than assumed as the norm, i' n, face casting should be seen as merely one possible response to certain conceptions . .1 ii'.ilism.
While both Soviet cinema and Hollywood emphasize face casting, however, the non-actor In I ypage differs markedly from the Hollywood star because the two models of type are based impeting notions of identity and the role of the individual. In typage, the non-actor icsents a social type, characterized by social class and social role—a Bolshevik, a sailor,
......mber of the aristocracy, etc. The individual serves as a stand-in for a class or caste and
......iningless in himself.4 Rather than individual psychology, typage relates the character's
Individual personality and problems to larger social forces, such as poverty, and uses non-I 'i'. to represent "ideas, elements in an intellectual argument" (Heath 1981, 183). Thus, a
i .i 'ii may be cast as something he is not, since the role is based on physical appearance hwks like a czar) and is not meant to reflect his real identity. In fact, the role might run tiler to the non-actor's ideology, personality, and class. For instance, according to
l i■ 11-.t. 111 when he cast non-actors, they often resisted playing characters different from lltpinsclves when the role was viewed as negative, because they did not want their friends i 11 ike their screen persona as reflecting their real self. Thus, he would have to "resort to III I •, " He says that when filming Ten Days, "Everyone wanted to play the Bolsheviks and nc wanted to play the Mensheviks . . . |so| we gave the actors the text ofan inflammatory i" • ■• Ii and they spoke it with great fervor. After this we added titles that said the exact i"   Ho ll.iscnstein 1988, 198).
In i ontrast to the Soviet model, Hollywood characters are generally defined in psycho-
ii ,il and not social terms. Social situations, such as a war or the Depression, may establish in, bill then the narrative will focus on how individuals respond. Thus, Hollywood adopts
' isslcally realist model of narration and character: narrative action springs from individual
i.....lets who function as causal agents with psychological motivation, goals, and desires.
hi  u i pi i singly, then, the Hollywood star is not generally seen as representing a member ' i l.iss < H caste. Instead, she is considered a unique individual. Stanley Cavell usefully • •|il.ilii'. I he distinction
Ihe t fe.it ion ol ,i ( m ii *( 'ii) | ict lor met is also the creation of a character—not the kind oi character an author creates, but the kind that certain real people are: a type . Doesthis iin-.in that movies i .in in n -i i H ili' Individuals, only types? What it means is that this is 11 ir in, ivii". w. iv ol i iimI 11 in linlivldii.il'. 11 icy i ic. ite individualities. For what makes someone
u I V| h- Is not hiss.....I.HIIy Willi i illii i Inrinliris ol that lypc but his slnkllif, scp.if.iteiiess
In,in , illiri |.,',,|i|, |( .w.lI I'i'U  "i H|
1 76   PAMELA ROBERTSON WOJCIK
This notion of type, then, emphasizes not only the actor's unique physiognomy but also his personality and performance style, and these are viewed as distinguishing him from the masses.
An additional difference between the actor in typage and the actor in Hollywood has to do with issues of recognizability and repetition. The actor or non-actor cast according to the rules of typage can appear and fulfill his role as a type in a single appearance on film. By contrast, if viewed only in a single appearance, the star might be viewed as performing a role as a realist character, in the Stanislavskian sense. Typification—and, indeed, stardom— occurs through the actor's recurrence across a number of films in different roles Recognition of the actor in a series of films creates a double identification in which we see not only the character but also the star. This recognition is crucial both to the star's function in the text and his or her extratextual success. On the one hand, as Murray Smith notes, recognition is the most basic level on which viewers grasp and construct characters. We know a character in a film and perceive her as a continuous agent because we recognize the body that coheres around her and "the star system provides an especially well-developed set of charactei models" to enable recognition (Smith 1995, 119). On the other hand, repeated recognition enables the commodification of the star. As Gaylyn Studlar suggests, "acting stars who disappear into their roles are never stars for very long":
The Hollywood system appears too dependent on the extratextual as well as textu.il overvaluation of star faces and bodies as recognizable commodities . . . While it is noi unknown for stars to transform themselves physically in the process of creating code-, of character (such as Robert De Niro's weight gain for Raging Bull), it is generally acknowledged that making your star unrecognizable is dangerous. This is because thl
value of stardom is most frequently measured in audience anticipation at seeing—.....I
recognizing—their favorite box-office attraction (Studlar 1996, 237-238).
Whereas typage requires only the recognition of the social type through external clue, recognition in Hollywood entails a complicated relationship between audience recognition of the star and the character.
In Hollywood, the star image is used in the construction of character and the chara< ti I that a star plays are seen to reflect aspects of the star's "real" self. To borrow a phrase from ErvingGoffman, the star achieves a form of "expressive coherence" between his social fronl his outward performance and appearance—and his "true" inner self (Goffman 1959 36| There may be instances when the star and role seem at odds but these are generally view | as exceptions to the rule: failures. Understood in this way, not only stars but also charai ti I actors are types. As Cavell says, "Not to remember the name of a traditional Hollywo. .< I lui player is possible, if hardly excusable: not to remember their faces and temperament- i unthinkable" (Cavell 1979,76).
Of course, the individual actor type may also represent a social type, stock charactei ni stereotype. Smith notes that particularity, even in the realist novel, will also be in the Mrvd I of types. For instance, proper names individuate agents but also perform a typifying fuf> tion insofar as proper names bear connotations of class, region, nationality, gender and raefl
(Smith IW), 10 .111(1 passim)  lot (\ivell, their is ,i dlstllii I.....       detwt't'll I he- ,i> ten ,is .1 ■ VI ■ •
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TYPECASTING 177
were not created in film: black people were stereotypes ... We were not given, and were not in a position to be given, individualities that projected particular ways of inhabiting a social roles; we recognized only the role" (Cavell 1979, 33). To be a type is to individuate the social type, stock character, or stereotype. Thus, according to this notion, Marilyn Monroe may be the quintessential dumb blonde, representative of a class-, Thelma Ritter may never rise .ibove the rank of low comedy eccentric: and Butterfly McQueen may be stuck in racist maid roles; but, as a type, each is unique in the way she inhabits the role.
Ironically, then, it is Hollywood's adherence to realist principles of individual character psychology which allow the realist character—who exists in a single film—to be transformed into a recurrent type, the star or character actor. This suggests that, despite the anti-type discourse of realism, the break between pre-Stanislavski acting and post-Stanislavski acting isn't as strong as it might seem. And, in fact, in his essay on type, Stanislavski's litany ol types includes not only traditional stock roles, such as "farce comedians" and "dandies," but .ilso realist types such as "Ibsen types" and "neurasthenic Hauptman roles," thus emphasizing his point that typecasting occurs due to the way theaters are organized, and cannot be simply altered by performing different kinds of texts (Stanislavksi 1968, 13). The seeming conflict between a realist aesthetic and typecasting in Hollywood, then, can be explained by acknowledging the fact that the discourse of realism in most 20th-century theories of acting deals with performance style, whereas typecasting reflects a complex web I 'I Institutional practices. It is not the case that acting style and institutional practice are unrelated. ■ I mislavski, after all, recognized that in order to transform acting one had to transform the Institution of theater by enhancing the role of the director, adding rehearsal time, cutting the number of plays performed, creating new realist set designs, etc. However, in Hollywood, • ii ting style and institutional practice, and in particular casting practices, represent a case of uneven development, with acting style shifting increasingly to the dominant naturalist model while casting maintains a residual outmoded theatrical model.
typecasting and acting in early cinema
11.my critics and film historians have argued, because technological limitations encouraged i In - use of a frontal, presentational style of acting and the lack of dialogue seemed well-suited .....tomime, early cinema adopted the performance style and character conception of 19th-
111111v melodrama rather than Stanislavskian or novelistic modes of realism. Most accounts til early Hollywood acting thus recount a tale of the new film form having to overcome iiiitinoded theatrical traditions as part ol a progressive march toward a more naturalistic "" I more cinematic acting style. For instance, in her analysis of acting in the films of D W. ' iiillith. Roberta Pearson argues that there is a shift from a "histrionic" or theatrical, melo-ill.im.it ii p.uitotni me stylo of acting influenced by theories of pantomime, such as Delsarte's
.......t poses, to a "verisimilar" style, which is more realist, and involves by-play and
kin.ill t.'esiuies .in.I ..lie link', tins stylistic change to cinema's transition from its status as i heap .• 11111-.<-r11• -111 1.1 lespei i.idle in.inisiic.iin mass media (Pearson 1992). With a different (Itiph.isis lien Hiew.lei and I ra |.n . ids aiuue III.il mote naturalistic styles developed as him lli'veli iped l.istei ei III I li« win. Ii lell .11 loi'i I ill It- I line It 11 posing ,nid insisted instead on
Ii i: ■ 1111 ■ 111 11 U *. 11 h- prill.mm,iii.....In p.llli. Illli'w'.lel .Hill I.ii oils 1997, l()9|  Si iii 11. ii ly, I.ii......
■remort tracei tin ihlll (torn melodramatic ■tyle* to more nnturallitlc or "Invisible"
1 78   PAMELA ROBERTSON WOJCIK
approaches. Acknowledging that pantomime exists residually in classical Hollywood, Naremore also argues that cinema realizes a Stanislavskian ideal through such technical innovations as close-ups, directional microphones, and shot-reverse shot editing, that enable a transparent, gestureless, un-ostentatious acting style (Naremore 1988, esp. 9-98).
Without denying the importance of melodramatic styles and theories of pantomime, or technical limitations, for understanding acting in early cinema, 1 would suggest that we can supplement these accounts of early him acting by considering early Hollywood's institutional structure, which increasingly models itself on the outmoded stock system and lines-of-business tradition at the same time that it moves toward progressively more naturalistic acting styles.
By most accounts, the lines-of-business tradition and theatrical stock companies largely expired in America in the 1860s and 70s.6 First, as I have been suggesting, the turn to realist modes of theater challenged the precepts of lines. More importantly, realist theater displaced the manager in favor of the director, and placed casting in the director's hands, not the actors'. In addition, the rise of the star system threatened stock. The rise of the star can be traced back to 18th-century Licensing Acts in England, which limited the number of new plays performed and stabilized the repertory so that companies tended to rotate a stable group of plays, thus highlighting the work of a few actors, like David Garrick, in roles that could be repeated time and again. The star system developed further in America in the 19th century through the development of long-runs and combination systems. Motivated by economic rationalization, the long-run allowed a performer to play a single role for a longer period of time than repertory theater, and thus highlighted the role of the virtuoso. Combination systems created traveling companies that would tour a single play throughout the country, rather than perform a repertory in a single theater. Consisting of a star and supporting players, combinations meant that actors were hired for single parts, instead of lines.
However, while touring companies and headliners displaced one version of stock, 19th-century melodrama created another. According to David Grimsted, melodrama arose in large part as a way of competing with the burgeoning star system. Whereas stars were associated with sure-fire old plays and revivals, especially Shakespeare, stock companies offered new plays, and especially melodrama, in order to compete (Grimsted 1968, 92-93]. Due to its reliance on stock characters such as the virtuous heroine, the villain, the old man father, and low comedy men and women, melodrama was well suited to the lines-of-business tradition In addition, the lines-of-business tradition was still an undercurrent in casting practice outside the stock system. As Benjamin McArthur explains, the combination system created new casting needs (McArthur 1984, 17). While the star headliner might tour with the show, smaller parts were often cast city-by-city. No longer an in-house process, casting became rationalized in the 1860s and dramatic agencies were created. Much as they do today, dramatic agents served as brokers for actors and managers. Actors registered at agencies and filled out questionnaires, describing the parts they had played, their physical characteristics, and their wardrobe. When managers contacted agencies, they tended to request actors usinc terminology from lines-of-business, calling, for example, for a soubrette or a heavy, rathei than describing the particulars of the role.
So, lines-of-business typecasting existed residually In 19th century melodrama and casting practices. In addition, the realist theater created ■ new kind < >l i vi »• The new realist
'.I vie. ,r. |" »pl 11, lll/i'd in All li-Mi ,l I >v Will I. ill i An hel ildvi >i .llei I   ill I...... "ti I ire.i il i. ill I v II'.
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TYPECASTING 179
.nul with, ml ,i| i. .1.iMiAlthill 1984 IM) This was intended to help the actor break free from lypiln .itum and ti iw.inl i le.itini individuated and psychologically defined characters, but "critics charged that modern actors . . . played every role in a similar fashion, making the author's character merely a vehicle for their individual personality" and decried "an era of
I V| n ' astmg, willi i ii it waid appearance valued more highly than proven acting skill" IM< Arthur I'»84. 183). This new type, defined by the actor's appearance and personality, is akin to, and often overlaps with, the star.
Thus the 19th century establishes new trends toward typecasting despite anti-type discourse and changes in theatrical institutions. Lines-of-business and typecasting by role exist residually in melodrama and the rise of dramatic agencies; and star systems and realist acting create an emergent new type, hinged on the individual actor. All these tendencies and t lends will be reproduced in early cinema.
In terms of performance style, early cinema adopted many of the features of 19th-century melodrama, including not only its presentational style and use of pantomime, but also its mode of characterization and reliance on stock types (Musser 1990, 3-5). More importantly, mid with more long-lasting institutional effects, early cinema modeled itself on the stock /item. Initially, as Charles Musser points out, when films were first made, there was not y«*t a category of the film actor. Early cinema has been famously described by Tom Gunning as a "cinema of attractions" linked to novelties, amusements, and modes of display and apectacle, rather than narrative. Early film included actors from theater and vaudeville, intertainers from the circus, boxers, dancers, and non-actors caught in actualities or put on •creen for staged events (Musser 1987, 57-62; Musser 1990, 3; Gunning 1990). Rather than acting, their activity on film was understood as a form of modeling, or posing (DeCordova 1990, 34f). As the "cinema of attractions" gave way to story films, the notion of film acting lirgan to be developed. The rise in story films coincided with the nickelodeon boom in 1907 which created a demand for more films and, therefore, greater rationalization (Musser 1987, i ''Cordova 1990, 27). To handle the greater demand, film companies could no longer rely ii i he casual and intermittent use of actors for individual films and so created permanent itock companies of actors.
These stock companies initially emphasized versatility. An actor in a Griffith film, for Instance, might, according to Roberta Pearson, "play the lead in one film and appear as an
II i .it a garden party the next" (Pearson 1992, 88). And, as late as 1909, there are claims that |i i. .is in stock companies receive equal pay, five dollars a day (DeCordova 1990, 79). In •' I- hi um, indicating how far removed film acting still is from theater, actors were uncredited nud anonymous. Despite these differences, film production was similar to the mode of
l.....In. linn in theatrical repertory theaters Until about 1912. film production was still
in it ' nncerned with the whole script. Leads might be given a script beforehand, but minor players wouldn't know anything about the film until they were called for rehearsal and they ullll wouldn't know the whole (Pearson 1992, 85-86).
Over time, rather than diverge further from theatrical models, the stock system became 11ii le.i'.nijiJv smiil.ii 111 11'pi Hi ii\ '.1 ni i Ac c ending to a 191 3 actor's manual by Frances Agnew. Would be hi in ,k 11 us would trglsli'i wit h di.im.it ii agenc ies to gain entry to the studio system Mild both agents and studio*. Ivp''l m tots by lines She writes
The nilinliel ol pi.r,i i .......I in I he nloi k litg.llll/.llloli dlllei with the various lihn
i on ip, ii ill ", '.......        hi.......... 1« Ihllly ol inoir i ni I he U'uul.il llsl, both at t he pllnc Ipal
1 80   PAMELA ROBERTSON WOJCIK
studio and in the western headquarters. Such a company includes five or six emotional and ingenue leads (actresses); about the same number of leading actors; three or four "heavies" (both actors and actresses) (this type is sometimes called the villain of the play); three or fourcharacter artists; two children for juveniles and half a dozen or more minor players who serve for general business, playing various parts and requiring some versatility (Agnew 1913. 51, 53).
As in repertory theater, actors were required to supply their own costumes, and do their own make-up (Agnew 1913, 75-78). Under the stock system, the director initially controlled casting, selecting leads from his stock company and extras from anyone who appeared at studio "bull-pens" (Bordwell, Thompson and Staiger 1985, 149). As in the lines-of-business, actors in the studio stock system could ascend through the ranks, from extra to lead (Agnew 1913, 44, 65).
As actor Charles Graham makes clear, early film casting adopts terminology and practices from the lines-of-business tradition. He describes how he was picked out of a bullpen to begin acting in 1912:
We joined a crowd of people . . . We had said not a word to a soul, and no one had questioned us, when a man in shirt sleeves and with a green shade over his eyes came into the room and scrutinized first one and then another. He picked out one or two, then came to Arundel and myself. "I can use you," said he, and handed each of us a card. My card bore a number and the mystic words "Walking Gent Card Scene." Arundel's card bore the same number and the same words. We learned that the film would be known by this number till its name was revealed to a waiting public, that we were the "walking gents" in a card playing scene which was to be shot that morning and that we were to take the card to the wardrobe room.
Told to wear their own clothes, but with straw hats, Graham and Arundel are made up and sent to the studio. For about three hours, "we smiled the same smiles, we frowned the same frowns, we played the same cards and at last the big lights went on and we did it all again while the cameras shot the scene." Graham, limited in knowledge to his activities, has no idea of the whole film: "Mr. Young . . . was the producer, and if he knew what he was producing I certainly did not" (Graham 1998, 19-20).
As film production expands, and director units are overseen by producers, the assistant director takes over casting and major players hire agents. Then, in 1915, the first casting director is hired.7 As lanet Staiger explains:
The phrase "type-casting" has literal implications within this mode of production. In order to set up such a system, the casting director, an expert who replaced the more casual approach which the firm had employed, needed some method to classify the potential players for his system . . . the selected classification became somewhat permanent as it went down on a card with other statistics and into the casting director's indexed and cross-indexed hies (Bordwell. Thompson and Staiger I9H5, 149).
Ini renseil ral mnall/.illnn nl Ihc stm k system thus leai Is In im m.....Ill In I sysli-ms 11| i ,isl I lie
.111(1 mi leased I v|.....IslllIJi
TYPECASTING 181
Al I In' s, in ir inn.' ihr si i H In . ..im k system like I heat tit al stock. 11 lids that it cannot Itutliil.iin its poll! y ill .tin uiyiniiy .mil vets.it lllty. The stock system of repetition leads film fans 11 >(.■ n i /t ■ le, ii line | il. ivi i •■ .mi 1111 tin kii.n tie them according to which studio's stock company Ihry belonged. For Instance, Florence Turner becomes known as The Vitagraph Girl, and first I lortnet Lawrence and then Mary Pickford are recognized as Biograph Girls. Recognition n lies a star system. Competitive bidding for leading players begins in 1909 when Carl
i h mmle hires Florence Lawrence away from Biograph to become the Independent Moving I'll iiueCompanyGirl.orlMPGirl (Musser 1987, 58-59).Then, publicity for individual actors
i it'll, producing what Richard DeCordova has called the "picture personality," an mieimediate identity for him actors before a full-fledged star system develops.
I .in recognition begins with the actor's image—her physical appearance. The picture ' inality indicates fan interest in "the personality of the player as represented on him." Ai 11 nding to DeCordova:
Personality existed as an effect of the representation of character in a film—or, more iiccurately, as the effect of the representation of character across a number of films. It
I.....I toned primarily to ascribe a unity to the actor's various appearances in film. However
I he illusion that it had its basis outside the film was constantly maintained (DeCordova 1990,86).
111111 ilisi nurse around personalities asserts a connection between the actor's identity and the It urn lets she plays on screen This in turn requires that the personality portray consistent It 'i.icter types, if not literally the same character from film to film. As DeCordova points out, 'il liltns show an especially insistent version of this homology in that the serial character's
...... is often conflated with the actor through naming, so that King Baggot plays a character
■• ' I King in the IMP detective series, and Kathlyn Williams stars in The Adventures ofKathlyn ■ nrdova 1990, 89). However, despite claims that the actor's real identity was an extension i screen image, the picture personality was a "professional existence—a history of ii'l" -iciti' '". m films and plays and a personality gleaned from those appearances," but did veal very much about the actor's private life (DeCordova 1990,92). it" pn lute personality establishes the screen actor as a type defined by physical
.........and role. In the teens, "the private lives of players were constituted as a site of
ledge and truth," thus leading to the development of the star proper (DeCordova 1990, \s fan discourse shifts to the star's personal life—her marital status, homes, leisure,
ii iinipiinn, political views, etc.—the homology between actor and character isdeepened.
■ inie time, the development of the star system alters the nature of studio stock --p.tnles so that they are more hierarchical. Rather than a company of versatiles that in In   il led upon to play any mle. the star system creates a hierarchical system. In it, stars ■ i i I' mi Is. a iii I sin. 11 let | >. it is ate hi lei I l>y a range of non-star types. The character actor Ii ips In this period as a mid-level player, recognizable and associated with a particular lllir nl liiisiiiev, lint nut kiinwii as.i icil in piiv.iie person In addition, there are bit players din I mi i. is win 1111. iy i 'i iu.i\ ii"t a si 'in 111 in nii'.li I Im i.mks In bet nine si. us or character actors While '.Lie. .mil i li.ii.h lei .1. 11 in in pi 1111.111• • 111 members nl stock companies, extras are
in ■ I ii" ' - .mil III led tlllnllgll 11.........1......1' ' nl 11'H.lt Ii Hi. Ii il met I iii 1925
Hfl'.e, I . in this I iii'i. ii i I ill .il .il ii I ,1»i mull ll|| Myulrlli ill Inles, I he stllilln system 11 ii'i eli He Mill n il s 11 it • i mi I li l '.link '.y...... ulillii  mil   I.....I  bill  i ill the iilliel Ii nil  with I he i le.ll
182   PAMELA ROBERTSON WOJCIK
hierarchy between stars and character actors, and the tendency for studios to loan headlines out for particular projects, Hollywood re-invents the combination system. Throughout I In classical system, Hollywood studios have stock companies. In addition, certain director, and producers, like Preston Sturges, lohn Ford, and David Selznick, maintain theirown stabla of players within the studio. When actors become free agents in the 1960s, the official stoc k system breaks down, but continues in defaclo stock companies such as the stable of player, linked to Martin Scorsese, lohn Cassavetes, Spike Lee, the Coen Brothers, and Paul Thorn.r. Anderson.
Emphasizing practical considerations, many actors' manuals recommend that the actoi must be willing to be typecast in order to be more easily classified with agencies. For instanc 11 one manual acknowledges, "There are stars, of course, who are remarkably versatile. But Ii >i a beginner it is wise to work out one especial type of thing, one sort of characterization, whi< Ii will be particularly good, even though he should try to learn to play every sort of role. Then there is no difficulty in making classifications when one registers with a casting director c >i agent" (Klumph 1922, 72-74).* An essay entitled "The Value of Specialization" suggests thai an actor should not just adopt a broad specialization in comedy or drama, but should carve out a niche in small roles. The list of possible specialties includes butlers, smart city men bookmakers, doctors, flunkeys, and judges for male actors; and cooks, maids, half-caste, aunts, nurses, and typists for actresses (Pickford, 6-12). This highly stratified division of lain u is aimed at keeping the actor employed in a regular line of business when being a lead may not be a reality. Stuart Hemward puts it bluntly in his actor's manual:
The average feature picture usually has two "leads" which call for a good looking younu girl and boy . .. but there is also the surrounding cast. . . older men and women, heavlei comedians, singers, dancers. Therefore in point of quantity there is a greaterdemand fi i| the homelier, standard types than for the ingenue and leading man . . . Your face may bi your fortune, but not exactly in the way you think. There are many types of comedienne-, who are not known as beauties, but who, nevertheless, have been successful Therefore, first of all, type yourself (Hemward 1937, 9).
Interestingly, and in contrast to Stanislavski, early cinema discourse views typecast inn not only as a practical strategy but also as key to naturalistic acting. Arguing against versatiliiy in a how-to acting book, producer Kenelm Foss argues:
Acting, in the sense of impersonating a character foreign to the player's personalir, does not exist. All actors deny this: all actors can play anything, given the cham I according to their own account... If an actor is not himself the part, or if his personality does not approximate to that of the part, he's not the man to play it... Types! Thai || what casting comes to, first and last—the selection of proper types (Pickford, 25-201
Similarly, Hemward emphasizes that typing will produce more realistic performances: "You must know your type and then develop naturalness of acting within the characteristics ol the personalities you desire to portray" (Hemward 1937, 13) In addition, lype< asting is viewed as the result of the camera's 'accural y" whu It demands a p.ntn ill ii kiln I . 'I le.tlism akin I., lypai'.e I lam es Agliew writes
IVI'I i ASIINt
Oil. th.il wold lypei In d.iy. ol yoir......itlsl was always an artist Uy the aid ol make
up and ait 1st ii leinpeiainniil ,i y.....iig man ol woman played a i liarac tel many year.
his semot, oi an oldei playei was likewise considered capable of giving an artistic youthful c h.itac irrigation . To-day the cry of managers is for types; a child must be played by a child, sweet sixteen must be sweet sixteen, not only in years, but In appearance "offstage" as well as on; the stage mother, aunt, old maid, etc. must be played by actresses possessing the appearance in private life; the handsome hero, the gallant old gentleman—each must look the part to a certain extent when engaged (Agnew 1913, 59).
While the idea of typing oneself goes against the grain of most theories of naturalism, in Hollywood, typing oneself quickly became and continues to be a practical necessity, and has been institutionalized and formalized in casting practice through the production and distribution of casting directories and casting services.
Casting directories and services
Almost as soon as casting becomes rationalized through the development of dramatic agencies and in-house casting directors, casting directories that promote and categorize actors are published and circulated. These directories feature photographs of actors and wtresses, sometimes listing their credits and/or studio affiliations, in alphabetical order and within certain categories. The earliest casting directories categorize actors using terminology that closely resembles the lines-of-business tradition.9 For instance, the undated Directory ol \rtists Under Exclusive Management of the Edward Small Company—which we can assume to be from i lie picture personality" era, due to its epigraph, "Personality is a Commodity"—categorizes actors in descending order as either leading men. juveniles (including leads, characters and heavies), males (including second leads and heavies), or character men. Women are similarly nttegorized as leading women, ingenues, females (including second leads and heavies), and character women. In 1924, The Screen Artist breaks down its listings into feature men, feature i' 'medians, leading men, juveniles, heavy men, and character men, with virtually the same groupings for women and a separate category for children. Reflecting the need for increased •penalization, The Standard Directory of Motion PictureTalenl from 1922 lists principals according 'inpressed lines-of-business—feature men, leading men, juveniles, character men, (iature comedians—but also adds a section for "supporting cast," comprising those minor roles that would have been filled by the lower ranks in the lines-of-business tradition. This "nupportingcast" includes an amazing array of specializations, defined by appearance or role, and Including male roles as acrobats, bits and parts, character men (old) and character men (young), Chinamen, doctors, female impersonators, Jewish (old and young), Russian types, Iwlns, underworld types, and well dressed men (old and young). For women, supporting parts lin hide not only i ham lei women and nit'.eliues, bill also cooks, dancers, grande dames.
Illllis, small town (old and \.....nri i.ill women (old and young), and witch types
I v-ni nails these spei i ill/ it lull', will i llsappe. il lloin pi i in, il y < ash tig duei lot les and will he 11'legal eil 11' i .r.l 11 if sen li i i |i dli alrd I,. exit, is I 01 instance, in I'Mft I he t lassllied groupings lni I he I enli.il i iMIHg t iil|iiilrtllnii lln hide the lollowmg Amein an Indian',. Alal'l.ilr. alili   i" handl.   . .....I    '.....I      dl ■ '.'. an. I i hal. i, 11 l   Imlli'l'. llillli-.e il«.llelte
184   PAMELA ROBERTSON WOJCIK
girls; clowns; cops; girls—sweet looking; Hindus, able to handle elephants; midgets; rough characters; strong men; and short men. These specializations also exist residually in studio files on contract players such as those of casting director William "Billy" Gordon. Gordon was casting director at MGM Studios from the 1930s to!947, and then at 20th Century-Fox until I960, and he became head of talent at Columbia for the 1960s and 1970s. Gordon's files on actors from his tenure at MGM consist of typed lists of actors placed in folders with headings such as the following for male actors: Anglo Saxons, Arab, bald, bartender, beards, character, collegiate, colored/Negro, cripples/midgets/freaks, fat, fencers, juveniles, nances, rubes, and underworld. For actresses, Gordon's files include: beautiful, blonde, characters (young), colored/Negro, exotic, fat, heavies, hookers, maids, old, old maids, prison matrons, showgirls, and singers.
As general utility and supernumerary specialties fall increasingly under the category of extras and bit parts, most casting directories are then focused on actors who can fill principal parts; and typical directories list lines-of-businessand include information about whether an actor is under contract. There is some overlap among categories. For instance, in 1924 s The Screen Artist, Francis X. Bushman is listed as both a leading man and a feature man, indicating a distinction between starring roles and other major roles. Similarly, in The Players Inc. Screen Casting Directory of 1928, Skeets Noyes is listed as both a heavy and a character. There is some mobility among the lines—an actor can ascend from juvenile or ingenue to lead—but the distinction between starring roles and roles as characters or comedians seems firm.
At this time, the actors listed are almost all white but race and ethnicity figure heavily in the category of "character," which seems to refer back to the categories of light comedy and eccentric business in traditional lines and generally includes actors who play distinct ethni< types, roles in uniform or other elaborate costumes, and roles in heavy make-up.10 For instance, in a lune 1928 issue of The Players, Inc., character actor William Vox Mong lists his specialities: "Chinamen, Frenchmen, Russians and Americans and am learning English. Roman and Eskimo."
By the 1930s, race becomes its own category as The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science Players Directory Bulletin (generally referred to as The Academy Players Directory) includes separale sections labeled "Colored" and "Oriental," which list all African American and Asian actors and actresses, adults and children, together while it classifies white men (without identifying, them as such) as leading men, younger leading men, characters and comedians; whilr women as leading women, ingenues, characters and comediennes; and white children at boys and girls. While African American and Asian actors and actresses exist outside the lines as it were, with no indication of whether they are, for instance, characters or ingenues, white actors such as Bela Lugosi and Peter Lorre who play ethnic types are still listed in the main male categories as "characters." By 1945, possibly in response to NAACP calls for bettei representation in Hollywood, actors of color are included among the regular categories I >Ul are indexed separately. Initially, there seems to be an unwritten rule that an African American or Asian actor cannot be a lead. Lena Home, for instance, is listed as a "character and comedienne" in the 1945 Academy Players Directory, despite her eroundbreaking st.ir (onli.u I While actors of color were eventually included among leads, they were still Indexed separately ,is. lusl Colt net I then Nee.ro. .mil event u.illy .is Ml.it k Today this pi,it lit e t out limes Willi
Hit le.iMim ,it lentli in in iii ult it nil iii.il Kin .mil | mill it .il t in lei n.....h, .1» m tori tint I actrr»Kr>
~ ......1"Mill, ahi.i, but ulkoiikAillt.lt. Willi l'K.iliilillea(liii lutlliitiilii
TYPECASTING 185
specific nature of their disability, such as quadriplegic, amputee, etc.), Deaf and Hard of Hearing Artists, Little People, Asian Pacific Artists, Hispanic Artists, Native American Artists, and, oddly, Twins."
Ultimately, through the combined forces of increasing rationalization and the star system, Hollywood develops a complex and hierarchical ladder of types—some defined by lines, some by appearance, some by personality, some associated with certain stereotypes, .hkI some with social types, some operating as stars and some as character actors. Over the years, the categories into which these types can be sorted changes according to changing tastes and mores. And, as the assumed homology between actor and role, and role and appearance gets increasingly rigid and increasingly politicized, types are diversified and increase exponentially but are still recognizable as types. For instance, a recent survey of casting calls in Breakdown Services, the leading print and web source in Hollywood foi casting, found roles described largely in terms of types. These types ranged from stock characters such as "high school sweetheart" and "mother type" to racial categories and corresponding stereotypes ('African American, 20-35. Dance . . . Basketball skills requlrex I I to types defined by pre-existing actors and characters ("a young lodie Foster or Queen I ..itil.ili, or Peppermint Patty from Peanuts" in a call for "real" and diverse girls).12
Thus, in a certain sense, the older lines-of-business practice was less traditional In its conception of casting—insofar as what enabled an actor to play a line was nol stmtly speaking his physical appearance but rather his costume and make-up, whereas in today's seeming diversity, the actor is defined increasingly by physical appearance, race, body type, age, gender, and sex. In the interests of upholding shifting conceptions of realism, Hollywood has proliferated rather than blurred the lines."
Conclusion
To conclude, I would suggest that a consideration of casting helps deepen and expand our understanding of film acting. First, casting needs to be seen as an interpretive process. A consideration of casting could complicate current models of authorship and of stardom. I.x.imining casting helps acknowledge not only the way roles are characterized but also the Ideologies about identity they embody. In addition, a consideration of casting helps show . lunges in performance styles as only one part of what constitutes acting on screen We need i > more consciously relate performance styles to casting practices and take into account i political, cultural, and labor issues at the time of performance. On a related note, just as the meaning of the word "type" has evolved, notions of "realism" have undergone a meta-ini uphosis to reflect changing ideas about acting and identity; and, therefore, the discourse of realism which has dominated studies of classical cinema needs to be more specifically liiloiiiiiil by .in ii mil'i si. mi line ol institutional practice and historical context. Finally, while let. .|'.iii/m!'. I In ■ 11 ill in-ii. e . .1 i ■ml it'tit let I I.Hi 11 11 Mil my theatrical t r, id it ions on contemporary . 11iic m.iy le,iiI lis to view I vi'i'i .r.linn .is inevitable, it should also open a door to change.
H, as StatlKI.IVski slier..".i ■. |ielloim.Hti e style ,md llistltlltltin.il pi.it In e t'.tt h.ilitl in hand. IIipii we net •! I now I in 'ii vi si, hi w.iy. It 11 ne.ili liee Iii mi 11 ■*. 1111 j. 11 .mil perhaps outmoded casting tl.i.lili.His lo 11. 11.11111,111 / ■ ■ Ii.il in.ill.iii .iii.I lne.it lire It,,m I.....les ol le.ilisin lh.it simply
I frpli ii I in e i nil own evelytl.iy lent lent Irs 1111 V| »• i ,isl
186   PAMELA ROBERTSON WOJCIK
Acknowledgments
Portions of this essay were presented at the Chicago Film Seminar, at the University of Notre Dame, and at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and a slightly longer version of the essay appeared in a special issue of Criticism. Special thanks to lames Naremore.Tom Gunning, Donald Crafton, Lesley Brill, and readers at Criticism for their comments. Casting directors lane Alderman and Debra Zane generously shared their thoughts with me; Gary Marsh at Breakdown Services provided sample breakdowns; and Barbara Hall at the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences helped me to fi nd archival casting materials.
Notes
1 For more on Non-Traditional Casting, see Gibbons 1991; Schechner 1989; and the website for the Non-Traditional Casting Project, www ntcp.org
2 The zanni is the clownish underling or servant, an acrobatic mimic, a Harlequin.
3 The Australian larrikin is a young street rowdy, a delinquent. Though the term refers to minor criminals, it can also be used to name valued Australian characteristics such as irreverence, non-conformism, and impudence.
4 Typage tends toward representations of what Richard Dyer calls "member types." Member types "are linked to historically and culturally specific and determined social groups or classes and their praxes, which are almost bound to be outside the present cultural hegemony (in so far as it has so much invested in the notion of individuality)." Dyer values member types because they hold out the promise of collective identity, and therefore, political action, as opposed to social types and stereotypes which operate on an exclusionary basis. See Dyer 1980, 37.
5 On "expressive coherence" and theories of acting in Hollywood, see Naremore 1988,68-82
and passim.
6 On the demise of the lines-of-business tradition, see Burge 1986, 212-213; McConachie 1992, 248-256; and McArthur 1984, 7-8
7 See "Casting Efficiency," Motion Picture World 26, no 11(11 December 1915): 1985
8 Similarly, in contrast to her own discomfort with typecasting, Mary Pickford advises actors to know their strengths and weaknesses and find types or roles they can play. She writes "The producer will probably help you in your selection of the part. If he knows his work, as most producers do, he has divided humanity in sections—young men, old men, comedians, tragedians—and within a few minutes of your first appearance before him he will have allotted you to one of those sections, and more often than not his judgment will be the right one." Pickford, 29.
9 All casting directories listed here are available at the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles.
10 This sense of the category of "character" parallels the use of the term "character" in dance, where, the "character dance" is invariably ethnic in nature and principally from the Russian or Slavic traditions, although there are Mediterranean character dances such as the Tarantella; and "character dancer" refers to those dancers who portrny older or comical i 11. ii. i. tee. '.hi 11 as I >i ('< !|>|m'li,r. ml n, ;>elm i n the step rm it ln-i in i iin/rn-l/ii (usually played
I I am in. lei il ril 11 i Kevin I Meyei I, ,| lie. inpl.ili.ll li hi n| this let llllllc ill >Uy
12
13
TYPECASTING 187
According to a February 2001 telephone interview with Keith Gonzalez, the current editor of theAojdemu Planers Directory, actors and/or their agents decide whether to list themselves as leads, younger leads or ingenues, or characters and comedians, and they also decide whether or not to be cross-indexed. Gonzalez, like casting directors I interviewed, feels that actors are poor judges of their type and often mis-categorize themselves. Breakdown Services, Ltd. Provides "breakdowns" or capsule descriptions of all roles needing to be cast for most Hollywood productions, including feature films, TV shows, commercials, student films, and industrials. The breakdowns are written by casting directors and/or in-house writers and breakdowns are sent to agents, managers, and other subscribers daily. See www.breakdownservices.com
An anecdote will indicate how traditional "non-traditional" casting can be. When I was doing research for this article, I had a conversation with a Chicago-based casting director who told me that if a director asked to fi 11 a role for a Polish female bank teller (which she assumed would be played by a Polish female actress), she might suggest the role be played as black, gay, and male instead; but her conception of who could play black, gay, and male was limited to actors who were themselves black, gay, and male. Thus, her conception of "non-traditional" casting consisted of swapping one type for another and her conception of type was tied to the actor's individual "real" identity. I had similar conversations with casting directors in Los Angeles.
references
Agnew, Frances. Motion Picture Acting: How to Prepare for Photoplaying, What Qualifications are
Necessary, How to Secure an Engagement, Salaries Paid to Photoplayers New York: Reliance
Newspaper Syndicate, 1913. hogle, Donald Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks. An Interpretive History of Blacks in
American Films. 1973. Reprint, New York: Continuum, 2001. lordwell, David, Kristin Thompson, and lanet Staiger. The Classical Hollywood Cinema. Vilm Style
and Mode of Production to I960 New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. ■irewster, Ben and Lea lacobs. Theatre to Cinema: Stage Pictorialism and the Early Feature Film
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. lurge, lames C Lines of Business. Casting Practice and Policy in the American Theatre, 1752-1899 New
York: Peter Lang, 1986.
Cavell, Stanley The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film. Enlarged edition. Cambridge,
MA Harvard University Press, 1979. DeCordova, Richard. Picture Personalities-. The Emergence of the Star Si/stem in Amerun i In. ■
University of Illinois Press, 1990.
Oyer, Richard "Stereotyping."\n Gays and Film, edited by Richard Dyer, 27-39. London British Film Institute. 1980
"The Role of Stereotypes   In 'IV Mutter of Images: Essays on Representations New York Rout ledge I «*<>"*
lllrnslein. S M   The I'lin. Iples . .1 Hie New Russian Cinema " In Selected Worfev Volume i WritincA. 192^ ium edited ami iiaiiKhiteil by Richard Taylor. Bloomlngton: Indiana
Ulllveisily i'n".'. I'>88
(illil'. He. |. >titi I   I lie Amen, .in I In,Hie . AllflM/H In Ai lilei'e Mii/lii ii/|iim/imh mi ' .laae I liminili Niw Tniililiniinli icliiii) I'll I) dim NhiIIiwmIpIH IInlvnr»11 v IWI
188   PAMELA ROBERTSON WOJCIK
Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books, 1959. Graham, Charles. "Acting for the Films in 1912." In Playing to the Camera-. Film Actors Discuss their
Craft, edited by Bert Cardullo, Harry Geduld, Ronald Gottesman, and Leigh Woods, 19-21.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. Grimsted, David. Melodrama Unveiled: AmericanTheater and Culture, 1800-1850. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1968. Gunning, Tom. "The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde." In
Early Cinema-. Space/Frame/Narrative, edited by Thomas Elsaesser, 56-62. London: British
Film Institute, 1990
Heath, Stephen. "Body, Voice." In Questions of Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1981.
Hemward, Stuart |. How to Get in Motion Pictures. Hollywood: The Hemwood Publishing Company, 1937.
Isaacs, Edith |. R. "Type-Casting: The Eighth Deadly Sin," Theatre Arts 17 (1933). 131-138 Klumph, Inez and Helen. Screen Acting-, lis Requirements and Rewards. New York: Falk Publishing, 1922.
Kracauer, Siegfried. "Remarks on the Actor." In Theory of Film-. The Redemption of Physical Reality
I960. Reprint, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. Kuleshov, Lev. Kuleshovon Film, translated and edited by Ronald Levaco. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1974. Majumdar, Neepa. "The Embodied Voice: Song Sequences and Stardom in Popular Hindi
Cinema." In Soundtrack Available-. Essays on Film and Popular Music, edited by Pamela Robertson
Wojcik and Arthur Knight, 161-184. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001. McArthur, Benjamin. Actors and American Culture, 1880-1920. Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, 1984.
McConachie, Bruce A. Melodramatic Formations-. American Theatre and Society, 1820-1870. low.i
City: University of Iowa Press, 1992. Musser, Charles. "The Changing Status of the Actor." In Before Holli/icood: Turn-of-the-Cetiimu
American Film, 57-62. New York: Hudson Hills Press in Association with the American
Federation of Arts, 1987. -The Emergence of Cinema-. The American Screen to 1907. History of the American Cinema, vol I
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Naremore, lames. Aclino. in the Cinema. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Pearson, Roberta E. Eloquent Gestures-. The Transformation of Performance Style in the Griffith Biograp\
Films. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Pickford, Mary <?! al. Cinema-. Practical Courses in Cinema Acting inTen Complete Lessons. London I III
Standard Art Book Company, n.d. Schechner, Richard. "Race Free, Gender Free, Body-Type Free, Age Free Casting." TDR (T/ir
Drama Review) Comment 33, no. I (Spring 1989): 4-12. Smith, Murray. Engaging Characters-. Fiction, Emotion and the Cinema. Oxford: Clarendon I'm
1995.
Stanislavski, Constantin. "Types of Actors." In Stanislavski's Legacy A Collection of Comments on i Variety of Aspects of an Actor's Art and t.ife, edited and ttanslated by l.lizabeth Reyin M» 11.1| >!'...,„ | If \<) \'KtH Kt •prim Now York Kt.utle<l«e \<><><>
:.111> ll.ii (,.iylyii Kir. Mad Masquerade Stardom and Mum ulmitu in llif tail Ai/i' New Yolk (.'uluinU.i
UlllVelMlyl'l.".-.. |Wf,
TYPECASTING 189
_
The 1950s
Black Stars
DONALD BOGLE
Ethel Waters sways her massive shoulders as she sings "His Eye Is on the Sparrow," and suddenly, becomes—for a new generation—its great earth-mother figure. . . . Dorothy Dandridge, first as Carmen, then as Margot, later as Bess, acts her heart out, wins her Oscar nomination, and emerges on screen and off as the living embodiment of the tragic mulatto. . . . Sidney Poitier enters the era shyly as a young unknown in No Way Out, only to close the decade as one of the most important leading men—black or white—in the movies. . . . Writer Richard Wright, baseball player lackie Robinson, boxer (ersey |oe Walcott, tennis champ Althea Gibson, football player Woody Strode, trumpeter Louis Armstrong, crooner Nat "King" Cole, songstress Eartha Kitt, comedienne Pearl Bailey, jazz stylist Ella Fitzgerald, and calypso artist Harry Belafonte invade the movies and go "dramatic.". . . And problem pictures continue, alternately engaging and alienating their audiences.
It was the 1950s, an era to be remembered as apathetic and sleepy-eyed, vulgar and hypocritical, grandiose, spectacular, and tasteless. Yet the Eisenhowerage was one of change find turbulence, a decade that encompassed an array of incongruities: McCarthy in the Senate, troops in Korea, a Nobel Peace Prize for Ralph Bunche in Sweden, the National Guard in Cicero and Chicago, the Supreme Court Decision of 1954, Marian Anderson at the Met, ĽmmettTill lynched in Mississippi, bus boycotts (later bombings) in Montgomery, the rise ' 'I M.irtin Luther King, sit-ins in Oklahoma, federal troops in Arkansas.
The 1950s' social-political whirl penetrated the motion-picture industry, which like the n .1 "I I he ' ountry, had to undergo change. Already the industry had lost some of its best i ilenls because of blacklist ing Slowly, too, the look of the American feature film was altered n- I' itiger stamped with the big-studio gloss but marked now by the individual signature of llir independent duei toi or pioducei television sets had come into homes across the nation nnd when box oil u e allelic lam e. altei its great boom in the war years, tapered off drastically
iI m 111 ■ 11 i m lust ly otleied the glatil wide sc teens Cinerama, ("inemaScope, VistaVision, 3-D— no ii despeiale means 11| holding llir auilleiii e likewise the industry picked up bold themes
III pall to hue the Iclevlsli ill .Hlilíniu r iiwuy lieHn 1»Hue anci in pall as a realistic reflect ion ol llir glowing ' h.ins in I he   i n . i   nl '.m. n. i niii In the psyc lies ol Its c Ill/ens (.lone alllli isl
tllllrly was Ihe mágii al n u......Hi   Lienu I lull llir daydlrain i|llallty ol llir old movies as
192   DONALD BOGLE
independent filmmakers brought to the public not only more problem pictures but "message" pictures, "serious" pictures, "thoughtful" pictures, "studious" pictures, and "controversial" pictures, all interchangeable but carrying different labels.
For black actors this era of silent change was important. The great gains of the late 1940s were continued in the 1950s with the emergence of distinct black personalities who, through their own idiosyncrasies, invigorated the Negro Lead Character and the Negro Theme. Almost immediately three diverse black personalities stood out prominently, and they were to remain so throughout the decade, making the greatest breakthrough for the black actor in American motion pictures. Sidney Poitier, Dorothy Dandridge, and Ethel Waters transformed the history of blacks in films from a study of pictures or parts or personalities to one of star dimensions.
As already seen, in the early days of moviemaking black actors were rigidly consigned to mythic types. Through the push and power of their personalities, some actors had created great pop figures. Everything in Hollywood was a game, they knew, and they did not expect to be taken very seriously. Movie audiences loved and laughed at these great comic strip characters. They left theaters having enjoyed themselves but with little reason to think twice about what they had seen. No one ever cared what Bill Robinson was really thinking as he danced up the staircases with Shirley Temple. Nor did anyone give a second thought to how Hattie McDaniel must have felt as she ripped the bandana from her head after a particularly humiliating scene
Occasionally, with black actors such as Stepin Fetchit or Lena Home or Paul Robeson, because their off-screen exploits paralleled their on-screen images and because they were publicized by their studios, audiences felt they had some insight into the person on celluloid But still unlike the important white stars—such as Garbo and Gable—the old black actors were not monolithic figures. They did not symbolize disparate elements of their audience's personalities. They were not able to affect lives dramatically or touch on the mass imagination Indeed, the moviegoing public was not yet prepared to be swept off its feet by the intrigues
of a colored personality.
But in the 1950s Poitier, Dandridge, and Waters reached out and affected the imagination of the mass audience. Patrons believed in them. Often because of their private lives or because of a strongly rooted image, the trio overpowered the films in which they appeared. Moreover in this strange psychoanalytic age when audiences started dissecting not only their own inner selves but those of their movies and movie stars as well, when patrons went to see black performers not for mere entertainment but for a comment on the black experience these three performers became popular because of what they represented to moviegi» < Like all great stars, they were aesthetic beings in themselves. To contemplate Waters' humanity or Dandridge's beauty or Poitier'scodeof decency was worth the price of admission and the three made a slight dent at the place Hollywood has traditionally cherished most the box office.
Ethel Waters: earth mother for an alienated age
Ethel Waters was the first of the three to win mass audience apptov.il She had been around
lor n long time, and her lite and < areet were a tale ol disotdei and i.....Ii e.nly soin >w Growing
up in ( hestei, Pennsylvania, she had stolen lood to eat, tun eitaluk Ii >i win ilrs been a lookoiil
THE 1950s: BLACK STARS 193
lor pimps, nu I um lei wi >i Id Humen AI llililaan i he was married At fourteen she was separated.
At lilleen she was a i li.iinlu n.....I and l.nin. Iiess ai a Philadelphia hotel where she earned
'"I /'> a week Tin -i i aliin tst niii.n uli iie.ly she rose Irom poverty to international acclaim, first in the i ell,us anil. ales wheie she was billed as "Sweet Mama Stringbean" and later on the
i ice in such stu . • -----1111 pioductions as Afričana, Blackbirds of 1930, Rhapsody in Black. As 'thousands Cheer. At I \omi Abroad. Mamba's Daughters, and Cabin in the Sky.
I.thel Waters later reached a whole new audience with her impressive film work. But suddenly her spiraling career fell flat in the mid-1940s. Overwork, exhaustion, exploitation, im I personal unhappiness had made her "difficult" and chronically suspicious of everyone, ii.i outbursts on the set of Cabin in the Sky remain a part of Hollywood legend. Subsequently there was a six-year period of unemployment in the film capital, and by 1948, when Darryl
muck asked her to test for Granny in Pinky. Ethel Waters was almost at the point of begging lor a role. Her Granny was an old typed vehicle but she got mileage out of it, and her career
• ung back into full gear. Today, because of her appearances in such films as Cairo (1942),
Tuli". of Manhattan. Cabin in theSky. Stage DoorCanteen (1943), and Pinky, many still thinkof Ethel
Waters as an exclusively 1940s figure. It was during this period that, singlehanded, she brought
.....w style and substance to the time-worn mammy. But as significant a figure as she was
In I he 1940s, it was in the Eisenhower era, in the film version of Carson McCullers' play The
Ii mber of the Wedding, that she scored her greatest screen triumph and an overwhelming |Krsonal victory.
i lir Member of the Wedding was more than simply a movie. It was in two very important inspects a motion-picture event. Foremost, it marked the first time a black actress was used my a major-studio white production. Secondly, the movie was another comeback for llhel Waters. Her autobiography His Eye Is on the Sparrow had recently been published and ' r. a best seller In it. she told all the lurid details of her life—the fights, the lovers, the in images the career troubles. Curiously, instead of alienating her audience, the turbulent Wants in the autobiography convinced patrons that Ethel Waters, who had always portrayed nu suffering women, was indeed the characters she played. Moreover, audiences knew llhel Waters had truly suffered. Now patrons rooted for her to succeed—to triumph. When I In Member of the Wedding finally opened, audiences got just that.
I he Stanley Kramer-Fred Zinnemann feature was a serious, oddly structured film for 1952 ili an moviegoers. It starred the original Broadway cast. It had little plot, and focused Hi 11 id on the interactions ol three outcasts: l; rankle Adams {played by lulie Harris), a twelve-\> ii i 'Id motherless girl entering adolescence and wanting desperately to belong: lohn-Henry ■Ion de Wilde), Frankie's six-year-old sickly cousin-playmate; and the weathered and a family cook, Berenice. In the course of the film, Berenice is revealed as the guiding l|ilill in the children's solitary lives. She is cook, housekeeper, protectress, reprimander, ^Har, and confidante. "Come on. Let us play a three-hand game of bridge." says Berenice
• In and t he children sit in the kitchen. "Play the King, |ohn-Henry," she tells the boy when ha Is about to cheat at their bridge game. "You know you got to play the rules of the game." Ill I In".r i|iiiet oi -.ol 11 el 111 ii ", 11111 ii i lei it nu hi lent s among the three, author Carson McCullers'
• •• ii Ivm i mi i w.r. appan-til .r. nun Ii ,r. In i theme ol human loneliness and alienation. "We id I lying one thing Then......11 hi Yei we te si ill i aught,' Berenice tells young Frankie,
lliilhei lime in hei most innvliig momilouue, she explains to the two children the lin-iil.-.1 Mind ill. ■-,   ol hei llli    It. n i   ili. Mist in in I evel loved Therefore I had to go
• ■ -py my.el I li nevel all el and what I did wa- to many oil little piei es ol I mil w hei level
1 94   DONALD BOGLE
I run across them. It was my misfortune that they all turned out to be the wrong pieces." She comforts the two and helps them grow from her experiences. She sings to them "His Eye Is on the Sparrow." The him is resolved with Frankie grown and over that aching period ol adolescence. Berenice stands alone in the kitchen of the house. She is leaving to work else where, and we understand that her talents as an earth mother, to nourish and comprehend, are needed in a new household.
The Member of the Wedding was a critical success, but reports of its strange plotlessness and unconventional characters scared off many viewers. Others found them baffling. But Ethel Waters, the actress and the human being, was praised by everyone, even by those who did nol like the film. Berenice was a perfect role for her, and there were obvious parallels between the seamy, confused tragic life of the movie's heroine and the legends about the entertainer. In the film version of The Member of the Wedding, the role was so well written and the character si I well etched that Waters at long last had the material for a bravura performance. In her hand', every line, even a seemingly unadorned statement, was delivered with a warmth and irony th.ii went beyond the script. "Can't bid," she said during the card game. "Never have a hand tin si days." "All my life I been wanting things I ain't been getting," she uttered plaintively. Ultimately, because The Member of the Wedding, with its skinny tomboy heroine and its pint-sized bespectacled leading man, was so unlike the typical Saturday evening movie fare, audiem e tended to accept Ethel Waters and her life rather than the lives portrayed in the film. She emerged now as more than just a representative of the long-suffering, strong black woman She was a great "serious" popular myth come true. For black audiences, Ethel Waters wa: personification of the black spirit they believed had prevailed during the hard times of slavey and they felt she brought dignity and wisdom to the race. For the mass white audiem e Ethel Waters spoke to an inner spirit of a paranoid and emotionally paralyzed generation thai longed for some sign of heroism. Movie stardom itself has often been based on a thin lira between actress and myth, and with this performance Ethel Waters became a genuine movir star. Her personality, rather than her character or her movie, had grasped the publll imagination, and thus the history of the Negro in American films gained a new perspective
But if Ethel Waters altered black film history, she was perhaps the last to know about it For in spite of her impressive performance, she curiously became in the mid-1950s a victim of audience indifference. From The Member of the Wedding she went on to important Broadw.iv appearances. There was also the successful television series "Beulah." Then new trouble! arose: income-tax evasion and other debts. Finally, her debts and problems mounted so liiuh that she was forced to make an excruciatingly painful appearance on the television qui* show "Break the $250,000 Bank." The great actress stood before millions in their homes tiyinn to win money to pay her taxes. Surprisingly, audiences took her plight in stride. There w.n neither outrage nor great sadness. In a frightening way, Ethel Waters' public sorrow .mil humiliation were considered fitting for the tough endurable mythic figure who had alw.iv» shown America that she could prevail, even under the most trying situations. When het iienl film, The Sound and the Fury (1959), was released, Twentieth Century-Fox's publicity depa ft nifiil announced that "everybody's favorite," indeed "America's favorite," Ethel Waters, w« back. As Dilsey, the "indomitable skeleton," the part Faulkner himself might have written ln| her, Waters again acted the strong black woman in grand style The movie at first kinkm! prom is inc. with .i cast th.it included Yul Brynnet, loanne Woodwanl and Mali'., net I .eif.lili ill Hut the act ins floundered in one mess (it a si npt. and Walois Imiidil In slay alloat II was I ml l.i .1 111 IT t ol the del ade
till Iv&Oi: «IA( K NAM IV» The I <>'>()', .in lei I wllli I I In I Walrls having appealed III but two motion |>l< lilies hill Ii i
this .ilielliK   nr.i ■■ mi   i|....... m ale,I n| Us own shadow and temlled "I lahtii' 11 ■. *■ ■. ■ In
was all echo (il I he p.i'.l I I hel Water, seemed to lie some noble part ol olll hell lac thai ■ ,
(|uk kly bc( onuiit: exiim i In a period ol mass uniformity, she was the Individualist looluh em nigh to asseil I hi,.I I v'l ■.! n him enough to pay lor the t onseqiiom es In I In end liei Image—the myth she lived out—loomed larger than life over the decade Through tht 1990s
Into the early 1970s, Waters made occasional television appear.im es on sin Ii plotll.....» .t»
"Route 66, "The Great Adventure," and "Owen Marshall," again playing the strong inainan hi I heroine. In her later years, she appeared with Billy Graham's Crusades In 1977, W.ilei* died at age 80.
Dorothy Dandridge: apotheosis of the mulatto
Dorothy Dandridge was the second of the black stars. Before the apathetic Eisenhower amended, she had infused it with hergreat intensity and risen as its most successful black loading lady. For a period that prided itself on appearances, hers was a startling presence. She was a grpat beauty Her eyes were dark and vibrant, her hair long and silky, her features sharply defined. And she had the rich golden skin tone that had always fascinated movie audiences, black and white. Moreover, she was a distinctive personality, schizophrenic, maddening,
[ euphoric, and self-destructive Before her Nina Mae McKinney had displayed uncontrolled rnunchiness. Fredi Washington had symbolized intellectualized despair, and Lena Home had acquired a large following through her reserve and middle-class aloofness. On occasion, Dorothy Dandridge exhibited all the characteristics of her screen predecessors, but most Important to her appeal was her fragility and her desperate determination to survive In a way never before demonstrated by a black personality, she used her own incongruities
| and self-contradictions to capture and extend the mass imagination. Her life and career were ■ rously reported on by the white and black press. At times she seemed to bask in her own publicity, and it was obvious that she took pains to create an image, to package it, and then Ii • market it for mass consumption.
The irony that overshadowed Dorothy Dandridge's career was that although the image Ihe marketed appeared to be contemporary and daring, at heart it was based on an old and I classic type, the tragic mulatto In her important films Dorothy Dandridge portrayed doomed, iinliillilled women Nervous and vulnerable, they always battled with the duality of their personalities. As such, they answered the demands of their times. Dorothy Dandridge's . liaiai ters brought to a dispirited nuclear age a razor-sharp sense of desperation that cut llin 'Ugh the bleak monotony of the day Eventually—and here lay the final irony—she may have been forced to live out a screen image that destroyed her.
I >( itothy Dandridge came to films after a lengthy and arduous career as a stage entertainer 'Ihe da lighter of a Cleveland minister and a comedienne-actress named Ruby, she performed |an child with her oldei sistei Vivian in a vaudeville act billed as "The Wonder Kids." At fifteen In mil Vivian aloiii: wit h am .1 lei IiI.h 1 r.iil appeared as the Dandridge Sisters, louring the toiintiy with the liniuiy I urn eloid band Al sixteen. Dorothy Dandridge performed at the lot Ion l lull, whole she 11 id 11.in ill I Nli hol.is ol t he da IK i tig Nicholas Brothers She married Inn i and I mho III lii a da i It'.hl ei I alei I ho | sin ill vol i od Thioiii'hi nit the 1940s, she worked in nii'lii lull', as well ,i\ in a •.Inn,1 . •! Iilm sin Ii as I ajii /i,hh I mmiiiiifi ( I'MI I Hahama Passage l||94.'| Hiniir. ,i/ lln ( ,'iiiin l I'M;I I I'.'ini I'.n.i.li an. I llic 11,1 I'atadeol I'M I
196   DONALD BOGLE
In the early 1950s, a trio of low-budget movies in which she played "good girl" roles served as springboards for Dorothy Dandridge's rise. The first, Tarzan's Peril (1951), was typical jungle fare with one twist. In a crucial episode, Dandridge, as a kidnaped African princess, was tied to the stakes by a warlike tribal leader. As she lay with legs sprawled apart, heaving and turning to break loose, it was apparent that never before had the black woman been so erotically and obviously used as a sex object. From the way Lex Barker's Tarzan eyed the sumptuous Dandridge, it was obvious, too, that for once Tarzan's mind was not on lane or Boy or Cheetah!
In Columbia's The Harlem Globetrotters (1951), Dandridge was cast as a sympathetic young wife trying to keep a decent husband from going bad. She had little more to do than look lovely. MGM's 1953 all-black Bright Road, followed, giving Dorothy Dandridge her first starring role. As a grade-school teacher working to reach an unhappy wayward student, she was cast opposite child actor Philip Hepburn and a shy newcomer named Harry Belafonte. Here she revealed a soft, radiant, melancholic quality. "Her work in MGM's See How They Run |the title was changed upon release| projects sultry Dorothy Dandridge into the enviable role of Hollywood's No. 1 female star," wrote Ebony. Life magazine also ran a special article on the film, spotlighting its leading lady. Thus by 1953, the momentum for Dandridge's career was well under way. Had she continued playing such nice-girl roles, her career might have been entirely lackluster. But Dorothy Dandridge learned early that there were better thing', ahead on the other side of virtue.
Carmen \ones was the celebrated movie that established her as the definitive tragic mulatto. It also contains the definitive Dandridge mulatto performance. The legend of how directot Otto Preminger first decided to cast Dandridge for the lead in his film reads like a press agent's dream tale, but it appears to be true. Initially, Preminger had thought her too sleek and sophisticated for the role of a whore. But he underestimated the talent and determination of the actress. When it appeared as if she had lost the role altogether, Dorothy Dandridge completely redid her appearance and style. She taught herself a Southern dialect. She mastered wildly uninhibited body movements. She shrewdly exploited her own nervous tension. With her new image perfected, she tossed her hairabout her head, made up her eye, darkly, dressed herself in a sheer low-cut blouse and a long, tight skirt, and then audaciously strutted into Preminger's office. Vivacious, sportive, alluring yet somehow haunted and vulnerable, Dorothy Dandridge was the living embodiment of the director's Carmen. The role was given to her.
Carmen \ones, released in 1954, was the 1950s' most lavish, most publicized, and mosi successful all-black spectacle. If audiences truly yearned for relief from the tedium and routine of their lives, surely this was perfect pop entertainment. Based on Bizet's comic-strip opeu Carmen, it cleverly transformed the opera's colorful Spanish cigarette girl into Carmen lone, a sexy black factory worker in the South. Her foil is a Good Colored Boy, |oe, portrayed k Harry Belafonte. Carmen lures him into deserting the army, goes with him to a sleazy Chicago • hotel where they evade the law, then deserts him for a prize fighter, and finally is strangle. I by him for her unfaithfulness.
The plot and the characters of Carmen \ones were pop creations, and I he film relied on tin stock situations: hair-pulling fights between black females, the inevitable barroom brawl, thl exaggerated dialects, the animalistic passions and luries ol the le.uk old style kitsch, h w.r. made impressive nonetheless by its director's exuberant style and III cait't great Alan
l.veiyone seemed to be theie to have a good time I Huhaliii < am ill had a small dei oialiv,
THE 1950s: BLACK STARS 197
tole as oiii' . 'I i ai in. n : i:.....I inn.' i'ii I Ii lends t )lga lames portrayed the submissive Cindy
I mi Pi... !• I vier. sii.ii lei I gl. .Mi Hisly as the villainous Sergeant Brown |oe Adams as prise llghtei Husky Milhi was sin h an overtly sexual performer that audiences could understand why he never went lar In Ulms White audiences still found sexually assertive black males hard to accept Pearl Bailey was an open delight as she belted out a rousing "Beat Out That Rhythm on a Drum." But Dandridge's Carmen dominated the production. On the one hand, cool, calculating, and perfectly confident, on the other, reckless and insecure, she is animalistic and elemental. When pursued by Belafonte, she kicks, she screams, she claws, she bites, and at one point, she crawls on all fours. Belafonte must tie her hands and feet to prevent her from escaping. Here again Dorothy Dandridge was the jungle queen tied to the stakes. But her performance was curiously detached. Certainly, audiences knew that here was a woman who was acting. But the sheer theatricality, the relish she poured into her pole, made audiences forget the incongruities of the plot and instead delight in Preminger's black fairy tale and this extravagant, high-strung bumblebee. "Looka here, baby," she seemed i.1 say, "it ain't real, but I am!"
"The range between the two parts \Carmen \ones and Bright Road\ suggests that she is one of the outstanding dramatic actresses of the screen." wrote Uewsweek. "Of all the divas of grand opera—from Emma Calve of the 90s to Rise Stevens—who have decorated the title role of Carmen and have in turn been made famous by it, none was ever so decorative or will reach nationwide fame so quickly as the sultry young lady ... on Li/c's cover this week," wrote the editors of Life when Dorothy Dandridge became the first black ever to grace its cover.
Carmen \ones made Dandridge a star. Her performance earned her an Oscar nomination as best actress of the year. Although she lost the award to Grace Kelly, no black performer had ever before been nominated for a leading actor award. (Hattie McDaniel's award and Ethel Waters' nomination were for best supporting actress.) Afterward the first rushing whirl . 'I publicity closed in on her. Paris-Mated and Ebony ran cover stories on her. A score of other publications, from Time to Confidential, carried feature articles about her. Dorothy Dandridge Wiis reported on, probed, studied, dissected, discussed, scrutinized, and surveyed. There were Incredible rumors and stories about her that yet live on in Hollywood, tales about her retarded diiughter, her "hidden" son, her white father, and, in keeping with the image gradually growing about her, of her white lovers. She was said to be involved with everyone in Hollywood in in Tyrone Power to Otto Preminger to Peter Lawford to Michael Rennie to Abby Mann to Ailhur Loew, |r. What with the publicity and gossip, Dorothy Dandridge now seemed a star nl the first magnitude.
But despite the great fanfare and recognition after her triumph in 1954, Dorothy Dandridge '..idly disi overed there was no place lor her to go. Bigotry and bias still had their place in I li .llywood. Very few film offers came her way. Those that did were little more than variations on Carmen. Always she was to be cast as exotic, self-destructive women
lust such a character was Dandridge's Margot in Robert Rössens island in the Sun (1957). line she was cast in the lust ol hennterrai i.il love roles Today some might think it totally unimportant that Doiothy I >.un Itnlge was the first black woman ever to be held in the ^~na of a white man In an American movie. Yet, because she was permitted to bring integrated
e lo I he 111. r.s at id lei ii e in an age at >■ ml 1.1 etllpl in < haos ovel I he Issue of integral ion, slit ■ finalns a soi i.illy signltli .nil ligim m ihr. Illm It was a testament lo her importance .is a Rlilt that Twentieth ( entmy I ... il !•. d Ii ilmiiiu fiel opposite white a< loi |olin Instill But.
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198   DONALD BOGLE
Darryl F. Zanuck, has admitted not liking the finished film because of them. Because of its theme of miscegenation, Island in the Sun was controversial even during the shooting. Before its release, some theater owners (mostly Southern) threatened to boycott it. The South Carolina legislature even considered passing a bill to fine any movie house that showed the film $5000. That bill was never passed, but the threats had their effect. Cautious steps were taken to avoid too much controversy. In the movie, Dandridge and lustin held hands and danced together, but little else happened. "The one scene I objected to seriously was the one in the summerhouse where lohn confesses his love for me," Dandridge later said. "We had to fight to say the word love." In the summerhouse scene, Dandridge's Margot seemed tense when asked about her background. Audiences associated that nervousness with the character rather than the actress. As patrons watched Dandridge and lustin dance together, surely they thought how lovely the pair looked and how happy they could have been if only the jittery beauty weren't colored. She had everything else going for her! Surprisingly as controversial as some thought the miscegenation theme to be, it attracted movie audiences. island in the Sun was made for $2,250,000 and grossed $8 million.
That same audience reaction, however—pity for the poor racially "tainted" beauty on screen—seemed built into the subsequent Dandridge films TO? Decks Ran Red (1958), Tamango (1957), and Malaga (1960). The latter two were filmed abroad.
Like Paul Robeson, Dorothy Dandridge fled this country, hoping to find in Europe an opportunity to play diversified, untyped characters. But she too encountered only disillusionment and repeated compromises.
Tamango cast her a mulatto slave loved by a white ship captain (Curt lurgens). Two versions, one French, the other English, of all the love scenes were filmed. Then because of the interracial love theme no major American company would distribute the picture, and it failed The Decks Ran Red fared a little better. In this tempestuous tale of a ship mutiny, Dandridge was surrounded by a trio of handsome white actors, lames Mason, Stuart Whitman, and Broderick Crawford. As all three furtively undressed her with their eyes, it was apparent thai had she not been black she would have ended up in the arms of one or the other before the picture's conclusion. In Malaga. Edmund Purdom and Trevor Howard were her leading, men. Asa woman torn between two loves, Dandridge was peculiarly remote and melancholy So immersed was she in despondency that her performance at times seemed separate from the rest of the movie. Here Dandridge was fully stripped of the fire and passion that dominate I her Carmen. Instead she appeared at her most vulnerable. What weighed her down was nol so much her character's dejection as her own. "No one knew what her nationality was to be in the picture," her manager, Earl Mills, later reported. "The problem as to whether Trevi >i Howard should kiss her on the screen was called ridiculous. This was Dorothy's most frustrating acting experience by far."
Curiously, the important aspect of these three European movies (as well as island in theSuni was that Dandridge was bringing her own personal disappointments and frustrations to hri characters. Audiences responded to the sadness on screen as an outside force. Perhaps t hey told themselves that the reason Dorothy Dandridge—this exquisite black love goddess was unfulfilled was because of that drop of Negro blood. It was wrecking her chances l< it fulfillment. And indeed, for Dorothy Dandridge, on screen and off, in the mass imagination the tragic flaw was her color.
I),indinine's last imp)id,ml Aini'in .in him was Voniu and IW m \'>">'> As < '.itfish Kim'', 11 il I id lie.',, she pill lii-i si, ii i|ii.ililli". i Hi In llll.ml display I >■      .. i In i n ',11.Halls l< mg I |gl il
THE 1950s: BLACK STARS 199
skirt and dark wide-brim hat made Dandridge a stunning creation. As she walked through the theatrical sets of the film, she was Dorothy Dandridge. Even star performers Pearl Bailey find Sammy Davis, |r., failed to take the screen from her. Costar Sidney Poitier was literally dwarfed. Again Dandridge portrayed the woman at odds with society, again the Bad Black Girl living to go right, again the tragic heroine who ends up leaving the good Porgy to wander Up No'th to Harlem with Sportin' Life. Dandridge gave a highly unusual interpretation of Bess, ii less obviously sexual woman (she refuses to play Bess as a whore), a far more haunting one. I he performance won her a Foreign Press Golden Globe Award nomination as best actress In a musical.
The rest of Dorothy Dandridge's career was a sad story. She appeared in but two more i 11ires. Producers and directors seemed unable to think of her in any terms but that of the i ic, doomed mulatto, and already by the late 1950s and early 1960s the mulatto figure was •lilted. There was talk of starring her in Cleopatra, but the plans fell through. Off-screen she was beset by a number of personal conflicts. In many respects, she epitomized the confused, unsatisfied movie star dominated by the publicity and life style that informed her screen linage. She was openly seen with white actors. And the stories circulated that she was ,m 1.11 ted to white men only. On the set of one film in which she worked opposite a very dark ltl.it k actor, she underwent a minor trauma, it was said, because she did not want his black
......Is to touch her. In the late 1950s her marriage to the silver-haired white restaurateur
I >enison seemed to confirm suspicions that Dorothy Dandridge had fallen victim to acting mi her screen life in private. In 1962 her troubles were heightened when after her divorce lliim Denison she found herself bankrupt. There were no movie jobs, few club offers, and 'iil\ ■« i asional television appearances. Dorothy Dandridge found herself a has-been, an in.i' luonism unwanted in a new Hollywood. Slowly, it was rumored, she drifted into alcohol, i'ill-, .mil self-destructive love affairs. Then in 1965, at the age of forty-two. Dorothy Dandridge was lound dead, the victim of an overdose of anti-depression pills. In the end, Dorothy
1.....fudge lived out and apotheosized the role she was always best at, the doomed tragic
mulatto, trapped, so the film industry believed, because of her color.
M.I
ney Poitier: hero for an integrationist age
iiii'V Poitier was the 1950s' third black star. His career proved more substantial, profes-ii illy uid personally, than those of his predecessors. Poitier came to the movies almost 1 '' ui ly Horn in Nassau in 1927, the youngest of eight children, he had lived in Miami i nniing to New York in the 1940s. With no thought of a film career, he worked in New 'i it odd jobs as a dockhand, dishwasher, chicken plucker, and bus boy. One day while
""i'.....I hlough l lie Tlic Ni'ic York Times, he stumbled on an ad for actors at the American
^■fO Theater. He auditioned—with disastrous results. But soon he became determined In In' .i si i, , i". si ii I ,ii I or All i-i null..i ■. l. ii'i- loli". .mil some road tours, Sidney Poitier came to
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11.1ni i■'.isoir. wliv lii   ii.....Ii ' I ui' I wi ui .m amlii'in e .il a lime when other black actors
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200   DONALD BOGLE
manners. For the mass white audience, Sidney Poitier was a black man who had met then standards. His characters were tame; never did they act impulsively, nor were they threats to the system. They were amenable and pliant. And finally they were non-funky, almost sexl< ■ and sterile. In short, they were the perfect dream for white liberals anxious to have a colored man in for lunch or dinner.
Poitier was also acceptable for black audiences. He was the paragon of black middle-class values and virtues. American Negroes were still migrating north and were gradually incre i their political power. The rising middle classes and the power (limited as it might havi seemed) of their money supported Poitier. Black America was still trying to meet whin standards and ape white manners, and he became a hero for their cause. He was neitliei crude nor loud, and, most important, he did not carry any ghetto cultural baggage with him No dialect. No shuffling. No African cultural past. And he was almost totally devoid of rhythm In short, he was the complete antithesis of all the black buffoons who had appeared bet. m in American movies. This was one smart and refined young Negro, and middle-class Amen. ,i both black and white, treasured him.
But the second reason for Poitier's ascension was that in many respects his characters were still the old type that America had always cherished. They were mild-mannered tour, throwbacks to the humanized Christian servants of the 1930s. When insulted or badgered, tin Poitier character stood by and took it. He knew the white world meant him no real harm I li differed from the old servants only in that he was governed by a code of decency, dut) and moral intelligence. There were times in his films when he screamed out in rage al thl injustices of a racist white society. But reason always dictated his actions, along with li for his fellow man. Most important, he did not use his goodness only as a means of sa\ position. Past good Negroes in the movies, notably Bill Robinson, were usually concerned about pleasing the master in order not to be booted out of the Big House. But Poitiei dl not care about the Big House. Nor did his goodness issue from some blind spot of Chirr.11 IK faith (as with his screen "mother" Louise Beavers.) He acted as he did because an overriding intelligence demanded that his characters be humane.
Finally, Poitier became a star because of his talent. He may have played the old to IB dressed up with modern intelligence and reason, but he dignified the figure. Always on dispU was the actor's sensitivity and strength. One can trace in all the Poitier features of the Wll the qualities that made him a national favorite. Interestingly, the evolution of the Poltll | screen personality was swift. In his first film, No Way Out (1950), audiences saw all the qualltli that would make Poitier characters so "laudable" for the rest of the decade.
loseph Mankiewicz's No WayOul launched not only Poitier's career but the cycle of problem pictures in the 1950s. Literate and sophisticated, the movie spotlighted the race riotsth.it hid broken out after World War II, at the same time presenting a sensitive portrait of the edm .ilml Negro. The plot centers on a young Negro doctor, Luther Brooks, at a large metropolii IM hospital. When two white hoodlums are wounded during an attempted robbery, Brook', lend the pair. One of the men dies. The other then accuses Brooks of murder. Thereafter the y >illl| doctor is embroi led in controversy, and he fights to prove his innocence. When the remaining white hoodlum organizes a group of racist friends to attack the ghetto area, the city veig»| on a major race riot. By a lucky stroke of Hollywood imagination. Brooks proves his innoc ring through an autopsy, and equilibrium returns to the city
With Its (risp and qiile k wilted dialogue No Willi ( Mil lo •.....» drgiee i apluied the n......I
ol p, .'.I wai Amen. .1 and '.limine. I up lis leplessei I 1.1. i.il I n e.l it It les   I i la-wise Its N. i '
THE 1950s: BLACK STARS 201
i Ii.ii.ii irr, weie walking exponents of the postwar black doctrines of racial integration mid oveiprove You got em. All A's," the doctor's wife tells him. "No wonder you're tired. Even I m a little tired (leaning up after parties. Eating leftovers. One day off a week to be with my husband To bea woman . We've been a long time getting here We'retired. but we're here, honey. We can be happy. We've got a right to be."
No Way Out garnered critical praise. The New YorkTimes called it "a harsh, outspoken picture wiih implications that will keep you thinking about it long after leaving the theater." But Ntrong. original, and honestly stated as the movie was, it failed to win a large audience. The public was already weary of the Negro-struggle film, perhaps because the struggles of previous . inematic Negroes such as the mulattoes Pinky and Carter had been so hokey and superficial I rom its advertising campaign, No Way Oul must have seemed only one more in the lot.
What distinguished the picture was Sidney Poitier. As Brooks, he had the archetypal modern integrationist torn role. He was a brilliant young doctor whose achievements—the ill As, the correct diagnosis—summed up the eciua I -by-being-superior philosophy He was handsome. He stood straight, spoke well, and never trod on anybody's toes. He was a man who could be reasoned with. He and his wife represented the average middle-class black nnpirants trying to make it. But he never made a move against the dominant white culture. Instead he nourished it. In one scene, after having been shot by the white hoodlum, Poitier oliuggles to save that man's life. In a purely Christian way, he forgives his opponent, saying: "Don't you think I'd like to put the rest of these bullets through his head? I cant.. . because I've got to live too. .. . He's sick. .. . He's crazy . .. but I cant kill a man just because he hates inr " What red-blooded all-American white audiences in this Eisenhower age of normalcy Could not have liked this self-sacrificing, all-giving black man? What integrationist-aspiring hla. k audienc e would not be proud of this model of black respectability? Poitier was clearly
■ in,in for all races
When one thinks of how much of Luther Brooks was to remain with actor Poitier. he is tempted to ask it scriptwriters Mankiewicz and Lesser Samuels should not be credited with i iralingthe most important black actor in the history of American motion pictures. Obviously, 11 ley did create was the character, the screen persona that Poitier was to popularize and
■ i 11. ilize on. In the early days, Poitier no more molded his image than did Stepin Fetchit; he lived out Hollywood's fantasies of the American black man.
I he actor's second film wasZoltan Korda's 1952 adaptation of Alan Paton's South African ilium.i Cry. the Beloved Country. The feature starred Canada Lee as an old village priest |i in neying to lohannesburg in search of a son gone astray. In the city, where he is saddened by the poverty and filth and bewildered by the racism, he is aided in his search by a young I prlrst played by Poitier. The movie made an ultimate plea for racial harmony and conciliation. ' .in.id.i Lee had the finest role of his careen Poitier was a supporting player, but he brought got id humor and a relaxed gregariousness to his priest. Moreover, the young Poitier was there i«i help a battered old man no one else in lohannesburg had the time for, and the humanity I his ' li.u.i. in mi keeping, with his heroic code) merely added to the momentum of his
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Ills next two lilms kY.I Mull I <rn   i l''V| with lelf Chandler and Go, Man. Go (1953) with
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in - i, ,;mI i vi". as a poslwal heed Ma. k I.....        I In rlnotlon.ll explosion "Look. I'dl/ whele I c nine
ll< <n > \.....loll I give i mil i    i ■ hi i ,1.  . i......r.l '., ,1,1 hi '.li, .up. when I', nl n i asks lol a i up
202   DONALD BOGLE
of coffee. But Poitier jumps upon him with passion and regains any lost dignity. Young black audiences loved him for it. Here at long last was a sane black man, free and strong enough
to shout back to whitey.
Shouting back was very much a part of The Blackboard\ungle (1955). In this harrowing expose of American high schools Poitier was costarred with Glenn Ford, Anne Francis, and Vic Morrow. He portrays Gregory Miller, an intelligent, complex student who fears that in the outside world there will be no place for a second-class citizen to take the lead. He hounds and torments white teacher Ford, who represents the oppressive system. He snarls, acts tough, and displays his virility more effectively than in any other film. "Come on! Go ahead! Hit me!" he yells to Ford. Here the disaffiliated young of the 1950s saw a man with a choice. He didn't have to take anything. Even before it was fashionable, he was bucking the corroding system. Yet at the same time, Poitier's Miller was an easily hurt, sensitive young man forced to live outside society. He was the classic loner of the 1950s, much like Marlon Brando and lames Dean. And young audiences understood his loneliness, his confusion, and his entrapment because it was a comment on their own in the Eisenhower age. At The Blackboard \ungle's conclusion, when he aids teacher Ford against a student with a switchblade, some of his earlier impact is diminished, but his code of decency is reaffirmed, and Poitier's Miller becomes a hero for young and old.
During the next four years Sidney Poitier worked in six motion pictures. In Something of Value (1957), with Rock Hudson, Band of Angels (1957), with Clark Gable and Yvonne De Carlo, and The Mark of the Hawk (1958) with Eartha Kitt and luano Hernandez, he was an unlikely amalgam of The Blackboard )ungle's Gregory Miller and No Way Oul's Luther Brooks. Sullen, angry, quick-tempered, and headstrong, he rebelled in many of these films, occasionally playing a modernized version of the black brute. (In the movies, most black men politically militant or merely politically motivated are simplified by the scenarists into the unreasonabli I, animalistic brutes of old.) But always, as if to save Poitier's image and the scriptwriter's whitr supremacist neck, the features concluded with Poitier's goodness and humanity reasserte I and once more audiences discovered him to be on the side of the angels. In this four-yen period, the archetypal Poitier roles—the two that remain among the finest in his gallciy of characters—were as Tommy Tyler in Edge of the City (1957) and as Noah Cullen in The De/imii Ones (1958).
The David Susskind-Martin Ritt production Edge of the City was an adaptation by Robert Alan Aurthurof his own television drama "A Man Is Ten Feet Tall," in which Poitier had already appeared. The story is about two men, a white and a black. In a true gesture of integratiomsi harmony, railroad worker Tommy Tyler befriends a wayward and confused army deserter (lohfl Cassavetes). The story has a twist because for once it was the black man extending In-, hand to the white. Poitier helps the white man find a job, and then as his greate'.l manifestation of friendship invites him home to meet his wife (Ruby Dee) and have dlnm I A Christlike figure, he stands for conscience and humaneness. But he is destroyed by hit kindness and loyalty. During an argument with a fellow white worker in which Poitier delem In Cassavetes, a fight breaks out. Poitier is winning. But he begs his white opponent to quit When he turns to walk away, the white man stabs him in the back. Poitier dies in CaSMVttt arms.
Poitier's role won him great favor with the critics The Neu' York HtftU 'Vnbune called Im.
hi,l< k 111.111 one ol tlet f plive silnplh ily "Wit ll his quit k Millie .lln I en hi I, mil Inn I,ilk," Wl( lie t Iii levlewei   he i ,.....i|i ile I lie hoy 1 ml 1 it deep ylooln Willi .i |ntr lie i in ■.lop .Hi ugly he Id
I
THE 1950s: BLACK STARS i>0 before it begins. But underneath he is a man of serious faith and deep strength, and whet it's time for him to listen sympathetically or to say something important, he is the finest kim of friend." After Edge of the City, no moviegoer in America had any doubts about Poitier's talents Nor did any fail to see what he represented. He was fast becoming a national symbi i| i il brotherly love.
Oddly, when viewed today, the incongruities and disparities ignored by the audience of 1957 are blatantly apparent. Poitier's character falls into the tradition of the dying slave content that he has well served the massa. His loyalty to the white Cassavetes destroys him just as much as the old slave's steadfastness kept him in shackles. In this case, writer Aurt Inn smooths over the black man's death by having the white Cassavetes hunt down the killer.
Curiously, Edge of the City also revealed Sidney Poitier as a colorless black. So immersed is he in white standards that there is little ethnic juice in his blood. The dinner scene between Poitier, his wife, and their white friends is not an interracial summit meeting because there are no cultural gaps. Nor are there any cultural bridges to cross. All four are decent Anient an citizens. Poitier also seems sexless in this movie. In previous features, scriptwriters were sure to keep Poitier's sexuality well hidden. He seldom had a serious movie romance. In those films in which he was married, it was generally to a sweet homebody type who seemed dew ild of sexual passion. Mildred lones Smith played this part in No Way Out. In Edge of the City it was Ruby Dee. She now remains the model movie mate for Poitier. (They have appeared in live lilms together.) An intense and talented actress, Ruby Dee is known for deft performances as unfulfilled, timid, troubled women. Certainly in Edge of the City, as she smiles sweetly .il Poitier or proves how understanding and sensitive she is, audiences must have found 111■ two a well-scrubbed sexless pair. One can understand why later militant patrons would view them both as sterile products of a decadent, materialistic Western culture. It should be not id ili.it in one of their next films together, A Raisin in the Sun (1961), they effectively portrayed a couple with bedroom blues. Poitier's romantic apathy just about drives Dee up the wall in this him, and it is one reason why she wants to abort their expected child.
In the 1960s, Sidney Poitier's sexual neutralization became embarrassingly app.iirni particularly when Hollywood provided romantic interest for him, albeit in a compromised manner. In The Long Ships (1964), when as a villainous Moor he kidnaps a beautiful while w. iman, he has been made to take a year's vow of celibacy. Therefore Poitier's sexual impulses remain safely suppressed. In A Patch of Blue (1965) he has a brief screen kiss with a blind white rill I llizabeth Hartman). Everyone knows there is a romance developing between the Iwo ii il the movie's end, rather than assert himself and bed the girl, he dutifully ships I hi ..II 1.1 ,i •.( hool foi the blind. And in the notorious Guess Who's Coming to I Hmui I 1967) he wins tin i> in. I of a white girl in marriage, but they are a peculiarly unromantic couple who are seen klxKliiK but once in the film, and the audience views this passionate event through a ■ibdrlver's rear-view mirror. Later, in They Call Me MISTER Tibbs (1970), Poitier was finally i iisi opposite a vibrant, overtly sexual black woman, Barbara McNair. But audiences were
u|irnly bullied at seeing this Lenity made up (with halt licit I y gloomed .mil < lollies i tit fly dull and "tasteful") to look like Ruby l>eel I'olllei's sexuality was still a problem loi Hollywood Hit ivlem. ikef s, alii I the .ll tempi s i.. keep 111 n i . . tol wele so obvious that he seen let I I ut lit i' ills 111 the I9')()s, howevel, .illillein i    h i epletl llie nriili.tllly .tnil ml her lespei lei I him lol il
The IV/iiiitf t >>tr. was Mtlney I'olllri « mo»l lllipolt.tlil him ol Ihe tlet .tile In It he played llUMh t'tlllen. a til.it k i niivli I huliilt llllnii In fl white (Tony t'urlln) tin the Iwo em ape Hi.
204   DONALD BOGLE
developed. For, once they have been unchained, the good Poitier comes to the rescue of Curtis, not out of necessity but out of brotherly love. Again he sacrifices himself, this time not with his death but his freedom, all for the sake of his white friend. In this film, one of his biggest hits, Poitier alienated a certain segment of the audience. When he saved his honky brother, he was jeered at in ghetto theaters. Black audiences were consciously aware for the first time of the great tomism inherent in the Poitier character, indeed in the Poitier image. Stanley Kramer's drama had glossed over the real issues and bleached out its black hero. Yet to Poitier's credit, his power as an actor demanded that the role and the film be taken seriously, and the jeers were somewhat muffled when he received an Oscar nomination
for best actor of the year.
Porgyand Bess was Poitier's last film of the 1950s. The movie portrayed blacks as the singing, dancing, clowning darkies of old. Poitier accepted the role of Porgyonly after much pressuring, and, although his performance was engaging, he seemed out of place. Here it was 1959. There was Martin Luther King. There were sit-ins, demonstrations, and boycotts. And what was America's black idol doing? There he stood singing, "I got plenty of nothin', and nothin's plenty for me."
In retrospect, it can be said that all the Poitier films of the 1950s were important and significant. Because they were all made to please a mass white audience at a time when the main topic of conversation was school desegregation, today their messages may seem rigged or naive. But they retain a certain raw-edged bite and vigor. Audiences still respond to the actor's sophistication and charm, to his range and distinctly heroic quality. In the 1960s, Hollywood belittled and dehumanized Poitier's great human spirit by making it vulgarly superhuman. He became SuperSidney the Superstar, and he was depicted as too faithful a servant, the famous Poitier code then a mask for bourgeois complacency and sterility. Bui in the 1950s his work shone brightly. For black and white Americans he was a marvelous reason for going to the movies. And whether an integrationist or a separatist age likes it 01 not, Sidney Poitier's movie characters in the 1950s singlehandedly made audiences believe things would work out, that they were worth working out. It was still just a beautiful dream but often that's what great movies and careers are all about.
In Praise of Character Actors
RUDOLF ARNHEIM
Ulld
The players in our films can be divided at first glance into two categories, as we would say in ■ German school composition: leading actors and character actors. The character actors' •cling surrounds that of the heroes like a baroque frame surrounds a renaissance painting. The fat uncle with a monkey and travelling blanket, the skinny piano teacher with a bun and pince-nez, the decrepit mayor, the hunchbacked inventor, theGalician profiteer, the bloated Ship's cook—these are the character actors. They lend spice to the film. Sweetness and beauty, though, we get from people of a different type and a higher pay scale: neatly combed and hly washed, the lovers romp around the inner circle of the plot.
i character," according to Meyer's Universal Encyclopedia is to be understood as an exaggerated id caricaturized element of art. On the contrary, we would I ike to propose that the character lor shows man as he is; the heroic actor shows man as he would like to be. The character letor is a special type, the heroic actor a general type. The character wears the individual am.i of the genuine, and this starts with his clothing. From the iron cravat to the laced boots, JtDrn the coiled coiffure to the tooth on the watch fob, the character actor's costume offers 111 > .i i omplete, highly disparate collection of the curiosities of human apparel. The leading H Ii 'i ■, »,irb presents us with schematic Standard types, tuxedo and evening dress, bathing Hill nnd pyjamas—flawless models that dare not bear the physiognomical imprint of their net's uniqueness. One spot on the vest, a lost button on the trousers—highly recognized •in nr. nl distinguishing the character actor—would cause the hero to give the studio l| mln v.. i a tongue-lashing and provoke the publi
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lesser a tongue-lashing and provoke the public to unseemly laughter. The character »li ii is by request unshaven, (reckled, cross-eyed, has wrinkles on his neck, dirty fingernails, tin I missing teeth I lero and hen line, on the dt her hand, are bathed in lily's milk, and a pimple iR Ihr i hin can destroy entire days of shooting
The acting displays the same differences as the make-up. The character actor swallows the way or swallows his words, he scratches his head, he slips, he licks a stamp, he kisses
tfll.....lie on both i heeks Willi a stn.i. k I lie lead ,k tuts tall into each other's arms like dancers
||{»y |||i le up and down stairways, they turn their heads graciously from the en face view to the vlfMi profile they lilt their shapely hands, thay spread their arms, and their facial expressions ■t hi h,inning symineliy even In liilmi ■ pain
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206   RUDOLF ARNHEIM
the "man without qualities." Of necessity he possesses a sex and an age, but this exhausts his personal traits. One can confuse lead actors, never character actors. Whether a female le.id role is played by Lilian Harvey, Marianne Winkelstern, Renate Mueller, Kaethe von Nagy, Mady Christians, Maria Paudler, or Liane Haid, whether the lover is played by Froehhi h Brausewetter, Liedtke, Stuewe, Verebes, Lederer, or Trevor, only the slightest nuances and the contracts which have been coincidentally drawn up differentiate them. How, though could we ever confuse Gerron with lunkermann, Sandrock with Wangel, Bressart with Rai Puffy with Arno? This is not to belittle the acting talents of the leading players, but only thi way in which they are used. The character actor's individuality is often emphasized to the point of unbearability, so that he bears more resemblance to a prehistoric amphibian than a respectable contemporary man with a right to vote and a five-room apartment—the leading player's uniqueness is filed down so forcibly that such different and unique actresses as Harvey and Sten cannot be told apart under the same ship officer's cap and after the saim application of makeup.
Even average directors have the most charming notions so long as they're working with character actors. They cleverly use original props and work on the most effective mannerism ■. of facial expression, speech, and gesture. The leading player they mold into a mannequin forbid him everything impulsive, everything new, everything mundane. His sorrow and liln pain must submit to the conventional gymnastics, and, just as in court, nothing may be added and nothing withheld.
What must be demanded of practical directorial work is the penetration of the character actor's methods into the hero's territory. The great success of Hans Albers is due in signilu anl part to the fact that he works in this manner. He plays the hero, the lover, but at the sain, time he acts like a normal person, like a character actor. He yawns, he makes faces, he doc.n | behave himself. Not that we're recommending bad behavior for bon vivants here. But Imw
much liveliness, how much direct contact to the public would be gained if we got away h.....
the childish prejudice that lovers must be on their high horses just because tlmll enlargements appear in the advertisements The actors would breathe sighs of relief, tin . would be more interested in what they're doing, and they would have more opportune, li demonstrate their individuality. We should allow ourselves to let the lead player act, withuul pressure being put on him regarding his costume, make-up and acting—just as individually, just as mundanely, and inflicted with just as many tragic flaws as the character actors W« should let ourselves be convinced that wrinkled trousers are thoroughly reconcilable with ■ love scene, and that a young hero can blow his nose upon learning of his mother's deat h uvm the telephone. If we dare it, it will immediately be apparent what a wealth of untappi 'I possibilities lie hidden here, and what charming warmth and naturalness remain to bediawn out of the simplest plot motif.
Let us dethrone the studios' values and take a look around outside, and we will 1« astonished to see that in this, our real world, there aren't any leading men to be smii only characters!
The Lives of Supporting Players
15
OAVID THOMSON
Let us wonder for a moment whether we have a shared understanding of what a character actor U A character actor plays someone who is not at the heart of a film, or, if at the center, not nomeone whose deci sions are the crux ofthedrama? Thus, Walter Brennan isa character actor m Red River, the narrator (either on the page or on the sound track), its observer, but not a pn 'i agonist Walter Brennan'sGroot does very little in Red River except toss knives or feed lines Into ihe plot when required. He is a fond witness, a model for us. Moreover, he lets the film rnoke fun of his false teeth: stars are edgy about such scenes.
Hut a character actor is not obliged to appear all through a film. He or she may need only | few moments; perhaps one drop-dead scene will do. There is not a lot of Lee Strasberg's llyman Roth in The Godfather, Part II, just a weary, fragile man watching the football game on IV in Miami, and the old fellow surprised and briefly delighted by being met at the airport
When Oscar time comes round, these people are known as "supporting players "The edifice if a picture has stars for spires, and such as Walter Brennan, Thelma Ritter, M. Emmet Walsh and Stockard Channing are their loyal, sturdy and obedient buttresses. Aren't they? Except -aIm . ever met a supporting actor who didn't serve in the belief and expectation that they ■ nil,I and would, and also should, be a star? Every Harry Dean Stanton has his Pan's, Texas, deserves it. lust by virtue of their color, eccentricity, vivacity and fidelity, don't our most ill ived character actors suggest a logic, or a passion, in which their characters are at least Important as any others on view?
May I ask a question? How many of you readers are, in life, merely the subsidiary/supports others? How many of you, on the other hand, are the centers of your known world? You ill have to be as assertive as Buddy Love in Tlie Nutty Professor. Tactful preeminence is in der. Still, aren't ice the subject? And in those cases where, as yet, owing entirely to unruly i In n instances, our centrality has not yet been fully acknowledged, how great is the need, the hi the anger and the energy that build because of obscurity?
I'ui it another way in the horizon of life that surrounds The Maltese Falcon, does Sydney •rust reel's Casper (ait in.in teally believe t h.it the morose, blunt Sam Spade is at the center I n iiiy. ' 11. lesn I 1 - nil is ■ H. ii I. in I ill lei sleep when the story is over'.-1 Whereas Gut m. in has iissi'm a ( all nit: a veil I able I I I iniadi i ()h yes. sir! you can hear him hiss Despite his 1 he- Is a i III veil soul blillillu' w 111.. pi. i I ■»f 1 he tali < in and exeit ismg that unspent. coiled lire III dli ill seipenl mi' ' "......."ii As |i il i n 111 is) i hi li hi In I II was veiy hald to put
208   DAVID THOMSON
Gutman in a composition and not have him take the eye. He is, you see, the shining idealist in the film. He is full of hope, love, need and desire—and desire is always beautiful in the movies, for it reminds us of ourselves.
So, where are we in our definition? Character actors play roles of considerable importance in pictures, yet not the biggest. And just because the action seems to employ them in the service of the gods, they may sometimes thrive, flower and linger in our memories more than the stars. Is it just because they have character? But if they have the character, then what is left for those weightier actors, the alleged stars? What could there be beyond character, except some inane, ghostly glamour that we have come to worship? What does it say about our films, and ourselves, if we put anything so mysterious, so phantom, ahead of character?
There are many practical, professional differences between characters and stars that may help us appreciate the mixture of nature and myth in our movies. The matter of composition is no small matter. Stars live through close-ups; it is there that they exist, radiate and preside Character actors do sometimes get close-ups, but only so that their characters may explain, lie, listen, threaten, make jokes, go mad or be the kind of small, vain fusspot not worthy to 'rule over films.' Stars sometimes just wait, reflect and dwell in themselves in close-ups Character actors never get that time: they have to be busy; that engine once known as story has to earn their time and intimacy. (We may love character actors because their scene', tend to tell the story—as opposed to suffering from it.)
It follows that character actors do not get the same kind of light. They do not have stand-ins, and so their lighting is arranged quickly; it is done so that they may be visible, not emotional or atmospheric. More or less, for 50 years, character actors had the same lighting it was on. Thus, they do not look as good as stars—but, the system says, they never did; that's why they are character actors, not stars, with fat, scars, lines and quirks to prove it. They ate the system's conciliatory gesture to the unlovely masses; they are meant to be like us. Su we should defend them and urge them to keep the faith with flaw and defect. Sydney Greenstreet would have been ill-advised to lose 150 pounds. Wasn't it dieting that killed Lain I Cregar? If Thelma Ritter had woken up one morning looking like Gene Tierney she'd havi been lost. For no one could ever have endured a Tierney who could think and talk, and wh< I wasn't endlessly pliant to male dreams and wishes. (That still goes on: Rhea Perlman'sCail.i in Cheers utters the wisecracks of romantic dis-abuse.)
Character actors don't get script or direction in the way stars do. (I know I am begging tin• question whether either of these commodities is really current. But bear with me, enter inn the fancy that they help a picture.) Character actors are hired to be Warren Oates or Spring Byington, Elisha Cook or Eve Arden. Casting is thought to settle an identity and remove further problems. Such tried-and-true players can turn up and deliver to order. If they only see a script a few days or hours before shooting, never mind, for they know what they do. and they know that's why you've hired them. They are automatic, axiomatic. So the director < .in give all his time to pry the star out of his trailer and out of a bad mood/bad high/bad i mien cul-de-sac long enough to be glorious. Sometimes if there isn't any script, a character n< tOI may be looked to as the person who knows best how Ben lohnson or Marie Windsor talks Su character actors are movie buffs.
They have to love the medium, lot they ate not paid on anything 11J-■ the si ale si,us r\\\<<\
Nol ill i i 11. Ill' lei .11 11 us . i Hue iii Ii il lesli Iii. i Is 11 i iii-ii pli lilies i hi 11 lllto lilts iii ( |,|ss|( s Tills
LIVES OF SUPPORTING PLAYERS 209
helps tlinii iln\ in told lot without security, they have to keep on working—and doesn't every, me k 111 iw thai an a. 11.1 s i i.ill needs to be honed every day. just the way Kirby Puckett likes four at bats every day? It's only the stars who can get away with taking a year off. They're sei ure I i. an a lax point ol view they may need to rest lor the next ten months. And at $6 million a picture, who wants to work just for the sake of it and risk a dog that could drag their stock down? They don't have to hit, they only need to be the designated hitter.
Character actors must feel unusually isolated. They do not have an entourage, and their lollowings must be taken on trust. Even among the readers of a movie magazine, how many people today could put the right name to the face if the pictures were of John Mahoney, Dan Seymour, Richard Bright, Mercedes Ruehl, Tom Noonan, Charles Napier, Barbara Baxley, Verna Bloom, Margaret Wycherley, lames Villiers? lust because they all set out hoping to be leads, they live with disappointment, draining struggle, and the lie that they are happy the way things worked out. Television is their best chance of fulfillment, for that is where natural character actors—from Ed Asner to Betty White, from Michael Tucker to Blair Brown—may get series, prominence, work and residuals. TV is certainly the arena in which the most interesting ensemble acting is to be seen in America. It is also the medium in which pressures ol budget and schedule fight the last battle against the prevaricating whim and neurotic hesitation of stars.
Nor is there any evidence that America is suffering in its supply of character actors, I lill Street Blues and L.A. Law have been rich proving grounds, even if many of the Blues seem to have died with the series. In the selection that follows, there is ample evidence of quality and daring. Moreover, we still have a few so-called star actors who honor the attitudes embodied in character acting—I am thinking of Gene Hackman, Alec Guinness, Robert Duvall, i ryl Streep, Vanessa Redgrave, Susan Sarandon. But the most important point that an introductory essay like this can make is to remind UK of how often America's movie-making has excelled when it has been founded in something llki a stock company, a group of actors for whom human and social character has seemed more interesting than clout.
Consider the work of Griffith, Lubitsch, Welles, Preston Sturges, Hawks, Ford, Coppola n ii I Alt man. Not that any of them have proved helpless or intransigent with stars and starry s— so long as one remembers Welles' insinuating and Gutmanesque need to be that star himself, and Altman's preoccupied but casual urge to knock the shine off big-name actors. 1.ninth helped define stardom as a narrative device; Lubitsch cherished the vanity of all actors, especially the pomp of small men; Hawks made so rare an icon of Lauren Bacall that in ' i it her director could ever rediscover it. |ohn Ford is largely responsible for what we think i .1 as |i .Iim Wayne, and Coppola has drawn extraordinary, dominating performances from Al I'm ino Gene Hackman and Marlon Brando
Hut those starry triumphs cannot be detached from the aura of the group that pervades tin ' \odfather, Only Angels Wave Wings, The Shop Around the Corner, The Magnificent Ambersons or NrtWiW/tV In some of those cases, It may be argued that the community of actors has produced a Mnllmentality th.it hinder, the ,n tlon or the meaning of a him; there is a false clubbiness possible iii sik h lil ins In I' 'tin I old I lie ihrloiii ol tram spirit can serve as a blithe cover for
milll.iiy iihedif iii r Their Is so nun h.....ir dispute < out ladle don and everyone talking and
lltllikliig at urn e In the gtoiipo ol llnwanl Hawks lutlhet, in The dodfather. It is the very Intensity i it l.iinily lei-lllig thai lean s tin I uliavli n 11| I lie ( ol Iroiirs so ambiguous Wr have llli Ii a good lllne wall hllig Ihe leedliiu tlilrlplay ol I'.n Ino. Duvall. lames i a.in K'li hint
210   DAVID THOMSON
Castellano, Abe Vigoda and lohn Cazale, that we sometimes forget what it is the team does The process of the movie reveals the beguiling Don in Coppola—yet there are those in his real extended family who have beheld not just a patriarch, but a loner, a user and a prince of darkness to match Michael Corleone. From Capra to Coppola, there are films that rhapsodize over community yet plot dictatorship.
There is a more challenging ideal in movie-making, which is to show us the group as a natural, helpless arrangement, not so much a unified team as the inevitable gathering together of lonely, suspicious, unhappy individuals who will occasionally rise to states of love, rapport and association, before slipping away from one another. This is a view of life that respects both solitariness and responsibility, and which sees how private lives and actions cannot help but affect public experience. It leads to a kind of film that spreads beyond the frame or a set storyline; it invokes a continuity and a crowded context that goon, seemingly, forever Needless to say, it understands how far the common state of experience is that flux of farce and tragedy in which we would all like to be at the center of the wheel. But cannot be Any objective observer sees a wheel, but subjectivity insists there are as many wheels as there are spokes. This is a way of seeing that confronts a factory of wheels; it is the cinema of Renoir and Mizoguchi—it is not entirely American.
For example, such a view does not fit well with tidy, conclusive and uplifting endings, or with any notion of some roles or lives being grander than others. The panorama of many small lives—of character actors—produces doubt, dismay and caution. Whereas so many American films want us to feel good.
Let me process three films which do pass this test with honors: The Shop Around the Corner, The Magnificent Ambersons and Nashville. In the Lubitsch picture, the title signals how far the place is the subject, even if it is a Culver City Budapest: lames Stewart and Margaret Sullavan are stars, and the discovered love between their characters is the destination of the story Yel it is a movie about misunderstanding and off-setting context, of many different things going on at once, of chance revelation and unexpected benefit. And it is in the company of Fran) Morgan, loseph Schildkraut, Felix Bressart. Sara Haden and William Tracy that we see a collection of stories and a climate of confusion such that Stewart and Sullavan pass as equal characters, noble fools living in the same light as everyone else. In Ambersons. love and happiness cannot be achieved anywhere without some corresponding loss elsewhere: a kind of emotional bookkeeping is at work, and no accumulation of assets or sentimental credit 1« proof against failure. It is that rare American film in which every character fails—no worn lei the system lacked the heart to finish it. Nashville is the apotheosis of this way of looking; it 1» a film about the crowd, maybe the first American film about us, the audience, that throng i 'I unnamed character actors.
Supporting Character
The Queer Career of Agnes Moorehead
16
I'ATRICIA WHITE
'Hie main character of Robert Aldrich's The Killing of Sister George is a role-playing lesbian 1 more than one sense. In "real life" |une Buckridge (Beryl Reid) is "George," a bawdy, ili iniiieering) cigar-smoking butch, whose younger lover Childie keeps house and collects ili ills As the country nurse "Sister George" on a television soap opera, she is a character o.ss beloved by the public. Produced in 1968, on the verge of Stonewall and just in r lo receive an X under the ratings system that finally replaced the Production Code, The u,i of Sister George is one of the first Hollywood films to represent lesbianism openly. But, 'iking its main character a character actress, the film suggests that lesbians may always •   been present in popular culture, accepted and loved by audiences in genres that never 'Hoi | of the existence of homosexuality.
m" him thematizes the continuity between the off-screen "masculine," tweed-suited 1,1" lype and the on-screen "asexual," tweed-suited nurse type—thus George is able to il i n iprlate her lesbian moniker from her television character—and demonstrates that the 'list Miction of the "asexual" is, of course, a heterosexist one. At one point the drunken
.....it.....akes a pass al a group ol nuns in a taxicab—a scene that at once demonstrates her
ii nexual courage and visibility and wittily restates the theme of covert and overt types.
I......r ought to be able to recognize a sister when she sees one. In the film's lesbian bar
Mimed on location and thus with extraordinary subcultural verisimilitude at London's ^Blwiys Club—George and Childie dress up as Laurel and Hardy. This additional level of Mo inc. makes reference to a practice of comic typing that conceals homoerotic logic Wlllilu a wildly popular mass cultural form.
When i Mi nuc executive Mercy Croft takes a fancy to Childie and has the Sister George I' ii "lei killed oil the soap, following a familiar script of homophobic narrative exigency, the HHIIon of the actress's visibility as a lesbian is preempted The supporting actress is offered id the Ii mi line, tole in hei veiv own si'ties   as Clarabell the Cow In Frank Marcus's play ■Pit Willi Ii the lilm was ad,ipieil * ,isiei i ,ei ,iro was a i haiaotei on a radio soap opera; the i    illels the demotion limn human lo animal with the step down from on-camera HM In vol! e ovei i ow Yel I In- ii ile In iwrvnl demeanilie and 1111si >c.yiust, atlords a certain
.......I 1 .....IC's disguise Al 11......11 'I I lie Mill i ,n 'Ige, who had at lust si mill III ly till lied
■Mil the i"le ol i I ualiell begins In |H,n II, i I............ Kill even in hei humiliation Ins a
til iii' I Humph     del   llllll'l......• • I - J«    I 'ill II |ni|»oti,l Will Si ill eulel I lie homes ol i i ,11 III less
212   PATRICIA WHITE
Agnes Moorehead was a familiar and popular television personality in the role of Endora on "Bewitched" when in one of the last of some sixty film roles she provided the voice ol the goose in the animated feature Charlotte's We6. It was not a degrading part, as Clarabell Cow was meant to be—she co-starred with her "beloved friend" Debbie Reynolds, and Paul Lynde contributed to the barnyard fun. The role drew on her roots in radio—what om ■ reviewer described as her trademark "crackling, snapping, sinister, paranoic, paralyzing voice."1 And, before her stardom as television's preeminent witch, Moorehead reigned ai one of the most widely recognized and highly regarded supporting actresses in Hollywood cinema. Like George, she played "types"; she was the silver screen's definitive spinster aunt. In accounting for the adaptability of her persona across a range of popular media, I believe that another element of Moorehead's star image must be considered. In an interview with Boze Hadleigh, "A Hollywood Square Comes Out," Lynde, a special guest star on "Bewitched" who played an "uncle" as aptly and as memorably as Moorehead played an "aunt remarks, "Well, the whole world knows Agnes was a lesbian—I mean classy as hell, but one of the all-time Hollywood dykes."2
Regardless of whether the lady really was a lesbian, the characterization complement-, her persona. It represents a gendered node within what Eve Sedgwick has described as tin modern Western "epistemology of the closet."3 If the "whole world" knows about Agnes, the so-called general audience may exercise what Sedgwick calls "the privilege of unknowing after all, it's only entertainment. I would like to argue that it is no mere queer coincident that Agnes Moorehead can be dubbed both one of the all-time Hollywood supporting actresses and one of the all-time Hollywood dykes. Moorehead is a prime candidate for g.iy hagiography. Her best known incarnation, Endora, is a camp icon; she passes even lit* cinephile test, having been featured in films by auteurssuch as Welles, Sirk, Ray, and Aldin h But, more important, Moorehead's ubiquity and longevity as a character actress are such thai she can be identified with the very media in which she triumphed, with the regime of popnl .1 entertainment itself, and with the continuities and ruptures in gender and sexual ideology that can be read off from it. At once essential to classical realism and marginal to its narr.it lv« goals, the supporting character is a site for the encoding of the threat and the promlM of female deviance. As New York lesbian performance artist Lisa Kron writes in a biography il note, reflecting on the animal and grandmother roles she was asked to play in colleg* "It begins to dawn on her that 'character actress' is really a code word for lesbian.'"1 Tlii negative valence of many of Moorehead's roles is marked—Endora herself is the butt ol constant barrage of mother-in-law jokes. Her persona is less "heartwarming" than many a golden age supporting actress—from Anne Revere to Mary Wickes to Marjorie Main Although the ideological stake in subordinating female difference is apparent, this negativity may also be Moorehead's most subversive edge.
My discussion of Moorehead takes up three overlapping areas of inquiry: the nan.ill' 1 function of supporting characters in the heterosexual Hollywood regime (as well as ilis
ideological weight that they carry in television's world of family values); the importai......I
typification in these roles and in lesbian recognizability mote generally, and the .....I 1
standing of star images as complex, contradictory signs, as exemplified in the work ol gay IlIlM theorist Richard Dyer as well as in the reception practices of gay culture.
Whal is it that supporting i h.ir.x lets are meant In  suppoil   il not the imbn< ill 1
11 lei 'I. igies nl heteinsexil.ll loin, uk e ,111(1 while Airier u .iii lirgi-l......y | iel i neat ing II
i lliein.ii' They plop |||i a veiy pall n ill.il lepiesenl.il h in.il ' n I' i   '   ' ill | ilii'li I lr.ith desi illn
Ulil I U i Alii 11/ i*l Ai .III !, Mi ii nil III Ml
the npei.itinii i il ii.ui.illvllv   I he llhn pl( ks up      the notable elements (ti 11......li II
lor the pmc lev. , ,| I he 11,il i,il Ive whl( h in let ill li dell l les I hell notability | Willi......
giving up whal is thus lilt aside and which it seeks to retain something . ■! h reserve of insignificant material—in order precisely to ring true, line in ,,,ilui, i speak a social "truth," the supporting character represents "an available lasei 1
insignificant." if "realistic," types of women—workers, older women iimiwhite w. m.....     I ,«> king
a love interest—Hollywood deems only one type of love of interest—fhadoaftii I r   i   1 1
up" by the story: in the most basic narratological terms, she is the wit< I.....in
film's end she has literally been left aside, just as she is composin. .n ill, >> frame. For, as Heath economically puts it, "Narrative contains a film s miilnpli mi as a single articulation, its images as a single image (the narrative linage whii li I* a Mini • presence, how it can be talked about, what it can be sold and boiighl i m stills displayed outside a cinema, for example)."5 Supporting chata, n . m narrative image of heterosexual closure, their names rarely appeal in the lelavltl blurbs about old movies, nor are their photographs included mi iln delivers a "picture" to a potential viewer.
Yet attention to the function of certain types of female chai.n len. . an llimw lulu ioIIhI
the single-mindedness with which the Hollywood system re-pic.....
example, the discourse of lesbian desire introduced by housekeepei Me. I......
Anderson) in Hitchcock's Rebecca significantly undercuts the film's ......
"resolution." And. while melodramatic pathos depends on lane Wyinan   I. c, Irom Rock Hudson in Sirk's Magnificent Ofwssion. an alternative reading mail
ol spectatorial regard—might note that she spends this off-si urn in........
her devoted nurse/companion, played by Agnes Moorehead, who olleied W\ • lour films besides. A film may be dismissive of a minor player, poll lay In i t .i but it may take less time and care to assimilate her to its ideologu al | m ■ i■ • i 11. • In the case of the female protagonist. In Hedda Hopper's column hit I'l i
the Stars," Moorehead remarks, "I sort of look at myself sideways nil.......
this < omment indicates a failure of narcissistic identification, even, pet haps ......!...... ,
Conservatism to which her image isoften harnessed, it also suggests an a.tun t  ■ I llminal. and at times disruptive, narrative function. It replicates, too, iln obllqui Iglitllni It.iced on Hollywood cinema by many queer spectators.
Nurses, secretaries, career women, nuns, companions, and housekeepei- .....
lesbian identity, but a deviation from heterosexualized femininity Gay malí i llllii 1
Iftg-lster an affinity with such characters. Inasmuch as character actresses u.....
admired, or pressed into camp service by a queer mode of reading, it is appaienily i h.ii llnelf that is supported. Thelma Ritter, a great ironic interpreter of this type ol n ilr w<u a [■articular favorite of gay film historian Vito Russo, for example. In his liunl mi tin re Ucnslbility. Michael Uronski singles out the woman friend that "many top female si.us whip p nu d oil with betme ihey ended up getting the leading man" as a cinem.itk type with paitii ului appeal pi u Hayed by iln- like-, ol loan Hlondell and Eve Arden, "the sldeklckV i" I' was i;i-i iei. illy h . .n i .r........I ii I. u ite am I to give t he audience a pungent analysis ol the plot
Hldekli ks wen - -.an a-.t..........nalili,  alii I sensible They wele cleverly sell deplei at lug bill
Id al-.. .1 in ii tin wil . ,i....... bio i.....I eve i In ťet I he in. ni -.ulekli ks had In settle ti ,| being
lliiini Ih.in everybody else I n| gay men who Would nevel walk nil into I he sunset with a Mill nr. man 'he slilekli k was a id mm ill lexl |||n  Itmnskl al tubules a si nt "I iih-I.i, ntn al mle
214   PATRICIA WHITE
to confidante characters and a self-conscious reading practice to their fans, but he reads these images in relation only to male characters and spectators. He goes on to cite Russo's work on sissy roles and the actors who specialized in their portrayal in Hollywood films of the thirties and forties. Bronski asserts, "Woman sidekicks were never played as lesbians, just 'old maids,' but the non-romantic male was always implicitly gay."7
Given the virtual conceptual blank that is lesbianism in the culture at large, it is no accident that the social types standing in for lesbians in Hollywood cinema are misogynistically coded as "asexual." They are trivialized and rendered comical rather than threatening. Although sex and ideology certainly mark the stereotypes of sissy and old maid differently, in particular in relation to tropes of gender inversion, Bronski's statement limits the operation of the connotative in the female images and thus compounds the invisibility to which lesbians
are already consigned.
In contrast, one lesbian writer confidently attributes sexuality to a much later incarnation of the "old maid" type. In a cover article for Lesbian News entitled "The Truth about Miss Hathaway," Marion Garbo Todd defends the spinster secretary character played by Nancy Kulp on the sixties American sitcom "The Beverly Hillbillies" from the following assessment in the fan magazine Television Collector. "Miss lane Hathaway could have been the prototype for the term 'Plain lane.' Tall and lanky, with an asexual manner, the epitome of a spinster" Todd retorts, "Where does this 'plain lane' stuff come from? How can the word plain be used to describe the handsome Miss Hathaway? Tall and lanky' is not the right phrase fen her body; 'long and sensuous' is much more accurate. Her long neck, aquiline nose, wavy hair, and large bright eyes made her very beautiful. She had smile lines to swoon over, and her voice was a delight. ... In her tasteful skirt suit, short hairdo, and horn-rimmed glasses she could have been the lead character in any lesbian pulp novel.""
Visual codes are recognized, enumerated, and deployed to cast Kulp in a leading role In a different genre. In her groundbreaking work on studio-era lesbian director Dorothy Arznei Judith Mayne notes that, in her films, secondary women characters can be seen sporting the dapper dress and masculine manner that Arzner herself affected. Lesbianism is made visible within the text through ironic inflection of an "asexual" type.9
As Richard Dyer writes, in an essay on "typical" lesbian and gay representations, "Amajoi fact about being gay is that it doesn't show. . . . There are signs of gayness, a repertoire t ,1 gestures, expressions, stances, clothing, and even environments that bespeak gayness, but these are cultural forms designed to show what the person's person alone does not show: that he or she is gay. Such a repertoire of signs, making visible the invisible, is the basis ol any representation of gay people involving visual recognition, the requirement of recognizabihty in turn entailing that of typicality."10 Thus, historically and culturally specific codes in lesbian and gay communities function similarly to the codes of recognition in popular cultuul forms. In this light, the often-heard demand for nonstereotypical, "well-rounded" gay and lesbian characters in film may go against thevery conditionsof ourvisibility. Dyer den. i the prevalence of the sexological discourse of "in-betweenism"—the notion that homosexu.ih betray characteristics of the opposite gender—in a range of typical visual repre: including self-representations, of effeminate men and mannish women. Citing Tde Kif/m.i of Sister George, he sees both George's tweeds and her rival Mercy Croft's chic and tailored predatory look as variations on this "dyke" type " The vexed quest ii m ol lesbian sterec >t vi >nm-< an be related to I he potent tally subversive implications i il iin iir gi-iiei.il pi.i<lie es < >l visual lyplng In Inn.tie siippi nl mg i li.ii.u ins
QUI I U ' AUI iimii  Al ,NI ', M( )( Mil iii All     > I S The wide-.plead a| i| iielieie.li hi i il llie M-.tel deoiges ol Miss lane llathaways as asexual
or. worse man -.i.uveil pin innly Invisible as lesbian—has to do, perhaps paradoxically, with the visual overdetermlnatlon of "woman" as sexual in film. The supporting character necessarily diverges from this Ideal—not incidentally, a white one—of woman in film I In-cinematic system of the look constructs the singular female star as image and guaiaun , of masculine desire and spectatorial fascination. As images of a different version ol lemlnlnlly than that of female stars, supporting characters may not ultimately be so suppcuim- , ,t in, status quo, for they can inflect with female desire the image of woman emlmilli I In
the leading lady, with whom they are narratively paired and iconogiaphn all\ > ■ h.....• ■ t
often within the same frame.
One of the most consequential operations of Hollywood's ronl.iliim.......I    u IaI
enforcement of difference is the near-exclusive restriction of nonwhltr and vlmi ill   11 I
audibly recognizable ethnic types precisely to supporting roles Mary Ann I ii i >..........t
that the "woman's film" genre is really the "white woman's him": 'Win n bin i
present, they are the ground rather than the figure; often they aie ma, I, I, ..... lllillii
diegesis. They inhabit the textual sidelines, primarily as servants 1 11.....mpl
crossing, and incoherence of racialized sexual and gender ideolog
screen conjunction of, and contrast between, black and white women I In man
often denounced as "asexual," may be inflected as "lesbian"..... i.
i he presentation of the white heroine's desire. Such a charactet, or a kin
as Ethel Waters in a mammy role, might not merge altogether wii h i h.   I......i ......
American, lesbian, and gay viewers.
A process of erotic doubling between a woman of color aiii 111,, vhlli   i u 11 digure lesbianism—for example, between Anna May Wong and M.n companions in Shanghai Express, in which the signifier prostitution , <n ill i ol the two women. Or the racist projection of sexuality onto tin erotic tension between the stereotyped woman of color and tin inpn presumptively heterosexual white heroine. Bette Davis's chaiai in i a, is in The Letter—she kills her lover in the opening sequence am -
her death at the hands of his Asian widow at the end While I he in,.......In III*
|hown, the "other" woman's body is insistently present, bizattely urn I.....
makeup and costuming used to transform white supporting ,n I iinnon casting practice foregrounds the way in which the repirseni.il t.
linns on the attributes of whiteness in the classical Hollywood......... n, n,n i a., i ,, i
the Davis character's long, center-parted black hair is uncannily u......i 1
by that of her mocking Latina maid, played by Mexican actress I......i ii ,i ■
In the story, the heroine disguises herself in the jeans and Manuel shin *.....i '
That the masquerade involves an element of gender iransgie-.-.i, m i......■ ill
the irreducible di Herein e between women—race, (lass, and p, «, i   11......
lUch doubling its dr.-.....
ludith Mayne goes on to di-.i ir.s In >w images of Dorothy Ai/nn   . .It. n i^■.....
looking at a i onveiil i, ,nal Iy Inn lull i. a, lirss    have been Used to llhr.li
IXts that emplialli ally d......I iiipiiIIihi Ih-i lesbianism When llinun Intlilun Ii I
K ll.ltlges ol the ga/e be i w. , Ii i i illl mutiny li'ln,lie types    gniri.il I \ In i ■   ■ i,   >i| i
laitlesses    an-ei In ie, I in AKIii'l » lllin* Miiyiir alglles. I hey i all be i, a, I , i gualiiie In a Iwi, -.In .1 In nil Mm ml WrtUh » "Mi, IvVivIl n/ Mnmii- Mmvi  iii.  i    i    I Aglmi
lllllll -lift iii! nlily ••.liHMle
in men
1« IIHVPI •• «MlV»
ml II.I.
216   PATRICIA WHITE
Moorehead in her bathrobe prevents lane Russell's sexuality from being perceived as intended for the male spectator alone. Yet the early feminist analysis of this film, too, ignored its lesbian visual economy. In another two-shot, Agnes Moorehead and Debbie Reynolds embody the visual relation between a supporting actress "type" and a bona fide female star. On-screen and off, the couple conforms to the stereotype of older, sapphic sophisticate who preys on innocent younger woman; in this case the singing nun.
While great Hollywood supporting actresses such as Thelma Ritter or Mercedes McCambridge could perhaps be read as working-class butch or fifties inbetweenist types, Agnes Moorehead's persona fits a more upper-class sapphic stereotype.15 As a promotional item describes her, "Rated as one of the best dressed stars of screen and radio, her preference runs to tailored suits"—to recall Lynde's words, she was "classy as hell". On-screen, the spinster type refuses both the masculine signifiers that make lesbianism visible in heterosexual terms and the hyperbolization of the feminine that is the very definition of womanliness. The type is a product of a misogynist and heterosexist imagination—yet within it the spinster can at once "pass" as straight and be recognizable as lesbian.
It is impossible to unpack the ambivalent character of the narrative category of support and the negotiable aspects of visual typification apart from a consideration of the performer as text. Donald Bogle, in Tows, Coons, Mulatto?, Mammies, and Bucks, his influential book on African American stereotypes, presents the most sustained argument for how particular performers become visible in these roles and transform types. As he states in an interview. There was another life and point of view that was being suggested to me by Hattie McDaniel's rather hostile edge."14 It is Ritter's nurses, Arden's sidekicks, Franklin Pangborn's sissies, and McDaniel's maids that capture the imagination. The more roles an actress appears in, the more unforeseen the effects that are introduced in a particular text by her casting. Star texts are ongoing, modified by shifting ideological imperatives, shaped by audience response On series television, the weekly appearance of the performer works like typecasting in studio films. It is in this sense that I want to speak of Moorehead's queer career.
In his work on stars, Dyer argues that, in narrative films, novelistic conceptions of character are articulated with stars as already signifying images—which essentially function within the same bourgeois ideology of the self-consistent individual. How might this approach apply tO Moorehead, who, as a character actress, however familiar, is not strictly a "star"? As Dyernotel "Type characters are acknowledged to have a place . .. but only to enable the proper elabi >u tion of the central, individuated character(s). In this respect, no star could be just a type, slno all stars play central characters."15 Moorehead does not have a fully individuated star image (at least not before "Bewitched"), yet neither can heron-screen type be considered merely .in extension of her off-screen "self" (which would reintroduce the category of the individual in another way). She has a subversive edge that does not get "rounded off." What was distinct was the fact of her acting, which allowed her to represent and to "quote" a type at the same tin m
Agnes Moorehead's long career encompassed a gallery of types connoting female difference. Her early success was achieved on radio as, among other things, a stooge to in. 11' comics After she went to Hollywood with Orson Welles and the Mercury Theater sin continued her radio work as an all-purpose female voice, impersonating Eleanor Roosevelt and scores of other women on the "March of Time." Outside the Hollywood regime of the gaze, it seems that a deviant version of femininity could represent the norm. On-screen, she
I level poili.iyeil .1 i eiill.ll 1 11. il. 11 tei ie< clvllltf lop billing only III I lie pi i'.tlilllui Hl'.ly leleasi I —h ■" »1 if laud Utlllah: III'.I' ml  -In pi..,. 'I .........I In Idle vail.il lote. on II..' num.1111. I
QUEER CAREER OF AGNES MOOREHEAD 217
woman: nurses [Magnificent Obsession), nuns {The Singing Hun, Scandal at Scourie), governesses [The Youngest Profession. The Untamed), ladies' companions (Mrs. Partington, Her Highness and the Bellboy], busybodies (Since You Went Away, All That Heaven Allows), hypochondriacs {Pollyanna), maids [Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte), and, of course, aunts.
In The Magnificent Ambersons, lack Amberson rebukes his nephew for tormenting the Moorehead character: "You know George, just being an aunt isn't really the great career it may sometimes seem to be." But this, her second film, launched the actress on a trajectory that proved otherwise. Despite her fifth billing, she was named best actress by the New York Film Critics and went on to play aunts again in lane Eyre, Tomorrow theVJorld, The Lost Moment, Summer Holiday, \ohnny Belinda, and Tne Story of Three Loves, and on Broadway in Gioi just before her
■ death. For variety, she portrayed women in professions that lesbians might suitably pur.ue a wac commander (Keep Your Powder Dry), a prison superintendent [Caged], a literary agent (From Main Street to Broadway), a drama teacher (leanne Eagels), a mystery writer (Tne Bat), a judge [Bachelor in Paradise), and, in a blond wig, a "sort of school marm and madam rolled into One." offering firm support to lane Russell's Mamie Stover.16 When she played married women, ■he was generally a nagging wife, most notably in the radio play Sorry, Wrong Number, written expressly for her talents. Critics note the "waspish and neurotic," "mean-spirited, shrewish "possessive, puritanical, and vitriolic," "bitter, nasty, frustrated," and "meddlesome" traits
■Of her "old crones," "harridans, spinsters and bitches," "termagants and passionate viragos" |Her many mother parts did not always evince maternal qualities. Besides Samantha, her Screen offspring included Citizen Kane, lesse lames, and Genghis Khan. Her role In Tht %\ory of Mankind was a brief appearance as Queen Elizabeth I, she commissioned a portrait ol .■If costumed as the red-haired virgin queen. The Agnes Moorehead of the "Bewitched" era (the show ran on ABC from 1964 to IV72I fan aptly be described with the title of her one-woman show, in which she toured extensively In the fifties—"The Fabulous Redhead." On "Bewitched," she was a flippant, vividly costumed, ■Utrageously madeup, impeccably coiffed, castrating witch with a mortal hatred loi hei daughter's husband, whose name she somehow could not recall. This is the Moorehead ,c, •character" association that the contemporary viewer brings to her earlier him toles Moorehead turned her Actress-with-a-capital-A stage image—regal bearing, ex.iggei.iled ■■turesand enunciation, and taste for high fashion—to high camp effect in her interpretation
■iBndora, flagrantly foregrounding "performance." Offscreen, she was nicknamed "Mad......
Mauve because of her inordinate fondness for lavender, which she insisted on having ■Ytrything "done" in—from her luggage and Thunderbird to her dressing room hghlbullis •iinl in.mis' uniforms 17
Uelore the fifties stage and sixties television brought color to her roles, Agnes Moon'head Vat considered an actress of "character." Her Victorian-sounding name (her father w.is a lliliii'.lei | aristocratic profile, penchant for accents and other vocal trademarks, her manure.
manneredness, contributed to the public perception of Moorehead as a "serious" actress. At one ( iitic notes she r. ,iss. u i.ited with "heavy dramatics on the grand scale. For many, Agues'* performances repretant the near epitome of screen theatrics."1" Although she W«> type. ,isi veisutllity was regarded as part of her artistry.1" A studio publicity Item lived  The .i. . on i pi is I led . 11. ii.i. lii a. Hess ol stage, si teen and radio is given here one ol hei
'ii.   . .pp. .It III lltli". I, . I .1. I I. .1.........ii........ .1    I he ii ".iii I   i'. .1 level, It loll ol ,1 IK'W I.K ('t ol
■ Veisat lie, ii Hess s III, il i\   i, I. , I i. |11 • •!,   ,111V ingly ellei live      111. • 11 npl li at loll Is I hat hei
HUty to poll lay .1 hcteii luminal 1« a Itlia tlgn ill talent
218   PATRICIA WHITE
Moorehead was distinguished by four Academy Award nominations for best actress in a supporting role, although she never won the Oscar. As six-time loser Thelma Ritter cracked, Always the bridesmaid and never the bride."21 A profile in a nostalgia magazine muses about the fact that Moorehead never snagged the award: "It is an interesting speculation that one of the reasons she always lost was that she played neurotic aunts, stepmothers, spinsters who reflected the dark side of the human condition."" That the old maid should evoke such a grandiose conception as the dark side of the human condition attests to Moorehead's considerable achievement—she makes the spinster positively sinister. In an essay on the functions of feminist criticism, Tania Modleski chastises a male literary critic who, "casting about for an example of the trivial, strikes irresistibly upon the image of the spinster." "From a feminist point of view," Modleski argues, "nothing could be more 'historically and ideologically significant' than the existence of the single woman in patriarchy, her (frequently caricatured) representation in patriarchal art, and the relationship between the reality and the representation."" Moorehead's image captured some of this, perhaps lesbian, signifi cance, if only in the mirror image of anxiety. The profile goes on to suggest how closely the spinster image was identified with the actress: "Never married, she. nevertheless, had an adopted son: a close friendship with Debbie Reynolds, with whom she co-starred in several of her last pictures; and a religious faith as a Methodist." This "nevertheless" means to blui over a logical relation between spinster and lesbian that the syntax sets up: "Never married she had a close friendship with Debbie Reynolds." The statement is interesting for anothei reason: its blatant, symptomatic contradiction of fact, for Agnes Moorehead was married at least twice (Reynolds mentions three unions). 1 presume that the actress's much-vaunt.'. I privacy and cultivated "mystery" were not intended to conceal this facet of her "many-sid. repertory."
Moorehead's image reconciles the serious with the trivial—having "character" with being "a character"—and thus occupies the domain of camp. As Susan Sontag notes, "Camp Is thi glorification of'character.'. . . Character is understood as a state of continual incandesccm c —a person being one, very intense thing. . . . Wherever there is development of char.i. ti I Camp is reduced."24 Camp is a crucial and far from trivial dimension of Moorehead's recepi lOfl but, with its emphasis on style, it is an insufficient analytic category for a feminist 11 ill sideration of what is at stake in the "content" of her image. Looking at how that imagi articulated in and utilized by certain of her films can illuminate the contradiction th i she embodies, as a figure simultaneously necessary to the Hollywood system and suppressed
by it. She is taken seriously, featured in so many films as to seem ubiquitous. At the s.......
time, her parts are marginal ones, the characters she portrays trivialized or vilified If her n >h as written often smack of misogyny, as performed they suggest a different negativity i negativity that cannot be represented within the terms of classical cinema and that sh.in the semiotic field of lesbianism.
Fanny Minnafer in Orson Welles's The Magnificent Ambersons is the role that established «1 once Moorehead's reviled spinster image and the difficulty of reconciling that image with llm Hollywood plot Lacking economic independence. Aunt Fanny lives with the fading Ami <
clan as an observer rather than as a participant. The Magnificent Ambersons is a sell . < m-.....m
film, and her restlessness and discontent contribute greatly to its mood. She accus. nephew I lei nne, You wouldn't lre.it anybody in the woild like tins, except old Fanny i »t«I
I......y  you say, 11 s in il ii nlv I nit i iii I I .iimy si i I'll kii k hei Ni ibndy II lesenl II, I'll kl( k Ii.....
I want lu.  but the III In II im llhes I .rniiy s position mi the peilpheiy   linking in I he sli.ii d iwi
QUEER CAREER OF AGNES MOOREHEAD III
to whisper her suspicions to George, looking on from the edge of the frame or the licit h
ground of the composition—as a vantage point for the spectator. She actually pi......
the formation of two heterosexual couples by her interference. In material excised linn film's release version. Fanny is shown at the end among a veritable colony ol iplnttlfl "I
the boarding house. Her discourse pervades the film, even if she triumph'.....I, i iln
representative of its themes of frustration and barrenness.
One commentator characterizes the challenge for Moorehead as an actress, "to i Intniinl her tremendous energy so that it would emerge in accord with the film rutin i th in intriguing distraction."25 Elements of her tour-de-force characterization of Am as fascinating "distractions" in such later roles as Mrs. Reed in \ane Eyre and (.'<nmtn»» Innn in The Woman in While. The question of Moorehead's discordant difference and ol In >i n i to the fulfillment of the romance plot is marked in another literary film, The I ml M. (1947). In this adaptation of Henry lames's The Aspern Papers, Moorehead pi aunt who in her youth was the recipient of love letters from a famous poet A n genarian in the novella becomes a hideously madeup 105-year-old in the film It 1« an ll plausibility of Moorehead's participation in such a romance even in the i extremes of disguise.
Moorehead thoroughly embraced that inexplicable quality of her chum, n ■ others to react with dislike, even phobia. In Since You Went Away (directed by |i >hn ( 1944), David O Selznick's sentimental story of women on the homefront duilnu. WniM W«i II, Agnes portrays a local busybody, a character who embodies a displace I unheroic activities in which women might become involved while the mini. >U war. loseph Cotten's character repeatedly insults her, joking that the sound ol In on him even when he's far away from her. The penetrating, persecuting female vi ill e tlgnll here not only as a quality of Moorehead's character, Emily Hawkins, but as Mm unite > 1 an actress, who often worked with Cotten. Ultimately, the disparate desires ..III., the film are rallied into patriotic solidarity when they castigate the Moorelie.i. I. i. h
petty war profiteering. The film scapegoats her to consolidate both national......i ,
ideology, a project that could be seen as operating across the forties, the peiiml in whit h Moorehead's image was established.
In Good Dames, his book on five female "character stars" (supporting actresses lately tin nlVw individual biographies), lames Robert Parish comments on Moorehead's perlori n ihli
film:
The role itself was a variation of the cinema type portrayed throughout the 194011• v •1 very adept Eve Arden. The difference in these two actresses' approach to sin h a pail I*
that whenever Agnes is required to make a flip remark on the screen, il....... n mu
in total seriousness as a reflection of her character's basic, unregenerate me.niiiev. 11. . piercing eyes and overall body movements provide the viewer with no othet inn i pretation In contrast. Arden can toss off the most devastating remark, and It emnigei as a pert observation, |un v and smart but essentially nonvicious •'"
Mt hough Mootehe.id did play ism nl Lilly iioiiv.....us toles she was mote c oiivun llig ami
ess let llpel.llile    III I it ■ i im ilnelil'i ..I llllli fi llt'lale mealiness  The Slllivelslvelless ..I lllf In".i . I.,11,1, lei slats   '.ll. Ii   i    M.I. i.....I Till' I   . .Ill lie li.'llt l.lll/ei I I ly i lull lielng fill till
Hash, ally adopted a-.....Idly < t.....iltltfntilii Mniilelie.nl s uiillkaltleiiess mi the la/nl thin
220   PATRICIA WHITE
edge of misogynist dismissal, contravenes this tendency. It is hard to embrace Moorehead without being spattered with acid.
Madge Rapf in the Bogart/Bacall vehicle Dark Passage (19471, directed by Delmar Daves, is a curious sort of femme fatale, whose fate is a telling example of the retribution that the Moorehead character could bring down. Moorehead's being cast against character in a "sexual" role is in part responsible for the film's surreal effects.27 As Dana Polan comments in an important analysis, "The narrative of Dark Passage is one in which dramatic coincidences occur so often as to break down any question of plausibility."2" When Madge happens to knock at the door of the apartment where, through an unlikely chain of circumstances, escaped convict Vincent Parry (Bogartl is hiding, he instantly recognizes the voice of his nemesis Madge had testified against him at his murder trial. As he observes, "She's the type thai comes back, and back again." This not only indicates how she functions in the film as the return of the repressed but is a fitting comment on Moorehead's career.
Madge's character is attributed with the evil, inconsistency, and unintelligibiiity of motive of an ordinary femme fatale, without the movie conceding that sexuality is her tool for leading men to destruction. Instead, her fatal quality seems to be the simple fact of her existence, rendered as "interference" through Moorehead's "nagging" connotations. As Vincent describe, her, "Madge knows everybody, pesters everybody." Her ex-fiance, Bob, snaps at her, "You're not satisfied unless you're bothering people. I'm annoyed whenever I see you." Responding to her concern that Parry will try to kill her, Bob remarks, with an extraordinary mixture of outright malignance and contemptuous dismissal, "You're the last person he wants to se< ■ let alone kill.. . . You're not the type that makes people hate." Her insignificance is thus marked in rather significant terms. It is as if the other characters recognize the difficulty ol integrating her in the plot. Vincent muses, "Maybe she'll get run over or something." And hi', wish is granted.
In this profoundly illogical film, the logic of misogyny works with classic simplicity; it can be placated only by Madge's abjection, by the spectacle of her death. When Vincent come, to her apartment to accuse her of murdering his wife, she defies him to prove it At her crowning moment of Moorehead histrionics, she "accidently" and quite improbably falls through a picture window, with a flounce of floor-length drapes. The camera dwells on her body.
descent, a markedly excessive cinematic flourish. Polan has commented on the ambiguity.....I
threat embodied in domestic space in forties films: "Significantly, in several films, muni,il suicide, and accidental death through windows blur (and not only for the characters but also for the spectator), thereby suggesting the ambivalence of sense." He captures something of the spectator's bewilderment in this instance: "In Dark Passage, for example, it is never cle.ii (even with motion analyzing equipment and freeze-framing) how Madge manages to I,ill through her apartment window to her death."29
Dark Passage plays out the film noir's generic fear of feminine difference. The hen I vindicated, and woman is both criminal and victim. However, here it is not the alluring I Url the annoying woman who is punished, an extreme case of the anxiety that the Moorohead character could provoke. Madge, as a "bad," superfluous woman, is marked for death from trU beginning. But for all that it is an almost mundane exigency of plot, her killing seem', to require a supernatural force, thereby foregrounding the ideology th.it demands it An, Madge's I. ill doesn't im mediately bench I I he hem 11 has soinel I n ng o| I he i|ii, ilit y ol . i •., II willed disappeaiaiii e Madge Ihieatens, "You will never I"' able In plnve anything bei alls, I won't be I here "
UNI I lí i AIJI I I* ( )l  Ai ,NI ', M( II Hrl III Al l
I leie, I wniili I llťe In i |ii,,li 11,, I ill   I, gem la t y u l ide igi oil t id gay lilmmakei and I lollywi h h I < amp tasleui.il.oi |a, k Smith
I'm being haunted now by a performance in a movie. It was in Dark Passage. Agnes Moorehead play. I his post In a huge close-up you see the twitch of her little purse of a mouth |Movies| can reveal a certain personality type—a certain kind of pest or what have you—and then you have something to remember when you see a person in life. . . . That happened to me just recently. This raging pest from the Gay Men's Health Crisis just called and said she'd be right over. . . . The poor creature, her life was so empty that she had to join the Gay movement to pester AIDS victims in order to have a social life. Right away I looked at her and thought of Madge in Dark Passage."10
Smith relates the star and the practice of cinematic typification to real life and to a gay context, using her quality of "intensity" to make sense of some aspect of the tragically implausible but all too real and very dark passage that is living with AIDS.
lohn Cromwell's Caged (1950) features Moorehead as Mrs. Benton, the efficient and smartly tailored head of a woman's prison, but here her philanthropic impulse is benevolent and welcome. In such an environment, among female deviates, Moorehead's persona is not pitted against other women but appears at its most benign. This is also the most overtly lesbian ol her films—it establishes a genuine genre—and Moorehead receives second billing. Like Tlii' Kdling of Sister George or the lesbian classic Maedchen in Uniform with its conflict between stern headmistress and compassionate teacher, this feminist drama opposes two "dyke" types in a struggle for control over the young heroine (Eleanor Parker). The sympathetic, reform-minded prison superintendent tries to protect innocent Marie Allen from the corruptions ol life inside. "You'll find all kinds of women in here, just as you would outside," Benton promises. Hope Emerson portrays Evelyn Harper, the sadistic matron in uniform who I ,i, >vides small comforts for her girls in exchange for payment. Of this remarkable six-foot, Iwo-inch, 230-pound character actress (who, incidentally, provided the voice of Elsie the Ii, irden cow), gay porn editor and film critic Boyd MacDonald writes, "Perhaps only members ol a sexual elite—that is, outlaws—can instinctively appreciatethegrandeurof an Emerson."31 In one scene. Harper, grotesquely dressed up for her night off, describes in detail her lipci 'ining "date" in order to taunt the imprisoned women. This attribution of heterosexuality, III"' I he photograph of a "husband" displayed on Moorehead's desk, can easily be read as an i 'iii and-out charade.
When Benton attempts to fire Harper, the latter leaks a scandalous tale to the press: Matron charges immorality," headlines blare. "Blames superintendent." The article is ictompanied by a singularly apt sketch of Benton/Moorehead's face encircled by a huge i|ii< uon mark. The unspoken questions dogging Moorehead's persona are here explicitly 'tod to a story full of "filthy lies" that euphemistically signify lesbianism.
In I his t I, ľ.sii si niggle I „i ween good and evil, Harper is finally stabbed by a prisoner. But, III I he meantime, Mane has g( me bad I he beginning of her defiance marked when her kitten i i nished in a not pi, ,v, iked I .y I l.upei s all em | it tn snatch I lull away from her. Marie finally
auepts the altelil.....s .,1 I he i.....|l|eo|i Kilty, who ariang.es lor her parole  Forced to
falllK|!llsll hel wedding ling 'Inn In went I o pi 1st ill, M. Hie losses il away when It Is let III lied Ott hei release hellion tells hrl . Ii , ,1 ei I , lei aiy lo keep Manes Ille a, I ive "She'll be b,K k " Ultimately, dllleienl In >|ns i ,| loalilaii tedlli I Ion   mill inam e and dominám e lepiesenled
222   PATRICIA WHITE
by different types of character actresses, Moorehead and Emerson, work in consort to keep the female community intact. In Caged, Moorehead's charactercan represent the film's moral center because here she presides over a homosocial world and, fittingly, over an extraordinarily talented female supporting cast.
While the pleasures of reading Moorehead's ornery forties persona are obviously augmented by her syndication canonization in "Bewitched," both her situation and its comedy on that show are made possible by the character of her prior Hollywood career. Writing on the popularization of camp taste in the sixties and on Whatever Happened to Baby lane? in particular, Andrew Ross claims, "The camp effect ... is created . . . when the products (stars, in this case) of a much earlier mode of production, which has lost its power to dominate cultural meanings, become available ... for redefinition to contemporary codes of taste."" Of Robert Aldrich's follow-up to Baby \ane, Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte, produced the year "Bewitched" debuted, Bosley Crowther ranted, "Agnes Moorehead as |Bette Davis's| weird and crone like servant is allowed to get away with some of the broadest mugging and snarling ever done by a respectable actress on the screen. If she gets an Academy Award for this performance . . . the Academy should close up shop!"" The slatternly Velma Cruther significantly reverses an important element of Moorehead's image—her fastidiousness. In a cycle in which the biggest female stars travestied their former images, it is appropriate for one of the great supporting actresses to play a classic supporting role, the loyal servant, in a spectacularly unsupportive manner—to indulge in upstaging and scenery chewing that puts Davis herself to shame. Velma may be killed off for her snooping by a fall nearly as dramatic as that in Dark Passage, but icons never die.
One of Moorehead's last films, scripted by Henry Farrell, who wrote Baby \ane, continues this self-conscious exploitation of her image. Set in the thirties, What's the Halter with Helen' (directed by Curtis Harrington, 1971) features Debbie Reynolds and Shelley Winters as the mothers of two convicted thrill killers in the Leopold and Loebmode, who move to Hollywood to escape their past. Reynolds, intrigued by the story, which was originally titled Best o) Friends, persuaded her friend Agnes Moorehead to play powerful radio evangelist Sisl< i Alma. The "matter" with Helen concerns not only her psychopathic murderous tendem lei but her fanatical devotion to the evangelist's message and, surprise, her lesbian love for In il best friend. The role and the project thus summed up a number of strong components of the Moorehead persona: radio, religion, the famous personality, lesbianism, the relationship with Reynolds
Endora represents the culmination of Moorehead meddlesomeness. In the premiee episode of "Bewitched," she repeatedly evicts Samantha's husband from the honeyim k ifl suite, and she literally casts a dark shadow over heterosexual relations each week when I" I credit "and Agnes Moorehead as Endora" appears on a black cloud of smoke blotting I iUl "Derwood" and Samantha's embrace. What's-his-name's anxiety about his wife's powers ,nr< well founded: she belongs to a matriarchal order of superior beings. "Bewitched" supported a veritable gay subculture among its "funny" witch and warlock character actors. A recent "Bewitched'-kitsch revival attests to the show's influence on the queer nation generation, In a recent interview with the Los Angeles lesbian and gay newsweekly the Advocate, star Elizabeth Montgomery even agreed lh.it the show's premise w. is "the nil I in. it e c l< isel stoiy "'"
II Moorehead's ear hei < h.II. id els weie outside thee enl i, il .111 loll I lidoia Is t lalisi eiidenl\\ i' X lellllh    As I Sit Mel lelll .llllp Will es  III I hi' sll II,il.........in ' lv    I'Hpei tail......I plr.i'.UI.ll lie
" ""Miliar linn lialltfllVCI" n ' 11 *- lln'1 i iliieiii y ol alldlein e exchange "
QUEER CAREER OF AGNES MOOREHEAD 223
Endora has an enunciative role in the series. Casting spells on small-minded mortals, she disrupts the couple's petty suburban lives and generates the weekly plot. She appears and disappears with a flutter of the wrist—her ability to materialize when least expected or to drop out of the picture altogether is almost a commentary on the disappearing act that "incidental" characters performed in countless Hollywood films.
From stern spinster to fabulous redhead to silly goose, Agnes Moorehead's queer career attests to the ideological, narratological, and iconographic congruence among old maid, witch, and lesbian. Her star image also appeals to lesbian and gay audiences because it connotes acting itself—artifice, impersonation, and exaggeration I do not wish to suggest that the characters that Moorehead portrayed "really were" lesbians, norto imply that lesbians can simply recover our presence in Hollywood cinema by identifying actresses who really were lesbians, although gossip in its many forms is a legitimate text to be read. Rather, the peculiarities of Moorehead's image and the enthusiasms that it has generated illustrate how supporting characters were essential but also potentially disruptive to the construction of sexual difference in classical cinema. They were the types who were meant to remain invisible 10 that the codes of Hollywood's heterosexual contract would also remain invisible. By resituating such performers in patriarchal domesticity, American television often ended up bn '.ideasting forms of queer performativity. Gay criticism and culture have been alert to the pleasures and resistances embodied in star signs. Feminist film theory has explicated the patriarchal construction of woman as image—and demonstrated the difficulty of articu-i iimg female desire and difference in relation to that construction. An exploration of the paradoxical conditions of lesbian representability in popular culture might fruitfully draw nn both approaches. Whether playing it straight or camping it up, Agnes Moorehead is quite I character, "the type that comes back, and back again," as an insistent reminder of the price #f heterosexual presumption.
Postscript
Hie television "personality" remains a privileged locus of lesbian and gay iconic signilu al li in i': .1 in cut, metatextual example shows On the top-rated ABC sitcom "Roseanne." Nam y a 'i 'i 11 ng character played by Sandra Bern hard—a notorious real-life, role-playing queei iied that she is a lesbian. Yet, in puffing forward an overt lesbian characterization, in this ii1' "I "ill ing and the representational politics of acting up, the show draws on a coverl our < i'ii surprised by her friend's announcement, Roseanne then recalls a code in which the HMiiIng mil message is intelligible: "Nancy always did like that Miss lane Hathaway mi The ■ Iv Hillbillies.' That about says it all."
Uni,-,
Montana Silkwood Thanks „, l      Cohen and Cynthia Schneider for their helpful
Hiled III Wallen Shnl,  A,„i,   M,  „|„,„l  A Vein Hfll'd/e I'ee.iin (I'hllailelph
"H 71, •MtMeaiaMUMi/a '-------.......
I'hl.i Don,in
224   PATRICIA WHITE
2 While filming How Sweet \t Is on an ocean liner, Lynde recounts, "At night, we'd sit around and dish. |Director| lerry |Paris| told me those rumors that everybody's heard about Debbie |Reynolds| and her close friend Agnes Moorehead. ... I'd heard those rumors, but lerry filled in some details that. ... Oh, I'd better not, I'm not even sure if the story's really true" [Outlook 6 |Fall 1989|: 26). Hadleigh claims that Reynolds threatened to sue Eddie Fisher if he included the story in his autobiography.
Reynolds herself reports the "innuendo" that she and Moorehead were lovers without explicitly denying it (see Debbie Reynolds with David Patrick Columbia, My Life |New York Pocket, I988|, 388). Moorehead repeatedly discussed "why I adore Debbie Reynold (interview with Sidney Skolsky, New York Post, 2 August 1964), avowing, "It's really the loneliest sort of life. ... I did become good friends with Debbie Reynolds" {New York Poll 11 January 1969). The friendship is generally considered a salient fact about Moorehead The two women "became close friends, in a mother-daughter type relationship" Garni", Robert Parish, Good Dames |New Brunswick, N.J.; Barnes, I974|, 122).
As corroboration goes, there is no more than ample documentation of the rumor in the gay press: "Hollywood knew her as its reigning lesbian, queen of Sapphic love. ('Wlm was Carrie Fisher's mother?' the old joke went. 'Debbie Reynolds. Who was her father? Agnes Moorehead')" (NYQ, 22 December 1991, 41). Dick Sargent, the second actor 10 play Samantha's mortal husband on "Bewitched," who recently came out in People and on "Entertainment Tonight" as well as in the gay press, was unable to confirm the talm about Moorehead's lesbianism. The knowledge that Darrin, the show's representative ol put-upon normalcy, was played by a gay actor literalizes what the Advocate calls the "gay allegory" of "Bewitched" (30 |uly 1992, 69). In a gracious interview with the lesbian ami gay news weekly on the occasion of her serving with Sargent as grand marshal I of the l,m Angeles lesbian and gay pride parade, star Elizabeth Montgomery notes, "Don't think that didn't enter our minds at the time. We talked about it on the set. . . that this wd» about people not being allowed to be what they really are . . . and all the frustration anil trouble it can cause. It was a neat message to get across" (ibid., 69). Asked aboUl Moorehead's lesbianism, Montgomery replies, "I've heard the rumors, but I never talh >i with her about them. ... It was never anything she felt free enough to talk to me about I wish . . . that Agnes felt she could trust me. . . . We were very fond of one another, I mi never got personal." In characteristically grande dame fashion, Moorehead herself wn il« "I have played so many authoritative and strong characters that some people are nervuiii at the prospect of meeting me. . . . There is a certain amount of aloofness on my pail nl times, because an actor can so easily be hurt by unfair criticism. I think an artist sin >nlil be kept separated to maintain glamour and a kind of mystery. ... I don't believe in llis girl-nextdoor image. What the actor has to sell to the public is fantasy, a magii i H of ingredient that should not be analyzed" (quoted in the New Yorle Times obituary, I May 1974, 48).
Outside of gay publications, what often appears in place of any remarks abnill Moorehead's sexuality is an emphasis on her religious beliefs (see Herbie |. Pilai' ■ Id Bewitched Book |New York: Delta. I992|, 24-26). That Moorehead was devout is mil IN question. But religion seems to appear as a defense against a homosexual leading •w the very emblem and safeguard of spinsterishness Ann H I t.ivls. who played Aln • ■ ii housekeeper who resembled a physn al edu< at ion lea. In i , m The Htady Hum h I.mil bed ne | ii nt layed S< hult/y on "The Bob Cum tilings Show i h r. .il■•■ > enjoyed a smgi in
applet l.iltoll In a lni will up. I in    I" Is Irpoitrd as having '.han 11 i li an i;pls( opal I ii'.l ii 'i' 11111 htn wile  The I luee ,ue dedlc aled In |Haynl all "never mauled ami admits   I basli ally don't do that well wild • litli
sister lidentu al twin Harriett says I'm a great aunt" (People. I Mine I'WJ
Maten,il on Mooiehead c iled throughout this essay was M......I in . Il
New York Public I.ibtary lor the Performing Artsand the Mm.i inn - i i I Center.
3 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley lliilvi 19901.
4 Lisa Kron, Program, "101 Humiliating Stories," performed at I". \)J Natu 7-31, 1993.
5 Stephen Heath, Questions of Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana Ilm 321.
6 Agnes Moorehead clippings Hie, New York Public Library Ii ii tli. i
7 Michael Bronski, Culture Clash: The Making of Gau Sensibilitu (Mostní See also chapter I, "Who's a Sissy?" of Vito Russo, The Celluloid i l.< . 111 Row. 1981).
8 Marion Garbo Todd, "The Truth about Miss Hathaway Tin i i Perennial Spinster," Lesbian News 16, no. 10 (May 1991): 40
9 See Sarah Halprin, "Writing in the Margins'" (review of E Ann t m 1 Both Sides of the Camera), lump Cut 29 (February 1984): 32, died In In. In i Looks: Dorothy Arzner and Female Authorship," in Hou' Du I I e. ■* • ■ t Hi.lii|.|   til  ■ . (Seattle: Bay, 1991), 115. Mayne's argument about At/nei al 3, "Female Authorship Reconsidered," of her book Woman at tin i . Indiana University Press, 1990).
10 Richard Dyer, "Seen to Be Believed: Some Problems in the Repr»»rii|ni Ii >pl as Typical," Visual Communication 9, no. 2 (Spring 19831 2 See also Im. Gays in Film, ed. Richard Dyer (London: BFI. 1978, rev., 1984), il iu .mil i i "Rethinking Stereotypes," in ideology and Cultural Production, ed Mn In York: St Martin's, 1979). 135-59.
11 Dyer, "Seen to Be Believed," 8.
I.1 Mary Ann Doane, "Dark Continents: EpistemologiesofR.ui.il and ....... lull
Psychoanalysis and the Cinema," in Femmes Fatales: Feminism. Film TIiivmi i York: Routledge, 1991), 233
I i Kitter was a member of the early lesbian community on Fire Island d..............I in I ihm
Newton's study Cwerru Grove. Fire Island: Sixty Years in America   Ihm „m.....i i
(Boston: Beacon, 1993). McCambridge's career encompasses a senes ol Ii Hing n ili tin unforgettable Emma Small in \ohnny Guitar, an uncredited bit in Welles s tnmli n/ I i<il h
I a leather-jacketed onlooker at lanet Leigh's rape, a guest spot as mom to mi u..........
I warlock on Hewitt hed,'another as the woman who wanted to matry [>i Sinlllioii lnul in Sp.n e, am I I he von e o| the devil in Tire Eiiorrisl
That Rittet and Mil .iinliiiilge were radio performers like Moorehead suggests an Interesting i1i.il*-« I n between lesbian lepiesentability and literal visibility M I is. i |i mes  The I lelianl i Hies A tall with I ihn Historian Donald Bogle." Village Von eI Mine I■>'> I I (''i ' .ee Donald Hi igle I mm I iinm Mulattin". Mummies, and Hm If. An Interpretive I lislun/ ii/HlmkMnAmeiiiiiMhliiMiluM NewVuik I out limům. |w.>>
226   PATRICIA WHITE
15 Richard Dyer, Stars (London: BFI, 1979), 117; see also 109-10.
16 The comment that character actors are a "brassiere for the star, literally holding him or her up," is difficult to resist quoting in this case (Hortense Powdermaker, Hollywood: The Dream Factory |New York: Little, Brown, 1950|, 206, quoted in Barry King, "Articulating Stardom," in Stardom: \ndustry of Desire, ed. Christine Gledhill INewYork: Routledge, 1991|, 179).
17 See Sherk, Agnes Moorehead, 70. In Charles Laughton's bio of Moorehead for Don |ua« in Hell, in which they toured extensively in the early fifties, he writes about her days as a drama student in New York: "She was kind of mad around this time, not because she had to pull in her belt notches, but because she hadn't enough money to buy mauve lace, and mauve taffeta and mauve velvet and mauve feathers and geegaws which area necessity to Agnes Moorehead's breathing."
18 lames Robert Parish, Good Dames, 78.
19 The Agnes Moorehead fan club's publication was originally entitled "Versatility," as noted in an issue of "Moorehead Memos," a later incarnation of the club's newsletter.
20 Unidentified clipping, Agnes Moorehead Clipping File, Museum of Modern Art Film Study Center, n.p.
21 Quoted in Mason Wiley and Damien Bona, inside Oscar (New York: Ballantine, 1986), 241.
22 Classic images 136 (October 1986): 18.
23 Tania Modleski, Feminism wilhoutVJomen (New York: Routledge, 1991), 50.
24 Susan Sontag, "Notes on Camp," in AaainsI interpretation (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1975), 283
25 James Robert Parish, Good Dawes, 84
26 lames Robert Parish, Good Dames, 90.
27 In another revealing comparison, Parish notes that Dark Passage gave Moorehead an "opportunity to portray ... a woman close to her own age without disguising costumes, makeup or foreign accents. . . . Here was a jealous, sex-starved characterization that the electric Dame ludith Anderson would have been proud to play in her heyday" (ibid,, 94). Charles Higham and |oel Greenberg acknowledge that "Agnes Moorehead's prying, vicious Madge Rapf is a definitive portrait of bitchery" {Hollywood in the Forties |New York Barnes, I968|, 39).
28 Dana Polan, Powerand Paranoia. History, Narrative, and the American Cinema, 1940-1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 195.
29 Ibid., 274.
30 lack Smith, "Remarks on Art and the Theatre," in lack Smith, ed. Ira Cohen, Historical Treasures no. 33 (New York: Haumann, 1993), 133-35.
31 Boyd MacDonald, Cruising the MoWes: A Sexual Guide to Oldies on TV (New York: Gay Press 1988), 21.
32 Andrew Ross, No Respect: intellectuals and Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 1989). I 19
33 Bosley Crowther, The New York Times. 4 March 1965, section 1,36.
34 Advocate, no. 608 (30 July 1990): 69.
35 Patricia Mellencamp, "Situation Comedy, Feminism, and Freud: Discourses of Grade and Lucy," in Studies in Entertainment, ed. Tania Modleski (Bloomingtorv Indiana University Press, 1986), 91
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in Contemporary Film Performance. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, forthcoming Basinger, leanine. Silent Stars. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press. 1999 Battcock, Gregory and Roberts Nickas, eds. Tne Art of Performance. A Critical Anthology New Y. irl Dutton, 1984.
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