“Let me guess,” Patti LuPone says as she plinks olives into a martini. “You came here to be a movie star.”
Here, of course, is Hollywood, where dreams are made, faked, defeated and deferred. In Ryan Murphy’s “Hollywood,” a seven-episode limited series that comes to Netflix on Friday, LuPone plays Avis Amberg, a former actress married to the head of Ace Studios. Ace Studios, while fictional, looks like Paramount Pictures, walks like MGM and green-lights pictures more progressive than any the Golden Age birthed. Set in the late 1940s as the studio system began to wane, “Hollywood” enjoys this dizzy cocktail of history and hopeful make-believe.
As a kid, Murphy watched Hollywood oldies with his grandmother and became particularly attached to three actors: Anna May Wong, Hattie McDaniel and Rock Hudson — all of them, he felt, stifled by the studio system.
“I was attracted to the idea of lost potential,” he said in a telephone interview last week. “And maybe worried about it myself, that I was not going to be allowed to be who I wanted to be because of who I was.”
After completing the first season of his series “Feud,” set in 1960s Hollywood, he mulled a more factual series honoring the system’s victims. “But ultimately, it was just too fragmented and also, to be honest, too depressing,” he said.
He began to think along revisionist lines, instead, imagining what might have happened if people of color had been offered work commensurate with their talent, if the industry had allowed its queer members to live openly. Happy endings all around.
“Hollywood,” which he created with Ian Brennan, mingles actuality and what-if. Real people — like Hudson (Jake Picking), Wong (Michelle Krusiec) and McDaniel (Queen Latifah) — rub elbows and more with invented ones like David Corenswet’s Jack, an aspiring actor and sometime gigolo, and Darren Criss’s Raymond, a biracial director who passes for white. Others merge fact and fictions, like LuPone’s Avis, inspired by David O. Selznick’s wife, Irene Selznick, or Joe Mantello’s Dick, a homage, at least in part, to the movie whiz Irving Thalberg.
To help sort entertainment history from fantasy, here is an introduction to the real-life figures who populate this counterfactual “Hollywood” and the inspirations for several of the series’s fictional characters. Action!
Principals
Rock Hudson
An actor who would ride the beefcake craze of the 1950s, Hudson, born Roy Harold Scherer Jr., came to Hollywood in the late 1940s.
“He knew how he looked,” said Picking, who wore facial prosthetics to play Hudson, a former Navy aircraft mechanic. “He would stand out in front of the studio gates in his uniform hoping to bump into someone influential.”
A bit player in the ’40s, Hudson, who signed with the talent manager Henry Willson, graduated to westerns, adventure pictures and melodramas, earning an Oscar nomination for his work in “Giant.” In 1959, he starred opposite Doris Day in “Pillow Talk,” a comedy in which his character briefly masquerades as gay. “He projected an attractive yet unthreatening masculinity,” said Steve Cohan, an author and film historian.
Willson thwarted tabloid attempts to out Hudson as gay and Hudson later married Willson’s secretary, Phyllis Gates, in what was possibly a “lavender marriage” meant to further allay suspicion. (Gates denied this. “We were very much in love,” she told a biographer.) In 1985, Hudson’s publicist confirmed a diagnosis of AIDS, and two months later, Hudson became one of the first celebrities to die of AIDS-related complications.
Henry Willson
A serial abuser and a starmaker with an impeccable eye for brawny, unformed talent, Willson helped rename and introduce actors such as Hudson, Tab Hunter and Troy Donahue, as well as women like Natalie Wood and Lana Turner. “For a while there, he understood how to make his own little factory of these strapping all-American men and plug them into the movies,” said Jim Parsons, who plays Willson in “Hollywood.” “That doesn’t excuse the despicable behavior by any means.”
The well-documented behavior included demanding sex from his male clients and various forms of psychological abuse, even as he protected his roster from hostile press and blackmailers. “He ranks right up there with Harvey Weinstein as one of the town’s greatest monsters of all time,” Murphy said. Deserted by his clients in later life, he died destitute.
Anna May Wong
Hollywood’s first Asian-American star, Wong, a third-generation Chinese-American, grew up in Los Angeles, where her parents ran a laundry, and went on to appear in dozens of silent and sound films.
“She was captivating,” said Emily Carman, a film professor at Chapman University. “Her presence radiated charisma and elegance.”
A fashion plate and a publicity darling, she rarely won principal parts (her later B movies are an exception) or unexoticized roles. As Wong, played by Michelle Krusiec, says in the series, “They don’t want a leading lady who looks like me.”
The role of O-Lan in “The Good Earth,” the film adaptation of Pearl S. Buck’s China-set novel, seemed made-to-measure for Wong. But the production code, a self-censoring charter major studios adopted, prohibited romantic scenes between actors of different races. Since Paul Muni, a white actor, had been cast as O-Lan’s husband, the part instead went to Luise Rainer, a white actress who played O-Lan in yellowface and won an Oscar for it. “The Good Earth” producers offered Wong the role of a seductress, the movie’s villain, but she refused it.
An alcoholic who experienced periods of depression, she died in 1961 at the age of 56. “Her lonely death, that for me was very sad to discover,” Krusiec said.
Hattie McDaniel
The first person of color to win an Oscar, McDaniel, the daughter of former slaves, began her career in vaudeville, as did several of her siblings. She moved to Los Angeles in the early 1930s and soon found screen work playing maids.
“She was a scene stealer,” Carman said. “She knew how to mobilize that stereotype to her advantage.”
She fought for the role of Mammy in “Gone With the Wind,” arriving for her screen test in a real maid’s uniform. She won an Oscar for it, though at the ceremony itself she was relegated by the event’s organizers to a segregated table. While she hoped the award might unlock a broader away of roles, Hollywood only saw her as a maid.
Later in her career, some African-American activists attacked McDaniel for accepting regressive roles. Her stock response: “I’d rather play a maid and make $700 a week than be a maid and make $7.”
“A woman had to make a living,” said Queen Latifah, who plays McDaniel. “But it was a waste of her talent. She was a powerhouse. She could sing. She could dance. She could act. She was smart. She was funny. She had timing. She was brilliant.”
Supporting Actors
George Cukor, Vivien Leigh and Tallulah Bankhead
In the third episode of “Hollywood,” the film director Cukor (Daniel London) throws a wild party with an elite guest list, including Leigh and Bankhead, and a crew of sex workers to provide postprandial entertainment. Cukor, who directed “The Philadelphia Story” and “Gaslight,” did host louche parties, many of them all-male. Leigh (Katie McGuinness), who played Scarlett O’Hara in “Gone With the Wind,” and Bankhead (Paget Brewster), who tested for the role, were both close friends of Cukor’s. In the late ’40s, Leigh was about to appear in the stage version of “A Streetcar Names Desire” and was experiencing episodes of bipolar disorder. Bankhead, known as one of Hollywood’s most accomplished seducers of women (including McDaniel, according to a persistent rumor) as well as men, had recently had a hit with Alfred Hitchcock’s “Lifeboat.”
Background Players
Scotty Bowers
Though Murphy disclaims any interest in Bowers, Dylan McDermott’s Ernie runs a service station that doubles as an anything-goes bordello. This dovetails with Bowers’s claims, aired in a controversial 2012 memoir, that he spent decades providing sexual services to the Hollywood elect, first as a pump jockey then as a party bartender.
“Whatever folks wanted, I had it. I could make all their fantasies come true,” he wrote in the introduction to “Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars.” The book alleges that Bowers arranged liaisons for the likes of Hudson, Cole Porter and Leigh (who all appear in the series as clients), as well as Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. (The stars he wrote about were already dead but the families of some of them, like Cary Grant, disputed the claims.)
Peg Entwistle
Within “Hollywood,” Jeremy Pope’s screenwriter character, Archie Coleman (glancingly inspired by James Baldwin’s Hollywood experience), sells a script about Entwistle, a 23-year-old aspiring actress who finally achieved brief fame by jumping from the “H” of the Hollywood sign, back when the sign still spelled Hollywoodland.
Born in Wales, she moved with her father to New York and began acting as a teenager, including a tour with the New York Theater Guild and in a number of Broadway plays. In the spring of 1932, she came to Los Angeles with a play and stayed to shoot her only film. Her contract was not renewed. After telling her uncle she planned to visit friends, she disappeared. A hiker discovered her body at the foot of the sign.
Source: Television - nytimes.com
