Republican Party Reptile(39)

It’s hard to face the truth, but I suppose you yourself realize that if you’d had just a little more courage, just a little more strength of character, you could have been dead by now. No such luck.





Manners

and Mores





Hollywood Etiquette





“Hollywood” is not, of course, a place. Nor is it a synonym for the entertainment business. There are upstanding citizens who make their living in that field. The real Hollywood is the reductio ad absurdum of personal liberty. It is ordinary men and women freed by money and social mobility to do anything they want unencumbered by family pressure, community mores, social responsibility, civic duty, or good sense. There’s a little streak of it in us all.

The entertainment business is a venue for Hollywood because heaps of money can be made by entertaining and because the public is famously tolerant of entertainers. Los Angeles is a site for Hollywood because, if all the freedom and money go blooey, it’s warm enough to sleep on the beach. Other places and professions have had this distinction at other times. During the eighteenth century it was the pirate nests of the Caribbean. When the Medici popes were in office, it was the College of Cardinals.

It is interesting that when people have great resources and few restraints they don’t always run amok doing evil to their fellow man. In Hollywood the evil is mostly self-destructive. On the other hand the good is limited to an occasional movie like Tender Mercies. Thus Hollywood is a disappointment to Hobbes conservatives and Rousseau liberals alike. But it is fascinating to the student of manners.

Manners are the formal and ceremonial manifestations of a society’s underlying values. Usually these values are things like loyalty, altruism, veneration of the elderly, valor, etc. But what sort of manners emerge in a society such as Hollywood’s where the only underlying value is personal gratification? The answer is none. Friends are ignored. Enemies and chance acquaintances are greeted with kisses. People meet in public places to discuss finance before breakfast. Total strangers ask you what you paid for your shoes.

It’s hard for a visitor from the civilized world to detect any standards at all. People shout the details of their sexual lives but conceal with embarrassment the brand of car they own. The streets are lined with expensive clothing stores, but no one dresses up. Restaurants have unlisted phone numbers. You never know what the natives are going to do next.

Not only the rich and irresponsible act this way but also the would-be rich and the would-be irresponsible. Feckless eccentricity has spread to every level of society, especially in the service industries. Waiters introduce themselves by name, inquire into your home life, and, if you aren’t careful, will invite themselves to sit down and sample your wine choice. At the grocery store, when you extend a palm for change you’re liable to have your Line of Life and Mountain of Venus examined and longevity foretold by the number of wrinkles around your wrist. Policemen pull you over for traffic infractions and show you résumés and 8×10 glossies.

A strong element of fantasy must be allowed for in Hollywood behavior. It can be disconcerting to do business with a bank officer in jogging shorts who does deep knee bends while discussing variable-rate mortgages. Meanwhile the man who cleans the pool comes around in a Cardin suit. The owner of every commercial establishment seems lost in dreams of grandeur. The drive-in restaurant has valet parking.

But sometimes Hollywood is too normal. Bellhops salute and carry eight bags without complaint. Taxi drivers tip their caps and say “You’re the boss” when you tell them to go to Bel Air from Santa Monica by way of Sherman Oaks. It takes a while to realize what’s going on. The bellhops and taxi drivers are acting. They’re engaged in that rarest kind of fantasy life, imagining reality is real. Don’t expect an encore, however. Tomorrow they’ll be surly, drug-addicted rock stars.

Though there are no standards of behavior in Hollywood, there are some criteria of status: money, power, and fame. Money—though it is the first cause, prime mover, and only useful product of Hollywood—is the least important. Hollywood is a single-crop economy, and there’s just too much money around. Millions are paid for Benedict Canyon building lots 2 degrees shy of vertical. Olympic-size swimming pools are built for families who haven’t been outdoors since 1965. People send their pets to psychiatrists. Everyone has money or spends it as if he did. (Though there’s no idea of what money might do. A fortune Joseph P. Kennedy would have used to elect a new Senate is spent on wristwatches.)

Money being common, prestige goes instead to power. There’s endless talk about power in Hollywood and much deference paid to it. But it’s a silly kind of puissance. What would Talleyrand have made of someone who had the power to put Leave It to Beaver back on network television or the power to turn a popular soft-drink jingle into a $30 million movie staring Lorna Luft? As for real power—the force to direct events and guide human affairs—the people of Hollywood don’t seem to have that over even their own lives.