Whether or not Hollywood was really a “mom and pop” business in the 1940s as actor Robert Wagner calls it, the men who ran the industry in those years were actually intimately connected with the business of movies. They enjoyed show biz and were often part of their own audience. As Wagner writes in You Must Remember This: Life and Style in Hollywood’s Golden Age (Viking), the contrast between those old moguls and the soulless drones of nowadays couldn’t be more pronounced. The old guys loved the movies. The MBAs who took charge after the ‘60s have been concerned with little more than quarterly profit and loss.
Wagner, whose career began in 1949 at 20th Century Fox, arrived as the party was starting to end. Even so, he had the opportunity to work with people who had toiled in the fantasy factory since moviemaking moved to Hollywood in the 1910s. Wagner’s latest memoir is less an account of his own career than a recollection of the look and feel of Los Angeles when street cars still ran, the sky wasn’t obscured by smog and the studios weren’t subsidiaries of trans-national corporations.
Writing with film biographer Scott Eyman, Wagner recalls the James Ellroy milieu of gangsters, crooked cops and gambling ships anchored three miles offshore and serviced by water taxis. Wagner quotes Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard—the line about the mansions those “crazy movie people built in the twenties.” He wasn’t around when they were built, but he was inside Valentino’s Falcon Lair and remembers all the Spanish haciendas, Norman chateaux, Moorish mansions and Art Deco aeries that fell to wrecking balls. The “glamorous excess” and “exuberant eclecticism” was the opposite of the “overly severe architecture of Mies van der Rohe.” It was the architecture of dreams, often executed by art directors working by day at the movie studios. Wagner recalls a typical setting: the Buddha statue in Jack Warner’s library whose head could be twisted to lower a painting and reveal a movie projector for private screenings.
Some personal gossip finds its way into You Must Remember This; mostly, Wagner’s memoir reflects on times past when even the crudest moguls thought it was important to have (or at least purchase) a sense of style and stars enjoyed privacy. “The freedom that used to be one of the perks of celebrity is now virtually nonexistent,” he writes. “The size of the media lens is so much larger, and the focus is less forgiving.”
