Holidaying with Late-Victorian Theatrical Celebrities: Rest, Wellbeing and Public Identity

‘In the Theatrical World our talk is all of holidays.’ So opened one of Hearth and Home magazine’s gossip columns in July 1897. The holidays taken by London’s late-Victorian West End theatre stars attracted regular press coverage and formed a regular subject of letters between actresses, actors and their friends. The narratives of hard work and public service that had played a significant role in improvements in the theatre industry’s reputational and cultural status prompted a secondary narrative around rest: a widely shared understanding that rest was necessary to counter the impacts of the ongoing on- and off-stage labour undertaken by stage stars. Together newspaper accounts and correspondence capture both industry-focused concerns about the maintenance of the strong physical and mental health required to sustain a theatrical career and social disquiet around the changing world of work more widely and patterns of overwork and exhaustion. In this essay I consider a range of press accounts and correspondence to consider how evidence of stage stars’ holidays can extend our understandings of the professional culture of the late-Victorian theatre industry and theatre’s contribution to wider social and political ideas surrounding work and rest, and physical and mental health.

Fiction for the Woman of To-day: The Modern Short Story in Eve

This chapter explores short fiction published in Eve, later Eve: The Lady’s Pictorial, a magazine directed to ‘the woman of to-day and tomorrow’ in print between 1921-29. This elite English women’s paper was avowedly modern in outlook - debating new social roles for women, new ideas about psychology and sexuality, changing relations between the sexes and modernist aesthetics - at the same time as upholding traditional values such as respect for class hierarchy and marriage within its routine content of society gossip columns, fashion pages, travel writing and reviews of new books, art exhibitions and theatre. This chapter shows how the tension between modernity and convention was also reflected in the magazine’s short stories, which ranged from formulaic and conservative plots to experimental and subversive narratives. It reads stories by familiar and forgotten authors, including Elizabeth Bowen, Joyce Anstruther, Marthe Troly-Curtin and Radclyffe Hall, that, in more or less radical ways, probed new models of femininity and new models for heterosexual relationships.

Gossip and Reputation in Small-scale Societies

This chapter treats gossip and reputation from an anthropological perspective, starting with the evolutionary origin of gossiping behavior and extending through the social and evolutionary functions of personal reputations in small-scale societies. The chapter points to an actual case history of a bizarre murder in an anthropology department, in which Persian burial rituals were replicated, and it provides an example of the use of gossip as a tool in anthropological field work, which is based on the author’s experience among tribal Serbs in Montenegro. The inherent “leakiness” of gossip systems is modeled, and the analysis of how private information becomes public suggests that often such exposure is a function of gossip chains rather than the result of deliberate betrayal of confidences. Also treated is the persistence of gossiping and reputation-mongering in modern literate society, including gossip columns, soap operas, and tabloids.

Prologue

Providing an overview of the tumultuous life and stellar accomplishments of silent screen star Barbara La Marr, the Prologue begins with her emergence into newspaper headlines as notorious, teenaged Reatha Watson—-reported kidnapped at sixteen, banished from Los Angeles by juvenile authorities for being “too beautiful” at seventeen, and soon barred by film studios from working as an actress for her scandalous activities—-and ends with her death at twenty-nine. Barbara’s impressive careers as a dancer, in vaudeville, and as a screenwriter are touched upon. Her tremendous impact as a reigning silent screen actress is then spotlighted: how her volatile sex appeal, glamour, talent, meteoric film career, and predilection to live life on her own terms bewitched her peers and the world whilst her explosive private life continued playing out in gossip columns and newspaper headlines.

Hollywood Confidential

The gossip industry underwent a fundamental transition after the war, from the gawking clatter of the classical era fan magazines to the gossip columns of Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons and scandal sheets that so successfully harried the Hollywood community after the war. Movie stars were lucky and pretty, rich and famous. But they were as well political neophytes and their everyday lives were, thanks to the columnists after the war, lumbered with undue consequence. It was one thing for the columnists to bemoan the unearned privileges of celebrity, and then to cut folks so lucky and full of themselves down to size. But it was quite another to cast the private and personal lives of these celebrities as fundamentally anti-social and un-American, to subject the lives and loves of movie stars to a narrow and frankly unrelated notion of patriotism, one that asked movie stars to behave, or at least pretend to behave, like the rest of us.

Noël Coward, Rebecca West, and the Modernist Scene

Noël Coward and Rebecca West shared a long friendship, and often met each other at theatrical openings, on transatlantic liners, and at parties hosted by the ‘international set’. Their wary negotiation with one another's celebrity and cultural value played out not only at these social events but also in print, through reviews, gossip columns, and memoirs. Using the relationship between Coward and West as a case study, this essay explores the social scene of modernism, paying particular attention to the suggestion of theatricality in the word ‘scene’. It takes up the notion of the ‘modernist party’ as, on the one hand, a kind of stage on which celebrities from different spheres performed together, and, on the other, a happening which, through reports in print, contributed to the forming of literary reputations and to the public fascination with modern style.

Star quality: celebrity casting in London West End theatres

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the practice of casting celebrity performers in London West End theatres. The paper uses the literature on celebrity to explore the impact that casting a celebrity has on the London theatre audience. Design/methodology/approach – The pervasiveness of celebrity culture forms the background and starting point for this research. In the first phase, theatre managers, directors and producers were interviewed to explore their views on the practice of celebrity casting. In the second phase, an audience survey was conducted. The approach taken is exploratory and is intended to illuminate the conditions under which a successful celebrity-focused strategy can be constructed. Findings – A distinction between fame and celebrity was drawn by both theatre professionals and audiences, with celebrity status being seen as something that is created by media exposure and being in the public eye. This is in contrast to fame, which is earned by being famous for something, or some achievement. Theatre audiences are more likely to be attracted by celebrities who have theatrical expertise and not by someone known simply through film, television or the all-pervasive gossip columns. Celebrities with a background in theatre and film were seen to strongly draw audiences to the theatre, as opposed to those with a background in reality TV shows, search-for-a-star shows or for being half of a famous couple. Originality/value – The paper is focused on the theatre and makes an original contribution to the current discussion of the power wielded by celebrities. It is the first empirical research on this aspect of the theatre business. Its contribution lies in understanding audience members’ interpretation and understanding of celebrity to ascertain the extent to which they perceive celebrities as credible to perform theatre. This is based on a differentiation between their mediated fame and expertise. It is helpful and useful information for producers when deciding whether or not to cast a celebrity and to which audiences that the celebrity might appeal.

Representing Queerness: Clifton Webb on the American Stage

In the American theater of the 1930s and 1940s, the designation “queer star” was an oxymoron – except when applied to Clifton Webb. The Indiana-born singer and dancer was (according to colleagues) homosexual and (according to critics and audiences) queer. He was also, after 1932, a star on Broadway and the road as well as a reliably queer presence in the gossip columns and arts pages of the daily paper. Unlike any other show business personality of his rank, he used his star text to raise the visibility of queerness in early twentieth-century entertainment culture.