Drafted for Stardom

The ad, sponsored by the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, appeared in 1921. Its headline read: “Don’t Try to Break Into the Movies.” It concluded with this doubtless spurious, yet not entirely unpersuasive, statistic: “Out of 100,000 Persons Who Started at the Bottom of the Screen’s Ladder of Fame Only Five Reached The Top.”

It is quite amazing: the early appearance of a public warning against what would in time become Hollywood’s central myth, the myth of discovery. At the time, Hollywood, as a center for movie production, was scarcely more than a decade old, and the invention of feature films, which made almost everyone movie-crazy, was even more recent. But still the promise of stardom was palpable, and while the ad probably did nothing to stem the flow of pretty, dopey hopefuls from Keokuk to casting couch, the discovery myth was already an essential component of Hollywood’s hold on the popular imagination. Some part of us needed to believe that movie stardom was available to any reasonably attractive individual who could be taught to walk and talk at the same time.

There was, naturally, a mystery at the core of this myth: the notion that there were certain faces the camera loved for inexplicable reasons, certain personalities who had (for want of a better word) “it,” that unquantifiable, indescribable quality that rocketed a few lucky souls to stardom. This mystery is why everyone ignored the statistical odds against success. It held that all you needed to beat those odds was one powerful insider--a mentor, a guide, a confidant--who sensed and shared your singular vision of yourself and could shape it for public consumption.

The movies about movies--”Show People,” “Movie Crazy,” “What Price Hollywood?,” the several versions of “A Star Is Born,” even “Singin’ in the Rain”--stressed this point. And it was reinforced by a potent metafiction: The talent scout observing Lana Turner at Schwab’s soda fountain and being knocked out by what he saw is the ur-example.

Curiously, the myth contained just enough truth to make it credible. Occasionally some improbable figure (Turner is an excellent example) emerged from obscurity to capture the world’s fancy. But, in fact, the myth was always pretty much nonsense. From D.W. Griffith’s days onward, most of the people who became movie stars were, in fact, trained professionals, actors who honed their craft on stage before turning to the movies. By the 1940s, when the great teachers began emerging from beneath Konstantin Stanislavski’s overcoat, it became next to impossible to achieve stardom without access to the knowledge, and the artistic passion, they imparted. The comparatively recent transformation of the studios into subsidiaries of vast international media corporations, unwilling to risk millions in on-the-job training for inexperienced cuties, should put a definitive end to the myth.

In this context, it seems at first glance almost quaint of Gustaf Sobin to write a novel about Greta Garbo, the greatest and perhaps the unlikeliest of all the accidental discoveries. The story of how this shy and lanky Swedish shop girl was transformed into the most enigmatically romantic figure in film history will probably seem to most modern readers impossibly remote and even slightly risible.

And, indeed, the “secret” of her transformation, which Sobin’s protagonist, a dying screenwriter named Philip Nilson, reveals in racing his own mortality in order to complete a scenario about her, is unpersuasive. He offers fictional “evidence” that the young woman--she was an impressionable 18 at the time--became legend during a brief sojourn in Constantinople in the winter of 1924-25. She had gone there with her Svengali, Mauritz Stiller, a director in the imperious European “genius” mode of the time, to make a ridiculous-sounding romantic melodrama. Together with a small crew, they were stranded in the Turkish capital, awaiting production funds that never arrived. But “Moje,” as Stiller was called, noticing something awed in the response of onlookers as Garbo stalked through their hotel, instructed his crew to start addressing her as “Contessa” and to treat her shyness and silences not as defects to be overcome but as qualities to be worshiped. Voila--a star is born.

Garbo’s several excellent biographers make far less of this interlude than Sobin does--perhaps because she had already played a countess in her first Stiller film, “The Saga of Gosta Berling,” possibly because, though she subsequently portrayed members of the nobility, there was ever something subversively anti-aristocratic in her sexuality, something playful and ironic, as if she somehow knew what her lovers did not--that the affair would end badly--and didn’t much care. “Wanton” and “perverse” were words George Cukor, director of “Camille,” used to describe her work in that film. And gallant, I would add. It was what sometimes rescued her films--humanized and modernized them--from antique convention.

What’s good about “In Pursuit of a Vanishing Star” (a clunky title for an elegantly written little novel) lies outside its ostensible subject. We see that its narrator-protagonist’s life has been shaped by a forbidden love for a half-sister he could not possess. This has led him to marry a woman who resembled her, then to divorce her when inevitably she turned out not to match his fantasies. We also see that his writing career has been devoted to the creation of dream works as improbable as the discovery myth, and Sorbin makes the reader see that Nilson’s choice of a final subject was inescapable, fated.

In his scheme of things, Garbo’s life was equally haunted by forbidden love. Her adored father, a worldly failure, had died young. Stiller was his surrogate but also prohibited from her because of his homosexuality. More important, he too died prematurely and a failure, discarded by MGM, to whom he had brought Garbo. Her obligation then was to fabrications: her own preposterous image, the silly movies that projected it, the twaddling cinematic notion that death is a minor inconvenience, easily surmounted by immortal love. No wonder she retreated into reclusive silence. She knew different. She knew better.

So does Richard Stern. In “Pacific Tremors,” he too flirts with the discovery myth. He has one of his protagonists, Ez Keneret, an aging, artistically conscientious but out-of-work director, find a pretty French girl named Leet de Loor on a Fijian tennis court and take her to Hollywood to star in his comeback film. She, like Garbo, is haunted by an absent father, a wartime collaborator who has disappeared from her life. But unlike Garbo, she is a wooden flop as an actress; the movie is canceled after three weeks in production. Also unlike Garbo, she achieves a sad yet truthful and oddly liberating resolution of her Oedipal drama.

She also arrives, perhaps, at a better place--marriage, a prospering business--than anyone else in Stern’s patchy, compelling and subtly complex fiction. He’s always been an ironic realist, and the irony he’s working here is a large one: the futility of ambition when it is posed against cosmic indifference. Not only is Keneret’s last-chance movie yanked from him, he also eventually succumbs to writing feckless autobiography, to illness and to death. His hugely supportive best friend, a film critic named Wendell Spear, first suffers a brilliantly comic IRS audit, then loses his house in a Malibu fire and finally dies just as it looks as if he might restore reasonableness to his life. The novel ends with a shattering earthquake, wiping out much of the past that might have sustained those whom Stern permits to survive.

Stern, whose large body of work has been underappreciated, relates his tale in a manner far jauntier than Sobin’s. And, at 72, he has an old guy’s impatience with detail and structural nicety. His grasp of how the movie business actually works, even the language of the people who make films, is shaky. But that’s unimportant in the end.

What is important is that his book, like Sobin’s, is haunted by death--the death of protagonists, obviously, but also the death of those illusions (including, but not limited to, the discovery myth) that sustained not just the movies but much of our public and private lives in the century just past. Stern is in more visible and self-conscious pursuit of this idea than Sobin. But these are both artful, eccentric and pleasing novels, flawed in their ways but notably--sometimes even nobly--resistant to the conventions of Hollywood fictions, the cliches of Hollywood historiography.

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Richard Schickel is the author of “Matinee Idylls” and reviews movies for Time magazine.