Hepburn, Garbo, and Now

I really enjoyed both “Hepburn and Garbo” and “Ten Notes on Oscar Weekend,” especially because in the earlier chapter Smith discusses her favorite movie—The Philadelphia Story—which also happens to be my favorite movie.  I found it incredibly interesting to read these chapters side by side because of the stark difference in strategy Smith employs when discussing these various actors and actresses. In “Hepburn and Garbo,” Smith fully buys in to the goddess statuses of Hepurn and Garbo, gushing about her personal admiration and life long devotion to the public personae of these women. In including so much biographical information, Smith joins the many legitimators of the legend of these women that had been crafted over decades by Hollywood and now bears the distinguished, romantic sheen of an iconic past. In her defense, Smith’s idea of perfection necessitates complexity, depth, courage, and independence of mind, yet she systematically adds to the misty elevation of these figures in a way that consciously immortalizes them. Not only does she buy into the mythicism of these women, but she champions them as something perfect of the past that will never again exist. At the end of her discussion of Hepburn, Smith writes “The marvelous weight of the pleasure ennobles all clichés, and I hope to see the obituaries full of ‘the last of her kind,’ ‘the greatest star in the firmament’ and the rest of that sort of guff because, for once, it is all true” (159). The fact that this essay is in some ways a eulogy, written days after Hepburn’s death, in part explains why it is possibly more sentimental than if Smith had written it at another time. Yet I found it very interesting that Smith chose to end the essay talking about clichés. As a successful novelist, Smith no doubt has a particular sensitivity to cliché and what it means in writing, so this statement can be seen as curious. Maybe she is saying that at the heart of these clichés is pure sentimentality, which is why they ring false and feel cloying under most circumstances. But, in an instance like this when actress beloved by so many, who has given the public so much pleasure, dies, the only appropriate emotion is sentimentality and therefore those phrases paradoxically become right and fitting.

In complete contrast, in “Ten Notes on Oscar Weekend,” Smith takes a completely opposite tack in discussing the various movie stars and other famous people in the industry. While it becomes fairly obvious, the reader doesn’t officially find out until the very end of the chapter that Smith is consciously subverting everyone’s expectations of an Oscar weekend account: “What if you got assigned to write about the Oscars and you didn’t mention a single name? You know, as a kind of demystifying strategy?” (221). She instead focuses on depicting attitudes; everyone has an attitude about Hollywood and collectively those attitudes conglomerate into an often unruly beast of expectations, glamour, exclusivity, and dehumanization. There are the “hot girls” and their “jock boyfriends” who sip expensive cocktails, groom themselves into oblivion, and feel they are on the lower tiers of the Hollywood glow by virtue of their appearance and habits; there are the aspiring writers and actors who often work as waiters, ever pushing at the seams, hopeful of a big break and admittance into the club; then there are the stars themselves, the people on the inside, whom Smith paints as professionally oriented but so conscious of the public gaze that they cannot even laugh at these events, but instead narrate their reactions: “That’s hilarious. That is so funny” (215). I felt Smith’s anti-name strategy was very effective at giving us an almost anthropological view of Hollywood; unencumbered by emotional responses to famous names, the ridiculousness, the performance, the endless and inescapable grasping and wanting came through and created a very perceptive social critique.

PS Because I am not totally immune to curiosity about who she saw/met that weekend, I did a little googling and found this picture. http://guestofaguest.com/tag/oscar-party/