Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [32]
The Vamp: Theda Bara at her most darkly seductive as Cleopatra (1917). Al Capone had a photograph of Bara in his office.
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“FIVE AND TEN CENT LUSTS AND DREAMS”
NEITHER POLA NEGRI NOR GLORIA SWANSON COULD CLAIM to be the first true screen siren; that prize is reserved for Al Capone’s favorite actress, Theda Bara, who became a star uttering the immortal words, “Kiss me, my fool.” Bara’s nickname, the Vamp, came from her role in A Fool There Was as a vampire who uses her sexuality to enslave and devour respectable middle-aged men. The publicity photographs for the film, released in 1915, show her posed above the discarded skeletons of her victims.
Promotional photos for her other movies (only six of the forty she made between 1914 and 1926 survive) are equally suggestive: Bara was always shown in the most fiercely come-hither of poses and the most darkly revealing of outfits. Her studio let it be known that she came from Arabia and was escorted everywhere by Nubian footmen. But this exotic, man-eating image was entirely fabricated—in fact the happily married Theda came from Cincinnati, Ohio, and no whiff of scandal was ever attached to her private life. Although she came to resent being typecast, for over a decade Bara thrilled audiences as Cleopatra and Salome and in titles like The Serpent, The Vixen and The She-Devil.
By glamorizing seduction and excitement, stars like Bara, Swanson and Negri helped change public views on morality. Mary Pickford might have been horrified at the thought of her fans seeing her as a divorcee, but the 1924 movie Alimony was promoted with irresistible images of “brilliant men, beautiful jazz babies, champagne baths, midnight revels, petting parties in the purple dawn, all ending in one terrific climax that makes you gasp.” Scriptwriter and director Elinor Glyn said that the aim of her movies was “to spread the ideals and the atmosphere of romance and glamour into the humblest home”; it was she who taught the heart-throb Rudolph Valentino to kiss not the back, but the palm of a lady’s hand.
No wonder that half of the older girls at Middletown High School, tutored by weekly movies, told the sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd that “nine out of every ten boys and girls of high school age have ‘petting parties.’” In 1933, a University of Chicago survey studied the effects of movies on teenage girls and found that 40 percent wanted a man to make love to them after seeing a romantic film—and that 14 percent were inspired by the movies to become “gold-diggers.”
In an increasingly secular age, movie theaters had become the focus of an almost spiritual yearning for beauty and glamour and people flocked to them as they had once flocked to the austere clapboard churches of New England. Lavishly comfortable, exotically decorated as Egyptian temples or rococo palaces, often air-conditioned, in 1925 there were 20,000 cinemas across the United States, selling 100 million tickets a week. The Lynds estimated that the 35,000 inhabitants of Middletown went to one of its nine theaters on average more than once a week.
The fact that the same films were shown across the country at roughly the same time had a powerfully unifying impact on American society: popular films became shared and defining American experiences. But while movies, like radio and national newspapers and magazines, brought the United States together as a cohesive cultural whole, their practical effect on family values (moral content aside) was subversive. Families seldom attended a movie together, as they would once have gone ice-skating or to a church picnic. More often teenagers went with friends or on dates, generally driving themselves in cars they had borrowed from their parents, free from the chaperones who would once have been observing and monitoring their behavior.
Investment in films soared from $78 million in 1921 to $850 million in 1930 and huge advances were made in film technology during this period leading up to the development of cartoons and the tentative introduction of sound