The half-life of the atom and the persistence of the cockroach are probably the best examples we have of mindless immortality. But if you were to draw up a top 10 list" of things that nag at the geekier corners of consciousness, surely antique movie gossip would find a place on it.
Over the years, Vanity Fair has developed a nice little line in fresh reporting on old crimes of movie star passion and, a bit more commonly, on retrospective visits to the struck sets and abandoned locations of movies that once preoccupied the press ("Cleopatra," "Myra Breckinridge") or have a continuing claim on our historical attention ("Sweet Smell of Success," "All About Eve").
We probably don't need to know that back in the day Burt Lancaster had a propensity to beat up on his girlfriends; that Warren Beatty eventually shot at least 2 1/2 million feet of film (weighing several tons when it was shipped to New York from London) on "Reds"; that Spyros Skouras, the head of 20th Century Fox, could not remember Elizabeth Taylor's name when he encountered her on the set of "Cleopatra"; or that Gary Merrill claimed to have had an erection lasting 2 1/2 days after meeting Bette Davis, whom he eventually married, on the set of "All About Eve" (hmm, never quite thought of her that way).
But somehow it's fun to become reacquainted with the dish of yore that "Vanity Fair's Tales of Hollywood," edited by Graydon Carter (who also presides over what may be the fattest magazine in human history), is richly supplied with. You will not, I imagine, be dismayed to learn that no generally useful lessons about how to avoid movie disasters emerge from these 13 case studies, by journalists including David Kamp and Peter Biskind. Happy movies are by no means all alike, but, sure enough, every unhappy one achieves misery in its own way.
The production history of the average movie tends to lack reportable drama. Like most capitalist enterprises, they just want to make some money in a hard-to-judge marketplace. They mean no great harm, but neither do they strain to make a lasting impression on posterity. Something like "The Best of Everything," which is probably the most routine film discussed here, was based on a hottish, bestselling first novel, directed by Jean Negulesco, a womanizing woman's picture specialist, and featured actresses playing young Manhattan career women (Hope Lange, Diane Baker, Suzy Parker) who were too innocent in temperament, though Joan Crawford was not. She was mostly insecure and drinking heavily, but not unmanageably so. It came out all right, and the most important thing we learn about it in passing is that Brian Aherne was the best lover Marlene Dietrich ever had, although -- slight slippage in the magazine's know-it-all pretense -- you'll have to look elsewhere to discover that he was possibly the great love of Brooke Astor's life.
