Way back when

A book of starlet glam shots raises questions like: Was it bad choices or bad luck that kept Sharon Stone from ruling Hollywood after "Basic Instinct"?

By Charles Taylor

Mar 15, 2002 | Where have all the flowers gone? Gone to head shots everywhere. When will they ever learn?

But then, would we want them to? Has our appetite for starlets ever abated, even for a minute? Pinups and nudie shots from the '30s, '40s and '50s, gathered in calendars and art books, have become staples of ironically appreciated kitsch, icons for pop-culture hipsters.

No hip irony has yet attached itself to the contemporary equivalents, those two-page portraits of some up-and-comer in Vanity Fair or Esquire, shot not by some sleazy photographer operating out of a seedy Spanish-style apartment in L.A., but by the likes of Herb Ritts or Patrick Demarchelier. These girls (and sometimes guys), the layouts say, are about to be news -- or what passes for it -- and you are here at the birth of a star. The starlet shots that are the raison d'être of Maxim, Stuff or Gear don't even pretend that significance. Sometimes the models are known, sometimes they aren't. Nobody at the lads mags are seriously claiming that good work or even stardom awaits these girls; they're promising just enough barely concealed tits and ass to make readers hope there's more to be glimpsed inside.

No claims for future greatness are to be found anywhere in the photos that make up Nancy Ellison's "Starlet." Ellison specializes in photos of would-be stars on the rise, the type of shots, she writes, that were once crafted by the studio publicity departments. These photos, taken from the mid-'70s to the early '90s, are removed enough from today that, by now, the subjects have either made it or faded back into obscurity -- sometimes made it and thenfaded back.

"Starlet" doesn't offer anything as homey as a "Before They Were Famous" layout in People, or home movies dug up for an E! Entertainment profile or a Barbara Walters special. In those contexts, the humble origins of stars are presented as cute diversions; we can relax and enjoy George Clooney in the car he drove cross-country, or Cameron Diaz's high-school yearbook photo, because we know they survived.

Some of the women included in "Starlet" have survived; others, God knows where they are. Sex objects fall into predictable fantasy roles. Ellison lists some of them in her introduction: "the virgin dreamer, the Loralie Eve, the bored sex object; the girl next door who might let you touch; the sun goddess, the bimbo, the harem siren, the mistress, the hippie, free lover, the brassy secretary." These photos conjure up their own fantasies: the star in chrysalis; the flash in the pan; the has-been; the oddity; and, inevitably, the victim. The young women in "Starlet" are poised to become Marilyn Monroe, or perhaps the Black Dahlia, Betty Elms or Diane Selwyn.

And yet that's an easy bit of moralizing. Of course stardom is brutal, and it's only rational to say that behind the photos in "Starlet" are stories of humiliation and indignities. But to see the women in the book only as potential victims is to fall into the prudish voyeurism fed by phrases like "the Hollywood Dream Factory," a phrase that promises truth and delivers melodramatic mystique. It's to turn into a finger-wagging hick, warning that heartbreak and disgrace await anyone who ventures to that wicked city; it's to become Piper Laurie as Carrie's crazy Bible-ridden mother looking at her daughter's prom dress and saying, shocked, "I can see your dirty pillows."

Americans harbor enough vestiges of puritanism to think that expecting the worst is equivalent to being sensible. But as Jacqueline Susann once said, there are plenty of girls who went astray without the help of books or movies -- just Uncle Clem and the hayloft. After all, we never look at photos of male starlets and feel the same kind of disapproval or moral superiority. It's likely that River Phoenix, included in a brief section here on male starlets, lived a hell none of the women in the book did. Without pretending that everyone in "Starlet" landed on their feet, it's important to remember that the scold looks at "glamour" photos and makes the subjects over in a different sort of fantasy object: the lamb gone astray who'll serve as a warning to us all.

Next Page: The sexiest shot belongs to Arquette

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