Girls Behaving Badly

When it comes to women, the hand wringing is even more anguished. In the latest version, tabloid mags across the nation are wondering whether Meg Ryan's recent adventures will affect her popularity as America's favorite "girl next door."

Maybe. But probably not. And not just because we're so advanced as a culture now that such things no longer affect us. Just ask Pee Wee Herman. But because there's really no way of knowing how the public will react to an individual scandal. Whether they will rally to support their tarnished star, or boot them out into the cold, stormy night. This is nothing new, of course, movie fans have always been fickle creatures. A glance back at some of the bad girls who preceded Meg is both informative and surprising.

The first, of course, was silent comedienne Mabel Normand. Her career began in New York at the very dawn of moving pictures. A pretty girl, who had done some modeling, Mabel was quickly snapped up by the embryonic industry and initially cast in dramatic ingénue roles. It wasn't long, though, before director Mack Sennett noticed her gift for comedy. Mabel knew no boundaries, she wasn't the least bit shy about making an idiot of herself and behaved as wildly in her private life as she did onscreen. But to her fans it was a lovable kind of wildness. She was a crazy girl, but always a good one. Then came that night in 1922.

Mabel had a drug problem, which older director, William Desmond Taylor, had been helping her to overcome. He had also been teaching her to read. On the night of February 1, 1922 Mabel stopped at Taylor's house for about half an hour to pick up a book. About fifteen minutes after she left, Taylor was murdered. His body was discovered the next morning by his valet, and all hell quickly broke loose. By the time the police arrived, the studio bosses were already there, sorting through his papers. Rumor had it that Mabel was there too, burning letters. This wasn't true, but Mabel didn't try to deny that she had been there the night before.

Now the studio had a problem. Taylor's death came hard on the heels of the Fatty Arbuckle trial, which had damaged the industry's reputation. Mabel's support of her friend and co-star had not helped him or her, and then there was Taylor himself. The dashing, British born director was apparently secretly gay. So, the studio reasoned, which was worse, to let the public discover yet another dirty little Hollywood secret, or to sacrifice a couple of actresses who weren't performing up to par at the box office anyway?

Guess which way they went? Mabel Normand and Mary Miles Minter were practically named as Taylor's mistresses and both of them kissed goodbye to their careers. The murder was never solved (though all signs point to Minter's mother, Charlotte Shelby), and Mabel died not too many years later of tuberculosis.

Fine, I hear you say, but that was the twenties and those actresses played virginal ingénues. Not too different from Meg Ryan, really, I reply. But, of course, it isn't as simple as that. Take Mary Astor.

Mary Astor started in silent pictures when she was thirteen and stunningly beautiful. She made an easy transition to talkies and by the late 30s had made over 74 movies in which she chiefly specialized in playing nice girls. She was married to her second husband, a doctor by the name of Thorpe when everything started crashing down. Their marriage had been crumbling for some time, and Mary had embarked on an affair with celebrated playwright George Kaufman (Dinner at Eight, The Man Who Came to Dinner, Stage Door, etc.). Nothing unusual here. Not in tinseltown, at any rate.

Except that Mary kept a diary. And she didn't just record where they met for lunch. She wrote about everything. In detail. Graphic detail.

And her husband found the diary.

By this time, they had begun divorce proceedings and were heading into a nasty custody battle. Dr. Thorpe reckoned the diary would come in handy. He planned on using it as evidence that Mary was an unfit mother. But he didn't just share his discovery with their respective attorneys, he shared it with the press. Mary was sure that her career was over. After all, it wasn't as if she'd ever been a really major star, just one of those contract players who always performs reliably without ever setting the heavens ablaze. But, astonishingly, her studio stood by her.

Prior to the scandal breaking she had been shooting Dodsworth for Goldwyn, who made the gutsy decision to release the film anyway. In later years, Mary would credit the film with saving her career. Audiences who saw her as the noble Edith Cortright, did not for a second believe that she could be the evil Jezebel that her husband was trying to paint her. She was also helped by the fact that the judge refused to accept the diary into evidence and ordered it burned as pornography (leaving posterity with only a few choice tid-bits).

The scandal not only failed to destroy her career, it positively helped. After the firestorm subsided, she was offered much more interesting roles, including the duplicitous Brigid O'Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon, and that same year, The Great Lie, which won her an Academy Award as Best Supporting Actress.

Ah, you may say, times had obviously changed. People were far more sophisticated in the late thirties than they had been in the twenties.

Trust me, no-one is sophisticated enough for that diary!

But, yes, the late thirties was a time of sophistication. Still, it was just over ten years after the Mary Astor scandal that another scandal broke, this one hit one of the top stars in the world and resulted in her being exiled from the country for seven years.

Ingrid Bergman, the star of Gaslight, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Notorious and, of course, Casablanca, might have thought she was safe from the puritanical noodlings of the hoy polloy.

She was wrong.

It all started when she saw Roberto Rossellini's Rome - Open City, and contacted the director, keen to be involved in his next film. At the time, she had been married to fellow Swede Petter Lindstrom for some years, but the marriage had been failing for some time. By the time she traveled to Rome in the spring of 1949 to shoot Stromboli, she had already written to Lindstrom telling him that the marriage was over. Of course, no-one knew this and the press was soon abuzz with rumors of an affair with Rossellini. The Motion Picture Association of America wrote to Bergman, asking her to deny all rumors ASAP, or kiss goodbye to her career. She ignored them.

The situation rapidly deteriorated, and it soon became public knowledge that Bergman was pregnant and that Rosellini was the father. At this point all hell broke loose. Bergman was denounced in the Senate by Edwin Johnson, who proposed that she never again be permitted to set foot on American soil.

Bergman could have cared less. She stayed in Europe, making four more films with Rossellini. By the time their marriage broke up in 1956, times had changed and when she starred in the critically acclaimed Anastasia (which was shot in the UK), she found herself everybody's favorite girl again, walking away with that year's Best Actress nod.

In the Looking Glass world that is Hollywood, it was as if the previous seven years had never happened. All was forgiven, we had learned from the experience and grown wiser.

Or possibly not. A mere three years after Ingrid Berman's triumphant return, Elizabeth Taylor made her first (though not her last) foray into scandal.

It's hard to recall now, but there was a time when Taylor was just another beautiful ingénue, and to audiences who had watched her grow up she was that sweet girl in Father of the Bride. Enter Eddie Fisher. At the time, he was married to Debbie Reynolds. The marriage was on the rocks, but no-one knew this. If Taylor was the beautiful girl next door, Reynolds was America's daughter, so when Taylor and Fisher announced plans to marry, Taylor was immediately cast in the role of Jezebel, the hard-hearted home-wrecker. It wasn't true, of course, but that hardly mattered. She was vilified by press and public alike. This time around though, it didn't hurt her career, she simply took to playing that type of role, which worked perfectly. This tactic spiraled up until the making of Cleopatra in 1964 when La Scandale really hit. On location in Rome, with Eddie Fisher on the set, la Liz began perhaps the most publicized affair in movie history when she fell ass over teakettle for dashing Welshman Richard Burton. The Senate had condemned Bergman, but Taylor went one better, inciting the anger of the Pope himself who waxed lyrical on the subject of the film industry in general and decadent American actresses in particular. He urged the producers to boot her off the film and out of the country.

The Pope obviously didn't read the trades.

Of course, Elizabeth Taylor's career was hardly damaged, though at this distance we forget how hated she was at the time. It seems hard to imagine any sexual peccadillo causing that kind of reaction these days, but history shows us that nothing is certain. If an actress is particularly close to the country, or if her actions are too diametrically opposed to her image, it is still possible to be destroyed. Then you're just a salacious tale for The E! True Hollywood Story, everyone nods and notes how fame and fortune doesn't buy happiness, and somehow feel better.

Meg will probably have more luck, not because she's America's sweetheart, but because the "wounded" party is in a career slump, and the object of her affections just hit the top rank. There's rarely anything moral in moral outrage.