essay
by SIMON LIBERATI
Elegance is a privilege, one that requires a certain flirtation with ruin. Hollywood stars from the 1920s to the 1960s fell into the gutter in very little time, like gangsters, tyrants, aristocrats, or children’s dolls. As Kenneth Anger described so well, Tinseltown was a cemetery of effigies and heads to be sacrificed. The myth of the has-been; Mary Pickford’s botched facelift; the arrests of Hedy Lamarr or Mario Montez for theft; the wanderings or prostitutions of certain others; the lobotomy of Frances Farmer; the suicides of Lupe Vélez or Carole Landis; the mythical decapitation of Jayne Mansfield — these are not accidents, not errors along the way, not the effect of a spell, but the result of a promise. It lies in the vocation of royalties to be overthrown. Fairground royalties are under the same regime as the real ones: the old regime, the regime of…