Life, 1923-06-14 · page 20 of 44
Life — June 14, 1923 — page 20: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This piece satirizes the moral panic surrounding Hollywood in the early 20th century. The opening passage mockingly mimics sensationalist press accounts portraying the film industry as decadent and corrupt ("City of Riotous Night," "plague spot of the Pacific"), then pivots to defend Hollywood's actual character. The photographs and captions that follow ironically present starlets—with invented names like "Dolores Quilt" and "Sylvia de Cuttle"—engaged in wholesome domestic activities: reading books, playing piano with family, and attending a "Girlies' Club" doing innocent activities like taffy-pulling. The satire's point: the press manufactures scandalous myths about Hollywood actresses when reality shows them as ordinary, family-oriented women. The underlying joke targets both the moralistic media crusade against cinema and the public's appetite for celebrity scandal. Life defends the film industry against exaggerated criticism by contrasting fabricated vice with documented virtue.
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Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
LIFE Is Hollywood the American Gomorrah? OLLYWOOD. Lights, music, laughter. Painted mouths. White bosoms. Long, sensuous glances. Bubbles dying slowly in a broken champagne glass. Then cold dawn, creeping gray, cruel, relentless over the City of Riotous Night. One pale white rose, its petals trampled into the dirt. That is what the press would have us believe of Hollywood, T press, that winds its slimy coils tight and ever tighter, crush as the moth is singed in the flame of a guttering candle. Lies. All of it. There is the Hollywood that we who love her know. Lights, music, laughter—true. But lights of mothers’ shining eyes, music of dimpled baby voices, laughter that comes in innocent games after the day’s toil. Hollywood. Not the plague spot of the Pacific. No. Hollywood. The City of Eternal Homes. CSRS 2 zs aA 5 MISCHIEVOUS little Dolores Quilt, bright light of the Heroin Comedies. is a most serious-minded little person away from the glare of the Kleigs. Her great fad is reading—“I'm just a lutton for the stuff,” she confesses faughingly—and one ‘can often catch her in some such pose as this, for she is never so happy as when among her book. SYLVIA DE CUTTLE, the be-satined, perfumed star of “Rich a Wives’ Bathrooms,” and known as the most daringly dressed woman s on the screen, loves nothing better than an evening at the piano, with her adoring young husband and her dainty little girls clustered ‘about her. Doesn't look much like the Hollywood you read about, does it? DOESN'T IT MAKE YOUR HEARTS go pit-a-pat OTHERS MAY HARK to the lure of the all-night to see so much beauty gathered together in one place, lunch-wagons, but Ethel Warmsworth, ‘America’s fans? This is one of the sessions of Our Girlies’ Club, Sweetie,” loves to steal away from the gaiety, and, an organization of the younger film stars. There are her mother heart all tenderness, all woman, croon a such wild goings-on as Bite-the-Apple, taffy-pulling, dear old song as she feeds a certain expectant little and light wines, and many a good story has its start in furnace, which will take its evening meal from none this little circle. Oh, boy—how'd you like to join? but her fair hands. comicbooks.com