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BIOGRAPHY REVIEW BY ADAM BERNSTEIN
The man who made Hollywood
EMPIRE OF DREAMS The Epic Life of Cecil B. DeMille By Scott Eyman Simon & Schuster. 579 pp. $35
half-jokingly suggested to a pro- ducer friend in 1912 that they give up on Broadway and join the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa. “No,” said his friend, Jesse Lasky, “if you want excitement, let’s go into pictures.” Within two years, they had established them- selves as a force in the nascent in- dustry with “The Squaw Man,” generally considered the first full- length Hollywood feature. DeMille (1881-1959) poured his considerable gusto into learning the art of motion pictures, and how to make them bigger and better than anyone else at the time. He displayed immediate command of the cinematic lan- guage, especially in vigorous pac- ing and flamboyant scope. He helped expand the possibilities of the medium and push the bound- aries of what the moviegoing ex- perience could be, and he was Hollywood’s master of spectacle and bombast for four decades. “Empire of Dreams,” Scott Ey- man’s biography of DeMille and the first written with complete access to the filmmaker’s ar- chives, provides a compelling window into the rise of Holly- wood as a movie capital. Through revealing anecdotes and fresh research, Eyman adroitly navigates DeMille’s con- tradictions. He was an early in- novator who later chose show- manship over artistry, a conserva- tive reactionary during the McCarthy era who also held abso- lute convictions about creative freedom (at least for himself), a man generous with old col- leagues but parsimonious with members of his family, and a mas-
C
ecil B. DeMille was a struggling writer, actor and director — a self- described “refugee from bankruptcy” — when he
terful judge of talent whose films were weighed down with kitsch. Consider Anne Baxteras Nefretiri crying out to Charlton Heston in the 1956 remake of DeMille’s own “The Ten Commandments”: “Oh Moses, Moses, you stubborn, splendid, adorable fool!” As Eyman rightfully observes
ofDeMille’s aesthetics, he willful- ly remained “a nineteenth centu- ry man of the theater — his great- est strength, as well as his great- est limitation.” In addition to those two versions of “The Ten Commandments,” he churned out grand-scale movies centered on Jesus (“The King of Kings”) and King Richard of England (“The Crusades”). He made rous- ing, if undistinguished, movies celebrating Manifest Destiny (“Union Pacific,” “The Plains- man”) and the venerable circus melodrama “The Greatest Show on Earth” (1952), for which he re- ceived his only Oscar for direct- ing. He crossbred visual panache and hedonistic flair, notably in “Sign of the Cross” (1932), with a lesbian dance sequence, a lithe Claudette Colbert bathing in milk and Charles Laughton playing an extravagantly gay Nero. Years ear- lier, DeMille had made exuberant marital comedies starring Gloria Swanson. Eyman provides a won- derful vignette of DeMille com- manding Swanson in an extend- ed bathing scene from “Male and Female” (1919): “Prolong it! Rel- ish the smell of the rosewater. More rapture!” No one excelled more at selling implausibility. “You really believed that they were taking Jerusalem or wor- shipping the Golden Calf,” direc- tor Martin Scorsese once said. “This is why the name ‘DeMille’ meant that I was going to see a real movie.” Eyman, a journalist and author
of previous biographies of film- colony titans including studio mogul Louis B. Mayer and direc- tor John Ford, calls DeMille an in- novator whose influence still
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 24, 2010
HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES Cecil B. DeMille, center, talks with circus extras on the set of his film “The Greatest Show on Earth.”
resonates in the contemporary works of Steven Spielberg and James Cameron. DeMille, Eyman writes, “incarnated the world’s idea of Hollywood: gleefully dra- matic, willfully unsophisticated, exuberantly, joyously excessive. He transcended his individual identity to become the living em- bodiment of the movie director and, beyond that, the embodi- ment of Hollywood itself.” Even if his films kept a devoted audience, after his death De- Mille’s reputation fell precipi- tously among film critics and scholars, who considered his
“The name ‘DeMille’ meant that I was going to see a real
movie.” Martin Scorsese
rousing adventures and Bible- based epics anachronistic. Read- ers are left with Eyman’s helpful insights into the films them- selves. Not only does he believe they hold up and are worthy of re- evaluation, but he also emphasiz- es the exceptional skill it takes to finance and produce an epic. He gives the sense that one of
DeMille’s greatest talents as a filmmaker was crowd control. Having transplanted thousands of Hollywood bit players into the Mexican desert to make “The King of Kings” (1927), DeMille grabbed a megaphone and sum-
moned everyone to attention. A cast member had died, he told the assembled horde, leaving behind a grieving widow and eight chil- dren. As the cast bowed their heads, DeMille ordered the cam- eras to crank. In fact, no one had died, but this was the shot he wanted: a mass demonstration of solemnity. It was extraordinarily perverse
and extraordinarily effective — and typically DeMille.
bernsteina@washpost.com
Adam Bernstein is obituaries editor of The Washington Post.
BIOGRAPHY REVIEW BY T.J. STILES Father of our country, man of his times
WASHINGTON A Life By Ron Chernow Penguin Press. 904 pp. $40
them from their own mouths. Washington had them fashioned into dentures, anchored with gold wire to his last native tooth. The apparatus distorted his fea- tures. Any pressure pained him — a bite of food, even public speak- ing. Humiliated, he tried to keep his affliction secret. On top of his increasing deafness, it made him seem aloof. Ron Chernow describes this dental hell in “Washington,” and rarely have missing bicuspids been used to such effect. Here we see the strengths of this biogra- phy: the interweaving of the in- ner and outer man; a sensitivity to the impact of a seemingly mi- nor matter; the juxtaposition of a civic saint with the trade in hu- man flesh (or calcium, in this case). But the very intimacy of the story hints at this book’s limita- tions. Like Washington’s teeth, his life as told here is less than fully rooted in its surroundings. Let’s be clear: “Washington” is a true achievement. A reader might agree with my criticisms yet thoroughly enjoy the book. That speaks to the triumph of Chernow’s narrative structure, the depth of his research and how alive he is to the emotional con- tent of dry material. In organical-
G
eorge Washington did not have wooden teeth. He had human teeth, which he bought from slaves, who pulled
even prose style. At times, cliches and dead phrases rustle noisily on the path. (“Throwing caution to the wind,” Washington found the “cards stacked against him” and had to “cool his heels.”) Cher- now pumps up descriptions as if he were Stan Lee writing about Spider-Man: The “powerfully rough-hewn” Washington’s “matchless strength” increases to “superhuman strength” in the same paragraph. The breathless- ness becomes counterproductive. An assertion that a wilderness ex- pedition was “incomparably daunting” naturally calls to mind entirely comparable journeys. But the grand redwood forest
of Washington’s life draws atten- tion away from the debris un- derfoot. Chernow builds sympa- thy for a man born into the ruling class of colonial Virginia, the slave-owning gentry. Desperate for a commission in the king’s army, young Washington resent- ed the mildest slight. He stum- bled in battle, won glory and learned to discipline himself. When the Revolution came, he was ready to lead. His strength of will and sheer presence helped keep an underequipped and un- dermanned army in the field for year after shoeless year. Chernow splendidly describes
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
ly unifying Washington’s private and public lives, he accomplishes a feat that eludes many biogra- phers. And he propels readers forward. There were moments on my march to the end of his story
on Page 817 when I thought he could have shortened the trip, yet I still felt that the writing was purposeful, not merely encyclo- pedic. He attains this despite an un-
Washington’s troubled relation- ship with money. The Father of His Country owned a great deal of his country — tens of thou- sands of acres — and scores of slaves. Yet he was constantly in debt, thanks in part to his lavish lifestyle. He even needed a loan to attend his own presidential inau- guration. Financial matters erod- ed his storied self-control; he be-
came by turns inventive, infuriat- ed and self-pitying. Chernow honestly explores Washington’s contradictory ideas about slavery, too. He endorsed abolition yet, short of money, drove his slaves hard and secretly pursued run- aways during his presidency. Chernow’s goal is to humanize
Washington. He succeeds hand- somely, depicting an irreducibly complicated figure. Remarkable as Washington was, however, he remained embedded in his times. Unfortunately, Chernow doesn’t really engage with the scholar- ship of Bernard Bailyn, Pauline Maier, Edward Countryman or the many other historians who have revealed so much about 18th-century America. Take Washington’s obsession with appearances, with expensive carriages and fashionable clothes. To understand it, we should know that contemporar- ies saw social stratification as not only natural, but desirable. In an age of multilayered property re- quirements for enfranchisement, Americans deferred to the leader- ship of the wealthy — specifically, those rich in real estate. In theo- ry, landed gentry passively col- lected rent and other income, which made them a disinterested elite, equipped to guide the rest of society. To be fully effective as a leader, Washington had to appear to be a man of leisure, rather than the debtor he was, tossed about by financial interests. Yet the “radicalism of the American Revolution” (to use Gordon Wood’s phrase) politi- cized a broad swath of middling sorts, who are largely absent from this biography. Chernow’s
account of Alexander Hamilton’s struggle with Thomas Jefferson and James Madison naturally tilts toward Hamilton; more seri- ously, it doesn’t capture the ex- tent to which Jeffersonianism went far beyond Jefferson. Washington and Hamilton sought to direct economic devel- opment from above, by, for exam- ple, incorporating the Bank of the United States. But Jeffersonians saw corporations as corrupt de- vices by which the king had granted favors to supporters; Ad- am Smith himself condemned corporations in “The Wealth of Nations.” America’s competitive individualism took root in this opposition to elite rule. As histo- rian Joyce Appleby writes, “Smith’s invisible hand was warmly clasped by the Repub- licans.” It’s worth reading “Wash- ington” alongside “Madison and Jefferson,” by Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg, two aca- demic historians more sympa- thetic to the views of Hamilton’s foes. (Disclosure: I provided a promotional quote for “Madison and Jefferson.”) By the book’s end, I shared
Chernow’s clear-eyed admiration for Washington as a selfless lead- er of the new republic. But the source of his greatness may have been that he so thoroughly em- bodied the values of a hierarchi- cal culture that the revolution fortunately doomed.
bookworld@washpost.com
T.J. Stiles is the author of “The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt,” winner of the 2010 Pulitzer Prize and the 2009 National Book Award.
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