It girls – and boys

Joseph Roach
IT
280pp. University of Michigan Press. US $60; distributed in the UK by Eurospan £38.50; paperback, £11.95.
978 0 472 09936 8

It begins with Joseph Roach, Yale Professor of Theatre, sitting in a New Haven barbershop, looking at the actress Uma Thurman. She is looking back at him, from the cover of GQ magazine, “eyelids drooping, lips parted, hair bad”, also “negligent of dress, or about to be”. That she appears to be alone, and has made eye contact with him, generates an illusory intimacy between them, “a modicum of privacy where none seems possible” – just one man and his magazine. But this “secular magic” is not limited to New Haven barbershops or Tarantino blondes. As Roach goes on to show, there is a great tradition of celebrities, martyrs, star performers, monarchs and others who have appeared in the public eye to have the gift of magnetism, charisma, sprezzatura, or what you will – each term carries its own particular historical charge. “It”, the subject of Roach’s book, is the ability to turn heads, regardless of acting talent, physical beauty, or any other more tangible accomplishment. But what is It exactly? Are you born with It, do you achieve It, or is It thrust upon you?

To have “It”, the fortunate possessor must have that strange magnetism which attracts both sexes. He or she must be entirely unselfconscious and full of self-confidence . . . . Conceit or self-consciousness destroys “It” immediately. In the animal world “It” demonstrates [Itself] in tigers and cats – both animals being fascinating and mysterious, and quite unbiddable.

The person who wrote the book on “It” is, of course, Elinor Glyn, whose book “It”, and Other Stories, published in 1927, was swiftly followed by the film adaptation that starred the first of the “It” Girls, Clara Bow. Glyn had made a scandalous name for herself, and tiger-skin rugs, with her novel Three Weeks (1907), the fuss over which led her to leave England for the United States – notoriety, as well as sexiness, plays a role in her version of “It”. But the image of the exotic, unbiddable animal preceded her encounter with Bow. The novelist had already described Sarah Bernhardt as “tigerish” (Bernhardt, Bow and Glyn were all, incidentally, redheads), and written of Douglas Fairbanks: “He had that nameless charm . . . and cats, as well as women, always knew when he came into a room”. “Evidently”, Roach says of her enthusings, “dogs try too hard.”

His own prose is more canine than feline – more eagerly tricksy than lazily cool. For him, as for Diderot, “It” is a paradox:

the power of apparently effortless embodiment of contradictory qualities simultaneously: strength and vulnerability, innocence and experience, and singularity and typicality among them . . . . It makes certain people interesting all the time; others require a lucky break or a lurid calamity . . . to activate the fickle prurience of the public . . . . Like a gestalt switch, during which the vase transforms itself, in the blink of the beholder’s eye, into two faces juxtaposed, only to switch back again, reversible polarities appear both to cause It and to assert themselves as its most startling and continuously compelling effect.

This contradictory power was not invented with the motion picture; Roach’s It tracks it back to seventeenth-century England, while acknowledging that it has existed, with significant variations, for much longer than that. But its modern form, at least as far as Anglocentric culture is concerned, has something to do with the Civil War: “extreme relaxation is the natural effect of extreme restraint”, wrote Thomas Babington Macaulay of the Revolutionary epoch, “and . . . an age of hypocrisy is, in the regular course of things, followed by an age of impudence”. And an age of iconoclasm, adds Roach, could be expected to “yield” to an age of icons. The regicide made a martyr of Charles I; but it is to portraits of Charles II and his mistresses (more negligence) that Roach turns. Aphra Behn could say of the actress and royal mistress Nell Gwyn that “whenever you look abroad, and when you speak, men crowd to listen to you with that awful reverence as to Holy Oracles or Divine Prophecies”. The metaphor applied equally well to the King himself, who has been described by Ronald Hutton as a “star” in the “theatre of kingship in the age of baroque”. The thorough publicizing of Charles II’s private life did not prevent him, divinely appointed as he was, from retaining some hint of sacred glamour. The Restored monarch, surrounded by high-ranking attendants in the bedchamber, ready to pass him his breeches or his chamber pot, remains sanctioned to rule – and to cure. Charles II amused his subjects in the playhouse by conducting both his private squabbles and his amours there, but he also touched more of them for scrofula, the King’s Evil, than any of his predecessors. Pepys recorded that his royal employer could perform this sacred duty with surprising solemnity, as much as he was agog to hear about Charles’s more widely celebrated activities around town – which he would sometimes perform wearing the regalia of state. His father’s reticence, Roach doesn’t tell us, had made it difficult for people to obtain the Touch during the aloof 1630s; consequently, during the 1640s, access to the ceremony became a royalist propaganda weapon. A successful one, it would seem: one petitioner actually attempted to drag Charles I from his coach in order to receive the Touch.

Glyn, for whom surreptitious childhood readings of Pepys’s Diary had been a formative experience, declared her beloved matinee idols to be the “reincarnated Stuarts, dynastic scions of a second Restoration”. Her ideas about “It” come with a nostalgic slant that Roach finds to be, in their accuracy about the relationship between one era’s stardom and another’s, “uncanny” (the word he also uses to describe his own encounter with GQ). Puritanism, she felt, had been “a blasphemy against the beauty and joy of my romantic dream world”, and it was no coincidence that her campaign to “re-enchant” Hollywood took place with the “menace of Bolshevism” lurking somewhere beyond the Tinsel. Her show-business restoration of the Restoration gives Roach his cue to reach back from Hollywood to a time when the king had two bodies and the word “celebrity” had a ceremonial application. Now it is celebrities who have two bodies: the body natural and the body cinematic.

At either end of the long eighteenth century, there are pertinent examples of “It” in the forms of Sarah Siddons, the tragedy queen sans pareil, and in archetypal rakehells such as the Duke of Buckingham, the Earl of Rochester and George Etherege’s Rochester-inspired creation, the libertine Dorimant, in The Man of Mode (1676). That comedy begins with its hero holding a kingly levee, accepting visitors while his valet fusses over his clothes, ensuring that the folds of his “mighty pretty suit” “hang just”. “I love to be well-dressed”, Dorimant announces, “and think it no scandal to my understanding.” Nonchalance, it would seem, is not the necessary accessory to charisma. “Clothes can charm the body they adorn”, observes Roach – though in this instance he skips past the significant detail that Dorimant’s refuses to disguise the reek of his body with “essence, or the orange-flower water”. The rake wants women to smell him as he is, and a conscious lack of effort, an odorous boast, is how his vanity permeates his finery.

Likewise, Siddons, a failure in London the first time she acted there, needed a lot of work, not least when it came to controlling her offstage image: when Joshua Reynolds took her as his model for a painting of the Tragic Muse in 1784, she had to tell him not to overdo the pigment, but retain that awful pallor for which she was renowned. Ten years earlier, the Drury Lane prompter had said that she “would look well enough if she did not paint her face so much with white and Red”. But the scathing reviews Siddons initially received in London, picking up on her monotonous voice and general lack of “It”, did not stop her learning “It” and returning to the capital in triumph. “There is but one great tragedian”, wrote Leigh Hunt, “and that is Mrs Siddons.” But it seems that the effort that surrounds and supports feline effortlessness must remain invisible. When Siddons came out of retirement in 1816, Hazlitt pleaded eloquently that she should reconsider; her mortality, in the absence of agility and grace, was showing.

Amid the clever connections that Roach makes between actors and princes, or between Johnny Depp in the Pirates of the Caribbean films and Catherine of Valois (via Pepys and Shakespeare’s Henry V), he pays relatively little attention to the techniques by which performers and their familiars perfect their act – the photographic conditions, for example, under which Greta Garbo’s face, as discussed by Roland Barthes, became the face of “the Divine” – or the historical conditions that make one society’s “It” distinct from another’s. The actor David Garrick had “It”, of course, but it is misleading to quote, as Roach does, Richard Cumberland’s overused line about the difference between his acting (“young and light and alive in every muscle”) and that of others without mentioning that, on the night that Cumberland recalls, the audience preferred the acting of the senior leading man, James Quin. Nor does Roach have much to say about what “It” sounds like (does “It” translate to the radio? It itself was a silent movie).

It is a piece of smart, provocative cultural history, nonetheless, not least because it includes some poignant examples of decline and failure, and how “It” can be lost. Clara Bow, for one, given years of the full Paramount treatment, encouraged by her studio masters to live fast, as long as she did so in the public eye, suffered a nervous breakdown. Sarah Siddons, being shown the door by Hazlitt. And just as sadly, Lillie Langtry, turning up in New York, no longer the showgirl type, determined to buy a frock from the fashionable dressmaker “Lucile”. Only when Langtry tries on a gown does she see why its designer has been so keen to dissuade her from doing so. “It makes me look so old”, she admits on the spot. Lucile tells this story in her memoirs. But how could she resist? She was, after all, Elinor Glyn’s sister, and the two taste-making girls had once sneaked into a party and hidden under the table in order to catch a glimpse of Langtry, the “Jersey Lily”, in all her undiminished glory – another bewitching royal mistress, another formative experience in the history of It and Its acolytes.

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Michael Caines is an Assistant Editor at the TLS. He is currently editing a book on David Garrick. His anthology of plays by eighteenth-century women was published in 2004.