193THE HOLLYWOOD FILE
THE MOST REMEMBERED CINEMA DIVAS, ICONS AND LEGENDS
Five
time Olympic gold medalist in swimming, Johnny Weissmuller broke three records
at the 1924 Olympics in Paris, and was the world's greatest swimmer after
turning professional. He is best known for his role as Tarzan, and though
other Tarzans existed before and after Johnny, none were as popular with the
movie-going public. Tall and handsome, Johnny was the perfect star of the
Depression era, when people needed a hero to look towards for encouragement,
and his charm and talent kept him a favorite for many more years to come.
Born
Betty Joan Perske, Lauren Bacall went from a part-time fashion model to one of
the silver screen's most famous leading ladies. Though she was never even
nominated for an Academy Award until her role as Hannah Morgan in
THE MIRROR HAS TWO FACES (1996) when she received a Best Supporting Actress
nomination, Bacall became famous co-starring with
Humphrey Bogart
in 1940s crime thrillers and later, as his wife in real life.
Many
movie comediennes have come along after Mae West, but none have equaled her
talent. Mae was whimsical, sexy, irreverent and ahead of her time. She was an
actor, dancer, writer, producer, and director at a time when women rarely had
jobs outside of the home. Her risque delivery of such immortal lines as "Come
up and see me sometime" and "Is that a gun in your pocket or are you just
happy to see me?" are as tantalizing today as when they were first heard over
sixty years ago.
The
live-fast-die-young message is replayed with each new generation. Teenagers
chanted along with Nirvana founder and heroin addict Kurt Cobain (1967-1994)
as if he were a cult leader: "Load up on guns and bring your friends / It's
fun to lose and to pretend," he sang on "Smells Like Teen Spirit." Found dead
of a seemingly self-inflicted gunshot wound, Cobain left his fans to ponder
murder theories and to comb his lyrics for clues. Not all male
icons are tragic, of course. Frank Sinatra (1915-1998) is still a straight
man's role model and a woman's ideal: cool, suave, a tough guy with a
marshmallow centre. He smoked, drank and caroused until he died at 82. Today,
a new generation of disciples (Peter Cincotti, Jamie Cullum, Michael Bublé)
are proving, by comparison, how inimitable Sinatra was. If all sorts of male
icons -- John Wayne (1907-1979), Babe Ruth (1895-1948), Martin Luther King
(1929-1968) are known for their fearlessness, the women often seem frail,
helpless. The much-ridiculed Elizabeth Taylor (born 1932) has the same
resilience. "She should have died about ten times," says Toth. "She was the
first big star to stand up there and open her mouth about AIDS. If that's not
a gay icon, I don't know what is." Never to be overlooked is Harvey Milk
(1930-1978), the San Francisco politician who was elected to the city's board
of supervisors in 1977 and united gay men into a proud political force. His
assassination in 1978 exposed the murderous depths of homophobia we've been
fighting ever since. Cher, Diana Ross, Madonna and other gay idols seem tawdry
and self-serving by comparison. They certainly pale beside Billie Holiday
(1915-1959), the greatest female icon in jazz. We'll love her forever for
showing us the grandeur of heartbreak, even when it leads to self-destruction.
In jazz, the latter may be unavoidable. Singer Ruth Young, who lived with Chet
Baker for 10 years, saw the toll exacted from him and many more of the genre's
icons: "What you have to go through to bare your guts -- it's so fundamentally
obvious. In order to really, genuinely be a participant in that world, you had
to find a poison to let you look in the mirror." Holiday and Baker turned
their grief into art, universal and timelessly meaningful. So did Dean,
Kerouac, Monroe and most of our other icons. That's what makes them triumphant
in the end.