Copyright information: http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu/press_copyright_and_disclaimer/default.html
"Hollywood is a synonym for wealth and glamour; it has also become a synonym for sin. As a symbol of sin, it should be noted, Hollywood is a scapegoat for traditional hostilities, the embodiment of Bohemia to all the Philistines on the face of the globe." - Leo Rosten, 1941
"Artist shall perform the services herein contracted for in a manner that shall be conducive to the best interests of Producer, and to the best interests of the motion picture industry generally, and if Artist shall at any time . . . either while rendering services hereunder or in Artist's private life, commit an offense involving moral turpitude under federal, state, or local laws or ordinances, or if Artist's conduct shall offend against decency, morality, or social proprieties, or shall cause Artist to be held in public ridicule, scorn or contempt, or cause public scandal, then . . . Producer may suspend the payment of compensation to Artist . . . [or] may terminate this agreement at any time after the happening of such event."
Hollywood has had a long association with scandal-with covering it up, with managing its effects, in some cases with creating and directing it. Of the wide range of memoirs and biographies that make up the lore of Hollywood and its stars, some are little more than strings of anecdotes, presented in greater or lesser detail and with greater or lesser fidelity to basic accuracy, about who did what with whom (or with what), and how these actions were kept secret- or leaked, divulged, laid bare-and to what effect.3 But despite its extraordinary ubiquity as a term, scandal has received relatively little attention in regard to the often contradictory ways it has functioned across time in American film and culture.
In fact, one of the reasons that we initiated this project was our curiosity about why many famous scandals of Hollywood's past would now, in a new millennium, scarcely raise a ripple of widespread public interest. What makes one era's scandals seem tame to succeeding generations, the response of the condemnatory public bewildering or ludicrous, the treatment of the participants unjust? Conversely, discussions among ourselves and our colleagues about what makes a scandal a scandal-to determine the parameters of moral turpitude-always ended in polite discord. For although we all agreed that scandals are, to borrow from Erving Goffman, ''deeds, not mere events,'' we knew that deeds we thought innocuous could be comprehended as offensive or shocking by groups surveying them through social frameworks, in Goffman's terms, different from our own.4 Goffman reminds us that in any situation ''many different things are happening simultaneously'' and that the meaning of any action that involves human agency does not attach to the action alone but also to its presentation (or representation, in the case of a mass-mediated scandal) in multiple frameworks.5 Scandals arise from the collision of deed, intention, context, and perspective and are therefore much more complex than their usual rendering as anecdote would suggest.
However, another recurring feature of our conversations about scandal was their tendency to devolve into gossip sessions, in that our attempts to establish the limits of scandalous behavior by recounting anecdotes ourselves about Hollywood and its stars would inevitably be met at some point with an astonished ''I didn't know that!'' We are also interested, therefore, in how we learn about scandalous deeds, where our information comes from and when, and who controls the terms of our knowledge. Even the most canonical Hollywood scandals, if one may call them that-Roscoe ''Fatty'' Arbuckle's arrest for his involvement in the death of starlet Virginia Rappe in 1921; the unsolved murder of director William Desmond Taylor in 1922; matinee idol Wallace Reid's death from the effects of morphine addiction in 1923; the publication of sexually explicit excerpts from Mary Astor's diary in 1935; Errol Flynn's trial for the statutory rape of two teenaged girls in 1942; Robert Mitchum's arrest and incarceration in 1948 for possession of marijuana; the extramarital affairs of Rita Hayworth and Ingrid Bergman in 1949, and the birth of Bergman's ''love child'' in 1950; the death of Lana Turner's mob boyfriend Johnny Stompanato, apparently stabbed in the stomach by Turner's daughter Cheryl in 1958; among many possible examples-have acquired different inflections now than they appear to have had in the past, at least in certain frameworks. Instead of being a morality tale about debauchery, licentiousness, and the arrogance of unearned wealth, Arbuckle's story is now more often employed in film scholarship, for instance, as exemplary of Hollywood's hypocrisy. In this version the subject has become Hollywood's ability to mobilize public outrage to its own ends-the way it scapegoated Arbuckle and defined him as deviant 6 in order to stave off government censorship and ultimately to consolidate studio power over exhibitors, the film product, and industry workers alike for thirty-odd years.7 Scandals are thus always discursive constructions as well as events, and it matters who controls the selection and omission of their narrative details. Rather than the result of knowing too much, a scandal may result from the public's being told too much about some things and too little about others.
Finally, we wanted to participate in an ongoing scholarly dialogue about how scandal should be defined. As Herman Gray has argued in his work on scandal and race, the standard use of the word associates it with personal or individual transgression against the ''dominant social and moral order''; yet that order also names what and who is outside its own boundaries and thus can define as transgressive whatever is marginal to its concerns or does not submit to its power.8
Gray differentiates the word and its associated forms diacritically in his discussion of how what we are told is ''scandalous'' often ''hides and glosses'' what is truly scandalous. Miscegenation, then, explicitly prohibited in Hollywood films between 1934 and 1952 by the terms of the Production Code, may have been ''scandalous,'' but this designation covers the truly scandalous institutionalized racism on which miscegenation, as a deed, depends. What scandals, in short, might even the most famous Hollywood ''scandals'' cover up? And what is the relationship of Hollywood to the ''culture of scandal'' that we are told by so many we live in today?
Anyone who picks up a paper, reads a magazine, or watches television would have to agree with the first sentence of James Lull and Stephen Hinerman's 1997 anthology Media Scandals: ''Scandals are pervasive today.'' 9 Scandal is now a commodity with proven market value, a dominant feature of contemporary journalism and even the most ''respectable'' forms of mass media, as well as of supermarket tabloids, gossip magazines, ''trash television'' talk shows and celebrity expose´s, and chat parlors in cyberspace. Over the past couple of decades there have been sensational scandals involving professional sports figures, ''televangelists,'' the music industry, banking and finance, and ordinary people; presidential politics have certainly been intermittently but spectacularly scandal-ridden since Watergate in 1974.10 Hollywood is still the locus of occasional scandals, but it is arguably no longer the predominant one (indeed, Lull and Hinerman bypass it almost entirely). We need to be reminded, therefore, that it once was, and that movies themselves, as Robert Sklar writes in Movie-Made America, ''have historically been and still remain vital components in the network of cultural communication, and the nature of their content and control helps to shape the character and direction of American culture as a whole.'' 11
In her 1998 book Scorpion Tongues: Gossip, Celebrity, and American Politics, Gail Collins locates the roots of celebrity scandal in the nineteenth century, with the ''incredible uproar'' produced by Harriet Beecher Stowe's public revelation that the ''brooding poet Lord Byron . . . had slept with his own half sister.'' The ''class of entertainment celebrities that we know today,'' however, began to be created around the 1880s as a result of increased urbanization and leisure time, and the concomitant development of tabloids and other media forms that relied on ''visual appeal.'' Although political scandals-beginning with the ''Washington gossip wars'' that pitted ''profligate'' John Quincy Adams against the ''adulterer'' Andrew Jackson in the 1828 presidential election-are the major focus of her book, Collins points to a number of Hollywood scandals in her account of how movies, theater, sports, and radio displaced politics as the ''main provider of celebrities to talk about.'' 12 From the 1920s on, Collins writes, ''Except in times of national crisis, the nation would never again be as interested in politicians as in movie stars.''