Hollywood: A Novel of America in the 1920s

The first scene is grand, with William Hearst's bulk shattering an antique chair and dropping to the thick Persian rug. The place to be now is Hollywood, says early 20th century media mogul Hearst as he bids good-by to his host and owner of the demolished Biedermeier chair, Blaise Sanford. Unlike Hearst, Washington newspaper publisher Sanford is fictional. But it's the second scene that starts the more mesmerizing narrative thread. Madame Marcia conducts a séance for Mrs. Harding and Jesse Smith--the Hardings' Ohio friend, owner of a dry goods emporium, a dewy-eyed political groupie and an unofficial lobbyist-government contractor of sorts. Poor Jess suffers from diabetes and sees ghosts. The shadows on the screens merge with shadows in Washington as power shapes the manufacturing of screen fantasies and conversely the making of fantasies leads to power. The wonderful movie, Wag the Dog, is many decades in the future. But as Gore Vidal presents it, the 1920s is when politics became integrated with moving pictures and the latter took over the world. What's so wonderful, says Hearst, is that all over the world the illiterate masses are watching my Pauline. His Pauline keeps moving on the screen because otherwise the audience might move out of the theater. This vivid depiction of Hearst stays close to the real man while making his foray into the movies the emblem of a society increasingly ruled by the image. But Hearst is a side character. President Harding, Sanford, his sister Caroline, Senator Burden Day and blind Senator Thomas Gore--quite a cast. But it's Jess who's truly unforgettable. At the end of the book, the shadows and ghouls get Jess, in a manner of speaking. As the reader wonders how he could have committed suicide by shooting himself on the left side of his head when he is right handed, all kinds of recent events involving lobbyists, lawyers, contractors, wars and sex in the oval office come to mind. Vidal is a master in bringing the distant past alive in a way that helps you think about the recent past and the present. The whole perhaps does not match the brilliance of some of the parts, but this historical novel, and indeed the series of five novels that starts with Burr and ends with Hollywood, are a must read for anyone who wants to understand America. And if you have any thoughts of what exactly happened to Jess, I'd love to hear.

This book provides several leitmotifs from the perspectives of several major fictional characters (Caroline Sanford, Blaise Sanford, and James Burden Day) that easily intermingle with the era's most historical non-fictional figures. With uncanny serendipity, each fictional character is able to find themselves engaged with every major political player at the exact moment they are making a major international decision. As there is no real historical figure to personify the influence of Hollywood on global politics, only Vidal's historical fiction can investigate the connection. His main character, Caroline Sanford, a.k.a. Emma Traxler, has an impossibly rich life transgresses the boundaries of American socialite, newspaper mogul and movie starlet. All while raising an illegitimate daughter and having affairs with America's most powerful men (two directors and a senator). Wow! What a woman! The story covers the transition from the pre-World War I presidency of Woodrow Wilson through the convoluted election of his successor, Warren Gamaliel Harding. As the Presbyterian Minster turned History Professor turned quixotic dictator, Woodrow Wilson, personifies utopian ideals of "peace without victory" and "League of Nations" while insulating himself personally from Americans. Wilson is the main non-fictional character of the book, but is neither portrayed as a villain or hero. He is an apparent victim; a man with vision and ideals, but unable to navigate the ruthless power struggles with Teddy Roosevelt nor the recent Republican majorities of the congress and senate. The League of Nations becomes a logomachy for the political advancement among party power brokers rather than a realistic foreign policy. The 1920 presidential campaign was characterized less by the stature of the candidates who ran but by the stature of those who could not run (Teddy Roosevelt -died suddenly; Woodrow Wilson - stroke). Warren Gamaliel Harding is, at best, the third most popular candidate in the 1920 Republican Primary. He is the ideal "middle of the road candidate" who prefers the sports pages to the editorials election and is addicted to chewing tobacco. As everyone's second favorite, he is able to slip past two more popular candidates at the republican convention, then easily pass an unsupported democratic candidate, who never has a chance because Woodrow Wilson refuses to pull out of the race, despite his physical and mental incapacities. An appreciation I have for Vidal is that he dispels the myth that political futility has only occurred in the last twenty years. Through his American Chronicles Series, he truly illustrates that politicians since George Washington have been caught in the organization of government and have found themselves spinning their myriad wheels frantically in the mud, going no where. Self-promotion, deception and manipulation were as prevalent for the founding fathers and their rowdy successors as they are today. However, the common focus of the

This is unquestionably one of the best of Vidal's longitudinal series on the governing classes of the US. While the cover is something of a double misnomer - Hollywood is more of a theme than the plot and it barely gets into the 20s - the book offers a deep and hilarious view of what was going on in the period. You feel what it was like (for some of the monied elite) to be there as witnesses and occasionally shapers of events, which is the essence of successful historical fiction, making the reader curious to look to history books for greater detail and analyis. Indeed, I found this volume to be Vidal's most subtle since Lincoln, full of themes and concepts that fascinate and titillate. It is often difficult to know where Vidal stands, at least for me, and that is a big part of the fun. In addition to the usual characters of the Sanford sibs and Sen. Day, at the center of the novel is Woodrow Wilson. You watch his decline, at once political - he loses his grip on the nation's political imagination with WWI and then the wrangle over the League of Nations - and physical. While he was indeed a messianic idealist, Vidal also creates a very human portrait of him that I read as sympathetic and, while typically sarcastic, almost entirely lacking in vidalian cynicism. You get Wilson's vision of the future as well, which events were surpassing as he dug in his heals, pointing directly to WWII. The nation at war, with all of the moral principles so blithely thrown about, also appeared to me as a prescient evocation of a key part of the American character, its narcissistic belief in the face of contrary evidence that it always acts for a righteous cause on the good guys side - just look at the current war in Iraq! More particularly, Vidal portrays the repression of free speech and the blatant hypocracy in light of our stated constitutional ideals. But there is also WG Harding and his courtiers, who added up to a disastrous mix of executive inattention and the crudest corruption, complete with murdered scapegoats. This too is a huge part of the American system, the desire to let things go and seek the good life while the rats are chewing out the bottom of the barrel. Sound familar? Again, it seems so prescient. Lastly, there is a taste of the power that Hollywood was becoming. This was the most unexpected part for me, as I am a hardened political junkie and quite ignorent of this part of American culture. Essentially, Vidal questions whether the incipient movie moguls' vision - that of shaping the dreams of the American psyche - will become more important than the shenanigans going on in Wash, DC. As such, his characters see a progression from politicians telling people what to believe, through Hearst's yellow journalism evoking what they should fear, to the far deeper tappng into the public's collective unconscious. That Vidal succeeds in getting a person as jaded as I am to take a new look at so many things is indeed a feat. Recommended

The fifth novel, chronologically, of Gore Vidal's American chronicle series deals with much more than the evolution of the industry that bears the title of this book. There is at least as much political chicanery in Washington as movie-making propagandizing in Hollywood. Politics runs through Vidal's blood so he can never escape the subject entirely. The dual career of Caroline Sanford as east coast newspaper publisher and west coast starlet, while not completely implausible, seems to be a way of weaving the world of the entertainment capital into the fabric of the political capital. I was quite interested in many of the strands of both stories but I felt they were welded together more than organically linked. I have read the American chronicle novels preceding this one and two of his early novels (The Judgement of Paris and Messiah). I had thought that Vidal had a workmanlike but non-descript style similar to Steinbeck's, at the opposite end of the spectrum from writers like Faulkner and Hemingway who announce their unique presence on every page. In the American chronicle novels, however, the god-like narrator is none other than Vidal himself, the catty, gossipy gadfly insider/outsider who can't resist giving you the inside scoop on every major development that occurs in his world. There are passages of spectacular wit and irony as well as a few in which he seems to be straining for an effect. Hollywood is nonetheless quite readable and especially indispensable in Vidal's American mythology and contributes new evidence to support my belief that he is one of America's most underrated writers from the mainstream.

Images manufactured with the intent of directing public opinion to support adventurers and profiteers is the tragic central theme of this novel. Our nation is in the hands of rascals and criminals, but as long as the pictures are pleasing and square with some melodramatic logic, the great unwashed stay quiet. It's enough to make you weep.