Hollywood Publicity in the 1950s
by Andre Soares
"Of all the revelations about the MGM publicity department in the days that it was run by Howard Strickling, the most startling is surely the one concerning ‘mammary equipment.’ In the 1930s and 1940s, the MGM studio publicists controlled every aspect of the stars’ public lives - and often ruled their private lives, too. ‘We told stars what they could say, and they did what we said because they knew we knew best,’ Strickling - the son of a grocery-store owner who became the head of publicity at MGM in 1930 and stayed with the studio for two decades - boasted."
Thus begins Geoffrey Macnab’s "Tinseltown in the Fifties: an alarming picture" for The [London] Independent.
Macnab’s piece is worth a look, though it should be noted that publicist Samuel Marx, who’s quoted in the article, was a good — as in "creative" — storyteller. In other words, take whatever Marx said with a (large) grain of salt.
Also, the scandalous tales mentioned in the article are basically just that. Scandalous tales concocted by rumormongers with lots of imagination and a desire to make a quick buck. Those guys know exactly what the average sexually repressed, brain-damaged tabloid reader wants to read. (That is not to say that no cover-ups ever took place. Damage control has always been the job of publicists, just like the creation of falsities and exaggerations has always been the job of unscrupulous writers.)
And finally, studio publicists have controlled stars’ public images from the early days of film — and continue to do so today. That is no news. Just like they are hired to control the public image of politicians, TV personalities, and basically any other public figure eager to fool the ever-gullible public.
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It never ceases to amaze me what the publicity department could cover up. One incident that they covered up about Ann Miller being thrown down the stairs by her drunken husband when she was 9 months pregnant has always astounded me. The studios really did have a lot of power then to make something like that vanish until Ann herself told the real story years later. MGM protected it’s stars, but they could ruin them just the same.
True, there was a lot of power, and much could be covered up before the age of television and the Internet. (Much can still be covered up and distorted, as we all know.)
Even so, I believe that a number of cover-up stories should be either totally dismissed — considering the evidence against them; or total lack of evidence *for* them — or taken with a large grain of salt. Unscrupulous writers love to come up with sensational tales, for obvious reasons.