Sometimes We Forget the Past

Germaine Greer was wrong on one point here a few weeks ago regarding the #metoo movement, and that had to do with her feeling women, at least actresses, in the past didn't tolerate sexual assault and harassment from movie bigwigs.  This is simply not true.

She said that "in the old days" women would "slap down" men who assaulted or harassed them, explaining: "In the old days, there were movies - the Carry On comedies, for example - which always had a man leering after women. And the women always outwitted him - he was a fool.

Most of the rest Greer said was true, but historically it isn't true actresses "slapped down" male assault.  The "casting couch" goes back to the very beginnings of Hollywood.  Starlets didn't dare turn down the advances of studio heads for fear they would be blackballed forever from the industry; back then, the industry was extremely incestuous.  The women were afraid they would be tossed out into the street with no money and no work.  Many traveled hundreds if not thousands of miles away from their homes and their families just so they could get the all-important "break" in the motion picture industry.  They couldn't speak out, either, and it was for the same reason.  A woman like Patricia Douglas was a rare exception.  She was the woman who was raped at a 1937 MGM salesman convention by one salesman, and she tried to fight the studio in the courts.  The rapist was never charged, and she lost every step of the way.  Author David Stenn made a movie about her, Girl 27, a film I mentioned a few days ago.  But Douglas was the rare exception of a woman going public, and she did shortly after she had been raped.  Most women kept silent for fear of financial ruin and fear of their reputations being destroyed.

Almost all  the big studio heads during the "golden age" of the Hollywood studio system employed the "casting couch," with the very worst them being 20th Century Fox's Darryl F. Zanuck.  He was a total pig, which is an insult to swine.  There really are no words harsh enough to describe this creep.  He must have had a "short man" complex--he was diminutive--and felt he needed to assert his power in other, more vile ways.  He married silent film actress Virginia Fox, who was no relation to the head of Fox Studios.  He never divorced her despite his rampant harassment of women and his cheating on her with much-younger mistresses.  As an aside, she was with him to the end of his life, after he suffered from a stroke and needed constant care, and after she threw out his last girlfriend, one Genevieve Gilles.  He eventually died of pneumonia in 1979, the last of the "golden age" Hollywood moguls.

But back to his vile treatment of women.  You can find lots and lots of articles about Zanuck on the internet and a number of books about his life and career.  This article from October mentions Harvey Weinstein and his membership od the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which dumped him, while looking at what Zanuck did decades ago:

Over at the Beverly Hills public library on Friday, Harris’s Dark Legacy book was still on the shelf. In it, any interested reader could learn that Zanuck – governor, benefactor, three-time recipient of a lifetime achievement award – went through contract actresses like tissue paper. “He was not serious about any of the women,” wrote Harris. “To him they were merely pleasurable breaks in the day – like polo, lunch, and practical jokes.”

Actresses were routinely summoned to a small part of his large, green-paneled office suite, in which he kept the casting couch. This was hardly a secret. As Harris wrote: “Anyone at the studio knew of the afternoon trysts.” Gossips said the studio shut down for a half-hour at 4 p.m. every day, while Zanuck had his way.

In the early 1980s, a Fox rep, conducting a private tour of the studio’s Century City lot, matter-of-factly described subterranean passages which, he said, were used by actresses who didn’t want to be seen on their sex trips to and from Zanuck’s office. The Underground Railroad, this was not. In fact, Zanuck’s record of harassment leaves something of a Confederate monuments problem at Fox today: Can anyone offended by Weinstein’s behavior feel entirely comfortable in Fox’s beautifully appointed Darryl F. Zanuck Theater? Or should it perhaps be renamed for an executive or producer who treated women better?

There is a bit of hypocrisy there, isn't there?

Here is another article about the vileness of Darryl F. Zanuck.