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The word that is out of its element in the sentence, stranded and gasping for air, is ‘grassroots’.
No one who reads his book will suspect Ross of irony here. It isn’t his style. His style is journalistic repetition with the occasional misty-eyed grand statement. The first time that I read that the politics of the right deals in fear and reassurance, the politics of the left in guilt and hope, I believed it; but the formula recurred so many times (the Marabar Caves effect) that any meaning drained away.
Ross’s chapter on Charlton Heston is called ‘Moses and the Red Tide’, a decent joke soon done to death. It’s not as if Heston himself didn’t hammer the parallel home, appearing with mocked-up stone tablets bearing the words ‘Top Ten Lies of Wyche Fowler’ when campaigning against a senator from Georgia in 1992. Even when exhibiting the onset of his Alzheimer’s he told the world, ‘I can part the Red Sea, but I can’t part with you.’
In fact the identification with Moses had more resonance in Heston’s earlier incarnation as a liberal, when for instance he led the Hollywood contingent at the 1963 march on Washington at which
Martin Luther King described his dream. Black vernacular culture preferred Moses to Jesus, because he promised freedom in the here and now, in this world not the next.
Liberal film stars tend to set up their own production companies, while conservative ones have no such faith in the transforming power of culture and prefer to harness their screen images to winch them towards institutional power. It’s suggested here (in a discussion of Warren Beatty) not exactly that liberals are likely to be the better actors, but perhaps that better actors are more likely to be liberal, by virtue of having learned to see the world from many different viewpoints. Certainly the screen personas of Beatty, Jane Fonda and Edward G. Robinson are much richer, more internally contradictory, than those of Reagan, Heston or Schwarzenegger.
The clogged, bland tone of the book becomes oddly acidulated when describing Charlton Heston’s ‘mean and angry’ late manner. If Heston’s reinvigoration of the National Rifle Association won George W. Bush his first election, then that’s quite a responsibility to bear, but my nominee for the book’s villain would be Louis B. Mayer, at the other end of its time-frame. Mayer commissioned short films (distributed free of charge to cinemas) which did a lot to destroy Upton Sinclair’s chances of becoming governor of California. The voice-over said of the interview subjects: ‘Remember, they’re not actors,’ but mainly they were. Supporters of the Republican candidate were well turned-out (suspiciously clean overalls for a car mechanic, for instance), while pro-Sinclair speakers were dirty riffraff.
Mayer also told his employees to give a day’s pay to the Republican party, which was clearly extortion, though Ross doesn’t mention the illegality of the manoeuvre. In his final exhortation he suggests that if every citizen behaved like his chosen ten, ‘the United States would be a far better place’.’ Not if they behaved like Louis B. Mayer.
The hero of this book is clearly Harry Belafonte, who did a great deal to make the civil rights movement effective. It helped that as a popular singer he could generate funds at short notice, and he made sure that those who were arrested on freedom marches would get bail. Without him there would have been many fewer willing to protest.
The songs that Belafonte sang were gentle, though the lyrics could be tougher. In the iconography of the 1950s and 60s he looks rather middle-of-the-road next to Sidney Poitier (it was really only with his performance in Robert Altman’s Kansas City, in 1996, that the wholesomeness fell away). Perhaps it comes down to skin tone. Belafonte, with two white grandparents, simply looked less black than Poitier, as if that was an index of compromise, when in fact it was Poitier who more than once took on roles that Belafonte had rejected as unworthy.
Because you read about book review
Also by Adam Marsjones
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