At the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles, on Wednesday, February 27, 1935, the Seventh Annual Academy Awards were in full stride, and Columbia Pictures boss Harry Cohn wasn't happy. You'd think he would have been: his little- picture- that- could, It Happened One Night, was cleaning up. Its lead actress, the lovely Claudette Colbert, had just been announced winner of the best actress trophy. Heads pivoted around the banquet room, she was nowhere to be found.
True to her word, Colbert had passed on the Oscars. She'd appeared in three of the twelve nominees for best picture, but she'd made no secret of her dislike for this particular film— the one that got her the best actress nomination— by an unproven thirty something director, Frank Capra.
Hollywood tradition has it that like her co- star, Clark Gable, Colbert was assigned to the film as a kind of penance: Colbert for daring to rebel against the brass at Paramount and Gable for running afoul of Louis B. Mayer and MGM. Both had been loaned to Columbia, a poor sister among studios. (That is, "loaned" in a broad sense: it's believed Louis B. Mayer, who had Gable on a $2,000-per-week contract, hired him out to Columbia for $2,500 per week.) It's said that It Happened One Night had been turned down by a who's who of 1930s Hollywood actors, and
Gable arrived on the set the first day, muttering, "Let's get this over with." When production wrapped, Colbert groused to a friend, "I just finished the worst picture in the world."
But it's another piece of the film's legend that transformed advertising. In one scene, the runaway heiress and the fast- talking reporter are in a motel room, where the reporter asks for privacy. When the heiress refuses, he calls her bluff and begins, nonchalantly, to peel off his clothes while reciting a neatly clipped monologue about the protocol of male disrobing. The prevailing story is that what with his topcoat, jacket, vest, tie, and shirt, an undershirt represented one layer too many for the rhythm of the scene— especially because it meant Gable would have to raise his arms aloft and possibly perpetrate the catastrophe of messing his hair. So . . . the undershirt went.
A legend then spread that Gable's bare chest caused undershirt sales to plummet. After all, who'd want to wear an undershirt if Clark Gable didn't? Some attached a number to the undershirt sales decline (75 percent is a popular choice), and many reported that the fashion industry was devastated. One manufacturer ostensibly threatened to sue Columbia Pictures.
But this is where, even by Hollywood standards, the imagination is stretched. In today's marketing- savvy world, it's impossible for one's nostrils not to fill with the distinct whiff of a studio publicity machine, especially considering that the great undershirt legend could only boost the reputation of Gable, the film, and the studio. Was the undershirt industry devastated? Maybe. But in 1934, with the economy reduced to matchsticks, 20 percent unemployment, and hot prairie winds making off with untold tons of prime topsoil, "devastated" was the norm. All the same, burning in the core of this legend is an ember of reality: Gable was Hollywood royalty and could easily have set such a trend, teasing Madison Avenue with opportunities to come.
It was neither the first nor the last time that Hollywood would influence consumer fashion.
Joan Crawford would champion the "shoulder pad" look; Greta Garbo would set a trend with her trench- coat- and- beret style; and Marlene Dietrich and Katharine Hepburn would lead millions of women out of their dresses— so to speak— and into slacks. Decades later Diane Keaton, if not
Ralph Lauren, would help make the Annie Hall look part of seventies pop culture.
Oddly enough, it would take decades before the inevitable marriage between marketing and art was consummated in the movie industry and the word merchandising would start cropping up before a picture was released. In the 1930s, while Undershirt- gate was or was not gripping North America, Hollywood and advertising were kept carefully separate. This was partly because movies were viewed by the public— and by investors— as being honed by great artistic minds in the lofty offices of the major studios. Radio and TV, by contrast, were seen as the poor cousins of film, who had to rely on brand sponsors who— gasp— actually created and produced the programming themselves. For those in the huckster- free sanctuary of film, this brand control over radio and television programming must have looked like shackles, confining broadcast— even reducing it— to a lowly "sales" medium, a bias that is still deeply engrained to this day. The differences were infused in the imagination: Jezebel was seen as a star vehicle for Bette Davis, a costume epic for Warner Brothers, a splashy, oh- so- Hollywood work of art; The Shadow was considered to be merely a radio sales vehicle for Blue Coal. Suspicion, Foreign Correspondent, and Notorious were about escapism, cinema noir, and the canny storytelling of Alfred Hitchcock; the radio series Suspense was about selling Roma Wines. Nowhere was the difference better illustrated than in Orson Welles' "jump" to RKO. Citizen Kane was perceived as his arrival in the world of cinematic arts, whereas his Mercury Theatre was seen as a first- rate troupe of theatrical refugees, whose raison d'être was to hawk Campbell's Soup— no matter how good the writing was.
Film was an art, an end in itself. The purpose of radio was to promote the sponsor's sales. The filmmaker's job was to create with one hand, and like any self-respecting artist, stack sandbags with the other, against the inevitable seepage of meddling benefactors— a balancing act that had been going on for centuries. Just ask Michelangelo.
Excerpted from The Age of Persuasion Copyright © 2009 by Terry O'Reilly and Mike Tennant. Excerpted by permission of Knopf Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited. All rights reserved.
The Age of Persuasion