There but for the grace of Goddard.
We scanned these photos from Sidney Skolsky’s This Was Hollywood, a magazine we began raiding for images a couple of months back and which was first published in 1955. The brief story here tells about Charlie Chaplin and Paulette Goddard’s relationship. This Was Hollywood makes it sounds like a fairy tale love, and that may be true—how many Western couples marry spontaneously while traveling in China? Unfortunately, after six years they were divorced in Mexico. But Goddard had lifted Chaplin out of a dark depression and helped refocus his creative energies at a time when he was so unsure of where his career stood that he was considering retiring and moving permanently to China. And of course their film collaborations are timeless.
There’s a reason she had such a sly expression on her face.
Here’s a scan from Sidney Skolsky’s This Was Hollywood showing Henri de la Falaise, actress Constance Bennett, and actor Gilbert Roland relaxing in 1933 at the Agua Caliente Hotel in Agua Caliente, Mexico. At the time Bennett was married to de la Falaise. They divorced in 1940 and the next year she married Roland. Knowing that really gives her devilish little smile a deeper meaning, don’t you think?
The Golden Age is any age that seems better than the one you're in.
Yet another piece of the treasure trove we picked up in Denver last year, This Was Hollywood is a compendium of anecdotes and photos from the supposed Golden Age of Hollywood. We say “supposed” because the magazine was printed in 1954, and at that time the 1920s and 1930s were the Golden Age. Today of course, the Golden Age is considered to run from the 1920s all the way to the early 1960s, and we can only assume that eventually the ’70s and ’80s will be considered part of the Golden Age, and we’ll all be sitting around saying how they don’t make movies like C.H.U.D. anymore.
This Was Hollywood was put together by Hollywood columnist Sidney Skolsky, the guy many say coined the term “Oscar” to refer to the Academy Award statuette. This particular issue of This Was Hollywood has about 80 pages, so moving forward we’ll be posting them a few at a time. Today we have five images—the front and back covers, plus three pages of shots of John Gilbert, Greta Garbo, John Barrymore, Joan Crawford, Clark Gable, and Dolores Costello. Much more from this publication later.