It is safe to say that Donald Trump’s relationship with Hollywood is not the usual amitie amoureuse that exists between American presidents and the acting fraternity. It has been replaced by visceral hatred, with President Trump being particularly offensive to male film stars. Under the Biden and Obama administrations, liberal thespians had free access to the White House. Now Hollywood’s self-styled elite, led by George Clooney, Robert de Niro, Alec Baldwin, and Mark Ruffalo have veered between baring their teeth like attack dogs and group therapy.
Meanwhile President Trump has no use for film stars and seemingly regards the views of most actors as suspect. Given today’s stars have only a fleeting fame, it would be interesting to speculate how the election of Donald Trump would have been received by the inhabitants of Hollywood’s Golden Age — the likes of James Stewart, Gary Cooper. Cary Grant, Clark Gable, James Cagney, and John Wayne. If their memories were capable of groping backwards, Mr. Clooney and his friends would probably vomit — as they do when they discover other people have different opinions from their own — at the political views held by their more illustrious predecessors.
The men who founded Hollywood were European immigrants who, paradoxically, sought to be as American as possible. The collective embodiment of the “American Dream,” the great movie moguls sold that dream back to the cinema going public. Samuel Goldwyn, Louis B. Mayer, and Darryl F. Zanuck were professional patriots and guardians of the national good. Even Warner Brothers, famous for its output of gangster films and the originally French genre of movies called film noir, ensured their productions contained messages so God-fearing and traditional that Mr. Trump would likely greet it with Hosannas.
Indeed, many classic films are mere Trumpism refracted through celluloid. They are flag waving, religious, patriarchal, and suspicious of both the liberal intelligentsia and foreigners, with a condescending view of blacks. Look again at the undercurrents in “Gone With the Wind,” “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” “The Wizard of Oz,” “Stagecoach,” “Casablanca,” and “It’s A Wonderful Life,” all made between 1938 and 1949. Even Cagney’s likeable convict in Warner’s “Angels with Dirty Faces,” from 1938, had to go the chair and die “yellow,” as an example to American youth.
Nor was Hollywood averse to the “politics of fear.” Movies in the late 1930s attempted to persuade Americans that all Germans were Nazis and that the country’s entry into World War II was essential to preserve the American way of life. In the late 1940s, the studios actively promoted “Americanism” in response to the Soviet Union and alleged Communist infiltration of domestic institutions, including the film industry. During the anti-Communist investigations of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), the majority of those who ran Hollywood certainly approved of its motives, if not its methods.
That is not to say that great actors were never against the environment in which they were placed. Cagney was known as “the Professional Againster” for repeatedly walking out on Warner Brothers, and Stewart, Wayne, and Bogart —who was forced to condemn Communism by his studio — were renowned for turning down poor scripts. But it’s safe to assume that many of the stars who appeared in the classics of the 1930s and ’40s broadly agreed with their political and moral content.
This is particularly true of those stars who portrayed the idealized American “Everyman,” a role Mr. Trump has sometimes claimed for himself. In Old Hollywood, the ‘Everyman” was often a small town guy who struggles against a decadent elite; a man who in the presence of sophisticated liberal folk is palpably uneasy. He is suspicious of their clothes and their too delicate manners. He knows that they are laughing at him — if not at his simplistic speech then at least at his Alpaca pantaloons. But still he conquers, for to the common people he is a savior, and he is catnip to even the haughtiest of women.
It would be difficult to say the latter of President Trump. But he would have had a high approval rating in the Hollywood of the 1930s and ’40s. The male stars who populated it were not in touch with their feminine side and would have recoiled in horror if anyone had told them they possessed one. They made love to women without being asked and often with violence. In “The Quiet Man,” John Wayne’s response to Maureen O’Hara’s decision to withhold her conjugal favors is to batter down her door and drag her by the hair. Pure Trump heaven, some might say.
Here are five cinema icons who would have regarded President Trump with rather more appreciation than today’s pallid actors:
Gary Cooper
Gary Cooper personified, on film and in life, the precepts of Trumpism. He would have regarded the President’s detractors as deeply unpatriotic and might well have called for them to be jailed. With his naturalistic speech and affinity for the loner, the Oscar-winning “Coop,” whom Frank Capra called “the best actor of them all,” represented the individual who swims against the tide of bien pensant opinion. Deceptively slow of understanding, Cooper specialized in playing soldiers, marshals or small town men standing up to the corruption of the metropolis and Washington’s career politicians, most notably in “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town,” “Meet John Doe,” “Sergeant York,” which, incidentally, is Trump’s personal favorite, “High Noon” — Cooper was unaware that writer Carl Foreman intended the film as a critique of “blacklisting” — and “The Fountainhead,” based on the novel by Ayn Rand. One of the few novelists of which President Trump approves, Rand advocated an aggressive, untrammeled individualism.
Cooper was the most politically conservative of the great Hollywood stars. In 1944, he became an early member of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. He followed this by acting as a HUAC “Friendly Witness,” and was one of the few actors to name alleged Communists in Hollywood. Like Mr. Trump, he had a penchant for philandering which he managed to reconcile with his professed Christianity.
In 1933 he married the socialite and athlete Veronica “Rocky” Balfe. “Rocky” taught her husband how to dress and gave him social polish. But the Coopers’ separations — the longest prompted by an affair with actress Patricia Neal — were notorious. Cooper, who was anti-abortion and uncomfortable in the presence of homosexuals, also enjoyed a liaison with the young Grace Kelly, of whom Judy Garland once said: “She might be a nymphomaniac if she calmed down.”
The strikingly chic “Rocky,” like Melania, baulked at studio requests to hold her husband’s hand in public or give gushing, misleading interviews to magazines about her marriage. But the couple never divorced. In 1953 Coop and “Rocky,” a practicing Catholic, were granted a private audience with Pope Pius XII, who persuaded the couple to resume their married life. A few years later the Episcopalian-born star formally converted to Rome. He died in 1961, the long-suffering “Rocky” by his side.
John Wayne
John Wayne is often seen as an ultra-conservative with almost fundamentalist views. Like President Trump, he had problematic hair; by 1950 he was wearing a toupee. He refused the lead in “High Noon” because he suspected, unlike the less intelligent “Coop,” that it was an allegory against blacklisting, calling the film, “the most un-American thing I have ever seen.”
But Wayne’s personality was more complex than his detractors suppose. He possessed an irreverent sense of humour (often directed against himself), could recite “Hamlet” from memory, spoke fluent Spanish, and sympathised with ethnic minorities. His favorite role was as the reticent former boxer in John Ford’s “The Quiet Man”— hardly a description of Donald Trump.
His breakthrough in films came with “Stagecoach” in 1939, which elicited Ford’s prediction that Wayne would “be the greatest ever American Icon.” For millions he personified the frontier spirit of the nation— 83 of his films were Westerns. Yet his failure to serve his country when America entered the war provoked charges of cowardice and hypocrisy. In fact, Wayne applied, unsuccessfully, to the United States Naval Academy. He was later accepted by the Office of Strategic Services, but the letter went astray. According to his widow, Pilar Pallete — still alive at the age of 97 — Wayne “would become a ‘superpatriot’ for the rest of his life trying to atone for staying home.” Certainly, Wayne vocally supported HUAC, backed the Vietnam War, and addressed Republican rallies.
Wayne’s interest in politics was intelligent and fluid. He differed with the Republicans over the Panama Canal, insisting Panamanians should have the rights to the canal, and sometimes sided with the Democrats. He had an unfailing sense of the ridiculous, that sets him apart from the current President. He was not averse to being mocked on live television, frequently appearing on Dean Martin’s Celebrity Roasts. During a widely-reported visit to Harvard, a student asked him if his hair was real? “It’s real, son,” Wayne replied. “It’s not mine, but it’s real.” Duke” Wayne would have undoubtedly given the current president a sporting chance, but he might have concluded he was a humorless bore who rarely kept his word.
Wayne was married three times, always to women of Hispanic descent, at a time when such marriages were still frowned on. One of the women who truly loved him was the Weimar sophisticate Marlene Dietrich. The pair had a long and torrid affair, once making use of the banister rail at the Hotel Excelsior in Rome.
The biggest male box office draw over a 25-year period, Wayne became recognized as a sort of American natural resource, with even critics hailing him as a father figure. Wayne had engraved on a plaque: “Each of us is a mixture. In considering one’s fellow men, it’s important to remember the good things. We should refrain from making judgements just because a fella happens to be a dirty, rotten SOB.” Would Mr. Trump allow his Democratic opponents the same slack?
James Cagney
James Cagney may seem an improbable proto-Trumpiste. But the star of The “Public Enemy” and “White Heat” would have had little time for the liberal film stars of today. The role of which Cagney was most proud was that of American showman George M. Cohan in 1942’s “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” a morale-boosting, patriotic musical.
Cagney was falsely accused of Communist sympathies and then officially “cleared” by HUAC. He had flirted with the left, but repudiated Socialism in the 1940s, voting for Republican Thomas E. Dewey in the 1948 Presidential election. He later said he and his friend Ronald Reagan “had once joined a liberal group, but left in disgust when we discovered which way it was going.” Cagney was a financial contributor to the Republican Party and supported Reagan’s presidential campaign.
In his autobiography Cagney described himself as “an arch-Conservative.” He saw his reaction against liberalism as “totally natural once I had begun to see undisciplined elements in our country stimulating a breakdown of our system…..those functionless creatures, the hippies, didn’t just appear out of a vacuum.” He was equally conservative in his personal life. In 1922, Cagney married Frances Willard Vernon. Despite attempts by Merle Oberon to seduce him, Cagney remained faithful to his wife until his death in 1986.
Clark Gable
Nicknamed “The King of Hollywood,” he was christened William but nicknamed Clark. His acting coach, Josephine Dillon, fixed his crooked teeth and had his hair styled. As a young man Gable struggled with a Trump-like barnet that would be slicked down with copious amount of hair oil. In 1924 the couple married and took a train to Hollywood.
By 1934 Gable was MGM’s most important male star and had divorced Josephine for Texan socialite Rhea Langham. Gable won his first Oscar for the romantic comedy “It Happened One Night” in 1934. American womanhood swooned, mercifully unaware he had false teeth, halitosis and bad skin. Still, many of his co-stars overlooked his defects. Gable was a philanderer and had affairs with Joan Crawford and Loretta Young, with whom he had an illegitimate child. Gable promptly fell in love with the Democratic-supporting Carole Lombard, divorcing Rhea and marrying Lombard in 1939. After her death in a plane crash in 1942, he reverted to his conservative mores, joining the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals.
Gable was a church-going man who loved hunting and shooting, with a suspicion of “fancy food.” President Trump would have appreciated the barbecues on Gable’s ranch, where, David Niven recalled: “Whole animals were roasted on spits.” “The King” was deeply patriotic and admired as a man of great courage. When America entered World War II, he was among the first Hollywood idols to enlist in the Armed Forces, joining the U.S. Air Force, flying five combat missions and being awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.
After Lombard’s death, Gable remarried twice. His final marriage, to Kay Williams, was a success and lasted until his death in 1960. He remained a staunch Republican and ultra-conservative all his life. Though admired as a decent and honest man, he was not renowned for the quickness of his wit. Ava Gardner once said; “If you say ‘Hi, Clark, how are you?’ he’s stuck for an answer.”
James Stewart
James Stewart was the most obviously American of actors, and, for want of a better word, a gentleman. A devoutly religious man, he spent his career playing individuals who fight for truth and American values. He was the reluctant politician in “Mr Smith Goes to Washington,” the milk-drinking sheriff in “Destry Rides Again,” and for Alfred Hitchcock, the college professor in “Rope” and retired policeman in “Vertigo.” Stewart also played almost every wholesome American hero, from aviator Charles Lindberg to band leader Glenn Miller.
In Hollywood, the word “honor” has a comic significance, but Stewart nearly succeed in making his trade look respectable. There was a fineness to him which was instantly recognized. From an early age Stewart was a conservative Republican and was prepared to fight for it; on one occasion he punched close friend Henry Fonda who was a Democrat.
Stewart was tall, lanky, and possessed the most seductive cello-contralto drawl in Hollywood. Unlike Gable or Wayne, he possessed a natural elegance and a thick thatch of hair. Trump would have envied his prowess on a chaise-longue. In the 1930s, Jimmy was the most sexually prolific male star in Hollywood. His conquests included Ginger Rogers, Marlene Dietrich, and Olivia de Havilland. When Stewart ended his affair with de Havilland she went to bed for a month.
More quietly patriotic than any actor in Hollywood, he was the first star to enlist after Pearl Harbor, joining the U.S. Air Force. Stewart flew 25 highly dangerous combat missions and attained the rank of Brigadier General, additionally being awarded the Croix de Guerre by the Free French.
Returning to Hollywood, Stewart married former model and animal rights campaigner Gloria Hatrick McClean in 1949. The couple had a long, happy marriage which lasted until her death. However, Stewart had lost his sunny, pre-war optimism, joining the Motion Picture Alliance though he declined to appear before HUAC as a “Friendly Witness.”
Possibly the most religious of all the great stars, which led to a solid social conservatism and a horror of abortion, Stewart became increasingly involved in Republican politics. In 1964, he endorsed Senator Barry Goldwater as the Republican Presidential candidate. Later, he became a cheerleader for his old friend Ronald Reagan and was a frequent guest at the White House in the 1980s. Some remarked that it should have been the other way around: “Jimmy for President, and Ronnie for best friend!”
