Higher Gossip: Essays and Criticism

by John Updike

  There seemed no limit to the labors that Hollywood could set before this diminutive Hercules. Each technical advance in cinematic art posed a fresh problem in makeup. When, in the late Twenties, sound came in, the microphones “picked up the noisy sputter of the carbon arc lights—the standard film lighting used … for fifteen years.” The new tungsten lamps were quiet but also much hotter, and provided a softer light. “The old Orthochromatic film, which had been used since the birth of the film industry, was not sensitive enough to properly record faces under the new lighting.” And so:

  The old film was replaced by super-sensitive, faster Panchromatic film, but it made faces appear noticeably darker, as if in shadow. The new film made every item in the Max Factor make-up line for motion pictures instantly obsolete.

  Max to his own rescue! He and Frank labored for months

  to test and perfect an entirely new formulation in a wider-than-ever range of shades that reflected the correct degree of light required by the sensitive new film. It had only one drawback. Because it was designed for black-and-white film, it looked bizarre in real life. For example, actresses wore dark brown lipstick, which photographed as red on film.

  This new panchromatic makeup was, Frank admitted, “horrifying to look at” in daylight. For its invention, Max Factor was presented with a special certificate by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, in recognition of his contribution to “Incandescent Illumination Research.” Frank recalled, “I had never seen my father simultaneously so happy and so on the verge of tears.”

  Dr. Herbert Kalmus, an MIT graduate, had been developing Technicolor film since 1912; its first successful two-color (red and green) version was employed throughout the Douglas Fairbanks feature The Black Pirate, in 1926, and its full three-color form was displayed in Disney cartoons of the early Thirties and an otherwise undistinguished live-action two-reeler, La Cucaracha, in 1934. Everybody who viewed Technicolor, including Kalmus and Max, “realized something was wrong”:

  Filmmakers were using Max Factor’s Panchromatic make-up, created for black-and-white film.… Although thin and transparent, its greasepaint base left a slight sheen on the skin, which reflected surrounding colors. If an actor was standing near red drapes, for example, his face would have a red cast.

  Bette Davis, Carole Lombard, Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo, Norma Shearer, and Claudette Colbert were among the stars who refused to appear in so unflattering a light. It may have been while brooding upon this rebellion that Max stepped from a curb and was hit by a delivery truck. While he was laid up, Frank hustled back and forth between the Factor labs and the Technicolor company, and, by the time his father was back, walking with a cane, had the reflective problem nearly licked. “Together,” Basten relates,

  they improved the original formula until the make-up was more porous, allowing air to penetrate it and the skin to breathe. They also overcame its slight tendency toward flakiness, so that no particles were shed after the make-up was applied.… The new make-up, which the Factors called the “T-D” series, was in a solid cake form. When applied with a damp sponge, it offered a transparent matte finish while concealing small skin blemishes and imperfections. The project was enormously complex, as Max admitted in a press release.

  The fully refined preparation, its name changed to Pan-Cake, for its panlike container and its cakelike form, was perhaps Max Factor’s greatest invention; not only did it make Technicolor visually palatable but women on the set kept stealing it off the shelves for personal use. Based upon the spectroscopic perception that skin holds a multitude of tints yet is “essentially a translucent covering with relatively little color of its own,” Pan-Cake was too dark to be worn successfully at night. Max at first resisted the popular demand that it be produced in lighter shades, saying that it was made for the movies and there was only enough of it for them, but Frank saw to its wide commercial release; it “immediately became the fastest- and largest-selling single make-up item in the history of cosmetics,” outselling all sixty-five of the imitations advertising themselves with the now magic word “cake.”

  It was not long after this that Max, in Europe with his son Davis pursuing some of the possibilities that his company’s international success had created, received a death threat (modestly demanding two hundred dollars, or else) that unnerved him and prompted his return home; he died in his bed in 1938, at the early age of sixty-one. Max Factor & Company did not die with him; Frank even legally changed his name to Max to smooth over the transition. Under its new Max, the company supplied the copper-green makeup that Margaret Hamilton wore as the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz, as well as the color of the Munchkins and the six horses that flash by in the Horse of a Different Color sequence. For the masses, it produced Tru-Color, “the world’s first perfect lipstick … non-drying but indelible,” its mettle proved in many an ordeal at the Kissing Machine—a device with rubber lips, a crank, and a pressure gauge. But Basten’s idolizing tome loses steam once its dapper, ambidextrous (he could apply makeup with either hand), chemically resourceful hero passes from its narrative.

  The company survived to develop makeup for television, but its glory days were with the golden age of the movie studios, when the stars used to provide product endorsements for as little as a dollar. Their glamour rubbed off on Max Factor, and vice versa. As the nation’s cinema palaces emptied and the fading studios cut their costs, Factors started to drift out of the executive ranks of what had been, ever since Max’s boys became “Jewish Indians” to protect hired wigs, a family firm. Its stock began to trade on the New York Stock Exchange in the early Sixties, shortly after it acquired the French company Parfums Corday; in 1973, it was itself acquired, by the Norton Simon conglomerate, which ten years later was taken over by Esmark, which a year later merged with Beatrice Companies, which made Max Factor part of its International Playtex division and moved its headquarters to Stamford, Connecticut. This left high and dry in Hollywood the Max Factor Make-Up Studio, a palatial Art Deco showpiece with offices and labs and makeup rooms (for brunettes, blondes, redheads, and “brownettes”), whose opening, in 1935, as floodlights probed the skies and stars from Betty Grable to Bela Lugosi signed a parchment Scroll of Fame, had been the crowning glory of Max Factor’s ascent. Now the building, restored after some thin times, survives as Donelle Dadigan’s Hollywood History Museum, Ms. Dadigan being a “Beverly Hills real estate developer and passionate Hollywood memorabilia collector.” But of course all the memorabilia in the world won’t bring back Max Factor’s Hollywood or—and who would mourn?—the innocence of a cultural climate where makeup was a shameful secret, associated with sexual prostitution and stage performers.

  This biography foregrounds its central figure in almost total isolation from the history of cosmetics and the beauty industry—topics of lively interest to contemporary social historians, almost all of them female, as it happens. In the slim and frivolously titled Read My Lips: A Cultural History of Lipstick (1998), by Meg Cohen Ragas and Karen Kozlowski, we learn that an ancient Egyptian papyrus shows a woman applying lip rouge. Inventing Beauty (2004), by Teresa Riordan, points out that as photography became, from 1870 to 1900, more popular so, too, did cosmetics, and that, “as the Depression deepened, cosmetics sales climbed steadily,” and that, in the 1950s and 1960s, the proliferation of synthetic compounds freed cosmetics from the drawbacks of naturally viscid and odorous oils and solvents. Riordan illustrates her text with patent applications of beauty enhancers right out of a torturer’s manual. Hope in a Jar: The Making of America’s Beauty Culture (1998), by Kathy Peiss, counters arguments, raised with special vehemence in the countercultural Sixties, against the beauty industry’s manipulation and trivialization of women by pointing out that it gave multitudes of needy women respectable employment as beauticians, manicurists, and saleswomen, as well as enabling some entrepreneurs, like Elizabeth Arden and Helena Rubinstein, and the African-American Annie Turnbo Malone and Madam C. J. Walker, who manufactured hair-care pr
oducts, to head up successful corporations. Max Factor, Peiss asserts, became a factor in this female-dominated industry by shunning the air of foppish effeminacy that since the eighteenth century had attached to male hairdressers: “Photographs of Factor show him simultaneously as makeup artist, chemist, and father figure.” To preserve this solemn image his publicists discouraged him from giving, in his comically strong accent, interviews.

  Sally Pointer’s The Artifice of Beauty: A History and Practical Guide to Perfumes and Cosmetics (2005) offers a thorough and harrowing history of cosmetics, going back to the first prehistoric traces of red ochre found in graves. The reader puts the book down convinced of the incorrigible human, and particularly feminine, appetite for beauty aids. Pointer quotes eight apt lines by George Gascoigne, in his blank-verse satire of 1576, “The Steele Glas”:

  Behold, behold, they neuer stande content,

  With God, with kinde, with any helpe of Arte,

  But curle their locks, with bodkins and with braids,

  But dye their heare, with sundry subtill sleights,

  But paint and slicke, til fayrest face be foule,

  But bumbast, bolster, frisle, and perfume:

  They marre with muske, the balme which nature made,

  And dig for death, in dellicatest dishes.

  Even as Gascoigne wrote, his monarch, Elizabeth I, was poisoning her complexion with ceruse, a lead-based skin whitener used in ancient Rome and revived in the Renaissance. Ceruse persisted into the eighteenth century as an ingredient in potent “wash balls,” long after many a woman of fashion had died of such toxins. The contemporary barbarism of piercing (eyebrow, tongue, navel) was preceded in the 1890s by a craze for nipple rings; a contemporary wearer wrote that “many ladies are ready to bear the passing pain for the sake of love.”

  For the sake of love, broadly speaking, American women in the early twentieth century, overcoming puritan scruples enforced by male employers, husbands, editorial writers, and legislators (in Kansas in 1915 a law was proposed making it illegal for women under the age of forty-four to wear cosmetics “for the purpose of creating a false impression”), began to paint themselves. Movies enhanced by Max Factor makeup were not alone to blame, but they did help legitimatize artifice and its false impressions. Their heightened images spoke to women of an attainable better self. As I remember it, years ago a scientific study, which electronically tracked eyeball movement, demonstrated that, during the showing of a motion picture, the eyes of the men in the audience followed the woman on the screen. But so did the eyes of the women.

  Sparky from St. Paul

  SCHULZ AND PEANUTS: A Biography, by David Michaelis. 655 pp. HarperCollins, 2007.

  There is much to enjoy and admire in Schulz and Peanuts, a biography of Charles Schulz by David Michaelis. The basic story, of how a not conspicuously gifted but very determined barber’s son from St. Paul, Minnesota, rose to become the richest cartoonist of all time, warms the heart in traditional American fashion. Michaelis, whose previous biography concerned the dynasty-founding illustrator N. C. Wyeth, never met Schulz but has interviewed almost everyone still alive who brushed against the lonely, self-contained creator of Peanuts, and has taken good advantage of the superabundant interviews that the cartoonist, jealous of his privacy though he was, gave to reporters:

  Charles Schulz’s commitment to newspapers was second only to cartooning itself. He saw it as his obligation to give an interview to every editor who sent out a reporter, no matter how large or small or distant the paper. Across five decades he spoke through the press about his life and Peanuts, and in answering what were often the same old questions week after week, year after year, he charted major and minor shifts in his beliefs and opinions, all the while accumulating a vast treasury of commentary about his personality and character.

  His character was made in Minnesota, and Michaelis has an evocative feel for such period Americana as the ecclesiastical profile of a mid-century Midwestern city:

  Veterans coming home to any midland city found the principal Christian denominations clearly marked: the Episcopalian parish church evoked Anglican tradition in its lavish half-timbering; the Catholic cathedral’s domed basilica proclaimed its place in a universal order; Lutheranism showed its stolid presence in brick churches quietly displaying modest, useful banners announcing bingo and bake sales, their pinnacled bell towers culminating in tall Gothic spires; the Methodist and Presbyterian churches, the one built of stone, the other of wood, each thrust a tall white steeple over opposite corners of a well-tended thoroughfare, invariably Church Street.

  Amid all this denominational pomp, Michaelis goes on to say, “the Church of God had no defining style or architectural tradition. It barely announced itself.” It was to this colorless permutation of Christianity, founded in Indiana in 1881, that the young Schulz attached himself, becoming a tithing pillar and part-time preacher. In the raffish, New York City–centered brotherhood of cartoonists, he was an antisocial, teetotalling, non-smoking oddity. He had never gone to an art school, learning his trade as a student at and then instructor for a Minneapolis learn-by-mail outfit called Art Instruction. Peanuts was launched, in 1950, in a squat, space-saving format and under an enigmatic title imposed, to Schulz’s lifelong indignation, by the syndicate heads. That same year, his nomination to the National Cartoonists Society was blocked by Otto Soglow, the membership-committee chairman, on the ground that no member—not even his nominator, Mort Walker, of Beetle Bailey fame—had ever met him. In 1954, while Peanuts was taking off with the public and setting new standards of minimalist subtlety and quiet daring, Schulz came east to the society’s awards dinner on the rumor that the coveted Reuben, already bestowed upon Walker and Dennis the Menace’s Hank Ketcham, would go to him. Instead, the sports cartoonist Willard Mullin received it. Schulz left without a word of farewell to his tablemates and claimed, back in Minneapolis, that he had been treated like “someone’s poor relative.”

  The pervasive magic of syndicated cartooning in the twentieth century is knowingly sketched by Michaelis, not only in historical terms, from The Yellow Kid and Happy Hooligan on up through Gasoline Alley and Blondie and Joe Palooka and Li’l Abner and—the first strip to captivate intellectuals—Krazy Kat, but as experienced by the aspiring young Schulz. Born in 1922, he doted on the comic pages, copying Popeye and Tim Tyler’s Luck on his father’s shirt cardboards. When, in the Depression years, he earned nine dollars a week as a grocery-store clerk, he was enabled “to work with Bristol board and Higgins India ink and Craftint doubletone.” The arcana of the cartoonist’s trade were dazzlingly displayed, Michaelis relates, in a 1934 exhibition of comic-strip art at the St. Paul Public Library:

  Here hung several hundred lengths of layered illustration board stroked in dense ink more purely black and warmly alive than the engraving process allowed for.… Outside the panels, cryptic instructions had been penciled in the margin; sky-blue arrows aimed to catch an editor’s eye. Inside the panels, there were unexpected traces of effort: accidental blots, glue stains and tape bits, strips of paper pasted to correct mistakes in lettering, unerased letters, registration marks, residues of white gouache, pentimenti reversing all kinds of slips and false starts—a whole unseen world of reasoning and revision had passed over the drawing board before mechanical reproduction reduced and tightened the lines.

  And yet, for all the biographer’s animation of the professional and geographical environments that shaped Schulz, he remains somewhat blank and hard to like, with a “cold, untrusting side.” An only child, he was a second-generation American on both his German father’s side and his Norwegian mother’s. Though he signed his strips simply “Schulz” and inherited his father’s work ethic, neatness, and devoted pride of profession, he said, “I always regarded myself really as being Norwegian and not German.” Yet his mother’s hard-drinking, violent-tempered brothers frightened him at Sunday family get-togethers. Though German immigrants gravitated to the cities and brought cultural institu
tions with them, the Norwegians, according to the Minnesotan Sinclair Lewis, “brought nothing new”; they clung to their family farms and clannishly intermarried. Neither ethnic group offered much encouragement to artistic aspirations, or lofty aspirations of any sort: “Don’t get a big head” was a mantra of the upper Midwest; the big-headed tots of Peanuts emerged as a defiance. Nor was display of the heart prominent; there was not much touching, Michaelis notices, in family photographs or in Schulz’s memory. When Sparky—as he was called all his life, nicknamed in infancy after the racehorse Spark Plug in the comic strip Barney Google—returned from the Second World War, in which he had seen overseas combat, he entered his father’s barbershop and the haircut in progress continued. “No one gave me a hug,” the young veteran recalled. “We didn’t have any party.… That was it.” In turn, Schulz was gingerly with his own children and shied from physical affection; his cousin Patty testified, “Hugging him was like hugging a tree—he never moved.” At the outset of his wartime service, in 1943, he came home on a day pass to say goodbye to his mother, who was painfully dying of metastasized cervical cancer. In Michaelis’s telling: “He said he guessed it was time to go.… She turned her gaze as best she could—it was a struggle to move at all. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘Good-bye, Sparky. We’ll probably never see each other again.’ ” A bleaker deathbed blessing has seldom been recorded.

  The Peanuts empire early and late included bound volumes of the strips, and for some of them, notably the wide-format Peanuts Jubilee (1975), Schulz provided, in an economical, unassuming prose, pieces of autobiography between selections of reprinted Peanuts. His own version of his mother’s farewell reads slightly softer than the version above: “Yes, I suppose we should say good-bye because we probably never will see each other again.” In another spot he dips into his uncanny childhood sense of himself: