Summary
There's a famous scene in Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard when Gloria Swanson's character, an aging silent film actress called Norma Desmond, sits down to a game of bridge with Buster Keaton, Anna Q. Nilsson and H. B. Warner, all playing themselves.William Holden's character, her young lover, describes them as “the waxworks.” After the first take of that scene was finished, Keaton, then 55, looked around at the other three actors, all old friends of his, and said, deadpan, “Waxworks is right.” Swanson recalled that “we all howled with laughter.” Other Hollywood aristocracy appearing as themselves in Sunset Boulevard include Cecil B. DeMille, gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, and, most notably, the great actor and director Eric Stroheim, whose role as Swanson's doting butler is actually quite a dark parody of the humiliations he suffered in the American film industry, a subtext that is lost on most modern viewers.
However, the film also contains one allusion to the pre-talkies era that is even more ghoulish, but also even more indirect, than the Stroheim character. Apparently, the name Norma Desmond is meant to recall both William Desmond Taylor, a director who was mysteriously shot dead in 1922, and Mabel Normand, an actress who became a suspect in his murder. Taylor, who, like both Buster Keaton and Hedda Hopper, died on today's date, did not have a particularly colourful career, but his still-unsolved killing was one of the great scandals of the silent film era, more sensational at the time even than the trial of Fatty Arbuckle.
Nearly a hundred issues of Taylorology, a newsletter devoted to the case, were published between 1985 and 2000, which is quite a feat given how negligible the evidence is. For non-Taylorology subscribers, of course, Taylor is completely forgotten today, but even at the time of Sunset Boulevard, it could hardly have been fresh in the memory, making the reference almost subliminal. In the most inconspicuous ways, Wilder made sure that his entire film took on the mood of Norma Desmond's crumbling house – a haunted mausoleum of Hollywood's past.
Ned Beauman used to be Commissioning Editor at Another Man, writes often for Dazed & Confused and has contributed to the Guardian, the Financial Times, and many other publications. His debut novel Boxer, Beetle will be published by Sceptre in August 2010
