In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

210 ARRAYS
This amalgamation of movie stars' fictional lives and private lives has
a functional equivalent among star athletes, who often act out fictional
lives that more or less parallel their private biographies as represented in
plays or in films. Unlike competitions in ballparks or arenas, such art
forms are capable of staging motifs of privacy (Ritter and Rucker, 84-
85). Jack Dempsey combines the two aspects of this promotional strategy
in a Broadway production entitled The Big Fight: A Drama of New
York Life. Playing "a champion who [is] tempted by a betting syndicate
to throw the big fight for a cool million bucks" (and who of course stays
clean), the heavyweight champion of the world is joined on stage by his
wife, Estelle Taylor, a modestly popular Hollywood actress. In this particular
case, however, the public manufacture of private identity ends up
working against the star. The live performance reveals a grotesque discrepancy
between the champion's impressive body and his high-pitched,
almost feminine voice (Dempsey and Dempsey, 182ff.).
Although it is impossible to identify outstanding achievements or
talents as the sole criterion for all the varieties of stardom, there is hardly
any star whose biography does not follow the narrative pattern of a
meteoric rise from unhappy childhood to national or international celebrity.
Babe Ruth "never had a real childhood in the usual sense of the
word," because his parents sent him to a reformatory before he was
seven (Ritter and Rucker, 8). Brought up with numerous siblings in an
impoverished Utah family, Jack Dempsey began his career as a
prizefighter at fifteen, out of sheer financial necessity. Like Ruth and
Dempsey, Valentino was born in 1895; he lost his father at the age of
ten, emigrated to the United States at eighteen, worked as a gardener and
a gigolo, and tried for a long time without success to be cast in a
Hollywood movie-before his big break came around 1920. The greatest
of all stars, Charlie Chaplin, had perhaps the most wretched childhood:
his mother, an actress, was mentally ill, and they lived in poverty in the
London slums. Through the roles they playas actors or as athletes, the
bodies of the stars often keep alive, like open scars, the memories of their
traumatic past. While such scars can underscore the star's ultimate triumph
as a miraculous event, they also encourage fans to dream of a
similarly glorious personal destiny-however depressing their own lifesituations
may be.
But even after the stars have crossed the role-specific threshold between
penury and glory, the private aspects of their public personae often