(4 of 11)
Calculated or casual, Shirley looks to a lot of Hollywood Toynbees like the start of a new cycle. Every so often, of course, a new ruler must move in to take over from tired hands and smile-weary faces, for Hollywood panders to every man's daydream of eternal youth. The guy in the air-cooled gloom of the theater grows older every year, but his dream girl is the same age always. The surprise is not that Shirley has moved to the top, but that she has been able to do it on her own terms without cheesecake, without studio supervised romances, even without a swimming pool. It could have happened only in a new Hollywood, which has found that kookiness can be more appealing than yesterday's gilded glamour. "It's this togetherness stuff, that's what it is," says Director Elia Kazan. "In the old days, with one or two exceptions, Hollywood girls couldn't be both sexy and funny. Nowadays they insist on being so-called complete women—healthy and natural. The new crop of actresses is dedicated to the proposition that the girl next door can also be sexy. They want to keep one eye on the baby and let the other eye rove."
The observation is interesting but debatable. Shirley's rivals are far more varied than "Gadge" Kazan suggests. The newcomers—and there seem to be more interesting ones in Hollywood these days than in years—are not necessarily all girl-next-door types, not all funny, not all "complete women." Inevitably, certain new Hollywood clichés have developed. Where it was preferable for yesterday's star to have been discovered at a soda fountain, it is better for today's model to have been found at the Actors' Studio. Where yesterday's glamour girl was expected to bathe in goat's milk, today's must dig Dostoevsky, or at least say she does. The sex goddess is a foreigner now—named Brigitte or Sophia—and Hollywood women seem to come in somewhat subtler shapes. And, at one time or another, they must all wear blue jeans. But under the blue jeans they are not kin.
Between the excellent Method acting of Academy Award Winner Joanne Woodward, 28, and the thinly silverplated style with which Martha Hyer, 34, attempts to replace Princess Grace, the town's new crop of females comes in assorted types and talents. Some examples:
Susan Kohner, 22, was born to the Hollywood purple. Her father, successful Agent Paul Kohner, provided a Bel Air home brightened with a portrait of Susan and her brother painted by a family friend, Diego Rivera, and other baubles to match. From her mother, Mexican Actress Lupita Tovar, she inherited liquid, tip-tilted eyes of striking beauty. As a Chinese girl on TV (Schlitz Playhouse), an Italian girl in To Hell and Back, a neurotic mulatto in Imitation of Life, she began her multicolored career as one of the most versatile young actresses in town. Her latest picture: Walt Disney's The Big Fisherman, in which she again plays an exotic part—a young Judean girl.