A Brilliant, Unknown Memoir About Classic Hollywood 

The 1988 memoir of the late silent film star Patsy Ruth Miller is a hidden masterwork of the genre.

Credit Photograph by Ralph Steiner / Conde Nast via Getty

While poking around in relation to the Film Forum series “It Girls, Flappers, Jazz Babies & Vamps,” and particularly Ernst Lubitsch’s wildly inventive 1926 comedy “So This Is Paris,” I got curious about that film’s stars and discovered that one of them, Patsy Ruth Miller, wrote a memoir. It turns out that it’s a hidden masterwork of the genre; I’m embarrassed to be coming to it so belatedly.

I would put Miller’s book, “My Hollywood, When Both of Us Were Young,” on my shelf alongside Louise Brooks’s “Lulu in Hollywood” (portions of which were originally published in 

). If Brooks writes like Fitzgerald, documenting tragedy beneath the glamour that both charmed and repelled her, Miller is more like a Dreiser of anecdotes, endowed as she was with a seeming total recall, a photographic and phonographic memory that vigorously and artlessly conjures an era and its conflicts through the accretion of surprising details and precise, incisive observations.

The book is subtitled “The Memories of Patsy Ruth Miller,” and memories they are, following chronology only generally and taking the charmingly meandering path of accidental associations. Miller wrote it late in her life—it was published in 1988 (she was born in 1904 and died in 1995)—thanks to the prompting and prodding of a journalist named Jeffrey Carrier, long after her movie career had ended. (A popular star in the nineteen-twenties, Miller vanished from the business after 1932.) In her foreword, Miller explains that the book isn’t an autobiography, just “stories”—“I don’t like dirty words, and I can’t write nasty things about the people I knew in Hollywood because I liked most of them . . .”—and yet, somehow, in her breezy and amiable way, she catches plenty of shadows along with the highlights. Miller’s memoir is a charming forerunner to “Hail, Caesar!,” by the Coen brothers, with its comical but unvarnished view of the unsavory living that resulted in Hollywood’s cinematic treasures.

Miller goes into copious detail about the series of accidents on which her career was based. First, at the age of sixteen, vacationing with her family (her father was a prosperous businessman), she encountered a minor Hollywood figure who presented himself as a major associate of the romantic star Douglas Fairbanks but was nonetheless able to get her a screen test, which, after the elaborate makeup and hairdo to which she was subjected, came to nought. But, soon thereafter, a social encounter with Alla Nazimova, a grand star of the European stage who had a brief flareup of Hollywood stardom as well, led to another test, which Miller did in her own style and which led to work as an extra and then, at seventeen, in 1921, as a supporting actor to Nazimova and Rudolph Valentino in “Camille.” (She became a close friend and protégée of Nazimova, whose grand style and theatrical wisdom Miller recalls along with Nazimova’s tales of hair-raisingly dramatic troubles in her native Russia.)

In 1923, Miller was cast as Esmeralda in “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” (“It was ballyhooed as The First Million Dollar Picture,” she writes), alongside the Quasimodo of Lon Chaney. Though not so credited, she writes, Chaney co-directed the film with a keen dramatic sense, imparting to her a crucial lesson: “You don’t have to cry real tears. I hate these people who brag that they can cry at the drop of a hat. The point is not for you to cry but to make your audience cry. So you must be in control. Don’t just throw yourself into it and say ‘Oh, I felt that scene.’ Make your audience feel the scene.” (This passage echoes notably off another, from “Lulu in Hollywood,” in which Brooks writes, “During the twenties, no director was considered any good who could not make his actors cry real tears, and no actor was considered any good who could not shed real tears on demand.”)

Miller offers portraits of Charlie Chaplin (highly unflattering), Buster Keaton (endearing), Darryl F. Zanuck (damning), Rudy Valentino, Fairbanks, Gloria Swanson, Mary Pickford, Ruth Chatterton, Kay Francis, and William Wyler, among many other Hollywood luminaries. She recalls meeting Howard Hughes at a time when “he hadn’t become THE Howard Hughes” but was only the socially awkward and unhappily married nephew of the director Rupert Hughes and was, said Rupert, “dying to meet a movie actress.” She went on several dates with him, including one where he took her to a movie and he “talked all through it, in a loud whisper, telling me why the scenes were all wrong.”

Miller was also a regular guest of William Randolph Hearst and Marion Davies at San Simeon, and she brings extraordinary detail to that living model of Charles Foster Kane’s Xanadu. Miller recalls the physical setting with photographic precision, talks of Charlie Chaplin’s self-aggrandizing after-dinner performances, and unfolds with a detective-like discernment the Hearst obsession with rules and regulations—notably, the one barring guests from bringing their own liquor. The center of that remarkable anecdote is the director Eddie Sutherland, who discovered that his baggage was searched upon arrival and was sent packing from San Simeon.

Miller makes fun of her own gossip-column nickname, “The Most Engaged Girl in Hollywood,” and makes light of her odd social relations, including encounters with the most charming gangsters—one of whom was shot down in New York moments after escorting her from Grand Central Station to the Plaza Hotel. The Film Forum series “It Girls” gets its title from the 1927 movie “It,” starring Clara Bow, a Brooklynite who quickly came to represent a new generation of sexually uninhibited and socially free-thinking women. The film itself is based on a story by Elinor Glyn, and here’s how Miller recalls her:

I do remember Elinor Glyn, the author who made the word ‘It’ synonymous with Sex Appeal through her novel Three Weeks, which was being filmed at my studio. The word around the lot was that it was very Hot Stuff! Hot stuff, in those days, was just a teeny bit more racy than Sesame Street. Madame Glyn looked like the cover of one of her sensational novels, with a few years added. She had a fine firm Valkyrien figure which she adorned with drapes and floating scarfs. Her hair was an incredible mahogany color, her eyelids matched the green of her eyes, and her eyebrows were fiercely black and horizontal, which was not the fashion at the time.

The movie “It” is rather stodgy, and Bow’s performance enjoyed fame because the actress conveyed freedom without danger, romance without recklessness. “It” offered a bowdlerized version of Jazz Age liberties—and Glyn herself turns up in the film to offer a sanitized definition of her own idea.

By the mid-nineteen-twenties, when Miller was in her early twenties, she was a star and a fixture in high society. When she came to New York, she was introduced to the Round Table at the Algonquin and was overawed yet somewhat unimpressed. She said that Robert Benchley “improved upon acquaintance” but that “about Dorothy Parker the same cannot be said.” Miller writes of meeting Parker years later, when they were neighbors in Beverly Hills. “The wit which had shone like a jewel in the Algonquin setting was still sharp and able to lacerate, but more as a broken bottle cuts than as a diamond.” As for Anita Loos, she “was also a member of the famous Algonquin Round-Table-ites, but like Robert Benchley, she was 

 them. She was more real; you didn’t have to talk to her in epigrams or quotable 

The nineteen-twenties appeared, to Miller, apolitical: “Quite a lot was going on all over that far-off world, but it didn’t affect us because we didn’t know about it. We had no modern marvel of radio and television to bring plague, pestilence and violence to our breakfast tables along with our orange juice.” She said of the twenties, “Except for the idiocy of Prohibition, it was a most satisfying decade almost to the very end. But it ended bleakly. The stock market crashed, my Mother died, and I got married.”

The husband in question, the first of three, was the director Tay Garnett, who, she reports, was in love with another woman the whole time. Miller and Garnett travelled—separately—to Europe in 1933 in order to get divorced far from the prying eyes of Hollywood journalists (ultimately signing the papers in Budapest), but, along the way, Miller revisited Berlin, where she observed that “tanks now rolled where prostitutes had paraded, wearing black leather boots, and flourishing whips.” She writes of the city having formerly been “as wide open as a city can be” and adds parenthetically, “If anyone wishes to find an analogy between Berlin then and New York now, feel free to do so.” But she saw clearly the politics behind the new public order:

All that was over. Hitler had come. He was not yet in full power, but he was making his presence felt. He promised Berliners a return to the days of bourgeois respectability and Gemutlichkeit, and though most of them didn’t like the bombastic little Austrian with his dreadful accent, they accepted him as the lesser of two evils.

There were no longer brothels openly displaying their wares, and families could stroll with their children without fear of being accosted, or subjected to indecencies before the eyes of their little ones. For this return to decency one must take a little bombast and saber-rattling, was the general attitude.

She talks about her stealthy aid to an anti-Nazi Hungarian on the train to Budapest, to help him get certain papers past German customs officers—and also about her passing the time there while awaiting her divorce by writing a “short story about how it was to be an American in Hungary,” which was promptly published by 

. Upon her return home, Miller also wrote a short story—thinly disguised fiction—about a decadent party at the actor George Raft’s apartment, called “Jackie Carter at Home,” which was also published in that magazine and which depicted his associations with underworld goons, one of whom conveyed Raft’s displeasure to her during a soirée at Ciro’s. (John Huston came to her rescue with a defiant stare and a lacerating insult.)

By that time, Miller’s movie career had come to an end, but she doesn’t blame talking pictures for her own withdrawal (which, however, she doesn’t explain). After leaving the industry, Miller went to Tahiti. Though her lengthy description of her exotic experiences there is far from the most engaging part of the book, she cites her enthusiasm for F. W. Murnau’s “Tabu,” which was shot there, and because of which she visited the small island where he lived while making the film. (The upshot is a charmingly mysterious cinematic ghost story.)

Miller was a friend of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s and an admirer of his writing, and she tells two anecdotes about him, one from the twenties and one from the thirties, which are perhaps the book’s most scintillating episodes. They make for a painfully contrasting montage—beginning with the effervescent tale of their meeting, thanks to her friend the playwright Marc Connelly, who brought her to Scott and Zelda’s apartment.

It was sheer bedlam. People were standing wall to wall, all seeming to be shouting at one another, with no one listening. A victrola was playing somewhere, and from the bedroom came voices in a sort of off-key barbershop quartet.

While I was looking around for Marc, who had been swallowed up in the crowd, a pretty, thin-faced girl at my elbow said, “I’m Zelda. What do you want to drink?”

Before I could answer, someone grabbed her and she was gone. I said politely to the empty space where she had been, “Nothing, thank you,” and suddenly the space was filled by a handsome young man with the clear blue eyes of a child.

The encounter with Fitzgerald himself goes on from there to a dialogue of a comically Beckettian absurdity that resulted in a fast friendship. (The entire scene is perhaps the most delicious and endearing anecdote in Miller’s book.) That night, after the bash, the Fitzgeralds, Connelly, and Miller went to a coffee shop and talked “until nearly dawn,” and, for the remainder of her time in New York, Miller often visited the Fitzgeralds, but found that Zelda often begged off from their dinners and stayed home alone.

Then, after relocating to Los Angeles, Miller met the author again, soon before his death, when her second husband, the screenwriter John Lee Mahin (who had written the script for Howard Hawks’s early masterwork “Scarface”), worked, as did Fitzgerald, at M-G-M. They found him despondent, and Mahin told him, “Some day you’re going to write something about Hollywood as good as 

Scott reacted as though he’d been accused of raping his twin sister. He said that he had never written anything worthwhile, that Gatsby was already dead and best forgotten, that nothing he had ever done would live, and not to give him any of that crap about great literature.

on the way home John said this was all because of the people Scott was surrounded by, all the writers who had suddenly become politically oriented; social-consciousness was the cry, and anyone who merely wrote about people and their everyday problems and emotions, was at least a Fascist or maybe worse. Poor Scott had been tossed into this whirlpool of Liberalism, and without a political credo to cling to, was drowning in it.

As for Mahin’s own vehemence, here’s what the film historian Kevin Brownlow writes, in his obituary for Miller: “Divorcing Garnett, she married the screenwriter Jon Lee Mahin (Scarface, Too Hot to Handle), noted for right-wing political views which Miller shared.”

Miller and Mahin divorced in 1946; what Miller writes about her experience of the Second World War from her home in “the Valley” while Mahin was in the Army and stationed in England reflects political views that are shocking to read. Miller writes of local incidents of attempted espionage and guerrilla warfare by local Japanese residents as well as attacks on California from Japanese forces, and she follows up by endorsing and supporting the U.S. government policy of the forced displacement of Japanese residents to internment camps. (“I think everyone felt a certain amount of sympathy for the innocent victims of a war not of their making—but what about that two—or maybe three percent who were not so innocent?”)

Miller’s essential conservatism comes out in occasional flashes of crabbed nostalgia, as when she contrasts the state of latter-day Hollywood with the “clean entertainment” of the movies of her heyday or complains about changes resulting from feminism—“Chivalry was still in fashion and male courtesy was as natural as breathing. . . . I suppose it’s only natural that, as the supply of gentlewomen in this country diminishes, so will the supply of gentlemen.” Her observations nonetheless have a mercurial illumination that’s tinged with an occasional flash of charmingly corny humor and folksy wisdom. She’s an upper-middle-class Midwesterner whose sophisticated experiences don’t override the folksy twang of her early proprieties; she has old-fashioned prejudices which provide, in effect, the lighting that makes for the visual style of her observation.

The love of classic Hollywood movies doesn’t take hold 

 the studio era’s prejudices and exclusions and inequities, but 

 of them. Modern progressives nonetheless fall hard for methods of acting, directorial inventions, styles and techniques and moods that are motivated and inspired by the era’s injustices and those that are particular to the studios themselves: white Protestant ethnocentricity and prejudice against non-whites and non-Protestants; heteronormativity and narrowly neo-Puritanical sexual morality (and the repressive laws to enforce them and social codes to maintain them); gender inequalities that were also observed in practice and sustained in law; a high-handed indifference to the living artistic heritage, which resulted in the geniuses of the age being thrown onto the consumerist scrap heap along with seemingly disposable cultural commodities such as popular movies themselves, which in turn weren’t recognized as the enduring art that they often are; the luxurious decadence of high society, the sumptuous deceit and cavalier aggression of its libertines; and the flagrant use and abuse of economic, political, and muscular power to maintain industrial discipline within the movie industry itself.

The classic Hollywood of halcyon dreams, with its romantic elegance and visionary craft, with its sublimely persuasive, titanic and intimate simulations and recreations of grand outer worlds and deep inner ones, is the froth and the shimmer atop a churning sluice of the uninhibited inflictions of power and indulgences in pleasures ranging from frivolous to depraved. Patsy Ruth Miller was an insider’s insider, yet somehow managed to skitter lightly upon the froth, to delight in the shimmer, even to catch its reflections while being among them. The blithe simplicity of her complex story is itself part of Hollywood’s mysterious, endlessly fascinating, and repelling essence.

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in 1999, and has contributed articles about the directors François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and Samuel Fuller. He writes about movies in his blog for newyorker.com.

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