Live Fast, Die Young

On September 30, 1955, James Dean died in a head on collision while driving his Porsche Spyder to a race in Salinas, California. He was 24. He'd starred in three films, all made within the previous year, East Of Eden, Rebel Without A Cause, and Giant, for which he received two Oscar nominations. James Dean appears four times in A Book of Ages.

Judy Garland

In September 1935 Judy Garland had a personal audition with Louis B. Mayer at MGM and was signed to a contract for $100 a week. She was 13, bright-eyed, pudgy, adorable and enormously talented. The talent came paired with a trembling vulnerability, the eyes almost on the verge of tears, the tremble in the voice. She starred in nine movies opposite Mickey Rooney, usually playing the true-hearted best friend, then in 1939 she played Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz; she was 16.

Louis B. Mayer thought her plumpness unattractive and he and other MGM executives urged her to lose weight. She was given pills to accomplish this. She grew thinner but became addicted to the pills. Pills and alcohol made her an unreliable performer on set and she was fired from several pictures during production, she suffered nervous breakdowns and paralyzing episodes of self-doubt, but she remained a galvanizing presence on stage. Audiences sat mesmerized while she performed on that narrow space between perfection and collapse, an apt metaphor for stardom if there ever was one. Judy Garland appears six times in A Book of Ages.

Hitchcock

Today is the birthday of Alfred Hitchcock. He was born in 1899 in London. The most formative episode in his young life took place at the age of six when his father sent him down the police station with a note instructing the officer in charge to lock him in a cell for ten minutes. Throughout his film career, respectable characters played by Cary Grant and James Stewart and Henry Fonda were repeatedly menaced by policemen, picked up and held on mysterious charges, stopped and questioned, watched, circled, pursued, and occasionally rescued, usually in a way that made the audience laugh with relief. Handcuffs became a leitmotif; sometimes you notice the stars hands, unshackled, are held as if bound. It is amazing how small incidents from our childhoods will haunt us for the rest of our lives. Alfred Hitchcock never won an Oscar for film direction, but a lot of lesser directors who wished they were half as good as him did. Alfred Hitchcock appears six times in A Book of Ages.

"I'm ready for my close-up Mr. DeMille"

Today's the birthday of Cecil B. DeMille, born in 1881, in the Berkshires where his parents were vacationing. He was 31 when he directed a film called The Squaw Man. It was the first feature produced by the Paramount film studio and one of the very first to come out of an obscure little town in southern California called Hollywood.

DeMille became the most famous film director in the world, his name associated with glamor and spectacle. He instructed famous actors how to act. He parted the Red Sea twice, or directed Moses to do so, in 1923 and again in 1956 when Charlton Heston played Moses.

DeMille played himself at the end of Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard, helping to lure the mad former film star Norma Desmond out of her mansion in the Hollywood Hills. Gloria Swanson ends the picture with the famous line "I'm ready for my closeup, Mr. DeMille." Cecil B. DeMille appears three times in A Book of Ages.

Rin Tin Tin

On August 10, 1932, Rin Tin Tin died at his home in Los Angeles. In dog years he would have been 98. Popular legend has him dying in the arms of screen siren Jean Harlow. Tin had retired from pictures the year before. He starred in 40 feature films, 26 of them for Warner Brothers, and is credited with saving the studio from bankruptcy. Rin Tin Tin appears twice in A Book of Ages.

Madcap

Writer-director Preston Sturges began writing his memoirs in February 1959 and finished the last chapter on August 6, in his room at the Algonquin Hotel. He died later the same afternoon. He was 60.

He came from the American Midwest, but spent most of his childhood traipsing around Europe with his mother, who ran a string of upmarket perfumeries, and his mother's best friend Isadora Duncan. Preston's mother gave the famous dancer the scarf that got tangled in the spokes of her Bugatti and ended her life. One imagines a brittle upbringing full of madcap adventures and ironic outcomes. Sturges the wise-eyed youth observing the sophisticated open marriages and negotiated romances. This brilliant stuff became the fabric of his plays and screenplays and of the swift sequence of brilliant comedies he directed between 1940 and 1944. Most notably the films The Lady Eve, Sullivan's Travels and The Palm Beach Story, which he made in quick succession in 1941-42. Sturges appears four times in A Book of Ages.

Fitzgerald in Hollywood

In July 1937 F. Scott Fitzgerald traveled to Hollywood on a six-month contract with M.G.M. for a thousand dollars a week. He was 40 years-old, no longer famous, and deep in debt. He moved into the Garden of Allah, where he met gossip columnist Sheila Graham. Fitzgerald’s last story published in The Saturday Evening Post is titled "Trouble." It was Fitzgerald who said there are no second acts in American life. He would die before his own began. F. Scott Fitzgerald appears seven times in A Book of Ages.