I

FIGURE THAT HOLLYWOOD promised to most of America what the Gatsbys did once upon a time: the possibility of godhoods and kingdoms of wealth not as afterlife's reward but as descended upon the chosen among men. It is not, after all, by accident that socialite and actor alike go by the name of "star"--star who could be god to more men than any man might be devil, star whose mortal success might so seem to fulfill the richest reddest blooded fantasies of the most American that it could appear as immortality achieved on earth. Gatsby would be as much monarch of his fortunes as any star could later feel of his screen, both immortals to unspeakably glorify the heart of America.

But figure further, figure even preposterously, that God gives all things equally to all men. Then if mortal life is rotten for most, the soul's reward will be golden. Then too, mortal stardom as every man's dream may be the star's nightmare. As it was Gatsby's, it would later be Hollywood's. Yes, Gatsby's falling star might have seen it writ in the stars that he and his kind would pass on the dreams of America to Hollywood. The talent though not the creed would change, and the next generation of immortals might be his progeny.

Hollywood was indeed, by the 1940s, consumed by a spirit not unlike the one which had so driven Gatsby: the golden dream of love and money. Though Gatsby's funeral was unattended, the devil of his opportunism rose as a phoenix in Hollywood, there to mainline his ambitions into the blood-stream of America, and to deposit his dreams in a substratum of the American mind.

II

Consider first West Egg, swimming in sybaritic air by the sea. It is a place of grace to try description and of grossness to try belief, proclaiming its economic sources even as it tells how prettily money can be used. It is a paradise existing as a testimony to the monstrous inequities of life--the logical extension of consumption ethic America--its wealth the moral point and the reward if not the end of economic success.

The spirit of the place is insistent with the presence of money. Set in feudal splendour cool and moist as the Snow Queen's summer palace in its perch upon the sea, it is redolent with sensual pleasure. It is also a monumental mistake built as if toward some transcendental point, and peaking in denial of possibilities even as it marks the exhaustion of America as a land still to be settled.

It is the place of the rich, yes, who are so different from you and me; of those who can afford to believe that life is to be comfortable and that the point if not the promise of life is happiness. But the place is somehow too brazen in its confidence that happiness can be bought and that the past can be brought back, too lacking in age and refinement, in the proportion and discretion that Henry James might approve. Its whiteness is somehow too harsh in a way that makes the mind spring ineluctably to the raw beginnings of the money. The enchantment of the place is too contrived, its greens too smooth, its hedges cut too sharply.

Its spiritual forefathers, hardy pioneers, might have shuddered had they foreseen where their dreams would head their children. For Gatsby's story is of those energies that settled Western America. He is son to that frontier past, the demise of which was sealed with the frontier. And Gatsby's tragedy comes of his attempt to graft the promise of a faded pastoral America onto an alien present.

His West Egg was as spiritually bankrupt as it was materially rich. Jumping off place and last stop for the ambitions and wealthy, it was for them a moral wasteland. Even as Gatsby wrought West Egg in the image of his dreams; his heaven on earth it could not be. More could it be his Hell, his dreams as phantoms, his mansion their graveyard. Embalmed in midsummer mists, the place even looked something of a mirage: shimmering on Saturday evenings with wealth and youth and beauty, and so heavy, up close, with the heat and sweat of life; dream and disillusionment ineffably caught in that blinking crystal of green at the end of Daisy's pier.

It was not, however, the heat and sweat that was remembered in his legend, but the wealth and youth and beauty. If West Egg for Gatsby had been a sort of haunted place, it had to look much more like paradise to most who had not lived there. And even more in the Depression that followed so close upon his death could it offer the fascination of the forbidden. If men could not have it and men could much less forget it, then it could still be had in dream and fantasy. In a grandeur of escapism might Gatsby's dream be borne back from the past. Yes, Hollywood could do as much.

III

Consider the Hollywood spectacular of the forties: where fireworks and fountains are settings for songs of love, whole armies in satin and silk top hats the choruses; where ending after ending applauding eternal love comes true; story after dreamy-eyed story where spectacle was half the thing and blissful love as life's reward the other half. As Gatsby dreamed of love and money, Hollywood made life out as all romance and pageantry. The picture of West Egg as a factory of pleasure could have been their fantasy factory's Model T.

Gatsby might have given Hollywood its bonanza formula. And Hollywood would not for pennies or cigars fail to capitalize on it--love and money, love and money. All the masterminds of Hollywood, all its technical knowhow and commercial wizardry, its public relations genius and its statistician's calculations had divined the hungry nerve of the public and hooked it on the Gatsby formula. One could get giddy on the charm in the promise even as the very existence of Hollywood testified to its exhaustion.

For as inevitably as the dream factories made Hollywood an economic empire, they made it a moral desert. The drug they advertized, then, the Hollywood magic formula, could be dangerous--as dangerous as any dream believed too much, even as dangerous as the course of Gatsby's dream. Then in Hollywood Gatsby's tragedy could be re-enacted.