Fame and its cousin, infamy

This is a thought that a lot of us secretly share, without ever quite saying it out loud: If I could just get to be even a little bit rich and maybe a little bit famous, I’ll be all right -- safe from shame, calumny, ostracism, all those ugly accidents that haunt our bourgeois reveries. Money and celebrity constitute, in this daydream life, a sort of hand rail we can reassuringly grasp as we pull ourselves upward along what we fondly imagine to be life’s gently curving path.

That this is not necessarily so you can prove every week at the supermarket checkout counter, where the tabloids trumpet the slips, slides and splats of the seemingly well-favored. Drink, drugs, divorce -- almost no one entirely escapes the vicissitudes of existence. But note that “almost.” Sometimes, it seems, even a little bit of privilege can produce a Betsy Blair, sailing serenely, solipsistically, above every one else’s anxious affrays.

She was a leggy teenage dancer, working her first show at Billy Rose’s Diamond Horseshoe in New York, when she caught the eye of gifted, ambitious Gene Kelly, a hot young Broadway dancer who was the choreographer. They married in 1940; he signed with MGM, and she became a Beverly Hills hostess, mostly to the young, gifted, high-spirited performers, musicians and directors associated with the so-called “Freed Unit,” then making the best musicals in movie history at MGM.

Meantime, she studied acting and without undue consideration embraced Stalinism. She started working in movies in 1947 and achieved her only memorable role as Marty’s plain-Jane girlfriend in 1955. She did some films and had some affairs in Europe, divorced Kelly and embraced an emigre’s life on the continent, eventually settling down with director Karl Reisz, turning their home into a much appreciated salon for wandering show folks.

It is not an uninteresting life. But her account of it in “The Memory of All That” is uninteresting, largely because of her blithe detachment. She doesn’t seem to find it odd, for example, that somehow she kept on working during the blacklist era when other party liners (the Communists refused her official membership, thinking her more useful as a fellow traveler) had their lives and careers ruinously interrupted. That’s because Louis B. Mayer and Dore Schary vouched for her when the investigators came calling -- because, of course, they were protecting their investment in Kelly’s huge stardom from guilt by marital association.

Similarly, she complains about the rather mingy divorce settlement she obtained from Kelly without fully acknowledging that he was the aggrieved party -- those affairs of hers. Nor does she notice that her pleasant life in exile was greatly eased by friendships begun when she was Mrs. Kelly.

The unexamined life turns out to be worth living after all. Or, to put it another way, the celebrity system worked the way we imagine it should for Blair. Tucked under the wing of Kelly’s fame and basking in its afterglow, she was protected, cosseted, indulged. There is no pain or panic in the life she blandly recounts. It’s all innocent Betsy, warmly welcomed, genially entertained by all the best people.

On the other hand, the Weller family, residents of Beverly Hills at the same time Blair lived there, would have reason to envy the ease of her passage. They weren’t big rich or big famous, but as of 1958, they were doing OK. They had risen out of the lower-middle-class Jewish life in New York and now the father, Daniel, was a prosperous neurosurgeon. The mother, Helen, did well and had fun writing for movie fan magazines. One of their daughters, Liz, had survived polio with minimal damage and now, with her sister, Sheila, was surviving the minor miseries of a Beverly Hills education. Their house had a swimming pool, and there was plenty of money for clothes and records and parties. Best of all, there was their raffish uncle, Herman Hover, a former Broadway hoofer who now owned Ciro’s, arguably the most chic of Hollywood nightclubs. The kids often hung out there with the likes of Nat King Cole and Sammy Davis Jr., their lives enlivened by celebrity’s glamorous touch.

Then, one night, it all “blew up,” as Sheila puts it in “Dancing at Ciro’s.” The kids had been out eating Chinese with their father. Returning home, Sheila skipped toward the front door while her sister lingered near the car with Daniel. Suddenly a figure emerged from the darkness and started pummeling Dr. Weller. He cried to Lizzie for the gun he kept in his glove compartment, while trying to fend off the blows of, of all people, his brother-in-law. Neighbors partook of the spectacle. The cops were called. Weller suffered a heart attack. Hover was hustled off to jail (he was bailed out by Marion Davies’ second husband).

It turned out that Weller had been having an affair with Hover’s wife. It turned out, too, that he had been masking a lot of insecurities. His heart had been weakened from a childhood bout with rheumatic fever, and he had done a good deal of lying to gain entrance to medical schools, to serve in World War II. But he smoked a pipe, which gave him a sober and reliable air, and he became a yachtsman, which hinted at the nautical skills that often accompany old money . He also did drugs -- the way doctors sometimes do -- to keep himself going on his ambitious rounds. In short, he had embraced a number of respectable lies, which caught up with him on this melodramatically colored January night.

Not long thereafter Ciro’s closed -- victimized by rock ‘n’ roll and the new ways the rich and famous found to waste their nights -- and Herman sank into poverty. The Weller women moved to the wrong side of the Beverly Hills, where the girls’ schoolmates treated them contemptuously. Their father essentially disappeared from their lives and from medicine’s fast track. Their swell friends from Ciro’s were not heard from. To put it simply, their disgrace was nearly total. Grace Metalious could have written a novel about them.

But if the Wellers descended socially, they did not descend into despair. Helen, fighting off black depressions, kept grinding out copy for the fan books. She was still at it when she died at age 81, now writing for the very tabloids that, had they existed in 1958, would have had a field day with the story of Herman’s assault on her husband. Sheila and Liz graduated from Berkeley, the former becoming a writer, the latter a lawyer. Both married happily and even managed a reconciliation with Daniel’s daughter by his second marriage.

In other words, they toughed it out on their own, with no Louis B. Mayers to ease their way, with nothing but that will to survive -- and prosper if possible -- that one almost thinks was genetically imprinted on the children and grandchildren of America’s Jewish immigrants. Sheila Weller’s book is a family history as well as a memoir, and every time you think there is perhaps too much old, somewhat archetypal stuff about this family’s struggle to rise through the American class system, you also realize that what they became -- the father’s slipperiness, the mother’s gumption, the girls’ ability to put their old lives behind them and make better ones -- was conditioned by that history. Although dancing at Ciro’s could be fun, it was not -- Betsy Blair to the contrary notwithstanding -- an entitlement. Fame, even on the local level as the Wellers enjoyed it, is infamy’s always edgy first cousin. “Dancing at Ciro’s” may be no more than serviceably written, but yet there is something haunting -- and instructive -- in its awareness of how contingent success is, how close we always are to ruinous misstep.