Changing Tastes: 25 Years of Social Taboos - 29 June 2001

Since President Bush came back across the Atlantic and failed to impress practically any European, including Mr Putin, with his stand on a whole range of issues his popularity rating here has dropped to 50%, which is the lowest mark for any president at any time, however troubled, in the past five years.

Last Wednesday the Federal Reserve cut basic interest rates by a teeny weeny quarter of one per cent, which nevertheless was the sixth cut in a year.

And whereas the first two provoked a cheerful leap in stock prices the later ones produced a universal yawn.

Wednesday's bold effort did not even show a reaction as gymnastic as a yawn. The main industrial index simply slumped a little more and many companies said that while the outlook for the next quarter had looked grey at best it was now tinged with a black cloud or two.

So seeking solace, surcease or maybe just escape from our woes I found myself, as the French say, scanning a high bookshelf that I rarely touch to see if some forgotten book suggested a topic that might cheer us up.

And my eye fell, as we say, on a fat red leather volume much frayed at the edges bearing on the spine a single word inscribed in faded gold. It said: Shakespeare. It was my father's copy.

Must have been very popular in its time - well printed, all the plays, no notes but scores of photographs of the leading actors and actresses of the day, which was the heyday of Sir Henry Irving and Ellen Terry (my father's two favourites) and rafts of other players whose names even are forgotten except by old, eccentric theatre historians.

The book was published just after the turn of the 20th Century. I flipped through many pages admiring the extraordinary quality of the hand-coloured photographs - this was 30, 40 years before colour photography - but remarking most on the looks and appearance of the famous actresses, mostly British but quite often American.

First off, most of them today would weigh in at about 160lbs. Next thing, they had firm, strong features, most with aquiline noses, and when they weren't playing Lady Macbeth in a nightgown they had waists bound in at say 24ins, busts overflowing at 44 maybe.

The publishers had plainly chosen beauty before acting fame and these were the reigning beauties of the day. Each an example of what my father called "a fine figure of a woman".

I remember thinking, as a boy, how - by contrast - how handsome the men were. They all had large, firm features, they were athletic, they had prominent noses, square chins - men not from the same planet as Tom Cruise and Hugh Grant, who, even today, look to me like actors in a high school play.

So there it is, the fact which the more you face the less you can deny, that the standard, the type, of what one generation thinks is handsome or beautiful changes more than you in your youth could guess.

So lately I thought I'd make a little private test by inviting two or three young women to see a film, a famous film, with Greta Garbo - who everybody in the 1930s thought the most beautiful woman alive. Show it and then just wait and see what their ideas were about the movie, about Garbo - her acting and so forth.

I said young people and make them young by your definition. Enough to say that none of these three was alive when the film was made in 1935. It was Camille - possibly the oldest chestnut of a melodrama in the European theatre, with or without music, the Lady of The Camelias, La Traviata (the fallen woman) in Verdi's opera.

Simply and lugubriously the courtesan who repents of her wicked ways when she falls in love with an upright, decent man. Alas too late, too late - she is dying of tuberculosis.

When this movie version came out in the mid-30s it was universally praised as one of Garbo's tragic masterpieces.

So when our private showing was over and I looked at my three youngsters the awkwardness of the silence, which was almost a noise in itself, and then somebody chuckled.

The verdict was that Garbo was mighty statuesque - yes, beautiful you could say in an unmodern way - but any thoughts about her looks were overwhelmed by the absurdity of her part.

I gathered from the following talk that the, to me, very familiar character of a femme fatale (a fatal woman), the temptress - Mata Hari (Garbo played that one too) - a constant standby character in my time was now so unreal, so unfamiliar, either in life or on the screen that when Garbo coughed and prepared to die, my irreverent trio of guests giggled, actually repeating the response of the first audience at the opening performance of Verdi's La Traviata.

That Italian audience showered the theatre, not with applause but with loud laughter, because to them the sight of a very large, probably boundingly healthy Violetta preparing to die of consumption, was comic.

To my guests Garbo was slim enough but the part itself, the repentant courtesan giving the required cough to indicate oncoming consumption, was just as funny.

The memory of that failed test convinced me that standards of beauty change drastically and as with many other inexplicable changes it's no use old folks going on as they do that things aren't what they used to be and they've gone to pot.

Having reached this noble conclusion I was ready to move back and talk about - I don't know - Mr Bush and Mr Putin, which sounds like an old music hall turn but is alas far from anything so genial and harmful.

I turned to my newspaper and I found a far more serious issue than changing taste but a piece about a change over 25 years in social taboos.

It was an obituary of Carroll O'Connor. The name may not mean much to listeners outside America, it's not however about the late Mr O'Connor himself I wish to talk but the part he played in a television series that ran here for years and years as I believe it did in Britain.

The series was known here as All in the Family and was an American adaptation of the British series Till Death Us Do Part.

The main character - Alf Garnett was it not in Britain? - was Archie Bunker here. Very much the boss of his working class family, his simpering, half dotty wife, rebellious daughter and frowning, cowering son-in-law whom Archie called a pinko Polack.

Archie, Alf himself, the strutting, absurd, semi-literate bigot with his suspicion of every type that wasn't what he called "true American" - which meant either of English or Irish heritage. Suspicious of Jews, blacks, fearful of Latinos, making occasional sly, belittling remarks about homosexuals.

The main thing about Archie was that he was pompous and funny, absurd but acceptable, even loveable. In the subsequent brief television biographies of Mr O'Connor they showed short clips of typical scenes - always examples of his dependable bigotry.

But you may be sure that the accompanying commentary was quick to stress that while the audiences of the time - both conservative and liberals alike - enjoyed the show it could not possibly be put on today. A much more sensitive time we gathered.

And it's quite true. Years and years ago, in the late 40s, one of these talks was devoted entirely to a change that had been enforced on the theatre - the vaudeville theatre - and on popular songs which I took to be illiberal and lamentable.

The standard funny characters of the old burlesque houses had been told to vanish. Jewish comedians, German comedians, Irish comedians - each kidding the others' quirks and prejudices.

I said I thought this a healthy thing. But as the immigrant moved into the middle class, the mainstream, he didn't like his peculiarities being pointed out as he thrashed in the shallows.

Fair enough. But it seemed a pity that my daughter's school wouldn't let a Jewish girl play Shylock. An absurdity that the lyrics of the Basin Street Blues no longer sang about "the street where the dark and the white folks meet" but had to be "where all the elite meet".

But now, not only are the different types and their different humours banned from plays, movies, television but any mention in life of them as separate or remarkable human beings.

And no wonder. One of the many fascinating discoveries of the recent census is that the all-American family - the regulation film, TV soap, TV commercial American family of white mother and father and two adorable children - is no longer the norm. Only one family in four conforms. That's a shocker.

And so is the news that a new president of the famous Ivy League College, Brown University, has been appointed. She is black. The daughter of a sharecropper, the granddaughter of a slave.

All the old blues lyrics, all the ethnic comics, all the national jokes were acceptable just so long as the white, the Anglo Saxon Protestant, was on top and gracious enough to accept them. But he's no longer boss man but a suspect native.

Fifty years from now, an old Southern friend of mine suggested, blacks may be privately chuckling over the jokes that secretly circulated through southern whites in the 1950s, shortly after the Supreme Court ruling that ended the separation of blacks and whites.

Then whites, whose long reign was about to be over, told with typical wryness such a tale as that of two black men coming into their club, ordering a cocktail at the bar and the white bartender shaking the ingredients vigorously.

And one black club man says to the other: "You've got to give them one thing - they got rhythm."

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