Paul Theroux is one of the world's most prolific and versatile authors. A writer of acclaimed and award-winning fiction, Theroux is perhaps better known as a traveller with the rare ability to bring the world home to his millions of readers. Penguin has happily been Theroux's companion both in his fictional and in his non-fictional forays, and in Two Stars he explores the world of celebrity surrounding two icons: Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe.
Verbal descriptions and dictionary definitions are not much use where starlets are concerned. Language fails to do justice to the prettiest face. This has a certain poetic truth since the received wisdom is that starlets are the least bookish of people, not to say illiterate. This cannot possibly be true, but such a view adds to the appeal, for in the mind of the simple-minded and predatory male a woman's low IQ is part of her beauty. But because a dictionary is little help in, let's say, adumbrating the nuances of the starlet, photographs, are a necessity. The starlet is a work in progress, not yet an icon, and great pictures provide all the complex suggestions and associations that are lacking in dictionaries.
Such portraits encapsulate all the possible meanings - the siren, the waif, the girl with screen potential, the babe, the expressive face, the eloquent buttocks. The starlet is depicted with the greatest subtlety in a photographic portrait - not in a walk-on or a cameo in a movie. Some are names in the Where are they now? file. One of the strange conjuring tricks of show business is the transformation that promotes some actresses to glory, and makes others vanish without a trace. It is not impossible that some of the women in by-gone starlet photographs are at this moment signing up for dieting classes, or 12-step programs; or running for public office, or driving their kids in the minivan to soccer practice.
One is reminded that the starlet, typically, is a very young, very pretty, seemingly unaffected and simple girl, until you take a second look and see more complex nuances, some of them worrying, others laudatory. The very pose and facial expressions suggest talent, or its lack. In each face there is hope. In some this hope is conveyed in a sort of job applicant's eagerness to find employment, but in most it is not a simple wish at all but a longing for a career, for a partner, for a life.
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