The Jewish people generally have such a talent and a liking for sex, and yet, from the desert to the Pale, have had to follow so many rules and regulations about when and how they could have it. So it was inevitable that, when they finally got to create their own secular empire, they might get a bit carried away.
In his great book, An Empire Of Their Own: How The Jews Invented Hollywood, Neal Gabler traces the rise of the men from Eastern European immigrant families who wove a new reality from their dreams. Main Street USA and the cowboy were just two Hollywood icons, remodelled from something rather less appealing, by men eager to reward the country that had given them a chance not just to survive, but to thrive.
But it was in the realm of romance - that slow-motion, high-investment Rohypnol - that they truly dazzled. In 1922, the studios hired the Republican politician and Presbyterian elder, Will H Hayes, as a censor after too many risqué flicks and off-screen scandals had tarnished the Hollywood sign. Movies moved from starring underdressed slave girls in biblical silents to fast-moving, motor-mouthed married couples who slept in separate beds and, when daring to use one of these for spousal smooching, kept one foot on the floor.
If, in private, the casting-couch and the Reno divorce - just a short, private plane-ride away - continued to cater to the whims of the big men of the studios, for public consumption "repression was the mother of the metaphor," as the poet John Cooper Clarke once said.
