Harvard’s presence in Hollywood is nearly as old as Tinseltown itself, yet the uneasy alliance between the country’s most prestigious academic institution and the nexus of mass entertainment is fraught with a singular tension: Can a highbrow university and a pop culture world just get along?
The marriage of Hollywood and Harvard may be an uneasy one, but in a sense, it was inevitable. Both are glamorous, powerful, iconic communities that have consciously endeavored to define and epitomize American identity. Their partnership has been an ongoing tug-of-war for cultural supremacy—and Harvard’s ambivalence may stem from a feeling that, over time, it would surely lose the fight.
The gulf between the two was greatest in the early decades of the 20th century. While Harvard was a bastion of this country’s cultural and financial aristocracy, “the great irony of Hollywood is that it’s defined by people who [were] at the margins,” says Neal Gabler, author of An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood. Gabler was referring to the born-poor, mostly Jewish immigrants who dominated Hollywood’s golden age during the 1920s and ’30s.
The earliest Harvard-to-Hollywood transplants, though born to privilege, also lived at the margins. In pursuit of fame, fortune, and reinvention, they defied their families, their school, and their social worlds. The first Harvard alum to make a name for himself in Hollywood was a new-moneyed upstart. William Randolph Hearst, who attended in the mid-1880s, was the son of a barely literate California prospector turned senator. At Harvard, Hearst had an antiauthoritarian streak: A member of the Lampoon, the humor magazine founded in 1876, he was expelled for giving his professors personally inscribed chamber pots. Originally a newspaper tycoon, he expanded his holdings to include film in the second decade of the 20th century. Luring stars and other moguls to his lavish San Simeon, Calif., estate and his private yacht, Hearst controlled much of early Hollywood from the shadows and inspired the Orson Welles classic, Citizen Kane.
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