‘Rockin’ Hollywood’ has painterly portraits and great dish
By Theo Douglas

HENRY ROLLINS by MICHAEL CHILDERS

The stories behind the photos—telling almost everything but why Henry Rollins seems to always have his mouth open—are what bring “Rockin’ Hollywood” to life in the new Sun Deck Gallery on the Queen Mary. Never mind that the photographer, Michael Childers, met everyone from Rod McKuen to David Hockney to Arnold Schwarzenegger, nor that by dint of these contacts and Andy Warhol’s penchant for celebrity, he became an Interview founding photographer.

Without a bit of text explaining why an early-1970s Sir Laurence Olivier is peering at the Queen Mary from a yacht, you’d have just another nice picture of Long Beach Harbor and two seminal characters in the foreground. But add the backstory (courtesy of Pasadena neurosurgeon Lou D’Elia, a 35-year friend and the show’s curator), and suddenly you scrutinize every frame.

It turns out Olivier was on board the Splendor, Robert Wagner and Natalie Wood’s yacht. They were en route to Catalina (of course) when Wagner detoured so Olivier could see the ship from the harbor. The star of Wuthering Heights, Rebecca, and Hamlet hadn’t seen the Queen Mary since his wife, the actress Vivien Leigh, sailed on it after she filmed Gone with the Wind—30 years before. And, says D’Elia, as the Splendor approached the Queen, the veteran actor shed a real tear.

“To me, every show has to have a story,” says the curator—and in most cases here, he’s right. Minus Childers’ commentary, this would mostly be just another show of good celebrity photos. More—more gossip, more E! True Hollywood Story—helps immensely. Because even Childers varies.

Some photos—say, Donald Sutherland perched on his suitcase on the luminous set of Day of the Locust, or a raving Karen Black sticking her tongue out in a painterly studio portrait from the same film—need virtually no annotation. But others—the more conventional glamour photographs of an American Gigolo test case John Travolta, or a young Demi Moore—need that boost.

Plus, we like knowing that a Myra Breckinridge-era Mae West did her own lighting and struck her own pose, ordering Childers around. “Lower,” she kept telling him. “Lower,” D’Elia says—until Childers photographed her almost at floor level, an angle from which she was looking rather commanding—as she always had.

ROCKIN’ HOLLYWOOD SUN DECK GALLERY | QUEEN MARY | 1126 QUEENS HIGHWAY | LONG BEACH 90802 | 562.499.1634 | QUEENMARY.COM | OPEN 10AM-6PM | THROUGH SEPT 3 | FREE