Once Upon a Time in Hollywood: A Novel

Rick’s best friend and stunt double, Cliff Booth, is a foil to Rick throughout the novel and is a static character. Although Cliff and Rick are close friends, Cliff is the antithesis to Rick because everything that Rick pretends to do on screen, Cliff has done in real life. His choice to pursue stunt work symbolizes his own internal struggle toward striving for authenticity over insincerity. However, in this pursuit, his cynicism gets in the way of his finding true authenticity. Cliff loves foreign films for their authenticity but also because he finds them “challenging in a way that made him feel clever for getting on the film’s wavelength” (32). In watching films with subtitles, he felt “smarter. He liked expanding his mind” (27). Cliff takes his love of foreign films as an intellectual superiority that he feels most Americans lack, mainly because they “were shielded from the gruesome details of [the war]” (25).

Cliff’s anger over the suffering he experienced during World War II drives him to seek truth in foreign films, yet his own life remains obscured in inauthenticity. All of Hollywood, including Cliff, knows that he killed his wife and got away with it, yet he doesn’t feel a moral obligation to come forward and confess his crime. Instead, he tries to explain away his own actions as if they were the actions of a character in a movie. When he thinks back on killing his wife, Cliff believes that his internal dialogue:

[It] was practically the accident he claimed it was. When his finger pulled the trigger, was it a conscious decision? Not exactly. One, it was a hair trigger. Two, it was more instinct than a decision. Three, was it a pull, or was it closer to a twitch? Four, it wasn’t like anybody was gonna miss Billie Booth (127).

Cliff’s inability to take responsibility for his own actions, even the murder of his wife, prevents him from moving past his cynicism about the world. He doesn’t believe that he should go to jail for his wife’s murder because he’s a war hero. Cliff refuses to take responsibility for his own actions or accept justice because he always believes that he’s in the right. However, when he questions Squeaky about her intentions with George Spahn, Squeaky challenges him on his fake altruism. Although Cliff looks down on Hollywood actors and their insincerity, Squeaky is the only person who sees that he tries to be a hero in real life, even though he constantly falls short.

Although Sharon Tate is a flat character in the novel, she shows vibrant characteristics such as optimism and hope. The story of her rise to fame represents the type of experience that Rick hoped he’d have: She hitchhikes to Los Angeles from Texas, and before long she stars alongside Tony Curtis. Sharon’s story is the quintessential Hollywood dream of rags-to-riches fame. However, rather than feeling entitled to the fame and success, Sharon is still in awe of her fame, so much so that she goes to see her new movie in the theater with the public.

Sharon’s role in The Wrecking Crew was a slapstick role, far outside her normal roles as a femme fatale, and she remembers her nervousness when she filmed it. She felt unsure of whether she was funny but remembers that the audience decides what’s funny, not the cast and crew. No matter what happened on set, “the audience either laughs at the gag or they don’t” (183). Sharon’s intention in seeing her movie in a theater full of audience members, who don’t know that she’s there, is to see whether she landed her role as intended. When she hears the audience erupt in laughter over her pratfall, she “turns around in her seat to look at the smiles on their faces. If she could have, she’d have shaken all their hands and thanked them all individually. As she turns back to the screen, she wears an ear-to-ear grin on her lovely face” (192). The audience’s validation of her talents thrills Sharon and gives her a sense of autonomy and vindication that she’s talented and more than just a beautiful woman.

When she was filming The Wrecking Crew, she remembers how there was “talk that maybe her character should be introduced as another slinky sexpot, like the other female leads in the film. But, much to Sharon’s delight, [the director] rejected that approach” (191). This memory reveals Sharon’s dislike of the industry’s presenting her only as a sex object, and she’s grateful to the director of The Wrecking Crew for giving her the opportunity to act beyond her normal type of role. Since Hollywood remembers the historical character for her gruesome death rather than her acting skills, the novel takes the opportunity to give Sharon depth and authenticity, suggesting that she was struggling with other people’s perception of herself, desperate for audiences to see her as an actor rather than a sex object.