Based on the excerpt from its first chapter, James Hirsen's Hollywood Nation: Left Coast Lies, Old Media Spin, and the New Media Revolution sounds like a pretty good read, sort of along the lines of Andrew Breitbart and Mark Ebner's Hollywood Interrupted from last year (which I ended up naming this site's whole show-biz category after). But I couldn't help noticing it unwittingly recycles urban myths whose origins date as far back as the mid-1930s:

It’s long been the case that the entertainment biz has provided the measuring stick by which we determine who, and what, is attractive or fashionable. As Joel Siegel puts it, “None of this is new. It’s been going on forever.” Siegel cites the famous example of how “undershirt companies went bankrupt” in the 1930s after Clark Gable appeared sans T-shirt in the Oscar-winning film It Happened One Night. Gable was the leading star of the day, a major sex symbol, and so, Siegel says, men took the cue from him and “stopped wearing undershirts.”

John F. Kennedy was that rare politician who had a glamorous air about him. As Siegel remembers, Kennedy broke with tradition by not wearing a hat at his inauguration. Hats were part of the standard look for men in those days—even at “ball games, they wore a hat,” Siegel notes. But as soon as people saw the fedora-absent inaugural footage, formal head attire went out of fashion.

Siegel also recalls the influence of Marilyn Monroe’s most famous scene from The Seven Year Itch, the “scene where the subway blows her dress up.” He tells me that at the time “women in Japan stopped wearing underwear to get that Marilyn Monroe look.”

Maybe Roger L. Simon, just back from Japan, can give us the inside scoop on that last item, but as the Snopes urban-legend Website has documented, those first two items simply aren't true. They have a page on Clark Gable's supposed murder of the T-shirt (which couldn't have been too deadly a shot--every guy I knew in school in the 1970s wore one under the blue oxford cloth shirt of his school uniform, at least during the bitterly cold New Jersey winters, and my dad still wears them to this day--a fact that I hope he won't mind me telling the world).

As for Kennedy and the hat industry, while there's no doubt that hats are a much rarer breed these days (Roger, Tom Wolfe, Matt Drudge and myself may be the only men left still wearing them on a regular basis), you can't blame Kennedy's inauguration for putting them on the endangered species list, something I noted right around this time three years ago:

As someone who has worn hats (Fedoras, Trilbies, and Panama Optimos, not baseball caps with Caterpillar Tractor logos on them) off and on for several years now, I've long taken the "JFK killed the hat industry" myth at its word. However, Snopes' Urban Legends does its usual thorough job of debunking that myth.

(Now if we could just get modern presidents to start wearing top hats again at their inaugurations...)