RIP, Princess and Queen

Now boast thee, death, in thy possession lies / A lass unparalleled..

Antony and Cleopatra, Act V, Scene 2

Shameless Saturday Camp Explosion: A Sea Change

 

The hallmark of Camp is the spirit of extravagance.

- Susan Sontag, "Notes on Camp"

Today's SSCE requires me to, as David Niven said of the Oscars streaker, reveal my own shortcomings.  I have to admit that I either never knew or have utterly forgotten that the great British director/aesthete Derek Jarman filmed a version of The Tempest, let alone that it featured such a magnificently charming thing as this interpolated number.

Miss Elisabeth Welch, who was rather the UK's iteration of Miss Mabel Mercer, ravishes the eye and ear, singing "Stormy Weather" (very much her tune, long before it was Miss Horne's) in a costume that conjures up both her own glory days in lavish London revues and a thoroughly 1979 take on an Erté fairy queen.  It is a '30s moment, transmogrified, with its sailor suits and baroque shepherdess costumes, and above all by Welch's own serene, imperial presence, into something quite appropriately, for the work, "rich and strange."

I'm especially charmed by the way in which she has completely conquered the lineup of fetching young chorus boys - I wouldn't be at all surprised if Jarman hadn't briefed them on just why they should be amazed at the woman who, at the time she breezed through this lovely moment, had been a star for rising 60 years.  I couldn't be more pleased to have accidently stumbled on this while lost in the wilds of Youtube, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I have.

To Sleep; Perchance to Dream...

One of the reasons I've been less than productive these past few days is that I've been sleeping oddly. Not badly, mind you; as happens occasionally, I've actually been sleeping rather too deeply. Mr. Muscato discovered this when a couple of nights ago I was unmoved and unwakened by a series of loudly slamming doors (wind; the downside of having the house opened up during these precious cooler months) and subsequently furiously barking dog.

When I go through these bouts of sleep-to-the-point-of-unconsciousness, I often wake more tired than after a similar amount of the usual dozing. Moreover, I'm more prone than usual to remembering dreams - usually long, complicated, and repetitive dreams. This week's featured, in a starring role, Miss Bonham Carter, albeit not in a lilac fur-trimmed peignoir as seen here.

We were walking together, for a very long time, doing the usual dream-state pointless searching for things, talking about other things, and generally not making much sense.

I woke suddenly yesterday morning at one such dream's end, just as she turned to me and said, "you know what the real problem is, don't you? Don't you?"

"Tell me," said I.

She turned away; looking gravely over her shoulder as she walked off, she said, simply: "Mystery clown."

And so I woke up. And this is what I Googled from that phrase:

Amazingly, despite the horror of that image, last night I slept the dreamless, refreshing sleep of the innocent and feel much restored.

But what could it mean?

Birthday Goddess

Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale

Her infinite variety...

Time in its Flight

Today's sad news is the kind of thing that unsteadies us, unwitting passengers as we are in something like the opposite of Fitzgerald's boat that was so famously "borne ceaselessly into the past." We're hurtling, helpless, into the future, yet further from the ever-receding, once-familiar shore.

Senator Edward Moore Kennedy was a paragon of no virtues but the civic ones, and I've always been essentially immune to the fabled Kennedy charm. Nonetheless, he and his extended family helped shape the last half-century or more of our American life, and for a while they did so with a lot of panache.

Here's an example, albeit a latish one: The first Mrs. Senator Kennedy, Joan, for whom I've always had a sneaking fondness, sandwiched between another sometime political matron, Mrs. Senator Warner, and her sister-in-law, Princess Lee.

The Kennedy ladies all trailed in the wake of Rose and Jackie O, and Joan had the disadvantage of being neither a born-Kennedy, nor a Bouvier, nor, like Ethel, a Martyr's Widow. She was, therefore always, comparatively, B-list. Still, she did the best with what she had, and when she'd had enough, threw it all in for life outside the charmed circle. She's had a hard row to hoe since, but here she is in memory's eye, poised, like her family, between Hollywood and royalty (well, semi-, at least), and seemingly carefree.

Today, nothing seems quite so simple, really; wasn't ever, I suppose, however much we liked to think so. I've quoted it before, but Shakespeare always says it best - "Golden lads and girls all must /As chimney sweepers come to dust." And just so we cover all the cliché-bases: good night, sweet prince...

Goodnight, Sweet Princess...

Sad news from the Subcontinent; I don't know how I missed this one, but earlier this week one of my favorite people returned to Fabulon. The glamourous Gayatri Devi, Rajamata of Jaipur, former Maharani of the same state, born a princess of Cooch Behar, has died at 90.

I would be hard pressed to do better than the New York Times obituary in conveying the nature of her allure. It quotes a 1966 report in which their reporter may have found himself a shade too transfixed, writing of her attendance at an official briefing:

The meeting had begun when the Maharani made her entry, giving everyone a whiff of expensive French perfume. She was dressed in a turquoise-blue chiffon sari with silver sequins sparkling like stars on a moonless night. She looked around with her large almond eyes. Everyone stood up. As Hillaire Belloc once described someone, ‘her face was like the king’s command when all the swords are drawn.'

Yowzah! Not many left in this low world who can have that kind of effect on a hard-boiled political journalist, no?

And Now for Something...

...completely ridiculous. Since we're in a TV kind of mood, herewith the cathode Lunt and Fontanne, making mincemeat of the Bard. The Scottish play, Paul Lynde, Elizabeth Montgomery, and a rogue hairpiece - what's not to love?

Flying home last week I watched an episode of Bewitched - and I have to say, it held up (it helped that it was an Aunt Clara, although not, alas, an Uncle Arthur). The writing may have been sketchy, and the sexism unbearable, but what a bunch of troupers, what a festival of character ladies!

Good Night, Sweet Prince(ss)

Ah, there's a new (and very glittery) star in heaven tonight, darlings, for Danny La Rue, that Slightly Different Diva, has gone and left us.

In the mixed-up pomo-homo world we live in, there's something slightly quaint, and very charming, about La Rue's long reign as the UK's favorite "comic in a frock," but we ought not let his old-school impersonations of the Great Ladies (including the fictional Dolly Levi) cause us to underestimate him. Anyone Noël Coward could describe as "The most professional, the most witty... and the most utterly charming man in the business" shouldn't be taken lightly.

When it comes to drag, La Rue was the Mother of the Them All for half-a-century or so; I like to think he's taking a little cocktail even as we speak with Julian Eltinge and Charles Pierce. You just know those peignoirs are fierce.

When Gods Descend

Miss Fontanne and Mr. Lunt lunching at a cafeteria, 1942. Imagine running into Kate and Petruchio over the salisbury steak...

What a Piece of Work is Man

I think this austere little study of studly Bollypop Upen Patel captures a certain je ne sais quoi reminiscent of Hellenistic portraits like those of Antinous - by which, of course, I mean that in a fair world, he'd be about to take off that belt and go full-bore Greek nude. Ah, well - a boy can hope...

Birthday Girl: Kate of Kate Hall

...for you are call'd plain Kate,
And bonny Kate and sometimes Kate the curst;
But Kate, the prettiest Kate in Christendom
Kate of Kate Hall, my super-dainty Kate,
For dainties are all Kates...

(The Taming of the Shrew, Act II, Scene 1)

Happy Birthday, Katharine Houghton Hepburn - 102 today, had she been even more long-lived, and of all stars, perhaps the most consistently surprising: perfectly beautiful and impossibly gawky; a great, subtle actress and a hopeless, mannered ham; a relentlessly private woman who refused to play the Hollywood game and still wound up on top; a strong-willed independent creature who subjugated herself almost masochistically to a chronic, possibly abusive, alcoholic.

In the end, who has a solider filmography, who a more glorious range of roles? Tracy Lord and Eleanor of Aquitaine; Terry Randall and Amanda Wingfield; Tess Harding and Rose Sayer. Oh, all right, I'll say it: she was yar.

Meanwhile, at the Garden Party

"Hell's bells," replied Harriet with a sigh, "It certainly is Rhoda Chester, and she's gone all Ophelia on our asses again. If we're going to have any peace at all this afternoon, somebody's just going to have to run back up to the house and fetch her meds."

The End of a Love Affair

Ah, woe is us! Parting is such sweet sorrow... and other ululations of despair. In a real blow to hopeless romantics everywhere, from Wasilla comes word that BristoLevi is no more, and that we won't have that particular fairytale wedding to look forward to. First Harry and Chelsy, now this. All I can do is join in the chorus now emanating from a shaken blogosphere: I'm shocked, shocked.

Wherefore Art Thou?

When I was, all those decades ago, in grade school, when the teachers needed to get something done - union meetings, parent conferences, God knows what - there would be a sudden shift in our otherwise lockstep days, and we would, with little warning and less explanation, be sent to the cafegymnatorium and shown a movie.

Sometimes it was a cobbled-together program of improving little documentaries and public safety films ("The Wonders of Modern Food Processing" with "Stop! Look! Cross!" as a double feature, for example). Sometimes it was a straight-out headscratcher (why would any sane teacher put 300 under-twelves in a room in 1971 and show them Duck Soup? It happened).

Mostly, though, they were pictures that were meant to be a little glimpse of High Culture in our drab lives, inspiring and enertaining. And by far the most entertaining of those, in my memory - although perhaps not for the reasons the principal intended - was Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet.

Here's why:

Zeffirelli, in what seemed for 1968 an amazing innovation, cast the movie with actors more or less of the age of the characters, and for Romeo he chanced on a little-known British stage novice (a veteran of Oliver! and not much else) named Leonard Whiting.

The rest is history. Olivia Hussey was Juliet, Michael York - fairly toothsome himself - was Tybalt, the location shooting was vital and glamourous, the costumes sumptuous, the whole thing very, very gala even as it was (terribly important at the time) Young, Hip, and Contempo.

But nothing approached the sheer beauty of young Leonard. And not just because, in a memorable scene that somehow, I suppose in the name of Kultcha, was not elided even for school viewing, we got a full-on butt shot. And very nice, too - it's around on the 'Net if you're interested (this is where I expect the Feedjit tracker will show a mass exodus to Google).

Together, the young leads really were pretty enchanting:

But unfortunately for Whiting, nothing much else happened. Hussey went on to a respectable enough career (although lately it's been mostly things like Psycho IV and one-offs on "Pinky and the Brain"), and Michael York of course was for many years a Big Star and is still very much at work.

Like many of the 60s pretty young men (think Keir Dullea or John Phillip Law), Whiting seems to have been a little too blank, a little too ethereal for the grittier 70s.

He tried to butch up for changing times, but the pickings were slim. He had a supporting part in Peter Shaffer's Incapalooza oddity, The Royal Hunt of the Sun, and he got a fair amount of attention headlining a TV version of the Frankenstein story. The the career more or less ended, though, in 1974 (right about when we were watching R&J at school, in fact) with an Israeli-made biblical sub-epic, Rachel's Man, that bizarrely also features Mickey Rooney and Rita Tushingham.

Rex Reed wrote about the furor that surrounded Romeo and Juliet's release, which included a gala royal premiere in London. It's an evocative bit that ends with an image of the young stars at the tail end of the ball that followed the screening:

"...at 2 a.m., when everybody else started turning into pumpkins, they stood in the middle of a lavish ballroom at Claridge's holding the magic as long as they could. Dazzling under the chandeliers like uncut diamonds, Romeo pulled off his tie, tore into that damnable collar, and lit into his third souffle'glace grand marnier, and Juliet kicked off her slippers, stepped all over the train of her Cappuci gown, and thrashed away the night with Prince Charles, heir to the throne of England, in one last sweaty Funky Broadway......And they lived happily ever after."

Well, not quite, perhaps, but it does seem to have been fun while it lasted.

A Rose by Any Name

A great joy, I am finding, is the sharing of things one loves, the chance to muse about what strikes one's mind and finds a home there. A Gentle Reader has recently discovered an earlier posting, on the extraordinary writer and bonne vivante known variously as the Baroness von Blixen-Finecke, Isak Dinesen, Tanne, Karen...

She started out as a pretty socialite from an extroverted, aristocratic Danish family, but one afflicted, at times, with a Nordic streak of melancholy.

She moved, daringly, to Kenya, following a feckless husband and a dream to have, as she later wrote, "a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills." That turned out to be a very mixed blessing; it meant years of work, financial ruin - and the genesis of her great career.

For in Africa she found both passion of the physical kind (in the arms of a dashing British aviator/hunter) and the stimulation - artistic, intellectual, natural - that she had needed to blossom. She returned to Denmark in 1931, a failure as a farmer, but with the idea that she might write.

She became one of the most celebrated authors of the twentieth century, considered a kind of Scandinavian Sibyl for her ornately sardonic tales and, especially, for her romanticized but very beautiful memoir, Out of Africa.

She made the most of it, traveling in lavish style throughout Europe and to the United States, fêted everywhere. Despite failing health exacerbated by more than a touch of hysteria, she had a marvelous time.

She turned her excessive thinness - variously caused, depending on whom you believe, by anorexia, by the lingering effects of syphilis, or simply by her iron will - into a very individual kind of chic. And she recognized fabulousness in others:

When giants meet: Miss Monroe and the Baroness (and mortals)

I am afraid she is not as much read as she might be - in danger of becoming an artist more famous for her life (and for the mostly egregious film, despite the presence of Miss Streep, made of it) than for her work.

That is a shame, for her best tales are gripping, moving, magnificently shaped and written with the assurance of a scholar, the humor of a woman of the world, and a kind of boundless tolerance for even the greatest of human follies.

She was, as has been eloquently chronicled over at An Aesthete's Lament, a connoisseur of flowers.

She would, I think, therefore likely be quite pleased to be the namesake of this elegant rose...

Although perhaps, after the flame trees of the hills outside Nairobi (where a neighborhood of faded colonial pretension, named for her, sits on the erstwhile fields of coffee trees) and her own brilliant, variegated tulips, it might seem a little pale.

If one wants to turn to film to capture her, much better to start with the exquisite Babette's Feast, from one of her stories, than with the Streep-Redford lovefest. Better still to turn to the books themselves, and to Judith Thurman's marvelous biography, Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller.

She adored, in her own life, mottoes by which to live. My favorite of these is this, taken from the French poet Alfred de Musset (himself no stranger to formidable female writers; he was a lover of George Sand):

"Il faut, dans ce bas monde, aimer beaucoup de choses / Pour savoir, après tout, ce qu'on aime le mieux." Meaning: We must, in this world, love many things - so that we can know, after all, what we have loved the most."

She lived her last years, I've read, almost exclusively on Champagne and delicacies like oysters and asparagus. I think of her, and of what I have loved the most, every time I have a glass.

Unfortunate Public Art

The powers-that-be in these parts can maintain all they want that this in fact a portrait of 17th Century poet and all around aestheste Pieter Corneliszoon Hooft.

I know a bust of a Scary Dead Clown Shakespeare when I see it.

Seriously: there is some mighty bad street art in Amsterdam. This particular one just especially gave me the heebie jeebies.

She's Baaaa-aaaack!

Ladies and Gentlemen - here's Grace!

This is a summer of unexpected returns - Donna Summer, Judy Garland (make that highly unexpected returns, in some cases) - but few can be more welcome than that heralded by universal rave reviews in the British press, that of the truly inimitable Grace Jones.

To quote the Telegraph, "When she appeared on stage to open with the thundering Nightclubbing she brought all of the eerie, hollow glamour of the fashion world with her, yet her warmth and loony joie de vivre seeped through in every line... All around the gawping, whistling, cheering Festival Hall was the sense that this is how a star should be. Jones was by turns droll and dismissive. She giggled and then turned away in utter contempt."

"Loony joie de vivre" - now there's something to aim for.

"Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety; other women cloy
The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry
Where most she satisfies; for vilest things
Become themselves in her, that the holy priests
Bless her when she is riggish."

The woman is 60. I'll have what she's having. Corporate Cannibal, her first album since grandpa was a boy, comes out this fall. If you could stand in line at i-Tunes, I'd be there...