The Fickle Finger...

So I'm still, mostly, stuck at home, and with the time not spent entertaining Rick the Physical Therapist, exercising to "Pee-Wee's Playhouse" (my current routine being conveniently the length of one episode), or catching up on old movies and new TV, I'm spending far too much time on the Interwebs.  It's got me thinking.

Portrait d'une Demi-Star

There's not nearly enough shouting about Mary Astor.

Self/Image

One actress, two takes.  Funny how we can think of ourselves so differently from how we may seem to others...

Question Time: Ask the Oracle #4

A fairly predictable set of queries, on the whole, although I have to own up to a wholly spontaneous (and entirely uncharitable) snort at the thought that anyone could even have wondered about that third-from-last one.

For the record: yes, at least occasionally, not yet, very likely, oh yeah, not yet, see above, [SNORT], a debatable and by now both pointless and tragic question, and, finally, not if there's anything like a loving god in the universe.

Birthday Girl: A Name Below the Title

Because it's her birthday today (she's 77, and still I'm sure a spritely presence), let's spend a moment thinking about Sue Ane Langdon. Who?  Exactly.  I'm always interested in the kind of performer who can work for years, and steadily, and even in high-profile vehicles (she made two Elvis pictures, which has to be worth something) and yet not really register in any meaningful way.

Sue Ane (Wikipedia claims she's a staple of crosswords because of the unusual spelling of her name; I'm an enthusiast and have no awareness of this) started out in early TV in the late '50s and kept at it until a stint on General Hospital in the earliest '90s.  In between she has a slew of credits, a great many of which are entirely redolent of their era:  from Love, American Style to The Love Boat, not to mention titles as diverse as The Andy Griffith Show, Bonanza, Ironside, The Wide World of Mystery, Three's Company, and Hart to Hart.  On film, in addition to the Elvii, she supported Walter Matthau in A Guide to the Married Man at one end of her career and Weird Al Yankovic in UHF at the other - not exactly the most toothsome brace of leading men.  She deserved better.

Cute and buxom rather than really beautiful, when photographed well she resembles a curvier Doris Day; when badly, an unfortunate combination of Shelley Winters and Micky Rooney.  After her turn as a sexy secretary in A Fine Madness (where she finally got a little eye candy - the star was Sean Connery*), she became an early mainstream name to pose for Playboy. She even did a little stage work, including a Broadway credit (late in the run of The Apple Tree in '67) and as one of the legion of great and good names who popped up in regional theatres as Dolly Levi.  She worked hard, appears to have had a conventional and happy enough private life, and now lives, one hopes contentedly, in retirement.

And that's really about all there is to say, on the face of it.  Still, one can't help but think it might be fascinating to sit down with someone like Miss Langdon, a public name with no real public presence, a kind of blonde Zelig who could probably tell us volumes about what it was like to be there, from Elvis to the soundstages of '70s TV films (that period's counterpart to earlier B-movies) and beyond.  Maybe she'll write a memoir and tell us all...

* In all fairness, she got her first on-screen credit against Tony Curtis in The Great Imposter, so even putting Connery aside, it wasn't all trolls, cinematically speaking...

Shameless Saturday Camp Explosion: Does "Diva" Have a Past Tense?

"Probably, intending to be campy is always harmful."

- Susan Sontag, "Notes on Camp"

It may not look like it, but what this video - a perennial favorite from 1985 (can it really be that long?) - represents is a diva in crisis.  It is, among other things, the last thing approaching a hit in the long career of Miss Diana Ross, and while at the time it all seemed very poppy and fun, what it really is, we now can see, is a dead end.

"Chain Reaction," the video, appears to be an attempt to summarize Miss Ross's own version of, if not her career, then at least her persona, from start to finish.  At every turn, though, something goes awry.  It's not really a surprise that in her own imagination she ponied her way through a glossy version of the '60s very much alone - but why is she doing it in a space-age Louise Brooks wig?  Why are the Bee Gees represented by actors who seem to be portraying the Pips (off-putting, not least because the Gibbs sound more like Florence and Mary)?

More surprising is how not-right Miss Ross and the team got her contemporary incarnation.  It doesn't help that she's introduced in a gown that appears to be a line-for-line copy of the one immortalized by Divine at the climax of Pink Flamingoes (in the eighties, could anyone take a fishtail dress seriously?).  It's made worse when she appears to inspire a prison riot by appearing dressed as late-period Dietrich.  It's made fatal when she sprawls on an underlit dancefloor and writhes in what looks very much like Michael Jackson's idea of a sexy lady move.

It doesn't help that the song itself - which on many levels I adore, I'm not ashamed to admit - is so very incoherent.  Until I read the lyric yesterday, I don't think I'd ever understood more than about three-quarters of the words.  The best diva songs tell a story, either directly (Piaf actually does regret nothing) or implicitly (Midler is as a brassy as a boogie-woogie bugle boy, but also as sentimental as a Rose).  This one is all over the place - first she's on a pedestal wanting a mystery, and then suddenly she's on a journey for the inspiration, and it's all linked only by talking about love, love, love, and somehow it's a chain reaction.  You can get away with that if you're the B-52s, but not if you're trying to be, well, Diana Ross.

As she has since found out.

The problem with Diana Ross, today and in most of the years since "Chain Reaction," is that she's incoherent, inconsistent, diva-wise.  From the time she first started shouldering aside her Supremes, it had seemed that her control over and understanding of her own image was iron-clad, as steely as the broad smile that took her through her middling Hollywood period and saw her emerge as "The Boss."  It's easy to forget what a Very Big Star she was in those years.  She seemed to be on a permanent trajectory that even Mahogany and The Wiz hadn't been able to dent.

But then the narrative falls apart.  "Chain Reaction" makes it clear that she doesn't really understand her own past, while the recriminations of her former colleagues mean that she can only ever glancingly connect with it (to sing too many Supremes songs only makes her audience think of Florence).  And in the years since "Chain Reaction," it's become clear that she can't think of any way to self-present that wasn't set in stone by 1985; it's all still there - the vast hair, the fishtail gowns, the rictus grins - but in a way that now seems more like impersonation than performance.

Thinking about all this, I watched videos of her participation, last December, in the Washington Christmas concert - a very gala event, the Obamas present and all very festive.  When she chooses to be, Ross is still in excellent voice (for a contrast, try out some audience-made concert footage of the last few years - horrifying).  Her voice - never large, but at its best enormously effective - is smaller, but under her command as it is for few singers heading into their 70s.  How odd that the technique of singing, which she learned at church and by singing with two friends, has stayed with her, while the technique of celebrity, in some way, despite being forged in the Mines of Motown and refined through a decade of superstardom, has not...

Birthday Girls: Stars Wavishing and Less So

Caught up in that little shopping frenzy yesterday, I missed a landmark birthday, that of longtime Café patroness and mascot, the magnificent Miss Kay Francis.  We see her here at the height of her glory, superb in all the trappings of stardom in the Golden Age: turban, stole, plunging décolletage, and an expression both mocking and enigmatic.

She was a not a happy lady, nor, from all accounts, a particularly sensible one when it came to most aspects of her private life.  Still, she accomplished one thing that in these intrusive, media-saturated days seems almost impossible:  when she was done with it all, when it no longer seemed worth it to keep up the pretense of being Kay! Francis! - and for a woman in her fifties, whose reputation always rested as much on her glossy appearance as her (underestimated) talent, and one given to excesses that can be distressingly aging, that must have been a lot of work indeed - she simply disappeared.

Try and find a photograph of her in retirement; with the exception of a couple of blurry personal snaps in one of the biographies that came out a few years ago, they would seem simply not to exist.  Not for Kay Francis the indignities of being trailed through the streets of Manhattan like Garbo or of being ambushed outside the doctor's office or worse that is the fate of too many stars today.  Of course, her determination to disappear (one of those biographies uses one of her own quotes: I Can't Wait to be Forgotten) was made easier by the complete collapse of her career and, for far too long (and for long after her early death, in 1968, at 63 or so) of her reputation.  It's only since TCM and other outlets have made more of her movies available to wider audiences that Francis's work has been restored to something like its proper place; like Marion Davies, she has benefited greatly from direct exposure to the actual films, which has allowed people to see for themselves that there is more to Kay Francis than overdressing and histrionics (although she certainly indulged in both).

Still, she resisted any and all temptations that came along and lived out her life entirely on her own terms, and when she died - alone, as apparently she wanted it - she died a rich woman who had if nothing else the satisfaction that she made her own decisions, however they turned out.

Today, by chance, is the birthday of another troubled, troubling Hollywood great, Miss Faye Dunaway.  The two make an interesting contrast.  Like Francis, Dunaway had a period of enormous success (it can be easy, now, to forget what a very topmost star she was for 15 years or so after her triumph in Bonnie and Clyde in 1967), followed by an ever greater period of near-total eclipse.  Unlike Francis, though, Dunaway for a long time seemed unable to give up the illusion - which must, in truth, be enormously intoxicating - of Great Stardom.  For years (turning into decades, since at least, with few exceptions, 1987 or so) she has appeared in almost nothing but trash, and great quantities of it - 16 films since 2005 alone, plus a couple of TV appearances.  Few stars have had as direct and seemingly enthusiastic a hand in the trashing of their own fame as Dunaway - yes, Francis made a trio of films at Monogram, but Dunaway did a thriller of sorts distributed by Troma and (a phrase I regularly recycle, as it so precisely defines her parlous situation) has consented to appearing fourth-billed in a Bai Ling picture.  It's a long way from Chinatown, Jake.

Lately, of course, she's been much taken by the idea of what looks to be a spectacularly misguided film version of Terrence McNally's Maria Callas stage hit Master Class.  Callas was another one who walked away; perhaps Dunaway should look a little more into the example set by her and Kay Francis, if only for the sake of her own, now so tarnished, legacy.

In any case, Happy Birthday, wherever you are, Kay Francis, and many happy returns, Miss D.  It may be cold comfort now, but as the years pass, you can at least know that your more dismal outings (Say it in Russian, anybody? Cougar Club?) will fade in the glow of Network and The Thomas Crown Affair, just we as now appreciate the glory of Kay in Trouble in Paradise and One Way Passage and don't pay all that much heed to Wife Wanted or Women in the Wind.

Steel yourself, though - there will never, ever be any piece of journalism on your life and work that doesn't mention (if it doesn't base itself around) Mommie Dearest.  Maybe you should have considered a Kay Francis biopic instead...

When Worlds Collide

Yesterday's birthday girl, Miss Marlene Dietrich, gives what is apparently the bemused glance of death to a really rather touchingly terrified young Miss Barbra Streisand, who has clearly only this very moment realized that being Kicky at a Chanel runway show might be classified by some - Miss Dietrich among them - as Trying Too Hard.

Accept No Substitutes

So.  I hear people have been talking about her a little this weekend.  That certainly wouldn't surprise her, although the low-rent context might - that was one thing she never was.

And God knows, she was many things.  Star - no, for her it can be said: superstar.  Beauty, at moments nearly unparalled.  Actress, and at times a damn good one.  Bonne vivante, gourmande, and acolyte of excess in almost every conceivable form. Wife (also at times a good one), mother, grandmother, philanthropist, activist, author, entrepreneur (few in Hollywood died richer).  Child, girl, woman, old woman, all in the very middle of the public eye.

All I have to say about this latest assault on her legend is to echo what another Hollywood survivor, Mr. Bugs Bunny, might have said:  da noive.

This impertinent attempt does conjure up one question:  has there ever been a really satisfactory incarnation on film of a film legend?  The only one that springs to my feeble mind is Betty Comden in Garbo Talks, and she was given only the (daunting) task of impersonating the star's back.  I know that Blanchett won an Oscar for her Hepburn, but I found it vaguely embarrassing, a party trick at best (and not, in the end, all that precise an impression).  Downey's Chaplin is close, I suppose, but the movie was all over the place, and after that it's kind of a yawning void - Mr. Barbra Streisand and An Unmarried Woman were hardly a satisfactory Gable and Lombard, and Dunaway as Crawford strays perilously close to Lizanddickland.  In the sixties, there were two attempts at Harlow, both flops (deservedly), and more recently Kirsten Dunst as a pretty blonde called Marion Davies, but nothing like the original in manner or looks.

One thing the last twenty-four hours have taught us:  when it comes to a force of nature like Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor Hilton Wilding Todd Fisher Burton Burton Warner Fortensky, Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire and Chevalière de la Légion d'Honneur (among countless other gongs, two Oscars not the least of them) - the viewing public would have been a lot better off, last night, watching BUtterfield 8.

Cover Her Face

Today, we're used to seeing famous people in disarray - either of their own making (coffee cups in hand, strolling around in torn shorts and sloppy tee-shirts, heedless of the telephoto lens) or of the relentless photographers' (that startled, universal expression that just precedes a more definitive response as some star or starlet leaves a nightclub, clandestine lover's house, or doctor's office).

Once upon a time, though, that wasn't so.  Stars were distant, perfect, glimpsed only at the behest of trusted studio photographers or social-column snappers who might get an idealized glimpse tableside at Ciro's or the Coconut Grove.  Those few who were, as it were caught in the act (often related to arrests, courtroom testimony, or similar indication of personal and professional turmoil) seemed, even more than ordinary mortals would have been, exposed, and somehow diminished (think of Robert Mitchum in jail, or Frances Farmer, dishevelled and struggling as she's dragged into night court).  Some survived this violation of the terms of fame (Mitchum came back); some didn't (Farmer sank into madness and obscurity, in part at least for so blatantly trampling her glittering blonde image).

All of which makes this picture all the more arresting. Joan Crawford was the absolute acme of the star-as-control-freak, the ultimate product of the ultimate studio, MGM.  Whether dining at PickFair at one end of her career or opening a Pepsi bottling plant in Paraguay at the other, she was always perfectly turned out, perfectly composed, perfectly... perfect.  And always, always, portrayed on her own terms.  Even her films - laden as they were with melodramatic excess - rarely, in the course of limning extremes of emotion, required the star to do more than look obdurately into the middle distance, a glycerine tear coursing a careful trail down her meticulously pancaked cheek (in a way, that's what makes her occasional moments of violence - slapping the egregious Veda in Mildred Pierce, for example - all the more bracing).  Oh, there were rumors, even at her height, that presaged her posthumous savaging at her daughter's hands, but they were offstage, distant thunder.

Here, though, she's giving way.  It's 1959, the funeral of her fourth and final husband, Al Steele, and although she remains beautifully dressed (although some might say the matching purse and pumps are just that little bit too much), for once her face betrays her, despite (perhaps because of?) the mask of veil and sunglasses.  Here she's Joan Steele, genuinely distraught, or as genuinely as Joan Crawford can be after, at that point, more than 30 years more frequently indicating than feeling deep emotion. 

Of course, she was spared the indignities that would be heaped on a star in this situation today - the microphones in her face, the mandatory questions ("How does it feel, Joan?" "Are you going to miss him?" "Where's Christina, Joan?") and the obligatory self-disclosure - right there, in the street; on talk shows; on Twitter ("@MrsSteele: Can't express too much my sorrow - we had the Best of Everything (in theatres now)").  Still, it's disconcerting.  You feel for her, for her double distress (at her loss, and at being seen experiencing it); it's an embarrassment, of a kind, and yet you can't look away.  Mine eyes dazzle; he died young, even if she didn't, and even if with her went the expectation that this sort of thing would be the exception rather than the rule of stardom.

 Photo from the invaluable The Best of Everything: A Joan Crawford Encyclopedia.

Birthday Girl: She is Telling us...

Jennifer Holliday had the great gift - ah, but double-edged, as so many of fame's gifts are - of a signature role.  In only her second Broadway outing, she achieved a perfect synthesis of individual talent and ideal part, and it is hardly her fault that everything ever after has seemed something of an afterthought.  Thirty years after Dreamgirls, she remains a working performer (she finished up a brief run, in fact, in what she says is her last go at Effie this past July, in St. Louis; reviews were positive, if tactful), and she can go to her grave knowing that her great moment was preserved: here, at the 1982 Tonys.

This is, simply, a one of a kind performance:  vocally fearless, utterly without vanity, a titanic eruption of pain, wounded pride, fury, and a love that rages at its own inability to make things right.  It takes a bad moment in a reckless woman's life and turns it into an epic meltdown, one is both musically overwhelming and psychologically totally convincing.  Holliday, under the acute direction of Michael Bennett, delivers something that is both shockingly non-naturalistic (sheer soap opera in the dialogue and pop-recitative that opens the number, and then as it all builds, something like kabuki as she staggers, pleads, implores, and ultimately collapses) and completely, uncompromisingly real.  Anyone who isn't riveted by the 6:00 minute mark, when Effie more or less leaves reality behind, has neither heart nor soul (one wonders, too, whether actor Ben Harney, as the manipulative Curtis, had any hearing at all left in his right ear by the end of the show's original run).

"I am Telling You" is a pop-opera "Rose's Turn," but sadly for Holliday, it didn't, as for Merman, cap a long career.  Instead, it set a standard that no future material could live up to, no future performance match.  What do you do for the rest of your life, if you climb Everest the first time out?

Jennifer Holliday has spent three decades finding that out, and it is to her credit that she's done so with grace and perseverance.  She is 52 today.

RIP: Goodbye, Emmanuelle

From Amsterdam comes the sad news that Sylvia Kristel, soft-core superstar of the 1970s, has returned to Fabulon.  Kristel occupied an uneasy place in films, neither an outright porn queen, but even so, never quite respectable.  She had a bumpy private life (a too-colorful childhood, the usual range of addictions, followed by the concomitant financial straits) and only limited success in later years in finding something to do outside of tawdry films.

Today, Kristel's brand of knowing naughtiness seems as far away and downright quaint as anything in the careers of either of this week's two earlier ladies, Misses Gish and Shearer - Emmannuelle was marketed as "a film that won’t make you feel bad about feeling good,” a quintessentially '70s sort of notion.  Her kind of exploitation picture may have been supplanted by, in turn, hardcore, home video, and most recently the pornucopia that is the Internet; still, she was a lovely woman in her way and an influential figure in the shadier regions of film history.  If nothing else, she has delighted vast audiences of lonely businessmen in cable-subscribing hotels around the world for many years, and that deserves a nod.

As for her most famous character (although she also took on both Lady Chatterley and Mata Hari at various points)?  Emmanuelle has taken on a life of her own, in variations from Black Emmanuelle to Emmanuelle in Space.  I suppose it's just a matter of time until Zombie Emmanuelle, but Kristel fans know the truth - accept no substitutes.  Fire up the Cinemax time machine, and return to an age of soft focus, cheesy string-heavy soundtracks, synthetic fabrics and simulated coitus; for a good time, call Sylvia...

Question Time: Ask the Oracle #3

Okay, most of these I can see.  Sadly, the question of her continued existence is all too germane (and it's not unkind, I think, at this point to wish her godspeed to a better place, however glamour-diminished a world she'll leave behind).  Of course, she is, in fact related, if only by marriage, to the tawdry sisters who wear a pale imitation of her crown of celebritude (she's their step great-grandmother, as nearly as I can make out).  And she is, at least in part on her mother's side, what dear Dame Edna calls a "Red Sea pedestrian."

But, really - pregnant?  The poor woman was born, even if we credit the latest possible date, in the fading glory of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  Spare her something, for heaven's sake, in what the Enquirer would once have called her "sad last days."

Question Time: Urban Legend

People can be so cruel, and some gossip just never seems to go away.  What does it matter?  Why the endless fuss?  Who cares if the poor man can't stand Debra Winger?  It's not like he's the only one - I hear Rock Hudson and Jim Nabors both hated her!

Question Time: Ask the Oracle #2

Hmmm.  to the best of my knowledge, I'm guessing the answers are:

no; only in spirit; no; no; more so than her career; no; up to a point; hells yes; that's the rumor; and probably not technically, but for all practical purposes, yes.

"The bodily message of what it means to be a star..."

"Watching Liza triumph and then crash, crash and then triumph, we witness humiliation's fiery presence within the mother-daughter bond. ... As we watch her sing "New York, New York" again and again (even as we cheer, even as we shiver with uncanny pleasure), Liza passes on to us the bodily message of what it means to be a star. ... It might mean private planes and Harry Winston jewels, but it also might mean delirium tremens at the Betty Ford Center, and garish caricatures of yourself in the minds of others.  Not always garish: in many hearts, there are genuine shrines to the fallen star, shrines tended without irony, and without unkindness."

- Wayne Koestenbaum, Humiliation

Bombshell

What's getting headlines today, of course, is that it is, unbelievably, 50 years today since the death of Marilyn Monroe.  Many, many others have written and will write about her today - her incandescent beauty, the ups and downs of her tangled, messy life, and the amazing way in which today, when she's been dead for more than a decade longer than she lived, she's a still a bigger star than ever she was alive.

No, I'd like to think a little about the other bombshell who left us on an August 5, seven years before Marilyn.  In many ways, Marilyn and the woman born Maria do Carmo Miranda da Cunha, who became in her prime the best-paid woman in the U.S., have more in common than one might think.  Principally, each became trapped, in different ways, in a popular image that threatened to overwhelm the woman within.

It would probably suprise Carmen Miranda's contemporaries that she remains such a vivid, present, immediate figure, someone who still turns up on campy greeting cards and in impromptu impersonations (put some fruit on your head, strike a pose, and bam, you're Carmen Miranda - who else can be evoked so effortlessly?).  She was seen primarily as a novelty star, someone to drop into a plot (such plots as they were, in the mostly shambolic 20th Century Fox musicals that immortalized her) for a couple of numbers and a few zingy one-liners.  Today, she's often the best (and sometimes the only) reason to watch more than a few of her pictures.  Whatever the billing in 1948 or so, now she's the star.  Consider:  anybody up for a Jeanne Crain film festival?  Sheila Ryan? June Haver?  I thought not.

Like Marilyn, too, she cemented this indelible image in a short time - less than a decade of top stardom - and in surprisingly few movies, just a dozen or so features.  Both capitalized on and exaggerated their features, until at their most extreme both are nearly unrecognizable.  It's almost startling, as here, to see Carmen turned out more or less like other stars (although even here, the trusty Fox wardrobe department has seen fit to add a little Miranda-esque bling to one glove).  

Most of all, like Marilyn, Carmen left too soon, too suddenly, and in a way - a sudden heart attack after bouts of depression and addiction - that highlights, perhaps unfairly, the sadder, darker side of what, mostly, is a pretty fizzy tale:  little girl from a Portuguese village becomes in turn the top star of Brazil, a Broadway sensation, a pop phenomenon, and the toast of Hollywood.  I've told the story before, but I think it applies here, too:  I once asked a Star Who Was There about knowing Judy Garland, and the response - immediate, unpracticed - was:  "What everyone forgets is that an awful lot of the time she had an enormous amount of fun."  I hope we don't forget, in the hyperbolic, elegiac tributes to Norma Jeane Baker, superstar, that much the same could be said of her, and I hope, too, of Carmen.

I wonder if they ever met, the Blonde and the Brazilian Bombshells, and what they might have had to say to one another...

Birthdays: Ducklings into Swans

Birthday richness today, in the persons of two of the funniest people I know, both of whom turned potential liabilities into their stock in trade.

Ladies first (although in this company, that's a tough choice):  Mary Wickes was nobody's idea of a Hollywood star, clocking in just shy of six feet and possessing a face blessed with, shall we say, strong features.  Still, something clicked when she was on screen, and from the start her wry presence proved a match for even the strongest competition (and she started with just about the strongest possible, holding her own against no less than Bette Davis in The Man Who Came to Dinner and scoring big as a longsuffering nurse). 

After a successful run at Warners, she moved seamlessly to television, where her ability to play off stars like Lucille Ball and Doris Day gave her career a longevity that many much bigger stars would have envied.  She worked steadily into her 80s, ending with a turn in the Susan Sarandon/Winona Ryder Little Women; her Aunt March works every bit as well Edna May Oliver's in the peerless 1933 Hepburn edition.  You may not be surprised to learn she never married...

...nor, for that matter, did today's birthday boy, seen here looking rather more sedate than was his wont.  Paul Lynde, who first burst upon the scene in that cradle of fame, New Faces of 1952,* was about as far from leading man territory as Wickes was from pinup stardom.  Even so, audiences responded to his incredible timing and genial bitchiness with an enthusiasm that seems inconceivable given the era. 

Character men don't often get the juicy little parts (scheming secretary, dotty neighbor, deluded dowager, flighty aunt) that their female counterparts do (and that allow them to become general-public Beloved in ways that belie the scale of their roles).  Nonetheless, Lynde turned the smallest parts into little tours de force of innuendo and arch double-takes, and as Uncle Arthur on Bewitched (the Valhalla, in its way, of glorified character stars) achieved a kind of camp nirvana.  I can only think it was instructive (and beneficial) for those of us who were children of the '60s, sitting with our families in front of the flickering Mediterranean Fruitwood Veneer Consolette, to soak in the richness that was Lynde, Marion Lorne, Maurice Evans, Agnes Moorehead,** and the rest of the treasurable cast of zanies and oddities surrounding Elizabeth Montgomery and the Darrin of the moment - some of us, at least, thinking, "if they can get away with that, why can't I?"

Lynde really came into his own, of course, on The Hollywood Squares, dishing out slyly catty one-liners that must frequently have soared over the heads of many in the prime daytime-TV demographic, bored housewives (but that made some of their kids feel very sophisticated indeed).  He doesn't seem to have been the happiest of people, but I can't help feeling that he must, at the right moment, have been peerlessly good company.

The success of people like Miss Wickes and Mr. Lynde reminds us that, at least some of the time, talent will out, for even the gawkiest and queerest of us, and I think that's a reassuring sort of thing, what with being more a hint of both myself.  In whatever ineffable realm they now inhabit, aged 102 and 86 (only!) respectively, I hope they're sitting down over a celestial cocktail and congratulating each other on their improbable success.

* Lynde, Alice Ghostley, Eartha Kitt, Carol Lawrence, Mel Books ... it really must have been a hell of a night in the theatre, no?

** Odd, isn't it, that Wickes never did a Bewitched. She did turn up on the spin-off, Tabitha, but somehow, by that time, the magic was gone (from the series, that is - never from Mary!)

Sic Transit...

May 2, 1989:  In that magic moment, Geena and Jeff knew - they just knew - that stardom was forever, that their marriage was a golden, shining thing, and that in a few hours (after the premiere that they've gotten so dolled up for) their latest joint effort, Earth Girls are Easy, would be a great, big hit that would vault them ever higher in the Hollywood firmament.

Well.  So what if they weren't exactly Newman-Woodward in the wedded-bliss department.  I hear she was terrif a few years ago voicing Stuart Little 3, and as for Jeff, well, a guest spot on Glee is nothing to sneeze at, no?  Oh, dear; time in its flight...

Ten Tips on Stardom

1.  Have an instinctive understanding of exactly how to hit your key light - something that never failed the Divine Josephine, even when the spotlight was all she had...

2.  Let Joan Blondell be your guide:  always have a positive approach to your grueling glamour regimen (and never, ever be seen without eye makeup, bangles, pumps, and, when situationally appropriate, an adoring attendant).

3.  Develop a trademark expression; extra credit if it can be variously read as vulnerable and alluring at the same time.  You may not hit the heights that Marilyn reached in no small part thanks to hers, but you have to start somewhere...

4.  Equally, however, you mustn't neglect the more ferocious aspect of divalicity; nothing so incites the fans to adoration as an affect just this side of disdain.  Dame Joan, despite an off-stage attitude of almost superhuman cosiness, was no slouch in this regard on stage.

5.  Never pass up an opportunity to let the boys in the stills gallery have a little fun.  If you can't face the prospect of yet another Arbor Day photo spread, at least don't hesitate to show off your hobbies, however implausible.  I don't for a moment believe that Mary Boland was a devoted ping-pong enthusiast, but it made a nice snap for the weekend rotogravures, no?

6.  However, never forget that glamour is job one.  Audiences forgave Lana everything for the better part of four decades, just because she could so reliably give that look.  It takes practice, kids, especially when you're balancing as much off stage as our Miss Turner here.

7.  Keep good company.  Peers and counterparts always make good press - that's why Jerry was almost always seen with one or preferably more of his girls...

8.  ...and at a certain point, cultivate the next generation.  Joan was smart enough to know that she could get away with that hat as long as she was standing next to the ravishing young Mr. Chamberlain.  Do you suppose she's goosing him even as the picture was snapped? (On a side note, I always think of this particular expression of Joan's as her "Mommie's had her vodka" look - it's her own special version of "Keep it together, Minnelli," as you can practically see the self-will that it's taking to keep her upright.)

9.  Never forget that you're Queen of the Lot, even if that lot is only Universal.  It takes a special moxie to wave at your minions and drive your own personal go-kart, but Doris takes it all in stride.

10.  Finally, and when all else fails - endure.