Birthday Girl: Illusions

The extraordinary creature born Marie Magdalene Dietrich was a belated Christmas present to the world some 114 years ago today.

Lazy

These days, I'm with Marlene here...purely lazy...

Farewell the Troubador

If one measure of the quality of a work of art, or at least the kinds of art meant for performance, is its flexibility, its openness to adaptation, then Pete Seeger was a great artist indeed.

Shameless Saturday Camp Explosion: Dance, Dance, Dance Little Lady

One is drawn to Camp when one realizes that "sincerity" is not enough. 

- Susan Sontag, "Notes on Camp"

Ticket to Ride

A remarkably hectic week, this, and now that it's Friday morning, I'm pleased it's over.  I had to go up to Dubai for a few nights (staying at our favorite hostelry, who really do treat one beautifully - when you find the right place, one of the few things the Sandlands really does right is mindless pampering, which even in a business context, which this very much was, is always a rather soothing thing).  It was a whirl of the usual nonsense, meetings and discussions and much backing-and-forthing, morning to night.

These days, thanks to the dubious blessings of modern technology, such trips require one to be in two (at least places) at once.  All the time that you're doing one thing, with the people with whom you are physically interacting, dealing with Very Important Out-of-Towners and the Critical Matters they have to discuss, you're also surreptitiously answering e-mail and checking texts and trying to figure out how to keep everyone back at the office content.  I wish I could claim to travel under such circumstances with all the aplomb that dear Miss Dietrich so effortlessly displays, but I fear that by Wednesday, when I finally got to come home, that was far from the case.

This trip was all the more surreal, for as it was happening, the background chatter with which I was dealing on the sly was of a sudden mostly about the remarkable fact, which has all just in those few days gelled to the point of no return, that in a matter of weeks we will be winging our way back to the only semi-familiar Great Unknown of life in the U.S. of A.  Flooding the BlackBerry was a tide of messages from travel agent, movers, veterinarian, and more, all requiring immediate answers about routing, packing, visas, shipping, you name it.  From that distance, it seemed a shade unreal; confronted back in the office with a stack of forms and an undeniable itinerary, right down to seat assignments, it suddenly is real.  Still terrifying, but now if nothing else plausible.

Mr. Muscato and I had a rather dazed and all-too-brief reunion on my return, for he has jetted off for a few days of well-earned fun with some old pals, during which they will doubtless cut a wide swathe across the loucher stretches of the Edgware Road (look out, Jon and other Café UK regulars, and keep an eye out for a stout Egyptian and a gaggle of amusing fellow-travelers).  That leaves me here with the dogs, who are increasingly suspicious about the various goings-on that signal change - piles of old clothes for sorting, stacks of magazines for throwing away, and worse.  Within a week or two we'll start breaking up the house in earnest, and then those few weeks of in-between that are a periodic feature of the nomad life, moving through a time when you go from being the proprietor of a comfortable, if anything overfurnished, house into a phase in which all you really have is a suitcase or two (or, if you're Miss Dietrich, ten), and then, as the shippers work their magic, gradually back again.

And on the side, what is more or less a whole new life, or at least a very different one.  House-hunting, for example, is something I've not had to do since the first Clinton administration (or rent-paying, for that matter).  We'll have to arrange for utilities and pick an Internet and cable plan and Heaven help us learn about recycling, which is not a feature of Sandlands life.  Expatriates are often warned about reverse culture shock when going home, and I have a feeling I'm in for a doozy.  In the meantime, though, I will study the serene resolve with which Dietrich approaches her voyage, and do my best to do the same.

Shameless Saturday Camp Explosion: One Mississippi

To perceive Camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role. It is the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theater.

- Susan Sontag, "Notes on Camp"

In honor of her birthday this week, a reminder of why Miss Carol Channing is (a) divine and (b) the Queen of Camp, Broadway Division. No other performer, I think, combines so much skill with so much self-awareness, assurance, and flat-out eccentricity.  She has been playing the role of Carol Channing for 60 years or so, and it's safe to say that no one could ever do it better.  The miracle of it is that she has been able to channel that extravagant persona into genuine characters:  her Channingness, if you will, proved far more adaptable than you might think, so that when she played Dolly, she was Dolly, or Lorelei, or any of her parts.   She's a camp, but not a stunt.

Here she demolishes, in sequence, two kinds of show-biz survivors (not to mention two kinds of speech impediments): first, Dietrich in her glam-grandma phase (I adore how the Channing grin fights for dominance with the Dietrich pout in what really is a masterful impersonation) and then the myth-ridden once-upon-a-timer (Cecilia is a hoot, but with just a shade of a dark side; there really were ladies pretty much that deluded, after all...).

I can't believe I've never seen this clip before - is it something everybody knows about and I've been mysteriously in the dark?  If so, I'll never forgive you for not telling me before.  Enjoy.

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.

Taxi for Two

Though we all might enjoy
Seeing Helen of Troy
As a gay, cabaret entertainer
I doubt that she could
Be one quarter as good
As our legendary, lovely Marlene!

- Noël Coward on the friend he also

referred to as "the canny old Kraut."

The Heavens Over Berlin...

...were once full of stars. Some were born there, some passed through; some lingered long, some burned out young or moved too close to black holes artistic or political. You still feel them, at times, in the streets here, in the makeup of old women and the attitudes of young girls...

Pola, once a serious artist before becoming a Hollywood vamp...

Louise, who arrived something of a Hollywood lightweight and left, although she didn't know it for two decades, a sublime artist - and a has-been...

Miss Dietrich, of whom no more need be said than that she did quite all right for herself...

Anna May, who was here a bigger star than ever she managed to be again...

And the ineffable Lil Dagover, for a while the biggest lady of all of these...

Not to mention the problematic Fraulein Riefenstahl, long-lived - but not enough to live it down...

A trouble shared, to some extent, by the far less villainous (and infinitely more camp) Miss Zarah Leander.

I think I saw at least three of them at yesterday's parade...

Speaking of Girls Who Get Around...

She's on my mind, too - not least because we've ended up in Berlin...

Heldengedenktag

Shall we stop, for a moment, on this Memorial Day, so that Miss Dietrich can remind us what we should be remembering? Even in German, her message comes through, loud and clear. Quiet, children - Mama's testifyin'...

Dietrich's Deco Disarray

This poster tells us one thing: even with her legendary business acumen, Miss Dietrich did not reserve for herself image approval for European releases. And this poster proves she needed it.

At least now we now what Shanghai Lily looks like when she wakes up in the morning...

Marlene

Frau Riva if you're nasty.

The Dietrich and the Dowager

An encounter in postwar Paris. It's hard to believe, but they're probably about the same age. Hell, it's hard to believe they're the same species...

And, apropos the post below - Marlene and Yul: mad crazy love. Must have been fun to observe. From a distance.

Three Smart Girls

Some images perfectly capture the moment they were taken; this is one. Eisenstadt snapped these three at a party in Berlin in 1929, when the most famous of them was the woman in the middle: Anna May Wong.

On the left, of course is Dietrich, who by that point had been toiling away for the better of a decade without becoming much more than a slightly risqué leading lady on stage and in unimportant films, a bit of a show-off and a climber. On the right is Leni Riefenstahl, at that point a rising star still four years from finding her niche as the Nazis' cinema darling.

Wong, though, at 24 here, had been a star since her mid-teens, with 30 Hollywood pictures and a handful of European hits behind her. She was a star in cabaret as well, singing wry songs like Noël Coward's "Half-Caste Woman" and showing off her perfect figure in clinging lamé gowns. Talkies kind of did her in, though, forcing her back to Los Angeles and the sort of supporting parts open to even the most beautiful Asian woman in the world.

If you want to know how the story turns out, Richard Corliss wrote an excellent multi-part feature a couple of years ago in Time. It's worth a read.

When Ladies Meet...

They talk about these two fierce bitches:

But what do you suppose they talked about, my little chickadees?

Leg Show: Golden Years

I don't know about you, but I like it when ladies of a certain age flash a little gam.

My grandmother would always, of certain of her acquaintances, observe "well, yes, she looks fine - but she's lost her ankles!" and then flash a demure glance down at her own dainty feet.

Marlene, of course, kept hers insured by Lloyds of London, and had them prominently on display when pitching Blackglama:


And it makes sense that a hoofer like Chita Rivera would keep hers in fine trim:

Elaine Stritch's trademark outfit seems designed to highlight her legs (in what I have long thought is the most calculatedly casual ensemble ever seen on stage):

I have to say it came as something of a surprise to find Mrs. Hart indulging in a bit of what Hollywood starlets once referred to as "Drape Art," but she carries it off:

It's even a pan-gender phenomenon, which in this case, at least, is a very good thing:

Those knees aren't getting older - they're getting better!

The Only Way to Fly

Yes, children, I know it's impossible to believe today - but flying, once, was glamourous. Imagine having her sitting next to you in 34C! Hausfrau that she was at heart, you just know she packed her own dinner.

Birthday Girl

Today, I'm sure you'll happy to know, marks the day that Sophie Friederike Auguste von Anhalt-Zerbst would, had she been possessed of an even more remarkable constitution than whe was, have turned 279. She was once a little girl called "Figchen," and she grew up to live through a startlingly bad marriage before really coming into her own, which she did to a degree rarely seen before in history.

Little Figchen, you see, went on, through a quite unlikely set of circumstances, to become Yekaterina II Alekseyevna, better known as Catherine the Great, Empress of all the Russias, the fine figure of a woman seen here:


I don't know why, but of the Major Historical Ladies, Catherine is the one I have the hardest time picturing in person, as a living, breathing person. One reason might be that she has been portrayed by some of the loveliest, unlikeliest of major performers in vehicles that are almost uniformly unwatchable, for any number of reasons. Essaying on stage and screen Catherine have been performers as diverse as Elisabeth Bergner, Tallulah Bankhead, Mae West, Bette Davis (!), Catherine Zeta Jones (!!), and Julia Ormond.

Perhaps the real reason, though, that I can never get a realistic picture of the Empress is that, to one extent or another, in my mind she'll aways really look like this:

Marlene, of course, in The Scarlet Empress

In honor of the day, I propose that for once in our lives we rise above the petty and eschew, in connection with this great lady, any and all equine jokes that might even rise to the edge of our conciousnessness.