The Younger Sister Says Goodbye...

Last night I dreamed she went to Manderley again...

Such Devoted Sisters

I had a feeling that our latest Mystery Picture wouldn't prove too mysterious to the Café's clever Gentle Readers, but I thought it was such a charming image that it deserved an airing nontheless. 

Dear Norma chimed in first, and quite accurately, to confirm that the two little girls in their Lewis Carroll-esque finery were in fact the glamourous pair seen above sharing a little all-too-rare together time.  Remarkably, both Miss Joan Fontaine and Miss Olivia de Havilland are still with us; perhaps it is the sheer strength of their celebrated enmity that keeps them going.  Their dislike apparently goes all the way back to their earliest childhood, meaning that it's entering its tenth decade - surely something approaching a sororal record.

However they feel about each other, I quite like knowing that such fabulous creatures still share this sordid world with us, and I can't help but think that when they go - they and their few surviving peers and colleagues - we will have lost something rather special.  And I still kind of hope, against all hope, that just maybe we'll get them back together one more time, Melanie and the second Mrs. de Winter...

Suddenly, Susans

Susan. Susan, Susan, Susan. Seems like a demure enough name, no? And when you've got a list that includes Debbie Reynolds, Joan Fontaine, and Garbo, you would think that things were fairly upscale, wouldn't you?

Nope. Somehow, being Susan brings out the inner Madonna in a whole lot more people than just Rosanna Arquette.

Of course, it doesn't take a whole lot to tease the tempestuous out of Miss Connie Stevens (and at least she's waxing melodramatic over the sole member of Henry Willson's legendary stable who's at least somewhat likely to respond).*

When your most demure example is embodied by Joan Crawford, you know there's something serious going on. This might be, by the bye, the least satisfying Crawford picture ever, if only because the denouement is all about how nice she really is at heart. Who goes to a Crawford picture for that?

When playing a character called Susan can put that look into Debbie Reynolds's eyes, something's definitely afoot. It certainly seems unlikely to have been her leading man, Dick Powell.

Even the quintessential lady (except when discussing her sister), Joan Fontaine, is caught up in the madness - the very idea of Susanness inflaming her to the point of trying to vamp George Brent, a pointless endeavor if ever there was one.

Garbo's Susan falls and rises - no surprise there, since that's basically what Garbo heroines always did - but the neon diner-sign font does give it a slightly tawdry air...

It's a sign of the name's potency that the outright trashy movies incorporate the name into titles no more risqué, really, than the ones starring Reynolds or Fontaine...

...and this one sounds like it could almost be a 20s campus romp starring Nancy Carroll or some such. But it's not - because of the dangerous power of "Susan."

* Did you remember that Troy Donahue was married to Suzanne Pleshette? I had totally forgotten.

Me and the Misses Joan

Fontaine

Children, it has to stop somewhere. Herewith, Miss de Havilland's baby sister, as she flips through her bedside book of bad childhood memories, looking for more reasons to continue what is still, in these late days of the first decade of the 21st century, Hollywood's longest-running feud.

I think we'll let her stand as the poster-girl for all the other Joans out there, great and small, - Rivers, Van Ark, Jett, Allen, Hickson, the great Blondell; slight variants Woodward and Worley (now there's a Vaudeville team); historical sisters d'Arc, Pope, and la Loca; fictional namesakes Holloway and She-Who-Loved-Chachi.

We adore them all. But it's time to move on, no?