Weekend Update

A quiet weekend at home, and herewith few random notes on life chez nous, at least a part of which will explain the choice of dear Mrs. Mortenson Baker Monroe DiMaggio Miller indulging herself in a little treat...

Three on a Match

A trio of lovely, crazy people share a moment.  There is a lot going on in this snap, and I can't quite believe I've never seen it before.

Shameless Saturday Camp Explosion: Drag Rant

What is extravagant in an inconsistent or an unpassionate way is not Camp.

- Susan Sontag, "Notes on Camp"

A few snippets of Camp at its most classic for this lovely August Saturday...

Three on a Match

One of my favorite literary meetups took place 53 years ago today, when Lula Smith had Tanne Blixen and Norma Jeane Miller over for lunch.  It was a real lovefest that even the taciturn presence of Mr. Miller couldn't dilute.

I choose to regard as gospel truth the longstanding rumor that, before the afternoon was out, the three of them danced on Lula's marble-topped dinner table.

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...

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.

Muffing It

A recent conversation over on Fabulon celebrated the ever-perfectly-accessorized Miss Ida Lupino, and in particular - thanks to the trenchant eye of MJ - her penchant for keeping her hands warm...

Which got me thinking about muffs. So practical in one sense, so ridiculous in almost every other...

I mean, surely in that gown, keeping her hands warm is the least of Miss Monroe's problems...

While Persian lamb just doesn't seem warm enough, however much it reinforces the visual message that Judy is perfectly fine, whatever else the readers of Photoplay might have been hearing.

As was so often the case in her pre-Desi career, Lucy seems less to be wearing than being worn by this particular costume...

While William Powell seems to be reacting with an inappropriate alarm when presented with Miss Binnie Barnes's impressive silver fox muff - although it must be admitted that she is wielding it superbly.

They go beyond Hollywood of course - on this important day, Jackie is actually using hers (something of novelty after all the foregoing) to keep her hands warm...

...while here it would seem that it is only the combination of muff, collar, and hat that's keeping the late Princess of Wales from spontaneously combusting on the spot.

Muffs! So versatile, so lovely, and so much of eras past! I trust that Miss MJ will now lead us a characteristically high-toned discussion of their sizes, depths, virtues, and uses.

Pola, Schatze, and Loco

I have to admit: when I first moved to New York, I considered How to Marry a Millionaire something of a user's guide to the city. It's so practical!

These days, I just find myself murmuring the director's name as a kind of soothing mantra: Jean Negulesco, Jean Negulesco, Jean Negulesco...

Lunch on Olympus

This must have been a rather epic little get-together: visiting Hollywood, apparently the only person whom Dame Edith Sitwell really craved meeting was Miss Monroe.

One would long for a transcript of that conversation, the meeting of two Fabulous Monsters, two Geniuses of Neurosis, if only it weren't such an intrusion. He who interrupted them would have risked being turned to stone.

Writing later, Sitwell said that she found in Marilyn "a benevolent dignity" and "extreme intelligence." They seem to have struck, if this photo is to believed, a natural chord of sympathy; not surprising, perhaps, between two such entirely damaged, brilliant, self-constructed persons.

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.

Birthday Boy: Somebody's Perfect

102 years ago today in a little town in Austria-Hungary, Mrs. Eugenia Wilder, née Dittler, had a baby boy. She must have been a remarkable woman, for her little Billie grew up to be Billy Wilder.


Looking through his owlish round spectacles, observing Mama Eugenia, what did he pick up that allowed him to create a gallery of some of the screen's greatest - and most diverse - women?

Is there part of Eugenia in Nina Yakushova Ivanoff, whom a combination of Paris and Melvyn Douglas transform into Ninotchka?



Somewhat more disconcertingly, is there anything of her in the predatory Phyllis Dietrichson, queen of the blank face and the world's only ominous bangs?

Perhaps that's the part that let him bring to life so entirely the vast and tragic mess that is Norma Desmond:

(I think Boulevard Crepuscule is if
anything a better title, don't you?)

I would like to think she's there in Ariane Chavasse, Hepburn's most sophisticated gamine in Love in the Afternoon (and if the December in any May-December is Gary Cooper, who's to say it nay?):

But, to my mind, the proof that Eugenia did good by her little boy is that he grew up to be able to imagine two such creatures, equally improbable, as Sugar Kane Kowalczyk and the man who transforms himself so happily into the fetching bass player Daphne:

He did well by his leading ladies, that's for sure: two of Stanwyck's defining roles (Double Indemnity and Ball of Fire), two of Monroe's (Some Like it Hot and The Seven Year Itch), two of Audrey Hepburn's (Love in the Afternoon and Sabrina) making Garbo laugh and Swanson immortal - not bad for a boy from Sucha Beskidzka.

I do think some of it had to be Eugenia.