Julia Cooke’s Starry and Restless: Three Women Who Changed Work, Writing, and the World comes out at the end of this month and I snagged an advance copy. I fell so in love with the book I reached out to Julia to see if I could interview her. The book is about the writing careers and peripatetic lives of Rebecca West, Martha Gellhorn, and Emily “Mickey” Hahn. To call them war correspondents is accurate but incomplete. These women did it all: reportage, memoirs, novels. Anyone even slightly familiar with my site will know my feelings for Rebecca West: the impact she has had on my life is truly massive. Cooke really contextualizes the world of journalism in the 20s and 30s, and how these women decided – separately – to forge out on their own, when very few women were. I love this book, it comes out on February 24, 2026.
On February 12, his wife Alice gave birth to their daughter. Two days later, on February 14, Alice died. Catastrophically, his mother also died on that day.
In the 6th grade, I was passionately in love with a boy named Andrew Wright. My love for him began to blossom tentatively in the fifth grade, but the sensation exploding in sixth grade was real love, no more kid’s stuff. I could sense the difference like night and day. I didn’t love Andrew Wright because he was cute, or because he was really funny and would crack jokes in Sunday School, or because he picked me to be on his baseball team (although all these things were true). I loved him because he was the epitome of all that was good and right in the world.
We grew up in the same neighborhood, and hung around together since we were little kids. We went to the same church and made our first communions together. We were on the same school bus, we would play tag or baseball in the summer twilights or the two of us would take turns re-enacting Carlton Fisk’s famous homer from 1975, as our mothers called us impatiently in to dinner, we would sneak into the backyard of the house diagonally across the street from mine and pick the raspberries growing there in the side yard, running away at the slightest movement from inside.
It was all very unrequited. We were eleven years old. Half of the fun was just being in love with someone. Nothing ever had to be done about it.
That winter in 6th grade, Andrew and I spent all of our time after school, and on weekends, skating on the frozen pond in the woods near our houses. He would steal my hat, and I would chase him to get it back. We would wrestle for it, sometimes rolling around on the ice, I would get it back, and then he would chase me. It was a private thing we did. We didn’t reference it when we were in school. We didn’t say to each other, “Let’s keep this a secret.” I guess when you’re a kid you understand these things. We became very close, in an unspoken way, in an outdoor way. Our true milieu was on the ice, the grey wintry woods around us, chasing each other on skates, laughing, freezing cold, the bare trees above.
In February, there was a big Valentine’s Day ceremony in our sixth grade class. The custom was to buy Valentine’s Day cards in bulk, the ones with cartoons and silly rubber-stamp sentiments (2 good 2 be 4gotten), and just sign your name. You’d write a card to everyone in your class. So that year, each kid was called up, the cards passed out, and everyone hovered over their pile, fluttering with sixth grade romantic feelings and alarming hormone surges.
Of course, once I settled down with my pile, I searched for Andrew’s card immediately, trying to play it cool in case anyone looked at me, womanly wiles already kicking in. You know, no biggie, whatever, just lookin’ at my Valentines, not looking for one in particular, heck no!
By the time I got to the bottom of the pile, my heart was a tiny hard ball bearing. There was no card from Andrew Wright in my pile. How could he? How could he have not written me a card? After all we had shared? After the frozen pond?
It was my first taste of that particular brand of dread, something I perceive now as adult in nature. My feelings for him were clearly not reciprocated. How could this possibly be? And, worse, what will I do now with all of this feeling I have for him?
It was an entirely new sensation to me, dreadful in its relentless clarity.
I thought I might have to get up and leave the classroom, abuzz with conversation and laughter and gossip, everybody wandering from desk to desk. There was a pile of cards in front of me, but not one from the boy I loved. I needed to get away and be really really sad for a minute, maybe even cry, away from my classmates. Nobody must see my grief. Andrew must never ever know how much I hoped for a Valentine from him.
But then, suddenly, Andrew Wright, on his way somewhere else, walked by my desk and, without stopping or saying a word, dropped what looked like a tiny spitball in front of me. He kept going, didn’t look back. Nobody looking on would have perceived what happened. It was a sly gesture, meant to appear invisible, a camouflage.
Disbelieving, I opened up the spitball.
It was not a store-bought card. It was not a rubber-stamp Hallmark he just signed his name to. It was not generic. It was not, in short, like the card I gave him. (Even then, the intensity of my emotions was such that I felt the need to protect people from it, even the boy I loved. It would be “too much”, right?)
What he dropped on my desk was a tiny piece of white construction paper, ripped off the corner of a larger sheet, and on it was his message in smudgy #2 pencil:
Dear Sheila
Youre a good kid and a good story writer.
Andrew
Even though I was a child, I knew the enormity of what had just happened:
— He couldn’t have given me a cutesy Hallmark Valentine and just signed his name, as per tradition. It wouldn’t have been right. In his young boy’s heart, he knew we were closer than that.
— He needed to express how he felt about me privately. He couldn’t have put the spitball in with all the other cards to be passed out. It would have been a disaster if other kids in the class saw his message. Our frozen-pond twilights were in the card.
— In the note, he didn’t talk about how cute I was, or how he liked my freckles, or any “part” of me. He talked about my qualities and my talents, and how he liked those. We were on the cusp of young adulthood, still little kids, but with adolescence breathing down our necks. In the years to come, much of the attraction of another human being would be pheromonal, and chemistry-driven, based on the overwhelming desire to roll around on a bed with that person. Andrew’s note pre-dates those desires. He probably wouldn’t have written such a note a mere year later, when we were in 7th grade. But here? He likes me because I am a “good kid”, and he likes me because I am a “good story writer.” I did not realize at the time what a gift this would be, to have someone perceive ME, in that way.
— He didn’t use an actual “card” at all. It would not not have been right for us, he knew that, so he made the bold move to go personal. He addressed me. Directly.
The note from Andrew, written before I wore a bra or knew about things like cramps or heartbreak, written during the bleak tail-end of the 1970s, is still the most romantic I have ever received.
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.
I was living in Chicago, having a grand old time. Let’s face it, I was wild. I had no interest in a serious relationship. There were a couple of men buzzing around me. One of them (sweet, nice, a guy I saw perform improv numerous times) approached me at a party and, after chatting me up for a while in a very humorous and effortless way, asked me out to dinner.
I said Sure!
It ended up being one of the best dates I have ever been on before IN MY LIFE. Not because there were sizzling romantic sparks between us (there weren’t) but because of where he took me to dinner, the people we met there, and what we ended up doing. We went out to eat at a great old-school Greek restaurant (sadly, the joint is now closed). The coffee they gave us at the end of the meal was so thick our spoons could stand up in it. We stayed there for hours, talking and laughing, and then, after 11 or so, the music started. There was a round dance floor in the middle of the tables (like a nightclub you see in 1940s movies, although dilapidated and decaying), and people started dancing. These people were all Greek. These people were all over the age of 70. They danced in a circle, holding hands, shouting and whooping.
We were the youngest people in the place by two generations. When the dancing started, it involved a bunch of 70-year-old Greek women, caked with makeup, jewels glittering on their ears, their fingers, dancing around in a circle, holding hands, gesturing majestically out to us to join their dance, as their 70-year-old Greek husbands, or lovers, stood on the outskirts, throwing money up into the air, throwing money at their women. The air was filled with floating American currency. White-haired women picked up 20 dollar bills and plastered them onto their sweaty necks and sweaty bejewelled cleavage. The atmosphere was sexually charged, more so than any hip dance club filled with 20-somethings like ourselves. This was experienced sexuality on display. It was midnight, 1 a.m. when we finally joined the geriatric set, who showed no signs of slowing down. We danced with them in their circle, as money swirled through the air. We scuffed through the bills on the floor, laughing at how much fun we were having, how awesome it all was.
But that’s a tangent, and not the story I want to tell which is the story of the Eyeball and the Dozen Roses.
During the great date at the late-night Greek place, for some UNFATHOMABLE reason, I told him that my eye doctor had taken a picture of the back of my eyeball.
He: “Your grey eyes look so lovely. I could drown in their sparkley depths.”
Me: “Oh yeah? I should show you a picture of the BACK of my eyeball, pal.”
I have no idea how the subject came up, but he (bless him) seemed completely fascinated by the idea of having a picture taken of the back of his eyeball. The photo of the back of my eyeball was very weird and I was kind of obsessed with it: It looked like a big burning red ball. It looked like a close-up photo of the red storm circling Jupiter in the cold depths of space.
The back of my eyeball looked like that, basically.
During the date at the Greek place, he already set up the next date. I’m telling you, he had the basics down! “Okay, so Valentine’s Day is next week. And – I know we don’t know each other at all or anything, but I think it would be fun to have a date on Valentine’s Day. Whaddya say?”
I Zorba-ed my way through the carpet of money, plastering 20 dollar bills on my arms, and said, “That sounds like fun!!”
I’m not big on Valentine’s Day, not being a romantic type (as this story will OBVIOUSLY prove), and also: it just seems like a hell of a lot of pressure. When I see couples out on Valentine’s Day, the men look stressed and cowed, and the women look either vicious or triumphant. It’s not my scene, man. But he and I had such an unbelievably fabulous time on that first date, I thought: It’s cool.
And then I came up with what I considered to be an inspired idea.
Instead of getting him a nice Hallmark-y little Valentine’s Day card, I put the photo of the back of my eyeball into a little red envelope, with his name on it. On the margins of the photo I wrote, “Happy Valentine’s Day.”
I know it is insane.
I cannot defend it.
I am just reporting the facts of the case, which are: I put a photograph of the back of my eyeball into an envelope to give to a guy I barely knew on Valentine’s Day.
I went over to his apartment for our date. He greeted me at the door, so nice, so sweet. He let me in. He got me a drink. We didn’t really know each other at all, but we had had (no contest) the best date EVER. One for the books. We were kind of proud of ourselves for that.
He went into the kitchen, and came back out, holding a dozen red roses for me. For Valentine’s Day.
The second I saw the roses, I remembered the little red envelope in my purse, and I could feel my face getting as beet-red as the back of my own eyeball.
Oh my God. I am such an asshole. I have given him a photograph of the back of my eyeball. I have given him a Polaroid of the inside of my body. What the hell was going through my mind at the time that made me think that was appropriate??? My head was literally burning with embarrassment about my eyeball.
I suppose I could have chosen to not give him the picture of Jupiter’s eternal red storm. But comedy is important to me, and I knew that what was going down here was freakin’ funny.
I said, “Okay, so this is completely embarrassing, seeing as you gave me a beautiful bouquet of roses … but here’s what I got you.”
He opened up the envelope, looked at the Polaroid, and then BURST into laughter. (Thank God.)
Throughout the night he kept making jokes about it, pretending he was describing his Valentine’s date to friends who didn’t know me. He would do both sides of the conversation.
“Hey, man, did you go out on Valentine’s Day?”
“Oh yeah, dude, I went out with this sweet girl I just met.”
“Really? What does she look like?” Long long pause.
“Oh …. she’s a circle.”
“Dude, you went out on Valentine’s Day? What did the girl look like?”
“Uhm, sort of like a raging fireball.”
Or, when someone would ask him, “What did your date look like?”, he would take out the photograph of the back of my eyeball and, smiling proudly, hand it over.
He ended up being very kind about the whole thing, turning it into a huge joke, which I appreciated.
So that is the mortifying story of a man who gave me a dozen roses and I gave him, in return, a Polaroid of the back of my eyeball.
A Coda:
We ended up going on something like 4 dates, stretched out over an 8 or 9 week period. Obviously there wasn’t a sense of urgency to it all. We weren’t hot for each other, we weren’t burning like the backs of our own eyeballs to see each other. I don’t even think we kissed. Occasionally we would go to a movie, or out to dinner, whatever, but nothing ever really happened beyond that. There were no games, no weirdness, it just was what it was. I would forget for weeks at a time that he existed, and then he would suddenly call me up and invite me to do something. I was dating other people, I’m sure he was too. Whatever. My 20s were great. I had my head on straight about all this shit.
The whole thing ended when I called him up, after another 3 week “break”, and asked him to go to a movie, or something like that.
He sounded very hesitant. I could tell immediately something was up.
So I said, “What’s up?”
He said, “Well … I guess I’m thinking that we should slow down.”
I sat there, on the other end, filled with blankness. I thought nothing, I felt nothing. I went completely dead. There was nothing to say, but it seemed I was required to respond.
And what finally came out of my mouth, was: “I literally do not know how much slower I can go.”
This was greeted by a deafening silence.
And then what came out of my mouth was: “If I go any slower, I think I will stop.”
An even louder silence from the other end.
I wasn’t being bitchy. But I was, God help me, being truthful, and the entropy was already swirling me into its polar vortex and I could not, conceivably, in any biologically-sound carbon-based universe, go any slower than I was already going, without stopping outright.
Needless to say, we stopped.
And to this day, in my group of friends, “If I go any slower, I think I’ll stop” is a favorite phrase. It works well in a multitude of situations.
I ran into him some years back at a party in Chicago, and we had a hilarious conversation. I said, “To this day, that date at the Greek place is one of the best dates I’ve ever gone on.” He said the same was true for him as well.
We avoided mention of the back of my eyeball, which is probably for the best.
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.
Ingmar Bergman wrote in Images: My Life in Film, “Harriet Andersson is one of cinema’s geniuses. You meet only a few of these rare, shimmering individuals.”
It’s difficult to talk about Harriet Andersson without hyperbole.
She herself said, “I’m not an intellectual artist. I go by feelings.” She never seems out of place. She can play broad farce. She can play naturalism. She can be adorable or tragic. She believed in her instincts and followed them without question. She is highly responsive to what Stanislavsky called “the given circumstances.”
She got her start as a teenager in theatre and revue. She made a bunch of films, catching the eye of Bergman who created Summer with Monika for her. It’s one of the best film debuts of all time. It made her a star.
The performance is full of details that linger: screaming at her siblings as she reaches for a cigarette, or casually splashing water between her legs when washing in the river, her vulnerability when her lover first sees her naked, or the way she chomps on the hunk of stolen meat. Her sexuality is unembarrassed (the title for the US release of the film Story of a Bad Girl is jarringly unfair — and eloquent about America’s prudery and misogyny). There’s a famous moment at the end of the film, when Monika, out with a new man, leans back and stares right into the camera, holding our gaze.
Bergman wrote: “Her relationship to the camera is straight and sensual.”
She is so assured in the role of Monika you might wonder if that’s all she could do. But in Sawdust and Tinsel, a period piece released the same year, she plays a sexually knowing married woman, and in A Lesson in Love released the following year, she plays a contemporary adolescent girl who wants to be a boy. The range could not be more dramatic. In her standout scene in A Lesson in Love, she sits in the grass with her father, played by frequent Bergman collaborator Gunnar Björnstrand, and they talk. It’s a long take, no cuts, and you forget you’re watching a movie.
Andersson tosses herself into the diverse contexts of all her different characters. In Dreams she plays fashion model Doris, an idealized object of desire. She is a clothes horse, drawn to mirrors. There are multiple scenes between Doris and Susanne, the magazine editor played by Eva Dahlbeck. The relationship is mercurial, fluctuating. Along with death, Bergman was obsessed with women. Watching Dahlbeck and Andersson together you can see why.
Smiles of a Summer Night brought everyone international fame. Andersson plays the maid, wiggling around as the embodiment of sexual possibility. She doesn’t vamp her sexuality. She doesn’t need to. Shame is not part of her makeup. Unlike some of Bergman’s other actresses, Andersson seems wholly “of this earth,” dirt under her fingernails, straw in her hair. She finds the fragility of men’s egos very funny. Bergman’s female characters are tough, even when broken. They are rarely sentimental. When Andersson romps with her lover in a haystack, she has a momentary flash of sadness at her apparent immunity to love. She’s a survivor, though.
It would be 6 years before Andersson worked with Bergman again, this time in Through a Glass Darkly, which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film.
The characters she had played for Bergman up to this point were open to life, earthily sexual, responsive. He treasured these aspects in her, but for their next collaboration, he guided her – or, more likely, followed her – into an entirely different/new realm. She gives a truly great performance.
In Through a Glass Darkly, we first see her stalking along the shore, a hearty girl, casually referencing the series of shock treatments she recently endured. Her mental illness creeps up on her, chipping away at her stability. There are times when she is a truly unnerving presence, gyrating on the floor of the attic, or listening for the voices through the wallpaper. Over the course of the film, she rapidly deteriorates. Lost in her delusions, when she – famously – finally sees what God really is, her breakdown is so frightening I put my hands over my eyes the first time I saw it. Harriet Andersson goes where angels fear to tread.
She was part of the ensemble in Bergman’s high farce (if you can picture that) All These Women, parodying Bergman’s own life situation showing the shenanigans of a harem of women clustered around a Genius Man. Andersson plays a maid again, and out of all the women, her love for him is the purest. Lost in admiration of him, her hand gives away what’s really on her mind, as it moves up and down the spout of a watering can.
Through the mid-60s and 70s, Andersson worked continuously in films by other directors as well as onstage- primarily at the Royal Dramatic Theater in Stockholm. 10 years after All These Women, she returned to the Bergman fold for the mighty Cries and Whispers, which won 3 Oscars, for Best Picture, Sven Nykvist for cinematography and Bergman for Best Director. Ingrid Thulin and Liv Ullmann brought their considerable powers to bear in the film, but Harriet Andersson, as the dying Agnes, is the emotional center, the one whose illness – so palpable in her performance you can almost smell it – is the catalyst for all that follows. One of the most famous moments is when Agnes, exhausted from a coughing fit, lies in the lap of the bare-breasted Anna, family maid and possibly Agnes’ lover. This devastating Pieta is one of the few peaceful moments in the film.
10 years after Cries and Whispers, Bergman turned to Andersson again to play the small but important role of Justina, the scary humorless maid in Fanny and Alexander (it would be Bergman’s final feature). Surrounded by judgmental Lutherans, Justina crouches in the background, gloomy and watchful. She deliberately terrifies the children by telling them the tragic story of the people who lived in the house before. Sitting at the table, Andersson whispers the horrible details in a purposefully frightening manner. Bergman films it in one take which makes it even funnier.
Theirs was a fruitful collaboration, and they were lifelong friends. Bergman valued her highly, writing in The Magic Lantern: “She is an unusually strong but vulnerable person with a streak of brilliance in her gifts.” Andersson does not overthink acting or plan much beforehand. For her, the key is to “play in the Now.”
In every single role, in every single moment, she is in the Now. Very few actors can do that.
There’s a scene in Through a Glass Darkly where, lost in her delusions, she moves to the center of the attic and faces the camera. What then follows is a series of gestures and movements which cannot really be described.
Andersson doesn’t appear to be controlling any of it, and Bergman – who loved to be surprised by his actors – didn’t tell her what to do. The moment itself is in control, not the actress. She responds to her psyche’s deepest impulses, impulses even she isn’t aware of. That’s playing in the Now.
No wonder Bergman was in awe.
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.
I will always be glad that I was assigned to review The Last Movie Star (2018), Reynolds’ final film, because it meant I got to pay tribute to him – not just his performance in the movie, but to HIM IN GENERAL – while he was still with us. So often I write about people who are already dead. But it’s wonderful to pay tribute to people while they are still here. I put my heart into that review. Not every review requires it. But that one – and Reynolds – I felt, did. Don’t just write off the film. Don’t focus on what’s wrong. In so doing, you are rejecting the enormous gift of a man like Burt Reynolds. He’s a figure who deserved – and deserves – serious critical appreciation … and if you DIS Last Movie Star and then write a heartfelt obit when he dies a couple of months later … well, okay, you do you. But I judge you for missing what’s really important. Here we were, with a film designed for him, written for him, prioritizing him, placing him at the center. Stop being so goddamned stingy.
Who in their right mind would look that gift horse in the mouth? Turns out, many critics did. And my heartfelt review brought me so many emails, some of the nicest emails I’ve ever received. I share this not to say “Look how great I am” but to say “Look at how much Burt Reynolds mattered to people that they would write me emails like this.” That’s what matters.
I’m going to share an email I received about my review. I’ve removed the name of the sender. It’s the most extraordinary email I’ve ever received, and I’ve received some truly amazing letters – but this email speaks to the love people have for Mr. Reynolds. This person wrote it to me after seeing the film, so Reynolds was still alive, and out there promoting the film still. This person wrote to me in frustration with the other reviews, with critics who were dismissive of the film, treating it as not worth their serious attention. This person was CORRECT to be irritated by that.
I just saw “The Last Movie Star” and was in tears I was so overwhelmed and moved. I read your review yesterday and was just floored. It was absolutely wonderful to read. I read it after being wildly frustrated by Ben Kenisberg’s review. Sure, he doesn’t have to like Burt Reynolds or the movie, but he wrote like he didn’t give a crap and I was so put off by his laziness and by the Times for publishing such crap. It’s disheartening as a fellow writer and lover of film, and for sure, as a lover of Burt Reynolds. Your writing not only told your audience you give a crap, but that you care about the context, you care about the bigger meaning, you took the time to share the wonderful and profound and ridiculous nuances in the film, in Burt’s career.
I met him a couple weeks ago after a screening of Deliverance and I grew up with him but when I got to meet him I found that I was so overwhelmed. It’s like not until that moment did I even understand how much his Joie de vivre and the joy of that laugh and how it brought my family together—it’s like it wasn’t until that moment that I registered that impact. I told him how much I loved his work and that I grew up with him, and the man took my hand in his and kissed me on the cheek. It was one of the most magical moments in my life.
Some friends think I’m kidding around because I am still talking about him, but my love is unironic. And I can even see how someone reading this could think I’m nuts. But I can see the bigger pieces, the indelible stuff that is larger than life, that is life.
I don’t know why at 35 all of this is hitting me so intensely now, and I type this rapidly on the subway because your writing, your review, it’s life, it’s the dirt, the sun, the rain, the wind, the scent, the sky, it’s the plants getting trampled and starting over, it’s blooming, the ebb and flow of the seasons. It so movingly captures and shares the film’s essence, his essence, and the fact that you give a shit.
Let me tell you something. I hear from a lot of people. I hear from Cary Grant fans, Elvis fans, John Wayne fans, Kristen Stewart fans, because of this or that thing I’ve written. Many wonderful emails from passionate fans, who really really care about the thing that they love.
But that email about Reynolds? That’s something else entirely. And it speaks to what I was getting at in the review: the love of him was something unique to him, and something far far more intense and passionate than “admiration” for his talent, or “appreciation” of his acting. It was HIM. People loved HIM. PERSONALLY. As I wrote: agents and marketing people and studios wish they could figure out a way to manufacture what Burt Reynolds had. They try. They fail. Because what he brought to the table was his and his alone. It can’t be manufactured.
Nobody said it better. Happy birthday, Burt.
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.
The problem with Elvis is like the problem of, say, the sun. The sun blots out stars. The sun creates heat waves. The sun is a good thing but there’s a hell of a lot else going on besides the sun. There might be a star behind the sun we’d love to know more about but the damn sun gets in the way. It’s a stupid analogy but if you spend enough time hanging around in the weeds of 1953-1957, not just skipping alongside Elvis, but hanging out with ALL of them, then you definitely get a sense of how much was going on – before Elvis, and “after” Elvis – but it’s just hard to SEE because the light is so blinding. Kind of like other playwrights doing good work in late 1500s England. Like, who cares, right? History doesn’t care. Or how you have to bodily move James Joyce out of the way in order to see what other Irish writers were doing in the 1920s. It just is what it is. You can bemoan how unfair it is but you’re participating in the least interesting part of the conversation.
Gene Vincent was a HUGE figure in the first wave of rockabilly, and he was extremely important in influencing the next wave – the boys coming up right behind, particularly the British invasion boys, who were stunned by him. Everyone was stunned by Elvis, but Elvis was a little bit otherworldly. His rise was so unprecedented you couldn’t even really ASPIRE to it. But Vincent’s level seemed much more achievable.
A couple things about Kim Stanley, who only appeared in 4 films, but was a hugely influential figure in theatre, live television, and Method acting. I mean, she’s the goddess. Jon Krampner’s 2006 biography of Kim Stanley is called Female Brando. And that’s how everyone talked about her. She inspired a generation. She holds the status of Laurette Taylor in the generation before. It’s so worth your while to track down the shows she did in live television (many are on Youtube). She was a sensation because of these performances. She went deeper, farther in her work than other people did.
When I interviewed my Actors Studio mentor Sam Schacht, Kim Stanley was a huge topic of conversation. Her work knocked him out as a young striving actor in New York of the 50s. (I quote Sam in the Film Comment piece too.)
Her four films are The Goddess (based loosely on the life of Marilyn Monroe), Seance on a Wet Afternoon (for which she was nominated for an Oscar), Frances (where she was terrifying as Frances Farmer’s mother) and – the role for which she is most well-known, because the film itself is so iconic – Pancho, the bar owner in the desert in The Right Stuff.
But this is not where you get the full Kim Stanley. Much of her good stuff can not be seen at all, since it was performances on Broadway in the 50s. You have to take the word of people who were there, who saw her in action.
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.
A couple of years ago, during a lengthy conversation about many different stars, Mitchell and I discussed Burt Reynolds. I recorded the whole thing. It was a game we played: I would throw a name at Mitchell, ask him to boil the person down into one word, and then elaborate. Here’s the transcript of the Burt Reynolds conversation. I knew it would be good and insightful – because it’s Mitchell – but our chat surpassed my wildest dreams.
ON BURT REYNOLDS
SHEILA: One word.
MITCHELL: Charisma.
Burt Reynolds had that thing that you can’t define. He was likeable. In a way, he’s sort of like the stars of today, who are learning to act on our time. They’re beautiful so they get some movie roles, and then we have to suffer through watching them learn to act if we choose to see movies that they’re in. Burt Reynolds was like that. He was so physical and so he could start in Westerns and those sorts of things, it didn’t require that much acting, but he could sit and he could study and he could watch. Burt Reynolds did one of those little TCM bios about Spencer Tracy.
MF: Spencer Tracy was his idol, his ideal. You never caught Spencer Tracy acting. Burt Reynolds was one of those people who took his charisma and took his opportunity and then became an actor. My favorite performance of his is in Starting Over with Jill Clayburgh. I think he’s wonderful in it. It was written by James L. Brooks, and Alan Pakula directed it. My point is that Burt Reynolds took his charisma and learned how to act. He took it seriously, he wanted to be good at it, and he did it. He was good in Deliverance, he was good in Starting Over.
I know we both hate the expression “guilty pleasure” but a movie that I love that isn’t great is him and Goldie Hawn in Best Friends.
The thing I want to say about Burt Reynolds has less to do with acting and it has to do with the way that he was as a person and it has to do with the kind of men that I have in my life. You know, I love a dude. I love a guy who’s a guy and is a big goofball of a guy.
MF: Look at David. Pat and Sam and all the guys in my life. They’re dudes. And Burt Reynolds was such a dude, and other dudes loved him, and dudes wanted to hang out with him, and yet one of his best friends for his entire life was Charles Nelson Reilly so he’s also the kind of dude that I like, who is not a homophobe, in a world where it would have been very easy for him to be one. This is part of Burt Reynolds’ personality that I have always really liked. I think that shifted as he got older.
My favorite Burt Reynolds was when he used to be on Carson. I have this whole thing about people who have the ability to be a talk show guest.
SOM: It’s like Neil Patrick Harris doing a magic trick on Jimmy Fallon.
MF: Yes. Neil Patrick Harris has it, Hugh Jackman has it. Joseph Gordon-Levitt has it. They have a charisma that shines through, they have a personality. They have prepared something smart and a schtick and something that’s going to be cool to listen to, not like Robert Pattinson who is boring and feels like he has to pretend to have lucked into a movie career, which I think is bullshit. Or Kristen Stewart who has the personality of wet toilet paper, although I think she was good as Joan Jett. Talk shows now are all about selling a product and my point is that Burt Reynolds had that thing where he was so funny “on the couch”.
MF: I want more people to be funny “on the couch” today. He had that stupid laugh, he was rakish, he used that persona, he used it in the Smokey and the Bandit movies. Charles Nelson Reilly and Dom DeLuise were his best friends? I mean, that’s fucking funny.
SOM: And he and Cary Grant were very good friends. They would go to the track, and do the guy things, but Grant also advised him on how to be a movie star, certainly.
MF: And then something happened. His personal life took over. When the tabloid era really kicked in, and he split with Loni Anderson, we ended up knowing too much about him and he seemed a little bit bitter, like time had passed him by. And then he got sick, people thought he was dying of AIDS, but it turns out he had this whole issue with his jaw and he couldn’t eat.
MF: It’s a little bit like that Lanford Wilson play, Serenading Louie. There’s nothing worse than an aging high school jock. I think he sort of let that get the better of him. I am sure he is a very charming man but there’s a desperation there that is the flip side of charisma.
SOM: The anxiety of losing your looks.
MF:P.T. Anderson gave him that amazing gift of Boogie Nights and he was so good in that.
MF: In Boogie Nights, Burt Reynolds is the fully realized potential of everything he had in his entire career. He’s masculine, he has a gravitas that goofy Burt Reynolds as a kid didn’t have, except for his size and his sheer athleticism, but he was also very warm, very real. He became a patriarch. And it’s a shame that there weren’t more opportunities to follow that up. It would have been interesting to have Burt Reynolds to do something like a television show. LIke Sally Field doing Brothers and Sisters. She can occasionally be in a movie and be very effective, but she’s also very effective on TV. Burt Reynolds had that sitcom, and it was all charm and charisma. It wasn’t the greatest show in the world, but he was very good.
SOM: He was the biggest male star in the world for …
I’d also like to mention…as Ronny has said too… that women get this movie much quicker than men. Women also understand. You know, for so many years men threw the word rape around and never thought about what they were saying. And I think the picture makes men think about something that’s very important, that we understand the pain and embarrassment and the change of people’s lives.
That’s a huge admission, I think.
MF: I think it is too. In some way, it says a lot about his persona, when he was younger, because he was very attractive. He was famously in the first famous cougar relationship. He dated Dinah Shore for many years. He was with Dinah Shore, who was his elder, and very beautiful and very famous and very respected and was in everybody’s living room every day. And on some level he was seen a little bit as a Boy Toy. But he was so confident in his masculinity and his sexuality, he didn’t sweat that. You never heard him apologizing for being on the arm of this older beautiful woman.
MF: It also makes you think what a hottie she was, too. Dinah Shore and Burt Reynolds in the 70s? You go get it, girl. She was even more wholesome than Doris Day because she didn’t have the chance to play any roles, she just really was this cheery beautiful woman who aged gracefully in front of us and scored the hottest hunk in Hollywood. The original cougar was Dinah Shore. Forget it.
SOM: One of the things I love about him is I always got the sense that he loved women. Not just as sex partners, but he thought they were hilarious and adorable and fun to be around. He got to be the person he wanted to be most with women.
MF: It’s interesting, right, because the male companions we know that he hung out with were not the most masculine of fellows. Charles Nelson Reilly and Dom DeLuise.
SOM: A lot of young male stars, who are on that sex symbol level now, have a difficult time relating to women, at least onscreen. I think it’s partly because women don’t have the place in films that they had when Burt Reynolds was coming up. Like, he had to get it up for Jill Clayburgh, he had to get it up for Goldie Hawn. These were powerful contenders on the screen. He would have been a wonderful screwball star in the 30s. There is nothing more awesome than a gorgeous guy who doesn’t give a shit and falls on his face.
MF: That’s true of William Powell and Cary Grant and so many of them.
SOM: It’s when John Wayne gets to be befuddled with Katharine Hepburn … “this woman is TORMENTING ME” – and because it’s John Wayne – yes, there is that male privilege thing that can be annoying – but we get to relax because we get to see John Wayne crack a little bit, and that’s always good. That’s what we want to see of these really powerful male stars.
MF: Glimpses of their vulnerability. I do think Burt Reynolds is one of those people, though, who did not always make good choices. Doing Lucky Lady with Liza, it seemed like a good idea at the time. Or doing At Long Last Love with Peter Bogdanovich. He often missed out. He’d be like, “That’s a good director, Liza Minnelli is Liza” and Lucky Lady did not work out, know what I mean? In between his successes, were a lot of dismal choices.
He often succeeded when he was the lead and he was a rogue. Smokey and the Bandit, Semi-Tough, The Longest Yard, Cannonball Run – as stupid as that movie is. His duet with Dolly Parton in Best Little Whorehouse. They are so adorable together, I don’t even care the movie is bad.
MF: And in the movie she sings “I Will Always Love You” to him, which, of course, is perfect.
MF: It’s that Robert Redford thing with his female co-stars. Reynolds isn’t standing in Dolly’s way. He’s letting Dolly be powerful, so he looks even more manly and successful.
You know who I think today has the Burt Reynolds charm is Ryan Reynolds, and it’s not just because I saw him do Celebrity Autobiography, and he read Burt Reynolds’s autobiography and he did a brilliant Burt Reynolds imitation. Ryan Reynolds read Burt, Sherri Shepherd read Loni Anderson, and Rachel Dratch read Burt Reynolds’ assistant. Ryan Reynolds did it AS Burt Reynolds. It was twofold: A, that was brilliant and his last name is Reynolds. But also, Ryan Reynolds walked into this very small space that this show takes place in. And Ryan Reynolds the movie star walks in, and he had to walk in through a very tight crowd from the back of the house because there’s no backstage. His charisma, his sexual charisma, his athleticism, his muscles, made the room blush.
MF: You can feel the sexual charisma of Burt Reynolds. And Ryan Reynolds has that. He also has that thing where he is very masculine, but also funny and self-deprecating, and also very charming with women.
SOM: I’ve enjoyed him very much. I like him in interviews too. He’s got some miles on him. He’s been around.
MF: And he’s done a lot of work already.
This is a total tangent. One of my favorite things as a kid was a very short-lived sitcom. It starred Eve Arden and Kaye Ballard. It was called The Mothers-In-Law.
MF: It was very short-lived and my brother and I loved it so much and there’s an episode of it on right now. Eve Arden’s daughter married Kay Ballard’s son. They live next door to each other and so they are constantly trying to meddle in their kids’ lives, and getting into trouble. It’s very Lucy and Ethel. These two brilliant comediennes. I haven’t seen it 30-something years and there are four episodes on today. Eve Arden is another interesting character. She set a precedent that people are still trying to reach. There’s a high watermark in her comic delivery that has yet to be matched. It’s the lost art of delivering the one line with a withering look and a gesture and an exit. Exemplified in Mildred Pierce.
MF: You want to study comic timing? Watch Eve Arden.
SOM: It’s deceptively simple. Otherwise more people would do it.
MF: You can’t really catch her doing it. It has to do with so many things that people take for granted now. Like, the study of voice. Back then, you didn’t even get famous unless you had a voice. She started out in radio, she studied. She worked on the freeing of her natural voice that the Brits do so brilliantly. For example, if I were to play for you tape recordings with your eyes closed, of James Mason, Vivien Leigh, Olivier, Kenneth Branagh, Maggie Smith, Judi Dench, you could tell me who they were instantly. This isn’t true of some of our best American actors. Nobody sounded like Eve Arden. She had her own show, a very successful radio and television show for years where she played the school teacher – Miss Brooks – and it was the misadventures of this lady who was unlucky in love but everybody loved her.
SOM: I just love these people who are in it for the long haul. That’s a casualty of being someone like Burt Reynolds. It’s not that I think he wasn’t in it for the long haul, but becoming that big a star is going to be a challenge for anyone, obviously.
MF: It’s almost easier for someone like Eve Arden to have a late-in-the-game success. Because she wasn’t so famous. One of the very few major movie stars who is continuing to do really interesting work is Catherine Deneuve because she is not denying what made her a movie star in the first place.
SOM: And that was what was interesting in how P.T. Anderson used Burt Reynolds in Boogie Nights, or used Tom Cruise in Magnolia. This is what the old studios used to do so brilliantly which we don’t do so much now: casting people because of what they remind us of. It’s like Bill Murray in Lost in Translation. We bring to it so much emotion already and he’s messing with the persona, but also deepening it. It’s been a whole second wave of his career. And for Burt Reynolds, that didn’t happen. Of course he was a sex symbol in a way that Bill Murray wasn’t. And it’s very challenging to grow old as a sex symbol.
MF: I think he did get caught up in that. The whole idea of using people for their persona: It’s not the greatest movie although it is a very successful movie, but when Dustin Hoffman and Barbra Streisand did Meet the Fockers. I can take or leave that movie, but their scenes in the movie is why that movie worked.
MF: And part of it is that we are bringing to it our emotions about them both. We are excited to see her, we are excited to see him. It’s Benjamin from The Graduate and it’s Tootsie and it’s Funny Girl, and it can be very very effective. The movie itself, blah blah, but that’s an example of how that can work. Figure it out, Hollywood.
SOM: It’s hard because film captures you in time. There are very few men who are as gorgeous as Burt Reynolds was during his prime. In Deliverance, the vest with the arms. When you’re captured at your prime on film like that, you have to have, I imagine, some sense of courage to get up there when you don’t look like that anymore. Because people are vicious. And I don’t know Burt Reynolds, obviously, but perhaps that is painful for him.
MF: With all of his charisma and confidence, and I don’t mean this in a stereotypical way, but I’m saying it in a stereotypical way to make a point, I think he does suffer from a woman’s vanity. He’s suffering from the same thing that has happened to the women of that era. Google pictures of him right now. He has had so much surgery. He is seemingly suffering from a level of vanity about his looks that is, for better or for worse, very feminine.
He was a sex symbol. He was a transition for us as well in how we viewed men and their sexuality. Men now are so happy to be objectified. Ewan McGregor‘s like, “Look at my cock” and all of the Twilight boys are like, “I will be shirtless til the day I die”, whereas men didn’t used to do that so much in the same way back then. But Burt Reynolds was the transition. He did that whole Cosmopolitan spread where all he did was cover his dick.
MF: There’s his hairy gorgeous body. That was a big deal. Men didn’t set themselves up in that cheesecake way. It’s a cheesecake photo as opposed to a beefcake photo. I mean, you can see his pubic hair in that Cosmo spread. Robert Mitchum was not showing his pubic hair.
SOM: And we are all the poorer for it.
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You could call [Josh White] the minstrel of the Blues, except that he is more than a minstrel of the Blues… Josh is a fine folksinger of anybody’s songs — southern Negro or southern white, plantation work songs or modern union songs, English or Irish ballads — any songs that come from the heart of the people…Josh White sings with such ease that you never feel like he is trying. This is the secret of true folk singing — for the folk song never tries to get itself sung. If it doesn’t ease itself into your soul and then out of your mouth spontaneously, to stay singing around your head forever, then it isn’t a folk song. And if the singer tries too hard and gets nowhere with such a song, that singer isn’t a folksinger. . . . From Blind Lemon to Burl Ives, from Bessie Smith to Aunt Molly Jackson, there runs a wave of singing easy. Josh White also sings easy.
— Langston Hughes, liner notes to Josh White Sings Easy (1944)
Last summer, sitting out on the porch at the lake house in New Hampshire, my mother somehow started reminiscing about Josh White, and the impact of his music. Mum grew up, came of age, in the folksinger era of the 1960s, and she remembered vividly his voice, his almost otherworldly guitar playing (Mum plays guitar, and gave guitar lessons all through my childhood). I started pulling up Josh White clips on my phone and we watched some of his live performances, and listened to some of the recordings. Mum was in tears. It was a beautiful bonding moment for us, and I was happy to be there with her as she walked down memory lane through the music of this artist.
It’s Josh White’s birthday today. When he died in 1969, the tributes poured out. Lena Horne counted him as a mentor. So did Eartha Kitt. He influenced generations of singers, across every genre. He merged “hillbilly” and blues, he merged gospel and blues, he brought jazz into the picture. He did it all, and often he did it first. Elvis loved him. When he died, Harry Belafonte put out a statement:
“I can’t tell you how sad I am. I spent many, many hours with him in the years of my early development. He had a profound influence on my style. At the time I came along, he was the only popular black folk singer, and through his artistry exposed America to a wealth of material about the life and conditions of black people that had not been sung by any other artist.”
