Ann-Margret entertaining US troops in Vietnam, 1966
Today is Ann-Margret’s birthday. Her autobiography, Ann-Margret: My Story is wonderful. What a career. And it’s still unfolding. There are so many classic scenes. Tommy. Carnal Knowledge.
Of course, too, there is the Elvis connection and that is what I will write about today, although there are so many other phases to her extraordinary career. These are edited re-posts on Viva Las Vegas, the one film she did with Elvis. One of his best, partially because of her presence, and their onscreen chemistry. In a perfect world, the two of them would have made 5 or 6 movies together, instead of just the one.
More on Viva Las Vegas – and him, and her – below the jump:
If King John should have been called “Three Mothers and One Illegitimate Man,” then Julius Caesar should be called “Brutus”. Caesar is assassinated at the halfway mark, and except for his Ghost, we never see him again. Brutus is the center of the play, morally and emotionally. He is the least “clear” of the characters, the one most privately tormented by his actions, the one with an interior life. He has to be convinced to join the conspiracy, and Cassius plays him like a violin – “seduces” him, which Cassius does deliberately, using the word. Brutus is not easily flattered – he’s man of moral upstanding, not really given to outward displays of emotion (see his botched oratory at Caesar’s funeral), but Cassius’ arguments do flatter him. Cassius’ tactic is, at first, “You are so wonderful, I wish you could see yourself the way others see you.” This would be difficult for most people to resist. The first two acts of the play involve the seduction of Brutus.
Brutus lives by a code. He has specific ideas about how the world should work. People like this, unfortunately, are often more susceptible to whispering seduction than those who are independent loosey-goosey. People don’t join cults. They join groups who share their strong beliefs about how the world should work. Brutus believes in abstract concepts like honor. He turns himself inside out to justify the murder of Caesar, he says he cares more about Rome than he cares about Caesar. He totally identifies himself with Rome. We can see what happens when someone totally identifies themselves – their whole world and persona – with a political cause or political group.
We know things are going wrong when Brutus starts referring to himself in the third person, like Caesar did. Brutus has been all “I” “I” “I”, and confidently so, but after Caesar’s death the third person creeps in. In order for Brutus to be “in politics”, he needs to kill the part of himself who knows who he is. His wife Portia feels this too. He has shut her out. This is one of the few good marriages in Shakespeare’s plays. You feel the love they have for each other. Brutus’ tenderness towards Lucius – his child servant – is also truly touching.
Julius Caesar is relatively short, compared to Shakespeare’s other works, and the language is noticeably different than anything in any other of his plays. There are almost whole entire scenes where the language is monosyllabic. It’s striking! It sounds weird and “other”. Perhaps this was Shakespeare’s idea of how ancient Romans spoke, and maybe they did speak like that, who knows … but the overall effect is very strange in a way that serves the play. The language is appropriate for blunt feelings and actions, and also a language where interiority has no place – or, at least, the language is not built to express ambivalence. Brutus murmurs his interiority late at night to himself, and Antony the extrovert blasts out his feelings during HIS funeral oration, in marked contrast to Brutus’ abstract rhetorical speech. In Antony’s speech, something else – something informal, something primal – – is allowed to speak.
You could say that in Antony’s speech, he is consciously playing the crowd, manipulating them: he knows they are fickle and easily swayed (he’s right: no matter who’s screaming at the podium, they scream back in agreement). Antony is also furious at what has been done, and is already plotting his revenge. Antony goes out there, knowing what he wants to accomplish, but his words are not just crowd manipulation. Brutus and the conspirators don’t stand a chance against Antony’s powerful eloquence.
When you watch Marlon Brando do the speech in the 1953 film … you see the real feeling powering those manipulative brilliant words. By the end of the speech, Brando is drenched in sweat – real sweat, you watch it appear on his face in real time, and he’s clearly on the verge of losing his voice. Brando uses the repetition built in – all of those “Brutus is an honorable man” – each time he hits them, they’re different, the ditch of the speech gets larger and larger. He’s using the words to do what he wants them to do, while pouring in complexity and real feeling. The whole “Marlon Brando mumbled” thing is stupid. No, he didn’t. He didn’t mumble in Streetcar. He doesn’t mumble here, either. I also have to point out what Brando does with the penultimate line: “when comes such another?” His voices rises, and he elongates the vowels into a scream: “when comes such anOOOOTHEEER”. Goosebumps.
The speech is all cut up in pieces on YouTube – the whole thing has to be about 15 minutes long:
Surrounded by classically trained heavy-hitters like James Mason and John Gielgud – who are both excellent and so fun to watch – Brando strolls in with slicked-down hair, a toga and sandals, and he seems like … he actually LIVES there. He shocked everyone at the time, and the hoity-toits were like, “This is an OUTRAGE.” He worked hard. He listened to tapes of Shakespearean actors saying the speech, he paid close attention to Gielgud, whose prosody/pantameter was immaculate, who also had played Mark Antony onstage. He talked to Gielgud, he asked for advice. I found this absolutely charming little conversation between Dick Cavett and John Gielgud about Brando in Julius Caesar:
I am not an expert at ALL, but one of the things about Shakespeare which takes getting used to is that the thought is IN the line. I think Olivier said that? I can’t remember. George Bernard Shaw had a lengthy correspondence with celebrated actress Ellen Terry, and in a discussion about Shakespeare, Shaw wrote: “Play to the lines, through the lines, but never between the lines. There simply isn’t time for it.” The thought is in the line, follow the punctuation, stay on beat, and there’s the thought. This isn’t the case with modern plays. With other scripts, you need your backstory and subtext. A well-placed pause can be very eloquent, but rarely in Shakespeare.
There is such a thing as talent. I won’t discount it. Brando just knew “how to work” – he had technique, he had been on Broadway, he knew. He was not precious with himself, he got Gielgud on tape saying the speech so he could hear how a legend would do it. Technique means you do what’s necessary to sneak your way in to a role or a theatrical context and you have lots of tools at your disposal, not just one or two tools.
Watching John Gielgud or Richard Burton or Lawrence Olivier “do” Shakespeare shows how you don’t really need to ADD much. What you need is there on the page. I am sorry I wasn’t alive to ever see Ralph Richardsom in action – his Falstaff was legendary – although his performances in The Heiress and Long Day’s Journey Into Night provide more than enough evidence of his uncanny vocal power. And with him, it might have been a trick, it might not have been, it really doesn’t matter: the voice went straight to his soul.
Manipulating the voice to bring out the text is a skill, especially since the language is amazingly fast! If you’re used to doing modern plays and suddenly you’re doing Shakespeare, you’re going to be tossed around in a whirlwind. You don’t have time to “set up” an emotional moment in between lines. You can’t keep up. “Listening and talking” takes on a whole different meaning in these plays. “Listening talking” is built into the language already. Don’t slow shit down. Like Shaw said, “There simply isn’t time for it.”
All of this is to say: in the “friends, Romans, countrymen” speech, Brando’s emotion is IN the line. One could never look at the performance and say “He’s singing the language”, but he is doing what the language demands, and he is doing it without complicating it. Emotion/thought is in the line. Also, what he’s doing is very CLEAN, and yet he sacrifices none of the emotion required.
Antony takes up less space in the narrative than Brutus and Cassius. They all take up more space than Caesar does. Antony exits the narrative mostly after his oration until he roars back at the end. Interesting what is missing here: there’s a lot of reference to how much Caesar loved Brutus. Brutus was Caesar’s “angel”. But except for a small moment in the opening, we barely them together. This seemingly central relationship does not exist in the text. We just have to take everyone’s word for it!
Cassius is not exactly Iago in his manipulations because there’s understandable motivation behind Cassius’ behavior, he knows he needs Brutus to “legitimize” the assassination. He must soften Brutus up. Still, there is a Iago-like sense of Cassius corrupting the pure. Brutus is too naive be in politics, probably. Politics are dirty. Brutus is Jimmy Carter. Brutus treats Antony with generosity, giving Antony permission to speak at Caesar’s funeral. Cassius balks, pulling him aside to say “I don’t think that’s a good idea.” And – as we have just discussed – it was NOT a good idea.
Hamlet is coming down the pike for Shakespeare, and Brutus – insomniac suicidal Brutus – does feel like an early version of Hamlet, but there are also elements of Macbeth/Lady Macbeth in there, the guilt, the sleeplessness – and the other spooky things Shakespeare is getting more comfortable exploring: ghosts, madness, visions. Julius Caesar is one of the most supernatural of Shakespeare’s plays thus far, and until we get to The Tempest. The Soothsayer’s warning is just the tip of the iceberg. Brutus’ wife Portia feels the dread to a prescient degree. She knows something isn’t right. Calpurnia has prophetic dreams, and begs Caesar not to go the Senate that day. (The women, of course, have intuition the men lack). Nature itself has gone berserk: Thunderstorms. Lightning. A lion is seen in the Capitol. An owl is seen during the day. Comets whizz through the sky. (Shakespeare uses “whizz”, which I assumed was a very modern word but … I guess it’s not!)
The play lays out such a stark conscious difference between day and night. There’s a clock striking one, two, three … never mind the anachronism. We are marching towards the Ides of March. When it’s night, you feel the darkness, the shadows, the comets whizzing by above. The first three acts take place in a 24-hour period, and with each scene darkness descends even further. The scene where the conspirators show up at Brutus’ house at 2 o’clock in the morning is one of the most chilling scenes in Shakespeare. They’re hiding their faces “even in darkness”, clustered at Brutus’ door.
In grad school, I took a “classics” class with Doug Moston, whom I paid tribute to in my first year of this here blog. GREAT class. Moston’s dad was Murray Moston (the guy who got his hand blown off in Taxi Driver, the subway token-taker in After Hours), and Moston didn’t even graduate high school, I don’t think, but he was a deeply learned guy and a GREAT teacher. He was the one who organized publication of Shakespeare’s first folio in facsimile (I still have my copy). He taught us how to read it, he made us play scenes FROM it, he handed out rolls of paper (“roles”) with only YOUR lines on it and had us play from that, because that’s how it used to be done. He taught us about how Shakespeare put everything in the language because there weren’t elaborate stage directions. The most elaborate he got was “Exeunt, pursued by a bear” – perhaps the greatest single stage direction in theatrical history.
So, to use an obvious example, if the scene takes place at night, then the characters will talk about how it’s night. This is where “O I am slain” comes from. It’s a clue to the actor about what is happening, and it’s all in the lines people say. One exercise I won’t forget: Doug handed out sides, randomly assigned us each a part, and had us read it out loud. Don’t worry about acting it, just read. The scene was Act II, scene i, of Julius Caesar, the conspiracy scene. He had us read this:
CASSIUS:
This is Trebonius.
BRUTUS:
He is welcome hither.
CASSIUS:
This, Decius Brutus.
BRUTUS:
He is welcome too.
CASSIUS:
This, Casca; this, Cinna;
And this, Metellus Cimber.
BRUTUS:
They are all welcome.
What watchful cares do interpose themselves
Betwixt your eyes and night?
Pretty straightforward. Introductions being made. But Doug had us listen carefully, to close our eyes. Because yes, there’s the thing happening in the scene, but he didn’t want us to get distracted by the acting. He wanted us to hear what Shakespeare was doing with the language.
Read it out loud and notice the frequency of the letter “s” – not just in the introductions – although that’s where it’s most obvious – but in the scene overall. Everyone’s name has an “s” in it. When you hear the language (it’s only perceivable when you hear it out loud), disregard the words they’re saying … all you really hear is “ssssssss”. The SOUND of the scene is whispered gossip. “Psst”. “Psst.” “Psst.” “Whissssper …” “Whisssper”. It also sounds like snakes hissing, and we’ve already heard Brutus mention an adder and Caesar compared to a serpent’s egg.
Theatrically, “S” is a sound that carries. If people whisper over the water cooler and don’t want to be overheard, they should stick to vowel sounds: “o” or “e” don’t carry across space, but an “S” will ricochet across a room as though there is a megaphone attached to it. In a theatre, this is even more true.
The ACTION of the scene – what the characters are DOING (conspiring to assassinate someone in a secret meeting) – is IN the language. Ssssssssss … the whisper of conspiracy.
This post is all over the place. I am not a scholar! But this is what comes up for me with Julius Caesar.
“Better the wound forever seeking balm
Than this gray calm!”
–Jessie Redmon Fauset, from “Dead Fires”
Jessie Redmon Fauset, whose birthday it is today, was a “forgotten writer” for many years, after her heyday in the 20s and 30s. Her work was resurrected by feminist academics and scholars in the 1970s, after which awareness of her has risen (complete with full biographies and critical studies of the groundbreaking aspects of her work at the time when she was writing it).
She was born into poverty in 1882. I believe Fauset’s mother died when Fauset was young, but not before the importance of education was communicated to the child. Fauset was valedictorian of her mostly-white high school class. She set her sights on Bryn Mawr but was rejected due to her race. Cornell, however, accepted this promising young student. At Cornell, she studied classical languages, and then got a Master’s in French from the University of Pennsylvania. Fluent to the point where she was bilingual, she visited France often, and translated many black European and African authors into English for the first time.
She taught French at a prestigious and exclusive black high school in Washington D.C. (where poet Anne Spencer was the librarian for 20 years – post about Spencer here. The two knew one another, were colleagues, members of the NAACP: there’s probably a good story about their friendship!) During the ‘teens of the 20th century, Fauset taught for the school year and spent summer vacations in France, studying at Le Sorbonne, or visiting France’s colonies in Africa.
Fauset joined the NAACP and – in around 1917-1918 – she started contributing to the organization’s magazine, The Crisis, founded by W.E.B. DuBois. Fauset’s op-eds, poems, essays, journalism, etc. so impressed DuBois he offered her the editor-ship of the entire magazine. She accepted. DuBois asked Fauset to move to New York and she did, placing herself at the vibrant center of the Harlem Renaissance. She was a major figure. She basically “discovered” Langston Hughes. Hughes wrote:
“Jessie Fauset at The Crisis, Charles Johnson at Opportunity, and Alain Locke in Washington were the three people who midwifed the so-called New Negro literature into being. Kind and critical—but not too critical for the young—they nursed us along until our books were born.”
Most of the Black writers she championed had zero experience in being published anywhere. She was often the first editor they encountered. So she was nurturing, but also exacting. In this fashion, she was a great mentor to not only Hughes, but Claude McKay (post about him here), Countee Cullen (post about him here), Jean Toomer (post about him here), her former colleague Anne Spencer. Fauset served as editor from 1919 to 1926.
Fauset eventually got another teaching gig at a high school in the Bronx, where she taught French and Latin for 20 years. She also wrote 4 novels in the 1920s and 1930s; novels which took place mostly among the Black middle-class (an unheard-of ‘category’ in literature at the time.) The hierarchy of skin color in the Black community was one of her main themes, but she also addressed feminism, economics, as well as what it was like to be part of the generation whose parents and grandparents had been slaves. There can’t be a bigger generation gap than that.
Her first novel, There Is Confusion, was rejected by a publisher (white, of course), whose comment was “white readers just don’t expect negroes to be like this”. The title of the book came from a poignant and troubling line from Tennyson’s “The Lotos-eaters”:
There is confusion worse than death,
Trouble on trouble, pain on pain–
If you want to learn more about this amazingly learned pioneer, in researching this piece I stumbled upon this essay in The New Yorker, which is well worth checking out.
Here are two of her poems, as well as an excerpt from There is Confusion.
Dead Fires
If this is peace, this dead and leaden thing,
Then better far the hateful fret, the sting.
Better the wound forever seeking balm
Than this gray calm!
Is this pain’s surcease? Better far the ache,
The long-drawn dreary day, the night’s white wake,
Better the choking sigh, the sobbing breath
Than passion’s death!
Rondeau
When April’s here and meadows wide
Once more with spring’s sweet growths are pied
I close each book, drop each pursuit,
And past the brook, no longer mute,
I joyous roam the countryside.
Look, here the violets shy abide
And there the mating robins hide—
How keen my sense, how acute,
When April’s here!
And list! down where the shimmering tide
Hard by that farthest hill doth glide,
Rise faint strains from shepherd’s flute,
Pan’s pipes and Berecyntian lute.
Each sight, each sound fresh joys provide
When April’s here.
Excerpt from her first novel There Is Confusion (notice how she gets an entire world and its context and its generation gap into her specific description of one young man’s journey):
But alas for poor Joel! His idea of greatness and his Mammy’s were totally at variance. The kind of greatness he had envisaged had been that which gets one before the public eye, which makes one a leader of causes, a “man among men.” He loved such phrases! At night the little boy in the tiny half-story room in that tiny house in Virginia picked out the stories of Napoleon, Lincoln and Garrison, all white men, it is true; but Lincoln had been poor and Napoleon unknown and yet they had risen to the highest possible state. At least he could rise to comparative fame. And when he was older and came to know of Frederick Douglass and Toussaint l’Ouverture, he knew if he could but burst his bonds he, too, could write his name in glory.
This was no selfish wish. If he wanted to be great he also wanted to do it honestly and faithfully, the things that bring greatness. He was to that end dependable and thorough in all that he did, but even as a boy he used to feel a sick despair,–he had so much against him. His color, his poverty, meant nothing to his ardent heart; those were nature’s limitations, placed deliberately about one, he could see dimly, to try one’s strength on. But that he should have a father broken and sickened by slavery who lingered on and on! That after that father’s death the little house should burn down!
He was fifteen when that happened and he and his mother both went to work in the service of Harvey Carter, a wealthy Virginian, whose wife entertained on a large scale. It was here that Joel learned from an expert chef how to cook. His wages were small even for those days, but still he contrived to save, for he had set his heart on attending a black seminary. Some day he would be a minister, a man with a great name and a healing tongue. These were the dreams he dreamed as he basted Mrs. Carter’s chickens or methodically mixed salad dressing.
His mother knew his ideas and loved them with such a fine, if albeit uncomprehending passion and belief, that in grateful return he made her the one other consideration of his life, weaving unconsciously about himself a web of such loyalty and regard for her that he could not have broken through it if he would. Her very sympathy defeated his purpose. So that when she, too, fell ill on a day with what seemed for years an incurable affection, Joel shut his teeth and put his frustrated plans behind him.
“Sometimes I think no matter how one is born, no matter how one acts, there is something out of gear with one somewhere, and that must be changed. Life at its best is a grand corrective.” — Jessie Redmon Fauset
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’ve had my best times trailing a Mainbocher evening gown across a sawdust floor. I’ve always loved high style in low company.” — Anita Loos
Anita Loos’ screenwriting credits are so extensive it’s impossible to absorb them. She’s most well-known for writing the book Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, which was made into a successful movie a couple of times – first in 1928 and then again in 1953. The 1953 version, starring Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe, is the one everyone knows.
According to IMDB her earliest credit was in 1912. Born in 1889, she started out writing treatments and scenarios with the Biograph when she was just a teenager. Many people wrote treatments and scenarios for films that weren’t ever even made, but Loos’ WERE turned into films. She had a knack for the gig. She also wrote titles for silent films (including, famously, the interstitial titles for DW Griffith’s Intolerance).
With the advent of sound, moving into the pre-Code era, she continued churning out scripts, logging multiple credits a year. She wrote the screenplay to the shocking (still) Red-Headed Woman, starring Jean Harlow and directed by Jack Conway. I love this jokey pic of Loos and Harlow:
Loos also wrote the hard-hitting Midnight Mary, directed by William Wellmann and starring Loretta Young as a young woman who emerges from a destitute childhood and descends into the criminal underworld.
Loos was a finger-on-the-pulse writer, and this was one of the reasons she was so valued by studios. She grew up in and around show business and from her earliest memory she was surrounded by shady rakish barely-socially-acceptable humans, from the lower rungs of society’s ladder. The outlaws, the actors, the reprobates. Her familiarity with the denizens of that world infuses her writing. Middle-class aspirations were not her thing. She SAW all of it around her and lampooned it.
She wrote original works and also adapted popular works for the screen too, like The Women, a legit classic almost 81 years later. Think about that. Claire Boothe Luce’s hit play was in good hands.
Loos wrote Babes in Arms, a film dealing with a situation she had lived it: the transformative journey from vaudeville to silent films to talkies, all happening in one generation. Babes in Arms predates Singin’ in the Rain by 20 years.
Her marriage to Jack Emerson was not easy. She was, by far, the bigger name, and he had a problem with that. Little did he know just how much bigger her name would get. She wrote Gentlemen Prefer Blondes almost on a whim, in 1926, piecing together a bunch of different scenarios into one uproarious farce, with acute observations about men, women, money, sex. It didn’t take her long to write it or to find a publisher. She had a deep friendship with “the sage of Baltimore,” H.L. Mencken, at the height of his fame. That such a staid guy, living at home with his mother, would become an emblem of the Jazz Age is one of American culture’s little mysteries, but that’s what happened. Mencken got a kick out of Loos, and they exchanged many letters. Mencken loved Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, saying to to her in a letter “You’re the first American writer to ever poke fun at sex.” And of COURSE a woman would be the first in that arena. Women have much more of a sense of humor about the absurdities of sex (obligatory and tiresome #notallmen) and they are less sentimental about the whole thing. They can’t afford to be sentimental, not with the specter of childbirth/rape looming over everything, even the most casual of encounters. Mencken helped usher Gentlemen Prefer Blondes to publication and reviewed it favorably in his column. His column was read by millions. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes was a bestseller.
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.
“One must know a bad performance to know a good one. You can’t be middle-of-the-road about it, just as you can’t be middle-of-the-road about life. I mean, you can’t say about Hitler, I can take him or leave him. Well, I can’t be middle-of-the-road about a performance, especially my own. I feel that if I can vomit at seeing a bad performance, I’m ahead of the game.” — Patricia Bosworth
The great Patricia Bosworth died from Covid-19 within the first month of quarantine. She was 86 years old. At the time, she was working on a new book. So far it hasn’t come out.
Bosworth was an actress, journalist, professor, writer. She wrote the best actor biography ever written, and I would also argue it’s one of the best biographies period – and I’ve read a ton: her biography of Montgomery Clift: Montgomery Clift: A Biography is a masterpiece. Compellingly detailed, based on first-hand interviews (she knew all the players: everyone talked to her), Clift emerges from the pages as a three-dimensional living breathing hurting soul, with a delicate yet powerful talent, and a fragility which overwhelmed him. The final section, where she lays out his rapid decline, is one of the most harrowing things I’ve ever read in any biography. His pain exhales from the page, expressed through Bosworth’s compassion but also her willingness to tell the truth. About all of it.
“In close-up, Monty was absolutely riveting. One was practically absorbed into his eyes, which were clearly formidable and perhaps his best asset as an actor. Large, grey, infinitely expressive in his beautiful but rather deadpan face, they could register yearning, intelligence, and despair in quick succession.” — Patricia Bosworth, Montgomery Clift: A Biography
I met her many times at the Actors Studio, where she was a lifetime member. She studied with Lee Strasberg back in the heady excited 1950s. Arthur Penn was the first to cast her in something and it is how she began a career, not really knowing what she was doing (it happened early for her). She learned on the job.
When I met her, I had already read her Clift biography. It made me a fan for life. I have read everything she has written since, including her fascinating biographies of Jane Fonda and Diane Arbus. (Here’s an interview with her about Diane Arbus.)
Her small biography of Marlon Brando, an entry in the Penguin Lives series, is a necessary corrective to all the bullshit that’s out there about him, written by people who know nothing about acting. Read it: Marlon Brando. Bosworth knows about acting. She’s sensitive and specific about what he is actually DOING. I rely on that biography a lot in my own writing.
Patricia Bosworth, her mother Anna Gertrude Bosworth, brother Bartley Crum Jr. and father Bartley Crum.
Bosworth approached her subjects understanding that life is complex and so are people. She didn’t put people on pedestals, and so she didn’t feel the need to go around tearing them down. Her father and her brother committed suicide. Her father was an attorney, famous for defending the Hollywood Ten and other victims of the HUAC so-called “red scare”. For this, he paid a price, lost most of his clients and status. Like so many other victims of that horrific period of un-American ANTI-American persecution, he eventually couldn’t take it. Even more horrific, his son committed suicide committed suicide six years earlier, during his freshman year at college. The family never discussed any of this, and Patricia Bosworth said that she never said a word about ANY of this for forty years.
Bosworth’s first memoir is about growing up in those HUAC years, at the epicenter of it in her father’s home. She got married when she was 17. “I was a child bride,” she said. She was flung out onto her own. She was an actor. She was a bohemian but also a wife. (The marriage didn’t last. Shocker!) It was New York, early 1950s.
She saw, without a shadow of a doubt because she lived it, that some people are, let’s say, more special than others when it comes to being artists. It’s not a level playing field. And that’s just the way it goes. And so let’s dig in to WHY someone is special. This goes against the grain of many biographers who look for the chinks in the armor, or highlight the controversies, rather than dig into the art. Bosworth digs into why. She asks: What made Clift stand out as an actor? What was it about him? Everybody felt it. It was undeniable. She was interested in how people worked. She understood the problems of the creative process, she understood what it meant to try to be a good actor, and she understood that understanding “how someone works” is essential and you have to get a handle on it if you want to be a writer.
You always feel like you are in good hands when you read something by Patricia Bosworth.
Her two memoirs are wonderful, not just for her writing about her personal life, but for the portraits they give of long-gone eras. She knew and interacted with so many of the famous players, because of the family she was born into. She writes about herself in the way she writes about her other subjects. She is honest. She does not flatter herself.
Her second memoir has the evocative title The Men in My Life: A Memoir of Love and Art in 1950s Manhattan. She puts you back into 1950s Manhattan with so much vividness you can practically taste the sugary Coca Cola. It’s the kind of book I would love to someday write.
Bosworth was a famous writer and journalist but I knew her as the white-haired woman at the Actors Studio who was so nice to us newcomers. I am so pleased, in retrospect, that I got to tell her in person how much her book about Montgomery Clift meant to me. I read it in college, when I was studying acting, and seeing as much as I could of the “old” actors. Her book was such a good guide, and I told her how much I learned about acting just from reading that book. She was so gracious. I’m sure so many people came up to her over the years saying the same thing, but she seemed as touched and moved when I said it as though it was the first time. This is the kind of person she was.
You can’t understand Barbra Streisand if you don’t know the famous story of her audition for I Can Get It For You Wholesale, which ended up being her big break. She made a splash in her Broadway debut, which of course was just a prelude to the superstardom which came with Funny Girl. You can’t understand Barbra Streisand if you don’t understand the revolution that she was, a revolution born out of beauty-standards – those beauty standards rooted in anti-Semitism, and shutting out “the other”. The Anglo-Saxon dominance not an accident. You have to understand all of these things. You can thrill to her voice, but you must get the context. The rise of Barbra Streisand was a revolution.
But how did this revolution happen? On a deep-down level, confounding if you examine it too closely, it happened because she believed in herself more than other people – including her mother, including the world – believed in her. She believed in herself so much that she walked into that audition with an entire FAKE backstory set up, a make-believe which set her free. Did she need such trickery? Wasn’t her voice – a once-in-a-generation voice – enough? Clearly not. She had to believe in herself so much that she literally forced others – who only saw her “ethnic” features and thought them ugly – to believe.
Michael Shurtleff gave us an eyewitness account in his essential book Audition. He sat in the theatre, watching an unknown teenage girl audition for the Broadway show, I Can Get It for You Wholesale.
Even when you know the story, when you accept that yes, Barbra Streisand did all this, the question remains: Why? How? How did she get the NOIVE? There was no gum?? Barbra!!
I had Barbra Streisand audition a couple of times for shows and the reaction was:’She sings great, but what can we do with a girl who looks like that?’ Along came I Can Get It For You Wholesale. I thought the role of Miss Marmelstein might just fit Miss Streisand.
I scheduled her last on the day of auditions. She arrived late, rushed onstage in her raccoon coat, explaining she was late because she’d seen the most marvelous shoes in a thrift shop window and just had to go in to get them. Only one of each pair fit, but she loved them anyhow and didn’t we think they were wonderful? She was wearing two unmatched shoes. She started to sing and then stopped after two notes, chewing gum all through this rapid-fire monologue, saying she must have a stool, could anyone find a stool for her, please? By this time the auditors were muttering to me, ‘Where did you find this nut?’ She sang the first two notes of her song, then stopped again. This time to take the gum from her mouth and squash it on the underside of the stool. THEN she sang. She mesmerized ’em. They asked her to sing two more. After that, they converged on the stage to explore their new discovery up close.
David Merrick, who was the producer, took me to the back of the house alone.
‘I thought I told you,’ he said,’that I don’t want ugly girls in my shows!”
‘I know, David, but she’s so talented.’
‘Talented, shmalented. I don’t want ugly girls in my shows.’
‘But –‘
‘There’s no buts! Look at them, swarming all over her. They love her! What am I going to do now? I’ll never get rid of her!’
Then – when Miss Streisand and all the others had gone, Mr. Laurents called me back. He was alone, sitting onstage on the stool Miss Streisand had commandeered.
‘Look at this.’ Arthur Laurents said to me. ‘Run your hand over the bottom of this stool.’
I did. There was no gum. She hadn’t recovered her gum. Arthur had been watching to see if she would. There had never been any gum.
‘My God,’ said Arthur. ‘What have we got on our hands here?’
It was the first inkling of what an incredible actress this young singer was: an adventuress who at 18 had her shit together so strong, she took the risk of putting on an act about a raccoon coat, shoes that didn’t match, a stool, and a piece of imaginary gum.
It wasn’t long after that, Mr. Merrick was paying her $5,000 a week to do Funny Girl and she was the biggest star on Broadway.
Camille Paglia, in her essay on Streisand (“Brooklyn Nefertiti: Barbra Streisand”), wrote:
There has always been a conflict in Barbra Streisand, as in Oscar Wilde, between her populist politics and her aristocratic and tyrannical persona. In early pictures, with her hair swept back, she looks so grand, like a Russian duchess. This is what gay guys liked about her – the arrogant, monarchical diva hood, which is definitely not democratic. Streisand has always been a kind of drag queen herself. That’s true of Sandra Bernhard too, and it’s true of me and of a lot of women who didn’t feel particularly feminine when they were growing up. For women like that, by the time you figure out what femininity is, you’ve become a female impersonator.
I’ve written in Sexual Personae that all the great stars imitated by gay men – Mae West, Marlene Dietrich, Bette Davis, Diana Ross, Joan Collins, and Barbra Streisand – are androgynous. That’s why their romantic relationships are so bad, because they are autocratic and autonomous. As artists, they need no one else.
Streisand performing “He Touched Me” in her massive Central Park concert in 1967, for me, is peak Barbra, although those early years have so many peaks. This is one of those performances where, no matter how many time I’ve watched it, and it has to be in the 100s now, my whole body – yes, my whole body – shivers with goosebumps as she reaches that final section. I am typing this now and have goosebumps just typing it. It is a purely physical phenomenon – rare in my experience. Elvis’ “If I Can Dream” does that. Whitney Houston’s Star-Spangled Banner. Judy Garland’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic” and “Ol’ Man River” do that. James Brown on the TAMI Show. Involuntary full-body response. Each time. Always. I’m never “over it”.
One of THE reading experiences last year was reading her memoir. It was a treasure trove at over 1,000 pages. It was so fun because everybody I knew was reading it at the same time. So we’d text each other. “Did you get to this part yet?” “Where are you in the book?” I know pretty much everything about her, at least biography-wise, but she’s so private in other ways that the book was a revelation. I was thrilled at how much she wrote about her process! Her acting process! It’s so in-depth, she does so much research, and just hearing how she thinks about those things was so interesting. Answers to the questions no one asks her.
I’ll let my friend Mitchell have the final word. On occasion, at different story-telling events, he has performed the following piece he wrote, complete with audio-visual clips to accompany, which he calls “The Tao of Barbra“.
“I arrived in Hollywood without having my nose fixed, my teeth capped, or my name changed. That is very gratifying to me.” — Barbra Streisand
Henry V is powerful propaganda. “We happy few” has been an inspiration for soldiers for hundreds of years – particularly in WWII – and “band of brothers”, of course, has deep resonance for anyone who has fought a war. The sense of identification is pure and comes from a deeply experiential place.
However. Agincourt is not exactly Normandy. The French are not the Nazis. England and France were never friends but what Henry V does is unprovoked aggression – a land grab, a power grab, a wealth grab, a princess grab. Cynically, two priests are brought in to “sell” the need for war to Henry and their words are cloaked in Christian propaganda and also – even more cynically – a treatise on succession, how France’s king is somehow illegitimate, and the French throne is rightfully Henry’s. But remember, Henry himself is the inheritor of a stolen crown. So is this a story of a man who punishes others for the things he does himself? Hamlet clocks his own hypocrisy. Hamlet is surrounded by mirrors and he can’t help but look within, and despises what he sees. Henry has no introspection. He is not an interior character. His first soliloquy comes in Act IV. Act IV!! The same guy who started off Henry Part 1 with the stunning “I know you all” soliloquy, taking us into his confidence the moment he is alone. Here, he is opaque, a glimmering glittering symbol who … what am I trying to say … buys his own bullshit, I think?
For example: Henry calls himself “a Christian king”. (This is Red Flag #1 at this point. But never mind.) The bishops gave his “excursion” into France the stamp of approval. They glaze him, as the kids say, with how holy he is, this is God’s wish, etc. Henry barely speaks. He just listens. 20 lines later, however, Henry receives the insulting “gift” of tennis balls from the French Dauphin, taunting him on his frivolity, his wild past, his youth. Henry explodes into rage of the “blood and soil” variety. He wanted France for multiple diplomatic-imperialistic reasons, but after the tennis ball “gift”, he wants to destroy France. So yes, the Bishops said, “Your Highness, you are destined to be king of France” (for their own greedy reasons), but the way Shakespeare lays it out, it’s so clear. Henry wants that land but he’s blood-thirsty war-hungry only after the tennis balls. In other words: it’s petty and personal. And Lord save us from leaders who are petty and personal. Henry will take out his anger on the French people. He talks with relish of the widows he will make, the babies that will be killed … it’s unforgivable. The Geneva Convention was invented for leaders like Henry!
And don’t even get me started on Henry’s “wooing” of Katherine, with its language of conquest.
Henry reigned 200 years before Shakespeare wrote the play. Henry was still a legend, a hugely attractive figure. He hung out in taverns, he was a king. He defeated the French in a stunning victory where the English were outnumbered. He married the French princess. (Never mind that it all fell apart after he died.) In Shakespeare’s day, a mighty monarch was on the throne, who had turned herself into a living symbol – far more successfully than Henry V did. The Spanish Armada had basically just happened. There was a lot of reason for English people to be proud of their Queen. Henry V was a very attractive mirror, at least on the surface.
After reading through the two parts of Henry IV, the cumulative effect in Henry V is … mixed feelings. Henry was so compelling in parts 1 and 2. Yes, you got glimpses of the future king in Henry IV, when he kills Hotspur (although Harold Goddard kind of made me re-think some of that: see his quotes below), and also when he put on his dad’s crown while his dad literally lay dying … his occasional cruel comments to Falstaff, the “I know you all” soliloquy which lets you know HE knows exactly what he’s doing and why. The public rejection of Falstaff is of course key and – in a way – Henry V, even with its rousing patriotism and battles, etc. – feels like an epilogue, i.e. Life After Falstaff. Henry’s Act IV soliloquy is beautiful and heartfelt, about the difficulties of being king … but it’s kind of like when some rock bands become so famous they suddenly can only write about famous people things. “It’s hard to be a king” is not exactly “to be or not to be”.
Henry’s transformation makes sense. It’s a tragic change, although Henry V doesn’t present it as such, at least not explicitly. Falstaff is mentioned maybe twice – there’s Mistress Quickly’s description of his death – very touching – and then later in the play, on the battlefield, Gower and Fluellen have a little conversation about the similarities between Alexander the Great and Henry V, and it’s kind of like … “do you all really want to have this discussion DURING the battle?” A small comedic break, Fluellen’s ongoing sob session with Roman warfare is comedic, his word pronunciation is comedic, his brain always in the ancient past. Fluellen makes the comparison, mentioning that Alexander killed his best friend. In other words, he includes “killing best friend” in the list of similarities. Gower, who has been resisting the comparison all along, balks at this, saying, “Henry never killed his best friend” and Fluellen says, “Yes he did” even though he has forgotten the “fat knight”‘s name.
By the time we get to the Battle of Agincourt, there’s Mr. Christian King telling the soldiers to “kill their prisoners”. Horrific. A stark contrast to Prince Hal. Even Falstaff’s name being uttered on the battlefield shows how much things have changed. And not for the better. Henry is most interesting in his own play when he dresses up in disguise just like the good old days to circulate among his soldiers.
Henry’s victory did not “stick”. He died, his child son became King, and all hell broke loose across the land in the Wars of the Roses, which stretched out over 20-plus years! Fighting the outward enemy turned inward as the Lancasters and the Yorks murdered each other off, crawling their way towards the crown. Henry’s victory, then, had no real meaning. I’m sorry I realize my unimpressed attitude is probably because I’m Irish and my Mayo ancestors were catapulting boulders at the British ships patrolling Galway Bay, building forts – the ruins of which I have wandered through – pillaging the shipwrecks, and pillaging the sailing ships too. At the very same time Shakespeare was writing his plays, the O’Malley clan was led, ferociously, by my famous pirate ancestor Gráinne O’Malley. So I like my family’s history better. haha
However, I will admit, in this last re-read, when I came to the line “Old men forget” a wave of goosebumps covered my body. Not an exaggeration. In fact, I had goosebumps as I typed it out. I know the speech almost by heart from that moment on. One of the great speeches in Shakespeare’s work.
I watched Olivier’s version in high school, because a theatre director talked about Olivier’s line reading of “Cry ‘God for Harry, England, and Saint George!” – basically imitating with Olivier did, and I still remember how Kimber showed astonishment at the boldness of what Olivier did, the build of it, but also the little breaths and the crescendo of volume as he culminated everything in that rallying cry:
I was 16 and a hungry young actor who could feel my own ignorance and so wanted to nod sagely as Kimber described this to me, I wanted to alREADY have seen it. So I rented it! Listen, we all have to start somewhere and thanks, Kimber, again, for everything. I saw the Branagh in the theatre with a big crowd of friends and it was overwhelming. If you ever get the chance to see Branagh’s version in the theatre, do it.
I will end on this note. I read Henry V in high school, I guess? My favorite scene was where the Dauphin goes on and on singing praise to his horse. His own true love. This is still my favorite scene! With some deviations, Shakespeare stuck to the “chronicles” for this one, the lead-up to Agincourt, the battles, etc., but the Dauphin praising his horse for an entire scene feels like it comes from out of nowhere, nowhere being the imaginative space where the unexpected can happen.
It’s the birthday of Lee Miller, fashion model, Surrealist artist, and … as if all that wasn’t enough … the only female combat photographer in Europe during the war, taking photos of concentration camps, firing squads, and all the concomitant horrors she saw embedded with the 83rd Infantry Division of the U.S. Army, documenting the Allied advance from Normandy to Paris, as well as the liberation of Dachau and Buchenwald.
Much of her history was erased through decades of obscurity and a total and shameful lack of a proper archive where her accomplishments get proper credit. Her son discovered a treasure trove of over 60,000 photos and negatives, and slowly but surely Miller is taking her proper place. More work needs to be done. There are biographies out now, and art books featuring her photos, and there have been a couple of very prominent exhibitions, heavily covered in the press. Because of her background as a fashion model, her work has also been covered by Vogue (which launched her career), Elle and etc. This little tribute post is the tip of the iceberg of this completely fascinating woman.
“Play to the lines, through the lines, but never between the lines. There simply isn’t time for it.” – George Bernard Shaw to actress Ellen Terry on performing Shakespeare, 1896
Today is (supposedly, roughly) the birthday of William Shakespeare. April 23, 1564. (Title of the post from Sonnet 98.)
I guess first off the obvious, if you’ve been frequenting these parts: I decided to read all the plays in chronological order (as roughly as can be guessed), and also read supplemental materials from books on my shelf. I’ve been writing posts about each play. I’m already deep into it!
Most of what I know about Shakespeare I learned by doing, by playing his scenes, by getting up and acting them out. These plays are meant to be spoken, not read. The plays are a whole different thing once you try to perform them, and actors often bring insights to the table which draws the subtext out, if you want to call it subtext, or at least the performance demonstrates the richness of psychology and motivation. A mystery that will never truly be solved – like the great movie stars of classical Hollywood – their allure can never be totally quantified and put in a box with a neat label. They beckon, we want to get to the bottom of it. So we go back to them again and again and again.
I treasure my Riverside Shakespeare: I splurged on the book at age 19: I figured: I’m a theatre major, I should probably have one of these. If you want to The book weighs 80 pounds. For some reason lost to history, I taped a dried autumn leaf on the inside of the cover. I’m sure it had major meaning.
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.
Louise Glück’s poetry sometimes hurts, touching wounds or fears and dreads so deep you don’t want to acknowledge they even exist. It feels like these things might overwhelm you if you give them any space. Glück knew these things existed, and she looked at them. She dealt with what haunted her. She dealt with it by putting it into words. Her sister died before she was born, and Louise was haunted by this ghost sister, a phantom presence which pre-dated her. Glück was about as successful as you could be as a poet. A living legend while she was here. She was the 12th U.S. Poet Laureate. She won the Pulitzer Prize, the Bollingen Prize, and also the Nobel Prize.
Glück’s poems have a chill clarity which can be a little frightening. There’s a slight remove, though – almost like she needs the remove in order to be able to speak – but she’s not distant or “above”. She’s direct. Her language isn’t fancy or formal. She says stuff like “Now let me tell you”.
Earthly Love
Conventions of the time
held them together.
It was a period
(very long) in which
the heart once given freely
was required, as a formal gesture,
to forfeit liberty: a consecration
at once moving and hopelessly doomed.
As to ourselves:
fortunately we diverged
from these requirements,
as I reminded myself
when my life shattered.
So that what we had for so long
was, more or less,
voluntary, alive.
And only long afterward
did I begin to think otherwise.
We are all human-
we protect ourselves
as well as we can
even to the point of denying
clarity, the point
of self-deception. As in
the consecration to which I alluded.
And yet, within this deception,
true happiness occured.
So that I believe I would
repeat these errors exactly.
Nor does it seem to me
crucial to know
whether or not such happiness
is built on illusion:
it has its own reality.
And in either case, it will end.
In Lives of the Poets, Michael Schmidt wrote of Glück: “The austerely beautiful voice that has become her keynote speaks of a life lived in unflinching awareness.”
William Logan, in The New York Times made a similar observation: Glück’s work is “the logical outcome of a certain strain of confessional verse—starved of adjectives, thinned to a nervous set of verbs, intense almost past bearing, her poems have been dark, damaged and difficult to avert your gaze from.”
Wendy Lesser, in Washington Post Book World, wrote: “Glück’s language is staunchly straightforward, remarkably close to the diction of ordinary speech. Yet her careful selection for rhythm and repetition, and the specificity of even her idiomatically vague phrases, give her poems a weight that is far from colloquial.”
Glück’s poem “Hawk’s Shadow” is a masterpiece.
Hawk’s Shadow
Embracing in the road
for some reason I no longer remember
and then drawing apart, seeing
a shape ahead–-how close was it?
We looked up to where the hawk
hovered with its kill; I watched them
veering toward West Hill, casting
their one shadow in the dirt, the all-inclusive
shape of the predator–
Then they disappeared. And I thought,
one shadow. Like the one we made,
you holding me.
Michael Schmidt wrote that “[Glück’s] firm reticence and her mercilessness with herself and her own experience, in prose and verse, make her an unusually powerful witness.”
Witness is the perfect word.
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.
, was rejected by a publisher (white, of course), whose comment was “white readers just don’t expect negroes to be like this”. The title of the book came from a poignant and troubling line from Tennyson’s “The Lotos-eaters”:
is a masterpiece. Compellingly detailed, based on first-hand interviews (she knew all the players: everyone talked to her), Clift emerges from the pages as a three-dimensional living breathing hurting soul, with a delicate yet powerful talent, and a fragility which overwhelmed him. The final section, where she lays out his rapid decline, is one of the most harrowing things I’ve ever read in any biography. His pain exhales from the page, expressed through Bosworth’s compassion but also her willingness to tell the truth. About all of it.
. (Here’s an 
. Bosworth knows about acting. She’s sensitive and specific about what he is actually DOING. I rely on that biography a lot in my own writing.
, was about the impact the Hollywood Blacklist had on her family.
. She puts you back into 1950s Manhattan with so much vividness you can practically taste the sugary Coca Cola. It’s the kind of book I would love to someday write. 
, Michael Schmidt wrote of Glück: “The austerely beautiful voice that has become her keynote speaks of a life lived in unflinching awareness.” 
