Gore Vidal 1925-2012

You will be greatly missed.

Happy Birthday Elizabeth!

For those of you who worried that I would end up gaunt from my calorie restriction, never fear. Fat Tuesday to the rescue! I ate bowls (plural) of fabulous vegetarian gumbo, as well as cinnamon rolls slathered with sugar. At this rate, I won't be a fashionably-thin ascetic saint any time soon.

And you all know what day it is!!! YES, it is the birthday of Dead Air's official Goddess, Elizabeth, as we all turn towards Hollywood and bow. (((bows, blows copious kisses))) My gallery of photos from last year is still regularly Googled! I am so proud to add to the pantheon of stunning Liz images! At left, Elizabeth in Suddenly, Last Summer (1959). She looks too beautiful for mere words. I have always loved that dress. Most mental patients, as you know, have to wear ugly white hospital gowns, but not our Elizabeth! Montgomery Clift himself brings her pretty dresses while she argues her way out of a lobotomy.

For those unaware, the sister of the play's author, Tennessee Williams, was actually lobotomized in 1943. Her name was Rose, and there is a "rose" reference in virtually every one of his plays (even a play with "rose" in the title, The Rose Tattoo).

Wikipedia notes:

The "mad heroine" theme that appeared in many of his plays seemed clearly influenced by the life of Williams' sister Rose.

Characters in his plays are often seen as representations of his family members. Laura Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie was understood to be modeled on Rose. Some biographers believed that the character of Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire is also based on her, as well as Williams himself [...] Characters such as Tom Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie and Sebastian in Suddenly, Last Summer were understood to represent Williams himself. In addition, he used a lobotomy operation as a motif in Suddenly, Last Summer.

Sebastian, in addition, is known unofficially as the "gay saint"--later joked about in the gay-themed play, The Boys in the Band.

From St Sebastian as a gay icon:

Saint Sebastian's appeal to gay men seems obvious. He was young, unmarried, and martyred by the establishment. Many gay writers and artists have taken Saint Sebastian's life and suggested that he may have been gay himself.

Sebastian is portrayed as a patriotic and loyal roman despite his subversive faith. While serving as a Roman soldier he became one of the Emperors favorites. Some stories say that the Emperor Diocletian made romantic advanced upon Sebastian and was enraged when Sebastian rejected him on Christian grounds. Other stories suggest that Sebastian and Diocletian may have had a homosexual relationship.

Imagery of Saint Sebastian has pictured him young, with a strong shirtless physique. He is beautifully receptive to the arrows penetrating his body but he has a look on his face of exquisite pain. Sebastian has become a homoerotically charged image of desire symbolizing isolationism, and persecution of the establishment.

Embracing a subversive faith, he is both strong and brave. Those who have wrestled with psychological demons, issues of sexuality, or have suffered publically can identify with Saint Sebastian. As a healer and patron of plagues, he has been linked with the devastation of AIDS. Catholics derive comfort from his possible representation of their sexuality before God.

I first saw Suddenly, Last Summer as a child, and didn't understand any of it. However, I was utterly terrified by the graphic finale, which I think is still pretty hair-raising, even after all these years. The story appears to mirror Tennessee Williams' own guilt (and possibly Gore Vidal's, author of the screenplay and the one who inserted the freaky images of the boys chasing Sebastian through the unnamed Third-Worldish streets) about paying impoverished young men and boys for sexual favors.

The play is about Sebastian's mother, Violet (Katharine Hepburn), who is attempting to have her niece (Elizabeth) lobotomized by handsome (and also gay) Dr Montgomery Clift. Elizabeth traveled abroad with Sebastian and witnessed his death. Hepburn instructs Clift to "cut this hideous story out of her brain"--one of those lines Williams was famous for... I have thought of it ever since, whenever hearing of lobotomies. (What did they "cut out of their brain"?--I have always wondered.)

At left: Sebastian has purchased a stunning white bathing suit for Elizabeth to wear. In the water it becomes virtually translucent, and she therefore doesn't want to go in. As the boys watch from a fenced-area (to keep the poor locals divided from the rich tourists), Sebastian forces her to go in the water. As always, his face is never shown.

As a kid, I didn't get the sexual references, about how Elizabeth was used as bait to draw the poor local boys to Sebastian (as Violet had been used previously, before growing too old). In the movie flashbacks, Sebastian always wears a white suit, symbolizing his whiteness. And his face is never shown; he stands in for all white men.

In the final harrowing flashback sequence, as Elizabeth narrates, the poor, ragged boys of all ages gather with clanging pots and pans as primitive instruments, making a clattering, scary racket... finally surrounding Sebastian. As a child, I was mesmerized: Why were they so angry with him? What do they want?

He throws money at them.

The boys just stare, unmoved. It is horrifying.

Sebastian runs.

He careens through twisting and turning narrow roads in his immaculate white suit, up, up, up, until he is at the top of a hill and there is nowhere to go. The boys surround Sebastian, and you only see his hand--stretching upward, as if to heaven--as they are on him.

And from Elizabeth's hysterical account, the secret emerges: the boys ate Sebastian alive.

As a 10-year-old, I knew not to ask any older people what any of this weird stuff meant, or why the boys were so pissed off. I knew the adults wouldn't let me watch it again, which I did every time it was on TV, trying to figure out the mystery. And at the age of 15, I finally did. (It wasn't until I was a bit older that I understood the cannibalistic reference.)

But even as a 10-year-old, I knew one thing for sure: I loved Elizabeth!!!!!

~*~

And I wish her a Happy Birthday!

Ending with Paul Newman's tribute to Elizabeth at Turner Classic Movies. Features the famous slip from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, but unfortunately, not the amazing party dress she wears in A Place in the Sun. (I also loved the sexy-pants outfit in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, one of her Oscar-winning performances... but I can't find any photos of her dancing with George Segal anywhere. Go to approx 2:21 here to watch the scene.) (NOTE: may trigger, etc.)

Feminists will enjoy the verbal bitch-slap of snotty sexist Laurence Harvey at 3:12. (From Butterfield 8, her first Oscar!)

Behold your QUEEN!

Paul Newman 1925-2008

Movie poster for HARPER (1966), one of my mother's favorites.

~*~

Reflexively, I almost called my (deceased) mother when I heard Paul Newman had passed.... he is so closely associated with her in my mind, that I cried for her all over again. She loved him SO much. I didn't have to read any of the official obituaries, since I already knew his life story; his movies, his long and stable marriage to Joanne Woodward, his car-racing, his son Scott's death, his politics...

Speaking of which, she was PROUD AS HELL of his progressive politics. During a conversation about conservative Hollywood people like Reagan, Schwarzenegger or Bo Derek, she would invariably remark on how pleased she was that "Paul didn't turn out like that!" She also periodically reminded me that he was a Buckeye--to her, the most famous and important one.

The proceeds of his organic food line, Newman's Own, go to progressive charities. Regarding this venture into business, Newman once said "The embarrassing thing is that the salad dressing is out-grossing my films!" (note: I particularly recommend the fire-hot pretzels and Ginger-O cookies!)

~*~

I don't know where the following excerpt is from... but it appears to be a segment of an old British TV documentary about Newman and Woodward. I chose this because I love looking at old stuff, and my mother was endlessly dazzled by the Cinderella-story of modest, Georgia-born Woodward moving to Hollywood and landing an Oscar and a leading man.

Also, check out the young, drop-dead handsome Gore Vidal at about 1:45. (WHO KNEW he used to be gorgeous?!?) My apologies for the documentary's use of the c-word to describe disabled people, herein used to describe Piper Laurie in The Hustler at about 3:13. At the time of the film, this word was acceptable and routinely used to describe Laurie's character (in reviews and trailers) and unfortunately, I believe the word is still in use at various news outlets today.

The increasing political involvement of Newman/Woodward is also chronicled here.



I will miss him, the beautiful Buckeye who made my mother flush and laugh, her eternal fantasy man.

William F. Buckley 1925-2008

William F. Buckley on the cover of TIME magazine, November 1967.




For a period of time in the late 1980s, I became obsessed with William F Buckley. I had never met such a person in real life, and I was convinced that this was part of my problem: I had no proximity to privilege and didn't understand the privileged mind. His aloof, haughty manner of speaking was utterly strange to me; his bored facial expression was also very odd. Why have a TV show or write books if you are so bored with everything? The upper classes are foreign to me, and he was as close as I was ever going to get. So, I studied him carefully, like an exotic butterfly under a microscope.

Reading his books, I finally learned what it was to be a wealthy, educated and erudite white man with plenty of family connections. I learned that to such a person, the New Deal, the Civil Rights movement, the Great Society, feminism, liberalism, equality (the very concept of which he openly jeered at) were quite simply RUDE. Who were these ruffians, encroaching on decency? I watched his TV show Firing Line religiously, as he argued with everyone in the world, using words I had never heard anyone actually use in conversation. I can still remember a conversation he had with Lynne Cheney, when she was chairwoman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. At one point, she said democracy demanded all people in the republic be educated, and I can still remember Buckley's answering snort of derision. She paused, flummoxed: "I don't know how else we can function in a democracy," she said. He rolled his eyes, in one of his trademark expressions of disgust. The idea of educating everyone? Obviously, you could see that he thought it was a charming notion, like pixies or elves, but it simply wasn't, you know, something that really happened, or should happen.

Despite his ongoing proud, arrogant snootiness, Buckley managed through his influential magazine The National Review, to unite the Old Right (then consisting mostly of croquet-playing, yacht-club types like himself) with the new Goldwater/Reagan, wild-west Republicans, and together, they would kick the nation's ass come 1980 (although it took them 16 years after the crushing defeat of Goldwater in 1964). Tenacious, well-oiled, well-connected and plenty loaded, they stood ready to grab the reigns when Jimmy Carter stumbled, and grab the reigns they did. Buckley saw his right wing become the big tent, bringing together in a coalition the southern evangelicals and paleocons, Jewish neocons, and loudmouthed talk radio riff-raff like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. If he privately had contempt for any of these people (who were remarkably like the 60s ruffians he used to sneer at on TV), he never said so. His only public disassociations were from the ultra-right, looney-tune John Birch Society, and columnists Joseph Sobran and Pat Buchanan, whom he accused of anti-semitism. Racism, sexism, homophobia, imperialism, war-mongering, all the rest were broadly winked at. He even called Gore Vidal a queer on network TV, during a celebrated feud, one of the few times he publicly lost his temper:

Buckley appeared in a series of televised debates with Gore Vidal during the 1968 Democratic Party convention. In their penultimate debate on August 22 of that year, the two disagreed over the actions of the Chicago police and the protesters at the ongoing Democratic Convention in Chicago. At one point Vidal called Buckley a “proto- or crypto-Nazi”, to which Buckley replied, “Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I will sock you in your goddamn face, and you will stay plastered.”

This feud continued the following year in the pages of Esquire Magazine, which commissioned an essay from both Buckley and Vidal on the television incident. Buckley's essay "On Experiencing Gore Vidal," was published in the August 1969 issue, and led Vidal to sue for libel. Vidal's September essay in reply, "A Distasteful Encounter with William F. Buckley," was similarly litigated by Buckley. The presiding judge in Buckley's subsequent libel suit against Vidal initially concluded that "[t]he court must conclude that Vidal's comments in these paragraphs meet the minimal standard of fair comment. The inferences made by Vidal from Buckley's [earlier editorial] statements cannot be said to be completely unreasonable." However, Vidal also strongly implied that, in 1944, Buckley and unnamed siblings had vandalized a Protestant church in their Sharon, Connecticut, hometown after the pastor's wife had sold a house to a Jewish family. Buckley sued Vidal and Esquire for libel; Vidal counter-claimed for libel against Buckley, citing Buckley's characterization of Vidal's novel Myra Breckenridge as pornography. Both cases were dropped, but Buckley's legal expenses were reimbursed by Vidal, and Vidal's were not. Buckley also received an editorial apology in the pages of Esquire.

And plenty more, of course. His was a life filled with controversy and attention-seeking. He wrote spy-novels and ran for Mayor of New York City. He was a fixture of the times.

And now he is gone. Michelle Malkin (the type of uppity-gal-of-color he would have sneered at in those Days of Yore) is gloriously praising his holy name, as is Rush and the whole Hee Haw Gang.

We'll be hearing a great deal, no doubt, about what a "gentleman" he was, as of course, rich white privileged men can usually afford to be.

~*~

From Buckley's book ON THE FIRING LINE, published in 1989, he reproduces a 1965 column in which he continues an unpleasant row with James Baldwin, after their debate in Cambridge. The two appeared on David Susskind's TV show Open End, and fought some more. Finally, Buckley had enough, and writes a column about Baldwin:

The objective of those who seek equality for the Negro is equality within the American system. If Mr Baldwin and his coterie of America-haters continue to give the impression that such as Roy Wilkins go along with their indictments, then they may very well wind up satisifying the American people that identification with the civil rights movement is an alternative to maintaining the American system. How long, one wonders, before the Baldwins will be ghettoized in the corners of fanaticism where they belong? The moment is overdue for someone who speaks authentically for the Negroes to tell Mr. Baldwin that his morose nihilism is a greater threat by far to prospects for the Negroes in America than anything that George Wallace ever said or did.

And he really believed it, too.