Reflections in a Golden Eye

The title image, as in a play by Tennessee Williams, recurs uncomfortably often. I guess that’s the way gay Southerners wrote way back then. Williams’ plays were made into films, however bastardized, when he was young and hot. Carson McCullers’ novel was made into a film the year she died. The 1941 novel and 1967 film are set on an army base. And its stars were dimming: as Lyndon Johnson sent more and more troops into Vietnam, the Marlon Brando and Elizabeth Taylor brands meant less and less. In 1941 people felt better about the army than they did in 1967. The film was not a hit, and it is difficult to find; but I liked it. Taylor is supposed to be sexy. And yet what fan would believe in Maggie the Cat after glimpsing Katharina the Shrew and the Martha of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Brando and Taylor were past time.

Die Dreigroschenoper

I just saw G.W. Pabst’s film of the Brecht-Weill 3 Penny Opera. John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera has always been a favorite text; Brecht’s play was based on the Gay; but Gay was handed the original idea by Jonathan Swift. The Reagan/Two Bush Era embodied exactly that operatic kleptocracy. When Polly in the Pabst film buys a bank, it is, as they say, priceless.

BEHAVIOR

Character actors deceive us. Porn and movie stars behave naturally and delight us. Taylor behaves outrageously, always on the big screen.

Taylor and the World before AIDS

LIZ AND ALL THOSE GAY GUYS

I loved Elizabeth Ashley on Broadway in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. But I was subsequently puzzled and disappointed with the Taylor and Newman film. But the film absolutely outraged Tennessee Williams, for his theme of repressed homosexuality was snipped completely. Growing up in a small Canadian college town in the ‘50s and ‘60s, all Tennessee Williams films puzzled me.

Ah, the 50s and the 60s! My parents weren’t movie fans. They were serious. My sister however was frivolous and luxury-loving. She filled scrapbooks with color photos clipped from movie magazines, mostly of stars like Montgomery Clift and Rock Hudson. My parents would watch Raymond Burr, TV’s Perry Mason. My father ran through dozens of Gardner novels. Burr, like Clift and Hudson, conducted spurious public romances to mislead the homophobic general; would you believe Natalie Wood broke Raymond Burr’s heart? And then in A Place in the Sun Burr took Clift’s head. Can we see here a foreshadowing of TV’s Ironsides?

BABYLON REVISTED

The Last Time I Saw Paris, unlike Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, did mediocre box office. Paris fails like Cat because of the script. It was based on Babylon Revisited, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novella about visiting Paris after the Crash of 1929. As the current financial crisis deepens, Babylon Revisited grows in power. But in the Taylor retelling, the film is set in the early 1950s, and there is no connection whatsoever to history or to the larger world. Paris is quite nice, of course; but the Roaring Twenties apparently occurred c.1948-50.

Elizabeth Taylor performed by Sante Kimes

The bio-pic is the cream of Hollywood nonsense. In Night and Day, for instance, Cary Grant portrays Cole Porter. Although Porter was gay, Cary Grant in the film locks him in the closet. Oh, where does one begin? Many have claimed Grant himself was in the closet.

The more Hollywood lies, the more She tells the truth. Citizen Kane fibs tons about William Randolph Hearst. “Rosebud”? I think not. I love La Vie en Rose -- but only because I am content to allow Marion Cotillard to efface Edith Piaf.

What stimulated my interest in Elizabeth Taylor was not her acting. Instead, some years ago I happened on a remaindered book about a con artist named Sante Kimes. The cover photograph seemed oddly, intimately familiar. Who did she resemble? Did Sante Kimes look like Elizabeth Taylor? Yes. I looked through the photos in the book. But she also seemed to look like -- my sister!

My sister, Joan, is eight years older than me, and growing up she cultivated
her resemblance to Taylor. But, more interestingly, Kimes pretended she was Taylor and as Taylor committed numerous, serious crimes. Kimes was a con artist, a swindler and finally a murderer.

Affection Deficit Disorder

Authorities differ about her number of marriages. The Columbia Encyclopedia (Fifth edition; 1993) states she was married nine times. The later Cambridge Biographical Encyclopedia (Second edition;1998) says she was married only eight times. Both agree she was married twice to Richard Burton. That kind of careless error might reflect the contempt many in the academy feel for Elizabeth Taylor. Perhaps, as John Turturro's mother once said, Taylor's the type who'd only ever sleep with her husband, which is why she needed so many. She's had more husbands than Henry VIII had wives. Is it attention--or affection--deficit disorder?

The Other Elizabeth Taylor

There is of course another Elizabeth Taylor:

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200709/editors-choice