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

unknown auden

A student film maker from N.Y.U. interviewed me about W.H. Auden. Auden was no unknown citizen. I confirmed the usual impressions. I had observed him on a panel at Columbia’s School of the Arts. Auden was slightly overweight and extraordinarily wrinkled. He dressed casually -- he even wore slippers. After an hour, he glanced at his watch, said he had to go, and shuffled on out. He was 63-years-old.

Then I saw him read to a huge sold-out audience at the 92nd Street Y. He recited his own poems by heart. Only once did he falter--did he glance quickly at a manuscript on the podium, or merely flip his hand a few beats to jog his memory? He seemed seamlessly to resume.

Auden was on TV! He was no actor but he had his lines down. Dick Cavett asked him questions. Auden tended to quote himself with his answers. He didn’t look at Cavett or at the camera.

So finally the time came to phone him and arrange our hour of interview. “I’ll be there promptly at 4:00pm,” I told him, “with my tape recorder.”

“No tape recorder,” he said. He then disparaged cameras, and clicked off.

Auden’s apartment was being broken up. Books and opera records were in piles or in boxes. Shelves were half-empty. He was leaving St Mark’s Place for Oxford, England.

At the end of his life, Auden’s poetry seemed to collapse into a faggy folksiness, a campy pointlessness. The poems were certainly charming but--why bother? They were in any case the opposite of The Orators, his willfully obscure and scarcely readable second book. Allen Ginsberg wrote a homage to this particular vein of camp verse in Indian Journals and it amused me mightily. I asked Auden if he liked Ginsberg’s homage. Auden seemed excited; he’d never seen it, and asked me to send it to him.

Months later I told Ginsberg how much I liked that homage. Ginsberg wondered if Auden had seen it.

“Auden’s seen it,” I said. “I sent it to him.”

Ginsberg looked stricken. “My poem was mean,” he said.