Sante Kimes 1934-2014

Sante Kimes has died. She inspired this blog. She was a grifter who sometimes impersonated Elizabeth Taylor. She murdered a few people. She burst into the headlines in 2000 when she attempted to assume the identity of Irene Silverman and appropriate her $7.7 million Manhattan townhouse. Sante and her son were convicted of murdering Silverman. My sister  --
Read more »

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.
Read more »

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.

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.
Read more »

La vie en rose

Edith Piaf’s life is chock-a-block with astonishing events. Raised in whorehouse? Check. Leaves whorehouse for circus? Check. Kicked out of circus with acrobat father and forced to make a living singing in the street? Check. A life with murders that ended with adulation at 44? Check. She was a tiny, pretty woman with an astounding voice. Check her out.