Carmen

I really have no excuse for this other than a) it's a truly miserable rainy day, and b) Rita Hayworth - Margarita Carmen Cansino - was an exceptionally lovely actress.

(Although let me pause for a moment, however, and just grouse: what the fuck was wrong with the official female "dress code" of the Forties through the early Sixties? Specifically, the red granny panties that come up to Rita's waist. Gah! Was a woman's navel some sort of mid-century erogenous zone, or what? Whatever it was, women in pictures and films had to wear these awful Depends^TM well until the surf films later in the Sixties introduced the notion that you could appear in public with your belly showing and not corrupt the children. Sorry. /rant.)

The saddening part of the combination of beauty and rainy days is that poor Rita's personal life was a dreary as the day today; she was a drunk with serious emotional issues and a career of finding lovers and husbands who were weapons-grade shitheels.

She also suffered from Glamor Girl Syndrome; "[M]en fell in love with Gilda, but they wake up with me." she said, and might well have been speaking for every public beauty whose partners take the parts that they played for the women they are. While it's very human to see what you want to see, when you do that with another person there's no real alternative but unhappiness.

So here's to the happy laughing Margarita of her glory years in the Forties when she was young and strong and lovely - awful swimsuit panties and all - who floated across our lives as a pair of legs long enough to bestride a chasm of troubles and a smile bright enough to lighten a gloomy day. If only you could have turned that brightness inwards, Doña; "Multa ferunt anni venientes commoda secum, Multa recedentes adimiunt"

Revirginated

Turner Movie Classics is having a Doris Day week all this week.Probably because Doris Mary Ann Kappelhoff was born 89 years ago yesterday. Y'think?

Anyway, I have a funny thing with Doris. In a lot of ways I enjoy both her public person and her work.

She was, and is, a very gorgeous and talented woman and I'm a sucker for smart, funny, handsome women.And while I think she's often pigeonholed in the "Fifties Crinoline" ghetto of leading ladies of the late studio period, assumed to be a sort of one-trick genre pony because of her bedroom farce work with Rock Hudson, she's a genuinely watchable actress, a hell of a singer, and a fairly gifted comedian. She did a lot of good stuff during her movie period, and her place as one of the divas of the American Songbook she earned her props.

But, at the same time, I really dislike her bedroom comedies. It's not just the now-infamous mismatch between the on-screen cliche ravenous-playboy-and-tightassed-virgin and the behind-the-screen cliche gay man and clueless (supposedly - Day has said publicly that she had no idea her co-star liked boys, too) het starlet.

It's the whole revirgination that the studio, their publicists, and the public foisted on Doris.

It's my understanding that she had the perfectly healthy sexual appetite. Doris was young and attractive in a place full of other young, attractive people; she was financially successful, making enough money to support herself, and frankly had no real reason not to enjoy any number of liasons, friendly, romantic, sexual, or all three if she so chose.

Doris herself later (in 1975) claimed that she liked to get busy, didn't try to hide that (beyond the normal public duplicity required in the Forties, Fifties, and early Sixties), and had no part in the "virgin-girl-next-door" maskirova:

"The succession of cheerful, period musicals I made, plus Oscar Levant's highly publicized comment about my virginity ("I knew Doris Day before she became a virgin.") contributed to what has been called my 'image', which is a word that baffles me. There never was any intent on my part either in my acting or in my private life to create any such thing as an image."

Sadly, what she did seem to have is a terrible run of luck - or terrible choices - in her long-term relationships. Her husbands (and she had four) were almost uniformly either wretched bastards or fools. At least two of them were Christian Scientists - which IMO qualifies as both - whose goofy woo-wooism nearly got her killed when she went for years with an undiagnosed breast cancer.So I can't get away from thinking about the woman's off-screen life when I watch her romantic comedies. The sexual double standard a Doris Day romcom hammers on is the mirror image of Doris Kappelhof's sexual life.

He's supposed to be - and usually is - a tomcat on the prowl. She's supposed to be - and usually is - this simpering missish little bit of fluff - but one who succumbs to his devilish charm.

He wants sex from her and throws out "love" (or a simulacrum of love) to try and get it. He tricks her, fools her, abuses her - in a sense - and she loves him for it.Meanwhile, she doesn't - and isn't supposed to - even think about sex until she realizes she luuuurves him...and then she finds a way to trap him into marriage to get both.

Her own welfare, her own business, are not even important enough for her to worry about, let alone him!

(For what it's worth, the worst one of these things I've come across wasn't a Hudson picture but something called The Glass Bottomed Boat she did in 1966 with Rod Taylor; it's also called "The Spy In Lace Panties", from which you get the idea. The worst insult is the point where Doris literally overhears Rod telling his crony that she's an idiotic life support system for a vagina that he's tricking into bed - and she ends up in bed with him anyway. It's a wretched mess, and it seems to have been a box-office hit. Ugh.)

So while I enjoy watching many of Day's films, she sometimes makes me uneasy. I just can't help watching Rock and Rod (not gay, those names, eh?) make a fool of her on the screen without thinking of her husbands beating on her and stealing from her and making a fool of her in life.

Art imitating life? Or life - in the persons of those husbands - learning what art told it it was supposed to do?Sometimes I wonder if Doris herself, walking alone through the rooms of her house in Carmel with only her pets for company, wonders that, too.

The Sex Goddess' Thumb

While researching the preceding post (on the Battle of Chipyong-ni, 1951), I spent some time scrounging the Internets for illustrations. While doing that I found this, a snapshot taken of the three-day USO tour Marilyn Monroe did in February, 1954.As I was looking over the picture (and, quite unexpectedly, oogling La Monroe in a sadly goatish fashion of a man of my age and weight) I noticed an odd little thing.

Her right thumb is bandaged.

Enlarge the picture and look for it. See it?

I don't know why that struck me as so odd and interesting. Possibly because I'm accustomed to the current seamless ability of the entertainment industry to make boo-boos like that disappear. Have you ever seen a current star, or even a starlet, with band-aids, bruises, bad hair (seen outside of the paparazzi sections of the checkstand rags, I mean)?

I was fascinated. What had happened? Fight with new hubby Joltin' Joe? Slipped on a microphone cable? So I went back to the 'Net, and...

Turns out that the Sex Goddess of the Fifties was cutting a cake for some soldiers when the knife slipped and she cut herself, quite badly, by the look of it.But no matter - the show went on and, apparently, went like free beer. Both the troopers, and the star, loved each other. It's kind of a nice story.

And Heaven knows if anyone needed a nice story it was Norma Jean, whose short life contains entirely too much unhappy drama.Nothing deeper than that; just a tiny bit of trivia for a Thursday evening.

Me Tondelayo

Caught the 1942 MGM chestnut "White Cargo" the other night.

Hard to try and discuss the thing, what between the bad acting, wooden directing, terrible script and, particularly, the amazingly out-front Forties racism and misogyny. All it lacked was some dancing pickaninnies and a comical John-Wayne-variety wifebeating. Seriously. It stunk just that bad.

The racism was so bad it wasn't even Forties-tolerable. The original New York Times reviewer called White Cargo "that antique lot of bunk which could, with the proper treatment, be made into screaming farce—you know, that lurid business about white men in darkest Africa going to pot from the heat, too much booze and the charms of a dusky native girl."But the "dusky native" girl" is, of course, the only reason to watch this dog anymore, since Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler - better known as Hedy Lamarr - was a native of Austria and dusky by virtue of whatever Metro used as spray-tan in the war years (since the genuine spray-tan was needed to make GI boots or something...) but was certainly all girl, or woman, and slinks about the film in cocoa makeup and a sarong speaking a bizarre sort of pidgin. Although the film is set somewhere in British colonial Africa Hedy's character, "I am Tondelayo" is said to be Egyptian/Arab, probably to get around the Hays Office issue with portraying white-black sex on screen.

And thats "White Cargo" summed up, really. Sex. Forbidden, blacky-white sex. It's about the stalwart White Man's burden; the slinky, scheming Dark Woman, who wants only to mulct him for the benefits of his White Progress by enticing him with her irresistible dusky poozle. Of course, Whiteness triumphs in the end, as the scheming Hedy/Tondelayo is forced to drink the Vile Puggle she is using to poison her white husband and runs screaming off to, presumably, Do The Right Thing and die in lonely agony in the jungle.

Hedy is both wonderfully scenic and monumentally awful, though her thigh-slapping Tonedlayo Dance really has to be seen to be appreciated. It's hard to believe she can't act, as she did well in other pieces both before and after this, and it's difficult to guess whether it was the rotten script or the bad direction that makes her so bad, or whether she just really hated the film and the part. Certainly the reviewers did, but at least they got some vicious entertainment value from it. From the NYT, again;

"...Metro has chosen to play it for Drachmae and implications of sex—or, at least, as much as the Hays office would let pass, which is mostly wiggles and leers. It has given Hedy Lamarr a mahogany finish, a limited vocabulary and a few dry goods and turned her loose to play Tondelayo with whatever else she happens to have. It has called upon Richard Carlson to be the sap who cracks up at this display, and it has set Walter Pidgeon, Frank Morgan and several other able actors to sweating and shouting the most abusive and ridiculous twaddle that has been heard in a long, long time.

As the gentlemen keep telling one another, the dry rot has set in—on the Capitol screen. Or is it the damp rot? We can't remember. But it is some kind of rot; that much is sure."

You write that today, Jackson, and you've got a hell of a lawsuit on your hands, but I have to agree - "White Cargo" sucked pipe.

The injustice hidden underneath all that makeup is that Hedy was, in her way, a really brilliant woman. Her adventures, beginning with her escape from Europe and a beast of a first husband, are as good as a storybook, and she seems to have been something of a minor genius with a knack for invention, developing an early version of radio frequency-hopping that eventually became the SINGCARS radios I used in the Army in the 1990s and Oughts.

I'm not kidding. Got it patented and everything. Smart woman.She was also a difficult person, too, apparently, with all sorts of personal and money problems. She was broke a lot later on, and was caught stealing several times. She sued a lot of people later in her life over use of her name and image; she never really managed to transfer her wartime-era glamor into a career in films that survived the Next Hot Girl and she seems to have become pretty damn bitter about it. She had a very up-and-down sort of life after the stardom years, and died in Florida ten years ago this January in relative obscurity.

But she was riding the crest the year she made "White Cargo", and as bad as the film is it's hard to watch it, and her vamping sullenly in her ridiculous makeup and imagine the hard years to come. In the flickering monochrome darkness of my living room in Portland, 2010, it was still 1942, the war was waiting outside, and the gorgeous woman with the lissome figure was still smiling up succulently and husking "What Tondelayo want, Tondelayo get."