Barbra Streisand asks the eternal question in A Star is Born.
I have a thing about A Star is Born. Not the 1937 Janet Gaynor original or George Cukor’s 1954 musical remake starring Judy Garland, though I’ve seen both. It’s the worst of the bunch, the misconceived 1976 lovechild of Barbra Streisand and Jon Peters, that I love unabashedly, even though it’s a top-to-bottom disaster. (Was there anything about its conceptualization of Esther that wasn’t completely deranged?)
The excesses and eccentricities of that iteration of A Star is Born were at the forefront of my mind in 2018, as the October release of Bradley Cooper’s remake drew near. I almost revived this website, long-dormant at the time, to discuss it. Part of what drove me crazy was that my wife was unfamiliar with every telling of the story and couldn’t pretend to understand my excitement.
Muriel and I have been coworkers since our first week together. (Her name isn’t really Muriel, that’s an alias selected because she’s frequently told “You’re terrible.”) For our first year together, we worked from an office where she made new friends every day. Since then, we’ve worked from home.
Every morning, including weekends, she follows me into the office and looks at me expectantly. Her preference is obviously for an exotic wilderness assignment, maybe a bit of bird-chasing or ritual squirrel murder. Then she watches me sit at the desk and open my computer, and perhaps notices the nearby stack of ’80s celebrity tell-alls and Kristy McNichol DVDs.
You can’t understand Ivy Compton-Burnett without understanding her love for her partner, Margaret Jourdain.
“Anyone who picks up a Compton-Burnett finds it very hard not to put it down.”
Ivy Compton-Burnett to Elizabeth Sprigge
Compton-Burnett, capable of making any reader’s brain ache in 100 words or less, died on this day in 1969. Legendarily dour, and one of my favorite writers, she was as uncompromising in her work as in her personal life. She knew her characters so well—their quandaries, quarrels, and especially their conversations—that she saw no point in slowing down to explain them to the rest of us.
She once told Jourdain, “I do not see why exposition and description are a necessary part of a novel.” This explains why, in some strange way, you don’t read Compton-Burnett’s novels so much as they happen to you. It’s a bit like being thrown into a bottomless lake and left to fend for yourself in the dark. Foreign, potentially sinister objects might brush against your skin, while, overhead, emotionally crippled people say devastating things to each other. (Some of you might call that ‘the holidays.’)
Note: This is an eight-year-old post that was accidentally set to ‘private.’ It’s not new or even worth reading!
And now, as the U.S. Open approaches, a post that won’t make sense to anyone unfamiliar with BFFs/former arch-rivals Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert.
As Michael Abernethy notes when mentioning Addams’ recent induction into the Chicago Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame: “That Addams was a lesbian is a matter of speculation, as Addams wasn’t gracious enough to leave an entry in her diaries that said ‘I’m a big ole lesbian.'” Still, I can’t believe that in the year 2009 grown men and women continue to debate whether she was gay.
Let me tell you a story about Jane Addams. When I was in fifth grade my history class learned about child labor legislation, settlement houses, female involvement in social and political activism, and all of that. Jane Addams was a big part of the unit. At the time I was an oblivious kid who’d yet to pick up on the fact that my aunt and her female roommate were more than roommates, but after reading a few paragraphs about Addams my gaydar started going off like Fannie Flagg — Match Game era Flagg, the gayest of them all — had entered the room.
The people who think Addams wasn’t gay, the ones who can somehow keep a straight face while trying to sell us that “romantic friendship” line, they’ll say that a ping (or twelve) on the gaydar is meaningless. Sometimes they’d even be right. But aren’t they also being kind of deliberately obtuse? The fifth-grade teacher who taught me about Jane Addams was a mild-mannered man in his mid-thirties who had never been married to a woman, professed not to have a girlfriend, but wore a wedding band anyway. He shared a house with, and routinely traveled with, his long-term male roommate.
What would the historians who are reluctant to concede that Addams was likely gay (after all, they’ve never seen Paris Hilton-style video footage of her having sex with Mary Rozet Smith) make of my teacher and his “roommate,” a man who was still in the picture years later when a friend’s sibling took the same class and had the same teacher? Would they try to act like the two men were just very close pals, or would they do a collective spit-take and shout “Bitch, please!” if asked to believe they weren’t a couple? I’m not a historian myself, but you can mark me down in the “Bitch, please!” camp when it comes to both Addams and my teacher.
No, I’m not talking about the time he spent with Anne Heche. I’m talking about his romantic weekend getaway with David Letterman. I’d forgotten all about this video Martin crafted for The Late Show until last night, when I stumbled across it on YouTube.
This is why I love Steve Martin. Well, this and Pennies from Heaven. And his end credits dance with Lily Tomlin in All of Me. And also for the scene in The Man with Two Brains where he tussles with Kathleen Turner and she gasps, “My balls!” (Why didn’t Preston Sturges have Barbara Stanwyck do that?) No one but Martin could get the curmudgeonly Letterman to act as goofy as this.
The reports are in, and the only lesbian relationship that Dame Julie Andrews, everyone’s favorite singing nun and medicine-peddling nanny, cops to in her new autobiography, Home: A Memoir of My Early Years, is her lengthy marriage to filmmaker Blake Edwards. As Daily Mail writer Michael Thornton recounts for anyone who has been cryogenically frozen for the last forty years and isn’t aware of rumors that romantically linked Andrews to her BFF Carol Burnett:
Just before she left the Broadway cast of Camelot, Andrews filmed a TV special with the American actress and comedienne Carol Burnett, her closest friend. It was titled Julie and Carol at Carnegie Hall.
Two-and-a-half weeks later, Andrews discovered that she was pregnant. When her daughter, Emma Walton, was born on November 27, 1962, Carol Burnett became her godmother. But was she also a lover?
This is the extraordinary suggestion which has found its way onto the internet, a rumour that in fact goes back as far as 1965, the year in which Andrews made The Sound of Music.
On January 18 of that year, prior to their appearance on stage at President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Inaugural Gala, Julie Andrews and Carol Burnett were observed kissing passionately in public in a Washington hotel.
The clinch, which both women later claimed was a stunt staged to amuse their friend, actor and movie director Mike Nichols, was witnessed by the President’s wife, Lady Bird Johnson, who unexpectedly stepped out of the hotel elevator at that moment.
This incident, sadly, is missing from Dame Julie’s new book, in which she says of her chum Carol, “I loved all that she was, all that she exuded — we bonded instantly,” adding: “I lost my own inhibitions and felt free beside her.”
“And I loved making her yodel like Tarzan in bed,” the passage most assuredly does not continue.
Why hasn’t the whimsical “We were doing it to amuse Mike Nichols” defense caught on, by the way? I’ll do my best to use it next time I’m caught in a compromising position, but can you imagine if federal agents had approached Eliot Spitzer and “Kristen” about their hotel room tryst and they both replied, “Oh, that? We were doing it for Mike Nichols. He loves that kind of stuff!” (Better yet, what if the agent countered, “We’ve already talked to Mike Nichols, sir, and he was in Los Angeles the night of your appointment.” To which Spitzer would be forced to sputter, “Did I say Mike Nichols? I meant Elaine May.”)
P.S. Because no Julie Andrews item would be complete without it, here, once again, is a link to The Scene from The Sound of Music.
