The Timestakes a look at the voluminous correspondence between everyone’s favorite depressed and drunken lesbian poet, Elizabeth Bishop, and her BFF, everyone’s favorite depressed and drunken non-lesbian poet, Robert Lowell.
Let’s everyone hope that no hacky producers are inspired to make a movie out of this, because you know they’d turn Bishop into a frustrated heterosexual who was desperately in luuurrve with Lowell and privately unhappy her in volatile same-sex relationships — relationships she was unable to walk away from because of the booze, or fears her partner would mentally collapse, or something similarly bleak.
And you know there’s a good chance the filmmakers would include a few pretentious queers looking for a bit of art-house credibility, which would make it even worse. So, on second thought, no one read the new book Words in the Air, which collects their complete correspondence. We wouldn’t want it falling into the wrong hands now, would we?
Unhappy with the roles he was being offered, Bogarde considered joining The Village People
A collection of Dirk Bogarde’s personal letters is set to be published in England later this month and, if anyone’s interested, The Telegraph offered their first batch of excerpts this morning. I gave them a skim to see whether Anthony Forwood, Bogarde’s partner of several decades, was mentioned (he is, repeatedly), and found myself amused by this recollection of the 1984 Cannes Film Festival, where Bogarde served as president of the jury, that was sent to Kathleen Tynan:
24 in 12 days, starting at 8.15am! I got rather to like it all… but some pretty crummy movies flashed over the screen I assure you! And if I have to look at another pubic-hair or another shot of a cow being slaughtered, a horse being drowned, a fat man having his orgasm, I’ll choke. All that, I may add, jammed with Lesbian-Love scenes of extreme explicity, at eight of a morning is really not adorable.
Bogarde’s description of art-house movie hell is just about perfect, but we’re not on the same page when it comes to lesbian love scenes. While I agree that 8 AM is a bit early for such viewing (I’m not at my most lecherous until later in the evening), I’d say the same of sex scenes featuring two men, a man and a woman, or threesomes of any variety. That he jokingly singles out lesbian love scenes as being enough to put him off his breakfast is a little obnoxious, but more than that I resent that he wasn’t specific.
How many films with such scenes of “extreme explicity” were being made in the early ’80s — and screened at Cannes, no less? The only film from that era that I could think of that might have played at the festival was Diane Kurys’s Coup de foudre (released as Entre Nous in the U.S.), which is famous for its lack of lesbian love scenes. Obviously I’m overlooking something, but what could it possibly be?
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.
James Frey: “Am I being lectured on honesty by Gayle King’s wife?!”
Was anyone actually surprised earlier this week when Margaret Seltzer, author of the recently published (and even more recently pulled from shelves) Love and Consequences, joined the ranks of publicly shamed con artist memoirists like the hacky, machismo-obsessed James Frey and Misha Defonseca, better known as phony Holocaust memoir lady? Didn’t Mimi Read’s recent New York Timespiece on Seltzer, then identified by her pseudonym, Margaret B. Jones, raise a red flag or twelve? (Even Seltzer’s body language is guilty in the main photo that accompanied the article.) My favorite quotes from the faux-thug version of JT LeRoy, for posterity’s sake:
Her memoir is an intimate, visceral portrait of the gangland drug trade of Los Angeles as seen through the life of one household: a stern but loving black grandmother working two jobs; her two grandsons who quit school and became Bloods at ages 12 and 13; her two granddaughters, both born addicted to crack cocaine; and the author, a mixed-race white and Native American foster child who at age 8 came to live with them in their mostly black community. She ended up following her foster brothers into the gang, and it was only when a high school teacher urged her to apply to college that Ms. Jones even began to consider her future.
“Why take out loans? I figured I’d be dead,”she said. “One of the first things I did once I started making drug money was to buy a burial plot.”
Read presumably edited out the part where Seltzer continued, “Death ain’t nothing but a heartbeat away/ I’m livin’ life do-or-die, what can I say?/ I’m 23 now but will I live to see twenty-fo’?/ The way things are goin’ I don’t know.”
“The reason I wanted to write the book is that all the time, people would say to me, you’re not what I imagine someone from South L.A. would be like,” she said, curled up on her living room sofa, which was jacketed in a brown elasticized cover from Target. Her feet rested on a chunky coffee table from World Market. The house smelled of black-eyed peas, which were stewing with pork neck bones — a dish from the repertory of her foster mother, known as “Big Mom,” whose shoe box of recipes she inherited.
“I guess people get their ideas from TV, which is so one-dimensional and gives you no back story,” she said.
Whereas Seltzer got her ideas from The Outsiders and repeated viewings of Dangerous Minds, which tell it like it is, hardcore.
A shelf above her desk holds an altar of family snapshots, with many more black faces than white. “This is my brother who’s dead, back when he was in juvie,” she said, pointing out Terrell’s face in a picture frame.
Shades of Terminator being HIV-positive, isn’t it?
Ms. Jones gave birth to her daughter while she was still in college, then graduated with a degree in ethnic studies. She stayed on in Eugene. Rya’s father, she said, was “the first white guy I ever dated, and she was the first white baby I ever saw. I said, she looks sickly, is there something wrong with her?”
As George Takei would say, “Oh my.”
“The first time my o. g. visited me here” — meaning original gangster, the gang’s leader — “he slept 20 hours straight. In L.A. your anxiety is so high you sleep three hours a night.”
I hear that for an encore, Seltzer sang “Rolling with the Homies” to Read. I won’t even get into her comments about the fictional Big Mom and perfect buttermilk cornbread. What’s astonishing, in reading what Seltzer had to say about her fake life and fake book before her deception was revealed, is that no one called her on all of her hilariously dated homie and o.g. and ‘hood lingo. If it’s this easy to get a bogus memoir published, I think it’s time to quit my day job and get to work on my life story.
The question is, since alcoholism, drug addiction, the Holocaust, gender issues, child abuse, prostitution, and now the South L.A. gang scene have already been exploited by crazy and largely talentless hucksters, what should I choose as my angle? Would it strike anyone as overly derivative if I presented myself as a transgender concentration camp escapee who covered my numbered tattoo with “FTBSITTTD” and went to live with the zany extended family of a wayward psychiatrist?
“I didn’t just create Kay Scarpetta, I’m also half of Hall & Oates.”
Itching to read more about the upcoming book detailing Patricia Cornwell’s ill-fated affair with former FBI agent Margo Bennett? Times Online journalist Tony Allen-Mills is here to help. I’d post quotes for those of you who like one-stop shopping, but this story, once mildly interesting in a tawdry tabloid kind of way, seems rather moldy now, especially since Cornwell has become more forthcoming about her personal life.
McGillis in The Monkey’s Mask: “Don’t ever interrupt me when I’m watching football.”
The 17th Annual Kelly McGillis Classic International Women’s/Girls’ Flag Football Championship begins this weekend in Key West, Florida. You can read more by visiting the tournament’s official website, which informs us that not only does McGillis — whose guest arc on The L Word begins later this month — enjoy playing football herself, but one of the teams in this year’s competition is called the Diesel Daisies.
I was going to suggest that McGillis Classic scheduling might be to blame for the Spice Girls cutting their reunion tour short (you know how Mel C. is about her sports), but it turns out they’re not wrapping things up until February 26th.
Sontag at home in 1988, in an image from Leibovitz’s A Photographer’s Life
In her review of David Rieff’s Swimming in a Sea of Death, a memoir of his mother Susan Sontag’s battle with cancer, Katie Roiphe quotes Rieff as writing that Sontag was “humiliated posthumously” by lover Annie Leibovitz’s “carnival images of celebrity death.” The personal photographs first caused a stir upon their publication in the Leibovitz collection A Photographer’s Life: 1990-2005 in 2006. Promotion for the book marked the first time Leibovitz spoke publicly about her lengthy relationship with Sontag.
Later this year, Rieff will oversee the publication of journals and notebooks his mother kept between 1947 and 1964. Previously published excerpts contain Sontag’s reflections on lesbian relationships with Harriet Sohmers and Maria Irene Fornes and comments like, “My desire to write is connected with my homosexuality. I need the identity as a weapon, to match the weapon that society has against me. It doesn’t justify my homosexuality. But it would give me — I feel — a license.” Sontag also wrote: “Being queer makes me feel more vulnerable.”
Other news and suggested reading:
Yesterday an appeals court ruled that Dr. Sneha Anne Philip died at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Philip’s disappearance was the subject of a 2006 New York magazine article that revealed a police probe into her personal life turned up stories of hidden alcohol abuse and bisexual affairs, which her family denied.
JFLAG, the Jamaica Forum for Lesbians All-Sexuals and Gays, has made a plea for government action in the wake of a mob attack on gay men in Mandeville. Their statement reads in part, “We are cultivating an uncivil society which seems to be itching for a reason to resort to mob violence as a redress for real or perceived grievances. When those with whom we entrust the responsibility of leadership fail to act decisively, they betray all Jamaicans.”
Where are gays in space? And Jodie Foster in Contact doesn’t count. We’re not talking about gays in front of bluescreens.
Newsday journalist Saul Friedman has written a nice piece about SAGE-LI, a new Long Island organization devoted to helping elderly GLBT individuals.
Julie Christie looked great at the SAG Awards last night, just as you’d expect. Equally unsurprising, Juno star Ellen Page was born without the dress posture gene:
“Why, yes, I used to play team sports.”
Five minutes with John Travolta would change all of that, but it’s imperative she bring along someone who can yank her out of the room when the E-meter comes out. I volunteer Diablo Cody.
Is Hayden Panettiere the new Jane Fonda? (These Washington Post reporters are referring to her activism, of course. While my exposure to Heroes is limited, I did catch Panettiere in Raising Helen and I don’t think we’ll be seeing her in a remake of Barbarella or Klute or Tout va bien.)
In an interview with New York Magazine, Clay Aiken forgets that he isn’t Lucinda Williams and journalist/fellow lesbian Ariel Levy isn’t Bill Buford as he plays up the Southern shtick. What you’ll learn, if you can hang with the Aiken for four excruciating pages, is approximately this: he’s a Democrat now, a shameless self-promoter, and he “has never had a romantic relationship with anyone, unless you count the girls he took to dances back in high school in Raleigh.” Sounds perfect for Raúl Esparza.
Reviews of Shelby Lynne’s Just a Little Lovin’ are coming in, and you can read them here and here. If you’re looking for Lynne’s contentious Advocate interview, we’ve got the scoop.
The Timespoints out that Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, and Barack Obama have identical opinions on gay rights issues, while fear-mongering Republicans continue to pander to bigots.
Margo Bennett, the former lover of crazy lesbian novelist Patricia Cornwell, is blabbing about their relationship—you know, the one that made headlines when Bennett’s husband hatched a murderous plot that landed him behind bars—in an upcoming book called Twisted Triangle. In a passage that makes Cornwell’s schlocky prose sound downright Proustian in comparison, authors Caitlin Rother and John Hess write: “As they talked, Margo felt the blood coursing through her veins, very aware of the close proximity of her body to Patsy’s. It felt dangerous. Wrong. Thrilling.” Anyone else think this would make the perfect made-for-cable comeback vehicle for Kelly McGillis?
I don’t plan on reading Andrew Morton’s new Tom Cruise biography that comes out on Tuesday—and even if I did, I wouldn’t admit it here (the Internet lasts forever, you know)—but early reports of its contents suggest a comic masterpiece on par with David Sedaris’s best work. Sayeth the website Digital Sky in its sneak preview:
Tom Cruise: An Unauthorised Biography claims the actor has chased women throughout his life.
Melissa Gilbert, who dated Cruise when he was 19 before being dumped for Heather Locklear, told Morton: “I can honestly say he’s a very sexual person. There was a lot of making out on the couch in my mom’s living room.”
One former date claimed he was homophobic after seeing his reaction to musical La Cage Aux Folles, saying: “Men dressed as women, he couldn’t handle it. We had to leave before the intermission. It really bothered him. He was definitely homophobic.”
Bert Fields, Cruise’s mega-lawyer, has called the book “outrageous, sick stuff,” and so far I’m inclined to agree. There has to be more to Gilbert’s couch story than Morton lets on, like maybe the room had such hideous window treatments that Tom was desperate for a distraction. Nor am I sold on the La Cage Aux Folles story, mostly because I have a hard time believing that someone so aggressively anti-gay would agree to star in Top Gun. (Or, you know, line up to see La Cage Aux Folles in the first place.)
Okay, so we know that dimwitted homophobic actors are occasionally tricked into playing gay roles or starring in films with a heavy gay subtext; we’ve all heard the Charlton Heston stories. But Top Gun is so spectacularly gay that even someone who believes in Xenu would pick up on the sexual tension between Maverick and Iceman, the special nature of Maverick’s relationship with the pornstachioed Goose, and the significance of Maverick’s love interest being a Kelly McGillis character named Charlie. It could only have been gayer if Bob Mackie designed the flight suits.
You can read more about Tom’s robust, lifelong appetite for heterosexual intercourse with biological women at Slate. I warn you, however, that it will leave a bad taste in your mouth, which is why I’m concluding this post with a photo of Tom’s former employee Penelope Cruz grabbing Salma Hayek’s ass to help cleanse your palate.
