Dirty Girl Things
Friday, June 29, 2007
Number Seventy-Seven
The Man From Elysian Fields
Pleasure Is His Business . . . . Call Him Old-Fashioned.
Reviewed by HARO Online.
The Man from Elysian Fields is a nice change of pace because it is a good adult movie. Here, ‘adult’ does not mean pornographic (which this movie is not) but sophisticated and complex. It’s nice in that the story is able to hide a fairly familiar movie theme, the one of someone rediscovering inspiration. The someone is Byron Tiller (Andy Garcia, Ocean’s Eleven, Lakeboat), an author with one critically acclaimed novel. Critically acclaimed in this case does not mean commercially successful, so Tiller lives a modest life with his wife Dena (Julianna Marguiles, Dinosaur, What’s Cooking?). Tiller is counting on his second novel to bring him more money and fame so he can provide for his wife. See, Tiller writes literate smart novels that the public ignores. His editor rejects his second novel, and Tiller is so dejected that he doesn’t know how to tell Dean. Instead, he lies.
Luther Fox (Mick Jagger, Enigma, Bent) works in the same building as Tiller, and offers him a job as an escort. Elysian Fields is an upscale escort service and Fox believes that Tiller is a good fit. Tiller objects, but realizes that life as an escort is better than a life of poverty. Fox assigns him to Andrea Alcott (Olivia Williams, A Knight’s Tale, The Body), the beautiful wife of a Pulitzer Prize winning author. Tobias Alcott (James Coburn, Snow Dogs, Texas Rangers) is in the twilight of his life, and is finishing what is most likely his last novel. He knows and encourages Andrea’s use of Elysian Fields, since he wants his wife to be happy. On her part, Andrea is strictly (emotionally) faithful to her husband. Tobias eventually asks for Tiller’s help in editing the novel, and Tiller uses this as a sort of inspiration. Helping Tobias finish the novel will eventually make things right with his life.
It’s not a big secret where Philip Jayson Lasker’s story is going to go. It is how it gets there that makes The Man from Elysian Fields stand above the crowd. Director George Hickenlooper (The Big Brass Ring, Dogtown) uses excellent characterizations and a wry sense of humor to move the film forward. The entire cast is good, with Jagger standing out. Fox is also ending the end of his career. He only sees one client (Anjelica Huston, Blood Work, The Royal Tennenbaums), and against all rules of his profession, finds himself falling in love with her. Jagger provides some sparse narration and also helps to set the mood, one of resigned melancholy. Fox is articulate, well mannered, and deliberate in his speech, and Jagger is all the more impressive given that his portrayal is the opposite of his stage persona.
Coburn’s performance is brave. Tobias is dying and knows it, and trying to hold onto his reputation and dignity. Writing is the only things he knows how to do, and is the only thing keeping him alive. Jagger and Coburn overshadow Garcia, Williams, and Marguiles, who have roles that are subtlely nuanced. The acting is also good enough to overlook some of the weaker elements of the plot. Tiller’s first novel, about a fictional son of Hitler, looks like junk. There is not enough writing in the movie to make it a movie about the writing process. Instead, it is a movie about redemption and new beginnings. It is the interactions between the characters and the way that they deal with their problems that make The Man from Elysian Fields worth watching.
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Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
Dirty Girl Things ©
Unrepentant. Unpretentious. Unconventional. ©
Thursday, June 28, 2007
Number Seventy-Six
Sensualle Lingerie. Brazilian Sexy. Brazilian Hot.
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Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
Dirty Girl Things ©
Unrepentant. Unpretentious. Unconventional. ©
Number Seventy-Five
Lola Luna. “Brevity is the soul of lingerie.” ~ Dorothy Parker
In Provence France, the Lola Luna lingerie company manufactures the most sexy and luxurious mini & micro thongs & G-strings in very small and limited quantities. Lola Luna lingerie is very exclusive and is hand-made from Calais lace & the finest embroidered tulles. It makes some of the most decadent crotchless micro thongs anywhere & many of its G-strings are decorated with Swarovski crystals & real pearl accents.
Lola Luna makes the ultimate & possibly the most expensive micro G-string on the planet: the very special Shakti is hand-made to order and is decorated with a Garnet jewel, 18-carat yellow gold & chains made of white gold (3.2 grams of gold total), and is presented in a luxury gift box with a certificate of authenticity.
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Here are some enticements.
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Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
Dirty Girl Things ©
Unrepentant. Unpretentious. Unconventional. ©
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
Number Seventy-Four
Succès de scandale!
Ninon de l’Enclos
“A shining example of the triumph of vice, when directed with intelligence and redeemed by a little virtue.” ----Saint-Simon
“Firmness is great; persistency is greater.” ----Ninon de l’Enclos
Born Anne de Lenclos in Paris, France, she was nicknamed “Ninon” by her father at an early age. In 1632 her father was exiled from France after a duel, and when her mother died ten years later the unmarried Ninon entered a convent only to leave the next year.
Based on the remainder of her life, the choice of a convent would seem surprising, but it was really only an aspect of the clear idea that drove her actions: she was determined to remain unmarried and independent. Influenced by Epicurianism in general and Montaigne in particular, she devoted her life to pleasure, both physical and mental.
Returning to Paris, she became a popular figure in the salon scene, and her drawing room became a centre for the discussion and consumption of the literary arts. In her early thirties she was responsible for encouraging the young Molière, and when she died she left money for the son of her accountant, a nine-year old named François Marie Arouet so he could buy books.
Ninon also took a succession of notable lovers, including the king’s cousin the Great Condé, Gaspard de Coligny, and François, duc de La Rochefoucauld. More prudish ages have characterized her as a courtesan, but it is known that money was involved in the transaction no more than a few times in her life. Regardless, both this and her opinions on organized religion caused her some trouble, and she was imprisoned in a convent in 1656 at the behest of Anne of Austria, Queen of France and regent for her son Louis XIV. Not long after, however, she was visited by Christina, former queen of Sweden. Impressed, Christina wrote to Cardinal Mazarin on Ninon’s behalf and arranged for her release.
In response, as an author she defended the possibility of living a good life in the absence of religion, notably in 1659’s La coquette vengée ("The Flirt Avenged"). She was also noted as a wit; among her numerous sayings and quips are “Much more genius is needed to make love than to command armies” and “We should take care to lay in a stock of provisions, but not of pleasures: these should be gathered day by day”.
At one point in her life, Cardinal Richelieu offered fifty thousand crowns for a night in his bed. Ninon took the money, and sent a friend instead. “Ninon made friends among the great in every walk of life, had wit and intelligence enough to keep them, and, what is more, to keep them friendly with one another.” (Saint-Simon).
Starting in the late 1660s she retired from her courtesan lifestyle and concentrated more on her literary friends — from 1667, she hosted her gatherings at l’hôtel Sagonne, which was considered “the” location of the salon of Ninon de l’Enclos despite other locales in the past. During this time she was a friend of Jean-Baptiste Racine, another first-class French playwright. Later she would become a close friend with the devout Françoise d’Aubigné, better known as Madame de Maintenon, the lady-in-waiting who would later become the second wife of Louis XIV. “The lady did not like her to be mentioned in her presence, but dared not disown her, and wrote cordial letters to her from time to time, to the day of her death” (Saint-Simon). Ninon eventually died at the age of (at least) 82, a very wealthy woman.
Ninon de l’Enclos is a relatively obscure figure in the English-speaking world, but is much better known in France where her name is synonymous with female beauty.
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THE JUDGMENT OF PARIS How Ninon de Lenclos Cheated the Devil ---- from Sexual Fables
THE NOCTAMBULE
Once upon a time, a young French woman named Ninon de Lenclos was at home on Sunday morning when there was a knock at the door. On the step was a little white-haired man dressed in black. He introduced himself as the Noctambule (“Sleepwalker”) and he said he was there to offer her a choice of three things: the highest rank in the land, great riches and fame, or eternal beauty. But she could choose only one…
Cynics will want to note that intelligence was not one of the choices but let us assume that Ninon had that to start with. Like Paris in The Judgment of Paris, and this historic scene is occurring in Paris, Ninon chose eternal beauty.
The Noctambule required her to write her name on a tablet and swear never to reveal this incident. She did so and he touched her shoulder with his ring. He had wandered the earth for 6,000 years, he said, and she was only one of five women to whom he had ever offered this choice and she would be the last. The others: Semiramis, Helen of Troy, Cleopatra, and Diane de Poitiers. Because Ninon chose eternal beauty, he said, she would always be young, charming, healthy and she would conquer any heart she desired. He said he would return when she had three days left to live, and then he disappeared, leaving only a faint whiff of sulfur.
Perhaps this story is true? One sour critic claimed that it was made up by a certain abbot who drank too much and who was infatuated with Ninon, but what did he know?
The courtesan Ninon de Lenclos is virtually unknown in English encyclopedias and dictionaries, yet she was one of the most influential figures in 17th century France and it was Voltaire himself who snottily observed, “If this mania continues, we shall soon have as many Histories of Ninon as of Louis XIV.” Curiously, English and American biographers, both male and female, did take a keen interest in her in the early 20th century: Enchanters of Men by Ethel Colburn Mayne (1909) and The Immortal Ninon by Cecil Austin (1927), to name but two. But after that the veil of silence falls once again, aside from Edgar Cohen’s Mademoiselle Libertine (1970), until the present when books like Susan Griffin’s The Book of Courtesans (2001) and Betsy Prioleau’s Seductress (2003) give her the respect she has long deserved.
Women dominated French cultural life in the 17th century, to a degree that may seem surprising today. It was French women intellectuals who renewed the traditions of the medieval age and the Renaissance, setting the style for the centuries that followed with their invention of the salon, possibly the most significant development in the rising importance of privacy and the bourgeois arts. Ninon herself was born in 1620 to a middle class family in the fashionable Marais district in Paris under the name Anne de Lenclos, but throughout her life she was better known as Ninon. She died more than 85 years later in 1705, by which time she was considered a national treasure. Perhaps the fact that she has been ignored in English-language histories is attributable to sexism and chauvinism in that a courtesan would never be considered a national treasure in England or the United States?
The question is this: do the Noctambule’s choices still hold good today? What do women want? Which gift should they choose today: power, riches and fame, or beauty, or now can they have it all?
POWER
On Its Virtues
As a young woman without a dowry, Ninon had four obvious choices: to marry, to join the Church, to become a governess, or become a prostitute. Of course she chose the last and least satisfactory of these—prostitution – which is why we must open with a cautionary tale.
Ninon had a son by one of her many lovers. But the father raised his son without him knowing whom his true mother was, to protect him from the shame of it. When the young man finally met Ninon, who must have been in her sixties by then, he fell desperately in love with her. Though she had promised his father never to reveal her identity, in an effort to calm her son’s passion, Ninon confessed the truth to him, and it had disastrous consequences. He went out the back of her house and committed suicide, for he could see that their love would never be consummated. So you see, not only did Ninon not keep her word, these were the consequences of not marrying to protect one’s children and one’s reputation. By all means have affairs, but do not forgo marriage and do not think of yourself all the time.
By way of contrast, consider the case of Ninon’s contemporary, Madame de Maintenon. She was first the mistress and then, from 1684, the wife of Louis XIV, the Sun King, a much smarter ascent up the social ladder.
Maintenon also may have received a visit from the Noctambule, though history does not record this, for she was more discreet. But it appears that she chose power, which is, in the end, all that really counts. If you are a woman, the key to gaining power is, and always will be, through marrying a rich man.
Maintenon’s career illustrates this point: early in her life she married one of those rich men and educated herself in her husband’s salon. Upon finding herself a widow, albeit with a pension, she faced Ninon’s choices: nun, governess or prostitute. She didn’t particularly like men and she wasn’t yet ready for the nunnery, so she chose to become a governess. Luckily she landed a job with the royal family, looking after Louis XIV’s six bastard children—in secret. Thus began her remarkable upward climb at the palace of Versailles.
Through her marriage to the King, Madame de Maintenon was granted the power to make an impact on society and she acted upon it, moving against the heretic Huguenots and the flourishing trade in prostitution. In these actions, she sought to reimpose a necessary order upon the anarchy breaking out all over France. It was not religious or social intolerance; she was born a Protestant and she came from the lower classes. Indeed she identified with the poor and she could sympathize with the spiritually lost. Only those who believed in chaos opposed her desire for restoring law and order. Maintenon understood at a profoundly personal level how lives, like countries, can spin out of control. Religious fanatics seemed to be everywhere, advocating this Reformation or that Counter-Reformation, on a rampage, burning women at the stake as witches. Even Maintenon thought they went too far. She fully supported Louis’ crackdown to bring an end to it.
On more personal level, she led by example, dedicating her energies to founding St. Cyr, a fashionable Paris girls school which took in only girls from poor but noble families. It quickly became a successful salon in its own right, offering a way out of the sexual temptations placed in front of young girls. Maintenon was forced to impose strict order eventually, but she did not consider herself prudish; she fully understood Aphrodite’s appeal to women. She even accepted that prostitution was at times the lesser of two evils. When the city authorities used prostitutes in the fight against homosexuality, she begrudgingly accepted it. Most of the houses of prostitution had been closed in the previous century and now there was a real fear that heterosexual marriage could wane because boy love seemed to be so prevalent. Many prostitutes, female and male, operated independently and it had become a lot more dangerous. Some trailed around Europe after armies and they became every bit as mercenary as the soldiers they solicited. Others set up shop in the suburbs.
What saved Ninon was that the courtesan emerged as a better class of prostitute who could wear fine clothes and keep a nice house, who could chase after married men and often keep them, and who worked in secret. (The word “courtesan” is simply the original feminine form of “courtier.”) Generally older women ran these business enterprises, mothers who were once courtesans themselves, and a girl could make a good living. Not that the neighbors were happy about this. Respectable working class and middle class families began complaining constantly to the authorities about the Ninons in their neighborhood and the authorities were obliged to hire many more policemen to cope with it. More than once Ninon had to flee to a powerful protector when things got too hot.
Maintenon urged Ninon to straighten out her own life before it was too late, inviting her to live with her at Versailles. Together they could have established rules for women to live by and have a significant impact on society. The form of power that Ninon specialized in—the power over men’s sexual imaginations as much as their bodies—did not teach the importance of living up to one’s responsibilities in life and ensuring the protection of family values. In the end, Ninon was a hopeless case: she was always more interested in men than in women—and many men at that. There was nothing Maintenon could do for her.
RICHES AND FAME
On Their Virtues
Some would say that the second option, riches and fame, is the least attractive of the three. Who wants to be rich and famous if no one is afraid of you and no one is attracted to you? Well, who cares? You can buy the company of the powerful and the beautiful. Sex has always been for sale.
Ninon certainly understood that. In her earlier years, her love life was keenly scrutinized and there was many a Right Bank conversation about the exact sequence of her lovers – this was a matter of great interest in the City of Love. Only later did she get herself organized, dividing her men into the payers, the martyrs, and the favored. It was the last group who made it into the bedroom. She never did become as rich as some of her clients but she did become famous (or infamous) for her salon.
Ninon’s salon at 28 rue des Tournelles in the Marais soon became the place to be for aspiring men about town and it was never boring. According to the memorist, the Duke de Saint-Simon, the word that summed up Ninon and her salon was “integrity”—no cards or loud laughter, no arguments or discussions about religion or politics. Ninon set the tone with her lightness of touch and her appreciation for all forms of art and culture, always spiced with wit and music (she played the lute very well). She was not a snob either. Although her salon was initially all male, in later life it attracted women from both the aristocracy and the middle class who wanted to learn how to live their lives as successfully—intellectually and sensually—as she had done and mothers introduced their children there before they were turned loose in society. Ninon was influenced by Montaigne’s ideas of political moderation and she knew and practiced Epicureanism, the honorable pursuit of pleasure. At her own salon she was protected by her “birds”—intellectuals like la Fontaine and la Rochefoucauld, some of whom got to sleep with her. She tended to be faithful in short bursts. All this made her a perfect target for local preachers who railed against decadence and immorality, yet she was a target more for her free-thinking and intellectualism than for her libertinism.
Ninon in her heyday became the leading critic of the arts and literature. Molière observed of her: “She has the keenest sense of the absurd of anyone I know.” Some would say there is nothing inherently superior about someone who writes their ideas down for posterity (like Molière) over someone for whom letter-writing and stimulating conversation are equally important (like Ninon). We can get a glimpse of Ninon’s intellectualism in her letters, for example the fine series to the Marquis de Sévigné, the son of Madame de Sévigné, on the subject of how to capture a lover. The inevitable happened of course: the Marquis fell in love with Ninon instead.
However, we don’t want to praise Ninon too highly since she was still sleeping with practically anyone she pleased, including monks and priests, well into her eighties! Indeed, if we are looking for role models, Madame de Sévigné herself offers a preferable alternative to the path taken by Ninon. Isn’t it better for a woman to marry, in the hope that her husband will die young, leaving her all the money, as happened to Madame de Sévigné? By not marrying, Ninon achieved little more than any dilettante. She deluded herself if she thought she could ever change society on the basis of charm and wit alone. She also failed for posterity’s sake, for what great works of art remain as a testament to her genius? What aristocratic title and property did she ever attain? None. What was the nature of her fame? As a courtesan? She barely rates in the history books.
BEAUTY
A Curious Concept
Ideas about beauty change through time. Consider the lithographs of Ninon de Lenclos and wonder why men and women found her so beautiful. She belonged to another age when aesthetic ideals were very different. But if her beauty was not resistant to time, then she did age gracefully at least.
One of Ninon’s critics once remarked, “She never had much beauty, but, above all, she had charm,” and one of her lovers said, “Her mind is more charming than her face.” Was charm the gift of the Noctambule? Like many women today, Ninon was alluring, seductive, sexy. Pure beauty is another matter: men usually find it somewhat remote, even intimidating. Helen of Troy was the best looking woman in ancient Greece but hers was a chilly beauty; men were only besotted with her until they met the woman underneath. People wondered whether there was a life of the mind behind the face and the body that launched a thousand ships. If there was, she failed to convince anyone beyond Paris.
Ninon chose beauty because it gets you the other important things in life – power, respect, riches, fame – it is just a means to an end. Prostitution is the same: women do not “fall” into it because of a failed love affair or broken heart. Neither do they do so because they are venal and unredeemable. They do so because the lifestyle can offer financial and emotional independence beyond what men are otherwise prepared to grant. The courtesan was a rebel before she was a fallen woman. Rightly the courtesan decided to live her life like a man, not as a man, for what is a man of the church or a man of public life but a whore? Ninon understood this at an early age. When she was 20 she wrote: “I notice that the most frivolous things are charged up to the account of women, and that men have reserved to themselves the right to all the essential qualities; from this moment I will be a man.”
Women become courtesans because they have friends who are doing it, full time or part time. For the successful courtesan, to have an attachment to a richer client-lover means clothes, an apartment, furniture, a carriage and horses, entertainment. Of course you must use your beauty to add a dimension of danger, intimidate men a little, reel them in. But how do you appeal to men? Not just by being a clothes horse. Beauty always depends on the intellect. Ninon, like other beautiful and intelligent women, enjoyed friendship and good conversation more than sex or seduction. She had many lovers over the years and she enjoyed sex, but her seductions were intellectual as much as physical and this is one of the key distinctions between a courtesan and a regular prostitute, which is not to say that all courtesans were intelligent company or that they had the freedom to live in the way they chose, but courtesans were able to ascend to levels of society that prostitutes found closed off.
By way of contrast, Madame de Maintenon paid too high a price for her power, for she constantly had to guard against losing Louis’ favor and she was never happy. Her influence became increasingly more religious, driving off the intellectuals and the libertines. Many considered her a bigot and held her responsible for the catastrophe of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, and whether that was really Louis’ doing, she did not stand in his way. In a dialogue by Voltaire, he has her say to Ninon, “It was decreed I must be a prude” and in the end that is what she was. Ninon herself once said of Maintenon that she was “too awkward for love.” Madame de Sévigné hardly represents a better alternative: to hope your rich husband will die young can turn into an impossible trap, where thoughts of murder intrude. It galled Sévigné deeply that her son became enraptured with Ninon.
Ninon was not interested in remaining attached to anyone for too long; she liked interesting and good-looking men but there were always others on the horizon. “Men lose more conquests by their own awkwardness than by any virtue in the woman,” she once wrote. “A woman’s resistance is no proof of her virtue; it is much more likely to be a proof of her experience.” After all, love is transitory, an illusion of the senses.
So far as the nasty allegations go, the story of her son committing suicide was made up by a hack writer. Ninon never had any children, which didn’t stop this story from making its way into her biographies. So far as going to bed with randy churchmen when she was in her eighties, Ninon was past worrying about that by then. It is true that monks and priests have made for very popular sexual partners because they are safe, discreet, and accessible. But this story about Ninon only reflects a certain churchman’s wishful thinking. Legends have always developed around beautiful women like Ninon because the inadequate men and women who dream them up were never privileged to share beds like Ninon’s. Beauty was clearly the best choice even if, like the others, it did not last.
THE ENLIGHTENMENT BEGINS
You will remember that the Noctambule intended to return to claim Ninon’s immortal soul. He did show up three days before she died, but he went away empty-handed because Ninon, an agnostic, apparently did not believe she had a soul to lose, and so had nothing to give him. This deathbed scene in 1705 marks the official beginning of the revolution known as the Enlightenment.
Ninon’s fable of the Noctambule is interesting because it reflected man’s attempt to explain women not as goddesses from another world but as enchantresses whose beauty just seemed divine and magical, perhaps even diabolical. The story keys into Christian and Romantic, not Classical, sexual fables. The Noctambule is of course Mephistopheles, the Devil. Let us say that the Noctambule really did appear before her. She chose beauty because she knew perfectly well that if she was beautiful, then it had nothing to do with any supernatural explanation he could come up with, however tempting that view was to others. The world of science was coming.
As she lay dying, it was clear she had lost her beauty, even if she still had her extraordinary femininity. Voltaire was introduced to her back then—he was 11 and she was more than 80—and the great philosopher commented (much later) that “Mlle. Lenclos had all the ugliest signs of old age in her face, and her mind was that of an ascetic philosopher.” So much for eternal beauty. But he made this snotty comment about a woman who had generously left a lot of money in her will for him to buy books, and one suspects he was just being facetious to cover his own respect for Ninon’s intellect. How sharp the old lady was. Even Voltaire was only 11-years-old once.
A century later, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe would be drawn to the story in his masterpiece Faust (Part I was published in 1808). Starring in the Ninon role is Faust, who has choices over his destiny, while the Noctambule is played by Mephistopheles. Goethe had other sources of course. As a boy he was impressed by puppet shows in which Faust and the Devil sparred in an eternal struggle over faith and man’s salvation. Goethe, like many before or since, experienced the sensation that if man could defeat the Devil then he could also stand up to God. Goethe was familiar too with one Georg Faust, who had made a career for himself by boasting that he was a necromancer, just as he was familiar with his contemporary Martin Luther, the true Faust figure of that century. Indeed it is not a coincidence that Goethe set Faust’s home in Luther’s Wittenberg!
Goethe’s Faust was as racy for its time as anything ever written. He arranges for Helen of Troy to be transported through time and space for Faust’s sexual pleasure and they even have a love child together. Helen is romanticized as the perfect woman, Greek beauty and harmony wrapped up in the one superb body. But Goethe was not really that interested in Helen. He was more interested in why there had to be all that killing at Troy in the first place over a woman! Goethe correctly surmised that the gods were behind it, since there was no other satisfactory explanation. He also thought it fair that Faust be let off the hook in his bargain with Mephistopheles, for why should Faust surrender his soul? This infuriated the religious authorities and other pompous German writers of the time who hated happy endings, but it revealed Goethe as a child of the Enlightenment. There were reasons for this.
Goethe had made a much-written-about trip to Italy in the late 1780s, when he was approaching his 40th year. That trip had liberated him to be an agnostic and an erotic materialist and it extricated him from the dead end of idealizing women who were unavailable – women like Charlotte von Stein. It was at this time that he chose to live with, and he later married, a young German woman from the working class named Christiane Vulpius, repeating what Martin Luther had done before him. While Christiane could never really share fully in his intellectual interests, clearly their erotic attraction to each other was enhanced by their differences, socially and intellectually. Goethe’s erotic epigrams from this time are full of nudity, erections, masturbation and other steamy subjects (few academics ever look at that aspect of Goethe’s writing, just as they ignore Christiane, although some have claimed to detect a whiff of homosexuality there. Rich women snubbed him after that, but Goethe knew that love, such as it is, was more important than the artificial barriers of class, age, culture and religion, and that loyalty freely given is what binds relationships together. He understood that women were at least the equals of men and in some ways superior and, because he believed this, he publicly promoted the careers of many German women intellectuals.
Goethe celebrated women in his concept of the Eternal Feminine spirit that embodies all the women that Faust encounters—not just Helen but also the unpretentious and worldly Gretchen (who resembles Christiane), the Virgin Mary, and so on. It is this generous spirit that Ninon embodied; it is the spirit that would become the basis for the growing sense of the privacy of the feminine self in the so-called bourgeois century, the 19th century. Intellectuals focus their attentions on the anxieties of unrequited or ideal love, and Goethe wrote his fair share earlier in his life. But the lesson we learn from Ninon’s life, and what Goethe learned from Christiane, is that when we make a judgment on someone’s life, what truly matters is how we live our own lives. It matters how we use the choices available to us, and how we make choices available to others. What does not matter is adherence to prevailing social, political, religious or academic orthodoxy.
THE JUDGMENT OF PARIS
When Paris was forced to choose between those three gorgeous goddesses back in ancient times, he could have had political power from Hera, or warlike prowess from Athena, or he could have had the most beautiful woman in the world from Aphrodite. As we know, he chose Aphrodite.
Despite what the Iliad or the movie Troy would have you believe, Paris was not only extremely good-looking, he was also an honorable man, which is why the goddesses chose him in the first place. For his part, he chose Aphrodite because she seemed like the least dangerous option. Little did he suspect when he was “rewarded” with the most beautiful woman in the world. As with anything to do with the gods, she was a flawed gift, for she turned out to be Helen of Troy and she was already married. As was he, of course, for both had had arranged marriages imposed on them. And though Helen was undeniably stunning looking, she was not much of a match in intelligence. Rather vain and frivolous actually. If her beauty was immortal and eternal, it was all on the surface, a harmony of the parts. She was, in a word, superficial.
And who is to say that Paris truly had a choice in the first place? If indeed he had had a choice, would he have chosen a married woman and a vacuous one at that?
Once this series of unfortunate events began to unfold, however, her husband Menelaus wanted revenge upon Paris’ family. This was understandable perhaps, not because he was jealous, but because Helen was his property. But it led directly to the Trojan wars and the eventual downfall of the House of Atreides. Helen was right in one matter at least: she blamed Aphrodite for the affair with Paris, claiming she had always wanted to return to her husband. For Paris’ own part, he was opposed to the war all along, believing it solved nothing. He was an idealist, a rebel; he only wanted to please everyone. He ended up pleasing no one. The gifts of the gods were a curse. They had made him participate in their charade, hurting everyone in the process. It seemed to Paris that humans were just as vain as the gods, for all they ever needed for a war was some petty excuse. That was all Agamemnon was interested in.
Paris has since been dismissed as a lightweight seducer, pushed to sidestage by the noisy, flashy Achilles, the heroic Hector and the “wily” Odysseus. He also has had to endure the idea that The Judgment of Paris qualified as a male fantasy in which the man could have had any woman he wanted and the women were to be blamed for everything. It was all a lie. Paris liked women. It was the gods—male and female—who were to blame for making us their playthings. He would not be the last to confront them.
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Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
Dirty Girl Things ©
Unrepentant. Unpretentious. Unconventional. ©
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
Number Seventy-Three
I’M A GIGOLO (Wake Up and Dream, 1929) ----Cole Porter
I should like you all to know,
I’m a famous gigolo.
And of lavender, my nature’s got just a dash in it.
As I’m slightly undersexed,
You will always find me next
To some dowager who’s wealthy rather than passionate.
Go to one of those night club places
And you’ll find me stretching my braces
Pushing ladies with lifted faces ‘round the floor.
But I must confess to you
There are moments when I’m blue.
And I ask myself whatever I do it for.
I’m a flower that blooms in the winter,
Sinking deeper and deeper in snow.
I’m a baby who has
No mother but jazz,
I’m a gigolo.
Ev’ry morning, when labor is over,
To my sweet-scented lodgings I go,
Take the glass from the shelf
And look at myself,
I’m a gigolo.
I get stocks and bonds
From faded blondes
Ev’ry twenty-fifth of December.
Still I’m just a pet
That men forget
And only tailors remember.
Yet when I see the way all the ladies
Treat their husbands who put up the dough,
You cannot think me odd
If then I thank God
I’m a gigolo.
* * * * *
Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
Dirty Girl Things ©
Unrepentant. Unpretentious. Unconventional. ©
Number Seventy-Two
Succès de scandale!
Porfirio Rubirosa
“Porfirio Rubirosa is a name likely to be unfamiliar to anyone born after 1960, but he certainly made a name for himself in the 1950s--as a playboy par excellence--and his life story proves well worth the telling.” ----Jay Freeman
“Polo player. Jewel thief. Part-time diplomat. Ill-gotten millionaire. Male consort to the richest and most beautiful women of his day (and pretty much any others available). Daredevil amateur race car driver. Treasure hunter. Punch line. Idol. Not a bad resume, if one ignores the lack of marketable skills. No matter what anyone said about Porfirio Rubirosa—and people said plenty during his three-decade run as high society’s most notorious lover, fashion icon, “sportsman,” and international man of mystery—they never accused him of being boring. And indeed, the Dominican came with the thinnest of obvious qualifications. (Or at least visible qualifications. Levy’s book graphically details that the playboy’s anatomy achieved such whispered renown that some Paris waiters still call the biggest pepper mill in the house a “Rubirosa”).
Rubi was the son of a minor diplomat, who owed both money and fame to his way with the ladies. He climbed the social ladder with short marriages to Doris Duke and Barbara Hutton, the richest American heiresses of their day. There was a wartime marriage with ultra-chic French actress Danielle Darrieux, a later liaison with Zsa Zsa Gabor (quite a hot ticket at the time) and countless other hookups (including a rumored affair with Eva “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina” Peron).
“You can’t get a DVD that shows you what Rubi was good at,” Levy says. “You can’t go to a museum to see it. You sort of have to take people’s word for it.” ----Zach Dundas
“His suave manner and rugged good looks came with a prodigious male appendage and sexual prowess, both subjects of much gossip. Truman Capote described his male organ as “an 11-inch cafe au lait sinker as thick as a man’s wrist”. To this day, large pepper grinders are commonly referred to as “rubirosas”. He was linked romantically to Dolores Del Rio, Marilyn Monroe, Ava Gardner, Rita Hayworth, Soraya Esfandiary, Veronica Lake, Kim Novak, and Eva Peron. He dallied with his ex-wife Flor during his marriage to Doris Duke, and with Zsa Zsa Gabor during his marriage to Barbara Hutton. He was named a co-respondent in at least two divorces, the husbands charging adultery.” ----Wiki
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Biography: The Last Playboy: The High Life of Porfirio Rubirosa by Shawn Levy Reviewed by CHRISTOPHER SILVESTER
We have not yet reached that stage of human civilisation when we will cease to be fascinated by penises of prodigious proportion. The Dominican playboy Porfirio Rubirosa (1909-65) was possessed of such an attribute, but lived during a time when it was a widely and archly advertised thing of mystery. “He became famous just as the era of audacious-celebrity-for-its-own-sake was blooming,” explains Shawn Levy in this excellent, gossipy study. “And the genius of it was that the reason for his celebrity, even if it were known, couldn’t actually be spoken of — not firsthand, not out loud.”
Halfway through his book, Levy devotes a lengthy passage to consideration of this priapic marvel. The homosexual photographer Jerome Zerbe followed Rubi into the gents one day, emerging to describe it, in a vivid phrase, as resembling “Yul Brynner in a black turtleneck”. His third wife, Doris Duke, reported it as “six inches in circumference . . . much like the last foot of a Louisville Slugger baseball bat with the consistency of a not completely inflated volleyball”. The former husband of one of his wives called him “Rubberhosa”. Furthermore, his vast, pendulous testicles required him to wear a jockstrap at all times. But those with organs of more modest dimensions can rest assured. His first wife later vouchsafed that “he took so long to ejaculate that by the end I was a little bored”.
Rubirosa himself found boredom unbearable. “It has always been one of my chief principles,” he confessed, “I will risk anything to avoid being bored.” He risked his life by eloping with Flor de Oro, daughter of his patron, the vicious Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo. What followed was far from dull: his subsequent marriage to Danielle Darrieux, the French film actress; his laid-back war years, spent under light arrest in the German spa town of Bad Neuheim; his marriages to two of the world’s great heiresses, Doris Duke and Barbara Hutton, each of whom gave him money and a B-25 aeroplane; his torrid, knockabout romance with Zsa Zsa Gabor; his last marriage to a young French actress, Odile Rodin, who tamed him (“Odile had the power over him that he had, all his life, wielded over others,” said the fashion designer Oleg Cassini. “She exhausted him and made him jealous.”) Then there was the endless round of Paris, Palm Beach, Hollywood, Las Vegas, New York, polo, motor racing at Le Mans; and, finally, his death by Ferrari (seatbelts are for wimps), dressed in his evening clothes, after an all-night celebration of a polo victory. It is hard to overestimate the dazzling impression that Rubi’s exotic, carefree life made on the American and British press of the 1950s. “Work?” he said in reply to a journalist. “It’s impossible for me to work. I just don’t have the time.”
Yet there was the secret working life of a diplomat from a minor Caribbean dictatorship: as a courier, he took money from Trujillo to New York and paid the assassins of a Dominican political exile; he was posted to Paris and, later, to Buenos Aires; he sold Dominican visas to Jews wishing to flee Europe; he made efforts, encouraged by JFK, to sway Trujillo into liberalisations, although this was overtaken by the dictator ’s assassination. Rubi needed patronage, but most important from Trujillo’s point of view, his colourful gallivantings put Dominica on the map for reasons other than its record of political repression.
Levy, who wrote an engaging book about the Sinatra Rat Pack, has a kinetic prose style. He likes the occasional one-line paragraph and sentences that begin with “and”. And he has a Runyonesque penchant for antique phrases such as “awaken the ire”. (You get the point.) It is unforgivable that his publisher has chosen not to include a single photograph of Rubirosa, apart from the one on the cover, even though there are plenty of good pictures available. The omission is all the more absurd given Levy’s final assessment of the publicity-seeking Rubi: “he had given himself over to sensation, he created sensations, he ended in sensation”.
Parisian waiters may still refer to over-sized pepper grinders as Rubirosas, but apart from that Rubi is a will-o’-the-wisp figure. “The world was there for him,” concludes Levy, “not vice versa.” But now, Levy’s luscious, shimmering and titillating portrait is there for the world.
* * * * *
Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
Dirty Girl Things ©
Unrepentant. Unpretentious. Unconventional. ©
Monday, June 25, 2007
Number Seventy-One
Succès de scandale!
Colette
“You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm.” ---Colette
“I love my past. I love my present. I’m not ashamed of what I’ve had, and I’m not sad because I have it no longer.” ---Colette
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From Histoires de Parfums . . . .
The only girlish thing about Gabby was her knee-length braids and big brown eyes. Around their village, Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette and her gang of girl toughies ruled the school. They had secrets, schemes and territories. Eager to prove themselves every bit a smart and tough as the boys their age, the carried themselves like more like a big city street gang than the peasant girls from the French countryside that they really were. They even called each other by their surnames, like their fathers did, which is how Gabby came to be known as Colette.
Precocious and headstrong, Colette was a wild child of nature who never grew tame. Analyse Colette and you’ll find an interesting dichotomy. She is undoubtedly one of France’s greatest woman thinkers. She wrote plainly about the tacit intricacies of love and relations in turn of the century France. Yet for such a cerebral writer, she was physical in all her pursuits. Victorian culture dictated that women laced themselves up tightly in corsets and passed their time sitting on wingback chairs whilst sipping tea. Colette wore a corset and drank plenty of tea but she also designed and built a gymnasium at her back yard and worked out vigorously every day.
Colette’s notorious first husband Willy plucked his precocious teen bride from the Burgundy countryside and transplanted her into Parisian society. Instead of being startled by the change, Colette thrived. A beautiful young bride who could be outspoken and elegant as the situation merited, she was quickly accepted among the Parisian intelligentsia that populated the literary salons of the day. Willy fostered his new wife’s popularity by buying her clothes and showing her off. Willy was already a successful and established writer when Colette tried her hand at her husband’s trade. She wrote thinly disguised and erotically charged memoirs of her school days. Willy liked them so much that he had them published under his name. The first “Claudine” novel was a sell-out success. So Willy locked Colette in the attic and didn’t letter her out until she finished the sequel.
Of course this sort of treatment didn’t fare well with headstrong Colette. As soon as she was able, she left Willy and tried to make a living on her own. She wrote, she performed in plays, cabarets and dance halls. She bordered on the edge of respectability, and these encounters with the Parisian underworld fuelled her creativity.
Colette Colette’s Claudine was the original Lolita, an underage girl bursting with saucy exploits and earthy sexuality. In the 1920s Colette wrote of opium dens and alternative society of fashionable, wealthy lesbians. She knew of both first hand. Later she waxes philosophical and lets cats and dogs argue the contradictory natures in men and women in Dialogues des Betes. In her later works, Colette returns to her most familiar theme of erotic urges and sexuality. This time her protagonist is an older woman and her paramour a younger man. The scandalous theme was again, like the Claudine novels, culled from reality as Colette was having an affair with her real life step-son.
France loved their audacious, outspoken Colette. They honoured her by making her the first woman admitted to the prestigious Académie Française. And they grieved severely when she died. Parisians cued all day in a kilometre-long line down the rue di Rivoli in order to pay respects or perhaps leave a flower on her coffin displayed at the Palais Royal.
To her dying day, she was a robust woman of remarkable energy. Lusty, soulful, stylish and smart, Colette is the Ultimate Parisienne.
* * * * *
Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
Dirty Girl Things ©
Unrepentant. Unpretentious. Unconventional. ©
Sunday, June 24, 2007
Number Seventy
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“Images without tension are purely decorative or formal” ---Andrzej Klimowski
A few words about Klimowski? Impossible. You can’t capture an imagination such as his in a sentence or two. He is a free man and you’ll never catch him. He looks at things head-on but at the same time inside out and upside down, round the corner and through a shattered keyhole. His eye is a microscope, a magnifying glass, a two-way mirror and a crystal ball. He leads the field by a very long furlong, out on his own making his own weather. He is Klimowski, unafraid. ---Harold Pinter
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Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
Dirty Girl Things ©
Unrepentant. Unpretentious. Unconventional. ©
Saturday, June 23, 2007
Number Sixty-Nine
The most glamourous, elegant and sophisticatedly wild event of the 21st Century, The Rakehell’s Revels has taken place every Tuesday since 2004. It is renowned --- notorious, even --- for attracting the best in-the-know society, from Hollywood starlets to scrubbed-up students, to “the most beautiful room in London” (Cecil Beaton) for an intensely heady evening of high sparkling swinging wit, dancing, cocktails, pointed conversation and worse. In a glorious celebration of the Golden Age of Swing, Style, and Subtle wickedness.
1920’s - 1940’s GLAMOUR
EVERY TUESDAY
THE GRILL ROOM
CAFE ROYAL
68 ROYAL STREET
LONDON W1
10PM—3AM
£5
STRICTLY THE MOST ELEGANT DRESS
More about Rakehell’s Revels here and here.
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RAKEHELL’S COMPILATION
Extending our fight against the vulgarity of the modern world—where beauty doesn’t exist, where glamour is drunken reality nobodies, where going out is sweaty, dark, and antisocial—THE RAKEHELL’S REVELS is launching a compilation of the best of music from the club. Everyone can now own a little piece of the clubbing sensation and uniquely beautiful experience that until now, only a select few have been allowed to find…
Featuring classics and rarities, foot-stomping swingers and toe-tapping bops, haunting melodies and jumping brilliance from the 30’s, 40’s, and 50’s, by the likes of Duke Ellington, Fred Astaire, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Nat King Cole, and Louis Jourdan. It’s a dance record—a romantic record—a funny record—and it has 21 incredible tracks. Any appreciator of music, or anybody swayed by even just the smallest nostalgia, cannot fail to love these superb and exciting songs.
The compilation is available now… look for it!
* * * * *
Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
Dirty Girl Things ©
Unrepentant. Unpretentious. Unconventional. ©
Friday, June 22, 2007
Number Sixty-Eight
LaRare Fetish Footwear
An interview with Nathalie Elharrar by Jason Campbell, JC Report.
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Last season when former Thierry Mugler and Lagerfeld Gallery shoe designer Nathalie Elharrar told us in confidence that she was developing a line around the fetish lifestyle, we gave her two thumbs up and demanded an exclusive on the story. We’re all for anything with a sexual angling done up chicly, and that’s Ellharrar’s specialty. Six months later, she has executed her clear-cut concept (slightly watered down in its debut to ease in the audience), and the resulting shoes are sublime, coming close to what Eric Stanton envisioned in his bondage illustrations. It’s haute luxury, titillating, and right on time for a shoe market that’s taking giant steps forward creatively. We met up with Ellharrar during Paris Fashion Week, where she showed her line at Michel Klein’s showroom, to find out the source of her wicked new steps, LaRare.
JC Report: At what point do fetish and fashion meet, and why did you decide to marry these two disciplines?
Nathalie Elharrar: Fetish and fashion have been deeply linked for a long time. It’s a part of the culture I got into when I was working for Thierry Mugler and Lagerfeld. We were already taking inspiration from this concept for shoes. I love the works of Araki, Stanton, John Willie (inventor of the first fetish heroine, Gwendoline, and publisher of fetish magazine, Bizarre) and from comics authors like the Italian Guido, Crepax, and her heroine Valentine. I also like the fact that the most respectable people can be so fascinated with high heels. And since I create shoes, I meet people for whom shoes are a part of their intimate dreams — they even have shoe dreams they confide to you.
High-heeled shoes drive you to have an attitude which confronts the question of power, control, and seduction. When you wear a 13cm heel, even with platform, you have to be in control of yourself in a very interesting way, which gives you more insurance, and it’s a constraint exactly like a corset sometimes (but my shoes are a bit more comfortable than corsets).
JCR: LaRare. Tell us of the double entendre meaning of the brand name.
NE: My family name is Elharrar. No one is ever able to pronounce it correctly the first time, and I wanted to create a very exclusive luxury brand of shoes, so LARARE came very fast in choosing the brand name.
JCR: Love the logo, tell us about the mix of woman and saddle.
NE: I wanted something with a bit of humor, glamour, and provocation. It’s a mix between my love of medieval blazon and an illustration by John Willie showing three women playing a pony story, which then appear in my logo as a horse-like silhouette with sexy female legs. It has been made in collaboration with Alex Gautier, who is the artistic director of Citizen K. To get him started, I sent him a few personal sketches of a double female centaur.
JCR: Describe the styles in this concise first presentation.
NE: The short card of colors: flesh, red, purple, and black, with a touch of pale pink gold, and metallic ultraviolet. High boots and “cuissardes” with geometric cut-outs or with eyelets and “lacets” in the back held by a leather garter belt. The whole story is in stretchy leathers (patent or suede), on a round last with double platform, mix of black, nickel, or metal finish and leather. Some pumps and boots come with ankle belts and metal locker with chain, on a short pointy last on a “virgule” shaped 12 cm high heel and platform made of recovered wood. This whole group has a ring of metal screwed under the sole just in the arch of the feet, and in the shoe box you will find a little pretty chain with snap clasp.
JCR: Is it just for women with an interest in a subversive fetish lifestyle?
NE: No, it’s not only for that. It’s for women who want a seductive and powerful attitude on high heels, for girls who love sexy chic shoes.
JCR: How do you envision the collection growing?
NE: Keeping strong codes as cuissardes in leather stretch, undersoles rings, and boots very [Eric] Stanton, and developing the collection step by step. Expanding the choices of leather to incorporate more exotic skins. Mulling ideas and concepts of a black box with a very private mini-collection...lot of ideas. For the moment, just keeping my feet on the ground to do each thing based in the reality.
JCR: Do you design for any other brands?
NE: Yes, I just finished designing the Paule Ka shoes collection and I’ve also designed the last two seasons of Michel Klein’s shoe collection.
JCR: Who are your dream retailers?
NE: In Paris, L’eclaireur, Maria Luisa, Bon Marché and Biondini (the most incredible choice of sexy high heels), Bergdorf Goodman, Browns, and of course kinky luxury shops like CoCo De Mer in London and Kiki de Montparnasse in New York.
This interview was conducted by Jason Campbell
* * * * *
Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
Dirty Girl Things ©
Unrepentant. Unpretentious. Unconventional. ©
Thursday, June 21, 2007
Number Sixty-Seven
Nick Broomfield’s Fetishes.
A review from The Spinning Image’s Graeme Clark.
Pioneering British documentary-maker known for both the relentless pursuit of his subjects and his eagerness to put himself in his films. Broomfield’s earliest films were observational documentaries covering such subjects as prostitution (Chicken Ranch), army life (Soldier Girls), and comedienne Lily Tomlin (Lily Tomlin). 1988’s Driving Me Crazy introduced the style of film for which Broomfield would become famous, as he detailed his own failed attempts to film a musical.
Subsequent movies include two studies of serial killer Aileen Wuornos, the Spalding Gray monologue Monster in a Box, controversial Fetishes and a pair of documentaries on musical themes, Kurt & Courtney and the rap-exposé Biggie and Tupac. Broomfield has also made two forays into fictional film-making, with 1989’s woeful thriller Diamond Skulls and 2006’s true life immigration drama Ghosts.
* * * * *
Documentary maker Nick Broomfield first planned to do a tour of American fetish establishments, but once he found Pandora’s Box, a high priced New York parlour situated on the top floor of an office block, he decided to concentrate on the workers and clients there instead. Most of the clients are high-flying businessmen, lawyers, Wall Street brokers and the like, and Pandora’s Box caters to all kinds of sado-masochistic predilections as Broomfield finds out over a two month investigation. But does he really want to know what makes the place tick, or is he indulging in his own preference: he likes to watch?
Apparently going by the premise that nothing is more interesting than other people’s sexual quirks, Fetishes was a controversial documentary when it was released, but only to the extent that Broomfield had gone to the lengths of filming sessions and holding frank discussions with both dominatrices and their dominated about their habits and the reasons behind the things they get up to behind the closed doors of Pandora’s Box. As far as I can tell, it’s not a brothel and the clients don’t go there for sex, but rather to carry out role play scenarios where they are humiliated in safe surroundings, where what goes on won’t go further than the walls of the rooms. Many of the clients have wives, partners and families who know nothing of their unusual hobbies.
At least until someone recognises them in this film, as Broomfield is typically candid and prying here. He interviews most of the dominatrices, initially about what they do there (and they have other, more regular, jobs as well) as they slyly attempt to entice him into a session, an offer he has no difficulty in refusing. It’s as if they believe every man has a need to be under the high-heeled shoe of a mistress, and seeing the interviews with the clientele it’s not surprising. Some of them are quizzed on camera, usually with their back turned or hidden under the saftey of a rubber mask, but their answers are banal; a childhood incident has set them on the path to S and M, or their job involves ordering people about so they relish the idea of being pushed around themselves - only not in the world outside.
It’s not only men who come to see the mistresses, there is the odd woman too, as we see early on when Broomfield awkwardly talks with a woman who is in the process of being strung up and spanked. You get the impression that she was included for titillation for the male viewers for whom the sight of doughy white men with clamps on their nipples crawling around on all fours is a less than appetising prospect. She’s the exception rather than the rule, in other words, although later on we see another woman, who claims to be a professional masochist, undergoing the full treatment, which makes you wonder how anyone could get off on such studied pain and ill treatment. Some clients even have a suffocation fetish, which entails dressing all in rubber and breathing through a tube, which is periodically blocked.
In fact, a few scenes are downright unsettling; one wrestling afficionado seems to want a real battle with his dominatrix, and storms out when he doesn’t get what he wants. Other clients include Jewish men who wish to act out fantasies of concentration camps or Nazi abasement, or black men who who prefer the slave on the plantation scenario - why would they want to put themselves in that position when there are unsavoury individuals who would want to do that to them in real life? You won’t get an answer here, none of Broomfield’s questions dig very deep, although there are lighter moments, as when he asks a woman if she does her dominatrix’s shopping, or when he interviews a man with his head in a toilet bowl (although the man’s genocidal reveries make you worry). Only enlightening as far as illustration goes, Fetishes is a fairly engaging look at a world many will find hard to understand.
* * * * *
Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
Dirty Girl Things ©
Unrepentant. Unpretentious. Unconventional. ©
Monday, June 04, 2007
Number Sixty-Six
P R E T T Y T H I N G S
The HBO Interview with Liz Goldwyn
Liz Goldwyn has worked in fashion, art, and photography since the age of sixteen. She has produced major fashion shows and art installations, helped establish the fashion department at Sotheby’s New York, and was a global consultant for Shiseido America. Liz has written feature articles for international publications including French Vogue,The Financial Times and Hantasubaki. In 2001 Liz launched an eponymous line of jewelry which is sold in the US and internationally. Her documentary film on burlesque queens, Pretty Things, premiered in July 2005 on HBO. Liz’s first book Pretty Things: The Last Generation of American Burlesque Queens was published in October 2006 by Regan/HarperCollins.
Drawing from ten years of close friendships and correspondences with many of her surviving idols, documentary filmmaker and writer Liz Goldwyn invites us to step back into an era when the hourglass figure was in vogue and striptease was a true art form. Among the stars we meet in Pretty Things are Betty Rowland, “The Ball of Fire,” her sister Dian Rowland, “Society’s Sweetheart,” June St. Clair, “The Platinum Princess,” Lois de Fee, “The Amazon of Burlesque,” and last but not least, Zorita, whose daring and sexually explicit performances earned her legendary status.
Goldwyn draws back the curtain to reveal the personal, often surprising, journeys of yesteryear’s icons of female sexuality, restoring their legacy to an age that has all but forgotten them. Pulling together hundreds of archival photographs, costume sketches, and memorabilia, Goldwyn celebrates the collaborative vision and talent that went into creating the burlesque act—from the all-important, exquisitely designed costumes to staging and choreography, to each star’s highly individual style. Pretty Things is at once a gorgeous visual feast and a lovingly documented tale of self-discovery and fleeting stardom.
The spectacularly illustrated book complementing Goldwyn’s HBO documentary of the same name focuses on the early--twentieth-century heyday of burlesque in America, especially its stars. The granddaughter of Hollywood producer Samuel Goldwyn rationalizes that although “raised in the wake of women’s lib, schooled to be independent and to downplay sexuality[,] . . . many women [feel] a strong attraction to the burlesque queen persona of self-aware sexuality,” and photos of her in vintage stripper costumes bespeak her own attraction. But she sees “burlesque queens as artists and their costumes as examples of great craftsmanship.” Book and documentary call attention to the era and the performers “so that their role in entertainment history can be reexamined and ‘legitimized.’” Including details on such vital matters as costume construction for the sake of quick, easy divestment; a wealth of pertinent illustrations; great stories of such stars as Betty Rowland, Zorita, and June St. Clair; and snippets on the likes of Gypsy Rose Lee and Mai Ling, this package gives said reexamination a jump start. --Mike Tribby, American Library Association.
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HBO
So according to the HBO press release, this film is “one young woman’s obsession with the long lost art of burlesque.”
LIZ GOLDWYN
[LAUGHS]
HBO
How did you get into all of this?
LIZ GOLDWYN
Well, I’ve always been a costume collector. And I started working with Sotheby’s, helping to found their Fashion Department. And working there gave me a real view on my own costume collecting. I realized that I actually had some very valuable things, and I learned how to take care of them properly and document their provenance. So I learned how to protect my costumes, write about my costumes, talk about my costumes.
At the same time I was going to art school and doing my thesis in photography. And I was working on a self-portrait series. And I found these two burlesque costumes at a flea market, and then photographed myself in them for my class. And I became really obsessed with these costumes. So I started trying to find any other burlesque costumes. And because I was at Sotheby’s I was connected to this global group of museums and dealers and historians.
And I realized that there was nobody else collecting burlesque costumes, and that the Metropolitan Museum of Art had maybe one Erte costume. But it was in a terrible state of disrepair and it was probably never going to be shown because they didn’t have enough costumes to constitute a show.
And by relating the costumes back to the couture gowns I was studying, I saw a connection that these costumes were as well made as the work of the French couturiers.
And obviously they had been worn for performance, multiple times per day. But they were still so sturdy and so beautiful on the inside and the out. So I became very interested in why hadn’t there been anything done. I said, I’ve gotta start collecting everything so that there can be a show, so that people can see what kind of art this was, this burlesque costuming.
And through collecting the costumes I started finding the women who wore them. And all the sort of historians and dealers in museums I was connected to through Sotheby’s because they knew I was doing this. Any time something would come up in a newspaper, you know, a burlesque queen had died and there was an estate sale, they would call me.
HBO
Lucky you-
LIZ GOLDWYN
I sort of had this real inside track, and I had gone back and researched Berlin cabaret era, and transvestitism in burlesque. And I had researched the Belle Époque in Paris and the English music halls. And I realized that when burlesque died, which in America was post-World War II, really, there had been nothing really written about the burlesque queens, and these people were dying and that it was possible to get first person interviews because I was simultaneously talking to these women about their burlesque costumes.
So, really, the whole project grew out of a need, or a lack of education into the world of burlesque costuming and burlesque queens. And it sort of grew into a more personal movie from there.
HBO
There seems to be a world of difference between the subtlety of the burlesque queens in your film who teased the audience, and the “nude, lewd and screwed” attitudes of today.
LIZ GOLDWYN
At the same time as when I started to collect these costumes, I had also been looking at a lot of burlesque and strip tease as portrayed in movies. And it was interesting to me that Theda Bara in Salome wore so much less on screen than a burlesque queen of the same period would have worn onstage.
Yet she was somehow accepted by polite society and the burlesque queens were not. I mean, especially in the case of Lilly St. Cyr, it was all about the subtlety of the tease. It wasn’t, Here it is, do you want it? It was, Here’s a little peek of my shoulder. Wouldn’t you like to have it? But you can’t.
A lot of people today don’t realize these women wore full-length gowns that looked like something you’d wear to the opera. They don’t realize they were on a stage, that they were akin to the performer in the theatre. There was a division between the audience and the dancers. Men might have been in the audience fantasizing about them, but they still had that separation.
So I think you’re right. It’s incredibly subtle and the women who were successful in their acts perfected their craft to such a point that it was all about the subtlety.
HBO
Were these women aware that they were legends when you began to approach them?
LIZ GOLDWYN
[CHUCKLES] That’s an interesting question-
HBO
Or do you feel like you re-discovered them?
LIZ GOLDWYN
A little. I wouldn’t give myself that much credit. They were definitely not talking about their careers. A lot of them were not even known in their community as having been these huge stars. It took a long time, pen pals and letters for two years before I met most of them in person. There’s a lot of trust to be gained.
I sent my own self-portraits and costumes so there was a friendship that developed before I even met them in person. And I think there was a fear because they had been out of the public eye for so long, and what would it be like now to be on camera, to revisit a time in their life where most of them did not have fond memories.
I was approaching it from the angle of, You’re so inspirational to me. I see you as such an icon. But they didn’t see themselves that way. So right away there was this huge discrepancy between my vision of their lives and their own memories. This was a subject that some of them had not spoken about. So it was interesting having to draw out the information.
HBO
So they were dealing with a much different reality in terms of how were they viewed in their day as opposed to how you were coming at it?
LIZ GOLDWYN
It was more that they’d never gotten the respect that I personally feel they were due. They had spent the last thirty to forty years in obscurity and whereas their male counterparts in burlesque had gone on to fame like Burt Lahr and Abbott and Costello.
They had been relegated to obscurity because there was just no room for strippers on TV or in movies. So I think that they were dealing with the fact that society saw them as being somehow illegitimate. I mean they used the term a lot—legitimate versus illegitimate theater.
Sherry Britton said to me in the movie, You can’t go back and erase it. They all have stories about interactions when people found out they were strippers in the seventies, eighties, the 1990s, it was still something that was considered, oh she was a stripper?
These were larger than life figures on stage, living, breathing female specimens that men couldn’t get at but who were sort of their first peek and flash and thrill of the female form.
So I think it depends on what generation you talk to, but definitely I would say that the women felt that they had not been respected.
HBO
At the same time there’s a sense that they have a tremendous amount of power, and that they’re not victims.
LIZ GOLDWYN
I think that’s probably what subconsciously attracted me to these women, when I put on these costumes. I always believed in the power of costume to transform character, but I didn’t feel that confidence that I saw these women radiating in the old 8x10 photos, and I wanted that in some way I guess. You know. I was attracted to that. How do you achieve that kind of power?
I think it’s a really interesting idea what you’re saying, and it’s one that I definitely have been dealing with. Because some of them in their private life did have bad childhoods, did have sexual abuse. And there is that aspect of being both disrespected and defiled by men in the audience who were essentially masturbating to their performance.
But at the same time that wasn’t their intention. I feel that they kind of owned it, especially someone like Serrita who stripped for men but loved women so it was even more so that you can’t have it. She was in control. She talked very openly about her strategies for money making. And she retired pretty well in Florida in the sun, on an estate that she purchased from money from stocks she received as a gift, just for dinner.
HBO
Wow.
LIZ GOLDWYN
But the most important thing for me is for them to be able to see that they have inspired a whole new generation of people, of men and women and that people do see them as icons. And even though they don’t think you can erase the past, I think you can reevaluate it.
HBO
Now you also put yourself in the film. How did that happen?
LIZ GOLDWYN
I didn’t commit to that really until the rough cut stage. I feel like I’m more of an everywoman character than me, Liz Goldwyn with my own specific personality. I see my role in this film as someone that anyone can relate to because it’s filmed when I was eighteen, so it’s sort of a coming of age in a way, but it’s also being up against these women who have done this for years, it’s second nature. I feel I look foolish attempting to do what they did.
HBO
Which is gutsy that you allow yourself to be awkward and striving to grab some of the essence of what made these women so great. It’s very endearing.
LIZ GOLDWYN
Well there would be no story if I didn’t, there would be no point really. But it was definitely something that I was incredibly reluctant to do. But there were many people who pushed me in terms of involving myself in the story at an early point.
And I’m very close to these women so they saw a lot of rough footage and saw that that aspect of the story made it relatable to a new generation, to really understand how hard what they did was. It was not getting on stage and taking your clothes off. It was a craft that had to be perfected. It involved costume designers and choreographers and sets. And the orchestra, and it was difficult. It was very difficult. It was very hard physically for me to create that persona. I cracked my coccyx, I had sciatica. I was face down in bed for literally four months because I just went so crazy into creating this character, I somehow felt that if I could perfect the dance number that I would be able to erase all the negative aspects of their life.
HBO
That’s incredible. So what do you hope audiences will take away from the movie?
LIZ GOLDWYN
Well for me I guess the hypothesis that I had in the beginning was of these romantic creatures and putting them on a pedestal as these glamorous figures, these glamorous icons of power and female sexuality. And you know after really knowing what went on in their lives and the flaws, in my own perception I guess my question was, can you still dream? Can you still perceive them as these glamorous figures even though you know the serious aspects of their reality? So that was one aspect.
And I guess the other was really giving a balanced view of how they saw themselves so that it’s really up to the viewer to decide what they want to walk away with. Because no matter how many times they would argue with me and tell me that they weren’t glamorous, that they weren’t icons, that they weren’t inspirations, the proof is in the pudding, you know
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Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
Dirty Girl Things ©
Unrepentant. Unpretentious. Unconventional. ©
