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. ©

Next entry: Number Sixty-Seven Previous entry: Number Sixty-Five