storytelling

Posted on by

the stories of historical figures fall in and out of fashion. and so it’s possible for marilyn monroe and audrey hepburn and marie antoinette and jackie kennedy to be a vibrant, prevalent part of our culture as images entirely divorced from the details of their lives.

as a glutton for biography, i tend to forget this and blithely assume everyone i know is walking around ALL.THE.TIME similiarly burdened by an encyclopoedic knowledge of the kennedys, 1950s film stars, the british and russian monarchies and marie antoinette. that they aren’t is a source of constant surprise. and frustration.

because i don’t understand how those images can carry so much meaning, how they can resonate at all, when striped of the biographical details. the pictures are pretty, yes, but over time pretty gets pretty dull.

marilyn was beautiful, but isn’t the sexiest woman in the world rendered a bit more provocative when you consider that she may never have climaxed? doesn’t she look different when you know that, ashamed of her lack of education, she became an auto-didact and read checkov and joyce? 

as a woman, audrey was an icon of prim femininity. as a girl, she carried messages through nazi-occupied territory to the french resistance in the sole of her shoe. she was thin not because it was fashionable but because, as a teenager, she’d escaped a deportation line and spent a month hiding and starving in an abandoned shed. audrey hepburn was a total badass. dear whole wide world, why do we not remember her for that?

marie was loaded and liked cake, but her life carries more meaning when you consider her death. when you know she was praised all around- even among the revolutionaries- for her great courage and that her last words were “pardon me, sir, i meant not to do it,” an apology to her executioner for having accidentally stepped on his foot.

and what of jackie? oh, jackie. as an intolerable jackie snob, i don’t think you can even begin to scratch the surface of appreciating her until you know that she knew about her husband’s pathological philandering. that her premature daughter died while her husband was sailing in france and that he continued sailing in france for a week before he returned home. that she lost a three-day-old son, a son she never saw, three months before her husband was murdered. that she was leaning in six inches from her husband’s face when the final shot hit. that, at parkland hospital, she nudged a doctor and handed him a sizeable chunk of her husband’s brain. and that four days later, the day she buried her husband, she threw a birthday party for her three-year-old son. and that’s just for starters…

images do not do people justice. 

we’re in the midst of a bit of “a marilyn moment”. this has revealed that a significant percentage of my friend-group have never watched a marilyn film. that’s easily fixed and soon they’ll see the hilarity in the fact that my week with marilyn is actually a better movie than the movie it is about.

i confess i hope this will springboard them all into a full-blown obsession that i can further by loading them down with biographies and life narrative analysis and saturday afternoons spent discussing the importance of storytelling. it’s unlikely, i know, but it’s also the biographical dream.

an open letter to lindsay lohan

Posted on by

dear lindsay lohan,

what the eff is up?

i know, i know. DRUGS.

no, no, no, you say, because you’re all clean now. to that i say, nuh uh.

but still. i don’t think drugs alone are responsible for this. you are twenty-freaking-five and, i kid you not, my first thought upon seeing this photograph from your one-on-one with matt lauer was…

DUDE. what the hell has happened to kim cattrall?

kim cattrall, li.lo. kim cattrall.

mind you, kim cattrall is an incredibly hot lady, but that is not my point (ps. what is happening here with your face = decidedly NOT hot). my point is that you are twenty-freaking-five. kim cattrall is fifty-freaking-six. she’s got 31 years on you. my whole lifetime stretches between your ages and yet i have just mistaken you for her.

kim cattrall owns her age, yes, and i think she owns it without having had a lot of work done like everyone else, which i applaud all around. but never should i ever have cause to look at your 25-year-old face and think i am looking at kim cattrall post-botched plastic surgery.

do you see how that should never ever be? why it would be worrisome? because it is appalling?

please, li.lo, get off the crack. bring back your real hair. for the love of god, don’t do that liz taylor lifetime movie. and leave your face alone.

love,
yours,
oline.

a brief digression re: wallis windsor

Posted on by

wallis windsor by irving penn

you may remember the duchess of windsor from the king’s speech. she was wallis simpson then… the slutty vixen who wooed guy pierce with her american wiles, precipitating his abdication of the throne so colin firth could assume his rightful place as king.

confession: i was one of the eight people committed enough to the genre of royal bio-pics to venture out to see madonna’s much-maligned directorial debut during it’s six day chicago run. anticipating 90 minutes of luxe vapidity, i was pleasantly surprised.


the critical savaging of w.e. likely says more about the public’s relationship to madonna than it does about her film…

(would that i were in grad school and in need of doctoral thesis right.this.minute, i’d be all over the tonal difference in the reviews of madonna’s “glossy”, “sloppy”, “hubristic” w.e. versus those of ralph fiennes’s “outstanding”, “strong”, “purposeful”, “admireable”, “aptly fierce” coriolanus. similarly flawed yet bold directorial debuts, Shakespeare directed by an Actor is hailed for its ballsiness while the film written and directed by madonna is slagged as a “gluttenous feast of self-pity by women with a total lack of self-awareness.” grrrrrrrrrrrrrr that.) Continue reading →

sir anthony

Posted on by

i’m sitting in row 38. sir anthony hopkins is to my left.

because if you’re sir anthony hopkins, that’s obviously where you’re going to be. in economy, in a middle seat on a continental flight out of orange county.

i’d seen sir anthony before. hollywood descended on hyde park for the filming of proof just as i arrived for graduate school and so my early days at the university of chicago were bizarrely studded with stars. gwyneth paltrow and jake gyllenhaal and sir anthony were all there. but sir anthony was the only celebrity i saw in the flesh.

one morning, as a friend and i walked to social sciences 122, sir anthony was traversing the quad. he was wearing a tan suit, drinking an orange smoothie and wearing orange makeup a solid inch thick. the overall effect was one of extreme technicolor, as though he had been shot through a tangerine filter while we were living in plain old black and white.

so i knew what sir anthony looked like. which is how i knew he was sitting next to me on continental flight #436.

after a multitude of furtive glances, i was absolutely convinced of it and began wracking my brain for a suitably obscure performance to compliment at the end of our flight- when he would have so enjoyed the 3 hours and 25 minutes of a privacy i had allowed him that my brief violation of it to acknowledge his contributions to film would simply make him appreciate, in retrospect, the spectacle of my in-flight discretion.

i’d just decided on bobby over proof when sir anthony stood up and said in the loudest, most american voice i’ve ever heard: excuse me, ma’am, i have to go to the bathroom.

so maybe i don’t know what sir anthony looks like after all.

some lessons learned

Posted on by

jackie - warhol

biography does not do wonders for your love life.
jackie loved parades.
the suburbs aren’t that far away.
neither is evanston.
don’t go to the dutch pancake place the day after halloween.
always follow-up.
UCLA is not USC.
pick your pen name before you publish.
know that it will be mispronounced 75% of the time.
checking out books doesn’t mean you’ll read them.
reading books doesn’t mean you’ll remember them.
accept paypal.
splurge on your business cards.
wear fake fuchsia bangs.
it’s good to have friends of friends in foreign lands.
don’t do anything stressful after giving blood.
god sleeps from 12 to 3 a.m.
don’t be intimidated by technology.
if you ask, people will give you columns.
bring extra batteries.
never ever drive to memphis.
try to remember toothpaste.
book reviews are where the money’s at.
wash your hair.
send flowers.
read the book.
say yes.
some people improve upon acquaintance.
a fortune can be built with $5 bills.

t-minus 597

Posted on by

Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysses

the philosopher is in town. we’re standing, shivering, on the boardwalk looking out on lake michigan when he asks what exactly the end outcome of the 20.09.13 plan is supposed to be.

and i give some whole blah-bitty-blah-crap answer about how where i live isn’t going to matter and how i’m going to be as mobile as i want to be. which kind of sort of maybe is what this was about in the beginning, but is really not at all what it’s all about now.

it’s funny, how you can have such a sense of where you’re going and see so many pieces of the picture without being able to precisely articulate what it is you’re doing or what it is you see.

i see jackie. that is all. i don’t know where she’ll take me, but i’ll go wherever she leads. she’s my adventure. and, at the moment, all i want, all i crave, all i need is biography and adventure. nothing else. except maybe paris.

in light of this (uncertainty?), it’s tempting to resort to labels. to attach all hopes and dreams to a finalized manuscript or a published book or a freelance job. but that feels limiting. which feels wrong.

i don’t want to be limited. i’m too in love with possibility.

right now, the end outcome of the 20.09.13 plan is an unknown and the 20.09.13 plan itself is about suspending expectations. about seeing what may come from that. from that massive, incredibly daunting void of not knowing.

as is the case with everything, there’s a jackie anecdote for this: she’s wearing a bikini and sitting on a greek beach sipping champagne with an old friend. and she turns to the old friend and she says, “do you realize how lucky we are? to have gotten out of that world we came from. that narrow world of newport [… to] have taken such a big bite out of life.”

she says this and then she smiles.

the only thing that is certain about 20 september 2013 is that i will have taken one hell of a big bite out of life and twelve million small steps forward since 20 september 2010.

that is all i know. and it is enough.

twenty minutes

Posted on by

if it weren’t for the twenty minutes just preceding everything i ever do, i think i could be quite successful.

but those twenty minutes, they’re a total drag.

it would be better if i had an assistant. someone whose sole responsibility it was to know what i was going to do so i wouldn’t have to know and then everything would be a surprise and the twenty minutes leading up to that surprise would be spent in a blissful haze of unknowingness rather than a maelstrom of knowledge and fear.

for instance, my assistant person would meet me after work, take me to my home, turn on my computer, hand me a coffee and say, and now you are going to facilitate a conversation with the author of a book that you’ve read and loved and we’re going to record it for this here podcast.

and i would be all, ooooooh, what a lovely opportunity. how grand. oh, hello there, author of the book i read and loved. let’s chat!

you see how easy that went down? it’s so much simpler than knowing for months that you’ve taken on something that involves three pieces of technology you do not know to use.

but without my assistant and with that knowledge, instead i manufacture dramas. like, amazingly stupid, ridiculously impossible albeit epic dramas. for instance, as of late, the feature presentation playing in my head has been: what if someone i’m interviewing has a heart attack on air?

come now. let’s be real.

never mind that it’s not even a live show, that is freaking NEVER going to happen.

add to that, the fact that it’s not even a creative scenario as i know i’m drawing heavily from the plot of gary paulson’s children’s classic hatchet, wherein the pilot of a two-person plane has a heart attack and the plane crashes in the canadian wilderness and our hero brian robeson- a kid who was simply on his way to visit his divorced father- is left to fend for himself in the wilds.

we’re talking about a podcast. it is in no way comparable to flying a two-person plane over the canadian wilds. and yet, somehow, in the mess that is my brain trying to come to terms with the things that i find difficult to do, the experiences are nearly identical.

this is why i need an assistant. someone who would tell me the things i need to do only as i need to do them. someone who would take hold of those twenty minutes just preceding everything i ever do.

because when you add those up over a lifetime, that’s so many minutes i’ve wasted. so much time i’ve squandered preparing for plot twists derived from children’s books.

i want to get to a point where i do not do this. a point where the twenty minutes just preceding everything i ever do are as euphoric as the twenty minutes coming just after. those moments where i feel as though i can fly that two-person plane over the canadian wilds, for myself, by myself, entirely on my own.

there are things you know you need to do

Posted on by

there are things you know you need to do. by which i don’t mean the honorable, upstanding things, but the thoroughly stupid, senseless, impractical ones. the things people will warn you away from precisely because they seem to make no sense. or because they cost a small country’s annual budget.

this has come up before. last year i used this exact logic as justification for going to paris for 13 hours. i’m realizing that, for me, the most thoroughly stupid, senseless, impractical things are maybe always going to involve paris.

i’m not sure what to do with that just yet. except go back to paris.

come may, i’m presenting a paper at a french conference on narrative. a paper establishing jackie’s tabloid life narrative as being of feminist importance.

the conference is five months away. so far, my paper exists only as a three paragraph abstract that hits upon jackie’s feminist importance in the vaguest possible terms. this proposition is stupid, senseless and impractical on many levels, not to mention expensive. by extension, i’m ruthlessly gung-ho.

in hopes of finding inspiration, i’ve been wading through the paper piles that have accumulated during the last eight years of research. two dozen legal pads filled with old notes and random musings. that is how i happened upon this, written in february 2004:

“jackie o as feminist icon? fun book to write but too hard to prove. TRUE but no one would believe it. it cannot be done.”

my first thought upon reading this? merde.

my second thought? yes, it can.

(photographs by peter beard)

prague

Posted on by

MM

in things that happened that i did not expect to have happen and yet which it is good to have had happen, i am going to prague. because a paper i wrote- though i’m not entirely sure which one- was accepted to a conference on celebrity studies that’s being held there come spring.

this has done much to hammer home my belief that there is no better possible gateway to exotic(ish) vacations than biography, in general, and jackie, in particular.

i’ve proposed exotic travels to everyone i’ve ever dated (all of them actual, living people), and yet it wasn’t until jackie and i got all serious that the exotic travels came true.

it’s a fact that reenforces my central thesis that jackie is an icon of such elastic extremes that she can be anything you want her to be. for me, at the moment, she functions much like a passport. a glittering ticket to a world whose wonders prove an excellent pallative to the strain stemming from her secondary function as a financial sinkhole.

and so i’m apparently going to prague with jackie to deliver some paper in a palace. file that under sentences i couldn’t’ve even begun to imagine writing eleven months ago.

(photo by cbs news staff; STR/AFP/Getty Images) 

allegations

Posted on by

barris marilyn monroe reading

tracy weiner- whose writing biography class constitutes the sole semester of biographical training that comprises the biography concentration of my masters degree in the humanities- once said: the biographer has the power to control perception.

that sounds a bit maniacal, but consider the case of the horrible things jackie allegedly said at random deathbeds.

as a biographer, i’m under no moral obligation to discuss the horrible things jackie allegedly said. i can’t remove the random deathbeds from jackie’s history, but i can erase the horrible things she may have said there. i can leave them out altogether and you’ll never be the wiser.

i can just as easily bring them up without any context and leave you thinking jackie’s a callous, intolerable bitch. i can make you ask, jackie, how could you stand at a random deathbed and say such a horrible thing?!

or, i can contextualize the random deathbeds and show you how the horrible things jackie said there were entirely warranted and were, in fact, not so horrible.

i can make the horrible things jackie allegedly said at random deathbeds look entirely within her character or completely out of it.

i can also cushion them with the word “allegedly,” so before you even hear that jackie said horrible things at random deathbeds there is already, in your mind, some shadow of doubt.

when it comes to your thinking on the horrible things jackie said at random deathbeds, i hold great power.

(presuming, of course, that you care about jackie and that it is of some importance to you whether she was one to say horrible things in general and at deathbeds in particular.)

as is nearly always the case, the story of the horrible things jackie may or may not have said at random deathbeds is important not so much for what it says about jackie as for what it says about us.

the core revelation of tracey weiner’s writing biography class was that there are practices- be that chronology, word choice or whatever- that biographers use to manipulate our thinking on a subject and impose their own beliefs.

though non-fiction masquerades under the auspices of being entirely true, it truly isn’t. it’s perception. and opinion. and a whole host of personal biases.

and so biography is maybe as much about the biographer as about the subject. within the genre, there’s a great deal of clucking over this. it’s often labeled a handicap, though i don’t think it always is.

i crave examples of female adventure, of women deviating from the expected.

from the first, that is the lens through which i have seen jackie. it’s a view that’s been missing in both the biographical record of her and her iconic persona and one that, i think, is integral to our understanding of who she was. it can’t be a coincidence that, time and again, when discussing her publicly, her children evoked her love of adventure.

i look upon hers as the most significant female life of the american twentieth century. i date that significance to the onassis years. and i base it on her fictional alter ego’s narrative journey through tabloid magazines.

all of that deviates from pretty much every existing line of thought.

that heroine though – the rich kid from newport who married a pirate and moved to greece and allegedly said horrible things at random deathbeds- she, my friends, is completely kick-ass.

but people like their icons boring. they like to play it safe. they prefer that their former first ladies be quiet, kid-gloved and kitten-heeled rather than wandering capri barefoot and without a bra.

even jackie’s biographers are skittish when the story strays far from her iconic image. in the case of the horrible things jackie allegedly said at random deathbeds, they hand over the anecdote like a hot potato, thrusting it upon the reader at a chapter’s end.

the schelesinger tapes evoked a similar sense of disquiet. jackie was catty! jackie had opinions! oh my god, jackie held a grudge!

as far back as the 1960s, when confronted with evidence of her humanity, the world has recoiled.

in taking on a set series of meanings, our cultural icons are supposed to be safe and sterile and silent. they are not meant to change but rather are fixed images, trapped like han solo in carbonite.

culturally, this is an important process. but it’s also one that biography should counteract.

the biographer has the power to change perception.

but can the biographer rewrite a myth?

(photos by george barris)