fight club

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(4 august 2008)

PART ONE


Just how awesome are literary throw-downs? That is the question. Because, really, literary throw-downs are effing unbelievably awesome.

Maybe simply because the centuries have afforded us so very few. We’re more accustomed to catty quill fights—Marlowe versus Shakespeare. Rimbaud versus Verlaine. Capote versus Vidal. Swell in their own right, yes, but bona fide, fisticuffs-and-all frays are few and far between. And infinitely awesomer.

On March 26, 1964, when Robert Kennedy’s office announced that the Kennedy family had anointed William Manchester to write the authorized account of the death of J.F.K., the Senator probably didn’t realize he was stepping into the ring for one of the greatest literary smack-downs of all time. It was an honest mistake. Hear the name Bobby Kennedy and bibliobrawler probably isn’t the first word that jumps to mind.

A former foreign correspondent for the Baltimore Sun, William Manchester seemed convivial enough and his greatest selling point was that he had written Portrait of a President, an idolatrous account of John Kennedy’s early presidency. The Kennedys always appreciated people who knew how to play the game, and back then Manchester had acted the dutiful courtier— submitting all proofs to the President’s press secretary and awaiting approval from the President himself before proceeding with publication.

Later, Manchester would consider his prior docility with the Kennedy administration the motivating factor in his appointment as authorized family scribe: “I think [Mrs. Kennedy] picked me because she thought I would be manageable.” He would be anything but.

Smart people sometimes do exceedingly stupid things. That is the only explanation for why the family would embark upon the literary equivalent of an autopsy to begin with, much less do so wielding little more than a flimsy contract whose most concrete sentiment was that the book could be released immediately or maybe later or maybe not at all. Such ambiguity guaranteed misunderstandings in the absence of stellar communication, and everyone was simply too busy and too emotional to be fully engaged.

They were going to a street-fight cloaked in gold lame. Manchester was sporting steel-toed boots.

Ultimately, the Kennedys and the author held fundamentally different views of what the book should be. Manchester wanted to make “a genuine contribution to history” and, presumably, some small donation to his bank account. Jacqueline Kennedy wanted a historical record— in no way sensational, in no way exploitative— as she later told Manchester, to be “bound in black and put away on dark library shelves.” It was, after all, the story of her husband’s death. Not exactly something she wanted on coffee tables all over the world.

William Manchester had once declared John Kennedy “the personification of most American’s daydreams,” and in revisiting the President’s murder, he was reliving a national nightmare day after day. After what Manchester later characterized as “three years of agony,” he completed the 380,000-word manuscript, writing Robert Kennedy: “I felt as though I had emerged from a long dark tunnel.”

All the interviews the author conducted were emotionally disturbing, but none more so than those with Mrs. Kennedy. Fueled by daiquiris and cigarettes, the pair talked late into the night.

At the time, historian and Kennedy family friend Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. was collecting oral histories for the Kennedy Library. Rather than subject Jacqueline to such an emotionally harrowing experience twice, Manchester conducted both the interview for the library and for the book simultaneously. Jacqueline believed the tapes would not be made public during her lifetime. Schlesinger told her to be as forthcoming as possible because she “was making a deposition for the historian of the twenty-first century.” In response, she was shockingly candid. Manchester himself admitted: “She had withheld nothing . . .”

♠

Once the book was completed, it proved impossible for the family to read. Robert Kennedy tried on several occasions but barely finished the first few pages. His wife, Ethel, reportedly read portions at some point. Jacqueline sat on the sidelines, awaiting the go-ahead, assuring Manchester that she would eventually read it, “After R.F.K. and Evan Thomas have gone over this manuscript [. . . ] whenever they think I should.”

Thus, the task was delegated to assorted Kennedy minions. Evan Thomas (Manchester’s publisher), John Sigenthaler, (Robert Kennedy’s former administrative assistant) and Ed Guthman (editor of the Los Angeles Times), were summoned and given the mammoth job of taming the beast.

And tt was quickly apparent to all that there was much to be tamed. Sigenthaler and Guthman immediately pressed for 111 editorial changes and the removal of several viciously anti-Lyndon Johnson passages.

The primary criticism was that, in his fawning reverence and dewy prose, Manchester’s Kennedys were cardboard, albeit glittering, characters. Jacqueline is cold, detached and, after her husband’s death, almost macabre in her role as a master of funereal etiquette, while Kennedy— with his sore back and staid majesty— seems to have a foot in the grave the minute he first strides into the Texas sun.

Ironically, the venom that colors the portrait of Lyndon Johnson renders him the liveliest character of the lot. The Vice President, though villainized, is the one you remember. This was not how it was supposed to be.

In reality, no book could have measured up to the Kennedy camp’s expectations. It was far too early for any account of the President’s death, much less a sprawling historical narrative. As Time later noted, “What nobody seemed to take into account is that the assassination is still so fresh in people’s memories and has left so many exposed nerve ends that any painstakingly detailed, step-by-step retelling is premature at this point.”

To the Kennedy readers, Manchester’s effort to capture the whole “tragic sweep of that entire weekend” hit all of these nerves, most directly by obscuring the man himself. John Kennedy, though the impetus for the book, was not its focus and that was unacceptable.

Guthman, Thomas, and Sigenthaler all agreed there were serious problems with the manuscript, but they withheld the full extent of their misgivings for fear of the psychologically devastating impact upon the author.

According to Sigenthaler, Thomas suggested that Manchester had become increasingly unstable: “[Thomas] would say, ‘There’s no question but that he’s seen that [Zapruder] film seventy-five to a hundred times and if you’d seen the President’s brains fly that many times then something would happen to you, too.”

Even if Manchester weren’t mentally disturbed at this point, the Kennedy aides began handling him as though he were. Rather than speaking with him directly, they pussyfooted around, employing intermediaries, in essence turning the project into an elaborate game of “Telephone,” which only added further confusion to the cacophony.

The reviewers were pissed, but they had not dismissed the idea that the book could be published by year’s end. They thought that through extensive revisions Manchester’s manuscript could be brought back in line with their vision of what it should be.

The announcement that Jim Bishop’s The Day Kennedy Died would be published in the fall of that year left everyone quaking in their boots and lent the project a renewed sense of urgency. Manchester, who had been living off a small advance from Harper & Row, was understandably eager for events to move quickly. He had been told to expect a telegram from Robert Kennedy that would allow the publication process to go forward. Under the impression that a telegram of approval was forthcoming, Manchester began taking bids for magazine serialization.

Senator Kennedy knew serialization was Manchester’s only source of profit and had indicated to others that he would stay out of the negotiations. He simply stated a preference for Look over Life, which had recently published several articles critical of him, and left it at that.

There was a lingering fear that the project would be tainted by the slime of opportunism. To that end, the Kennedys had made it clear from the first that all profits from the book were to go to the Kennedy Library. There was to be no hint of exploitation here.

In a letter written to the Senator, Manchester reiterated this, crowing that he would have full editorial control over the serialization regardless of which magazine won the rights: “I’m holding the line on control of text and layouts, and, in fact, there have been no recent protests about that. I can guarantee you that it will be handled with not the faintest tinge of sensationalism. I can guarantee it because I’m the man who will be making the decisions.” He didn’t comprehend that with the magazines entrance, he would ultimately forfeit everything.

As bidding heated up, Manchester cooled his heels awaiting the telegram from Robert Kennedy. None came. Which didn’t matter much since no one really knew what the telegram would mean.

After a series of conversations on July 14th, the significance of the forthcoming note was only further muddied. According to Sigenthaler, Thomas had suggested the Kennedys send a reassuring telegram to the worried author. Thomas himself said he thought the telegram would say the book would be published that year rather than 1968. In contrast, Manchester emerged with the belief that the telegram would indicate a blanket endorsement of the book. Three men, three different stories. Still no telegram.

On July 27th, Manchester panicked, calling the home of Robert Kennedy’s secretary and begging for the letter he had been promised. Angie Novello summarized their conversation in a detailed memorandum to the Senator, noting that Manchester hadn’t “slept in 3 nights worrying about that letter.” Later that day, Robert Kennedy wired Manchester:

While I have not read William Manchester’s account of the death of President Kennedy, I know of the President’s respect for Mr. Manchester as an historian and a reporter. I understand others have plans to publish books regarding the events of November 22, 1963. As this is going to be the subject matter of a book and since Mr. Manchester in his research had access to more information and sources than any other writer, members of the Kennedy family will place no obstacle in the way of publication of his work.

This was what Manchester had been waiting for. Approval. The following day, he sold the American rights of The Death of a President to Look magazine for $665,000—at that time, the highest price ever paid for serialization. Instantly, the “no commercial exploitation” myth that had sanctified the project was besmirched.

In defense of the hasty contract, Manchester later explained to an interviewer: “When I saw ‘members of the Kennedy family will place no obstacle in the way’ of publication of the book, I thought it was all over.” It had only just begun.

♠

It had always been Manchester’s belief that R.F.K. was acting as his sister-in-law’s representative. When the author approached Jacqueline Kennedy’s secretary, Pamela Turnure, with a copy of the manuscript, Turnure brusquely told him to “work through Bob, who is representing [her].” From then on, Manchester assumed R.F.K.’s approval was Jacqueline’s. Little did he know.

In late July of 1967, Jacqueline, who had not yet seen Manchester’s manuscript, returned from a Hawaiian vacation to find an effusive letter from the elated author in which he touted an “approved manuscript.” She had approved nothing.

At a cocktail party on July 31st, when Robert Kennedy informed her of the serialization and how much Look had paid for the rights, the shit hit the fan.

Faced with the imminent publication of a “highly personal account, an emotional retelling of the assassination,” Jacqueline, working through Turnure, supplied Manchester with a memorandum of passages to be revised. The list included at least 25 areas that would require substantial revision and also recommended that the book needed a new, less emotional tone— all fundamental textual problems that would require a ton of time to fix.

There was a sense that the situation was controllable so long as it revolved primarily around financial matters. To this end, Harper & Row hatched an elaborate plan in which Manchester would grandiosely divert a portion of the Look profit to the Kennedy Library and would be reimbursed on the sly by the publishing house so that there would not be publicly scene as having profited from the project.

On August 12th, during a tense flight from New York to Washington, Evan Thomas rehearsed his author on a speech to the Senator. Things quickly fell apart when, upon entering Robert Kennedy’s hotel room, Manchester, ever the poppycock, deadpanned, “I guess we should be facing each other with dueling pistols and swords.” With that, the meeting was effectively over.

The press would only further complicate matters. In early August, Evan Thomas alerted Robert Kennedy that Homer Bigart of the New York Times was poking around in the book and serialization deal. They knew it would just be a matter of time before the rest of the press came knocking.

On August 10th, Robert Kennedy cabled Thomas: “Under the present circumstances, with the situation as difficult as it is, I feel the book on President Kennedy’s death should neither be published nor serialized. I would appreciate it if you would inform Bill Manchester.”

In sending the telegram, Kennedy took a major political risk. He was censoring the author he had appointed himself, a situation that looked not only foolish but faintly unconstitutional. But his motivation was clear– Jacqueline Kennedy was raising hell…

© faith e.

(citations available upon request)

my harsh mistress and mariah carey

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(21 september 2006)

i love writing. but sometimes writing is a mighty tough trick.

i’m supposed to be writing about faux2. it’s supposed to be me, right now, writing about faux2. i know this and all i can think about is mariah carey.

mariah carey as marilyn monroe. mariah carey and the american dream. mariah carey and tommy matolla. mariah carey and gangsta rap.

all i want to write about is mariah carey. or maybe elvis impersonators or tabloids or the fall or the cute dog in the park or how much snow we might get this winter. so really, right now, i want to write about everything in the world but faux2. but mostly, i just want to write about mariah carey.

because when i couldn’t sleep the other night, all i could think about was marilyn monroe and mariah carey. to me, there is no one in modern american life quite so monroe as mariah carey. the public image of monroe, a comic genius, reduced her to little more than an erotic freak. it would seem that’s the public image path mariah carey has either been pushed into or is plodding down. she has a truely astonishing vocal talent yet has, lately at least, been most often celebrated in the mainstream for her bosom and repeated weightloss/gain.

admittedly, this is partly her own doing- the woman has a weakness for some slutastic clothes and slutastic clothes, as we all know, can be unkind. but it’s unfortunate that someone talented to that degree should be limited to an image largely defined by physical change and unfortunate fashion. because though we forget it, images are so often almost always very wrong.

i wanted to write about mariah carey not just because of monroe, but because when i couldn’t write tonight, all i could listen to was mariah carey. i don’t know how this was supposed to be helpful but at least it didn’t hurt. it would have been far, far worse to have suffered a michael bolton relapse and gone flying into the arms of his greatest hits. mariah carey seemed the safest, most respectable indulgence.

but i thought i had gone beyond mariah carey. i didn’t believe she could possibly have anything for twenty-five-year-old me. then i listened to mariah carey again. and again and again and an embarrassing number of agains, and i realized maybe i was wrong. because when writing was a really, really tough trick of an essay, mariah carey was there, as she (and the jackson five) said she would be. and i know now, mariah’s got my back.

heaven tonight

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(11 october 2006)

a friend and i are writing a play. tonight this play took us where we inevitably knew it would. but that doesn’t mean we were prepared. that we weren’t both rather stunned when the friend dunked her chocolate chip cookie, leaned back and declared, so i guess at this point we must ask ourselves how marilyn would greet jackie in heaven.

blindsided by the fact that we would have to ask ourselves such a thing- though i must have always known we would- i abruptly leaned forward, my hair sweeping up the pile of pumpkin bread crumbs that i would spend the remainder of the evening shaking from it.

i was a mess. i wasn’t ready. had i known we were going to heaven tonight, i would’ve at least shaved my legs.

by now, we’re pretty certain this play is unspeakably awesome. we read it and we laugh and cry. as though this weren’t actually our play. as though elves were writing furiously in the night to produce theatrical brilliance for us.

our ladies are surprising. these ladies we know so well. we read that jackie ashed her cigarette on marilyn’s carpet and we jumped back in shock. jackie! we gasped. what a bitch! as though we hadn’t been sitting in panera a month ago cackling about how hysterical it would be for jackie to do precisely that. as though she were no longer our jackie. as though she had become her own.

so tonight the play made it to heaven. and we sat in starbucks trying to figure out what jackie and marilyn would say in heaven. we, of course, knew what they would be wearing, but what would they be like? would they be funny in heaven? or serious? would smoking be allowed in the afterlife? we had no idea. we didn’t know where to begin. we were lost. we could not go on.

until the friend dunked her chocolate chip cookie, leaned back and astutely observed, we’ve got to assume they’d have all sorts of wisdom and shit because they’re, like, dead. and with that we had our motivation. and our subtitle.

showtime

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(26 june 2009)

in 1993, josh pateet was quite possibly the coolest kid in page middle school, if not the world. at the time, i wasn’t aware of having a crush on him. i was all consumed with unexpressed love for tony cromierr but looking back now, i think maybe i was a little in love with josh pateet as well. in that way that middle school girls can be in love with eleven boys at once.

because josh pateet was hot. an undeveloped yet dangerous, skinny sixth grade boy type of hot. he had a cowlick. he wore white button-downs and black pants. and he had a michael jackson impersonation.

a white button-down and pop music. this is all a girl needs.

josh pateet was semi-famous school-wide for this michael jackson impersonation. we’re talking winter of 1993, so michael jackson was everywhere. he’d not yet been accused of molesting little boys. he’d just married lisa marie. their joint barbara walters interview was so significant that josh pateet brought in a VHS that we watched in mr. adams’ history class as an example of “seeing history unfold.”

josh pateet. the page middle school talent show seemed to have been invented just for him.

we’re talking about a school that was literally situated between two cow farms. for a month out of every year, the whole place smelled like manure. it was a setting in which a michael jackson impersonation seemed the height of glamor and we reacted accordingly.

every year of those three years, when talent show time rolled around, josh pateet’s performance was held to the last, presumably so he wouldn’t shame the other acts. when the lights were dimmed and “beat it” came pounding over a sound-system so out-dated it seemed the music was thrashing inside to fight its way out, we cheered for josh pateet as though this were a once-in-a-lifetime sight rather than a spectacle we were treated to whenever a teacher finished early in class and had nothing else with which to fill the time.

i often wonder what happened to him. he seemed awfully big for a school so small. is he married? is he gay? has he gone on to do great things or did he peak at page middle?

but mostly i wonder if he remembers those days– those moments, innocent in their showiness, that have flickered through my mind every time i’ve seen anything to do with michael jackson ever since– when a boy with a cowlick moonwalked across the cougar painted on the polished floor, reveling in being someone he wasn’t as 250 preteens cheered for him in a darkened gym as if he were the real thing.

time after time

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(8 april 2009)

i’ve been watching saved by the bell in the mornings lately. primarily because every episode has been seared into my brain, thus obviating the need to wear contacts or glasses. but i was struck by something today.

how devastating is zack and kelly’s breakup?

you know, the one where they sit on the picnic table outside the costume ball while slater and jessie (I’M SO EXCITED!!!) spano lip-sync that sad, sad michael bolton song about how can you possibly go on living when the person you love no longer wants you.

let’s think about that for a minute, because that is awful.

a truth the gravity of which i think we were spared in our youths because saved by the bell unfolded largely outside of time.

most of us grew up with it in syndication (tbs from 3:05-4:05 and wgn from 4:00-5:00) so we’re accustomed to the patchwork sequencing. slater and zack would be best friends at 3:05 and then the knives would be out come 3:35. zack and kelly were dating one hour then just friends the next. tori was everywhere and then she wasn’t. and at 4:30 zack would kiss lisa, something no one would ever mention again.

since it was a show set outside any logical order, it’s appropriate that the dvds reflect a similar chronological disarray. there, the episode of zack coping with the kelly breakup actually precedes the breakup itself. which is nice in a way, because watching them break-up, you already know that, after acting out with screech’s strangely attractive cousin and getting a lecture from the gang, zack will recover and he and kelly will reunite as friends at lisa’s birthday party and zack will admit that the college guy kelly dumped him for is actually kind of cool.

it is when you make the sadistic effort to watch these episodes in logical order that you realize how completely ridiculous an interpretation of a post-breakup this really is.

because this is an awful breakup.

they are sitting on a picnic table in full elizabethan dress. because kelly’s parents apparently practiced the rhythm method and consequently have 800 kids, kelly couldn’t afford to buy a dress of her own, thus, she is wearing a dress that zack has bought her and which, in a surprising touch of realism, exposes way more bosom than is probably right for a saturday morning kids show. her breasts seem to be taunting him as he, in a move that seems the final emasculating blow, wears tights- tights!- for her and yet still she has just called him by the name of another man as they win the bayside equivalent of Couple of the Year.

as if that weren’t devastating enough, as they sit together on the picnic table, serenaded with the lyrics “how am i supposed to carry on/when all that i’ve been living for is gone,” zack asks kelly for a last dance

ouch, my heart.

of course, zack morris would do this. because zack morris could be nothing less than a gentleman. he would have to do the honorable thing.

but i like to think there’s an alternate universe. one where kelly goes out dancing and catches jeff the douche with a college girl and realizes she made a horrible mistake.

but then, that can’t happen now. that happened eight episodes earlier.

Stars, Tabloids, + Sex Taboggons

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(16 may 2006/23 september 2010)

Long, long ago, back in the dark ages before US Weekly, the movie magazines reigned supreme. A special breed of tabloid that the film studios cunningly created in the 1920s as a publicity tool,  the movie mags spent their first 40 years offering puff pieces on everyone’s favorite stars. But, because it is often hard to make money being nice, in the late 1950s, the tone of their coverage took a salacious turn and veered towards the tantalizing cocktail of glamorous lives, naughty headlines and provocative photographs that beckons to us from newstands to this very day.

Tabloids, as a genre, engender little loyalty, so the industry has always depended upon newsstand sales to an extraordinary extent. To this end, movie magazine editors rushed to find celebrities who exercised broad appeal and would hold the public’s interest over long periods of time. Three months was considered an eternity. Thirty years had never before been done.

Much as popcorn kept movie theaters afloat after the advent of television, so Jackie Kennedy salvaged the movie magazines. She never starred in a movie but she featured in the movie magazines to such an extent that  in 1962, Variety enthusiastically hailed her as the “world’s top box office femme.” The prevailing editorial policy of all of the 40+ movie magazines then became this: to regularly feature the First Lady alongside “any lady or gentleman of the screen and television who misbehaved.”

Among the ladies and gentlemen misbehaving at the time, Liz Taylor was queen bee. Thus, despite the absence of any legitimate connection, Liz and her then-husband Richard Burton would become Jackie’s “magazine relatives.” Ultimately, the Jackie-Burton-Liz tabloid triangle pervaded the national consciousness to such an extent that it created among magazine readers a Pavlovian response to the three principle players. According to sociologist Irving Schulman:

If new photographs worthy of inclusion at deadline were not to be had, art directors arranged jigsaw cutouts for Jackie-Burton-Liz, and in a very short time indeed a national conditioned response was established. Purchasers who saw a photograph of Jacqueline Kennedy would think immediately of Elizabeth Taylor and what she was doing; conversely a photograph of [ . . . ] Elizabeth Taylor would conjure up an image of Mrs. Kennedy.

The Jackie-Liz connection would become so integrated into the popular culture that in the Hollywood treatment of the Jackie story, The Greek Tycoon, the lead female character was named “Liz.”

In the beginning, particularly during the Kennedy administration, the movie magazine coverage remained somewhat circumspect. The couples served as simple foils for one another; the Burtons’ racy exploits emphasized the Kennedys’ elegance while Jack and Jackie’s élan exaggerated Burton and Liz’s decadence. In the fall of 1963,  the question of the Kennedys’ “Marriage & Taste” versus the Burtons’ “Passion & Waste” was of such critical social import that  Photoplay gave it major coverage.

In retrospect, it is not surprising that this circumspection ceased with the death of JFK. As Jackie marched into single womanhood, the tabloids switched course and focused on the remaining threesome- cropping cover photos and manipulating gossip to suggest romantic intrigues, clandestine meetings, and unorthodox sexual proclivities. Richard Burton and Jackie Kennedy may never have held hands, but thanks to clever editors and decoupage, on countless magazine covers they did.

The tabloids intentions here were completely pure: they sought to unite “Jackie” with the Burtons because “It would truly be a new, fun, fun world for Jackie– for the Burtons are fun, fun people.” And, really, who didn’t want Jackie to have fun?

Editors could not have created more different and more profitable characters to mash-up. Women loved to hate “Liz,” an actress who seemed constantly on the brink of personal disaster; they simply loved Mrs. Kennedy. In the words of pop-philosopher Wayne Koestenbaum, “Liz was trash; Jackie was royalty.” It was the perfect mix.

In the American consciousness, Jackie and Liz presented two entirely different versions of femininity in practice. What this translated into was Jackie being the woman everyone should aspire to be and Liz being the woman no woman would want to become (never mind that Liz seemed to always be having a hell of a lot more fun).

This dichotomy is nowhere more vividly exemplified than in the 1962 magazine, JACKIE and LIZ. The commemorative opens with a page that explains the editors’ reasons for comparing Jackie and Liz: “They shine in completely different constellations and exert a completely different emotional and moral effect upon us… To compare them [ . . . is] a way for us to examine the natures of the stars we create, and in the process discover something about ourselves.”

What we, the reader, should discover is clarified in a simple headline on the same page: “LIZ TAYLOR: A Warning To American Women; JACKIE KENNEDY: An Inspiration to American Youth.” Jackie was “WOMAN OF THE YEAR,” “Mistress of the Washington Merry Go-Round,” and “First in the Hearts of Her Countrymen.” She “KEEPS HER MAN HAPPY,” is “SURROUNDED BY LOVE” and only “Leaves Her Home For Service.”

In very stark contrast, “Liz” was the “SENSATION OF THE YEAR” and “STAR OF THE ROMAN SCANDALS.” “A Woman Without a Country” who was “Caught in the mad Marriage-Go-Round” and “SURROUNDED BY FEAR,” she faced “A THREATENING TOMORROW.”

I know no women who would welcome a threatening tomorrow. Life is hard enough as it is.

In JACKIE and LIZ, Jackie was lifted up as a shining paragon of virtue and good. To gossip columnist Fanny Hurst, her place in people’s affections was a barometer of the national well-being. So long as we all loved Jackie, the world would be ok.

In contrast, through “unsavory Taylor-Burton headlines, the shabby stories of shabby lies, of multiple marriages, infidelities, divorces, broken homes, displaced children,” Liz- heaven help her- had “steered her sex toboggan down a dangerous run.” A message that was, no doubt, not lost on readers whose own marriages might be lacking “the fire of passion” and women who might be tempted to follow Liz’s less traditionally feminine example by steering their own toboggans along her perilous path. Let there be no doubt, “Roman Scandals” were not welcome here.

Collectively, the tabloid narrative implies a sexual rivalry between the two women. When Jackie, allegedly rankled by Liz’s affair on the Cleopatra set, didn’t attend the movie’s Washington premier, TV Radio Mirror rushed to declare it: THE DAY JACKIE ‘SLAPPED’ LIZ! In the article, prudish Jackie frowns upon Liz’s amorous exploits and Liz’s doings appear spectacularly more whorish when on parade before Jackie’s puritanical restraint. Yes, Liz’s indiscretions were startling by contemporary standards, but she appears downright depraved beside Jackie’s sanctity.

In later years, all this would change.  With“Jackie’s” slide toward Greek decadance, the rivalry would continue to dominate newsstands but the headlines would grow increasingly sexual and provocative: AMERICA’S TWO FALLEN QUEENS; ONE NIGHT WITH JACKIE’S HUSBAND MAKES LIZ’ DREAM COME TRUE; THE NIGHT ONASSIS TURNED TO LIZ; JACKIE DISGRACED AS ARI BOOZES IT UP WITH LIZ IN PUBLIC BAR; TWO DESPERATE WOMEN GAMBLE ALL; LIZ’ PREMARITAL HONEYMOON PLANS INVOLVE JACKIE’S HUSBAND!


Jackie’s very appearance in the movie magazines suggested a massive shift from their original function as an advertising vehicle for motion picture stars. Both Liz and Jackie were exaggerated icons, however, Liz, an actress, was in fact selling a product– herself and her movies. Because Jackie had nothing to hawk, her life itself was turned into a movie for the public’s entertainment. By the early-1960s, it was playing out on newsstands all across the country.

In time, the differences in the unique relationships readers developed with both women would become more apparent. Liz’s connection to the public derived from total revelation. In Life the Movie, film and culture commentator Neal Gabler succinctly catalogs Liz’s shifting societal role:

Taylor’s early appeal as a life performer was her willingness to expose her private sexuality, first with [Eddie] Fisher and then with [Richard] Burton, and to provide a voyeuristic charge for those who read about her. Her later appeal, when she was no longer a sex symbol, was her willingness to expose her dysfunctions as melodramatic entertainment: her ballooning weight and subsequent diets, her drug problems, her vexed marriages and romances, her various illnesses.

In contrast, Jackie’s audience was tantalized by what she withheld. Her adamant refusal to reveal herself or her private life created a vast expanse of ignorance, which proved fertile ground for wildly speculative assertions and implausible fantasies. Because Jackie refused to participate in the tabloid pageant, the magazines reached out to readers—inviting them to select a wedding dress for Jackie’s remarriage, to suggest a hairstyle, and to pass judgment upon her hem lengths. In a manner eerily evocative of American Idol, the movie magazines fostered the public’s sense of interactivity in Mrs. Kennedy’s life. After her remarriage in 1968, Motion Picture even invited readers to vote to “BACK JACKIE,” as if their support would have a real effect upon the new Mrs. Onassis.

In American culture, Jackie acted as a tabula rasa, onto which everyone from little girls to frustrated housewives could project their fantasies of glamour and romance. As an Onassis acquaintance once said: “Jackie was nothing; an ordinary American woman with average tastes and some money. She was a creation of the American imagination.” Yet, within the tabloid culture, Jackie heralded a new age, in which “an ordinary housewife writ large” could become a star. And as that great arbiter of celebrity- and friend of both Jackie and Liz- Andy Warhol once said, “More than anything people just want stars.”

© faith e.

Review: Black Sun

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(5 march 2007)

Upon its initial publication in 1976, Geoffrey Wolff’s Black Sun: The Brief Transit and Violent Eclipse of Harry Crosby was dismissed by The New York Times as “a three ring circus of scandal and anti-social behavior.” Perhaps the Times was right—but, seriously, what a show.

The nephew of the bazillionaire J.P. Morgan, the eccentric poet Harry Crosby scandalized Boston society by marrying a divorcee and fleeing to Paris to establish the renegade Black Sun Press. He flirted with Romanticism, Decadence, and Surrealism only to settle for a combination of narcotic experimentation and sun worship vividly manifested in wretched verse: “The Sun! The Sun! / a fish in the aquarium of sky.”

A “minor” poet, Crosby ran with the “major” literary figures of 1920s Paris. He drank with Hemingway and Cummings, published Joyce and Lawrence, pissed off Wharton, and was eulogized by Eliot and Pound. He was the quintessential dabbler—manically tarting his writing in every available shade of literary dress. According to Wolff, “during five working years Harry duplicated a century of complicated aesthetic traditions.”

And what better way to conclude such an earnest, unimaginative career than with a typically clichéd bang? In December 1929, the thirty-one year old married Crosby was found shot dead—his toenails lacquered red and his feet tattooed—alongside the corpse of his married girlfriend and with a letter from another woman in his front pocket. Contemporaries considered Crosby’s murder/suicide his best poem. Wolff considers it his final literary experiment.

Wolff’s background in fiction and his narrative approach to biography lend Black Sun the feel of a splendidly executed novel, which is appropriate given the performative nature of Crosby’s entire life. Though Wolff is clearly fascinated by Crosby, he knows his subject is nutters and he’s astute enough to capitalize upon that as Crosby’s greatest charm. It’s a shrewd move, and Wolff’s snide jokes and witty asides strut memorably alongside Crosby’s maverick conformity and appalling verse.

Though the 2003 edition of Black Sun features no textual changes, Wolff includes an intriguing new afterward. Responding to the question “Why [write about] Crosby,” he explains his interest in this man who was reduced to a footnote by most 20s scholars. Wolff rejects Crosby’s reputation as a Lost Generation archetype and finds him interesting simply because “What Crosby said he’d do he did, exactly.” He was “not merely some posturing dandy of the boulevards. He acted everything out—everything; there was no lag for him between thought and experiment.” Crosby’s shoddy, suicidal poetry made his intentions quite clear.

Harry Crosby is not an important literary figure. He was, after all, only famous by association and his own poetry never developed beyond the subject matter of adolescent angst. But, as Wolff admits and Black Sun proves, there is “something about [the poem’s] very badness”– something about Crosby’s very badness– that is haunting: “Like Icarus, of whom [Crosby] wrote, he flew toward the sun till it melted his wings of wax [ . . . ] unlike Icarus, however, he was forewarned.”

Geoffrey Wolff, Black Sun: The Brief Transit and Violent Eclipse of Harry Crosby. New York Review: NY, 2003.

decline + fall

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(21 april 2007)


2007 began with one resolution. i was going to read books i already own, most especially the 500+ pagers. way back in january, this seemed like a very exciting madcap sort of literary la adventura. ultimately, it’s kind of sucked.

i read one book at a time. i have always done this. i have never not done this and i never thought i would be the kind of person who doesn’t do this. but, at the moment, i am not doing this- a fact that has mildly unhinged my sense of self. every morning my eyes open to a pile of books on a nightstand and i fear that i have wandered into the bed of some unfocused person with curiously similar literary taste.

then i remember. this is who i am now. a girl with a commitment problem.

it seems increasingly likely that i may be a girl who lives a very very long life only to die with that damn shelby foote, the memoirs of the duc de saint-simon, and michael bellesiles’ arming america still unfinished, still piled on the bedside table, still bookmarked at pages 425, 364, and 243 respectively. and this simply will not do.

yet, how to put a stop to it? over the years, i have come to avoid bookstores like the plague, because they get me in trouble. it would be like an alcoholic hanging out at a liquor store- a plainly unwise move. but a literary rut demands desperate measures, and what better way to resolve a handful of languishing reading relationships than a book-buying rampage?

because book-buying can sometimes be a rather difficult thing to avoid when one is a lover of books, i’ve developed an array of emotional armament to protect myself from flagrant biblioindulgence. a bookstore trip should always be a group activity, because in company one is less likely to throw down the credit card with reckless abandonment and walk out with the collected works of anna maxted and the marquis de sade.

when a solo bookstore encounter cannot be prevented, a pen and paper are vital because one can then peruse the shelves jotting down titles, which creates a sense of interactivity without actual purchase. these titles can then be added to a 34-page amazon wish list, creating the illusion that they are at least members of one’s virtual library if not the real thing.

i honestly can’t remember when i last went to a corporate chain bookstore by myself. but today- defenses down, pen and paper at home, caution thrown to the pleasantly warm wind- i fell, exhausted, humbled, and literarily broken-down, into the loving arms of borders. two and a half hours and three wildly different books later, i left him and walked home in the sunny saturday afternoon, grinning like a fool because all is again well in my written world.

heydays are passing

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(7 march 2008)

i had high hopes for kurt andersen’s heyday. over-inflated, fool-heartedly high hopes, largely based upon a catchy cover. in this i greatly erred. it was supposed to be a “joyful, wild gallop through a joyful, wild time.” “a thrilling voyage.” “a dickensian calliope.” “fiction at its finest.” and yet, heyday was neither joyful nor wild. it was ponderous. it was wearisome. it was there will be blood minus the milkshake. in essence, it was beyond boring as dirt.

in the weeks since i finished it- as i went on a restorative gallop of my own through classic fiction- i’ve wrestled with what exactly was wrong with heyday. why didn’t it work? what was wrong with me that i thought it didn’t work when every critic from baltimore to banff alleged that it did? i think i’ve finally nailed it. and i think it has a lot to do with there will be blood.

perhaps this is naive, but i think a novel and/or a movie has to build up to something. it has to be going somewhere, no matter where and no matter how seemingly inconsequential. and it can’t just show you where it’s going- it has to take you along. this doesn’t mean there must be some great societal point (though if it’s trying to make one, it sure as hell better), but there does have to be an engaging element beyond a lone oil rig explosion or sending an arrow through the antagonist’s eye on the final page. and, for me, that’s what that film and this book came down to. those were the moments where i sat up and thought, at last! maybe we’re going somewhere! alas, we didn’t.

for a book trying to capture the frenetic energy of 1848 new york and a film trying to the depict the internal unrest of an admitedly deplorable character, both were oddly stagnant. as though andersen and anderson simply forgot to instill their work with the movement and agitation that should have been at the very heart of what they were trying to do. there was tension, yes. tension restrained to the extreme. and exhaustion. but no energy.

if there will be blood had ended at the scene in the church where daniel is baptized, i would have been a believer. i would have walked out of there blabbing on and on about what an unbelieveably incredible film that was. but it didn’t end there. it went on and on and on. and yet, it went nowhere. the same with heyday. collectively, the pair of them were the very definition of running to stand still. and i guess what we learn here is that does not work for me. i have to go places. i have no patience for standing still.

tall, dark and deadly

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(24 june 2010)

my beloved dear friend lara ehrlich has written a book. a phenomenally wonderful and amazing book. and when we gathered last weekend to review over mimosas and tots, i had one word of caution- that she needed to consider the book’s message about women and violence. because in a dark, dark book, that seemed to me the darkest part.

i said that then and i’m not so sure now. because i was thinking, at the time, only of the parents and the press. never once did i worry about the kids. because i think kids should be allowed to read whatever they want. and i think writers have an obligation to their young readers to- for lack of a less melodramatic phrase- take them into darkness.

because this is where we learn our lessons. these books of our youth.

i began reading sweet valley high at the ripe old age of nine. when, after a 4th grade field trip to the atlanta zoo, a friend handed me a copy of #7: dear sister.

knowing nothing of the motorcycle accident in #6: dangerous love that had put elizabeth wakefield into a coma and caused her amnesia and personality change in #7, my enthusiasm was largely motivated by a discrete notation in the front of each book announcing that it was intended for “age 12 and up.” i had been secretly listening to madonna’s true blue for months, but reading SVH three years before it’s publishers had deemed suitable seemed spectacularly more rebellious.

spurred by the same nostalgia for the recent past that inspired me to re-watch the entirety of dr. quinn and weep violently at nearly every episode’s astonishingly hokey yet unbearably heartwarming end, last summer i returned to sweet valley high. and like a reunion pre-facebook, i was shocked to the core by how everyone had changed.

the emotions and dramas of youth seem so indulgent when one knows how seldom high school relationships pan out. but the wakefields, they do not know this. and so by page 49 of #1: double love, jessica is crying “tears of angry frustration” and 66 pages later, even perfectly pulled-together elizabeth is “filled with despair.”

by the time #5: all night long– in which jessica stays out ALL NIGHT LONG with an older (read: 19) mustached man- rolled around, i realized my under-aged self had, to some extent, been oblivious to the dark side of sweet valley.

yeah, yeah, elizabeth is in an accident and tricia martin dies of leukemia, but what i absolutely did not remember was how terrible some of the boys were and how violent were their ends.

for instance, good old john pfeifer. in the awesomely titled #90: don’t go home with john, lila goes home with john and is nearly raped. but then john dies…

ronnie edwards, the first boyfriend of elizabeth’s bff enid, is characterized on wikipedia as “a highly scheming and very selfish troublemaker.” but then an earthquake hits sweet valley and he dies…

liz’s friend luke lives in london and is- inexplicably- a werewolf. until he dies…

poor jessica’s boyfriends fare the worst. sam woodruff is in a drunk driving accident. christian gorman is in a fight with kids from a neighboring school. inevitably, both die.

[dear wikipedia, thank you for having a surprisingly extensive sweet valley high listing and The Greatest Plot Summary Of All Time- “#122. A Kiss Before Dying The feud between Palisades and SVH reaches a deadly conclusion when Christian Gorman is accidentally killed, and Jessica wins the surfing contest.”]

in the face of all this death and squandered youth, i- like carrie bradshaw- couldn’t help but wonder… what does this mean? the fact that i loved a series of books in which- aside from todd wilkins- the recurring male characters who escaped violent death can be described as an “often drunk bad boy,” “a handsome jerk who was disliked by almost everyone,” and “a rich, handsome snob”?

ultimately, i’m pretty sure it means nothing and is useful only as an indicator of how uninterested i was in boys at the time and how much that has changed now.

because it was for different reasons that francine pascal’s sweet valley high was the most significant literature of my young life. namely, #40.

#40.

on the edge.

wherein regina, the deaf girl who just moved to town and had surgery to restore her hearing, is dumped by her boyfriend, gets in with a bad crowd, overdoses on cocaine and dies.

i was a deaf girl.
i had just moved to town.
i’d had surgery to restore my hearing.

O.M.G.

i didn’t know it then but this would be the penultimate reading experience of my life. the ribbonless typewriter in extremely loud and incredibly close and the last three pages of the knight of maison-rouge were almost as impactful but only almost. and, really, nowhere near.

because nothing is ever so fresh or scary or vivid as when you are young and don’t yet have the words for it. when you are experiencing it for the very first time. the only first time. presumably that is why this silly book has stuck with me all these years.

before #40, i had not known i could die.