PRINCE POPPYCOCK

My favorite Myrna Loy story. As you can perhaps tell from the new banner, it is particularly appropriate this fine Brooklyn morning.

It's from her autobiography Being and Becoming, published in 1988. If you had never seen a single Myrna Loy movie, this book would make you forever her slave. Myrna (I hope the first name doesn't seem like lèse majesté --I love her too much to think of her as Miss Loy) put her movie career somewhat on hold during World War II and afterward to do various forms of charitable work. During the war she spent a lot of time visiting military hospitals. Amputees, burn victims, men blinded in battle, eventually even the shell-shocked guys in the mental wards, she went to see them all. "Apparently I had something that made them trust me," she says, with her usual graceful understatement. "The blind boys would hear my name, put their hands over my face, get hold of my nose, and say 'Yup, that's her.' I would have fun with them for a little while and then go to the ladies' room and cry."

Here is Myrna, offering a steadying arm, kind counsel and a well-timed hair of the dog to another star on a visit to Halloran Hospital in Staten Island.

The biggest hit of all was Betty Grable, who agreed to visit Halloran during a brief stop in New York. When I picked her up at the hotel, she flopped limply into the car. 'Have I got a hangover,' she groaned. 'Harry James and I were out on the town last night.' A game gal, direct and unaffected, she tried to make polite conversation on the way to Halloran while obviously suffering. Finally, I stopped at a little roadhouse, and made her take some beer to appease the gremlins.


Then we got up there, and she's a sensation. Can you imagine? This was the pinup girl of the Navy, the Army and the Marine Corps. They were so thrilled, so excited--some of them shy, some of them forward--and she was absolutely terrific, which wasn't easy in her condition, particularly since she hadn't been prepared for all that horror. Overcome at one point in the burn ward, she sat down on the edge of an empty bed, looking up at me like a little girl ashamed of being naughty. 'That's all right,' I said. 'You can sit and rest.' In the last ward, to cap the climax, we ran into a sexy, life-size model of Betty. The men had built it out of cardboard, with the emphasis, of course, on her famous legs. She was a little upset by it, a bit taken aback. Betty was sick and tired of her legs. All the so-called sexpots become aggravated by the preoccupation with their legs or whatever it is that's concentrated on. 'Oh no, don't be upset,' I told her. 'They love you. They're just happy to see you.' So she stayed quite a while and bore the adulation, giving kisses and autographs, putting her lip-prints on plaster casts as the men moved joyfully around her, some on crutches, some legless in wheelchairs, some excitedly clapping their good hands against their legs, in lieu of a hand that was gone. Once you had seen those men and talked with them, watched their faces light up and heard them call you by your first name, once you realized the amazing impact of your presence--to them you were something of home, however little it might have been--you couldn't walk away.

The Siren is on a major Oscar Levant bender, having ordered A Smattering of Ignorance, Memoirs of an Amnesiac and A Talent for Genius: The Life and Times of Oscar Levant all in one binge. She isn't sure what prompted it, unless it was watching his big encore from The Band Wagon on Youtube and wondering once more what in holy hell was going on with his hands. Still, Levant, with his dangling cynicism and constant cigarette, is a welcome presence in every movie he ever made. And he's a wonderful writer too, stylish and assured, funny as hell and so informative about George Gershwin. (If you put the Siren under hypnosis she would probably admit Gershwin is her favorite composer.)

Anyway, from A Smattering of Ignorance, published in 1942, here are some vintage Levant thoughts on film scores.

It is a tradition in pictures (one of the most stubbornly respected) that nobody in the world goes to hear a movie score but the composer, the orchestrator and other composers. As a kind of compensation, I suppose, they hear every single sixteenth note in the score and are thereafter equipped to discuss its most obscure subtleties. Frequently, however, they have to be told what the picture itself is about.

This has its parallel in another tradition in the movies with which every composer comes into contact as soon as he reports to a studio. It was probably devised by the first producer ever to use a musical score for a dramatic film and runs as follows: If the audience doesn't notice the music, it's a good score. This I could never quite understand...

Perhaps one of the reasons for the low repute of picture music may be found in the words that fill the air when a Hollywood score is discussed by those versed in such matters. You never hear any discussion of a score as a whole. Instead, the references are to "main-title" music, "end title" music, "montages," "inserts" and so on, with no recognition of the character of the complete score. It is much as if one would discuss a suit in terms of its buttonholes, pleats, basting and lining, without once considering its suitability to the figure it adorned...

In the early days of the talkies the idea of writing music under dialogue was so revolutionary that a number of prominent producers (as, for example, Irving Thalberg) countenanced it only under the greatest pressure, and then but sparingly. They were not merely unfriendly to music; they were actually suspicious of its potentialities.

They made a great fetish, for example, of pointing out the conflict between the so-called "reality" of the movies and the "unreality" of music. Always when a situation seemed to demand a heightening by music effect they would come back at the composer with the question, "But where would the audience think the orchestra is coming from?" This was supposed to be the stopper for all arguments. When a musical background was absolutely inseparable from an effect they would go to the most extravagant lengths to relate the music to the scene by having a band playing outside the window, or secreting a string quartet behind a row of potted palms or having the sound come out of a radio. Unquestionably it is an additional virtue to make music an integral part of a dramatic situation, but it always seemed to me an example of remarkable shortsightedness that even the best directors and producers could not reconcile themselves to the thought that they were dealing with a completely artificial medium and adapt themselves to it accordingly.

The second half of that last sentence melted the Siren into a puddle.

Anyway, in honor of Levant, here is a list of twenty film scores. The Siren, at this point, knows better than to give this list a designation like "Favorites" or, god help us, "Best." After much thought, she has decided to call it "An Alphabetical List of Twenty Film Scores I Could Still Recognize and/or Hum After Two Glasses of Scotch," an organizing principle she feels Levant might approve despite his being more the prescription-drug type.

A Summer Place, Max Steiner
Alexander Nevsky, Sergei Prokofiev
Ascenseur pour l'échafaud, Miles Davis
Band à Part, Michel Legrand
Limelight, Charlie Chaplin
Doctor Zhivago, Maurice Jarre
Giant, Dimitri Tiomkin
How Green Was My Valley, Alfred Newman
Kings Row, Erich Wolfgang Korngold
On the Waterfront, Leonard Bernstein
Peyton Place, Franz Waxman
Shaft, Isaac Hayes and J.J. Johnson
Spellbound, Miklós Rózsa
The Bad and the Beautiful, David Raksin
The Big Country, Jerome Moross
The Reivers, John Williams
The Third Man, Anton Karas
To Kill a Mockingbird, Elmer Bernstein
Vertigo, Bernard Herrmann
Walk on the Wild Side, Elmer Bernstein

And here, the final three of the Siren's Books from a Cinephile's Past. The Siren has written before of her stint babysitting a toddler by the name of P.D. His parents were movie buffs and in addition to Mary Astor's novel A Place Called Saturday, on their shelves was a treasure trove called The Great Movie Stars: The Golden Years, by English critic David Shipman. In later years the Siren came to disagree with Shipman on certain stars (one notable example: Joan Crawford), but she returns to this book again and again. Shipman's research is amazing--pithy lines about each major film for each star, this in the days when he was writing without benefit of VHS or IMDB. How often the Siren has sought out a little-known movie that Shipman loves, such as The Young in Heart, and discovered it is indeed a gem. Observe the love he gives the undeservedly forgotten, such as Aline McMahon. But most of all, relish his wit, as dry as a perfect glass of sherry. No film book in the Siren's extensive collection has more delicious picture captions:

[on a still of Barbara Stanwyck from The Locked Door] They think she's just murdered her husband; she hasn't, but in typical Stanwyck fashion, she sure looks guilty.




[on a still of Lew Ayres and James Stewart--not this one, even worse if you can imagine] Joan Crawford is known to look back on Ice Follies of 1939 with much despondency: it would be strange if James and Stewart and Lew Ayres didn't feel the same way.

Hearts Divided (36) was a lavish historical romance directed by Frank Borzage...Marion Davies was effective in that part, but whoever cast [Dick] Powell as one of the Bonaparte boys deserved a prize for imagination.

Gary Cooper and Carole Lombard in Henry Hathaway's Now and Forever (34). Shirley Temple is not in this still but she was much in evidence in the film.

Speaking of Gary Cooper, here is a bit of Shipman's essay:

The strange thing is that Cooper (as his TV interviews showed) had in life a number of rather effeminate mannerism. However, on screen he was virility personified, all that was required of a hero: honest, courageous and determined--determined to do what must be done at whatever the cost.

Sometimes Shipman is eye-poppingly wrong

Future historians of the art of film will probably pause at the name of John Wayne only because he appeared in some of John Ford's best Westerns, but it is a name which gives pause to everyone interested in the industry.

...but then again, when he's right, he takes your breath away.

[on Irene Dunne] Few actresses could play comedy as she did: there is a brief sequence in The Awful Truth where, her back to the camera, she is contemplating the antics of Cary Grant--her gurgling, smothered laugh is more eloquent than many another's close-up.

Highly recommended. Beloved Siren commenter Yojimboen is a Shipman fan as well. You can find this book easily on Abebooks and if you're in the city the Strand bookstore usually has a few copies lying around. (Probably three-quarters of the Siren's film books come from the Strand. There, now you are privy to one of the Siren's closest secrets.) If you're lucky the Strand will also have the almost-as-wonderful companion book, The Great Stars: The International Years.

Now for a book the Siren doesn't like very much, but it had an undeniable influence on her. Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon was a hand grenade hurled at nostalgia, and it remains a salutary reminder that while Joseph Breen may have been busy keeping the screen safe for the tender minds of his fellow Americans, no amount of Ivory soap could scrub some Hollywood business clean. This compendium of years of scuttlebutt is lavishly illustrated with extremely well-chosen, frequently horrifying stills and news photos. Hollywood Babylon mixes historical truth, leering slant and outright errors. It's witty in parts, but after you devour it (and the Siren did, her book is split in two at the spine) you feel as you do after knocking back one too many drinks with the nastiest gossip in the office. You're in the know, but you hate yourself.

The real problem with Anger is one of tone. Where does all this hatred and seething resentment come from? Take this description of Fatty Arbuckle, whom Anger paints as guilty of rape and manslaughter despite considerable evidence to the contrary:

As headlines screamed, the rumors flew of a hideously unnatural rape. Arbuckle, enraged at his drunken impotence, had ravaged Virginia [Rappe] with a Coca-Cola bottle, or a champagne bottle, then had repeated the act with a jagged of piece of ice...or, wasn't it common knowledge that Arbuckle was exceptionally well endowed?...or, was it just a question of 266-pounds-too-much of Fatty flattening Virginia in a flying leap?

Or, in a discussion of the William Desmond Taylor murder, this acid description of poor tragic Mabel Normand:

It was soon revealed that Taylor's good friend Mabel Normand, whose antic clowning for Sennett gained her fans by the millions, owed her effervescence at at least in part to Cocaine & Co. Mabel's monthly expenditure for "cokey" was in the neighborhood of $2000, blackmail included.

From Anger, the Siren learned that you can certainly look at Hollywood celebrities as spoiled, hateful children and smirk at their comeuppance. God knows that's fun sometimes. Hollywood Babylon is one of the most imitated books about Hollywood ever written--it plays to our sense that the stars have too much and deserve it too little.

But you also can take the angle of Adela Rogers St. Johns, the Hearst columnist whose memoir The Honeycomb is the Siren's final selection for this series. St. John knew the people she wrote about, knew their secrets and their nastiest flaws. But she understood the magic. And she understood that being a star takes, as a friend of the Siren wrote to her, "superhuman effort, talent and grit."

They'd never been to New York. They had never been anywhere including school, except Joan Crawford, who washed dishes at Stephens College for Girls to get a half a freshman year and Jean Harlow, who eloped from a fashionable Chicago finishing school at sixteen to get married. Unless they came over steerage--Chaplin and Valentino--they'd never been to Europe. Garbo was applying lather in a Stockholm barbershop until a Swedish director refused to come to America without her. Finances got frightfully tangled because half of them didn't know what to do with checks. Judy Garland was singing at Elks' Club smokers and Lon Chaney was a kid hoofer in the cheapest musical tourist companies, half-medicine shows and half-circus...

Do not believe for one second that they were ordinary citizens from Emporia and Little Rock.

No, the Siren doesn't believe it. That's why they still matter to her.

After writing about Brian Aherne's account of his friendship with George Sanders and Sanders' unforgettable advice on how to write memoirs, the Siren just had to order her own copy of Aherne's autobiography, A Proper Job.

And it's a wonderful book, despite Aherne's rather slighting his Hollywood films to devote more professional reminiscences to his theatrical career. Aherne was British and seems to have had the attitude often attributed to British actors, that films should be what one did to supplement one's theatrical calling. His career as a Hollywood actor was never as front-rank as that of his first wife, Joan Fontaine, a fact she alluded to with some asperity in No Bed of Roses and which he also admits, in a roundabout fashion. And his theatrical career had some brilliant high points, including his having originated the role of Robert Browning in The Barretts of Wimpole Street on Broadway opposite the legendary Katharine Cornell.



Aherne was handsome and showed definite sex appeal in movies such as the strange and wonderful Sylvia Scarlett, as well as Merrily We Live and The Great Garrick (now available via the Warner Archives and yes, David Ehrenstein, the Siren promises to order it). But for whatever reason--luck, timing, lack of a killer instinct, probably all of the above--he never became a huge star. (CinemaOCD has a good rundown of his Hollywood parts here, with a link to many of the pictures from A Proper Job.) Eventually he moved gracefully into character parts, maintaining a stage career with roles like Professor Higgins in the touring production of My Fair Lady.

But the Siren has found that often it's the people on the margins of stardom who give the best picture of Hollywood life, and Aherne's book is remarkable not only for his intelligence, but for the compassion with which he treats the Hollywood figures he knew. It isn't hard to imagine why the saturnine Sanders kept returning to Aherne for companionship, year after year. Aherne was not a judgmental type. Even when describing a taxing experience, such as working with Bette Davis on Juarez, he does so wryly: "I even found Bette Davis attractive, when I played Maximilian to her Carlotta and, brilliant actress though she is, surely nobody but a mother could have loved Bette Davis at the height of her career."



While Aherne doesn't go out of his way to disdain the movie colony, he does permit himself the occasional joke at its expense. At one point the actor goes into a small California bookshop and complains to the manager that the poetry selection is too slight: "'What's the use of carrying more?' said the man. 'Only you and Katharine Hepburn buy it!'"

The small, precise portraits of Hollywood notables include John Gilbert, spinning out his contract while the studio tries to make him so miserable he will terminate it. "If motion pictures don't want him, where can a great screen star go? What can he do?" asks Aherne. "The gods and goddesses cannot jostle with the crowd, cannot take a job in an office..."

Aherne doesn't bother to add, but the reader can deduce, that he preferred his own fate. He found diversion in farming and flying, eventually married a woman with theatrical ancestry but no ambitions, took the roles that still came and took pleasure in things like the commotion of Sanders' occasional visits. Aherne does show some regrets, as when he ruefully describes how he lost the part of Sidney Carton to Ronald Colman, or how he repeatedly turned down Captain Blood (thus ensuring that Jack Warner forever cursed him for saddling the studio with the ever-troublesome Errol Flynn). But Aherne evidently felt it was better to be an occasionally working actor than a burnt-out star.



If any additional evidence was needed, there was also the fate of Aherne's good friend Ruth Chatterton. He advised her to take the part of the wife in Dodsworth, but Chatterton told him it would end her career to appear as a middle-aged woman. She took it anyway, gave a brilliant performance, and never got another Hollywood offer. Chatterton, whose Pre-Code talkies continue to bowl over critics, wound up in the Connecticut countryside, writing books and living happily with her husband until he died. Hollywood, however, never did come around to pay the great Chatterton her due:

I am happy to remember that my wife and I visited [Chatterton] shortly before her death. The walls of her bar were hung with photos of friends whom she had entertained lavishly at her home on Palm Drive in earlier days. I asked her if she had ever heard from any of them. No, she said, and when she had played Los Angeles some years before not one of them of had even sent her a word. She was alone with her four dogs when she died, and her body lay for three days on the floor, watched by her dogs and surrounded by the mute faces of her former friends.

Aherne gives a wistful description of an afternoon at Pickfair toward the end of Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford's marriage. As Aherne's visit wound down, Pickford entered and, spurred by not very much, went to the window, looked out at the garden and spoke "almost tragically of the futility of ambition and the evanescence of fame." Aherne hastens to add that after her career ended, Pickford found great comfort in religion and Buddy Rogers. But he doesn't sound entirely convinced himself, and the Siren found herself thinking Billy Wilder's initial casting instincts were not far off when he approached Pickford about Sunset Boulevard.

And the Siren was mightily amused by the description of Marlene Dietrich: "She baked me a fabulous Viennese cake; she is a great cakemaker." According to Maria Riva, who was deeply fond of Aherne, he was making a great deal more than cake with Marlene. But the lady was alive and still technically married at the time the book was published, and chivalrously Aherne breathes not a word of their affair, though he admits to wondering "how I could manage to bake Miss Dietrich." George Sanders must have rolled his eyes over such determinedly uncommercial discretion.

But the story that caught the Siren was one she had never heard before, that of Aherne's affair with the stage actress Clare Eames. Eames was married to playwright and director Sidney Howard, who later wrote the screenplay for Gone with the Wind. Howard was in London to direct his play The Silver Cord, and Aherne was cast opposite Eames. All went smoothly until Howard returned to America and the play began its run, whereupon the attraction between the two actors swiftly became a headlong, passionate romance. "I forgot she was a married woman with a child," says Aherne. "I forgot she was six years older than myself. I forgot my Puritan upbringing. I forgot that I was nothing but a penniless young actor. I heard the angels sing. I was lonely no more."



The affair, as might be expected, caused as much pain as it did joy. Early on Eames gave Aherne a copy of Anna Karenina. The actor fretted that he "might become her Vronsky;" Aherne must have known he already was. Howard, according to his rival, played Karenin to the hilt. "He did not care for Clare, but he cared deeply about what people said," says Aherne. Howard "cut off financial support, refused a divorce, and insisted upon the return of the baby and her nurse."

Over the three years of their relationship Eames and Aherne struggled to find work. Howard's stature made New York nearly impossible, and the romance coincided with the British acting unions cracking down on the use of American actors. Eames tried at one point to reconcile with Howard, but it didn't work. "Young as I was, I doubt I fully realized the tragedy of her position," says Aherne, and he evokes Anna Karenina once more when he describes his lover slipping into her former house to see her child when Howard was out. Eames was sick, and getting sicker, although Aherne never says precisely what the trouble was--severe abdominal pain, is all we are told.

Finally, as Aherne was playing a wordy, difficult part in a dismal failure of a play, Eames became extremely ill. She had an operation, and the night after it took place Aherne slogged through a nightmarish performance in front of a tiny audience. When the curtain finally came down, a car was sent and Brian was driven, through a driving rainstorm, to Clare's bedside. They told him she needed sleep, but the rain had turned into a deafening thunderstorm, and Clare died as he held her hand.

"I went on blindly running for the next twenty years," says Aherne. You don't have to be as romantically inclined as the Siren to wonder if he ever stopped. Joan Fontaine certainly felt Clare's ghost when she married Aherne a full decade later. In her memoirs, Fontaine paints a picture straight out of Rebecca: Barely finished with her honeymoon, she was dragged to Connecticut to visit Eames' dying aunt, and found herself staring at pictures of Brian and Clare on the piano.

The daughter Eames stole time with was Jennifer Howard, who married Samuel Goldwyn Jr. in 1950. Their four children included Tony Goldwyn, most famous for playing an evil yuppie in Ghost.



It is this scene, which took place only a year or so after Clare died, that the Siren can't get out of her head. It is as cinematic as anything she has ever found in a star's memoirs. Aherne had returned to Hollywood, but in a stage production of Barretts, again with Katharine Cornell. The audience for the opening included everyone from the Thalbergs to Charlie Chaplin.

Afterwards, Ruth Chatterton gave a smart party for Miss Cornell at her beautiful house in Beverly Hills. Stepping back from the buffet with a plate in my hand, I bumped into someone who stood, hard and unyielding, behind me. I turned in surprise; it was Sidney Howard, looking straight in my eyes, a few inches away. He said, 'I seem always to be in your way, Brian!' For an instant we looked at each other, and then I said, 'I am sorry, Sidney,' and moved away. I never saw him again. He remarried and died tragically, crushed by a tractor against the wall of his barn in Massachusetts.

The Siren has been a bad girl. Not only has she neglected her blogging, but she neglected to link to MovieMan0283's blog when she embarked on her part of the Movie Books meme. Anyway, let's continue this one.

City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940s by Otto Friedrich

When the Siren is asked to name a favorite movie book, this is the one she always picks. The late Otto Friedrich was a journalist and historian with a marvelous prose style, and City of Nets is made unique by his perspective, wit and discerning eye for an anecdote. As Hollywood was and remains a company town obsessed by the movies, the book has plenty of studio stories, but Friedrich is after a more complete account. He also looks at society and politics, including race riots, the aircraft industry, vicious labor disputes featuring corruption on both sides, gangster shootouts, and the bewildered European intellectuals--refugees just trying to figure the damn place out. Although, it must be said, some of the emigres didn't try all that hard. Arnold Schoenberg is shown taking a 1935 meeting with Irving Thalberg and announcing to the flummoxed boy wonder that if he were to compose the score for The Good Earth, the actors "would have to speak in the same pitch and key as I compose it in. It would be similar to Pierrot Lunaire," the composer explained, adding reassuringly, "but of course less difficult."

This isn't a book of criticism; it is history, many sources knitted together by a talented man to give you as complete a picture of Hollywood high and low as exists anywhere. In the same chapter that describes how a shy young Spanish dancer named Margarita Carmen Dolores Cansino went into the studios and came out as Rita Hayworth, you will find Sergeant Marcario Garcia. Fresh from being decorated with the Congressional Medal of Honor, Garcia entered a restaurant and tried to purchase a cup of coffee, only to have the owner threaten him with a baseball bat.



Friedrich's withering description of the origins, proceedings and consequences of the HUAC hearings is still the best the Siren has encountered. Here is his tale of how Hollywood Ten members Ring Lardner Jr. and Lester Cole acquired an unexpected colleague in the federal prison at Danbury, many miles from Hollywood:

'There are rumors already here in advance of your arrival,' said the parole officer, 'that both you and Lardner are prepared for violent revenge if you can get away with it.'

'Who the hell could have said that?' Cole wondered.

'Will you swear,' the parole officer insisted, 'that you are not planning some sort of revenge against J. Parnell Thomas, who is in this institution?'

It was no secret that the crusading congressman had been indicted in 1948 for padding his congressional payroll and taking kickbacks from his employees...But Cole and Lardner had not realized that they and their grand inquisitor would be locked up in the same federal prison.

'He must have started the rumor himself,' Cole said. 'Kill him? My greatest pleasure will be seeing him here with his own kind, petty thieves.'

...Lardner was being given the same warning by another parole officer, and when the two writers next met, they both burst into laughter. 'What luck!" said Lardner. 'There's got to be a way, a dozen ways, to make the bastard miserable.'

When Lardner finally saw the frightened congressman in the prison yard, however, he could not bring himself to speak to him. 'He had lost a good deal of weight,' Lardner recalled later, 'and his face, round and scarlet at our last encounter, was deeply lined and sallow...Neither of us made any social overtures to the other.' Cole was more combative. He said that Thomas 'scurried at least fifty feet away when he saw us coming,' but they finally met at work. Cole had been assigned to cut grass with a sickle, and that brought him near the chicken coops, where Thomas was engaged in scraping up dung with a hoe.

'Hey Bolshie, I see you still got your sickle,' Thomas jeered from behind the chicken fence. 'Where's your hammer?'

'And I see just like in Congress, you're still picking up chickenshit,' Cole shouted back.

City of Nets is full of uproarious stories, from Joseph Mankiewicz's best quip ever, to Dimitri Tiomkin composing orgasm music for David O. Selznick, to Walt Disney watching dailies of cupids, fauns and nymphs in Fantasia and observing, "Gee, this'll make Beethoven." And Friedrich's careful research makes this book one of the few that points out, for example, that the dubious old tale of John Barrymore's corpse being exhumed for one last drinking session exists in at least three different versions.



But it is ultimately a sad book, an elegy for a system wrecked from within and without. Whenever the Siren picks up City of Nets, she is always drawn to the heartbreaking account of the final days of John Garfield, as the great actor, in exile in New York, types up a "confession" for Look magazine and spends hours on the phone, "trying to find somebody to talk to." Days pass as he neither sleeps nor eats. He tries to connect with Hildegard Knef, on her way back to Frankfurt after a failed attempt at a Hollywood career, but she has a party to attend and they never manage to meet that night.

Garfield had gone to see a new friend, Iris Whitney, who had an apartment on Gramercy Park. They went out to dinner. They sat in the park. Garfield said he felt sick. Miss Whitney took him home and put him to bed. There later were entirely unsubstantiated rumors that he died in the midst of wild fornications. Perhaps. But the official version is, for once, more plausible--that after three days of anxiety, drinking, sleeplessness, and wandering through the wreckage of his life, John Garfield simply collapsed. Miss Whitney put him to bed with a glass of orange juice on his night table. When she woke up the next morning, she found the orange juice untouched and Garfield dead.

From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies, by Molly Haskell.

This book gets its own entry, in first person, and its own set of personal digressions.

The digressions begin with Mrs G., my favorite high-school teacher. She taught Psychology, a class available only to seniors and full of jocks convinced it was an easy way to boost your GPA. In truth Mrs. G. was not a hard grader; nose-to-the-grindstone was not her style and not what she was after. The discussions and the mental workout were the point of her class.

The big spring feature of Psychology was a senior project. You had half a class to present it and were supposed to spend most of a six-week unit working on it. One conservative, deeply religious girl did prison reform, I remember--asking the class to reconsider whether a purely punitive attitude towards corrections was good for the prisoners or good for society, talking about the effects of putting a low-level offender in with hardened cons. She had started her research with a "lock 'em up" attitude. That was Mrs. G.'s class for you, turning expectations on their head.

The project was loosely defined, and I found out just how loose when I got permission for my class project, an in-depth feminist analysis of movies focused on Molly Haskell's From Reverence to Rape. Psychology, you ask? Maybe not. More just Mrs. G.

I had discovered this book in the town library, and I probably took it off the shelf because the title struck me as promisingly salacious. I was only 18. But what I got between those baby-pink covers (the wit of that choice only struck me later) was a brain-rearranging look at the movies I had spent my childhood and adolescence watching while other kids were developing, well, a social life. Here was a fiercely intellectual critic who not only liked all the movies that I liked, but liked them for the same reasons. As much as I had been devouring Kael in the New Yorker, I couldn't say the same for her.

Haskell saw what I saw in the women's pictures:

...There is a third category, one to which the better women's films aspire: It is the fiction of the 'ordinary woman who becomes extraordinary,' the woman who begins as a victim of discriminatory circumstances and rises, through pain, obsession, or defiance, to become mistress of her fate. Between the suds of soap opera we watch her scale the heights of Stendhalian romance. [Haskell had me running to the Reader's Encyclopedia a great deal, too. -C.] Her ascent is given stature and conviction not through a discreet contempt for the female sensibility, but through an all-out belief in it, through the faith, expressed in directorial sympathy and style, that the swirling river of a woman's emotions is as important as anything on earth.

She understood why I disliked violence against women in modern films, why I rolled my eyes over women characters in action movies:

With the substitution of violence and sexuality (a poor second) for romance, there was less need for exciting and interesting women: any bouncing nymphet whose curves looked good in catsup would do.

She knew why I loved Bette Davis...

As Rosa Moline [in Beyond the Forest], Davis creates her own norms, and is driven by motives not likely to appeal to the average audience. She is ready and eager to give up husband, position, security, children (most easily, children), even lover; for what? Not for anything so noble as 'independence' in terms of a job, profession, or higher calling, but to be rich and fancy in Chicago! And here is Davis, not beautiful, not sexy, not even young, convincing us that she is all these things--by the vividness of her own self-image, by the vision of herself she projects so fiercely that we have no choice but to accept it...She says it for all smart dames when David Brian tells her he no longer loves her, that he's found the 'pure' woman of his dreams. 'She's a book with none of the pages cut,' he says. 'Yeah,' Davis replies, 'and nothing on them!'

and Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday...

Russell does not become an imitation male; she remains true to the two sides--feminine and professional--of her nature, and as such promises to exert a healthy influence on the hard-boiled, all-male world of criminal reporting. It is as a newspaper reporter, rather than as wife and mother, that she discovers her true 'womanliness,' which is to say, simply, herself.

and Stage Door...

[Andrea] Leeds is the actress of phenomenal talent, Hepburn the brash and thoughtless upstart, but neither, contrary to the usual convention, is pictured as neurotic simply because of her determination. Nor do the life choices of the others--marriage, an affair, return home, den mother--appear as compromises but rather logical steps in each girl's evolution.

and Haskell also understood why I could look past certain aspects of the old movies and still love them.

The fact that I consider myself a film critic first and a feminist second means that I feel an obligation to the wholeness and complexity of film history. It means that art will always take precedence over sociology, the unique over the general.

Andrew Sarris is a very great critic, but my heart belongs to Molly.

So for half an hour I talked about this book, and the movies, in Mrs. G.'s class, and I can still remember the expressions on the faces of my fellow students when I began with a discussion of the virgin/whore dichotomy. I was loud, confident and well-prepared so I don't think they were bored. They just had no idea what the hell I was talking about. One football player (actually a nice guy) explained patiently to me that it was unreasonable to expect, for example, Indiana Jones to untie Karen Allen in Raiders of the Lost Ark because she was going to get hurt. I don't remember what he said when I responded that Allen had taken quite good care of herself to that point, and that in the old movies, women got hurt all the time--but in different ways.

Another football player (not such a nice guy) announced during discussion time, with a pointed look at me, that the only women espousing this kind of stuff were ugly ones who couldn't get a date. And my favorite part of the whole presentation was the look on his face when I held up the book to reveal the back-jacket photo of glowing, blonde, gorgeous Molly. Take that, Greg. Bet you're paunchy now. Haskell is still gorgeous.

Anyway, my stubborn decision to go with this subject matter goes some way toward explaining why I did not date in Alabama, but instead had to wait to land in New York, where some men looked at a fair-skinned feminist with a copy of the New Yorker under her arm and, when she brightly announced that Double Indemnity was at Theatre 80 St. Marks, said "Cool. What time?"

But Mrs. G. (who gave me an A, by the way) saw different things in me. The last day of school, just for fun, she went around the class giving predictions of where we would be in five years. She looked at me and said, to the sound of suppressed giggles, "C. will be in New York City living with a rock musician." And you know what? She was right.

Here's to Molly Haskell, Mrs. G., and all the other women, and men, who see things that others don't.

The Siren has been tagged several times, but (she believes) first by Tony Dayoub, for a meme about books that have influenced her view of the cinema. At first, the Siren thought, that's been done. Sheila O'Malley's shelf-by-shelf descent through her enormous film-book library is a hard act to follow. Still, the Siren went over to her own haphazardly organized shelves and began to get quite nostalgic over the books she read years ago. So she decided to attempt to reconstruct a small part of her early film-book reading pattern, where she went from just watching movies to wanting to read about who made them, and how, and when, and why. This is not a heavyweight list. It is more akin to stopping into a children's bookstore and saying, "I remember that! I even remember what I was doing when I read it!" But the Siren has always found that the books you read as a youngster stay with you the longest.

So then, roughly in the order that the Siren encountered them, 10 books that shaped my view of the cinema. Herer are the first five books, with the next five to come:

Vanity Fair: Selections from America's Most Memorable Magazine, ed. Cleveland Amory and Frederick Bradlee.This wonderful book, firmly out of print but available on the Web for little more than the price of postage, is full of beautiful images from the magazine's first incarnation, which ran from 1914 to 1936. The Siren spent hours decoding the witty articles like messages from a lost ship--which, in a way, they were. Since this was well before the Internet, it sometimes took years to find out what they were talking about. Who, for example, was Doris Keane?

Long before Graydon Carter or Twitter ever came on the scene, the magazine was in the habit of handing notepads to celebrities and asking them to come up with thoughts, for example, on The Ideal Woman. And, further to our digression on Ruby Keeler, perhaps my readers would like to see what Al Jolson had to say on that matter. Read it and see if you don't appreciate Ruby a little more for sticking it out for 12 years:

1. The gift of stretching a can of sardines into a banquet.
2. A thorough dislike of all actors--save one.
3. An appreciation of the fact that, in all the important affairs of life, and in the trivial ones as well, I am, for some curious reason, invariably RIGHT.
4. A disinclination to be taken out--unless she had bid 'one club.'
5. A hearty laugh for all my jokes, including the very old ones.
6. A loathing for crossword puzzles.
7. An inability to block a straight left. [!!!! -The Siren.]
8. Complete ignorance of the existence of the Lucy Stone League.
9. A million dollars.
10. A cough.

Many were the photographs that filled the Siren with desire to see the subject's movies. Like this one, which along with Queen Christina sparked a lifelong love for Garbo:



Or this one, which prompted the Siren to pick up Sunshine and Shadow, Mary Pickford's autobiography.


Pauline Kael in the New Yorker. I could cheat here and cite 5001 Nights at the Movies, but in truth I didn't get that book until much later and I have been missing my copy for years--probably wound up with an ex-boyfriend. My father subscribed to The New Yorker and my favorite section was the front, where I could get all manner of intriguing capsules about movies I had already seen and movies I wanted to see. I didn't agree with Kael all the time (who does?) but she opened my eyes to so many directors and so many movies. Like this one below, chosen just because the title leaped out at me at this site:

Paths of Glory. Just after he made his racetrack robbery picture THE KILLING, Stanley Kubrick directed this version of Humphrey Cobb's novel, photographed in Germany. It is not so much an anti-war film as an attack on the military mind. Some of the press went all out for it ("searing in its intensity," and that sort of thing), but it wasn't popular. The movie has a fascinating jittery quality, especially when Timothy Carey, who's like a precursor of the hipster druggies of the 60s, is on the screen, and the strong, liberal-intellectual pitch makes it genuinely controversial, though it was certainly easier to be anti-militaristic in a film (made in peacetime) set during the First World War than it would have been in a film set during the Second World War. The story is about the class structure within the French army--the aristocratic generals in their spacious, sunlit châteaux and the proletarian soldiers in the dark trenches; trapped between them is Colonel Dax (Kirk Douglas), who commiserates with the men but is powerless--he carries out the orders of the high command. When the soldiers refuse to fight in a battle that is almost certain death, three of them are selected to be tried for cowardice; Dax has the task of defending them. The film's rhythm is startling--you can feel the director's temperament. And there's an element of relentlessness in the way he sets out to demonstrate the hopeless cruelty of the "system." (The film was banned in France for some years.) It's an angry film that seems meant to apply to all armies. Watching it is very frustrating: Kubrick, who wrote the script with Calder Willingham and Jim Thompson, doesn't leave you with anything. He must have felt this, because he tacks on a scene at a cabaret, with a German girl (Susanne Christian) singing and the soldiers singing along, as they weep. (It just makes you uncomfortable.)

The Siren most emphatically does not agree with everything in that capsule--for one thing, I couldn't disagree more about the film's ending. Other parts engender the same "Yes, BUT..." reaction that I often have to Kael's criticism. But Kael made me want to see the movie, and she made me want to think about the movie, and she made me yearn for an intelligent conversation about the movie. And that's just one of thousands. Years later I can still remember phrases from both her capsules and her long reviews. Not many critics can expect their writing to be that fresh, that provocative, that memorable long after they have died.


Scarlett Fever by William Pratt, including the collection of Herb Bridges. This picture-packed (but alas, entirely black-and-white) book about Gone with the Wind helped spark the Siren's interest in movie-making, as opposed to just movie-watching. It could be a model for other fan books. There is a long section about Margaret Mitchell, the writing of the book and its stupendous success, but the Siren liked the movie sections the best. Pratt goes back through the filming records and shows almost day by day how GWTW was shot. He details the alterations made during filming, and the rationales for them. There are many on-set photographs, a whole series of test stills of Walter Plunkett's costumes, sketches from William Cameron Menzies, pictures of Ernest Haller at work, and many other details on the movie, from rights purchase to Atlanta premiere, all the way up through re-releases. You get all the directors, including a rundown on which bits George Cukor did, which scenes were shot by Victor Fleming and which were shot by Sam Wood. Pratt even introduced the Siren to such cinephile controversies as aspect ratio, describing misbegotten re-releases in widescreen that cut out part of the image. There's also a huge (maybe too huge) section on Herb Bridges' collection of GWTW memorabilia. Pratt eschews gossip; you will find none of the rumors about Cukor's departure, just a rundown on his "script differences" with David O. Selznick (which appear to have been real enough). But since reading this book, the Siren has read a lot more about Selznick, Vivien Leigh and all the others involved in Gone with the Wind, and has found very little to criticize in terms of Pratt's accuracy. In fact the book politely sets the record straight on a number of matters, Pratt shaking his head gently over such howlers as Bosley Crowther asserting in The Great Films that Victor Fleming died during production. Interpretation is another matter, and the book's most serious flaw is that it barely touches upon the controversies that surrounded GWTW from the moment of the book's publication. Still, this was one of the best Christmas presents my parents ever got me.



Lulu in Hollywood by Louise Brooks. Another Christmas present, and my introduction to Louise Brooks, whom I met as a writer long before I met her as Lulu. Brooks could really write, and this is another book that still has phrases rattling around in the Siren's head. The Siren recommends reading this slim volume of essays alongside Barry Paris's biography of Brooks, because some of her writing bent the facts to her particular viewpoint--the most notable example, according to Paris, being the "Gish and Garbo" essay. Which lends a whole different layer to beautifully executed passages like this one, from her essay on W.C. Fields:

The tragedy of film history is that it is fabricated, falsified, by the very people who make film history. It is understandable that in the early years of film production, when nobody believed there was going to be any film history, most film magazines and books printed trash, aimed only at fulfilling the public's wish to share a fairy-tale existence with its movie idols. But since about 1950 film has been established as an art, and its history recognized as a serious matter. Yet film celebrities continue to cast themselves as stock types--nice or naughty girls, good or bad boys--whom their chroniclers spray with a shower of anecdotes.

The Great Romantic Films by Lawrence J. Quirk. This one I bought for myself with babysitting money on the strength of a cover shot from Wuthering Heights, with which I was slightly obsessed at the time. Lawrence J. Quirk, nephew of the legendary Photoplay editor James Quirk, has written some 30 Hollywood books but the Siren loves this one for two reasons. One, the romantic melodramas it covers are often given short shrift by "Great Film" tomes. And the films that do get a fair bit of serious critical attention (Letter from an Unknown Woman, All That Heaven Allows) are often analyzed from an angle that assumes the romantic and emotional trappings are fripperies to be stripped away to reveal the "real" themes underneath. Quirk passionately believes that the sentiment in these films is part of what recommends them, and needs no apology. The Siren agrees with him. Second, the Siren loved this book for the huge variety of films the writer chose, everything from the obscure (speak up--who here has seen The Life of Vergie Winters?) to the eternally popular (Now, Voyager) to the head-scratcher (the Siren is still trying to figure out what Teorema was doing in this book, although Quirk gives it a thorough write-up). The Siren has spent years trying to see all of the films discussed here; she has about eight left, including Vergie Winters, Only Yesterday, Lydia, the 1932 Smilin' Through and The Music Lovers.

Quirk's definition of romance is a broad one, encompassing mother love and friendship as well. Here is Quirk describing No Greater Glory, the intensely moving Frank Borzage film that the Siren finally saw this year. Quirk sees no need to justify, or indeed even take note of, those things a modern audience might find hokey. He takes the movie on its own lyrical terms:

Young [George] Breakstone's Nemecsek tags after a gang of boys who wear uniforms and run their lumberyard playground like a military post. Heading the gang is Boka (Jimmy Butler), a handsome, stalwart little fellow who is idolized by Nemecsek and whose approval he constantly seeks. But Nemecsek is an outcast; he is frail and delicate, inept at the assorted skills the others regard as mandatory. The impatient, barely tolerant Boka is forever consigning him to his black book for shortcomings and minor ineptitudes. The only "private" in an army of "officers," Nemecsek is held in contempt and condescension for his failure to cope in physical and coordinational terms, although in the actualities of his soul he is a martyr and visionary in the making, the one pure soul of the lot.

(Part 2 to follow...)

A letter from George Sanders to Brian Aherne, reprinted in the latter's A Dreadful Man. The two men had quarreled after Sanders, fortified by vodka, expressed his low opinion of the acting profession, and when Sanders had to rush off to catch a plane, the argument continued via written correspondence.

December 31st, 1937

Dear Brian,

I was very happy to receive your angry letter, and I am glad I shook you up a bit. Ask yourself this question: If money (greed); loyalty to theatrical tradition (pernicious exhibitionism); rigid conformity to social convention (masochism), are incompatible with personal happiness--which should be sacrificed?

You talk about the theatre as if it had some cosmic significance. As a matter of fact it is pathetically sublunary; a drab and dusty monument to man's inability to find within himself the resources of his own entertainment. It is usually rather fittingly housed in a dirty old building, whose crumbling walls occasionally resound with perfunctory applause, invariably interpreted by the actor as praise. A sad place, draughty and smelly when empty, hot and sick when full.

I wonder which is the sickest, the audience which seeks to escape its miseries by being transported into a land of make-believe, or the actor who is nurtured in his struggle for personal aggrandisement by the sickness of the audience.

I think perhaps it is the actor, strutting and orating away his youth and his health, alienated from reality, disingenuous in his relationships, a muddle-headed peacock forever chasing after the rainbow of his pathetic narcissism.

My love and best wishes for a happy New Year.

George

This charming letter is Sanders to the core, from the command of the language to the marvelously tranquil closing--actors are pathetic narcissists, happy New Year!

No wonder Aherne had it framed.

You'll never go broke dissing actors, and indeed no one can bash actors quite like another actor. The Siren wonders, though, what it is about acting that makes some of its best practitioners value it so little. Those who possess genius in other fields usually don't question why they bother. The Siren spent a number of years working for some spectacularly gifted mathematicians, and these gentlemen did not sit around muttering "Oh Christ, I've thought of another theorem. How dreary." Is it the supposed subliteracy and philistinism of so much of Hollywood? Well, in the above letter Sanders was writing to Aherne about the theatre, which is usually taken to be a higher form of acting. Even given that Sanders had a career primarily in film, his lack of regard for acting is still striking. George Gershwin also did most of his work in a popular vein, and to the Siren's knowledge he never wrote letters suggesting that the beautiful melodies that poured out of him were useless.

George Sanders' low opinion of acting appears to have been as authentic as it was frequently expressed. There is a wonderful TCM clip of goddess Angela Lansbury discussing Sanders, in which she remarks on his intellect and says something to the effect of "Acting occupied such a tiny portion of his brain," illustrating said brain portion with a thumb-and-forefinger pinch you might see on a cooking show.

Early in her blogging career the Siren wrote a little piece about Sanders, which you can see here, in which she tried to look at the Sanders image. She read Aherne's book a couple of years later, and it simultaneously supports the vision we all carry of Sanders, and tears it down. Sanders was indeed a supremely intelligent, witty man, writing from Switzerland that news of Aherne's letters brings joy to all Lausanne--"laughter is heard," children skip around gaily, "monks in the monastery of Montchoisi start buggering one another with renewed vigor." Aherne also reprints a long letter Sanders wrote to his parents shortly after arriving in Hollywood, in which he discusses "practises such as jumping into Producers' cars and trying to rub them up the right way," and that part alone is worth tracking the book down.

As is the story about Sanders, confronted by Nigel Bruce at a party during World War II. Bruce demanded to know why Sanders hadn't contributed to the latest British War Relief Whatever. Sanders took a drag on his cigarette and replied with perfect sang-froid, "Because I am a shit." So much for the glories of a united Hollywood war effort. (Gloria has an addendum to the story here.)

Then there's Sanders, determined to rid himself of second wife Zsa Zsa Gabor, arranging to break into her bedroom on Christmas Eve with a detective and a photographer in hopes of catching the Hungarian beauty in flagrante. Sanders climbed through the window. Flashbulbs popped and Zsa Zsa's lover sprang, too late, for the bathroom. Sanders held out a gift and boomed, "Merry Christmas, my dear!" Aherne was fond of Zsa Zsa, and here you can see why, because Zsa Zsa poured champagne for everybody and a good time was had by all. Except the chap cooling his heels in the bathroom. (Probably Porfirio Rubirosa, although Aherne doesn't name him.) When the divorce news was released to the papers Sanders' statement read, "I have been cast aside like a squeezed lemon."

Still, it's obvious that Sanders had a depressive streak that went well beyond any of the usual guff about his alleged Slavic temperament. (Rather confusingly, Sanders was born in Russia of Russian parents, at least one of whom claimed English descent.) X. Trapnel once remarked in the Siren's comments that the distortions of the David Lean Doctor Zhivago were occasioned not by leftist apologetics, but by a "British assumption that Russians are basically sentimental, irrational wogs." Aherne buys into this with his talk of how the Russian part of Sanders predominated, as though that explains anything. Well, George Balanchine was Russian, too, and you'd be hard-pressed to find Sanders-type stories about him. (Note: Fellow ballet fan Yojimboen reminds the Siren that Balanchine's roots were Georgian, and she stands corrected.)

One moment Sanders was witty and urbane, the next monosyllabic and impossible. One of the Siren's aforementioned mathematician bosses was also a dedicated cinephile. One night in the early 1950s the mathematician found, to his delight, that he'd been seated at Sanders' table due to overbooking at a European resort restaurant. Expecting his dinner companion to be rather aloof, what the Siren's old boss got instead was catatonia. Sanders was impeccably polite, but seemed barely able to lift his fork. The actor's All About Eve costars agreed that while playing Addison DeWitt, his energy was low to nil and he was a general wet-blanket. His costar for the great Viaggio in Italia, Ingrid Bergman, became so alarmed by Sanders' panic and gloom on the set that she didn't know whether to send for his psychiatrist or his wife. Eventually Bergman and Rossellini sent for Zsa Zsa; she didn't help.

At times, Sanders' behavior toward women went beyond caddish. Asked why he didn't take first wife Susan out more, he replied, "Oh, I can't bring her. She bores people." Another woman found Sanders bounding out of her bed and out of her life when she casually remarked that she owed a big tax bill. This was a long and eventually depressing theme in Aherne's book; Sanders was obsessed to the point of mania with avoiding taxes. Now you are thinking, well, Siren, so are most of us. True. Aherne himself moved to Switzerland at one point to avoid paying high taxes. Aherne did not, however, set up several corporations of varying degrees of legality, get involved with international swindlers, set up complicated, annual multi-country residence schemes or accept lousy, career-damaging jobs based solely on whether or not he could hide the income. Sanders did all that and more, and his obsession with tax evasion was to have sad consequences toward the end of his life.


His main joy appears to have been his unlikely marriage to Ronald Colman's widow, the former actress Benita Hume, to whom Sanders proposed mere weeks after Colman's death. Much of Aherne's book consists of Benita's letters, which isn't as disappointing as you might think. Aherne at first suspected Sanders was after her money, but Benita was the love of his friend's life. She was quite funny and charming in her own right: "Greer G[arson] was there, she's become no end odd and when she greets you, you have the strong impression that she has just opened a bazaar and I for one fully expected her to give me a nice rosette for the biggest cucumber." Benita also gives a good picture of life with her George, as he complains in a Tel Aviv restaurant that he does not like frankfurters and would like some pork sausages--"You know, PORK." "I sometimes wonder what goes on inside that head," she concludes placidly.

Benita knew what she was getting into. Aherne includes a letter she wrote well before Colman died, in which Benita laughs over the Zsa Zsa-Christmas-detective story that was making the rounds of Hollywood and concludes, "There is something irresistible about a man who cultivates caddishness to such Homeric proportions." So well did Benita seem to understand Sanders that the Siren thinks his "dreadfulness" might have been oddly comforting at times. Benita was diagnosed with breast cancer and came home one day after being informed by a horrifically insensitive doctor that she'd need a double mastectomy. Sanders asked how it went, his wife burst into tears, and when she managed to tell him the news, he sighed with relief: "Oh, is that all? Well, who needs them?"

When Benita died, in 1967, Sanders wrote to Aherne that she wouldn't have wanted mourning: "The mood here is one of gaiety." He stopped in to visit Aherne, played piano, gave singing lessons and seemed in good spirits. Sanders kept it up until, on the way to the airport, Aherne asked him a question about Benita--and "he burst into uncontrollable sobs."

A couple of years later Sanders married the wealthy Magda Gabor--Zsa Zsa's idea, he told Aherne. After only a few days of marriage, Sanders announced he was divorcing her, because he didn't want to ask her for money, and he "couldn't have a normal conversation" with her; Magda had aphasia from a stroke. Not only did Sanders himself have a milder version of the same problem, also from a stroke, he was discussing this with Aherne in front of Magda. When Aherne protested, Sanders admitted affably that Magda was "much the nicest of the Gabors" and came up with the idea that the marriage should be annulled on grounds of his impotence. Which it shortly was.

The marriage to Magda came and went, and things got worse for Sanders. His parts diminished, his drinking increased. Always subject to fits of gloom, he began to slide into despair, showing up at Aherne's place leaning on a cane and insisting that he was dying, whacking the sofa with the cane and groaning, "I can't speak straight and I can't think." Aherne tried to comfort him, saying it was the old age we all face, but Sanders was inconsolable, having just turned down a good part because his stroke-damaged speech would not permit him to do it. Sanders' sister Margaret went to take care of him. One morning she found George had ordered the servants to drag his piano, which he once played every day, into the garden, where Sanders chopped it to pieces with an axe. When Margaret protested, he pushed her away. "I can't play the damned thing any more," he cried, "so why should I keep it?"

In a final attempt to avoid more taxes, Sanders made the disastrous decision to sell his house in Mallorca, Spain, which he had owned with Benita and which she'd intended to be his well into old age. When Aherne last saw him, in March 1972, just a month before his suicide, Sanders was downing glasses of straight vodka, asking "how many would it take?" (pills) and saying he should never have sold the house: "Everything I do is wrong. I can't do right. I must be crazy!"

The actor tried hard for an acerbic, Sanders-style coda with his famous note: "Dear World, I am leaving because I am bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool. Good luck." In reality, the end was as somber as any other suicide. Dan Callahan, in his excellent Bright Lights piece, tells the story even better than Aherne does:

Old, sick, and very tired, Sanders traveled to Barcelona in 1972, took a hotel room, and wrote his famous suicide note before overdosing on pills. This note was gleefully reported after his death, and certainly it remains one of the best of its kind. What is less known is that Sanders wrote a second suicide note, addressed not to the press but to his sister Margaret, the only person who connected him to his Russian childhood and everything he had lost: 'Dearest Margoolinka. Don't be sad. I have only anticipated the inevitable by a few years.' In the end, the entertaining Cad had his say, only to make way for the tender Russian boy behind the mask...

That the first suicide note has passed into immortality, while the gentle farewell to his sister is almost forgotten, is understandable, indeed almost appropriate. Sanders may have despised acting, but like all stars he understood image. "THINK ONLY THIS OF ME," he wrote in one of his last letters to Aherne, "that in some corner of a crummy foreign village there lives, for the time being, that old shit-heel from St. Petersburg--Sanders." Indeed it's much easier to contemplate Sanders being an "old shit-heel" than the melancholy, broken person he was at the end, and it was easier to play parts that way, too.

Next up, the man behind the cad, in three movies: The Private Affairs of Bel-Ami, Summer Storm and yes, M. Ehrenstein, Viaggio in Italia. (Many thanks to Yojimboen, without whose kindness the Siren would not have seen the first two films.)

(Note: Catastrophe. While attempting an unrelated blogging task, the Siren managed to delete this post and its attached comments. She retrieved the post, and that part of the comments which she had lurking in her email account. Never let it be said that untidy email habits do not ever pay off. You can find the retrieved comments, back to sometime yesterday, in, of all places, the comments section. Profuse apologies.)

Honestly, the Siren wants to write something but it's like trying to dig an MG Midget out of a snowdrift. Just getting the time to watch anything has been a chore. Daylight is approaching, however.

In the meantime, the Siren turns to her beloved George Sanders, who had some decided ideas about how to keep a reading audience interested, as he here demonstrates in a letter to Brian Aherne.

In the late 1950s Aherne and Sanders, good friends for many years, were simultaneously writing their respective memoirs. Aherne assures us that both autobiographies were remaindered quickly, but Sanders' Memoirs of a Professional Cad is now an out-of-print cult item, commanding prices that start at about $80 to $100 for a battered second-hand copy. Some years after Sanders' suicide, Aherne collected his reminiscences of and correspondence with his friend (and Sanders' longtime wife Benita) into a book called A Dreadful Man, from which this letter is taken.

Dear Brian,
I think you will find if you tell the truth in your autobiography nobody will be interested and you will find it difficult not to be pompous and dull. It doesn't matter if the title of the book is misleading, as long as it's eye-catching and intriguing, and it doesn't matter if its contents are silly if they are entertaining. As a suitable title for your book I suggest,



"Take that you bastard!" said Joan Fontaine, her strong little fist connecting with my chin. Lightning exploded in my brain and I went down for the count of ten. As consciousness returned, my mind drifted back to my boyhood in Birmingham. I thought of the poignance of first love, the unforgettable spring when Birmingham's air, soft, richly thick and grey, and fragrant like an unwashed bedsock, made my heart beat faster. And she came running towards me, my little Beryl, her little fist outstretched and her high, childish voice crying to me, "Take that you bastard!"

My reverie was cut short by the emergence of Louis B. Mayer from the bathroom. I understood at once that my career was ruined. I had caught the great L.B. in a compromising situation with my wife! It was unforgivable. I knew then that my contract would be dropped and I would be relegated to spending the rest of my life on tour with Katharine Cornell.




That's the kind of thing to give the public.








The Siren here adds that Aherne was married to Joan Fontaine at one time. As she hasn't read Aherne's autobiography, A Proper Job, she doesn't know how dear Joan comes off in it, but Fontaine's descriptions of Aherne in her own book seem to indicate a certain desire to settle scores.

British-born Aherne also spent part of his childhood in Birmingham. Aside from that, the only other bit of truth is that Aherne was, in fact, on tour with Katharine Cornell in 1959, which Sanders weaves into the narrative with characteristic tact.

Given Sanders' attitude toward memoir-writing, the Siren thinks that when she does get Memoirs of a Professional Cad, she will be setting it next to the salt-cellar, even as she eats up every word.

More on Sanders here.

James Wolcott weighs in with a delicious excerpt from Memoirs of a Professional Cad. Be warned, you will be defrosting the credit card to get your own copy.

Fellow redhead Sheila O'Malley is never better than when she's got her Irish up, as she does over Peter Manso's Brando biography. James Wolcott already covered this one, but it bears another look. Sheila was particularly incensed by Manso's snide referrals to Brando's reliance on taped cue cards, as though the process somehow diminished the performance.

So this one is for the magnificent Sheila, and her superb collection of film books. May her series about them continue forever, or at least down to the very bottom shelf. This anecdote is from Garson Kanin's Hollywood, which is not the most unimpeachable of sources. In this case, however, the Siren catches a whiff of authenticity. See if you agree.

It's 1938, and Kanin is filming The Great Man Votes with John Barrymore, a star whose reliance on lines scrawled on blackboards owed more to a memory dented by years of diligent alcohol abuse than technique. How much Barrymore really needed them is anyone's guess--he could recite Shakespeare by the page even in the very depths of his binges--but insist upon them he always did. On this film Barrymore's "blackboard man" was named Henry, and Kanin came on set one day to find that Henry was about to mix it up big time with the principal gaffer.

The gaffer spoke. "Listen, I've put up with this goddamn pest every day since we started, but enough is enough. He doesn't have to be in here with that goddamn sliver. I need this spot for my key light and I want him the hell out of here."

Henry, a dignified old gentleman, said, "I know my job and I"m going to do it and no one's going to prevent me from doing it. My job."

I was confused. "What job? What do you mean 'sliver'"?

Henry held up a blackboard the size of a child's slate. On it was written the word "Yes."...

I went over to Barrymore...

"We have a little problem," I explained. "You know the scene. We're outside here with the camera. Miss [Katharine] Alexander knocks on the door. You open it. She says, 'Are you Gregory Vance?' You say 'Yes.' She walks in and that's it."

"Fine," said Barrymore. "What seems to be the trouble?"

"Well," I explained, "Henry here sems to feel that he has to be standing here with this little slate that says 'Yes.'"

"Oh by all means!" said Barrymore.

I did not grasp his meaning at once. "You mean it's all right for him not to be here. Is that it?"

"No, no," said Barrymore. "I'd like to have him here. With his slate."

I was losing patience, struggling for control. "But let's be reasonable, Mr. Barrymore. All she asks is, 'Are you Gregory Vance?' And you are, so what else could you possibly say?"

Barrymore thought for a long moment, then looked at me and said, "Well, I could say 'No,' and then where would you be?"

We found a spot for Henry and his slate.

This week marks the start of a long-awaited vacation for la famille Campaspe. We'll be in France for three weeks, hence the banner change. The itinerary is Paris, then Normandy, then Paris again, then back home. I will have Internet access in Paris although Normandy is something of a question mark. In any event I have set up some posts via Blogger's spiffy new advance-post system, as well as my piece for Mike "Goatdog" Phillips's "Movies About Movies" blogathon. I will be checking in when possible but I hope you guys still chat amongst yourselves.