The restaurant is almost empty. He sits, looking away from her and smoking his cigar, while Wanda finishes her food. He has pushed away his plate but she is still eating, spaghetti in tomato sauce. The manager has finished stacking chairs and gone back into the kitchen. They are sitting on these orangey-pink leatherette banquettes, the last patrons of the evening. He eyes her reproachfully: wipe your mouth. She wipes her mouth and takes a piece of bread, looks at him again, leans over, her gaze never slipping from his face, dips the bread into his plate, looking casual, wipes the sauce with exaggerated greediness, staring at him still, that’s the best part of life, don’t you like that? That part? She’s still watching him, she is asking him a question and he isn’t answering. She tries on different expressions, flickering between joy, tenderness, and surprise, as though there was something between them.
Later, in the shadowy darkness of a bedroom, he is lying in the middle of the bed, his back to her, while she lies naked, arms folded, at the edge of the bed, barely covered by the sheet, Mr. Dennis, don’t you want to know my name?
She sits up and gently strokes his forehead until he cries out. She pales, but I only wanted to be nice. Silence. It’s two in the morning, the exhaustion from the lack of sleep is palpable, but more than anything we sense the weariness, the bitter taste of not being loved. She scratches her arm just for something to do. In the middle of the night he tells her to go out for burgers, no garbage, no onions, no butter on the bun! He hits her when she gets back, reproaching her for not getting what he asked for, etc. There is nothing easily recognizable between them: neither lust nor passion, no exchange, no offering. In this hotel room, with its green walls and flowery curtains, on this bed with sheets rumpled from heat and mutual incomprehension, a hackneyed scene of humiliation and submission is being played out, the silent withdrawal of one into another.
Once upon a time the man I loved reproached me for my apparent passivity with other men. We were in the kitchen having breakfast: he told me that he was afraid of that habit particular to women in general and me in particular, in his opinion, of being either unable or unwilling to resist uninvited male desire, of the madness of giving in to whatever they asked of us. He couldn’t understand how hard it is to say no, to be confronted with the desire of another and to reject it—how hard it is and possibly how pointless. How could he not understand the sometimes overwhelming necessity of yielding to the other’s desire to give yourself a better chance of escaping it?
Sylvia Plath writes in her journal: “For instance, I could hold my nose, close my eyes, and jump blindly into the waters of some man’s insides, submerging myself until his purpose becomes my purpose, his life, my life, and so on. One fine day I would float to the surface, quite drowned, and supremely happy with my newfound selfless self.”
They leave—or rather he leaves and she follows. The police are after them now. Wanda reads aloud from the newspaper: Police surround the couple (here, strangely, Mr. Dennis smiles faintly, as if the word gives him some secret satisfaction). They are driving a stolen metallic blue Skylark Buick. She carries on reading and, thinking aloud, worries about what will happen next. He brakes sharply and stops on the side of the road, leans over her to open the passenger door and tries to force her out of the car. She stiffens and protests, but I haven’t done anything!, and pulls the door shut again. He drives off. Through the rear window the road seems to be slipping away. Wanda watches the place where she has come from and from which she is escaping, unable to put a name to what she is leaving behind. We think they’re driving without a destination in mind but they are heading somewhere—only later will we find out where. They seem to be circling some dreary place, nothing staggeringly American, no streamlined horizon into which to dive and disappear, no mind-bending trip, Riders on the storm, Riders on the storm, no incandescent, dreamlike place. They drive around in silence, he is clutching the steering wheel, tense and irritable, like a husband and father who’s been ruined and is considering the idea of collective immolation at the next service station; she sits the way my mother used to sit next to my father, upright, short, alert, holding her breath, just waiting to be murdered.
A few weeks later I found myself alone in a room in a 1960s motel near Waterbury, Connecticut. The interior had been miraculously preserved; I remember how the bedside tables, the bed, the radio, the dressing table with frosted-glass light fittings and a mirror were all integrated in a single line of wooden paneling, the wardrobe too, all the way to the door of the bathroom lined with sea-green tiles. I was reminded that only in unfamiliar bedrooms do we perceive with such clarity the true nature of our existence—true because astray—only away from our own bedroom, from the room that I longed for every moment of my trip—how I longed to be there, to slip into it—in the persistently unyielding space of a deserted place that just won’t be appropriated. What had I come here for? All I wanted to do was to collect some images; I was looking for something tangible to express uncertainty, to describe the submission to what one imagines to be the other’s desire, to describe that inability to say no, to get angry, to refuse, the impossibility of remaining detached, the impulse to do something well, the waiting, the torpor. I wanted to link my present with the history of certain emotions experienced by other people. With nothing better to do, I emptied out the contents of my incredibly cluttered toilet bag and started to arrange the tubes, jars, and pencils, laying them out one by one, unsure as to whether I should organize everything by category, size, or color, taking comfort in the gentle murmur of a radio coming from one of the neighboring rooms. So there I was. I looked at myself in the mirror, like Dürer’s angel of melancholia dubiously contemplating the tools of her paltry knowledge, or like the woman in the Hopper painting, sitting alone on the bed in a hotel room, bent over a book in her lap, leaning over the abyss.
I am reading Elia Kazan’s memoir, pencil in hand, writing down word for word everything he says about Barbara Loden: he describes her as a wild, out of the ordinary, feisty woman who could be bitchy; kittenish around men and bold on the street; she knows the things a girl from the back-country needs to know; there is something a little improper about her; she has a provocative tough side; she gives off an air of being unafraid of any man; it is very difficult for her to communicate except when she is overwhelmed by powerful feeling, sexual passion, or rage, when a relationship seems to be at stake. “I get mad at her but I respect her because she hides nothing.” She says, “Trust no man! All you have is your body. Make them pay for it. Never give in totally. If someone hurts you, revenge yourself by ‘seeing’ someone else.” She is terribly sensitive, capable of physically attacking a casting director in the middle of the street if he has denigrated her; she is hard and can be unkind; she is aggressive and tough; she wanted to be independent, to find her own way.
I try to see beneath Wanda’s lost expression, beyond her forlorn face and the nervous, distracted way she holds herself in front of other people. I’m trying to find everything that she has in common with Barbara.
To the 1971 edition of the journal Madison Women’s Media Collective, in answer to a question about Wanda: “It’s like showing myself in a way that I was.”
I remember my mother making these exaggerated gestures, contrived and apprehensive, whenever my father was around. The look of panic on her face. Like Wanda she had this worried stare, an odd way of scrutinizing the man’s impassive expression to try and understand and anticipate what would come next.
Wanda is perched on the car hood, they are drinking beer and whiskey, dogs are barking. Even the most deserted wasteland, the most miserable place, can outwit fright in a last stand; it needs no more than a pebble to sustain dusk’s insubstantial loveliness, and sadness; ignorance and deception are momentarily appeased in a last trick of the light. Mr. Dennis comes up behind her and slips his jacket over her shoulders. Sun’s going down, she says, it’s so calm, she believes it, now they can talk normally, say in a calm tone of voice how beautiful the twilight is, they
can put aside suspicion and caution, abandon themselves to a moment that for once looks like life as she used to imagine it. He is watching her, lit by the dense, saturated light of the setting sun. He watches her and awkwardly reaches out to her to try and fix her hair, curtly reproaches her for looking terrible, for not owning anything, not even a hat or a scarf, anything. We understand it’s his manner. She stays calm, tells him that she owns nothing, never has and never will. You’re stupid! She says yes, I’m stupid. If you don’t want anything, you’ll never have anything, and when you have nothing, he says, you’re a zero, you may as well be dead. She says in that case she’s dead, for sure. What does that mean? Is that what you want to be, dead? They’re interrupted by the whir of a miniature airplane circling above them, like a childhood memory, like a fable of menace or rescue. Mr. Dennis climbs onto the roof of the car and looks at the sky, shouting and waving his arms, yelling like a desperate man, Come back! Come back! as if they needed to be saved, to be taken away far from their own story, far from punishment and confession, from the possibility of love; the little plane is still whirring and then it flies off, bearing away Norman Dennis’s phantoms. Later, they’re both drunk. Norman Dennis is laid out on the hood, fast asleep. It’s cold.
I’m having dinner in the type of noisy restaurant you only find in New York, where everything seems to have been designed for people to meet up and then to be unable to hear what the other is saying, the impossibility of having a conversation being the very sign of the success of the exchange. Jenny is literally shouting as she tries to explain to me the essential importance of the sexual and social question. Obviously, she tells me, Barbara is, like all women of our generation, fragmented; on the one hand she’s a glamour girl who’s managed not only to seduce a giant, Kazan, but to hang on to him—difficult, very difficult—but at the same time she’s the one who suffers from all the things left unsaid: what happened with Kazan? What was the arrangement, what was the deal? Barbara is already married to a man who has in a way shaped her: dance classes, elocution classes, drama classes, he’s the one who introduces her that day to Kazan, the almighty Kazan, who is never going to be able to resist such a feisty, sexy blonde. It works, of course. Kazan is crazy about her. He gets her pregnant. Nobody knows, people will talk, and of course they do. I’m not really keeping up, she’s talking too fast. She’s frowning. She chews, distracted, you know, then philosophical: first Barbara was Candy Loden—pin-up model, calendar girl, ambitious, she somehow embodied all that a man could desire, whatever that might be, all that matters is that it is both triumphant and ironic; it’s odd how men like their women to be a little brazen, confident in their own capacity for pleasure; it reassures them, relieves them of uncertainty and regret, and of course girls like that did whatever they had to do to earn a bit of recognition, a scrap of autonomy, but Kazan didn’t see, he didn’t want to see what Barbara was really interested in. The typical 1970s woman is a woman who’s wondering what she’s actually going to be able to do with the freedom that everyone keeps telling her about; a woman who wonders what new lie she’ll have to make up now, how she’s going to pretend to be cool, so that all these men will finally leave her the hell alone.
I am still looking for Barbara’s face, trying to locate it in other places, not just in Wanda. I watch a TV show where she plays the cute assistant—with the most incredible legs—to a vaudeville magician; there she is, in another scene, trying on a new dress, posing coquettishly, half-naked, then suddenly she catches sight of Warren Beatty watching her and she is overwhelmed with sadness, her voice drops, her eyes fill with tears; in another scene she works at the Land Registry, all uptight and brisk—hair neatly pinned up, big spectacles, flat shoes, full green woolen skirt, thick cardigan, buttoned-up blouse, sleeves turned up above the elbow; she’s eyeing Montgomery Clift closely, she has this intense presence, grave and comical all at once (such intensity, such desire to do things properly, and yet so entirely inadequate); here she is again, beautiful and agitated, she’s running erratically through the night in a wispy little silk dress, men in dark suits can’t take their eyes off her, they’re waiting for the opportune moment, she trips from one to another, her face tilted upwards, haggard, undone with intoxication and the wish to die, she calls out to them before she steals into the night, resplendent and trembling, she cries out, she doesn’t want anything any more, what has she ever wanted, leave me alone, leave me alone, she whispers.
The New York Times of December 12, 1966 praised Barbara Loden’s performance in the television adaptation of The Glass Menagerie: “The vision of her glowing face after her lips had been touched by the caller will stand as a closeup of almost unbearable loveliness. In Miss Loden’s touching tenderness of expression there was embodied all the agony of human yearning for another and all the ecstasy of being wanted.”
What is it that attracts me so to Wanda? I have never been homeless, I have never abandoned my children, I have never given over my existence or even my financial affairs to any man, I don’t think I have ever entrusted even the most banal area of my life to anyone. I’ve left men, sometimes heartlessly, with the trembling joy that one feels slipping away down a side street, or vanishing into a crowd, or jumping onto a passing train, or standing someone up; the acute and rare pleasure of avoiding something, of evading something, of disappearing into the landscape—but never the experience of surrender. And yet: it did happen to me once, just one time and it was enough, but who hasn’t experienced that—not knowing how to say no, not daring to say it, yielding to the mortal threat, escaping in the end by withdrawal, absence, slipping to the ground, no longer even offering him the gift of fear, no longer pretending, no longer thinking the unthinkable, protecting oneself in shock, vomiting, the lusted-after body suddenly repulsive, leave me alone, leave me alone. But mostly what’s happened is that I’ve allowed myself to be pushed around, just waiting for it to be over, preferring misunderstanding over confrontation—it’s impossible in moments like that to think that defending my body could be worth the effort, and anyway what does that mean, “my body,” at the age of fifteen? Only this matters: not to be alone, not to be abandoned.
In Red Desert, Giuliana wanders off along the docks and says to a sailor: “Some days, bodies are separated.” Natalie, in The Rain People, sets out on the road alone: “I don’t want to go away with you, I want to get away from you.” In The Savage Eye, Judith is walking alone in the city. “I don’t want to see anybody, I don’t want to speak to anybody.” In Sue Lost in Manhattan, Sue, empty-eyed, says: “I’m not that big on conversation, I can only communicate through sex.” In Jeanne Dielman, Jeanne has stopped speaking.
The hair curlers, the handbag. The bag, that strange, oversized handbag with its mysterious contents, is an event in itself. Everything in Wanda’s life has gone, but this immaculate still life of a handbag is there to bear witness, a proof of reality, proof that there is something that remains even if there is nothing inside.
Between petrol stations and supermarkets, a little conjugal routine, an assemblage of odd synchronized gestures, is wordlessly taking shape. They are parked in a car park, car doors open, like a little house. Wanda and Mr. Dennis are busy doing things to impose a little familiarity on the pervasive anxiety of their lives: tidying, organizing stuff in bags, moving the contents of one bag to another, folding clothes, putting on a shirt, changing a pair of shoes, moving things about, smoothing things out—everything is falling apart but they’re occupied, losing themselves in the insignificance and meticulousness of their movements. He has given her some money so that she can change her clothes; she has bought a white sleeveless shift dress. He has stolen a man’s suit from the back seat of a car, she is putting on a new pair of shoes, he changes his tie, she is wearing a hairband made of tulle with big white flowers sewn onto it. They look like they are getting ready for a wedding, but suddenly, Where’s your husband? Where are the kids? The moment before, as she slipped on her new white dress, she had let out a little sigh of sa
tisfaction, crossing and uncrossing her lovely tanned legs, hoping that he would look at her and say something, she was imagining herself inside a normal life, en route on this lovely summer day to Sunday lunch with the in-laws, it felt like a day when something might be declared. The kids? she repeats dreamily. She mutters that they’re better off without her, I’m no good, I’m useless, I can’t do anything, she says, she repeats it, trying to convince herself, eventually she is convinced, she tries to laugh it off. Just no good. Wanda gets into the car. Mr. Dennis closes the door. He looks at her vaguely, as if he were standing on the threshold of an unfamiliar room that is too dark to see into, the disquieting sense that someone is there but it’s impossible to be sure.
In February 1964 Barbara Loden starred in the role of Maggie in Arthur Miller’s new play After the Fall. Every night is a victory, for she knows it was Kazan who insisted on her being cast, and that he claimed to have begged Miller to agree to her being given the part. They don’t much like Barbara at Lincoln Center: they find her acting skills limited, her range too narrow, the dance coach thinks she is stiff and lazy, and her shrill voice exasperates her elocution coach. But Kazan says that she’s very good at portraying the innocence of a fifteen-year-old, and that anger liberates her body and endows her voice with unexpected inflections. He says it’s true that she only goes from A to B, but within that range she goes deep. So she is cast in After the Fall. Even if Miller always denied it, every character of the play is a phantom from his own past, and all New York comes to applaud Barbara Loden in the role of Maggie, directly inspired by Marilyn Monroe, from whom Miller was divorced in 1961. (One critic wrote: “No critic in the world, from Patagonia, Azerbaijan or Scarsdale, can reasonably watch the character without thinking of Marilyn Monroe first.”) Among other things the play is about the essential failure to understand each other that was at the heart of their relationship—general opinion has it that that is the strongest element of the play. Barbara wears a short, fine, peroxide-blonde wig. She is Marilyn. Kazan, founder of the Actors Studio, knew what he was doing: “I knew that they shared certain characteristics, childhood traumas, a common wound.” She is Marilyn. The whole of New York is stunned by her ingenuity and skill, by the way she gives herself up to some nameless desire, the way she has of standing up against herself, of being both dramatic and needy, she is Marilyn, she is on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post in February 1964 and she wins a Tony award.
Suite for Barbara Loden Page 3
