She stood up to her swindling agent, to Louis B. Mayer’s tantrums, to Howard Hughes (“Don’t even try, Howard, I’m too athletic”), to tyrannical directors and egomaniacal co-stars. Even the secretary of the Navy didn’t daunt her. Modeling her Cole of California Esther Williams bathing suit, she asks, “Mr. Secretary, could you make this the official swimsuit of the U.S. Navy?” “Consider it done.”
Esther Williams in Million Dollar Mermaid
You can enjoy Esther Williams musicals (I do) and you can find them ludicrous (I do), but you can’t dispute her determination. No star ever worked harder, often under perilous conditions (“I think Esther Williams is dead,” her wardrobe lady shouted once. “She can’t get out of the pool”). And her hard work paid off; quickly she became a top ten box-office attraction. The formula of her movies was cut and dried—what she calls the mismatched-lovers plot punctuated by gigantic aquatic production numbers. Sometimes she had fun—appearing often opposite that other all-American, Van Johnson. Sometimes it was hell, as when Gene Kelly tormented her during the making of Take Me Out to the Ball Game. The problem was that “as much as Kelly resented the fact that I was not a dancer, he resented my height even more.” Typically, when things got really bad, she laid it on the line: “Gene … I have perfect proportions in a swimsuit, and that’s why I’m here making movies at MGM. I’m sorry that my physique doesn’t fit in with your plans.”
So how did it happen that this formidable professional led such a disastrous personal life? She begins her book by revealing that in 1959, following the example of Cary Grant, she took LSD to “find some answers.” She was thirty-seven years old. Her second marriage—to the alcoholic and compulsive gambler Ben Gage—was over, but he had left her owing $750,000 to the IRS. And with MGM crumbling, nobody was going to make multimillion-dollar aqua-musicals ever again. The LSD helped explain her to herself by making her relive the moment—she was eight—when her adored sixteen-year-old brother, Stanton, the pride and hope of the Williams family, died without warning. “Suddenly … a revelation hit me, and I knew what my life was all about.… His talent, his good looks, his ambition had been our only chance to break out of poverty.… Now that he was gone, somebody had to take his place or we would all be lost.… I looked about me and realized that … I would have to be that rock.… If my shoulders weren’t strong enough as yet, then I would make them strong.”
She proved strong enough to survive being raped repeatedly by a sixteen-year-old boy her parents had taken into the family (this began when she was thirteen and went on for two years). She survived a foolish early marriage. She even survived Ben Gage; she had to—they had three children, and he certainly wasn’t going to provide. Luckily, her mother was a source of unsentimental common sense. (“I heard the voice of my mother, Bula, in the back of my mind. ‘Esther,’ she asked, ‘what part of the problem are you?’”) Nor did it hurt that she was healthily sexual—enjoying romps with at least two of her leading men, Victor Mature and Jeff Chandler, although the latter relationship ended when he cheerfully revealed himself as a confirmed cross-dresser. Even then, she kept her sense of humor and her cool, explaining to him, “I can’t be married to a matron,” and leaving him with a useful fashion tip: “Jeff, you’re too big for polka dots.”
Yet this is the point when her story takes a deeply disturbing turn. In 1960, Fernando Lamas, her leading man seven years earlier in Dangerous When Wet, re-enters her life. For the next twenty-two years, she lives in total submission to him—it would be fair to call it bondage. Their deal is simple: She will stop being “Esther Williams”; only “Fernando Lamas” matters. She will recede from public view, be a housewife, have no wishes or will of her own. And no other man must look at her—in fact, it’s better when she gets fat, so that no man will want to. In return, he will be faithful.
Lamas’s peculiarities apparently stemmed from immense vanity covering profound insecurity, and some of them can be seen as amusing. “He absolutely hated wrinkles. If we were driving to a party, he often would get behind the wheel nude from the waist down, with his perfectly pressed English gabardine pants on a hanger behind him. When we got within a couple of blocks of our destination, he’d find a secluded spot, leap out into the bushes and put on his trousers.” (Why didn’t I ever think of that?) But no one could find amusing his refusal to have anything to do with his wife’s three children. They were not welcome in the Lamas household, and chillingly Williams relates how she spent years surreptitiously cooking for them and driving the food to where they were staying, helping them with their homework, and scurrying nervously home. Only in 1982 does she turn back into the Esther Williams we thought we knew, defying Lamas by insisting on going to her daughter’s wedding. And at this very juncture, he is stricken by the cancer that swiftly killed him.
This is a dreadful story, and Williams tells it honestly. But does she really understand how and why it happened? She insists that she made a sacred pledge to care for Lamas until death, to make up to him for the traumas of his childhood. (“I have always been a person of my word, and only death could set me free from the vows I took.”) But surely there is more to it than that. Perhaps this was the price she paid for being the family rock. Perhaps she found psychic advantages to being trapped in a pumpkin shell. Happily, since Lamas’s death she has regained her energy and drive, making a good fourth marriage, re-emerging as a successful businesswoman and becoming, as she puts it, “godmother to a sport”—synchronized swimming.
And she has written, with the help of Digby Diehl, this interesting and engaging account of her life, and of the Hollywood she knew.
Her account is peppered with anecdotes about the great and the near-great—Dietrich, Crawford, Bette Davis, Lana Turner, even the Windsors. She describes a dinner in Spain where the Duke was passing out from drink until “finally the Duchess took him into a bathroom upstairs and emerged with him on her arm. He wasn’t steady by any means, but at least he was vertical. ‘I used your favorite thing,’ Wally shouted to me proudly … ‘I threw water in his face!’” Water had certainly carried Esther Williams a long way.
The New York Times
OCTOBER 3, 1999
Tame Jane
JANE EYRE IN THE MOVIES
THE NEW FILM VERSION of Jane Eyre isn’t all bad, but it’s all wrong. The story, despite a confusing flashback structure, is coherent. The dialogue is satisfying. The look is convincing. What’s lacking is Jane Eyre itself—Charlotte Brontë’s feverish inner world of anguish and fury. Instead, everything is pallid and sedate. Only the landscape projects some feeling: The director (Cary Joji Fukunaga) and the cinematographer (Adriano Goldman) are far more at home looking at moors than at people.
Some viewers find the classic 1944 version over-melodramatic: Joan Fontaine too beautiful for plain Jane, Orson Welles’s Rochester over-the-top with his flaring cape and piercing eyes and ultra-resonant voice. Well, he is over-the-top—but that’s true to the nature of Brontë’s imaginings. And if Fontaine is too classically beautiful, her perfectly chiseled features more Hollywood than Yorkshire, her screen presence has the right eager masochism for Jane—as it did for her two most triumphant earlier films, Hitchcock’s Rebecca and Suspicion. The black-and-white photography, all deep shadows and swirling mists, ups the windblown stakes, and we’re in a recognizable projection of what the novel feels like. Jane Eyre the novel is operatic; the new movie is what opera never should be: tame.
There have been many previous adaptations, including an early sound version from the “Poverty Row” Monogram studio, with the stolid and moribund Colin Clive as a bloodless Rochester and a too-handsome Virginia Bruce as a Jane with a Southern accent. Various television attempts have been livelier, though it would be hard to identify a more miscast Rochester than George C. Scott or a more irritating Jane than Susannah York in Delbert Mann’s 1970 version. But they all suffer from the same syndrome: Jane Eyre is too highly charged, too febrile, for the small screen, and for TV-type acting.
And now it turns out that it’s also too highly charged, too febrile, for this latest large-screen attempt by Fukunaga and Moira Buffini, a not very experienced director and screenwriter who have no problem with pictorialization but shy away from high emotion. Can they be embarrassed by all that passion, all that lack of good taste? The acting is careful and small-scale. Michael (Inglourious Basterds) Fassbender’s Rochester is standardly handsome rather than rough-hewn, and he speaks well, but his performance is tender rather than threatening or even edgy; he’s a post-feminist lover. Jane is Mia Wasikowska, who was exceptionally moving in HBO’s In Treatment as a suicidal teenage gymnast, but whose portrayal of the young daughter in The Kids Are All Right was no more than capable, and whose Alice in Tim Burton’s Wonderland was conventional and dull. (If you’re looking for real acting in that movie, don’t take your eyes off Johnny Depp’s wild and daring Hatter.)
Michael Fassbender and Mia Wasikowska in Jane Eyre (2011)
Orson Welles and Joan Fontaine in Jane Eyre (1944)
Wasikowska is talented, certainly, but she’s yet to show that she can create a character; what she does instead is be herself: serious, sensitive, occasionally breaking out her lovely smile. She’s nowhere near intense enough for this iconic nineteenth-century emotional extravaganza that’s thrilled generations of young women (and men). As Jane she gamely goes through the paces, but no sparks fly—certainly not the crucial ones with Rochester. When their eyes first meet, they’re cautious and reflective. When Orson Welles’s glare meets Joan Fontaine’s instant surrender, stand back!
What we have here is the usual result when the movies take on a famous book with a singular voice. They hold on to the plot, the furnishings, even the language, but they lose the essence. It’s the problem with all the Vanity Fair adaptations—they give us Becky, they give us the Waterloo ball, but they can’t give us Thackeray’s sardonic vision of Vanity Fair. No filmed Moby-Dick reflects Melville; no filmed Madame Bovary suggests Flaubert. The current True Grit is a sad case in point: It reproduces Charles Portis’s story—but ploddingly. The special charm of the book lies in the earnest, humorless voice of its girl heroine, and how do you convey that on film? The utterly affectless Hailee Steinfeld, playing Mattie Ross, hasn’t a clue. But the Coen brothers don’t have one either: Their movie is about Jeff Bridges wearing an eye patch. (I feel particularly strongly about this one, maybe because I was the book’s editor.)
The great exception to the rule is Dickens. David Copperfield, Great Expectations, Oliver Twist have made terrific movies, and there are acceptable television adaptations, too. But as everyone has noted, Dickens was a cinematic writer; they only had to follow along, they didn’t have to reinvent. No, it’s likely to be second-rate novels that make good movies, ones with exciting stories and clearly etched characters but no particular vision of life, no unique authorial voice. These latter qualities are what books are for. Back to Charlotte Brontë.
The New York Review of Books (NYR Daily)
MARCH 26, 2011
Monstres Sacrés in Love
STRAVINSKY AND CHANEL
ALL BIOPICS ARE BY DEFINITION RIDICULOUS, since their subjects have to be manifestly unique people—why else would the movie be made?—while what makes them unique is exactly what’s so impossible to convey. (Creativity is invisible, hence unfilmable.) At best, what you get is the kind of superior impersonation Meryl Streep is so adept at, from Isak Dinesen to Julia Child, or that motored not one but two faux-Capotes a few years ago. (The best such recent effort was Marion Cotillard’s Oscar-winning turn as Edith Piaf. The movie itself was standard stuff, but Cotillard’s performance seemed less like an impersonation and more like the real thing—or a real thing.)
Hollywood once majored in stuff of this kind. Through the decades geniuses suffered (the uplifting stories of Louis Pasteur, Madame Curie, and Dr. Erlich—and his Magic Bullet) and artists suffered (the tormented trajectories of Chopin, Van Gogh, Michelangelo). Later came the entertainment icons—Al Jolson, Billie Holiday, Ray Charles, and their endless spawn of Lifetime TV specials. And then there’s the world of Classica—Alexander, the Macedonian who’s had the distinction of being portrayed by a Welshman (Richard Burton) and an Irishman (Colin Farrell); Cleopatra—you know who played her; and—still around in a few obscure and empty theaters—that renowned early-fifth-century Alexandrian astronomer and mathematician Hypatia, in a Rachel Weisz ego-trip titled Agora. (She’s murdered by a Christian mob.)
The latest stab at showing us how genius operates is Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky, a swanky re-enactment of the supposed flaming affair between two of the major creative forces of the last century. (In real life, they did—or didn’t?—share a brief moment.) Why and for whom was this movie made? There’s no big name attached to it—it was never headed for your local Cineplex. One possible clue: Anna Mouglalis, who plays Chanel, has worked for the fashion house for eight years, and remains a “muse” for Karl Lagerfeld’s Chanel products. Is this what’s meant by “synergy”?
Mads Mikkelsen and Anna Mouglalis in Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky
Mouglalis is a great beauty—the closest thing we’ve seen to Ava Gardner since Ava Gardner. And beauty is the main thing the movie offers—every approving review gloats over the opulence and glamour of the period sets and costumes; it’s Masterpiece Theatre meets The Rite of Spring. Which is indeed how the movie opens: with a meticulous and convincing re-enactment of the famous “scandal”—the boos, the catcalls—of the 1913 premiere of that Stravinsky/Nijinsky/Diaghilev cause célèbre. Coco, elegantly strapless, is on hand, coolly approving while taking note of the hunky young composer (Mads Mikkelsen). Here, to anyone who knows the Stravinsky iconography, is where a willing suspension of disbelief had better start kicking in: Stravinsky was many extraordinary things, but at five feet three inches and with his owl-like visage he was no hunk. In the last few years, Helen Mirren, in a burst of verisimilitude, sported Her Majesty the Queen’s signature hairdo and Nicole Kidman proudly asserted Virginia Woolf’s nose. Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky is much too busy with the verisimilitude of the furniture and the drapery to bother with what its iconic protagonists really looked like.
World War I comes and goes, and the Stravinskys are on their uppers, needing a place to perch while the great man Creates. Coco has not forgotten him, and offers Igor and his little woman and their four littler ones her country estate to live and work in. (Cozily, she’ll be there, too.) Madame S, who’s suffering from jealousy as well as tuberculosis, is understandably miserable, but tant pis—what must be, must be, when two voracious geniuses are living under one roof, particularly when they’re so well dressed.
Despite all its pretensions, C & I is just the same old Hollywood story: A selfish and tormented hero is torn between a ruthless Joan Crawford and a self-sacrificial Lillian Gish. Poor Catherine Stravinsky (Elena Morozova, in the film’s only convincing performance) confronts Coco: Think of the children. Have you no heart? And you’ll be stunned to hear that beneath her coldness, her ruthlessness, her straplessness Coco does have a heart, and subtly engineers a quarrel with her lover, so that the Stravinskys are forced to decamp with the family more or less intact. But not before we’ve been treated to a variety of embarrassing sex scenes. It’s just plain mortifying to find yourself contemplating Igor Stravinsky’s bare buttocks pumping away over Coco Chanel’s bare everything. For comic relief, though, we do get Igor teaching Coco how to play the piano in two minutes. (She doesn’t reciprocate by teaching him how to sew, although she does stitch on one of his buttons.)
There’s been a run on Chanel lately: not only last year’s Audrey Tautou movie Coco Before Chanel (actually, she was Gabrielle before she was Coco), but a couple of years ago a TV movie with Shirley MacLaine (!) as the mature Chanel. Neither of these films was exactly persuasive. Even so, in the dialogue department the new movie wins hands down. The epic spat between the two monstres sacrés goes as follows:
She: “I’m as powerful as you,
Igor, and more successful.”
He: “You’re not an artist, you’re a shopkeeper.”
End of affair.
Well, Chanel was a shopkeeper (and what a shop!), and she would undoubtedly have acknowledged it: She was above all else a realist. Diana Vreeland put it this way: “Peasants and geniuses are the only people who count, and she was both.” And “Coco was never a kind woman … but she was the most interesting person I’ve ever met.” I just wish D.V. had lived long enough to see her and her equally prodigious lover portrayed not as the earth-shaking revolutionaries they were but as props in a high-toned soap opera.
The New York Review of Books (NYR Daily)
AUGUST 3, 2010
An Actress Like No Other
SETSUKO HARA
WE’RE ALWAYS HEARING ABOUT THE ENDS OF ERAS, but the recent death of the great actress Setsuko Hara really is the end of an era—the era of the classic Japanese film, of the directors Mizoguchi, Ozu, Naruse, Kurosawa, and Kinoshita (to name only the best-known here in America), and of the period’s dominant actresses—Kinuyo Tanaka, Hideko Takamine, Isuzu Yamada, Machiko Kyō, and Hara herself. Her death at the age of ninety-five, more than fifty years after her voluntary retirement from the screen—and from all public life—still comes as a shock. There’s now no one left of this astounding constellation of talent; and that she was by far the most emblematic figure of the era makes her disappearance reverberate even more strongly.
In the West, most of us first encountered her in 1972 when Yasujirō Ozu’s 1953 masterpiece, Tokyo Story, was released here. I had never heard of Ozu, although I had seen and admired international award-winning Japanese films like Rashomon, Gate of Hell, and Ugetsu. Ozu had obviously been considered “too Japanese” for Western consumption, and it was greatly due to Dan Talbot, who ran the Upper West Side’s New Yorker Theater, as well as an important film-distribution company, that he finally emerged here. Beginning with the moment when Tokyo Story first reached us, Ozu’s international fame and influence have grown and grown to their current towering stature.
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