January 11, 2019 Arts & Culture Salka Viertel’s Forgotten Account of Old Hollywood By Lawrence Weschler Salka Viertel with Greta Garbo. Back in the day (the late thirties and early forties), many of the Central European cultural émigrés in flight from Hitler’s depredations back home who’d found themselves improbably beached on the West Coast of the United States used to entertain themselves with the melancholy joke about the two dachshunds who meet on the palisade in Santa Monica. “Here it’s true I’m a dachshund,” the one admits to the other, “but in the old country I was a Saint Bernard.” The west side of Los Angeles was rife with erstwhile Saint Bernards in those days, and in her splendidly evocative (if somewhat lamely titled) 1968 memoir, The Kindness of Strangers (being reissued this month by New York Review Books), the onetime Max Reinhardt actress turned Greta Garbo scenarist Salka Viertel regales her readers with countless representative tales of fish decidedly out of water, to vary the metaphor slightly—Sergei Eisenstein, for instance (though he had come to Hollywood and signed a yearlong contract at Paramount for reasons somewhat different from those of his German and Austrian counterparts). Salka, who through much of that time served as the Russian master’s closest local support and confidant, begins her account of that bollixed year with a typically priceless sentence: “As soon as Eisenstein arrived, Upton Sinclair, who had most impressive friends, gave a picnic lunch for him at the ranch of Mr. Gillette, the razorblade millionaire.” From there, she goes on to detail the story of how Sinclair’s wife mobilized a group of idle Pasadena millionaire wives to sponsor Eisenstein’s filming expedition to Mexico, with patrons and director soon falling out catastrophically. Before long, the whole project went down in flames, leaving a heartbroken Eisenstein to return to his Stalinist homeland. Salka likewise tells stories of Schoenberg and Irving Thalberg at ludicrous cross-purposes over a possible score for the latter’s production of Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth, and of Heinrich Mann (brother of Thomas and author back in Germany of massive historical novels as well as the tale upon which the Emil Jannings–Marlene Dietrich classic The Blue Angel had been based) and Bertolt Brecht (arguably the greatest playwright of his era)—all of them utterly squandered by a studio system that had no idea what to do with them. Read More
January 8, 2019 Arts & Culture On Randy Travis’s Distinctive Whine By Drew Bratcher Randy Travis. The first song I ever loved was “On the Other Hand,” by Randy Travis. It was the first single from Travis’s debut album, Storms of Life—and it was the third single, too. The song fizzled when Travis first released it in the summer of 1985, so he rereleased it the following spring, figuring it might fare better after “1982,” the album’s second single, entered the top ten. This time, “On the Other Hand” went to number one on the charts. It was on country radio all the time, and because we listened to country radio all the time, I learned the song, as I’d learned countless others, through osmosis. We lived in Davidson County, in the hills due north of Nashville, a place where country music was less a form of entertainment than an atmospheric feature, as ubiquitous as clouds and often as nebulous. “On the Other Hand” was different from the other country music I heard at the time. Travis’s deep nasal whine, a mix of range and grog and woebegone, blew through the blur. His voice seemed to summon Hank Williams by way of a bullfrog. He was, among other things, an irresistible parody. I stood in front of the fireplace in the living room. I pinched my nostrils. “On one hand, I count the reasons I could stay with you,” I started, pausing to release my nose-hold and inhale again before continuing, “and hold you close to me, all night long.” Read More
January 7, 2019 Arts & Culture On Being a Woman in America While Trying to Avoid Being Assaulted By R. O. Kwon Etching by Martin Lewis Lately, I’ve come to suspect that maybe a lot of people, especially men, still have no idea what it’s like to be a woman in America going about her life while trying, and at times failing, not to be assaulted. So, these past weeks, I’ve been observing myself. I, for instance, elect to walk on certain streets, not others. The elevator doors slide open, and there’s one man inside: I evaluate his size against mine, calculating how well I could fight him off, if I had to. I check the backseat of my car before getting in, just to make sure no one’s waiting there. I don’t leave my drink unattended; when I have to use the bathroom, I take it with me. It’s a multiperson bathroom. I take it into the stall. I lock my car as soon as I get in, then I start driving, pronto, no dallying. While I’m waiting at the bar to buy a drink, a man starts talking to me. I respond politely, if briefly: I hope to indicate, without provoking his ire, that I’m not interested. I get unsettling emails from a stranger, a man. I try to decide what’s safest, if I should create a filter that directs all his missives to the trash or if I should remain aware of what he’s saying. I make the filter, then I delete it. I should be aware, I think. Read More
January 7, 2019 Arts & Culture Meeting Eve Babitz By Lili Anolik Eve Babitz. Photo strip from the collection of Mirandi Babitz. I arrived at Short Order straight from the airport. I was the first customer of the day, the hostess unlocking the door as I reached for it. The restaurant was Eve’s choice, a fifteen-minute walk (she hadn’t driven in years) from her condo, in the Farmers Market at Third and Fairfax. It looked like the kind of place that would have sold hamburgers and hot dogs to beach bums and bunnies had it been located on the water, only fancy. I sat at a table by the window, sipping a seltzer, my stomach a mess from nerves and travel and being six weeks pregnant, and waited for the woman who once said she believed “anyone who lived past thirty just wasn’t trying hard enough to have fun,” now sixty-nine. And then the second customer of the day entered. I stood up from my chair, half sat back down, stood up again as I thought, It’s Eve, wait, it can’t be Eve, wait, it has to be Eve. She no longer looked like a bombshell, her hair gray, the cut short and blunt, her clothes a way of covering up her nakedness and nothing more, her glasses, black-rimmed, the lenses thick. She didn’t, however, look like a burn victim either. (Her face had been spared in the 1997 fire, started when she tried to light a cigar, dropped the match in her lap.) She looked, remarkably, unremarkable, an older woman who didn’t give much thought to her appearance out for lunch. She picked up a paper take-out menu from the hostess’s stand, began studying it. I walked over to her, touched her shoulder. She smiled, toward me rather than at me. And I saw immediately that I’d been wrong about her looking unremarkable. That was the impression she gave from a distance. Up close it was another story. Her glasses were smudged, greasy. She’d applied lipstick to her mouth, only she’d done it haphazardly, a streak of pink on her chin. She had, too, a smell about her. Not body odor—it wasn’t tart or tangy. Something else, something I could almost identify but couldn’t quite, something heavy, sweetish. She said she was starving. Read More
January 4, 2019 Arts & Culture Dark Fashion By Nina Edwards Darkness in fashion is seldom bland. Even where it fails, its objective is to make its mark, whether one of elegance or uniformity, modesty or dangerous seduction. Like red wine rather than white, it can suggest sophistication, even opulence; like the darks of professional makeup—the art of smoky defining shadows and dark lipstick—it can obscure what we find less appealing and hint at mysterious qualities that a scrubbed-clean face couldn’t hope to inspire. In China and Japan, for example, teeth were once lacquered black to protect the enamel, but also because it was considered beautiful, and the practice goes on today among some minorities in Southeast Asia. To paint black what should be white creates a shock that is the essence of dark fashion. Fashion is related to the desire for conformity. Even the least sartorially concerned among us might feel uncomfortable wearing bright colors at a funeral unless asked to do so, say, or be reluctant to turn up at a wedding dressed top to toe in black or, indeed, white. To ignore the unspoken rules of dress is to draw attention to oneself and to seem to make a critical statement about the status quo, as if one knows better. This is fashion in its widest sense. We may not think we give a damn about what we wear, but still we can find ourselves caring very much when even the smallest aspect of dress feels curiously unlike ourselves, as for a conservative dresser in a tie that is brighter or fractionally wider than his custom. It may be important to a person that their clothes do not look cheap—or, to another, too new. Today dark clothing has become ubiquitous. It can be sexy, flattering, neutral, daringly individualistic, and even subversive. In the recent past, as now, dark clothing was often preferred because it was easier to maintain, although in the West, at least, the advantage of “not showing the dirt” has become less important, since clothing has become cheaper in relation to income and washing machines are a common possession. In our grandparents’ or great-grandparents’ day, black or dark clothing was often associated with formality, and in southern Europe it was—and sometimes still is—the uniform dress code of older women of lower status. Thus it may be that a greater formality remains attached to darker clothing. Darkness somehow lends a garment intrinsic gravitas. Read More
December 21, 2018 Arts & Culture Was Holly Golightly Bisexual? By Rebecca Renner Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s The name Holly Golightly is synonymous with sex and sophistication, but viewers may not know as much about her as they think. Audrey Hepburn’s portrayal of the character in the 1961 adaptation of Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s, with her iconic little black dress, ushered in a new fashion era for women. But the movie also signaled a change in the average person’s attitude toward sexuality. As the 50s became the 60s, sexual mores strayed from the rigid monogamy of the past into the culture that produced key parties, beatniks, and the Free Love movement. Hollywood’s standards lagged behind. The Motion Picture Production Code, which banned such on-screen events as excessive kissing — and please, don’t even talk about sex — came into effect in 1934. Since then, homosexuality had been nodded to in film, but in coded language (a pansy worn on the lapel) or in stereotypical and mocking portrayals, almost always of effeminate men. Lesbians, according to Hollywood, didn’t really exist. By the time screenwriter George Axelrod was adapting Tiffany’s for the screen in 1960, the production code’s grip on American filmmaking was already beginning to loosen, thanks to the competing racy material in foreign films and on television. Axelrod found himself with the challenge of satisfying audiences who wanted movies that reflected their changing attitudes, while still making a movie the tight rules of the Production Code would deem decent enough to release. Read More