Slippery When Wet

I had Indian Food for dinner last night, and over curry Esther Williams came up, as she does sometimes.

When I got home I asked Shorty to re-read the first chapter of Million Dollar Mermaid, Esther's late-90s memoir that I so love. I remember there was a line in that opening chapter that made me take it home from the bookstore.

So, he sat in the new chair and did just that:


And lo, there it was!

"Nobody was going to make multimillion-dollar aqua-musicals ever again." You don't find many lines better than that. Thanks, Esther.

Also, remember when we in the book biz used to make tchotchkes to promote our wares? Here's something you can print out and make at home! Ask an adult to help with the scissoring.

"I hated the soup and felt little for the can"

Shorty finally finished Freedom. He liked it, but it took him forever to read and I get the sense he had some over-identification issues, so despite the beautiful sentences about the Silver Palate cookbook and an evening of Zinfandel, he was glad when it was over.


Not so with Patti Smith's memoir of her friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe, Just Kids, which unlike the Franzen's tome, was nominated for a National Book Award.

Smith touched me when I was a late teen and her musings seem ripped from my adolescent heart (the appropriate time & age for over-identification, it seems), and it's nice to see this carry over to my adulthood. Sentence for sentence, it's a tough call - but my money is on her. This one here is the fave so far.

"I didn't feel for Warhol the way Robert did. His work reflected a culture I wanted to avoid. I hated the soup and felt little for the can. I preferred an artist who transformed his time, not mirrored it."

And yet, I do love those cows.

The Id(l)es Of March

Search Engine Review Time!

I've been a bit lazy at reporting on the analytics that bring folks here. Oh well.

In March 2010, 10 people found us on the web by googling some version of "Shamrock Shake Finder." Here's how to make your own until next March:

Another 22 people googled to find out the various different ways of pluralizing things, including the following terms:

• plural of egg [an evergreen, I'm not sure why]
  
• what is the plural of breakfast
  
• interesting plural
  
• kiwi plural
  
• plural amazing


• plural for doris
  
• plural of "child actor"?
  
• plural of fanny [I guess this makes sense, is it y or ie, but still I wonder if they're going to write about multiple American fannies or British ones? What would you do wtih more than one of either?]
• plural who


• town plural
  
• what is a plural for "amazing"?


• what is the plural of ice cream


• can my favourite thing be plural [confidential to this person: the answer is yes]
  

Another 15 people were googling "Sirotan." Here's something for you folks!:

Eight people googled "poo." I have nothing for you.

Six of you googled "Raquel Welch." In honor of this, I have ordered a copy of her new memoir, It's Not About The Cleavage, for Shorty to read & report back on.

Another four googled "Barb Jungr," I can tell you folks I'm excited to see her next month at the Metropolitan Room. Come along with me!

And then some other oddballs:

• christopher walken natalie wood
  
• sepia town
  
• obama curlicue signature
  
• japanese sitcom
  
• grace jones
  
• teaching montgomery clift how to throw a punch
  
• ides of march snacks [I guess someone was planning a fancy party]
  
• doris day birthday

I did a google on the Monty Clift one, I guess Howard Hawks taught him how to do that for Red River.

Anyway, that's March. Cheerio!

Including Him Out; or, A Farley Good Read

Guess what? Shorty finished a new book.
It's embarrassing for him, because he started this one before Christmas, and only finished it about a week ago. The holidays are busy times!

Anyway, it's a highly enjoyable memoir by Hollywood's Farley Granger, called Include Me Out. The title comes from one of Sam Goldwyn's famous malapropisms, but it has a DOUBLE MEANING on account of how Farley, you know, liked to swing both ways.

My favorite way that Farley swung was down Shelley Winters way, but I digress.

Granger was one of the pretty boy contract players in the MGM stable, and would alternate between serious, actorly roles and teen fluff, basically whatever Sam Goldwyn told him to do. He was loaned out for two Hitchcock movies - Rope and Strangers on a Train. Rope of course has been discussed elsewhere, and I enjoyed it more than I thought I would. Strangers on a Train was remade as one of my favorite movies of my childhood, Throw Momma From The Train, starring Mama Fratelli from Goonies.

Farley tells us that Hitchcock had originally wanted the cast of Rope to be himself and Montgomery Clift as the two murderous lovers, and Cary Grant as their teacher / father figure / third point in their love triangle. Neither Clift nor Grant would take the roles though, as even heavily censored the gayness struck too close to the bone (hee hee) - or in Grant's case, too close to the lady underpants he liked to wear. Theatre actor John Dall ended up playing Granger's lover/co-conspirator, and Jimmy Stewart took the teacher role. Stewart played the role as a straight man - in both senses of the word (and according to a Stewart bio I read he was able to force Warners to up his salary to the amount which had been offered to Grant - a big step for him). I'm sure Mr. Hitchcock would have enjoyed having three men with secrets about their sexuality play three men with secrets about their sexuality...and murder.

Well, most people are probably skimming this post by now, but one thing I really liked about Rope watching it in the 21st century is the double constraints Hitchcock made it under (something he would maybe appreciate? He sure liked doubling). The technological constraints of shooting the film in real time, on ten minute reels, with heavy cumbersome equipment, and the constraint of making a movie loosely based on real life gay lovers who killed someone, without completely hiding their sexuality (they shared a bedroom in the movie, amongst other hints) in the culture of the late 1940s.

Of course, we can't get too liberal arts college-y on the whole thing. As Farley writes,

"To this day, reporters and film aficionados still ask about the actors' discussions with Hitchcock about the implied homosexual relationship between the two young men in Rope, and how Jimmy Stewart fit into those discussions. My answer is always disappointing to them: 'What discussions? It was 1948.' "

My favorite story about Rope was that after meeting Hitch, as he called him, Granger went to a friend's house to cat-sit only to discover that some guy named Arthur was also cat-sitting. Now, I don't only like this story because it involves cats. A few days later Granger discovered that Arthur was Arthur Laurents, who wrote the screenplay for Rope. They ended up having an affair that lasted the length of the movie....until Farley dumped him for Shelley Winters.

What I love most about their relationship, other than the simple fact that it involves Shelley Winters, is that it lasted for decades. Shelley would have her marriages then rebound with Farley, Farley would have his straight (Barbara Stanwyck, Ava Gardner) and gay (Leonard Bernstein!, among others) romances, and rebound with Shelley.

Farley ended up in a relationship with Robert Calhoun, a producer, which started the night Kennedy was shot and ended with Calhoun's death last year. Shelley eventually moved into their building in NYC a few floors below them.

They made one movie together, Behave Yourself, a screwball comedy sold to them as being produced by Howard Hughes (which he actually had nothing to do with). Netflix is delivering that to me this week, so I'll see if it's as bad as Farley says it is.

Farley was a great date for Shelley as they would bounce around town getting her all the publicity she wanted, and he recounts a fun trip to London and Italy they took together where she spent most of the time in her hotel room afraid her freckles were cancerous, then met and left him for Vittorio Gassman.

Well, I've typed enough today and barely scratched Farley's surface. The book was really enjoyable, and not just for the gossipy bits. I liked reading about a Hollywood contract player trying to navigate the system. I liked hearing about his friendships with folks I wouldn't have guessed - like Betty Comden & Adolph Green, or Peggy Guggenheim. His role playing opposite Barbara Cook in Anna & The King on Broadway, and interacting with Rodgers & Hammerstein as they worked on the production.

In conclusion, thanks Farley, for writing your book. I'm sorry I took so long to read it and got all rambly writing about it.

Picking Up The Tab

What did Shorty read this month, you ask? Why, Tab Hunter Confidential, by Tab Hunter!
This book came out to no shortage of fanfare in 2005, because this one time-teen idol (née Arthur Gelien) was relatively frank about what it was like to be gay in Hollywood in the 1950s, and how he - and the studios of course - kept his deviant ways a secret while he starred in B-movie pictures and publicly romanced Miss Natalie Wood and Tuesday Weld and other starlets.

Here's a nice publicity shot of Tab giving Natalie some birthday spankings. Huh. Not deviant.

Anyway, most interest-ing-ly for me & Shorty, was his two year romance with Anthony Perkins. I only saw Psycho - my first Perkins movie - a few years ago, and was bamboozled by how handsome he was. So, apparently, was our friend Tab.

They were both deep in the closet, though Tab insists he himself was more closeted for professional reasons than personal, while Tony had personal conflicts with his identity, on top of professional ones. Whatever. They would often double date with starlets to keep up their images, then they'd drive their dates home and meet up at Tab's for either some Romance, or a Fight.

Don't they look happy here on their double date?

I love this snap that Shorty scanned from the index, which Tab took of Tony in a candid and intimate moment.

It's just so sweet, right? I don't remember who that man is in the photo cropped in the lower corner.

It was around this time that Tab started making records, and even went to #1 with this ditty, "Young Love."

One particularly interesting thing to me was the story of a group lawsuit against Confidential Magazine, more or less the National Enquirer of its day. This was basically a superstar class action lawsuit against the magazine for defamation, and both Tab Hunter and Liberace were among the complainants, for allegations of "pajama parties" and "wild" behavior with their male companions.

What Shorty and I found fascinating about the coverage of the trial was that, as Tab puts it, "the mainstream media couldn't even come up with adequate euphemisms for homosexuality," so their parts were never discussed in the press. It was Maureen O'Hara who won the case for the stars, for proving a purported tryst of hers in LA happened while she was out of the country. Always the Irish lasses sticking up for the boys.

Frankly, I'm not sure how secret all this stuff was. Here's a publicity shot of Tab with Roddy McDowell, where I guess they're making breakfast together, in their underpants? And Roddy is bringing Tab a cake, and Tab is about to put a weiner on the stove?

Moving on...

Here's his description of Rudolph "Rudy" Nureyev, about their affair together in Italy in the early 1960s:

"Some mornings he'd materialize on the [beach], his bone white body with blue veins clad only in a silver lamé swimsuit. Rudy looked like a finely chiseled corpse freshly risen from an ancient crypt, and he walked as if the world was far beneath him."

I mean, who wouldn't like to hear themselves described that way? It's like a passage from Twilight, but with less ellipses(es).

Personally, I love this photo of him and Nureyev. Not only are they doing the recently re-popular side hug, but they seem to be pointing at each other, and not with their hands. Oh how I wish I could come up with an 'adequate euphemism' for this!

Later in life Hunter had his big comeback with John Waters and Divine in Polyester, and there's no putting the horse back in the barn (closet?) after doing a John Waters movie.

Of course he & Divine met up again in Lust in the Dust, which leads to the one Shelley Winters reference Shorty found in the index (he always looks for that first before deciding to read a book). Shelley was originally offered the Lainie Kazan role of Divine's sister, but turned it down. A true, crying, shame - 'cause that would have been a helluva flick.

Even without much Shelley, this was a pretty great book, and a fun tale of old gay Hollywood. We're going to explore more of this topic in the days to come.
Thanks Tab, for the fun tale!

This'es And That

It's that time again - Shorty's Book Club!

So what's Shorty reading now? Why, it's This 'N That by Little Miss Bette Davis.



This 'N That is the second memoir by Miss Davis, from 1987. Her first one, The Lonely Life, came out in 1962. As Shorty explained it, the first book was a proper memoir, the second one is a cornucopia of different things. It's part memoir of her career post-1962, including a lot about her made-for-TV movies. It's part about her stroke and recuperation, and it's partly a refute to the 'Mommie Dearest' knock-off memoir her daughter wrote a few years before.

Anyway, Shorty is - no surprise - mostly interested in the pictures. So, we broke out the Scanner from the Up High Storage Space, and put it to work.

Here she is in what she calls a "cheesecake" photo. I'm confused by what the purpose of the medicine ball is in this snap. Maybe that's some sort of sexual thing I'm not aware of?

We both liked this one of her and that handsome devil (ha! entendre!) Robert J. Wagner. It was almost exactly a year ago that Shorty and I couldn't sleep and read his memoirs late one night. I think this is when she guest-starred on It Takes A Thief.

This pic though, this takes all the cakes in the world. It's Bette, Mae West, and Beverly Sills.

My greatest regret is that there's no index to the book, so we can't quickly enjoy reading about that "fascinating evening." What a dinner party!

Shorty had a few other faves, including one that's a bit morally iffy. We'll save that for the Bonus Content!

Until next time.

! This post was updated from its original content to include links to some other blog's discussion of Robert J. Wagner's classic TV program, It Takes A Thief.