Over a distance of ground

So no sooner was I inundated by public grief over the suicide of one actor came news of the peaceful death of another:

"A gutsy broad who rode her life and its hardships with self-effacing dignity: “You just learn to cope with whatever you have to cope with. The world doesn’t owe you a damn thing,” she said."

What I remember about Betty Joan Perske - better known as Lauren Bacall - was that when I was a young man, living in the world when young men and young women had very little style and bearing (not that young people have ever had much of either, regardless of their times) she seemed the ideal combination of gutty, sensuous, and confident style and mature, intelligent bearing.

That was pretty much the sum of what she did on screen; in a sense she wasn't a "star" or an "actor" but a character actor whose character was so compelling that she became a star without really having to do more than act the same character in whatever part she was cast.

But, damn, was that character terrific. As that character she was the woman you wanted to fall for, the one you wanted to fall for you, the one who was so desireable, so terrific, that the two of you together would be more than you were as individuals.

And - not an altogether unimportant thing for a young man - Bacall's character introduced me to the idea that men and women could flirt intently and intelligently, that an adult relationship could be much more than just what they showed in "adult" films. Here's a great example, from The Big Sleep:



If that's not one of the sexist goddamn scenes ever filmed I can't think of many others.

I don't want to use this to get maudlin about Betty Joan's - Lauren's - death. I didn't know her or anyone who did. So far as I can tell she had a rich, full life and died full of years and honors, and I can't think of a better way to leave this world, and from what little I know it appears that she covered that distance of ground very well.

Her passing simply reminds me of the affection I will always have for the character she played, now preserved forever in silver salts and black to beguile, I hope, other young men as they venture into the unknown lands beyond their childhoods.

Sophia Loren in a boat

It's hot and nastily humid here in Portland. Really nasty, one of those days that you stop in the open doorway from your air-conditioned home or office as the fetid air pushes against you like a wet dog's mouth. It's just goddamn hot and muggy.

This, on the other hand, is Sophia Loren in a boat.

Hot. But not humid. Amazingly gorgeous woman. At 79 she's STILL stunning.

No excuses; I've just been dicking off. Work, kiddos, the usual worries plus not having anything to say other than vituperitives.

Somewhere in the back of my head there's a Panama story trying to get out. I'll see if I can get it written this weekend.

Esther Williams 1921-2013

Readers of this blog are probably familiar with my appreciation for the films of the Studio Period.

One of the most intriguing and at the same time peculiar stars of that era was Esther Jane Williams, the "Million Dollar Mermaid".

Williams has always held an odd sort of fascination for me because her place in American film is so...bizarre. She said it herself: “I know I can’t act. I know I can’t dance. I can’t sing, but I’m going to keep trying until I get it right.” Her movies were almost interchangable, the only differences the setting or the names of the characters. They were bright, cheerful, accessible, and trivial; in some ways like the lady herself.

She is also intriguing because in a movie world full of tiny, petite little women she was a titan. Like many of the best swimmers she was tall, broad-shouldered, and long-legged. And that wasn't all that was big about her. Look at her pictures; the woman had nature's swim fins on the ends of her legs. I haven't found any sources that will come straight out and talk about Esther's shoe size but I'll bet she wore a women's 10 or 11. Not a bad thing for a competitive swimmer, but I'll bet the studio costumers and camera guys had a hell of a time ensuring that she never got photographed with those big ol' dogs right in the camera. Wouldn't do for the lads to see the girl had some big, strong feet, right?

I wonder if her arch-enemy Gene Kelly cracked wise about her ginormous hooves? He certainly seems to have snarked about all the other aspects of her size during the filming of Take Me Out To The Ball Game...

She had wretched taste in, or luck with, men. The ones that she got on well with were married to other women; the ones she married were frightful - the first was neurotic, the second drunk, and the third, Fernando Lamas, a psychiatrist's poster boy for priapic self-centered egotism. Once when Esther has an argument with him he tells her that he isn't going to do something purely because she wants to do it, and that is what's going to happen every time she wants something other than what he wants.

"Then the best thing for me to do is not to want anything, right?" she says, to which Lamas replies serenely;

"Yes, that would be best."

William's "autobiography" - which is where I culled this gem - is a delight, full of gossip about the Hollywood of the studios and stars of her day. Esther dishes the dirt, too, and for all that she is often elliptical she comes across as a woman who knew what she wanted. Her biggest troubles always seemed to come from men and her weakness for them. She doesn't come right out and say it but you get the feeling that Esther was a bit of a lusty lass who tended to ignore her man's other bad news if her man was good at pleasuring her.

In later life - after Lamas' death - she seems to have found a great deal of satisfaction in her businesses and the "sport" of synchronized swimming. She seems to have finally found a good man who was good to her (and good with her, since though in her autobio she finally shuts up about her carnal escapades after Lamas it's hard to imagine Ms. Williams being happy with a fella who couldn't make her shout when the lights went out...). She died peacefully in her sleep at 91 after twenty-five years with her husband and kids beside her and a happy ending to a busy life.

And speaking of that...for what it's worth, I'm not sure that I don't believe her story about Jeff Chandler and the striped dress. Chandler's people got into a tizzy and Esther sorta-kinda said that she might have made the story up. But no reason that Jeff couldn't have been all man AND a cross-dresser. It takes all kinds. Thank heaven.

Well, Esther went to the big Pool in the Sky this June.

We will never see another like her. She was a creation of a studio system that is long gone, and a public whose taste in entertainment has vastly changed since her stardom. Her films, her family, and her odd little sport, though, remain behind so she will remain a shining smile and a sparkle in the eyes of those who come upon her works.

Not exactly a bad legacy, that.

Safe somewhere

One of the fun things about blogging is where it can take you
.

In this case, it took me into the life of someone named Dorothy MacKaill.

Dorothy is the strikingly pretty woman whose stocking-tops enliven the preceding post. I hate to admit it to her shade but all I was doing was looking for a bit of spice to illustrate the "pre-Code" era films and I Googled up her picture.

But from there I had a fun time pursuing Dorothy. Turns out that she was a damn fine actress and a sort of minor-A-lister in the Hollywood of the Twenties and Early Thirties. But she didn't quite make it over the bar. She wasn't re-signed by First National Pictures in 1931 and spent another six years knocking around Tinseltown before hanging 'em up.

But here's where the story actually gets interesting in a maddeningly opaque way.

Dorothy moved on from movies due to a mixture of failure to draw, bad luck, and bad timing. In 1931 - right after her best known flick Safe in Hell (which is where Dotty appears looking so fetching in those stockings) - she got married to a musician, a guy named Miller, and supposedly had decided to make a go of being a good little Thirties wife and live on hubby's income. This seems to have been something of a wash; they were divorced by 1934, with Dotty complaining that Miller had conned her into leaving the film biz.

She sort of drifted around after that for a while. She was back in Britain in 1937 where she made one of the long-running Bulldog Drummond flicks. I can't find where she spent the war years, but was presumably doing something like making O.D. paint for the War Effort. She is said to have spent time taking care of her mother, but there doesn't seem to be a genuinely reliable source for this.

She turns up in Honolulu in the early Fifties, living at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in a setting of convivial solitude. She made a couple of appearances in the old Hawaii Five-Oh series in the Seventies, supposedly as a favor to Jack Lord.

She died in her bed at the Royal Hawaiian in 1990, at the age of 87.

What intrigues me is that Dorothy seems to have been perfectly satisfied with the quiet life she led in the islands, so it must have been perfectly satisfying for her.

But what it was like, who she was like, we do not and cannot know.

That's the fascinatingly elusive things about celebrity. Here's a woman that we can "meet" on the screen. We can see her walking, hear her speak, see how she carries herself; all the sorts of things we associate with people we actually know...and yet, we truly don't know ahything about her. If she chooses - and she did - she can disappear completely. Her life outside of her films, and three television episodes, is a complete blank to us.

She spent forty years doing...something...probably all sorts of things of which we know absolutely nothing.

We have no idea how she filled her days for forty years. Don't know what she liked, what she did, whose company she enjoyed and whose she didn't. Did she love to hike into the forests of the Koolaus? Could she tell an o'hia from a banyan? Was she a regular at the Honolulu Public Library? Did she play golf, or tennis, or rugby, for that matter?

Whatever she did, whoever she did it with, or not, Dorothy seems to have had a long and pleasant time doing it.

And that seems good enough to me.

Ancient of Days

Just a couple of brief notes today.

Am I the only one who finds it utterly cool that we just lived through something that has only happened four times in recorded history (that we're sure of, anyway) and only once before in the past 600 years?

I should add, however, that the sede vacante left by the latest incumbent is a siege made perilous by the still-unresolved problem of clerical misbehavior.

As one who flirted with Catholicism in my adulthood as much as I appreciated the pageant-history and magical traditions when it came to the sticking point I couldn't stomach the authoritarianism. It seemed to me then and still does that if a faith or a religion (and I do not consider the two the same or often even very similar) is to do more human good than harm it must allow for its adherents the freedom of their own morals. Especially Christianity, which is probably the most difficult and complex religion to practice.

Pace the other great faiths but in their essence they seem to me fairly coherent for the believers. Islam and Judaism are fierce, totemic tribal faiths based on loyalty to a patriarch-deity partial to His partisans and implacable to outsiders. Buddhism is as much a tradition and a philosophy as faith and one based firmly on a peaceful, meditative tradition and renunciatory philosophy. Hinduism...well, I haven't figured out quite what the hell Hinduism is.

It doesn't seem terribly complex to me to be Shinto, Jain, Animist, Sikh, or Zoroastrian.

But Christianity? Christianity is fucking impossible.

You have to reconcile the tribal-God of the Old Testament with the Father-God of the New and try and figure out how to live by the strictures of a Savior who only demands six impossible things of you before breakfast. No wonder many people of faith, and almost all the major Christian religions, have either abandoned, or never even attempted, to live as Jesus commanded. Because, as a better writer than I put it:

"No, you just don't understand. Let's all put our brunch plans on hold, because if you really heard what I said, you'd be absolutely terrified. You'd want to run or give up your faith, or kill me right now, because what I said was impossible. What I said is absolutely going to break you. If you're lucky."

And you all probably know how I feel about what happened when Jesus met Rome. The result wasn't just rendering unto Caesar that which was Caesar's. It was becoming Caesar.

IMO the clerical child-and-pretty-much-anything-else-moving-with-a-hole-in-it-abuse-scandal isn't about who put whose totem pole in whose donut hole.

It's about the fact that when confronted with the most clear-cut choice between humility and contrition, and power, the Holy See chose power.

The reigns of the last two Popes have, at bottom, been about buttressing the power of the Church rather than its humanity. Regardless of how you feel about the Levitican rules, you'd have to agree that if you choose in favor of an ancient text over kindness toward living humans you aren't exactly choosing in favor of the things your Savior talked up like brotherhood, compassion and love. That tends to work better for things like dietary rules about shellfish or owls than deciding who should or can love whom and what should place a man or woman outside the bounds of your God's care.

It seems rather dreary that an institution like the Papacy - which, whatever you feel about it, carries such a glittering and complex tradition of scholars, schemers, poets, madmen, villains, and saints - has been filled in my late lifetime by little men who seem to be obsessed with rules, authority, and chastening any trace of individual conscience in both laity and the lower clergy rather than trying to expand the horizons of the faith and the love their founder preached.

Their legacy is a curia crammed to bursting with other pettifoggingly narrow and stern little men who would rather wag their fingers at a couple of homosexuals embracing than leap with the joy of the Good News and give all their riches to the poor. And from this precious lot the Church will be blessed with its next pontiff.

Ma nisrat lech bamoch!? as Jesus himself might have said.

Speaking of old things, this early Kodacolor/Kodachrome test film is kind of fascinating:

The fascinating thing is not so much the film itself, which shows that the Kodacolor process still had a long way to go in 1922, but the motions of the actresses in the film.

As the Slate website says: "Their open expressions of feeling and the particular way they move their hands and tilt their heads...are so unfamiliar now, they seem like a foreign language." It's that, combined with the peculiar intimacy granted by the color film.

Black and white film emphasizes difference. The images look removed t us, unlike anything we're used to seeing either in film or our lives. The monochromatic pictures increase the distance between us and the people we're seeing on film.

But the women (and the child) in this little film look very familiar, less the Twenties fashions. Especially the last subject, the blonde woman in the shiny robe that smoulders and pouts, not all that much different than some 2013 starlet vamping for the camera.

And I mention as an aside that we tend to forget that the Twenties and early Thirties were, in fact, a very "modern" period in films. A lot of pre-Code films of the time have an almost 21st Century license around sex and sexuality; so it's no surprise that a screen test actress might throw in something spicy for the boys in the editing room.

Except that...go back and watch her. The actress' face and her body just...well, they just don't look and move like a modern woman.

You've seen modern screen actresses smoulder and they don't smoulder like that.

I think we often don't realize how we are shaped by our arts as we shape them. The gestures and expressions in the 1922 film are the exaggerated ones of the old melodrama and Victorian stage by way of the silent film era, where the actors had to "talk" using stylized movement and larger-than-normal facial gestures.

To us in 2013, raised on the naturalistic style we see around us, and on television and film they appear ritualistic and bizarre.

So I thought that this little clip at once brings to young life people who must be dead or very, very old while at the same time emphasizes how far removed from them and their time we have grown.

Surely, while "everything old is new again", many things are irrevocably changed into the weird and marvelous with the long passing of the days.

Carmen

I really have no excuse for this other than a) it's a truly miserable rainy day, and b) Rita Hayworth - Margarita Carmen Cansino - was an exceptionally lovely actress.

(Although let me pause for a moment, however, and just grouse: what the fuck was wrong with the official female "dress code" of the Forties through the early Sixties? Specifically, the red granny panties that come up to Rita's waist. Gah! Was a woman's navel some sort of mid-century erogenous zone, or what? Whatever it was, women in pictures and films had to wear these awful Depends^TM well until the surf films later in the Sixties introduced the notion that you could appear in public with your belly showing and not corrupt the children. Sorry. /rant.)

The saddening part of the combination of beauty and rainy days is that poor Rita's personal life was a dreary as the day today; she was a drunk with serious emotional issues and a career of finding lovers and husbands who were weapons-grade shitheels.

She also suffered from Glamor Girl Syndrome; "[M]en fell in love with Gilda, but they wake up with me." she said, and might well have been speaking for every public beauty whose partners take the parts that they played for the women they are. While it's very human to see what you want to see, when you do that with another person there's no real alternative but unhappiness.

So here's to the happy laughing Margarita of her glory years in the Forties when she was young and strong and lovely - awful swimsuit panties and all - who floated across our lives as a pair of legs long enough to bestride a chasm of troubles and a smile bright enough to lighten a gloomy day. If only you could have turned that brightness inwards, Doña; "Multa ferunt anni venientes commoda secum, Multa recedentes adimiunt"

Revirginated

Turner Movie Classics is having a Doris Day week all this week.Probably because Doris Mary Ann Kappelhoff was born 89 years ago yesterday. Y'think?

Anyway, I have a funny thing with Doris. In a lot of ways I enjoy both her public person and her work.

She was, and is, a very gorgeous and talented woman and I'm a sucker for smart, funny, handsome women.And while I think she's often pigeonholed in the "Fifties Crinoline" ghetto of leading ladies of the late studio period, assumed to be a sort of one-trick genre pony because of her bedroom farce work with Rock Hudson, she's a genuinely watchable actress, a hell of a singer, and a fairly gifted comedian. She did a lot of good stuff during her movie period, and her place as one of the divas of the American Songbook she earned her props.

But, at the same time, I really dislike her bedroom comedies. It's not just the now-infamous mismatch between the on-screen cliche ravenous-playboy-and-tightassed-virgin and the behind-the-screen cliche gay man and clueless (supposedly - Day has said publicly that she had no idea her co-star liked boys, too) het starlet.

It's the whole revirgination that the studio, their publicists, and the public foisted on Doris.

It's my understanding that she had the perfectly healthy sexual appetite. Doris was young and attractive in a place full of other young, attractive people; she was financially successful, making enough money to support herself, and frankly had no real reason not to enjoy any number of liasons, friendly, romantic, sexual, or all three if she so chose.

Doris herself later (in 1975) claimed that she liked to get busy, didn't try to hide that (beyond the normal public duplicity required in the Forties, Fifties, and early Sixties), and had no part in the "virgin-girl-next-door" maskirova:

"The succession of cheerful, period musicals I made, plus Oscar Levant's highly publicized comment about my virginity ("I knew Doris Day before she became a virgin.") contributed to what has been called my 'image', which is a word that baffles me. There never was any intent on my part either in my acting or in my private life to create any such thing as an image."

Sadly, what she did seem to have is a terrible run of luck - or terrible choices - in her long-term relationships. Her husbands (and she had four) were almost uniformly either wretched bastards or fools. At least two of them were Christian Scientists - which IMO qualifies as both - whose goofy woo-wooism nearly got her killed when she went for years with an undiagnosed breast cancer.So I can't get away from thinking about the woman's off-screen life when I watch her romantic comedies. The sexual double standard a Doris Day romcom hammers on is the mirror image of Doris Kappelhof's sexual life.

He's supposed to be - and usually is - a tomcat on the prowl. She's supposed to be - and usually is - this simpering missish little bit of fluff - but one who succumbs to his devilish charm.

He wants sex from her and throws out "love" (or a simulacrum of love) to try and get it. He tricks her, fools her, abuses her - in a sense - and she loves him for it.Meanwhile, she doesn't - and isn't supposed to - even think about sex until she realizes she luuuurves him...and then she finds a way to trap him into marriage to get both.

Her own welfare, her own business, are not even important enough for her to worry about, let alone him!

(For what it's worth, the worst one of these things I've come across wasn't a Hudson picture but something called The Glass Bottomed Boat she did in 1966 with Rod Taylor; it's also called "The Spy In Lace Panties", from which you get the idea. The worst insult is the point where Doris literally overhears Rod telling his crony that she's an idiotic life support system for a vagina that he's tricking into bed - and she ends up in bed with him anyway. It's a wretched mess, and it seems to have been a box-office hit. Ugh.)

So while I enjoy watching many of Day's films, she sometimes makes me uneasy. I just can't help watching Rock and Rod (not gay, those names, eh?) make a fool of her on the screen without thinking of her husbands beating on her and stealing from her and making a fool of her in life.

Art imitating life? Or life - in the persons of those husbands - learning what art told it it was supposed to do?Sometimes I wonder if Doris herself, walking alone through the rooms of her house in Carmel with only her pets for company, wonders that, too.

The Sex Goddess' Thumb

While researching the preceding post (on the Battle of Chipyong-ni, 1951), I spent some time scrounging the Internets for illustrations. While doing that I found this, a snapshot taken of the three-day USO tour Marilyn Monroe did in February, 1954.As I was looking over the picture (and, quite unexpectedly, oogling La Monroe in a sadly goatish fashion of a man of my age and weight) I noticed an odd little thing.

Her right thumb is bandaged.

Enlarge the picture and look for it. See it?

I don't know why that struck me as so odd and interesting. Possibly because I'm accustomed to the current seamless ability of the entertainment industry to make boo-boos like that disappear. Have you ever seen a current star, or even a starlet, with band-aids, bruises, bad hair (seen outside of the paparazzi sections of the checkstand rags, I mean)?

I was fascinated. What had happened? Fight with new hubby Joltin' Joe? Slipped on a microphone cable? So I went back to the 'Net, and...

Turns out that the Sex Goddess of the Fifties was cutting a cake for some soldiers when the knife slipped and she cut herself, quite badly, by the look of it.But no matter - the show went on and, apparently, went like free beer. Both the troopers, and the star, loved each other. It's kind of a nice story.

And Heaven knows if anyone needed a nice story it was Norma Jean, whose short life contains entirely too much unhappy drama.Nothing deeper than that; just a tiny bit of trivia for a Thursday evening.

Me Tondelayo

Caught the 1942 MGM chestnut "White Cargo" the other night.

Hard to try and discuss the thing, what between the bad acting, wooden directing, terrible script and, particularly, the amazingly out-front Forties racism and misogyny. All it lacked was some dancing pickaninnies and a comical John-Wayne-variety wifebeating. Seriously. It stunk just that bad.

The racism was so bad it wasn't even Forties-tolerable. The original New York Times reviewer called White Cargo "that antique lot of bunk which could, with the proper treatment, be made into screaming farce—you know, that lurid business about white men in darkest Africa going to pot from the heat, too much booze and the charms of a dusky native girl."But the "dusky native" girl" is, of course, the only reason to watch this dog anymore, since Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler - better known as Hedy Lamarr - was a native of Austria and dusky by virtue of whatever Metro used as spray-tan in the war years (since the genuine spray-tan was needed to make GI boots or something...) but was certainly all girl, or woman, and slinks about the film in cocoa makeup and a sarong speaking a bizarre sort of pidgin. Although the film is set somewhere in British colonial Africa Hedy's character, "I am Tondelayo" is said to be Egyptian/Arab, probably to get around the Hays Office issue with portraying white-black sex on screen.

And thats "White Cargo" summed up, really. Sex. Forbidden, blacky-white sex. It's about the stalwart White Man's burden; the slinky, scheming Dark Woman, who wants only to mulct him for the benefits of his White Progress by enticing him with her irresistible dusky poozle. Of course, Whiteness triumphs in the end, as the scheming Hedy/Tondelayo is forced to drink the Vile Puggle she is using to poison her white husband and runs screaming off to, presumably, Do The Right Thing and die in lonely agony in the jungle.

Hedy is both wonderfully scenic and monumentally awful, though her thigh-slapping Tonedlayo Dance really has to be seen to be appreciated. It's hard to believe she can't act, as she did well in other pieces both before and after this, and it's difficult to guess whether it was the rotten script or the bad direction that makes her so bad, or whether she just really hated the film and the part. Certainly the reviewers did, but at least they got some vicious entertainment value from it. From the NYT, again;

"...Metro has chosen to play it for Drachmae and implications of sex—or, at least, as much as the Hays office would let pass, which is mostly wiggles and leers. It has given Hedy Lamarr a mahogany finish, a limited vocabulary and a few dry goods and turned her loose to play Tondelayo with whatever else she happens to have. It has called upon Richard Carlson to be the sap who cracks up at this display, and it has set Walter Pidgeon, Frank Morgan and several other able actors to sweating and shouting the most abusive and ridiculous twaddle that has been heard in a long, long time.

As the gentlemen keep telling one another, the dry rot has set in—on the Capitol screen. Or is it the damp rot? We can't remember. But it is some kind of rot; that much is sure."

You write that today, Jackson, and you've got a hell of a lawsuit on your hands, but I have to agree - "White Cargo" sucked pipe.

The injustice hidden underneath all that makeup is that Hedy was, in her way, a really brilliant woman. Her adventures, beginning with her escape from Europe and a beast of a first husband, are as good as a storybook, and she seems to have been something of a minor genius with a knack for invention, developing an early version of radio frequency-hopping that eventually became the SINGCARS radios I used in the Army in the 1990s and Oughts.

I'm not kidding. Got it patented and everything. Smart woman.She was also a difficult person, too, apparently, with all sorts of personal and money problems. She was broke a lot later on, and was caught stealing several times. She sued a lot of people later in her life over use of her name and image; she never really managed to transfer her wartime-era glamor into a career in films that survived the Next Hot Girl and she seems to have become pretty damn bitter about it. She had a very up-and-down sort of life after the stardom years, and died in Florida ten years ago this January in relative obscurity.

But she was riding the crest the year she made "White Cargo", and as bad as the film is it's hard to watch it, and her vamping sullenly in her ridiculous makeup and imagine the hard years to come. In the flickering monochrome darkness of my living room in Portland, 2010, it was still 1942, the war was waiting outside, and the gorgeous woman with the lissome figure was still smiling up succulently and husking "What Tondelayo want, Tondelayo get."

Lady of the Dance

We're having an fun discussion over at Self-Styled Siren:

Astaire or Kelly?

I have to admit to loving movie musicals. My little guy comes by his taste biologically; I have favorites and preferences, but almost anything from Gold Diggers of 1933 to Sweeney Todd is grist for my entertainment mill. So when I stumbled into Campaspe's discursion on "Dance as Soliloquy" I followed with fascination her dissection of probably the two best known movie hoofers: Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly.

I've always enjoyed Gene's work more than Fred's, probably because I just don't have the feel for the ballroom basis of Astaire's style, and the technicolor musicals of the late Forties and Fifties are more kinetic than the black-and-white Thirties versions. But even in the Sixties Fred was the Thirties; you could almost see him looking around for his white tie and tails. Kelly is more the modern, and his dancing has a "West Side Story" sort of muscularity to it that makes Fred seem slight by comparison. The singing voices match: Gene a little rough at the edges, Fred wispy and croony, a sort of Rudy Valle' in tap shoes.

But I didn't actually post this to talk about the guys - Campaspe's doing just fine on that subject. I wanted to talk about Ginger Rogers.

First, because I've always enjoyed the hell out of her as a dancer and actress. And second because she's usually thought of - when thought of at all, these days - as "Mrs. Fred", the other half of Astaire and Rogers. But she did good work, both before Fred and after, and she's a hell of a tough, sexy woman who should be respected for her own work, not just as the arm-candy of half of the Great Dancers of Movie History. Gene Kelly has never really been "paired" with another dancer, although I understand his favorite partner as Cyd Charisse. Ginger is linked with Astaire in a way that none of Kelly's female leads has been. Which, IMO, is kind of unfair. Ginger was a good, solid working actress, and has chops of her own.

She worked all over in Hollywood, as chorine, as the wisecracking sidekick in "gold Diggers" and "42nd Street". She did comedy as varied as "The Major and the Minor" to slapstick "Monkey Business" with Cary Grant. You haven't seen World War Two homefront pathos until you've seen Ginger jerk tears as the "Tender Comrade" (although I've always been suspicious of her fervid denials of the "socialist" subtext there. C'mon, Ginge: either you're in on the gag or you're just that dumb - you can't have it both ways).But...because my mind is always on sex (being male)...the one thing I've always thought curious is the idea that Ginger "gave (Astaire) sex", that is, made their dancing believable as courtship and/or consummation.

First of all, Ginger wasn't - couldn't be, really - physically the sort of woman Hollywood typically casts as "sexy". She was slender and relatively small (she had to be, to dance comfortably with Fred, not himself a big man), and in common with dancers lacked the mammilary opulence we think of as conventionally sexy. She only seems "oomphy" next to Fred; her body isn't insistently female. If anything, her sex appeal is generated as much in her head as in her loins.

(If you get the chance, try and catch "Monkey Business" - it shows every so often on Turner Classic Movies. It's notable for the pairing of Ginger in her maturity with the latest ingenue starlet - Marilyn Monroe. For my money, Ginger plays La Monroe off the screen. But go, watch, see what you think.)

While the later Rogers did fill out nicely, even then her physicality was as much attitude as pulchritude. It always was. Go back and look at her earlier work, cornball stuff like "Rafter Romance" in '33 or "42nd Street". She's just a slip of a girl but she's all woman. It's the cocky, tough little showgoil attitude that makes her seem like such an earthy hoyden.She and Fred are a terrific dance team and I think it has a lot to do with the fact that she consciously worked to soften her edge and let Fred "lead", if you will. With Kelly, you're left thinking that all this sweaty dancing is going to lead to something else...sweaty. You never see Astaire sweat and you suspect that he probably doesn't...sweat. And I think that has a lot to do with Ginger lending him a certain authority without ever becoming his doormat. And she had to do some pretty good acting to make him into a plausible "romantic" lead in that sense; he's almost asexual although "charming" in a Thirties way.

The often-quoted line about her bringing the sex, BTW, is from Kate Hepburn, who claimed that Fred "gave her class", which I think it a rotten slur on Ginger. Yes, she was a difficult, Red-baiting Republican with some serious mother issues, but on screen "Feathers" was always my ideal of Hollywood class and professionalism.But as for the "she gave him sex" thing?

I've always thought that Ginger just seemed a little TOO sexy for Fred.

Picture if you can the honeymoon "epilogue" of a Fred-and-Ginger picture (not easy, given the wan sexuality Fred projects on screen): there's wispy little Fred in his boxers, hands clasped protectively over his groin, standing by the turned-down bed staring transfixed - a midnight deer in the headlights, Balboa gazing upon the vast Pacific from that peak in Darien - at Ginger, emerging from her frou-frou nightie like a great pink-and-cream battleship emerging from the sea-smoke.

You can see by his rabbit-eyes he knows, and by her knowing smirk that she knows he knows, that the shattering blasts to come are going to sink him without a survivor.