Word: dietrichs
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Briefly, in the early '30s, gays were familiar screen types: "pansies" (often played by Franklin Pangborn) for comic relief and, more heroically, bisexual heroines (incarnated by Garbo and Dietrich) who looked thrillingly glamorous in their tuxedos and bachelor togs. That was old Hollywood's highest compliment to a woman--that she acted and thought like a man--just as new Hollywood accepts films with transvestites, men who act and think like women. In the '50s, gayness could be viewed as a social disease (in Tea and Sympathy) or with oblique rapture (in the torrid gaze of Stephen Boyd's Messala...
DIED. BRODRICK HALDANE, 83, photographer whose status as a member of high society (Scottish son of the 26th Laird of Gleneagles) helped him capture classic images of the famous (Dietrich, Chaplin) and the powerful (President Kennedy, Queen Elizabeth); in Edinburgh. DIED. RUSSELL COLLEY, 97, dubbed the "father of the spacesuit," who designed the 1961 extraterrestrial fashion statement worn by astronaut Alan B. Shepard Jr. in America's first step starward; in Springfield, Ohio...
There is an agreeable illusion, evidenced in much of the commentary about Elisa, that those of us who witness the abuse of innocence--so long as we are standing at a certain distance--need not feel complicit in these tragedies. But this is the kind of ethical exemption that Dietrich Bonhoeffer called "cheap grace." Knowledge carries with it certain theological imperatives. The more we know, the harder it becomes to grant ourselves exemption. "Evil exists," a student in the South Bronx told me in the course of a long conversation about ethics and religion in the fall of 1993. "Somebody...
...risks were worth it from the beginning of Hollywood, as the moguls who in 1916 paid Mary Pickford an astounding $10,000 a week could attest. In the '30s and '40s, stars like Stanwyck, Hepburn, Davis, Garbo and Dietrich were not only paid as much as male stars but cast in strong roles. But then women stars retreated into the domestic comfort of TV, whose agenda they still set. And the guys took over the movies. The major exceptions were Barbra Streisand, Goldie Hawn and Bette Midler, stars who became producers and are heroines to today's generation of actress...
...Conde Nast hothouses with a sharp sense of the pretensions by which publishing people define their territory. There was the society editor who was "a friend to the rich, a brute to her researcher"; the entertainment editor who sat behind an "enormous mahogany desk, taking phone calls from Marlene Dietrich and Truman Capote"; the editor in chief who addressed long letters to the staff with "Dearly Beloved Family...