PLAGUE DIARY 22: SKY WRITES REVIEWS OF OLD BAD HOLLYWOOD MOVIES TO KEEP HIM SANE DURING THIS TIME OF HORRIFIC INSANITY

Lady Be Good (1941)
I didn’t like it, really. There’s one song that the incandescent Ann Sothern sings, the title song, ‘Lady Be Good.’ Ann Sothern is not merely beautiful, but possesses an inner motherly calm that occasionally bursts open into a kind, indulgent wit. It is a wit that is indulgent of all others, and is kind, but  nevertheless pierces through whatever kind of nonsense is going on. When Ann Sothern sings ‘Lady Be Good,’ it is a perfect Hollywood moment, which — if it hadn’t been her — might have imploded. Sothern — and the perfectly bland Robert Young — are a singing, songwriting couple, which sounds promising, and their marriage is on the rocks, which is even more promising. Unfortunately they have no real conflicts, other than the fact that if they aren’t writing songs together then they don’t love each other. It becomes immediately apparent that creating is — for them at least — sex. For instance, if one of them doesn’t feel like working on a song, they’ll say ‘I’m tired’ or ‘I’m not in the mood.” The metaphor is true, sex is kind of like writing a song, and creating anything, with anyone, is kind of like sex. in fact I once said that playwrighting was better than sex — which was a hyperbole certainly — but maybe a slightly profound one. So it behooved director Busy Berkeley to feature a song in which Ann Sothern and Robert Young have sex in front of us. Ann Sothern is required to do that impossible thing, stand at the piano with her husband and act as if she is caught unawares, in the middle of an act of spontaneous inspiration. 'Lady be…let me see…lady…what?’ And the bland Robert Young says ‘Good’? And she says, ‘Yes oh I like that. Lady be good…now what rhymes with good.…I know….misunderstood.’ It’s of course thrilling to imagine that this is the way any real-life songwriting ‘couple’ (I don’t think there were a hell of a lot of songwriting couples, except perhaps in rock and roll) might create. But Ann Sothern convinces us that she is actually writing it on the spot— she is so real, surprising, impulsive, vivacious and just simply ‘there,’ in the moment. And then it’s gone. It’s gone, and you miss it. I’ve never been able to collaborate with anyone in a romantic way. The closest I ever came was when I directed Anything Goes at the Shaw Festival in 1987. Christopher Newton had invited me down to Shaw because he loved Drag Queens in Outer Space. (This may of had something to do with the fact that it starred Leonard Chow, a beautiful young gay man — who later tragically died of AIDS—  as the indefatigable Judy Goose. You see, Christopher discovered Leonard Chow  — “I saw him doing an act at a gay club,” Christopher said — ‘he was climbing all over someone’s body!”). But for whatever reason, suddenly I was directing a musical at the Shaw Festival. Christopher and I had become lovers the first time he invited me to Shaw, after seeing my play Cavafy or the Veils of Desire, about 5 years earlier. (I’ll never forget it. He knocked on the door of the dressing room and said “I loved the show. Just loved it, absolutely beautiful.” And the next day I got an official phone call saying “Christopher Newton would like to have you assistant direct with him at the Shaw Festival.” It was all like a dream. I worked with Christopher on The Secret Life of Albert Nobbs, and I was invaluable to him because he was simply afraid of certain women. They had to have a sense of humour; or he didn’t know how to relate to them — the more bizarre their sense of humour, the more he loved them. An actress once asked me ‘How do I get Christopher’s attention? He doesn’t seem to like me.” “Tell a dirty joke,” I said. But no one ever believed me. Anyway, that first summer I wore the shortest blue nylon hot pants — and Christopher was a sucker for hairless legs — and we became lovers. Director Derek Goldby was very angry at me, and in fact ordered me to wear Bermuda shorts to his rehearsals. Christopher just laughed.) I did love Christopher very much. And yes he was a father figure (nearly 20 years older than me). But to have a father who was cultured and brilliant and more talented than I was! Five years later when Christopher saw Drag Queens in Outer Space, it was time to go to the Shaw Festival again. But I had lived in Niagara-on-the-Lake already once. And even when I was in love with Christopher I was climbing the walls, but now we were no longer together. Suddenly Niagara-on-the-Lake seemed worse than self-isolation during COVID-19. During Anything Goes rehearsals I had a lot of phone sex (or tried to; I wasn’t very good at (because I like words, and I don’t like wasting them). There was almost no sex for me; and I am a creature of the night. So I decided that I couldn’t live there anymore, and once the show went into previews, I told Christopher I had to move back to Toronto and commute. He was not pleased. Some actors had a party to say goodbye down at The Gazebo, near the water, one night. And we all wondered, would Christopher show up? But he did. Let’s just say that I’ll never forget him walking down the hill but — enough. Then later he got mad at me for not attending enough previews. (I was very bad!) But he forgave me again, thank God. The moment I remember best — and it was kind of a Lady Be Good moment — was when I was telling him how frustrated I was with directing Anything Goes (which is not a musical, by the way, just like Lady Be Good is not a musical. It’s just an opportunity for funny, talented performers to do their schtick. Eleanor Powell, just to give you an example, does a whole tap dance sequence in Lady Be Good with a very talented dog.) And I was so frustrated with directing a bunch of loosely connected vaudeville bits and songs, that I gave up even trying to giving the actors motivation. When one of them asked me ‘Where am I coming from when I enter?” I said “You enter because you have to sing a song.” Christopher was livid. It was very much like Ann Sothern and Robert Young. I said in an earlier blog (can’t I just erase them all now?) that I liked actors because I never really have to be intimate with them. That’s not true. One does get intimate, even if one is not in love with them. It’s the nature of the beast, and we can deny it all we want. But the worst case scenario is not that we don’t get intimate in those fleeting moments when we are creating things together —but that we get too close, and then it’s over. I never had the kind of romantic creative intimacy I had with Christopher again. There’s a speech from Truffaut’s Day For Night — I searched for it like a bugger. I’m so glad I found it. “‘It’s a strange life we lead,’ Cortese, as Séverine, says at a farewell party near the end of the Meet Pamela shoot. ‘We meet, we work together, we grow to love each other, and then… As soon as we grasp something, it’s gone. Gone!”’ Or maybe sometimes it slips away before it’s gone. That’s what happened with Christopher and I.