PLAGUE DIARY 32: SKY WRITES REVIEWS OF OLD BAD HOLLYWOOD MOVIES TO KEEP HIM SANE DURING THIS TIME OF HORRIFIC INSANITY

Red-Headed Woman (1932)
Written by a woman (Anita Loos) — although the first draft of the screenplay was by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and based on a novel by a woman — it is what you might expect: way ahead of its time. In fact I think it might be necessary still, to catch up. I kept waiting for it all to turn tragic, as Jean Harlow plays quite an awful woman, the amazing thing is that she still manages to maintain our sympathy. Lil Andrews is Shakespearean in conception; there is nothing good about her other than her beauty. Her journey In the film is from man to man, and she’s clearly only after them for their money. She ruins a perfectly good marriage — out of greed — and decimates poor Chester Morris by flinging herself at him in a manner that is almost frightening, until he divorces his wife and marries her. Then she leaves him for a richer man, and finally ends up shooting Morris — not fatally, thank God — because, remarkably, it’s a comedy. Lil Andrews would have been a ‘fallen woman’ in 19th century melodrama — and only 40 years earlier Oscar Wilde managed with much wit and dramaturgical craft to redeem such women, but not without excessive breast beating, to expiate the guilt and shame. I am trying to think of a movie that I have seen recently in which a woman screws her way to the top and does not end up dead and/or detestable. Jean Harlow ends up married to some old rich geezer and we feel almost a little sorry for her — is this what you wanted? A life sentence of having sex with that creature? But the camera pans back and we realise that Charles Boyer (in 1932, he was really sexy) who is her chauffeur and paramour, is driving the car. So she’s really got everything she wants. And it never happens that way, for sexual women, in art. My favourite moment is when she chooses a dress at the movie’s start. She asks the salesgirl “Can you see through this?”, and the girl replies, tentatively: “I’m afraid you can, Miss” and  Harlow responds —“I’ll wear it.” And when she’s chasing after Chester Morris she gets a waiter at the restaurant to tell him he has a phone call (he’s having dinner with his wife) and Harlow is waiting for him in the phone booth (remember phone booths?), and shuts the door and throws herself at him, and after necking a bit they come out. Someone is waiting to use the phone, and watches Chester Morris and then Jean Harlow, each by each, exit the booth. Yes, I’ve been in the situation (only it was a toilet) many times. Yes, I was kicked out of a washroom in a gay bar in Brighton England, for setting up a kind pf a practice in a cubicle (you don’t want to know) and it was Pride Day and that was the only place to go in Brighton. So you see Harlow and I have a lot in common.  And yet I don’t know if I’ve ever been able to convince anyone that I’m actually a very appealing person, at least one on one.  Of course that’s a bald-faced lie; some people do seem to think I’m nice and ‘human;’ but you do cut yourself off from easily half the population imagining you are capable love, if you talk too much about sex. Chester Morris’s wife says exactly that about Jean Harlow “You caught him with sex — but love is one thing you don’t know anything about and never will.” I learned about being a ‘fallen woman’ from my mother. When we joined the Unitarian Church in Don Mills — this would have been back in 1968 perhaps — she told me how difficult it was for her to make friends because she was a divorcee and couples would of course not have her to dinner. Then of course, she fell in love with Jerry Kelly, a philandering, alcoholic, Roman Catholic father married with six boys; they used to stay up late at night, and drink, and smoke listen to Frank Sinatra, and I assume, after I was in bed, they did it. Because my mother was in love with Jerry, she had sex with hardly anyone else, but she was always so beautiful that men wanted her endlessly, and women were endlessly jealous (at least according to her) — kind of like Jean Harlow. How does Jean Harlow manage to maintain our sympathy, especially when she is basically a pragmatic home wrecker who uses sex (Noel Coward coined this phrase) “like a shrimping net”? We sympathise with her because she is believably vulnerable, and her desperation to get up in the world “I'm not gonna spend my whole life on the wrong side of the railroad tracks” is noble, in the same way that Shylock’s anger over the treatment of the Jews makes him demand a pound of flesh. Well it’s important to know that just because you’re obsessed with sex, and even if you use it to get what you want (and why shouldn’t a woman use it? It’s a man’s world, and that certainly hasn’t changed) that doesn’t mean that you’re not capable of love. I think Jean Harlow is in love with Charles Boyer at the end. Anita Loos has her number; I mean, you can’t marry a chauffeur, can you? So you marry a rich man and have it off with the chauffeur on the side. And right now I want to tell you all sorts of things about the man I love, but I’ve been sworn to secrecy. You see I couldn’t write this, or anything like this, ever again, if I ever revealed any details about him. I do write about him in poems, or I did, when I was still writing poems, but poems are different. It’s nice to think that he’s too big for prose.  But I don’t keep these kinds of secrets about anyone else. I’ve written things about my dead mother and father that I know they would have hated but  — and not unlike Jean Harlow — I thought it was worth it, career-wise for me to  spill those beans. But I can’t do that with him. The terror of losing him is enormous, and I do have a terror of losing things. The irony is that he will never leave me; I know that, even if he comes to hate me some day. It’s a weird kind of love, when they love you like that. And when you’ve said things to each other that are quite savage — not just laced with hate but dripping with blood. And then of course, you kiss and make up, knowing that you have ripped each others guts out. That’s a gesture that is more than courtesy and respect, it’s like being friends with someone who has just killed someone, and steps over the body to kiss you. ‘No  — that’s not love!’ — you say? ‘Love is affection and sweetness and cuddling with a good kind person?’ Well you have your love and I’ll have mine. I’m afraid of him — and adore him — because he knows everything about me and everything about himself; and I’ve never really met anyone who knows that much about those two things. He can cut me to the quick and he does, sometimes, but then when he doesn’t; it seems like an act of the utmost tenderness, so gentle I just can’t put it into words.