But women have long held a near-monopoly on artistic villainy. Apparently, we come to it by honest means, we seem to be built, or at least bred, for cattiness. “According to psychologist Robert Cairns, girls, at around age ten, develop a powerful, sophisticated technique that, although not physically assertive, uses alienation and rumor-mongering to vanquish a rival,” writes Michael Segell in one of Esquire’s periodic attempts to remind its readers why women are not to be trusted. “This style of indirect aggression can emotionally devastate the victim, who often has no idea why, or even by whom, she’s being attacked. Organizing social intrigues as a way of ganging up on a peer not only prolongs conflict but kindles larger group discord. As girls enter adulthood, they become even more skilled at using gossip, aspersions, and social ostracism to assault their adversaries.” This doesn’t even touch on the way women either do or are thought to use sex as a weapon, but it suggests the developmental model for the iconic bad girl, for the woman who thinks that bad means sassy, sexually manipulative, intriguing, a woman who knows that her persona is greater than her person. It’s a woman who understands that she will achieve her apotheosis when anybody can project any idea, any neurotic impulse or erotic fantasy, onto her person, because she is the parallax view, the human Rasbomon—because she is either that beguiling or that empty. Doesn’t matter which is true.
And men somehow seem less inclined or less amenable to this kind of personality-as-performance thing. The strange idol worship that has attended Elvis since his death (nothing of that magnitude has followed John Lennon, Jim Morrison or Kurt Cobain) would suggest that it is possible for men, at least posthumously, to become mere receptacles for the projectile emotions of the masses. But Elvis is a highly sequined anomaly: for the most part it is famous women, both dead and alive, who become the dustbins for our dreams. This may just be because women are naturally more iconic than men are: there is a female quality, perhaps it is passivity, the ability to be objectified, to be the face that launched a thousand ships without so much as saying a word, that makes women perfect for ongoing and mesmerizing examination, even once they are six feet under. Women are idolized more for what they don’t do—for how they look and what they project—while men must be men of action. That’s why the female villainess is always more interesting than her male counterparts. In modern cinema, men rarely get to be villains—true lagos—rather, they are just bad guys: the wrong sets of Mexicans in Sam Peckinpah films, the savage Indians in Sergio Leone Westerns, the evil cowboys in Kevin Costner movies, the guys Jeremy Irons and Jack Nicholson always play, that Jimmy Cagney and Marlon Brando used to play, the actors epitomized by James Woods, the ones with pockmarked cheeks, deep forehead scars, the ones with steely blue eyes and Indo-European accents. The ones you recognize immediately as Bad Guys. Tom Cruise and Tom Hanks will never play these parts. They are Good Guys always, that’s that. Women are granted a bit more complexity. In fact, emotional complexity is the female icon’s lot, while heroic simplicity is what works for the men. A female villainess rarely holds up a bank, and she gets to be seductive and sweet until that creepy moment when, suddenly, she just isn’t. She is conniving and manipulative and tempting and treacherous. Insofar as a man ever becomes a complex character in old-fashioned film noir roles, it is because of the way the evil woman, the bitch, brings him down. Surely Fred MacMurray would not have done what he did without Barbara Stanwyck, without the way she walked down the stairs in her Los Feliz bungalow, the way he could tell by her ankle bracelet that she was hot.
She was hot, and by the end of Double Indemnity she was dead.
I only mention this as a reminder of the typical fate of the usual bad girl. Because it’s important to remember that behind all the intrigue, almost like behind the curtain in The Wizard of Oz, these bad girls live miserable unfulfilled lives, lives of great style and utter misery. This book is a chronicle of that unhappiness. This book wishes to remind people that though Delilah may have brought Samson down, she went down with him, the temple falling on her head as well as his. Cleopatra may have been the great female ruler of her day, lover of many men and spurner of many more, she may have been the royal romper of the Nile, but she was a fool for love and she fell for Caesar and completely lost her head, and somehow she managed to let her boyfriend burn down the library in Alexandria, the repository of all the world’s books and most of its knowledge. Anne Boleyn, of course, literally lost her head, as did Marie Antoinette—and Nicole Brown Simpson. And then there are all those glamorous literary babes: Zelda Fitzgerald as the toast of Montparnasse, Anne Sexton as beautiful blue-eyed Pulitzer Prize poet, who two-timed (and three-timed and four-timed) her husband, Sylvia Plath as sensitive suicidal college girl who married Ted Hughes and made a real-life Catherine and Heathcliff. Well, of course, Zelda died in an institution, Anne Sexton died in a gaseous garage and Sylvia Plath, most famously, stuck her head in the oven. Did Lou Reed write “Femme Fatale” for Edie Sedgwick or for Nico? Not that it much matters since both are dead now, both victims of the needle and the damage done, while Lou, he’s clean, he’s in love (with Laurie Anderson), he’s a serious artist, he composes operas he gives performances at the Brooklyn Academy of Music using a stand for his lyric sheets as if he were a real musician. Eva Duarte Perón, a.k.a. Evita, not only died at thirty-three of ovarian cancer but has had to suffer the indignity of having her life turned into an Andrew Lloyd Weber musical. Of course, it could be worse: She could be Bette Davis, ending her career and her life with the likes of Shari Belafonte and Connie Sellecca (Mrs. John Tesh) on Hotel.
Thank God the only Rita Hayworth we know is the one from Cover Girl and Blood and Sand, the original redheaded pinup (I still wonder what they were thinking when they made Jean Harlow, who had already earned the distinction of being the original platinum blonde, the star of Red-Headed Woman), all aflame and ablaze. Let her daughter raise money and throw benefits on behalf of Alzheimer’s disease sufferers like her mom—I’d just as soon remember Rita Hayworth the way she was, absolutely fabulous. And speaking of renowned redheads, do you suppose Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York, better known as Fergie, really enjoys having to do battle over titles and custody with Buckingham Palace? Don’t you suppose that if she knew all this would happen she would have left the toe chomper back in Texas? For that matter, of course, the one bit of gratification Diana might have gotten from all her nasty dealings with Charles is that some of us still remember his telling Camilla Parker Bowles on a tapped telephone that he wished he could be one of her tampons. Maybe it’s me, but I would not want anything to do with any man who wished to be my, much less someone else’s, tampon.
But these glamorous, tragic women were legends, such legends. For the sake of her legend alone Diana could have done nothing more graceful than die. A spate of sudden, recent and reissued biographies make for Diana-dominated best-seller lists, books repeating and competing over various versions of events, the godly details of the mythmaking machinery retelling the same stories with minor differences, like the gospels of the New Testament. What becomes a legend most? Is it Natalie Wood in blackglama mink or Natalie Wood in a shroud? Put it this way, by the time she was floating like cork or beach glass or maybe just like a corpse, dead and drowned near Catalina Island, it had been years since Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice, years since Marjorie Morningstar, and married to the star of Hart to Hart, how long before she’d have been on bad television, the bitch-matriarch on a nighttime soap, Joan Collins and Jane Wyman and Barbara Bel Geddes all at once? But dead, today, she is still a black-haired beauty, it is still possible to forget that Marni Nixon did her singing in West Side Story, it is still possible to remember the sad, straitjacketed girl of Splendor in the Grass, still possible to wonder if Robert Wagner did not in fact kill her.
If Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart, Clark Gable, Rudolph Valentino, Laurence Olivier and the likes of them, the male heartthrobs and matinee idols, have ceased to be fascinating postmortem, the female icons of yore have come alive in their d
eaths. Sure it’s interesting to know that Olivier had an affair with Danny Kaye or that Gable secretly sired a daughter with Loretta Young. But the intrigue with these dead white males, it doesn’t take on the quality of an archaeological dig, the longing to understand why Greta Garbo wanted so badly to be alone, why Judy Garland was so damn tragic, why Marilyn Monroe was a demolition derby, destroying nothing so much as herself. Marilyn, about whom so many books have been written that even non-biographer types—like literary lion Norman Mailer and feminist pussycat Gloria Steinem—have weighed in with deconstructing tomes of their own, occasionally seems to broaden the meaning of necrophilia. Thought to be a lot of trouble in her lifetime—in fact, Ms. Monroe’s erratic behavior on the set of The Misfits was blamed for the death of Gable—Marilyn in the afterlife has become the liveliest corpse of all, a radiant effigy we hang over and over again.
One reason I think many bad girls come to a nasty end is a lack of conviction: they recoil at their own badness and try to be the sweethearts they were raised to be. They revert to type, a tad bit embarrassed that they actually stood up and stood out and demanded and demolished at will—at Nietzschean will—and try to cover their steps, back their tracks and be angelic. It is the mixed message, the ambiguity and ambivalence, that finally destroys them. The strong clear vision that is required to be a woman of heart and mind, of her own free will, is really quite hard. Just ask Madonna or Courtney. Why do you suppose that every so often—say, every third news cycle—those two will do interviews where they speak of their loneliness and vulnerability, where the reporter writes in astonishment about how ladylike they seem. In a recent profile of Donna Hanover in W magazine, the First Lady of New York City—who is also an anchorwoman and actress best known for a small part in The People Vs. Larry Flynt—allowed that Courtney had been to visit at Gracie Mansion. “She told me, ‘I’m really much more conservative than people realize,’ ” Hanover reported. At this point, Courtney has had an entire makeover—conceding in interviews that she has surrendered her body to several cosmetic surgery procedures—and she appears on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar and in the pages of Vogue as the Versace muse who has left her grunge-girl days behind her. Mademoiselle Love happily plays the part of rich socialite who, mais oui, sans doute, flies to Milan for the alta moda, to Paris for the haute couture collection shows, who has opted for lady instead of tramp.
Even Heather Locklear—who is not a bad girl, but plays one on TV—feels a constant need to distance herself from Amanda Woodward, saying that when the character is called a bitch, “I love it. As long as they don’t call me a bitch.” Blah blah blah. It’s not that all this stuff isn’t true—I bet it’s completely true, but it probably always was. The point is that the world does not have room for women with big strong personalities—it simply will not tolerate their existence past a certain point, so they just kind of have to behave periodically—if they’re smart (and the footnotes of the history of Hollywood, of literature and of rock and roll are littered with the names of the ones who weren’t smart).
In contemporary cinema, it is not so much the great beauties whose private lives are found to be wanting as the ones who are career women or more generally manipulative. And most of the energy that should be going into creating compelling plots on-screen seems to go into the construction of personae off, so that insofar as films revolve around women at all—and mostly they don’t—it doesn’t much matter what happens, because the real fantasy is going on in gossip columns and on talk shows and tabloid TV. Put it this way—if people like to see Mel Gibson, Tom Hanks or Tom Cruise on the big screen, it’s for what they are doing on-screen. Not that we aren’t interested in who they’re married to and what countries they are adopting children from and all that, but it is secondary. However, when we watch Julia Roberts, Sharon Stone, Cher or Barbra Streisand it is because of their messy, madcap private lives as much as anything: they are movie stars much more for their entire creation and being than for their talent per se. Actresses who cannot quite manufacture fascination, who don’t have that Vanity Fair cover-story way about them—like Meryl Streep—can be very successful, but they will never be movie stars. Never. And the ones who do, even if their talent is minimal or unclear—think Drew Barrymore, Elizabeth Hurley, Madonna—will always find work, will always be on our minds, even if by all rights they have no business preoccupying anybody.
Beyond the sad story, this is also one that explores fascination. How is it that certain people become larger than life, it girls, cover girls, dream girls, goddesses, furies? How is it that for a period of time—sometimes just days, and occasionally decades—it does not matter how many stories are printed about some women, you could always stand a few more. Think of the weeks when we could not find out enough about Tonya Harding, distant as they seem now. Think of the months when we were held captive by the latest developments with Maria Maples and Ivana Trump, with Gennifer Flowers or Donna Rice and the political wives who refused to be involved in an imbroglio over infidelity. Or think of the era when Edie Sedgwick was so fully engaged with being a youthquaker that she made it seem like a legitimate job. And think of how long we’ve had to suffer with the headlines about Elizabeth Taylor and her men, her drugs, her muumuus, her diets, the chicken bones caught in her throat. And, by God, enough already with Jacqueline Kennedy. Ditto Marilyn Monroe. Or any of the fucking Kennedy women—any of the sisters, wives, mothers, mistresses—may they all dry out in the same sanitarium and leave behind no record of their recovery that can be turned into yet another tome.
Somehow there are these certain women who are capable of manufacturing fascination, who just seem so damn interesting, everything they do bespeaks trouble and scandal and a feeling that even when they’re home all alone, there is always a party going on. Who can say just what makes it so? A couple of years ago every glossy magazine on earth seemed to be profiling the Miller sisters—Marie Chantal, Alexandra and Pia—because these three heiresses to a duty-free fortune (already this is off the charts for the vast majority of us who don’t spend half our lives on the Continent) were all marrying princes and getting titles, or becoming fashion designers or renovating castles, or whatever. Point is, no matter how many pretty pictures there were of them or their elaborate nuptials—flowers by Robert Isabell, music by Peter Duchin, gown by Carolina Herrera, or something like that—it was impossible to care. They were just ciphers. All they did was get married. So what? Likewise, the only thing that actually made Gwyneth Paltrow seem interesting was dumping Brad Pitt, and he is the only reason she seems interesting to some people in the first place. Carolyn Bessette, on the other hand, has managed to hold our attention because there is something dark and unpleasant about her. She seems unhappy. She seems no-nonsense. She keeps her mouth shut. If she just sticks to this program, she may even have a future.
Women, you see, only become interesting if they give you the feeling that something is not quite right. In fact, altogether better if it’s clear that things are very, very wrong. Your life may be miserable, but your death will be immortal. After all, Jayne Mansfield became much more interesting when she got involved with the Church of Satan, befriended Anton LeVay and then was rumored to have suffered the diabolical fate of being decapitated in a car accident. In fact, her big blonde wig was simply flung off her scalp when her neck snapped, and when it flew out of the convertible she was driving, tabloid pictures recording the scene turned the hairpiece into a head. This myth of Mansfield’s beheading is rarely debunked because what can the truth hold to a story like that? Sure, she’s still just a B movie Marilyn (this does not account for the many times when Monroe herself was just a B movie Marilyn) with a figure that defied gravity, but clearly she had her own demons. At any rate, she seems more substantial than Mamie Van Doren … but that’s another story.
When I was an adolescent, I read Rolling Stone—this was back when it wasn’t even properly stapled—with the rapt devotion as if it were the Bible and its Apocrypha combined. Probably the first gir
l rock and roller I got infatuated with who was not already dead was Deborah Harry. Blondie was a breakthrough, far more significant than they are given credit for, and their album Parallel Line’s a triumph of the cultural melting pot, where downtown punk met uptown disco. But really for me it was all about Debbie, her status as a junkie, her stint as a Playboy Bunny. All I wanted in life was bleached blonde hair and cheekbones so protuberant that they could seat six. But I really think I finally understood why the magazine had become my Ten Commandments when the first article about the Pretenders ran. Rolling Stone hardly ever bothered with girl singers, but Chrissie Hynde was special, a punk who wrote love songs, and she gave me a new possibility of chick, so tough, smoky eyes, boozy lips, but with this utter vulnerability.
And then there was Bernardine Dohrn, La Pasionaria of the sixties left, the smart part of the Weather Underground, the Post Office pinup bomber girl on the FBI’s ten-most-wanted list who only surrendered herself to the law in 1980 after the G-men had so thoroughly harassed her and her fugitive family—she was by then the married mother of two, residing peacefully in the quiet post-radical enclave of Nyack, New York—that she negotiated her way above ground with a guarantee that she wouldn’t have to serve time. Beautiful Bernardine—Rolling Stone described her as “a stunningly attractive woman—bisque skin, brown eyes, a full figure”—was an attorney who attended the University of Chicago Law School; she knew about writ of habeas corpus. And still, Ms. Dohrn’s dossier particularly interested me because for all her intellect, she couldn’t help her hypersexuality, her need to seduce all the guys in the room. “She used sex to explore and cement political alliances,” a friend is quoted in Rolling Stone. “Sex for her was a form of ideological activity.” The article about her went on and on about how when she lived in a group house in Chicago with her fellow Weathermen, she would expose her breasts at the dinner table, make other outrageous plays for attention, refuse to contain her need to be noticed. “She would be arguing political points at the table with blouse open to the navel,” one of her male housemates recalled. “It wasn’t a moral thing, just sort of disconcerting. I couldn’t concentrate on the arguments. ‘Bernadine! Would you please button your blouse!’ She just pulled out one of her breasts and, in that cold way of hers, said, ‘You like this tit? Take it!’ ” To my teenage mind this was simply magnificent! What a distracting, dominating female presence she must have been! She was not some simple, easy girl who could be reduced to the stereotype of slut, her sexuality was so clearly her strength and not her weakness. Reading about Bernadine Dohrn made steamy carnality combined with college-girl smartness seem suddenly possible.
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