Bitch

by Elizabeth Wurtzel

  Meanwhile, as Macbeth said of his misguided crimes, “We have scorched the snake, not killed it.” All the while that Amy claimed Joey had asked her to kill his wife, Mary Jo, made more ferocious by her wounds, refused to consider the possibility that her husband had anything to do with her injuries.

  Amy was to be charged alone.

  In May 1992, Amy Fisher was arrested and held on $2 million bail, the highest ever in Nassau County for a nonhomicide (to put this in perspective, the child molester who kidnapped little Katie Beers and kept her chained in his underground bunker—another famed Long Island case—was held on only $500,000 bail). Forfeiting a trial, Amy plea-bargained and she is now doing five-to-fifteen for first-degree assault.

  By late 1992, in an unprecedented move, all three major networks had produced made-for-TV movies about the case. By early 1993, when CBS and ABC chose to air their versions opposite each other on the same night—it was Alyssa Milano vs. Drew Barrymore, teenage mud wrestling at its best, the truly stupid against the falsely trashy—the ratings war on the eve of Bill Clinton’s swearing-in threatened to upstage the inauguration itself. Drew had a 19.5 Nielsen take, Alyssa—in a show based on Buttafuoco lore—got a 15.8, and the version that played a week before, starring the unheralded Noelle Parker, pulled in a 19.1.

  In the words of Russ Meyer: Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!

  “Irving Thalberg used to tell me,” Anita Loos reports of M-G-M’s boy wonder in Kiss Hollywood Goodbye, “ ‘When you write a love scene, think of your heroine as a little puppy dog, cuddling up to her master, wagging an imaginary tail, and gazing up at him as if he were God.’ ”

  (So this is what gave Nancy Reagan the idea.)

  But as author of the novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and the screen adaptation of The Women, and as a leading architect of the cinematic flapper girl with her freewheeling, footloose and fanciful ways, it is unclear if Loos ever really took to Thalberg’s mandate. No matter: the rest of Hollywood has been following it ever since. Which is why nubile girls on the edge of seventeen—in motion pictures, at least—never had it so good. All those incredible child-star debuts and teenage takes in the spotlight: the preternatural, premature grace and elegance of Elizabeth Taylor in National Velvet, Claire Bloom in Limelight and later on Olivia Hussey in Romeo and Juliet; the European goddess girls, from the stark and Teutonic mystery of Nico in La Dolce Vita to the all-blonde, all-bleach, all-nude-beach of Brigitte Bardot in … And God Created Woman; the more American shiksa goddess worship of Candice Bergen in The Group and Cybill Shepherd in The Last Picture Show; the hot and bothered babes, from the fifties repression of Susan Kohner in Imitation of Life and Carroll Baker in Baby Doll, to the full-frontal girl trouble of Mackenzie Phillips in American Graffiti, Melanie Griffith in Night Moves, Carrie Fisher in Shampoo, Jennifer Jason Leigh in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Lori Singer in Footloose and Laura Dern in Smooth Talk; the accidental seduction of Sue Lyon in Lolita, Brooke Shields in Pretty Baby, Nastassia Kinski in Tess and Juliette Lewis in Cape Fear; the latter-day takes on hard-scrabble, self-sufficient Shirley Temple types in the wise precocity of Susan Strasberg in Picnic, Tatum O’Neal in Paper Moon, Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver, Linda Blair in The Exorcist, Quinn Cummings in The Goodbye Girl, Drew Barrymore in E.T., Jennifer Beals in Flash dance and Natalie Portman in Beautiful Girls; the smart, solid, good-girl sturdiness of Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz, Patty Duke in The Miracle Worker and Ally Sheedy in War Games; the unexpected sweetness and strength of Molly Ringwald in Sixteen Candles, Martha Plimpton in Running on Empty and Mary Stuart Masterson in At Close Range; and then there is the simply, breathtakingly lovely—Natalie Wood in Rebel Without a Cause, Tuesday Weld in Bachelor Flat, Mariel Hemingway in Manhattan, Diane Lane in A Little Romance, lone Skye in Say Anything. What has happened to these girls?

  In many cases the jury is still out, in a couple of instances the Oscars and Barbara Walters interviews eventually came, the Academy Award for best supporting actress—frequently given, when it isn’t already earmarked for some aging British character actress, as some form of Hollywood imprimatur to this year’s starlet—was a lock. But most did not live up to their initial promise, most could not possibly excite the shock of the new ever again, and even if they did, they became drug addicts, they made lousy choices in love, they made claims that Michael Jackson was the most normal person they knew, they made guest appearances on The Love Boat, they became beards for Rock Hudson or Malcolm Forbes or both, they became spokespeople for Poly-Grip, they did testimonials for the Psychic Friends’ Network, they died mysterious deaths. They faded away, published bad poetry like Ally Sheedy, became full-time manic-depressives like Patty Duke, were found out to be bad actresses like Candice Bergen, chose bad roles repeatedly like Juliette Lewis, lived with Rick Springfield at fifteen and Rick James at twenty like Linda Blair, became fat, old and profligate like Tuesday Weld and found themselves married to a classical violinist and living on Long Island, became ridiculous like Tatum O’Neal. Or worst of all, like Olivia Hussey, so beautiful in Franco Zeffirelli’s classic, so archly alabaster and gorgeous as the screen’s most memorable Juliet, they simply disappeared, left the time zone, left the continent, went to a faraway place where the extraordinariness of their youthful beauty, the experience of having it photographed and captured and commodified at such a young age, could be lived out in peace.

  They—or the best part of them—died young: Or I swear / I’ll die young / like those favored before me, hand-picked each one / for her joyful heart. So wrote poet Olga Broumas in “Cinderella,” the lament of a woman rewarded for nothing more than fitting a glass slipper, raised from plebeian status and her washerwoman’s post because of her shoe size, not so much different from little girls loved for a sexuality they are not in control of, a sensuality they might not be aware of, a way of being they are enslaved to though it is not a skill they can develop, it is not like playing tennis or solving quadratic equations. They are revered for a passive trait, an immanence in the eye of the fickle beholder—at a very young age they are endowed with a power certain to abandon them almost as soon as they figure out how to really use it. Adolescent sexuality, which employs ignorance as aphrodisiac, can become a girl’s deepest experience of Marxian alienation from the fruits of her labor: as soon as a girl understands what she is doing, she is no longer fit to do it. After all, the most exciting thing about Lolita is that she does not mean to be exciting.

  “I defy any pretty girl who is rocketed to world stardom at fifteen in a sex-nymphet role to stay on a level path,” Sue Lyon, star of Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita, told the London Sunday Times.

  It’s not that Willie Aames or Ricky Schroder or Leif Garrett or Troy Donahue have fared so much better—but they were just heartthrobs, teen idols, Tiger Beat fodder, not unlike Tiffany, Debbie Gibson, or Marie Osmond, bubblegum girls whose balloons were meant to burst. (Of course, had they the good sense to become country singers like Tanya Tucker, they’d still be at it, because the patron-plutarchs of Nashville—still as entrenched as the old studio system in Hollywood once was—do take care of their own: a girl can get hooked on barbiturates and become a casting-couch casualty when she tries to break into movies, but when she comes home to Opryland, she’ll be greeted like a prodigal daughter and given back her old slot on the charts.) Like the Hispanic pop group Menudo, which replaced its members as each hit puberty, they must have understood that their success was glandular, hormonal—they were temporarily privileged by youth. But the women I mentioned were actresses—of the type that would insist, today, on being called actors. Somehow, their like-minded male counterparts made the transition into adulthood with a lot less grease and grime. We all know that Warren Beatty lived to achieve superstar status—as an actor, producer and director—long after his youthful debut in Splendor in the Grass, that the Hollywood experience made him feel competent and capable, a moviemaker and a womanizer whose appetites and activities were all part of a will to power. Likewise, Dennis Hopper man
aged to survive playing Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson’s eldest son in Giant to go on in his twisted way and somehow manage to make something of his life. (I believe that role, as child of two of the fruitiest people ever, with an unhinged James Dean at the other end of the set, in a movie that must have taken a long time to make, is adequate explanation for all of Hopper’s oddities.)

  But when it comes to young actresses, Jodie Foster is the exception that proves the rule. Of the rest—the remains—mostly, they lost a little something, they shed petals, they stiffened or they drooped, they became thespian models of defloration—a rape by voyeurism—as if something really wonderful and meaningful had been taken away from them. They demonstrated the Heisenberg principle in action, proof that the results of an experiment are altered simply by being watched. They started to look spent. They started to be spent: Tuesday Weld’s troubled trajectory became the paradigm for Hollywood’s jailbait set (Drew Barrymore followed it almost precisely), with her first nervous breakdown at nine, her first bout with drunkenness at ten, her first love affair at eleven, her first suicide attempt at twelve—all of which meant that by fourteen she had nothing better to do than begin fucking her favorite drinking buddy, the forty-four-year-old pre-Mia Frank Sinatra. A 1996 biography of Ms. Weld was appropriately titled Pretty Poison. But even without the private dysfunction, the public dissolution of talent is bad enough. Can anyone detect any continuity between the freshness of Juliette Lewis in Cape Fear and the wretched, rowdy ugliness she displays in Kalifornia—an unpleasant quality which keeps following her through Natural Born Killers and beyond? Can the pure, direct loveliness of Mariel Hemingway in Manhattan actually belong to the same actress who seems false, flat and not even particularly pretty in just about everything she has done thereafter? By the end of the century this adolescent deterioration process had been so completely hastened that after completely winning us over in 1995 as nice, spoiled Jewish girl Cher Horowitz in Clueless—a Beverly Hills update of Emma whose adorableness transcends for-teenyboppers-only status—by 1997 Alicia Silverstone could be declared completely over: as Batgirl in Batman she was trashed for being fat, and in The New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote of her performance in Excess Baggage (which Ms. Silverstone, somehow, also produced): “The petulant curl in her lips has deepened into a sculptured cleft … she is a surreal, zaftig everyteen who seems eerily larger than life.” And while sitcoms have saved a few great beauties found to be wanting on the dramatic front—Lucille Ball was actually the first gorgeous woman to be such a goofball on television that after a while no one noticed her looks at all—the subtle, precocious performances as well as a certain rare elegance that Cybill Shepherd, Brooke Shields and Candice Bergen once commanded seemed to promise so much more. That magic, that teenage bloom, it never can be captured again.

  Consider the case of Melissa Gilbert, who appears to have had so much plastic surgery that her face barely resembles that of the girl she once was on Little House on the Prairie. Without the fleshiness in her nose and with the red rinse that’s been cast on her hair, Gilbert—in a similarly unconvincing quest to shed the farm-girl-fresh face of early fame that drove eldest Waltons daughter Mary Ellen to do a spread in Playboy and an ad for Scientology—has become a spokesmodel for Belle color hair dye. But she is like a child playing with Mommy’s makeup whose proud attempt at glamour fools no adult: a finger-painted face, with smeared fuchsia lipstick and smudged blue eye shadow, it is the overdone job of the underage playing grown-up. Gilbert seems desperate to be an adult, and in doing do she has lost not just the quality that made her Laura Ingalls but also whatever it was that made her Melissa—whoever that was—to become a hologram, a TV-movie version of Julia Roberts, a hollow Stepford Wife replacement for herself. Now, somehow Ron Howard still looks like Richie Cunningham—in fact, he still looks like Opie. Somehow the boy from Happy Days has not been transformed into an extra on Melrose Place. Somehow his face—and his life—have retained their integrity.

  But for women to grow up in public, they must create discontinuities with their old selves, they must disappear, change masks, go off to Yale or go under in Dr. Kamer’s office, they cannot just make a graceful, fluid transition. Their teenage quality and exuberance is just too much for the world to take, the mischief and frenzy must go into hiding, and allow us our ritual mourning for the lost adorableness: we ooh and aah over cute little Judy Garland before it all went wrong, we coo over the lushness of Liz Taylor on horseback and eight husbands ago, and we sigh over the way Tuesday Weld was such a dream girl, so obviously the perfect girlfriend that even in 1991 Matthew Sweet used an old movie still of her on the cover of his album Girlfriend. We grieve for the loss even though we sanction it—it is our choice to take away the girl’s glorious freedom before she mistakes the privilege for a right. But we do it so reflexively that we don’t even notice, it seems as normal to us as virgin sacrifices once seemed in pagan cultures. And these former girls come back, thinner and paler, like tubercular patients coming down from the magic mountain, or returnees from the “rest cure,” a postlobotomy Frances Farmer, reemerging at peace with the world, blanker and blander, rather like a soap opera character who is sent to live with her grandmother in Florida for a few years while still in grade school before a forced return brings her back as a whole new grown-up thing.

  It’s the magazine makeover, it’s the acolyte who runs away to the desert for several years—Moses, David, Buddha—and comes back a holy man, it’s the promise of muscles and manliness from Charles Atlas, it’s queen for a day, it’s Grimm’s fairy tales, it’s a metamorphosis myth that ignores the plodding, slow sameness of reality.

  Girlchild stars who grow up in public seem as transformed as someone who has gone into the witness protection program.

  “I’ve never hidden the fact that I love young girls,” Roman Polanski yelled at the nagging press corps that pursued him all around the 1977 Cannes Film Festival as he ambled about the Croisette with a fifteen-year-old Nastassia Kinski on his arm. “Once and for all, I love very young girls.”

  Considering the accelerated aging process that wastes away and wears out Hollywood’s sweet young things with a fast-forward so fast it’s as if they were living in dog years (bitch years?), it almost seems reasonable that Polanski should be a sucker for raw meat, for milk-fed tank-bred veal. In this context, our culture’s fascination with the virginal victim—who is, if nothing else, a break from the tired woman—is understandable. In these oversexed times—when Tracy Lords retired from her pornography career by the time she was eighteen—it is only the girl who knows nothing about sex, perhaps doesn’t even know where babies come from, who can guarantee that a man will feel his dominance, and will experience himself as breaking and entering. After residing in this erotic gray zone of date-rape confusion, with seduction and sexual harassment and who made the first move all constant questions, there is something so nice and safe about surefire violation, about fucking a child, or a comatose hospital patient, or a mentally retarded woman—all of them offer the relief of certainty, since they are not even in a position to express, experience or exercise volition. “You ain’t never had no pussy like that,” the pimp played by Harvey Keitel in the 1976 movie Taxi Driver says of his underage hooker Iris, portrayed by Jodie Foster in her first Oscar-nominated role. “You can do anything you want with her.”

  But Iris’ appeal is that she is quite knowing, a stray cat made smart by living on street scraps—that she is twelve but not really. It is the untouched and unmolested that fuels our latest array of fantasies. The fascination with the murder of JonBenet Ramsey would seem, at first, like a good example of the public’s prurient interest in a tender, taboo sex object, except that there is nothing sexy about a child so done up she looks like she belongs in Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum. Our interest in this dead six-year-old is indeed perverse—but perverse in a social, not a sexual, sense. This little girl is just so peculiar: doomed at birth by being christened with a name that’s a cross-pollination
of Jonathan with the title of a frequently administered IQ test, a name that, whatever its origins, could only belong to a Bourbon Street stripper, a name that is about as French as french fries, French kisses, French vanilla, French roast, French braids and French-cut jeans, a name with hoity-toity aspirations that are meant to obscure the very trashiness they spotlight. This little girl had glamour photos that paid homage to Francesco Scavullo’s Cosmo covers, and played dress-up in clothes that actually fit her, with no blue eye shadow misplaced on her cheeks and no coral lipstick smeared sloppily on her chin. This little girl wore “outfits,” matched purses and shoes, coordinated bonnets and gloves, symbols of leisured gentility last seen at Sweet Briar College in 1957. Anyone concerned that baby beauty pageants sexually exploit girls so young that even Larry Flynt would blush are missing the point: which is, of course, that it is all just so cheesy. It’s embarrassing. It’s the kind of thing that allows the French to make fun of America even as they watch their Mickey Rourke movies and Jerry Lewis telethons. It’s silly and infantilizing. I’m sure the participants in these pretty-baby contests are thoroughly damaged by the experience, but in ways far stranger than anything having to do with sex. The fuss and focus on this tacky subculture provided a momentary freak distraction from a dominant culture in which the lust for sweet young things—a few years older than JonBenet Ramsey, and more likely to be wearing flannel and blue jeans than broad-rimmed hats and twin-sets—has become perfectly normal, and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop it.

  In the little-seen art-house film The Babysitter, Alicia Silverstone has no idea what kinds of perverse and extreme fantasies her charges, the father of the kids, and various teenage boys are having about her as she wanders around, blissfully unaware, attending to the children, giving them baths and getting her shirt all wet, basically lying in wait for whatever may happen because her alarm system is not yet installed. Uma Thurman in Dangerous Liaisons is similarly there for the taking as John Malkovich does just that. In the movie Kids, the HIV-positive philosopher of the delights of defloration—who is supposed to be sixteen but looks no more than eleven, and actually looks a lot like a walking penis—goes on about how he loves to fuck virgins, loves that there’s no “loosey-goose pussy.”