Bitch

by Elizabeth Wurtzel

  And let us not forget the way Bill Wyman, the seemingly most unrolling of the Stones, reminded us never to underestimate still water when at age forty-seven he took up with, then eventually married and later divorced, the thirteen-year-old Bardot-in-a-kilt Catholic school girl named Mandy Smith (for good measure, at some point, her mother hooked up with his son). It reminds us of some of this century’s great romances: Elvis and Priscilla, Jerry Lee Lewis and Myra, Frank and Mia, Woody and Soon-Yi, Seinfeld and Shoshana, Roman Polanski and whoever, Hugh Hefner and whatever. Harold and Maude, sort of. Charlie Chaplin and his succession of teenage brides, definitely. (Chaplin’s second wife, whom he wed when she was fifteen and knocked up, was actually named Lilita, a fact not unknown to Nabokov, whose literary legacy was just a vowel away; by the time Chaplin married his last wife, Oona O’Neill, he was fifty-four and the bride was his oldest yet—at seventeen.) I would add to that list Charles and Diana, but he doesn’t count because position compelled him to marry a virgin, and because, frankly, he just doesn’t count.

  And of course, so many movie jokes would never exist without the May-December possibilities. Woody Allen’s now much-bitten line in Manhattan—“I can’t believe I’m dating a girl who does homework”—became much funnier, or much sadder, when its real-life implications were realized. In When Harry Met Sally …, Billy Crystal mocks his unserious serial monogamy by saying of his new girlfriend, “I mentioned something about the Kennedy assassination and she said, ‘What? Was Ted Kennedy shot?’ ” And in real life—more like sort-of real life—Amy Fisher offers the tidbit that when she and Joey met for love in the afternoon at a local motel, he would turn the clock radio to the classic rock station and quiz her to make sure she knew it was the Doors who did “Light My Fire” or the Eagles performing “Peaceful Easy Feeling.” And Boston cabby Jimmy McBride, the MTV alter ego of actor Donal Logue, made fun of Alanis Morissette’s misuse of the title “Ironic” when he inserted this couplet: “It’s like meeting the girl of your dreams / And finding out she’s five years old.”

  Meanwhile, the archetypal virgin—meaning Lolita, not Mary—has apparently been thoroughly misunderstood by posterity. In an interview in Vogue, Jeremy Irons, who plays Humbert Humbert in Adrian Lyne’s almost unreleased film adaptation of Lolita, points out that despite the notion of teenage temptress that has been attached to the moniker Lolita, in Vladimir Nabokov’s novel she is actually rather vile, obnoxious, not in the least bit seductive. She chews on gum with bovine vigor and blows enormous pink bubbles that pop into sticky puddles across her face. She prefers her sleeve to napkins and tissues. Her nail polish is always chipped. She may be the subject of blue movies, but Nabokov’s Lolita is green, still picking at earwax in public, an unwashed phenomenon. “In the popular imagination, Lolita is this stupendous little kitten,” Irons says. “And in the film we certainly paint her so. But in the book she’s absolutely ghastly—cheap, not pretty, bad teeth, bad skin, smelly—that’s the drama, that he’s besotted by this awful girl.” In the same Vogue article, mistress of vampires Anne Rice is quoted as noting that Lolita “was a very ordinary girl who didn’t herself have profound sexual feelings and never really enjoyed the illicit relationship.” It seems that in the void created by Nabokov’s beautiful and complicated text (lack of reading—not misreading—is the culprit here), a cultural version of the game Telephone—with Freudian phantasies and wish fulfillments guiding it along—has turned a girl who is the object of perverse desire into the subject of a rapacious sexual appetite. But the literary Lolita’s appeal is not in the way one can partake of her supple, youthful flesh in that moment of ripeness and unspoiled beauty that explains why teenage fashion models are lust objects, girls in their luscious prime. To be a man and be hot for Bridget Hall is perfectly normal; to be Humbert Humbert and hung up on twelve-year-old pudge is to be a pervert, a pedophile—to wag one’s tongue after youth with vampiric intent, to pursue it only to destroy it, to be the agent of the girl’s downfall, turn her into the wretch that any man preying upon such a childish subject must believe all women are. “Humbert Humbert,” British novelist Martin Amis has said, “is without question an honest-to-god, open-and-shut sexual deviant.”

  And Jeremy Irons is right: the uncouthness of Lolita is precisely the point. She reminds us that men who take up with teenyboppers and believe that they are getting a woman that has not, in the language of used-car salesmen, been “pre-owned” are not much different from Humbert Humbert. For they are actually hooking up with the same pimply baby that Lolita was in print if not in practice, but fooling themselves with the high gloss of femininity in bloom.

  They think that statutory rape laws were written for other men. That Amy Fisher isn’t really a teenager and Joey Buttafuoco isn’t really a pervert.

  Meanwhile, a romanticized notion of what is really a violated little girl allows for the counterimage, the celebration of innocence as front, of ignorance as sexuality. It allows for the lovely, unadorned black-and-white photographs of Christy Turlington in ads for Calvin Klein underwear, a woman in her twenties looking slightly fleshy and all pouty, curves suggesting baby fat, not even showing much cleavage in basic briefs and no-push-up bras that create a sexiness that is the opposite of what one would get with anything that might be called “lingerie.” (Interestingly, Victoria’s Secret, catalogue of décolletage and dishabille, has mimicked Klein’s success by putting Claudia Schiffer and Stephanie Seymour in television and print ads selling its “underware” line of practical, ribbed cottons.) It allows for a magazine—known in jargon as a “stroke book”—called Barely Legal. It allows for baby-doll dresses and kinderwhore fashions, for chunky high-heeled Mary Janes from Prada and solid-silver pacifier pendants from jewelry designer Helen Bransford.

  It allows for the entire career of Liv Tyler, who in Heavy, Stealing Beauty, that thing you do! and probably in as many more roles as can possibly tolerate this act, plays the virginal sweetheart, the very very very nice girl with coltish gracelessness and unscathed beauty, whose mere presence irradiates everyone around her, whose luminescence wakes up the long-dead urges and makes people want, in each of those respective films, to go to cooking school, to face death with dignity or to take up improvisational jazz drumming. It allows for Carroll Baker in Elia Kazan’s film of Tennessee Williams’s Baby Doll, the child bride who lounged in a crib, sucked on her thumb and whom a much older Karl Maiden spends much of the movie just trying to keep under his thumb. It allows for the ongoing fascination with Edie Sedgwick, the most celebrated of the Warhol superstars, subject of an oral history called Edie that portrays her as the Forrest Gump of the demimonde, a dead girl whose memory outlives her life as the Pop Art pop tart, the girl on fire with silver streaks in her hair, an ectomorphic little frame, bone-white skin stretched on her skeleton like a lampshade. But Edie’s longevity in the afterlife, which would seem to be because of her youthquaker cool, is actually a product of the belief that all that was just a facade: we’re in fact infatuated with the photographs that show her when she wasn’t in costume, pictures that reveal such innocence, snapshots of little girl blue with long black hair fresh from a spot of shock at Silver Hill, pictures that focus on her big huge eyes that shine like flying saucers, liquid sky, pure as a really pure batch of Burmese heroin, pure as Ivory soap. This photomontage of a reconstituted Lolita—frail, fragile, dead by her own hand, a girl whose good looks make you imagine potential that was never there, a girl who makes you sigh and say, So beautiful, so sad—allows us to be in love with the Edie we believe was worth saving.

  And then finally our sordid romance with the malleable, labile Lolita allows a situation in which, far from not having a clue about her power to drive men mad, this former naïf becomes a knowing menace, a shadowy figure of danger and deceit. It allows for a situation where Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Edward Albee—who is not, I don’t think, a stupid man—amid much frustration while trying to stage Lolita for Broadway in 1981 (starring Blanche Baker, daughter of Car
roll), actually responded to protests from Women Against Pornography and social worker types by saying, “It is Lolita who seduces Humbert. It is the exploitation of the adult by the child.” It allows for a movie like Poison Ivy, which brought Drew Barrymore back from the dead, allowing her to play an irresistibly naughty teenage tramp who befriends a lonely, unlovely Sara Gilbert, and manages to move into her house, share her bed (director Katt Shea never makes it really clear what we are to make of that), then seduce her handsome father (Tom Skerritt, a Guess jeans ad veteran at a time when the same modeling assignment was still in Drew’s future), “inadvertently” kill her bedridden emphysematic mother (Cheryl Ladd, also brought back from the dead), and basically get the run of the place. It allows for the dangerous curves of The Crush, which has a fourteen-year-old Alicia Silverstone report to her twenty-eight-year-old object of pursuit, “Guess what? I got my period!” It allows for girls on an after-school murder spree in the movie Fun, and for the girls on a lesbian murder spree in Heavenly Creatures.

  It allows for avant-garde filmmaker Jennifer Montgomery to re-create her prep school affair with photography instructor Jock Sturges in the grainy, black-and-white starkness of Art for Teachers of Children—and it allows for Sturges himself, all his pretty pictures of all the pretty blonde girls with no clothes on. It allows for the Calvin Klein jeans ads of 1995—part of the designer’s time-honored tradition of controversial campaigns—that were taken off the air and pulled from billboards because the awkward unkempt models, posed in faux pine-paneled rec rooms reminiscent of the Brady Bunch basement, gave some people the impression they were auditioning for kiddy-porn parts. It allows for the disturbing discovery of Lewis Carroll’s infatuated photographs of the real-life Alice. It allows for the lingering strangeness of the nude pictures of model-turned-photographer Lee Miller, taken by her father in the 1920s when she was just a teenager. It allows for a situation in which everyone, ad hominem, permanently primed for scandal, gets all nuts about Sally Mann’s photoessays of her own children—often unclothed—even though the actual images tend to be rather innocuous, the idea more racy than the implications, a lot of bark for very little bite. And it allows for a situation in which, in a 1977 New York magazine profile of Brooke Shields, her mother Teri can be caught looking at stills from the film Pretty Baby and saying, “Look at you with your little titties sticking out. You would know she hit puberty the day filming began. When Louis Malle signed her up, she was as flat as a board, but when we got to New Orleans she had her first period and he could see these two little knobs popping up.” On the magazine’s cover, the mother and daughter are pictured beside a tag line that reads, “Brooke is twelve. She poses nude. Teri is her mother. She thinks it’s swell.”

  But in truth, to differentiate between these types of intriguing teenage personalities, to view one as deliberately seductive, another as helpless and blameless like Thomas Hardy’s Tess Durbeyfield or Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, is to miss the point. Because any of these behaviors can be thought to be a come-on—some of them may even be—if the excitement of youth itself is turn-on enough. In the end, Humbert Humbert as connoisseur of the nymphet implies a level of refinement that will not be found in the average john purchasing the services of an underage call girl. In fact, unless he is a serial killer whose prey are always prostitutes and who has a very specific physical and psychological specimen in mind, the client in this exchange is probably motivated by a simple salacious admiration for a young, supple body; the subtleties of personality pale against the pursuit of crude, cheap sex. And a teenage girl thrown into a Lolita situation is left unsure of what she did to get there. Endowed with some unearned power to drive men wild, she will wonder what she must to do to stay in this vaunted position—how long she can keep this up, how long she will be able to rely on this very unreliable asset. There’s the looming specter of the coach that turns into a pumpkin come midnight. And after a while the girls who are in crisis, who have no career goals or education to fall back on and no future that they can foresee, find themselves willing to give up all of themselves, body parts gone, everything else gone, the girl is an amputee, a human manqué: the weapon of sexuality boomerangs, backfires. As Amy Fisher (with the help of Sheila Weller) put it in her autobiography Amy Fisher: My Story: “People call you ‘seductive,’ as if you have power. But you feel you have no power. No power at all. You’re just going blindly along on tools you picked up. But, if you’d ever been given a choice, those might not have been the tools you’d have chosen.”

  In recent years, theorists of female development seem to have declared détente in the fight with Freud over penis envy, and redirected those efforts toward extending his models—the Oedipal struggle, phallocentric but still useful—to encompass the very different maturing phases in girls’ lives. Their main conclusion is that (surprise!) adolescence is a period when girls go underground, when their personalities are muted, when they lose sense of what they want and who they are, when they begin to scurry desperately to maintain relationships, often at the expense of their own integrity, of being a self. The glow and edge of youth fades away, a process depicted in the disintegration of many of the aforementioned actresses’ performances. They lose their natural charm because they lose their fighting spirit: the glory of their early work is in seeing that last gasp, a losing army that won’t surrender, the holdouts on top of Masada, or Samson pushing the pillars in a final frenzy of strength before he dies. The beauty of adolescent girls is that all that is beautiful about them will soon be snatched away: they are creatures about to disappear—fireflies, thorn birds, june bugs.

  This discontinuity is the subject explored by Carol Gilligan and Lyn Mikel Brown, both research psychologists and professors of human development, in their 1992 book Meeting at the Crossroads: Women’s Psychology and Girls’ Development. The authors and several researchers spent time interviewing and just hanging out with girls between the ages of seven and eighteen, hoping to track the phenomenon of diminished resilience, lost vitality and a faded fighting spirit that they call “losing voice.” Perhaps Gilligan and Brown’s most astute revelation—although, if you think about it, this is actually rather obvious—is that boys have their cursed bad phase in preschool, but girls experience it several years later. “The pressure on boys to dissociate themselves from women early in childhood is analogous to the pressure girls feel to take themselves out of relationship with themselves and with women as they reach adolescence,” they write. “On a theoretical level, the evidence we gathered led us to consider early adolescence as a comparable time in women’s development to early childhood in men’s: a time when a relational impasse forced what psychoanalysts have called ‘a compromise formation’—some compromise between voice and relationships … [This adjustment] leaves a psychological wound or scar, a break manifest in the heightened susceptibility to psychological illness that boys suffer in early childhood and that girls suffer in adolescence.” In other words, boys have to make a break with Mom and assert their masculinity at a very young age, which is why come kindergarten there are suddenly all those hyperactive boys with their Ritalin prescriptions while their parents are trying to find a cure for ADD. But girls don’t assume their sullen, troubled mien until sometime in junior high school when the bloom and blood of burgeoning sexuality forces them to break with Mom, puts their bodies on view in the free-market bazaar that is the world, and they experience firsthand nature’s processes as she turns them into baby makers, bodies to bear more bodies.

  The conclusion Gilligan and Brown come to is that girls react to the changes by entering a trancelike dissociative state they call “going underground”:

  [S]eparating themselves or their psyches from their bodies so as not to know what they were feeling, dissociating their voice from their feelings and thoughts so that others would not know what they were experiencing, taking themselves out of relationship [with themselves] so that they could better approximate what others want and desire, or look more like some ideal imag
e of what a woman or what a person should be. Open conflict and free speaking that were part of girls’ daily living thus gave way to more covert forms of responding to hurt feelings or disagreements within relationships, so that some girls came to ignore or not know signs of emotional or physical abuse. And relationships correspondingly suffered.

  Everything that is so hard about being a woman, the inherently torn and conflicted nature of choices between career and family, between romance and respectability, between recklessness and restraint, between virgin and whore, between pushing and pulling—problems which were supposed to be resolved by now, but probably won’t ever be put to rest—are all rooted in what happens in our teenage years. After all, what Gilligan and Brown are really describing is the process of self-destruction—the wearing down and winnowing away of the integrity of the self—that is better known as becoming a woman. Books like The Rules, which essentially instruct women to control their impulses in an attempt to act like they have self-esteem—even though anyone who actually had self-esteem would just do whatever the hell she wants—only reaffirm the lessons girls learn early on about self-silence. “Girls, we thought, were undergoing a kind of psychological foot-binding, so that they were kept from feeling or using their relational strengths,” write Gilligan and Brown. “Instead, these strengths, which explain girls’ remarkable psychological resilience throughout the childhood years, were turning into a political liability. People, as many girls were told, did not want to hear what girls know.”