The Fame Lunches
Page 11
Reading remained a constant pastime throughout his life, whether he was lolling in the sun on a yacht off Portofino or shooting a biopic of Tito in Yugoslavia. “I stayed in the bedroom all day yesterday,” he writes on December 31, 1968, holed up with Taylor and her children in a Swiss chalet, “and read or rather re-read Schlesinger’s massive tome on JFK. I must have read without interruption including mealtimes and visits to the lavatory for about 16 hours.” While stopping at the Plaza Athénée in Paris in January 1969, he builds “a small library … of about 200 books excluding reference books,” and his comparison of Ian Fleming’s You Only Live Twice and Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts is worthy of someone who writes reviews for a living: “West’s book is taut, spare and agonized while the other is diffuse, urbane and empty. West hates himself and postulates a theory that you are always killed by the thing you love, while Fleming loves only himself, his attraction to women, his sexual prowess, ‘the-hint-of-cruelty-in-the-mouth’-sadistic bit, his absurd and comically pompous attitude to food and cocktails.”
One cannot help but wonder while reading these intricate, deft musings what would have happened if Burton had lived long enough—and had the necessary focus—to make use of these diaries as the basis for a proper memoir, as he considered doing. Certainly the urge to write was with him well before he met Taylor, and although he protests more than once that his journal keeping is purely personal, a hedge against his habitual laziness, it is clear that he also flirted seriously with finding a book project. Convivial as he could be when the occasion called for it—when dining with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, for instance (Burton’s affection for this displaced pair makes me wonder whether there was more to them than I had previously thought) or the Rothschilds—his native temperament was essentially that of a misanthropic loner, perfectly suited to the solitary occupation of a scribe. Then again, it’s all too tempting to regard Burton as a man of enormous and unfulfilled promise, whether as a writer or an actor; it was a view he was utterly familiar with, and dismissive of: “The press have been sounding the same note for many years—ever since I went to Hollywood in the early fifties, in fact—that I am or was potentially the greatest actor in the world and the successor to Gielgud Olivier etc. but that I had dissipated my genius etc. and ‘sold out’ to films and booze and women. An interesting reputation to have and by no means dull but by all means untrue.”
Did he believe this, or was it the version—virile and unself-pitying, as suited the son of a miner—he chose to tell himself? Perhaps it’s fairer, indeed kinder, to assume that in many ways he lived the life he intended to live. “But don’t let’s be stoned all the time,” he wrote in January 1969. “Let’s have days and days of brilliant clarity, etched and limpid, cool and surgical.” On the evidence of these diaries, between the drinking and the idling, there were more than a few of those days, and he their eloquent conjurer.
II
SKIN-DEEP
AGAINST LIP GLOSS OR, NEW NOTES ON CAMP
2006
Let us now deplore the present moment and lament all that has been lost on the way to becoming overstimulated and spiritually starved inhabitants of an imperiled social order. First we must ask: Where did we go wrong? Where did we go so terribly wrong? I know many of you would blame it on the usual suspects, on the insatiable maw of the media or on large, amorphous forces run amok—our having started up in Iraq, say, or our having ravaged the planet in the name of progress and capitalist gain—but I blame it all on lip gloss. I believe there is something irrevocably ruinous about a culture in which women are expected to go around with their lips in a permanent state of shiny readiness, a perennial Marilyn Monroe moue of glistening sexual receptivity, hinting at the possibility that they, like Monroe, sleep fetchingly in the nude. Just after this thought occurred to me on a recent Saturday night while I was waiting for the subway, I found myself sitting next to two college-age women who were discussing—I kid you not, this is either synchronicity or Sartre’s idea of hell—the merits of various glosses, Kiehl’s as compared with Lancôme’s as compared with Trish McEvoy’s, which one lasted longer and why.
I eavesdropped raptly, being myself the dissatisfied owner of many tubes and pots of said product—from the lowly Blistex and ChapStick versions to the designer jobs that can go for as much as fifty dollars—as well as of a mouth that always insists on returning to type, which is a recalcitrant state of parched dryness. The potential staying power of cosmetics is an inherently unsettling concept, suggestive as it is of a kind of Viagra principle of female enhancement—indeed, of a core confusion between the messy imperatives of reality and the contrivances of theater, which is, when you come to think of it, at the heart of everything that is problematic, if not unbearable, about the way we live now. It is, all the same, a concept that has been picked up with alacrity by gay male commentators on the E! channel who espouse the need for cosmetic “fixatives.”
The E! channel, for those of you who have succeeded in hovering above the fray rather than flailing in it, exists to beam out programs about red-carpet sightings of celebrities as well as the inside scoop on their clothes, jewelry, and accessories for viewers who wish to look like celebrities or, at the very least, long to be mistaken for Jessica Alba. (There is, in fact, a brand-new E! program called Style Her Famous.) If you want to resemble a person who is worthy of red-carpet treatment, it is crucial, apparently, that your makeup not wear out and begin to show glimpses of the unvarnished face beneath. As one of the Western world’s leading aficionados of beauty products, I am naturally familiar with the existing range of complexion beautifiers—indeed, I own a batch of barely touched tubes and bottles of primers, luminizers, correctors, and concealers—but fixatives were a new one on me, conjuring faces trapped beneath thick white coatings of Elmer’s glue.
Still, if one is looking to condemn the zeitgeist wholesale—which, to be perfectly clear about it, I am, since there is no place to live but in the present moment, and I trust that I am not alone in finding so much of it a trial—one has to begin somewhere and trace the all-important dramatic arc from better to worse. Points of origin are always hard to agree on, of course, and have become even slipperier since the term “paradigm shift” started being thrown around, but let me try. Once upon a time—not all that long ago, really, yet inconceivably long ago if you are under twenty-five and can’t believe that typewriters once roamed the earth, that anyone ever managed to get by without iTunes, that colors like gray and navy were only, forlornly, themselves and not yet harbingers of the new black—an essay appeared in a now-defunct highbrow journal called Partisan Review. The year was 1964, and the essay was by Susan Sontag, who was, I feel quite safe in saying, both the first and the last intellectual celebrity America has produced. (In France, where they believe in the glamour of the mind and where Sontag chose to be buried, but not before accepting an offer from UCLA to buy her papers and library for $1.1 million, intellectual celebrities are not all that uncommon, especially if you boast a good head of hair, as Sontag did, and as Bernard-Henri Lévy still does.)
The essay was called “Notes on ‘Camp,’” and it attempted to define an emerging, homosexually derived cultural attitude—one that was, as Sontag characterized it, “something of a private code, a badge of identity even, among small urban cliques.” Camp, according to Sontag, “converts the serious into the frivolous”; it sets itself resolutely against the hierarchical universe of value judgments—those tiresome “high culture” legacies of “truth, beauty, and seriousness”—and posits instead “the equivalence of all objects.”
Camp, in other words, does away with the nuanced discrimination between High (complexly mediated) and Low (simplistically projected) levels of cultural expression—between the depressive ruminations of a writer like Robert Musil or W. G. Sebald and the air-spun sagas of Jacqueline Susann or Danielle Steel—that are the bread and butter of critical discourse and that helped establish Sontag’s reputation as a discerning observer in the first p
lace. None of which deterred her from championing it in her crisp and haughty “are you with me, you morons” manner. The camp sensibility, once deemed “esoteric” by Sontag, has since become so much a part of the air we breathe (like Brangelina or Bush bashing) that it is hard to imagine people used to walk around living their lives without an acute consciousness that they were “living” their “lives.” Hard to imagine, that is, that a sense of radical disjunction between one’s interior experience of self and one’s stylized (or, as the academic jargon would have it, “performative”) self hadn’t yet become standard, permeating every other overheard conversation at Starbucks across the land. It is a disjunction best evoked by those ubiquitous, irritating “air quotes,” which is lingo for the act of bracketing every declarative remark in invisible quotation marks, as though we were all characters in a Will & Grace episode, referencing opinions and convictions, searching for the reassuringly tinny sound of a laugh track. Camp, Sontag noted, “is the consistently aesthetic experience of the world. It incarnates a victory of ‘style’ over ‘content,’ ‘aesthetics’ over ‘morality.’” Goodbye, Matthew Arnold. Hello, Andy Warhol. Goodbye, heavy-handed German metaphysicians like Immanuel Kant, with their anxieties about the Ding an sich, the unknowable essence beyond appearances. Hello, nihilistic French theorists like Jean Baudrillard, with their blithe sanctification of inauthenticity. Welcome to our world of borrowed auras and copycat identities, one in which we have successfully overcome the response that Sontag describes as “the nausea of the replica.”
The victory of the simulacrum—the pleasure we seem to take in an infinite regress of reproductive images, in visual seriality for its own sake—is, of course, nothing less than the triumph of camp. Although as a state of mind it feels as if it’s been here forever—as if we’ve been cozy with its wink-wink approach to traditional values for so long that the latest iteration of homophobia might be said to be heterophobia (a suspicion of unhip straight people)—in truth the ascendance of the camp sensibility has been a while in coming.
It began in the early nineteenth century, with the technical advances that the historian Daniel J. Boorstin, in his proleptically anti-camp manifesto, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (published in 1961), termed the Graphic Revolution; sped up in the late nineteenth century with the invention of dry-plate photography and then the camera; and acquired a plangent but heartless mood of its own with Christopher Isherwood’s Sally Bowles as well as a bit of philosophical heft after Walter Benjamin wrote his 1936 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” From there it was a hop, skip, and jump to the club scene on the Rive Gauche, where the competing egos of the young Yves Saint Laurent and Karl Lagerfeld used to hang out, as evoked by Alicia Drake in her fascinating account of the two designers’ rivalry, The Beautiful Fall: “There were pockets of homosexual life and men cruising all over Paris, but Saint Germain in the 1950s was known for its folles, the name used to describe camp gays of the moment who were recognised by their bottom-swivelling walk and deliberately effeminate ways, including a habit of high-drama shrieking.”
By the late 1980s and early ’90s, Spy magazine, ever alert to the taxonomy of the risible—and newly available for scrutiny in what is itself a swishy form of homage, a book titled Spy: The Funny Years—was busy attending to the climate change, teasing out the fine line between “Camp Lite” (attending the Warhol auction) and “True Camp” (attending the Warhol funeral) in one issue, and again, almost three years later, charting a graph of camp icons with the aid of categories that included the “Healthily Campy” (Robert Goulet), the “Forgiveably Campy” (Henry Kissinger), the “Rather Sad” (Priscilla Presley), and the “Just Pathetic” (Sukhreet Gabel). True to Sontag’s dictum that the ethos does not allow for the possibility of tragedy, Spy allowed for none, either.
It seems hard to believe now that there was ever an age before ironic appropriation, before John Currin and Vik Muniz. Did Rembrandt think of himself in quotes, as “Rembrandt”? And is there any chance that we will ever know, buried as we are beneath the rubble of postmodern rhetoric, attuned to the chipmunk chirps of vituperative bloggers and smug talk show hosts (I say this without ever having had the patience to watch more than five minutes of Jon Stewart)? How has the world become so fluidly post-gender and so unregeneratively boys’ clubbish at one and the same time? And is the JonBenét story a tragedy, a piece of (witting) camp, or an example of (unwitting) kitsch?
Then again, there are so many questions I would like definite answers to. I am starved, truth be told, for a hint of the old directionality, the old imperialist verities that have ceded pride of place to provisional suppositions and apologetic stances. These days, those of us who don’t wish to cast our lot with the intolerant or the ignorant have been collectively tyrannized by the doctrine of equal validity that underlies the social construction of knowledge—by the belief, as Paul Boghossian, a professor of philosophy at New York University, describes it in Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism, “that there is no such thing as superior knowledge, only different knowledges, each appropriate to its own particular setting.” This might help explain why everyone I know feels marginalized in his or her “lifestyle,” at risk of being exposed for not being sufficiently novel or, simply, aspirational enough in his or her aspirations. It might even help explain why I am frightened by the specter of mass customization so ingeniously exploited by Warhol—by the profusion of design choices in everything from typeface fonts (thirty thousand of them) to drawer pulls (fifteen hundred of them). Virginia Postrel, in The Substance of Style, her defense of our design-obsessed society, assures me that all this focus on “impractical decoration and meaningless fashion” is actually a good thing, an indication of our desire and ability to create “an enticing, stimulating, diverse, and beautiful world.” We want, she crows, “our vacuum cleaners and mobile phones to sparkle, our bathroom faucets and desk accessories to express our personalities … We demand trees in our parking lots, peaked roofs and decorative façades on our supermarkets, auto dealerships as swoopy and stylish as the cars they sell.” We do?
Then again, one might argue that the anxiety of artifice—an underlying uncertainty about the solidity of the perceptible—is as old as the hills or Plato’s cave. The problem with camp is that it valorizes ambiguity by insisting on framing the narrative of real life as a series of celluloid outtakes. In doing so, it leaves us no place to look for confirmation but in the mirror, allowing for no rush but in the pseudo-image, the hyper-seen, and the reseen. These days, the threat of the artificial has been converted to an enticement: life as a Warhol silk screen. With a retrospective now on at the Gagosian Gallery and several new books, Andy himself is back in a big way this fall, although one might reasonably argue that he has never gone away—unlike so many of his hangers-on who died badly or lived on into pallid obscurity. In Ric Burns’s recently aired hagiographic documentary about Warhol and his influence, we are treated to four hours of interviews with a cast of observers who vie with each other in ascribing ever more far-reaching transformational importance to this “most colossal creep,” as one lone dissenter calls him, this cultivatedly affectless voyeur whose two gods were fame and beauty. If you pay close attention, you can spot a young, black-haired Sontag, early in Burns’s film, smiling at Warhol’s camera, her teeth photogenically white. As Warhol closes in on her, there is something unsettling about her smile, something snarling, almost feral. Maybe what she needs is lip gloss.
IN MY HEAD I’M ALWAYS THIN
2013
Here’s the odd part: In my head, I am always thin. The persistence of this mental picture, given the alarming number on the scale, is such that I have intermittently wondered whether I suffer from an as-yet-unrecognized psychiatric condition that is the opposite of body dysmorphic disorder, the main symptom of which is an overly positive view of one’s appearance. Or it might well be that this unchanging (and, let’s face it, warped) perspective goes back to begin
nings, to the first image of oneself in the mirror.
I had been naturally thin as a girl and then grew into a relatively thin young woman. Narrow hipped and tight of butt, with long, slender legs and full breasts—the sort of body that men reflexively eye, with enough shapeliness to cause a photographer to stop me one spring day on West Seventy-Second Street, many years ago, and ask if I was interested in posing for Playboy. Not skeletally, tormentedly, time-consumingly thin, mind you—a size 8 or 10 as opposed to a 2 or 4. I wasn’t overwhelmingly careful about what I ate, and I worked out erratically, except for those times when I felt my weight inching upward and I’d get more serious about running or hitting the gym or going off to a spa to rev things up a bit.
This state of affairs remained more or less true, take or leave ten to fifteen pounds, throughout my twenties and until my mid-thirties, when I got married, became pregnant shortly thereafter, and put on a whopping fifty pounds. I eventually trimmed the weight off, although not with nearly the alacrity of a Jessica Alba, and returned to my previous size. At some point in my late thirties, I decided to have the breast reduction I’d been debating ever since pregnancy had expanded my already big breasts, after which I looked more proportionate and less matronly on top. There is a photograph of me with a boyfriend (I was divorced by then), taken at a friend’s house one summer in my early forties, in which I look impressively lean in a polo shirt and shorts—my arms and legs taut and my face at its angular, high-cheekboned best. I remember this boyfriend as being both an avid flirt and conspicuously weight conscious, and while I was with him, I became ever so slightly more vigilant than I had been. I didn’t count calories, precisely, because the very thought of doing so bored me, and I would have felt as if I were doing so only to please a man, like the most submissive of geishas, but I did try harder to deny some of my fattier cravings.