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Carole

Notations for a work in progress

4. June 2003

6/1/2003

After some suggestions from Stacey and a couple of revisions, I reached the following draft of my Times submission, with some hope of success:

Remembering an American Beauty

July 4, 1948 was the last day in the life of actress Carole Landis, found dead the next morning in her Pacific Palisades home from an overdose of Seconal. Irreverent and "liberated" ahead of her time, Carole was at heart a romantic devastated by her repeated failures to find a stable love-relationship. Her suicide note, addressed to her mother, makes no complaints but apologizes for the suffering her death would cause.

Carole Landis was born in 1919 and grew up in San Bernardino. Starstruck from an early age, at 16 she took a bus to the Bay area where she worked as a dancer and a nightclub singer before returning south to try her luck in Hollywood. Her big break came in 1940 when she was cast opposite Victor Mature in One Million BC because "she ran like an athlete and not like a girl." In a few months she was a major celebrity.

In 1941, American Magazine wrote that "Carole . . . has been dubbed by columnists from coast to coast as Hollywood’s top glamour girl, with the most gorgeous figure in moviedom, a distinction she says she hates." Carole understandably wanted to be appreciated for more than her looks; but after Pearl Harbor Day, "her glamour was . . . not her burden but her gift. . . her beauty was something she could offer. She was going to war to entertain the troops" (www.carolelandis.com). Carole’s wartime service was the high point of her life.

In 1942, Carole led a four-woman team called by Newsweek "easily the biggest war-front entertainment of World War II" to England, Ireland, and North Africa; her book about this experience, 4 Jills in a Jeep, was subsequently made into a film. A manuscript at the Motion Picture Academy speaks of Carole as "probably the finest ambassadress of good will ever to come out of Hollywood . . . traveling more miles and playing more shows than any other girl in motion pictures." On the wartime radio show Command Performance, where GIs asked for their favorite stars, "the single most famous request involved film star Carole Landis, who was commanded to ‘step up to the microphone and sigh’" (The Transmitter, Spring 2000).

June 4, 1944, two days before D-Day, Carole sold war bonds in the rain on Wall Street:

In November 1944, after Carole’s trip to the South Pacific, where she nearly died of malaria, a woman forwarded this letter from her brother to Photoplay Magazine:

Thousands of people attended Carole’s funeral at Forest Lawn on July 10, 1948; soldiers from General Eisenhower on down sent telegrams and flowers. Today she is largely forgotten.

* * *

Carole Landis’ rare combination of looks and talent allowed her to incarnate a brief moment between the thirties, caught between the ethereality of Garbo and the sluttishness of Harlow, and the fifties, with its half-bared bosoms and adolescent smarminess, in which female beauty could be appreciated undistorted by teasing or perversity. Yet this appreciation would go only so far. Despite her gift for romantic comedy and her throaty contralto much beloved of GIs, Carole, who had major roles in 28 films, never attained true Hollywood stardom. Directors feared that this woman whom Life called "distractingly desirable" would divert audiences from the story line. Carole’s best known picture, I Wake up Screaming (1941), is as much about her as about her character, Vicki Lynn. Vicki’s murder precedes the action, but Vicki/Carole’s image--in flashbacks, photographs, a film clip of her singing--haunts the film; even the police detective has a photographic shrine to Vicki. The film’s ironic lesson, sadly borne out in Carole’s career, is that the silver screen can accommodate the signs of beauty, but not living beauty itself.

Carole’s photographs are as breathtaking today as when she was alive; her smile radiates with all the generosity and optimism of the nation to which she gave so much. As we celebrate our national holiday on this fifty-fifth anniversary of her death, let us take a moment to remember Carole Landis, American Beauty.

Had I permission to add a photograph or two, I would add these:

The photograph on the left shows us Carole's radiant smile; it suggests her body without needing its explicit presence. There is no smile more American than Carole's; the bright eyes, the lustrous hair, the uplifted head all bespeak vigor and gentleness, abundance and generosity. The shot on the right displays Carole's famous figure, but above all it shows her joy despite all inconveniences in participating in the war effort; her lovely smile is not flirtation but sheer generosity.

6/2/2003

Busy with meetings all day (including the HOA in the evening); no time for any research or phone calls. Since  I received an eBay magazine by coincidence from Kirk Crivello of the Landis filmography and Fallen Angels, who was kind enough to give me his phone number, I will call him, hopefully tomorrow, along with Bryan Ridste who seems rather elusive.

Tonight I received a number of photographs and magazines, including a couple of early shots in a swimming pool (but are they as early as that?) and one from the Mystery Sea Raider era; also that cute Sinclair Oil ad from 1947 that shows Carole in a magician costume sawing George Brent in half; a little turnabout joke. We finally watched that "Mysteries and Scandals" segment that Jeff B. had kindly sent me. It contained little new information (it was nice to see Crivello as a preparation for our conversation) and quite a bit of disinformation, including the incredible feat of setting Carole's death back one day to July 4; one would think they could get that right. It is also stated as fact that Landis was her mother's maiden name, which in fact was Stentek, another fact widely available, and that she came to California at the age of three instead of at two or three months (and with her father, who separated from the family only in San Diego). Some nice pictures of Carole, but as the name implies, the usual scandal-oriented approach, with the innuendoes about her relationship with Zanuck, etc. Maybe she slept with Zanuck, but if she was really the "studio hooker," why didn't she have a better career with Fox? The show suggests that at some point she rejected his advances; why would she have accepted them earlier? And it also repeats the canard about her rejecting that part in Blood and Sand, although it seems clear that Mamoulian preferred Rita Hayworth, as well he might, since the role is more appropriate for her than for Carole, whether with red hair or not.

As a consolation, we watched Road Show, since Stacey had forgotten the plot--which is pretty forgettable, since it jumps from a wedding to an insane asylum to a river to a traveling circus run by Carole-Penguin Moore. I wonder where they got her name from. Watching this again makes even clearer the point that Carole owed her early film career not merely to her figure and whatever sexual activities can be imagined, but to the diversity of her talent. In this film she plays a hard-bitten circus director with flawless believability; she climbs a rope and hits the gong with the hammer, then sings a lovely song. Where are all these "talented" actresses who can sing a song, climb a rope, and give a believable acting performance at the same time? not to speak of being beautiful in the bargain. If in 1 Million BC Carole had only to look tender and run, in Turnabout she is a pampered wife, in Mystery Sea Raider, an entertainer in a dramatic role, and in Road Show a circus director. There is more variety in these few roles than in all of Bette Davis's--which doesn't mean that Carole was a "better actress" than Bette.

It seems increasingly clear to me that Carole's career problems were largely if not entirely attributable to the historical mutation of popular culture in her day; the end of the "screwball comedy" and of straightforward traditional plots lacking in historical relevance, which were the things she did best. Carole was not theatrical; she was too natural for histrionics, and it would be wasting her to make her incarnate the dark side of life when she was so naturally full of optimism and sparkle (one gentleman on the TV clip compared her to a shaken-up bottle of soda water). This naturalness was invaluable during the war in entertaining the troops; it lost its value as the fifties approached and her beauty lost something of its freshness (although this is exaggerated by the poor prints of her late British films; she looks fine, for example, in Out of the Blue, and lovelier than ever in some of those late photographs where we see the Ping Girl turning into a mature woman). The postwar era was a deconstructive one and Carole's persona was positive and life-affirming.

This is an analysis that I will have to deepen; but I think its focus is correct. Watch Road Show--do we care whether this is a B or an A picture? Most of the story is silly, but it's never offensive (unless one is particularly sensitive to the good-natured racism of the day--a different kind of offensiveness, in any case)--and it has Carole, whose freshness and simplicity was never better displayed. The V-neck crossed-front dress in light color (yellow?) with flowers is one of the loveliest that Carole ever wore; its modesty shows off her figure far better than anything more revealing could do. And her smile was never more unproblematically radiant. Watching the film one forgets for a moment the sleaze and innuendo of the TV presentation; here is the studio hooker with the unsavory reputation lighting up the screen with effortless beauty and grace. For one so corrupt to present so unspoiled an image was an acting triumph indeed.

Today there were a few messages on the GAlist from women--some of whom I know quite well--expressing their thoughts on my interest/obsession/passion for Carole. The most striking feature is their insistence on non-existence, as though death not only ended one's physical life but one's very being. If Jesus has been dead two thousand years, why is he more living than Carole? Is this how we would see ourselves in the eyes of those we ourselves leave behind, as corpses fated to rapid decay, dust in a buried box? Were that the case, why indeed weep for Carole's suicide; once dead, nothing remains to weep for. Or to claim that all I know of Carole is an image, fixed and lifeless; what then is art if Carole's beauty is but dead ink on glossy paper? There is a living woman behind the image, and we would not look on it with anything less than horror were her life not present to us. It is this we mean by immortality, not pie-in-the-sky existence in white robes among the clouds. Carole is not here to live her life, but when we look at her we live it for her. The real question is that of the look. Of thousands of images, why have I chosen to resuscitate hers? I can only answer that her image--and by this I refer not to one photograph, however beautiful, but a figure of Carole reconstructed from a hundred images and thousands of words, in her book, in magazines, letters to her fans, family reminiscences--was too full of life to pass by, a life I had never dreamt that an image of someone unknown could make me live. Not only did I never dream that a woman could be as beautiful as Carole, but I could never have dreamt of dreaming that, however beautiful a woman might be, I would find it my duty to perpetuate her.

Imagine that, as a little boy in the Bronx, having taken the subway one day to Manhattan with my mother, I was kissed by Carole Landis. Too young to articulate her sexual beauty, I would be seduced by it nonetheless, overwhelmed by the immense love and desire of this woman, a tiny spark struck, stuck in my heart forever. That this never happened is all but certain; but if I say it did, would that justify my enterprise? or would death have turned Carole even then to soulless dust?

6/3/2003

Another day when I seem to have run out of time before being able to write anything substantial, the immediate cause being that I reorganized my photographs of Carole in a new file with thumbnails since paging through 45 pictures is tedious, and this way they can all be seen at once.

I attempted a few contacts today; spoke with Kirk Crivello, who was very cordial but made it clear that he knew nothing more about Carole than what he had put in his book Fallen Angels, which is pretty limited. I called Ridste again and asked him to return my call this time, but I am beginning to doubt anything will come of this. I imagine he reacted immediately to my email and that since then he has had second thoughts, or no thoughts at all, simply a desire to avoid the whole business. It's ironic that the people who might be expected to support this project are so lukewarm about it, but I imagine the family has been burned with all the nasty things said about Carole over the years. If only I could get hold of her niece Diane Carole, but where to begin looking? I sent a couple of messages to USC (which houses the Warner archives), and having finally received Fox's permission to examine their files (kept at UCLA), I sent back the form they want me to sign.

I also bought a frame for that lovely News cover, got a copy of an article, copied some more material; I will eventually have to sit down and read it a little more closely. I find it painful to read most things about Carole, and it may well be that the publications I don't find painful to read are largely puffery.

I will have to answer the ladies whom I mentioned yesterday, and defend my project from the accusation of self-indulgence. The experience that got me into this project and keeps me going in it can be described in one word: beauty. No one is beautiful all the time, not every shot of Carole is beautiful, either in photographs or in movies: but so many variants of Carole are more beautiful than anyone, anything else I have seen. Is this enough to save Carole; is beauty really of permanent interest? I can hear so many saying that there are many beautiful women, that Monica Belluci is beautiful and who knows how many others; and always I feel the scandal that the qualitative difference of Carole's beauty goes unrecognized: what I saw in her when I didn't even know her name, when I thought she was an improved Betty Grable. Call it prejudice if you like: but then I can have no faith in my own intuitions even in the area where biology and culture have worked the hardest to refine my senses. If I can't judge a woman's beauty, what else can I be expected to judge? But even given the validity of my claim, what ethical significance does it have? Clearly Carole was an exemplary human being in everything but her love life, where giving oneself is not a wholly unselfish act. But I have not yet shown or perhaps discovered what is so important about Carole; I can understand her importance for me, and that she deserves a book sympathetic to her, and to be rescued from oblivion; but once my textual home for her has been created, and her pictures made visible to an audience we can at least stipulate as sympathetic, I will have to face the fact that just "saving" someone is ill-defined; how much fame does she require? Her pictures still sell on eBay; by how much would I raise their price? There must be some qualitative payoff to correspond with the qualitative superiority of her beauty, and its specificity is still to be defined.

6/4/2003

I seem to spend half my days at least working on this project, not always with much to show for it. Last night I spent several hours reorganizing the on-line file of Carole's photographs with thumbnails; it's counterproductive to make people to page through 45 pictures. Today I hung up the Weekly News picture of Carole in my office; it's very lovely. I spent an hour or so talking to Bobby G. about this project. Then this evening I worked on my Times submission, tightened it up; its only defect is as a theoretical analysis, since it makes virtually no allusion to the specificity of Carole's beauty. Tomorrow, having no obligations at UCLA, I will spend the day at the Academy; hopefully I'll find something new. Meanwhile, I heard from Ned C. at USC, concerning the Fox scripts they have there some of which bear Zanuck's writing.

This not to speak of time spent on eBay, etc. It would be nice to get into contact with Carole's family, to give this project an immediate human reality on which this expenditure of time could be said to be focused. But I have a feeling that such things are always disillusioning; unless some extraordinary affinity is realized, even with the best will in the world, one tends to be at cross-purposes. The strength to complete this project will have to be my own. I think I have enough material for a book already, but since it's likely to be the only one, I should try to include as much information as possible, and this only the family could supply.

It's difficult not to be able to talk about Carole's uniqueness except in guarded terms, but if the Times accepts my piece, a great step forward will have been made. (If not, well...)

6/5/2003

Today was my father's birthday; he would have been 94. For him, Carole would have been a youngster, ten years younger than he.

I revised my LA Times piece and sent it to the editor; it's an improvement over the first version, at least formally, since it avoids the split between two chronologies, one ending with Carole's wartime activities, the other going back to her film career. This way I am forced to explain why being beautiful is a handicap but in exchange I can avoid pointing fingers at Carole's "victimizers." For a victim, I think she did pretty well, both for herself and for others.

Let's hope they run this; Carole deserves a break; it's been 55 years since her death.

* * *

Who knows if this is acceptable? but writing it taught me a few things, and you have to give it your best shot. I spent the entire day at the Academy looking through Carole's old films; searching the files of her leading men produced no results. More on this later.

6/6/2003

I seem to be devoting an increasing portion of my existence to this project; hopefully not in vain. Today I purchased a little apparatus that connects a VCR to the computer, permitting the recording of video; my idea was to capture a couple of clips of Carole, such as the charming little sequence with Groucho Marx from an old radio broadcast. Carole is so spontaneous, so full of life and beauty, her every move and expression so perfectly at ease with her loveliness; I wonder whether even if she had died a natural death I wouldn't feel the same poignancy to watch her knowing such grace will not be seen again. Those 40s dresses and hairdos are those of my childhood and whether or not I ever caught a glimpse of Carole her beauty belongs to this time and its so natural and elegant image of womanhood. Were she only with us--but there is no way to bring back the past save in images, not dead, certainly, but inhabited by absence; her singing and smiling there the only substitute for absence altogether; just to think of that lovely silhouette brings tears to my eyes, like a little boy crying for a dead pet, or for that water bottle my father broke long ago, its form forever destroyed, like Carole's alas but of her we retain these lovely images, loveliness too fragile for long life in this world. If I can't save this woman from oblivion I scarcely care to live; it is not even her beauty I miss but the extraordinary strength it gave her in her vulnerability to life; she holds nothing in reserve, but generously gives herself confident of replenishment, replenishment that failed her in the end. Could I but tell her how moved I am to see her faded image on this same screen on which I type this supplement of words in homage to the irreplaceable. I sense that it is not for myself I weep but for this beautiful soul so ill remembered that my own life seems worthy only to keep alive. Why it is I have been chosen for this task is a question no longer askable, as if the products of evolution could hypothesize away their adaptive core and still remain; I would not be alive without this disposition so long latent to feel the pain that ransoms this overwhelming delight--that of hearing and then recalling Carole in her shower-cap in Road Show singing Hoagy Carmichael's "I Should Have Known You Long Ago,” a song I hadn't thought much of or about on first hearing and whose beauty I now understand, a delicate beauty like Carole's to be sung by the not very powerful but so sweet voice that gave us that once-famous sigh.

If I can but stand witness to Carole, I know I would forgo all the rest; and it is a feeling so true and yet so bizarre I cannot claim to understand it. At least were there a relative of Carole's, her favorite niece and namesake, to mourn for Carole with, as if I had a right to mourn. I have also begun a Chronicle in an attempt to explain and understand this devotion miraculously commanded by her grace.

6/7/2003

I'm not sure I'm advancing in this project by uploading images and writing emails to presumably interested parties; I do have an appointment at USC on Tuesday and Bobby has promised me the Time and Newsweek materials for this Wednesday. I read through a couple of articles before classifying them; one little segment from When the Stars Went to War seems to have taken its content from 4 Jills itself; it repeats Carole's remark that Kay Francis asked her to sing less as a criticism of her performance instead of an admonition about daily life--sign of a pretty superficial reading. The tone hardly takes Carole very seriously, and adds the usual little tidbit about Harrison, her "loss of reputation" after the war, even the story about the man breaking into her dressing room seems to be held against her, though no one explains why. In a word, another dismissal. I also confirmed that Edwin Seaver was the ghost writer for 4 Jills (he said this at a Senate hearing in 1953 investigating Communists among writers). I will look up his memoirs and see if he says anything more about this. It always seemed to me that Carole however intelligent and even well read would hardly be capable of some of the stylistic touches in the book, although I'm sure the material is really hers.

As I told Stacey in an attempt to explain why I find Carole so moving I never had very fond memories of childhood, always seeing it as a distasteful necessity while awaiting adolescence. Now even adolescence seems to have faded; I can hardly become emotional any more thinking of my walks with Beverly in 1957. But looking at Carole, the world of the 40s in which I was a child is transfigured by beauty I would not have appreciated, or at least not in the same way. Yet perhaps the greater emotion produced by that little clip with Groucho is due to the absence of overt sexuality; Carole is witty and charming, wearing a simple dress (or what looks like one) of a 40s housewife, not a glamour girl or even the overwhelming sexual beauty we see in Road Show and in so many other films. Someone who could be a younger cousin of my parents nice enough to smile and banter with a little boy. Carole makes an ironic aside pointing to the script; she screws up her mouth comically to sing the "Western" song; her contact with the spectator is total, more vital than Groucho's. Such effortless charm, this was not really part of my childhood, or not after I began school, but here it is on tape, saved "forever" from forgetting, to cry each time when it's over.

* * *

To finish I wrote to both Ridste and Frank S., telling the former I would be honored to talk with those who knew and loved Carole and the latter that he deserved credit for being the only person--I cannot yet say: "beside myself"--to devote a serious amount of time to preserving her memory. Let's hope the former is away, since no one seems to answer the phone, and that he will be as cooperative as he sounded in his first message.

I cannot avoid wondering how this project will finally be realized, what kind of publication and its impact; I have already put in hundreds of hours and I will put in thousands if necessary but still wonder if it isn't all a subjective illusion--not Carole's so genuine even frightening beauty, but my attempt to make into a public value my gratitude for it. How indeed express one's gratitude to the dead?--a term I always regret applying to Carole, because it evokes not our natural mortality, but some scandalous failure that blackens the whole existence of this woman who loved life too much to bear being like all of us betrayed by it. It really only satisfies my own desire to escape mortality, or rather it is the fulfillment of this desire, as if it were so easily to be accomplished, that would signal my success in restoring Carole to her place in history: the only woman of such beauty that the media have ever let us see, because it was felt that running like a deer or climbing a rope would distract us enough from Carole's distracting desirability to let us watch the movie. Well who cares if we watch the movie: can we remain indifferent to such beauty? or is not this feigned indifference, this sacred fright the only sacred wisdom distilled to the great public who will find any pretext to grasp the inconsequential image and sanctify it in preference to the real thing, the truly desirable object whose living subjectivity is an offense to our illusion of self-mastery.

6/8/2003

Having set up my video capture software I was able to reduce a couple of songs to under 2 MB and store them on my website, adding a page entitled Carole Sings. I hope to collect a few more, and especially to make the little clip with Groucho available; it shouldn't require a gigabyte to show three minutes of very faded B/W video. The song from Road Show is really lovely, but "I'm Crazy" from 4 Jills is a more typical Carole song. There are a couple of songs in Dance Hall and the Flame Song in A Scandal in Paris; there's also at least a piece of a song in Brass Monkey (and another piece in I wake up...; the fragments in Moon over Miami probably aren't worth recording. It's a shame Cadet Girl is unavailable. There's also a bit from Wintertime by dear old Flossie.

Awaiting further data I feel as if in suspended animation; I think my overall thesis is clear, and my vision of Carole as a person and as a public figure; my understanding of her intimate life is less clear, and would certainly benefit from some contact with her family. What I will be able to do with it all is another story. Not being much of a public figure myself, my personal encounter with Carole is unlikely to strike any sparks, except as a kind of frame for a more serious account. Perhaps I should begin looking for an agent.

One more person to write to is Robert Osborne of TCM; perhaps he would be sympathetic to my request for a series of films starring an actress generally forgotten but unforgettably beautiful. It would be nice for people to see her in something else than I wake up screaming where she is so distant from the world of the other characters. Little films like Road Show and Dance Hall show a very different Carole, one even more forgotten than she herself, remembered if at all so badly. Today a lady I wrote to concerning a misdated photograph of Carole and Bob Hope in New Guinea told me she would buy a copy of my book when it comes out. When and if. There is no doubt a certain titillation at the idea of appearing on TV to talk about Carole, appearing in the LA Times, piggy-backing on Carole's fame. But my pride is doing it for her; the only thing of myself that such publicity would show would be my devotion to Carole, in hopes that my act of witnessing would have something of a mimetic effect. There is a point at which one should not fear publicity however vulgar--what else is the reason why we still know of Carole today? How study and show respect for an entertainer without being willing to take on a vastly reduced version of her role?

I wonder how many of the few who know Carole at all know that she sang.

6/9/2003

Time keeps marching on. Tomorrow I go to USC; Bobby has promised me Time and Newsweek copies, so I can't say I'm doing nothing, yet I feel increasingly anxious that I will not be able to carry out this project in a useful manner--useful to Carole rather than to myself, but useful to Carole only if useful to myself. Glancing through one of the apparently numerous biographies of Rex Harrison--one wonders why this man's life is so significant that he merits four or five biographies--I find the usual condescending disparagement of Carole, the girl who never got very far because actresses who sleep with the producers are just kept around in small roles and then discarded... One wonders if the gentleman has seen a single film of Carole's, or even can name one. He refers to her busiest time as 1940 when it was 1941 and 42. I haven't read farther; such reading is, unfortunately, very painful because it denies my image of Carole which is quite consistent based on all I know about her and substitutes another on limited or absent evidence and yet, this is how Carole is seen when she is seen at all. There is more about Carole in biographies of Rex Harrison than in any other books; she is best known as a desperate lover and suicide. Can I really hope to correct this perception? I can tell the truth about her, and extol her qualities, but what makes her unique is her beauty, and people find it easy to make light of that.

Tonight we watched for a while Thousands Cheer, a 1943 MGM musical with Kathryn Grayson, Gene Kelly and Elinor Powell, then skipped the last hour to watch Dance Hall with Carole and Cesar Romero, her best leading man. The films inhabit two different worlds, a difference accentuated by the contrast between the digital TV image and my God-knows-how-many generation videotape. The MGM production is in color, the whole world seems to be a movie set; even when the people are talking normally the cutesy background music turns the dialogue and action into an opera; the romance and all the rest is drowned in confectioner's sugar. Kathryn Grayson has a fine voice and sings operatically, even classically at moments, or should I say semi-classically--the film is a tribute to the middlebrow. Kathryn is pretty, or at least made up to be so, and suitable for the young heroine, daughter of a colonel but romanced and surely won had we stayed to the end by a mere private, played by Kelly, whose background is the circus, a terrain not unknown to Carole, who played a circus owner/manager twice. The film is not quite aimed at children, but it has a cloying, over-full quality; we are constantly being "entertained," by the studio that gave us "That's Entertainment" after all.

Carole's film inhabits a different universe. It's shot in black and white, the sets are simple and "production values" are clearly of the low-budget variety. The dialogue and ambience are popular and cynical rather than bourgeois; this is the world of the dance hall as Road Show was that of the carnival, although this is romantic comedy without the farce. Carole is good in these hard-bitten roles, although she is given a few too many lines that express her indignation at some caddish trick of Romero's. It's almost as though the films were aimed at different social classes; the respectable small-town middle class would watch Grayson and Kelly, and the urban sophisticates from the Stork Club to more Runyonesque locales would take in Landis and Romero. The contrast between Carole's and Kathryn's singing tells the whole story: Carole is no opera singer, she sings by instinct a couple of simple, pretty love songs, not the theatrical numbers of MGM. But she is so warm and human and full of life that one doesn't care about the plot, or rather one takes in the plot as part of the festivity that her presence signals to us. Of all her films, it is perhaps in Dance Hall that Carole is most beautiful--and Carole is beautiful in the least of her films.

I have tried to claim that Carole is suitable for "festive comedy" in the old Aristophanean mode rather than the formulaic, family-focused New Comedy. This is the only kind of plot that can show her, as she is shown here, in her dazzling beauty whose impact on a high-resolution large screen I can scarcely imagine. Yet although this formula might be said to work in Road Show, whose farcical aspects (many of which don't involve Carole's presence) distract us from her, in Dance Hall she is constantly on screen, and at a certain point rather than the anticipated esthetic catharsis a certain anxiety set in. I saw her rather than her character and the end of the film becomes a loss rather than a reabsorbtion into anonymous life. I can let Kathryn Grayson walk off into the sunset with Gene Kelly and feel that all is well; but letting Carole go, even aside from the ominous metaphors, is watching beauty walk out of our life, not into its own world. Such beauty is deliciously painful to watch; but I wonder how many feel either the delight or the pain; beauty is there for all to appreciate, but it demands perhaps too much, that movement outside the story into one's own desire can be perceived and resented as an invasion, and its inspirer held responsible. Perhaps one must reach a certain age to prefer this pain to the balm of narrative satisfaction; it is at a moment when I no longer read novels that I have become susceptible to the revelation of beauty that even the best-plotted film has the potential to allow, although it almost never does, and never to the overwhelming extent it does here. As in so many of her films, the story is a fragment of her own: Carole's stage name in this film is Venus, Vénus toute entière à sa proie attachée, the most terrible of the gods, and no doubt the most resentful of those who usurp her name. In the film, Carole incarnates the goddess; in the après-film, she would be punished for it.

6/10/2003

I spent the day at USC examining the Fox script files and then Carole's Warner contracts from 1937-38, when she earned $50 per week (not a bad salary in those days) as what they called a "minor artist." There was also at the USC library a scrapbook with many movie magazine articles I had not seen, unfortunately mostly without indication of date or even of the specific magazine they were taken from. Many lovely pictures of Carole; I think Ned C. was impressed by them, although he might just have been trying to be nice. Explaining my interest in this project as the result of Carole's beauty is a hard sell, although that is the real explanation. I do think that when all is said and done the project will stand or fall on the strength less of argument than of style; how to create an equivalent in language of Carole's beauty so as to lead the reader to it. A kind of Proustian construction of the narrative self is necessary, but that model is merely a point of departure. I certainly have no interest in writing a dry scholarly tome about Carole, including an exhaustive list of whatever. Let some graduate student do that after I have aroused enough interest in her to merit a book. (Which makes me think I should check on doctoral dissertations.)

I have thought of calling it Carole: A Memoir, although that sounds a bit pretentious. But the name "Carole" has become so intimate with me that I have difficulty using her last name. If she's so little known, it isn't name recognition that will sell the book in any case.

Zanuck wanted the Vicki character in I wake up... to be "sex-loaded"--one of the most interesting revelations of the Fox script files.  He understood that this film was a "strange, bizarre story," although he didn't articulate it; one wonders to what extent he himself saw this film as telling Carole's story. If she was indeed his mistress, his reflections would be all the more interesting, although I would hardly prefer to make this assumption.

At some point in the near future, perhaps on my return from Innsbruck, I will have to give some serious thought to the overall plan of this project; it is not enough to keep a diary of it.

6/11/2003

Today among other things I found what I believe is the original reference to Carole's designation as the "studio hooker" of Darryl Zanuck: it is in Leonard Mosley's book entitled Zanuck (London: Granada, 1984). Here is the quote, as unpleasant as it is to reproduce it:

There was one period in Zanuck's daily routine which never failed to amaze [Milton] Sperling. . . "You know that Darryl was mad about women," Sperling said. . . . [E]very day at four o'clock in the afternoon some girl on the lot would visit Zanuck in his office.  The doors would be locked after she went in, no calls were taken, and for the next half hour nothing happened . . .

It was usually a starlet who was chosen for this daily assignation, and it was rarely the same one twice. The only girl who ever seems to have been called in more than once was a Fox contract feature player named Carol [sic] Landis, who was casually referred to by Sperling as "the studio hooker." (She subsequently committed suicide after her name had been linked with a star, Rex Harrison.) Otherwise, any pretty (and willing) extra was picked for the daily session. . . (242-43)

This ugly text contains gross inconsistencies. To read this, one would thing that Carole was altogether unknown, not merely by Mosely in 1984, but by Sperling himself, who can't even spell her name correctly, and who uses the word "star" to imply that Carole was at the antipodes of that status. Both these men, as the narrative makes clear, had been around since the thirties; they had lived through the war years, when Carole was one of the best-known women in the world.

There is also a curious error in logic in this passage. On the one hand, it was "rarely the same one twice." On the other "the only girl who ever seems to have been called in more than once..." This lack of regard for consistency in two consecutive sentences is revelatory. And what it reveals is rather peculiar. If Zanuck did indeed choose a different girl each time, this implies 365 girls per year. Even "willing extras" are unlikely to be so numerous. And it wasn't never but "rarely" the same one twice. But the one person of all these thousands of girls who is named and denigrated is Carole. In the one other mention of her name in this long book about Fox, in reference to I Wake up Screaming, Sperling is again the source: "[Sperling] teamed Grable with a newcomer to the studios, Victor Mature, in his first film role, and Zanuck at the last minute ordered him to find a role for Carole Landis" (247). Now Mature was far from his first role; in particular, he had made a big splash in One Million BC in 1940, along with Carole. Carole also plays an important, even dominant role in I wake up screaming. A note in Zanuck's hand in the film script is revelatory in this regard: he says that whoever plays the role of Vicki must be "sex-loaded." Whether or not he knew this from direct experience, he could not have chosen anyone better for the role. Nothing is said of her acting in Mosley's description; and Carole, who made thirteen films for Fox, disappears from the book at this point.

We will never know whether Carole was Zanuck's mistress, as is implied here, and it is just as well. But one thing that is obvious is Sperling-Mosley's animus against her: in this Hollywood world full of all kinds of sexual conduct and misconduct, Carole alone is reduced to the level of a common prostitute, who presumably prospered through this activity alone. Sperling's "studio hooker" is one of the most widely quoted descriptions of Carole; Kenneth Anger repeats it, as do biographers of Rex Harrison such as Roy Moseley (presumably no relation to Leonard). Anything to reduce this beautiful woman to a whore. Only in Hollywood is this kind of rampant sexism still the norm. But even there... I think enough dust has settled so that we no longer have to pay so much attention to all this ugliness; that people have forgotten Carole has this good side: they have forgotten the calumnies and cheap shots as well as the good deeds, and the latter are easier to resurrect than the former. Why should we be concerned with, and critical of, the sex life only of beautiful women? If Mary Astor liked to spend her afternoons with George S. Kaufman, we find that amusing, but the mere accusation of sexual activity brands Carole with the reputation of a common streetwalker. As Stacey put it, if indeed Carole was obliged to sleep with Zanuck just to get a few subpar roles with Fox, she suffered enough indignity without our having to compound it. Had she been half as beautiful, but with friends and relations in the right places, things would have surely been easier. But Carole was noticed for her looks and then obliged to defend her position with her talent. The pieces on Carole in the movie magazines inevitably emphasize her intelligence and desire for learning; she was taking French lessons, or piano lessons, or flying lessons, or even chess lessons. Of course there is an element of puffery here, but, in the first place, these assertions are true (we can find corroboration in her sister Dorothy's insistence on Carole's love for learning, the notes she took from courses of all kinds), and second, they show a sadly insistent desire to counter the common perception of someone so beautiful, that she is, to quote that infamous blurb in People magazine (from 1987: the text is in the USC collection): "curvy, blond, vulnerable and unfettered by talent."

Tonight I listened to one of Carole's Command Performance radio broadcasts, with Bob Hope, Frank Sinatra and a few others. Carole could sing, she could laugh and tell jokes with the best of them; just listening to her voice one can sense her infectious charm. Never does Carole for all her sexual attractiveness present herself in a suggestive manner; she comports herself with grace and dignity even in her cheesecake pictures. In these radio broadcasts, with their innocent jokes about her beauty, she is unfailingly delightful, as she is in that little video clip doing a broadcast with Groucho Marx.

I do think the time is ripe to re-present Carole to the world, so that others than myself can express their gratitude for showing us just how beautiful a woman can be--that a woman can combine in full measure all the attributes of desirability and make of them not pornography but beauty. It is not sexiness alone but beauty that enrages the Sperlings and the Angers; one must hasten to reduce the latter to the former, to make a lovely woman into a slut--while the real sluts, the Monroes and the Harlows, are treated with reverence and delicacy. But Carole's revenge--not that she would have called it that--is indeed her beauty. No one compares with her; no one who sees her photographs or her films can doubt that she is the supreme beauty of her and our age, the era in which an image can be photographically captured and reproduced, the age of glamour shots and reticence, not yet that of dresses open to the navel and teenybopper stars. I have nothing against our era; and were it not for Carole I would have little regret of hers. Rita Hayworth is to my mind far above either the Harlows or the Monroes; but she is not sublime, she does not push back for me the limits of beauty. Seeing Carole that day in January, in the film Zanuck picked her for, four o'clock or not, with the shrewdness that made him a legendary studio boss, was a revelation as seeing no one else has ever been; it changed my life. I owe her this project and this book for that alone, and these hundreds of hours are as nothing in recompense. The difficulty will not be in convincing people of Carole's beauty, even that she is the most beautiful of all Hollywood stars; it will be in convincing them that this matters--that America should show care and respect to our greatest American Beauty. Let us at least remember how generously Carole shared that beauty with the armed forces here and overseas--and with all of us, all the more so today when we have lost all awareness of her yet she continues to shine forth from her image, cold and lifeless now less than ever, radiant with the differential strangeness of an age just past that we love without knowing why and whose loveliness Carole better than anyone can explain.

6/12/2003

A couple of nice things said about Carole: in the Films in Review mini-bio from May 1965:

Ill-fated Jean Harlow and Marilyn Monroe have been more than adequately written about but beautiful and tragic Carole Landis has scarcely been covered at all. she was an adept actress, a witty comedienne, and as accomplished singer and dancer. and one of Hollywood's most tormented glamour girls. (323)

I'm not sure that "tormented" is quite the word for Carole, or that she was an "accomplished dancer," but this is certainly a far cry from "studio hooker," and it brings out the important but generally neglected or denied fact that Carole wasn't just a body. (In contrast, Time in her obituary notice (July 19, 1948) called her "a lovely torso, not an actress" while attributing her success to "brassiere-worship." Whatever the power of brassiere-worship, this nasty passage gives proof that shame at male desire for woman's breasts is stronger. Nihil admirari has ever been the snob's credo.)

And Rex Harrison, whose autobiography I will say something about shortly, speaks of his admiration for Carole, and even his dismissal of her acting ability is tempered by his assertion that there would have been room for her in many pictures.

Meanwhile, I'm not hearing from any of those from whom I had hoped for some support: neither from her nephew, nor from the proprietor of carolelandis.net, nor from the LA Times, whose editor has after all no particular reason to be supportive of my project.

* * *

I begin to see myself reaching the end of the research phase of this project. I've gone through Carole's files at the Academy and at USC, including Warner's; next week or shortly thereafter I will look through her Fox records at UCLA; I've already seen all her films, exclusive of early bit roles; I've acquired and ordered a good sampling of the movie magazine material; I have a collection of Time and Newsweek articles, and Bobby should get through Life one of these days and is even beginning to look at Variety; I've looked at virtually all the books mentioned in Frank S's bibliography and a few others besides. There just isn't much more material on Carole, as the passage above makes clear. And I don't want to write the kind of gossipy chronologically bound biography that I hate to read. If our knowledge of Carole's life is fragmentary, that only adds to her mystery; we never know anyone completely. What is there, and visible, and demonstrable, is her extraordinary grace and beauty, I always come back to that. Even her handwriting is graceful and beautiful. Read all the nasty slurs, the sniping innuendos--and then just look at Carole and tell me honestly if she isn't in a class by herself. Had I not seen her I would never have known how beautiful a woman can be. At the very least I can write a book that celebrates her beauty, perhaps even puts beauty back in style. Haven't we had enough of all this victimary dreariness?

I am also beginning to envision the end of this "diary" of my project. Whatever its interest, it is not a final product, and it doesn't pay to work on it as such. It would be much better to conceive the book as a whole and then to put the relevant portions of these notes into it. My great regret is not having access to anyone who knew Carole, and particularly her niece, who must have a houseful of souvenirs and memories of her wonderful aunt.

Tomorrow I will spend another day at the Academy, coming a bit closer to finishing what they have there. Then back to USC the following week to finish those Fox scripts. Perhaps the summer will be enough to finish a book on Carole; but that means I must decide before long on its format. Perhaps I should talk to a literary agent before beginning the job.

6/13/2003

I spent the day at the Academy (obtained my library card), and completed the files of Carole's films; the two British films don't have files, as I recall. I made Xerox copies of a number of pictures of Carole and they came out very well--well enough to reinforce my conviction that her beauty is simply incomparable. There are dozens of pictures of her for which words like "breathtaking" can only convey my reaction if they are taken literally, not (usually) in the physiological but in the moral sense. Carole's beauty sets up a kind of panic reaction; it is a mysterium tremendum. It does not "combine" sexiness with ethereality--the dream of the well-read chorus girl, shared by Carole but only on the practical plane of self-improvement, not that of lamentation or posturing--but blends them, or rather has never dreamt of separating them. Thus Carole can wear quasi-revealing costumes yet never be vulgar; on the contrary, the sexier she is, the more naturally she acts. In Having Wonderful Crime (watched tonight), which is a very dumb picture but in which Carole is both unbelievably beautiful and full of life and happiness--again, it is a defect of language to say "both"--Carole wears a quite revealing black lace top in the hotel lounge; since she is supposed to be a newlywed (a running joke in the film, perhaps because her husband is George Murphy) she goes around the room kissing the men and makes her patented sigh as though it is really she who is taking pleasure from the encounter. Imagine Mae West or Harlow or Monroe or anyone in these circumstances. Carole purifies sexuality, not by "subliming" it into something else, but by making it sublime. Perhaps the scandal, which strangely backfired against Carole herself, of the man who broke into her dressing room during the filming of A Scandal in Paris comes from the resentful need to accuse Carole of leading men on, of titillating their desires, when she is converting desire itself into beauty. That legendary serviceman who cries "I can't stand it" at Carole's performances expresses this conversion in comic form. He can't stand it because she is so desirable; but she has created a forum in which he can voice this desire in something other than a shameful manner. I begin to understand the hostility against Carole, the willful misunderstanding. How not to resent someone who possesses so unique a gift?

There is a point, I suppose, at which I can't care any more whether I persuade others, or rather I care, but on a lower ontological plane from my conviction. It is a curious fact, but a fact: Carole is truly in a class by herself. I was going to copy a couple of Rita Hayworth pictures to demonstrate the difference. Rita is indeed beautiful; she shares with Carole the warmth with which she expresses an adult sexuality, as most visible in her smile, which is less sublime than Carole's but generates more wattage. But her body, although certainly not unattractive, does not fulfill the promise of her face. Rita's smile is there to make you forget the body; in My Gal Sal, she wears the most gorgeous costumes and wears them well, but the costumes again take the emphasis away from the body beneath them toward an ideal body that one cannot quite desire. (In Gilda, there is a less decorative use of costume, yet even there--recall Gilda's "strip tease" which consists in removing her gloves.) Rita successfully turns the bawdy Mae West image closed on itself into a generous gift of beauty, but without complicating matters by anything like the direct provocation of desire. Whatever Zanuck's personal motivation--and I don't think he was successful for so many years by choosing his stars merely on the casting couch--he was probably right to choose Rita over Carole for the lead in this film. Carole is indeed distractingly desirable; she could play, somewhat uncomfortably, a vamp role disguised as a European in Scandal in Paris, but in an American costume drama, she would be too much the real thing to perform it. The irony that chose Rita who could not sing over Carole who could is not simply perverse; Carole's public beauty is too close to the private for her to be able to generate the context for these old songs, something Rita does with ease. It is not a lack of acting ability, but an excess of sexual beauty that is the source of this impossibility. What works in the zany contemporary atmosphere of Having Wonderful Crime--or on a military base in wartime-- would be out of place in the gayest of nineties nostalgia flicks. The carnival girl she plays is as far as she can go without cheapening herself into a purveyor of sexual sensation; it is a dry run for Scandal, with even the (rather annoying) mouche in place. Or to put it differently, Paul Dresser didn't write songs like "I'm your pinup girl." (Stacey pointed out the unflattering awkwardness of Rita's bathing costume in the seaside sequence of My Gal, in contrast with Carole's adorable outfit in that priceless little clip.)

Another truth that emerges from these files is that Carole was quite well regarded as an actress, always praised for her performances even when the films are panned (just as was the case in the Broadway flop The Lady Says Yes).  It's not her fault that looking at her gives you more pleasure than looking at the character she's playing, and in light romantic comedy the difference is not crucial. The source of all the nastiness is not altogether clear, but it has no basis in the consensus about her performances. Everyone always comments on Carole's beauty, because it is inescapable, but she was not dismissed as "a lovely torso, not an actress" during her lifetime.

* * *

When I look through the Xerox copies I have made of Academy photographs, I learn again, as if I had forgotten, the meaning of the expression "achingly beautiful," in which the adjective expresses not a contingency but a necessity of the beautiful. It is not credo quia absurdum, but a more existential reaction: we know that the very category of beauty implies this self-estrangement, yet we are surprised to experience it because we habitually see only the mimetic signs of beauty, not an object capable of regenerating our experience of it. The sublime was invented out of skepticism as to beauty's existence; one separates the sublime from the beautiful and leaves prettiness on one side and terror on the other. Once we realize that the sublime is a quality of the beautiful, we should come to expect the kind of experience that Carole provokes in us; but to await it without experiencing it directly is analogous to awaiting the first occasion of sexual pleasure; or better put to await that petite madeleine that will empower us to open up the world. Having seen Carole, I know what beauty is.

6/14/2003

Today I added a few more audio clips to the Carole Sings page, including the video with Groucho; I haven't yet found a tool that will reduce even this three-minute clip to downloadable proportions. We looked at the beginning of Wintertime and I copied the little song she signs with Cesar Romero ("I Like it Here" by Nacio Herb Brown), which is mostly a vehicle for Woody Herman's band. Flossy Fouchere is Carole's most demeaning role, although she plays it convincingly enough.

Perhaps I don't really care for ideas at all, but for the kind of literary writing that Carole inspires. Her beauty is the objective correlative that guarantees from without my enterprise, my petite madeleine or is it my paving-stone whose movement signals the time to begin my magnum opus. But is this opus really without ideas? Forgetting beauty (another possible title, that would put the emphasis on what people have said or not said about Carole rather than on Carole herself, a possible tactic, surely, although at first glance self-defeating, since it implies that she is less interesting in herself than in her posthumous non-existence) is a historical phenomenon, a part of postmodernity, linked to the refusal of the center. Carole is my call to performance, my reminder that we are in a new millennium, one marked even by a lucid patriotism. And thus a return, why not, from deconstruction to incarnation, a concept that Carole better than anyone incarnates, as the person who best exemplifies the marriage of matter and spirit.

The scandal of Carole which is also but another proof of her sublimity is that this most beautiful of all women came from a simple background, never went to college, never thought herself superior to others--none of which is in the profile of the "golden girl" a la Grace Kelly, for example, whose sluttishness, incidentally, is mentioned but never becomes reason for contempt. Incarnation belongs to humble backgrounds. But who would have thought that emerging from a humble background Carole would never be a snob (if we forgive her her "glamour girl" defensive posture, which is not snobbery in any case, but an honest attempt to come to grips with her needs, something she could never do in real life).

There is always a reason in revelation that one discovers afterward, the originary moment being an opening to its discovery rather than the discovery itself. This revelation to me is that of the positive basis of desire, our mortal limitations as spirit, the need to get on with it before time swallows us up of which a woman's beauty is so exquisite a reminder. Carole, you will have your vindication; you will not be forgotten, relatives or no, I am your guardian now. I will make you the symbol of our new age, of desire with neither shame nor shamelessness, of finitude accepted as the sole foundation of the appreciation of the infinite. If Carole is the accomplishment of finitude, then death is worth the price.

6/15/2003

Today I had little time to devote to this project, beyond scanning a couple of photographs. This evening we watched and recorded Gilda (1946), Rita Hayworth's most striking performance and the one I had in the past spoken of as inventing a new approach to screen sexuality, the seduction not merely of the characters in the story but of the camera. Rita can be said to have invented modern sexiness with this film, and given its evolution in the following generation (Marilyn Monroe and her clones), one might wish she hadn't. Gilda was a lush production (albeit in black and white, film noir style) that solidified Rita's status as the "goddess" of the 40s, at a moment when Carole was appearing in silly low-budget films like Having Wonderful Crime--in which she nevertheless gives a wonderful performance, all her own.

I would not begrudge Rita her greater success. Carole's career was tragic in that the vehicles that would have ensured her success no longer existed; Carole is not a vamp, her beauty has nothing to hide. It is interesting to watch Rita now that I have seen Carole; it may sound silly, but the first time around I saw her as the high point of on-screen sexual beauty. Nor was I wrong, in the sense that Carole's beauty is for the screen both too powerful and too intimate. Rita has an overpowering smile that seems to concentrate within it all the energy in the scene. And she knows how to move in a provocative manner, as several dance scenes show, most notably the famous "strip-tease" where she takes off ... her gloves. Rita's exhibitionism is insisted on even to the detriment of the plot; she is constantly attempting to create scandal in order to free herself from her marriage(s), after which we learn from the deus ex machina policeman that it was all an act. Could Carole have played such a role? not credibly. Sexy as she is, or as she appears, Rita doesn't have a body that responds, like Carole's, to the desires her seductive antics arouse. Carole looks so good in clothes because you are sure that she would look good without them; in Rita's case, the costume makes you forget, either a little, as in Gilda, or a lot, as in My Gal Sal, about the body beneath it. Bosom aside--for this is a category in which Hollywood had, and probably still has, no competition for Carole--Rita's body displays distinct front and rear surfaces where Carole's is round. Both women were fairly tall for the era at 5' 6" (Carole is sometimes listed at 5' 5 1/2" or 5 3/4") but Rita is so much wider that she makes Carole look almost slight. No, I would not begrudge Rita Hayworth her success or deny her beauty. But watching her only confirms my belief that Carole is the only actress in whom the outward signs of beauty conceal no possibility of disillusion.

Carole's whole career was defined by the war, which, we tend to forget, did not begin on December 7, 1941--her third feature film in 1940, Mystery Sea Raider, was a war film. The war was the moment of truth in sexual advertising; there was no time for seduction, death was nearby. But as Carole discovered, even in war, Hollywood could not really accommodate her; as soon as she could, she began performing in military bases, singing and sighing for the GIs who deserved this contact with a woman who could dress chastely yet still have nothing to hide. It is one of those little ironies that Cadet Girl, which contains near the end footage taken on a military base that repeats a real Carole performance there, where she sings in uniform "I'll Settle for You," just the kind of song she must have performed a thousand times to military audiences, is unavailable elsewhere than the UCLA Film Archives. In this film it is her soldier-fiancée who returns to West Point (why she couldn't just wait for him to graduate is one of those plot flaws that B producers haven't the energy or the budget to fix), but as the military song shows, it is Carole who far more significantly departs the world of civilian entertainment for the military. Two films later, My Gal Sal certainly showed Carole her place in the civilian scheme of things.

It is good to see and admire Rita Hayworth, yet to be confirmed in my conviction that there is a sublime beauty that only Carole attains. Another way to see the contrast is to recall Rita's "victory" over Carole in the casting of Blood and Sand, and the title I proposed to the Times: "Remembering an American Beauty." Rita was born in New York, but her father was Spanish and she reflected this heritage, which certainly suited her more for Sangre y Arena than Carole. In Gilda, Rita plays an American in Buenos Aires, but one can be forgiven for finding her at home in Argentina. At one point she says a few words in Spanish, and we perceive she speaks the language as a native. The vamp is not an American persona; Carole's vamp role in A Scandal in Paris, however charmingly acted, is never really convincing. Carole's beauty is celebratory; she belongs on a float at the Fourth of July parade. Carole, who twice performed, trembling with a schoolgirl's awe, for the Queen of England, was the closest we have come to a Queen of our own--the only one we need, our American Beauty.

6/16/2003

Since I leave tomorrow for Innsbruck this will be my last entry here for a while; a good moment to take stock. One thing I have learned in this project is that there is no one out there who knew Carole or was closely connected to her who has made it his or her business to keep on top of developments such as my project, which is after all 5th in Google under Carole Landis. Nor can I count on any help from Mr. Ridste or from Frank S. either. I have my little Carole support group, but no one with any independent knowledge of Carole has gotten involved; Jeff B. and Bill sending me copies of videos, along with a few helpful librarians, are my only benefactors. It's hard for me to put myself in the place of a relative of someone like Carole; on one hand, she is a source of pride, on the other, her death was a scandal and one can't help reading some of the more scurrilous things said about her; perhaps one would want to put her and those who attempt to revive her out of one's mind.

To revive her... My actions in putting Carole's photographs and songs on the Internet could be said to be motivated by a desperate and chimerical desire to revive her through my efforts. What communion is possible with the dead? There is an obstacle of infinite sadness to any successful completion of this project: Carole will never return; as her secretary said so poignantly, we will never see "our lovely lovely Carole" again, or hear her "throaty, velvety" voice. Evidently. But as I get increasingly used to seeing her alive, I find the idea of her death harder to bear.

Tonight we watched The Brass Monkey, in part because it contains a singing sequence, crudely interrupted so as to ruin the recording of the song--something not done for the performances of the British entertainers in the film. No doubt Carole herself didn't insist that her song not be interrupted. In any case, a sad way to go out, making supposedly desperate attempts to escape and falling down, then being caught; the direction of this film is abominable, in particular the direction of her. The plot is outlandish and merely sketched in as a pretext for a couple of vaudeville numbers; Carole's final explanation of her crimes would be more understandable coming from someone who caught the criminal rather than the criminal herself. But what matter; we already know that Carole's filmography is not by itself a guarantee of survival.

Which brings it all back to me, Carole's self-appointed "guarantee of survival." Let us hope I can let her be remembered for her unique qualities and not for the nasty clichés that are still spread around about her, as the only kind of "legitimate" target for the kind of locker-room sexism that has by now been driven out of polite society. There is still a chance my piece will appear in the Times, against many chances that it won't.  That small piece of publicity would make all the difference in the world to the rest of my Carole operation.

6/22/2003

After four days at Innsbruck, I am resuming these entries. I had thought I'd have a Chronicle on the subject of Carole's place in esthetic history but writing about Carole in a less informal setting is difficult. I wrote about 5-600 words on the plane as a draft of the introduction, but I don't think I have quite the tone to appeal intelligently to the general public. As for the title American Beauty, it's been used for various things, although that's not necessarily an obstacle.

On the plane back, I tried writing a little introduction (about 500 wds) but was not successful in getting the right tone; it can't be too personal nor too rhetorical (nor above all too sentimental). The style I think works best is more lyrical, but that can't serve as an introduction to a "practical" book. Perhaps there is no solution to the problem of reconciling my needs with that of the general public--nothing new there. Or perhaps a more daring format is required, making greater use of illustrations, perhaps with commentary. There should be a new stage in this project: now that the formal researches are reaching the point of diminishing returns, I should have a clearer idea of how to proceed. What I fear is winding up with a little femme et oeuvre that won't be interesting and, even if published by some university press, won't do anything much for Carole either. More on this subsequently.

* * *

We watched the 1937 A Star is Born because Carole is supposed to be "Girl in Beret Seated at Santa Anita Bar." But this girl is hardly visible and then only for a few seconds; the only thing you can see is the beret, so that Carole's description as such is a function of the utter triviality of her role rather than, as one might think, the opposite.

6/23/2003

On the basis of a suggestion from Bill, who has returned from his travels, I asked Bobby to make a list of people on the IMDb that Carole worked with; I will try to contact those still alive. Discussing the project with Stacey it appeared I should divide it in two: the serious intellectual project should be separated from the lyric element which is at times present here and can be retained in a second work analogous to "Making ... " films about the making of "real" films. Even the vaguest perspective of such a work would allow me to eliminate personal effusions from the primary project. Carole will stand or fall on the strength of this project; knowing this should keep me disciplined. The idea that I am building Carole a nest of words should not be taken to imply that I should inhabit the nest with her.

This gives me a much better idea of how to write the book; I will need more patience doing research before I can actually begin writing. There is just too much material I haven't seen--not to speak of Carole's family, whose absence might discredit the project altogether. I went through Orion and Melvyl and chose a little bibliography about beauty; I will have to follow this up with some readings on "glamour" in Hollywood, and perhaps a study of the place of starlets more scholarly than Fallen Angels.

Tonight I read an article received through ILL entitled "Meet the New Landis" published in 1943, just after her marriage to Tommy Wallace. There are two themes in this article: war and marriage. Carole presents her position in both areas persuasively and reflectively, but hindsight tells us how divergent her judgment is in these cases; all the tragedy is there. Carole tells movingly of the awareness brought to her by the war that the soldiers and their experiences are more important than Hollywood stardom, criticizing the "old Landis" as someone who would do anything to succeed. (I can't help wondering to what extent this applies to the Zanuck situation. Is the very fact of saying so openly that she would do anything to please the bosses a sign that she did nothing unmentionable, or an indirect confession of it? More probably the latter, but she deserves the benefit of the doubt--this is someone who spoke openly about visiting her escorts' homes to observe the quality of their taste!

The conversion into a woman no longer passionately ambitious and even willing to renounce her career altogether is not simply attributed, as we might expect, to her marriage; the latter seems rather the effect of her experience of war and of her duty to the soldiers. She specifically mentions keeping up her appearance no longer for her own sake but for that of the soldiers whom her presence consoles. This awareness of the role of female beauty in men's lives is certainly to her credit. But if all the soldiers fighting for their country and for the liberty of the peoples of the world are heroes more important than Hollywood stars, there is one in particular she is thinking of, and of whose aerial exploits she is proud. She recounts their meeting in terms similar to those of 4 Jills; some of the language is identical. She mentions their common Californian background and similar age as advantages, although she had written scarcely two years earlier that she would only marry and older man for security, knowledge, and, as we can surmise, money. One cannot doubt her absolute sincerity in this, yet of course we know what happened to this, as to all her marriages. There is clearly more to it than bad luck. Two years later, she will be explaining how despite loving her husband she had married a "stranger." Each marriage after her youthful ones to Wheeler and Hunt represented a new attempt at equilibrium, and there were probably a few love affairs in between that may have represented others. But her gift of self-persuasion always seemed to make her miss some essential factor. Although everything I know about her makes it difficult to understand how any man could tire of marriage to Carole, the contradictions between her desire to subordinate her career and her desires to her husband's and her attachment to this career must have given rise, in these men of the 40s, to a sense of betrayal. We see this in the scenes she describes with Tommy in New York, his refusal to stay at her classy hotel, to accept her professional needs, and despite his war record, his sense of being overshadowed by her.

So sad that as Carole's goodness found expression her life became more unhappy; one almost wishes she had remained focused on her ambition, for even then it's hard to believe she was ever ungenerous. Her passion to give of herself left nothing behind, not even her life; her sister understood this.

There are still many details I do not know about her life and career, but I think I understand both Carole and her circumstances, and beyond that, her place in history. Or should I say that, as a result of my labors, she will at last acquire a place in history, that story from which her role has been unfairly written out.

6/24/2003

Alas, the LA Times turned down my little Carole article; not enough argument. Perhaps it will fit into the Calendar section; Nick G. isn't going to give me the address of the entertainment section, so I'll have to find it on my own. Meanwhile I acquired on eBay a 16 mm copy of A Gentleman at Heart. My intention is to give it to the Film Archives in exchange for an extra VHS tape for my personal use.

At the same time, I received a message from Chris M. who wished me the talent of a Saul Bellow to tell the story of an old professor who discovers the meaning of beauty; I have never liked Bellow, but I do sound like one of his characters, which is another way of calling myself a failure, since novels are written about failures, tragic or otherwise, not successes. The core of Chris's idea isn't far from Stacey's, however: separate the literary and scientific aspects of the project. There's probably a market for neither. Does anyone care about an old man's sentiments? They don't even care about Carole, whose beauty they can't help acknowledging.

All this on a day in which I spent a little under five hours going through the Fox legal files on Carole. Not many revelations: Carole had a record contract in 1941; she was on many radio shows; she turned down a part from Fox in 1946; Fox did indeed drop her option; she did a couple of weeks of vaudeville in 1943; Fox and Roach quarreled for a year and a half over her contract. Perhaps there is more interesting data in the individual film files, although it's probably pretty similar. Tomorrow I visit USC again for the remaining scripts and the scrapbook. One can't say I'm not devoting enough time to this project; it's not clear whether I will succeed in writing something to justify it, even as a personal homage to Carole.

I think after another email or so I'll just give up dealing with Ridste; either they're away somewhere and don't get the messages, which strikes me as highly unlikely, or they're screening their calls and screening me out. Something tells me that Ridste will never answer emails or phone calls; but who knows what the problem is. Where to get a hold of Carole's niece is another matter.

I'll end on this: today I received the 7/13/40 Life with the Ping girl article, the launching of Carole's stardom.

6/25/2003

Another day in the archives; the remainder of the Fox scripts contained no new revelations. I had hoped that there would be something in the Blood & Sand file to clear up the mystery of whether Carole turned down the part voluntarily. Perhaps the UCLA legal files have some data, which means I'll have to ask Fox for another permission. At USC I found a few books not at UCLA, including a scurrilous work entitled Did She or Didn't She, which purports to reveal the sexual lives of the stars. Perhaps needless to say, it slanders Carole in the vilest manner, stating as fact not only that she was a call-girl in San Francisco but that she "repeatedly" prostituted herself to "Warner and Fox executives" for better roles. I always thought that prostitutes got paid for their work; but Carole was apparently such a slut (the "studio hooker" line) that she "prostituted herself" on spec, even to executives of a company she last worked for at $50 a week in 1938. There is no law against this sort of character assassination when it's directed to a dead actress with no one to defend her name. There are a few nice things about her out there, however; I was just looking at the Fabulous Forgotten Forties' Femmes Fatales site, which says under Carole's name: "No doubt about the first name on this list." Right on!

I also looked through a few other books at USC, but realize I'll have to go systematically through every book about Hollywood since there's no bibliography other than Frank S's. I did check out/reserve some works about beauty, even a volume on "the breast." It does appear that it was around 1939 that bosoms began to be emphasized in Miss America contests--certainly an interesting fact. The war is the obvious cause of this; in wartime, there is at least a market for the real thing as opposed to the usual flim-flam. The scrapbook wasn't there because its owner is repairing it; it would be nice to get in touch with her, since she's a Carole fan from way back.

I should probably stop feeling that I'm not doing enough on this project and do a little real writing; this isn't quite the same thing. This evening I scanned and uploaded about 15 more photographs, bringing my collection to 80. I was surprised to see that the Fabulous Forgotten author, who is also a champion poker player (!), has put together a collection of Carole photographs, some of which he may even have copied from me, and some I'll certainly copy from him. There are still troves of information about Carole out there. If only I could get in touch with her niece; perhaps I should make an effort to look up the two Ross boys, Walter and Billy, even if Ross is an extremely common name. I will send Ridste one more email and that will be it.

* * *

This is the ultimate expression of desire: the image is always present but the reality is gone not even conceivably to return. The more I feel I know Carole the more I mourn her absence. Not merely writing but communicating to the world about her would be solace of sorts; the soul survives in the communications we have about its owner. In this sense Carole will survive as long as I'm around. I think I understand why Carole arouses such emotions in me; what is harder to explain is how this need could have remained undiscovered so long--but the need was merely an absence that became a need when someone became available to fill it. It is that revelation that keeps me going, long after I have ceased to regard that one photograph as transcendent even with respect to Carole herself.

6/26/2003

Some encouraging signs of interest in Carole: Bill pointed out a Yahoo group on Carole that seems to have taken a few photographs from my site. The more shots of Carole on line the better. Perhaps Carole’s time has come, as I have been trying to say here: this is a moment of patriotism and positive valuation of national solidarity, and what could be more symbolic of the nation than our American Beauty. In some of these photographs Carole is just incredibly beautiful; it’s hard to find words to describe the sense of fulfillment she projects. As I wrote to Bill earlier, after a lifetime always being more or less disappointed in "beautiful" women, to find one who does not disappoint is a proof that the world is adequate to our desires; transcendence is here in our fellow humans--is this not the Christian message? This is certainly not that abjection of the Other we are always being asked to respond to. Why not the beauty of the Other? We’re all beautiful "in our own way," but in order to see that, we should begin with Carole, who is beautiful in every way.

The only communion possible is with others who appreciate her; she will live on in our conversation. This is the time to write a book about her, and I’d do well to hurry before someone else has a similar idea. The book I’d like to write, needless to say, would not have to be concerned with competition because it would be personal yet universal. I wish I could be writing that book now instead of these tentative notes. I would think that the objective work should precede the subjective; perhaps this is something to think about.

I received three Interlibrary Loan books about beauty, none of which even mentions Carole; if they understood anything about beauty, they would use Carole as their frontispiece. But no, it’s always the bigger stars, beautiful or not, who are "beautiful" and therefore worthy of mention in such publications. One even prints a poster of Moon over Miami showing Betty Grable; Carole’s only presence in the book is on the bottom line of the poster. Just today I received a portrait of Carole leaning on a bed (?), that no other woman comes close to. There is such a need to express enthusiasm in superlative terms, as though the existence of another woman as beautiful would cheapen the effect. Yet there she is, incomparable because when you see her, you have no desire to make comparisons, to think of how her beauty could be improved (the importance of a full bosom in this regard cannot be overestimated).

Before we leave for KC, we should go to Forest Lawn and put some flowers on Carole’s grave to commemorate her death. I hope that by next year at this time I will have something more substantive--or more spiritual--to offer Carole than a bouquet of flowers.

6/28/2003

I was too tired to add anything to this file last night; I was working on an "apologia" that attempts to develop the reasoning behind this project. Yesterday I spent the afternoon at the Academy going through Carole's photographs trying to find the best ones to develop as stills and/or copy. There are many faces of Carole, most beautiful, a few less than so, especially a few late shots where her mouth surrounded by dark lipstick seems to take over her face. I fear I will never know much about Carole's sentiments beyond her interviews for movie magazines; no correspondence and no family contact. I will send BR a final message but there's no point calling and calling. They have set their phone to answer on the second ring, which means they don't answer it at all; whether this has anything to do with me is unlikely. All I know is that he answered my first message, so the presumption is that he could answer the others but has decided not to do so.

Any book about Carole will be necessarily fragmentary. I can tease meaning out of various pieces of evidence, but there's so little outside of periodicals; she doesn't even seem to have made it into people's memoirs, aside from Rex Harrison of course. I always like to think I am inventing new genres, new ideas, when in reality I'm just expressing my adolescent disappointment with those that exist. Never having written a real biography, I'm not likely to do a great job with this one, but at least it raises some interesting issues and helps keep this lovely woman's memory alive. Tomorrow I will return to Forest Lawn to put some flowers on her grave before July 4.

6/29/2003

Today I visited Carole's grave at Forest Lawn, brushed away a little dust, and left a bouquet of flowers I made up in Chinatown with Michael Z. and his friend Rachel, red, white, and blue carnations for the 4th of July. I'd rather commemorate Carole's last day on earth than her death. I took some photos and sent one to her nephew with a message that I hope (but don't expect) will persuade him to take an interest in my project.

I am working on an apologia to explain my interest in Carole, but I'm not sure I can do so as a generative anthropologist who knows "one big thing." It's true that GA is about singularity, but how does one persuade people of the significance of Carole's singular role in Hollywood, in the history of beauty? The general view of her, scurrilous accusations aside, is that she was "tragic" because she was inconsistent in her aims, "a lovely torso, not an actress," whose protests of being treated as a "curvaceous cutie" were mere publicity stunts, and her marriages certainly show an almost pathological impulsiveness. My view of her gives her a consistency that others have never seen, and makes her into a truly tragic figure, but I may well be accused of creating Carole rather than studying her.

This does not explain, of course, what is "originary" about Carole. But let us say, for the sake of argument, that Carole's beauty is emblematic (how to define this term precisely?) of liberal democracy in its moment of greatest danger; that it was eclipsed during the postmodern era because beauty is too centralizing in an era of decentralization; and that it should be able to make its comeback now that 9/11 has convinced us that our system has no alternatives and must be defended against the nihilistic forces of resentment. What does this mean in concrete terms? That we can reinforce our love for liberal democracy by looking at pictures of Carole? I may claim to do this, but I don't think many will go along. They might, however, be willing to buy a book if only to look at the pictures. Yet even if millions look at pictures of Carole, the link between her beauty and the evolution of culture is not likely to convince them.

Thus the question comes back to the original one: just how historically significant is Carole, really? If she alone turned sexual attractiveness into real beauty, what has been the result? Why has no one stopped to notice her unique beauty that in retrospect only seems to serve as a transitional moment between the sluts of the thirties and those of the fifties? A unique moment of truth surrounded by falsehoods? But beauty "is its own excuse for being"; it needs no historical justification, but rather provides one. Carole's unique public beauty, which adds no fakery to private beauty, is the esthetic touchstone of the greatness of her age, not in some kind of chronological contest, but as an eternal moment that her beauty itself arrests in time.

An eternal moment that is the reorigination of the world. A model, therefore, of the central role of revelation in all our lives--in life. If desire is born on a scene that focuses it on a sacred center, then it is susceptible of returning to a similarly stable scene rather than floating mimetically from one mediator to another. Carole may bear the signs of the Hollywood glamour industry, but we don't look at her because of whatever mediations that industry may be said to have exercised. We look at her because she is beautiful, and an imaginary scene forms between the looker and the looked that restores the center to its structuring power. To neglect Carole is to posit a cynical universe of eternal disappointment, a disenchanted world, the vision of consumer society we so often hear. But if Carole is the genuine article, then there is reason to hope for a world adequate to our desires, not a utopia but simply a world where beauty is possible, making death "less bitter, less inglorious, perhaps even less probable."

6/30/2003

The first half of the year is over; it is hard to believe that when it began, I knew nothing of Carole Landis.

Chris M.'s comments on yesterday's entry suggest that I am on the right track. Here is another consideration. Popular culture is about comforting popular resentments. Yet if we limit ourselves to this definition we will miss what is most valuable in popular culture, which is its ability to transcend its instrumental aims.

Carole's greatness and failure in Hollywood can be understood in terms of class stereotypes. Writing on the day of Katherine Hepburn's death, I am all too aware of her privileged background and how it is reflected in her on-screen behavior. America has never had an aristocracy, but there is a boot-licking side to popular culture here as elsewhere; one identifies with the upper class in order to feel superior to one's neighbors. Carole came from a modest background, hence she was expected to incarnate the vulgarity of her class, in particular, in her sexual behavior and morality. But Carole had a natural refinement and love of beauty that is evident in nearly every image of her. Her home was tastefully decorated with lovely things (over 800 items at her estate sale in 1949). Her clothing is always tasteful, except in some obligatory cheesecake shots, and even then, she is never vulgar. This is what is so admirable about Carole: in the best American fashion, she transcended her origins without ever denying them, remained close to her family, always treated others as equals, caring for her beauty as her gift to them. And the gift was accepted by those who came in contact with it. Yet the popular imagination, in the long run, could make no use of it; popular resentment wants girls like Carole to be tramps, not ladies; the ladies should come from better circles.

And so Carole's career was less successful than it might have been; but consider to the credit of Hollywood that her example could survive to inspire me and those whom I can reach to tell of it. True beauty is not bound by social stereotypes, and Carole's example shows that it is incompatible with typecasting of any kind. One way of describing the uniqueness of Carole's beauty is to call it "classless": it cannot be associated with any predefined social group. If Carole identified herself as a "glamour girl" it is because this is by nature a classless status, as she alone may have grasped. The very contradictions of her thought and action reflect the impossibility of living this status: on the one hand, the glamour girl's need for refinement requires her to choose as escorts only wealthy, cultivated, older men; on the other, her universal reciprocity with others makes her typically fall in love with men who are far from fitting this description. But the agony of Carole's love life is never apparent in the image she presents to the world; she soldiers through these insoluble contradictions (and the calumnies to which they give rise among the envious) as if she realizes that they alone can preserve her beauty in all its amazing purity.

It is the greatness of America that its very vulgarity can be a nourishing milieu for beauty neither aristocratic nor popular that could not possibly flourish elsewhere. It is sad and exhilarating--a pairing I have used elsewhere in this connection--to find Carole's American beauty all but forgotten and to have been granted the opportunity to be dazzled by it and consequently to attempt to understand it.

It is my mission to give Carole the last word as against those who patronized and insulted her. Their highest achievements are bound to a time and to a milieu; Carole's beauty is universal. There is but one glamour girl whose image still makes people gasp, and will always make them gasp, driven as if by a higher will to sacrifice a moment of earthly life for a glimpse of paradise.

July 2003

Eric Gans / gans@humnet.ucla.edu
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