"It was kind of sad because she was lonesome. Judy would come out wearing her one little black cocktail dress and a pair of little earrings with pearls..."

"... and she would make shepherd’s pie because she liked it. It was comforting. We would have dinner and then we would watch 'The Ed Sullivan Show,' which was on before her show. And if she didn’t like the way someone performed, she didn’t mind telling you!"

Said Bob Mackie about Judy Garland, quoted in "Bob Mackie notoriously created Cher’s look— but he didn’t always like it: 'Don’t tell anyone'" (NY Post).

Mackie also designed for Tina Turner "She was just amazing and funny and if she hated something she told you immediately."

Is this typical of great singers, that they blurt it right out what they don't like? Judy "didn’t mind telling you" and Tina "told you immediately."

"Just found out i’m not hot. Please give me and my family space to grieve privately and uglily at this time."

Said Sarah Sherman, quoted in "'SNL' star Sarah Sherman has hilarious response to TikToker who said the show has never hired a ‘hot woman'" (CNN).

The quote became quotable by Althouse blog standards with the use of the word "uglily." I note that it is difficult to say, it draws attention to itself — if you ever happen to say it — and it contains — in defiance of ugliness — a word that expresses loveliness, "lily."

Here's the TikTok Sherman is responding to. It's a lot meatier than the headline makes it sound:

I've curated 5 TikToks for you this evening. Some people love them.

1. "Alexa! Play Rosemary Clooney!"

2. "Don't cry if you don't want me to laugh."

3. A tribute to the "Apparently" kid.

4. Random kid drama becomes a song.

5. The amazing human capacity to run — explained, while running.

"Cotton Mather called them 'The Hidden Ones.' They never preached or sat in a deacon’s bench. Nor did they vote or attend Harvard."

"Neither, because they were virtuous women, did they question God or the magistrates. They prayed secretly, read the Bible through at least once a year, and went to hear the minister preach even when it snowed. Hoping for an eternal crown, they never asked to be remembered on earth. And they haven’t been. Well-behaved women seldom make history; against Antinomians and witches, these pious matrons have had little chance at all."

That's from "Vertuous Women Found: New England Ministerial Literature, 1668-1735," a 1976 article by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, a professor of Early American history at Harvard. I'm reading that at Professor Buzzkill because I wanted to know the source of the line I put in boldface, which is a pretty common feminist slogan.

Some people think that quote originated with Marilyn Monroe (or one of many others), but no, it was Laurel Thatcher Ulrich.

Anyway, the old saying popped into my head when I saw that title of a new NYT op-ed, "The Unruly Heirs of Sarah Palin" by Rosie Gray. Let's read:

"With a libretto written by... first-time opera makers, the show has Rousselle largely mumbling, rather than singing. Her mumbles are then translated..."

"... for the audience using supertitles.... Despite the opera’s central character being named Blake, 'the only reason people are going to see this is because of Kurt Cobain’s celebrity,' [said a Cobain biographer].... The idea for making 'Last Days' also had little to do with Cobain as a person, said [Oliver] Leith, the Royal Opera House’s composer-in-residence.... [Agathe Rousselle, who plays the Cobain character] best known for starring in the horror movie 'Titane' as a woman sexually attracted to cars, said... [s]he was bullied at school and one day one of the school’s popular girls threw a CD of Nirvana’s 'Nevermind' at her, sneering, 'That’s the kind of thing you weirdo would listen to,' Rousselle recalled. When she got home, she immediately played it. 'I lost my mind to it,' she said.... [Rousselle] said the opera was not about Cobain, but bigger issues like how 'becoming a myth will kill you' and 'the absurdity of being famous and wanting to disappear when you’re recognizable to pretty much everyone.' The opera could have been made about Amy Winehouse or Janis Joplin and still made the same points, she added."

From "A Kurt Cobain Opera Examines the Myth, Not the Man/The creators of 'Last Days,' an eagerly anticipated opera about a grunge star’s final days, insist it’s really about how society treats its icons" (NYT).

"On the one hand we have the blandest pap imaginable — superhero movies and Adele — and on the other we have Netflix and its mindless death porn...."

"It feels, actually, as if we’re going backwards. The playful cheesecake Marilyn of the 1950s — a confected blonde bimbo that this film clearly despises — seems infinitely preferable to the Marilyn of 70 years later: a haggard, weeping cipher and shivering perma-victim who is obsessed with the contents of her womb. In an attempt to 'explain' Marilyn, the makers have simply created another pathetic object: a woman who spends the entire film either naked or in tears, or both.... She can barely touch a drink without getting wasted; barely get in a car without crashing it.... Is this where victim culture has led us.... Schoolgirls are told that they ought to be crippled by their periods. Female celebrities scramble to be defined by menopause, the horrors of pregnancy or, even better, miscarriage. On podcasts, in interviews and in articles otherwise intelligent, capable women moan about their lives collapsing, or being unable to cope with even the tiniest sliver of adversity: they are all like Marilyn on a date with DiMaggio at a perfectly nice restaurant: 'I’m afraid of some of the people here.' Marilyn had more power when she was a plain sex object, giggling on the cover of Playboy." 

Writes Camilla Long, in "Every generation has its own Marilyn. Our one gets drugged and raped. Thanks, Netflix" (London Times).

"I think that since it’s told in this first-person perspective, it works somehow for the film to be a traumatic experience."

"Because you’re inside of her – her journey and her longings and her isolation – amidst all of this adulation... [W]hether it’s an extreme depiction or not – it’s honoring the extreme chasm between the public’s perception of the fame and the glory of Hollywood’s most famous, iconic actor, and the reality of that individual – the loneliness and emptiness and mental turmoil and abuse of that individual."

Said Adrien Brody, who plays Arthur Miller in the new Netflix movie about Marilyn Monroe.

Quoted in "Adrien Brody says ‘Blonde’ is ‘fearless filmmaking,’ meant to be a ‘traumatic experience’" (NY Post).

I wonder how Arthur Miller is depicted. 

"A writer friend shared with me the bound galley of his latest book-to-be, and I pointed out to him that his passing reference to barbecued chicken ribs at a picnic..."

"... was surely meant to be barbecued chicken wings. Not (entirely) displeased with my catch, he introduced me to his production editor — the person in a publishing house in charge of hiring copy editors and proofreaders.... In my early days, I would sulk in my office with the door closed if I found out that one of my books included a typo. A sentence referring to 'geneology' once sent me into a blue funk for hours.... I’m occasionally asked whether I can make my way through the world without shivering under the constant bombardment of typos.... [O]nce, watching the movie 'My Week With Marilyn,' I elbowed my husband sharply in the ribs over a prescription bottle, visible on a night table for approximately a second and a half, whose label read 'Tunial' instead of 'Tuinal.' 'I think it must hurt sometimes to live in your brain,' my husband has said on occasion, not unkindly. But, as he also notes, in a kind of nursery rhyme mantra, 'Your strengths are your weaknesses, your weaknesses are your strengths.'"

From "My Life in Error/A copy editor recounts his obsession with perfection" by Benjamin Dreyer, the copy chief of Random House (NYT).

I don't want to send Dreyer into a blue funk, but if I were writing an essay that had the line "passing reference to barbecued chicken ribs," I would not also have "elbowed my husband sharply in the ribs." It's a repetition of a distinctive image — ribs — for no recognizable reason. That's a language mistake. Make it your husband's arm. You're in a movie theater. It was more likely his arm that you elbowed anyway, wasn't it? You just liked "ribs," but your feeling of liking it came, I'll bet, from having seen it so recently.

And here's the Wikipedia entry for Tuinal, a Eli Lilly sleeping pill introduced in the late 1940s and now discontinued:

"I was surprised. Yeah. I thought we’d colored inside the lines. But I think if you’ve got a bunch of men and women in a boardroom talking about sexual behavior..."

"... maybe the men are going to be worried about what the women think. It’s just a weird time. It’s not like depictions of happy sexuality. It’s depictions of situations that are ambiguous. And Americans are really strange when it comes to sexual behavior, don’t you think? I don’t know why. They make more porn than anyone else in the world."

Said Andrew Dominik, the director of a new movie based on the Joyce Carol Oates novel that is based on the story of Marilyn Monroe. He's quoted in "Ana de Armas Confused by ‘Blonde’ NC-17 Rating: Other Films Are ‘More Explicit’ and ‘Have More Sexual Content’" (Variety).

The dress was dangerous then and it's dangerous — in a newly fussy way — now.

Kim Kardashian's decision to wear Marilyn Monroe's iconic "Happy Birthday, Mr. President" gown to the #MetGala has conservators, curators and fashion historians baffled and worried that the incident sets a dangerous precedent.

Here's why. https://t.co/kVIjfJZqI0

— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) May 4, 2022

From the L.A. Times article:

"I don't have a bunch of shit about what happened, so if you came to hear that, I had like a whole show I wrote before this weekend."

"And I'm still kind of processing what happened, so at some point I'll talk about that shit. And it'll be serious and it'll be funny, but right now I'm going to tell some jokes."

Said Chris Rock last night, as he took the stage for his show at Boston's Wilbur Theater, CNN reports.

He said absolutely nothing more than the bare minimum. It was just on with the show. That's what he did on the Oscars stage too: On with the show.

"On with the show" is an old show business slogan. It's old-timey, so maybe you don't remember it. If you try to Google it, you'll get a first page full of Mottley Crue links. I know there's a way to exclude a term from the search, but I've forgotten how to do it and I've got the distracting prior question whether I need to use those fake umlauts. I see it's a Rolling Stones title too.

Ah, but there is another version of the slogan that gets me to a nice TV Tropes article: "The Show Must Go On":

[I]n live entertainment, the show must go on at all costs... This forces the characters into crazy improvisations, costume changes, awkward stealth to avoid further disrupting the show and any number of disparate things to keep the show going. It must also be remembered that for live entertainers, not only is it about making sure people get their money's worth or ensuring a production continues, performing is something they've dedicated their lives to. It's not something they do, it's who they are, and it's a point of professional pride that no matter what, the show must go on....

Ethel said it best (words by Irving Berlin): 

 

And here's the crazy, over-the-top finale, with Marilyn: 

"[T]he movie version of 'Breakfast at Tiffany’s,' while certainly beloved, isn’t nearly as interesting to any Capote fan as the novel..."

"... in which the author’s voice comes through (and where the character was imagined as more of an 'unfinished' type, à la Marilyn Monroe, whom he wanted for the role). Capote was disappointed by the casting of Audrey Hepburn; ergo, clips from the movie actually misrepresent his vision."

From "'Truman & Tennessee: An Intimate Conversation' Review: An Imagined Tête-à-Tête Between Capote and Williams/Director Lisa Immordino Vreeland uses the friendship between two icons as a leaping-off point for an affectionate if somewhat forced dual portrait" (Variety).

I watched 2/3 of that documentary last night and stopped only because of streaming problems (which I attribute to my internet service, AT&T, not to the streaming service, Criterion Channel).

 

In that trailer, Capote, at 1:12, says "Here is a man who has devoted his whole life to art and is a genius" and then, at 1:28, "Most people think because somebody is a creative individual, they must be intelligent. It is not so. Like Tennessee Williams."

"Omit," "skip."

Annotations by Marilyn Monroe, in the margins of a Jewish prayer book, described in the saddest religion story of the day, "Jewish prayer book annotated by Marilyn Monroe, who converted in 1956, could fetch thousands in auction" (WaPo).

The high school official told the 17-year-girl to "stand up and move around" so she could see if her nipples were still showing...

... and then offered her 4 adhesive bandages to X out her nipples. The girl, Lizzy Martinez, had left off wearing her bra that day because a sunburn (we're told) made the bra unusually uncomfortable.

From the NYT, "Is Your Body Appropriate to Wear to School?":

“She told me, ‘I’m thinking of ways I could fix this for you. She said, ‘I was a heavier girl and I have all the tricks up my sleeve,’” Ms. Martinez said....

The incident happened two weeks ago — Ms. Martinez’s initial tweet about the incident went viral — but the backlash is still going strong. On Monday, Ms. Martinez and some of her classmates held a silent protest in support of “the destigmitization of natural bodies.” Despite threats of disciplinary action, about 30 female students opted not to wear bras, and a number of students decorated their backpacks with Band-Aids in the shape of an X. One student wore a shirt that read, “Do my ni**ples offend you?” (The asterisks were hers.)...

In the case of Ms. Martinez, for example, the school is “foisting this notion that unrestrained breasts are sexual and likely to cause disruption and distract other students,” [said lawprof Meredith Harbach]. But this kind of messaging that targets young women — your skirt is too short, you look too sexy, you’re distracting the boys — “deflects any and all conversation about appropriate mutually respectful behavior in schools between boys and girls... Who is disrupted actually? It’s Lizzy. Whose learning experience is impacted?.... It doesn’t sound like other kids had a major disruption, but she sure did.”...

Meanwhile, women whose nipples don't show are getting injections to produce those "Kendall Jenner" bumps because they love the look. This amusing video was in the NY Post recently:

Female privilege.

Happy birthday, @KatyPerry! It’s time to bring out the big balloons! pic.twitter.com/w84DMphK3V

— Ellen DeGeneres (@TheEllenShow) October 25, 2017

ADDED: You might think: Katy Perry is not objecting, but what can she do but keep smiling and show herself to be a good sport? She can't improvise, and she can't step on Ellen's effort at comic performance. Ellen is the comedian. She's the comedian with a show, a media outlet to the fans. You can shut that door if you choose, but what's the motivation?

Katy Perry clearly wants her breasts to be noticed and admired — or at least she's decided to use them as devices to further her career. So why would she complain (as long as Ellen doesn't become a target of #MeTooism)?

Ellen is clowning in a style that reminds me of Jerry Lewis, so I went looking for a photo of Jerry Lewis staring at a woman's breasts. I couldn't find one, but I did find this example of Jerry doing the complete opposite of staring at a woman's breasts:

"There are many pornographers, but what, within the realm of pornography, earns you a substantial obituary in The New York Times?"

"Some day we'll see how they treat Hugh Hefner, who made pornography clean, commercial and classy, but today we read about the death of Al Goldstein: '... The manifesto in Screw’s debut issue in 1968 was... 'We promise never to ink out a pubic hair or chalk out an organ...'... Apart from Screw, Mr. Goldstein’s most notorious creation was Al Goldstein himself, a cartoonishly vituperative amalgam of borscht belt comic, free-range social critic and sex-obsessed loser.... ' In later years, it became impossible to get famous for being a loud sleazy guy with a magazine, and the idea of anyone 'inking' out pubic hair seems mostly puzzling...."

So I wrote back in 2013, and now the day has come when I can read the substantial obituary for Hugh Hefner in the NYT. I've already written 2 posts, the first 2 of the day, on the death of the gargantuan cultural icon Hugh Hefner. Let me then, at long last, get to the NYT obituary:

Hefner the man and Playboy the brand were inseparable. Both advertised themselves as emblems of the sexual revolution, an escape from American priggishness and wider social intolerance. Both were derided over the years — as vulgar, as adolescent, as exploitative, and finally as anachronistic. But Mr. Hefner was a stunning success from his emergence in the early 1950s. His timing was perfect.

He was compared to Jay Gatsby, Citizen Kane and Walt Disney, but Mr. Hefner was his own production. He repeatedly likened his life to a romantic movie; it starred an ageless sophisticate in silk pajamas and smoking jacket, hosting a never-ending party for famous and fascinating people.

The first issue of Playboy was published in 1953, when Mr. Hefner was 27 years old, a new father married to, by his account, the first woman he had slept with.

He had only recently moved out of his parents’ house and left his job at Children’s Activities magazine. But in an editorial in Playboy’s inaugural issue, the young publisher purveyed another life:

“We enjoy mixing up cocktails and an hors d’oeuvre or two, putting a little mood music on the phonograph and inviting in a female acquaintance for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex.”

A boy's fantasy of adulthood and sophistication.

Mr. Hefner began excoriating American puritanism at a time when doctors refused contraceptives to single women and the Hollywood production code dictated separate beds for married couples. As the cartoonist Jules Feiffer, an early Playboy contributor, saw the 1950s, “People wore tight little gray flannel suits and went to their tight little jobs. You couldn’t talk politically.... You couldn’t use obscenities. What Playboy represented was the beginning of a break from all that.”...

In “The Playboy Philosophy,” a mix of libertarian and libertine arguments that Mr. Hefner wrote in 25 installments starting in 1962, his message was simple: Society was to blame. His causes — abortion rights, decriminalization of marijuana and, most important, the repeal of 19th-century sex laws — were daring at the time. Ten years later, they would be unexceptional.

“Hefner won,” Mr. Gitlin said in a 2015 interview. “The prevailing values in the country now, for all the conservative backlash, are essentially libertarian, and that basically was what the Playboy Philosophy was. It’s laissez-faire. It’s anti-censorship. It’s consumerist: Let the buyer rule. It’s hedonistic. In the longer run, Hugh Hefner’s significance is as a salesman of the libertarian ideal.”

Born in 1926, he was raised "with a lot of repression" by Methodists, but he found his way through drawing comics, first as a child, in high school (where he "'I reinvented myself' as the suave, breezy 'Hef,"  and in college as the editor of the humor magazine. He came up with Playboy as "a vehicle for his slightly randy cartoons."

What did his cartoons like like? I found this (click to enlarge and read ("This is me, dreaming about women in general!"))

More here.

The NYT devotes the mid-section of the obituary to the feminist challenge. Gloria Steinem did undercover research as a "bunny" in the Playboy Club in 1963 and discovered that it's hard work, the outfits are uncomfortable, and the customers are (as the Times puts it) "vulgar."

Another feminist critic, Susan Brownmiller, debating Mr. Hefner on a television talk show, asserted, “The role that you have selected for women is degrading to women because you choose to see women as sex objects, not as full human beings.” She continued: “The day you’re willing to come out here with a cottontail attached to your rear end. …”

Mr. Hefner responded in 1970 by ordering an article on the activists then called “women’s libbers.” In an internal memo, he wrote: “These chicks are our natural enemy. What I want is a devastating piece that takes the militant feminists apart. They are unalterably opposed to the romantic boy-girl society that Playboy promotes.”

The commissioned article, by Morton Hunt, ran with the headline “Up Against the Wall, Male Chauvinist Pig.” (The same issue contained an interview with William F. Buckley Jr., fiction by Isaac Bashevis Singer and an article by a prominent critic of the Vietnam War, Senator Vance Hartke of Indiana.)

Mr. Hefner said later that he was perplexed by feminists’ apparent rejection of the message he had set forth in the Playboy Philosophy. “We are in the process of acquiring a new moral maturity and honesty,” he wrote in one installment, “in which man’s body, mind and soul are in harmony rather than in conflict.” Of Americans’ fright of anything “unsuitable for children,” he said, “Instead of raising children in an adult world, with adult tastes, interests and opinions prevailing, we prefer to live much of our lives in a make-believe children’s world.”

The 3 quoted sentences from that internal memo are fascinating. The first 2 talk tough, calling for a hard fight, but the third one makes an argument that belongs in a sweet, soft fight: The feminists want to say that we're alienating men and women — with domineering men and oppressed, insignificant women — but we're the ones who are for "the romantic boy-girl society." What do women want? A lot of us love the ideal of a romantic boy-girl society. It's interesting that Hef wrote "boy-girl" and yet later publicly talked about the "adult world" and rising above the "make-believe children’s world."

Marilyn Monroe appears twice in the obit, first as the nude model in the first issue of Playboy and second as the long dead body in a mausoleum next to which the newly dead body of Hugh Hefner will lie.

"But it's different with girls, don't you think?"

The shimmy, part 2.

Earlier today, I raised the question whether that shoulder thing that Hillary Clinton did during the debate...



... is properly called the shimmy. I took the position that what makes that shoulder shake a shimmy is if you're doing it to jiggle your breasts.

In the comments, MayBee said: "Yes! That's why it was so creepy!"

Tim in vermont said: "She sort of reminds me of Ursula in The Little Mermaid as she sang 'Poor deplorable souls'":



EDH linked to a "Gilligan's Island" clip of Ginger singing "I Want to Be "Loved by You" and asks: "If Hillary is Ginger, does that make Trump MaryAnn? If so, Trump wins." But I just want to say Ginger only wishes she could shimmy like her sister Marilyn:



She couldn't aspire to anything higher... than the presidency!

Noton Yalife and Earnest Prole both say: "That's a Bingo!"

"Trump is like a Karass Negotiation Class that's run wild."

Writes Tom, fascinatingly, in the comments to the first post of the day (the one about what Rush said about Trump's complicated relationship to conservatism).

I'm sorry to see that there really is something called a Karrass negotiation seminar. 2 "r"s there, but I think that's what Tom meant. "Karass" in my book — which is "Cat's Cradle" — is "A group of people linked in a cosmically significant manner, even when superficial links are not evident."

I don't know how you could take a class or negotiate about that, but I loved the idea of Trump as a man finding his Karass.

Kurt Vonnegut wrote:

"If you find your life tangled up with somebody else's life for no very logical reasons," writes Bokonon, "that person may be a member of your karass." At another point in The Books of Bokonon he tells us, "Man created the checkerboard; God created the karass." By that he means that a karass ignores national, institutional, occupational, familial, and class boundaries. It is as free form as an amoeba."

One time we talked about this blog that way:

matthew said...
So are the readers here a karass, or is this blog just one giant granfalloon?
12/14/08, 11:25 AM

Ann Althouse said...
Clearly, a karass!
12/14/08, 1:11 PM

BJM said...
The internets are a granfalloon; blog Althouse a karass.
12/14/08, 5:15 PM

I love the idea of speaking and, by speaking, causing kindred souls to assemble. But does it make sense to think about Trump that way? It resonated for me, because I think there's some unusual variety to who responds to Trump. MSM may hope to brand Trumpions as the uneducated and unintelligent. But something more complicated is going on, and — as I said yesterday in a Bloggingheads episode that isn't up quite yet — there's a coming "cascade" of support for Trump when people feel liberated to reveal their affiliation — or, as I'm seeing this morning, their membership in the karass. I know, misreading, but it's that cascade that came to mind when Tom spoke of running wild.

Things read too early in the morning: "John Kasich Won the Debate."

I'm up hours before dawn and trying to close the tabs I left open last night, when my last post flagged Camille Paglia's denouncement of Taylor Swift as an "obnoxious Nazi Barbie" and "a scary flashback to the fascist blondes" from some period in the past Paglia identifies only as her "youth." Paglia was born in 1947, so I'm not sure what fascist blonde left that mark. Marilyn? Tippi Hedren?

Loose lobbing of the facist/Nazi epithet seems especially lame right now after all its use against Donald Trump. Google Trump is a Nazi or Trump is a fascist and you'll get 40+ million hits for Nazi — including "5 Ways Donald Trump Perfectly Mirrors Hitler's Rise To Power" (Cracked) and "Donald Trump has gone full blown Nazi on us" (Daily News) — and just under 2 million hits for fascist — including "I asked 5 fascism experts whether Donald Trump is a fascist. Here's what they said" (Vox) and "Trump May Be a Loudmouthed Demagogue, but Is He a Fascist?" (Foreign Policy).

Completing last night's post, I wanted to know what Camille Paglia thinks of Donald Trump — Nazi? Fascist? I found "Why Does Camille Paglia Love Donald Trump?/Because she's basically the Donald Trump of feminism" and that was enough for nighttime blogging. (By the way, have you noticed how many people seem to love Donald Trump out of a weird sense that they somehow are Donald Trump?)

This morning, clicking out the tabs of yesterday, I can't let go of the ludicrous "John Kasich Won the Debate" (dated August 7, 2015). Remember that debate? Here's how my readers polled:



What I remember about Kasich in that debate is that when Megyn Kelly asked whether each candidate had "received a word from God on what they should do and take care of first," Kasich answered "Well, Megyn, my father was a mailman...."

So, now, why did Camille Paglia think Kasich won? Paglia largely opined on manhood: "Why do Jeb's smiles remind me of a dimply grandmother?...There's something too baby-like about [Chris Christie]....  [Marco Rubio] seems caught in a time warp of self-stunted maturation.... [Rand Paul was] like a petulant schoolboy.... [Ted Cruz has] an almost womanly face... [Scott Walker is] like a pleasant sitcom dad...." Ah, but Jon Kasich!

His brusque, animated gestures are awkward but manlike in a solid, old-fashioned way. Kasich is a genuine populist with working-class family ties. He made the Princeton-educated Cruz look effete tonight. Kasich was full of specifics about his congressional experience on the armed services and budget committees. I think he won the debate. Kasich is a mensch in a party of parakeets.

He won through manlikeness.

As for parakeets, here's a man in India who feeds 4,000 parakeets a day:



"Like how people keep parakeets in the cage, now the birds have put me in a cage."