Carole

During the last week of January 2003 I had an experience that changed my life in ways still incalculable, albeit not wholly involuntary. As is our wont, despite the many reasons to the contrary--books to read, books to write--my wife and I watched on Turner Classic Movies I Wake up Screaming, a 1941 production starring Victor Mature and Betty Grable. Also in the film, one Carole Landis, a suicide, described by the ineffable Rex Harrison as no actress but a beautiful girl. As the film began, I was struck by a powerfully yet elusively beautiful Grable, remarking that her features were far more delicate than I recalled. When Grable’s sister appeared somewhat later in the film, my first reaction was that Carole would have had good reason to commit suicide had beauty been her only claim to livelihood. But then I realized that I had the two sisters of the film reversed.

Enthralled by this woman whose long, full-bosomed body possessed an unemphatic grace unavailable to the touted beauties of the screen, I sought a image of her on the Internet, often my source of wisdom and sometimes salvation, and found the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.

This photograph at scarcely more than thumbnail resolution brought to my eyes the taste of Proust’s fictive madeleine. There entered into me the knowledge, fictitious perhaps yet uniquely real, that this image held the truth of the biological and cultural conglomerate I call myself. It seemed to me that, discoverer of the origin of language though I may be, I had been sent into the world, for over sixty years unknowingly, to witness the beauty of Carole Landis and to rescue her from what the French call untranslatably, oblivion connoting rather a bottomless pit beyond forgetting, l’oubli.

* * *

Writing this now gives me a pleasure I have experienced in the past only in those moments of writing poetry for the one I love, most recently and in greatest volume to my wife. I would not write poetry for Carole, she not being alive to read it but above all needing from me not the expression of desire or idolatry but what alone the love of a fellow-creature can give beyond death: a true appreciation of her worth.

The hedgehog who dares to claim, if only to himself, to have raised up the riddle of human origin to a new level, the Bronx romantic infatuated with modes long abandoned, embarrassed less by the reader’s anticipated reaction than by the sad promiscuity of a life led and lost in Hollywood’s no-man’s-land--no man, so many men--between starlet and star, obliges himself to tell the story of Carole whom I strangely feel I know and the sight and awareness of whom, as Proust says of the petite phrase and her companions in art, makes death seem to me less bitter, less ignoble, in some far-off sense less probable.

Sadness and pride, presence and absence, the exquisite equilibrium of art yet more than art make of this portrait the most beautiful of images, beautiful in a way no longer possible or necessary, beauty for all to see, yet for me alone to witness, to make from its light a new trace that the world may now acknowledge--or yet ignore, because such beauty in our world fulfills no purpose. Unavowable in the nascent postmodernity that condemned Carole, beauty has never ceased to move us to desire and beyond; in our postmillennial age it can reemerge and, as Raoul Eshelman might say, perform itself in the screen stars of our day, more beautiful than those of the past, than all but she. For the renewed sublime today’s beauties inherit, like the one God of all particular to the Jews, was first hers and so of necessity less in them than in her. Today's invented and performed sublime can only point to the exiguous moment of history when the vulgar Hollywood display of leg-art, pin-up, cheese-cake attained sublimity by freely offering itself as the gift of one who transfigured this freedom to sublimity by renouncing it.

A character in a drama not our own, ritual rather than fictive, Carole turns her face from the camera while leaving it fully exposed; the sadness and pride of her expression balance on the razor’s edge of this unique instant when its mortal sharpness is no metaphor. Her eyes wide open, she offers her bosom’s sweet generosity (Carole four times married died childless). The line of her hips suggests her long, graceful legs; the fold of the dress, the discreet core of her sexuality. The dress itself, the golden hair, whose gaudiness she bears with proud humility, are the trappings of royal sacrifice--the princess offering herself, the ultimate gift.

Although the madeleine’s taste remain, its revelation fades do we not grasp it. What of world-history have we here?

* * *

I will learn if I must in libraries and archives dear Carole’s sad fate. For now I tell what I know now--this beauty was a pure gift of love for life at its last crucial battle with death.

How many movie actresses, aided or not, have published a book before the age of twenty-five? A memoir of the War before the war was even over? Carole’s 4 Jills in a Jeep is, as she tells us in the preface, based on the diary she kept during what she calls "five wonderful months of my destiny." This book indeed contains her destiny. It rings too sincere to be doubted in its narrative, whose external facts are all well attested. Carole gives us her self through her self-image when embedded in a chosen world that gives value to her and her actions, all acts of generosity.

Carole is wholly typical of her time yet unique in the way she assumes this typicality. At the outset she insists on her desire to participate in the war effort even before Pearl Harbor brought the US into the war. She took flying lessons in hopes of joining a British women’s squadron. Greater even than her patriotism is her desire to serve in any capacity, not preferentially that in which her service was given, in entertaining the boys. For Carole was a singer before she was an actress, and she went abroad not to act but to sing.

Throughout the book, Carole is constantly impatient; but the impatience is never to get but to give. She is impatient to be chosen for a tour, impatient to begin it, impatient for her planes to take off. Impatient as well to marry the husband of her third failed marriage, the object of a coup de foudre to which experience should by this time have made her immune. The story of her marriage in England hours before her departure for a tour of duty in North Africa is, like that of the book as a whole, of which the encounter and marriage form the narrative armature, gay and uncomplicated, and only retrospectively pathetic. The final episode of the chapter begins, words too poignant for words from the pen of one who would take her own life less than five years later, "This story has nothing but happy endings" (179).

In the course of the narrative, Carole has appendicitis and other digestive ailments, if not yet the malaria and dysentery she would catch on her later trip to the Pacific. Even for someone in the prime of life, she acts with ominous improvidence. She leaves nothing for a rainy day; her life is tactics without strategy. She revels in her ability to persuade and overwhelm until she gets her way, but the way she gets is to give still more than if she had not, the beautiful princess battling to sacrifice herself so that the bell might ring more pure.

The mystery of Carole that I have not yet, will perhaps never solve, is her inability to maintain a genuine love-relationship. We have to believe in her love-at-first-sight romance, but its happy ending lasted but a few months. The failure of love in someone whose gravestone inscription speaks not of her beauty but of her love, graciousness, and kindness is a mystery that sustains the more personal mystery of my own sense of kinship with this woman I know only as a bygone celebrity. I see her body crumpled on the floor and something tells me that I can, even now, protect her from herself--this absurdity holds meaning, could I unravel it.

Beneath serenely raised eyebrows, her perfect eyes draw me into them, making me weaker and stronger. This is the beauty of a unique moment that I am privileged to recapture. The war gave glamour photography ethical legitimacy--Carole’s beauty, a gift to the boys, took itself out of commerce. But the war is over, the gift can no longer be given. To show herself is to prostitute herself to our regard, yet in showing herself she hides herself. Sadness and pride, presence and absence, all is reflected in those beautiful eyes that look away into nothingness.

A photograph in Life magazine shows Carole looking on as Cecil B. de Mille gives blood for the war effort, herself a donor, curious to give her substance to her countrymen.

I have so much yet to learn about you, Carole, and about myself as one humbly drawn to you by the media, this sacrifice of cultural identity gladly offered to you whom I know as I know myself, but only through their mediation. You will never know me, I will ever know you, yet what is love but unresented asymmetry? This one moment of revelation reconciles me with celebrity, to which I sacrifice so much less than you.

One pure moment of beauty revealed to me across six decades--lost time I would regain. My own greatest gift to the world would be to reveal to it that revelation. However well I understand our human origin, something in you speaks to me of my own, the origin of a certain originary thought. I will learn everything about you, Carole, and more than that, I will make the world remember you, who have returned me to my memory.

Is the purpose of this lesson to teach me the limits of indifference? I cannot denounce what your sublimity owes the imitation of the world’s desire. It is you who free me by your look from the infernal circle. Only in this vulgar context could you guarantee my pledge. You are not mine but the world’s and I proudly and arduously recall you in the constant reassurance that you and therefore I exist. Here at the beginning, you will be there at the end, however long my task.

Carole’s command performance:

How could one not wish to preserve forever this modest instant of happiness, blessed by a queen, leading thousands far from home in a song of someone’s native land? The end of this happiness is the sadness by which your beauty becomes sublime.

Language is the tool of consecration; every name a name of God. Through you I consecrate my lost beginnings. Un seul être vous manque, et tout est repeuplé. I recall the happy moments of my childhood without affect. My mother teaching me to read in father’s wing armchair, visits to museum dinosaurs, I vaguely remember but no emotion accompanies them. It is seeing your photograph in Life that is precious in that dead past.

If I imagine Carole in my world at all, it is not as lover or wife, but as an older sister I would have loved and admired and protected from herself.

We live in a performatist age; Carole is my performance.

What guarantees these ephemera is you, your beauty and what it stands for. Should people read this, however unworthy, for your sake, I will have triumphed, not in myself but in my cause.

The Foreword tells us how, dining at the Stork Club in New York, an officer had given Carole a copy of a standard-issue soldier’s diary.

No narcissist could have written these lines. Carole is eager to identify with the servicemen to whom her book is dedicated. Her book is that of a movie star who humbly invests her status in her service and whose writing seeks only to inform us of this investment. Her only book reveals beyond her possibility of knowledge that these would indeed be the "wonderful months of her destiny." All the tinsel glory of Hollywood is suddenly cashed in beyond the nexus of the market, in the pleasure these shows gave to the "boys." During these "wonderful" months, Carole came down with appendicitis and underwent all kinds of inconveniences, which only made them, and Carole herself, all the more wonderful. Reading these pages, one begins to understand why there has never been, can never be again, a beauty equal to hers.

This inauguration is preceded by a more frivolous introit:

This is followed directly by the anecdote of the diary in which Carole inscribes her name.

Several things are of interest in this passage. It is the only allusion in the book to Carole’s celebrity status independent of her war role; the only mention of her name in newspaper headlines; the only allusion to her public, as opposed to her immediate, desirability. ("Distractingly desirable" a 1940 Life article had called her.) When in the course of the main narrative she comes to her stay at the Savoy, this incident is not alluded to. Instead, she narrates the onset of the reciprocal love-at-first-sight romance that culminated in her second marriage.

Thus once the Foreword has established her extra-narrative celebrity, her asymmetrical relationship with the rest of the world, the story itself insists on the symmetry of desire that drove her, considered for the moment as a character in her story, to what was subsequently revealed to be an ill-considered marriage.

We should read this book as Carole’s Recherche du temps perdu. This was the wonder-moment of her life, romance the happy ending of her story, and this passage from hierarchy to symmetry, the sacrifice that gave value to the efforts that had brought her fame, that had transformed her from a beautiful girl into a desirable star.

In the course of the book, Carole meets someone from home:

This is the only mention in the book--the book that is her life--of Carole’s family and her pre-celebrity life. In her forgetting of Jerry we first see evidence of the repression of this life, but the final explanation is not that Carole has changed or been changed too much to recognize someone from her past, but that it is he who has been aged by an experience of evil incommensurate with her Hollywood tribulations. Thus his request that the "girls" come over to his camp--a request immediately acceded to, although his camp was twenty miles away and the lodging consisted of a pup tent with a straw floor--is not phrased as a tribute to celebrity but as the most generic desire possible, that of seeing a woman of his own race. When indeed Carole describes the ensuing performance:

she presents herself and her comrades as trying to look like something they already were but presumptively were not, while secure in their success in giving the boys a treat merely as "white women."