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Carole
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Carole
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8/1/2003
Last day at the office before our trip to France; I looked at a few books in the Arts library. The only interesting revelation was in a book on the Secret [i.e., homosexual] Life of Tyrone Power, where the author claims that Darryl Zanuck wanted... Jane Russell for the famous part in Blood and Sand, and even cites the figure of $35,000 a week! I'd like to see his documentation. Ah, the wonderful world of film "scholarship." I think I'll claim in my book that the person he really wanted for the role was Gloria Swanson... at $50,000 a week.
I also received some nice photos of Carole; my photo collection is now at 182. And I started, perhaps a bit late, a bibliography that adds to Frank S's the books where I have found some additional information, usually not very much of it. When I come back from France, I'll work on this a bit more, and fix up my file of copies of book pages.
The months go by and my enthusiasm for Carole does not diminish; if her beauty no longer surprises me, it reassures me. As I was saying to Stacey today, a propos of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, which we both consider in another league from Ford's other films, the miracle of popular culture is that one finds occasional masterpieces, such as Seinfeld, in a cultural context that can't really tell the difference between a masterpiece and a "quality" deployment of vulgar clichés, such as Frasier or Friends. Carole is such a masterpiece of feminine beauty in a world of Harlows and Monroes--with no reflection on their acting skills or lack of same. But where Seinfeld and Liberty Valance are distinguished, even if insufficiently, in their respective domains, Carole is scarcely remembered. Beauty is bad box office; Hedda said it, and she ought to know.
8/2/2003
I went back to the office and copied the relevant materials from Seaman's book on Susann and two Harrison tomes. I am sure no one in Hollywood was ever spoken of as disrespectfully as Carole. The revenge for her sexual attractiveness is to reduce her to it. Everyone else in Hollywood is gaily screwing around, but only Carole is defined exclusively by her sex life, with sexual favors her sole asset. At least Rex never speaks of her this way.
Tonight we watched Johnny Eager (1941) with Robert Taylor and Lana Turner. I found it a most useful experience. The film in which I first saw Carole was also from 1941; she and Lana were practically contemporaries (Lana was born in 1920, Carole just a year earlier). One can see in this film, in many respects a turgid melodrama of the sort that we associate with Lana (but never with Carole), the elements of what made for the former's success at the box office, not to speak of the scandal sheets. Lana plays a college girl (a "sociology student") who falls in love with gangster Taylor. She has a certain poise and elegance, and a slightly breathy way of speaking that anticipates MM. She embodies a troubling ambivalence between innocence and experience, with more than a hint of perversity, that makes her able to play the role of an adolescent in love, a role Carole, who married at 15, could never have played convincingly. Lana is pretty and well-built but far from beautiful; her face is rather coarse, yet her natural poise allows her to avoid vulgarity. Her sexiness is not Carole's overwhelming adult sexual beauty but what Halliwell perceptively calls the "promise of promiscuity"; it is the sexiness of the virgin on the make. This seductiveness, which anticipates once again that of the "child-woman" MM, allows the spectator to situate it within the actress/character's personal history and so to disculpate himself of the desire it arouses in him. This desire is absorbed into the narration, where it provides a supplement and guarantee to the mimetic effect of the male character's own desire. The passage from innocence to experience is, after all, the very basis of narrative, and this passage is typically, if not inevitably, situated at the character's sexual initiation, the passage from childhood to adulthood. Because Carole has "always already" made this transition, her beauty stands outside the narrative and not only "distracts" the spectator from the story but cheats him of vicarious participation, generating a resentment that is the psychological basis for her otherwise inexplicable denigration. In other terms, Carole's "story" does not merely exceed that of the film, it rivals it. Carole herself, with her passion for being seen in public with different men, contributed to this mimetic conflict. Lana's life, which received ten times as much publicity in the movie magazines, and no doubt elsewhere, as Carole's, was cut from a different cloth. Where Carole's marriage to Willis Hunt and her other social and/or sexual affairs of 1940-42 were imprinted with the stamp of comic frivolity, Lana's marriages were "tragic," the public being incited to hang on each one's success in finishing off Lana's adolescent transition.
8/3/2003
[continues previous entry] Thus Lana incarnates the crisis of adolescence. More specifically than the "promise of promiscuity," it is the promise of defloration that she enacts for us. Carole has nothing to do with adolescence. She is always already a woman; it is difficult to imagine her in any moment of painful transition, and impossible to conceive its dramatization. When we read the accounts she provided, on enough different occasions to allow us to see them as her own version of an initiation narrative, of the beginnings of her show-business career, whether in the Bay area or in Hollywood, or even in the stage incidents she recounts at ages six and twelve, the only transitional moment is that in which she grasps the necessity of action and acts, even unprepared. Her subsequent apprenticeship, always a catching-up of knowledge with will, is not loss of innocence but gain of the experience necessary to accomplish her goal. In a little piece for American Magazine entitled "The Man Upstairs," Carole thanks a young man who taught her the dance steps she needed for her chorus assignment at Warners. The metaphor is unmistakable: God is wherever there is charity freely given. Initiation is not painful but providential.
Thus Carole's "failure" in films is really the same phenomenon as her classification as a "liberated" woman, with its unsavory connotations in her time. For her concept of initiation is not something she invented for herself; it has at its base the typical masculine attitude--yet with a particular twist that comes from her being a woman after all, one whose professional ambitions are by no means independent of her gender. Carole defines herself in the first place with respect to her career, but there is always in her notion of "career" if not a preponderance then at least a large portion of being, and of being seen as being, as opposed to doing. This female professionalism that denies those who witness it the tale of defloration inspires in retribution a near-obsessive resentful association of Carole with "the oldest profession." Sperling's "studio hooker" may be the source of many other calumnies of this sort, but already in 1938, Busby Berkeley's mother is said to have given credence to rumors that Carole had been a call girl in San Francisco. Despite all the sexual shenanigans of the Hollywood set, Carole is the only woman to be consistently referred to in this manner, as though her disdain for the narrative of virginity and its loss necessarily reflected a purely instrumental view of female sexuality that puts her beyond the respectable pale. Thus it is that sympathy is lavished on those whose sex lives, however sordid, are accompanied by a condign sense of degradation, in contrast with Carole's "brazen" refusal to treat the loss of virginity as the turning point of her existence.
8/6/2003
While on the plane to France, I looked through
Walker's text on Rex H, where Carole is depicted, with
a condescension more disagreeable than hostility, as a pathetic creature
of no particular talent, trading sex, not very successfully, for professional
favors--by no means a fit companion for the great Rex Harrison. Thus is this
uniquely beautiful woman reduced to something below a common streetwalker, or,
at best, to the status of "Babylon woman" or "fallen angel." If we seek a reason
for her suicide beyond the final despairing loss of her last straw man, we can
surely find it in this horribly cruel response to her lifelong quest for uniqueness. All
those articles and the book, the night courses, the beautiful furnishings and clothes (they say
she spent $500 on clothes just before her suicide, perhaps on Friday July 2, the
same day Dixon saw her on Rodeo Drive and she cut that last record for her
fans), piano, French, music lessons (flying lessons!), poetry, painting--all for naught. The cruel
truth is less sexual than professional; these calumnies, even if partly or
wholly true, reflect less a pathetic promiscuity than the doubt never lifted
from Carole's head as to her power at the box office--the fear that "beauty
attracts but does not hold." The difficulty with which Carole's beauty fits into
the standardized
narrative patterns of popular culture becomes in the end her
expulsion from films altogether, and when that happens, Carole's anomaly in Hollywood fiction becomes
her degradation in Hollywood reality. Not
that no other ending was conceivable, but the flight to England and the flight
to Rex had become too closely intertwined, and the loss of the one made the
other that much less a sustaining force.
It is sad and sobering to think that the joy that Carole's gift of beauty still provides us was bought at that price, yet the fitting reaction is of course to accept the gift with enthusiasm rather than to dwell on the underside that she would never have wanted us to see.
Carole, who looked not only so lovely but so right in uniform, was a soldier of beauty who could not live in the peace for which she had fought so hard. I can see her picking up the phone on VJ day (August 8, 1945) to call Jacqueline S in Toronto; the war is over, how could she not be overjoyed, yet how could she not view with anxiety return to civilian life?
In the midst of such thoughts we need more than ever to recall to mind Carole's glorious image. What we call promiscuity in the flesh is the sacred sign's peace-bringing universality.
8/7/2003
The heat in Paris is so oppressive it is hard to think about anything more than keeping cool. I looked at the FNAC for Valley of the Dolls, which doesn't seem to be available in either French or English. However tawdry the story, it is written by someone with at least a modicum of literary talent and who knew Carole and loved her in a way; one shouldn't disdain such insights.
Of course I don't expect to do any research on Carole in Paris, but I would like to be able to consolidate my ideas, whether or not for American Heritage. At the FNAC I was struck by the vast number of books most of which I have no interest in reading, and the need for each writer to tell himself that his project is the most important of all. Some books do stand out, win prizes, remain after the others fade; I have never imagined myself capable of writing such a book; will I be able to do so now? Even for Carole's sake?
8/8/2003
We spent most of the day chatting with Maxime C., who expressed support for my Carole project. There is more at stake in this project than in the past; it is not enough to write a book, or even to publish it; the book must be read, get publicity, permit me to become a spokesman for Carole, even if necessary go on talk shows. Carole was a creature of the popular media, not of university scholarship; it will do her little good to lecture on her to the French department. I can show people her picture, but I must do more than that to be successful: I must persuade them to prefer beauty, the end of desire, to the deceitful perpetuation of desire. Those actresses identified with narrative who seek to draw us into their story teach us only the childishly cynical lesson of eternal unfulfillment, whose noblest incarnation is Gilda with whom one cannot wake up in the morning. Carole doesn't make us yearn for an ideal beyond herself; her gift to us is herself entire, the perfect incarnation of desire fulfilled, provided we are willing to put away the childish things that solicit our desire. Walker stupidly calls her a cuddly American version of the Marlene Dietrich femme fatale. Carole is no femme fatale, she belongs to heaven, not hell, and she has no appeal for those who need the stimulation of the ambisexual Blue Angel's whip. It is amazing and horrible that one can look at Carole and not see her, reduce beauty itself to a bad imitation of beauty's simulacrum.
And into such a world I must carry Carole's banner, armed only with the eloquence of the heart, to ask as though naively: Is it really so important to covet the object of your neighbor's covetousness? why must you prefer hate to love? why must resentment inhabit your most intimately biological desire? why must you revel in the world's tawdriness and turn your back on the transcendent sublime?
For all the talk about the end of history, has anyone thought to imagine what it might look like? I think it would look like Carole; we will never invent for ourselves anything more beautiful. We should be glad that the end has been shown to us; now that we know what desire is for, we can accept its part of ourselves without having to fear some apocalyptic dispossession. The lesson of our "performative" era is that we can recast the world in terms of our own desire. In the absence of the assurance of harmony that Carole provides, we risk contaminating our affirmation with the dregs of postmodern cynicism. It is because we live in a world where Carole was not merely possible but actual that we can assert our own potential plenitude.
8/9/2003
I received today a couple of emails from fans of Carole (and admirers of her beauty) who had seen my website. There is clearly a world out there, small but real, of people who recognize Carole's uniqueness and who would not only buy my book, which is a merely materialistic consideration, but whose affection for Carole would be encouraged by such a book. Speaking to Kathleen this afternoon about my "mission" I felt the same enthusiasm with which I started this project, if anything reinforced by all I have learned about Carole since then. On my return to Los Angeles I hope to finish up the library research and make contact with whoever, family and/or co-workers, is able to give me some first-hand information about her. I have probably outlined in these pages the general ideas of the book, and will need to fill in the analyses of individual films and texts. Carole's photographs are so eloquent that my text need not concern itself overmuch with persuasion.
I think that tomorrow I'll follow Matt's advice and expand my LA Times piece into something for American Heritage or another journal of that type. If anything, it will be a useful exercise in developing my fundamental ideas about Carole at greater length than the Times' 800 word limit permitted.
It is curious that this project is contemporary with experiences of popular culture as something disquieting and empty, dominated by youth, yet strangely devoid of anything sexual but "attitude"--as we observed in a poster of Christina Aguilera in the Paris metro: attitude can be conveyed with less information that beauty, and it can, unlike beauty, serve as a lesson to the unbeautiful, beginning with CA herself, who can scarcely even be called pretty. Should we call this a postmodern culture? It certainly lacks the self-creating component of performatism; it is a cynical conformism that is aware of itself as such but sees any transcendence of this purely mimetic condition as a romantic lie--a peculiar inversion of Girard's opposition between the romantic and the authentic, which is finally the authentically narrative (vérité romanesque). This is a culture that reduces narrative to the silliest clichés which, as Serge put it, it appreciates as if from the technical perspective of their screen rendering rather than as offering a new narrative catharsis. Carole too I see as transcending narrative, not in the sense, however, of destroying it or rendering it futile, but in that of furnishing it with a model of its transcendent object.
8/10/2003
The terrible heat makes it difficult to work or to do anything else. But today was a red-letter day in the evolution of this project: I received a message from and spoke on the telephone with Tammy G, Carole's grand-niece, who told me that Dorothy and, sadly, even Diane Carole had both died, but that she had spent much time with her grandmother and heard many stories about Carole, who was very close to her sister. Apparently most of what Dorothy left behind is in Salt Lake City in her eldest son's family; with Tammy's help, I hope to gain access to this material, which must contain many items of great importance for this project.
Beyond all practical matters, it was a very moving experience to speak with someone of Carole's flesh and blood. I felt as though I were talking to a long-lost relative, a warm and friendly person in her own right but also a little piece of Carole.
The importance of this breakthrough should not diminish the importance of another message I received today from a gentleman named Peter, who once wrote a musical based on Four Jills in a Jeep and who has a considerable collection of Carole materials, including letters and her last fan magazine (the Caroler). Since he kindly offered to be of assistance, I have some hope of being able to see this collection.
I'm very happy to see that my website is beginning to reach people who really care about Carole. Whatever her historical or theoretical importance, this project is essentially a personal one, an expression of my gratitude toward this woman who showed me what beauty really is but whose lesson has been all but lost to the world. The participation of a member of Carole's family makes it all the more imperative that I succeed in this project.
8/13/2003
Despite all the problems with our Alsace trip, I was able to work for an hour or so on expanding the LA Times piece into an article. Expansion poses some problems of organization; the double chronology of the piece will probably have to be simplified, so that the relationship between Carole's difficulty in finding good roles and her shift in focus from her film career to entertaining the troops and ultimately going overseas will have to be explained. It would not do to suggest that Carole's generosity and patriotism were somehow the result of her failure to obtain good roles, although it is possible to argue that both these phenomena have a common cause: Carole's generosity of body and soul, which limited her casting opportunities but made her the ideal person to raise military morale. Not clever enough to be a spider-woman, or a cuddly American femme fatale: both these descriptions, stripped of their condescension, suggest that Carole's straightforward, un-coquettish American beauty had no place in Hollywood.
One way to begin a book about Carole:
Yo' mama's so ugly, if you look up "ugly" in the dictionary it's
got her picture.
If you look up "beautiful" in the dictionary, it should have Carole's picture.
8/21/2003
My 62nd birthday seems an appropriate moment to put an end to this daily record of my research and reflection on this project. It has served its purpose of demonstrating my commitment to the project and to Carole herself, a commitment that has only now become real; for a promise to the dead is only meaningful if it can be translated into a responsibility in the world of the living.
I can now promise performatively to her living heir that I will spare no effort in setting Carole in her rightful place in history as having provided at its most crucial moment the most sublime incarnation--tragically so, perhaps--of the grace and generosity of American beauty.
Eric Gans / gans@humnet.ucla.edu
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