Reliable Essays: The Best of Clive James by Clive James

Author:Clive James [James, Clive]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Macmillan Publishers UK
Published: 2009-09-30T04:00:00+00:00

This is the language of critical self-deception, fine judgement suppressed in the name of a broader cause. What does it mean to dance with all the grace you are ever going to need? It doesn’t sound the same as being good at dancing. The fact was that she could handle a number like the ‘Running Wild’ routine in the train corridor in Some Like It Hot (Wilder covered it with the marvellous cutaways of Lemmon slapping the back of the bull-fiddle and Curtis making ping-pong-ball eyes while blowing sax), but anything harder than that was pure pack-drill. And if Zanuck really believed that her voice was dubbed, then for once in his life he must have made an intuitive leap, because to say that her singing voice didn’t sound as if it belonged to her was to characterize it with perfect accuracy. Like her speaking voice, it was full of panic.

It took more than sympathy for her horrible death and nostalgia for her atavistic cuddlesomeness to blur these judgements, which at one time all intelligent people shared. The thing that tipped the balance towards adulation was Camp – Camp’s yen for the vulnerable in women, which is just as inexorable as its hunger for the strident. When Mailer talks about Marilyn’s vulnerability, he means the inadequacy of her sense of self. Camp, however, knew that the vulnerability which mattered was centred in the inadequacy of her talent. She just wasn’t very good, and was thus eligible for membership in the ever-increasing squad of Camp heroines who make their gender seem less threatening by being so patently unaware of how they’re going over. On the strident wing of the team, Judy Garland is a perennial favourite for the same reason. If common sense weren’t enough to do it, the Camp enthusiasm for Monroe should have told Mailer – Mailer of all people – that the sexuality he was getting set to rave about was the kind that leaves the viewer uncommitted.

Mailer longs to talk of Monroe as a symbolic figure, node of a death wish and foretaste of the fog. Embroiled in such higher criticism, he doesn’t much concern himself with the twin questions of what shape Hollywood took in the 50s and of how resonantly apposite a representative Marilyn turned out to be of the old studio system’s last gasp. As the third-string blonde at Fox (behind Betty Grable and June Haver) Marilyn was not – as Mailer would have it – in all that unpromising a spot. She was in luck, like Kim Novak at Columbia, who was groomed by Harry Cohn to follow Rita Hayworth in the characteristic 50s transposition which substituted apprehensiveness for ability. For girls like them, the roles would eventually be there – mainly crummy roles in mainly crummy movies, but they were the movies the studios were banking on. For the real actresses, times were tougher, and didn’t ease for more than a decade. Anne Bancroft, for example, also started out at Fox, but couldn’t get the ghost of a break.

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