Frederick the Great, discussion post 6
Dec. 2nd, 2019 02:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cahn...I think we need another one (seriously, you guys, this is THE BEST) and I'd better make it now before I disappear into the wilds of music performance.
(also, as of this week there are two Frederician fics in the yuletide archive and eeeeeeeeeee)
(huh, only one of them is actually tagged with Frederick the Great even though two with Maria Theresia and Wilhelmine, eeeeeee this is awesome I CAN'T WAIT)
Frederick the Great masterpost
(also, as of this week there are two Frederician fics in the yuletide archive and eeeeeeeeeee)
(huh, only one of them is actually tagged with Frederick the Great even though two with Maria Theresia and Wilhelmine, eeeeeee this is awesome I CAN'T WAIT)
Frederick the Great masterpost
Re: Elizabeth Taylor - 2 (Richard Burton)
Date: 2019-12-05 11:32 pm (UTC)Okay, one more orginal text. Context: Burton and Taylor fell in love during the shooting of Cleopatra in Rome; she played the obvious and he played Antony. This was the big scandal of the day and the public reaction even included reprimands from the Vatican despite neither of them being Catholic, for being a danger to public morale. But in fact, they had very briefly met once before, years earlier, when a much younger Richard Burton had tried to crack Hollywood the first time around. (This led to hilariously bad films like „Alexander“, in which he‘d played Alexander, in a terrible blond wig.) Elizabeth Taylor, otoh, was already a superstar - well, she’d been one since her childhood - currently married to Mike Todd and pregnant (he would die in a tragic air plane accident later, the only one of her marriages not ending in divorce).
Richard Burton, for whom, btw, English was not his native language - he wasn‘t just Welsh, but among the minority of Welshmen whose first language was still Welsh, and English only second, learned at school - much later wrote a wonderful, tender and witty description of that first brief meeting under the title of „Meeting Mrs. Jenkins“ (Jenkins was his real name; he was the youngest son of a Welsh miner, and had been adopted by the English teacher Philip Burton who first spotted his talent):
“It was my first time in California and my first visit to a swank house. There were quite a lot of people in and around the pool, all suntanned and all drinking the Sunday morning liveners – Bloody Marys, boilermakers, highballs, iced beer. I knew some of the people and was introduced to the others. Wet brown arms reached out of the pool and shook my hand. The people were all friendly, and they called me Dick immediately. I asked if they would please call me Richard – Dick, I said, made me feel like a symbol of some kind. They laughed, some of them. It was, of course, Sunday morning and I was nervous.
I was enjoying this small social triumph, but then a girl sitting on the other side of the pool lowered her book, took off her sunglasses and looked at me. She was so extraordinarily beautiful that I nearly laughed out loud. I didn’t, of course, which was just as well. The girl was not, and, quite clearly, was not going to be laughing back. I had an idea that, finding nothing of interest, she was looking right through me and was examining the texture of the wall behind. If there was a flaw in the sandstone, I knew she’d find it and probe it right to the pith. I fancied that if she chose so, the house would eventually collapse.
I smiled at her and, after a long moment, just as I felt my own smile turning into a cross-eyed grimace, she started slightly and smiled back. There was little friendliness in the smile. A new ice cube formed of its own accord in my Scotch-on-the-rocks.
She sipped some beer and went back to her book. I affected to become social with the others but out of the corner of my mind – while I played for the others the part of a poor miner’s son who was puzzled, but delighted by the attention these lovely people paid to him – I had her under close observation. She was, I decided, the most astonishingly self-contained, pulchritudinous, remote, removed, inaccessible woman I had ever seen. She spoke to no one. She looked at no one. She steadily kept on reading her book. Was she merely sullen? I wondered. I thought not. There was no trace of sulkiness in the divine face. She was a Mona Lisa type, I thought. In my business everyone is a type. She is older than the deck chair on which she sits, I thought headily, and she is famine, fire, destruction, and plague, she is the Dark Lady of the Sonnets, the on lie true begetter. She is a secret wrapped in an enigma inside a mystery, I thought with a mental man-to-man nod to Churchill. Her breasts were apocalyptic, they would topple empires down before they withered. Indeed, her body was a miracle of construction and the work of an engineer of genius. It needed nothing but itself. It was true art, I thought, executed in terms of itself. It was smitten by its own passion. I used to think things like that. I was not long down from Oxford and Walter Pater was still talked of and I read the art reviews in the quality weeklies without much caring about the art itself, and it was a Sunday morning in Bel Air, and I was nervous, and there was the Scotch-on-the-rocks.
Like Miniver Cheevy I kept on drinking and, in the heady flow of the attention I was getting, told story after story as the day boozed slowly on. I went in swimming once or twice. So did she, but, lamentably, always after I’d come out. She swam easily and gracefully as an Englishwoman would and not with the masculine drive and kick of most American girls. She was unquestionably gorgeous. I can think of no other word to describe a combination of plentitude, frugality, abundance, tightness. She was lavish. She was a dark unyielding largesse. She was, in short, too bloody much, and not only that, she was totally ignoring me. I became frustrated almost to screaming when I had finished a well-received and humorous story about the death of my grandfather and found that she was turned away in deep conversation with another woman. I think I tried to eavesdrop but was stayed by words like – Tony and Janet and Marlon and Sammy. She was not, obviously, talking about me.
Eventually, with half-seas-ed cunning and with all the nonchalance of a traffic jam, I worked my way to her side of the pool. She was describing – in words not normally written – what she thought of a producer at M.G.M. This was my first encounter with freedom of speech in the U.S.A., and it took my breath away. My brain throbbed; I almost sobered up. I was profoundly shocked. It was ripe stuff. I checked her again. There was no question about it. She was female. In America the women apparently had not only got the vote – they’d got the words to go with it.
I was somewhat puzzled and disturbed by the half-look she gave me as she uttered the enormities. Was she deliberately trying to shock me? Those huge violet-blue eyes (the biggest I’ve ever seen, outside those who have glandular trouble – thyroid, et cetera) had an odd glint in them. You couldn’t describe it as a twinkle…. Searchlights can not twinkle, they turn on and off and probe the heavens and so on.
Still I couldn’t be left out. I had to join in and say something. I didn’t reckon on the Scotch though. I didn’t reckon that it had warped my judgment and my sense of timing, my choice of occasion. With all the studied frenzy of Dutch courage I waded into the depths of those perilous eyes.
In my best chiffon-and-cut-glass Oxford accent I said: “You have a remarkable command of Olde-Englishe.”
There was a pause in which I realized with brilliant clarity the relativity of time. Aeons passed, civilizations came and went, brave men and cowards died in battles not yet fought, while those cosmic headlights examined my flawed personality. Every pockmark on my face became a crater of the moon. I reached up with a casual hand to cover up the right-cheeked evidence of my acne’d youth. Halfway up I realized my hand was just as ugly as my face and decided to leave the bloody thing and die instead. But while contemplating the various ways of suicide and having sensibly decided, since I had a good start, to drink myself to death, I was saved by her voice which said, “Don’t you use words like that at the Old Vic?”
“They do,” I said, “but I don’t. I come from a family and an attitude that believe such words are an indication of weakness in vocabulary and emptiness of mind…. Despite Jones’s writing that in times of acute shared agony and fear, as in trench warfare, obscenities repeated in certain patterns can at times become almost liturgical, almost poetic….” I ran out of gas.
There was another pause; more empires fell. Captains and kings and counsellors arrived and departed. She said three four-letter words. These were, I think, “Well! Well! Well!”
Somebody laughed uneasily. The girl had turned away. I had been dismissed. I felt as lonely as a muezzin, as a reluctant piano lesson on a Saturday afternoon, as the Last Post played on a cracked bugle.
I went home and somebody asked, when I told them where I’d been, what she was like. “Dark. Dark. Dark. Dark. She probably,” I said, “shaves.” To nobody in particular I observed that the human body is eighty percent water.”
Re: Elizabeth Taylor - 2 (Richard Burton)
Date: 2019-12-10 04:23 am (UTC)Re: Elizabeth Taylor - 2 (Richard Burton)
Date: 2019-12-10 12:55 pm (UTC)Fortunately, ET, clever woman who she was, managed to win most of his friends and family around. She never pretended to be anything she wasn't, i.e. if she visited the Welslh miners, you can bet she wore diamonds as well. But she cultivated his sisters, helped cleaning up, and outdrank his brothers in the pub, she impressed further by proving herself a hands-on and involved mother to her kids instead of leaving them to the help, and as for his adopted father Philip Burton, who'd sworn not to talk to him again out of loyalty to Sybil, she approached him and told him RB, who was returning to the stage for the first time in years, really really really needed his help and coaching and could he please, no one was more important to Richard, etc. Cue Philip caving and starting to socialize with the adulterous couple. Otoh Montgomery Clift never quite lost his "is he really good enough for Bessie Mae?" distrust, and Peter O'Toole, RB's best actor friend, certainly loathed ET till his dying days because he blamed her for taking Richard away.
Incidentally, there was a recent BBC movie, Burton and Taylor, set during their autumn days, Long after their second divorce, which I can reccommend, and here's my review quoted:
It's been finally done: after various attempts that were embarrassing in various degrees, we finally got a good film about Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. It wisely did not try to be a biopic covering their entire relationship, or even those parts that were most famous (and where the audience would have the most mental images to compare), but instead picked a time near the end of Burton's life, the disastrous (as far as the critics were concerned, not the audience, for the cash, it flowed) run of Noel Coward's play Private Lives they did together on Broadway, years and years after their second divorce. So you have a short and limited time frame which allows for better character focus, plus aged ET and RB which means the actors don't have to compete matching them in their prime.
The next smart thing the BBC did, putting the project together, was the cast. Because it's Dominic West as Richard Burton and Helena Bonham Carter as Elizabeth Taylor. Neither of them looks much like the originals, but they have the charisma, and they have the craft. I can't tell you what a relief it is so see Helena Bonham Carter in something where she doesn't have to do the 104040th variation of her Gothic wildwoman persona that she picked up after abandoning the Edwardian beauty persona. I always thought either was selling her short because in those films where she's neither, she tends to be excellent. (A more recent example: supporting Colin Firth in The King's Speech.) Here, she's glorious, capturing the wit, the vitality, the middle-aged booziness and the larger-than-life-passionate nature. Dominic West must be able to do self-destructive witty Celts in his sleep by now, and he's very much not asleep in this film. (The voice isn't Burtons but gets the idea of it across very well, if that makes sense.) Also very important: they have great chemistry. (BTW, Burton and Taylor don't always have it in their screen appearances; real life chemistry doesn't necessarily translate, and neither does film chemistry to real life. See, say, Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable, who were both passionately in love with other people when they filmed Gone With The Wind and completely uninterested in each other.) The script gives both of them great zingers and, given the obvious temptations here, valiantly resists imitating either Edward Albee or Noel Coward. It does go for bittersweet and the can't live with, can't live without that the subject asks for, while also making it clear why "live with" wasn't an option anymore. It's what we call a chamber play - Kammerspiel - in German, for the tv format, and if you're uninterested in Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, it's still a good story about a middle aged couple of exes whose ties to each other went very deep, and who face aging in a profession that forgives anything but yet do so with gusto and no genteel restraint whatsoever. May it come out on dvd soon, BBC.
Re: Elizabeth Taylor - 2 (Richard Burton)
Date: 2019-12-16 10:51 pm (UTC)