We're all meant to have a personal Diva, or at least we once were, gay men. May still be true for all I know. Is it, young LGBTQIA+ persons? Are there queer young people laying on narrow beds in a childish rooms, greedily reading every word about Zendaya or memorizing all the lyrics of Billie Eilish? There must be. But is it still a gay thing? (Come to that, are there still going to be gays?) The whole business of gay Diva worship may well have passed into obsolescence, like wearing a green carnation in one's buttonhole, like buttonholes, or the hanky-code, or being defined exclusively as gay. There will always be crushes and fans. Youth will call to youth and kids will pick some pretty child from a Korean boy band or devote a wall to exactly the same kind of mild, manufactured rebellion that put up all those pictures on bedroom walls across the nation. Remember those spreads from Tiger Beat and Teen Magazine featuring cuties and "bad boys." (In my day a "bad boy" was basically any young celebrity who posed for a photo while smoking -- preferably in his underwear.) Some of us weren't brave enough to keep Matt Dillon anywhere but tucked away in our dreams and or under the mattress. However having pictures of Dolly, or Linda Carter, or Marilyn wasn't quite the tell you might think. Despite Sontag's 1964 essay, in my youth camp hadn't yet come to the hinterlands. So loving Bette Davis, while part of a long and storied gay tradition unknow to me at the time, was weirdly both safe and daring. My grandma liked Bette Davis. (Dad was a Gene Tierney man. Always a sucker for a sexy overbite. Mom was a big Van Johnson and Johnnie Ray fan, which is of course why I am gay.)
When I was in my twenties, I worked in a video store with a man who owned an original oil painting of Joan Crawford. That's right, an original oil painting. The painting was nearly the size of an actual Crawford. He lit it like a shrine. Pretty much took up the one empty wall in his very small studio apartment. At least two other walls were lost behind bookcases containing every available film and bootleg of the lady on VHS. He had every book and every article ever written about her and files of photos, signed and unsigned. He knew her credits and her husbands, her triumphs and struggles the way a nun might know the Stations of the Cross, or straight guy might know a baseball player's freshman stats. It was impressive. He was a good looking guy, the Crawford fanatic, if balding, with a magnificent mustache. He did alright in the bars, from what I'd heard, so his tricks must not have minded all that Joan -- though who really wants to wake up to that woman every day? (Who ever did? Poor Joan.) Years later when the video store was long gone, I visited him once in his new digs. He was managing quite a nice apartment building and had a big place on the ground floor. By then he had a menagerie of abandoned pets from dead tenants. A box turtle sat under the kitchen table and ate lunch with us. Not a sign of Crawford and for some reason I didn't ask. Simply moved on I suppose.
Once in San Diego I was introduced to a friend's neighbor who had photo-albums uniformly bound and filled with Diana Ross. His greatest treasure, brought out specifically because I'd been told beforehand that I should ask, was an album full of Polaroids he'd taken at concerts with the lady herself. There were dozens of these. I worry now they must all have eventually turned that sickly green Polaroids tend to turn over time, maybe they even faded away altogether. In the end, was there anyone to preserve those pictures? Save that album? He must have meant to pass them on, but to whom? My friend moved, then died some years later. They hadn't kept in touch. When I met the Diana Ross queen it was clear he hadn't long to live, though who knows? Some did.
Of course those examples were both extreme and all the more memorable for being so, but I certainly met others less fanatical through the years, if no less devoted in their own way. Once, aged maybe twelve, at a sledding party at a working dairy, I was drawn away from our hot coco by the sound of unfamiliar music. Without a moment's hesitation I abandoned the party of grubby, noisy boys and the freezing wet "fun" of hurtling downhill and into the side of an enormous barn. Boys. Ick. (And yum, admittedly.) Safely inside that big, stinky farmhouse, I went in pursuit of that music and found it. Thereafter I spent a happy hour on the floor of an older brother's bedroom, being introduced to the mystery that remains Liza Minnelli. The brother's room was all about Liza; scrapbooks, and posters, and records. This was probably also my first time hearing the story of her mother, the glorious tragedy that was Judy Garland, in many ways the Mother of Them All, the Gay Divas. If I did not entirely understand everything about that dark afternoon, I nevertheless remain grateful for the effort made to initiate -- in the most innocent way -- a fledgling queen. Every queer boy needs his first Judy.
Much latter I would meet opera queens, show queens, and enthusiasts of various cults like Barbara Cook and Julie Wilson, even a man who claimed to have seen every show Edith Bouvier Beale ever did at Reno Sweeney. I don't know that I ever laughed harder in my life than I did when a friend played me the cassette a Barbra queen made -- back when making such things was harder to make -- of just the final note held in every Barbra Streisand song. Heroic was what that was.
My taste in heroines would prove fairly catholic, though I've naturally had long-standing, largely dead favorites. Before she passed, I actually prayed that Mama Cass Elliot would cohost The Mike Douglas Show for another week. (The show broadcast from Philadelphia in those days. Mike bought Cass a grocery cart full of Tastykakes -- a local competitor of Hostess -- and presented the gift to her on air. It was a simpler, crueler time, though I must say Tastykakes still kick Little Debbie's ass.) I've loved Bette Midler since I first saw her sing Ten Cents a Dance on the same show in 1971. I collected records by Blossom Dearie, Shirley Horn, Rosemary Clooney, so many. For a time I was obsessed, in turn with Margaret Rutherford, Cloris Leachman, Anna Magnani. Later I became determined to see everything Margo Martindale has ever done or will do. I like a broad performance, so to say. For me it has almost always been women artists who most attracted me, be they actresses, jazz singers, pop stars, novelists. Still, there's only ever been one woman whose picture I keep on my office wall, so yes, I do have a Diva, capital "D" for Davis, first name Bette. I know it is not an original choice.
I have a friend who prefers Hepburn -- Katherine not Audrey -- a choice of which I completely approve. Some years ago a film organization voted Katherine Hepburn the greatest female film star of all time, though as I remember it, they revealed the name of her male counterpart, Bogart, after her, top of the bill as it were, which even then seemed to me sexist and wrong. Hepburn deserved that spot. (Davis was number two in that particular list of top actresses.) This same friend, the Kate man, regularly insists that one should never argue matters of taste and he is right, as I've found he is about most things other than Margaret O'Brien (inexplicably he can't stand the kid, even in Meet Me in Saint Louis wherein she was maybe the last performer able to steal focus from Judy Garland, and Judy singing Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, yet! That's a pro, right there.) I concede Kate's place in the pantheon without a murmur. Extraordinary creature, astonishing, long career, and in a number of my favorite films. AND she was Spencer Tracy's beard. (And he hers.) Points again. I could and do watch Hepburn over and over and over again and always with wonder, affection, and abiding admiration of her very great, and very specific gifts. In her way, she was a kind of genius, and an admirable human in most other ways to boot.
Bette Davis was many things, but not I think admirable in quite the same way. I would not have her any but the way she was, you understand, but no one ever looked at Better Davis and thought, "she must be fascinating on a hike," or "I should very much like to see her garden." Both New England girls, by the way. That in common if little else. Question of class, possibly? Hepburn's parents were moneyed, her father a crusading, overbearing doctor, her mother a Suffragette. Davis' dad was a lawyer, but a deadbeat. Bette was raised by her rather grasping, somewhat hapless mother, Ruthie. Both actually enjoyed the outdoors and both looked pretty good in a flannel shirt, but Hepburn? Hepburn made everything she did, everything she wore, everything she said into Hepburn. "My, she was yar." (Not unlike Dietrich in that regard, though Dietrich had a distinct offstage persona too: glamourpuss to hausfrau and never the twain shall meet.) Ruth Elizabeth Davis was more cigarettes and tinned beans and a bottle of Jack by the campfire. I might have wished Davis more happiness in her personal life, though that is simply sentimental and not at all to do with why she's my star. I don't hold with artists being more worthy of worship for coming to sad ends; Judy, Judy Holliday, Monroe, Lady Day*. Love those ladies all and find their untimely ends deeply moving, but I don't listen to Billie for the heroin, as it were, or listen for the amphetamines when Garland played the Palace. I like my stars upright and running circles around the competition. And I generally prefer the truculent to the tragic, a riposte to a riptide. All these tragedy women were smart and funny, but at some point you had to look away. I like my stars fixed and flashing. I love Billie kicking the tar out of an up-tune. I love Judy when she could still giggle. Come to that, I love Hepburn when she purrs a putdown without missing a consonant. But I love Davis in everything.
Hepburn has sharp angles. Bette has edges.
I have in fact read every major and minor biography of Bette Davis -- none of them very good, may I say, though I still own nearly all of them -- and I believe I have by now seen every surviving film and most of what she did on television, including interviews and talk show fluff (she was never a great talk show type, like Judy G. or even Hepburn when she finally did it on Cavett. Bette Davis doesn't relax much on camera without a script. We get only glimpses of how much fun she must have been at lunch with Olivia de Havilland, or watching TV with Victor Buono.) In her greatest film roles it would be no exaggeration to say that I have seen Bette Davis dozens of times. I've kept all these years the People Magazine announcing her death, and then there is that eight by ten glossy of her as Margo Channing, her greatest role, framed above my bookcase.
I love Bette Davis I think for the very thing that now threatens her reputation as a great actress, namely that she was almost never not acting. Not so Hepburn. Hepburn at her very best, though never not Hepburn for a minute, was supremely clever at allowing the camera to slip in and see her, the actual woman, if only for a very well judged moment exactly as she was or would be in that moment, in the given circumstance. Most famously she did this watching Spencer Tracy's last monologue on film, the admiration and affection brimming her eyes, but she did it nearly from the start, and at least once or twice in every early film until she'd mastered the camera completely. It can still be quite startling, and very moving. It might be her frustration in Sylvia Scarlett, her hilarious practicality in Bringing Up Baby, or her wry vanity in Lion in Winter, but always there she is and nothing in the way. It is an intimacy Garbo might have envied. It makes even some of Hepburn's most mannered performances weirdly modern, despite that diction and the languorous physicality very much of an earlier style of acting than any we might see now.
Davis invites no such intimacy. She might well have bristled at the suggestion that anyone in her audience had a right to any such thing. In this she remained all her life and despite a history littered with husbands and lovers, a very proper New England sort of prude. The very idea! (For a woman who by literally aaaalll reports liked dick nearly as much as Crawford liked attention, Davis was hilariously prim in public discourse, insisting for example that she saw something in her first husband, the appropriately named Ham Nelson other than, well, meat. If she did she was proved very sadly wrong. Of the lot though, and she had four husbands, based on even just the few surviving photographs? I'd fuck 'im.) What's more, as she was always the first to point out, and again unlike great beauties like Hepburn, the camera did not love Bette Davis. From the moment she arrived in Hollywood this was the one thing about her with which her employers all seemed to agree; there was nothing in her face, figure, or person that called the camera to her. Even those famously large eyes are less likely to invite us in than frankly to stare us down. At five foot three, with a broad face and a high forehead, bad teeth, and a bust too big for her frame, as she put it, she was "never a glamour girl." Sex, on the rare occasions it was called for from her on screen, though obviously in her personal wheelhouse, was -- when she acted -- neither more nor less than the task at hand; like playing the piano, or starting a campfire, shooting Claude Rains, or making baked beans; something to be acted as well and as honestly as she was able.
I'm reminded of a moment from very early on in Davis's career, in a picture she claimed to detest called Three On a Match, from 1932. The stars are the delightful Joan Blondell and the repulsive Warren Williams -- a now almost unwatchable example of 1930s Lothario best passed over quickly. In the film there is one of those typical pre-code scenes where, for no good reason Davis is dressing while talking to Blondell. Curious now to think that it is Davis in the slip and Blondell fully dressed, but then maybe Blondell being the bigger name at the time was entitled to keep her dress on. Almost any other actress of the day would have played up or have been made to play up the suggestiveness of such near nudity. Blondell herself might have played the same moment any number of entertaining ways, comedic and or weary, but sexy in either case. When Davis puts on her stockings and garters it is nothing of the sort. Instead it is a sixty second study that might as well be titled A Woman Puts On Her Stockings. There's nothing prudish in it, no demure, but neither is there a hint of anything other than a practical, unobserved task appropriate to the action. This is how one does that. One can almost sense the voyeur's and presumably the director's disappointment even now. Still makes me smile.
A more famous example of the actor's sangfroid would be from Of Human Bondage (1934), perhaps her first really good part in a really good picture. As fans, in our house we still quote entire her deliciously hateful confrontation with poor Leslie Howard, "And after ya kissed me, I always used to wipe my mouth! Wipe my mouth!" and always with appropriate gestures. But it's the end of her Mildred of which I now speak. Her cockney accent has dated about as well as Dick Van Dyke's. There are now faults to be found throughout the performance that established her as more than a star, and a serious actress. Not my business here. I would not presume. (Try not to watch her though, every minute she's on screen.) But for the end of the picture, when her character Mildred is discovered dead or dying in a seedy room, Davis researched how such a person facing such a death would look, where she might fall when she dropped, and Davis fought fiercely to be discovered exactly so. It is still a breathtaking moment. It is a minor triumph and a tragedy in miniature and unequaled I think by any American actress of her stature until Meryl Streep played dead in a similar scene in Ironweed more than fifty years later and for what feels like half of an hour. Of Davis' Mildred we get only a glimpse, but there is still an echo of the original audiences gasping nearly a century ago. Comedy may be hard and death easy, but dying is no easy thing to get not just right but real and Davis was intent on getting things right.
She didn't always. Setting aside all the things she may have got wrong offscreen; marriage, parenting, theater, exercise, alcohol, some of her choices on film can seem arbitrarily fulsome, her commitment disproportionate to the occasion. She won her first Academy Award for Dangerous (1935,) a potboiler about a dipso actress on the skids, rescued by selfless love. (Joan Crawford would have nailed it.) It is about as good as that sounds, though it has some beautiful work from cinematographer Ernie Haller. Down and out, stumbling along the genuinely mean looking streets, Davis is superb. No one in cinema ever looked likelier to hit the gutter, hard. But when rescued and threatened with kindness by the blandly pretty Franchot Tone, she vibrates and pops like dry beans in a hot pan. It is a genuinely startling performance, if not always in a good way. Davis was frequently accused of being theatrical. She isn't here. There are actors of that period, Judith Anderson, Constance Collier, Ethel Barrymore come to mind, who always look and sound like they've just crossed into frame out of a production of Medea or Macbeth or something by Congreve. However trite or contrived the screenplay, however small the part, They all just sailed in from the wings of the Old Vic. Angela Lansbury may have been the last truly great theatrical movie actress. She could do screen acting beautifully, and did when they let her which wasn't often enough, but she knew just when a broad should be broad as well -- Death on the Nile (1978) comes to mind -- and it now looks breathtakingly bold. (But I'm wrong. There's another. Nathan Lane.) Despite some serious stage training and the mid-Atlantic accent that used to connote legitimacy, Davis never declaims or poses or mugs. She does shriek, honk, yell, wring her hands, roll her enormous eyes, pull her hair. When required, as she saw it, her voice is no prettier than her puss. Why? Because this character in these circumstances wouldn't be concerned about such things and so Davis plays it that way. Keep that very much in mind watching Davis, she intends not to tell but to play the truth. That's the lady's job. If it's pain required, she will by-God perform pain in every excruciating particular, likewise anger, love, distrust, lust, despair, hated, exhilaration, etc., and all in the space of the time allotted. She doesn't exaggerate the emotion so much, or the moment, she just performs -- everything. In Dangerous, it's too much. It lacks variety. It can be as hard to watch as an actual breakdown. These explosions are not infrequent in her early work, on the rare occasions when she was actually given something big enough to do. Mostly though they tried to make her into either a denuded platinum starlet -- see those dreary first Universal pictures -- or another blond dame at Warner Brothers, sort of an anemic Joan Blondell or a Glenda Ferrell with veddy gud deportment and elocution, see?
But one has only to watch her in better films, with better scripts and better stories and better directors to see her make better choices. In her greatest triumphs from the late thirties through the mid-forties she is capable of unparalleled subtleties that put every other actress save Garbo -- and only Garbo inevitably in love, at that -- to shame. She goes blind better and dies more beautifully than anybody, in part because before this she panicked perfectly, and laughed and played house, and suffered. Yes, she could be a bitch. So could Joan. Joan wants us to love her even when she's being an asshole. Bespeaks an insecurity not so much in her acting as in her person. Davis doesn't need our sympathy. She has our attention. She breaks an engagement or a fiancé like a matchstick and we love her untroubled selfishness. Her uncertainty in borrowed evening clothes is exactly right and achingly real. Her all too brief mad scene in Juarez (1939) is actually dizzying. Rigidly unhelpful as her husband dies behind her, or meltingly faultless in her secret love for a married man far above her station in life, or older than it seems possible to be when she lets Errol Flynn lose his head, no actor on film ever made bolder, more beautiful choices. She needs you, the audience to know what this looks like, to see the emotion she is showing you, this character at this moment, and all of it alight. She never fights onscreen but for her life. She never falls in love but from a great height, even when all she has to land on is usually just doughy George Brent. It's not dishonest, it's just more; more than is seemly, more than is usual, more than we might ever allow in anyone but Davis. She feels everything for us. She is never without an audience, but we are expected, very much what she deserves. We are after all her one true love, but it is a love of equals. We pity Crawford. We admire Hepburn. We rise to Davis. It's why we secretly like it when Paul Henreid won't leave his wife, or Gary Merrill looks like he won't last. Davis will always turn to us.
In 1976 Davis paid tribute to her greatest director (and former lover) William Wyler when he received his Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Film Institute. (A year later Bette Davis became the first woman so honored.) She described a particularly tempestuous exchange with Wyler when he insisted she do a scene not as she intended but as he wanted. Unsurprisingly, he won that fight. He was the director. He was a man. In her speech Davis could not resist adding that she still thought she was right, even as she lauded Wyler as her first great director. I loved that. The point wasn't that she was right, but that she was still willing to continue the argument. A major part of her legend comes from her willingness to fight; for parts, for better scripts, with the studio and against the limitations imposed upon her as a woman and an artist. She was to the end notoriously combative. Lots of performances and loads of anecdotes to support this idea of Davis as a termagant -- all delightful to relive as a fan at this safe distance from her death. Also points to what I think is one of her greatest achievements on screen. Bette Davis was film's first really angry woman.
Think about it. Gish suffered. Garbo made art from unequal parts unhappiness and bliss. Blondell was sassy. It only feels like Crawford slapped more faces on film than John Wayne threw punches, but usually she just wanted some dope like Jeff Chandler to notice her and say she was pretty. Stanwyck was the only other star I can think of with something of the same temper on film. Women's anger was shocking. Still is, sadly. It was usually punished, even in a Bette Davis picture. She wore that red dress to the Olympus Ball in Jezebel (1938) but it did not go well thereafter. Both Davis and Stanwyck were humbled on film for their discontent, punished for kicking against the pricks. In the misogynist hegemony, what could be worse, or more thrilling, than laughing right in men's faces? With Crawford this always looks like a strategy before the inevitable clinch. When Stanwyck said she'd kill ya, she meant it. Davis too. When Davis as Margo Channing fights with her not so charming younger lover in All About Eve (1950) it is clear she would kick him right in the nuts if she could, not because she is jealous, or insecure, or hurt, but because he deserves it. She clearly knew whereof she acted. An incandescent Davis is a force with which to reckon, not just a lady in a mood. Davis didn't do anything by halves. Pissed off she's near perfect.
Other than angry, and often at the same time, my favorite Davis is Davis laughing. She was a great actress and some of her very best performances are quiet to the point of delicacy, as in All This, and Heaven Too or the superb William Wyler adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham's The Letter, both released in 1940. But a year later, in The Little Foxes and The Man Who Came to Dinner, for very different reasons playing completely different characters, she laughs and it is thrilling. When it was right for the role, she roars, but even better is the laugh that slips out. It feels perfect, exactly what we want from her, utterly human. She can smile very like an actual movie star, but there's effort in it, whereas bemused is her at maybe her most attractive. Sarcasm came naturally to this working woman in a man's medium, and with it she tends to show off her lower register. But her bark has bite and mocking or mirthful her laugh is I suspect as close as we the viewers ever get to seeing Davis do that thing Hepburn could seemingly do at will, maybe the mask slips a little. There she is, Bette. Hepburn and Stanwyck could play comedy brilliantly. Neither strikes me as having had a specially developed sense of humor or any real capacity for self-mockery. Neither was I should think very funny in company, whereas Davis was rarely funny on screen, not a lot of that came her way, but she is uniformly reported to have been a hoot in real life at least as often as she proved a horror, I imagine depending on her blood alcohol. When she is funny in movies, it's usually because she has let herself comment a little on the scene with a look, a smile, a pause to light the next inevitable cigarette. But when she laughs I laugh. Doesn't matter if it's a chuckle because Robert Montgomery has briefly stopped being a prat, or a mad cackle at her own villainy later in her career. Davis laughing isn't pretty, it's profound. That's how you do it, that's how you tell death to fuck right off. Smoke forty cigarettes a day, sip a gin martini, adjust the hair, and -- bark. There's always a hint of a jeer in even her lightest laugh, often at her own expense. Even when she isn't funny, she gets why it is, or should be. Never winks though. Beneath her. Furies don't wink.
And that's why she's my Diva. I inherited my father's quick anger, but not his birthright as a straight, white dad to express it. I've always avoided confrontation. Many of the most awkward and uncomfortable moments in my life have come from panic in the face of strong emotion. I don't fight, I scramble. Better to please, amuse, distract, defuse. As a sissy I learned early that my antagonist always had a weapon in easy reach. I was born outnumbered. So no, I did not identify with the melting femininity of Marilyn Monroe or the bisexual dash of Carry Grant. One cannot aspire to be as pretty as Robert Taylor or Brad Pitt. I'm never going to be as funny as Chaplin holding a fork or tying his shoe. Watching the movies, I hoped one day, if I was lucky, to be either Clifton Webb or Monty Wooley. I could see my lane. I studied Max Beerbohm and Oscar Wilde and Noel Coward and longed for silk dressing gowns and snappy lines. Eventually I used an actual cigarette-holder. I did. As a boy I watched for coded faggotry on the tv and prayed one day for wit. I cultivated what I could of self-deprecation and disdain -- the defense and offence of gay. I hid as much as I could of what would get my ass kicked. No question what my authentic self might look like -- turns out he's fat with a white beard, remember Monty Wooley? -- but I knew it was going to be a long time before I had the chance to be him. Meanwhile, to understand authenticity, to know emotion, I had to see it acted. That was how you do that, honey, soon as you get the chance. Make a note. Someday, when it's safe, that's how you tell someone to fuck right off. That's how you show contrition. That's how you sacrifice yourself for love, and suffer beautifully, and laugh at fate, and smoke. That's how you shoot Claude Rains, slap Miriam Hopkins, keep Mary Astor on a diet, lose your damn mind and push a flower pot onto the heads Joseph Cotton and your friend Olivia de Havilland. And so I worshipped Bette Davis. She inspired not because I saw myself in her, but because I saw in her the possibility someday of feeling everything overtly that I had to keep very much to myself.
I recently had a brief conversation at the cash register with a customer buying books by the famous Buddhist monk and writer Thic Nhat Hanh. I told her that I had actually seen him once, years ago in San Francisco. The customer gasped and told me how lucky I was and I agreed. She told me she considered him her "spiritual master" and greatest teacher. When she asked me who mine would be I said without hesitation or thought, "Better Davis." We were both startled by my answer. Took her a minute to even sort out who I might have meant. "The movie star?" she said. "That's the one," I replied.
If that seems absurd it is because it is. There was a time when I intended to become an actor. Went to school for it and all. Never once at the time did I think "I want to be Bette Davis!" Neither did I ever ask myself onstage, "How would Bette Davis do this scene?" I was too busy reading Stanislavski and studying Uta Hagen. I was trying to peel imaginary oranges and worse, trying to smell them as I did. It was all rather awful and wonderful and all too brief. Really nothing to do with Bette.
There are writers, novelists, poets, and yes, even philosophers and scientists who have been my greatest teachers, writers who have shaped my thinking, and my language which comes to the same thing. Montaigne would have been a good answer. Artists of all sorts have inspired me and from earliest childhood I have studied and imitated the line of this one and the composition of that. No one has had a greater influence on my character than my parents and later my husband of nearly forty years.
Nope. Bette Davis.
The truth is I've no idea why I said it, but it still does not feel wrong. Bette saw me through some shit, may I say. I remain absolutely fascinated even after all the unflattering, occasionally damning information I've so greedily taken in over the decades. I would still rather watch her in some pre-code stinker than almost anybody else, including the real stars of that era, just because it is her and I might miss something. I still make myself not watch All About Eve or The Old Maid unless they turn up on Turner Classic movies just so as to not miss out on other things -- like Glenda Ferrell in a Torchy Blane programmer or Ann Sothern playing Maisie again, because that can be great fun too. ("Can't all be caviar and cock," as my late friend Jimmy used to say.) Nonetheless, given my druthers -- and who's to say what I do with my own damned druthers at this age?! -- I would rather reread Great Expectations, and listen to Ella sing the Cole Porter Songbook, and watch Bette Davis in any goddamn thing than do just about any goddamn thing else. Haven't watched June Bride in awhile, or The Sisters. The Catered Affair?
She made me the man I am today, or at least the one I still intend to be.
Miss Bette Davis, ladies and gentlemen? Rise.
*In a later generation, there are those who are quick to insist that when it comes to more contemporary pop Divas that the late Amy Winehouse was superior to Adele, somehow the more authentic artist or some such because -- heroin and dead? Balls. Loved them both the very first time I heard either. Not the same artists. Not a competition.
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