It’s the birthday of director Martha Coolidge. I have always loved her work – cherished it, really – and finally got to pay tribute to her in my Film Comment column. And it’s funny how things work out. Mitchell and I saw Rambling Rose together, when it first came out. I vividly remember our discussion afterwards. And we talked about one moment Robert Duvall has, one absolutely astonishing moment – which I consider to be the best work he’s ever done (and considering his career, that’s saying something). Cut to – DECADES later: Martha Coolidge is at Ebertfest, for the screening of Rambling Rose, Mitchell is there with me as my guest, and I got to ask her at the QA ABOUT that very scene Mitchell and I had discussed so many years before! AND the answer she gave was … so perfect I almost couldn’t believe it was happening. Mitchell was sitting there next to me! It’s like our younger teenage selves could never have guessed that so many years later we would be able to ask the director personally about how she handled that amazing scene and how Duvall did what he did. Anyway, it’s a great QA overall, and a really special moment in my memory.
I haven’t written about the majority of his roles – not for lack of admiration (and in some cases, awestruck wonder) – but here is what I have written:
I included his “you talkin’ to me” scene in my gigantic piece for Oscilloscope on scenes where men look at themselves in the mirror. I mean, it’s really the Grand Master of them all.
When Taxi Driver was restored for its 35th anniversary, I went to see it at the press screening – the colors of that film are overwhelming – and then wrote about it on my site.
Additionally, when I interviewed Dan Callahan about his excellent books, The Art of American Screen Acting, volumes 1 and 2, we discussed De Niro at length. I think Callahan’s chapter on De Niro in Volume 2 is one of the best things written about the actor – who is a difficult subject.
My video-essay is in the special features of the DVD/Blu release, and for Criterion subscribers it’s streaming on the website. I did a deep DEEP dive into Robert De Niro’s work, much of it was a re-tread, since we (my group of friends and I) were obsessed with him as college-age acting students. We weren’t fans. We STUDIED him. So I watched it all. I read all the Scorsese books. There aren’t too many interviews with De Niro and he’s not particularly articulate about his process. The greats rarely are. But it was a glorious experience, and even after I handed in my draft of the video-essay, I kept going on chronologically, moving past Raging Bull and on into the 80s and 90s. I’m back on the Elvis train now, so I had to take a step back with the De Niro project, but I do want to shout out Stone, a 2010 movie I missed when it first came out. Missing it was a major error, because this performance should be counted as one of his greatest. See it.
It’s James Cameron’s birthday today, and I haven’t written all that much about him, but I did devote an entire column at Film Comment to the sexual/romantic tension between Ripley and Hicks in Aliens – and how crucial it is to the film’s emotional resonance – it’s so much a part of it – it’s SUCH a satisfying relationship.
Celebrating Elvis Week is not my thing, although of course I always mark it here, because what the hell else would I do with my time. Other anniversaries matter more to me. But I figured I’d share here the last photo taken of Elvis, pulling in through the gates at Graceland in his most bad-ass car, the most bad-ass of the bunch. The 1973 Stutz Blackhawk.
It makes my heart ache a little bit. He was just a man, just a human. His life was unreal but he was just a GUY.
“It got silent, then all these voices said
‘Come follow me into the gates of Hell.’
I heard ’em yell ‘Welcome to the Norman Bates Motel!’
I ring the bell for service and I was greeted by his mother,
Covered in dry blood, head still dented from the shovel.
I said I need a room so I could try to get some rest.
She gave me the keys to the best suite and a bag of cess
And told me that’s just for starters, Satan’ll be in to see me later
To see if I’m interested in being partners.”
— Eminem, “Demon Inside” (1998)
That ^^ is from one of the first songs Eminem recorded with Dr. Dre. It didn’t end up making it onto Eminem’s first (official) album, The Slim Shady LP, and it remains unfinished and unreleased but it is the perfect way to start this post for Alfred Hitchcock’s birthday, a post about Eminem’s lifelong obsession with Hitchcock (he calls him “Uncle Alfred”) and Norman Bates, in particular.
If you listen even casually to Eminem you’ll hear references to Hitchcock everywhere. Even though “Demon Inside” didn’t make it onto the first album, “Role Model” did.
“I’m ’bout as normal as Norman Bates with deformative traits.
A premature birth that was four minutes late.
‘Mother, are you there? I love you!
I never meant to hit you over the head with that shovel!'”
— Eminem, “Role Model”
An isolated weirdo with violent thoughts and Mama issues? A demonic Mama’s boy? Not a stretch to figure out the connections. Norman is the perfect metaphor for him.
Or how about this.
“Don’t come close, don’t run, yo (run),
you can’t hide
We’re in the shadows of the room you got sentenced to
So leave the motel or no sperm cells, go into the doorway and get fucked.
Anyway, it’s Norman Bates.”
— Eminem and 50 Cent, “Norman Bates Motel” (2009)
In 2020, Eminem took the Hitchcock thing next level, using it as the organizing principle for not one, but two albums, Music to Be Murdered By (dropped in January 2020, just before Covid demolition-derbied into our lives) and Music to Be Murdered By, Side B (dropped in December 2020). These two massive albums – one of which was recorded entirely during 2020 lockdown – were inspired by Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 spoken-word album Music to be Murdered By, which Dr. Dre somehow discovered and passed on to Eminem, knowing MM’s whole Hitchcock thing. At this point, Eminem drops the albums himself – with no advance press and/or warning. He barely does interviews. But suddenly: here they both were. He is a recluse and a workaholic: the pandemic didn’t halt his work ethic, an engrained habit, but I can’t help but feel he also knew how much everyone out there (his fans anyway) needed it. Needed something from him, if nothing else as a distraction. Entertainers can provide welcome distraction, it can be one of their most important roles, particularly in times of stress/trouble. 2020 was so bad, and he gave us two albums that year.
The cover art on the album was an imitation of the cover art of the original.
I can’t even express how happy this all made me.
Because Eminem is like Howard Hughes at this point, rarely seen, he basically dropped the first album via Twitter, saying: “Uncle Alfred and I have cooked something up.”
The album starts with a clip from Hitchcock’s original album, Uncle Alfred crooning in his “let’s all get deliciously scared” voice:
“How do you do? Ladies and gentlemen. My name is Alfred Hitchcock and this is Music To Be Murdered By. It is mood music in a jugular vein. So why don’t you relax? Lean back and enjoy yourself ….
Until the coroner comes.”
This is then followed by a horrifying clip of a woman screaming, accompanied by what sounds like a shovel hauling up dirt. Ominous. The first song on the album, “Premonition”, is a bragadocious “I’m the best and fuck the haters” song ending in a perfect cadence:
“Only way that you’re ahead of me’s alphabetically
‘Cause if you diss me I’m coming after you like the letter V.
Killing everything, play this tune, it’s your eulogy,
It’s your funeral, prepare to die.
This is music for you to be murdered by.”
Skipping ahead: A couple months after the first album dropped, the world shut down. Eminem performed a show in Dubai (in February, I think). He performed “Lose Yourself” at the Oscars and Salma Hayek spilled water on him backstage. After that, we went into lockdown, and Eminem was literally not seen – not once – for the whole entire year, until he showed up randomly in an SNL sketch in December 2020. Almost an entire year passed without one glimpse of him. (He did guest “spots” on a couple of people’s albums, contributing a verse to a song with Moon Man, with Jessie Reyez), but he was never SEEN. I thought, “Can someone do a welfare check on Marshall? Just for Proof of Life?” In a year when celebrities became so accessible to us we knew what the interiors of their houses look like, Eminem vanished even more completely. There was news though: In April, 2020, a man broke into Eminem’s house in the middle of the night. Eminem woke up and a person was standing over his bed. Eminem said, “Who are you?” The person said, “I am here to kill you.” !!! Eminem somehow defused the situation, and talked to the guy, keeping him calm. We still don’t really know how he did this or what was said, since Eminem has not once addressed it. Eminem led the guy out of the house, where the security detail – who had clearly been napping on the job – tackled the stalker. The guy was arrested. We only heard about all this when the news broke a month later. Eminem, to this day, has never spoken about it. Meanwhile, he was quietly sending food to the healthcare workers at Michigan hospitals, those who couldn’t (and wouldn’t) take breaks from the disaster unfolding. The only reason we know about THIS is because Detroit-area nurses and doctors were posting pictures to Instagram of the food and the notes from “Marshall Mathers”. He was also working on voting initiatives in Detroit, using his clout (quietly: again, none of this was publicized) to convince stadiums to open their doors to voting, so people could come – en masse – to cast their vote while ALSO social distancing.
There was rampant speculation this whole time that he was working on a second album, a part 2 of Music to Be Murdered By. In the fall, a couple of photos leaked, one of him in a hat with a bird on his shoulder that appeared to be from the same photo shoot for the cover of Music to Be Murdered By.
Also: black bird? Plus Hitchcock? People felt like something might be coming. There was then the aforementioned surprise SNL “appearance” in mid-December.
Right on schedule, if you had been sifting through all these tea leaves, Music to be Murdered By, Side B arrived a couple days after the SNL appearance. The fortune tellers had been right.
So let’s discuss.
The lead track of the Side B album is an extravaganza called “Alfred’s Theme”. It’s over 5 minutes long. It is … not a song you’d bump to in the club. Casual listeners would be like “wtf is this?” It’s not melodic, there’s no real beat, and … it isn’t really “about” anything, except for re-capping the strangeness of life in quarantine (including singing “Happy Birthday to you” as he washes his hands), as well as bragging and word play, just for the fun of it, all set to Charles Gounod’s “Funeral March of a Marionette” (the theme song of Alfred Hitchcock Presents). Eminem plus Gounod is a VERY strange mix on the one hand, but makes perfect sense on the other: Gounod’s song has a circus–y jangle to it, similar to Eminem’s use of dark-spooky-circus background tracks, which gives his work a mischievous sound, a sort of “I am tiptoeing up behind you with my Silver Hammer and about to yell BOO and bop you on the head” kind of sound. (See: “My Dad’s Gone Crazy”). “Alfred’s Theme” sounds like hip-hop as filtered through an organ-grinder in 1884. Hip-hop as played in a vaudeville theatre in 1911.
Early on he chants:
Yeah, and I’m buddies with Alfred, we about to
Disembowel them, gut ’em and scalp ’em, yeah.
This is ’bout to be the bloodiest outcome
‘Cause we gon’ make you bleed with every cut from this album.
The whole conceit – the whole “double”, as hip-hop heads call it – is that “murdered” means violent death and is also colloquial for a successful performance. “You MURDERED the crowd tonight.” There’s Nas’ famous dis to Jay-Z: “Em murdered you on your own shit” (in regards to the Jay-Z Eminem collaboration “Renegade”, technically Jay-Z’s song with Eminem providing a guest verse. People are still arguing to this day who “murdered” who on that track. In this context, Nas, a legend, saying “Em murdered you on your own shit” is brutal.)
Word on the Eminem-street is that “Alfred’s Theme” was supposed to be on the first album, but there were extremely complicated rights issues to maneuver, and this held up the process. This is a strange thing when you consider “Funeral March for a Marionette” was written in 1872. Who the hell is going to put up a fuss if Eminem samples it? Regardless: it was all sorted out, so Eminem led off with “Alfred’s Theme”.
A couple months after the second album dropped, a video was released for “Alfred’s Theme”. There is so much to discuss. It’s a “lyric video”, as they say, where the words appear alongside the images. The visuals are the thing here: the video is Saul Bass-inspired animation, a perfect choice considering all of the memorable Saul Bass opening credits Hitchcock used in his films. Even more fun, the video is crammed with references to Hitchcock’s movies as well as deep cuts from Hitchcock’s TV show.
Here are the references I clocked:
Psycho Rear Window The Birds Notorious (the binoculars with mirror-like glass) The 39 Steps Vertigo The Sorcerer’s Apprentice
I may be reading too much into it, but I think there’s a ref to an episode from his TV show: “Glass Eye” Young and Innocent (a super deep cut)
Plus there are dancing skeletons.
I’m probably missing some! Let me know if you clock any others.
This Eminem/Hitchcock thing was so much fun, in a year (2020) where fun was hard to come by. And I found it disheartening on another level: This rich detailed nerdy 30-track double album – inspired by Alfred Hitchcock – came out and… crickets from film critics.
I wrote about it on my site and Tweeted about it. I was the only one. I pitched a piece about all these connections to Film Comment, for my column (RIP), and they were intrigued, but then Film Comment shut its doors in the late spring of 2020. Rolling Stone published a snooty review of one of the albums – or maybe it was just an essay, I don’t know – but it sounded like it was written by one of the “pick a little talk a little” ladies in The Music Man, horrified that the librarian “advocates dirty books”. It’s so strange to hear a pass-the-smelling-salts tone in Rolling Stone for God’s sake, written by someone who isn’t 75 years old. From one of the comments made in the review, the critic clearly did not know of the existence of Kamikaze, Eminem’s 2018 album, released right on the heels of his – unfairly scorned – album Revival. Inexcusable. After being bombarded with reader complaints, a correction was appended to the review. How can you write on Eminem if you don’t even know his discography? The reviewer led with a disapproving tone, fact-checking one of the lines from “Gnat”, where Eminem joked about all of the adjustments everyone has had to make during lockdown. The reviewer corrected Eminem’s joke about getting Covid from a bat-bite, and accused Eminem of spreading harmful conspiracy theories. Since the reviewer was clearly not familiar with Eminem’s work, I suppose he missed Eminem’s guest spot earlier that year on Moon Man’s song “The Adventures of Moon Man and Slim Shady” which started with:
Fuck’s going on, man?
Bunch of half-wits up in office.
Half of us walking around like a zombie apocalypse.
Other half are just pissed off and
Don’t wanna wear a mask
and they’re just scoffing.
And that’s how you end up catching the shit off ’em
I just used the same basket as you shopping.
Now I’m in a fuckin’ casket from you coughin’.
It was so irritating to read a review where the critic spent half the time pompously correcting Eminem’s “incorrect” information about Covid (complete with links to CDC pages), when CLEARLY what Eminem was doing – Eminem, the only artist I am aware of who received a visit from the FBI, wanting to ascertain whether or not Eminem’s public rage at Trump posed a serious threat – was lampooning Trump’s campaign of misinformation. The reviewer also mentioned the “disturbing” image in the “Gnat” video of Eminem coughing into the camera. My God, guy, haven’t you heard of irony and satire? Or, at the very least, lightening the mood in a universally serious and scary time? Why is a critic for Rolling Stone scolding an artist for being “disturbing”? Are you familiar with rock ‘n’ roll at ALL? You think the Sex Pistols or Jerry Lee Lewis or Little Richard WEREN’T “disturbing”? Disturbing the complacent status quo is how rock ‘n’ roll was born.
Considering this young critic’s attitude, maybe writing for Good Housekeeping would be a more appropriate gig.
At this point, Eminem doesn’t need accolades or critical approval. Both albums were on the top-selling albums lists of 2020 (and the usual suspects huffed and puffed in indignation because no one THEY knew listened to Eminem. “Nobody listens to Eminem” someone said with a straight “face” on Twitter.)
So this is my post about Eminem’s use of Alfred Hitchcock as an inspiration.
You’d have to tiptoe into Eminem’s body of work in order to perceive the overlap between the two. Here, off the top of the dome, are the connections, explicit, implicit:
— Hitchcock’s glee at making people squirm in their seats, his joy at causing fear in others
— the catharsis Hitchcock felt from expressing his own inner nightmarescape, sharing what terrified him in the hopes others will share the terror
— Hitchcock’s innovations in what was already a well-established genre
— Hitchcock’s creation of characters who have entered the cultural lexicon as a kind of shorthand (can you say “Stan”? “Stan” is cousin to “Norman”)
— Hitchcock’s films are frightening, but they are also unapologetically popular entertainments. Hitchcock wasn’t going for a niche audience. He was going for everyone.
— Hitchcock suffered from anxiety, dating back to his childhood. He remembered every trauma.
— Hitchcock was 1. an exhibitionist and 2. socially awkward. An anxiety-provoking combo.
— Hitchcock was a one-woman man. Maybe not a HAPPY one-woman man, but a one-woman man nonetheless.
— Hitchcock was a devoted father, and he often included his daughter in his work.
— Hitchcock was one of the most successful artists of his day, racking up an awe-inspiring number of awards.
— Hitchcock was celebrated in his own time and ours. He directed hits. But in the critical world, this is often a strike against you. You’re a “hack” if you’re too popular. (The French took Hitchcock very seriously indeed.) Critical consensus often celebrates not the serious, but the SELF-serious – and wanting to be entertaining is seen as low-brow.
Lots of overlap.
“You’re all hitched to my cock.”
— Eminem, “Alfred’s Theme”
“Hate those two words together, they are so unwomanly and unpoetic together they cancel each other out. ‘Poet’ I don’t like or ‘woman’ or ‘man’ none of these words although I have had to use them. ‘Female’ not much better. ‘Poetess’ actually I like the sound.” — Medbh McGuckian on being called a “woman poet”.
Born in Belfast on this day in 1950, poet Medbh McGuckian studied with Seamus Heaney at Queen’s College, and met other Northern Irish poets like Paul Muldoon (post on him here) and Ciarán Carson (post on him here) while there. She had already decided to be a poet during her time in a convent school, and she began to publish things here and there in the mid- to late 70s. A harsh time in Belfast. Her poems do not directly address the violence of Northern Ireland. Her concerns are personal. As the quote above from her expresses, she felt she was in a no-win situation from birth: a typical response to being born Catholic in Belfast, but there is the added level of womanhood. She is eloquent on the role of Irish women in Irish society, and the society of literature, where they are often ignored or, in a way worse, put on a pedestal.
Her voice is an important antidote. She writes about families and love and childbirth and mothers and daughters. These are not “women’s concerns”. Does not Seamus Heaney write about his father? His childhood? Does not James Joyce write about his wife in every damn thing he ever wrote? Why is it different when he does it? The fact of the matter is it is NOT different, but it seems different, “lesser”, when a woman does it – at least to men looking on. McGuckian, standing in a very male tradition, writes from the center of that tension. She is highly aware of the “other”-ness of female experience, specifically Irish female experience. She feels that womanhood itself has been pathologized in Ireland. The only safe role for women historically has been “beasts of burden”. If the Irish woman shows some spunk or intelligence, or even a desire for love, if she is in any way unruly, she is feared and scorned or thrown into a Magdalene Laundry. These fears are real.
“I know being a woman for me for a long time was being less, being excluded, being somehow cheap, being inferior, being sub. I associated being a woman with being a Catholic and being Irish with being from the North, and all of these things being not what you wanted to be. If you were a woman, it would have been better to be a man; if you were Catholic, it would have been a lot easier to be Protestant; if you were from the North, it was much easier to be from the South; if you were Irish, it was much easier to be English. So it was like everything that I was was wrong; everything that I was was hard, difficult, and a punishment.”
Eavan Boland opened the space for other “women poets” (yuk, hate the term). She widened the spectrum of what “could be talked about” in poetry (and she continues to do so). All the “big guys” of Northern Ireland (Muldoon, Heaney, Carson) recognized McGuckian’s gifts. She lives in Belfast still. She teaches there. She has four children, and a busy life.
Her first poetry collection came out in 1982. She has won many prizes and awards.
On Ballycastle Beach is the name of her 1995 collection and I’ll post the title poem today. Her images are startling and disturbing, and you can feel her circling around her own private library of associations, working something out in the verse. She has said she often writes a cluster of poems on one particular topic, and then realizes later only one of them is THE poem.
Calvien Bedient called her “easily the most white-hot Irish poet since Yeats.” Comparisons are unavoidable (especially in Irish literature). Every Irish poet has to deal with the giant of Yeats. I suppose it is better to be compared to Yeats than to NOT be compared to him, but the tension of influence and history is part of what McGuckian’s poems are all about, with the special knowledge that being a woman throws the whole situation off even further.
On Ballycastle Beach
If I found you wandering round the edge
Of a French-born sea, when children
Should be taken in by their parents,
I would read these words to you,
Like a ship coming in to harbour,
As meaningless and full of meaning
As the homeless flow of life
From room to homesick room.
The words and you would fall asleep,
Sheltering just beyond my reach
In a city that has vanished to regain
Its language. My words are traps
Through which you pick your way
From a damp March to an April date,
Or a mid-August misstep; until enough winter
Makes you throw your watch, the heartbeat
Of everyone present, out into the snow.
My forbidden squares and your small circles
Were a book that formed within you
In some pocket, so permanently distended,
That what does not face north, faces east,
Your hand, dark as a cedar lane by nature.
Grows more and more tired of the skidding light,
The hunched-up waves, and all the wet clothing,
Toys and treasures of a late summer house.
Even the Atlantic has begun its breakdown
Like a heavy mask thinned out scene after scene
In a more protected time – like one who has
Gradually, unnoticed, lengthened her pre-wedding
Dress. But, staring at the old escape and release
Of the water’s speech, faithless to the end,
Your voice was the longest I heard in my mind,
Although I had forgotten there could be such light.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, one doesn’t STUDY poets! You READ them and think, That’s marvelous, how is it done, could I do it? and that’s how you learn. At the end of it you can’t say, That’s Yeats, that’s Auden, because they’ve gone, they’re like a scaffolding that’s been taken down. Thomas was a dead end. What effects? Yeats and Auden, the management of lines, the formal distancing of emotion. Hardy, well … not to be afraid of the obvious. All those wonderful dicta about poetry – ‘the poet should touch our hearts by showing his own,’ ‘the poet takes note of nothing that he cannot feel,’ ‘the emotion of all the ages and the thought of his own’ – Hardy knew what it was all about.” — Philip Larkin, Paris Review interview
It’s Philip Larkin’s birthday. Born in 1922.
This is a bit of a repeat of what I wrote below, mainly because the main post I wrote years ago and I am just updating some thoughts: He wasn’t on my high school curriculum, and – for me – if someone wasn’t on my high school curriculum then I had to discover them myself. Which took years. Larkin came up a lot in Christopher Hitchens’ writing, and the first poem of his I read was “This Be the Verse”, probably the best way in. I was maybe in my early ’30s. The poem is so colloquial and it gives you an idea of him – correct in some ways but a blind alley in others. Some of his other poems are so deeply sad, so pessimistic, so haunted by death… that (to be honest) you wonder how he was able to bear life at all. (Apparently, he was an alcoholic.) I think Ernie Hilbert featured him in his poetry newsletter (which I subscribed to back in the late ’90s/early aughts).
A couple years back, in my ongoing lifelong project to fill in blanks and introduce myself to writers I have heard of but know nothing about, I decided “Hey, let me fill in the blank on Larkin!” I bought his collected works, a very big volume, with more footnotes than text. It took me months to get through it. Six or seven months. ! I read a poem every morning (sometimes a couple, if they were short). It was arduous. I like arduous reading in the early morning. Not too much of it, just a page or two. I am currently crawling my way through the collected works of Jonathan Swift and learning a lot about controversies in the 1720s. The notes in the Larkin volume weren’t just “this means this” etc. They are obsessively detailed. Larkin only published four volumes of poetry, but there were many more “one off” poems, unpublished and published.
“Critics established a snobbery toward me.” — Esther Williams
My formal introduction to aquatic-mermaid-star Esther Williams wasn’t through her movies. Oh, I may have seen some of the numbers on the various afternoon movies shown on local TV, where I first saw the old movies that made me a movie fan. But no, not for Esther. I learned about Esther Williams through Judy Blume.
When I was a kid, 9 or 10 years old, my favorite book of hers was Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself. It tells the story of a young Jewish girl whose family moves to Miami Beach from New York City in 1947. Sally lives a rich world of fantasy. She dreams of being a detective, or the star of some sweeping romance. During her first months in Florida, she becomes convinced that their next-door neighbor is Hitler, in disguise. Judy Blume has said that Sally J. Freedman was her most autobiographical book, dealing with a post-WWII childhood, the lingering spectre of Nazism over American Jews, and the domination of Hollywood over the dreams of kids. Movies are an escape for Sally from frightening reality.
Sally is obsessed with Esther Williams.
Here is an excerpt from Blume’s book:
Esther Williams was her favorite movie actress. Some day she was going to swim just like her, with her hair in a coronet and a flower behind her ear. Swimming along underwater, always smiling, with beautiful straight white teeth and shiny red lipstick. Esther Williams never got water up her nose or had to spit while she swam, like Sally, who didn’t like to get her face wet in the first place. Not even when she dove off the high board. You’d never know you had to kick to stay afloat from watching Esther Williams. And when she swam in the movies there was always beautiful music in the background and handsome men standing around, waiting. It would be great fun to be Esther Williams!
Check out this wonderful homage to Williams:
I was a kid who loved watching old movies whenever they showed up on channel 56. That’s how I first saw James Dean, Marlon Brando, Joan Fontaine, Vincent Price, Cary Grant, and all the rest of them. On a staticky little black and white TV on Saturday afternoons.
When I first saw an Esther Williams movie, I remember feeling a thrill, feeling so SMART because I already knew the name, and I already knew how important she was, because hadn’t Sally J. Freedman introduced me to her so well?
Thanks, Judy Blume.
Fanny Brice, the original Funny Girl, supposedly once wisecracked, “Esther Williams? Wet, she’s a star. Dry, she ain’t.”
When Esther Williams heard that remark, she laughed. She didn’t take herself too seriously. She didn’t have pretensions about who or what she was. She was a star. More “serious” actors would kill to have her charisma. You look at her and you feel happy. How many people can you say that about? She was an amazing athlete, the undulating movements of her body showing off her power, but also her grace, her legs curling around underneath her, her back arched like a swan’s neck, silky, elongated, beautiful. Through all of this … her smile seems – IS – real, and that’s what I think of when I think of Esther Williams. Well, I think of her body, its beauty, its fluidity, how she moved, the long strength of her legs. But mostly I think of her smile.
Here’s a clip from Easy to Love, 1953.
An apt title. It describes Esther Williams in 3 small words.
“It appeared as if I had invited the audience into the water with me, and it conveyed the sensation that being in there was absolutely delicious.” — Esther Williams
