“Language most shows a man. Speak that I may see thee.” — Ben Jonson

Posted on June 11, 2026 by sheila

“O rare Benn Johnson.” — Jonson’s incorrectly-spelled epitaph in Westminster Abbey

It’s his birthday today.

Ben Jonson did everything. Plays, poems, satires, elegies, epigrams. His talent was wide and flexible. Everything he wrote feels inevitable. However, as Michael Schmidt writes in his wonderful Lives of the Poets: “Jonson suffers one irremediable disability: Shakespeare.”

When people have discussed him, throughout history, more often than not they do so in comparison to Shakespeare. Shakespeare is the context, Jonson is in that context’s shadow. As giant as Ben Jonson was, and he was a GIANT, he is not allowed to stand alone, because Shakespeare hovers over all. One cannot exist without consciousness of the other.

The men are placed in opposition merely because of their closeness in the timeline.

Bing Crosby once said something along these lines in re: Frank Sinatra: “Frank is a singer who comes along once in a lifetime, but why did he have to come along in my lifetime?”

One can imagine Ben Jonson thinking something similar about Shakespeare.

More beneath the jump:

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“What good is a character who’s always winking at the audience to let them in on the secret?” –Gene Wilder

Posted on June 11, 2026 by sheila

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It’s his birthday today.

Where does the humor lie? Can this moment be broken down to discover its secret? Is it the eye pan to the right? Is it the delayed eyebrow raise? Is it what’s happening with his mouth? Is it that it’s one of his specialties – the comedic pause?

Trying to describe in words why this moment is so funny is like trying to describe in words how a complicated calculus equation works. At a certain point, you just have to be good enough at calculus to even understand the lingo. Same here. All is really left is to sit back and be awed at someone who is this good at what he does.

Humphrey Bogart said that good acting was “6 feet back” in the eyes. Gene Wilder went that deep. Like … where WAS he? When he was at his most lunatic – he – whoever he was – was gone. All that remained was a devotion to the maniacal moment.

For example this:

Actors watch a moment like that and have the same reaction a young violinist probably has to seeing Ihtzak Perlman. You are in the same field as the genius, but in watching you realize it is in name only. You’re not even in the same hemisphere, really. A moment like Wilder’s turns the actors I know into Salieris. That’s the breaks. Just be grateful there are such artists who come down among us for a short while and grace us with their presence, their generosity, their gifts. We can learn from them and be inspired to be better.

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This is a famous story, but worth repeating:

In Gene Wilder’s book Kiss Me Like a Stranger, he describes his first meeting with the director Mel Stuart, before he had decided to do Willy Wonka. Wilder had reservations about the script as is. He had an idea. Listen to him, and learn. This is how specific he was as an actor. This is how much he understood story and character and AUDIENCE, too, let’s not forget. Those who think actors just do what the director tells them … well, they haven’t ever ever been involved in a creative process. Ever.

Although I liked Roald Dahl’s book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to play Willy Wonka. The script was good, but there was something that was bothering me. Mel Stuart, the man who was going to direct the movie, came to my home to talk about it.

“What’s bothering you?”

“When I make my first entrance, I’d like to come out of the door carrying a cane and then walk towards the crowd with a limp. After the crowd sees that Willy Wonka is a cripple, they all whisper to themselves and then become deathly quiet. As I walk towards them, my cane sinks into one of the cobblestones I’m walking on and stands straight up, by itself … but I keep on walking, until I realize that I no longer have my cane. I start to fall forward, and just before I hit the ground, I do a beautiful forward somersault and bounce back up, to great applause.”

” … Why do you want to do that?”

“Because from that time on, no one will know if I’m lying or telling the truth.”

Mel Stuart looked a little puzzled. I knew he wanted to please me, but he wasn’t quite sure about this change.

“You mean – if you can’t do what you just said, you won’t do the part?”

“That’s right,” I answered.

Mel mumbled to himself, ” … comes out of the door, has a cane, cane gets stuck in a cobblestone, falls forward, does a somersault, and bounces back up …” He shrugged his shoulders. “Okay!”

Imagine Willy Wonka without that tumble.

Best of all: Mel Stuart filmed it exactly as Gene Wilder told him to. Shot for shot.

Wilder was RIGHT.

He was also right about Willy Wonka’s costume. Mel Stuart sent Wilder some sketches. Wilder looked them over, and wrote Stuart a note back with his thoughts.

Don’t miss Wilder’s letter. “The hat is terrific, but making it 2 inches shorter would make it more special.”

Gene Wilder came and spoke at my grad school. He would say something, or pause to think a bit before saying something, and the moment wasn’t even funny but his TONE and his TIMING had us roaring. He would stop when he heard us laugh, and say, “Y’know, that happens to me all the time.” He wasn’t annoyed. He calmly accepted that when he spoke in a serious way large groups of people began to laugh.

His timing was otherworldly.

My favorite Gene Wilder story (it’s in his book, but he told it to us when he visited my school) was about his first day on Bonnie & Clyde, his debut in film. He had done tons of theatre, but no movies.

He’s in the back of the car for the scene where the criminals take him hostage, and director Arthur Penn yells, “ACTION” and Wilder immediately started the scene. Penn stopped Wilder and said, “Just because I say Action doesn’t mean you have to start. It means that we are ready for when you are ready.” In other words, Penn felt Wilder’s nerves, and wanted him to chill. “Just take your time, and start when you’re ready.” Wilder was grateful. He took a moment after Penn called “Action”, got himself together, and then played the scene brilliantly. Afterwards, someone on the crew said to him, “Don’t get used to that.”

Wilder told that story in praise of Arthur Penn as a director (who was present in the room, this was an Actors Studio event), but also to illustrate that it’s an actor’s job to get himself together, however he has to, in the middle of the chaos of a set, so that you’re ready to go when everyone else is ready. That’s the job. Be ready when the director calls “Action.” And Penn gave him the space to learn that lesson on his first day on a movie set, without being yelled at/shamed/scorned.

He also told the story of seeing Charlie Chaplin’s The Circus when he was a kid, and having an “A-ha” moment in re: comedy. There’s the bit with the little boy and the hotdog.

Wilder watched it, agog, his analytical mind trying to break down WHY it was so hilarious. There was the timing of the bit with the hot dog, and Chaplin making goo-goo faces at the baby and then eating the hot dog, etc. Finally, Wilder realized that why the scene was so funny was that nobody in it – including Chaplin – was “acting funny.” The situation was funny. Chaplin played it for the reality of it. Wilder said that that one moment in The Circus inspired his whole career and he would come back to it if he got stuck. It was a roadmap of what to do, how to solve any given problem. Create a situation that is so funny that nobody needs to “act funny.”

Which brings me back to him saying something serious and all of us bursting into laughter.

His genius was untouchable. It’s like musical genius or a genius for math.

You can get more proficient in those things. But you cannot learn to do what the geniuses do. You’ll never EVER catch up.

 
 
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.

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“I couldn’t do no yodelin’, so I turned to howlin’ and it’s done me just fine.”– Howlin’ Wolf

Posted on June 10, 2026 by sheila

Chester Burnett, who would eventually become the legendary Howlin’ Wolf, was born on this day in 1901.

He is in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in the “early influences” category. He is in the Memphis Music Hall of Fame (He recorded at Sun Records in the early years – pre-Elvis, in other words). He is in the Mississippi Music Hall of Fame. He is in the Blues Hall of Fame. I could go on.

Sam Phillips at Sun Records talked about him with the reverence usually reserved for spiritual experiences or out-of-body close encounters with extra-terrestrials. Everyone felt that way about him. The Rolling Stones sure did. He was one of their major influences. When the Stones appeared on Shindig, they handed over the stage to Howlin’ Wolf, with a great blues band, including the great James Burton (who would eventually play for Elvis all through the 70s). It’s astonishing, and the young Rolling Stones sit on the stairs behind him, looking up at him, agog. Poor quality clip visually, but all you need are the vocals.

Howlin’ Wolf was born in Mississippi, recorded in Memphis, but eventually would become associated with the Chicago blues. His voice is unmistakable. So powerful it’s impossible to listen to him casually. He demands full attention. His strength of persona was titanic. He had major gravitas – as though he was emerging FROM the earth – but also explosive lift-off, creating an excitement so huge it must have been absolutely overwhelming to see him life. Most artists have one or the other – gravitas or lift-off. He had both.

We’re lucky he lived long enough (he died in 1976) so there is a lot of footage of him performing live.

One final thing, a funny thing I just discovered while trying to find the photo of him at the top of this post (it’s my favorite photo of him because he’s IN ACTION, he’s coming right at you). If you Google “Howlin Wolf” he is the first thing that comes up – of course – but one of the alternate searches showing in the search bar was “Howling wolf animal.” So what this means is: the determined wolf lovers out there who just want to see pictures of their favorite animal out in the wild howling at the moon, have to add “animal” to their search, to clarify what it is they are actually looking for – otherwise all they’d see would be pictures of this legendary bluesman.

The landscape is still saturated with his name.

 
 
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.

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“If you have to be in a soap opera try not to get the worst role.” — Judy Garland

Posted on June 10, 2026 by sheila

It’s the great, the irreplaceable, Judy Garland’s birthday.

The screengrab above is from John Cassavetes’ 1963 film A Child is Waiting. This film is not really well-known, except among Cassavetes/Garland completists – but some serious Cassavetes fans don’t know about it either. This was a “job” for him, it wasn’t a self-generated project, and so … to these purists … maybe it doesn’t “count” as much. Or something. I don’t know. He himself disowned it, saying the end result was not what he was going for, that there was a conflict between himself and producer Stanley Kramer about how to tell the story. All of this may be true, but that’s no reason for us to not watch the film and make up our own minds. It’s definitely filmed in a more “conventional” way than his other more personal films like Faces, Woman Under the Influence, Husbands and etc., all of which came later. But it’s interesting to watch because it shows what Cassavetes is like as a “director for hire” … and you can FEEL his sensibility in every frame, I don’t care what the purists say. A Child is Waiting is about a woman (Garland) who joins the staff of a mental hospital for disabled kids and immediately disagrees with the treatment of the patients, as decreed by the head doc (Burt Lancaster). She bonds with the kids – one in particular – whose mother, a chilly blonde played by Gena Rowlands, cannot deal with the fact that her son is not “normal” – she’s put him into the institution and basically never comes to visit, breaking the son’s heart and spirit. Garland fights for better treatment of the kids. The children in the movie were not trained actors. They were all mentally-challenged and disabled kids from a nearby state hospital. It gives the film a palpable and almost dangerous sense of reality that it certainly would not otherwise have. Cassavetes didn’t try to control the kids, or manipulate them, in either what they did, or who they were. This is where “he” is most felt in the film. He doesn’t film the kids with pathos, or pity, or sadness. He captures them in the fullness of their lives, mischievous, angry, sullen, pleased, whatever. And: He just thrust Garland among them. And the whole film, as far as I’m concerned, is about watching her take it all in. The screengrab at the top is what she is like through the whole thing: She takes them in – listens to them – intuitively cares about where they are at and what they are going through. Because it’s Cassavetes and his eye was always so tender and human – this does not feel exploitive. A Child is Waiting was produced by Stanley Kramer – who wanted to expose the plight of such children – (he was a very socially conscious guy as I’m sure you know). Other big actresses were considered for this part – offers were made, they all turned it down. Kramer had just worked with Garland in Judgment at Nuremberg so he got her to take the role.

If you want to see pure distilled empathy – felt in every thought/word/deed/gesture/expression … it’s in A Child is Waiting in Judy Garland’s performance.

Because that’s the thing with Judy Garland. She couldn’t do it any other way. It ALL was real for her. It’s how she was built, it’s how she received the world. It’s why she was a great actress, and it’s why she suffered so mightily. She paid the price for the easy accessibility to her own depths, of course, but it came from a place not of neurosis – as is so facile-ly claimed – but of generosity, fearlessness, and, above all else, reality. And actors must always “find a way” to make their fictional circumstances real. That’s the gig. Garland couldn’t do it any other way and so actors have much to learn from her.

If the pain was real for her, and it was, then so too was the joy, the love, the humor. It ALL was real. She had access to ALL of it.

This is a PHENOM in emotional availability and performance, in actors AND in regular people, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

She was DIFFERENT. This is why she is who she is and why she was who she was. It’s why she’s so wondrous to watch.

For me, one of the greatest single pieces of acting in the 20th century – and one that predicts Brando by over a decade – is the scene in Wizard of Oz when she sees Aunty Em in the big globe. This scene is one of my Talismans of Great Acting.

She’s not controlling the emotion, or even expressing it. She is IN it. And remember: Aunty Em is NOT in the glass globe. Judy is looking at nothing. Nobody’s there. She’s looking at a prop. Everything she does she does from her imagination. It’s astonishing.

Another high-water-mark: Judy Garland’s one-of-the-greatest-performances-of-all-time rendition of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”, sung on her TV show a couple of weeks after President Kennedy – a friend of hers – was killed.

Like I said: one of the greatest performances of all time.

Another high-water-mark: the scene in the dressing room in Star is Born. Again, for me, it’s another Talisman of Great Acting. Judy has a ton of those.)

It’s long. But that’s why it’s so masterful. Because I must point out: she does it with no cuts. She has to speak a huge wall of text – the scene is 5 minutes long – and she must “go” someplace during the course of the monologue. She doesn’t start out where she ends up. She can’t play the end of the monologue before she gets there … so she actually has to go THROUGH this. In front of us. No cuts, to give her time to prepare, or jump-start the final emotional state. The camera is placed on her and we watch her … she starts out sad but relatively calm, and at the end she is completely BROKEN. (The following scene is the huge number “Born in a Trunk” – which she is forced to perform with all of THIS churning around underneath it. And so that scene ALSO is a wonder, because in it she has to suppress all of THIS that we see here.)

No fakery. Never. She literally COULDN’T fake it.

Nobody like her. Happy birthday Judy.

 
 
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.

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Mike Doughty, if you’re out there …

Posted on June 10, 2026 by sheila

It’s singer-songwriter Mike Doughty’s birthday today. My brother Brendan introduced me to Doughty’s music back in the day – specifically the album Skittish, which I still own – because I still believe in owning my music, not renting it from some corporate overlord.

I spent about a year and a half re-posting all my brother’s music writing – from off his blog – because I felt this stuff shouldn’t be lost or forgotten. Brendan is such a good writer. So I resurrect pieces when I can. Mike Doughty’s Skittish was # on Bren’s loosely organized “50 Best Albums” list, and I think it’s such a beautiful piece of writing I wanted to share it again: The title to this post here is from Bren’s piece.

50 Best Albums, #3. Mike Doughty, Skittish

 
 
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.

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Happy Birthday to “Mr. Excitement”, Jackie Wilson

Posted on June 9, 2026 by sheila

Jackie Wilson’s voice is otherworldly. He had a four-octave range. You listen and there are times where you can’t even believe what you’re hearing.

Wilson started out in Detroit talent contests, where he had a tendency to win. Big fish small pond, although even in the 40s it was hard to stand out in music hub Detroit. Eventually, Wilson auditioned for and was accepted into the successful R&B group Billy Ward and His Dominoes, a staple in Las Vegas entertainment. (Elvis, famously, saw them perform in Las Vegas in 1956 and was so blown away by Wilson, whose name he didn’t know, that he went on and on … and ON about it, during the rap-riff session in 1956 now known as the “Million Dollar Quartet”. Wilson performed Elvis’ recent hit “Don’t Be Cruel” and you can hear Elvis’ awe: he didn’t know the song had THAT in it. 1956 was the year Elvis went national/global. “Don’t Be Cruel” was huge for him. But he performed it without exploring the depths. Wilson showed him the depths. Listen to Elvis regale Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins with the story. There’s no jealousy. It’s sheer personal and professional respect.)


Billy Ward and his Dominoes

Wilson and Elvis eventually became friends. Wilson always had nice things to say about Elvis and, of course, the reverse was true, as we have immortalized on tape.

You can get a great sense of Wilson’s style in “Rags to Riches”, where his lead voice launches out of the group in an undeniable way. He doesn’t obliterate the group, but he does seem to single-handedly justify its existence. It was 1953. He was plucked from obscurity into this position.

Wilson was always getting into big trouble. He was stabbed by a sex worker, for example.The women, the kids, the assaults, the chaos … The Dominoes were good for Wilson at first. It gave his life a structure to his talent a pltform. He stayed with the group for 4 or 5 years, but finally left, tired of the endless “residency” in Vegas. He was meant to be a solo artist. A headliner.

From his earliest days in Detroit, he was already doing the songs which would soon be regular staples of his act for years to come. Like his version of “Danny Boy”. I don’t even know what to SAY about his “Danny Boy”.

WORDS ARE INADEQUATE.

You have to go to YouTube to watch this clip of him performing “Danny Boy” live. They won’t let me embed it. It’s outrageous. So beautiful.

Here’s the recorded version but you have to see him do it live, because it drives home the point that Wilson didn’t need the studio to shine. He was, if anything, better live.

Wilson returned to Detroit at the same time a guy named Berry Gordy was starting to be make a name for himself in the local scene. One of Wilson’s first songs as a solo artist, “Reet Petite”, was written by Gordy. Wilson knew what his voice was capable of. He’d choose a key for a given song and producers/other musicians thought it would too high. Wilson knew he could hit those notes. It’s WHY he started songs up the scale. If you have four octaves in your pocket, you want to show it off.

An early hit for him was “Lonely Teardrops”, a staple of his act which went to #1 on the R&B charts. Here he is performing it on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1962:

Wilson’s heyday, like his life, was brief. The British Invasion was a game-changer for singers like Wilson. The landscape changed overnight, leaving a lot of singers behind, no matter how talented. If you didn’t write your own stuff, you were stranded. Motown exploded, but Gordy cultivated other singers for superstardom. I’m not sure why. Wilson had fallings-out with pretty much everybody (except his audience, who went batshit every time they saw him live. People fainted. People tore their hair out. People stormed the stage. He was one of the most exciting performers ever).

He’s probably most known for “Higher and Higher”, an analogy for his voice.

In 1975, he collapsed onstage while singing “Lonely Teardrops”, and went into a coma. His life stretched on for another eight years, but he never “woke up”. He was in an institution. It’s tragic. There’s a rumor Elvis donated money anonymously to pay for Wilson’s medical bills, which sounds like something Elvis would do. There were others. Benefit concerts were held. A lot of Motown artists donated money. Was Jackie Wilson conscious in there? It’s horrible to think about.

When he died in 1984, there wasn’t enough money for a headstone. Friends raised the money. He was buried with his mother in a mausoleum in a Detroit ceremony, and the plaque reads “No More Lonely Teardrops”.

Wilson’s voice was one of those eerie miracles of humanity, but he wasn’t just a voice. He was a full body performer (part of Elvis’ monologue in the Million Dollar Quartet details how Wilson moved while singing “Don’t Be Cruel”).

I found this wild clip where Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Linda Gail Lewis and Wilson come together to sing “This Land Is Your Land”. God bless the person who recorded this – who saved it – and God bless the person who uploaded it to YouTube. I love all of them but when Jackie Wilson comes on – and then grabs the microphone to do his verse – and you hear that voice – it makes me want to cry.

 
 
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.

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“I was smart enough to go through any door that opened.” — Joan Rivers

Posted on June 8, 2026 by sheila

It’s her birthday today.

A couple of days before Joan Rivers died, when there was still some hope she would pull through, I thought it would be a great opportunity to talk about this legend with someone who loves her, and who has a lot of smart things to say about her. We had been talking about the tone of all of the Tweets in support of her, and how unique they were, and what they said about Joan Rivers (especially the comments from her fellow comics – which, as far as I’m concerned, were the only comments that mattered). So I put Mitchell on speaker and turned on the tape recorder.

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Joan Rivers Portrait

Mitchell Fain: Joan Rivers is definitely one of the top queer icons. I don’t know a gay person who doesn’t love her.

Sheila O’Malley: And why is that?

MF: It’s twofold so stick with me on this. There’s a lot of criticism lately because of the mean things Joan says. It’s a very PC world right now. My thing is: Nobody gives that criticism to Don Rickles. They only say it to Joan, because of sexism, anti-Semitism, a kind of “keep that mouthy Jewish broad quiet” thing.

But I think what people are missing is: Yes, she says incredibly mean things. A. She’s a comedian. She’s never done anything differently than the boys. And B. if Joan Rivers were a person who said mean things about one particular group of people and not another, if she only singled out one group, it would be a very different thing. But there’s not one group of people who get a pass from her.

She’s one of those people who says things out loud what we’re all thinking, in our worst moments, and she says it with cleverness and speed. And the monster gets smaller. You know when you’re a little kid and you think there’s a monster in your closet, and you have to take the monster out of the closet and realize there is no monster? Joan Rivers makes the monster smaller. Whether it’s Kim Kardashian or menopause, she makes the monster smaller. And everybody is subject to her attention. It could be the Jewish girl sitting there, the skinny white girl, the black guy. Yes, it’s insult comedy, but it’s always felt honest, as opposed to just mean.

There was that thing recently where she was on CNN and she walked out of the interview.

MF: I think a lot of people thought she was faking it for publicity. I don’t think that’s true. Rivers said, “You are not the person to be interviewing a comic.” The woman was taking her to task and saying, “You say really mean things …” and Rivers just walked off. We can talk about it in terms of political correctness, and of course it will be better to be a kinder gentler nation, but I will always take Auntie Joan’s honesty.

One of the big controversies recently was with Lena Dunham, where Rivers said something about Dunham’s thighs or something. Lena Dunham tweeted about Joan Rivers when she heard Rivers was ill, and she could have said any number of things, and she wrote:

We can’t lose Joan. All love and healing wishes to Her Majesty Joan Rivers- being ripped a new one by you is an honor to be treasured.

It makes me want to cry, I don’t know why. Dunham freakin’ gets it. There was an article titled Did Joan Rivers Body-Shame Lena Dunham? Yes, she did. And Lena Dunham said it was an “honor and a treasure.” So fuck you.

All I know is Joan Rivers still makes me guffaw or gasp or shake my head in shock. I am never less than entertained. She’s a loud-mouthed bubbe who tells the truth. We need her.

We can talk about her in terms of her importance to comedy. You can really count on one hand the female comics who broke that ground. What Joan was doing was different and she was doing it on a much larger scale.

Joan Rivers

MF: The one time I saw Joan in concert was back in the 80s. My brother and I went to see her at the Warwick Musical Tent, and it was a big deal because the whole show was David Brenner and Joan Rivers. And at the time, popular conception was that you couldn’t have two comics on a bill. It wasn’t done. You’d have a singer and a comic. And Brenner and Rivers were like, “WHY can’t we do this?”

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MF: It was a juggernaut. It was huge. It changed the game. She challenged people’s ideas, she challenged how the industry saw comedians.

She also changed the way women could speak in public. Let’s not underestimate that. Yes, a lot of what she did was self-deprecating. But the stuff she talked about, her inadequacies as a sexual partner, all of that stuff, was extraordinary.

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MF: Her mom was like “You marry well as a Jewish lady, and make sure your husband makes a lot of money so that you can have a fur coat and rise in a society that hates Jews.” That’s how it worked. Joan’s mom married a doctor and it was the Depression and Joan’s dad would see patients for free, or take eggs as payment, and Joan’s mother was not having it. There was a lot of tension in the household about success and making money which is why Joan Rivers was always good at making money. She marries this guy Edgar, she loves him, he then loses all her money, and kills himself. And remember when that happened: this comedian’s husband kills himself, and the one commodity she has, her humor – nobody wants to see it anymore. Nobody wants to see the widow of a suicide victim tell jokes. Then she proceeds to make her fortune back by doing whatever the fuck it takes. And that is a big thing for me about Joan Rivers and her comedy. She will do whatever the fuck it takes.

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MF: One of the things that is very fun to watch is this In Bed With Joan Rivers web series. My favorite one recently is Bianca Del Rio, who was a contestant on Rupaul’s Drag Race. Bianca is an insult comic but he does it in drag, and is definitely the descendant of Joan Rivers. So here is this drag queen basically doing Joan’s act, really well, on Joan’s show, and you see Joan Rivers sitting back, letting Bianca Del Rio get all the laughs. Joan Rivers certainly gets in her perfectly-timed digs, but that type of generosity is the real Joan Rivers.

MF: Here’s the deal. Everybody I know has stolen from Joan Rivers’ act. We watch Joan Rivers and she said all the things we couldn’t say or felt disempowered to say. It’s like Barbra Streisand’s answer to why the gays love her so much: “I was different and I made it.”

SOM: There was a moment in the documentary “Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work” where she’s there for the Mark Twain award for George Carlin. And what was so revealing was her saying, “I’m never included when these events come up. I’m just glad I’m included.” It takes a kind of stamina to withstand the Boys Club that still exists.

MF: In her first book, Enter Talking, she talks about Second City being a Boys Club and she tells stories of stepping forward from the back line – where you step into a scene – and seeing other people put their arms out to stop her. Now she talks very lovingly about Second City, in retrospect, but her experience there was not a positive one. It was another place where she wasn’t wanted.

SOM: And then there are these amazing moments like when Johnny Carson says on air, “You’re gonna be a big star” and then eventually hands over a permanent guest-spot to her. That was a game-changer as well.

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MF: There still isn’t a late-night talk show with a female host, except for Chelsea Handler.

SOM: At the Comedy Central roast of Joan Rivers, it was all about trashing her looks and her plastic surgery. Anytime anyone mentions the plastic surgery, I get annoyed. If she didn’t do that to her face, she’d hear about it. “Look at how she let herself go!” You can’t win, as a woman, with aging. Besides, who cares? It’s the most obnoxious concern-trolling. Men aren’t treated this way. She was also one of the first people to talk about, to admit she was getting plastic surgery.

MF: She talked about everything. Periods, menopause, how your body falls when you get older. It was the next step from Phyllis Diller who talked about not being a good housewife.

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SOM: And Diller’s schtick was including women in the conversation of comedy in a very important way. Diller was admitting something really secret, admitting that the happy homemaker thing was shit. She was telling a dirty little secret about women’s lives at that time. Then there was Carol Burnette. Elaine May. You can feel a new ground opening up.

MF: Rivers opened the door for us to talk about stuff that the boys didn’t want us to talk about. And she did it anyway and she’s been doing it for 50 years.

There was a late-night cable show a while back that was a roundtable of different comics. It was almost always boys, with an occasional girl. They would throw out names of comedians and everyone had an opinion. “Let’s talk about Pryor.” And someone threw out Joan Rivers. It was all these young boy comics, and the way that these guys talked about Joan Rivers, they were like, “Let me tell you something. Do not count Joan out. Just because she’s an old lady with plastic surgery and she’s on red carpets and Hollywood Squares – when you’re one on one with Joan Rivers, she’s still the smartest person in the room.”

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MF: And that’s what matters. The reaction from comics to her illness has been so interesting. It’s not “Poor Joan Rivers,” it’s almost selfish. It’s like, “We need more from you, Joan. Get it together.” There’s a selfish thread of “We are not done needing Joan Rivers. We still need Auntie Joan to say shitty things.” The tone is: “No no no, there are way more people to make fun of, we need you, the Kardashians are still around, who’s next, we need you to call it out.” Who’s gonna say that stuff now?

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MF: It also speaks volumes about Joan Rivers’ awareness of pop culture. I mean, Fashion Police, is, for me, appointment TV. She says shit you can’t believe someone is getting away with on TV. It’s amazing. Even the people on the set with her, they can’t believe what she’s saying. Joan Rivers calls out Ariana Grande, or Lena Dunham, she calls out the most brand-new and/or obscure or utterly of-the-moment pop culture person, and Joan Rivers wants to find out who the fuck they are. It seems like she’s off-the-cuff making up mean things, which she is, but the important thing is that she’s still paying attention. In a weird way, she’s a version of Will Rogers. She’s the Will Rogers of mean. She’s always observing and making comments about our culture.

I mean, what 80-something year old lady knows who Ariana Grande is? I think it’s extraordinary. Clearly it comes from a place of being driven, maybe a little bit crazy, or desperate … but she’s still doing it at a level that other people her age just are not.

SOM: What I loved in that “Piece of Work” doc were her file cabinets of jokes. One was labeled “Cooking to Tony Danza.”

[Roaring laughter.]

SOM: D comes after C. Oh my God.

MF: It’s genius.

SOM: Cooking to Tony Danza…

[More laughter.]

SOM: There’s that moment in the documentary where she’s playing the club in Wisconsin and she makes a Helen Keller joke and a guy storms out after heckling her. And afterwards there was a little Wisconsin lady getting Joan’s autograph and the lady was like, “That guy, he just doesn’t understand comedy,” and Joan said, “I know. It’s comedy. It’s not meant to be serious.” I loved that bonding moment with a real person, but then, Joan is being walked out to her car, and she’s saying, “I feel bad. His son is deaf. Maybe he had a catharsis tonight. Maybe it was good for him to shout at me.”

MF: What I love about that scene is how she handles the heckler. As someone who has spent many years onstage, making jokes, hoping the audience thinks it’s funny and then dealing with people who don’t, watching Joan deal with it is a master class. She tells the joke. He heckles. She rips him a new asshole. She improvises a joke to get the audience back on her side. And then, boom, she’s back into her act. THAT is technique. She’s an old lady. She’s a senior citizen. I know 20-year-olds who cannot recover from a moment onstage like that. She does a 3-point turn right back into her act. It’s one of my favorite scenes in the movie. It blew me away. I watch that scene over and over, asking, “How does she do that? What’s the formula?”

Here’s one of my favorite Joan Rivers moments of all time. It was from when she had a daytime talk show and it was during the whole Jessica Hahn and Jim Bakker scandal. Jessica Hahn was on Rivers’ show via satellite and Hahn turns the interview around to start attacking Joan for saying mean things. And you think, “Honey, what possessed you to take on Joan Rivers?” Underestimate her at your peril. Underestimate this old lady at your peril. It ends with Joan Rivers, legitimately pissed, saying, “I’m not the one who slept my way to the middle.” I think when the history of television is written, that is definitely a high point. It is one of my favorite moments of all time.

SOM: “I’m not the one who slept my way to the middle.” Wow. You can’t recover from a comment like that.

MF: Yup. Done. Garry Shandling tells this great story about how he opened for Joan Rivers in Vegas years ago. There was a big party afterwards, there was dancing. Joan was dancing with Edgar, and Garry was dancing with his wife, and this old Jewish woman danced up to Garry Shandling, not realizing Joan Rivers was right behind them, and she leaned into Garry Shandling and she said, “We thought you were much funnier than Joan.” And Joan turned her husband around, without missing a beat, and said, “You have no breasts,” and then danced away with Edgar.

So mean, so base, but the whole point is: You’re shaming me in my own place, and I’m going to go right for the jugular.

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MF: This is sort of a non sequitur but it has to do with my feelings about Joan Rivers. I was recently talking with someone about Madonna. There is a world of Madonna Gays. I am not one of them. I love Madonna but I stopped paying attention after “Music.” There are Madonna apologists, you can’t say anything bad about Madonna, they lose their minds. I’m a bit of a Joan Rivers apologist.

Yes, she’s politically incorrect. Yes, she’s rude. Yes, she’s self-deprecating. Yes, she has had too much surgery. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. I still love her. She’s a legend. She changed the game. She’s a trailblazer who’s still working at a certain level at her age. How many people of her generation have their own television show? Don Rickles doesn’t have his own television show.

Then there is the fact that Joan got her fortune back. Selling jewelry on QVC. Doing Hollywood Squares. There’s something about this woman as a business woman that I find unbelievably admirable. Everyone made fun of her for hawking her jewelry on QVC, and now, who DOESN’T have a line on QVC? Everyone snickered and sneered at the time, and now Mariah Carey does it, Jennifer Lopez does it, Gwyneth Paltrow does it … not that they personally sneered at Joan, but the idea that Rivers would have the gall, the lack of class, to go hawk jewelry that she thought was pretty – which, by the way, she stands by and wears all the time – and she did it anyway. She was a single mom with a daughter to raise. She made all her money back. Amazing.

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SOM: I think the fact that the boys are all rallying around her on Twitter – that it’s not just the women – speaks volumes.

MF: Yes! I mean, Seth Rogen. He’s so current-generation goofball stoner boys club, and his Tweet says

I really need Joan Rivers to be ok.

The tone of Seth Rogen’s is the tone of a lot of them. In these tweets, is the idea that Joan would want her friends and fans to be like, “Get your ass up, Joan Rivers, because we are not done with needing you.” It’s almost selfish and it’s revealing the importance that she had for people, even those who don’t admit it because she’s not hip or politically correct.

Listen, there is an argument for being kind to each other and to not use words that hurt people’s feelings. But Joan is a social commentator, Will Rogers as a pit bull. She’s making a social comment with her shark-biting humor. It’s all absurdity to her. The absurdity of life, of the human condition. If she pulls out of this, the jokes that she’ll tell about it … I am so looking forward to it.

The Tweets from other comics reminds me of the poem that we love by Frank O’Hara.

SOM: “Oh Lana Turner we love you get up.”

MF: We need our Lana Turners to get up, we need our Joan Rivers to get up. Oh Joan Rivers we love you get up.

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Later that week

Sadly, Joan Rivers did not “get up.” Here is the tribute I wrote to Rivers for Rogerebert.com.

 
 
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.

Posted in Actors, On This Day, Television | 4 Comments

“Art is about building a new foundation, not just laying something on top of what’s already there.” — Prince

Posted on June 7, 2026 by sheila

It’s his birthday today.

It still doesn’t seem real. I still have moments where I think, “…. wait a second … he’s dead?”

In April of 2016, I attended Ebertfest. Directly following that, I flew to Albuquerque to attend the Albuquerque Film and Music Experience, where my short film – July and Half of August – was having its premiere. I arrived and my friend Stevie (he who stalked Dean Stockwell with me) picked me up at the airport, with much shrieking of joy at seeing one another again. We went to his house, he cooked me dinner, we hung out, it was wonderful. Then he drove me to the big hotel where I would be staying. Mum was flying in to attend the festival with me. I walked into the hotel and there were all these guests, wearing badges, and you knew they were there for the festival. Somehow, as if by osmosis, after I checked in, I got the sense that something had happened. Everyone was talking very intensely and checking their phones. I can’t remember who told me the news. I am sure I checked my phone. Maybe Mitchell texted me: “have you heard?” The bottom dropped out. Literally everyone in that lobby was thinking about the same thing, talking about the same thing, huddled in upset groups. I couldn’t BELIEVE it. I texted five friends. I needed to be with my Prince people. I texted my brother. I was in a state of shock. I got in the elevator to go up to my room, stunned, and a couple of other people got in, and I said, “Prince.” And they all – strangers to me – nodded and shook their heads and said things like “I can’t believe it”. I’ll never forget it. I was in the perfect place for news like this – unwelcome as it was – to come down. These were all artists and professional musicians. Everyone feels connected to Prince. He was only 57 years old.

The festival’s closing night was a concert by its special guest, studio musician/genius guitarist Nathan East, who’s played with literally everybody. His whole family was there, musicians many of them. Mum and I still talk about that concert. There was a FEELING in that theatre, a connectivity and love and power. I wrote a piece about the spontaneous tribute that occurred.

As awful as Prince’s passing was, and as weird as it was to hear the news in a place I’d never been before, surrounded by strangers … it was the perfect place for me to grieve, feel the loss, and also just be thankful I was on the planet at the same time, that I got to experience his rise, his music, in real time.

Personal Prologue over:

The Syncopated Ladies are a tap-dancing group based in Los Angeles, headed up by Chloe Arnold (she and her sister Maud were both featured in the wonderful documentary Tap World). They have a Facebook group where you can see their latest videos.

Here is their tap-dancing tribute to Prince. Tapping away to “When Doves Cry.”

One of the fun things in the wake of his death – if you could call it fun – were all of these crazy stories emerging of Prince’s behavior, random Prince sightings, who he was “out in the wild”. This was a persona he maintained, a persona that went so deep it WAS him. Because that’s how you get to be as huge as Prince was. Jimmy Fallon’s encounter with him is my favorite:

Everyone covers Radiohead’s “Creep.” I wrote a whole post about it. The song is an anthem for the weirdos of the world, the isolated outcasts, the lonely, the self-loathing. Prince did an absolutely epic 8 minute version of it at Coachella in 2008. I can’t even describe where he goes with it, what he does with it. The self-loathing is gone. It’s a celebration, a “fuck you” to the normals – it’s better to be a creep! – and he digs deeper and deeper into it, deeper than even Radiohead itself can go. “Creep” is one of those malleable songs where you can put so much stuff onto it. I still remember the first time I watched this performance. I could barely process it.

A couple years back, I had a blast talking with Film Comment editor-in-chief Nicolas Rapold and writer/Criterion editor Andrew Chan about “concert films” on the Film Comment podcast, and one of the films we discussed was Prince’s awesome Sign o’ the Times. Have a listen!

I’ve posted a bunch of my brother Brendan’s music writing here on this site and he wrote quite a bit about Prince. They’re excellent pieces, so here they are:
on Purple Rain
on Under the Cherry Moon
Seeing Prince at Jones Beach
Seeing Prince at Madison Square Garden

At the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame 2004 ceremony, Tom Petty, Steve Winwood, Jeff Lynne, George Harrison’s son and a host of others performed “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” And that’s awesome enough, right?

But wait for it.

My cousin Liam said on Facebook in regards to this guitar solo by Prince:

Everyone onstage here is completely astonished and delighted. Look at George’s son Dani’s expressions. Widely claimed as the greatest guitar solo ever played. Which is of course ridiculous as that’s done every night somewhere from someone’s bedroom to a dingy dive to a soccer stadium, but this NIGHT, HERE, it was done by Prince. And it is incredible.

You keep thinking it couldn’t possibly get more epic … and then, of course, it DOES.

Prince was the music of my adolescence. I lost my virginity to a Prince song. I am a Gen X cliche, and proud of it. Even if you didn’t choose Prince specifically for your own virginity-loss, Prince would have been on the radio in the background ANYWAY. He was the biggest genius who was actually active during my lifetime. If you were in high school in the 80s, he was everything. He IS everything. And what was the song playing? “International Lover”. lol

He can’t be replaced.

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Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.

Posted in Music, On This Day | Tagged | 4 Comments

“I dread to think about life without singing.” — Tom Jones

Posted on June 7, 2026 by sheila

I’ve written about him before, mostly here.

He’s still out there. His voice is not only intact but as powerful as it ever was. He is recently a widow after 59 years of marriage. He is beloved by his fan base who have been following him for 50, 60 years now. Let’s see who, of your young musicians today, will inspire that kind of loyalty. There will be some, I guarantee it, but you never know who it will be. Longevity is the name of the game. Staying power. Generosity. Integrity. Doing what you WANT to do. Not resting on your laurels. Continuing to create. Continuing to be generous.

Tom Jones’ cover of Gillian Welch’s killer song “Elvis Presley Blues” blows my socks off and I didn’t think anything could compare to Gillian’s version. The arrangement of Jones’ version is startling, intense, with no catharsis in it, no resolution, no let-up except in Jones’ vocals … the cover is an ongoing pulse of sound, never varying, a tightrope wire of electricity. But I am also struck by Jones’ performance. Of course, he knew Elvis. He and his wife would vacation with Elvis and Priscilla. So there’s a smile on Jones’ face, in his eyes, as he thinks of Elvis. As sad as it is that Elvis died so young, it is my belief that people should smile when they think of him. His entire life was an act of generosity. It wore him out.

As Gillian Welch so gorgeously wrote in her lyrics: Elvis went out onstage “with his soul at stake.” His SOUL at stake.

As I always say, It’s got to cost you something. Otherwise, why do it? And so someone who didn’t know any other way to do it, like Elvis … should be celebrated, admired.

Jones’ smile, as he watches the footage of Elvis, is soft and open, tender.

Powerhouse.

 
 
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.

Posted in Music, On This Day | Tagged , | 22 Comments

“I want them to think ‘He was a nice guy. He did pretty good and we loved him’.” — Dean Martin

Posted on June 7, 2026 by sheila

From Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams, by Nick Tosches. Getting to the heart of it all.

His schoolmates had never really known him. Even his loving family could not tell for sure what lay within this kid who moseyed around among them with a hat on, singing. There was a pin-tumbler sidebar lock on his guts that no one could pick. That was just the way he was, and it was just the way he always would be.

Unlettered and rough-cut, Dino possessed both wiles and wisdom beyond his years – anyone trying to fuck with his mind or his body or his soul found this out forthwith. But the wisdom served by those wiles was an annihilating wisdom. It was the wisdom of the old ways, a wisdom through which the seductions of reason and love and truth and all such frail and flimsy lepidoptera would in their seasons emerge and thrive, wither and die. The sum of Dino’s instincts had to do with the old ways, those ways that were like a wall, ways that kept the world lontano, as the mafiosi would say: distant, safely and wisely at bay. That was how he liked it: lontano, like the flickering images on the theater screen that gave him pleasure as he sat alone, apart from them and unknown to them, in the dark.

Those close to him could sense it: He was there, but he was not really there; a part of them, but apart from them as well. The glint in his eye was disarming, so captivating and so chilling at once, like lantern-light gleaming on nighttime sea: the tiny soft twinkling so gaily inviting, belying for an instant, then illuminating, a vast unseen cold blackness beneath and beyond. The secret in its depth seemed to be the most horrible secret of all: that there was no secret, no mystery other than that which resides, not as a puzzle to be solved or a revelation to be discovered, but as blank immanence, in emptiness itself.

There was a picnic in Beatty Park. Roozy had gotten hold of an eight-millimeter movie camera, and they were all going to be in pictures. No one who saw that movie ever forgot it. The camera captured the silent laughter of the Crocettis and the Barrs. It followed Dino’s friends back and forth as they ran and fumbled, threw and jumped in a makeshift football game. There was merriment everywhere, but there was no Dino. Then the camera scanned to the right, to a tree off in the distance, and there he was by himself under the tree, away from it all, caught unawares and expressionless, abstractedly toying with a twig, sort of mind-whittling it. That was Dino, all right; the Dino inside the Dino who sang and swore and loafed and laughed.

He was born alone. He would die alone. These truths, he, like every punk, took to heart. But in him they framed another truth, another solitary, stubborn stone in the eye of nothing. There was something, a knowing, in him that others did not apprehend. He was born alone, and he would die alone, yes. But in between — somehow — the world in all its glory would hunker down before him like a sweet-lipped High Street whore.

Jesus GOD, Tosches.

Now whether or not that really is the real Dean Martin is up for debate. It’s really Nick Tosches’ Dino but the writing is so definitive it’s almost impossible to shake. I have always loved Dean Martin, I especially love how he seems to treat everything as an amusing joke, even his talent, his voice. He’s so easy with it. It’s like he’s doing something else, not performing live. I don’t know how he does it.

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Here’s a bit from Peter Bogdonavich’s superb essay about Dean Martin, included in his book Who the Hell’s in It: Conversations with Hollywood’s Legendary Actors. Bogdonavich talks to Howard Hawks about directing Dean Martin in Rio Bravo, where Martin gives an excellent performance. According to Hawks, Martin was afraid he couldn’t do it, afraid it would be “too dramatic”, that he would fail.

Hawks told me how he had happened to cast Martin in what would remain the finest dramatic performance of his career. “I always liked him,” Hawks said. “I’d met him personally.” Martin’s agent had asked if Hawks would consider Dean for the role of the drunken deputy and talk with him. Hawks said, “OK, nine-thirty tomorrow morning.” When the agent said he wasn’t sure Martin could get there quite that early, Hawks just closed him off: “Look, if he wants to get here at all, have him get here at nine-thirty.” Hawks grinned, remembering that Dean had come in the next day right on time and said, “Well, I’m kind of shufflin’. I did a show till midnight over in Vegas — got up early, hired an airplane to get down here and I’ve had a lot of trouble gettin’ ‘cross town.” Hawks shook his head. “You went to all that trouble to get here at nine-thirty?” Martin answered, “Yes,” and they talked for a minutes until Hawks abruptly said, “Well, you’d better go up and get your wardrobe.” Dean looked confused. “What do you mean>” he asked, and Hawks replied, “Well, you’re going to do it – go get your wardrobe.” Howard went on to me, “And that’s what we did. I knew that if he’d do all that, he’d work hard, and I knew that if he’d work we’d have no trouble because he’s such a personality. And he did – he worked hard over that drunk.”

It shows – yet only in the best way – never labored, remarkably natural. Clearly, Martin never worked that hard over a role again, nor did he ever have as layered a part to play. Apart from a cowboy burlesque with Lewis (Pardners), Rio Bravo was also Martin’s first Western, which was by far his own favorite kind of entertainment. Especially John Wayne Westerns. In his last tragic eight years, supposedly all Dean ever did was sit in front of the TV and watch Westerns. Therefore, to co-star with John Wayne (of all cowboy stars, the most popular), and to be directed by Howard Hawks – for the director’s first Western since his triumphant debut epic with Wayne, Red River — must have been for Dean one of the crowning moments of his career. The performance he gave was a kind of committed investment proving to doubters that if he wanted to, Dean could, within his range as an actor, do just about anything.

Dean Martin was smart. He worked. He could have been ruined when he “broke up” with Jerry Lewis. The two of them were such gigantic stars together. Their legendary nightclub act helped make his name, as did the crazy movies they made together.

Dean Martin very easily could have sunk into obscurity, post-Jerry-Lewis. But he was bold. He was smart. He struck out on his own. He began performing solo, opening his act in Vegas on March 6, 1957. All of his friends came out to see him. He rose above what could have been a huge detriment. He was so identified as the straight-man to Jerry Lewis’ manic loony. Many lesser performers can never survive such a loss of identity. Dean Martin not only survived, he flourished.

I love the marquee.

Here’s one of the stills from his first solo performance, the night that would launch a spectacularly successful solo career. I love his goofiness.

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Here’s a clip to glory in:

Observations: They walk to the left. They walk to the right. They walk forward. They are applauded for this as though it is a Rockettes kickline. Why? Because they are awesome. I like to watch this clip just tracking Dino, or then Judy, or, finally, Frank. Watch how they compete with one another, and then silently give each other props, like, “Wow, you just sounded awesome.” The sense of feeling and friendship between the three is genuine. You don’t need to DO much. Well, except have talent and genius. But if you have that? All you need to do is link arms, walk to the left, walk to the right, and you’re home.

He was a hell of an actor, too.

Perfection. Watch how easy he is with himself, with his talent, how freely and gently he shares it. It’s like breathing with him. It’s that simple and that automatic.

Please go read my friend Trav S.D.’s profile of Dino’s career and importance.

Do you know anyone who doesn’t like him? I don’t. I think of him as the embodiment of a certain kind of show biz, with so much charisma that he transcended trends and fashions, yet so low-key and subtle that it wasn’t shoved down your throat.

His variety show is a gold mine of talent. He is amazing solo, but he is equally amazing in duets with people. I love him and Ella together.

And him and Louis …

You can tell he is there to support the genius beside him, but it is in his almost self-effacing quality that he can be most properly perceived. It’s not easy to be a “sidekick”. But sidekicks make the main event possible. Jerry Lewis was best when he had Dean Martin next to him, reacting. Martin is so beautifully and easily supportive, but he can also keep up, vocally. He blended with everyone. He brought out the best in others.

And finally, my brother Brendan’s amazing comments on Dean Martin.

I remember seeing the Dean Martin roasts and being scared, like a drunk friend of a drunk uncle had showed up unannounced at a dinner party and started shoe-horning everyone into singing along to perverted folk songs. I didn’t know what he was famous for and those roasts seemed to hint that he didn’t really know why either.

Then, years later as a grownup, I heard “Ain’t That A Kick In the Head” in some movie, or in a bar. That’s really all you need to do…just listen to that song a few times in a row. It all seems like a joke. Then you start to hear how well he sings the song. Then you realize that someone could have completely fouled the song up. It isn’t a very good song, actually. Think about all the classic standards. Everybody does ’em. But is there another famous version of that song? If there is, I haven’t heard it.

How does he turn a mediocre song around? He doesn’t sound all that invested in the heartbreak aspect of it, there isn’t irony dripping all over the place. I still can’t quite place what makes the song work so well. But I’m going to try:

His presence and personality are so evident that you don’t even need the song. He has sung the song out of existence. All you want to do is hear him make a rumble in his throat and roll his eyes about how much trouble a broad can be. You also somehow realize that no broad ever caused him too much trouble. He causes them trouble. And they love it.

It is almost a taunt. What could be a stupid jokey brushoff of heartache turns into a come-on. It is a magic trick.

Another thing that strikes me about Dean Martin is that you get the sense that he would have behaved exactly the same had he been a truck driver, a grocer, a whatever. Most of the other stars of that era seem to have been transformed in some way by fame and what came along with it. This guy could have strolled around the streets of Rome with his jacket over his shoulder and 10 bucks in his pocket and it would make no difference to him.

The most underrated of all time.

Posted in Actors, Music, On This Day | Tagged | 19 Comments