Reflections on ... The Hollywood Reporter's interview with Carroll Baker

/ Pictured: Carroll Baker in the sixties /

My quick thoughts on the fascinating but problematic Hollywood Reporter podcast interview on 6 July 2021 with the fabulous Carroll Baker, who I venerate as a trash cinema goddess. (I call her that with love! It’s a high compliment!).  The profile is meant to commemorate the 65th anniversary of Baker's film debut (actually, Baker's show biz roots stretch all the way back to the dying days of vaudeville!) ... but it goes in an unexpected direction towards the end! 

90-year-old Baker is impressively sharp-witted, extremely articulate and has a treasure trove of juicy anecdotes from fifties and sixties Hollywood. Some highlights: 

Baker was offered the Natalie Wood part in Rebel without a Cause (1955) - but turned it down because she disliked the script! 

There was talk of Baker playing Madge in Picnic (1955), but studio mogul Harry Cohn’s protegee Kim Novak got the role instead (Baker makes a rare bitchy dig at another actress here: “Kim Novak couldn’t act!”). 

On Giant (1956): Baker and James Dean were already friends from their Actors Studio classes in New York, but once they made Giant together, the social-climbing Dean swiftly dropped her to befriend the more famous Elizabeth Taylor. Baker admits that at the time, she disparaged the acting ability of Hollywood movie stars Taylor and Rock Hudson (whereas she and Dean had "serious" Method training). Looking back now, to her credit Baker admits she was a snob and appreciates how genuinely good their performances were. 

Later, when Baker inexplicably rejected the role of Maggie in the 1958 film adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Taylor was ecstatic, telling her, “Carroll! You’ve given me a whole new career!” Which was true: Cat reinvented Taylor as a gutsy, risk-taking overtly sexual adult actress (and began Taylor's fruitful association with Tennessee Williams). 

Baker is eloquent and sympathetic regarding her peer Marilyn Monroe. She recalls how Monroe would drink straight vodka and pop Seconals while partying with the Ratpack, then at the end of the night the men would simply pour her into a cab and send her home, so she found Monroe’s death grimly inevitable. 

/ Pictured:  Baker as a young starlet around the time of Baby Doll / 

Obviously, Baker is asked about her most famous movie Baby Doll (1956), but I loved hearing her discuss the underrated avant-garde Something Wild (1961). Baker’s ultra kitsch sex kitten-era films The Carpetbaggers (1964), Sylvia (1965) and Harlow (1965) are routinely dismissed as dreck – but I happen to love them! Her post-Hollywood Italian filmography is entirely skimmed over.  

Then interviewer Scott Feinberg mentions Harvey Weinstein and inquires whether Baker ever encountered “the casting couch”. She volunteers, “My heart is broken for Bill Cosby … he’s a wonderful human being”, does some horrifying victim-blaming and asserts, “He’s a very sexy man!” Oh, Carroll! 

/ Baker (and her sequined nipples) around the time of The Carpetbaggers (1964) /

Listen for yourself here.

Further reading:

My reflections on Something Wild (1961).

My reflections on Harlow (1965).

My reflections on Andy Warhol's BAD (1977).

 

 

Reflections on … Harlow (1965)

Make no mistake: as a truthful biopic, the infamous, ultra-trashy 1965 film Harlow is entirely misbegotten. But as a prime exemplar of the so-bad-it’s-fabulous camp classic, Harlow - directed by Gordon Douglas, adapted from Irving Shulman's scurrilous best-selling (and widely discredited) 1964 exposé Harlow: an Intimate Biography and starring Carroll Baker as doomed platinum blonde depression-era sex goddess Jean Harlow - belongs in the elite canon alongside Valley of the Dolls (1967), Diana Ross’ Mahogany (1974) and Mommie Dearest (1981). In fact, Harlow contains the essential components we demand in any film-making endeavor: emotions. Conflicts. Wigs!

Seen today, it’s fascinating how recklessly fast-and-loose the script plays with Jean Harlow's story, as if the facts are somehow insufficiently dramatic, tragic and action-packed enough. Harlow’s tumultuous, abbreviated life was marked by two scandals so shocking they’re still swirling with urban myths decades later. After just two months of marriage, her husband Paul Bern died of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound on 5 September 1932. Because MGM’s publicity department swept in to “manage” the situation before the police arrived, the precise circumstances – and Harlow’s role in them – remain one of Hollywood’s enduring mysteries. Harlow’s own abrupt death of uremic poisoning aged 26 on 7 June 1937 sparked further speculation. Was it caused by a botched abortion? Venereal disease? Were her mother’s anti-medicine Christian Science beliefs to blame? Or did the bleach used to maintain Harlow’s platinum blonde tresses cause “peroxide poisoning”?

/ A portrait of the real Jean Harlow (born Harlean Harlow Carpenter, 3 March 1911 - 7 June 1937) in 1933 /

Harlow the biopic displays almost zero curiosity about these aspects, instead opting to cram the bare bones of Harlow’s life into a hackneyed rise-and-fall show biz cautionary tale narrative imbued with the lurid sensibility of Jackie Susann’s Valley of the Dolls. (It’s astonishing how much Harlow anticipates the hysterical tone and sherbet-coloured look of the 1967 film adaptation of Dolls. When Harlow hits the skids and begins drinking heavily, for example, she suddenly becomes Neely O’Hara. Was Dolls' director Mark Robson carefully scrutinizing Harlow’s formula and taking notes?).

/ Actress Caroll Baker's extensive research for portraying Jean Harlow /

Harlow also makes no attempt to conjure the real Harlow’s unique brassy and hard-boiled comedic screen persona evident in her best films like Red-Headed Woman, Red Dust (both 1932) and Dinner at Eight (1933). Instead, Harlow – an archetype of brazenly overt and unapologetic pre-Code sensuality, who reportedly “iced” her nipples and eschewed underwear onscreen - is depicted as a victimized and misunderstood prig constantly fighting-off the casting couch advances of predatory film executives and determined to preserve her virtue. One jarring example: Harlow posits that the twenty-something actress was saving her virginity for her wedding night with Bern. But because the impotent Bern was incapable of “performing” on their catastrophic honeymoon, her virginity remained intact. In real life Harlow was married three times and Bern was her second husband – facts that Harlow gleefully erases.

Note also that Harlow was made without the cooperation of Harlow’s real studio MGM. (Her studio is called “Majestic” in the movie). Perhaps that explains why none of her actual films are cited. Instead, we keep seeing cinema marquees emblazoned with weirdly generic titles like Blonde Virgin, Sin City, Yukon Fever, Luscious Lady and Love Me Forever!

/ Baker as Harlow. Considering her wig was styled by the great Sydney Guilaroff, presumably it's meant to be crooked? /

Hilariously, the film also insists Harlow’s platinum blonde hair is all-natural. (While Harlow was genuinely blonde, she was also a peroxide pioneer to achieve that not-found-in-nature albino-silver shade). In any case, Carroll Baker sports a wig to portray Harlow. And what a wig! It may be styled by esteemed coiffeur-to-the-stars Sydney Guilaroff, but that ultra-fake acrylic-looking Dynel wig is so distracting it frequently upstages the actress sporting it. Interestingly, the makers of Harlow skip Harlow’s signature plucked-out half-moon eyebrows – maybe because they assumed sixties audiences would find them off-putting?

/ Intriguingly, if you do a deep Google Image search you'll eventually come across these pics of Baker as Harlow (presumably hair and make-up tests?) that suggest initially the makers of Harlow contemplated a more authentic look - and then decided against it / 

It must be said that at no point does Baker resemble Harlow that much.  In one glorious high camp moment, once she finally achieves mega-stardom, we see Harlow undergo an epic studio-sanctioned glamour make-over. The beautician’s chair is finally spun around for the big reveal – and the only change is that they’ve added a little black beauty mark under the corner of her mouth! Combine the outrageous immobile blonde bouffant wig, the heavy false eyelashes and the beauty spot, and Carroll Baker looks significantly more like sixties-era jazz chanteuse Peggy Lee than Jean Harlow.

/ Pictured: Miss Peggy Lee /

Baker also frequently looks gaunt and wan in Harlow, and so ravaged that it’s startling when Harlow’s mother must co-sign her studio contract because she’s meant to be a minor. (The film is studious to never specify what year it is or the characters’ ages). Certainly, Baker’s make-up, wig and lighting are surprisingly harsh and unflattering. But by all accounts, she was also stressed and miserable during the production (the script was still being cobbled-together during filming and Baker was feuding with producer Joseph E Levine). Her tension is tangible onscreen. Baker valiantly attempts to breathe some conviction into the material, considering Harlow is written as a one-note victim. (What counts for character development here: once Harlow becomes famous, she begins smoking with a long white cigarette holder).

/ A portrait of Baker around the time of Baby Doll (1956) /

Let’s pause here to contemplate Baker, a strange, distinctive (that weird, unmistakable drawling patrician voice!) and sensual feminine presence in mid-century cinema. How did Baker - a high-minded, risk-taking and serious Broadway actress steeped in the New York Actor’s Studio Method tradition – wind up typecast as a sexpot in so many vulgar melodramas? Certainly, her career started promisingly. After a breakthrough role opposite James Dean, Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson in Giant (1956), Baker sparked an international furor as a thumb-sucking nymphette child bride in the controversial film adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ Baby Doll (1956). The perverse Lolita-like image of Baker lounging in a playpen was as scandalous a depiction of wanton eroticism as anything Brigitte Bardot did in And God Created Woman (1956) – and that movie was French! 

And yet she subsequently wound-up starring in mostly tepidly received dross. (Although I treasure both Something Wild (1961) and Sylvia (1965)). Interestingly, the role of “Maggie the Cat” in the 1958 film version of Tennessee Williams’ play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was reportedly offered to Baker before Elizabeth Taylor. (Contract disputes with Warner Bros meant she couldn’t accept it). Maybe that part would have altered Baker’s trajectory?

/ Baker wore this understated ensemble (worthy of Jayne Mansfield!) to promote her "comeback" film The Carpetbaggers /

In any case, within a few years hit movie The Carpetbaggers (1964) gave Baker’s faltering career a major fillip. Under the guidance of that film’s producer Joseph E Levine, Baker was now marketed as “the next Monroe”. She even went so far as posing for a “nudie cutie” cheesecake pictorial in the December 1964 issue of Playboy magazine entitled “Baker in the Boudoir.” Baker had played a sexy Harlow type in The Carpetbaggers, so it made sense to cast her as Harlow herself when the Schulman biography got optioned. But as Penny Stallings concludes in her 1978 book Flesh and Fantasy: “the film and the hype were a disaster. There’d been all sorts of problems with the script and a rival production starring Carol Lynley, but the main problem was that Carroll’s PTA prettiness and clipped delivery just didn’t meld with her concocted image. She felt awkward in the role and her discomfort showed on screen. Perhaps even more to the point is the fact that cultural styles were rapidly metamorphosing when the film was released, and the public simply wasn’t in the market for a platinum blonde bombshell in 1965.”

/ "Baker in the Boudoir!" From Carroll Baker's December 1964 Playboy pictorial / 

Harlow was savaged by the critics, but it wasn’t a commercial flop. Nonetheless, it spelled the end of Baker’s career as a major American leading lady. In 1967 she moved to Rome, successfully re-inventing herself as the star of Italian giallo horror films before returning to US in 1977 as a gutsy middle-aged character actress (witness her vanity-free performance in the black comedy Andy Warhol’s BAD). But maybe author Ken Wlaschin is correct when he surmises “(Baker) is actually at her best in trashy movies.” Is there any higher praise for an actress? Baker is still with us at 89-years old. Let’s celebrate her as a cult icon now!

/ Baker's intriguing Italian filmography is ripe for discovery and should most definitely not be regarded as a "step down" for her. Her giallo films aren't easy to see: they sometimes crop up on YouTube, but usually sans English subtitles or dubbing! The only one I've seen to date is the extremely stylish Baba Yaga (aka Kiss Me, Kill Me) from 1973 (pictured). Baker is utterly magnetic as the enigmatic lesbian villainess. Read more about Baker's Italian era here. / 

/ Above: Carol Lynley as Jean Harlow /

(As per Stallings’ reference above: there was indeed a second overlapping biopic (also entitled Harlow!) under production at the same time. (Isn’t it bizarre to think Jean Harlow was such a hot property in the mid-sixties, almost three decades after her death?). It’s equally as bad as the Baker film, just in different ways. This version starred the pallid Carol Lynley and took a radically different interpretation of the Harlow story. A visibly low-budget effort shot in eight days in harsh grainy black-and-white (it looks like a William Castle quickie), it depicts Harlow as a sarcastic, tantrum-throwing bee-yatch as opposed to Baker’s sinned-against victim. It offers a more factually accurate account of Harlow’s life, and is notable for being Ginger Roger’s last major film role (she plays Harlow’s mercenary mother). A true oddity, you can watch it on YouTube. Keep your expectations low!).

/ Above: Carol Lynley in the rival biopic Harlow (1965) /

What I adore about Harlow: Gordon Douglas’ lazily old-fashioned, almost indifferent direction. His motto appears to be, when in doubt, cut to a montage! He also regularly employs newspaper headlines to explain what’s happening.  There’s great pleasure in watching the “all-star cast” flailing: Red Buttons as Arthur Landau, Harlow’s saintly-beyond-belief manager. Mike Connors as suave Jack Harrison (a cynical matinee idol who seems to be based on Clark Gable?). Angela Lansbury as Harlow’s weak-willed mother (note: Lansbury was only six years older than Baker) and Italian actor Raf Vallone as Marino Bello, Harlow’s parasitic lounge lizard stepfather. Puffy Peter Lawford as Harlow’s ill-fated husband Paul Bern (one of the few occurrences where a character is named after the real-life person). Did anyone exude jaded hungover sleaziness onscreen quite like Lawford? He really phones it in. Bern is introduced and killed-off so abruptly we can only shrug when he dies. Leslie Nielsen as cigar-smoking, silk dressing gown-wearing film mogul Richard Manley (apparently based on Howard Hughes) and Martin Balsam as studio head Everett Redman (Louis B Meyer).

/ Angela Lansbury (as Harlow's ineffectual but well-meaning mother) and Raf Vallone (as her stepfather) /

/ Saintly manager Arthur Landau (Red Buttons, centre) eavesdrops while leading man Jack Harrison (Mike Connors, a vision in beige suede) flirts with starlet Harlow /

/ Jack Harrison and Jean Harlow arriving at a premiere /

Harlow was a big-budget film and the lush production values are up there on the screen. The sensation that envelopes you watching it feels glossy, ridiculous and sumptuous. In fact, the sets – complete with banks of floral arrangements, candelabras and grand pianos - are all so garish (Harlow’s all-mauve dressing room! Richard Manley’s baroque mansion!) it feels like every scene is unfolding in some rococo brothel. But even with all that money, there is no sense of period and no attempt to replicate the Art Deco decor associated with Jean Harlow. The vibe throughout is ultra-sixties atomic-era rather than remotely 1930s. The soundtrack, for example, emphasizes the then voguish sounds of Latin exotica and bossa nova. There’s a justifiably notorious moment when Harlow appears to break into the twist – seemingly inventing the dance craze a good thirty years early! (To her credit, old pro Edith Head designs some spectacular slinky bias-cut gowns for Baker that successfully emulate the ones Harlow wore).

/ Jean Harlow pouting through the pain in her luxe dressing room (a real tart's boudoir!) /

And the dialogue. The dialogue! Everyone speaks in cliched show biz platitudes. Some representative samples: “You have the body of a woman and the emotions of a child!” Landau exclaims to Harlow. “She’s the girl you want to marry – and have for your mistress!” is how Everett Redman summarizes Harlow’s allure. “There’s nothing lonelier than a bedroom with only one person in it,” Harlow laments to her mother. She also admits, “I was looking at my body in the mirror to see what’s so different about it that makes the public go crazy over it!” Once Harlow has ascended to stardom, Jack Harrison snarls, “Welcome to the velvet prison!” Harlow’s dying words to her mother from beneath her oxygen tent: “Mamma! I’m going to be a good girl … a good girl!” Landau gets the last word: “She didn’t die of pneumonia. She died of life!” (Harlow didn’t die of either pneumonia or “life” – she died of uremia). 

Just when you think Harlow couldn’t get any worse, in one final flourish of bad taste, we’re treated to a slideshow of glamour shots of Baker as Harlow overlaid with the tear-jerkin' musical accompaniment of sappy ballad “Lonely Girl” by Bobby “Blue Velvet” Vinton! 

(You can view Harlow on Amazon Prime. Read further analysis of Harlow here). 

Reflections on Susan Tyrrell (18 March 1945 - 16 June 2012)

“Actor often cast in sleazy, raunchy roles.” That was the headline for The Guardian’s obituary of the maverick cult movie actress Susan Tyrrell (18 March 1945 – 16 June 2012), who died last month aged 67 after a very tough life. Seriously: what greater career summary could an actress possibly hope for?

Since her death I’ve devoured all Tyrrell’s obituaries and found the outrageous anecdotes about this tempestuous outlaw / outsider actress so fascinating, it prompted me to do my own (belated) tribute. I hadn’t thought of Susan Tyrrell much since reading the tragic news of her losing both her legs in 2000 (they had to be amputated when she was stricken with a rare blood disease; considering her health problems, Tyrrell's death wasn’t entirely unexpected) or kept abreast of her subsequent film appearances. It’s sad when it takes death for someone to be reappraised, but there’s been a genuine outpouring of affection for Tyrrell online in the past month – a recognition we’ve lost a true original. I hope I can do justice to Tyrrell’s weird charisma.

Prior to her death, I mainly knew Tyrrell from just two films. Like many people of my generation, she made a vivid impression as raspy-voiced, gum-snapping hillbilly matriarch Ramona Ricketts in the John Waters juvenile delinquent rockabilly musical Cry-baby (1990). Many years later, I saw her as Carroll Baker’s mousey, tremulous and down-trodden daughter-in-law in Andy Warhol’s BAD (1977). (I know I’ve seen Big Top Pee Wee (1988) at some point, but it’s been so long I need to re-visit it to refresh my memory of Tyrrell in that).

Polaroid of Tyrrell as Ramona Rickettes and Iggy Pop as Belvedere Rickettes in John Waters's Cry-baby (1990). I want to look like them when I grow up

Tyrrell as Mary in Andy Warhol's BAD (1977). You can read my blog about this film and Tyrrell's performance in it here

Since then, I’ve loaded my LOVEFiLM request list with Susan Tyrrell films (not many of which are available on DVD in the UK, sadly) and seen Forbidden Zone (1982). But what all of Tyrrell’s obituary writers unanimously agree on is that her crowning achievement was her performance as the volatile alcoholic Oma in Fat City (1972).

When people lament wistfully about the golden age of gritty, small-scale 1970s character-driven American films, they mean films precisely like Fat City, John Huston’s downbeat and soulful study of melancholy losers. Set in a peeling, shabby vision of skid row Stockton, California, Huston’s tone is hard-boiled but sensitive and compassionate if ultimately pessimistic (“Life is a beeline for the drain,” one of the characters despairs towards the end). The action mostly shuttles between boxing gyms, derelict welfare hotels and dark dive bars where the characters chain-smoke and drink away their troubles while mournful Country & Western music emanates from a Wurlitzer jukebox. (The Kris Kristofferson ballad “Help Me Make It through the Night” plays under the opening credits and sets the mood for the ensuing film).

Fat City contrasts the stories of two couples: Jeff Bridges as a promising teenage boxer on the ascent and his naive girlfriend Candy Clark, and the stoical, battered Stacy Keach as a past-his-prime boxer and Tyrrell as his booze-sodden love interest Oma. (The older pair is far more interesting).

Tyrrell as Oma in John Huston's Fat City (1972)

The role of juicehead Oma was originally intended for Faye Dunaway, then at her zenith. No doubt Dunaway would have been fascinating in the part, but Tyrrell invests it with a totally idiosyncratic frowsy, bleary-eyed kewpie doll strangeness. (Dunaway would eventually get to interpret a similar role much later in her career, as the drunken Wanda Wilcox in the 1987 film Barfly).

It’s jarring to realise Tyrrell was only 26-years old in Fat City: with her matted rat’s nest hair, face screwed into a mask of misery and slumped, defeated body language she could pass for someone a good fifteen years older. (Tyrrell always looks vaguely forty-something in all of her films, regardless of her actual age). Her performance is the quintessential study of the jaundiced bar stool mama, the kind of drunk you pray doesn’t spark up a conversation with you at a bar while you’re waiting for someone (and they always do). She’s such a hardened barfly that when Oma makes a rare sojourn outside in daytime, the jolting unfamiliarity of sunlight makes her blink and turn unsteady. Tyrrell nails the stormy mood swings of an alcoholic: sherry-swilling Oma is alternately tearful, petulant, maudlin, raucous, self-pitying and needy. When angered she turns shrewish, a harridan. “Screw everybody!” she slurs. She and Keach have a piquant argument at one stage (Him: “Screw you!” Her: “Up yours, cowboy!”). She’s also prone to drunken philosophising: “The white race has been in decline since 1492 when Christopher Columbus discovered syphilis!”

Once Keach’s initial infatuation with Oma wears off, he realises what exactly he’s lumbered with. “Every time she opens her mouth, I think I’m going to go crazy!” he despairs. Yes, Oma is a nightmare, but Tyrrell scalds the screen every time she appears. While the rest of the cast give low-key naturalistic performances, Tyrrell is on an entirely different register – out-sized, bravura, Bette Davis-ish intensity. She’s an actress out on a limb, risking embarrassment. Tyrrell was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her performance, but rather than herald greater things Fat City sealed her fate and set a bar she’d never be able to reach again for various complex reasons -- perhaps her own tumultuous personality, or maybe Tyrrell was so convincing as an unstable drunk it scared off producers?

Fat City certainly guaranteed Tyrrell would never be a conventional leading lady (probably not her destiny anyway). Luckily she saw herself as primarily a character actress: she was beautiful enough to be a mainstream star (sculpted cheekbones, feline eyes, heart-shaped mouth), but instead opted to embrace her inner freak. (One of the defining characteristics of Tyrrell's career was her willingness to look grotesque).

But looking back at Tyrrell's wayward, erratic filmography, she deserved better films. Tyrrell probably belongs to the elite tradition of actresses too uncompromising, eccentric, decadent and individual for Hollywood to know what to do with: think of loose cannons / trouble makers like Louise Brooks or Tallulah Bankhead (and more recently, Sandra Bernhard). In fact, in Barry Paris’s essential 1989 biography of silent cinema’s wild child Louise Brooks he quotes a friend of hers recalling asking Brooks how – when she was almost overburdened with beauty, potential and star quality – she wound up exiled from Hollywood and unemployable. Brooks admitted, “I like to fuck and drink too much.” I suspect that’s equally true of Tyrrell (who could swear like a truck stop prostitute). And it clearly rankled her: in interviews Tyrrell repeatedly bewails the quality of her films. In 1992 she starred in an avant-garde one-woman performance art stage piece about her career disappointments entitled My Rotten Life: A Bitter Operetta. You can watch it here: it’s like David Lynch meets Kurt Weill and Tyrrell is on scathing form.


Susan Tyrrell - MY ROTTEN LIFE; A BITTER OPERETTA from Norn Cutson on Vimeo.


The other Tyrrell film I’ve seen since her death is Forbidden Zone. Very deliberately striving for cult movie status, this zany musical looks great and has some amazing moments (it’s remarkable what was achieved on a clearly small budget) – but it’s also frequently shrill and annoying, and the music of Oingo Boingo is pretty much nails on a blackboard for me. As the vicious Queen Doris of the Sixth Dimension, Tyrrell walks off with the film. Boiling with sexual energy and fury, gleefully luxuriating in her own evil (Eartha Kitt's Catwoman in the 1960s Batman TV series would appear to be her template), Tyrrell demonstrates (for a heterosexual woman) a profound understanding of camp in this performance. In fact her only potential threat in the film is the superbly deadpan former Warhol superstar Viva, who makes a cameo appearance and delivers with peerless nonchalance the killer line, “See you guys later – I need to change a Tampax.” (In a climactic moment, Tyrrell and Viva roll around on the ground in a cat fight. It needs to be seen to be believed).


Once you’ve seen this clip, you’ve pretty much seen the highpoint of Forbidden Zone. Tyrrell clearly knew how to deliver a musical number with real verve. A definite added bonus in this song is The Kipper Kids in go-go boys mode shaking their asses in jock straps. Damn, those two were built like tanks! One of them is now married to Bette Midler. Boy did she luck out!

In Forbidden Zone, the sadistic Queen Doris is married to King Fausto of the Sixth Dimension, played by dwarf French actor Herve Villechaize (yes, Tattoo from Fantasy Island). In one of the extra features on the Forbidden Zone DVD, Tyrrell is interviewed and discusses her relationship with Villechaize (they’d been romantically involved, but split by the time they co-starred in the film). She reminisces about the first time she ever saw Villechaize, onstage in a play. As the play progressed, Tyrrell found herself drawn to him and it gradually dawned on her: “I want to fuck a midget!” When the interviewer splutters with nervous laughter, Tyrrell clarifies, “In a very loving way!”

As a nice postscript, this is Tyrrell interviewed in Lee Server’s excellent 2006 biography of Ava Gardner, recalling her encounter with the ailing veteran actress in Spain in 1984. It reveals much about Tyrrell's warmth, generosity, hedonism and ribald sense of humour.

“I was in Spain doing a film ... had two fabulous lunches with (Gardner). She had saddlebags of vodka on the sides of her eyes. But what a beauty. You’re just in awe, it’s like taking in the Taj Mahal of beauty. But she was a real girl. “Honey honey” and smoking smoking and the beauty of this face and drinking and laughing our asses off. She was trying to get me out of Madrid. She said I had to get out of there – get the fuck out of the country. And she leaned over the table, and she said, “You need to get the fuck out of Spain, because the guys all have little dicks and they’ll fuck you in the ass before you can get your panties off.” I loved her so much. We laughed so hard ... What a genius. She had a lot of vodka in her, boy, that’s for sure.”

I think I want to go to for a boozy, debauched lunch with Susan Tyrrell and Ava Gardner ...

Tyrrell is survived by her mother, but sadly they were estranged and hadn't reconciled by the time of her death. In 2000 Tyrrell recalled, "The last thing my mother said to me was, 'SuSu, your life is a celebration of everything that is cheap and tawdry.' I've always liked that, and I've always tried to live up to it." “A celebration of everything that is cheap and tawdry”: talk about words to live by. RIP Susan Tyrrell.

Further reading:

Tyrrell’s leading man in Fat City, Stacy Keach pays her a sensitive and lyrical eulogy in the Huffington Post online. “I loved her whiskey voice, always reeking of soul and sweetness,” Keach recalls. “She was like the Billie Holliday of the dispossessed. She sang the blues with every word she spoke, and the unique colors she brought to the behavior of the characters she played always embraced a vivid portrait of a highly sensual woman. Sexy and vulnerable, not unlike the qualities of a battered Marilyn Monroe.”

Michael Musto (doyen of the downtown NYC nightclubbing scene and Village Voice gossip columnist) has posted some hilarious recollections of the times he interviewed Tyrrell in the 1980s (once for Soho Weekly News and then for Details magazine, when it was still hip). Read some scathing excerpts from the 1983 Details interview here and here.

Nice, thoughtful piece on Dangerous Minds, praising Tyrrell's ability to "ignite flicks that strained to be weird with flashes of her eccentric brilliance, often salvaging otherwise unwatchable pieces of crap" and calling her "Cinema's Gonzo Goddess."

It was Dennis Cooper’s typically excellent blog about Tyrell (a treasure trove of photos, clips and juicy info) that prompted me to do my own in the first place.

Susan Tyrrell's own website (check out the outrageous photo gallery!)

Finally, the mother of all Susan Tyrrell interviews is Paul Cullum’s insightful and incendiary masterpiece from The LA Weekly News in 2000, subtitled “Susan Tyrrell’s Sentimental Journey through Money, Fame, Sex and Amputation.” Against a soundtrack of rap music (“Thank God for rap music — without it, I would slit my throat”), Cullum meets Tyrrell (accompanied by her geriatric poodle Willie) right after her legs have been amputated and finds her in a remarkably sassy, un-self pitying frame of mind – what a resilient tough cookie. I especially love Tyrrell tenderly reminiscing about her friendship with the doomed Warhol drag queen superstar Candy Darling. Less happily, her account of how she got the role in Fat City will forever tinge your opinion of John Huston (the man, not the director) and make you recall his sinister role in Roman Polanski's Chinatown.

Reflections on Andy Warhol’s BAD (1977)

“The final film released under the Andy Warhol moniker is a much more polished affair than Flesh, Trash or Heat, but preserves the oddball wit and eccentric flair that made those films so memorable. A New York housewife has to support a houseful of relatives on her own. She pays the bills by operating an electrolysis service out of her home and by running a murder-for-hire service staffed exclusively by women.” Allmovie Guide

When you watch BAD, “polished” is definitely not the word that spring to mind, although admittedly it’s all relative. And the above description seems to underestimate the poetry of Paul Morrissey’s admittedly rough and unvarnished but frequently beautiful earlier films, which cover similarly lurid subject matter but feel entirely different to BAD (which was directed by Andy Warhol’s then-boyfriend, Jed Johnson, rather than Morrissey). While BAD certainly has a significantly higher budget than the Morrissey films, it frequently feels inept, the performances are mostly grating and it has the smudged, dark, murky and ugly look typical of low-budget films of that period (see also: the el cheap-o drag queen comedy Outrageous! also from 1977 -- perhaps the only true Canadian cult film), although for some that could be part of BAD’s grungey allure.



BAD aims to be a satirical exercise in deliberate bad taste, but (for me) it misjudges the tone. It’s a botched black comedy with gratuitously nasty violence (I’m the first to admit to being ultra squeamish when it comes to violence). BAD’s most notorious sequence shows a woman throwing her baby to its death from a high rise balcony (obviously a doll, but still distressing!). A scene where one of the hit women kills an illegal immigrant mechanic by crushing him under a car and then cutting off one of his fingers (presumably as proof she’s completed the job) is pretty grim, too. (The scene is so badly-lit you mercifully can’t see much, but I can’t get the bone-crunching sound effects out of my head!).

John Waters has always been voluble about how as a youth watching Warhol’s trailblazing 1960s underground films like Chelsea Girls (1966) shaped (twisted? Corrupted?) his aesthetic sensibility. With BAD, it feels like the Warhol crowd was now taking cues from Waters himself, and trying to catch up with the prince of puke. BAD captures the nihilism of early Waters like Pink Flamingos (1972), Female Trouble (1974) and Desperate Living (like BAD, 1977), but with his gleefully campy verve, wit and humour mostly surgically excised. Instead, BAD is just grindingly unpleasant, brutal and bleak.

(Pedro Almodovar was clearly an acolyte of Waters in his scabrous early films; maybe he also saw BAD. If BAD reminds me of any film, it is Almodovar’s deliberately offensive feature debut Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón (1980), made during the post-Franco punk era in Madrid. It’s probably my least favourite film by Almodovar, who I revere).

Bear in mind I’ve always wanted to see BAD (it’s only just recently been reissued on DVD in the UK after being long unavailable). I remember reading about BAD in Danny Peary’s book Cult Films as a teenager and almost physically yearning to see it! And I’m a hardcore Warhol fanatic: I used to watch Warhol double-bills at the much-missed sleaze palace The Scala cinema in London’s Kings Cross. I’d stay until the bitter end of, say, Lonesome Cowboy (1968) when the cinema was virtually empty after most people had long since drifted out, exasperated. (Read this great blog with a contrasting point of view about the merits of BAD).

Warhol films were traditionally enlivened by the presence of his charismatic and freaky stable of Superstars, but their era had come to an end by BAD. Glam rock scene-maker and Max’s Kansas City habitué Cyrinda Foxe (whose admirers included New York Doll David Johansen, David Bowie – she’s featured in his "Jean Genie" video -- and Aerosmith’s Steve Tyler) plays RC, one of the hit women. Foxe looks sensational, a 1950s platinum blonde rockabilly bombshell (in one of the early scenes, she sashays down a Queens street while a group of garbage men hoot at her – it recalls Jayne Mansfield in The Girl Can’t Help It!). But Foxe is no actress, and her mystique evaporates every time she speaks.

Similarly, Perry King as LT, the sole male hit man in Hazel’s doll squad, looks great: a chiselled dark-haired hunk in a muscle shirt, if you squint he resembles Joe Dallesandro (apparently the role of LT was conceived with Dallesandro in mind). But King completely lacks Dallesandro’s strange, torpid almost Robert Mitchum-like magnetism. He may be a charisma bypass, but King does have one nice moment, when he announces completely straight-faced, “I committed suicide last year.”

What BAD can boast is the presence of a genuine Hollywood star, albeit a somewhat faded one down on her luck at the time. Carroll Baker plays homicidal Queens housewife and beauty salon proprietor Hazel Aiken (a role originally intended for Shelley Winters; the fact that Winters, an actress not exactly known for quality control, turned it down speaks volumes. Weirdly, I’ve also read the role was offered to Vivian Vance – Lucille Ball’s I Love Lucy sidekick Ethel Mertz! Now that would have been mind-blowing casting).

Caroll Baker as Hazel. Photo Via

Baker first caught the public eye in the 1950s in the deluxe family melodrama Giant (1956) co-starring alongside the likes of James Dean, Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson. Later that year Baker created a sensation as a prototype Lolita in the scandalous Tennessee Williams adaptation Baby Doll, along the way getting nominated for a Best Actress Oscar and enraging the Catholic Legion of Decency. (John Waters has recalled the nuns in his Catholic school in the 50s warning him that to see Baby Doll was a guarantee of going to hell). With the exception of The Carpetbaggers (1964), Baker’s subsequent films (like a 1965 biopic of Jean Harlow) bombed and after legal battles with Paramount she re-located to Rome to salvage her career with kinky / arty Euro-sexploitation giallo films like The Sweet Body of Deborah (1968) and Paranoia (1969).

Pouty and perverse: the famous image of a thumb-sucking Carroll Baker in her crib in Baby Doll (1956)

Returning to the US to star in BAD, the film finds Baker long past her Baby Doll prime: Photographed unflatteringly, she looks frumpy and matronly. To her credit, though, Baker seems to revel in Hazel’s callousness; she re-invents herself as a mature character actress and nails a witheringly aggrieved, acidic delivery. (Baker has a nice Joan Crawford moment towards the end when she snarls at Perry King, "I don't have the luxury of being sensitive!"). And at one point, when alone in her bedroom and feeling nostalgic, Hazel takes a luxurious white fur coat out of the closet and wraps herself in it you suddenly get a brief glimpse of Carroll Baker in her 50s sex kitten heyday.

I tell a lie: there is one true Warhol Superstar in BAD. Amongst the grotesque freak show of clients who hire Hazel’s hit women, blowsy Warhol stalwart Brigid Berlin (aka Brigid Polk) is on blistering form as the racist, misanthropic Estelle who hires the sociopathic sisters Marsha and Glenda (“You’ve got to kill a dog, and you’ve got to do it viciously!” she screams). BAD sparks to life every time she appears: Berlin gets the film’s best lines, and sinks her teeth into them with venomous zeal. “People stink – all they do is eat, fuck and watch TV!” she philosophises. Later, when Estelle violently attacks one of her neighbours, her hateful foul-mouthed tirade (“You dirty old shithead! You Irish bastard!”) includes, “You welfare recipient!”



Another high point is provided by Geraldine Smith and Maria Smith (real-life sisters) playing the sneering, sarcastic killer sisters with Dorothy Hamill haircuts, Glenda and Marsha. (Geraldine had already been memorable as Joe Dallesandro’s venal wife in the 1968 Warhol / Morrissey film Flesh). They maintain deadpan, contemptuous expressions and flat nasal Brooklyn-accented voices (think Penny Marshall in Laverne and Shirley) even while killing and committing arson.

Maria and Geraldine Smith as sullen killers-for-hire Glenda and Marsha. Photo Via

Susan Tyrell also makes a strong impression as Hazel’s much-abused, downtrodden daughter in law Mary. A tremulous, wincing mousey depressive constantly trying to console her crying baby, Mary is apt to lament, “I just can relate to smoking. It’s the only thing that’s always there ...” and then burst into tears.

It’s the traumatised Mary who nails the film’s whole ethos when she whines, “People are so sick. The more you see them, the sicker they look.”

In retrospect, perhaps Andy Warhol's BAD's lasting contribution is ... it made for a great t-shirt.