Reflections on ... Lauren Bacall in Young Man with a Horn (1950)

Recently watched: Young Man with a Horn (1950).  Directed by Michael Curtiz (Casablanca, Mildred Pierce), it covers the rise and fall of an idealistic, uncompromising young jazz trumpeter Rick Martin (Kirk Douglas) in the hard-bitten, dog-eat-dog neon jungle of New York’s nightlife. Doris Day co-stars as Jo, the wholesome and sympathetic big band singer who’s in love with Rick. If he only he could see she’s perfect for him! The dramatic black and white film noir photography is spectacular and it gets wildly, pleasurably overwrought as it progresses, encompassing alcoholism, nervous breakdowns and pneumonia. Note: your enjoyment of Young Man with a Horn will depend on how much you can tolerate watching Douglas mime playing trumpet in the frequent musical sequences.

BUT mid-way through the film Lauren Bacall – that smoky-eyed Siamese cat-in-human form – rocks-up as Amy North, Douglas’ frosty, frigid rich bitch socialite wife and blows everything apart. Perennially wreathed in cigarette smoke and meant to represent the polar opposite of Doris Day, Bacall’s sleek and soignée appearance belies a roiling, wildly dysfunctional (possibly mentally ill) interior.  Amy is cultured and worldly, sexually ambivalent, independent, speaks Latin and is studying to be a psychiatrist: in the context of the film, her intellect is depicted as off-putting and unappealing. Worst of all – she admits she doesn’t actually like jazz! There are hints of repressed lesbianism: Rick and Amy are seen to sleep in separate single beds, and she’s subtly coded as queer recognizable to contemporary 1950 audiences in the way that characters played by, say, Peter Lorre or Sydney Greenstreet would also have been understood as gay. As Ian Scott Todd writes in his blog Primal Scenes:

“Amy is neurotic, withholding, passive-aggressive, and anal-retentive, to name only four of her "symptoms."  All of the other familiar lesbian signifiers are here, too, in her elegant but mannish suits, her stand-offish demeanor, and the sophisticated décor of her apartment.  Bacall’s Amy North is what Halberstam might classify as a predatory dyke: calculating, urbane, aloof.  She matches her interior space, with its hard, sleek, coldly elegant surfaces, off-set by touches of the bizarre, such as a pet cockatoo to which she refers—ominously—as her “best friend” … Amy is an example of the predatory dyke as femme fatale, trapped within the gilded cage of her own sexual “perversity,” someone to run away from, preferably into the arms of a “real” woman.  And yet, like all femme fatales, Amy’s dangerous sexuality makes her infinitely more attractive than the blandly chipper Jo, whose normality is, indeed, terrible.” 

Towards the end, Amy casually tells Rick, “I’ve met a girl – an artist. We might go to Paris together.” Here Bacall suddenly anticipates Cate Blanchet in Carol (2015). “You’re a sick girl, Amy!” Rick finally shouts as their marriage unravels. “I’m sick of you trying to touch me!” she screams.

The ostensibly unsympathetic but compelling and complex Amy represents the late Bacall’s strangest, most intense performance and she steals the film from Douglas and Day. I don’t recall her ever being asked about Young Man with a Horn in any interviews. I’d love to know how Curtiz and Bacall conceived and discussed the part. Did Bacall even know her character was meant to be gay? In any case, her portrayal should be included as at least a footnote in any discussion about LGBTQ representation in Golden Age Hollywood cinema.  

Joey Arias at Brasserie Zédel 12 February 2017

Any time Joey Arias – veteran performance art / cabaret legend, toast of Mondo New York and all-round fabulous creature – breezes into London, attendance is freaking obligatory! So, a big gang of us assembled to see his gig last night (Arias is doing a residency at Brasserie Zédel inSoho 11-14 February 2017).

Arias’ speciality is his evocation of doomed jazz diva Billie Holiday in all her earthy, ravaged foul-mouthed hedonistic glory. This isn’t a conventional “tribute act”, though – Arias is freakier, raunchier and far more original than that. And the Art Deco opulence of Brasserie Zédel provided the perfect backdrop, creating a sense of mid-century café society.

Arias himself was a compelling spectacle in fetish-y black Frederick's of Hollywood-style lingerie and full Vampira make-up. His voice is a soulful smoky, scratchy rasp alternately lewd and awash with heartbreak (my friend Louise admitted afterwards she cried several times during Arias’ set). As well as samplings from the Billie Holiday songbook ("You’ve Changed", "God Bless the Child"), Arias also answered the musical question: what would unlikely other songs by the likes of Cream or Bob Dylan sound like given the Holiday torch song treatment (with added Yma Sumac-like bird noises and punctuated by deep stripper squats)? The answer – hilarious, dramatic and exquisite!

Between songs, Arias gave a swear-y but elegant masterclass in audience participation, shuttling between seduction and aggression just because it amused him. Mingling through the crowd, flirting outrageously, he stopped and asked a woman’s name. “Ann-Marie? That’s a whore’s name.” He implored two (platonic) female friends at another table to kiss on the lips. When they hesitated, Arias snapped, “I’m not saying eat her pussy! Just kiss her on the lips! It’s love!” More pointedly, he turned his full laser beams on a rude heterosexual couple who arrived late then proceed to check their mobile phones and talk amongst themselves. “Sarah! Look at me!” Joey hissed. “Focus!” (Who were those two and what were they doing there?)

For the night’s emotional high-point, Arias demanded all the venue’s lights be extinguished (even the neon sign behind the bar) so that he was illuminated by just a single blue spotlight. Then he crooned an eerie, spine-tingling “I Cover the Waterfront”, transforming the jazz standard into an anguished prostitute’s lament. Devastating!

/ Afterwards we ambushed Arias in the lobby for an impromptu red-hot camera session! L-R: (back row) Chris and Pal. Front: Louise, Joey Arias, Nell and me /

/ Above: (Back) Chris, Joey, Nell and Pal. (Front) Louise and Alex /

Further reading:

See the full set of photos from Joey Arias at Brasserie Zédel here

See my photos of Joey Arias performing at London's Institute of Contemporary Art in 2014 here

Read my account of seeing Arias perform in 2013 here

The intense off-and-on friendship between wild women Billie Holiday and Tallulah Bankhead

Reflections on ... What Happened, Miss Simone? (2015)

Around Christmas time I finally watched the powerful 2015 Netflix documentary What Happened, Miss Simone? Consider yourselves warned: the film is wrenchingly sad. It could just have easily been titled The Torture of Nina Simone or The Anguish of Nina Simone. The inside of Nina Simone's head was  seemingly a harrowing place to be. But it’s compulsory viewing even for people with only a passing interest in Simone’s earthy but elegant musical oeuvre. It follows the former Eunice Waymon (a child musical prodigy born in 1933 in North Carolina) on her difficult transformation into the lacerating and angrily politicised High Priestess of Soul. There are plentiful hypnotic clips of the regal diva in performance, highlighting her serpentine piano playing and lacerating bittersweet voice (Simone herself explains “sometimes my voice sounds like gravel, sometimes it sounds like coffee with cream.”).

But it also explores the personal torment audible in Simone’s agonised singing. The genuine seething rage in Simone’s music makes for exciting art for us listeners but wasn’t so edifying for Nina Simone herself or the people close to her. She had a lifelong reputation for being volatile and temperamental. Only after her death was it revealed Simone lived with undiagnosed mental illness for much of her life (she didn’t start getting treatment for bipolar disorder until the eighties). She also suffered domestic violence in her tempestuous marriage with her manager-husband, a tough ex-vice cop. The documentary frequently incorporates revealing passages from Simone’s own journals, where she confides in her depression, loneliness and violent fantasies.

Her later life was blighted by financial difficulties, record label woes, legal problems (Simone wasn’t exactly thorough with her taxes), heavy drinking and the racism she routinely encountered in the country she called “The United Snakes of America.” The documentary puts Simone’s whiplash mood swings at her infamous performance at the 1976 Montreux Jazz Festival into context. It includes the scary moment when Simone abruptly stops playing when someone in the audience dares to get up from her seat mid-song. “You! Girl!” she hisses. “Sit down …” I wonder how long that woman required trauma counselling for? 

/ You can watch Simone's entire Montreaux performance here /

There is unlikely to be a more definitive documentary on Simone than this: all of her closest intimates come forward to give warts-and-all accounts, including her ex-husband and the musicians who toured with the imperious chanteuse for decades. Most remarkable is Simone’s daughter Lisa, who frankly discusses her prickly relationship with her frequently abusive mother without a trace of bitterness. 

On a more superficial level, What Happened Miss Simone? demonstrates how ineffably stylish Simone was over the decades. Early on she favoured cocktail gowns and sleek wigs. Later she increasingly embraced African headwraps, Cleopatra eyeliner, crocheted halter top-and-bell-bottoms combinations and Black is Beautiful natural Afro hair. The epitome of radical chic!

Simone found her true purpose giving expression to the civil rights movement in the sixties. The footage of her as an avenging fury singing for all-black audiences will make you want to give the Black Power salute to the TV. Nina Simone died in 2003 aged 70. You can’t help but wonder what she would have made of Black Lives Matter and the rise of Donald Trump.

/ "I'm gonna kill the first mutha I see ..." My all-time favourite Nina Simone track: the simmering-with-rage "Four Women" / 

Is That All There Is? The Strange Life of Peggy Lee

[I wrote this book review for the essential Beige website earlier this summer. I’m posting it here too for posterity. I know from when I used to write for alternative arts and culture Nude magazine, online articles can sometimes vanish over time]

Author James Gavin has previously written absorbing biographies of twentieth century jazz luminaries like Chet Baker and Lena Horne. In his latest effort he focuses on definitive sultry blonde torch singer Peggy Lee (1920 – 2002).

As with his earlier subjects Gavin writes with precision and eloquence about their artistry and the qualities that made them unique. For Lee, it was her trademark alluring cool restraint and ultra-minimalism. Vocally she conveyed maximum emotional (and erotic) impact with little more than a smoky, languid murmur (“a tough purr,” Gavin calls it “... that kicked open the bedroom door”).  Without ever resorting to wailing, belting or breaking a sweat, Lee – arguably the great white jazz seductress of the last century - could be alternately soulful, sensual, bluesy, melancholy or swinging.  Her primary vocal influences were the intimate, effortless conversational styling of Bing Crosby and Billie Holiday. (According to Gavin, the latter actively resented the younger white upstart scoring hits from her songbook and getting rich in the process. “She stole every goddamn thing I sing,” Holiday reportedly grumbled). Presentation-wise, Lee emulated her idol Marlene Dietrich (flattering and dramatic onstage lighting, glittering sequinned gowns).

Reading Gavin’s insightful analysis, you find yourself yearning to re-visit Lee’s definitive musical statements like the finger-snapping “Fever”, the swirling Latin exotica of “Lover”(which Lee attacked “like a panther in heat”), “Johnny Guitar”, “I’m a Woman” (“a feminist anthem with a stripper beat”), “Black Coffee” and the supremely world-weary “Is That All There Is?”

But let’s face it, Beige readers like a bit of sensationalism and Gavin doesn’t disappoint: the gossip here is juicy. Gavin is exceptionally good on the neuroses, addictions and personal demons that drove the anguished musicians he writes about. His descriptions of the ageing and increasingly dysfunctional and self-destructive Lee’s twilight years ensconced in the darkened bedroom of her Hollywood mansion are almost eerie, verging on Sunset Boulevard or Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? territory.

Lee’s serene and glamorous show business mask concealed a troubled, anxious and insecure woman. Onstage and on record her trademark persona was misty, mellow and slightly boozy. In fact Lee typically took to the concert stage benumbed and floating on a cloud of intoxicants. As Gavin reveals, this glazed-over, dreamy and detached demeanour was at least partly a side effect of the industrial quantities of cognac and later the tranquilisers Lee used to calm her nerves. (Valium. Seconal. Quaaludes – Lee popped ‘em all, Valley of the Dolls-style). “The queen of self-medication”, one of Lee’s retinue calls her. (Like all self-respecting divas, Lee went everywhere surrounded by an entourage. When crossed she could be vicious towards her employees).

In terms of myriad spectacular health crises (both real and psychosomatic) Lee’s only rival was Elizabeth Taylor. She loved to regale journalists with a litany of her illnesses and operations. (In the index at the end of Is That All There Is?, there is a separate lengthy sub-section devoted to “medical issues of PL”). Also like Taylor, Lee struggled with her weight. She had always lived with a commitment to old-school Hollywood glamour. As she aged and grew increasingly corpulent, that sensibility eventually tipped-over into unintended high camp. Multiple cosmetic surgery procedures left Lee’s face weirdly taut and expressionless. In fact, she underwent so many facelifts her hairline deeply receded (her hair had already thinned due to years of bleaching); Lee compensated with towering ringlet-festooned bouffant wigs that looked spun from meringue.

From the sixties onwards Lee gradually resembled a blowsy brothel madam or a drag queen imitating Mae West. It’s this fleshy and mature baroque Peggy Lee of the immobile face and forgiving diaphanous caftans that nightclub female impersonators like Jim Bailey and Craig Russell embraced – and reportedly was the inspiration for Miss Piggy of The Muppets, whose original full name was “Miss Piggy Lee” until Lee understandably objected.

And yet in Gavin’s compassionate account Lee ultimately emerges as a durable and tenacious survivor – albeit a wobbly, deeply-flawed and fallible one. Lee may have frequently been a temperamental pain in the ass, but no one disputed her talent. No matter how tormented her life offstage, Lee never lost the ability to mesmerise an audience. Perennially unlucky in love, she channelled her romantic disappointment into her music. A restless and uncompromising control freak, she fought her record labels for creative autonomy and challenged the Disney empire when she felt short-changed over royalties for the songs she composed for the 1955 Lady and The Tramp soundtrack. Long before the era of the singer-songwriter made it commonplace Lee frequently wrote her own lyrics. More than most of her pre-rock contemporaries, she strove to challenge herself and remain modern and relevant into the turbulent youth-dominated music scene of the sixties and seventies by covering contemporary pop hits - even though she received scant acclaim for it at the time and it alienated her conservative older fans. In the tradition of Edith Piaf, her passionate drive to sing saw Lee determinedly continuing to perform well into old age long after she was physically ailing and confined to a wheelchair. In her youth Lee endured hostile audiences, demanding bandleaders and the kind of tough, grit-building setbacks and indignities it’s difficult to imagine today’s performers tolerating. All examples of the iron will that propelled the former Norma Deloris Egstrom, a round-faced and nondescript farm girl from hardscrabble Depression-era rural North Dakota into the upper echelons of the music industry.

Reese Witherspoon is reportedly in negotiation with Lee’s family to make a Peggy Lee biopic. Certainly Lee’s life and career warrant the kind of deluxe film treatment already afforded Johnny Cash, Ray Charles and Piaf. It will be interesting to see if the filmmakers do justice to the complex and volatile Peggy Lee.

Is That All There Is? The Strange Life of Peggy Lee by James Gavin [£19.99 hardback available now. Simon & Schuster UK]

Bonus material: Gavin makes a persuasive argument that Peggy Lee’s great unsung masterpiece is Mirrors, her 1975 album of art-y, twisted dark neo-cabaret songs. It absolutely bombed on initial release both critically and commercially, but has since been reappraised as a "lost" cult album. Certainly the mysterious “The Case of M J” – which sounds like an off-kilter nursery rhyme or lullaby – must be the eeriest and most disturbed / disturbing thing Lee ever recorded.  In her most benumbed and deadpan voice, Lee seems to be describing the psyche of a mental patient or childhood abuse victim. It’s genuinely spine-tingling and David Lynch-ian. Once heard, never forgotten. “How old were you when your father went away? How old were you when your father went away ... ?”

Tallulah and Billie

/ Tallulah Bankhead in the 1930s /

/ Billie Holiday photographed by Carl Van Vechten in 1949 /

The intimate friendship between dissolute husky-voiced first lady of the American stage Tallulah Bankhead (1902-1968) and the great doomed jazz chanteuse Billie Holiday (1915-1959) spanned at least two decades – from the golden age of 1930s Harlem cafe society until the mid-1950s. “Tally and Lady were like sisters,” as one observer put it. Fierce, stylish sisters with a tinge of incest, apparently.

From Joel Lobenthal’s 2005 biography Tallulah! The Life and Times of a Leading Lady:

Tallulah’s relationships, of course, seldom observed clear-cut boundaries, and it appears that during the late 1940s she and Holiday were also lovers. Perhaps they had been all along.  Holiday later told William Dufty, who ghostwrote her autobiography, that when Tallulah visited backstage at the Strand Theatre, the thrill she took in exhibitionistic sex made her insist on keeping Holiday’s dressing room door open. Holiday later claimed that Tallulah’s brazen show of affection almost cost her her job at the Strand.

John Levy was also Holiday’s lover as well as her manager at the time, and although he was one of the abusive strong men to whom Holiday gravitated, Levy was intimidated by Tallulah and her connections. When Tallulah came around, all he could do was get out of the way. Once at a nightclub he sat at a nearby table watching Tallulah express her affection to Holiday. “Look at that bitch, Carl, look at that!” he exclaimed to musician Carl Drinkard. “That bitch is going out of her fucking mind, she’s all over her.”

A daughter of the patrician Old South who knew a thing or two about breaking taboos, the gloriously hedonistic Tallulah was a bold pioneer when it came to interracial sex – another of her conquests was Hattie McDaniel (yes, Mammy from Gone with the Wind). Sadly, Bankhead and Holiday’s friendship ended acrimoniously around the time of the publication of Lady Sings the Blues, Holiday’s 1956 memoirs. (Bankhead was bedeviled by tabloid scandals at the time and, fearing what dirt Holiday might rake up in her autobiography, abruptly distanced herself from her – probably on the advice of her lawyer). What a shame. Read Holiday’s lacerating and embittered kiss-off letter to Bankhead here. 

/ Bankhead was primarily a stage actress and only made a handful of films. In the early 1930s she was dispatched to Hollywood in the hopes she would become a screen rival to Garbo and Dietrich (in truth, she was the rare American actress who did convincingly exude their kind of heavy-lidded Continental decadence). Unfortunately all her films belly flopped and her Hollywood stint was brief. Here she is in The Cheat (1931), which certainly looks intriguing. I've never seen it, but apparently it’s available to watch in ten-minute segments on Youtube /

/ Sultry Bankhead with delectable leading man Gary Cooper in The Devil and The Deep (1932) – which I have seen and is great, campy fun. Bankhead famously confessed, “The only reason I went to Hollywood was to fuck that divine Gary Cooper.”/ 

/ I think my favourite photos of Billie Holiday ever taken were from this weirdly modern 1949 series by Carl Van Vechten (1880-1964) – which include these sensational nude portraits. Young Holiday looks a bit tough and hard-edged but not yet ravaged. I love how they're clearly un-retouched: you can see the little scar on her face. Her golden skin makes her look like one of Gauguin’s Tahitian beauties. See more here /

/ Towards the end: Holiday in 1958 /

/ Rare shot of Billie and Tallulah in happier times, apparently taken at The Strand Theatre circa 1948 /