James Bond Meets Diamond Lil: An Anecdote From The Bad & the Beautiful.
Just finished reading The Bad and the Beautiful: Hollywood in the Fifties by Sam Kashner and Jennifer MacNair (Old Saybrook, CT: Konecky & Konecky; hardbound; 2002; undated bargain reprint edition for Barnes & Noble [originally published by W.W. Norton & Company]; ISBN: 1-56852-577-X; 380 pps.; list price U.S. $7.98); it's an entertaining look at some of the scandals, sleaze, schmaltz and sensationalism that swirled around Hollywood in the 1950s that has garnered nice blurbs from the likes of James Ellroy (neo-noir author of Black Dahlia, L.A. Confidential, White Jazz and American Tabloid) and Ernest Lehman (author of the novella Sweet Smell of Success and the screenplays for North By Northwest, West Side Story, The Sound of Music and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?), although it's nowhere near as dark a take on La-La Land as Ellroy's work, much less Kenneth Anger's (Hollywood Babylon, Hollywood Babylon II; it should be noted, however, that Kashner and MacNair listed Anger's books in their bibliography).
Kashner is the author of the novel Sinatraland (2000) and the memoir When I Was Cool: My Life at the Jack Kerouac School (2004); NPR's Fresh Air conducted an interview with him on his tour flogging this last book on 15 March 2004.
At least two chapters of The Bad & the Beautiful originally saw light as articles in Vanity Fair (the chapter on Rebel Without a Cause -- focusing on the director/co-scripter Nicholas Ray and the stars, James Dean, Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo -- and the chapter on Sweet Smell of Success); I'm pretty sure that part of Chapter 9 ("Love and Hate: A Place in the Sun and The Night of the Hunter) appeared in GQ, because I remember reading the part about the making of The Night of the Hunter in a drug or discount store a couple of years ago, although I didn't buy the magazine. Kashner is listed as a writer for both VF and GQ.
There's nothing terribly insightful here; there are some dishy bits, but again, nothing at the level of Hollywood Babylon. (I was rather annoyed that the authors neglected to mention, in their chapter partially devoted to tennis star "Big Bill" Tilden, that Vladimir Nabokov parodied the paedophilic athlete in his novel Lolita.) Still, there was some new-to me trivia; perhaps the most shocking/cringe-inducing news was this:
Mae West performed a duet of "Love Will Keep Us Together" with Timothy Dalton in her last-gasp attempt at a movie comeback, the 1978 musical Sextette (directed by Ken Hughes, one of the five directors of the 1967 farcical James Bond movie, Casino Royale).
Let me repeat that:
Mae West -- who, at that point was in her mid-eighties, and by all accounts still seriously considered herself to be the same alluring, off-colour, take-charge sex queen that she was in the 1920s and 1930s, the woman whose bustline was honored in World War II by having an inflatable lifejacket named after her -- sang The Captain and Tenille's "Love Will Keep Us Together" with Timothy Dalton, who would go on to be arguably the most ineffectual James Bond in a "straight" movie ever (and just how blah do you have to be to make Roger Moore look good as Bond by comparison..?). The once-and-former Diamond Lil crooning "Young and beautiful/Someday your looks will be gone/When the others turn you off/Who'll be turning you on?" to the once-and-future James Bond?!
Ohhh, the mind reels....
On the other hand, if this scene could've been incorporated into either of Dalton's two turns as 007 (The Living Daylights and Licence to Kill), it would've made the "lucky" movie in question much more memorable. Perverse and surreal in a way that Casino Royale couldn't hope to be, but memorable nonetheless.
(I could try to cap this by relating how Kashner and MacNair report that Tony Curtis, who also starred in Sextette, didn't bother showing up at the set until after she'd had her daily enema -- after one o'clock in the afternoon -- or how Ms. West developed the habit in her vaudeville days owing to the filthiness of the restrooms, or how she bragged how her daily enemas "left her smelling 'just as sweet at either end;'" but I won't.)
Kashner is the author of the novel Sinatraland (2000) and the memoir When I Was Cool: My Life at the Jack Kerouac School (2004); NPR's Fresh Air conducted an interview with him on his tour flogging this last book on 15 March 2004.
At least two chapters of The Bad & the Beautiful originally saw light as articles in Vanity Fair (the chapter on Rebel Without a Cause -- focusing on the director/co-scripter Nicholas Ray and the stars, James Dean, Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo -- and the chapter on Sweet Smell of Success); I'm pretty sure that part of Chapter 9 ("Love and Hate: A Place in the Sun and The Night of the Hunter) appeared in GQ, because I remember reading the part about the making of The Night of the Hunter in a drug or discount store a couple of years ago, although I didn't buy the magazine. Kashner is listed as a writer for both VF and GQ.
There's nothing terribly insightful here; there are some dishy bits, but again, nothing at the level of Hollywood Babylon. (I was rather annoyed that the authors neglected to mention, in their chapter partially devoted to tennis star "Big Bill" Tilden, that Vladimir Nabokov parodied the paedophilic athlete in his novel Lolita.) Still, there was some new-to me trivia; perhaps the most shocking/cringe-inducing news was this:
Mae West performed a duet of "Love Will Keep Us Together" with Timothy Dalton in her last-gasp attempt at a movie comeback, the 1978 musical Sextette (directed by Ken Hughes, one of the five directors of the 1967 farcical James Bond movie, Casino Royale).
Let me repeat that:
Mae West -- who, at that point was in her mid-eighties, and by all accounts still seriously considered herself to be the same alluring, off-colour, take-charge sex queen that she was in the 1920s and 1930s, the woman whose bustline was honored in World War II by having an inflatable lifejacket named after her -- sang The Captain and Tenille's "Love Will Keep Us Together" with Timothy Dalton, who would go on to be arguably the most ineffectual James Bond in a "straight" movie ever (and just how blah do you have to be to make Roger Moore look good as Bond by comparison..?). The once-and-former Diamond Lil crooning "Young and beautiful/Someday your looks will be gone/When the others turn you off/Who'll be turning you on?" to the once-and-future James Bond?!
Ohhh, the mind reels....
On the other hand, if this scene could've been incorporated into either of Dalton's two turns as 007 (The Living Daylights and Licence to Kill), it would've made the "lucky" movie in question much more memorable. Perverse and surreal in a way that Casino Royale couldn't hope to be, but memorable nonetheless.
(I could try to cap this by relating how Kashner and MacNair report that Tony Curtis, who also starred in Sextette, didn't bother showing up at the set until after she'd had her daily enema -- after one o'clock in the afternoon -- or how Ms. West developed the habit in her vaudeville days owing to the filthiness of the restrooms, or how she bragged how her daily enemas "left her smelling 'just as sweet at either end;'" but I won't.)