20 Favorite Actresses

There's a meme going around where bloggers are supposed to name their 20 favorite actresses.  I decided to use the TV test - If I'm flipping stations and I catch a glimpse of an actress, do I stop to watch the movie?

In no particular order they are:

• Deborah Kerr
• Katherine Hepburn
• Judy Garland
• Audrey Hepburn
• Ingrid Bergman
• Jessica Lange
• Meryl Streep
• Judi Dench
• Maggie Smith
• Myrna Loy
• Helen Mirren
• Peggy Ashcroft
• Emma Thompson
• Judy Holiday
• Doris Day
• Grace Kelly
• Vivien Leigh
• Katherine Grayson
• Bette Davis
• Greta Garbo

I put Judy Holiday on the list even though she didn't make many movies because I like her in all the movies she was in.  Here's the famous gin rummy scene from Born Yesterday:

Lies, Lies, Lies ...

I was reading Eurotrib’s open thread and saw that a commenter posted a link to a BBC story:

Nearly half of all men and one-third of women have lied about what they have read to try to impress friends or potential partners, a survey suggests.

Men were most likely to do this to appear intellectual or romantic, found the poll of 1,500 people by Populus for the National Year of Reading campaign.

The men polled said they would be most impressed by women who read news websites, Shakespeare or song lyrics. Women said men should have read Nelson Mandela's biography or Shakespeare.

Animated discussion ensued.In my life, I don't ever remember lying about what I was reading to impress a potential partner or a friend. Or, really, anyone.

My lies are lies of omission. I don't tell people what I'm reading or what I've read. Especially men. Because usually their eyes glaze over when I mention the word "book". There are exceptions. But the exceptions aren't much better. There are the intense, serious types who want to talk about the book to the exclusion of everything else, going on and on at the party about it no matter how much I try to change the topic. Yeah, yeah, I know. It's my own "I'm Trapped!" phobia.

The other exception is Britain. In Britain I always talk books. With total strangers. I usually come back thinking I should move to London. But now that I've read this article, I suspect that they were all lying to me anyway.

So, how about you?

Martin Dressler

This novel, Martin Dressler by Steven Millhauser, follows what the back of the book calls "the entrepreneur" Martin Dressler as he makes (and loses) his fortune. Starting as a youth in the cigar shop of his father, he becomes a bellboy at the Vanderlyn Hotel where he works his way up to secretary to the manager. Using his funds and the funds of friends, he obtains the cigar shop franchise in the lobby of the Vanderlyn. Leaving the Vanderlyn, he opens a Manhattan lunch room/billiard hall which expands into a chain of lunch rooms throughout the New York City area. Finally he buys the Vanderlyn Hotel and opens other hotels in New York until his big dreams reach a height that cannot be maintained and he emerges, penniless, into a sunny New York to, apparently, start over. And all of this by the time he is in his early thirties.


The biggest problem with this novel, for me, was that I never bought Martin Dressler as the kind of entrepreneur who could start a small business and build it up to a real estate empire. He never seemed ... driven (at least, not until the end). And my experience of highly successful entrepreneurs is that they are nothing but driven.

Martin Dressler isn't interested in making money, he just happens to do things that are successful and that make money. He isn't interested in lunch rooms and yet he builds a chain of successful lunchrooms. He isn't particularly interested in hotels, and yet becomes a hotel magnate. What he seems to be interested in is how to make things work - the mechanics of behind the scenes systems. As a young man he is fascinated by the way that the Vanderlyn Hotel works behind the scenes in a way invisible to the guests. As the owner of a restaurant chain he is fascinated with the way that costs and labor can be saved by combining much of the behind the scenes operations of the restaurants.

But he is not passionate about anything until he finally has a dream (literally) and decides to build a hotel that isn't a hotel but is an alternate reality. And the dream proves too big.

The other problem with the novel, for me, was the women in the story. I disliked Millhauser's treatment of all of them. Martin's principal relationships are with the two sisters Caroline and Emmeline and with a maid at his residence named Marie Haskova. In some ways, Martin also exerted no great effort in these relationships. He meets Caroline, she is the beautiful sister that he is expected to marry and he marries her. His relationship with Marie is important to him but almost non-existent in actuality. His relationship with his sister-in-law Emmeline on the other hand is like a relationship with a close business partner or a woman with whom he has been married for years. I found Millhauser's portrayal of all these women annoying and I equally found annoying Martin's passive aggressive relationship with them. As an example, the following is a passage from the time before he marries Caroline, when he has never had a conversation yet about marrying her.

Sometimes, when he looked across a table at Emmeline, he had the sense that he and she had been married for a long time. It was a comfortable companionable sort of marriage, calm and peaceful as cozy furniture in a firelit room. And at once he would think of Caroline, tense and languorous in her armchair in the hotel parlor, waiting for something, something that was bound to happen or would never happen - Caroline with her half-closed eyes and motionless fingers and pale hair pulled back tight on both sides. For it was Caroline after all whom he had married, or was about to marry, or had somehow forgotten to marry. And when on Sunday mornings he stood against the doorjamb talking with Marie Haskova and watching her bend this way and that, Marie Haskova with her heavy body and sudden swift questioning glances, then too he would think of Caroline, waiting in her chair for something to happen. Perhaps they were all waiting for something to happen - waiting for him to make up his mind. For it was as if he had three wives, and was married to all of them, or none of them, or some of them, or now one or now another of them. Of the three wives, Emmeline and Marie Haskova were the most vividly present to him, the most solidly there, whereas Caroline seemed a ghost wife, a dream wife -- although he wondered whether it wasn't whether it wasn't precisely her lack of substance that allowed her to haunt and hover, to invade the edges of other women.

Millhauser draws Caroline as almost completely lacking substance and, indeed, almost completely lacking speech. She seems half asleep most of the time. She is one of the most boring women characters ever created, which I think is the point. Because it certainly says something that Martin marries her, without ever having a conversation about marriage with her and even without asking her (he has her sister ask her). Caroline is one of those annoying feminine characters that women love to hate.

It was as if her perplexing, irritating coolness, her difficulty, were a sign of her high value.

And yet, in the end, Millhauser makes clear that the marriage is a disaster.

Emmeline, on the other hand, is a very likeable woman and we are clearly meant to believe that Martin married the wrong sister. But I found myself rebelling against the idea that a man couldn't have a business relationship with a woman without us wondering if perhaps their relationship should also be physical. In the end Millhauser makes clear that there is no physical attraction between Martin and Emmeline and it is just a meeting of the minds. But by that point I was finding the novel so irritating that I felt no happiness that he had done the right thing, at least from my point of view.

This irritation factor really didn't kick into high gear until close to the end, however, I was fairly happy reading until the last few chapters. As Martin devolves into his dream state and builds his alternate reality hotel, Millhauser begins to pile on the detail. At one point he devotes eight pages (EIGHT PAGES!) to the description of the new hotel including one descriptive sentence that comprises four pages. I like detail but found my eyes crossing. Especially since I didn't believe that any place like that could exist in 1904 New York. It was more like 2004 Las Vegas.

It was at about that point that I looked to see when this novel was written and realized that it was not a newish novel but a novel written in the midst of the boom 1990's. And suddenly I realized that the novel with its bubble of dreams was a perfect reflection of the bubble years of the 1990's and accurately predicted the bursting of the bubble. Maybe that's why it received the Pulitzer Prize. At least, I hope so. Because I couldn't think of any other reason.

This and That

Just some stuff I've been thinking and reading about:

• Oprah has caused a shortage of Kindles.  So don't even think of giving one for Christmas if you haven't already purchased it.
• Auditions for the YouTube symphony orchestra are being accepted.
• Truman is getting to be a Big Dog: (Thanks for the picture dad!)
• Lost Oscar Wilde manuscripts and letters have been found.  Scholars, start your engines ...
• I'm laughing at Pride and Prejudice as reported by the characters in their Facebook updates.  (There's one for Hamlet too.  But the idea of Jane Austen and her VERY social characters on facebook just strikes me as funnier.)

The Oxford Project

I don't watch Sunday morning television (I don't watch ANY morning television) so I didn't see this in real time. I saw a reference to it on EarlyWord and clicked the link they provided, and watched. And I thought, "What a cool project!"

This is a story about a the making of a book of photographs called The Oxford Project. The town, in Iowa, where the project took place reminds me of a lot of towns here in Missouri. The fact that the photographer, who moved there from New York, would have lived there 8 years and was still considered a stranger doesn't surprise me. But he's part of the town now.


Watch CBS Videos Online

Enid Bagnold

A week or so ago, on a Sunday morning, I was catching up on my book blogging reading and I came across a reference to The Chalk Garden and it's author, Enid Bagnold.  I remembered The Chalk Garden as a movie, made in the 1960's, starring one of my favorite actresses, Deborah Kerr.  In my memory it was vaguely Hitchcockian in style.  It also starred a teenaged Hayley Mills and her own real life father John Mills.  It never occurred to me that it started out as a play, I'm not sure why, and it had never occurred to me to wonder who wrote it.

The brief reference aroused my curiosity so I checked my local library on-line catalogue to see if there was a copy of the play and to see what else she had written.  Her name rang a bell with me, but I wasn't sure why, until I saw the library catalogue listings.  Enid Bagnold wrote National Velvet.

What an odd combination:  National Velvet and The Chalk Garden. One a beloved children's book that is still in print and the other a strange psychological drama about three generations of women bridging the gap between Edwardian and modern times and the mysterious governess who assists them.  Granted, each of them has a young girl in it. But, although it has been years since I read (or saw) National Velvet, I don't recall Velvet Brown as being psychologically disturbed, as Laurel is in The Chalk Garden.  Although perhaps wanting to dress up like a boy to compete in a horse race would have been seen as an issue back in the 1930's.

Curious, I ordered the play from the library and the only other book (besides National Velvet) that they had:  A Diary Without Dates, which is a memoir of her time working in a hospital during World War I based on diaries she kept during the time.

Then I googled her.  She seemed like an interesting woman.  Born in England in 1889 to an army family, spending a few years in Jamaica when her father was stationed there.  She returned to be educated in Europe, studying art.  When World War I broke out she volunteered through the Volunteer Aid Detachment (VAD's) and worked as a nurse at the Royal Herbert Hospital in Woolwich.  While there she published A Diary Without Dates, which was very critical of hospital administration.  So critical, in fact that the military arranged for her to be dismissed.  Well ... this made me a bit more excited about receiving my book from the library!

She moved on to being a volunteer driver in France and from that came her book A Happy Foreigner.  (I checked, the library does not have it.)

She apparently lived a "bohemian" lifestyle and had a number of affairs but in 1920 at the age of 31 she married Sir Roderick Jones, the head of the Reuters news agency and became Lady Jones. They purchased a country home in Rottingdean, East Surrey, where she spent much of the rest of her life.  It had formerly been owned by the artist Edward Burne-Jones and its garden is the inspiration for The Chalk Garden.

She, of course (of course because we can see the result not because it was necessarily natural for women at the time) continued to write and in 1924 published her first novel The Difficulty of Getting Married. In 1935 she published National Velvet, which was probably based on a horse that her children had. She also published a few additional novels as well as a number of plays.

None of this explained how she wrote two such different works. 

I picked my books up yesterday and the book is one of those small, 4x6 sized, books that probably had a dust cover at one time but is now just blue faced cardboard binding with yellow crumbling pages within.  It is a United States edition published in 1935, after National Velvet became a hit (because on the title page it says "by Enid Bagnold, author of "National Velvet").  It does not smell musty but it looks as if it should.

Opening it, I read the inscription: 

TO THAT FRIEND OF MINE WHO,  WHEN I WROTE HIM ENDLESS LETTERS, SAID COLDLY, "WHY NOT KEEP SOMETHING FOR YOURSELF!"

This is followed by another page with the following:

I apologize to those whom I may hurt.

Can I soothe them by pleading that one may only write what is true for oneself?

E.B.

I found this very encouraging. I haven't started the book yet, but I'm looking forward to reading this woman and seeing what she had to say.

In my Googling, I found that The Chalk Garden was revived in London this year for the first time since 1971.  If it makes it across the Atlantic to New York I would be tempted to make a trip to see it.  And in the review is some information from the production notes that does explain a few things:

The programme has a fascinating description as to how the play came about. Enid has inherited a prior family from her husband Sir Roderick Jones, a war wounded son, a young daughter in law and a three year old granddaughter for whom she engaged a nanny. It was when a friend, a judge, came to lunch that she noticed the strange and uncharacteristic reaction of the nanny which started Enid thinking. Enid loved words and she stuffed the witty expressions which she'd been collecting into her play, making it rather heavy going. London impresario Binkie Beaumont turned it down but Enid's agent Harold Freedman sent the play to Irene Selznick, daughter of Louis B Mayer. Selznick worked on the script with Enid, "to pull the threads straight" and curtailing Bagnold's excess of expression. The result was marvellously successful.

Here is a scene from the movie - it is a scene near the beginning in which the mysterious Miss Madrigal is applying for the job of governess to Laurel.  I think I may just have to rent the movie and watch it through again.  After I read the play.