A Sample Progress on Queer Street
“It is not a joke, the great clang of New York. It is the sound of brassy people at the party, at all parties, pimping and doing favors and threatening and making gassy public statements and being modest and blackmailing and having dinner and going on later.”
—Harold Brodkey
Wherein the author (clearly under the influence of Alfred Hitchcock’s greatest picture, Vertigo) becomes habituated to leading a double life, until the double life (considerate curbside young heterosexual gentleman vs. The Other One) became a strain and when felonious queer reality hit that high-carat idea from the European arsenal, Alienation in the Metropolis, and one began one’s career in brokering of affection with strangers, ever after clouding the original picture of the Edenic abode.
THE CIRCUITS
Carnegie Hall: pivot of the uptown circuit (favored by serious contenders). Carnegie Hall to the Russian Tea Room to the Plaza to the Sherry-Netherland to the Angel of the Waters. . . .
Across the boat lake into the Ramble, back past the Belvedere Castle to the Dakota and the Apthorp; segue to the Mais Oui, then back to the Osborne (diagonally across from . . . Carnegie Hall).
An essential strand of the elders’ history, deep-structures category, always figures in the stories of mettlesome queers who “came out under fire” in World War II and, as a societal sop, were indulged by the nation in the post-war years, emboldening the firebrand Harry Hay, the Mattachines, and One magazine to pitch more than just a few camp tents coast to coast. This all took place until the unholy alliance of the hard-line New York Freudians (wielding their powerful electro-and-insulin shock therapy wands) and the McCarthy–Army-State Department scare, compounded by the actions of the ever-resourceful Confidential magazine and Universal Studio’s purge of queers, resulting in Universal’s preservation of the fiction of Rock Hudson’s heterosexuality by having him marry Phyllis Yates, thus making it possible, inter alia, for Rock to appear in the Sirk melodramas. This Unholy Alliance raised the national hysteria against the Queer Menace to a pitch that brought on nervous seizures in show dogs (a low blow).
In reaction to all of which, the author, QT, confected and retained for personal use the brawny bathhouse image of the gorgeous manly Harry Hay and his bronzed Los Angeles Mattachines, and of a Queer Street stretching underground from coast to coast, accessible in QT’s imagination (and then some) through secret passageways in myriad Greyhound bus station toilets.
While closer to home, moving along at warp speed from a single encounter on Eighth Street (the Other Circuit, where those beyond contending slummed and spawned their hardy guttersnipe offspring) QT was ferried to what Auden nailed as the Uptown Manhattan Homintern, finding himself, improbably—but that in itself was probably the reason—present at Sunday matinee receptions at which, like Beckett’s Godot (all the rage, but who’d ever seen the play except on television?), Gore Vidal, Arthur Laurents, James Baldwin, Truman Capote, the Ancients of Days: Carl Van Vechten, Glenway Wescott, and Leo Lerman (then only in his middle forties, but already Augustan beyond the common measure) were always expected and seemed never to show—or if they did, they’d leave, like the sable-enveloped Hollywood star at Margo Channing’s coming home party for Bill Sampson in All About Eve, with half the men in the joint, leaving the host to remark, “The trouble with inviting every suspect in New York to a party is they tend to come.”
Sunday matinee party talk was divided largely between two branching topics, decoration/display/music/theater and Abstract Expressionism. From the first would ramify, inevitably, all the latest Lenny Bernstein, Jerry Robbins, John Latouche and Company dish—such as who had really been at the opening night party for Candide, who really had seen The Golden Apple, House of Flowers and James Dean in The Immoralist, and for those who insisted on chewing old cud as if it were licorice sticks, or James Dean’s last pair of socks, who really had been there at the opening night of The Cocktail Party? Nearly always next—following a few nods toward the literary (Must we really read By Love Possessed? Do we freely admit we devoured The Fountainhead?) the most minutely detailed give-and-takes concerning the preparations for the drag-flotilla that sailed once a year, at season’s end, from Sayville across Great South Bay to Cherry Grove: show boats packed to the gunwhales with Du Barrys who were no ladies bent on making this the Year of Years on Fire Island to remember all year long back on the uptown Bird Circuit (the Blue Parrot, the Coq d’Or) and downtown at the Café Finale and the Cherry Lane on Commerce Street, at Lenny’s Hideaway and the Modern.
From the second topic inevitably, the on-dit on Jackson Pollock, as rumored rough trade guesting at Mary’s and how de Kooning threatened to beat him up for it if it was true, never mind the measurable difference in size or stature, or vertical extension up from the plane of earth between them.
On the boys at MoMA, on the burgeoning New York School: Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery (absent on official leave in Paris), Kenneth Koch (he’s straight, thank God) and James Schuyler (the crazy one, but one of these days . . . watch out) or Edwin Denby and what exquis he’d just penned for Ballet News, on the go-betweens Rudy Burkhardt, Joe Le Sueur, Morris Golde, on certain painters besides Pollock and de Kooning, on the fabulous Patsy Southgate (back from Paris in peak form).
Certain post-modern tenets come retrospectively into play right about here. The parable is itself performative, a case of circular, or self-propagating information transfer. Fiction/non-fiction: free-association. The prophecy is self-fulfilling. The jig is up. The fleet is in. The price is right; the time is now. (The Bronx is up and the Battery’s down.) You might as well live.
Thus more of the Romance of the Authority Figure, which utterly p.c. homosexuals, gasping for tenure-plus-treats, have learned with ease to call identifying with the oppressor. What I say is, if you’re looking to convey a message, put it on a bumper sticker like the one I saw that afternoon coming back on the ferry from Cherry Grove to Sayville: Feel Safe Tonight/Sleep With a Cop.
The author’s avidity became entirely a matter of connection to older queer New York: res gestae of a raucous past (toot, toot) and his self—image that of the Solovox, the instrument, precursor to the Moog synthesizer, in which eight instruments could be simulated one at a time by pressing switches, becoming now the cello, now the horn. And as an instrument how do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice.
Every queer coming of age in America, who developed the ambition to be metropolitan, was instructed the same way: the goal is the penthouse overlooking the river, or the Park, or midway between the two, but uptown, far away from the 14th Street fault line. (Nowadays it’s Chelsea, a little close for comfort, but home of the pre-cast façade: gyms, clubs, cafés, housed in those cast-iron buildings that made New York what it was a hundred and fifty years ago: The Metropolis of the pre-cast façade.) Every queer who instead opts for the house off Mulholland Drive, or hanging precipitously over one of the better canyons, likes to think he has the po-mo edge over his Eastern Seaboard coeval, but knows his house and all that goes with it is likelier with each day that passes to be, if not burnt off the hill, then swallowed up by the restless earth on which over the centuries he has had less than good luck wandering.
Then there was the enemies list, headed by the awful Norman Mailer solemnizing and slandering in politico drag, investing in hip. But possibly, originally, Emerson and everybody in his thrall, including, sadly the infantilized Hart Crane, who in “passages” yearned for an improved infancy, but in any event, without question, the Partisan Review mafia and the terrible Trillings, plus conflicted “self-reliant” liberals in the business who were if anything worse than the pinko straight (as Allard Lowenstein and Bayard Rustin, for two, discovered to their grief). So that when today, when some leftist hectors the author for his interest in the Log Cabin Republicans, saying, “Don’t those assholes know their party is out to destroy them?” he tells him, as if he were Ayn Rand or somebody like her (the director of the Federal Reserve, for example), to check his premises.
For some years prior to the publication in 1964 of Susan Sontag’s “Notes on ‘Camp’” (a breakthrough) in Partisan Review, the issue of the Jews and the homosexuals as two subversive agencies was back in the news—even as queer historian-activist Richard Plante tried without any real success until the 1970s to make the equivalence-in-suffering vivid with his revelations of the Pink Triangle in Auschwittz.
Timely icon: the Jewish heterosexual sympathizer (“No, but some of his best friends are”).
QUEER MUSIC
Prior to all contenders and to any declarations of relative worth, and historically exemplary in both the aesthetic and the moral sense, Henry Cowell is American Queer Music’s Apollo. Sprung from the late nineteenth century’s San Francisco Bay Area Bohemian milieu, promulgator of the rule-shattering tone cluster (“Natural sounds, such as the wind playing through trees or grasses, or whistling in the chimney, or the sound of the sea, or thunder, all make use of sliding tones”), author of the highly influential New Musical Resources, and teacher of George Gershwin, John Cage and Lou Harrison, he was an innovator, a rebel and a genius (and not incidentally a victim of the stringent sodomy laws in force throughout the land and only finally—if not in perpetuity—rescinded on June 27, 2003, by the United States Supreme Court in Lawrence and Garner v. Texas).
Samuel Barber, the single genius (the violin concerto, the string quartet, Knoxville: Summer of 1915; Vanessa at the Metropolitan Opera).
Gian-Carlo Menotti (late-late verismo: Zandonai for Broadway and television).
Ned Rorem, salon fritillary and fashion victim; musical ideation derived from singing French ventriloquists, pitched as something on the level of Poulenc, actually a watery combination of “Chopsticks” disguised as “Gymnopédie” and endless sub-Reynaldo-Hahn elaborations of “Ah, vous-dirai-je, maman?”).
Uncle Virgil Thomson (the plain Jane of plain Janes) who koshered Gertrude Stein into Protestant American plainchant in Four Saints in Three Acts, and who, it was said, wrote to assure Mary Garden concerning Maria Callas’s impending Metropolitan debut, that he’d been told she, Callas, was a fake.
Leonard Bernstein, triumphant composer of On the Town, Candide and the immortal West Side Story, an expert if undiscriminating master of musical derivation and pastiche—in which respect he imagined himself the American Stravinsky, but as exquisite and self-effacing as was Stravinsky’s “serious” musical decorum, so did Bernstein’s become coarse, and narcissistic.
Ned Rorem, then, as always, at the height of his career.
Lou Harrison. Uncle Virgil said of him, “It was Mozart’s boast that he could master any musical style within a week and by the end of that time compose in it adeptly enough to deceive experts. Lou Harrison has something of that virtuosity himself . . . and he mixes things with infallible imagination.” A later generation recognized in him the very alchemical genius Uncle Virgil had so devoutly wished for in himself—to make American music anew in according to the very “melting pot” principle upon which the Republic, if not exactly founded, has been, since the end of the Civil War, sustained. Chances are it could only have happened in California.
And everywhere and always the self-styled (and he made it stick) Petronius Arbiter of the official shirt-and-tie counter-culture, Gore Vidal (“Gloria Vitriol,” and to the chic known as Madame Sans-Gêne): his trump card, the ceaselessly repeated until virtually canonized Blatant-Male-Sexuality-Incarnated-For-The-First-Time-In-The-Culture-By-Marlon-Brando hypothesis. This was contested by the venerable with forensic defenses of pre-war and wartime erotica: Valentino, Richard Barthelmess, Ramon Novarro and Francis X. Bushman in Ben-Hur, Paul Muni in Scarface, Johnny Weismuller as Tarzan, William Holden in Golden Boy, John Garfield (the sexiest yid on film till Paul Newman, who is anyway only half) in Body and Soul, Burt Lancaster in anything, not to mention the thousands of images of near-naked fighting men in the Pacific with which the newsreels created as many ripple effects as there were women and queers.
All supplemented by the action features in which dozens of young, toothsome American males of varying histrionic capabilities revealed the aggressively sexual male in his most characteristic environment, war: essentially farm boys transformed by the glamour of the camera into the warriors of classical mythology.
All these men paved the way for that undeniably volcanic appearance in 1947 at the Ethel Barrymore, an event which certainly rocked Gotham, in which the boy Nils from I Remember Mama (who’d also been Katherine Cornell’s Marchbanks in Shaw’s Candida and had even done a stint opposite Tallulah Bankhead in The Eagle Has Two Heads, and of whom some queens insisted they’d seen it in him all along) suddenly tore his shirt off and bellowed “Stell-aaa!” (With particular vehemence, some said, to please his famously emphatic teacher, Stella Adler.)
Followed in the next decade (the great chrysalis decade of twentieth-century American homosexuality) by the sensitive boy on Broadway. Tony Perkins as Eugene Gant in Look Homeward, Angel (wags crowed, “Look, a homo angel!”), Roddy MacDowell (former boy idol and emblem of Ganymede pluck) and Dean Stockwell (resolutely heterosexual but heart-stopping opposite Errol Flynn as Kipling’s Kim, and in Joseph Losey’s late-’40s “difference” melodrama, The Boy with Green Hair) tearing up the proscenium as the fictionalized Leopold and Loeb in Meyer Levin’s Compulsion. Stockwell was the Leopold giving the most delirious rendition of homosexual passion since definitions were applied. And Off-Broadway, the legendary performance given by James Dean as the Arab Boy in The Immoralist.
“Ah, oui, chéri, guider mon ombre aveugle en ces rues que j’aime.”
—The French Ventriloquist
The eleven blocks walk of destiny: down Broadway from the Old Met (“The Yellow Brick Brewery on Broadway”) to the Everard Baths. Broadway is on the diagonal and so was the author, QT. Broadway is an old Indian trail that cuts across the superimposed Manhattan grid. At the southwest corner of 28th Street, turn right into the old Tenderloin. The Everard Baths. The two green lamps made it look like a precinct entrance. It was a precinct entrance—since everyone did say it was owned and operated by the Patrolman’s Benevolent Association.
Everybody went to the Everard Baths (“We have all walks of life in here, my dear, and some of death”). From Alfred Lunt and Lorenz Hart to Charles James dressed up in a long sheet tied into a 1913 hobble skirt to Gore Vidal to Nureyev. Et cetera! The place reeked of the experiences of men caught up in history, of the destinies of their own kind, of war and chemistry and a life truly lived.
The Everard in evening clothes: The Metropolitan Opera Club (reserved seating in the Grand Tier), an all-male bastion presided over genially by Francis Robinson, the Assistant General Manager, a true Southern gentleman who applied all the finesse of an Eleanor Belmont to lightly pinching teen-boy cheeks and trawling the Family Circle score desks for “guest listeners” and was the nicest possible old daddy a young person with musical ambitions could want to know. On a first-name basis with all the divas, current and retired, although he never addressed Ponselle or Jeritza, Novotna or Milanov, as anything but “Madame.”
And behind the opera house, on Seventh Avenue, the outdoor tarpaulin covered the scene dock: metaphor of the queer life: scene upon scene all slotted together to be carried off in the back of a truck (and later that night: the scene among the trucks along West Street). Truckers and the scene dock became synonymous with Ljuba Welitsch (“It’s a short show; wait for me across the street in Bill’s”). Then they would frolic in her dressing room while the lucky guy’s colleagues good-naturedly struck the set.
The Opera Line, Shubert Alley, the Museum of Human Oddities, the Astor Bar: all side turns off the main drag. The tour bus from Eighth Avenue. Author imagines a queer version, for newcomers who might like to look at what they’re getting into before deciding. Even so, it probably wouldn’t work—cause of that Potemkin Village–Warner Brothers–back-lot quality of façade construction.
At the opera Gotham queers preferred Don Giovanni to The Marriage of Figaro, the Don being the one opera most undeniably pliable in a queer reading (although the queer immolation opera of all time remained Bellini’s Norma), most especially in the character of the Don himself, who, like some lockerroom Lothario jock, carries his cocksman reputation on stage but is never once seen to succeed in seduction during the course of the evening (and believed by queers, before he attempts to seduce Zerlina, to have his eye squarely set on a ménage-à-trois with Masetto, whom he trusts will pursue and be cajoled into consenting).
In Don Giovanni, the intrigues of the wicked city were imprinted on them the way Beaumarchais’s intrigues, analogous to country-house party weekend, could hope to be. And Don Giovanni was the one opera that had really gotten to Freud. Features included the easy elision of the ear from ragazza to ragazzo in the champagne aria, so Cesare Siepi and George London, both big butch guys, could be imagined without undue paranoiac strain as, for a gag, dropping in at a gay bar, or even at a stretch, the Everard.
Don Giovanni, all in all, the opera most complicated for queers—much more so than the tortured readings of Tristan that imagined Tristan really in love with Kurvenal, or anything at all by Verdi or anything else by Mozart. Donna Anna was gay vengeance itself—Ljuba Welitsch and Eleanor Steber as oracular women—and Donna Elvira was a gay boy’s madonna—the intro music, “Povera Elvira!” to the “Mi tradí” the most piercing lament in the whole opera.
At the author’s first opera queen party, the floating symposium on the question of the opera of Gone With the Wind to open the new opera house ran on all night. Scarlett O’Hara must be a mezzo, Melanie Hamilton a lyric soprano, Ashley Wilkes a lyric tenor. The only agreed-upon piece of casting: Eleanor Steber as Belle Watling.
An evening full of the antics of (male) parlor divas dressed up in low drag doing Santuzza, Amneris, Leonora, Ortrud, Cio-Cio-San, Liu, Lady Macbeth, in sync with the Meneghini—a camp trend that culminated a generation later in the creation (by Ira Siff, tenor star of the inspired queer oratorio compositions of the wonderful Rev. Al Carmines) of the sublime Vera Galupe-Borszkh, and her La Gran Scena opera troupe. But it was also from such crossover soiree performances that the gift of David Daniels, countertenor superb, would be brought to light.
The Old Met Standing-Room Line came further out. Barber’s Vanessa at the Metropolitan and Carlysle Floyd’s Susannah at City Opera became the encoded queer operas of the age (augmenting Norma and Salome). Vanessa was the pink-tea queen’s fantasy of betrayal, and Eleanor Steber, its star, a great gay icon right down to the 1970s when, a resident of the fabled Ansonia Hotel at 73rd Street and Broadway, she came all the way down in the elevator, in a gorgeous recital gown, and sang to the men in the then-regnant Continental Baths, located in the subterranean passages of the Ansonia’s basement, joining such successor luminaries as Bette Midler and Holly Woodlawn to constitute a triple goddess of quality queer vaudeville.
Susannah was the encoded story of all the hundreds (later thousands) of boys who ran away from religion and preachers with hot hands that were not just layin’ on the Holy Spirit. Particularly, they were Catholic boys from dioceses of Brooklyn, New York, Newark and Philadelphia, bearing the secret of having been raised up to more than sanctifying grace in the sacristy and through the confessional grille.
And not just grand opera. There wasn’t a queen worth the salt she took her truth with who didn’t identify absolutely, not only with Judy and The Man That Got Away, but also with that Weimar relic, Lotte Lenya, singing “Surabaya Johnny” from Happy End. You heard them singing it on the opera line and in the corridors of the Everard.
In due time, West Side Story became the supreme encoded queer Broadway musical. The deconstruction of “I Feel Pretty” for queers: “See that pretty girl in the mirror there!” Chorus: “What mirror, where?” “Who can that attractive girl be?” and so on. The “absent” but “ever present” mirror of the queer narcissistic experience: in the shop windows; in the windows on the subway; in the tea-room window—Vide Supra—copied in the shiny stone and finally glass façades of the new skyscrapers replacing the look of the ’20s boom with the “mirror look” that dominated and defined first New York then every other American city in the next four decades.
Before West Side Story, people who called Leonard Bernstein a genius were confusing a pathological narcissist with an abundance of talent with the real thing. After West Side Story, Bernstein joined the company of Victor Herbert, Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, Frederick Loewe and Frank Loesser as a Broadway legend. West Side Story, if not the greatest musical ever, (Show Boat, South Pacific, Oklahoma! vie with it), but it certainly stands at the pinnacle of American musical theater.
In theater, the self-identified queer playwright drew upon and replenished the queer culture to a far greater extent than the queer novelist. The narcissism inherent in the predicament inducted gay boys into a theater: to have a look at themselves in the company of others far more successfully, from their point of view, than sitting home, in that most dreaded of all queer circumstances, alone, reading a book. Without question they got bangs for their bucks in their theater: at home with a book they might have been forced to whimper. They’d tell you they’d read the latest—but you daren’t attempt to quiz them on the contents. As for the latest spectacle by—they could give it back to you, blow by blow, and the lower the blow the better the bite.
All very curious to recall, when in today’s queer-karaoke theater, playwrights, actors and directors staining the world with the beauty of their sin have been virtually replaced by the sinning public itself, the club promoters and the most po-mo-homo creature of them all, the dj, who engineers that apotheosis of attention-deficit disorder and the cocaine aesthetic of discontinuous jump-cut discourse, the mix. As a rising dj star recently told HX: “The number one thing is to be representative of the people. They’re the ones who put you there. Once you have their attention and respect, you can educate them.” Presumably out of their deficits.
A central conflict then of ’50s queens, looking back at the earlier Golden Age of the ’40s, was this: whether to be Judy singing the Trolley Song all the way to the end of the line or Blanche Dubois taking the streetcar named Desire, then transferring to one called Cemeteries and getting off at Elysian Fields. But the haunted woman was not Judy or Blanche—it was Kim Novak in Vertigo.
ON VERTIGO
Vertigo is Alfred Hitchcock’s retelling of a primordial theme (Pandora, Eve), Man’s Great Fall Through Woman’s Wiles.
A man may conceive of his father as the author of his life, but if so, he can never deny that his mother is the publisher. For a filmmaker this translates as follows: he may be the author/father of his oeuvre, but the distributor/ mother is certainly the captain of The Industry—and Hitchcock is the artist he is in large measure because he has been able to marshal his fear and aggression to seduce The Industry (and its clientele the paying public) in ways that, for instance, Orson Welles, his artistic equal and companion paranoiac has never mastered.
Vertigo’s conscious register is, as its creator told Peter Bogdanovich, to “play on his fetish (of the protagonist, played by James Stewart) in creating this dead woman and he is so obsessed with the pride he has in making her over.”
But what is a fetish? A pliable stand-in (the physical utensil that corresponds to screen memory) for the exact reverse tendency: so that in the unconscious register (to which the audience responds with anxiety and ambivalence, components crucial to effective catharsis) the protagonist betrays the shame he has in annihilating this living woman—a stand-in for every living one—and the shame he feels in undoing her body and soul. And this is what surfaces so memorably in the best acting Stewart does in the film: the reaction to the barbed indictments of the sitting judge in the inquest scene and the unconscious undertow of reluctance he manifests as his goal comes closer and closer in sight and Kim Novak’s Judy Barton turns back into Madeleine Elster.
Vertigo is operatic, never more than in the gaping plot holes vaulted over (without a downward glance) by gestural rhetoric. Early commentators in that supposedly Freudian age seem to have missed the point of the title credits, concentrating on the apparent or given image of the woman’s eyeball swirling into a vortex: the first emblem of the one dangerous open window of the heroine’s soul (through which the hero lives in terror of falling to his psychic death). Then, within seconds of the running credit sequence, a Bernard Herrmann canonic theme begins doing its part to induce imbalance in the viewer-listener. The score is the third major actor in Vertigo, starting out like Rheingold and evolving through the second act music of Tristan und Isolde and Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht into a carousel tune at the point of Hitchcock’s orgasmic 360-degree pan.
The eye quickly evolves into the whorl which will later be revealed as the back knot of the heroine’s coiffure, but is initially perceived as first a conch shell—emblem of the “oceanic” female, the mermaid, Lorele-Undine that the heroine will, impersonating so much else, impersonate as well—and then finally as what it has been reaching toward all along, the vagina.
These creatures—the undines, willis, and sprites, also the enchanted swans or nightingales or birds of paradise—are called by esotericists egregore beliefs. As the anonymous author of Meditations on the Tarot writes:
Like the belief in the Canaanite Moloch, who demanded the bloody sacrifice of the (male) firstborn, and like the Tibetan tulpas, they are created by a collective imagination infatuated with the thrill of fear, in a three-part process involving
1. the creation of a tulpa through concentrated and directed imagination,
2. the evocation (romancing) of these, and
3. the freeing of consciousness from their hold on it by an act of knowledge which destroys them.
The theme cannot thereafter be easily ignored. Barbara Bel Geddes (the extraordinarily gifted Method actress, creator of Maggie the Cat in Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof on Broadway) as Midge (whose diminutive name—and emotional diminution by Scottie—denotes her status as girl “buddy” in this grim buddy picture) is sketching the design for a brassiere on the principle of the cantilever bridge. (So the identification between San Francisco—a city reached by bridges—and the terrain of the female body is established, to be played out over and over as Scottie pursues Madeleine over the city’s hillscape.) In one of those instantaneous cuts that Hitchcock might have designed for analysis, three letters out of “cantilever” read in bold face: EVE.
Scottie’s depressive character is an inversion of James Stewart’s career-making “sensitive boy” roles and a perverse fulfillment of his suicidal George in It’s a Wonderful Life. The vacancy of his bewilderment, which made him an American icon, is here cannily registered as precisely the reaching out for validation of a man who believes in nothing definite—the typical American stance after the Great Depression and World War II proved beyond suspicion that nice guys finish behind last. Scottie’s real name is John, really the American name for Adam: Midge calls him “Johnny-O” as if to underscore the point, which also points to the viewers’ realization that Stewart at first glance is too old by fifteen years for the part. As the picture progresses, however, it becomes clear that arrested development is a key essential in the psychic action. Similarly, the actor seems at first temperamentally unsuited to sadistic aggression—the signal American gesticulation—but Scottie typically retreats into passive aggression against Midge. And in Barbara Bel Geddes, Hitchcock found one of the supreme masochistic female temperaments in looks and voice of the depressed-at-home-housewife era.
Another thing established in the Scottie-Midge dialogue (and Hitchcock pictures rely so very little on dialogue to define anything at all that whenever they do so it is important) is that the condition, the fall (in the prologue)—so far as the surface, or legal-moral plane, is concerned—“isn’t your fault.” “I know,” Johnny-O replies. “That’s what everybody says.” Meaning he does not believe it—and neither does Catholic Hitchcock. He is clearly willing to have the argument garlanded with Freudian Newspeak and imagery. (He was willing to do the same, for somewhat similar but more superficially melodramatic purposes, in Spellbound. By the time he came to make Vertigo, as again in his late masterpiece The Birds, he was determined to scale the heights, not look down. Both pictures program stop-dead, irresolute closure, although The Birds hints at the possibility of escape and renewal.)
We resort not entirely to dialogue for the set-up of Scottie’s “bad boy” (unconscious homosexual) pact with Elster. Scottie and Midge were engaged back in college (easily finessed historically by imagining Scottie as a mature GI Bill student). “You were the one broke it off, remember?” Cut to Midge, whose look is one (as they used to say) pregnant with possibilities, and the next point is “Do you remember a guy called Gavin Elster?” (Midge’s responses tend to be gnomic, like a sister’s, but after that look there is a good enough case for thinking she remembers all right.) In the next sequence, in the meeting between Scottie and Elster, where the plot starts spinning—centripetally, like that eye vortex—the relation established between the two old friends (and new accomplices, one conscious, one unconscious) is initially presented as a little dance of exchanging positions—standing and sitting (who is on top, who is underneath)—and proceeds again by means of plot line and dialogue to establish Madeleine’s connection with the uncanny (control from beyond the grave), and from the look on Stewart’s face it is further stressed that everything murky, inexplicable and dangerous is associated with women. (One cannot help noticing that a remake of Vertigo set in San Francisco today would be untenable: there is almost no one in California who does not believe in channelling and retrieved memory from former lives: Social acceptance there is well on its way to being determined not merely by who you are now but who you were lately.) This unconscious pact is again reinforced in the critical inquest scene, when, in the grisly and detached manner Hitchcock always employs when dramatizing courtrooms, Scottie is publicly exonerated by the sitting magistrate (read superego) but implicitly condemned for Madeleine Elster’s death, and Gavin Elster approaches his hapless accomplice and says, “It’s no use, Scottie, they’ll never understand. Only you and I know who killed Madeleine.”
Whether we like to think so or not, as often as not cathartic feelings of pity and terror are engineered in us by accomplished artists who are outside the exhilarations of their art fairly pitiful and terrified human beings, and this is as true of the very greatest American motion pictures as it is, for example, of the American novel and of bluegrass music.
The first sight of Madeleine—with the husband on the way to the opera—is of her bare back and signal conch-shaped bun (once more, as in Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus,” known vulgarly as “Venus on the Half-Shell,” symbol of woman born of the sea). Thereafter, at the McKittrick Hotel, in the filtered light of the garden of the Mission Dolores, in the museum at the Presidio, in the noon glare of the Mission San Juan Bautista, and most of all deep in the redwood forest, Madeleine impersonates the kind of blonde, utterly chaste heroine of a highly evolved spiritual cast of mind that Wagner lit on for his early kitschy knight-errant operas—Elsa in Lohengrin and Elisabeth in Tannhäuser—but all the while the “real” brunette Judy Barton from Salina, Kansas, Gavin Elster’s cat’s paw, lurks behind the scene with all the malign force of Ortrud the witch and the pagan Venus in the same operas.
From her first words (waking in Scottie’s apartment after the plunge into San Francisco Bay)—“What am I doing here?”—Kim Novak treads the fine line between the ridiculous and the sublime. There was at the time not another actress in Hollywood whose reading of the line would have dared the audience to laugh the way Kim Novak’s reading does. Indeed the essential quality of the Kim Novak persona—entirely in tune with her career trajectory: she very quickly grew to despise stardom, and gave it up as soon as she could—was best expressed in the very question: What was she doing there? Apart from the epicene beauty common to Poles (beautiful males and beautiful females of that nationality are, so far as facial features are concerned, nearly identical), Kim Novak always seemed both there and not there, even as the earthy Judy, tentative in a way that is absolutely perfect for Vertigo. It is nevertheless true that she was not Hitchcock’s first choice and he was not happy with her. (“Miss Novak,” he told François Truffaut, “arrived on the set with all sorts of preconceived notions I couldn’t possibly go along with.”) It is one of the great ironies of film art that either because of that, or in spite of it (and who can tell those things apart?), not only is she far and away the most effective female in the Hitchcock oeuvre (I would put Tippi Hedren not far behind her), but it is her very physical obstinacy—the neck and shoulders are particularly marmoreal, Nike-like and static—that goes a long way toward making Vertigo the universal masterpiece it is. She is the plumb line which grounds the aesthetic: without her Vertigo might have been some kind of strange combination of the depressed and the hysterical that the late Frenzy was; with her it achieves that balance between ratios of kenosis, demonization, ascesis, and apophrades (return of the dead) that places it at the very center of the American visionary sublime.
Kim Novak’s abstracted readings and sullen aura, which Hollywood tried desperately to cover with adjectives like ethereal, make her—always excepting Marilyn Monroe—the most interesting leading female player in fifties American motion pictures, and in an amazing way the very reverse of the coin of which Marilyn is the obverse. (Compare the smoky approach-retreat intonation Kim Novak gives—in answer to Stewart’s “I hope we do meet again.” “We just have.”—with Marilyn’s classic contribution to social small talk in All About Eve. “I believe you know Miss Caswell?” George Sanders as Addison de Witt offers. “I do not,” Bette Davis as Margo Channing replies. “We’ve never met, maybe that’s why,” Marilyn rebounds.)
Madeleine next appears at Scottie’s apartment in the middle of the night, again dressed in the highest mannequin mode, again embodying (whenever clothed) the American female as the creature of advertising, a living emblem of what the late Harold Brodkey has called our optimism and hopefulness, our “American fondness for advertising and our dependence on it culturally to represent not what works or is worth preserving but what is worth our working for.” When Judy/Madeleine later comes to Scottie’s door in a histrionic panic, having been tutored in the story of the Spanish church seen in a dream, and Scottie equates that dream landscape with the real, local Mission San Juan Bautista, what he says is “You’re going to be all right now, Madeleine. Don’t you see, you’ve given me something to work on.” This is the high point of Scottie’s hubris—pretending, as it were, against casting, to embody the kind of wisdom and to work the kind of magic that Ingrid Bergman had worked on Gregory Peck over a decade before in Spellbound (It has often been pointed out that Hitchcock was most intrigued and obsessed with police and priests. The psychoanalyst is, of course, both, and to have an out-of commission—impotent—cop play the dupe, in the guise of mental detective, was perhaps the filmmaker’s most ironic achievement.)
In other (Freudian) words, Scottie acts out our wish fulfillment. It is the depressive and effectively impotent Scottie’s wish to find and see destroyed the perfect embodiment of woman, and he is willing to work very hard indeed to see it happen. For his vertigo is, in the manner of screen words, a screen fear, a defense directed against its opposite: not the terror of falling but the terror of mounting. Of course, the “dream” scam works, and leads to the (off-camera and problematical) murder and the turning point in the picture or, really, the “ending” of the first picture, for the unique genius of Vertigo is that it is the perfect mirror film: two in one, the second the exact reverse angle of the first.
To emphasize this point there is the high-angle view of the mission tower bisecting the screen. On the left, the crowd gathers around (the real) Madeleine Elster’s fallen body. On the right, running away from the scene, is Scottie—so as to be unable to verify the corpse, of course, but more importantly, thematically, so that he is disassociated from both the action and the passion, and falls into the mirror-world half of the picture, into a hopeless torpor, which is the true reflection of his inner state.
Hitchcock subscribes to a universe in which man is charged with the organization of space and time, and woman (the latecomer) with the propagation of both (unto chaos). Thomas Mann nervously attributed to Beethoven, whose Fidelio is another kind of a story of a woman in purposeful disguise (but as a man), “articulating time, filling it up, organizing it.” The paranoiac ailment free fall (vertigo) is thus emblematic of male failure. (Of the four great film masters, Hitchcock and Welles were paranoiac, and Griffith and Ford were purely grandiose.) The chaotic profusion of contexts (unweeded gardens, propagation rampant) is dramatized in the apophrades, in this case the Judy who impersonated Madeleine, who unwisely and willfully has stayed in San Francisco after the murder has been committed, who must then again (by compelling, merciless fate) be undone, destroyed. Thus this Kim Novak antiheroine (or vamp) is variously Madeleine (the Magdalen, or Holy Whore), Carlotta (name not only of the “sad” character, buried at the Mission Dolores, she pretends to believe she has reincarnated, but of the mad hapless Empress of Mexico—an association resonant in the world of Spanish California that is Vertigo’s ground) and finally Judy Barton. (Judy is the trickster of the Punch and Judy show—the English reduction of the Italian commedia dell’arte—but also the diminutive of the great Biblical castrator and avenger Judith.) Thus, the most dramatic overall aesthetic configuration in Vertigo is related to Freud’s latest and most compelling formulation, from Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the compulsion to repeat.
Robin Wood, the most astute of the English Hitchcock critics, writes (in Hitchcock’s Films): “Hitchcock is throughout the first half of Vertigo using his audience’s escapist expectations, the fact that they go to the cinema to see a ‘hero’ with whom they can identify.”
Contrary feminist theory would hold this statement evident hostage to the classic psychology of under half of the human race—and not incidentally of Hollywood market research, which results in the industry targeting product to an audience of middle-to-late-adolescent males. It would point out that the continuous female orgasm—the reverse of vertigo—renders such psychic formulations more than merely dubious, and (compare classic Buddhism, Aristophanes’s Lysistrata, and early Christianity) that it is the organized suppression of that information that is responsible for the forging both of Western civilization and of its discontents.
Elster had to train Judy to be Madeleine, so Scottie does it all over again—reinforcing the male pact—and this time it is he who succeeds in murdering his femme fatale, with the same unwitting accomplice. The view that here Judy becomes as trusting as Desdemona is, I think, not far-fetched, nor is the observation that Judy’s allure, both physical and temperamental, is far greater than Madeleine’s, who was after all a zombie.
Scottie discovers Judy walking on the street with a group of girls—in sharp contrast to the elegant restaurant where he first sighted Madeleine in the company of Elster. Judy has dark brown hair, but she is carelessly wearing a dress the same color as Madeleine’s car. The dress is clinging, common wool jersey, the polar opposite of Madeleine’s carapace couture costume. He follows her—on foot, as befits this lowly reality and not on expensive wheels as before—as he had followed Madeleine, and she, just as Madeleine did, enters a hotel—only this time, when he goes to find her, she is indeed in her room, not the evanescent will-o’-the-wisp, or the elusive swan, but a sitting duck. In rebuffing him, she tells him she works at Magnin’s—where Madeleine would have shopped regularly—and so the mental associations begin to build up in the audience, along with the suspicions, until, in the picture’s great departure, the audience is let in on just who—or more exactly what—she is: the female not as mate but as accomplice.
The moral crux, however, is ambiguously delineated in the silent replay (behind Judy’s trapped gaze, full front to the camera) of the murder of the real Madeleine Elster. Just as Judy, pursued by Scottie, reaches the top of the bell tower stairs at the Mission San Juan Bautista, Elster is waiting with the already strangled corpse of his wife, Madeleine. Judy registers not the excitement of a true accomplice, but the shook of a woman who has agreed, for money, to take a charade up to a crucial point without being aware of the full scenario. Nevertheless, in Hitchcock’s picture, she must die at the end. In the fatalistic, paranoid and obsessive Hitchcockian mind, an essentially cruel mind allied to one of the great geniuses of cinema, the merely fallible woman—the cat’s paw of the hero’s degradation—must be destroyed: not existentially, for her actions, but for what she essentially is.
The “second” Madeleine is made by Scottie out of his grotesque idea of Judy and is as surely murdered by him as the first was by Elster, thereby completing by duplication, or compulsive repetition, the misogynist pact between the two men. Greatly resembling both the ordinary exploited call girl and indeed the victims of male perpetrators generally, she conforms more directly to the configurations of the cabalistic tradition of Lilith—Adam’s perfidious first wife (Eve’s dark side). Whereas the Fall of Man is initially attributed to the serpent who first seduces Eve, the “second” and all-pervasive corruption of the race is given over in a progressive sense to the perennial Lilith, the ageless female, the vampire, embodied in Parsifal’s Kundry. Robin Wood adduces Keats’s Lamia, placing the matter in the exact referential constellation—youth:truth:beauty:death—and also observes of Vertigo that “to object that the characters’ motives are not explained in terms of individual psychology is like demanding a psychological explanation of the sources of evil in Macbeth.” By “individual psychology” he intends the rationalist literary expression of character developed in the Renaissance and exemplified by Shakespearean soliloquies. The answer we have to come to prefer in this post-Renaissance, post-Enlightenment and particularly post-Romantic time lies, as does the explanation of the sources of the evil in Macbeth, in the force of evil once projected onto women as witches, but from all ages generated in the psyche of disjunct and paranoiac man.