Preface
1 Writing and ideas about stars prior to the present volume were surveyed in my book Stars (1979) and, subsequent to it, were extended, debated and contested in, for instance, Butler 1991, Gledhill 1991, McDonald 1998, Geraghty 2000, McDonald 2000.
1 Monroe and sexuality
1 All quotations of reviews are taken from Conway and Ricci (1964), unless otherwise stated.
2 French is writing retrospectively about the fifities; so am I. The fact that our emphases are similar (besides, I learnt a lot from her novel) should alert us to the possibility that this may be the post-sixties way of constructing the fifties. We should always be aware of the way in which we make over the past in the concerns of the present; but there is a reductio ad absurdum whereby any investigation of the past is held to be only a reflection of the present. The relation is more dynamic. French (and I) may be emphasising aspects of the fifties out of post-sixties interests, but that doesn't mean that what is being emphasised was not also a fact of the fifties.
3 One other dominant feature of the psycho discourse was masochism, which is not however an aspect of Monroe's image. Her desirability is bound up with vulnerability, which potentially overlaps with masochism, with pleasure in being hurt. However, if we are invited to take pleasure in her pain, her image nowhere signals that she might get pleasure from it too.
4 Missing from this discussion is the important lesbian take of Lucie Arbuthnot and Gail Seneca 1982 on Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.
2 Paul Robeson: crossing over
1 For further reading on Robeson written since the original publication of this essay, see Stewart 1997 as well as Martin Duberman's definitive biography (1988).
2 Robeson was in a revival of this in 1931. The part was not written as a black one, but the symbolism, including the use of the ape motif, made it seem very suitable for casting Robeson.
3 Musical examples are given in the clef and key of the original score for ease of comparison; i. e. my renderings of Robeson's versions are not transposed to his register.
4 The epithet ‘Uncle Tom’ has become so associated with black accommodationist, selling-out positions that the nature of its earlier force as an image is sometimes forgotten. In raising it here in connection with Robeson I am not passing judgement on whether he was an Uncle Tom in this later political sense.
5 For further discussion of Song of Freedom, see Young 1996: 71–9.
6 Besides – Marie Seton (1958: 58): ‘The central point of the play was never clear.’
7 Song of Freedom, in so many ways a vehicle for Robeson, includes a performance by John Zinga of The Black Emperor, an opera that is obviously a reference to The Emperor Jones even down to the similarity of the costume; we see only the emperor in the forest in his agony of flight – the scene is virtually meaningless if the viewer is not familiar with The Emperor Jones, but equally the scene is wholly sufficient to evoke the received idea of the play.
8 Note also the opening words, by Bertolt Brecht, sung by Robeson in the English language version of Song of the Rivers 1954: ‘Old Man Mississippi rages …’ (Musser 2002).
9 For more discussion of Body and Soul, see Bowser and Spence 2000 and Musser 2000.
10 There is some dispute over what part Robeson would have played. The film was to be called Black Majesty and to deal with the Haitian revolution in the nineteenth century. Nizhny says Eisenstein wanted Robeson to play Dessalines, but in a footnote to the text Herbert Marshall says that Robeson thought Eisenstein wanted him to play Toussaint L'Ouverture, while he, Marshall, is certain it was Henry Christophe. In any event, what is interesting is Nizhny's account of how Eisenstein intended to use Robeson. Even if Nizhny reports this inaccurately, this is no great matter here; it is not a question of what Eisenstein did or did not think, but rather of the way Robeson figures in the discourse of Soviet montage theory.
3 Judy Garland and gay men
1 Namely, Gay News and Him (Britain), Body Politic (Canada), New York Native and The Advocate (USA). These range from the broadly political/social papers like Gay News to more pornographic magazines like Him. The letter asked people to write to me about their memories of Judy Garland and why they liked her.
2 The emergence of the contemporary gay movement is commonly dated from an incident at the Stonewall bar in New York in June 1969, also the month and year in which Judy Garland died.
3 For a different perspective on Garland and suffering, see McLean 2002.
4 Since this was written, evidence of Garland's actual relationship to homosexuality has come forth (a bisexual father, bisexual or basically gay husbands, lesbian liaisons (see Clarke 2000); see also Alexander Doty's discussion (2000) of The Wizard of Oz as a lesbian text.
5 Cf. note 4.