In Which Cate Blanchett Vamps Like A Mere Servant

Ungrateful

by ALEX CARNEVALE

Some things are too good for critics.

In the Lincoln Center Festival production of Jean Genet's The Maids, Cate Blanchett prances around the stage in her undergarments until that special moment when Isabelle Huppert begins humping her red dress and choking her as anyone with a brain would want to be throttled. If you can't enjoy watching Cate playact sadomasochism with one of the finest French actresses of her generation, something is probably wrong with you.

There is something completely non-American about The Maids that is impossible to translate, even when the words themselves are done better than they ever have in a rewrite by Benedict Andrews and Andrew Upton. Any production of this oft-staged comedy is on some level shameful and difficult to watch, since there is no amount of crossdressing or wackiness or satirical commentary that makes people feel OK about servants betraying their employers.

Why do so many theatrical reviews read like histories? It really doesn't matter how anything was performed in the past. The past no longer exists, I think this was a major theme of Mr. Holland's Opus or perhaps The Nutty Professor.

Now, today, you can see Cate Blanchett writhe and spread her legs as Claire, the youngest of the two maids in the employ of Madame (Elizabeth Debicki).  When older sister Solange (Huppert) puts her hand in her sister's mouth as she is straddling her, there is not a lot of thinking that has to go on to realize that this is the kind of fun we never end up seeing anywhere except pirate romance novels. The overall cumulative effect is something like if the girl of your dreams suddenly began slobbering all over you, jamming her fingers in your mouth.

The fact that a play from the late forties could still have any shock value in it at all shows how prudish American culture is, but that is the not-so-interesting part of watching Blanchett smear her makeup and monologue the inner desire she has to poison her fickle employer. Murder is less shocking than transcendent sex play; it is also a lot more understandable.

Cate's ministrations eventually make you realize that, is it really so bad when Bradley Cooper's girlfriend slobbers and jams her fingers down his throat?

Under the bright lights of NY City Center, Blanchett's face oscillates like a sun dial. She is always the center of any action on the stage, just subtle enough to not be overwhelming. Director Benedict Andrews dresses her older sister up more modestly, like the young girl she is not. Huppert's strong accent and sonorously low voice make her sound even more alien than her statuesque blonde sister, and the fact that she makes Blanchett's Claire seem normal is the basic premise of this production.

At some point an actress like Blanchett is just playing herself, or off herself. The latter is a lot more fun. The best part of The Maids occurs when Elizabeth Debicki finally enters the proceedings as Madame halfway through the play, and the natural order of things returns to the household.

We always find it easier to laugh when the existing social order is intact. Disturbingly, the most regular arrangement of individuals comforts us. It was either William F. Buckley or Genet who taught the West that there was a reason things were the way they were. I suppose in some twisted way those two men were peers and co-conspirators.

Hilton Als called this version of The Maids "a rip-off", I guess because there was a video screen, I am unclear on the actual reason. Watching a screen display what is already in front of you is a complete waste of time, but you have to remember that almost half the audience at the performance of The Maids I attended waited in line to get headphones that would assist with their ability to hear the show. If they squinted they might be able to tell Cate Blanchett apart from Elizabeth Debicki, but that would be the sole way they could do it. The only people who go to the theater are actresses, tourists and senior citizens, and it has always been this way.

And critics.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording.

"Miles Away" - Philip Selway (mp3)

"Waiting for a Sign" - Philip Selway (mp3)

In Which We Shut Our Eyes Wide To Elia Kazan

The Friendship Mask

by ALEX CARNEVALE

She says the same thing, that bitch, that you do about me, that I'm an emotional cripple, by which she means that I don't release my true emotions, that it's a cover-up, what I show the world.  

- Elia Kazan to his therapist about Barbara Loden

Elia Kazan decided to break things off with Barbara Loden. She had already felt, almost imperceptibly, his reluctance. She had recently told him at length of all the men she had ever been with. She informed him of her history, she said, so he did not have to wonder.

Enraged, Kazan began cheating on her whenever he could. She rehearsed her part in The Changeling all afternoon and evening at Lincoln Center, and he was free to stroll off from the set during those times. With a blonde girlfriend, he now exclusively courted brunettes.

with first wife Molly

One of these available women was a singer in a religious choir he had met in Tennessee. She kept her eyes closed while they fucked, mystifying Kazan. Another was a Greek brunette who tried to convince him to impregnate her and disappear. (He refused.)

While Loden was being fitted for costumes for her role, he wandered in Central Park one day and picked up a girl playing softball. She gave him her dead husband's favorite sweater.

Kazan's friends feared that Barbara Loden had trapped him years before by keeping her only pregnancy. The boy, Leo, was now three, and Kazan had less than no interest in him. "I've never regretted telling Barbara that if she wanted a child it was all right with me," he writes in the best show business autobiography ever penned, A Life. "Knowing my nature, wouldn't you say she was taking a riskier chance than I was?"

wrapping up 'Streetcar'

Seven years into the relationship, Kazan was now weary of her. ("No one can tell me that novelty is not a great charge in sex," he states in A Life, as if that were a revelation.) His numerous indiscretions only further convinced Kazan that he and Loden did not have love between them anymore.

Elia and Barbara

He planned to pick up Barbara Loden from rehearsal in a cab and head back to her place, where he would break the news gently. In the taxi, she immediately began complaining about how he had blocked her scenes, and criticized his directorial efforts in general. Kazan turned on her, dismissing his earlier reticence towards cruelty. She listened quietly to what he said.

Once her room, she took off all her clothes immediately, as she always did, to appease him. "I wanted to lie still on the bed and hold her," Kazan writes about the post-coital mood. "But I noticed she didn't like this the way she once had, and although her head was on my upper arm, and her leg over mine, she seemed tense, like a runner before a race. Then she said, with a casualness I thought feigned, 'Daddy, I wish you'd tell me what you want me to do.'"

with his father

He could think of no real reply. Moments later, she said, "It's either we marry or break up for good." After seeing her home, he went to the apartment of the young widow. There he was happy for a time.

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When Elia Kazan had first introduced Barbara Loden to his friend John Steinbeck, the writer told him, in no uncertain terms, to stay away from her. Kazan planned to resolve his conflict with Loden by leaving for Europe; his therapist suggested he would feel better if he said goodbye to her. There, on a bench in Central Park, he met his son Leo for the first time.

Molly & Elia with John and Elaine Steinbeck

Elia had been with his first wife Molly Kazan when he first met Loden. Ostensibly a playwright, Molly was not much of a writer and on some level, even after four lovely children by her, Kazan could not forgive this weakness. Molly first learned of Kazan's penchant for infidelity during his not-so-quiet affair with the actress Constance Dowling.

with katharine hepburn & spencer tracy

He always made a habit of introducing his wife to his mistress, but his affair with Constance was so obvious Molly was told by a third party. His wife banished him to the study of their home, right next door to the bedroom, and seriously considered divorce. A friend gave her a piece of advice: "If you want him, you'll have to take him as he is." The only one who supported the director in the marriage's impasse was his parents.

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He started up with Loden originally on the set of Splendor in the Grass. They had sex during every single lunch break. When the production was in New York, he would go home to his wife and their maid would serve the family dinner. He only stopped having sex with Loden when she became visibly pregnant.

directing Vivien Leigh in 'Streetcar'

Again he was compelled to see what Molly thought of Barbara, and vice versa. Unable to resist, he asked Loden for her opinion on his wife. "She's a very handsome woman," Loden said.

with Molly and their four children

Throughout these lascivious trails, Kazan reveals he felt very little in the way of guilt. His penchant for self-acceptance in A Life reeks of 20/20 hindsight, but there is something else at work there, too, an essence his analyst identified and determined could never be fully repaired. Kazan did not long for other women because there was something lacking in his life. He had determined that this was his life: what primacy could any other part of his self claim, to stand up to that?

Elia's commiseration with Loden waxed and waned as the years went on. Sometimes she sent him letters describing an empathy she felt for him; at other moments she wondered if she even liked the man at all.

From his perspective, her innate destructiveness and lack of interest in how others viewed her was what attracted him in the first place. It was also the inner element which produced the natural charisma invaluable to her work as an actress and filmmaker.

Molly Kazan

Loden and Kazan continued to see each other, if infrequently, in the last years of Molly Kazan's life. (She died from a brain hemorrhage in 1963, and was buried with her wedding ring.) Given a new primacy in his life after Molly's death, Loden challenged Kazan regarding the stage roles he gave her. She constantly threatened to move to Los Angeles.

Kazan openly wondered to friends whether he'd required Molly to make his relationship with Loden work. He lost the ability to maintain an erection with her during sex, and attempted to break things off, as I have already described.

with Marlon Brando

Free of Barbara, wandering the earth, Kazan felt somewhat alone. He wrote to Loden, suggested he missed her and asked her to come to Japan. They kept writing until she arrived, and when he saw her at the airport, he knew he had made a mistake. Still, she did everything she could to please him, and he responded in turn. She seemed happy to be with him again until Kazan told her that he had been fucking around with another woman in the month before she arrived.

Back in the U.S., Kazan continued seeing both Loden and his new mistress. (He was never able to manage much more than two at a time.) Again, his curiosity got the better of him, and he encouraged Barbara to confront the other woman he was seeing. Kazan called the girl to warn her Loden might try to see her.

"She's right here," the girl said.

"How are you getting along?" Kazan asked.

"I like her very much."

Loden somehow emerged the victor of these events, and she moved in with Kazan a few months later, walking into Elia's study and putting Leo in his lap. They were married in Kenya soon after, and a ceremony was held in the Caribbean. They were wed for less than a year before he found a mistress that would complement her better.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording.

loden during her cancer
"No Devotion" - White Hinterland (mp3)

"Wait Until Dark" - White Hinterland (mp3)

In Which We Crack Under The Pressure Of Kenneth Halliwell

The Younger Man

by ALEX CARNEVALE

Joe Orton's partner Kenneth Halliwell started to crack long before he read his boyfriend's diaries, before he began imitating Joe's voice on the telephone to find out what people would say about him to the man he lived with. In a tiny London apartment, Orton's secrets from Halliwell were few and far between. But as Kenneth found out, he did have them.

It was not much of a surprise to Halliwell that Orton, one of the supreme playwriting talents of his century, cheated on Kenneth Halliwell quite frequently. The younger man also wrote privately about his dalliances. Upon meeting a beautiful blonde boy that year Orton wrote, "He had a softness about his body that wasn't the softness of a woman. I hoped he would let me fuck him."

joe orton accepting the award for best play the year previous

Threesomes were routine. Orton recalls one particular scene in his diary:

After awhile I turned Dave over and shoved my cock up his arse. He gave a yelp and I took it down. A. Tills produced vaseline and I put it on my cock. A. Tills put some up blue-eyed Dave's bum and I began again. It went up like a treat. "Flat! Lie flat!" I said. He did so. Actually, it was quite exciting. After I'd come and withdrawn, I noticed A. Tills had come. Dave rolled on top of me and rubbed himself off on my belly. We lay in bed for awhile, half asleep. The ceiling was very clean. Moulding of leaves. An alarm clock besides the bed said 4:00. "I must go at five," I said, thinking that Kenneth would be back by then.

Orton was becoming the most notorious young playwright in Britain, his fame quickly spreading. His dialogue was unmatched in his industry, and the dark humor of the work found an enchanting balance between silliness and depravity. Other plays could not help but seem impossibly buttoned-up compared to the excitement plays like Entertaining Mr. Sloan, The Ruffian on the Stair and What the Butler Saw inculcated on stage.

from "Loot"

In contrast, Halliwell's writing never got off the ground at all, not matter how many manuscripts he send to his boyfriend's representation. This lack of any discernible success in the field left Kenneth Halliwell despondent. Orton's diaries find him complaining of Kenneth's foul moods and hypochondria almost constantly, contrasting his own libacious second life with a domestic arrangement that seems unhappy at best, mutually abusive at worst.

On the first of May in 1967, Orton writes:

Kenneth H. had a long talk about our relationship. He threatens, or keeps saying, he will commit suicide. He says, "You'll learn then, won't you?" and "What will you be like without me?" We talked and talked until I was exhausted. He said, "I am disgusted by all this immortality." He began to rail savagely at Tom and Clive and, after a particularly sharp outburst, alarmed me by saying, "Homosexuals disgust me!" I didn't attempt to fathom this one out.

left, Orton, center Kenneth Williams, right Kenneth Halliwell

He said he wasn't going to come away to Morocco. He was going to kill himself. "I've led a dreadful, unhappy life. I'm pathetic. I can't go on suffering like this."

After talking until about eight he suddenly shouted out and hammered on the wall, "They treated me like shit. I won't be treated like this." I agreed that they both had chosen to agree with me on all things whether sensible or not. "You had tea, they had tea, you had jam tarts, they had jam tarts. And those photographs of Mustapha - he was so unattractive, and because you had him they said, 'What a dish.'"

I'd noticed all this the previous evening. I'd also noticed that they'd been over-enthusiastic in praise of anything connected with me. "Surely you expected this?" I said.

Orton and Halliwell on vacation, 1965

Orton was a voracious reader, and Halliwell endeavored to be his guide. This caused substantial resentment between them — the older man, by seven years, felt he was more educated, and that it was his duty to instruct the more talented Orton. Halliwell privately began to loathe the perceived crudity of his partner's work just because he was so fawned over.

Orton with a friend, 1965

Their sex life was furtive and occasionally disturbed. After Kenneth had parted with a few of his valium to loosen them both up, Joe

had a hard on. And we had a furious sex session. He stuck his finger up my arse and wanked me. And he said I could fuck him if I wanted to. "I can't overcome that particular psychological inhibition with you," I said. He sucked my cock. And then I tossed him off after a very long love-making session. I came, but I don't know how much, because he wiped it up before switching on the light.

Later that week, they tried again.

When I got back home, Kenneth H. was in such a rage. He'd written in large letters on the wall, JOE ORTON IS A SPINELESS TWAT. He sulked for awhile and then came round. He'd been to the doctor's and got 400 valium tablets. Later we took two each and had an amazing sexual session. I'd decided that I'd fuck him. But it didn't work out. "I'm not sure what the block is," I said. "I can fuck other people perfectly well. But up to now, I can't fuck you." This is something strange. I had a big hard on. Yet, when I turned to put it up him, it just went off. Anyway we made love and came. He sucked my cock. I've got a mark on it where he did it too hard.

To get away from things they vacationed in Tangiers, where both men slept with such young servants as their hotel could provide. Orton called ninety-five percent of the boys Mohammed, subsisting on a steady diet of hash cakes, valium and vaseline. When Joe got back to London he made a habit of checking out men's bathrooms looking for sex. He was relieved to be able to talk in English again during his fucks, noticing how much sex missed a common verbal language. Kenneth was less on his mind than ever.

Kenneth Halliwell

The reverse was true for the increasingly jealous Halliwell. In Tangiers he attacked Orton for the first time when the younger man nastily criticized him for his predilection for being masturbated to orgasm. Halliwell punched Orton in the back of the head.

Getting Kenneth to snap only increased the vigor of Orton's nastiness, and he clearly thought nothing of the danger he was putting himself in by acting this way. The blow to the head, in retrospect, was the first enactment of Orton's murder.

When they returned from "paradise" for good, Orton's play Loot, his finest work, was beginning its long run on the London stage. Meanwhile What the Butler Saw was being reshaped and polished with Halliwell's help. Orton reunited with those he'd missed while he was away.

I went to the negro's room again today. He told me his mother died of cancer. "Of the womb," he said, "and that's a terrible thing, you know." He said, "It's it's the breast than they can cut them off. Only it doesn't always work. I know a woman who had her breast off and now she's dead. Oh, man, that cancer is a terrible thing. Most people don't live, you know that." He said his father died when he was seventeen. He had several sisters and brothers in England and in America. Mostly their marriages are failures," he said, "they don't seem to get on. And they separate. I don't know what you feel about this. I feel pretty bad." He said, "I've a West Indian paper here. I just bought it. I'm looking for a job." We took off our clothes and I let him fuck me.

Then, after he'd listened to the one o'clock news on a portable wireless - "the news is bad all over the world. My God! I don't know a single spot where the news is good" — I fucked him. I took a lot longer in fucking him. "I come off too quick, man," he said morosely as I got up off him. "If I could pick up a gay doctor I'd ask him about that."

The night Joe Orton was murdered by Kenneth Halliwell, he had been groping a woman in front of him, Sheila Ballantine. He was doing so completely playfully, to show how one of the actresses in Loot had overdone her own sexual promiscuity. Halliwell could barely see in front of his eyes — he tried to tell Orton that he'd gotten a bunch of pills from the doctor, that he was considering suicide. His lover dismissed it as typical Kenneth; Orton was more concerned about a meeting he had with the Beatles the following day.

halliwell in tangiers

On August 9th, 1967, Kenneth Halliwell bashed Orton's head in with a hammer after taking 22 nembutals. (Halliwell's father had ended himself by putting his head in a gas oven.) The pills killed him before Orton died of blood loss in his bed. On Halliwell's desk the police found a note:

If you read his diary all will be explained.

K.H.

P.S. Especially the latter part.

Yet the very last pages of the diary, those covering the week before Orton's murder, had been torn out.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He is a writer living in Manhattan. He last wrote in these pages about Paul Bowles and the romance between Peggy Guggenheim and Samuel Beckett. He tumbls here and twitters here. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here.

"A Good Sadness" - MGMT (mp3)

"Plenty of Girls in the Sea" - MGMT (mp3)