In Which We Regard Ourselves As Equals

The Opal Ring

by HELEN SCHUMACHER

A spiritualist and mystic who believed in reincarnation, June Mathis always wore an opal ring when she wrote, believing it brought her ideas. Her films were recognizable from their religious figures and esoteric themes. Nearly one hundred years before The Secret, Mathis claimed that, “If you are vibrating on the right plane, you will inevitably come in contact with others who can help you.” She elaborates, “It's like tuning in on your radio. If you get the right wavelength, you have your station.” As is all-too-typical of successful women, Mathis dismissed her hard work and natural talent, instead attributing her achievements to an outside force. And Mathis was highly successful; one of the first female Hollywood executives, she also became the highest paid (male or female) at age 35.

Born in Leadville, Colorado, in 1889 and raised primarily in Salt Lake City, Mathis first employed the idea of a mind-cure as a sick child with a heart condition and tried to will herself into health. At 12 years old, she was well enough to join a vaudeville act and began touring the country. She continued with theater tours and Broadway performances for the next decade, until deciding to become a screenwriter.

After studying with an editor friend for two years, Mathis entered a screenwriting contest in 1914. She didn’t win, but her entry was impressive enough to garner offers from Hollywood. Mathis moved to California with her mother and began working for Metro studios in 1918. A year later she was the head of the scenario department and the only female executive at the studio.

Mathis’s next break would come with her adaptation of the epic war novel The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. She had been put in charge of production of the film and was responsible for casting Rudolph Valentino as the lead. The movie was a huge success, becoming one of the highest grossing silent films, inspiring fads in tango dancing and gaucho fashion, and launching the careers of director Rex Ingram, Valentino, and Mathis. Valentino and Mathis would be on-again-off-again creative partners for the rest of their lives. Mathis had another box office hit the following year with Blood and Sand.

With Valentino and Ingram on the set of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Mathis believed she knew the two men from a past life.

Working within the studio system for the next six years, eventually Mathis would leave Metro for Famous Players-Lasky and later move to Goldwyn during its merger into MGM, just before which, Mathis would be charged with adapting and heading up production of Ben-Hur. She insisted the movie be filmed on location in Italy, a decision that proved problematic as the local crew went on strike and extras lied about their swimming experience and consequently drowned. Mathis also fought with the director Charles Brabin — who ignored her despite her responsibility for his being hired.

After the MGM merger, the studio was desperate to finish the expensive, troubled film and fired the crew and recast the lead. The movie would end up being the most expensive silent film ever made until 2011’s The Artist. Although the experience was a professional disappointment, the trip to Italy was not a total loss. While there, Mathis met an Italian cameraman named Silvano Balboni. They were married after she returned to California.

With her husband, Silvano Balboni

Three years later, while seeing a performance of The Squall with her grandmother in New York, Mathis had a heart attack, leaping up from her seat and shouting “Mother, I’m dying!” during the play’s final act. She was pronounced dead in the alley behind the theater at age 38, having succumbed to her lifelong heart condition. Her ashes were shipped to California and interned in the mausoleum next to Valentino in the Hollywood Forever cemetery.

Helen Schumacher is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Brooklyn. She tumbls here and here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She last wrote in these pages about Clouzot.

Most Powerful Women of Early Hollywood

Mary Pickford: Having acted in 52 films, Pickford’s international stardom helped define the concept of modern celebrity. An adroit businesswoman, in 1916 she signed a contract with Famous Players-Lasky that gave her control over any of the movies she starred in and a record-breaking salary of $500 a week. Later she founded United Artists with D. W. Griffith, Douglas Fairbanks, and Charlie Chaplin.

Lois Weber: Weber’s Wikipedia page begins with a quote from film historian Anthony Slide that declares: “Along with D. W. Griffith, Lois Weber was the American cinema’s first genuine auteur, a filmmaker involved in all aspects of production and one who utilized the motion picture to put across her own ideas and philosophies.” A talented professional pianist as a youth, Weber went on to work as a screenwriter, producer, director and actress. She was also an evangelist who supported progressive social causes. Under the surveillance of Hollywood censors, her film Hypocrites would contain the first scene with female full-frontal nudity, and another called Where Are My Children? addressed abortion and birth control (and, disappointingly, promoted eugenics). She was also the first woman to start her own movie studio.

Frances Marion: After serving as a correspondent during World War I, Marion moved to Hollywood and began working as a writing assistant for Lois Weber Productions and later writing scripts for Pickford. During her tenure, she wrote over 100 scripts and won two Oscars. She also directed several films, taught screenwriting at the University of Southern California, and was married four times.

Dorothy Arzner: Her first big assignment was as an editor for Mathis’s Blood and Sand. Soon after Arzner began directing, including Clara Bow’s first talking film, and would continue working until the mid-1940s. She also invented the boom mic.

Anita Loos: Loos was best known for her Harper’s Bazaar column “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” and the book that followed. She was successful writer despite getting married to the needy John Emerson, whom she met while both were working on a series of Douglas Fairbanks films. The two continued to work together with Loos writing the scripts and Emerson directing them and later shared writing credits with Loos doing all the writing and Emerson spending all the paycheck. When she wasn’t writing or caring for her husband’s hypochondria and schizophrenia, Loos enjoyed an active social life and regularly made appearances at society galas and fashion shows. She hung out with the Algonquin Round Table while renting a suite at the hotel and spent summers in Paris with another Hollywood couple Joseph Schenck and Norma Talmadge. Loos was an early member of the Lucy Stone League and creator of the Tuesday Widows club — after her husband convinced her that he needed to take a break from their marriage once a week, she would spend those days entertaining friends like the Talmadge sisters, Marion Davies, and Adele Astaire or visiting Harlem jazz clubs.

Lobby card for Ida May Park’s Fires of Rebellion

Ida May Park: Like Weber, the director Ida May Park’s work often addressed social issues, such as sweatshop conditions (Fires of Rebellion) or sexual harassment in the workplace (The Model’s Confession, Risky Road). Besides her success as a director, Park wrote over 500 scenarios and created her own production company, Ida May Park Productions. In 2009, a chapter Park wrote on filmmaking for the 1924 book Careers for Women was quoted by Manohla Dargis in her essential article on Hollywood sexism: “She warned other women about her chosen path. ‘Unless you are hardy and determined,’ she wrote, ‘the director’s role is not for you. Wait until the profession has emerged from its embryonic state and a system has been evolved by which the terrific weight of responsibility can be lifted from one pair of shoulders. When that time comes I believe that women will find no finer calling.’ There are women who would agree with Park’s conclusions, or would if they could get the chance to direct. The problem is, 90 years later, women have advanced while much of the movie industry has not.”

Mary Pickford and Frances Marion, Suspense

In Which We Fall Victim To Gory Seduction

Blown to Bits

by HELEN SCHUMACHER

In the 2009 documentary Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno, filmmakers Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea unravel 185 cans of recovered footage from Clouzot’s unfinished project L’Enfer to tell the story of the legendary French director’s attempt to make what he saw as his most important film. Given an unlimited budget by Columbia Studios and inspired by the op art of the ‘60s, Clouzot set out to make a work whose innovation would surpass that of his young New Wave rivals and once again establish him as a pioneering filmmaker.

Serge Reggiani in a scene from L’Enfer

Set in a lakeside resort town, the film is about a jealous husband Marcel (Serge Reggiani) who becomes increasingly obsessed with the idea that his wife Odette, played by Romy Schneider, is cheating on him. It is through Marcel’s visions of his wife's infidelity that Clouzot endeavored to change the visual vocabulary of cinema. The surviving footage is hypnotic and dazzling.

Schneider is captivating. A siren covered in olive oil and glitter, she patiently seduces Clouzot's camera, exhaling a cloud of cigarette smoke under pulsating blue and yellow lights — a nightmarish vision of sensuality.

Clouzot and his team of special effects engineers spent months conducting camera tests for L'Enfer. The tests sought to construct a world deformed by jealousy — a discomforting one in which the viewer loses his or her spatial bearings. Relying heavily on kinetic sculpture, op art, mod fashions, and repetition of images and phrases, the crew toiled away in experimentation, becoming what one cameraman calls "experts at optical coitus." In palette and tactility, their kaleidoscopic imagery often resembles the gory seductiveness of a Marilyn Minter artwork.

Romy Schneider during a color test for L’Enfer

L'Enfer was never finished. Reggiani quit the project, Clouzot had a heart attack while filming a scene, and the reservoir where the film was set was drained. But these were just the dramatic final blows to a career dogged by fear.

There had always been a sense of foreboding surrounding Clouzot. It started when, at the age of 27, the director was diagnosed with tuberculosis and sent to a sanatorium. Clouzot spent the next four years of his life reading voraciously and studying story and plot, and confronting the absoluteness of mortality.

After being released from the hospital, Clouzot found that the German occupation and the subsequent flight of France's Jewish filmmakers had left the country's film industry in shambles. However, through a contact from his previous job as a script translator in Berlin, he got work at a Nazi-run studio, the same one that would produce his first two full-length films, L'Assassin Habite au 21 and Le Corbeau.

Le Corbeau

Le Corbeau, released in 1943, is a deeply paranoid film. The psychic terror of the sanatorium and the horror of World War II had moved Clouzot's work in a dark direction. Opening on an anonymous provincial setting, a town’s new doctor begins receiving poison-pen letters denouncing him as an adulterer and abortionist. Soon everyone in town is receiving the letters, spurring forth a fervor of accusations at each other. The local psychologist compares the villagers' rising levels of fear and suspicion to a fever — a metaphor that occurs throughout Clouzot’s work. The French public was outraged over its critique of the bourgeois paranoia and informant culture of the occupation. After the war, Clouzot's work for the German studio got him blacklisted for several years.

Brigitte Bardot in La Verite

Clouzot resented this punishment, having already had his career sidelined by sickness. He made his comeback, though. The director's mastery of suspense and character earned him ranking among France's premier directors of the time. He was referred to as the French Hitchcock — mostly because of his ability to keep audiences guessing and build tension, but also because of his brutal treatment of actors.

If the script had his characters eating rotten fish (as in Diabolique), then they ate it in real life; if his character was getting manhandled by the police (as in Quai des Orfèvres), then Clouzot would slap him around before the next take. In La Verite, when Brigitte Bardot’s character was supposed to have overdosed on sleeping pills, Clouzot slipped her sleeping pills, saying they were aspirin, to get the dazed, drowsy look her character needed. His manipulation at times was sadistic. His first wife, Vera Clouzot, who — like the schoolteacher she played in Diabolique — suffered from a weak heart, was practically worked to death by her husband.

During the filming of Les Espions, Clouzot made Vera film a physically taxing scene of her character’s mental breakdown 48 times only to then use one of the first takes. She died of a heart attack a few years later at the age of 46.

Vera Clouzot with Simone Signoret in Diabolique

Vera was Brazilian, and she and Clouzot traveled to South America for their honeymoon. The trip helped inspire Clouzot to create Wages of Fear in 1953. A white-knuckle thriller trimmed of all unnecessary frills, Wages of Fear takes place in the fictional Venezuelan town of Las Piedras. In it, a group of expatriate men pass their days in the shade of the village's one bar while scheming of ways to make it out of the isolated region. Their big break comes when the Southern Oil Company, an American company in trouble for their exploitation of the native population, decides to hire a few non-union men for $2,000 to drive two trucks stocked with nitroglycerine across the mountains to an inflamed rig that needs the explosives in order to stop the blaze. Selected for the job are friends Mario and Jo in one truck and the caricatured Italian Luigi and Dutch Bimba in the other.

The majority of the film follows the four men as they rely on machismo and prayers to make it across washed-out roads, hairpin turns and petroleum bogs and claim their paycheck.

Wages of Fear

Wages of Fear seems prescient in its ability to foreshadow the career-long consumptive battle, both physical and mental, that led to Clouzot's downfall on the set of L’Enfer. In the film, again fear manifests itself as a physical ailment. Even if the men do manage to complete the journey, the stress of the mission is guaranteed to leave them changed. One prospective driver, a man from the oil fields of Texas who had seen the effects such a trip can have, ominously warns, "Once you have the fear, it's for life. Your hair turns grey and you shake like palsy."

The drivers and an oil company man before their suicide mission

Since leaving the sanatorium, Clouzot had been plagued by insomnia. As in his bedridden days, he used these sleepless nights to work on his movies. Crew members often complained about his habit of waking up them at 2 a.m. to work on the filmmaker’s latest idea. The lack of sleep made his collaborators resentful and it made Clouzot unpredictable and unstable. The anxiety that comes to one in the middle of the night can be insufferable, and it’s easy to imagine that Clouzot spent many of the nights worrying about the ridicule he had been receiving in the pages of Cahiers du Cinéma regarding his detail-obsessed filmmaking. It’s a scenario that brings to mind the conversation between elder Jo to the younger Mario during their trek where Jo tells Mario that he lacks fear because he lacks imagination. “I see the explosion; I see myself blown to bits,” says Jo.

Jo (Charles Vanel) and Mario (Yves Montand) contemplate death by nitroglycerine in Wages of Fear

While filming L'Enfer, Clouzot tried to prove that illness could be controlled, that it could be mapped like coordinates on a grid, that “madness could be conceived as an equation.” In the end, what emerges from the documentary is the story of how a master of French cinema was undone by sickness. It tells of Clouzot's eventual defeat, not to the changing style of filmmaking, but to the pathological symptoms that had plagued him since entering adulthood.

Like a cinematic Marie Curie, whose experiments in radioactivity won her Nobel Prizes in Physics and Chemistry but who later died from aplastic anemia brought on by working with the toxic elements, Clouzot became of victim of the emotions — jealousy, fear, paranoia — that, previously, he had expertly manipulated to create the work that made him such a celebrated filmmaker.

Clouzot on the set of L’Enfer

Henri-Georges Clouzot died in 1977 while listening to Hector Berlioz’s "The Damnation of Faust."

Helen Schumacher is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Brooklyn. She tumbls here and here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

"Red Poison" - Sun Kil Moon (mp3)

"Among the Leaves" - Sun Kil Moon (mp3)

Among the Leaves, the new album from Sun Kil Moon, will be released on May 29th and contains seventeen songs all played on nylon string guitar.

In Which We Still Adore That Pair Of Jeans

Instant Chic

by HELEN SCHUMACHER

At the dawn of the 80s, no one’s wardrobe was complete without a pair of Fiorucci jeans. Preferably you would have seven of the skin-tight pairs — one in every color of the rainbow, to be worn with your gold Fiorucci cowboy boots. When he turned 15, Marc Jacobs "saved and saved" for his first pair. Miuccia Prada has claimed to have only ever owned one pair of jeans; they were from Fiorucci. Diana Ross, Jackie Onassis, and Lauren Bacall were fans, as was every 13-year-old girl with a Seventeen magazine subscription.

Elio Fiorucci opened his first shop in Milan in 1967 not with couture in mind, but with the idea of bringing the London street trends of the Youthquake movement to Italy. The Fiorucci line debuted shortly after in 1970. However, Elio was a marketing whiz with a taste for the outré, not a designer. The clothing reflected this; much of the line consisted of basics like polo shirts, denim jackets, and tote bags emblazoned with Fiorucci’s winged putti logo.

To Elio’s credit, before Fiorucci, designer denim was unheard of. The company was also one of the first to embrace a global aesthetic, importing not just English looks, but also drawing inspiration from traditional prints and fashions of India and Brazil, with Fiorucci sending young trendspotters around the world (or downtown) to scout for unique local styles to be reproduced by the label. "What he had done was to capture a kind of international ideal of teenage promise and bottle it," said Eve Babitz, author of Fiorucci: The Book.

While the garish fashions of Fiorucci may have rarely made the pages of Women’s Wear Daily, the stores’ parties did. The opening of the Beverly Hills store was famously shut down by the Los Angeles fire department. A year later, Blondie held a post-concert party in the same store to celebrate their album Parallel Lines going platinum. Attendees Wilt Chamberlain, James Woods, and Karen Black watched as Debbie Harry arrived in a World War II tank. Today one can revisit the scene by watching Xanadu, which features Olivia Newton-John and Michael Beck dancing to ELO’s "All Over the World" while Gene Kelly shops for a new suit.

The fluorescence of the Beverly Hills shop may have been permanently archived on celluloid, but the real epicenter of Fiorucci’s cool was its New York store at 125 East 59th Street. Opening in the spring of 1976, it soon became a destination for all those young and weird. The press compared its atmosphere of debauchery to that of Studio 54. In 1977, New York magazine would declare: "All it took this year to achieve instant chic, day or night, at the slickest New York party or the trashiest was a pair of $110 gold cowboy boots from Fiorucci."

Much of the store’s cachet was due to its eccentric staff. Klaus Nomi, drag performer Joey Arias, designer and filmmaker Maripol, and Madonna’s brother Christopher Ciccone all worked for Fiorucci during its heyday. The store was one of the first places to sell Betsey Johnson’s clothing and exhibit Keith Haring’s artwork. Fiorucci’s knack for youth-driven pop-art consumerism also attracted the likes of Andy Warhol. Surrounded by a coterie that included Truman Capote, Warhol launched Interview magazine with an in-store party. Douglas Coupland was inspired to quit studying physics after visiting the store.

"There was this absolute density of color and imagery," Coupland recalled. "I just thought it was the most perfect place I had ever been to." He brought back a postcard (the only thing he could afford). “It was on my desk. I looked at it and thought, 'Science is over.' I stopped caring about school. I had been a straight-A student and I started getting D’s. It felt like the best drug ever, and I thought, 'If this is what a bad grade feels like, this is great!'"

The store was a playground of glitter and spandex. Wide-eyed squares in their drab trench coats regularly gathered in front of the legendary window displays to see fashion at its most fun and subversive. It was Shangri-la for freaks and the conservative world couldn’t get enough. A People article from 1981 describes one memorable display: “Wearing a Merry Widow corset, bikini bottoms, fishnet stockings, and spiked heels, the Barbie Doll model reclined in a zebra-striped bathtub that had been placed in the window of Fiorucci's Manhattan store. For the next six hours she read smutty paperbacks, ate bananas, and blew bubbles — to the delight of a street crowd pressing 20 deep against the window.”

By way of explaining Fiorucci’s aesthetic, the article quotes Elio as calling haute couture “pathetic.” He embraced a certain trashiness in dress — lamé, peek-a-boo plastic, animal prints — literally incarnated when the store gave away miniature garbage-pail backpacks covered in brand-name stickers to customers who spent over $150.

Despite its popularity, the New York store wasn’t necessarily profitable. In the beginning, Fiorucci bet on the store’s ability to establish the brand’s image within the United States and, in turn, entice retailers around the country to sell Fiorucci merchandise, increasing the company’s wholesale business. At first the gamble paid off, and profits quadrupled the year following the store’s opening.

However, the label was built around the fickle tastes of the youth market and success was short-lived. Soon after Fiorucci jeans hit the market, Calvin Klein signed a jeanswear deal and his brand would emerge as the new must-have designer denim, bringing along with it his beige-on-beige minimalism as the look du jour. The Manhattan Fiorucci shuttered in 1988. The brand was further hindered by a series of ineffective business deals and relaunches that flopped.

Today a Williams-Sonoma occupies the 59th Street address and the Fiorucci name doesn't hold the same prestige it once did, but its impact remains. The boy who once spent his summers hanging out in the store, Marc Jacobs, has said his Marc line is influenced by the label. And the cheap plastic key chains and makeup compacts of his accessories boutique are certainly a nod to the tourist-friendly knickknacks Fiorucci used to carry. Any store that has hired a DJ and tried to turn retail into a party experience (ahem, Fashion’s Night Out) is indebted to the Italian label, as is anyone who has tried bring a little sex and trash into fashion.   

Helen Schumacher is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Brooklyn. She tumbls here and here. She twitters here. She last wrote in these pages about the life of Veronica Geng. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

"Bird on a Wire" - Leonard Cohen (mp3)

"One Of Us Cannot Be Wrong" - Leonard Cohen (mp3)

"Hey, That's No Way To Say Goodbye" - Leonard Cohen & Julie Felix (mp3)