pages 155-156 C Sheila Weller "Dancing at Ciro's" Published by Saint Martin's Press
Helen Hover Weller, Sheila Weller's mother, was a reporter in Hollywood writing on celebrities. Weller is setting up the mood of Hollywood at the grand opening of her uncle Herman's new restaurant on Sunset Boulevard. It is World War 2, the troops have invaded North Africa and Winston Churchill is optimistic. It is the day after Christmas... and the doors open.
"Consequently, "they came in twos and fours and sixes," Herman recalled..... Joan Crawford ...Cary Grant... Lana Turner came with her new husband, restaurant owner Steve Crane, and my mother - supervising the cigarette and coat-check girls with one eye, sleuthing for column items with the other - got the actress she most avidly chronicled to sit down with her in the cigarette girls' lounge.
"The movie stars of the forties had a combination of qualities that are the mirror opposite of their counterparts today. On the one hand, they gave off a glamour unheard of in our era, when ten-million-a-picture actresses wear jeans on David Letterman. But the jeans-wearing actresses are sophisticated; those glamour girls were not. They were often socially naive contract-worker-bees completely beholden to studio bosses. They were raised in a culture that still inculcated obedience and in an America deeply gridded by the caste system. A lot of them were insecure about their rough edges (high school drop out Betty Hutton told my mother she kept a dictionary on her bedstand to look up words whose meanings she didn't know) and their recent poverty (ex-elevator operator Dorothy Lamour remembered when she and her mother had to stretch $1.75 to last five days. However, they were still able to be human beings. They didn't have minders and bodyguards; they opened their own front doors; they worried about getting pregnant; and when they got drunk, they would pour out their hearts in a powder room.
Showing posts with label Sheila Weller. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sheila Weller. Show all posts
2/21/10
7/7/08
GIRLS LIKE US by SHEILA WELLER
GIRLS LIKE US
Sheila Weller
C Kellwell Inc
Atria Books Division of Simon and Shuster
QUICK REVIEW by CHRISTINE TRZYNA
Carly Simon, Joni Mitchell, and Carole King, perhaps the three most influential singer-songwriters of 20th century popular music; they reflected and influenced pop culture through their unconventional lives and original music that so very many of us still sing in the shower. While Carole embodied the Jewish earth mother who kept her children and family life apart from her career, Carly was the vampish sex positive intellectual with the (frequently) true heart who wasn't always sure she wanted a career. Joni decided early that her creativity would prevail over personal relationships but her angst over giving up her long secret love child for adoption was the underlying theme that effected both profoundly.
OK so guess who made it through all three ladies' lives? That Lothario James Taylor! (I can see you now going right to the index to read the specific parts about James....)
So which lady is most interesting to me? Probably Carly.
But since this book follows the three women through their lives as expressing the challenges of a generation of women, lets go to page 292-293 where we read this....
"On the one hand, being an old lady, or a "lady" - the kind of arty, sensual, esoterically spiritual chick for whom the coolest men had lust and awe- well, you couldn't beat that. All over the country, young women were trying to shoehorn their personalities into that fashionable archetype" talkative girls got stoned and talked slower; unaesthetic girls took to wearing dangly jewelry; pragmatic girls started reading their horoscopes. Verbal, argumentative girls pretended to be anti-intellectual and serene. But many young women (especially, it seemed, in Laurel Canyon) didn't have to try; they naturally personified this glamorous new femininity.... '
"On the other hand, medieval courtliness had its blowback: When you were someone's old lady, a piece of you belonged to your old man- and he was always coming out ahead, because he was a man....'
Pages 296-297
"Ladies of the Canyon" (Joni Mitchell's) was released in March 1970 and it was shot though with idealism and idealization: idealized long-skirted ladies, the pitfalls of worshipful love, the chafing between idealistic women and "straight" moneyed men, the inequity between rock star's wealth and a street musician's poverty, the misguided destruction of "paradise," for the sake of money..."
Sheila Weller
C Kellwell Inc
Atria Books Division of Simon and Shuster
QUICK REVIEW by CHRISTINE TRZYNA
Carly Simon, Joni Mitchell, and Carole King, perhaps the three most influential singer-songwriters of 20th century popular music; they reflected and influenced pop culture through their unconventional lives and original music that so very many of us still sing in the shower. While Carole embodied the Jewish earth mother who kept her children and family life apart from her career, Carly was the vampish sex positive intellectual with the (frequently) true heart who wasn't always sure she wanted a career. Joni decided early that her creativity would prevail over personal relationships but her angst over giving up her long secret love child for adoption was the underlying theme that effected both profoundly.
OK so guess who made it through all three ladies' lives? That Lothario James Taylor! (I can see you now going right to the index to read the specific parts about James....)
So which lady is most interesting to me? Probably Carly.
But since this book follows the three women through their lives as expressing the challenges of a generation of women, lets go to page 292-293 where we read this....
"On the one hand, being an old lady, or a "lady" - the kind of arty, sensual, esoterically spiritual chick for whom the coolest men had lust and awe- well, you couldn't beat that. All over the country, young women were trying to shoehorn their personalities into that fashionable archetype" talkative girls got stoned and talked slower; unaesthetic girls took to wearing dangly jewelry; pragmatic girls started reading their horoscopes. Verbal, argumentative girls pretended to be anti-intellectual and serene. But many young women (especially, it seemed, in Laurel Canyon) didn't have to try; they naturally personified this glamorous new femininity.... '
"On the other hand, medieval courtliness had its blowback: When you were someone's old lady, a piece of you belonged to your old man- and he was always coming out ahead, because he was a man....'
Pages 296-297
"Ladies of the Canyon" (Joni Mitchell's) was released in March 1970 and it was shot though with idealism and idealization: idealized long-skirted ladies, the pitfalls of worshipful love, the chafing between idealistic women and "straight" moneyed men, the inequity between rock star's wealth and a street musician's poverty, the misguided destruction of "paradise," for the sake of money..."
6/25/08
GIRLS LIKE US by SHEILA WELLER coming up!
I never blog on any book that isn't intriguing and creatively, interestingly written, and so you can figure at four stars on anything I post. GIRLS LIKE US is a terrific book and I'll soon be blogging on it!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)