Author Archives: Dana D. Burnell

To Hell with God Damned “L’Amour” (A Letter from Noel Coward)

07 Thursday Jun 2018

Posted by in Golden Age Hollywood, Sex Symbols, Uncategorized

≈ Comments Off on To Hell with God Damned “L’Amour” (A Letter from Noel Coward)

Tags

, , ,

By 1956, Noel Coward and Marlene Dietrich had been friends for over two decades. One day, Coward received a letter from his old pal in which she lay out her broken heart and told a tale of humiliation. What should she do? How could she go on?

Immediately, the playwright sat down to write an answer. And it’s one for the ages. . .

But first, a little back-story:

Marlene Dietrich, the energetic, ageless iron butterfly of Hollywood + international cafe society, was dealing with something unprecedented: unrequited love. At the tail end of a five-year secret affair with the King of Siam, aka Yul Brynner (then the toast of Broadway in The King and I), she discovered herself behaving as her own conquests always had: waiting for phone calls; sending yearning glances across crowded rooms; receiving airy, dismissive promises of future assignations. Grateful for a drunken visit or a cinq-a-sept pounding before the King cleaned his sceptre and took it back to wifey.

Dietrich had never had to yearn. Yearning was for the ugly and the mortal. All she’d ever had to do was reach out a manicured hand and possess.

But Brynner was different. He proclaimed love, then left with a shrug. He promised forever but couldn’t even give flowers. How could this be? And why didn’t she stop it? Dietrich found herself so humiliatingly obsessed that she repeatedly followed Yul to Hollywood, then back to NYC. She kept herself to her best behavior, merely pausing for refreshing essentials like a brief ongoing affair with Sinatra. And Kirk Douglas. And Harold Arlen, Erich Remarque and Edward R. Murrow.

Lovely and attentive as these men were, Dietrich’s diaries during these years mention only one name with yearning, with passion–even desperation. Yul. 

Continue reading →

Advertisements

The 5:17 to an Ass-Kicking: Million Dollar Baby

01 Thursday Mar 2018

Posted by in Film & Storytelling

≈ Comments Off on The 5:17 to an Ass-Kicking: Million Dollar Baby

Tags

,

mdb1

Moody, yet Macho.

We’ve all been reading about Eastwood’s new movie, a particularly Clintian broth boiling machismo down to the savory whiff of destiny. The 5:17 to Paris promises us heroes who’d been in training all their lives, unwittingly and otherwise. It sets itself up as a comforting alternative to our current reality, a world in which to be American is to be ready–and not ashamed. I’ll see the movie, and lick the popcorn butter off my fingers, and remember a time in which that seemed a possibility. ‘Cos it sure doesn’t feel that way anymore.

But all the publicity made me think of my favorite Eastwood movie, one seasoned with the regret and loss of age plus the transformative zest of friendship. Plus pie. And that’s Million Dollar Baby. 

I once read an article in London’s Evening Standard in which a journalist took England’s most famous female boxer, Cathy Brown, to see Million Dollar Baby. Brown had recently knocked out Hungarian Viktoria Varga after just two rounds– exactly the type of fight Hilary Swank’s character, Maggie, excels at in the film. I’ve seen the film again recently and nowadays it’s even more satisfying to watch Swank swing out a meaty arm and knock someone senseless. I just wish we could CGI a #metoo tattoo on her knuckles.

Continue reading →

Another City, Another Life. . .

03 Wednesday Jan 2018

Posted by in Golden Age Hollywood, Uncategorized

≈ Comments Off on Another City, Another Life. . .

Tags

, , ,

Since reading an Economist’s report on the competitiveness of global cities, I’ve been thinking about just what makes a city livable, and indeed how one thinks of cities at all. I have lived in many cities and, as a born romantic, never once asked myself the Economist’s practical question–how does this town compete in terms of physical and human capital? Never mused about what’s up with a burg’s institutional competitiveness.

Or I think I haven’t. As I actually read this chart and took in the (rather contradictory) concept of livability being equated with competitiveness, I began to think about the cities in which I’ve lived–and made a surprising realization.

I’ve always anthropomorphized them. Each city seems to me to have its own very particular personality, to the extent that I can not only give each a gender and an age, but also character qualities and often quite a bit of backstory. These are amusing fancies, though not nearly as impressive as those of my British ex, who has synaesthesia and glamorously associates days of the week with color (Friday is black and therefore suits everyone).

However, I will tell you this about the Economist’s analysis on this subject: compared to my own system, it tells you nothing, nothing, truly useful about a city. The best way to get the vibe of a town before you go is to ask two people — one a native of that town and the second a recent arrival — a single question:

If this city were a person, how would you describe them?

What do I mean? Here are examples from three cities in which I’ve lived:

Continue reading →

The Life of a Sex Zombie

22 Sunday Oct 2017

Posted by in Golden Age Hollywood, Sex Symbols

≈ Comments Off on The Life of a Sex Zombie

Tags

, , , , , , ,

Veronica Lake

Veronica Lake was in my living room yesterday morning, poised and bored, with the lissome form of a young dancer and the dead eyes of.  . .well, the eyes of someone who’s seen Veronica Lake’s future.

Which wouldn’t be a cheery vision.

In the watchful coolness of this siren’s gaze, you’d be right to sense that although so gleamingly young, this was somebody who’d already encountered choppy waters. After a troubled childhood, Veronica Lake–nee Constance Ockelman–had lost her father to an industrial explosion, and later was kicked out of a Catholic Girl’s School for rebellious behavior (which seems to me indicative both of intelligence and possession of a spine). Lake was moved down south, where she was simultaneously lauded as the most beautiful girl in Miami High and diagnosed with mental illness.  Continue reading →

The Great and Powerful Roz

06 Friday Oct 2017

Posted by in Film & Storytelling, Golden Age Hollywood, Uncategorized

≈ Comments Off on The Great and Powerful Roz

Tags

, ,

Hey, Brother–Can You tell ’em I’m no Lady?

Just now, while flicking Jungle Red fingernails through the spammed questions I receive for this blog, I noticed the sort of query I usually relish (since it would lead us straight to Kenneth Anger territory– I am worryingly familiar with that dirty turf).   The question was: “Could you tell me more about classic Hollywood’s grubby underbelly?” 

Why yes, friend, I could.  I absolutely could be a tour guide though Hollywood Babylon, leading you by your soft hand as we stroll by the “Hollywood” sign, where Peg Entwhistle jumped from the “H” to her death in 1932.  Then we’d wander near the house David Niven and Errol Flynn shared, which some wag* nicknamed “Cirrhosis by-the Sea.”  I could talk about Harlow’s Hubby’s death dildo and Jeff Chandler’s yen to wear polka-dot dresses.  Or about how Bogart used to hide under tables while his wife Mayo got into bar fights.  I could talk about all kinds of salacious useless crap, and quite often do.

But, dear reader, not today.  Today my nails are sharp but my spirit is yielding. Today I choose not to focus on the weary negativities of life, the injustices, imbalances, and the thrush-inducing mornings-after the night before.  So I won’t do a tour of syphilitic Hollywood, and not only because that’d be one lo-ong essay to write of a lovely October day.

Today I want to talk about lighter and rarer things than a rollicking dose of the clap.  Instead I want to discuss a truly great comic performance:  A great Female comic performance that is more balls-to-the wall than any other piece of acting in that annus mirabilis of 1939, and which should’ve put all that sexist nonsense about “Are Women Funny” to rest before WWII.  As if Mabel Normand herself didn’t do it decades before. . . Continue reading →

The Undertow

24 Thursday Aug 2017

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ Comments Off on The Undertow

Tags

Screen Shot 2017-08-24 at 9.39.38 PM

I recently re-read a USA Today article on our national disgrace–no, not that one. This stomach-churner didn’t even make the front page, though it’s moved to the center of many of our lives: Big Pharma is encouraging geriatricians to prescribe—and then keep prescribing—opiates at a feverish pace.

As Dr. Mel Pohl of the Las Vegas Recovery Center points out in the article’s online video, the US has four percent of the world’s population but 80% of its opioid users. And why’s that? Because America just keeps taking out its prescription pad. The video features a number of heartbreaking stories—including that of 67-year-old Betty Van Amburgh, who was prescribed “a constant changing of medications” after back surgeries and ended up  treacherously addicted. Van Amburgh entered rehab with a shopping bag full of prescribed fentanyl, hydrocodone, and Xanax. She was nearly unconscious, yet still in pain.

This medical system is rendering our parents comatose, but no one’s taking responsibility because they don’t yet know what else to do. . .plus there’s just so much money to be made from pain.

And it breaks my heart.

I visited my mother a few weeks ago. It was all the same: The bedroom smelling of urine; the nest of a bed, the tray of pills and white tablets scattered everywhere. I could grab one so easily. I hear they’re—Oh, I hear they’re delicious.

Continue reading →

Monroe: Some Kind of Mirror

11 Sunday Jun 2017

Posted by in Drug Deaths, Golden Age Hollywood, Sex Symbols, Uncategorized

≈ Comments Off on Monroe: Some Kind of Mirror

Tags

, , , ,

Marilyn MonroeIn just over a decade, she worked with the greatest directors in Golden Age Hollywood: Huston, Wilder, Cukor, and Hawks. Moviegoers paid $200,000,000 to watch her project her trademark combination of atomic-age sexuality and childlike, vulnerable astuteness. She was born into an orphan’s chaos and lived the shadowy Los Angelean life of a Raymond Chandler character—losing her soul in a struggle for acceptance, and then her life trying to re-find it.

I did what they said and all it got me was a lot of abuse. Everyone’s just laughing at me. I hate it. Big breasts, big ass, big deal. ~MM

It took me a while to like her at all. It was clear, early on, that she wasn’t for or about me. She was about Men and playing the game by their rules, contorting herself into their ideal, sublimating her rage into their ultimate frustration. The inimitable Billy Wilder might be the director most connected to the celluloid Monroe image, having directed her in The Seven Year Itch and Some Like it Hot. Of working with Monroe he said, “I have discussed this with my doctor and my psychiatrist and they tell me I’m too old and too rich to go through this again.” Continue reading →

Missing the Adrenaline Rush

26 Wednesday Oct 2016

Posted by in Health & Beauty, Uncategorized

≈ Comments Off on Missing the Adrenaline Rush

screen-shot-2016-10-26-at-10-48-04-am

(Originally in the Guardian Weekend Magazine, by Dana D. Burnell)

I always knew there was something wrong with my heart. No other kid collapsed on the ground after playing, cradling their chest. It was only me, with a pain I instinctively ignored. At nine, I leapt from windows on to ice-hard lawns. At 12 I played in Chicago streets, tormenting drivers until they swerved their cars towards me.

In my early 20s, at school in Maine, I’d fallen for a broken-nosed Brooklynite who seemed as misplaced in New England as I was. One night I sat watching him play pool in the local dive bar. I had one beer, but felt dizzy. The room around me smudged into rapidly moving forms. Black and white linoleum rolled beneath my feet as I stumbled to the door.

A man’s face loomed enormously. “Honey, are you OK?” Gripping my elbow, he led me to the parking lot. My boyfriend appeared as I fainted backwards, my skull falling like an anvil against the rough cement. Continue reading →

A&E Intervention Recap: Season 15, Ep. 13: Alicia (and Nexxus!)

09 Tuesday Aug 2016

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ Comments Off on A&E Intervention Recap: Season 15, Ep. 13: Alicia (and Nexxus!)

Tags

, ,

Intervention: AliciaA&E struck gold back in 2005 when they launched the Emmy-winning Intervention, a docu-style series following alcoholics, drug addicts and those struggling with other disorders from the depths of their addictions through a staged intervention and, if all goes well, off to treatment. Though briefly canceled in 2013, the show was revived just a year later and is now continuing its 15th season. This was the 13th episode of Season 15 airing Sunday, July 10.

This is Alicia

Alicia is a 29-year-old brunette from Staten Island whose accent harks straight back to MTV’s Jersey Shore—though she was probably too busy and bummed out to audition for that gig. She’s a long-term heroin and Xanax addict with a $1200 a week habit who states right off that “All I want to do is be fucking high, and I hate my life…if I had the balls, I would shoot myself.”

Instead she shoots herself up, and occasionally drops by the family plumbing business to “work,” i.e. pester her mother, Gina, for cash to buy drugs. Then she shoots up again and sits at her desk, giving Gina the joy of watching her daughter nod off while ignoring incoming calls. Perhaps, says Gina, Alicia thinks “stray cats will answer the phone.”

With one kohl-lined eye at half-mast, Alicia assures us, “I am 100% a heroin addict.” She nods off again, submerged in the opiate swamp, but pops back up just in time to chew a Xanax. At this point some info appears onscreen: mixing Xanax with heroin can cause respiratory failure.

Alicia’s a dab hand at obtaining money from Gina, but she is also a master shoplifter. As the camera scans rows of top-end hair products Alicia’s boosted from local shops, I am gobsmacked. How the hell does someone pull that off? Alicia must borrow Santa’s bag to haul that amount of Nexxus out of the local Ricky’s. Continue reading →

A&E Intervention Recap: Season 15, Ep. 11: Oh, Ginjer

06 Saturday Aug 2016

Posted by in Recaps

≈ Comments Off on A&E Intervention Recap: Season 15, Ep. 11: Oh, Ginjer

Tags

, ,

Screen Shot 2016-08-06 at 8.08.33 AM

A&E struck gold back in 2005 when they launched the Emmy-winning Intervention, a docu-style series following alcoholics, drug addicts and those struggling with other disorders from the depths of their addictions through a staged intervention and, if all goes well, off to treatment. Though briefly canceled in 2013, the show was (thankfully) revived just a year later and is now continuing its 15th season. The first of these new episodes aired Sunday, June 19th.

This is Ginjer

Ginjer is a 28-year-old self-described “sugar baby” with a six-year-old son, a sweet but shockingly amenable boyfriend and an addiction to shooting Dilauden that sends me diving beneath coffee tables. (Let’s just say that if you’re the kind of person who gets flipped out by seeing needles insterted into necks, our Ginjer’s going to push your bougie boundaries.)

Still, Ginj, who has the stunned eyes of someone who simply can’t figure out how the fuck life got like this, has agreed to be in a documentary about addiction and I’ve agreed to stick with her through it. Despite the fact that her neck is a map of puncture wounds, she says that “sugar babies” are at the top of the prostitute social structure. (This may not be revelatory but these sugar daddies, by the by, do not look like the ones in Lifetime television’s movies for women.) Still, Ginjer meets men online so she never walks the streets or brings home ones she doesn’t know unless she’s like really desperate or something. Madame du Barry: Take notes.

Continue reading →