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Dana Dunbaugh Burnell

~ I write. I drift my gossamer way, eyes averted, through your keyboard. . . on my way to the refrigerator. Shall we make a pie, darling?

Dana Dunbaugh Burnell

Category Archives: Golden Age Hollywood

Mutti Dearest. Daughter Dullest.

24 Thursday Oct 2019

Posted by Dana D. Burnell in Golden Age Hollywood, Sex Symbols, Uncategorized

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Dietrich

Hollywood Books (Part Ein): Marlene Dietrich by Maria Riva

Ahh, Veteran’s Day not long ago. The leap of Spring is now long gone, along with the smoked salmon celebrations and the psyche-graveling guilt of Mother’s Day. Back in olden times, when dinosaurs played canasta and ice cubes could speak, AMC aired Mommy Dearest on repeat all day. As a nation we all settled in, savoring every moment as sulky Christina received the cleaning tips and financial abuse she so richly deserved!

But today I have put away childish things to dip my toes in a more sophisticated Hollywood mother/child battle, one in which European sophistication is routinely condemned by American complacency (and alongside each condemnation there floats the heavy, hamburger-ed scent of defensiveness).

I’m talking about the 1993 book, Marlene Dietrich, by her daughter, Maria Riva. If you haven’t read it, it’s a pippin.

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In one corner we have the face, the myth, the joyously intemperate, prudently slutty and self-absorbed monster of fabulous. 

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And in the other corner, Maria Riva. Who likes hot dogs and ice cream and lawnmowers and baseball and shit. But who also can write. 

This book is salacious in the grandest way possible: Riva’s a writer with no real concept of her own prejudices (she refers to women who are “openly” lesbian; I hear the sealed variety don’t get much action). But she does also provide quality gossip in absolutely clogging doses, each well-salted with a Teutonic tsk of disapproval. From bulimia to abortion to suspicious death, Marlena did it all with casual virtuosity and daughter in tow. In between these girlish hijinks Dietrich also ruined the sanity of her own husband’s mistress and gave Our Boys at the Front several rollicking doses of the clap–meanwhile proclaiming herself the perfect wife and mother.

But honestly, it’s Riva’s lack of self-awareness that brings acid to this mother/daughter Hollywood tale. Beneath Riva’s prickly pride in being a virtuous American wife and mother, in Plain Cooking and Homey Simplicity, is a deep suspicious certainty that her self-vaunted virtues are far less interesting than her mother’s secret vices. Anyone, anything–man, child, dog, cadaver, blades of grass, emery boards, whatever –would rather spend time on this planet being warmed by Dietrich’s hot voodoo madness than by Riva’s cold stew.

Riva is actually an odd sort of genius who both brilliantly depicts her mother’s kaleidascopic, cracked charisma and wetly rages against just how deep those cracks were. And how powerfully overwhelming the charisma.

So while I do acknowledge that life handed Riva a lemon on one front–Dietrich was beyond dispute a sable-coated monster with the face of a fallen angel and the ego of Caligula. One who dragged “the child” around continents, lying about the child’s age and alternating between smothering affection and cool indifference. But Dietrich also got Riva out of Nazi Germany in the 1930s and to a safe country where the child was educated and (as Edith Piaf snottily bitches) even gifted a Manhattan townhouse by her loving mutti. Many daughters have been both victims and veterans of crueller parental wars than this one.

So while my heart does go out, a bit, to poor Riva, always the dark moon to her mother’s blinding sunlight. But like the rest of the world my hat’s off to you, Lily-Marlene! With a coil of my long diamond-braceleted arm I will again pick up your daughter’s book to read, again, about the time you banged old Joe Kennedy. How your seaside antics do make me laugh. . .

 

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Picture Cary in a Boat on a River. . .

16 Saturday Mar 2019

Posted by Dana D. Burnell in Golden Age Hollywood

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Aldous Huxley, Cary Grant, Hollywood Drug Use, Oscar Levant

PoliceGaz1967_2Here’s a piece I wrote for Afterpartychat.com on how acid is coming back into play for scientific experimentation. Naturally, I had to take a look at early experimenters–like the sadly tormented, surprisingly intrepid Cary Grant: Continue reading →

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New Book on Garland Spills Sad Revelations

02 Tuesday Jun 2015

Posted by Dana D. Burnell in Golden Age Hollywood, Salacious Biographies

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Stevie Phillips

Judy Garland Sad Revelations

This week brings us a new Judy Garland book upon which one should look down with a high-browed disdain for salacious gossip.  I’ll definitely remember to do that later, once my hands aren’t so busy plonking down hard-earned coin as I buy the book TODAY.

Oh, Poor Judy. And yes, ghastly Judy. According to the NY Post Article and Vanity Fair, we didn’t know the half of it. The incessant and hysterically public breakdowns, the rage-filled complacency of her constant suicide attempts. This book promises some strong stuff and Holy Rainbow, Toto–it delivers!

Stevie Phillips, who wrote the memoir, Judy & Liza & Robert & Freddie & David & Sue & Me, worked for Garland for four years. She deserves both a medal and a lobotomy for having done so. Or perhaps a double of each, since Philips then turned around and worked for Liza, too. She must be the Catholic Saint of Enablers.

Old school star dish doesn’t get much better than this. I promise to be thoroughly, heartily ashamed of myself. But first–page one. . .

Also linked: My earlier Judy obit, written last year.

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A Surrealist Poet, Francois Truffaut, and Jane Russell’s Nipples Walk into a Bar. . ..

28 Friday Feb 2014

Posted by Dana D. Burnell in Film & Storytelling, Golden Age Hollywood

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Francois Truffaut, Howard Hughes, Jane Russell

You Have Complaints, Howard?

You Have Complaints, Howard?

Let’s all enjoy the moment when, in 1958, Francois Truffaut made a sudden leap from high art to low neckline. In a graceful segue, France’s premier filmmaker and critic, pivoted from a quote by Guillaume Apollonaire (France’s great surrealist poet of World War I), to Howard Hughes’ obsessive presentation of Jane Russell’s nipples. Now that is an impressive display of dexterity!  Shall we? Mais Oui!

L'Américain est un idiot quand il s'agit de graisseurs! (Trans: Hughs is a Dolt.)

L’Américain est un idiot quand il s’agit de graisseurs! (“Hughs is a Fathead.”)

The Postscript from the end of Truffaut’s Von Sternberg Essay in The Films in My Life, on Howard Hughes’ Production Notes: 

. . .Paraphrasing Guillaume Apollinaire without realizing it (“Your breasts are the only shells I love”*), Hughes demonstrates in the following memo what happens when an actress’s brassiere undergoes aerodynamic design analytics: Continue reading →

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“Whatever Happened to Baby Jane”? Another Unncecessary Remake, That’s What!

08 Wednesday Aug 2012

Posted by Dana D. Burnell in Film & Storytelling, Golden Age Hollywood, Uncategorized

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Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Liza Minnelli, Meryl Streep

Is a Remake Sacriligious? Even if it gives us more Crazy to Love?

So it’s official, and has been for a month or so.  Whatever Happened to “Baby Jane”?  It’s Getting a Remake.  Which seemed to me to be one of the silliest decisions I’ve encountered since Hollywood tried to remake The Women and ended up pouring bong water over the embers of Meg Ryan’s career.

But naturally they’re at it again.  It’s clear they’ll never learn, because here’s a little sample of Hollywood logic for you:  “The idea is to make a modern film without modernizing the period.  It needs to resonate the golden age of Hollywood.”  These words were uttered by Walter Hill, who was chosen to be the director of this remake.  The man is doubtless an artist, whose upcoming Stallone film, Bullet to the Head, will rival Grand Illusion for delicacy and depth.  How the hell could anything resonate the golden age of Hollywood more thoroughly than Bette Davis impaling herself on Joan Crawford’s falsies, before kicking her to the head? 

Continue reading →

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The Wilde World of “Nothing Sacred”

15 Sunday Apr 2012

Posted by Dana D. Burnell in Film & Storytelling, Golden Age Hollywood

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"Nothing Sacred", Dietrich, Lombard, Selznick, Wilde

Love.

Stephen Fry as Wilde

I like any chance I get to think about Oscar Wilde, and there are surprisingly frequent opportunities in life to do so:  Whenever one gives in to temptation, sees ghastly wallpaper, or greets a widow with newly blonded hair.  Anytime you encounter someone so improbably youthful that you assume they have a ghoulish self-portrait in their attic.  Whenever you write in a diary, or stay in a cheap hotel room in Paris, or leave your family to run across town to spend time with a pretty, mean-spirited young lover whose daddy is a Marquess and an inventor of boxing rules.  Whenever someone in this world cannot find it in their hearts to believe that small-minded people are out to destroy them, and ends up doomed by their optimism. 

But most often, and increasingly, one thinks of Wilde whenever brackened, unformed life lurches from the primordial mire and shapes itself. . .into an imitation of art.  As happened in New York recently.  (Ah!  New York–the place where Wilde, upon his first visit, informed customs officials that the only thing he had to declare was his genius.  See?  Dude’s everywhere.) Continue reading →

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