CELEBRITY BLOG featuring THE BEST in INFOTAINMENT! Interviews, Reviews, Editorials & More! From Pop to Cult, Welcome Joan Crawford Fans, Grey Gardeners and DIVA Lovers!
Showing posts with label Valley of the Dolls. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Valley of the Dolls. Show all posts
Unfortunately, another celebrity has left us early this year. Patty Duke, born in Queens, NYC, died today after suffering from a ruptured intestine. So many things to look out for as we grow older.
Ms Duke detailed her struggle with bipolar disorder in two autobiographies, Call Me Anna and Brilliant Madness.
Patty was only 69.
Fans best remember Ms Duke as Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker opposite Ann Bancroft. Patty played deaf, dumb and blind with great zest. The show was a hit on Broadway from 1959-62. It then became a hit movie that immortalized her immediately. Being bipolar may be a drawback in real life but it can sure feed into a fabulous performance, looks like.
The Patty Duke Show was a hit ABC tv series from 1963-66. Designed by hit producer Sidney Sheldon for its star, it unintentionally externalized her schizophrenia by having Patty play identical cousins (an improbable likelihood). It was set in Brooklyn Heights. Growing up in Paterson, Nj, only 25 miles away, I thought it sounded like the most exotic place in the USA and I wanted to move there.
"A hot dog makes her lose control." Me too!
Duke did a lot of admirable work in the movies and on tv. But she became a camp icon when she assayed the role of Neely O'Hara in the 1967 film Valley of the Dolls, her first role as an adult actress.
Mark Robson's screen version of Jackie Susann's Valley of the Dolls is a camp classic and a gay classic you can quote from forever. "They drummed you out of Hollywood, so you came runnin' back to Broadway. Well, Broadway doesn't go for booze and dope!"
Susan Hayward dominates the film as Broadway legend Helen Lawson. The younger leads are Barbara Parkins, Sharon Tate and Patty Duke as Neely. Patty was far afield of her Miracle Worker Oscar days, though she chews up the scenery in an obvious effort to win one.
In the 1980s, I saw a stage parody of this off-Broadway and it was hilarious. The Lawson role was assayed by a man in drag, appropriately.
There is of course the infamous cat fight in the ladies' powder room between Duke and Hayward. "I've got a man waitin' for me." "Not one of the fags you usually go out with?" "Well at least I didn't marry one, honey!" Meeoww!
Amazing how homophobic this film was. "You know how bitchy fags can be." Yet, today, it's all appreciated for its camp value. Classic theme song sung by Dionne Warwick.
So, relax, get ready for some laughs and thrills and enjoy The Valley of the Dolls!
ps: The script for this film does a great job of truncating Susann's novel. A more faithful-to-the-book tv version was made in '81 and it was a sprawling mess.
Nobody should meet the cruel end that Sharon Tate did at only 26. She was a victim of the Manson gang's "Helter Skelter" murder spree, being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Her birthday was January 24th.
Tate was 8 months pregnant when she was murdered. She was married to director Roman Polanski at the time.
Sharon became a major gay idol when she co-starred with Patty Duke and Barbara Parkins in the camp classic Valley of the Dolls. "Toooony! Toooony!
I adored her in The Fearless Vampire Killers or Pardon Me but Your Teeth Are in My Neck. She could obviously handle serious and comedic roles alike. And she fell in love with her director.
After his wife's death, Polanski directed the very dark and bloody (though brilliant) screen version of Macbeth to try to exorcise himself of his experience.
Sharon Tate is a true beauty gone too young, too soon. If she were alive today, I wonder what she'd look like in her early 70s. I somehow think she'd age gracefully over the years.
She made a film, 12 + 1, with Orson Wells, released shortly after her death.
Just as you've got to climb Mt Everest to reach the Valley of the Dolls, conversely, there's an uphill climb from the Bay Ridge waterfont to reach home I learned today.
I first committed to do a power walk with downstairs friend and neighbor, Kevin, last week but finked out. Today, when he called on me, I reluctantly agreed to his "see you in 15 minutes." Off we went into the sunny, 80+ degree weather, but not before I stopped into our downstairs deli to buy coffee and bottled water required for this adventure.
You see, I've never been to the waterfront here before, so Kevin was my guide on how to actually get there. You have to know the way. We were dressed in shorts, tees, sneakers, sunglasses and caps (mine the souvenir cap from the revival of reviled musical, Carrie). Past the stately manors west of Third Ave we hoofed it, finally reaching an overpass at Shore Road that took us across the Parkway to the other side, where we covered the waterfront.
To one side, the view of the imposing structure of the Verazzano Bridge traversing the water; to the other, the isle of Manhattan glittering like Oz with its array of shiny skyscrapers. Large barges anchor offshore on the restful waters. And the briny odor of the bay filling our lungs. It was gorgeous! We sat for awhile to chat, bask in the breeze of the river, soak up the sun and take a load off. It felt reinvigorating, rejuvenating, refreshing.
Back we went, walking down to Bay Ridge Ave., so we could stroll through the little but well-tended botanical garden where we literally stopped to smell the roses. (Scentsual!) There was a small bamboo forest and a cluster of bird houses amongst the varied flora. (This is as close as I like to get to communing with Nature, by the way.)
It was a long, sweaty schlep back, uphill, to Third Avenue. A wink and a wave to my friends, Tony and Kevin, in the deli. My pal Kevin and I parted ways at his second-floor apartment, and I climbed once more to my place and, at last, a shower, now well needed.
So, I'm feeling good! Very good. I'm glad I went. I'm glad I walked. I'm glad I let Kevin nudge me into doing this. My body thanks me as I sit here, a bit sore but it hurts so good, and it's glad, too. Think I'll go do it again, solo, tomorrow. If you watch Saturday Night Fever, you'll think Bay Ridge is some sort of claustrophobic urban nightmare. But, as Sportin' Life would say, "It ain't necessarily so."
It is 87 degrees, but a sumptuously, sunny day right now. Soak up the sun, y'all!
What can I say about a Broadway show that has its main character, Judy Garland, bounce back from the dead just before curtain to belt out "Somewhere Over the Rainbow," except that I loved it!
You don't have to be gay to like End of the Rainbow but, as they say, it helps. Ben Brantley gave it a rave in The New York Times.
"As befits a play about Judy Garland, a woman known for liberally mixing her pills, Peter Quilter’s 'End of the Rainbow' is a jolting upper and downer at the same time. After watching Tracie Bennett’s electrifying interpretation of Garland in the intense production that opened on Monday night at the Belasco Theater, you feel exhilarated and exhausted, equally ready to dance down the street and crawl under a rock," wrote the critic.
Rainbow is most definitely a theatrical star vehicle with the star giving an absolute tour de force performance. Tracie Bennett flies around the stage more than Spiderman, and she's not on wires! (Though "wired" is a good way to describe her performance.) When it comes to booze-and-pills-soaked egomania mixed with an unending neediness, Judy Garland puts Neely O'Hara (her counterpart from the Jacqueline Susann roman a clef, Valley of the Dolls) to shame, if we are to believe playwright Quilter's dramatization, which is certainly part fiction, part legend, part truth.
The real Judy with 5th hubby, Mickey Deans
It would be no wonder Garland went through five husbands, four of whom left her (she died on the fifth), as spending just a little over two hours with her impersonator left me with a slight revulsion. A manic-depressive mess in a dress, Bennett's Garland is a bunch of raw nerves, and irritating, but not without a coquettish charm. This show may be exhausting to watch but it must be even more exhausting to perform. I couldn't imagine giving this energy to a matinee and evening performance in the same day. And the currently Tony-nominated Bennett has been doing this show since she originated it in London's West End!
On behalf of all the drag queens all over the world, I'm afraid Tracie Bennett is the greatest drag queen of them all when it comes to Judy, Judy, Judy. She's got the voice right, the look honed to perfection and her singing is flawlessly on target. Of course, drag is about illusion, and illusion is what theater is about. I don't know if the real Judy Garland slung bon mots around so freely, but I like to imagine she must have.
Besides Ms Bennett's brilliant performance, she receives strong support from Tom Pelphrey as husband-to-be Mickey Deans, Michael Cumpsty as the fictitious pianist, and Jay Russell in an array of bit parts.
The set that transforms itself from Garland's London hotel suite to the Talk of the Town theater (where a flat-broke Judy is attempting to stage another comeback) and back again is very cleverly constructed, with the show's great orchestra seen behind a scrim in the Talk of the Town sequences. Ms Bennett covers all of Garland's biggest hits ("The Man That Got Away," "Come Rain or Come Shine") to ironic effect within the context of the script.
Judy was fired from the making of the film, Valley of the Dolls, for being unreliable on the set. She left with her Helen Lawson costume (replica worn in the play). Judy's film role then went to Susan Hayward. As Helen Lawson roars in the movie: "Broadway doesn't go for booze and dope!"
Obviously, she was wrong.
At the Belasco Theater, 111 West 44th Street, Manhattan, (212) 239-6200, telecharge.com.
Below, an alcohol-and-pills-fueled Judy talks into a tape recorder in an attempt to put together some raw data about her life for a planned autobiographical book. (She died before these tapes could produce anything coherent for publication.) As a narrative, this is almost unintelligible. But, emotionally, it is real; unprocessed and unrefined. Judy's rage and sarcasm make me think that End of the Rainbow is far from exaggerated or fabricated. This YouTube entry is from the hard-to find bootleg cd, Judy Garland Speaks.
