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Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, and Barbara Stanwyck--to name a few--maintained their images as glamorous big-screen sex symbols complete with dashing escorts, handsome husbands, and scores of male admirers, thanks to studio publicity departments. But off the set, all three box office divas were involved in "lavender" marriages (marriages of convenience, often to gay men) or remained stoically single. They, and several other Hollywood starlets of the era, were members of a discreet women's "club" called the Sewing Circle, Hollywood's underground lesbian society. Madsen takes a candid look at the very complicated dual lives these great stars led and the impact their preference for same-sex relationships had on their movie careers. … (más)
The Sewing Circle was a euphemism used to describe sapphic Hollywood. Offering a long list of sources, Madsen presents a picture of lesbian and gay Hollywood from the twenties until (almost) current times. Everyone is aware of how the big studios controlled the lives of the actors under contract to them, and anyone who was bi-sexual or gay was forced into so called "lavender" marriage to hide that fact.
The book focuses mainly on playwright Mercedes de Acosta, Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Tallulah Bankhead and a few other big names. It is an interesting read, but not a compelling one, as it feels more like reading a gossip column that it does a history. It seems it was meant more to titillate than to inform. ( )
This trashy, scandal-mongering history of lesbian and bisexual women in Hollywood remains readable in spite of itself. Fran Lebowitz once said that "if you remove all gay influences from Hollywood, all you've left is Let's Make a Deal.'' In his perfervid attempt to detail this influence, Madsen (Stanwyck, 1994, etc.) names names and dishes dirt with an almost gleeful elan.... In the end this book is little more than a who-slept-with-whom compendium; further proof of how ultimately unrevealing sexuality tends to be and, at least in Madsen's hands, how trite.
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
Membership in the closed society of the motion picture industry is almost never revoked for moral failings. -John Gregory Dunne, "Playland"
Dedicatoria
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
To Dana Henninger
Primeras palabras
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
This is a book about appearances, about denied attachments and emotions, and the mocking of mystery and allure. -Author to Reader
Irving Thalberg, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's production chief, was in no mood for jokes. -Chapter 1
Citas
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
It was at Cukor’s that Edna Ferber and Noël Coward both showed up wearing double-breasted suits, and to Coward’s remark, “You almost look like a man,” Ferber parried, “So do you.”
Garbo’s appeal to women was reflected in the Hollywood in-joke about the bridegroom getting into bed and vowing to his bride that, with one exception, he would always be faithful. If he ever had a chance to make love to Greta Garbo, he would no doubt succumb. To which the bride answered, “Me, too.”
...a decade later, the sewing circle alluded to Dietrich’s passel of “good-time Charlenes,” and the expression came to refer to a loose network of lesbians in the performing arts. Only those who mattered “knew.”
“Destruction, delay, deceit, and despair” were the horsemen of the Republican leadership.
Banton feared a fur hat Marlene wanted would look like a knockoff of Garbo’s headgear in Queen Christina, but Marlene assured him that no one ever remembered what Garbo wore.
French police warned Dietrich she might be subject to arrest if she dressed like a man in Paris. Katharine Hepburn’s bosses at RKO objected so much to her trousered look that they threatened to suspend her unless she switched to skirts. She, in turn, threatened to walk around in her underwear, and when the studio carried out its threat and confiscated her clothes, she carried out hers and went from her set to the commissary in her underpants.
“If you know your Bible and your Shakespeare and can shoot craps, you have a liberal education.” Tallulah always put brakes on her outrageousness if she sensed it could threaten her father.
...her favorite line from the play Shakuntana, which she adopted as her motto: “There are doors to the inevitable everywhere.”
She wrote poetry and prose in French, saying that a bilingual education was rather like having a mistress and a wife: you could never be sure of either.
Últimas palabras
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
The greatest compliment we can offer their memory is to see them as people of talent who gave the best of themselves.
Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, and Barbara Stanwyck--to name a few--maintained their images as glamorous big-screen sex symbols complete with dashing escorts, handsome husbands, and scores of male admirers, thanks to studio publicity departments. But off the set, all three box office divas were involved in "lavender" marriages (marriages of convenience, often to gay men) or remained stoically single. They, and several other Hollywood starlets of the era, were members of a discreet women's "club" called the Sewing Circle, Hollywood's underground lesbian society. Madsen takes a candid look at the very complicated dual lives these great stars led and the impact their preference for same-sex relationships had on their movie careers.
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