Dinosaur Bees

Language, An Actress
Andrew K. Peterson

An actress had fully to imagine the feelings of a character. She was the daughter of a photographer. She is a natural wearer of costume capable of making us believe that the “period” world we are watching is happening now. She was on the brink again in the Tenant. She was curiously indifferent to Justine. She began to seem past prime. Her petite, sore-throated charm was perfected in Till the Clouds Roll By. She was Southside Girl in Chicago Cab. She was in support, spiky and ill at ease in a passion. Her own background was in revue and the chorus line, rather than straight theatre. She looked splendid at sixty-plus, but she had lost her voice and didn’t seem unduly interested in acting. She makes wholesomeness seem like a terminal condition, that she valiantly resists being interesting, should teach me that many people find enormous pleasure for reasons that baffle me. She had a famous fall from a Las Vegas stage, and came back. She might seldom be much more than decoration: the cheap detective, the villain, middle age crazy. Her Slim in that picture was an outrageous reversal of the meek ingénue, instructing the master in whistling and watching everyone as if she had been up all night writing the script. She had created the character of the wisecracking teacher. She made a couple of pictures under her real name, the song of love, and dancing lady. She has shown steady development, and it may be that she only needs the right conjunction of star and material to become recognized. She had a turmoil of feelings about Hollywood. She had difficulty making up her mind about projects, and she was often indecisive about how to play scenes. She was in Arizona, talk of the town, a lady takes a chance. She did a weepy. She made over twenty silents without looking like more than a conventional, timid ingénue. She turned out some fascinating pictures and clearly was able to pursue a personal if undoctrinaire interest in the issue of women’s identity. She did not stretch or threaten the system; but that is also a sign of how far the 1930s romance was susceptible to a feminist sensibility. She worked on blood and sand. Her early work was conventional, saucy comedy about love and marriage. Dotted through her more than one hundred movies, there are many signs of an intelligent woman. She never played a star for more than one year at a time, and she slipped from supporting parts into alcoholism and sessions with an analyst that eventually led to autobiography. The saddest aspect of her longevity is her haughtiness, her rather hollow grandeur—it is just the pomp that her slim would have deflated. She was not good in it, but she was nominated, and she proved she couldn’t act in the moment when she tried to pretend she didn’t care about losing. She was a nightclub dancer and a pupil at the Actor’s Studio—a mixture that has never deserted her. She seemed to go along with the silliness of the turning point. She plainly needed large parts and demanding directors, she got away with dutiful gestures, but she may think more highly of the theatre. She remains damp but unaltered, allowing her bracelet to be used as pretty bait for nourishing fish. She was required to be the stiffed point of action in romantic triangles; unconvinced, she did not stay in place. Her actual screen appeal was as a brunette, pouting but smiling, and with a perfect body that she was casually willing to display. She quickly turned blond and her eyes grew heavy fake lashes. Her face and smile seemed pumped up and only exposed the weird lack of personality or intelligence. Her presence may have enabled Godard to be more open in admitting his fears and in revealing that element of misogyny that recurs in his films. She is close enough to our own family to make us all aware of the vicissitudes of show biz as an environment. She is not a great actress, yet she promises good company and genuine humor. Is she even, really, that beautiful? She was uncommonly serene as well as long-suffering and enduring. She has insisted on herself, without being strident or monotonous. So she covers a range—and that’s one of the things acting is supposed to be—but she seems too guarded and intelligent to settle on a definite or passionate inner being. Very cunningly, she placed herself as someone who did not really need pictures—this allowed her to be bored, disdainful, and not even that good. She stressed the pose of an amused outsider, and she was so pretty, as well as heartless, that her humor was the more striking. She had a tiny part in her father’s The Valley of Decision, and then small roles in Reckless Youth, Evidence, What’s Wrong with Women? She then made Wild Geese Calling, Confirm or Deny. She was the girl from Nob Hill, in Scarlet Street she is casually corrupt and endearingly vulgar. She was crucially unique and her own chosen self. Is she an example of the librated woman, exercising her freedom even to the brink of self-destruction? Was she one of the world’s martyrs to publicity, or did she nurse a special aptitude for suffering? How many ways are there of watching her grave face? Are the cheeks carved by love’s gaze? Did that hair fall on her head like night? Perhaps she is too solemn; the scale of exploitation shifts, and as it grows greedier so shame and secretion fall away, leaving naked professionalism. But the nearly complete resignation of blue did seem like the next stage of an illness that fell on her in the grisly damage, where her passion was inseparable from anomie. But she really can act, and there’s not much doubt about the rough and difficult life that has made her. She was only one actress in a great generation, but one wonders if she had done something to offend the big man. She has a comic imp inside that can make a character out of something very slight. She was simultaneously austere and passionate as the most Russian character in The Brothers Karamazov. “She did all those ignoble things with a beautiful, sober face,” though too many since have seemed content to keep her ladylike. The part was in many ways a slice of life: a teenage girl, tossed about in the storms of growing life, experimenting with love, in turmoil over her family. From shot to shot, nearly, she seemed to be shifting in mood and age, and what was most uncanny of all—she had already one of the great watching, waiting, listening, attending faces. In her bearing, her gestures, her resentful passivity, and especially her movement, she dominated the excellent Vagabond. She played with William Hurt. She has a speed that is sensual. And she knows, and likes, more than her words can admit. Her appeal may no longer operate urgently, but she is the first actress intent on arousing sexual excitement who is not ridiculous. She had to buy off an aggrieved wife, she was dogged by gambling debts, and in 1931 she sued her former secretary, for selling stories about her fucking movie stars and most of the USC football team. All so sad, and unlikely, if one looks again at her astonishing vibrance. She was also one of the first whose creativity was morbid, or self-destructive: she had a hunch that might last better than simple success. She exists in fragments the do not make a tidy whole. But she has become a business, her own production company. She had offended Paramount, but the excursion had had much more serious effects on her. A desperate cheerfulness struggles with grim prospects and her battered good nature comes near to breaking down. Her good spirits are listless, as if she kept going back to that dread worry. She was by then in Rochester, quoting Proust to eager interviewers, still seductive, still difficult, a snob and a gossip, and a connoisseur of her own mystique.

ANDREW K. PETERSON :: Museum of Thrown Objects (BlazeVox 2010), bonjour meriwether and the rabid maps (a Fact-Simile chapbook, 2011), Here Come the Groovies (w/Joseph Cooper), and between here & the telescopes (w/Elizabeth Guthrie) :: recent/forthcoming poetry online at The Offending Adam, Otoliths, Buddhist Poetry Review, Disingenuous Twaddle, Cricket Online Review :: coeditor at Livestock Editions, a small press devoted to experimental poetry :: dwells in Mass.

Chad Redden ::	Growing Up Baptist

Sherri Marilena Pauli ::	Translations in Rainstorms on Salt Flats

Megan Kennedy ::	Afraid

Jenni Lord ::	Five paintings

Steve Subrizi ::	Migrating to Portland
	Backstroke

Ben Segal ::	Tell It Again From Your Mouth

Russ Februaryy ::	I Put My Fingers In Your Eyes

Elizabeth Glixman ::	American Cats Are Overweight Studies Suggest
	Why Did Frankee Stein Become A Free Market Capitalist?

Nick Sturm ::	The Fences
	Three erasures

Andrew K. Peterson ::	Language, An Actress
	Steve McQueen’s Lines in The Blob

Rich Ives ::	Anatomy Lesson

Gabrielle DeMarre ::	Stan

Kristen E. Nelson ::	Song of Praise i. Him One
	Song of Praise ii. Him Two
	Song of Praise iii. Him Three
	Yvette

Acquanetta M. Sproule ::	A Nursery Rhyme