Book Review: Play It as It Lays, by Joan Didion (1970)

The cover of Play It as It Lays, by Joan Didion, 1970.

She read the book quickly. It did not seem to matter much how the sentences were arranged, or whatever exactly the sentences said, because they all seemed very long and emotionless and the kind of sentences you could read for a very long time without really absorbing much of anything. The main character was an actress, but she didn’t seem to do much acting, and her agent was trying to get her to take more acting jobs so she wouldn’t be so depressed, and finally she did take this one acting job on a TV show, and that was the only time during the whole novel that she actually did some acting, but it was clear she didn’t like doing the TV show. The character was really depressed and isolated and bored, and that seemed to be the whole vibe the book was giving, depression and boredom. Ennui, that was it. Everything sounds better in French. Maybe instead of saying we’re depressed we should just start saying we have ennui, which made her think of Alain Delon lying around the swimming pool in La Piscine, and she thought of how gorgeous Romy Schneider was in La Piscine, and how if Alain Delon and Romy Schneider had a baby together it would have been so beautiful but they didn’t have a baby together and after Romy Schneider died so young Alain Delon never watched La Piscine again because it made him too sad, and that sounded very romantic and very French to her, to deprive yourself of a beautiful movie because it made you too sad and she thought of Alain Delon’s beautiful blue eyes filling with tears and that made her very sad.  

The one thing the actress liked doing was driving her car on the freeways, and that did seem like it would be pretty cool. She imagined if she had an old Corvette like this actress had and like Joan Didion had, you know, the kind with the long sexy hood and a T-top roof, but those old cars probably got really terrible gas mileage, and they probably weren’t good for the environment with their powerful, gas-guzzling, sexy V-8 engines that put out 300 horsepower. But they must have been fun to drive. She had never owned a car with 300 horsepower.  

She understood some of the reasons why the actress in this book was so depressed, because literally everything in her life was really terrible and awful. The actress was getting a divorce, and her husband seemed self-absorbed and egotistical, and there were probably a lot of men like that in Hollywood in those days, and the actress had this gay friend that she hung out with a lot, but he wasn’t like a fun gay best friend, he seemed like a drag as well, and he had a lot of money and his mother paid him money to be married to a woman, and that didn’t seem like too bad of a deal, really, because he was still doing whatever he wanted to and his wife didn’t really seem to care very much and he bought her expensive jewelry and she seemed pretty okay with this weird kind of bargain they had made.  

The one time this actress actually seemed to enjoy something, besides driving her car on the freeway, was when she went to the Hoover Dam. The actress wanted to lie down on the main water pipe in Hoover Dam, and as she read the book she wondered if there was something sexual about the Hoover Dam for the actress. Also, as she read this part about the Hoover Dam, she thought about how Joan Didion wrote about the Hoover Dam in her book The White Album. Joan Didion wrote: “Since the afternoon in 1967 when I first saw Hoover Dam, its image has never been entirely absent from my inner eye. I will be talking to someone in Los Angeles, say, or New York, and suddenly the dam will materialize...” (The White Album, p.198) And that sounded kind of weird and nutty to her. The Hoover Dam was just a big, giant slab of concrete, it sounded much more fun to have a yellow Corvette in your dreams.  

And this actress had an abortion, and that part of the novel was really, truly, awful and she thought of Hemingway’s short story “Hills Like White Elephants” and she remembered reading that in high school and how the questions in the short story book told you that it was actually about an abortion, and she couldn’t quite remember if she had realized when she was reading it that it was about an abortion and she remembered reading “Hills Like White Elephants” again in an American Literature class in college, and she remembered asking the other students if they knew that it was about an abortion and it was her little dig at Hemingway because sometimes he was spare and close to the bone and beautiful and other times he was just abstruse and she wondered if it was hard for Hemingway to say what he actually meant and she thought how she liked F. Scott Fitzgerald better because he could write those beautiful gorgeous sentences that would just stop you in your tracks because they were so beautifully crafted and perfect.  

She didn’t know how many stars she should give this book. She could really justify any number from 1 to 5. One star because all of the people in it were really pretty awful and there wasn’t really anybody to sympathize with, although she did kind of sympathize with the actress because everything was so awful for her, but it was more like a kind of pity for the actress and you never really got to know any of the characters well enough to feel much emotion for them, but maybe that was the whole point of the book but then why go to all the trouble to write a whole book about these people if you weren’t really supposed to feel any emotion for them? Five stars because the book did what it was probably supposed to do, which was make you feel pretty awful and rotten and be glad you weren’t as depressed as this actress was, so it was effective in doing that, and other people had thought this book was good too, and that was part of the reason she had read the book was because other people said how good it was. She had read the book really quickly, over just two days, so that was good, but she hadn’t really enjoyed reading the book, although she figured that was part of the point, that the book wasn’t meant to be enjoyed. She finally settled on three stars. 

Book Review: Being Elvis: A Lonely Life, by Ray Connolly (2016)

Paperback cover of Being Elvis: A Lonely Life, by Ray Connolly, 2016. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

Simply put, Elvis Presley was one of the most significant figures in the history of 20th century music. Elvis has become such an icon that it’s hard to separate his work from the celebrity surrounding him. British writer and journalist Ray Connolly examined Presley’s life in the excellent 2016 biography Being Elvis: A Lonely Life. Connolly’s book doesn’t attempt to be the definitive Elvis biography; rather, it presents us with an examination of Elvis’s personality in a relatively brief 320 pages.  

Connolly has clearly done his homework—to write such a tight biography of Presley means that he has a thorough command of his sources and the narrative that he crafts. Like Baz Luhrmann’s 2022 film Elvis, Connolly places much of the blame for Elvis’s decline on his manager, Colonel Tom Parker. Unlike Luhrmann, Connolly fully dissects Elvis Presley’s personality, in an attempt to try to illuminate Elvis’s actions. Elvis is a tricky subject for a biographer—on the one hand, there’s too much information to wade through, as seemingly everyone who ever met Elvis has written a book. Serving Royalty: How I Made a Cheeseburger for Elvis at McDonald’s, by Mark Taylor. (That book doesn’t actually exist.) And yet at the same time, Elvis gave very few interviews after 1960, so there isn’t a ton of material where Elvis describes his own thoughts and feelings.  

For someone at his level of fame, Elvis Presley was at times curiously passive about his own career. That’s a bit of an overstatement, as he was often tenacious in the recording studio to achieve the sound he wanted on a record. But if you think of people at Elvis’s level of fame, say, Frank Sinatra or Barbra Streisand, the picture that emerges is of powerful people who might border on control freaks. That wasn’t Elvis Presley. For all his dissatisfaction with the movies he made, Elvis did little to take control of his Hollywood career. I also think that Elvis was often hindered by his enormous fame—it was a burden sometimes. Elvis was so famous, on such a different level than just about anyone else, that he couldn’t blend into a movie: his movies aren’t just movies that Elvis happens to be in, they are ELVIS MOVIES.  

I’d argue that Elvis did make some good movies, like Jailhouse Rock and King Creole, but when you compare his movie career to Bobby Darin’s, you see a stark difference. Bobby Darin was a very successful entertainer, but he wasn’t burdened by the same level of fame that Elvis was. When Darin broke into movies, he didn’t have to just play Bobby Darin in every movie he made. Darin’s first movie role was in 1961’s Come September, where he starred alongside Rock Hudson, Gina Lollobrigida, and Sandra Dee. Darin didn’t have to carry the whole movie himself, as Elvis so often had to. Darin also made several movies where he didn’t sing, something Elvis always wanted to do. Darin’s other films include Too Late Blues, directed by John Cassavetes, State Fair with Pat Boone and Ann-Margret, Hell is for Heroes, with Steve McQueen, Pressure Point, with Sidney Poitier, and a supporting role in Captain Newman, M.D., with Gregory Peck, Tony Curtis, and Angie Dickinson. Because Colonel Parker was risk-adverse in the extreme, there was no way that Elvis was going to be in a John Cassavetes movie, or appear with stars like Steve McQueen and Gregory Peck, who might overshadow Elvis.  

Reading Being Elvis reminded me of what an instant phenomenon Elvis Presley was. The recording session on July 5, 1954 that produced Elvis’s first record, “That’s All Right,” was the first time that Presley had ever sung or played with other musicians. (p.32) Not bad for a debut. By July 5, 1956, Elvis Presley was the hottest thing in show business.  

Connolly unearths tantalizing nuggets, like the Colonel’s negotiations with RCA for a proposed 43-city tour in 1963. RCA balked when Parker demanded a guaranteed advance of $1 million, and so the deal came to nothing. Since his release from the Army in 1960, Elvis had only performed 3 live concerts in 1961—he hadn’t toured since 1957, and I’m sure the demand for tickets would have been huge. Another opportunity lost.  

While the 1960’s had been a decade of making movies and not touring, the 1970’s were the opposite, as Elvis appeared in Las Vegas and toured extensively throughout the United States. Connolly hits the reader with the astonishing fact that, besides Elvis’s 2-year stint in the US Army, the longest break of his career was a four-month hiatus in 1975. (p.280) At that point, Elvis was in obvious need of a rest, for his health and to regain his enthusiasm for his career.  

Being Elvis, the 2018 documentary Elvis Presley: The Searcher, and Luhrmann’s 2022 movie all make the point that singing in Las Vegas was not good for Elvis’s voice. I’d be interested to hear someone explain more about this. Is singing in Las Vegas generally detrimental to singer’s voices? If so, how did Vegas staples like Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin thrive for decades in the desert? Or was there something specific about Elvis’s voice that the dry desert air damaged?  

1973 was a key year in Elvis’s career. The year began on a high note, with a huge global audience viewing Presley’s satellite TV special Aloha from Hawaii. It was a huge milestone for Elvis. But by the time Elvis opened his August shows at the Las Vegas Hilton, a Hollywood Reporter critic wrote “It is tragic, disheartening and absolutely depressing to see Elvis in such diminishing stature.” (p.269) 1973 was also when Elvis should have finally broken free from Colonel Parker’s unimaginative management of his career. Elvis fired the Colonel but made no move to contact anyone to replace Parker. Parker correctly gambled that Elvis would eventually come back, and so he did. Instead of touring the world, as he should have done, Elvis performed 180 concerts in 1973, all within the USA.  

Elvis needed a break, but his finances were in such poor shape that he would have had to plan ahead, and curb some of his famously generous spending, in order to take some time off. Elvis also needed someone other than his father, Vernon, handling his money. Vernon was honest, often criticized Elvis’s lavish spending, and he did the best job he could, but he was not financially sophisticated. It’s rather shocking that one of the most famous entertainers in the world handed his finances off to his father, who hadn’t even graduated from high school. That might have worked fine in 1955, when Elvis was basically just making money from touring, but by 1975, his finances needed outside help.  

Being Elvis is a sympathetic portrait of a gifted artist who was adored by millions of people around the world, and yet his life was a lonely one indeed. The Elvis I like to think of is the one who lives forever inside the music he left us. I love hearing Elvis get lost in a song, the way he did when he was jamming on songs. Listen to the joy in his voice as he tears into songs like “Reconsider Baby,” “Hi-Heel Sneakers,” “Stranger in My Own Home Town,” “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” and “Merry Christmas Baby.” That’s Elvis the way I want to remember him, not the jumpsuited icon, not hidden away inside the gates of Graceland, but singing for the sheer joy of it.  

The Films of Warren Beatty: "The Only Game in Town," starring Warren Beatty and Elizabeth Taylor, directed by George Stevens (1970)

Warren Beatty became a full-fledged movie star after producing and starring in "Bonnie and Clyde" in 1967. The movie helped usher in the "New Hollywood" era of films, and it also made Warren Beatty a very rich man. Warner Brothers had such little faith in "Bonnie and Clyde," thinking that it would merely be a "B" movie, that they gave Beatty 40% of the profits. According to imdb.com, "Bonnie and Clyde" cost $2.5 million to make, and grossed about $50 million in the US alone. Good job, Warren. So, what movie did Beatty choose as his follow-up? Typically for Beatty, he waited and waited, and turned down a classic movie, "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid." Beatty then accepted the offer to replace Frank Sinatra in director George Stevens' last movie, "The Only Game in Town," where he would co-star with Liz Taylor. Beatty was a huge admirer of Stevens's work, and basically said yes to the movie just so he could work with him. Stevens directed many great movies like "Gunga Din," "A Place in the Sun," with Liz Taylor and Montgomery Clift, "Shane," and "Giant," with Liz, Rock Hudson, and James Dean. Unfortunately, "The Only Game in Town" is not one of his great movies. Ever polite, Beatty defended his decision, saying, "I always thought that it was probably one of the most sensible decisions I had made because I got the chance to work with George...ultimately it was more rewarding to me to have made a sort of an unsuccessful picture with him." Beatty soaked up everything from Stevens, who was a perfectionist with a tendency to over-shoot. (Just like Beatty would be as a director.) Beatty was amazed by Stevens's calm demeanor, and remarked that he never once heard Stevens raise his voice on the set. Beatty tried to handle himself the same way as a director.

"The Only Game in Town" is set in Las Vegas, but it was mostly filmed in Paris. Why, you might well ask. Well, because Richard Burton was a tax exile from England and could only spend a small number of days a year in the UK. So Burton's latest movie, "Staircase," though set in London, was being filmed in Paris. (In "Staircase" Burton and Rex Harrison play gay hairdressers. Really.) And Liz wanted to be in the same city as Richard. Therefore, extremely expensive facsimiles of Vegas casinos were built in Paris to accommodate Liz. Ah, show-biz!

"The Only Game in Town" was actually a play before it was a movie, running on Broadway for 16 performances in 1968. Frank D. Gilroy, the playwright, must have clicked his heels for joy when 20th Century Fox bought the film rights for $500,000 before the play even opened! It's basically a two-person character study, as the film focuses on chorus girl Fran meeting cocktail bar piano player Joe. Fran has been in Las Vegas for five years, and Joe is planning to leave for New York City as soon as he can save $5,000. Joe soon hits a lucky streak and wins $8,000 at the casinos. He tells Fran he wants to have one more nice night on the town before he leaves the next day. In an excruciating scene, we watch as Joe gambles away all $8,000. Which explains why he's been in Las Vegas for 5 years trying to save $5,000. Just as Joe is waiting for the perfect time to leave Vegas, which may never come, Fran is waiting for her lover, married and living in San Fransisco, to finally divorce his wife and marry her. In the meantime, Fran invites Joe to move in with her. No strings attached, free to leave whenever either one pleases. Eventually Fran's lover comes back with what seems to be the perfect news: he's gotten a divorce, and now they can get married. He's booked them tickets for a honeymoon starting that night. But after saying goodbye to Joe on the phone, Fran realizes that she is in love with Joe, and doesn't leave with her lover. (In a very un-Liz Taylor like moment, Fran even gives him back the ginormous ring he bought her!) So, what happens at the end? Well, I won't spoil that for you.

"The Only Game in Town" is actually a pretty good movie, it's certainly better than I thought it would be, and better than it's reputation would suggest. It was a flop when it was released in January 1970. The movie cost about $10 million to make, took a very long 5 months to shoot, and only grossed $1.5 million in the US. But it's an interesting story, and it features a very good performance from Beatty. Like many other Beatty characters, Joe is a charmer who is very adept at reading people and getting his way. His dreams are less grandiose than most of Beatty's characters, as his only real goal seems to be making it to New York. Joe is actually a well-written character, in part because he is very sarcastic and ironic, which makes his character seem much more modern. You could give Joe's lines to a character in a contemporary romantic comedy with no trouble at all. Sinatra actually would have been quite good for this part, the only problem is that he was about 20 years too old for it. (A piano player in his early 50's who is trying to make $5,000 to get to New York? Um, no.)

Liz is good, but her voice drives me nuts sometimes, as she has a tendency to screech her lines when she yells. She can sound so shrill and harsh. And whoever designed the wardrobe for Liz should have been fired. It's obvious from the way Liz is dressed that she must have gained some weight around the middle, as all of her clothes are really big and baggy on her, which just makes her look larger than she really was. She was only 36 when the movie was filmed, and still had a gorgeous figure, but you'd never know it from this movie.

And how did Richard Burton feel about his wife making a movie with Hollywood's new Don Juan? According to his journals he was a bit jealous. (Personally, Richard Burton and Warren Beatty would both be on my list of guys I would not want my wife to make a movie with.) Burton was on the set when Liz and Beatty filmed their love scene, and he played some George and Martha-like mind games, saying to them, "I say Elizabeth, don't you think you should be a bit closer to your lover? And Warren, you look a touch bashful. Is my presence making you nervous?" According to everything I've read, nothing happened between Liz and Beatty. I would think that Beatty would have tried to do everything he could to impress Burton, as the young Beatty had a pattern of seeking out friendships with older men who were more established in their careers, but I can't find any evidence of this from biographies of Burton or Beatty.

"The Only Game in Town" is certainly a curio, and it's not good enough for me to recommend it without reservations. It's not available on DVD, but I caught it on the Fox movie channel. But if you like old movies that are somewhat talky, or if you want to see two amazingly pretty people go gambling, or if you want to see Warren Beatty be incredibly snarky, this is the movie for you.

Liberace and Elvis: The Triumph of Kitsch

After my recent trip to Las Vegas, and a stop at the Liberace Museum, I started to ponder the odd similarities between "Mr. Showmanship" and "The King of Rock and Roll." Maybe it was the hot Vegas sun beating down on my forehead, maybe it was the glare from all the rhinestones, but it seemed to click in my head, Elvis and Liberace, two pillars of 20th-century kitsch, more alike than you might think at first glance.

When I say that Elvis was like Liberace, I'm thinking more of 70's Elvis, in Vegas, with the ostentatious outfits. But there were some similarities in their public personas dating back to the 1950's. Liberace became a star in the early 1950's in large part due to his TV show, which featured his colorful wardrobe, (this was before he was all about the rhinestones, and this was also a time when it was a big deal that Liberace wore a white tuxedo for a performance!) his brother George, and his mother, who was in the audience for almost every show. Liberace was a very shrewd performer, and he had discovered that he could win over audiences with his personality as much as his brilliant piano playing. He was able to take what might have been a shortcoming, his very swishy manner, and turn it into a huge asset. Considering how homophobic 1950's America was, this was no small victory for a gay man. This was, after all, a time when gays could be fired by the US State Department for being a "security risk." (Okay, so Liberace never publicly admitted he was gay, in fact, he even denied it under oath, but I'm pretty sure he was.) In this way, Liberace was actually quite subversive for the time. He was pointedly different, at a time when conformity was what people strove for. But what Liberace did was to temper this subversiveness with more "normal" behavior, like his emphasis on his family, brother George and his mother. And Liberace's personality was so sunny and warm that viewers couldn't help but be charmed by him. He was humble, gracious, and polite, and in this way showed that he was not a threat to the status quo, despite his differences.

Elvis Presley burst onto the national spotlight in 1956, and he seemed quite different and threatening to many people. Like Liberace, he was able to use television to greatly further his career and expand his appeal. And also like Liberace, Elvis was able to use TV to show people that he was not actually threatening, and that he was also humble, gracious, and polite. Eventually, as people began to know more about Elvis's personality, he seemed less threatening, despite his obvious differences. (Like Liberace, Elvis was also totally devoted to his mother. Some people conjecture that Elvis never really got over the death of his mother in 1958.) By entering the Army in 1958, and serving his 2 years like any other normal guy, Elvis again showed his essentially conservative, non-threatening persona.

There aren't many similarities between Liberace and Elvis in the 1960's. Liberace went through a brief period where he tried to tone down his costumes and his flamboyance, but the public wasn't interested. They wanted him to be his glittery self, and so he went back to the rhinestones, and his costumes started to get more outrageous. Elvis spent most of the 1960's proving that not only was he not threatening to the youth of America anymore, he was also in danger of becoming terminally boring. He shuffled his way through some incredibly crappy movies, didn't give any concerts, and recorded some really great songs that got buried on the second side of his soundtrack albums. (His gorgeous cover of Bob Dylan's "Tomorrow Is a Long Time" could be found on Side Two of the "Spinout" soundtrack. Really.) Amazingly, Elvis was able to reclaim his career and prove that he might still actually be a little dangerous in his 1968 TV special, "Elvis." (Now referred to as the "Comeback Special.") The following year he returned to live performing in Las Vegas. And that's when the similarities begin again.

By the 1970's, Liberace was now wearing tons of sequins, rhinestones, rings, everything sparkly that you could think of. Every new costume and stage entrance had to top the last one in fabulousness. He started being driven onto the stage in a Rolls-Royce! He started performing in bejeweled shorts. And Elvis was right there with him. In 1969, Elvis had been wearing tasteful jumpsuits on stage with very little accessories. But as the 70's crept on, the jumpsuits got a little more jeweled, and then a lot more jeweled, until he was seriously rivaling Liberace. That's been a mystery to me, why did Elvis suddenly turn into Liberace in about 1971? I don't get it. Elvis started entering his concerts to the sounds of "Also Sprach Zarathustra," by Richard Strauss. Where his style of singing before had been nuanced and often understated, now it became bombastic and overly emotional. (Just compare the 1956 version of "Love Me Tender" to how he sang it in the 1970's.) In fact, Elvis and Liberace's performing styles became very similar during this time. Both were highly emotional, sentimental, schmaltzy, florid, and over the top. The difference is that Liberace had always been this way, but it was only in the 1970's that Elvis's style changed. (They really should have recorded an album together in the 70's.)

Both Liberace and Elvis had amazingly ornate homes, furnished in the most garish way imaginable. Their plush lifestyles became a part of their public personas. How did they get away with such conspicuous consumption? By asserting their humble origins. As Liberace said, "Don't be misled by this flamboyant exterior. Underneath I remain the same simple boy from Milwaukee." And Elvis probably would have said the same thing, substituting Memphis for Milwaukee. Whether or not this was true of both men is not the point, the point is that people seemed to believe it. A difference between the two men is that while Elvis shut himself away behind the gates of Graceland, Liberace opened up his home for tours! (He had to stop doing this because his neighbors complained about all the traffic!)

As the 70's wore on, Elvis sadly became addicted to numerous prescription drugs, his weight ballooned, and his performances severely suffered. He had become a parody of himself. Elvis had become the Liberace of rock and roll. And I don't mean that as a compliment. The tragedy is that while Liberace knew he was creating an image, a persona for the audience, a caricature, if you will, Elvis never seemed to know how low he had sunk. In some of his last performances, Elvis, the man who had changed rock forever, was reduced to reading the lyrics to "My Way" from a sheet of paper. It was a sad decline for a man who had so much talent.