MISS MAY DOES NOT EXIST: The Life and Work of Elaine May, Hollywood’s Hidden Genius, an unjustly underknown and underappreciated woman

MISS MAY DOES NOT EXIST: The Life and Work of Elaine May, Hollywood’s Hidden Genius
CARRIE COUROGEN
St. Martin' s Press
$30.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Miss May Does Not Exist, by Carrie Courogen, is the riveting biography of comedian, director, actor and writer Elaine May, one of America’s greatest comic geniuses. May began her career as one-half of the legendary comedy team known as Nichols and May, the duo that revolutionized the comedy sketch.

After performing their Broadway smash An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Elaine set out on her own. She toiled unsuccessfully on Broadway for a while, but then headed to Hollywood where she became the director of A New Leaf, The Heartbreak Kid, Mikey and Nicky, and the legendary Ishtar. She was hired as a script doctor on countless films like Heaven Can Wait, Reds, Tootsie, and The Birdcage. In 2019, she returned to Broadway where she won the Tony Award for Best Leading Actress in The Waverly Gallery. Besides her considerable talent, May is well known for her reclusiveness. On one of the albums she made with Mike Nichols, her bio is “Miss May does not exist.” Until now.

Carrie Courogen has uncovered the Elaine May who does exist. Conducting countless interviews, she has filled in the blanks May has forcibly kept blank for years, creating a fascinating portrait of the way women were mistreated and held back in Hollywood. Miss May Does Not Exist is a remarkable love story about a prickly genius who was never easy to work with, not always easy to love and frequently often punished for those things, despite revolutionizing the way we think about comedy, acting, and what a film or play can be.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: A biography of a living person, one famously Private and Reclusive, faces an uphill battle when that person declines to participate in the project. The issues become apparent early. I felt put off by one tic the author has: Referring to her subject as "Elaine" seemingly in an attempt to give a spurious sense of her own intimacy with the steadfastly unavailable Miss May.

This is really a minor stylistic issue in most cases of biography. When Miss May simply won't show up...apparently a habit of hers, as the author rather disconcertingly learns via stalking the woman...it looms large because there is nothing of a personal connection in the biographer's tale. This is a very well-researched and capably written dissection of a classic parasocial relationship. Miss May is a public figure as an actress of stage and screen fame. The ways in which the author collects information about her subject are available to other members of the public. Miss May therefore maintains control of the master narrative available to the author, as to the rest of the world. The amount of research required to write this book is, as it must be to make any kind of a story, deep. The border between that depth and stalking is blurry in all cases. I was, however, pushed into "really? Ew!" territory when the author used her own artist connections to find out when and where her subject would be attending public events and getting herself invited to them.

My own personal line was crossed when I read that. I saw the project in a very different light afterwards.

How the heck do you tell The Truth about someone who so values her privacy that she will invent stuff for public dissemination, decline to interact with people in any unmediated fashion, and simply not show up at invitation-only public events? This is someone who doesn't want people rummaging in her drawers. I expect that, like those Victorian folks who directed that their records be burned after their deaths, we will discover that this level of erasure is Miss May's wish as well. So the public record as ably collated and presumptiously contextualized (possibly inaccurately and unfairly, I doubt we will ever be allowed to know) by the author might very well be the only formal record of the long and excellent career of an unfairly overlooked and undervalued creative force.

That will, I expect, have to do. The work she did will speak for itself in the long run; absent a change of heart or a sudden betrayal of Miss May, here is a record of the truth she wanted the audience to know. Fellow pedants please note the citation style is inconsistent and incompletely explanatory.

SUITE FOR BARBARA LODEN, a hybrid literary biography/novel that miraculously transports us

SUITE FOR BARBARA LODEN
NATHALIE LÉGER (tr. Nathalie Lehrer and Cécile Menon)
Dorothy, a publishing project
$16.00 trade paperback, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: “I believe there is a miracle in Wanda,” wrote Marguerite Duras of the only film American actress Barbara Loden ever wrote and directed. “Usually, there is a distance between representation and text, subject and action. Here that distance is completely eradicated.” It is perhaps this “miracle”—the seeming collapse of fiction and fact—that has made Wanda (1970) a cult classic, and a fascination of artists from Isabelle Huppert to Rachel Kushner to Kate Zambreno. For acclaimed French writer Nathalie Léger, the mysteries of Wanda launched an obsessive quest across continents, into archives, and through mining towns of Pennsylvania, all to get closer to the film and its maker. Suite for Barbara Loden is the magnificent result.

Moving contrapuntally between biography and autofiction, film criticism and anecdote, fact and speculation, Suite for Barbara Loden is a stunning meditation on knowledge and self-knowledge, on the surfaces of life and art, and how we come to truth—a kind of truth—not through facts alone but through acts of the imagination.

My Review: As Duras says above, “I believe there is a miracle in Wanda,” writing of the only film American actress Barbara Loden ever created. “Usually, there is a distance between representation and text, subject and action. Here that distance is completely eradicated.”

A film more famous in our time than in the year it was released, Barbara Loden’s sole filmed work as writer and director went from an affront to American feminists—how dare a woman filmmaker represent a woman as a passive pawn in her own life!—to a smash reception at the 31st Venice International Film Festival, where it received Best Foreign Film honors—as the only American entrant accepted that year. Honestly, it might as well have been a foreign film right here in the USA for all the attention it received in the 1970s.

Loden was an actress who was famous if you knew who she was. She was the leggy, semi-clothed blonde bombshell sidekick to sophisticated sketch and improvisational comedian Ernie Kovacs on his critical darling of a revue show. She won a Tony Award in 1964 for playing a thinly disguised take on Marilyn Monroe in an Arthur Miller play. She was a featured actress in several of second husband Elia Kazan’s films (eg, Splendor in the Grass). Her Method acting was learned at the Actors’ Studio while she was a teen-aged dancer at the famed Copacabana nightclub. This was a woman of formidable ability and negligible self-confidence who, paradoxically, married two high-powered men (her first husband was film and television project distributor Larry Joachim, a major player in the early years of television) and left each of them yearning for the strength to control her.

French author Nathalie Léger is introduced to this subject of obsessive interest by a writing assignment: Create a composite entry for Loden and her single outing as a writer/director for inclusion in a film encyclopedia. Léger tells us that she got the instruction from said editor, “No need to put your heart and soul into it.” Sounds to me as though this was not the editor’s first go-round with Mme Léger. That was possibly the most wasted breath the editor had ever used to form speech. “I was trying to be as objective and rigorous as possible. To describe and only to describe, in as few words as possible,” says Léger of beginning her research. Instead, this encyclopedia entry blossoms into a combination personal essay, critical assessment of film, director, and star, and miniature biography of a minor player in the film world with a major talent.

At the very most, I’d expect someone charged with writing an encyclopedia entry to visit a film-school library, see if the subject’s only film was available in some format and give it a watch, at the extravagant end spend the money for an international phone call to an easy-to-locate colleague of Loden’s who was still living at the time. Léger flies to Pennsylvania’s coal country, the setting of the film; contacts film scholars in the USA as well as famous French star of the same era as Loden, Isabelle Huppert; haunts the late Loden’s son, who possesses “twenty-five boxes” of material on his mother and (not unreasonably to me) wants to know what specifically or even generally Léger is looking for; and can’t articulate to any of them precisely what it is she is seeking. I have the sense that, even as this beautiful and intimate mixed portrait of Loden, Wanda, and Léger was going to press, she wouldn’t have been able to articulate precisely what the purpose of her journey was except in terms of its result.

Loden and Léger are each on a road trip towards some sort of epiphany. Loden’s, as Wanda, is going to be fraught with the usual sort of misery and pointless, purposeless suffering that is the lot of the intellectually ungifted when they come unmoored from whatever habits and relationships they’ve tangled themselves into. Léger’s road trip is guided by that savior of the directionless, GPS:

Sky. The ocean floor. The earth’s gravity field. Lines, measurements, a shape, a time. What the experts call the figure of the earth. I don’t want to know any more. I allow myself to be guided; I don’t understand the organized collusion of data transformed into electromagnetic waves that come crashing mathematically into the rental car’s black box to dictate my itinerary. I’ve muted the sound; heading into this unknown country I rely only on the image of the infinite ribbon unspooling on the GPS screen. No obstacles, a marvelous, illusory continuity, the perfect representation of stupidity—what others might call an acceptable representation of reality. “The magic box,” the mechanic had said. I have heard that the GPS is altering our perception of our position in space and the way we travel from place to place. The very notion of an itinerary is problematic nowadays; some people go so far as to believe that everything, including time and emotions, can be localized. It seems to be becoming increasingly difficult to accept that we don’t always know exactly where we are, and by extension it is becoming increasingly difficult to know exactly where we are.

Where in the world is Léger? She’s lost; or she’s not found, anyway, not by the spirit she seeks so assiduously that, instead of knocking out two hundred fifty words or so on a minor player in the film world, she knocks on time’s doors and bangs her shins on the invisible furniture in the dark theaters where Wanda isn’t playing.

It is a very good film, if you’d care to watch its 102 minutes. Cinema vérité isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, and while the ample-for-its-day budget of $110,000 is spent so that it shows on camera the seedy underbelly of the American Dream is pretty much intact and uncomfortably familiar. The upholstery is different colors and the TVs have flat screens. All of Wanda’s acting is done by Loden and her man, Michael Higgins; as Mr. Dennis, he’s the latest loser to tow her long behind him. He’s enough of an improvement over the husband she didn’t so much leave as simply drop and forget to pick up that Wanda makes every attempt to stay with him as his petty little control tactics become more and more desperate (throwing a new pair of slacks out the car window because “no slacks when you’re with me,” and “no curlers, they make you look cheap; do you wanna look cheap?”) as his unrevealed criminal plan begins to crack open. But for Wanda this is the big time, this is freedom from the hideous coal-mining burgs of her entire life, from kids she doesn’t care about, from people who know her and despise her. Author Léger relates this barren freedom to her own mother’s life, and does so in a way that makes clear what those 1970s American feminists were testy about: At every turn, these women exist, actually exist, only in relation to the plans and persons of their men.

The bleak truth is that many women in 2016 are in the same boat. Wanda’s cult classic status among the most sophisticated cinephiles does not make the subject matter more comfortable for today’s energetic and ever-more-successful activists to watch. And Léger, by writing a beautiful film critique mixed with a biographical sketch and a patch or two of memoir, has used artful image juxtapositions to create the unsettling but unignorable truth behind all of these stories.

NOTORIOUS, a major Hollywood star's life of being her own damn self in the unforgiving spotlight

NOTORIOUS: The Life of Ingrid Bergman
DONALD SPOTO
Da Capo Press
$22 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The life of Ingrid Bergman (1915–1982) is as compelling as that of any of the women she portrayed in dozens of unforgettable movies and plays—a list that includes Casablanca, Intermezzo, Gaslight, The Bells of St. Mary's, Notorious, Anastasia, and Hedda Gabler. Hers is a story that begins with a tragic childhood in Sweden, then moves on to the nightmare of Germany under the Nazis and later to Hollywood in its golden age. From her position as America's most beautiful, admired, and loved actress, she was plunged into national disgrace and branded "an apostle of degradation" for her adulterous love affair with Roberto Rosellini in the late 1940s. But her independent spirit triumphed in the end, winning her honors and accolades even as she fought an eight-year battle with cancer. Donald Spoto, who knew Ingrid Bergman and had unprecedented access to her husbands, friends, lovers, directors, and costars, as well as to her papers, letters, and diaries, has written a biography that the San Francisco Chronicle called "mesmerizing" and "deeply moving"—the definitive account of a consummate actress who dared to live the truth.

My Review: The subtitle says it all. For those who might be unfamiliar with Planet Earth, Ingrid Bergman was a stunningly beautiful film and stage actress of the 1930s to the 1980s. Donald Spoto, the author, will celebrate his 76th birthday this year (2017); he was a monk, a teacher, and then a pop-culture apologist/celebrist/analyst with some 20-plus celebrity biographies to his credit, plus several books on Christian/mystical themes.

Preston Sturges. Alfred Hitchcock. Grace Kelly. Miss Bergman. Diana, Princess of Wales. All subjects of Spoto's apparently unstoppable urge to biographize, expressed over the past 35-plus years. So look at that list: Is this author gay? Oh my goodness, yes. Gladly and openly so.

I start out each book, then, with a very strong connection to the author. He's One Of Mine. Small moments that might slip past a non-gay reader are here, smirking at me. I *love* that sense of being in on the joke. And that right there? That's the reason people read celebrity bios. They're in the know, they're totally equipped with gossip material, they are Inquiring Minds that are now sated. It's fun. It's harmless. It's hugely profitable.

Well....

IS it fun? For readers of the better quality books about figures of their personal interest, yes...for the fussbudgetty writers, probably...for the cooperative subjects, maybe. At any point in that chain, whether it be a writer whose passion for organizing and categorizing gives out before the job is done, finishing this type of fact-checking nightmare of a book can be awful, and not to mention the bliss and heaven of a source recanting important testimony! Or a cooperative subject who turns uncooperative!

Harmless? Hardly. Harmful in the extreme. We The People do *not* have the right to know what, for example, Ingrid Bergman felt in her last days on this earth as she slowly and painfully died of metastatic breast cancer. That her friends and family cooperated with Spoto, as Bergman herself had in a different context (a series of interviews about Alfred Hitchcock gave birth to this bio of Bergman, because she was very forthcoming with the author), does not absolve the reader of such a book as this of a defensible charge of prurience, and passive or active participation in a cultural trend that leaves those who are not resolutely anonymous with no zone of privacy anywhere ever. Contemplate that for a few seconds. What a horrifying thought. So spend that $30 and feel entitled to ALL THE DIRT!! The dirtier, the better. Then imagine that it's *your* life under this scrutiny.

Profits are made in stacks, for sure and certain, because the books keep a-comin'. Spoto alone has published 29 books to date. The publishers aren't in the charity game, so they're minting the spondulix or there wouldn't be any more.

Okay, all that said...this book was a blast! It gossiped my ears off for two whole days and the pictures were so cool! I loved the evocation of some of my favorite actors and movies and learned interesting new stuff about them all.

I admit it: I am part of the problem. But I have a smile on my face!