The Muse Above My Desk
14 Wednesday Nov 2018
Posted in Art and Photography, Magazines, Profumo Affair
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Christine at 72, Christine Keeler, Dear Christine, Difficult Women, Fionn Wilson, Garageland, Pal Hansen, Profumo Affair, Wicked Baby
Not long ago I acquired a very special painting by my artist friend, Fionn Wilson. Christine at 72 is based on one of the last formal photographs of Christine Keeler, captured by Pal Hansen just a few years before her sad passing in December 2017. I’ve decided to place it above my desk: Christine was (of course) the inspiration for my first book, Wicked Baby. And I was born in ’72, so it seems lucky in many ways. For me, this image represents a proud, independent woman looking back on her past and ahead to the future, always with unflinching courage and honesty. I also find it reassuring to contemplate this model of a mature woman, embracing wisdom and experience alongside her beauty and sensuality.
I first got to know Fionn due to our shared fascination with Christine Keeler. Fionn has created many striking portraits which show this British icon in a very different light to the tabloid cliché. For several years, Fionn has been working with other women artists on a multi-faceted project which will be launched next year. She is also in touch with Amanda Coe, whose BBC drama The Trial of Christine Keeler is currently shooting and will air in 2019.
Dear Christine (a tribute to Christine Keeler) will be touring from 2019-2020 to Vane Gallery (Newcastle), Elysium Gallery (Swansea) and Arthouse1 (London) and includes sculpture, painting, poetry, music, film, photography (previously unseen images of Christine) and a performance piece and writing and involves twenty amazing artists. It’s not just about me by a long shot. The contributors are: Natalie d’Arbeloff, Katie Chatters, Caroline Coon, Catherine Edmunds, Roxana Halls, Penelope Hayes, Sadie Hennessy, Marguerite Horner, Barbara Howey, Shani Rhys James, Sally Jones, Jo Wonder Woodward, Sadie Lee, Cathy Lomax, Julia Maddison, Sonja Benskin Mesher, Wendy Nelson, Sarah Shaw and Stella Vine. With writing from Lucy Bernadette Cox, Tara Hanks, Julie Raven (Julie Burchill), Tanya Gold, Cathy Lomax, Caroline Coon and Bo Gorzelak Pedersen.
Naturally, I’ll be keeping you all updated as these events develop. In the meantime, Fionn has written about Christine for the current issue of Garageland magazine, taking ‘Difficult Women’ for its theme. (And while we’re on the subject … where would we be without those wicked ladies, anyway?)
Turning a New Page With Jeanne
10 Saturday Nov 2018
Posted in Books, Film, History, Jeanne Eagels, Non-Fiction, Theatre, Updates, Writing
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I’m glad to tell you all that Jeanne Eagels: A Life Revealed (Revised and Updated) is now available in hardcover and paperback. A full 90 pages longer than the first edition, and with new photos, it will be our last word on Jeanne’s remarkable life and career. So if you’re looking for a meaty biography to read this Christmas, make sure to buy this new edition as the older version will soon be unavailable. I’ve updated all the links to order from Amazon and other stores here.
Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up
13 Saturday Oct 2018
Posted in Art and Photography, Fashion and Beauty
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Communism, Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up, London, Madonna, Mexico, V&A, Victoria and Albert Museum
In her lifetime, Frida Kahlo was little-known outside Mexico. Her reputation abroad could be summarised by this derisive headline from a newspaper article, published during her first trip to the USA in 1933: ‘Wife of the Master Mural Painter Gleefully Dabbles in Works of Art.’ Neither was she commercially successful, though her work was feted by prominent European aesthetes like André Breton. In her home country, however, she was a cultural icon, leading the charge for a modern, independent Mexico.
For Jeanne, An End … And a Beginning
03 Wednesday Oct 2018
Posted in Anniversaries, Books, Film, Jeanne Eagels, Non-Fiction, Theatre, Updates
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As autumn leaves began to fall in the New York of 1929, Jeanne Eagels was recovering at home after eye surgery and seeking treatment from her physician at his Park Avenue hospital for a ‘nervous disorder’. After seeing him on October 3, she decided that an evening out might lift her spirits. She slipped into an evening gown complemented by several strands of pearls, and finally put on a fur coat to warm herself in the chilly night air.
However, her condition quickly worsened. A little before 7 pm, she left with her maid, and was driven some 60 blocks to Park Avenue, where her doctor was called from his downstairs residence, and she was escorted into a 5th floor examination room by a nurse. Jeanne removed her coat and was sitting on the bed when she suddenly went into convulsions. The nurse ran into the hall calling for the doctor’s assistant, but by the time they returned, it was too late.
Jeanne Eagels was dead at thirty-nine.
Exactly 89 years later, I am proud to announce that a revised and updated edition of Jeanne Eagels: A Life Revealed, the 2015 biography co-authored by myself and Eric M. Woodard, will shortly be published by Bearmanor Media. We retrace the life and career of the woman who rose from the streets of Kansas City to become a Broadway sensation, and lit up the silver screen: with new material on her loving, if troubled family background; her acting triumphs, including Rain and The Letter; her ill-starred marriage to athlete Ted Coy, and much more.
“Jeanne Eagels: A Life Revealed offers a startling look at the actress and her times … packed with detail and drama, and does bring Jeanne Eagels into 21st century focus as an ambitious, driven woman who often fought the system, but could not defeat her own demons.” – Liz Smith, New York Social Diary
“Their research, to this reader, sparkles and shines . . . the kind of meat one likes with this rich meal of a book.” – Stephen Michael Shearer, author of Gloria Swanson: The Ultimate Star
“What you are about to read is nothing short of remarkable.” – Michelle Morgan, author of The Ice Cream Blonde and Carole Lombard: Twentieth Century Star
Murder Orthodoxies: Sex, Lies and Marilyn
29 Wednesday Aug 2018
Posted in Books, History, Marilyn Monroe, Non-Fiction
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The tragic death of Marilyn Monroe in 1962 shocked the world, and over fifty years later, the rumours are still coming. In a new book, Murder Orthodoxies: A Non-Conspiracist’s View of Marilyn Monroe’s Death, author Donald McGovern unpicks the myths and searches for the truth. You can read my review at Immortal Marilyn.
‘You May Be My Lucky Star…’
16 Thursday Aug 2018
Posted in Anniversaries, Fashion and Beauty, Film, Madonna, Music
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Beautiful Stranger, Catholicism, Confessions on a Dancefloor, Desperately Seeking Susan, Evita, Ghosttown, Into the Groove, Jump, Like A Prayer, Live Aid, Live to Tell, Living for Love, Lucky Star, Madonna, Marilyn Monroe, Marvin Gaye, Material Girl, Ray of Light, Secret, Smash Hits, Wembley, Who's That Girl, William Orbit
From the age of eleven, my Saturdays would often include a trip to the record department at Boots to buy a 7-inch single. One of these was ‘Lucky Star’ by Madonna. Along with ‘Holiday’, it was one of her earliest songs played on the radio. Each weekend I stopped to gaze at her gorgeous album cover, but my savings rarely stretched to LPs. When I finally bought it, it had a different cover and my best friend (who wasn’t a fan) borrowed and never returned it. Continue reading
Emily Brontë at 200
30 Monday Jul 2018
Posted in Anniversaries, Books, Fiction, History, Poetry
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#Bronte200, Andrea Arnold, Anne Brontë, Brontë Parsonage, Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, Haworth, Kate Bush, Kathryn Hughes, Lily Cole, Making Thunder Roar, Muriel Spark, Poetry, Stella Vine, To Walk Invisible, Victorian Literature, Virginia Woolf, Wuthering Heights, Yorkshire
Last weekend, the historian and literary biographer Kathryn Hughes wrote for The Guardian about ‘The Strange Cult of Emily Brontë and the “Hot Mess” of Wuthering Heights,’ arguing that the middle Brontë sister was “no romantic child of nature but a pragmatic, self-interested Tory,” and that her only novel (which Hughes read as a teenager and struggled to finish) was a “screeching melodrama.” Published on the eve of Emily’s bicentenary, this clickbait sensation was only the latest in a long line of outraged and baffled responses to the writer and her work. Whereas her sisters Charlotte and Anne have been embraced by feminists, Emily – about whom little is known – remains something of an outcast. Continue reading
Happy Birthday, ‘Lust for Life’
21 Saturday Jul 2018
Posted in Lana Del Rey, Music
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A$AP Rocky, Adidas, Andrew Lloyd-Webber, BØRNS, Carnival of Souls, Chuck Grant, Clark Jackson, Coachella, Eðvarð Egilsson, Father John Misty, G-Eazy, Get Free, God Bless America, Gucci, Hedy Lamarr, Jonathan Wilson, LA To The Moon, Lana Del Rey, Love, Lust for Life, Our Lady Of Sorrows, Rich Lee, Rick Nowels, Sean Lennon, Stevie Nicks, Summer Bummer, The Weeknd, White Mustang, You Must Love Me
A year after its release, here’s my in-depth review of Lana Del Rey’s Lust For Life… Continue reading
There’s No Business Like Show Business
08 Friday Jun 2018
Posted in Fashion and Beauty, Film, Marilyn Monroe, Music
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A Man Chases a Girl (Until She Catches Him), After You Get What You Want (You Don't Want It), Brighton, Cinemascope, Dan Dailey, Donald O'Connor, Duke of York's Brighton, Ethel Merman, Heat Wave, Irving Berlin, Jacqueline Rose, Joe DiMaggio, Johnnie Ray, Lazy, Marilyn Monroe, Mitzi Gaynor, Picturehouse, Susan Strasberg, The Seven Year Itch, There's No Business Like Show Business, Travilla, Twentieth Century Fox, Walter Lang, You'd Be Surprised
On June 1st – exactly ninety-two years after Norma Jeane Mortenson was born in the charity ward of Los Angeles General Hospital – her 1954 movie, There’s No Business Like Show Business, was screened at the Duke of York’s Cinema in Brighton, and will be shown at selected Picturehouse venues throughout June. The first musical made in CinemaScope (a pioneering widescreen technology developed by Twentieth Century Fox to combat the threat of television), it was also one of the last Technicolour musicals made under the studio system model of Hollywood’s golden age. Continue reading
Marilyn: An Unlikely Feminist
01 Friday Jun 2018
Posted in Books, Film, Marilyn Monroe, Non-Fiction
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In the wake of last fall’s revelations about sexual harassment in Hollywood, some were quick to point out that this was not a new phenomenon. Actress Joan Collins claimed that Marilyn Monroe had warned her about the ‘wolves’ who preyed on young starlets. Mira Sorvino and Ashley Judd, who played dual roles in a TV movie about the legendary star, revealed that they were later blackballed for resisting unwanted advances. And a producer on the 2011 biopic, My Week With Marilyn, recalled how disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein loitered on the set while Michelle Williams filmed a nude swimming scene.
Just as Monroe’s glamorous image has come to symbolise Hollywood’s golden age, she has also been linked to its darker side in a way that risks over-simplification. For not only was she one of the first to speak out about sexual abuse, she also battled for equal rights and fair pay, which women are still fighting today in Tinseltown and beyond. Michelle Morgan, author of Marilyn Monroe: Private and Undisclosed, paints a fuller picture in her new book, The Girl: Marilyn Monroe, The Seven Year Itch and the Birth of an Unlikely Feminist. Continue reading
