"I don't know why I want to write you
now."-- Robert Thomas, translating heritage.
Anyone who remembers the golden age of Eisenhower matinee as an adult is dead, thus this is a qualification to the inexplicable mystery of why men found Lana Turner a worthwhile trophy hard on. It is baffling. Marilyn Monroe is self-explanatory, like her latter day counterpart, Goldie Hawn, who may have upgraded the motif, but followed in its tradition with sterling lack of deviation. Grace Kelly was upper echelon. Doris Day was barefoot and pregnant, the girl scout type. But Lana Turner? Golden heart ho?
Loretta Young wasn't marketed to men. On the contrary, her capital as a Hollywood diva was her appeal to my mother. The nuclear family tensions beneath the surface, the cover up of the crime worse than the crime itself. Despite obstacles, if you do not violate the theatrical laws of time and scene your sacrifice shall be duly noted, rewarded in the end. The model has been deconstructed a thousand times over in feminist literary theory. I am not interested in defending it so much as interested in the anxiety which threatens Young's constraint through the course of her career, caught in a high wire act between obedience, independence within her own movement, sacrifice to the pressures of the patriarchy with the implicit acknowledgment that she will be granted a degree of autonomy if she behaves, a more talented and palatable Joan Crawford. Crawford was often histrionic because she scared the living shit out of you, and probably saved a few men the trouble of a vasectomy. Loretta was a more honeyed variation, not immune to the sensibility of threat.
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