Selected Product:
| The Girls: Sappho Goes to Hollywood
Paperback
Edition: 1st
Author: Diana McLellan
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Release Date: 2001-09-19
ISBN-10: 0312283202
ISBN-13: 9780312283209
List Price: $17.95
Average Customer Rating:
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ISBN-13: 9780140171228
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Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com
Diana McLellan reveals the complex and intimate connections that roiled behind the public personae of Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Tallulah Bankhead, and the women who loved them. Private correspondence, long-secret FBI files, and troves of unpublished documents reveal a chain of lesbian affairs that moved from the theater world of New York, through the heights of chic society, to embed itself in the power structure of the movie business. The Girls serves up a rich stew of film, politics, sexuality, psychology, and stardom.
fantasy
| Customer Rating: | | Nearly all of Dianne McLellan's accounts of Greta Garbo's lesbian liaisons are unreliable,and therefore fail to titillate. Otherwise this book is well written, entertaining and informative. |
McLellan's tone makes the book
| Customer Rating: | Homosexual activity in Old Hollywood was wrapped in such a thick shroud of secrecy, it's doubtful there will ever be a "definitive" book on the subject. The reviewers who criticize this book as being too speculative miss the point that, with so little provable fact to work with, any book on the subject winds up being speculative. (Even interviewing surviving family and friends doesn't guarantee the researcher will avoid opinions, lies and personal agendas.)
Since there are so many holes chroniclers must fill in, the books end up being more of a Rorschach test of the authors than an objective presentation of the history. (And in reading the reviews here, I'd hazard the opinion that it becomes a Rorschach of the READERS, too!)
Here's my personal Rorschach:
I couldn't disagree more with the comment that McLellan's tone was off-putting. Her tone was precisely what I liked best about this---yes---speculative romp. (The term "my girls" is patronizing? Funny, I felt the author's distinctive *affection* for her subjects with that phrase.)
I have read far too many Old Hollywood biographies written by disapproving authors. In these books, lesbianism was presented as a seedy, shamefaced, sideline activity which resulted from either inebriation or narcissistic hedonism.
However, McLellan dares to create a tone of celebration when talking of her subjects and their attraction to each other. Yes, these women were catty and manipulative and their affairs were short-lived and often shallow. However, throughout the book, McLellan creates the feeling that these women were capable of genuinely loving life and each other between melodramas. Wow. Women-loving-women being portrayed as actually being FUN? How radical is that? (wink)
Take the book with a grain of salt, (like all other books on the subject, even William J. Mann,) but enjoy the fact that women-loving-women in Old Hollywood DID exist and that some of it was actually a celebration.
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Herta von Walther was in Joyless Street, not Dietrich
| Customer Rating: | `"I'm of course aware that some believe that Herta von Walther played the Dietrich role in the Garbo film Die freudlose Gasse, "The Joyless Street",' so writes Diana McLellan.
Despite the author's claim that Marlene was in Pabst 's "The Joyless Street," there is absolutely no evidence that any actress other than Herta von Walther played the part of the woman in the butcher line.
McLellan certainly has no proof that Marlene played the part. Therefore any thing she says about her in that role is opinionated speculations.
There is, however, much evidence that Herta von Walther was in that role.
Marlene and Herta did appear together in one film in 1923, Tragödie der Liebe.
There is no evidence that Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich ever appeared in any films together.
The fact is that Herta made four films with the director of The Joyless street between the years 1925 and 1928. The four are Joyless Street, Secrets of a Soul, Love of Jeanne Ney, Abwege.
There is no record of director Georg Wilhelm Pabst having ever made any films with Marlene Dietrich. |
Too much conjecture
| Customer Rating: | | Interesting book, a quick read, and an interesting perspective about the evil influence of Salka Viertel on the career of Greta Garbo. Ironic that the only friend she ever trusted ruined her career (Salka Viertel). I did not like Greta Garbo's treatment of her loyal friend/lover Mercedes. Greta Garbo is depicted as a young woman who developed some strange coping mechanisms in order to survive in Hollywood. Some things that the author wrote about seem fictional or conjecture, for example, Greta stripped down to nothing in front of Georges Schlee for a fitting by his designer wife. How could the writer know such things unless she interviewed Mr or Mrs. Schlee themselves? |
Fun, But Too Many Flaws
| Customer Rating: | | Sure, I had fun reading this book. But the Amazon reviewer who termed it "highly speculative" is understating the case. Opinion, conjecture, hearsay, and speculation too often take the place of thorough, solid documentation. And unlike many other Amazon reviewers, I found McLellan's tone off-putting. She alternates between patronizing her subjects (the very notion of calling them "my girls," for instance) and setting them up primarily as sources of voyeuristic thrills for the herself and the reader. Is the book dishy and intriguing and flamboyant? You bet. But is the topic of lesbianism in Hollywood well-served here? I don't think so. |
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