Coolest Couples #2: Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor

When a towering drunken genius collides with love, sometimes it's like a human torch marrying into a wet fireman's blanket. Other times it's a human torch colliding with another of equal heat, two towers of drunken balls-out badassitude that burn each other out like two candles lit on both ends, laid across so they burn waxy holes in each other's mid-sections at the same time. That was the case with Liz Taylor and Richard Burton.

Of course their life together is legend; they met on the set of CLEOPATRA (1963), their torches burning up enough money to practically bankrupt 20th Century Fox in the process (Fox had to sell off half the studio to pay for overtime).

A part of their success stems no doubt from a shared love of liquor, and this is also perhaps their demise. Booze made Liz bloated and Dick droopy-eyed, but it also made them burn twice as brightly when they were burning, as they did in films like WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF, TAMING OF THE SHREW, a chunk of SANDPIPER. When they were fire blanketing each other out--as in BOOM!, THE VIPS and THE COMEDIANS--they were still sporadically worth watching. Somehow the more weary and hung-over they appeared, the more adult they became, sometimes stiflingly so. You can imagine watching THE COMEDIANS with your parents on TV as a kid and being bored into a coma, but if you're old enough, you can at least count the drinks and enjoy as Liz wafts in and out of her German accent.

 A book is coming out next week that incorporates a vast trove of love letters between the two stars, and paints a sometimes ugly, sometimes beautiful portrait of their relationship. Furious Love: Elizabeth Taylor And Richard Burton And The Marriage Of The Century by Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger (order it here). An abridged excerpt:

On July 9, Elizabeth flew to San Felipe, arriving while Burton was still shooting. She spent the afternoon with him on the set and later they returned to his hotel to make love.
All their old sexual fire came back, despite her recent surgery, the energy-sapping 115-degree heat and the fact that he had now gone 140 days without drinking. Her presence and her body lifted his Welsh gloom, and it was as if they had just met. The two of them devoured each other.

The following week, Elizabeth returned to Los Angeles and Richard pined for her all over again. She informed him she had lost one of her tooth caps and he wrote to commiserate, closing his letter with 'all my love. Never think of anything but you for very long. I fancy you a very lot, Shebes.  -  Rich'.

While still in San Felipe, Richard accepted a part in a low-budget thriller, Villain, to be filmed in London. Elizabeth, too, had received a film offer for Zee And Co.  -  an adaptation of Edna O'Brien's novel about a sexual triangle, to be made in London at the same time. 

Richard urged her to accept it.

'Dear Long-wayaway-one,' he wrote, 'Very antisocial I am when I don't booze. And no fun when you're not around... I hope that girl's teeth are not hurting too much... are you going to do the film?

She accepted the role and they decided that, rather than fly, they would take the train from Los Angeles to New York, before boarding the QE2 for England. The train trip gave them a rare chance to be alone together for the first time in over a year.

They made love and Elizabeth giggled at what she called Richard's 'new technique,' which he insisted was simply the movement of the train swaying and rocking as it rolled down the track.
But the seeds of destruction were also planted on that train  -  for the first time in four months, Richard had a drink.

'Forgot the momentous news,' he confessed in his diary on August 2. 'I had a Jack Daniel's and soda and two glasses of Napa Valley red wine last night with dinner. Felt immensely daring and all it did was make me feel very sleepy.'

A few days later, he polished off a bottle of Burgundy and by the time they crossed the Atlantic to England and reclaimed their yacht Kalizma, Burton had slid completely off the wagon.

Elizabeth's co-star in Zee And Co. was Michael Caine, who was nervous about meeting 'a living legend' for the first time, and equally nervous about meeting Richard Burton. He had been warned that Burton's presence on the set was his way of keeping an eye on Michael, considered to be a ladies' man  -  a real-life Alfie  -  at the time.

But the truth was that Burton, drinking heavily, usually spent the afternoons sleeping on the couch in Elizabeth's dressing room. And sometimes, the tremor in his hands was so bad that, afraid of embarrassing his wife, he stayed away.

If Elizabeth was alarmed at Richard's tremors she didn't show it. Neither of them as yet considered Richard to be an 'alcoholic'. Besides, she, too, continued to drink heavily. They each needed the crutch of alcohol. The difference was that she drank to free her emotions, while he drank to numb his. (Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor: The Love Letters. How drinking cocooned them from pressure of fame. Without it, they couldn't even make love)

Man, I sure can feel that pain. Booze, like Xanax, pot, or coke, gives you the world and promises more, then takes the senses away with which you would perceive that world, and instead of more offers less and less until life's just waking, baking and taking naps. While it's sharpening your wit it's dulling your speech so that poetry comes out slurs and vice versa. But who the fuck caresh? Booze and drugs make you cooler. Period. Anything that kills you makes you cool first. So long as you don't vomit on anyone or make your mom sad by dying. At least at the time their drinking was more celebrated than openly demonized. Imagine Dick in Celebrity Rehab, or wearing one of those SCRAM ankle bracelets like Lindsay Lohan, and you realize just how lame this decade really is.

And this is not to mention their casual openness with regard to sex. Burton once cut short a poolside afternoon interview, saying "excuse me gentlemen, I have to go make love to my wife." And that's a catch phrase and a half, enough to remind a million marrieds what they got into this mess for anyway. Again such frankness was common in the more enlightened age of the 60s-70s, and Dick and Liz probably did a lot to help make it so. You couldn't get all prim and judgemental like a salacious church lady over their lifestyle, they'd lay you flat with great acting in tones so mellifluous everything they said seemed true and right. A few years ago I reviewed the Burton and Taylor boxed set, and wrote of THE SANDPIPER:

Piper doesn't even have to be good when the chemistry between this pair is in full flow the way it wasn't in The VIPs and The Comedians. There's a great scene where the two are gazing into each other's eyes, emoting and talking, and the wounded sandpiper that Liz saved earlier in the film comes flying in for a landing right on Liz's head! She doesn't even flinch; she just keeps staring into Dick's eyes, and for his part, even with that sandpiper there he doesn't freak out, just stays in the scene, fixed on her gaze like a hypnotist. Then after they kiss, she reaches up and cups the bird in her hand without even looking at it, and then lets it loose, saying, "Fly away, baby, in that husky afterthought style of hers, as she waved it off into the air.  Was this something they shot twenty takes of, just to get that damned bird to land on her head, or was it just a lucky accident that the pro thesps seized on? I spent the whole rest of the film just admiring the perfect nonchalant stillness with which these two lovers acted out their scene with this bird standing in Liz's wild hair. Then, when she later chases her old sugar daddy-cum-rapist out of the house with a hatchet, my heart was sealed... like a crypt. (Snap went the Dragon 12/08)

on THE VIPS (1960):

A couple as coolly debauched as Dick and Liz could probably not exist in the films today anyway. The power-suit and baseball cap-wearing "industry" people would probably have a hard time getting either actor to agree to product positioning and not smoking. Plus, these days it's tough getting insurance for any film starring notorious drunks, and audiences are far less indulgent and quicker to forget; there's no long-term loyalty. Liz and Dick made apparently dozens of Giglis and people dutifully came, ditto Martin and Lewis. Now those kind of loyal fans are gone and so are the boozy couples. The equivalent to the Dick and Liz pair bond today would probably be Courtney Love and Nick Nolte, if they were a couple, and maybe they should be. (The Case of the Mysterious Disappearing Accent, 12/08)

Times have changed since I wrote the above, now of course there seems to be just Lindsay... is she all alone out there? Won't some soused actor or actress come and help that lady off her feet? Til then, the first couple of drunken gravitas-pulled thesping will always be Taylor and Burton, and if they only made a few good films together and maybe if they were soberer they could have done it better, I'd say the fault is ours. When artists go that far out on a limb for us the way Dick and Liz did, we owe them something more than enough money to choke a diamond horse, we owe them material cracked enough to be worthy of their lustre, and it just wasn't there and still isn't (aside from WOOLF, a film that still startles and makes us reel from its besotted brilliance). Since there was no other material, they made art of themselves, and if their paint hardened and their livers swole like rivers, well, that's show biz. Dick would die and Liz would go on to help make rehab centers ubiquitous in our culture. But hey, for awhile they blazed, they raged, and they showed drunken America how to burn itself up like there wasn't a wet fireman's blanket in 100 miles.

Coolest Couples #4: Burt Reynolds and Dinah Shore

Couples are, let's face it, rarely cool.  Am I right? Come on, ladies, raise your hands. Even if the two of you are cool to begin with, and promise yourselves not to make all the same mistakes and become your own father or mother, things can quickly turn uncool. You must be firm as Cialis and yet supple as a cedar riding crop otherwise you will surely weaken and crack under the lashing magnetic polarity of the other. So the couples stay at home more, raise each other's kids, and, the next time we see them, they've gone cheerful on us.

But when a couple really clicks in the right way--as two cool people making each other cooler--then they're more than the sum of their parts; they shine forth and make the world a better place. Acidemic is proud to present a new series "Coolest Couples" - focusing on the few awesome Hollywood matches. We'll start with one of my very favorites, from my childhood:

He was the 1970s embodied: an archetype of mustached, swaggering, Trans-Am driving, curse word-using, raunchy good old boy with a heroic heart when push comes to shove. She was an afternoon TV show host, former radio star and sweet-natured blonde singer from the 1950s-60s. Two less likely candidates for a genuine bona fide no-nonsense "til the wheels come off" love affair you'd never find, but don't doubt their love wasn't real and heartfelt. Read this from PEOPLE magazine:

Burt Reynolds is the star you hate to love. Artistically, he is the male Raquel Welch. His only innovative breakthrough has been as Cosmo's first centerfold, stripped to his hairpiece. His lifestyle and costuming are studiously vulgar. When a visitor is startled to silence by the overpowering tastelessness of his Sunset Strip pad, Burt agrees cheerily, "It looks like a bullfighter threw up in here, doesn't it?"

That sense of self-parody makes the rest of Reynolds' macho malarky bearable, if not ingratiating. And he does have a certain redeeming social value. Stardom, for example, never interrupted his friendship with the old Southern buddies he keeps casting in his TV shows and pictures. He just staged a fund-raising benefit and personally kicked in $50,000 to alma mater Florida State U. (where he dropped out in his sophomore year). He has set up his parents in his lush 180-acre Florida ranch that once belonged to Al Capone. He is on best of terms with his ex-wife, Judy (Laugh-In) Carne. And finally, Burt is, in his fashion, affectingly loyal to his new old lady—19 years older—Dinah Shore. (People 10/28/74)

 I've been looking all over youtube for the footage of their graceful reunion on the Dinah Shore Show a few years after they'd split up. I remember seeing it on TV with my mom one afternoon after school and being moved by the sincerity with which Burt--the alleged womanizing macho brawler--professed not only love and loyalty but admiration, trust, and everlasting friendship to this woman who then and now looked a lot like my mom. Both Burt and Dinah are professional enough that they don't actually cry on the show, they just talk openly, hesitantly but proudly, and hold hands, and it's so intimate and nice and slightly tacky in the 70s tradition, right there on live television, with other guests gathered around on both sides of them, that it's one of the truest moments ever I witnessed. Even then, as a child, from the TV distance, I felt connected to their love and its loss, concerned for all the strikes against them: their age and differing fan bases, the fickleness of changing styles and how relentlessly each had to adapt to keep their finger on the pulse public, and seeing them pull it off with such grace my faith in love as a uniting force in a fractured world was renewed. After it was over, I resumed trying to throw myself downstairs to get out of soccer practice with renewed vigor.

Let me just close with this bit of an interview Reynolds did with Larry King in 2000 on CNN. With his usual direct poetic-realist elegance, Reynolds sums up a beautiful and courageous women with a few touching, but unsentimental words:

KING: Then "Deliverance" of course made you, right?

REYNOLDS: "Deliverance" changed -- totally changed my life. And I met a person, a woman, a love, friend that -- who is crazy for you, and I know you were -- Dinah.
KING: You met her during the filming of that? Or...
REYNOLDS: Right after that. And she was such an inspiration in terms of making me believe that this sheriff's son could understand that -- about art and maybe do some art and maybe understood a little bit about me, introduced me to Chet Baker and jazz and Chagall.

KING: (...)The thing with Dinah Shore, was it -- was that -- you know, people would read about the age difference. Was that love from the start? Was that romance?
REYNOLDS: Yes.
KING: It was?
REYNOLDS: But I swear to you, I never -- and I don't right now, if I was under oath. I never knew her age, never cared about that. It never entered my mind. She was just this extraordinary person. And you know, you'd say, "Well, what about Hitler?" And she'd say, you know, "very good house painter." I mean, she had nothing unkind to say about anybody. I mean, you -- and I'm sure there were rough, rough times for her. I never heard about them. All I heard about was -- there was an interesting story. You may know this story. But it's a great story about when she kissed Nat King Cole on "The Show of Shows."
KING: Never been done.
REYNOLDS: Never been done.

KING: Black and white kissing on television.
REYNOLDS: African-American never white person kissing: 28 affiliate stations in the South dropped her show. And they said, well, what are you going to do? And she said: "Well, next week I'll just (UNINTELLIGIBLE). And the following week I'll kiss Sidney Poitier." And then the following week -- and she did! And you know what? They all came back. That was her way of doing it. And it was right for her and it worked.
KING: Why didn't you get married?
REYNOLDS: I wanted to marry her; I really did. That was her.
KING: And she didn't want to?
REYNOLDS: No, I think she kind of thought that, and rightly so, that I hadn't, you know, done all the crazy things that I was about to do in my life.
KING: Sowed all of your oats?
REYNOLDS: Yes, I suppose that's the saying we would say. I don't know how they would express that in -- yes, I hadn't -- I hadn't sowed them. I hadn't even found them. But I did.
KING: Do you think she was right?
REYNOLDS: I suppose. I suppose she was.
KING: Were you close at the end of her life?
REYNOLDS: Yes, very, very.
KING: Did you know she was ill?
REYNOLDS: Yes, yes. She didn't -- not because she said anything, but she asked me to come over, and when I saw her, I knew something was very wrong. Never talked about it, never discussed it. We just talked about a million laughs that we had.
KING: How did you find out she died?
REYNOLDS: I think I got a phone call -- I know I got a phone call from someone, and I just -- it just put me right on my knees, still does. I mean, I think of her all the time, in terms of truly a great friend. I could talk to her about anything...

 

 (read the rest of the interview here)

See, that's the thing. We can see dim shades of it in Demi Moore and Ashton, but with them it's far more about, or seems about, two insecure narcissists desperate to connect. Ashton now and Burt in 1974 have a certain immature rawness in common where you could understand an older woman going for it, because she knows she has something worthwhile to give them back, more than money or maternal support, a kind of medium heat that will harden and shape that raw material into something. But there's no comparison beyond that because unlike Ashton, Burt was/is a real man. And here on Larry King he's being more emotional than Shore was on her show, and that's why it's so brave, why it brings me almost to my knees to read that interview above, incoherent as Burt may be, because it reminds me there's something missing, something our 21st century man has yet to find. Male sensitivity now is inescapable, so it's become worthless. Once it was the gentle cracking of a hard macho shell due to a bursting heart full of a love beyond mere sentiment and gushing mawkery. Today sensitivity comes wrapped not in macho hardness butt passive-aggressive snickering boy nonsense or high-voiced ectomorphic pretentiousness. Dinah would bitch slap the lot of them, while Burt cracked up in the background, and because she's not here to do it, we all mourn.

Moments of Manly Godliness

Every once in awhile we all get "on" and our A-game shines forth like a beacon unto the galaxy, but how many times is this actually captured on film for all to see, for all time? Sure there was young Brando, and James Dean, and Jackie Chan, Buster Keaton, but what about, like, physical prowess, commanding aura, superhuman speed and skill all in one package? When it merges both the focused intense auric brilliance of prime performers like Streetcar Brando with Drunken Master agility and Richard Burton gravitas? Let's take a look at these top five film documents of men rocking it, rollin' it, or punchin' it down.

Elvis Presley in ELVIS: THAT'S THE WAY IT IS (1970) 

No one in Las Vegas could have anticipated the glory of Elvis' big comeback tour in 1969. We see a silver fox Cary Grant in the audience, smoking a cigarette and flanked by two beehive hairdo Vegas beauty queens, now what else do you need to know? Sure, the King's monkeying around and struggling to keep a straight face through even his ballads, but just to look at him onstage in that glorious, 70s-heralding stuntsuit, is to see masculinity at its most ferociously loving and beautiful. When he busts out a standard like "Mustang Sally," he warps time itself, like Neo at the end of the Matrix. It's brought tears to me eyes and made me sigh like an orphan looking for a pappy... all is life... and has suddenly found one.

2. Muhammad Ali in WHEN WE WERE KINGS (1996) - (Rumble in the Jungle, 1974)

Poor George Foreman. He was a perfectly nice guy and yet the big celebration of African-African American unity in 'the jungle' paraded around him in a wide berth; he was their straw dog and everyone forgot maybe he was also just a guy who never hurt no one, aside from in the ring. But that aside, it's glorious - Ali coasts into Africa like a living God, and then backs that up by performing one of the most poetic bouts in boxing history.  For round after round, Muhammad hangs back and just absorbs Foreman's punishment. Then, George all punched out, Ali bursts forth like a lion and pounds him down with the strength of the entire African nation, and yet, somehow, also with love, and Ali knows that if no one else. George is just another boxer, after all, just doing his thing, and look who got the golden grill!!

3. Bruce Lee: ENTER THE DRAGON (1973)

Every kid in the 1970s knew Bruce Lee was, but we never could see his actual films, unless they came on afternoon TV on "Chop Socky Theater" dubbed and panned and scanned so badly half the time you just see one guy's one eyebrow. By the time it's the late 1980s and you finally get to rent ENTER THE DRAGON, you've basically forgotten all about poor Bruce Lee. But once we get down to his big basement fight around pots of boiling heroin and imprisoned old men in black pajamas, a whole rift in time is opened up and we're back to being wide-eyed, turned-on-by-life 70s godlings instead of worn-down pouffy-haired John Hughes chick-chasing lowlifes.

The most classic scenes involve middle range shots that keeps Bruce in the center of the screen, his eyes unfocused so as to see everywhere at once, looking downwards at the floor in fact, his head cocked, relaxed but puzzled, as if he's trying to remember the line of some old song while waiting for a train, his feet shuffling back and forth like he's doing an admiring parody-homage of Muhammad Ali, or in close-up, bugging his eyes and holding very still, then snapping someone's neck with a loud crunch offscreen.  Sure purists sing the praises of the CHINESE CONNECTION over ENTER THE DRAGON, and sure Jet Li and Jackie Chan both may have out-kicked Lee in later films, but it's DRAGON that has the universal appeal. Even if the script borrows heavy from James Bond and Ten Little Maidens, the music is awesome 70s copshow funk and the hero's not afraid to snap every neck in sight.

4. Keith Moon / The Who : "A Quick One (While He's Away)"  Rock and Roll Circus (1968)

Poor the Rolling Stones. I also know what it's like (it's exhausting!) to be throwing the party your band is playing at, as happened with Mick, Keith and Company at the shooting of the 1968 TV Special, The Rolling Stones' Rock and Roll Circus. At best you bring your B game since you're always half-focused on the cup emergency, the lack of ice, the broken keg pump, the a**-hole townie and frat boy gate crashers and the cops responding to neighbor noise complaints. It's fine to play your B game when all that shit's going on, but if some band you invited to open for you brings their A-Game, well well... well. You end up mayb like the Stones and dot even releasing this hour long TV show for a few decades, and most rock fans believe it's because the Stones were just so ashamed--not that they played particularly badly, but they were just so outgunned. The Who were just those guns!

I've also seen how being in a band among bands makes you very insecure and that can bring out either your best or your worst in a performance, depending on how drunk you were the previous evening;  I've been around, is what I'm getting at, and I can assure you there's no finer rock moment in the history of the universe than this performance of "A Quick One While He's Away."  I've never been much of a Who fan. But I'm a huge gushing fan of this, and especially the madman dervish insanity of Keith Moon. Not only is "A Quick One" a great mini-opera all in itself, it's also about forgiveness, a soft spot.

5. Tom Cruise as Les Grossman: MTV Music Awards 2010 / Tropic Thunder

I don't know much about theater, but I have worn big padded clothing and had to dance around on a hot stage under blazing spot lights, so I know what it is to sweat like a withdrawal-stricken junkie (for that and other reasons too). So when I saw Tom Cruise in a huge fat suit hadn't even broken a sweat after an amazing, hilarious dance session with Jennifer Lopez (who came in halfway through the song and was still sweating, even wearing next to nothing, by the end) then I knew I could finally finish this entry, as I'd been waiting for quite a few years.

Presumably a loose caricature of the late, hairy-chested producer Don Simpson--who helped launch Tom Cruise's career with TOP GUN--Grossman is the first truly Lacan-Lynchian example of grotesque over-enjoyment to make it to the MTV, and much Lacanian Ink could be spilled over the rich eloquence of Grossman's connection to such other anal fathers as: BLUE VELVET's Frank; STAR WARS' Jabba the Hut, and APOCALPYSE NOW's Colonel Kurz. Add them together and Cruise is Don Rickles and William Demarest welded to Sammo Hung and the cocaine-enhanced militarism of John Milius. Can you handle it?

A good performance shows the terrifying green headed fury of Oz and the gentle merry charlatan behind the curtain, simultaneously. Is this not the purpose of Brecht, Godard and bad horror movies, to express our deepest anxieties in such a form as we can laugh at them and realize death is not the end. If theater be at all a model of the cosmos, don't all severed soldiers once the day's dying's done return, corpse-like at first, then as a butterfly, until mom calls them in for dinner or the show gets canceled? Cruise as Grossman is the butterfly-chrysalis that Charlize Theron and Aileen Wuronos conceived in MONSTER and the 2003 Academy Awards, rolled and unrolled until a seamless J. In the words of D. Boon: "Our band could be his songs / I'm his soldier child."

Blades in the Apple: LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR, The Village People, SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER & WINDOWS (When the Rainbow is Enuff)

It's easy to come across a "torn from today's swinging singles nightmare" headline movie like LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR (1977) or CRUISING (1980) and think they're just exploitation fearmongering "scare" films that just kind of appeared at the side of 70s mainstream cinema road like mutant babies left to die (as IT'S ALIVE, PROPHECY and THE MANITOU), but you'd be wrong. Dead wrong. And those of us who vaguely remember the thrilling danger of local drive-in movie and newspaper ads in the 1970s have a wide-eyed respect for the potent sexual menace of pre-GIULIANI Manhattan - it was scarier than Dracula, Frankenstein and the Wolfman combined, and sexier than Barbarella with doll-bitten stockings.

From the safety of drunken wife-swap American suburbia, the weird mix of leather, queerness, and something called "a singles bar" seemed to be a provocation, almost a challenge. The sex in the suburbs was 'safe' but the "city" brand was cinematic. 70's Manhattan was a nightmare, a tourist freak show that was fine to pass by and gawk at but you just didn't want to dive right in and actually rescue a teenage prostitute or get mugged. Just as now tourists come to go to gawk at vast displays of WB and Disney goods, in the 1970's tourists would go to gawk at X-rated marquees and a street theater ballet melange of strutting pimps, jittery winos, wobbly hookers, and shifty-eyed junkies. As we got older, the idea was to sneak up there and find Plato's Retreat, a club where apparently everyone walked around naked and had sex in the open. My mom even helped us look for it, that will give you an idea of the weird sexual permissiveness of the era. By the time we were even older and actively looking for the "sleazy theater experience" ( if the word grindhouse was popular then, I don't remember) it was all winding down, way down... but I still remember the grisly, soul-stunning smell of the Roxy.

I remember, too, going in to see "a Broadway show" in scary old Times Square as a kid with my family, and waiting in the big outdoor, middle-of-42nd Street Cheap Tickets line and getting permission to run off by myself and get a coke from a nearby deli, weaving my way past shocking X-ray marquees and tons of depressing urban dirt, trash, grime, and decay. I was horrified, traumatized, turned-on, and nauseated. I'd barely even ever seen black people in real life, or naked breasts, and didn't know quite what sex entailed yet, so it all had the bizarre effect of a dream.

 Letting a nine year-old kid run loose through that sort of neighborhood would be considered negligence today, but back then sleazy sex had a detached aura; we were exempt from harm by virtue of our disaffected stances. We weren't saints like kids are today, we ran loose all through the neighborhood from the age of four or five onwards.  I was plenty scared going to get that Coke, but that just heightened my senses: cigars and asphalt tar heavy in my nose; the roar of jackhammers and the groans and blaringly loud Kung Fu kicks coming from loops playing on a television in the marquis windows and an overabundance of naked female flesh and twisted title marquis swirled together and coalesced into the faded sadness of the woman's face on the pre-dirty and pre-faded Subway-style poster advertising For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuff. As I walked I ran through the crowd, it seemed like the denizens of the street began performing bizarre street scenes for my amusement, demanding only my feigned nonchalance and thinly feigned horror as payment.

Safely back in the suburbs, films like TAXI DRIVER (1976), MEAN STREETS (1973) and MIDNIGHT COWBOY (1969) provided the artsy boilerplates for not just our tourist perceptions, but a whole genre of 1970's films that used the vice-gripped city as a backdrop, from early 1980s video rentals like MS. 45 through to bigger budget mainstream grindhouse that capitalized on the 1970's suburban yen for singles bars and "aren't we glad we moved to the suburbs and had kids instead of staying single in the city" cautionary tales like DEATH WISH (1974), LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR and SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER (both 1977). All you had to do was point a camera in New York and you had a movie about grime and vice, from graffiti-covered trains to wino-drenched stoops and garbage strike mountains.

It's bizarre to think that William Friedkin was ever given a budget to make something like CRUISING (1980), as the sadomasochistic homosexual environment of the West Village couldn't possibly turn on straight America and gay America was protesting it even before it was finished. Straight sex in NYC was freaky enough to provide the suburban thrill-seeker with a lifetime of prurient gawking. Producers must have presumed the mainstream's yen for inner-city sleaze extended to queerness, but for all its medallion-on-the open chested liberalism, white middle class (straight) suburbia was still pretty provincial, and being very frank and open about your hatred and fear of gayness was how we knew you weren't gay, because there was so much loosey-goosey touchy-feely swinging going on, you needed to be clear up front, if only to yourself. And as a kid especially you were always worried gayness might strike you like a virus, constant demonstrations of manliness were required, and no one suspected those demonstrations themselves were a telltale sign.

To give you an example, none of us knew The Village People singing "Macho Man" was at all gay. We thought it was, you know, Burt Reynolds-style cowboys and Indians... for the kids. If we'd have known the truth, "Macho Man" wouldn't have been the first .45 single I ever bought, that's for sure. I would have been afraid of reprisals and dints on my manly armor. We learned instead about the 'gay agenda in our midst' via Anita Bryant, who was always on the news, ranting and raving about gays corrupting our kids' morality, until even the starchiest parents figured that if an obviously evil old broad like this (the Sarah Palin of her era) was so anti-gay, then homosexuals must be all right... wherever they were. Thanks to Bryant we were guided from hating them as straw dogs to fearing they were amongst us to siding with them against the real menace, rabidly intolerant orange juice shills

Even so, at the pre-AIDS awareness moment of Friedkin's CRUISING (1980), gays were still pretty reviled outside city limits. The only "out" celeb of the day was Elton John, and he was British and already covered in so many feathers it made tarring redundant. Lesbians were a slightly different matter: sexy as long as they weren't too butch, we were fascinated by them and by another now almost impossible to find film about homicidal queerness called WINDOWS (1980), starring Talia Shire as the victim of an obsessive dyke stalker.

WINDOWS got terrible reviews, caught gay rights flak, and everyone seems glad to have forgotten it today. Everyone, that is... but old Erich, who's still traumatized by seeing it reviewed on some local Philadelphia news show back in 1980 (they called it depressing and hateful - I was instantly thrilled).

I guess it's easy to sum up a decade as being sinful or doomed by its propensity to abuse newly found freedoms--especially in the US., where even the backlashes have backlashes--so for every starry-eyed examination of the polyester scene there's going to be three pieces of nihilistic dread-mongering like Richard Brooks' LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR (1977).

Out of circulation for a long while (presumably over music rights) there's no denying the power of a film that dares to star Diane Keaton and Tuesday Weld--two of the most brilliant comedic actresses of the era--only to proceed to throw them to the wolves with no regard for audience emotional endurance, making every single guy in their lives an unrepentant sleazy jerk, including dad and brothers-in-law, and leaving the girls no place to turn but between the sheets with any poisonous ogre who cuts them a line.

GOODBAR's best scenes involve Keaton getting off over her fear and ambivalence towards Richard Gere as a coked-up rentboy mix of ROCKY (1976) and John Travolta in SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER (1977). But for all his kinetic air-punches, Gere's character is still a stereotype of Vinnie Barbarino barbarousness. Meanwhile, Keaton's so good you want to abduct her in a white van and drive her over to a better film. But you can't, and the only glimmer of light is an in-joke scene where she picks up Richard Gere via small talk about Mario Puzo's The Godfather (which of course, Keaton co-starred in as Pacino's wife). In the light of what's to come it's an insult.

SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER  is a film that too many people--including my mom who took us to see it as children at the drive-in--thought was a dancing rags-to-self discovering class hero epic like ROCKY or BAD NEWS BEARS (1976) and instead turned out to be depressing and way-too-sleazy for children, no matter how many kids birthday parties I'd attended we were danced to the double album. It was 'the' album for years, along with Fleetwood Mac's "Rumors" and "Frampton Comes Alive."

The main drag is Travolta's posse of youthful Italian-American hoodlums hanging out under the Verrazano bridge, balling their collective whore/gang deb played achingly well by Donna Pescow, and generally fuming with working class self-loathing and thick New Yoahkka accents. I haven't seen FEVER since that night with mom at the drive-in but I remember how much I hated all the characters and shuddered in sympathetic horror at the sad sexual desperation and abuse of poor Donna Pescow... and I remember only one line "Ah, they're spics, they're greasin' up the floah." a remark made against a competing Latin dance couple. Now what does that tell you about the power of racist evil to endure in an innocent child's memory? We all grew up wanting to be DAMIEN: OMEN II (1978) or have Patty Duke for our mother in LOOK WHAT'S HAPPENED TO ROSEMARY'S BABY (1976), but we didn't want to do it in fucking Brooklyn, especially goddamned Bay Ridge! Yeeeeesh. I still hate Brooklyn, even though I'm sitting in it right now! At least it's Greenpoint, or Fort Greene, I can never tell them apart, but not because of reasons you think, playa. That's racist.

Of course by now you know I'm a sensitive soul, so please sympathize when I tell you that one lazy Sunday in the very early 1980's I caught the last 30 minutes of MR. GOODBAR by accident at a friend's house on the Movie Channel.  I was around 13 or so, and I was alone (my buddy was out mowing a lawn), I thought it was ANNIE HALL at first, which I'd never seen but heard was great (I recognized Keaton). Of course it was not the case.

I was so traumatized I couldn't even look at a Playboy for six months.

Seeing the film in full for the first time last night--some 30 years later--made me realize it's still way too shocking for my poor system. Sexual violence is something much better digested when unrealistic, as in bad, as in fake-looking.  Little winks of Brechtian narrative disruption do much to relieve anxiety in the viewer, or at least me, but when full-on Hollywood muscle is applied to giving you a strobe-light asphyxiation panic attack then Mr. Brooks, you should be ashamed! This nasty little ending traumatized me in 1981 and it traumatizes me now, worse than REQUIEM FOR A DREAM which used a similar eye-rape strobe technique brutalizing shock ending and left me feeling similarly in need of a Xanax, which I didn't have. Where's the cinematic Xanax for our come-down for this daring but misogynistic and undeserved ending, Mr. Brooks?  Even Buck had a Ratzo! Give Keaton a break, like a sympathetic girlfriend who isn't a knife-wielding psychotic. Why not give her a friendly, protective dog? She's a beloved saint at her school for the deaf, but the one time she fails to show up on time, all the kids instantly hate her. The minute the one good guy in her life starts to seem human enough to waken her from her nympho slumber, he starts acting as shady as Jackie Earle Haley in LITTLE CHILDREN (2006). It's like Brooks was still angry the censors wouldn't let him castrate Paul Newman at the end of SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH (1963) and he's been castrating us all by proxy ever since.

At any rate, back in the day, as I well recall, GOODBAR was on everyone's lips (adults had all read the book) as the cautionary buzzword that kept 70's singles ever alert for signs of derangement in their take-home projects, razors in their Halloween apples if you will. A 'Goodbar' was slang for a dangerous date ("watch out for the Goodbars!") that we kids didn't understand, associating it with the candy bar and wondering if it had something to do with getting in cars with strangers or accepting opened candy bars (before the Tylenol scare of 1982 for example, there were very few protective coverings on bottles). But that was the attitude of the time: safety and security took a backseat to getting your kicks and rocks off. There were no 24/7 hall monitors, no racing to pick the kids up from school rather than letting them walk home alone through the spooky park. The complete reverse of how it is now, when all our liberties are slowly stripped away and we're glad to get rid of them, tightening our security systems until we choke on boredom and claustrophobic anxiety but aren't as afraid.

Long unavailable on DVD, GOODBAR is currently on Netflix streaming and see it if you can, before they yank it down again, but just remember that this film really should have a tag like LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, or a warning like a Gaspar Noe movie, for epileptics if no one else. Just keep repeating "It's only a movie, it's only a movie," or in this case, only the first sparks of the early 1980's anti-sexual backlash hysteria. What it's not is what the ads and stills all promise (the 'danger' cautionary tale aspect perhaps forgotten by lazy critics who never saw it through to the end), a dramedy where a girl runs with a dangerous crowd in pursuit of herself, and then probably winds up with Gerard Butler or some nice Jewish boy, and her klutzy best friend cries at her wedding and winds up with a caterer.

In 1977 things were still good. The cocaine was flowing and the hospitals had yet to fill up with heart murmurs. We still had some time to sleep around and not fear the AIDS reaper. But when the change finally came, we were ready. We were exhausted. We were sorry. We  learned to be politically correct and gay-friendly at first just because we hated the haters more than the hated, and because America naturally sticks up for the underdog. Then VHS arrived and slowly emptied the adult theaters and a decade later; and later Disney cleaned up Times Square. Now we can't even dance or smoke in most NYC bars, and we can't drink outside in brown paper bags or smoke cigars in the Broadway theater lobby. But everyone's 'happy' (thanks to SSRIs and Viagra). And no matter how hard we looked--and still look--through the trash of 42nd Street, we never did, and never will, find Plato's Retreat. When I finally did stumble into that orgy I'd always wanted it was Halloween night of 2003, and before I could strip off my tie I mumbled an excuse and ran outside to smoke a cigarette, panicky, hand shaking as I lit in a way that would have made a Corleone wince, then ran home on shaky legs to call my sponsor. Vomiting B&T revelers in shitty pirate costumes splayed before me like a gauntlet. I leapt over them and ran from it all.

God help me, I ran from freedom.