Ho-hum! So what else is new?

Among the American Founding Fathers, John Hancock was said to be a smuggler in Boston; Henry Laurens, a big-time slave trader; George Washington and Ben Franklin were supposedly involved in land grabs of dubious legality. Ben was known to have been equally successful at wooing French women as well as French financiers of the American Revolution. Thomas Jefferson had a love slave − literally: Sally Hemings, a woman of mixed parentage whom he owned. James Buchanan, who was the President immediately prior to Lincoln, was allegedly in a three- decade relationship with a southern Senator and slave owner. His illustrious successor too was believed to have similar proclivities. Coming closer to the present, Dwight Eisenhower had his “pretty Irish driver”, an Englishwoman named Kay Summersby Morgan. He wanted to marry her after divorcing Mamie, according to President Harry Truman. Ike even went so far as to request the Pentagon to relieve him of his command so that he could follow his heart. He was threatened with dire consequences if he indulged his romantic inclination. It fizzled out and, despite Ike’s solemn promise to take her to Washington as his secretary; Kay got the sack after he left Europe. In short, she lost both her man and her job, poor dear. Monica Lewinsky, the White House intern in the notorious Blue Dress, was only one of Bill Clinton’s many peccadilloes, in and out of the Presidency. That JFK took frequent and brief breaks from his high-pressure job with his numerous flings, including the one with Marilyn Monroe, is an open secret too widely known and accepted as an integral part of US Presidential lore and unlikely to raise any eyebrows anymore. So why should we be scandalized by the recent revelations by Mimi Alford, now a 69-year-old grandmother and retired New York City church administrator, about her 18-month-long affair with Kennedy in 1962-63 during her White House internship at age 19? Why indeed? http://nyp.st/yKC9bn The reader reactions to an article http://bit.ly/zV3vul about a soon-to-be-published tell-all memoir of the secret life of Hollywood stars of the swinging 40s and 50s – long before AIDS and gay liberation, Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars (Grove Press) by the self-proclaimed “facilitator” Scotty Bowers is along the same lines. No big deal how people chose to live in private. Anyway, who the devil cares about a bunch of ancient has-beens? P.S.: The cover page image at Amazon.com website shows a 3-word excerpt from Gore Vidal’s comment that lends a semblance of credibility to the 88-year-0ld Bowers’ book, though. The full comment reads: “I have known Scotty Bowers for the better part of a century. I’m so pleased that he has finally decided to tell his story to the world. His startling memoir includes great figures like Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. Scotty doesn’t lie — the stars sometimes do — and he knows everybody.” http://bit.ly/ yZRZEo, http://bit.ly/xO704s

Leave her to heaven.

The world is never weary of Marilyn Monroe. The first time I saw her was in Niagara, the 1953 noir flick. She was the faithless wife planning to murder her husband, the hapless Joseph Cotton. Jean Peters, the better half of a fellow honeymooning couple unwittingly stumbled on her secret lover and got caught in the web. Marilyn was rivetting. Andy Warhol used the publicity shot from the same film as the basis for his famous Marilyn Diptych, Acrylic and silk screen ink on canvas,1962. The Tate Gallery caption to it reads inter alia: “Warhol found in Monroe a fusion of two of his consistent themes: death and the cult of celebrity. By repeating the image, he evokes her ubiquitous presence in the media. The contrast of vivid colour with black and white, and the effect of fading in the right panel are suggestive of the star’s mortality.” http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?workid=15976. Very prophetic, what? (A diptych , by the way, is a painting in two panels. http://www.tate.org.uk/collections/glossary/definition.jsp?entryId=88.) There’s another possibility as well. Maybe, Warhol’s multiple-image, multiple-colour-combo metaphor is a pointer that, even in adulation, Marilyn is no more a person but merely a mass-consumption commodity. I wonder what Warhol, as “an expert in subverting notions of celebrity” (as the Publisher’s Weekly once famously tagged him) had he access to it, would have made of the telltale still from the verboten 16 mm Marilyn Monroe film shot in the 1950s and now consigned forever to a vault by a reverent MM devotee. Would he had blown it up and once again worked his assembly line, multiple exposure magic on it? Interestingly enough, Warhol shot in his Factory with a second-hand 16 mm Bolex camera films such as Chelsea Girls, Empire and Blow Job that have since become underground classics. http://www.warholprints.com/Bio.Andy.Warhol.html. "They're experimental films; I call them that because I don't know what I'm doing. I'm interested in audience reaction to my films: my films now will be experiments, in a certain way, on testing their reactions," is how Warhol described his work in 'Nothing to Lose', his interview by G Berg in the May1967 issue of Cahiers du Cinema in English. Sam Ishii-Gonzalès, a teacher of aesthetics and film history at New York University and the Film/Media Studies Program at Hunter College, puts a different interpretation on the most famous Warholism: "In the future everybody will be world famous for fifteen minutes." http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/cteq/01/14/blow_job.html. “…for Warhol, this "everyone" are the refuse of American society, and this refuse includes himself,” he argues. So, it is not just “a prophetic statement about the media celebrity accorded to serial killers, Monika Lewinsky, Amy Fisher, etc.” Did Warhol’s "everyone" include his already dead Marilyn(s), his close-to-dying Liz, his Brigitte Bardot (“BB” to her French fans) wrapped in the French tricolour and his Mao (“the ultimate star”) based on the portrait photograph in the Little Red Book?