Joan Crawford Teaches Us About Life (And, As Always, Eyebrows)

Even a casual observer of the films broadcast on, say, AMC, or Lifetime (not that I spend a lot of time watching Lifetime, no. Not that there was a period of time, say, back in graduate school, when I ritualistically flipped to the Lifetime Network in search of Sally Field’s stunning performance in the 1991 Not Without My Daughter, and not that I found myself finding Not Without My Daughter eight out of every ten ritualistic flips, and not that I found myself screaming, after Betty Mahmoody’s anguished and tortured outburst, “Noooo! Goddamn you all!!!” seven out of the ten times that I found Not Without My Daughter) will notice that there is one particular theme that often pops up in the most Fashionable Films of Fashion, and that one particular theme is this: what you do in your past will come back to haunt you. Take, for instance, the Fashionable Film mentioned in our Fashionable Must-Haves: the 1964 William Castle masterpiece, Strait-Jacket, in which a be-wigged and big-eyebrowed Joan Crawford shows us exactly what this lesson means when the double murder she committed twenty years ago comes back to haunt her (and chop off several peoples’ conveniently-bowed heads with conveniently-located axes).

This Fashionable Lesson of Fashion also become clear to Zelda and myself this evening. In order to proceed, Vivienne must make a confession: Vivienne cannot talk on the phone unless she is doing something else: loading her dishwasher, painting her toenails blood red, chewing Nicorette, and/or, as she did this evening whilst in the middle of a Teleconference of Fashion with her Most Fashionable Writing Partner Zelda, cleaning out her file cabinets. In the midst of cleaning out her file cabinets, Vivienne was faced with the horror of horrors: the worst — no, the WORST — poems she wrote in graduate school. There they were, just sitting there, staring at her, blank-eyed and bloody, like the two decapitated heads staring at Strait-Jacket Joan Crawford from the pillow next to hers.

Vivienne, at first, felt tugged by the tides of inadequacy (and, sadly, not for the first time today). Then, she remembered the lessons she would like to say that she learned from Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind, but that she actually learned from Carol Burnett in The Carol Burnett Show‘s send-up of Gone with the Wind: when one feels tugged by the tides of inadequacy, it’s time to take down the drapes and make some fashion, all the while screaming, “Nooo! Goddamn you all!!!!” And so we came to the FaOuLiPoWriMoFa assignment / OuLiPoAss (OuLiPoAssignment) for tonight: to find potential for literature in the worst poem we wrote in graduate school through the Fabulous Restriction of Fashion, Haikuization. All I will tell you, gentle readers, of the text from which this poem comes is that it was an assignment in my Forms class — to write in blank verse. Shiver and shudder. Shudder and shiver.

After Months and Miles

Viv morphs into Plath.