The latest issue of Cottage Living, a very strange ladies' magazine headquartered in Alabama somewhere, which hits a certain femme sweet spot in an aspirational kind of derriere-garde Tri-Delt way in which Utopia is, actually, one of those darlin' Disney housing tracts -- the architecture, as one scholar calls it, of reassurance -- has a feature this month on Julie Newmar.
Julie Newmar, as I recall from fleetingly glimpsed 60s vignettes in My Living Doll, a Jeannie/Bewitched knockoff in which Newmar played a fembot, was tall and smart and kinda wiggy. Was there something, back in the day, about her being six-foot-two and a MENSA member? In any case, she was always cast as an uberwench. Hollywood sort of got her and sort of didn't. Broadway too. She won a Tony in 1961, and Joe Papp fired her in 1973 from a Broadway production (The Boom Boom Room) in which she played "a bisexual go-go dance captain". She took it like a sport. Papp said, admiringly, "She had something. A bizarre, grandiose stage presence. If I had directed her earlier...." The other person Papp had fired from the production was the female director. Papp continued, "She needs a man directing her."
Newmar is now in her 70s and nothing has changed. The Cottage Living spread shows her standing in the middle distance in her garden, looking beautiful and very, very thin -- still maintaining the classic Hollywood silhouette of huge head and stick body.
http://www.cottageliving.com/cottage/gardens/article/0,21135,1812477,00.htmlHer garden is unbelievably beautiful. There are roses and lilies and orchids named after Julie, and she grows them. It is impressive, and so is she for making it.
And I think of femme secession, of old people retiring into their gardens and making a world there. I think about Tasha Tudor, who died recently, who made a whole child's illustrated world of her desire to live in the 1830s. She dressed up and lived, somewhat seceded yet aggressively marketed by her family in all the twee ladies' magazines, until she was 90 years old.
Newmar has not lived quite such a hermit's life. She is a California girl, born and raised in LA. She was widowed young and has a deaf son with Down's syndrome. She had a long aggressive feud with her neighbor, Jim Belushi, trying to run him off.
Her house is, according to the architectural rendering in Cottage Living, quite modest but CL thinks a lot of things are cottages which are not.
The layers of climbing, blooming greens all but obscure Julie's modest 1940s house, which she fell for in the early 1980s because violets sprouted in the drive. "'Pick me! Smell me! Embrace me!' they cried. So I did," she says, smiling.
Cottage Living says she is a busy actress, investing in real estate and travelling. This does not sound busy to me. Asked where she'd been since Catwoman in the 1960s Batman, she told the New York Times, "I would prefer being a producer, someone who shows the way, rather than one at the end of puppet strings, who has to work so hard. It's not worth it anymore. And being a mother and businesswoman are major tests in life. You just can't be a movie star."
She has a blog, not a bad one, either. It's quite good. She writes of trying to get into Gaza to a school for the deaf. She writes she is unable now to walk without assistance. She writes about having sex.
There is not one comment on any of the posts.
Comments