25 Years Later: Bette Davis and The 6th of October

Miss Davis with one of her many beloved dogs, Tibby.

As I look back on my life, the profound significance of October 6th is truly awesome. It all began when I was just over a a year old: although unbeknownst to me at the time, October 6th, 1982 was the commercial release date of Madonna’s first single, “Everybody”. I don’t think I need to detail the impact that the first rung on Madonna’s ladder would ultimately lead to in my own life. 

Exactly one year later was the more profound October 6th for me. That was the literally awesome day when I met my newborn sister Jennifer for the first time, just before she came home from the hospital. I've been blessed to share most of my life journey with her, for she truly became my first and most defining friend. 

On October 6th, 1991, our dog Frisky came into the lives of Jen and I, soon to be joined by her equally beloved sister Chloe. And they changed us both forever. 

In the interim between the October 6th milestones that saw Jennifer and Frisky become defining parts of my time here on Earth, there was the October 6th when the whole world lost an artist and a heroine and gained an angel and a Goddess. It is no exaggeration to say that my life would never be the same. 

I refer to the October 6th of 1989, and to the death of Bette Davis.

Looking back as an adult, and verifying my theories via a calendar for 1989, I can surmise that my family was spending Columbus Day weekend on Cape Cod. We took two cars to get there from where we lived at the time, and my Mom and my sister and I left after my Dad, who arrived at the house while we were still en route. I still remember my mother getting the call on the vintage car phone in our station wagon. It was my Dad, telling my Mom to tell me that Bette Davis had died. The news must have just broken, and I can imagine that that night it would have been all over CNN, which I remember him always watching. The next morning, there was a gorgeous photograph of her face on the front page of The Boston Herald when I came downstairs for breakfast. I vividly remember that moment of seeing that newspaper and, internally, making peace with the finality of her passing. And for nearly ten years, the photo that they selected was immaculately recreated in my memories, too. But I can no longer definitively recall which photograph it was, for I went on to become such an enamored fan that that part of my memory was eventually lost among hundreds of beautiful still photos of Miss Davis that I have since laid eyes on. I strongly believe it was either the most iconic photograph used in the promotion of William Wyler's The Letter or a publicity shot of Bette as Margo Channing in Joseph L. Mankiewicz's All About Eve. I have trace memories of slightly longer hair, like Margo’s, yet with her face sparkling in that indescribable way it always did during the best years at Warner Bros. Either way, she looked utterly beautiful splashed across the whole cover of one of her hometown's two biggest newspapers.

I loved Bette Davis at the time that she died, which was why my father wanted my mother to be the one to break the news to me. But I had a narrowly focused way of showing idol worship at that age, for I was apt to be intensely fixated on only one era in a person’s career. In the case of Diana Ross, my favorite singer at the time, my obsession was all-consuming and yet relegated exclusively to her years with The Supremes. I worshipped Diana, but only as I would have in the 1960s, as if her incredible solo career had not even happened. (Thankfully, I got to enjoy the rest of her magnificent career many years later!) In the case of Bette Davis, I was fascinated and in awe of who she was in the 1980s, as opposed to any decades prior. This was based largely on the impact of being introduced to her via John Hough's infamous/brilliant Disney horror film The Watcher In The Woods. I had not only not been afraid of Bette Davis, as many traumatized members of my generation apparently were, but came away adoring her and apt to rewatch the film, and her performance, repeatedly. 

My adoration of Bette Davis was also based on her priceless talk show appearances. I gather that her ventures into late-night television were always legendary, but they seemed to take on a new air of importance in the 1980s, when she did not let her unbelievably debilitating stroke stop her from electrifying TV audiences with vivid recollections and a razor sharp wit. There was a relevance to the fact that the indomitable Bette Davis should come back from suffering a double mastectomy, a stroke, and a broken hip all within a year to still be the greatest star on the planet. The stroke dramatically affected her ever-copied persona, inhibiting her oft-imitated speech and limiting her defining use of body language. But she soldiered on, proving to the public that nothing could stop Bette Davis. She unconsciously formed a whole new set of mannerisms and speech patterns after the stroke, and it was this grande dame persona that I fell in love with as a child.

The place where I fell in love with Bette was, beautifully enough, Cape Cod, where her theater career blossomed at The Cape Playhouse. It was in Cape Cod where I have the most vivid memories of endlessly rewatching The Watcher In The Woods as well as seeing Bette on TV one afternoon thanks to a late-night TV appearance that my father taped for me the night before. (Like that fateful newspaper cover whose image has dimmed in my memories over the years, I cannot say with any certainty which Bette Davis interview(s) I watched as a child, because I have seen so many since.) And indeed it was en route to Cape Cod that I learned that the incredible life of Bette Davis had come to an end.

The Cape Playhouse, as photographed in 2010 for Cape Cod Today.

About nine months after Bette died, my family and I lost our beloved Grandma Mary, an “adopted grandmother” who had been as integral a part of my and my sister's childhood as both of our biological grandmothers. Grandma Mary’s death was the first loss to hit so close to home. Seven years later, my father lost his mother, and less than two months ago, my mother lost her mother. My sister and I have since found ourselves living in a world without the physical presence of the three matriarchs of our childhood and adulthood. These three losses in many ways are the defining signposts of my personal timeline up to this point. And the loss of Bette Davis preceded all three of them. 

I had already been fascinated with the concepts of life and death and differing perceptions of reality at an extremely young age. But the passing of Bette Davis was the first time my life was consciously affected by death. I was saddened and yet neither afraid of nor confused by the death of Bette Davis. Whether because of upbringing, intuition, or some profound spiritual influence, I put emotions aside and accepted the idea of life ending with death despite, or perhaps because of, a belief in the immortal spirit. My perspective on the sharp distinction between physical and spiritual death has never wavered. I do not feel guided in this by doctrine or delusion or fear, but rather by an internal understanding that has remained with me for as long as I remember being alive. I cannot say that Bette's death fully prepared me for any of the subsequent losses yet to be endured, but I believe that my actively accepting the notion of Bette Davis in spirit has absolutely guided me in the ensuing quarter century.

The back cover of the 1962 first edition of The Lonely Life.

I suppose you could say that I have always considered Bette Davis to be the standard-bearer for all of humanity. But it was not until a decade after her passing that I actually dove into her filmography. In 1999, I read her last book, This ‘n That, saw many of her classic films, and even wrote about Bette Davis (along with Madonna and Dario Argento) for an essay that apparently helped get me accepted into Emerson College. In the mid-2000s, a number of DVD releases reignited my interest in her career and prompted my finally reading her earlier autobiographies, The Lonely Life and Mother Goddam. I ADORED both books, but it was The Lonely Life that offered an unprecedented insight into the mind and heart of an individual who was far more like me than I could ever have realized simply by watching her films or even her dazzling interviews. I feel that I reaffirmed a deep spiritual bond with Bette Davis when I read The Lonely Life at the age of twenty-four. It has since become my favorite book, and based on what I have learned in the ensuing years, I believe it offers a very strong suggestion that Bette Davis was, like myself, an individual with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Bette's unrelentingly honest insights into her all-consuming drive, obsessive perfectionism, constant desire to work, and lifelong struggles with personal relationships were as relatable to me at twenty-four as they still are at thirty-two. These shared traits are also part of what  lead to my being diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome/High Functioning Autism. There is much discussion online, thanks to communities like Wrong Planet and one of my personal heroes, Rudy Simone, about the nuances of ASD in individuals like myself and many female Aspies who "hide it" underneath a protective veil of feigned charisma. We may never know if Bette Davis was on the autistic spectrum, but based on evidence left behind, I believe she was. And I believe that that makes her an even greater role model to millions of people just like me.

Aside from being the greatest of artists and finest of human beings, Bette Davis epitomized Joseph L. Mankiewicz's notion of "a great star". I must admit that Bette has even eclipsed Madonna as my favorite star--but Madonna is, of course, a very close second! It really is something that Bette's best films, from any given era of her career, still entertain new generations of viewers in the exact same way that they did upon their initial release. And thanks to Bette's impeccable taste and domineering influence, her best films still hold up on artistic merits, too. In her work and in her life, Bette underlined the role that a brilliant mind plays in being "a great star" versus merely "a celebrity". I take stardom very seriously because of Bette Davis. And I would argue that every culture benefits from stars who break barriers and inspire masses, which Bette Davis did in spades both during, and indeed long after, her incredible lifetime.

Thank you for everything, Miss Davis. XO

A Decade Of Madonna's So-Called "Life"

Madonna’s American Life album put me on the path towards completing my very first screenplay, the title of which would go on to be the theme of every script I have written in the ten years since: Disillusion. The realization that I was fantasy-obsessed, and patterning my life after Madonna's career, was obvious to my loved ones ever since I poured all of my nine year old creative energies into that video tribute to "Vogue". But my own epiphany would not come about until the release of American Life, ten years ago today. I figured there would already be plenty of fellow SuperFans putting this album and its unprecedented commercial failure against the backdrop of the cultural climate that followed the horrors of 9/11 and preceded the horrors of The Iraq War. So instead of a sociopolitical context, I thought I'd do what I do best and put this album into the context of....Me.

Hi. 

Rather than a proper multimedia retrospective, I offer a random assembly of thoughts, linked by some of my favorite tracks from one of my favorite albums. It's me at my most honest and unstructured because American Life is Madonna at her most honest and unstructured. And who would I be if not someone who lives and breathes to pay tribute to Her? Whereas now I can say that as a tongue-in-cheek nod to my trademark penchant for idol worship, such a statement would have been a lot less ironic ten years ago. Up until “The American Life Era”, my devotion to Madonna could theoretically have been read as amusing, admirable, or pathetic. It was Madonna herself who not-so-subtly encouraged me to look deeper into myself and how I could contribute to the world with the same passion with which I contributed to her record sales. It was, specifically, a statement she made when performing before an audience of SuperFans at an HMV Record Store in London on May 9th, 2003. 

"In the process I forgot....that I was special too."

It was the sort of promotion one would expect from an artist at the launch of their career, not the relaunch. Fans slept on the street to get into that ultra-exclusive, never-broadcast mini-concert. Yet while Madonna thanked them for their worship, she also encouraged them to put it towards their own betterment, not just hers. As she worded it herself that day: 

“If you want to pay tribute to me, do something important with your life.”

Those three words rang through my head, for they gave me permission to love myself as much as I loved Madonna. Initially, “maximizing my own potential”, as a guru might put it, was the ultimate tribute to my idol. But in time (thanks to my impeccable taste in idols) the desire to do good had (roughly) as much to do with love for humanity as it did with worshipping a Goddess. Thanks to the impact that Madonna’s American Life had on my American life, today my devotion to Madonna is defined by self-respect and a commitment to my own growth as an artist and human being. It all began the summer after the album was released, when I sacrificed my busy social life to commit myself to the isolation I required in order to complete a screenplay. Whereas my life before American Life was dominated by watching movies, my life after American Life has been dominated by writing movies: nearly all of my film viewership since 2003 has, for better or worse, been a part of my own artistic process. And it was Madonna's "Life" which opened the creative floodgates. 

Thanks, Madonna!

Even though American Life continues the journey Madonna embarked upon with Ray of Light and subsequently Music, in many ways this is, in fact, a reboot of her career—hence those record store gigs on both sides of the pond.  If Confessions On A Dancefloor was the 21st century reincarnation of her eponymous first album, then this was the debut record of the artist who Madonna was before she ever signed a recording contract, back when she shifted between rock and disco in New York clubs. Her guitar work on this album is apparently amateurish (I wouldn't know one way or another) but it's also as painfully honest as an adolescent love letter (which I can vouch for with more assurance). Ditto her youthful, almost child-like singing, a far cry from the post-Evita vocal training that impressed and divided listeners of Ray of Light and Music. For the "calculating" SuperDiva to have been so vulnerable and unpolished remains among the ballsiest moves Madonna ever made. It also defined the "screw the career, I'm finally happy" quality of both the album itself and how it was sold to the record-buying public.

The first televised performance of one of my all-time favorite songs. 

I was convinced American Life would be a smash, though that didn't stop me from buying ten copies of the CD in its first week of release to help it debut at #1 in America—which it did, giving Madonna her first back-to-back #1 albums in the U.S. since the 80s. Alas, it was soon to tumble down the charts. Fearing my overspending was bad karma and lead to weak sales, I went on to buy another eighteen copies on CD, vinyl, and eventually digital download between 2003-2005. This meant a lot of people were gifted copies of American Life during the two and a half years when it was "the new Madonna album". I gave a copy to the security guard at my building. I handed out a few to fellow college stoners after passing around my old bong, “Veronica Electronica”, while not-so-subtly playing the full length album. (Cannabis has never diminished my ability to be a fascist host to my company.) I even mailed CDs to friends and relatives along with a wordy letter about how Madonna's new album was her best ever and yet was being totally ignored by radio stations and in turn record buyers. In fact, quite a few of those friends and relatives became bigger Madonna fans after they actually heard the album. I even gave a CD to one of the first guys I ever hooked up with on his way out my door. The encounter was lovely, but the greatest pleasure that came out of that afternoon was learning that the album made him a bigger Madonna fan, too.

"How could it hurt you when it looks so good?"

Like many fans, I often wonder where Madonna's career would have lead, or what completely new shape it might have taken, had American Life sold as many copies in America as did the two albums that preceded it. It could have been the political mood of the country. It could have been the hostile reaction to the panned performances Madonna gave onstage in Up For Grabs and on the big-screen in Swept Away and Die Another Day. Or maybe it was just the same good old-fashioned misogyny that made the life-after-forty years of Bette Davis and Joan Crawford an uphill battle against "you already made it, so now be quiet" ageism.

"Do I have to chaaaange?!"

Ultimately, American Life's commercial failure shaped the subsequent decade of Madonna's career. She began to embrace her "greatest hits" catalogue on The Re-Invention Tour, and returned to a full-on dance music album after American Life's commercial and promo-only remixes dominated the Billboard Dance/Club Play charts for two years. Like most fans, I thought Confessions On A Dancefloor was an even better album--in fact, it's my personal favorite of all time, and I imagine it always will be. But “Confessions” is not simply a great album: it is the perfect companion to the downtempo American Life, and I could never have loved "Confessions" if I had not first fallen in love with "Life". Personally, I have always regarded both as Disc 1 & Disc 2 of a haphazard Double LP sent from the Gods and Goddesses of Pop Utopia. You cannot fully appreciate the exquisite pleasures of one without the other, and you cannot deny that each takes the listener on a journey from hard thumping to pleasant release. (Feel free to view those words as an aural, lyrical, sexual, or spiritual reference: all four interpretations apply to both albums.) And so today I honor not only American Life, one of Madonna's best albums and one of my favorite works of art, but also the incomparable changes it lead to in my life. I cannot put into words just how grateful I am to Madonna for weathering an embarrassing commercial failure in the (X-static) process of inspiring countless artists like myself. And to think, it's only been ten years....I'm thrilled to imagine the influence that this truly timeless, ever-listenable album will continue to have on my life and millions of others in the decades to come.

"And the world can look so sad....only you make me feel good."

My Love Letter To "Give Me All Your Luvin'"

Like many of you, I am sick of the ageism being hurled Madonna’s way for the last, oh, say, twenty years. Megaforce’s “Give Me All Your Luvin”, Madonna’s first video of the new decade, is an affront to that ageism. 

It’s not the defiantly and effectively youthful quality of Madonna’s (fabulous) song that makes the most powerful statement about the triviality of a performer’s age. It’s the ripe-at-fifty-three sexuality on display in the video. Madonna's sexuality isn’t dark or intense in this video, as in Jean Baptiste Mondino's “Justify My Love" or Madonna's SEX book. Rather, it’s colorful and silly and fun and frothy, just like the song itself. It’s Madonna affecting positive change the way she does best: not with an overt political statement, but rather by being herself, without any hint of shame. Physical beauty will always be subjective and societal. But sex appeal is irrefutable and eternal. Madonna is sexier than ever at fifty-three, and she seems to be having more fun than ever, too. I don’t love this simply because I love Madonna. I love many women in their 40s and 50s who are sexy and funny and have many decades of living ahead of them. Their uniquely earned glory is being celebrated by Madonna, and in turn by the millions of people who are watching this video. After all, the young should be jealous of the experienced—NOT the other way around. 

I think that this is Madonna’s best work in music videos since the one-two punch of Johan Renck’s “Hung Up” and Jamie King’s “Sorry”, the former of which might be her best video and the latter of which might be my personal favorite. I also think that “Give Me All Your Luvin’” is her most important video since Guy Ritchie’s “What It Feels Like For A Girl”. Both are works of pop art meant to evoke “oohs” and “aahs” amongst the loyal fans who are bound to love seeing Madonna achieve the impossible in a music video fantasy world. But they’re also both chances for Madonna to express her frustration with the rules handed down on her, not as Madonna herself but as a representative of two overlapping demographics that she belongs to. “What It Feels Like For A Girl” was about the restrictions that are commonly and universally placed on women from birth to death, and the violent extremes to which one might go in rebelling against those restrictions. In “Give Me All Your Luvin’” Madonna lashes out at the constraints that society places on women over fifty. “What It Feels Like For A Girl” makes a statement through the glamorization of violence being committed by a woman against all men. Madonna’s similarly in-your-face approach in “Give Me All Your Luvin’” takes the exact opposite form: it is a display of adoration of an older woman by hordes of younger men.  There are many women who can and do attract the adoration of younger men, but few of them are celebrated for it. In fact most of them, like Madonna, are scorned for it, publicly and privately, by gay and straight men and by gay and straight women.

I haven't emphasized the invaluable contributions of M.I.A. and Nicki Minaj to the song and video because they will inevitably (and involuntarily) be credited with bringing young people to the clip. This is not to undermine their own brilliance as artists, nor the edginess and self-definition which prompted Madonna to see herself in them. Thankfully, there’s a sign on YouTube that the "Give Me All Your Luvin'" video is already making an important impact on young people, separate from its M.I.A./Nicki appeal. Special thanks to my friend Nelson for showing me a video that fills me with optimism. After all, nothing trumps ageism quite like brilliant teenagers.

Madonna’s career as an artist has coincided with her contributions as a liberating icon, and her comfort with her own sexuality has been at the center of her positive and vital impact on feminism and gay rights. Now, at the dawn of a new era in her career, I hope that Madonna will continue to shatter Western society’s concepts about aging. All people, male and female, reach a certain age at which they’re expected to act a certain way, dress a certain way, and restrict themselves a certain way. Madonna is saying NO to that "certain age"/"certain way" mode of thinking. The more her message reaches the masses, the better chance we all have of living in a world that is rid of the prejudices that shape our conscious and unconscious perceptions of people. 

I have actively followed Madonna's life and career since 1990, and I have witnessed the world's perception of my sexual orientation changing dramatically since then. Madonna’s once radical views on gender and sexuality have become absorbed into the mainstream in the two decades since her most famously progressive works of art achieved commercial success and media saturation. But there’s a new terrain for her to conquer, and that warpath is the world’s intense resistance towards women who do not age quietly.

And who better to change the world than the woman who rules it?