From the ‘Sob-Story’ file, the Chicago Tribune (Nov. 28) investigates why people cry at movies. One of the biggest throat-catchers mentioned is Brokeback Mountain, along with Schindler’s List, Sundays and Cybele, and Brian’s Song. Until puberty, boys and girls cry in equal amounts but then women surge by a ratio of 4 to 1. But everybody does it sometime. The movie that researchers found guaranteed to bring tears is a ’57 British flick called All Mine To Give in which a 12-year-old boy whose parents are killed gives his five younger sisters and brothers away door to door. Even the researchers had to start leaving the room early because they began to cry as soon as the movie started.
The New York Times Book Review (Nov. 25) looks at The Letters of Noel Coward, ed. by Barry Day and reviewed by John Simon, the playwright. Simon says flat out, ‘Coward was a genius;’ he was an ‘… actor; author of comedy, drama and farce; also operetta, musical comedy and revue,… composer and lyricist… novelist, short-story writer, light versifier… autobiographer, diarist, travel writer, filmmaker… actually he had more talents than Leonardo da Vinci and was, unusually for one such, a nice man, loyal friend and generous spirit. And model son.’ And gay. He wrote to and received amusing letters from everyone: Marlene Dietrich, Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontane, Gloria Swanson, Virginia Woolf, T.E. Lawrence, Ian Fleming, John Gielgud, Harold Pinter, Edna Ferber, Bernard Shaw and lots of British royalty. Lots of gossip and tidbits: He was a spy for the British government in WWII and was probably the boyfriend of a male heir to the British throne.
The New York Times (Nov. 25) asked ‘… how [does] a handsome black man who can also look an awful lot like a beautiful black woman, except with better legs than most and a beard… end up on the… cover of French Vogue’? Andre J., who had come out of his apt in NYC in his usual fabulous get-up with his white Afro-daisy do and a ’70s wet-look outfit, ran into an agent and, three weeks later, was a cover girl. He does not consider himself a cross-dresser or a drag artist, and ‘trans-‘ anything does not apply to him. He’s just not ‘confined by the conventions of gender.’ He’s been one of the ‘It’ people of LA and NYC for some time.
Edward Albee, the gay playwright (‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf’), is 79 and has a new play, Peter and Jerry, out soon, according to an interview in The New York Times (Nov. 11). His companion of 35 years, the sculptor Jonathan Thomas, died in 2005. Thomas was 18 years younger than Albee and Albee says ‘… the whole idea was that when I got to be my age [that I am now] he’d be taking care of me, you know?’ Albee says that rather than getting over his mourning he’s transformed it into inspiration for new plays.