“MICHAEL MOHHHRRREEEEAAAHHHHTTTEEEEE?!” she echoed again.

“I thought you wuh dead!”

Symbolically I had, indeed, died to the business of celebrity and fame. It frightened me. Sickened me, actually. Made me commit a kind of career suicide. Because my career blip had fallen off Katharine Hepburn’s radar screen, I had become dead to her.

I’m sure, though, if I had ever called again, it would be her, Hepburn and not her secretary, picking up the phone in the East Side Manhattan brownstone she owned. This particular clip from “Glass Menagerie” says it all.

“Then go to the moon, you selfish dreamah!!!”

That is Hepburn rocketing the whole, profoundly ignorant, lifeless world to an equally banal and distantly barren planet. The faint echo placed upon Miss H’s cry of “dreamah” is particularly resonant now, insofar as the symbolic son that Kate was exhorting was, in real life, the playwright Tennessee Williams whom I also knew. About whom I will write in a future Big Hollywood post.

I came to know both Ms. Hepburn and Tennessee because of “Glass Menagerie.” My friendship with Tennessee lasted much longer than the volatile one I’d briefly shared with Hepburn.

Why?

(more…)

Tuesday was the finale of what I’ve come to believe is the best show on TV: “Justified.” I say that not because I’m enamored of the lead, Timothy Olyphant – and who would not love that hat? — but because of the show’s iconoclastic portrayal of the South. 

Hollywood has always stereotyped the South as full of ignorant rednecks and racists, and the Mason Dixie line became synonymous for Yankees like me, especially dark-skinned Latinas, as an area to avoid. Nevertheless, I met my husband forty years ago in the deepest of the South — Florida — and had an opportunity to form my own opinion. 

I learned that the N- word was routinely used by blacks and whites to describe any black and I was probably called a half-breed “spic” behind my back. That didn’t bother me, and as the years passed my in-laws grew up, so did the South.  One thing I did note was that none of the Southerners I met had any resemblance to the Hollywood boobs in the movies or on TV. They were bright, articulate and romantic. My husband reminded me that some of the best American literature is by Southerners and about the South.  (more…)