A perfect symbol of the empty rhetoric and slick manipulations of the Clinton campaign is its chairman, Terry McAuliffe, a wheeler-dealer businessman and former chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Despite our shared Syracuse background, I despise McAuliffe with every fiber of my being. On primary day in Pennsylvania last month, I voted for Obama in the suburbs and then dashed to 30th Street Station in Philadelphia to catch a train to New York (where I was to tape a TV interview with Sandra Bernhard for the In the Life gay channel).
There big as life right at the top of my departure stairs in the airy main lobby was Terry McAuliffe, dressed in a dark suit like a well-appointed undertaker and chatting away conspiratorially with two similarly dressed clones. A wave of aggression swept over me. From 10 feet away, I locked on to McAuliffe like the deranged ED-209 crime-fighting robot that shoots up a corporate boardroom in Paul Verhoeven's "RoboCop." Nouns like "scum" and "rot" and adjectives like "vile" and "corrupt" flashed through my mind, ready for ignition and firing. I struggled but uncharacteristically held my tongue. My cardinal principle of free speech was restrained by my subordinate principle of respect for shared public space. McAuliffe had as much right as I do to be free from harassment in a train station. But passersby missed what could have been a tasty little scene of 1960s-style street theater.
Now for something completely different. I was surprised and impressed to see the attention given by the New York Times to the death of Beverlee McKinsey, a soap opera star whose prime period is long gone. Plaudits to the obit department! McKinsey's portrayal of bitchy supersocialite Iris Carrington in "Another World" (1970-79) gave me endless pleasure. Those were the glory days of TV soaps -- now a dying form, narcotized by corporate blandness.
McKinsey played Iris like Oscar Wilde's imperious Lady Bracknell crossed with ice-blond Grace Kelly. But her low, velvety voice more resembled Joan Greenwood's as Gwendolen Fairfax (Lady Bracknell's daughter) in the Anthony Asquith film of “The Importance of Being Earnest.” In those pre-VCR years, I had to scribble down soap-opera dialogue as fast as I could. I was then at my first teaching job at Bennington College, which I was regularly disrupting with my obnoxiously militant Amazon feminism. (I gave a rueful account of those hectic years to Philip Davis for his superb recent biography of Bernard Malamud.) McKinsey as Iris Carrington clearly prefigured Joan Collins' ruthless, glamorous Alexis Carrington Colby in the blockbuster prime-time soap "Dynasty," in the 1980s. Both McKinsey and Collins portrayed and embodied an important form of female power that I fiercely felt was excluded or libeled by Second Wave feminism.
Here are some McKinsey highlights from my Bennington notebooks for 1975-76:
As her father's goody-goody wife Rachel lies in critical condition on the verge of losing her baby, rich and idle Iris Carrington causes trouble in the hallway outside the hospital room: "Really--Rachel's servants are becoming as rude she is."
Iris on long-distance telephone: "Oh, Millicent, I know you're usually in Barcelona in June, but surely my wedding takes precedence over that!"
Iris' maid Louise to a plant she is watering: "I know Mrs. Carrington is in an irritable mood this morning, but I hope you will cheer her up."
Iris (entering): "Are you discussing me with that monstrosity?"
Loretta (Iris' New York sophisticate friend): "I'll never forget how you cheered me up after my divorce at your villa in Saint-Tropez."
Iris (evenly): "I don't have a villa at Saint-Tropez."
Loretta: "You don't?"
Iris (very evenly): "I hate Saint-Tropez."
Loretta (brightly): "It must have been Olive's villa!"
Two years later, while attending a Lily Tomlin show in New York with my friend Stephen Feld, I spotted the actress who had briefly played Loretta on "Another World" and had acted in that very scene. I leaned over the hapless two patrons sitting between us and (to her astonishment) enthusiastically recited both parts of the Saint-Tropez dialogue.
Sticking with the subject of alluring dominatrixes, I recently rented Louis Malle's 1958 film, "Ascenseur pour l'echafaud" ("Elevator to the Gallows"), which began the vogue for avant-garde European films to use cool jazz on the soundtrack. Here, thanks to the wonders of YouTube, is the inimitable Jeanne Moreau strolling bleakly through the night streets to Miles Davis' music, specially written for this film. What sensuous beauty of sound and image bathed my 1960s generation as we avidly consumed foreign films in college. Artfulness today has migrated to the high-tech realm, magnificent in its own way but starved of psychology and spirituality.
I've often grumbled over the past 15 years about Stevie Wonder's strange erasure from radio airplay. "Superstition," an eerily great song, is now a standard, but the general Stevie repertoire doesn't go much beyond it. So I was thrilled to hear one of my all-time favorites on the radio recently: "Love Light in Flight," from the 1984 film, "The Woman in Red." Here's the rather banal video, which undercuts Stevie's sublime lyrics and ethereal vocal line with hokey calisthenics in an airplane hanger. The long version of the song is available here but with a thinner sound.
Stevie's 1972 album, "Music of My Mind," entranced me with its fluid changes and restless stylistic synthesis. It was definitely the soundtrack for my first drama-filled year at Bennington (where I often say I grew up). Among other things, there was a "Death in Venice" type infatuation-at-a-distance with an androgynous Philadelphia socialite in the equestrian Tracy Lord genre, but we won't get into that. Here's the album's vivacious opening song, "Love Having You Around."
As long as we're dealing with lost personal classics, I'll serve up another: Donovan Leitch's "Hey Gyp (Dig the Slowness"), which I'm amazed to find on trusty YouTube. This acoustic blues song (which turns psychedelic at the end) is as obscure as it gets: Recorded in 1965, it was released in the U.S. the following year only as a single. But it made a huge impression on me in college -- that cracking bullwhip prefigured the Velvet Underground's 1967 breakthrough album, with its sadomasochistic motifs. Who was "Gyp," I wondered? One had heard that the lavishly talented Donovan, who would later become overexposed as a hippie guru, bummed around on his travels with a young man named Gypsy (later identified as musician Gypsy Dave). It did pique one's curiosity, shall we say.
Another obscure Donovan song, from his major 1967 album, "Mellow Yellow": "Young Girl Blues," unfortunately yoked here to a video of lugubrious orphan photos. But there are enough moody nymphets to give the right idea about an innocent, vital, Edie Sedgwick-type girl worn out by the fast-track London scene. Wonderful atmospherics and projection of compassion. It contains a line that practically became my motto as a social analyst: "They can't see the patterns they're weaving."
Finally, we need a pick-me-up after that Donovan dirge. Check this out, one of the seminal influences of my early career: the live version of Cream's "Deserted Cities of the Heart," written by my ego ideal, feisty bassist Jack Bruce. Recorded in 1968, it was released in March 1972 as the opening track on "Live Cream Volume II." It was my final semester of grad school at Yale, and I was still unemployed. (Bennington wouldn't call until May.)
"Deserted Cities of the Heart" blew me away. It felt like anthem, hymn, and manifesto all in one. It was everything I wanted to embody in my writing, the nascent "Sexual Personae
Camille Paglia's column appears on the second Wednesday of each month. Every third column is devoted to reader letters. Please send questions for her next letters column to this mailbox. Your name and town will be published unless you request anonymity.
About the writer
Camille Paglia is the University Professor of Humanities and Media Studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. Her most recent book is "Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-Three of the World's Best Poems."
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